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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


"The Door"

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

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

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

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


The Silent Planet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Penalty Loop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

"Buff-O-Ween": Extra Ordinary

As I've been saying when IFFBoston does their Fall Focus every year, local film festivals doing "and-a-half" series to screen the movies that would play their main event except for how films don't stay on the festival circuit for that long anymore is a downright fantastic idea, and the Boston Underground Film Festival having this horror-centric one in October is especially great. Many of these things are not going to hit the big screen otherwise, and they deserve a chance to be seen.

(Selfishly, it's really convenient for me, being able to pick off a couple that I couldn't make work for my schedule at Fantasia like this one, while also including others that I did see so that I can not have this one event eat my entire weekend like IFFBoston's Fall Focus will in a couple of weeks.)

Speaking of scheduling and other festivals, this one was co-presented by the Irish Film Festival of Boston, and while introducing the movie, representatives for both fests talked about how the various organizers are trying to coordinate and work together better, which means that next year the Irish and Underground festivals will not be held the same weekend, but one after the other. As someone who has regretted missing some of the Irish movies, I find this to be genuinely great (and long-overdue) news.

"Raspberries"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 October 2019 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Buff-O-Ween, digital)

I remember John Cleese once saying that the secret of Monty Python was that they eliminated punchlines, so they never had to reset and it was harder for a sketch to become retroactively disappointing because someone didn't like how it ended. I don't know if that's what David Guerrera was thinking while making "Raspberries", but it seems to be a necessary part of the plan. I can't think of an ending that would actually work here, but there are a couple minutes of laughs to be mined from the odd situation he chose.

It's one that most viewers will recognize - the odd family tradition that makes a newcomer uncomfortable - and Guerrera mines just the right amount of confusion and exaggerated eccentricity out of it before quickly cutting bait and forcing the audience to have an opinion on who was being unreasonable. It means that there's kind of not much here, but I suspect that when you consider it in its natural environment (as a YouTube video for a channel that delivers quick off-kilter hits), it's going to work pretty well.

Extra Ordinary

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 October 2019 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Buff-O-Ween, digital)

I suppose movies like Extra Ordinary are the domain of the streaming services now, but there should be theaters in every city that show movies like Extra Ordinary for relatively cheap, making it easier to experience them with an audience. It is built to be a cheap and memorable date, with plenty to make the audience smile, and even if someone somehow doesn't like it, it's just off-kilter enough to let you talk about how screwy it was.

Rose Dooley (Maeve Higgins) can talk to ghosts, but chooses instead to work as a driving instructor in her small Irish town, ever since the death of her father (Risteard Cooper) in an exorcism-related incident when she was younger, though they were just the level of locally famous that people still call her with their strange noises. Martin Martin (Barry Ward) has rather more than strange noises; his dead wife has been haunting him for eight years and is as pushy and, really, kind of abusive as ever; daughter Sarah (Emma Coleman) says she's moving out unless he does something about it. And Christian Warner (Will Forte), an American one-hit wonder who moved to town for tax reasons years ago, is looking to make a deal with the devil to jump-start his career, but after an unfortunate incident with his wife Claudia (Claudia O'Doherty) and their planned sacrifice, he's going to need another virgin, and the omens lead him directly to the hardware store where Sarah works after school.

One of the clever things filmmakers Mike Ahern & Enda Loughman do right in the VHS-tape-exposition drop that opens the movie is to establish that, compared to a lot of supernatural comedies, the stakes are likely to be fairly low; most ghosts, we are told, can't really establish enough of a toehold in our world to be more than extremely minor nuisances. Controlling ambition can be useful for this sort of movie - it keeps the visual effects budget under control and means you don't have to work too hard to sell that all this supernatural stuff can be happening in a world we find familiar. The next step is maybe even more impressive - deciding that small doesn't necessarily mean petty. Heroes and villains alike have modest enough goals that it feels like a situation the audience can fall into.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Rezo

I have a couple of Russian co-workers, and I should probably ask them how popular and well-remembered Revan "Rezo" Gabriadze and his films still are. Probably not well-known as a filmmaker - or maybe writers get remembered more in Russia - so I'd probably ask about Kin-Dza-Dza! and hope I'm not annoying them. I've never really heard of the guy, just coming across this film as one of the Russian flicks that occasionally gets booked at Fenway (very occasionally - something like one show three times a year), seeing "animated autobiographical documentary", and figuring, sure, why not? Given that it didn't really seem to be part of any sort of series with branding on it, I actually wasn't sure whether or not it would have English subtitles, crossing my fingers.

