Film Rolls, Round 13: Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain and Sex & Zen 3D: Extreme Ecstasy

Oops, I skipped Mookie and Bruce wound up going first this round! Not that it really matters, because this is not a real game as opposed to a game-shaed thing, but fortunately fate made it up to Mookie.

Bruce rolls a 17 and lands in the Tsui Hark zone, specifically Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. I don't tend to give a lot of thought to connecting the figures with the movies - maybe for "season 2", I'll try to have the figures be more in-character - but this did make me ponder that about five years separated Bruce Lee's death from Tsui Hark's first film as a director, and, dang, does that seem like a great what-if!

Mookie, meanwhile, rolls a 20! That gets him to Sex & Zen 3D: Extreme Ecstasy, which I was kind of annoyed didn't play Boston back when 3D was at its peak and Chinese film distribution in the US was just starting to take tis current shape. I was mistaken to feel that way.

The rule with 20s is that you get a freebie from the recent arrivals shelf, but I kind of forgot that, so Mookie benefits from a Halloween viewing of Army of Darkness.

So how did this weird round work out?

Shu Shan - Xin Shu shan jian ke (Zu: Warriors of Magic Mountain)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

Even beyond Tsui Hark remaking this film 20 years later, it's fun to look at this and the big fantasy adventures he would make in the 21st Century and see how those are what he wanted to do all along - he did this right at the start of his career, and it's just taken circumstances this long to catch up, between Mainland Chinese financing and more accessible effects.

For as much as watching this forty years later is to imagine what he would be doing with modern CGI - he stages these scenes the same way modern directors do, a generation ahead of time - it often seems to take its inspiration from Saturday Serials as much as anything else, a regular barrage of action that tosses soldier Di Ming Qi (Yuen Biao) into a newer, crazier situation every fifteen minutes or so, teaming him first with an aloof master (Adam Cheng Siu-Chow) and then an equally overwhelmed monk (Mang Hoi). The pacing kind of feels like a serial edited down to a movie, a combination of zipping from one episode to another to sort of running in loops as the crew goes to and from the Ice Queen's Palace, the sort of quest that there are lots of stops on and a roundabout path that occasionally allows the good guys to fight each other.

The action's a ton of fun, though, starting with classic period swordplay done exceptionally well - Corey Yuen and star Yuen Biao are handling a lot of the martial arts, and Yuen gets to play off Sammo Hung in the early going - to increasingly crazy and abstract wire fu that Tsui and his crew put together well. For all that Tsui is anticipating later digital blockbusters, he's still building monsters with papier-mache and ingenuity, with a demon represented by a dyed-red sheet being stretched over faces and other shapes a standout for being exceptionally practical but nevertheless very cool. Effects have got to both communicate and look cool on screen. The martial-arts team does darn good meshing weightlessness and momentum throughout.

This is also about the right time to be a star-making performance for Yuen Biao, who previously seemed to be one of his classmates Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung's favorite sparring partners but got few lead roles; he's got a charmingly earnest persona here, a puppy dog audiences will happily follow who slips easily into screen fighting in a way that seems natural. He pairs well with Mang Hoi, a different sort of naive (there's a real delight in movies like this where the action feels like it's following sidekicks until they come through), while Adam Cheng and Damian Lau are a more abrasive odd couple as the masters. A lot of folks get underused - even with two roles, one wants more Sammo Hung, for instance, while Brigitte Lin doesn't show up until 45 minutes in and has little to do, which is also when Moon Lee makes her first appearance and makes the audience wish that the filmmakers knew what they had and gave her a bigger role.

Underneath, there's something going on about war wearing down the gates of Hell, making it possible for demons to escape, but Tsui's not looking to make something that deep, even if he does see how that might strike a chord with viewers. He's just trying to make the big wuxia action he wants to see on screen, and honing his chops for when he'll have the right tools.

3D Yuk po tuen: Gik lok bo gam (3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy)

* (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-ray)

Look, I'm not going to tell you that the original Sex & Zen was a good movie - although it apparently played the Weekly Wednesday Ass-Kickings at the Allston Cinema (remember that?) just before I made this into a full-time movie blog so I don't have any record of what I thought, though I remember it as mostly good fun, a Category III film built to entertain as well as titillate. This reboot from 2011 is more porn-y, not much more than excuses to stitch its sex scenes together.

The main problem, though, is that it's mean. There's not much joy in its sex, just selfish lust and cruelty; though Ruizhu (Hara Saori) initially intends to learn from the Prince (Tony Ho Wah-Chiu), the latter is a despot and the former picks up his attitudes quickly enough, and the audience is left to get its vicarious pleasure in watching people be victimized, with the story taking increasingly violent as it moves toward the end.

The filmmakers certainly seem to be having fun with their 3D and virtual backlot tools, at least - this was during the period when folks were shooting with actual 3D rigs, and it's just professional enough to be watchable - the cast (many imported from Japan's adult film industry) understand their particular sorts of sex appeal and play to it, and while the non-digital scenery is not elaborate, it doesn't immediately strike one as cheap.

It's not fun, though. There may be some who get some thrill out of erotica leaving them feeling kind of gross, but that's not for me.

Army of Darkness

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Army of Darkness wasn't quite my first big cult film - I'm of the age that inhaled Monty Python and the Holy Grail in high school - but it hit me just right in college, and was probably my favorite movie for a long time. I don't know how many copies of it I've purchased - a VHS, probably 2 DVD editions, an HD-DVD, a Blu-ray, and now this Shout Factor 4K disc. This will probably be the last, unless I find a 35mm print at a yard sale somewhere, and what are the odds of that?

I occasionally worry that I'll outgrow it, but it never quite happens. The jokes are still good. Sam Raimi stages action and slapstick as well as anybody ever has, and has a unique ability to blend the two so that they both impress without undercutting each other (someone should have put him and Jackie Chan together at some point). Bruce Campbell taps into this unique dumbass persona that makes Ash weirdly relatable whether he's being a moron or weirdly competent. It's earnest in its love for old Harryhausen films but is its own thing rather than a slavish recreation.

Why? I think because it came at a very specific point in this team's careers. This was probably not not meant to be one last project right at the point where they were still folks screwing around but had just graduated to having a real crew, making a movie for fun before everyone got professional, but it sure feels like it exists at that turning point, and that's a large part of what makes it a blast. It's why even the studio interference works in the movie's favor; rather than sulk, Raimi made that absolutely bonkers ending.

I don't love it quite as intently as I did in college and soon thereafter; I can't. But I appreciate it as fun in a way that is awful hard to accomplish on purpose.


Mookie really lucks out with that 20, doesn't he?

Mookie: 43 ¼ stars
Bruce: 51 ¾ stars

Next up: A big jump forward in time, a couple more favorites, including a bit more 3D.

Titane

Not related to the movie itself at all, really, but for the second time in as many weeks, I was clumsy in getting my popcorn into a stable position while managing soda, coat, and backpack, this time spilling just about the whole container all over the floor. As was the case when it happened in Belle, I felt completely mortified, because being 25 years away from having that particular job does not make me any less sympathetic to the people who are going to have to get that tidied up before the next show. The funny bit, though, was that someone saw this and handed me the "1 Free Large Popcorn & 2 Large Sodas" coupon you get when you join the Brattle as a member so I wouldn't go without. It's a very cool thing to do, but I think I may have a couple in my wallet and ten years' worth tossed because that is far more popcorn and soda than I can take for one showing (although I should maybe ask if I can have my second soda ready for the tail end of a double feature sometime), and it amuses me that apparently this happens to other people too.

