I don't think Rescue Dawn is playing much anywhere, which is a bummer. I caught it on the last day it was in Arlington, and almost missed it there - I'd been doing some work-delay at the office when I noticed that it wasn't on the next day's listings. I'm not sure how I let it slip to a month and a half, other than that it was one that opened while I was in Montreal and then the new releases sort of shouted it down until it was almost too late.
Speaking of Fantasia and new releases... I repurposed my review of Ils (Them) for BostonNOW (link here), and picked one up today to see if they'd used it.
No. And aside form John Black's review being, well, wrong, he goes and blurts out the ending in the second of his three paragraphs. Why do that? Did Mr. Black dislike the movie so much that he had to undercut something the filmmakers clearly didn't want the audience to know, but highlight how they had kept hidden what he chose to blurt out? There's not recommending a movie, and then there's aggressively spoiling the end so that readers might figure there's no point in seeing it.
I kid in the title about how I should replace him - I know I probably wouldn't know the first thing about being an "entertainment editor", but geez - how hard is it to write three short paragraphs without giving away the movie's ending?
(Yeah, I suppose this could be construed as biting the hand that feeds me, but this blog has gotten two hits over the past month from BostonNOW. They don't feed me that much.)
So, in short - don't read the review in that paper. See Ils at Kendall Square. You'll be better off.
Rescue Dawn
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 23 August 2007 at the Arlington Capitol #6 (second-run)
Werner Herzog has covered this material before, in his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, but let's face it, people don't really watch documentaries. It's easy to see why telling the story that way would not be enough for Herzog; Dieter Dengler's story is the sort of thing that has always fascinated him - and which he's very good at putting on film.
It's man versus jungle, and this time, the jungle is Laos and the men are prisoners of war. Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) is the latest, captured after his plane is shot down during a bombing run. He is brought to a secluded camp, where he is thrown in a cell with Phisit (Abhijati Jusakul), Procet (Lek Chaiyan Chunsuttiwat), Duane (Steve Zahn) and Gene (Jeremy Davies). They've been there for months and years, but Dieter has no intention of staying that long and having his mind go as seems to be happening to them. He's getting out, even though Duane points out that the jungle itself is as potentially lethal an obstacle as any guard tower would be.
What makes Dieter able to plot and survive an escape when few if any other POWs could? As Christian Bale depicts him, Dieter has both the ingenuity and some of the naïveté of a precocious child, quickly seeing how things might fit together in ways that a more rigid mind might not while at times remaining blithely ignorant of just how hostile everything around him is: There's a definite element of Dieter being too stupid/inexperienced to be scared, at least compared to the other prisoners, along with occasional fits of petulance. Of course, he'll gain that experience over the course of the story, but Bale's performance is so good that I don't recall a specific spot where desperation started to challenge Dieter's confidence. The way he carries himself also shows the physical toll imprisonment takes - I don't think he dropped a lot of weight like he did for The Machinist or Tom Hanks did for Cast Away, but it sometimes seems like he did.
Full review at HBS.
Now, please, announce this sucker on one of the HD formats.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Duck
Some people really enjoy when they're the only ones in the theater, and I can dig that, especially for a matinee where you might have come for the specific point of not dealing with the boors who can ruin a good movie. And it makes you feel important - it's almost guaranteed that the movie theater is spending more on rental fees, electricity, and paying the projectionist than your ticket covers - it's the kind of treatment that only the wealthy seem to be afforded.
Still, when you're the only person at the 7:20 show for a movie that's on its fourth day of release, and isn't a bad film at all... Well, that's kind of sad. Duck may not be a great movie, but it's got a good actor in the lead and people either don't know it exists or are choosing lesser, more obviously commercial options instead.
Duck is playing at Landmark Embassy Square in Waltham, and as I post this, the 4:50 show is probably just starting. Since there's no way it will get a second week, that means there are probably about seven screenings left between tonight, tomorrow, and Thursday. It'd be a shame if they went dark.
Duck
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 August 2007 at the Landmark Embassy Theater #3 (first-run)
You may not know Philip Baker Hall's name, but you know and probably like his work. He's the old guy with the weathered eyes and gravelly voice who shows up in a half-dozen movies and TV shows every year and makes already strong ensembles better. And even if Duck is sometimes maudlin or bizarre, it's got Philip Baker Hall in almost every scene, and that alone makes it worth a look.
Hall plays Arthur Pratt, and a series of photographs at the beginning tells his story - born in 1933, served in the military, married a beautiful woman, loved their son more than anything, and lost him in 1979 at the age of eighteen. Now his wife is gone, too, and his plan is simple: Plant a tree and scatter her ashes next to the one they planted for their son thirty years ago (even though the area is set to be bulldozed to make way for condos and a mall), then take some pills to join them. Before he can do that, though, a motherless duckling shows up. Arthur names him Joe and takes him home, but his wife's care has left him broke, and they're soon camping in the park, and then walking west toward the ocean.
Though Duck is a sort of road movie, with Arthur and Joe encountering new people every few minutes as they cross Los Angeles, there's something especially powerful about its opening scenes - Arthur is initially crushed by grief, and Joe is this tiny yellow thing that won't stay put, a perfectly innocent creature to counter Arthur's despair and disappointment. If the movie had just ended with Arthur taking Joe home, it would have been a perfect little short film, showing how the world always has use for a person like Arthur, even if he feels completely superfluous.