It did, thankfully, as did the animated short that helped pad the 62-minute running time out a little. I suspect I would have gotten the gist without it, but that would have been a truly unusual night at the movies.

It's kind of notable how not-quite-incestuous this program was: Both short and feature were produced by Timur Bekmambetov, I believe the "Zhanna Bekmambetova" who directed this short is his daughter, and the feature is directed by Rezo's son Levan - who also directed the Bekmambetov-produced Unfriended. Makes it easy to get everyone to agree to play together, I guess.

"Chik-Chirk" ("Tweet-tweet")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 September 2019 in Regal Fenway #6 (special engagement, DCP)

I saw and enjoyed this back when it played as one of the runners-up during this year's Oscar, and though it was only seven months ago, I could swear at certain points that this was some sort of extended cut. I didn't remember there being as much about the future husband the first time through, and I'm still not sure what the bird represents.

Still a very pretty movie, at the very least, and with a lot of charming, well-animated moments. Well worth twelve minutes and nice to see again.

What I wrote back in February

Rezo

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 September 2019 in Regal Fenway #6 (special engagement, DCP)

I'm not sure I've ever before seen a biographical documentary where at the end, I wasn't entirely sure what the subject was famous for. But that's where Rezo leaves me, as Revan Gabriadze spends almost no time discussing his life's work, nor the personal life that happened alongside it. The film, directed by his son Levan, has him telling stories of the father's youth and a philosophical moment or two as he returns home an old man, apparently presuming that anyone watching this film knows the rest or will look it up. It's an odd but not unpleasant sensation.

Revaz was born in what is now the country of Georgia, at the time part of the Soviet Union, in 1936; his uncle was a pilot who died during the war. He grew up in the city of Kutaisi, something of a mommy's boy, teased and bullied by everyone in town from kids to pallbearers, his best friend a rat in the library with whom he shared books (as Revaz devoured the contents, "Ippoli" chewed the leather covers). An illness led to him spending the summer in the country with his grandparents, next door to a camp full of German POWs. One was assigned to help around their plot of land, becoming a source of friction between the grandparents. By the end of two summers, he's grown more confident, enough to take chances on himself as a writer and artist, eventually making movies in Moscow and opening a marionette theater.

Animation and cartooning are not mentioned during the film; maybe they don't need to be. Gabriadze the elder is credited as the art director, so the animation is presumably based upon Rezo's own drawings. Those images are simple and appealing, brought to life in what appears to be classic cel-based style with fluid movement, though it sometimes skips showy, complex motions (for instance, when Rezo's grandmother washes her hair, the audience doesn't see any water). Every character is full of personality that emerges right away, and crude jokes share space with sometimes foreboding atmospheres. His flights of fantasy as a young boy are bounded, built around the portraits of authority figures judging him, intimidating in a way that a creative child can either miss or twist to his own amusement. Kutaisi itself is crowded and overwhelming when he is there as a child, though a bit less so when he revisits as an adult.

Full review on EFilmCritic

Boston Underground Film Festival 2018.04: Top Knot Detective, "Comedy? Maybe!", The Ranger, Revenge, and Ghost Stories

I've been pretty fortunate that, as BUFF has expanded enough to have a few weekend matinees at the Harvard Film Archive over the last couple of years, it hasn't presented me with a lot of really difficult choices. I'm generally cool with skipping the music videos and sleeping in long enough to miss the Saturday morning cartoons, so it was pretty easy to choose Top Knot Detective for the first show of the day, with a little room to eat and poke around Harvard Square before catching the comedy shorts block for the second. I could do that because I saw Spoor at Fantasia last summer, and it was fantastic.



That gave me a chance to see shorts by all these lovely people: J.B. Sapienza & Jim McDonough, nearly the entire cast and crew of of "Tiny Clones"; "Mailman"'s Eric Levy; Brian Petillo of "I Remember My First Beer, Man"; Devi Snively, who directed "Bride of Frankie"; Nicholas Santos, director of "Mother Fucker"; and Neil Cicierega & Kevin James, of "Year of the Snake", with Ryan Murphy sadly cut off because my phone doesn't take quite as wide a shot as I'd thought. It was a 14-film program and Kevin pointed out with some surprise that there were folks who left in disgust during #4, and if they couldn't make it that far, it's probably for the best. There's no way that they were up for all the menstrual blood coming later.