Closer to the film, the timeframes that go into making movies are kind of strange. I saw filmmaker Julia Ducournau's first movie, Raw, at MonsterFest in Melbourne five years ago, and even without the pandemic sort of messing with time, that trip seems both relatively recent and a while ago, and I'm not sure whether four or five years to get her second feature made is a long time or not. I know folks who hate the term "elevated horror", but what Ducournau and folks like her do is different than the folks who can knock a new movie out every year because they're either doing work for hire or not making something terribly elaborate (or alternately trusting the FX specialists when they do). It's not a quick follow-up, and I actually lost track of how I apparently liked Raw more walking out of that theater in Australia than I remembered later.

Can't say I liked this one as much. Even before the sexy/bloody/crazy first act finished, I kind of found myself flagging (though the bit where there were just so many people to murder made me laugh for how delightfully nasty it was), and got really fidgety during the rest. I could see what they were doing well, but I must also admit that I've grown impatient with movies where you have to work out that what you see isn't literally what's happening - if fooling the audience is part of the game, I prefer it come with a rug-pulling moment rather than some sort of winking ambiguity. Parts of this movie, I think, would probably hit harder if you assume that Alexia is raped by her stalker and concocts the whole thing with the car and all the later bits about bleeding motor oil and having something metallic within her as a defense mechanism, but I don't know that it's fair to make the viewer reconstruct something that didn't happen on screen and isn't revealed in order to fit things together, especially if that viewer is like me and doesn't have a real handle on what is and isn't a likely delusion. Alfred Hitchcock's heavy-handed explanations as in Psycho may be psychologically dubious, but putting that in the movie means there's no second-guessing it: That's how things work in the movie, and you don't have to worry about whether it's realistic or not at that point.

Titane has a lot of things you've got to see at least once, and like a lot of horror by/for/starring women, it's entirely possible something in it is going to resonate strongly with someone who is Not Me; there's a lot of pregnancy body horror and queer themes that don't mean as much to me as they would to someone closer to it. Still, when I face the inevitable question of which "French woman sort of getting it on with a machine" movie I prefer from the two I saw in last year, I'll probably go with Jumbo, which may have a layer or two less but communicates a bit better.

Titane

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 January 2021 in the Brattle Theatre (Some of the Best of 2021, DCP)

The descriptions for Titane as it played festivals and made its way to theaters were notably vague, calculatedly so, perhaps because writer/director Julia Ducournau often seems to have bolted two movies together and folks pulled in by one may be disappointed to get a heaping bowl of the other. The sort of switcheroo she pulls on the audience can pay off, but in jumping from the outrageous to the merely very weird, she doesn't necessarily do either side of the story any favors.

She starts by introducing the audience to Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a model and dancer who mostly works car and boat shows, the sort of gig selling the idea that this machine will make a hot girl wet. It may not be far from the truth for Alexia; she's been excited by cars and metal even before the accident that led to doctors putting a titanium plate in her head. Indeed, she seems more excited by the nipple piercings of fellow dancer Justine (Garance Marillier) than the girl they're attached to, and she seems quite fond of her titanium hairpin beyond how well it lets her deal with a fan who stalks her in the parking lot. It doesn't seem to be her first time using it that way, but she soon goes way overboard and winds up on the run. That's when she notices that she bears a vague resemblance to the digitally aged image of a boy who disappeared ten years ago at the age of seven, and soon finds that his father Vincent (Vincent Linden) is willing to overlook a lot of things that don't feel right to have his son back.

This description elides some important events, such as how Alexia's classic muscle car seems to come alive after the first killing, leading to what sure as heck plays as a sexual encounter that leaves her pregnant. Once that happens, no matter how twisted and uncomfortable things get later, the audience can't help but think "okay, but what about that? How's that going?" It's truly strange that for as much as the start of the film establishes a certain pathology - she was obviously drawn to cars even as an awful-seeming seven-year-old and the metallic implant gave her more reason to identify further with them - that never particularly matters once Vincent has taken "Adrien" in and made him part of the firefighting team. There are icky moments that depict something weird going on in her reproductive organs, but it never pushes her to act in a way that someone without this particular issue wouldn't.

At that point, a lot of the attention has shifted to Vincent, and that's not a bad thing: Actually-first-billed actor Vincent Lindon gives an impressive performance as a man whose identity as a father and firefighter requires complete confidence and authority despite being utterly desperate, with every single performance choice made building that up a little more. The way Ducournau and her co-writers keep Alexa/Adrien around so that the audience can watch that never passes the sniff test, and fails it in ways that are not nearly spectacular enough to get a pass in the way that Alexia's mania does. There's a line about Vincent refusing a DNA test, but do the cops seriously not fingerprint "Adrien"? No social workers? No physical for someone who, at the very least, has recently had their nose broken? Even if you figure "Adrien" doesn't need certification or examination because he's meant to be a mascot, and the rest of the station is terrified of losing Vincent's favor, any suspicions are quickly pushed aside. The movie that got Alexia into Vincent's house (or near those sexy fire engines) would have her reacting to that, but the one which is centered around Vincent can't upset the apple cart until it's time.

At times, it's almost as if Ducournau wrote the first act and then realized that she maybe couldn't sustain that level of out-and-out craziness for feature length and came up with something still unnerving but more manageable. One can't exactly say that this movie plays it safe at any point, but it's interesting that she does a bit of what she did in Raw toward the start, getting a gross-out reaction from Alexia's surgery but then going relatively light on the gore thereafter And when she and Agathe Rousselle feel free to let loose on Alexia being weird and awful, the film plays as terrific black comedy, whether Alexia's making her father squirm, making the audience believe that killing makes both her her and the car horny, or a dance scene that doesn't make any damn sense but which plays out exactly as funny as it must have been in Ducournau's head. Alexia doesn't talk a whole lot but Rousselle is great with body language and attitude.

Titane is electrifying in its best moments, and what's on screen is always people giving all they can, whether it be Lindon and Rousselle or the terrific cinematography by Ruben Impens. Those great scenes and complete commitment are the sort that make a viewer tell friends that they've got to see this, even if they spend a lot of time asking why these people are doing this without exactly being intrigued. There are two potentially fantastic movies inside this one, and maybe they don't mix, but it's better to have their conflicting weirdo natures on full display rather than have them cancel each other out.

(Formerly at eFilmCritic)

Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands

Last day for this in the Brattle's virtual screening room, although I wouldn't be surprised if West Newton or someone else picked it up, even if nobody still has Bacurau to let you do a Sonia Braga double-feature. I'm not sure how the negotiations for regional exclusivity and the like work in this weird new situation. We'll see! Maybe it will be on regular Film Movement Plus come Friday, and they'll probably be happy to sell you a disc of some sort later this year.

Not yet, though. Still, one of the first things that popped up doing an Amazon search for a link is Kim Ki-Duk's 3-Iron, and… huh. I kind of see that, but I am also kind of terrified of what sort of AI algorithm is going on for Amazon to make the recommendation. Is it something as relatively simple as "seeing" that the posters for both have a woman in bed between two men, or is there a lot more data being correlated?

It's also nice to see that the new restoration still has a distinctive film-like look to it, giving the movie a warm but rough appearance that digital restorations, or even digital presentations of older films, don't necessarily have. It wasn't quite like actually being at the Brattle and seeing film projected, but it certainly looks more like it than a lot of the other movies of similar vintage that I've watched on Blu-ray in recent months. It's a pleasant surprise if you didn't realize that was an itch you wanted to scratch.

Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Brattle Theatre Virtual Screening Room, Film Movement Plus via Roku)

The recently restored and re-released Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands is billed as a sex comedy, but it really doesn't get into that material until fairly late in its second half, and the forty-odd years since its original release have not been kind to its first half. It's just good enough and interesting enough that viewers will spend time figuring out how to make it work for them, maybe coming to a different conclusion in the twenty-first century than they would have at the time.