The episodes that follow don't so much drag things down as they introduce a bit of unevenness. Some of the segments are nearly as good as the movie's first act, but others aren't quite so well done. One or two - a Halloween party, for instance - feel as if they were made up on the spot without a clear goal in mind. Just checking out the reactions an old man and his duck get is not necessarily a bad way to make a movie like this, but the scene's got to go somewhere. The people Arthur and Joe meet also tend to fall into one of two types - older and/or down-on-their-luck but basically decent folks who are basically similar to Arthur and inflexible, rule-spouting younger folks.
That sort of drags the film away from just being a story about Arthur and his desire to be needed and loved, but more about how we as a society treat the elderly and otherwise disenfranchised as a whole. Writer/director Nicole Bettauer pointedly sets her film in 2009 - two years after its release, four years after its festival premiere, and six years after it was shot - where Jeb Bush is president, Social Security is completely wiped out, and even recycling programs have ended because they supposedly encourage homelessness. She chooses locations that are particularly garbage-strewn and run-down, showing us a future where people simply don't care enough about each other. That's probably the real point of the movie, and Bettauer does well to make it without much partisan finger-pointing and blame; she probably could have avoided mentioning the Bush family and simply let it play as the way the world is heading.
At the center, of course, is Philip Baker Hall. Hall is probably best known for playing gruff (with an optional good heart), but he doesn't seem at all out of place wearing his heart on his sleeve as he does as Arthur. Arthur's a bit of a chatterbox - as he puts it, his wife always knew what to do, but he always knew what to say - but not the type that needs to fill every quiet moment. He's got knowledge and wisdom and is happy to share, and doesn't know what he'd do without someone to share with. There's a scene late in the movie where he's hugging Joe, crying, saying he doesn't know what he'd do without him, and Hall makes it work because he isn't afraid to look a little silly.
Aside from Hall, French Stewart is probably the most recognizable name, and he's not bad, although his odd voice undercuts his suicidal character's despair a bit. Amy Hill is the one who plays off Hall the best, as a Vietnamese salon worker initially curious about the man with the duck but eventually just happy to talk to someone who looks her in the eye and respects her. Bill Cobbs could play his blind old man role in his sleep, but it's still a pleasure to see him and Hall take to each other like kindred spirits.
The ducks, of course, are delightful just by being ducks, moviedom's funniest and most lovable animals.
Duck is kind of a surreal movie - an old man and his duck wandering across a city that has at times seemed to have been hit by a slow apocalypse. It's got a good heart, though, and gives us a large portion of a talented actor we normally only see in small doses.
Still, when you're the only person at the 7:20 show for a movie that's on its fourth day of release, and isn't a bad film at all... Well, that's kind of sad. Duck may not be a great movie, but it's got a good actor in the lead and people either don't know it exists or are choosing lesser, more obviously commercial options instead.
Duck is playing at Landmark Embassy Square in Waltham, and as I post this, the 4:50 show is probably just starting. Since there's no way it will get a second week, that means there are probably about seven screenings left between tonight, tomorrow, and Thursday. It'd be a shame if they went dark.
Duck
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 August 2007 at the Landmark Embassy Theater #3 (first-run)
You may not know Philip Baker Hall's name, but you know and probably like his work. He's the old guy with the weathered eyes and gravelly voice who shows up in a half-dozen movies and TV shows every year and makes already strong ensembles better. And even if Duck is sometimes maudlin or bizarre, it's got Philip Baker Hall in almost every scene, and that alone makes it worth a look.
Hall plays Arthur Pratt, and a series of photographs at the beginning tells his story - born in 1933, served in the military, married a beautiful woman, loved their son more than anything, and lost him in 1979 at the age of eighteen. Now his wife is gone, too, and his plan is simple: Plant a tree and scatter her ashes next to the one they planted for their son thirty years ago (even though the area is set to be bulldozed to make way for condos and a mall), then take some pills to join them. Before he can do that, though, a motherless duckling shows up. Arthur names him Joe and takes him home, but his wife's care has left him broke, and they're soon camping in the park, and then walking west toward the ocean.
Though Duck is a sort of road movie, with Arthur and Joe encountering new people every few minutes as they cross Los Angeles, there's something especially powerful about its opening scenes - Arthur is initially crushed by grief, and Joe is this tiny yellow thing that won't stay put, a perfectly innocent creature to counter Arthur's despair and disappointment. If the movie had just ended with Arthur taking Joe home, it would have been a perfect little short film, showing how the world always has use for a person like Arthur, even if he feels completely superfluous.
The episodes that follow don't so much drag things down as they introduce a bit of unevenness. Some of the segments are nearly as good as the movie's first act, but others aren't quite so well done. One or two - a Halloween party, for instance - feel as if they were made up on the spot without a clear goal in mind. Just checking out the reactions an old man and his duck get is not necessarily a bad way to make a movie like this, but the scene's got to go somewhere. The people Arthur and Joe meet also tend to fall into one of two types - older and/or down-on-their-luck but basically decent folks who are basically similar to Arthur and inflexible, rule-spouting younger folks.
That sort of drags the film away from just being a story about Arthur and his desire to be needed and loved, but more about how we as a society treat the elderly and otherwise disenfranchised as a whole. Writer/director Nicole Bettauer pointedly sets her film in 2009 - two years after its release, four years after its festival premiere, and six years after it was shot - where Jeb Bush is president, Social Security is completely wiped out, and even recycling programs have ended because they supposedly encourage homelessness. She chooses locations that are particularly garbage-strewn and run-down, showing us a future where people simply don't care enough about each other. That's probably the real point of the movie, and Bettauer does well to make it without much partisan finger-pointing and blame; she probably could have avoided mentioning the Bush family and simply let it play as the way the world is heading.