It was a fairly entertaining QA, although sometimes short by the nature of the comedy shorts block, because there's a point where the answer to pretty much any question is going to be "we did what we thought would be funny and I guess the programmers thought it was". One of the most memorable bits was Devi Snively saying it was a bit of an odd experience because it was the first time that her short had been part of a comedy program. She also mentioned that "Bride of Frankie" actually served as a sort of prequel for an upcoming feature, and I don't know about that; it sounded like more of a steampunk adventure than the relatively contained thing the short was.



The Ranger director Jenn Wexler was there for her movie, which was a pretty good time. She opened her Q&A with a bit of a rant against cell phones making horror movies hard, which I generally don't have a lot of sympathy for; if your horror story can't work in the face of modern technology, then there's a good chance that it's not about what really frightens a contemporary audience. It worked for hers, though - setting it in the 1980s fits for a lot of other reasons.

Amusingly, she also mentioned that the movie wasn't really her idea; it came from a horror script that a friend had written back in their film school days, a hook that she kept thinking about until the opportunity to make a feature came along. Then she ran with it, putting together a pretty strong film, one of my favorites of the festival.

Finally, we wrapped up with a secret screening, which is something I tend not to like at film festivals unless it's an open "we technically can't advertise it but we're not going to create a situation where you pass up something that interests you for something you may hate" situation. Both this year and last, BUFF avoided that by having it play unopposed, although the not-fun some friends had at last year's Buster's Mal Heart had them deciding to skip a mystery midnight. Unfortunately for them, Ghost Stories was really good, though the good news is it soon came out on both VOD and a week in local theaters. The bummer is that my guess for the movie, The Endless, didn't play, which is a shame, because it hasn't made it to Boston yet won't play Boston until late June (the Brattle just announced a "late show" booking).

"Viola Vs. The Vampire King"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)

The BUFF guys are good enough at matching shorts to features that I briefly thought that "Viola vs the Vampire King" was a clip of the fake TV show in Top Knot Detective, which had me worried, because while it's kind of cute and funny, 80-odd minutes of it might have been a little much. It's kind of right on the border of where making do with relatively little goes from being impressive to ostentatious, with the crayon-drawn map and spider-web forest that seems pretty open and title character who seems like she should be a kid but clearly isn't. Like, you could have made it fit what you had, but chose incongruity.

Still, it's a fun and energetic short film that goes all in on its action, fast and frantic but, though over-the-top, not ever bad-looking the way other bits of the movie are. It's big, often-bloody action - vampires being nearly-indestructible and blood-based gives the filmmakers room for a lot of gore and mayhem to back up both combatants' trash-talk. And while it's got one of those endings that is expected less because the story leads there than because some twists are de rigueur by now, the filmmakers milk it for all it's worth, playing it out long enough to be more than just a cheap gotcha moment.

Top Knot Detective

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Harvard Film Archive (Boston Underground Film Festival, DCP)

Top Knot Detective is a whole heck of a lot better than the typical "fake pop-culture spoof", for a lot of little reasons. That is generally the way these things work: It's not necessarily easy to come up with a fun idea for a mock-documentary, but it's also not exactly hard, and the gap between the obviously dumb and obviously brilliant ones is thin; enthusiastic improv can spin that into enough material that the filmmakers will need to cut down rather than pad out most of the time. It's the folks who consistently make the silly bits engaging or show that there is an actual plan without seeming to rein themselves in that create something worth a look.

The fun idea here is "Ronin Suri Tantai", a short-lived Japanese television series in the 1990s that developed a cult following in Australia despite running just once under the name "Top Knot Detective", with VHS tapes passed around since. It was created by and starred Takashi Takamoto (Toshi Okuzaki) as Sheimasu Tantai, a masterless samurai looking to avenge his master and defeat his former best friend Kurosaki Itto. Ostensibly a mystery show, it soon had Tantai having ever-more bizarre adventures, as the self-destructive Takamoto feuded with his employers at Sutaffu Corporation - with Chairman Moritaro Koike's son Haruto (Masa Yamaguchi) playing Itto. The early recasting of the show's female lead turns out to be just the start of the chaos involved.