It kicks off with Valdomiro "Vadinho" Santos Guimarães (José Wilker), the first of the two husbands, dropping dead of some sort of heart attack or stroke during Carnival in 1943, right in the middle of getting in the face of some lady dancing her way down the streets of Bahia. They've been married for seven years, and Vadinho was ducking out to the casinos and the brothels right on their wedding night, and during which time he's not contributed much aside from good sex. Afterward, a friend sets Flor (Sonia Braga) up with sweet middle-aged pharmacist Dr. Teodoro Madureira (Mauro Mendonça), and he's nice, but when Vadinho's naked ghost returns, it's clear that she's been missing something.

That's awful close to the whole movie, and while getting to the midway point before introducing Teodoro may be how Jorge Amado's original novel is structured for all I know, it is an awful lot of Vadinho being just an unrepentant piece of garbage to get through before the audience gets to see Flor weighing him against Teodoro. It's not time that is completely wasted; director Bruno Barreto uses it to establish Flor as a sensible and respectable young woman who likes the sex enough to stick with Vadinho despite his less admirable qualities, even if a good middle-class woman can't just say that, and it probably doesn't hurt to take some time to establish Vadinho as pretty gifted in that area. The amount of it is aggravating, though, perhaps more so 43 years after its initial release, when the line between which men are lovable ne'er-do-wells and which ones are abusive parasites has likely shifted somewhat. One may not necessarily judge Flor too harshly for her choices, but Barreto may be presenting Vadinho as more entertaining than he now appears.

So what to make of his return? Oddly, that part works well enough that one might like to trade a bit of the living Vadniho for more time with his ghost. There are entire movies to be made around Flor struggling with the fact that she still wants her old husband in bed even as her new one is a better man and closer to what society says she is supposed to want, both reflective and farcical, but Barreto seems to short-change the film here, with detours into the ghost helping his friend in the casino and Teodoro seldom doing more than passing through scenes with Flor and Vadinho. Those moments are funny, and Sonia Braga does nice work in letting the guilt Flor feels for still wanting Vadinho pass across her face, but a film with this premise isn't necessarily the time to be subtle about Flor deciding what to retain and what to jettison from her first marriage.

Braga is generally quite impressive enough in the movie that served as her international breakthrough; it's easy to initially read Flor as a "good girl" with a secret, shameful sexuality, but she never actually seems to be switching faces: The way she doesn't shrink from what she gets out of her relationship lines right up with how she calmly talks about making good food. She's sensual and even if she doesn't flaunt it or giggle about it like the other women in the film, she knows herself. José Wilker gives what's often a genuinely funny performance as Vadinho, a confidence that is just larger enough than his present circumstances to make for a good gag. He's got a genuinely nasty vibe in Vadinho's worst moments, too, bringing just enough of that out in the last act when he knows that even if he can't actually hit Flor, she's all but powerless to do anything about his unwanted presence.

And for all the film's faults, it's still kind of remarkable to see that Barreto was something like twenty-one when he made it. It may be wrong-headedly confident in certain ways, but it does have the nice quality of looking better on a closer examination even if it originally rubs one the wrong way. Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands is an interesting thing to rediscover with its new restoration, undoubtedly a bit dated but still worth chewing on a bit.

Also on EFilmCritic

Three Husbands

Just spent a week and a weekend in Hong Kong, and I'm kind of as surprised as anyone how little of my vacation was directly movie-related, given that I'm me, Hong Kong cinema was a major inspiration for the trip, and even local films tend to show with English subtitles there, but what can I say? The Film Archive didn't have much going when I was in the neighborhood, I tended to wear myself down by the end of the day, and Captain Marvel pushed a lot off of the city's screens once it opened (two days before it did in the U.S.). There actually wasn't a whole lot of local film playing at times I wanted to see it. I was really hoping the Jackie Chan picture that opened on the Mainland for Chinese New Year would be around, but nope. Instead, I saw Captain Marvel opening day (it was pouring rain anyway), and nearly screwed that up by going to the wrong theater.

But, walking around on my last day there - always the best way to spend the end of a vacation, I pretty much stumbled onto this:



They were playing host to the European Film Festival, but also had a 7:40pm showing of Three Husbands, the new one from Fruit Chan, and, hey, I'd heard of him. Mostly in terms of his contributions to horror anthologies, with this apparently more typical of his general output (although he's also co-directed at least one action movie with Sammo Hung and has a big-looking action-adventure coming out this year). It was being called the third part of his "prostitute trilogy", but let's be honest - is two movies seventeen years ago plus a new one a trilogy, or just a guy going back to something that worked for him before? I mean, have people been asking him when this was going to come for a decade and a half?

Hey, it was a full house, at least, enough that I was seated in the front row, munching down popcorn for what wasn't really a popcorn movie because I was hungry. Not bad for a Sunday night screening of a movie that seemed to be down to one or two shows a day, and not always the same ones (HK scheduling seems a bit more creative than that in Boston). I'm sure that absolutely everyone there had a better handle on the movie and what it was saying than I did, but you know what - it was Hong Kong as hell, and that's not a bad finale for the trip.

(Oh, one more aside - they asked if I was part of their membership program at both the box office and concession stand but, obviously, I don't join those when I'm just going to be in a country for a week. But when I was going upstairs, I saw that Broadway is apparently owned by AMC by some of the signage, and I started to wonder if my Stubs A-List membership would have gotten me anywhere!)

Anyway, good movie, neat theater - it's got both a video store and a film-related bookshop in there, on top of being a fair place to see a movie. And I highly recommend Hong Kong as a vacation, especially if you've been slurping their movies down for years.

Sanfu (Three Husbands)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 March 2019 in Broadway Cinematheque (first-run, DCP)

I'm not in a position to wonder too much about the critical reception Three Husbands has received in its native Hong Kong; even more than most movies from the region, familiarity with its satirical targets, language, and other pieces of context will almost certainly enhance a picture that is already an impressive bit of independent filmmaking. It's the sort of film that's built to be a critical darling, especially with filmmaker Fruit Chan Gor returning to the sort of thing that first made him his name twenty years ago, maybe flattering the art-house audience a bit.

It opens with "Brother Four-Eyes" (Chan Charm-man) at a brothel just across the water in Zuhai, seemingly making time with a girl who claims to also be from Hong Kong (Larine Tang) before the police raid the place. His shtick involves saying he'd marry a girl, and it seems to be sincere, as he actually pursues Ah Mui (Chloe Maayan), who plies her trade on a boat docked off Lantau Island. Voluptuous and seemingly insatiable, she's too good an earner for "Second Brother" (Chan Man-lei) to let go easy. He eventually relents, but life on land (and off her back) is strange for Mui, while the frequency of their lovemaking is among the things that have their neighbors looking askance.

So, what's the metaphor here? Is Mui Hong Kong, passed between men who both exploit and claim to love her, or is that maybe more the way an outsider would read the situation rather than the sort of movie Chan would make for his neighbors a generation after the handover? Even if that's not it, there's still not a moment involving her or the general set-up that doesn't feel like it's about more; Mui is too blank a slate and the events a little too cheeky for it to just be taken at face value. Chan is certainly talking about the base-level urges of love and sex and how they get mixed up with the commercial, although the specific ways that relates to Hong Kong and the Tanka people never quite snapped into focus.

Full review at EFilmCritic

Look at This: The Love Witch & Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Sunday afternoon, going to be on a plane come Monday morning, what moviegoing do you cram in? The two that would probably benefit the most from theatrical exhibition, even if you know they probably aren't the best ones playing at the moment, or even the best ones on short time.

The funny thing: Despite being at best lukewarm on both, I kind of wish both of them had been presented somewhat closer to how they were intended. The Love Witch was shot on 35mm and there is apparently a print bouncing around, making me wonder if maybe it will play that way at the Brattle or Coolidge later, and Billy Lynn didn't even play in 3D outside of NYC/LA, let alone the super-high frame rate which apparently only a handful of screens in the world are equipped for. I don't know whether either would have made a better impression that way, but it's something worth pondering.