At the center, of course, is Philip Baker Hall. Hall is probably best known for playing gruff (with an optional good heart), but he doesn't seem at all out of place wearing his heart on his sleeve as he does as Arthur. Arthur's a bit of a chatterbox - as he puts it, his wife always knew what to do, but he always knew what to say - but not the type that needs to fill every quiet moment. He's got knowledge and wisdom and is happy to share, and doesn't know what he'd do without someone to share with. There's a scene late in the movie where he's hugging Joe, crying, saying he doesn't know what he'd do without him, and Hall makes it work because he isn't afraid to look a little silly.
Aside from Hall, French Stewart is probably the most recognizable name, and he's not bad, although his odd voice undercuts his suicidal character's despair a bit. Amy Hill is the one who plays off Hall the best, as a Vietnamese salon worker initially curious about the man with the duck but eventually just happy to talk to someone who looks her in the eye and respects her. Bill Cobbs could play his blind old man role in his sleep, but it's still a pleasure to see him and Hall take to each other like kindred spirits.
The ducks, of course, are delightful just by being ducks, moviedom's funniest and most lovable animals.
Duck is kind of a surreal movie - an old man and his duck wandering across a city that has at times seemed to have been hit by a slow apocalypse. It's got a good heart, though, and gives us a large portion of a talented actor we normally only see in small doses.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Death at a Funeral
Not much to say about this one - it's good, but not great, and I think it's weird that so many reviews seem to be treating it like some sort of big comeback for Frank Oz. I'm all for Frank Oz making a big comeback, and The Stepford Wives was ten sorts of awful, but I just don't see this as that big a deal. I mean, consider Cold Comfort Farm, which is one of my favorite movies of my college years (even beyond "see, I was into Kate Beckinsale before all the rest of you"), but did it herald a big John Schlesinger comeback? Not really. It is nice that a good director like Oz or Schlesinger can get out of the Hollywood system and just make a good movie. It would have been really nice, though, if Death at a Funeral were nearly as funny as Cold Comfort Farm.
Death at a Funeral
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 August 2007 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run)
There's something almost quaint about Death at a Funeral; it could have been made and set up to a hundred years earlier with just a few details being changed. Maybe it would have been better that way; this farce about a dysfunctional English family stiff-upper-lipping their way through a disastrous funeral might occasionally have benefited from having to be a little more restrained, or a little less old-fashioned.
Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen) is attempting to run the affair, which is not off to an auspicious start, with the undertakers initially bringing the wrong body. His wife Jane (Keeley Hawes) seems more worried about whether he has delivered the down payment on a flat in the city, so that they can sell the house if Daniel's mother Sandra (Jane Asher) will live with her other son, Robert (Rupert Graves) in New York. Every mourner expects Robert, a successful writer, to deliver the eulogy, which just makes Daniel feel more slighted. Also in attendance are nephew Troy (Kris Marshall), a student chemist; his sister Martha (Daisy Donovan); her nervous fiancé Simon (Alan Tudyk); hypochondriac family friend Howard (Andy Nyman); Justin (Ewen Bremner), who is smitten with Martha; and Uncle Alfie (Peter Vaughan), the requisite cranky wheelchair-bound old man. Also appearing is Peter (Peter Dinklage); no-one else recognizes him but he feels entitled to something, even beyond being there.
This is fairly well-worn ground, but to a certain extent that means that the material is well-tested; most everybody knows their role, and how this kind of comedy works, and as such they don't slip up very often. Writer Dean Craig and director Frank Oz generally balance irreverence with sincerity; they're careful to make sure that their characters aren't too peculiar; otherwise, the movie would just become a grotesquerie about people who are eccentric and stupid for no good reason. They do test the limit of that on occasion - these days, apparently even British comedies about repressed family tension have scatological bits which are momentum-crushingly unfunny, and a recurring bit about the Valium that Martha gives Simon actually being a designer hallucinogen goes on for a very long time before paying off as something other than getting a disconnected laugh out of Alan Tudyk acting crazy every few minutes.
Full review at HBS.
Death at a Funeral
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 August 2007 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (first-run)
There's something almost quaint about Death at a Funeral; it could have been made and set up to a hundred years earlier with just a few details being changed. Maybe it would have been better that way; this farce about a dysfunctional English family stiff-upper-lipping their way through a disastrous funeral might occasionally have benefited from having to be a little more restrained, or a little less old-fashioned.
Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen) is attempting to run the affair, which is not off to an auspicious start, with the undertakers initially bringing the wrong body. His wife Jane (Keeley Hawes) seems more worried about whether he has delivered the down payment on a flat in the city, so that they can sell the house if Daniel's mother Sandra (Jane Asher) will live with her other son, Robert (Rupert Graves) in New York. Every mourner expects Robert, a successful writer, to deliver the eulogy, which just makes Daniel feel more slighted. Also in attendance are nephew Troy (Kris Marshall), a student chemist; his sister Martha (Daisy Donovan); her nervous fiancé Simon (Alan Tudyk); hypochondriac family friend Howard (Andy Nyman); Justin (Ewen Bremner), who is smitten with Martha; and Uncle Alfie (Peter Vaughan), the requisite cranky wheelchair-bound old man. Also appearing is Peter (Peter Dinklage); no-one else recognizes him but he feels entitled to something, even beyond being there.
This is fairly well-worn ground, but to a certain extent that means that the material is well-tested; most everybody knows their role, and how this kind of comedy works, and as such they don't slip up very often. Writer Dean Craig and director Frank Oz generally balance irreverence with sincerity; they're careful to make sure that their characters aren't too peculiar; otherwise, the movie would just become a grotesquerie about people who are eccentric and stupid for no good reason. They do test the limit of that on occasion - these days, apparently even British comedies about repressed family tension have scatological bits which are momentum-crushingly unfunny, and a recurring bit about the Valium that Martha gives Simon actually being a designer hallucinogen goes on for a very long time before paying off as something other than getting a disconnected laugh out of Alan Tudyk acting crazy every few minutes.