It's not a real show, of course, but filmmakers Aaron McCann and Dominic Pearce put some care into making it feel just genuine enough, and not just by getting Des Mangan and folks at an anime convention to play along. They create just enough in the way of Top Knot Detective artifacts to sprinkle in the background of interview sequences to make it seem like part of the culture but not overwhelming enough to give the game away. There's the usual loving attention to cheap/tacky detail in how they stage the fake clips, but also the sort of restraint that isn't always there; there's little (if anything) here that crosses the border between "stuff that looks authentically 1990s" and "goofy things they might have done in the 1990s with modern CGI". The behind the scenes details feel right; it's kind of generally insightful about the entertainment industry without seeming to hit anything too specific.

Full review on EFC

"I Remember My First Beer, Man"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

Ah, the escalating-unfortunate-voicemail gag, the very similar-looking brother to the escalating-bad-message-on-the-answering-machine gag, and apparently not quite so endangered despite people hating voicemail. It just doesn't work as well with texts, though, so it's quite possible that Brian Petillo's take on it could be something close to the format's last hurrah.

If it is, it works in large part because it's even more off-kilter than usual, with a weird sort of desperation from caller Richard (Richard Chiu), drinking to excess to try and find some common ground with the guy he dropped off a few nights earlier. It's not just the usual bad decisions which will be soon regretted, but more basic uncertainty; Richard isn't really sure he wants to drink, and there's a certain question of whether his new friend is into other guys. It's a fun play on how weird it is that society has built this whole system on behavior that impairs good judgment, but played loose enough that it's the awkward jokes that show up, not any looking down on it.

"The Break-Up"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

It's kind of easy to overdo talking about why goofy shorts like this work, because it almost seems like a paradox: It hits something square on the head amid a lot of good lines, and while those good lines are what make it work as comedy, the idea is what holds it together, and gives you something to talk about rather than just rattling off jokes.

In this case, that means hopefully not minimizing what is actually a fun set-up well-executed, as a nervous guy tries to break up with his lady-friend who has clearly instigated every bit of trouble he's ever been in in his life. They play it as a fun role-reversal and banter about the escalating insanity well, well enough for that to be the entire joke. The short is simple visually - two people on a park bench - but filmmaker Tim Butcher knows when to get both characters in the same shot and when to jump between. But ultimately it's the punchline, which is kind of funny but not a great joke in and of itself, that winds up working in large part because it does provoke something in the audience like, yeah, this might be tougher than what's typically associated with the title. Which is pretty nifty, but it's pretty easy to get carried away and give it more importance than how this short movie has a lot of funny jokes.

"Mother Fucker"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

I'm not saying that reviewing this is pointless - it's a funny little short that does a nice slow burn, turning the awkwardness up before springing the end on the audience quickly - but the title is pretty much the punchline, and talking about it even this much has probably ruined it.

It makes for a kind of weird existence for this movie - it works perfectly well as something kind of anonymously buried in the middle of a shorts block, but go looking for it on its own, or stick it on the front of a feature where everyone has seen what short is attached from the program, and it's maybe 50% as effective. I wonder if the filmmakers were thinking of that when they were making it.

"Year of the Snake", "Third Wheel", "Gene Lover"

* * ¾-ish (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

It's been a month and I've pretty much got just the vaguest memories of these three shorts from the middle of the festival. They weren't bad at all, though they all kind of played like YouTube shorts with a couple good absurdist images and trouble with sticking the landing.

"Tiny Clones"

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

This one is kind of in that bucket in terms of being a wacky idea without a whole lot to brace it, but it at least sticks out because near-one-man-band Jim McDonough makes it striking, playing multiple roles, setting it in a weird, memorable location, and hitting the proper deadpan attitude toward its fantastical premise head-on in a way a lot of shorts don't.

It's mean, though, in a casual way that doesn't make me laugh the way a lot of other dark comedy does. Combine it with the look that seems as much intentionally cheap as scrappy, and I have a hard time digging the dark whimsy that went into it.

"Robo Greaser"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

"Robo Greaser" appears to be the official title of this short, but I'm pretty sure it appeared on-screen as "Robo Greaser Fag" - which is what the title character is called through much of the movie - and that kind of puts a different spin on it, highlighting the cruelty visited upon the guy as much as the goofy mash-up nature of the title character. And I kind of don't get it - sure, I know that there are a ton of people out there that indicate their disdain for anyone around them with that particular three-letter-word, and I guess there's something to making a short about people treating the weirdo like crap even when he's kind of a miracle of engineering, but it seems like a carefully considered way to do this in the least funny way possible. It's blunt and cruel but not twisted into something clever.