The Love Witch

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 November 2016 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

Poke around this site a little bit, and you'll find my review of Anna Biller's previous feature, Viva, as well as some comments about how, because I didn't much like it,I clearly didn't "get" it for finding it all impressively-recreated pastiche but often dull and empty. The good news about The Love Witch is that it's a better movie, with something interesting underneath its incredibly detailed surface; the bad news is that Biller still seems to have trouble separating the wheat from the chaff when she's worked so hard on every frame.

She introduces us to Elaine (Samantha Robinson), a young witch moving from San Francisco to a smaller town after things ended badly with her last lover, and she intends to use all that she knows about love and sex magics to make it happen. For a somewhat sleepy town, there are plenty of targets, from a libertine university professor (Jeffrey Vincent Parise) to the recently-promoted police officer who stopped her on the way in (Gian Keys) to the husband (Robert Seeley) of her new neighbor (Laura Waddell). Of course, these spells do tend to backfire.

The story itself doesn't matter for a little while, or at least the audience might be inclined to be patient, because the movie looks so good. Biller and cinematographer M. David Mullen shot on 35mm to better capture the bright, 1970s-inspired colors that she uses as her palette; though not actually a period piece, she draws a great deal of inspiration from that time, with hairstyles, wardrobe, and set decoration, much of it handmade by Biller herself, making for a tremendously lush, sensual visual experience.

Full review on EFC.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 November 2016 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, high frame rate DCP)

There's a paradox to Ang Lee's decision to shoot (and, ideally, exhibit) Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in 120fps 3D - while these technologies are intended to present an image on-screen that better reflects reality, the actual effect is to make everything seem a little off, because even in 2D at, I'm guessing, 48fps, it looks different enough from what a viewer is used to for the whole thing to seem kind of surreal. And, don't get me wrong, this absolutely works for the movie Lee is making, where both the war in Iraq and the return for a publicity tour are kind of unreal in their own ways. Which raises the question - if this tech did become common, would a good part of its effect be lost?

That would probably be a more relevant question for a better movie; this one is serviceable enough, dotted with clever and well-observed moments, but often seeming to fall just a bit short of its potential. It's got ideas, though none that seem particularly radical when viewed twelve years after the story's fictional events, but it struggles with making them personal for the audience. There are competing narratives around Billy - how he was not a patriotic volunteer but coerced into service for being a screw-up, how he ironically found his niche, how he is being exploited to feed the war machine (and would be exploited to oppose it) - but they don't quite coalesce. There's a real mess here that deserves examination, but this is a movie mostly content to look at the mess, not poke around in it.

A shame, because I like newcomer Joe Alwyn as Billy, capturing just how crazy young most of the people sent off to war are, stumbling toward some amount of wisdom. His scenes with Kristen Stewart as the older sister who feels responsible for him being over there and has come to hate the war both independently and as a result of it are great, especially as even those inclined to agree with her might become uncomfortable with how she's using him. There are bunches of surprising supporting performances, from a toned-down Chris Tucker to an unctuous Steve Martin, and the inappropriate weirdness of the halftime show is kind of impressive.

This movie probably isn't going to age well, especially removed from its natural theatrical environment. It's a fairly honest, well-intentioned one that tries some interesting things, at least, and that deserves a bit of praise.

Last Weekend at the Brattle: Mountains May Depart & Belladonna of Sadness

Odd coincidence - these two movies that played the Brattle as sort of a split-admission double feature are both being released on home video the same day this summer Second odd coincidence; this was the second stop in the Boston area for each, as Mountains May Depart was part of the Belmont World Film Series and Belladonna of Sadness was an opening night film for the Boston Underground Film Festival.

Seeing that makes me a little less frustrated to not get something up while they were still playing the Brattle; I've been generally dragging this year and am really hoping to make up some ground in the next few weeks.

Shan he gu ren (Mountains May Depart)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 May 2016 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)

The future is just as much a part of our lives as the past, but it often makes storytellers wary. Who wants to remembered for guessing wrong on details, let alone major happenings? Is risky, but sometimes your story has to extend that far in order to fully express what is teller is getting at, the way Mountains May Depart ("Shan he gu ren" in Mandarin) does. Its unconventional third act is not all that makes it an intriguing and noteworthy drama, though it is an essential part of the story.

The seeds, of course, are laid in the past, when 25-year-old beauty Shen Tao (Zhao Tao) has two suitors - "elite" Zhang Jinsheng (Zhang Yi), whose wealthy family owns the local gas station among other things, and Liang Jangjung (Liang Jing-dong), who like most of their town of Fenying has a job tied to the nearby coal mine. Though the coal is running out, Jinsheng buys the mine, which turns out to be a decent short-term investment as the price of coal goes up. By 2014, things aren't going so well for everyone; Tao is divorced, with her son Daole living with his father in Shanghai, while her other suitor is returning home in ill health. In 2025, "Dollar" (Dong Zijian) is living in Melbourne, 18 years old, barely able to communicate with the increasingly bitter father who has never really learned English, and the most interest he has in any of his classes involves Mia (Sylvia Chang), the fortyish but still striking teacher of his Mandarin class.

Mining towns like Fenying are dying all around the world; someone watching this in West Virginia would probably nod sadly at how familiar some of it is, even though writer/director Jia Zhangke seldom directly addresses the town as a whole rather than Tao, her friends, and her family. It's still an important reflection of what the characters do - in the past, the mine is something everybody practically takes for granted even if they know intellectually that it can't last forever, but the middle section of the movie lingers on death, whether it be the inevitable decay associated with mining coal or simple age. Jia doesn't portray Fenying as a ghost town at that point, but it's still very clear that the future is elsewhere, with Doale clearly not there for more than a visit in the middle and only the briefest of glimpses of the town.

Full review on EFC.

Kanashimi no Beradonna (Belladonna of Sadness)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 May 2016 in the Brattle Theatre (Special Engagement, DCP)

There wasn't much of a market for Japanese animation in the United States when Eiichi Yamamoto's Belladonna of Sadness was released in 1973, let alone films with the sort of limited animation and adult content that Yamamoto and producer Osamu Tezuka (often justifiably described as Japan's Walt Disney) were making in that period. As a result, it would take over forty years and a restoration for this film to get a theatrical and home video release in America, and while it's probably not worth that long a wait, it is worth discovering, especially for fans of art-house animation.

Yamamoto and co-writer Yoshiyuki Fukuda base their film on a nineteenth-century history of witchcraft by French historian Jules Michelet which contains several hypothetical short stories, which may explain why the story is so choppy - they are either trying to stretch something originally just a few pages long into ninety minutes or taking parts from several and making a single narrative out of them. So the film winds up having a reasonable enough frame, as poor farmer Jean (voice of Katsutaka Ito) and local beauty Jeanne (voice of Aiko Nagayama) marry, only for the local Lord (voice of Masaya Takahashi) find Jean's tribute offerings insufficient, leading to a prima nocte gang-rape that hangs like a cloud over the pair's intimacy, eventually leading to a deal with the Devil (voice of Tatsuya Nakadai).

In the middle of all this is a story of the young couple rising and falling separately (both become the town's tax collector at different points), the Lord committing to a costly war, and his mistress (voice of Shigako Shimegi) trying to strike at Jeanne out of jealousy. Knowing that Michelet's La Sorcière was more history than novel explains this somewhat - Jeanne's tribulations become a list of the pressures that medieval women had to deal with, which is interesting for scholarship, but not nearly as interesting an individual story as Jeanne finding herself punished and distrusted for being attractive, even by those who love her, and having to weaponize it to survive. That would not be original, perhaps, but it resonates in any place and time.

Full review on EFC.