Full review at HBS.
Monday, August 13, 2007
"Virtual" Fantasia: Backwoods and The Last Winter
Well, finally finished all my Fantasia stuff, barring an unexpected care package coming in the mail (which could happen; I don't know how long it was after last year's festival ended that I got one last year). Overall, I had a real blast; the broader selection of movies made it much harder to get burned out. I can't wait to go again next year.
So, here's the last of it. I've also updated the posts for Days Nine and Ten with reviews of The Rage, Puritan, Isabella, and Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater
The Backwoods (Bosque de Sombras)
* * * ¼-ish (out of four)
Seen 11 August 2007 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2007 Screener)
This is a very cool little thriller, with nice performances by a very nice cast (Gary Oldman, Paddy Considide, Virginie Ledoyen, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) I wish I could properly review it, because unfortunately the screener I received from Fantasia was missing English subtitles on the Spanish-language scenes, which I strongly suspect are necessary to understanding just what the deal is with the little girl Oldman's & Considine's characters find locked in an abandoned house. Without that, I just can't figure it out.
So, relationship between English-speaking characters and chase-type stuff: Pretty darn good. Story which drives it? Can't tell you.
The Last Winter
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 August 2007 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2007 Screener)
It would be completely wrong of me spoil the thing in The Last Winter that made me go from thinking it was a nice little "isolated area (and maybe something else) starts messing with people" horror movie to lapping it up like a ten year old boy whose dreams have just been answered. Since I find myself unable to finish writing this until I let it out, allow me one small tease: G____ d________!
It's a slow burn before we get to them. North Industries has just received Congressional approval to start drilling for oil in Alaska; we're ominously informed that an exploratory well was drilled twenty years ago but abandoned. Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) has just flown out to get things on schedule, only to find his ex-girlfriend Abby Sellers (Connie Britton) sleeping with the head environmental impact monitor, James Hoffman (James LeGros). He's warning of environmental catastrophe, of course, but the rising temperature is making it difficult to build the ice road needed to get equipment out there. Also on the base are Hoffman's assistant Elliot Jenkins (Jamie Harrold), "Motor" the mechanic (Kevin Corrigan), Inuit employees Dawn (Joanne Shenandoah) and Lee (Pato Hoffman), along with Maxwell McKinder (Zach Gilford). Maxwell is starting to get "big-eye" from the endless white landscape anyway, but comes back from a trip to see the old test well even more unsteady.
The first half of the movie is set-up, but writer/director Larry Fessenden spends it more on establishing character relationships than anything else. We get to see which characters get along and which don't, for reasons both personal and political. The opening exposition is a little heavy-handed, but it's the quickest way to get us up to speed on what we need to know without wasting a whole lot of time, and it does kind of prime us to treat it like a horror movie: Aside from the ominous depiction of the station's isolation (which would feel right at home in The Thing), the first half hour could seem like it was laying the groundwork for an "evil ex" movie, an issue-oriented drama, or, (shiver!) some terrible combination of the two. A little foreshadowing that the movie might wind up going in a paranormal direction keeps what happens later from being an unwelcome surprise.
Full review at EFC.
So, here's the last of it. I've also updated the posts for Days Nine and Ten with reviews of The Rage, Puritan, Isabella, and Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater
The Backwoods (Bosque de Sombras)
* * * ¼-ish (out of four)
Seen 11 August 2007 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2007 Screener)
This is a very cool little thriller, with nice performances by a very nice cast (Gary Oldman, Paddy Considide, Virginie Ledoyen, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) I wish I could properly review it, because unfortunately the screener I received from Fantasia was missing English subtitles on the Spanish-language scenes, which I strongly suspect are necessary to understanding just what the deal is with the little girl Oldman's & Considine's characters find locked in an abandoned house. Without that, I just can't figure it out.
So, relationship between English-speaking characters and chase-type stuff: Pretty darn good. Story which drives it? Can't tell you.
The Last Winter
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 August 2007 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2007 Screener)
It would be completely wrong of me spoil the thing in The Last Winter that made me go from thinking it was a nice little "isolated area (and maybe something else) starts messing with people" horror movie to lapping it up like a ten year old boy whose dreams have just been answered. Since I find myself unable to finish writing this until I let it out, allow me one small tease: G____ d________!
It's a slow burn before we get to them. North Industries has just received Congressional approval to start drilling for oil in Alaska; we're ominously informed that an exploratory well was drilled twenty years ago but abandoned. Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) has just flown out to get things on schedule, only to find his ex-girlfriend Abby Sellers (Connie Britton) sleeping with the head environmental impact monitor, James Hoffman (James LeGros). He's warning of environmental catastrophe, of course, but the rising temperature is making it difficult to build the ice road needed to get equipment out there. Also on the base are Hoffman's assistant Elliot Jenkins (Jamie Harrold), "Motor" the mechanic (Kevin Corrigan), Inuit employees Dawn (Joanne Shenandoah) and Lee (Pato Hoffman), along with Maxwell McKinder (Zach Gilford). Maxwell is starting to get "big-eye" from the endless white landscape anyway, but comes back from a trip to see the old test well even more unsteady.