Which is a bummer, because Eli Gottfried plays the earnest but occasionally inappropriate android in broad, entertaining fashion, and co-writer/director Dakota Arsenault is good at creating a vibe of eccentric innocence about him, even if she is frequently going to puncture it. There's not a lot of story, but there's just enough to sew the plentiful physical comedy together.

"Flow"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

It's not sophisticated humor, but "people arguing over bathroom stuff when there is arguably much more serious stuff going down" is one of the most solidly reliably comedy tropes there is. It can be messed up by getting too scatalogical too fast, or getting too cutesy, but there is something undeniably delightful about the embarrassingly mundane making its way into the melodramatic.

So, yeah, I laughed pretty hard at this short about two guerrilla fighters grumbling about how impossible it is to remain supplied with tampons in the middle of a revolution. It's got a neat bantering/bickering pair in Jamie Birkett and Lucy Clements, and writer/director Shelagh Rowan-Legg has it paced nicely, making the comedy dark without bringing the audience down and finishing up before the joke stops being funny.

"BFF Girls"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

Coming right after "Flow", "BFF Girls" feels like a lot of menstruation humor, but we're probably kind of due until they catch up with the number of random erection jokes that have been a staple of raunchy comedy for the past forty years. It stretches a bit further to make them, a bit more into the range of "hey, we're sticking something gross into something cute, isn't that edgy?" territory, but there's broad wackiness to it for that to work. Director Brian Lonano and co-writer Victoria Cook go from the goofy starting points of magical girl anime/manga and the foreign fandom thereof and do a nice job of escalating the gags in both big and little steps, and the cast and crew hit the target with just the right blend of wide-eyed innocence up front and self-awareness behind the camera.

This does kind of leave the satire in the movie feeling about a mile wide and an inch deep: Every bit of the way they put it together seems to be saying that when you look at this stuff, even the most charming gets kind of pervy, from the obviously adult actresses playing pre-teens, to how these North Americans actually become Japanese when they transform, to the creepy older dudes paying a lot of attention to them coming of age. It's actually good material, but it does kind of play like the filmmakers are saying "hey, we noticed this!" and then stopping there.

Which is fine, they've got the jokes and the energy to make it work. I've still got to wonder what "BFF Girls" would have been like if the claws were out.

"Bride of Frankie"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

Somebody is going to watch "Bride of Frankie" and describe it like "what if Frankenstein had been written by a woman, and that's an invitation to a well-deserved roasting, but it's also a fair way to describe the film's feel if not its intent, as it tweaks Bride of Frankenstein by positing that Baroness von Frankenstein is just as sharp a scientific mind as the Baron, and there will be no simply creating the Bride just to please the Monster, spending a lot of time on how both the Monster and his creator take their brides for granted, mulling relationships rather than spreading carnage.

But that's by no means a bad thing, and writer/director Devi Snively gets a lot of solid laughs out of the premise despite, as she points out, never really looking at the movie as a comedy when she was making it. She winds up investing the short with an impressive melancholy without allowing that sort of material to make a movie where most of the main characters are sewn-together corpses and the most reliable comic relief is a ⅙-scale homonculus ballerina (a loving reference to the most off-handedly bizarre part of James Whale's Bride) mundane. It's a nifty take on the material that works better as it becomes clearer that Snively isn't going to steer it hard in either the spoofy or horrific directions.

"Freelancer", "Postman", "End Times"

Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Comedy, Maybe; digital)

Another set of three short films that didn't make enough of an impression on me that I can honestly give them a true review a month later. "Freelancer", at least, had a memorable concept, in which a videographer believes he is being hired for some sort of boring rich-person event and winds up in the middle of the summoning of an elder demon, with all hell literally breaking loose. It's probably the one that I'd most enjoy seeing expanded to a full feature, as it feels like it could hit a real sweet spot between high-concept adventure and nasty farce.

The Ranger

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)

The Ranger is a damn fine 1980s throwback slasher that does every facet of the genre just a little better than you might expect. That's not necessarily enough to earn a recommendation - enough movies are made about folks getting cut up with an axe every year that even with a 95% failure rate, that's a fair amount of "pretty decent" - but Jenn Wexler hits the sweet spot here, making a movie that's got something on its mind aside from the genre itself but still manages to be bloody and entertaining before everything else.