Love (2015)

So on Saturday night, I pretty much watched The Peanuts Movie, took the Red Line up to Davis Square, and walked right into the theater showing Love. Since there was no glasses bin between the screen and the exit at Boston Common, I wound up using the same pair of glasses. In retrospect, that seems kind of inappropriate.

Very limited release on this one in the Boston area - just 10pm shows at the Somerville Theatre while the Boston Jewish Film Festival has the screen at 7, and just one mid-afternoon show a day in West Newton, that one in 2D. I was actually kind of surprised at that - I kind of thought this was along the lines of Farewell to Language, where you don't get it unless you play it in 3D. Odd that it plays Somerville instead of Kendall Square, but sometimes they're a little more adventurous.

I kind of wonder what the plus/minus for people seeing it because it's in 3D is. As much as I was kind of curious about seeing the new one from the guy who made Irreversible, I'd skipped Enter the Void because I'm not really that big on envelope-pushing stuff. But I dig 3D, even if I sometimes feel like I'm the only person who really likes movies who does sometimes. I especially love it when it shows up in something other than a big American action/animated movie, even if that sometimes means watching Goodbye to Language, which is what you might call boring if prone to understatement. Love does some nifty things with it, and I kind of hope other art-house filmmakers give it a try, even if it is a beast to shoot with.

Love (2015)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 November 2015 in Somerville Theatre #5 (first-run, DCP/RealD)

It's almost a shame that Gaspar Noé apparently shot Love entirely in native 3D, because it might be fun to ask guys doing post-conversion work whether sex was a nice change of pace from the usual violence. That it was all shot this way, on the other hand, indicates that every action in this movie is done with purpose, which means that even when it's dragging a bit or shoving more in the audience's face than it might want, it's at least put together in an intriguing way.

It tells the story of Murphy (Karl Glusman), an American in Paris who came as a film student and is now raising a child with a lovely girl by name of Omi (Klara Kristin). Unfortunately, the true love of his life is probably Electra (Aomi Muyock), but she has been out of his life for some time - out of everyone's in fact, as her mother Nora has not heard from her in two months and is thus desperate enough to see if Murphy has been in contact with her.

There's not a whole lot of time spent on finding out what happened to Electra, or indeed in the film's present at all. Her disappearance mostly serves as a reason for Murphy to think back on the entire length of his tempestuous, intertwined relationships with her and Omi, and those familiar with Noé's work might find that framing work unnecessary, as his stepping back a bit further each time bears a certain amount of resemblance to Irreversible (he originally planned to make this film in the early 2000s with the cast he would use for Irreversible, but when they backed down from the unsimulated sex they changed plans and Noé filed Love away for later). It's a superficial similarity; both films move toward a happy beginning from a dark ending, but Love does so along a natural, well-marked path rather than the shocking context-shifting tragedy of its predecessor, and it's not nearly so straight a line back. Noé's goal here is less to surprise than examine, maybe unearthing how early the seeds for disaster were planted.

Full review on EFC.

The Fantasia Daily 2014.17: Hunter X Hunter: Phantom Rouge, From Vegas to Macau, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared, Black Butler, Time Lapse, Naked Ambition

Crazy-long seeming day, and that film's title just makes it seem longer.

I almost had a bit of a break to get some writing done or something, as I opted to use the longish wait between the end of Black Butler and the beginning of Time Lapse to stop at Mr. Steer for some actual sit-down food. I suspect that this place can serve as sort of a metaphor for St. Catherine Street in general - in the years since I've started coming, they've remodeled a fair amount and while I wouldn't necessarily call it upscale now, it's a little glossier and neater. It's still basically a diner at heart, though, and if you're seated toward the front and looking out the window, you're still looking at the sign for the strip club next door.

They still serve one of the tastiest burgers in Montreal, and not just because they'll cook it medium rare for you. I was briefly worried that I shouldn't have dallied, though, as Time Lapse was officially full by the time I got there. There turned out to be enough seats for the passholders, though, even if I wound up down in front.



Actual note taken: "Bradley is the one wearing glasses", so that I can say director Bradley king is on the left and co-writer BP Cooper is on the right. I'll replace the photo with one that looks less demonic once I get back home and have a mini-USB cable to connect my camera to my computer.

Fun Q&A; as they talked about how they had to do a lot of weird things with the photographs from the future that drive the plot: They were taken with a Canon digital camera while the movie was being shot, manipulated in Photoshop to get a Polaroid look, printed and placed into those plastic Polaroid sleeves that they purchased on Ebay. The shooting schedule for several scenes had to be built around this process, so they wound up shooting a good chunk of the film backwards.

They also talked about how it kind of gutted them to cut John Rhys-Davies out of the film. You can see him in some of the photos as the inventor of the future-camera, but the characters never meet him alive in the movie and a flashback sequence had to be cut out because it was slowing the movie down and repeating information. There wasn't even a letter he could narrate.

At any rate, good movie and a fun Q&A, although I was checking the clock toward the end so that I could rush across the street for Naked Ambition. I got there just in time to see half a vintage trailer before the movie started, and was ready to drop by the end. Funny movie, but I think it was the first time I felt much of an "I'm in no mood for glasses" strain by the end when seeing one in 3D.

Gekijouban HUNTERxHUNTER Hiiro no Genei (Hunter X Hunter: Phantom Rouge)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: AXIS, HD)

Well, that was certainly an animated movie based upon a manga I have never read that was as a result kind of difficult to wrap my head around. Kudos to those involved for keeping it from becoming incomprehensible, though - along with the trés kawaii bit that opened the movie to explain everything, the last-act pile-up of characters is shockingly manageable, even if all the talk of "nen" does sort of become gobbledegook to an outsider such as me.

One thing that kind of struck me about it, and I wonder if it's generally true for similar manga & anime, is that while Gon is the protagonist, the more interesting character is his friend Killua, struggling with the very idea of having friends. As much as it makes one kind of want the movie to be about that 12-year-old "hunter" in training, it wouldn't work the other way around; Gon would become kind of extraneous.

Anyway, enough fun for me to go see the next one, even with the weird freeze-frame montages and overstuffed plot.

(Dead) link to full review on EFC

Ao Men feng yun (From Vegas to Macau)

* * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

It's been a while since I've seen any of the original God of Gamblers movies, so it's quite possible that they were a great deal sillier than I remember them being. The thing was, even when they were kind of comedic, Chow Yun-fat was cool in them. In this quasi-sequel, he's something else, a guy everyone talks about being awesome even though it no longer seems the case.

Things start of with another guy called Cool (Nicolas Tse), who along with his father Benz (Hui Shiu-hung) and cousin Karl (Chapman To) steal from loan sharks Robin Hood-style to help those who have been extorted and pay Benz's wife's medical bills. It turns out that Benz is an old friend of the world-famous gambler Ken (Chow), who has been working as a security consultant in Las Vegas for the past few years, but whom Chinese detective Lok Chi-man (Jing Tian) is trying to recruit to bring down Mr. Ko (Gao Hu), an international money launderer.

There's more - good lord, there's more. Writer/director Wong Jing seems eager to keep busy, filling every available minute of the movie with comic relief plots, fast-paced back-and-forth in the dialogue, and absolutely any excuse for special effects he can come up with. A tour of Ken's mansion becomes something out of a movie for much younger viewers as CGI effects have things pop in and out of the floor. It's madcap, and caps things of with an ending that's in the same exaggerated spirit but naturally a last-minute addition.

It's frenetic, and doesn't really give any of the characters a chance to aspire to anything but paper-thinness, but that doesn't mean there's no fun to be had. Jokes that often seem juvenile are still kind of universal, so it's hard not to giggle at broad slapstick or visual gags like Ko turning over an 11 because he's somehow able to change the number on a card, and the sheer amount of silliness on display has to impress and occasionally hit if only by random unless one is a complete sourpuss. It can be a low count and still get the job done. It can be a tough balance with the meaner aspects, like how Ko winds up torturing one of the characters, but likely something will work for everyone.