The first half of the movie is set-up, but writer/director Larry Fessenden spends it more on establishing character relationships than anything else. We get to see which characters get along and which don't, for reasons both personal and political. The opening exposition is a little heavy-handed, but it's the quickest way to get us up to speed on what we need to know without wasting a whole lot of time, and it does kind of prime us to treat it like a horror movie: Aside from the ominous depiction of the station's isolation (which would feel right at home in The Thing), the first half hour could seem like it was laying the groundwork for an "evil ex" movie, an issue-oriented drama, or, (shiver!) some terrible combination of the two. A little foreshadowing that the movie might wind up going in a paranormal direction keeps what happens later from being an unwelcome surprise.
Full review at EFC.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Stardust
I'm not much of a fan of Neil Gaiman's; I started reading comics at about the time he was moving on to bigger things, and as much as I enjoyed Good Omens, 1602, and Mirrormask, the stuff he's famous for - the "urban fantasy" and "magic realism" stuff - just isn't my usual thing. Still, I did like those things, and the Brattle was having a preview, so why not?
Glad I did, because I can't recommend it highly enough. It's just a whole ton of fun.
Almost done with the Fantasia reviews - Days Seven, Eight, and Nine are updated with links to reviews of The Tripper, Special, Silk, The Unseeable, End of the LIne, and The Fox Family.
Stardust
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2007 at the Brattle Theater (preview)
Stardust is an unprepossessing little fantasy; it takes place in a world literally just next to our own, which is matter-of-factly magical. It doesn't try to oversell an apocalyptic tension or crush the audience with details to show just how hard the creators have worked. Sure, a kingdom hangs in the balance, but that's no excuse to be something other than playful.
There is a wall, and an town called Wall near it, that separates England from the magical kingdom of Stormhold. Tristan (Charlie Cox) was born there, after his father snuck through a gap in the wall and met a pretty slave girl. Now seventeen, he pledges to recover a fallen star for his neighbor Victoria (Sienna Miller), only to find it's more complicated than it seems: The star was knocked out of the sky by a locket thrown by Stormhold's King (Peter O'Toole); whichever son recovers the locket (or kills the others) will inherit the kingdom. Oh, and have we mentioned that stars are people (of a sort), and not only is Yvaine (Claire Danes) rather upset about being knocked out of the sky, but a three witch sisters have sent one of their number, Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer) to recover her and cut out her heart, bestowing youth and magical power.
For all the witches and kings and fallen stars, Stardust is basically the classic story of a boy so fixated on one pretty but uninteresting girl that he does not, at first, consider the possibilities with the far cooler lady right under his nose. The three of them play their parts as well as anybody could hope: Charlie Cox is youthfully oblivious, but charming, and manages to capture Tristan's big heart without making him look like a fool. Claire Danes gets to play Yvaine as justifiably cranky when she first comes to earth, but as the movie goes on we get a sense of her enjoying an adventure without coming off as tomboyish or someone who had never fit in in the sky. Her prickly but genuine perfection easily relegates Sienna Miller's Victoria to merely being the best thing Tristan had seen so far, and Miller is just right as the shallow queen bee that might be easy to idolize when the world is just the one village, but pales in comparison to true beauty.
That's a solid base to build on, but it's the embellishments that Neil Gaiman put into the source material and which the filmmakers put on-screen that make it such a complete delight. Take the septet of princes that the king has sired; as the film starts, only Primus (Jason Flemyng), Secundus (Rupert Everett), Tertius (Mark Heap), and Septimus (Mark Strong) are still alive, but whatever spell or curse controls succession in this kingdom keeps the others around as ghosts until only one is left, allowing them to serve as a witty chorus, with no apparent grudges held among the dead. Then there's the elaborate trap Lamia sets for Yvaine, and the chaos that a unicorn's magic-negating horn wreaks on it. Or the flying pirate ship whose nets catch lightning rather than fish, captained by a Robert De Niro whose boistrous imitation of machismo is fooling nobody.
De Niro is just the biggest name of the numerous scene-stealers that have been assembled for this movie's highly entertaining supporting cast, and one of the most memorable: It's a goofy, broad performance that still comes off as relaxed rather than heavy-handedly playing against type (like some comedic De Niro performances). Other familiar faces include David Kelly as the surprisingly spry old man guarding the gap in the wall between worlds; Peter O'Toole as the monstrously bloodthirsty king who, on his deathbed, is disappointed that his sons haven't killed each other (why, he single-handedly eliminated eleven brothers in his day!); Mark Strong, Jason Flemyng, and Rupert Everett, as his (respectively) vicious, noble, and dim sons; Ricky Gervais as a black marketeer; and Nathaniel Parker as Tristan's unusually understanding father. Maybe least familiar but most amusing are Jake Curran, Mark Williams, and Olivia Grant as Lamia's amusingly transformed henchmen.
Then there's Michelle Pfeiffer herself, absent from film these last five years, but back as though she had never left. She makes Lamia a delicious villain, with her tremendous vanity at odds with her delight in having magical power to use, even though it ages her drastically. She's having a great time playing evil, a villain to be taken seriously even if she occasionally makes us chuckle.
Director Matthew Vaughn is good with that - this film will probably get compared to The Princess Bride quite a bit, because it's got the same basic vibe: A fairy tale that's simple and sweet enough for children but smart enough for grown-ups to enjoy even if they don't have kids in tow. He skips the self-referentiality, instead opting to play things relatively straight, getting the jokes from who the characters are and how they react to the absurd situations they find themselves in. He handles the special effects well, too, filling the screen with beautiful images from the crater Yvaine makes when she lands to Captain Shakespeare's blimp-ship. The story moves at a spritely clip, but the on-screen action is never confusing.
There's something fun in just about every minute of Stardust, but it's kind of low-key about it. It manages to be constantly entertaining, but never has to show off.
Glad I did, because I can't recommend it highly enough. It's just a whole ton of fun.