It's sometime in the 1980s, Chelsea (Chloe Levine) is in her early twenties and into punk rock, in one of those situations where the line between a band and its hangers-on is kind of fluid. That's how she ends up in a van with boyfriend Garth (Granit Lahu), "Jerk" (Jeremy Pope), Abe (Bubba Weiler), and Amber (Amanda Grace Benitez), running from the cops after a whole drug-gun-car situation gets messy. She's told them that she inherited a cabin upstate, and they immediately figure that would be a great place to hide out. It soon seem like a less-than-great idea - her friends don't know the first thing about the outdoors, even without a ranger (Jeremy Holm) warning them that the area around the national park isn't same. Kind of unnervingly, he's the same ranger that was there the last time she was up, finding her after her Uncle Pete (Larry Fessenden) died suddenly.

Director Jenn Wexler and her co-writer Giaco Furino give the audience and the punks some getting-to-know-you time before the carnage starts, but when it does, the filmmakers have an enjoyably traditional take on it: They're (mostly) in the woods, the weapons are basic rather than supernatural, and they leave ugly, bloody wounds that give the kids obstacles and let the killer hit people twice. It's not winkingly self-referential, and it's not terribly subversive; it's a maniac hunting young people down, executed by folks who know their gore, working better because Wexler and her crew edit in a way that continuously tightens the noose after giving the audience just enough lay of the land to figure out just how dangerous a situation can be. It's sharp filmmaking that knows how these movies work.

Full review on EFC

Revenge (2017)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival; DCP)

Revenge does what it says on the package - it's a gory, effective rape-revenge picture with moments that are not for the squeamish. It's a lot of violence, maybe more than some are going to be up for, but it's well-staged and good-looking as well as blood-soaked.

It opens with Richard (Kevin Janssens) and his mistress Jen (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) arriving at a fancy vacation house isolated enough that they have to arrive by helicopter. It's fun for a day or two, at least until the other guests - Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arrive a bt early. Richard, it seems, was planning two vacations, a romp with his girlfriend and then a hunting trip with the guys, and while they seem to get on well enough, Jen is attacked almost as soon as Richard steps out for a bit - and he does not respond as his girlfriend would hope at all. Lucky for them, she seems to have been pretty definitively dealt with.

Or not; the film is not a ten-minute short named "Rich Men Get Away with Everything". Taking that as a given, writer/director Coralie Fargeat creates an impressive amount of uncertainty as things kick off with a jaw-dropper of a big moment that puts the audience on its back foot and then leads to a bunch of sympathetic groans through much of the film. It's a gruesomely symbolic way of showing the audience how Jen has been violated, one that she carries around for as long as the movie can justify it. It lets Fargeat work her way back up, and she doesn't back off handing the audience another few strong visual cues - not only does Jen soon emerge from a cave as if reborn, but the camera goes up and down her body in the same way it did when she sashayed off the helicopter, this time highlighting tense muscle instead of soft curves.

Full review on EFC

Ghost Stories

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2018 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival: Secret Screening; DCP)

Ghost Stories is an effective anthology of sorts, the cinematic equivalent of variations on a theme that certainly has room to play. It perhaps puts a little too much effort into giving itself a clever twist in the last stretch so that it can be a feature rather than a set of short stories, but the three episodes that make up the bulk of the film are impressive on their own, combining classic supernatural situations with humans' willingness to scare themselves.

That's the explanation offered by Professor Philip Goodman (Andy Nyman), introduced shooting a documentary meant to debunk "psychic star" Mark van Rhys (Nicholas Burns). Goodman was inspired by another paranormal investigator, Charles Cameron, who faded from public view decades ago. A mysterious message summons Goodman to meet his mentor, and he's handed three cases that the old man wasn't able to completely debunk: Tony Matthews (Paul Whitehouse), a former security guard who saw something at a shuttered mental hospital; Simon Rifkind (Alex Lawther), a teenager who hasn't been the same since his parents' car broke down on the way back from a party; and Mike Priddle (Martin Freeman), whose unused nursery has allegedly been haunted by a poltergeist since the loss of his wife (Emily Carding).

These are all elemental, well-worn tales of the supernatural; there's nothing in the main three or the initial framing sequence of skeptics wrestling with their own expectations that horror fans haven't seen before, and even those that don't consume large amounts of spooky stuff can recall a tale or two around those general themes. Filmmakers Jeremy Dyson & Andy Nyman don't necessarily break new ground with the specific stories, but they've built themselves situations where they don't need to: With each getting twenty-five minutes or so, they've got just enough room to stick to the basics, add in a few memorable details, and then get out before things start to collapse. It's the right amount of detail to keep things ambiguous, too, with nothing that would necessarily convince a skeptic but plenty to freak a person out.

Full review on EFC