This sort of goofy slapstick has never really been Chow Yun-fat's wheelhouse, though, and there's something sad about him hamming it up here, his character actually protesting that he's almost sixty at a couple of points when actually pushed at a much younger woman after a fair amount of leering and flirting. He doesn't have the wildest takes, but this is basically one of the roles that made him an icon of cool, and he's only got a couple of moments where he seems to be acting rather than mugging. He's easily upstaged by Nicholas Tse, who can actually make a character named "Cool" work even behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Jing Tian is a fine enough leading lady that I kind of wish they'd paired her off with Tse; with Kimmy Tong pretty but bland as Ken's daughter, maybe it would have been more fun to have her weird enough to actually go for Chapman To's goofy sidekick.

The action, at least, is pretty good; it's handled by Nicky Li and tends to feature John Zhang Jin as Ko's enforcer "Ghost Eyes". He's not messing around and has good fight scenes with both Nicholas Tse and Philip Ng Wan-Lung, a burst of serious energy in the middle of silliness. Must of the rest is CGI-augmented, including Ken's golden playing cards that cut through the air like throwing stars. The bouncy piano score is also a plus.

It's possible that my lack of enjoyment of this movie is the result of coming at it with unfair expectations, wanting to see a cool Chow Yun-fat in a light but not exactly ridiculous movie, and someone coming in looking for zaniness will enjoy it more. I doubt it somewhat, though; even for slapstick comedy, it's dumb enough to be frustrating.

(Dead) link to review at EFC

Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann (The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Sometimes you see a movie and don't realize what it was missing until decades later, when someone else tries something similar but with an added extra ingredient. Such is the case with The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, which demonstrates how Forrest Gump and Zelig could have been much better movies if their title characters had really liked to blow things up.

Allan Karlsson (Robert Gustafsson) is still at it at 99, when he uses dynamite to deal with the fox who attacked his cat Molotov. That gets him put in a retirement home, although he walks out on his hundredth birthday, and into an accidental adventure that eventually involves a biker gang, bored retiree Julius (Iwar Wiklander), perpetual student Benny (David Wiberg), animal rights stalwart Gunilla (Mia Skäringer), and her elephant. This is not exactly new for him, of course; his long life and love of explosives has taken him to the Spanish Civil War, the Manhattan Project, a Soviet gulag with Herbert Einstein (David Shackleton) - Albert's rather dim brother - and a career in espionage as a double agent.

In some ways, it's two movies about about roughly the same thing - a guy who is kind of detached from the world, loves blowing things up, and sort of stumbles into misadventures as opposed to initiating them deliberately. They do, eventually, tie together, and on reflection, may even all be part of the same elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that leads up to some huge laughs in the end as things spiral into absurdity that is often literally explosive. Director Felix Herngren and co-writer Hans Ingemansson (adapting a novel by Jonas Jonasson) play it with a light enough touch that it feels more like funny coincidence than destiny or master plan that the audience is supposed to be impressed by.

It's not all build-up to a big payoff, though - this is a flat-out hilarious movie throughout, from that fox getting more than what's coming to it to the way a character exits toward the finale. It is very much the sort of comedy where much of the humor comes from people meeting unfortunate ends, albeit generally in a dry, silly way that is absurd without seeming bloodthirsty, but it's also filled with general oddity, sequences where moving the pieces into place generates nearly as many laughs as them finally lined up, and funny exaggerations of history. Karl is often played as a rather passive character, but there's a tremendously funny bit of ongoing banter as he tries to explain an escape plan to the phenomenally stupid Einstein. Plus, just about any funny situation can be made even better with the addition of either high explosives, an elephant, or a man so old that he is just past giving a damn.

It helps to have a pretty great cast selling it. Robert Gustafsson is actually a really impressive comedy chameleon here; he's got good make-up jobs to work with, but he's a little more scattered and out of it to emphasize Allan's age in the present-day segments while still being the same kind of in-his-own-head throughout the movie (side note: the festival DCP had another actor doing English-language narration, and since it was noted in the subtitles rather than the actual credits, I presume the film is localized like that outside of Sweden). While David Shackleton's Einstein is the best scene-stealer in the past - though Manuel Dubra works what is basically one great, mean joke to perfection as a would-be Spanish revolutionary - the whole crew in the present is fairly fantastic: Iwar Wiklander is a progressively more devil-may-care Julius as the movie goes on, David Wiberg is amusingly nervous as Benny with Mia Skäringer a good balance as Gunilla, the whole biker gang is hilarious, and Ralph Carlsson makes an exceptional balance is the ever-more-perplexed cop investigating what at first seems like a trivial case that transmutes into something bizarre.

Really, everybody does their jobs well, and that's important, because it's not just a matter of whether this kind of humor is your thing or not. That just indicates whether you can enjoy it or not. This one made me laugh hard, nearly constantly; it's a legitimately great comedy, going for the huge laugh when getting the audience to crack a smile might have been considered success.

(Dead) link to review at EFC

"You Can't Hear Me, You Can't See Me"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

I'm not sure if that title every shows up in the movie - I certainly don't recall seeing it - but it describes the short well enough. This is an action reel about a pair of brothers (one blind, one mute) trying to defend the woman they both love (also blind) from a group of religious fanatics who kidnap and sacrifice defenseless blind women. Fortunately, she is singing, and when she does that, she is so wrapped up in it that she doesn't hear the melee going on outside.

I see on IMDB that it's a proof-of-concept short, which may make its flaws a bit more forgivable - the goofiness of how director Awi Suryadi and writer Andrew Suleiman introduce their concept would probably be smoothed out in a feature, along with the editing that has a hard time getting the right rhythm jumping between Mary and Mo & Mickey. On the other hand, the absolute absurdity of the concept is appealing, the bits before the action are cute, and the fighting is pretty great. You can't always see the characters' handicaps in it, but it shows up enough for the fight to come across as inventive, and the actual stunt-work is top-notch. I would not mind seeing a feature at all.

Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Action!, DCP)

One of the women in front of me was throwing her hands up roughly every ten minutes or so during this movie, and I wondered off the top of my head whether she was just having a general "what the hell is this thing?" reaction or a more specific "what the hell have they done to my favorite manga it's not supposed to be like this?" one. I gather the film takes some pretty extreme liberties with the source material, and maybe if I'd read more than a few chapters in Yen Press's brief attempt at a weekly Japanese-style manga anthology, I'd be upset too.

But I haven't, and I'm not, because this thing is just gloriously daffy. It features a heroine who cross-dresses as her illegitimate brother so that she can inherit the family fortune and title in an alternate 2020 where there is still a powerful aristocracy - some members of whom serve as secret agents - and the demonic butler who protects her and serves as a partner so that he may someday consume the soul she sold to him as a child, after she completes her mission. Many of the outfits are neo-Victorian frillery with a Matrix-inspired color scheme.

Really, it's the best Tim Burton movie in a couple of decades, even if he had nothing to do with it and probably couldn't pull off the fast-paced, vicious action that directors Kentaro Otani and Keiichi Sato have their stars engage in. This is a surprisingly intense action movie for being so downright weird - even if scenes which would normally have nasty arterial spray seem to skip in in order to avoid getting red on all those pretty clothes - and aimed at what I presume is a tween/teen audience. The story is kind of bonkers, and implies the start of a series. I kind of hope it does, because this really is a fantastically strange, fun little movie.

(Dead) link to full review on EFC

Time Lapse

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Paradigm Shifters, DCP)

Very glad to get into this one, another standout in one of the best sci-fi years I can remember Fantasia having. This one's an enjoyably devilish time-travel story that, as many of the best do, fits together like an exceptionally well-constructed puzzle. I didn't quite figure out the missing piece exactly, but did wind up appreciating that bits were hidden in plain sight without becoming predictable.