Almost done with the Fantasia reviews - Days Seven, Eight, and Nine are updated with links to reviews of The Tripper, Special, Silk, The Unseeable, End of the LIne, and The Fox Family.
Stardust
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2007 at the Brattle Theater (preview)
Stardust is an unprepossessing little fantasy; it takes place in a world literally just next to our own, which is matter-of-factly magical. It doesn't try to oversell an apocalyptic tension or crush the audience with details to show just how hard the creators have worked. Sure, a kingdom hangs in the balance, but that's no excuse to be something other than playful.
There is a wall, and an town called Wall near it, that separates England from the magical kingdom of Stormhold. Tristan (Charlie Cox) was born there, after his father snuck through a gap in the wall and met a pretty slave girl. Now seventeen, he pledges to recover a fallen star for his neighbor Victoria (Sienna Miller), only to find it's more complicated than it seems: The star was knocked out of the sky by a locket thrown by Stormhold's King (Peter O'Toole); whichever son recovers the locket (or kills the others) will inherit the kingdom. Oh, and have we mentioned that stars are people (of a sort), and not only is Yvaine (Claire Danes) rather upset about being knocked out of the sky, but a three witch sisters have sent one of their number, Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer) to recover her and cut out her heart, bestowing youth and magical power.
For all the witches and kings and fallen stars, Stardust is basically the classic story of a boy so fixated on one pretty but uninteresting girl that he does not, at first, consider the possibilities with the far cooler lady right under his nose. The three of them play their parts as well as anybody could hope: Charlie Cox is youthfully oblivious, but charming, and manages to capture Tristan's big heart without making him look like a fool. Claire Danes gets to play Yvaine as justifiably cranky when she first comes to earth, but as the movie goes on we get a sense of her enjoying an adventure without coming off as tomboyish or someone who had never fit in in the sky. Her prickly but genuine perfection easily relegates Sienna Miller's Victoria to merely being the best thing Tristan had seen so far, and Miller is just right as the shallow queen bee that might be easy to idolize when the world is just the one village, but pales in comparison to true beauty.
That's a solid base to build on, but it's the embellishments that Neil Gaiman put into the source material and which the filmmakers put on-screen that make it such a complete delight. Take the septet of princes that the king has sired; as the film starts, only Primus (Jason Flemyng), Secundus (Rupert Everett), Tertius (Mark Heap), and Septimus (Mark Strong) are still alive, but whatever spell or curse controls succession in this kingdom keeps the others around as ghosts until only one is left, allowing them to serve as a witty chorus, with no apparent grudges held among the dead. Then there's the elaborate trap Lamia sets for Yvaine, and the chaos that a unicorn's magic-negating horn wreaks on it. Or the flying pirate ship whose nets catch lightning rather than fish, captained by a Robert De Niro whose boistrous imitation of machismo is fooling nobody.
De Niro is just the biggest name of the numerous scene-stealers that have been assembled for this movie's highly entertaining supporting cast, and one of the most memorable: It's a goofy, broad performance that still comes off as relaxed rather than heavy-handedly playing against type (like some comedic De Niro performances). Other familiar faces include David Kelly as the surprisingly spry old man guarding the gap in the wall between worlds; Peter O'Toole as the monstrously bloodthirsty king who, on his deathbed, is disappointed that his sons haven't killed each other (why, he single-handedly eliminated eleven brothers in his day!); Mark Strong, Jason Flemyng, and Rupert Everett, as his (respectively) vicious, noble, and dim sons; Ricky Gervais as a black marketeer; and Nathaniel Parker as Tristan's unusually understanding father. Maybe least familiar but most amusing are Jake Curran, Mark Williams, and Olivia Grant as Lamia's amusingly transformed henchmen.
Then there's Michelle Pfeiffer herself, absent from film these last five years, but back as though she had never left. She makes Lamia a delicious villain, with her tremendous vanity at odds with her delight in having magical power to use, even though it ages her drastically. She's having a great time playing evil, a villain to be taken seriously even if she occasionally makes us chuckle.
Director Matthew Vaughn is good with that - this film will probably get compared to The Princess Bride quite a bit, because it's got the same basic vibe: A fairy tale that's simple and sweet enough for children but smart enough for grown-ups to enjoy even if they don't have kids in tow. He skips the self-referentiality, instead opting to play things relatively straight, getting the jokes from who the characters are and how they react to the absurd situations they find themselves in. He handles the special effects well, too, filling the screen with beautiful images from the crater Yvaine makes when she lands to Captain Shakespeare's blimp-ship. The story moves at a spritely clip, but the on-screen action is never confusing.
There's something fun in just about every minute of Stardust, but it's kind of low-key about it. It manages to be constantly entertaining, but never has to show off.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
"Virtual" Fantasia : Time
Distribution for foreign films is a funny thing. Kim Ki-duk's Time barely played in Korea - isn't this the one where he wasn't even going to bother releasing it in Korea at all? - and right now it's just scheduled for about eight shows in ten days at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And yet, it will probably get a whole lot more exposure in the United States than 200 Pounds Beauty, which I saw at Fantasia, and was a gigantic hit in its native land, making a star out of Kim Ah-jung.
And I'll bet 200 Pounds Beauty barely registers here. Romantic comedies are way down the ladder in terms of what foreign-language films get theatrical play here, well below art-house films like Time. Maybe that's justice of a sort, since Time is a much better movie than Beauty.
Time (Shi Gan)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2007 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2007 Screener)
The opening moments of Time are some of the more stomach-churning shots I've seen in a movie in a while, but it's not a gore movie. They're shots of cosmetic surgery, and my reaction was just a knee-jerk response to stock medical footage, what filmmaker Kim Ki-duk does afterward is perhaps even creepier.