I also really liked the cast; I've enjoyed seeing Danielle Panabaker pop up in things since she played James Woods's daughter on Shark, and she's the most familiar face that didn't wind up on the cutting room floor (alas, John Rhys-Davies) and also pretty great in her own right, starting out as the quiet glue that holds the movie together before having a chance to take over. Matt O'Leary and George Finn wind up playing opposite poles, with O'Leary decent but indecisive and Finn making his character risky and more to make sure that the audience never takes what's going on for granted.

I'm really hoping that this can get picked up for something more than VOD; it's both easy enough to grasp and good enough to play in regular theaters.

(Dead) link to full review on EFC

Naked Ambition

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Xpand 3D)

I have to wonder a little bit just how many of the folks who regularly make sure to include something along the lines of "don't pay the extra for 3D, there's nothing that merits it" for seemingly every movie released in the format will pause when considering Anri Okita's L-cups. In a shot-in-3D sex comedy that doesn't necessarily merit an hour forty-five with glasses on, it's hard to overlook things that make an impression.

Format aside, this was actually a pretty fun comedy. Heck, scratch the surface just a little bit and it's a good romantic comedy starring Chapman To and Josie Ho, although the filmmakers mostly recognize that they're looking to do madcap and kind of hit the brakes whenever they get near the sort of sincerity required for it to really work that way. Instead, they mostly go for laughs, which are plentiful, both in terms of the weird situations To's Wyman Chan gets himself into and the Adult Video (AV) spoofs that pop up throughout the movie, which pivot on turning the tables on the usual scenarios to have Chan's character playing the "victim" of sexually aggressive women. Apparently they are dead on.

Hong Kong has been putting these 3D sex comedies out for the last couple of years, but this seems to be the first with a legitimately great cast. It made for a late night at Fantasia, but a unique, entertaining experience.

(Dead) link to full review on EFC

The Fantasia Daily 2014.12: The Creeping Garden, Hana-Dama: The Origin, Guardian, Creep

Every year, I spend one week of Fantasia working mornings to make sure stuff from the office doesn't fall too far behind. This is that week, and it started great with my work laptop's password having expired and my phone opting to drain rather than charge overnight. Plus, it was raining, and I still haven't gotten around to getting a new umbrella since leaving my last one on the bus, so not the ideal start to the day.

Started okay, though, with these guys presenting a documentary on slime molds:



I'll replace it with a better one as soon as I can hook my non-phone camera up to the computer, but that's Jasper Sharp and Tim Grabham, two guys who normally do other things entirely - Sharp is well-known as a programmer of Japanese films - but sometimes you get an idea like slime molds into your head and that's the movie you've got to make. One thing I really liked was the great fondness they seemed to have for people doing research on these weird life-forms, many amateurs. They also talked about how difficult it can be to make this sort of movie, as the people who fund science docs tend to want something identifiable and anthropomorphic, leading to "endless bloody films about penguins and meerkats". Another fun bit of trivia: The first person to do their Ph.D thesis on slime molds was Japan's Emperor Hirohito.

After that, I stuck around de Seve for Hana-Dama, and let me tell you, that is an uncomfortable movie. When it's just about bullying, it's okay if somewhat over the top, but when it gets straight-up rapey midway through... Yeesh. There's something to be said for this sort of material and how it should make the audience wince, but it's worse when the lady next to me is doing the wincing and the movie follows it up with little but bizarre cruelty, even if it is directed toward villains.

Pretty much no time between that and Guardian, where I once again got seated just as a short film was starting. Who do I ask to find out if they matched a short starring Missy Peregrym with a movie featuring Sarah Carter because somebody on the festival staff like Black Sash back in the day?



Director Helfi Kardit was there for The Guardian, and he mentioned Tony Scott as an influence when asked that question, which was kind of unusual - most of the time, filmmakers answer with guys really known for their inventive action rather than ones known for making a slick commercial product. The choppy editing kind of matched latter-day Scott, though.

After that, Creep, one of my favorites of the festival so far. So a couple of not very good movies that didn't have "Creep" in the title surrounded by two good ones that are practically on back-to-back pages of the program.


Today's plan: A lot of "well, I guess..." followed by what I really want to see: I'm not terribly excited by To Be Takei, do kind of want to see At the Devil's Door, but that's balanced by how the short film in front of it will make it all but impossible to get to Boss at the Cinematheque and, since I've already seen Starry Eyes (good!) and am not getting into Guardians of the Galaxy, that leave me seeing The Search for Weng Weng. The night ends with The Snow White Murder Case, though, so that's pretty good shape.


The Creeping Garden

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, HD)

I take a certain amount of pride in seeing/reviewing movies like this at festivals, and I half think it's why some give me press passes - a lot of folks will be trying to get into the big Marvel movie, but he is down for the weird science doc.

And this is a particularly good one, full of the expected information and striking photography, and then some. I appreciate that, while they put an unnerving score by Jim O'Rourke underneath, they didn't seem to lean into the horror movie vibe that they could, considering that these things are neither plant, animal, or fungus, move (albeit very slowly, about an inch per day) and pulsate when seen on time lapse. They seem so far out of our experience as to be scary as heck, but directors Tim Grabham & Jasper Sharp instead see them as fascinating.

They also go off in some interesting directions, like 19th-century magic lantern shows, some of the first nature documentaries, and how slime molds are fascinating for simulating network connections, with a very nifty segment on how if you set oats (their favorite food) out on a map in the place of major population centers, they'll expand toward them in a close representation of how the roads are laid out in the real world. It's a sort of intelligence, but very different from how we frequently use the term.

At any rate, this is some very cool science that doesn't come off as gross so much as engrossing.

Full review on EFC

Hana-Dama

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, DCP)

I don't know if I'd necessarily say I liked this movie for most of its running time, or if I'd call it "good", but I kind of admired its frankness about bullying, both among peer groups and institutionally. It's not the best-acted or most inventively written take on the idea, but I bought into it and sympathized with the characters, even when things were a little over-the-top. It had a moment I really liked. And even when the bullying becomes full-fledged sexual assault, I wanted to see how the characters either dug themselves out or served as a horrible object lesson.

And then the weird crap kicked in, with a corpse flower blooming out of the main character's head (something the movie had been leading up to), and it just becomes awful. There's no satisfaction in the revenge fantasies that play out afterward, but no engagement, either. It just gets weirder and nastier and although some of what's going on is clearly meant to be symbolic, it seems both ham-fisted and off the mark much of the time.

Full review on EFC

"The Proposal"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Fun concept here - first date as martial arts/gun battle, and Geordie Sabbagh executes it with no small amount of style. That includes some nice fight choreography which seems a bit slowed down but that also did a nice job of exaggerating the clarity and giving the audience a hint that this is metaphoric rather than two assassins set up for whatever reason. Some fun gags, too, including a good punchline.

The two-person cast of Missy Peregrym and Peter Mooney - co-stars on Rookie Blue, although I don't know if they're paired up often on that show - is pretty good, too, a little more polished than you necessarily see in this sort of short film, and it shows; aside from doing the physical parts pretty well, there's a zip to how they play off each other that doesn't seem to have come completely through editing. That's a big part of what this sort of short needs, and this one works

Pengawal (Guardian)

* * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival: Action!, DCP)

Keep your eye on Dominique Agisca Diyose. She's a looker from Indonesia, a good enough actress for the sort of material she's given here, and she certainly looks like she can throw down when the movie gives her a clear shot. Hook her up with a better movie and maybe a better director - maybe the next one from The Raid's team - and she can be a real star.

Guardian isn't the movie that gets her there, though - it's the one where you hope she stands out amid the godawful mess that is the rest of the movie, including a script that is just full to bursting of stupid: Nobody ever seems to do anything for any sort of reason that makes sense, whether it be Diyose's mother or her surly daughter, including a truly frustrating number of times when the former could just tell the latter what is going on and save what seems like a lot of trouble later on. The action is also both kind of excessive - long stretches of the movie are just the constant din of machine guns - and poorly shot, often in low light that the shaky handheld cameras can't really handle and cut in a way that does a terrible job of establishing the geography.

I've seen worse - it's at least got Diyose and Sarah Sanguin Carter, who's often better in things like this than her appearance might suggest. But the action is quantity over quality, and the folks involved deserve better.

Full review on EFC

"The Flames of My Love"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

This is an interesting idea for a short that could maybe use a little polish, with Sarah Scott as a girl admitting all her outrageous lies to her boyfriend, only to have things back up over the course of the relationship and the face of her boyfriend change within the scene.

Scott gives a pretty winning performance as Kelly, but it's kind of hampered by how filmmaker Jonathan V. Hludzinski seems to have about three different ideas for this short - the rewind, the lies, the stalker - and they don't necessarily add to each other. Sometimes, they even seem to be fighting for supremacy. Ten minutes is not a lot of movie, and I think this one could use a little streamlining to give the best parts all the time they need.

Creep

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clakre (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

My only issues with Creep come from the generic title - it's only been ten years since the movie by that name with Franka Potente and word that two sequels are already planned. This movie is self-contained and works in a way that I don't think is repeatable. Maybe I'm wrong and the folks involved knew where they were going for a trilogy before shooting the first bit of footage, but...

That stuff doesn't matter, though - what does is that this is a very entertaining movie, with Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass coming up with a good reason for a found-footage style movie to be generating footage and then piling every joke that they can on and selling the heck out of it. Creep is a tremendously funny movie - one of Duplass's best comedic performances - and even when it starts getting into more unsettling territory, the jokes are perfectly executed. It's "wait, what?" humor executed more or less perfectly.

Full review on EFC

The Fantasia Daily 2014.05: Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, Butter on the Latch, Hwayi: A Monster Boy

Things you do when attending a film festival with a press pass: Write emails in the morning asking which movies have screeners of what type available, because that night features two movies only showing once during the festival, both with directors attending, so which one is easier to see later?



That's Jang Joon-hwan in the center, so as you can see, I opted for Hwayi over The Harvest (which, being an English-language movie with fairly well-known actors, might pop up elsewhere). Personable guy who made an appreciated stab at Franglais when introducing the movie, handled the inevitable "so, what's the relationship with your father like" question with good humor, and got into fun detail about the conception of the monster in his movie.

It's worth checking out. And if there isn't Korean fanfic out there that introduces its main character to the one from Joe Wright's Hanna - or if it doesn't pop up in English as this plays more festivals/hits video - well, I'll be very disappointed with the pop culture fanatics out there.


Today's plan: White Bird in a Blizzard and Cheatin' in de Sève, cross the street for In Order of Disappearance and No Tears for the Dead. Probably won't have any spare time to find a place showing the Red Sox/Blue Jays game in between.


Thou Wast Mild and Lovely

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

Before Joesphine Decker's Thou Wast Mild and Lovely starts to be a weird, creepy sort of movie in a way that has real certainty and direction, it's got two scenes that kind of warn the audience what it's getting into. In the first, farmer Jeremiah (Robert Longstreet) and his daughter Sarah (Sophie Traub) are rolling around in the grass, throwing a headless chicken back and forth, getting blood all over their clothes. In the second, Sarah narrates, describing a strange, ethereal, perfect lover while the camera slowly zooms in on her increasingly agitated dog. Decker quickly moves on to other things, and maybe I'm reading things into that latter juxtaposition that aren't meant, but even if that's the case, what the hell is the deal with everything else?

There's also a new farmhand on Jeremiah's spread, Akin (Joe Swanberg), a taciturn young man who has hired on for the season . He has lied and said he was single in order to get the job, but that just leaves him dealing with a beautiful girl his own age starved for male attention and a man whose attitude toward anyone who looks at his daughter a certain way seems to owe more to jealousy than protectiveness - and who seems to disdain Akin even beyond that.

It's a situation with seemingly unlimited range to get creepier even before adding family to it, whether they be Jeremiah's equally icky kin or Akin's wife Drew (Kristin Slaysman). The way Decker (and co-writer David Barker) manages to keep finding ways to push the situation a little further, whether by things that are transparently troublesome or moments that should be innocent but instead seem to fuel the strange erotic atmosphere of this setting, is impressive to behold. There's no easily identifiable moment when things go from a situation that Akin probably would rather not be in but will endure because work is hard to find to something that is messed up beyond toleration, but the movie is clearly there by the end. There's a pervasive, uneasy air of dangerous sexuality.

Full review at EFC

Butter on the Latch

* * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

Butter on the Latch was listed in the program as playing before director Josephine Decker's prior film, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, as if it was a short film rather than a 63-minute feature. The programmers and projectionists mercifully flipped the order; I can only imagine how the audience might have revolted if this had played first. The properties that make it not a very good movie would have made it even more of an endurance test if the audience was sitting through the whole thing to get to the film whose name actually appears on the ticket.

It's an improvised thing, mostly set around two friends (Sarah Small & Isolde Chae-Lawrence) attending a Balkan music and dance seminar in Mendocino, California. Isolde says she's just broken up with her boyfriend for real this time but isn't looking for a replacement, while Sarah is on the lookout, with her gaze eventually landing on a cute banjo player (Charlie Hewson). The event is mostly held outdoors and in tents, which also means that Sarah and Isolde are staying in tents in the middle of the woods, providing ample opportunity to get lost in the dark.

The multiple scenes that take place in near-total blackness, with what available light there is coming from Sarah's headlamp, aren't the most trying visual element of this movie, though. That would be cinematographer Ashley Connor's frequently out-of-focus camera work. Decker and Connor would tone that down a fair amount for Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, but here, it seems as though every scene starts blurry until they figure out what they want the audience to concentrate on, and it's brutal, to the point of being headache-inducing from the strain of one's eyes naturally trying to accomplish what the camera refuses to do. It may be meant to emphasize dreaminess or searching for clarity, but it looks like a problem with projection.

Full review at EFC

Hwayi: Gwimuleul samkin ahyi (Hwayi: A Monster Boy)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

A little over ten years ago, director Jang Joon-hwan made a good-sized splash with a film by the name of Save the Green Planet, but after that, barely a peep. He certainly seems to have come back to the Korean movie scene in style with Hwayi: A Monster Boy, which shows a little rust - but not when the time for action comes.

There's an important time-jump in the movie, too: It kicks off in 1998, when ruthless outlaw gang the Day Breakers have kidnapped a pre-schooler, only to be met with cops instead of a ransom. Rather than killing the boy, though, they raise him as his own. In 2012, Hwayi (Yeo Jin-goo) is seventeen and likes to wear a high school uniform even though he is home-schooled by his "fathers" - planner Jin-sung (Jang Hyun-sung), getaway driver Ki-tae (Cho Jin-woong), martial artist Dong-bum (Kim Sung-kyun), weaponsmith Beom-soo (Park Hae-joon), and killer Suk-tae (Kim Yun-seok). Before Hwayi goes off to art school, the Day Breakers aim to involve him in one simple-enough job - which naturally turns more complicated than it looked.

Five fathers - and one mother, Young-joo (Im Ji-eun), who was also in chains in 1998 - is a rather unweildy number, to the extent that Dong-bum and Beom-soo have relatively little to do. It takes a bit of squinting for the way Park Ju-seok's script pulls everything together in the end to really make sense; as much as it pulls what could be an entirely random story together in a way that gives the final showdowns more emotional resonance than just a lot of people who are good with guns pointing them at each other, it also requires a group of master criminals to not notice what this job entails and whether or not involving their bright, highly-skilled son who has never actually killed before is really the brightest of ideas.

Full review at EFC