First, he introduces us to Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo) and Seh-hee (Park Ji-yeon), who have been together for two years. Their relationship is starting to fray; Ji-woo occasionally turns his head to look at other girls and Seh-hee reacts with near-hysterical jealousy. They seem to make up after one outburst in a coffee shop, but soon afterward Seh-hee visits a plastic surgeon and suddenly disappears from Ji-woo's life. He's miserable, even as his friends try to cheer him up and introduce him to other girls. After six months, though, he hits it off with the new waitress at the coffee shop he and Seh-hee used to go to. He and See-hee (Seong Hyeon-a) have some weirdness going on, though - he accidentally uses Seh-hee's name, and she's got no pictures of herself as a child.
The twist here is obvious, and it's to Kim's credit that he doesn't treat it as something to be revealed: even if he doesn't initially spell it out, we catch on to Seh-hee and See-hee being one and the same very quick. For most of the movie, Kim avoids obvious melodrama, using low-key scenes of Ji-woo and See-hee dating to give us a chance to ponder the idea of what it might be worth to repeat the early, good years of a relationship, or to have a fresh start. But as much as we see See-hee and Ji-woo enjoying themselves, we're also aware of how they're visiting the same sculpture park Ji-woo and Seh-hee did, even taking photos that are eerily similar to the first times they visited the place.
Updated Day Seven's post with are reviews of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society and Big Bang Love.
And I'll bet 200 Pounds Beauty barely registers here. Romantic comedies are way down the ladder in terms of what foreign-language films get theatrical play here, well below art-house films like Time. Maybe that's justice of a sort, since Time is a much better movie than Beauty.
Time (Shi Gan)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2007 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia 2007 Screener)
The opening moments of Time are some of the more stomach-churning shots I've seen in a movie in a while, but it's not a gore movie. They're shots of cosmetic surgery, and my reaction was just a knee-jerk response to stock medical footage, what filmmaker Kim Ki-duk does afterward is perhaps even creepier.
First, he introduces us to Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo) and Seh-hee (Park Ji-yeon), who have been together for two years. Their relationship is starting to fray; Ji-woo occasionally turns his head to look at other girls and Seh-hee reacts with near-hysterical jealousy. They seem to make up after one outburst in a coffee shop, but soon afterward Seh-hee visits a plastic surgeon and suddenly disappears from Ji-woo's life. He's miserable, even as his friends try to cheer him up and introduce him to other girls. After six months, though, he hits it off with the new waitress at the coffee shop he and Seh-hee used to go to. He and See-hee (Seong Hyeon-a) have some weirdness going on, though - he accidentally uses Seh-hee's name, and she's got no pictures of herself as a child.
The twist here is obvious, and it's to Kim's credit that he doesn't treat it as something to be revealed: even if he doesn't initially spell it out, we catch on to Seh-hee and See-hee being one and the same very quick. For most of the movie, Kim avoids obvious melodrama, using low-key scenes of Ji-woo and See-hee dating to give us a chance to ponder the idea of what it might be worth to repeat the early, good years of a relationship, or to have a fresh start. But as much as we see See-hee and Ji-woo enjoying themselves, we're also aware of how they're visiting the same sculpture park Ji-woo and Seh-hee did, even taking photos that are eerily similar to the first times they visited the place.
Updated Day Seven's post with are reviews of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society and Big Bang Love.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Sunshine
I'm taking a quick break from reviewing Fantasia films to talk about Sunshine. Same basic type of film, but, hey, this one's actually in widening release, and deserves some word of mouth. Still, for more Fantasia stuff, I've reviewed through Monday and Tuesday, adding EFC/HBS reviews for Aachi & Ssipak, Jade Warrior, Minushi, and Exte: Hair Extensions. Today (Tuesday) is the last day, so now it's all playing catch-up with the dozen or so films I have left.
Anyway, I loved this movie, and was gratified to see that Matt and his girlfriend Morgan did too. It initially had a vibe of being "just for me", in that it seemed to zero in on the things I, in particular, like and sometimes complain about not seeing in science fiction movies.
Sunshine
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2007 at Landmark Kendall Square #1 (first-run)
Sunshine is a real treat - a great big special-effects laden adventure movie that at no point asks the audience to turn its brain off. That doesn't make it inaccessible - to the contrary, it means that there are more ways for the audience to enjoy it.
We start off in media res, with the dubiously-named spaceship Icarus II already a year and a half into its journey to the Sun's south pole, where they will launch a bomb the size of Manhattan into the heart of our nearest star, hoping to give it a needed jump-start. Already, nerves are becoming a bit frayed - Dr. Searle (Cliff Curtis), the man in charge of the the crew's physical and mental health, is addicted to viewing the sun with as little filtering as possible, and trying to get Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) to join in; physicist/payload specialist Capa (Cillian Murphy) and computer tech Mace (Chris Evans) have just come to blows, likely in part over one of the only two women in the crew, pilot Cassie (Rose Byrne). The other woman is Corazon (Michelle Yeoh), in charge of the ship's oxygen garden; also on board are communications officer Harvey (Troy Garity) and navigator Trey (Benedict Wong). Aside from needing to blow off a little steam, the mission is going well, at least until they receive a signal from Icarus I, which disappeared seven years earlier. Mace insists they continue with the mission as planned; Capa says attempting to recover the ship's payload is worth the risk. Agreeing that two last hopes are better than one, Kaneda follows Capa's advice. And, of course, all hell breaks loose.
Director Danny Boyle and Writer Alex Garland (who previously teamed on 28 Days Later) throw us into a very cool environment right off; the first shot of the film appears to be the sun but is actually the massive set of heat shields/solar panels that covers the ship; when we look behind that, we see a rotating skeleton that reminds us more of the present-day International Space Station than the sleek, fighter-jet-modeled ships that frequently populate the movies. It's one of my favorite movie spaceships ever. Garland, Boyle, and the art department sweat more details than the average sci-fi film, things like approaching the sun at a pole rather than head-on, although they are smart enough to not dump a whole lot of science adviser Dr. Brian Cox told them into the script; they just paid heed. Sure, sometimes the pseudo-gravity doesn't seem to be lined up with thrust or spin, but we always get the feeling that this is an environment with rules and limits.
It's also got wonders. An early sequence has Mercury transiting the sun, and Boyle keeps the effect relatively simple, just a fast-moving silhouette, showing it to us from the crew's perspective so that we can share their awe. Soon after, the movie gets down to business, and the lavish visuals start to service tension as much as delight, but even when the cold equations are killing the cast, there's a savage beauty to it.
The filmmakers do, of course, start reducing headcount, and once they start, the tension skyrockets. The middle part of the film is all about this - space is a dangerous place with no margin for error, and one little mistake that anybody could make starts a chain reaction of problems. There's a few scenes in here that would make the John W. Campbell proud - for instance, when a spacewalk to repair the ship's heat shield turns dangerous. We understand the danger, but we're still taken in by the sheer spectacle, all without things setting off alarms about the belief suspension levels being inadequate. Once that happens, Boyle and company never really let up - things keep getting worse, with just enough breathing time between episodes for the audience to start to wonder how things could get worse.
The last act is, admittedly, problematic. On the one hand, even though the filmmakers have done a fine job of setting up how months in a confined space with the same people on a mission so vital it beggars comprehension can get to people (check out Searle's increasingly nasty sunburn for a constant reminder); on the other, they've done so well at making the hostile environment so compelling that people having to fight other people seems almost too conventional Boyle handles it well, making it almost as tense as what came before, but there is a definite feeling of disconnection. He misdirected us a bit too well earlier; looking back, there were all sorts of signs that it could come to this, but we were too distracted with cooler things.
I haven't spoken much about the cast; the trouble with this type of movie is that the characters are, of necessity, too competent and focused on the mission to give the cast easy hooks upon which to hang a performance. Cillian Murphy's physicist still seems a little jittery away from terra firma, and Cliff Curtis does a good job of adding creepy to mostly harmless, but Hiroyuki Sanada's slightly aloof Captain Kaneda is more likely to be the norm. Michelle Yeoh, Rose Byrne, Benedict Wong, and Troy Garity make their characters individual and likable, but even under extreme conditions, they're mostly going to stay professional. Chris Evans gets to have a little more fun - he gets the play the prick. You know, the guy who doesn't care about anything but the mission, speaks his mind regardless of whose feelings get hurt. It's a fun role, and he has a good time with it.
I love this movie, although I freely admit that it may not be a great movie. It is, however, a very good one, which hits things that I have a particular fondness for. We don't get many hard science fiction films, though, and I'm thrilled to have one this good come along.
(Formerly at EFC)
Anyway, I loved this movie, and was gratified to see that Matt and his girlfriend Morgan did too. It initially had a vibe of being "just for me", in that it seemed to zero in on the things I, in particular, like and sometimes complain about not seeing in science fiction movies.
Sunshine
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2007 at Landmark Kendall Square #1 (first-run)
Sunshine is a real treat - a great big special-effects laden adventure movie that at no point asks the audience to turn its brain off. That doesn't make it inaccessible - to the contrary, it means that there are more ways for the audience to enjoy it.
We start off in media res, with the dubiously-named spaceship Icarus II already a year and a half into its journey to the Sun's south pole, where they will launch a bomb the size of Manhattan into the heart of our nearest star, hoping to give it a needed jump-start. Already, nerves are becoming a bit frayed - Dr. Searle (Cliff Curtis), the man in charge of the the crew's physical and mental health, is addicted to viewing the sun with as little filtering as possible, and trying to get Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) to join in; physicist/payload specialist Capa (Cillian Murphy) and computer tech Mace (Chris Evans) have just come to blows, likely in part over one of the only two women in the crew, pilot Cassie (Rose Byrne). The other woman is Corazon (Michelle Yeoh), in charge of the ship's oxygen garden; also on board are communications officer Harvey (Troy Garity) and navigator Trey (Benedict Wong). Aside from needing to blow off a little steam, the mission is going well, at least until they receive a signal from Icarus I, which disappeared seven years earlier. Mace insists they continue with the mission as planned; Capa says attempting to recover the ship's payload is worth the risk. Agreeing that two last hopes are better than one, Kaneda follows Capa's advice. And, of course, all hell breaks loose.
Director Danny Boyle and Writer Alex Garland (who previously teamed on 28 Days Later) throw us into a very cool environment right off; the first shot of the film appears to be the sun but is actually the massive set of heat shields/solar panels that covers the ship; when we look behind that, we see a rotating skeleton that reminds us more of the present-day International Space Station than the sleek, fighter-jet-modeled ships that frequently populate the movies. It's one of my favorite movie spaceships ever. Garland, Boyle, and the art department sweat more details than the average sci-fi film, things like approaching the sun at a pole rather than head-on, although they are smart enough to not dump a whole lot of science adviser Dr. Brian Cox told them into the script; they just paid heed. Sure, sometimes the pseudo-gravity doesn't seem to be lined up with thrust or spin, but we always get the feeling that this is an environment with rules and limits.
It's also got wonders. An early sequence has Mercury transiting the sun, and Boyle keeps the effect relatively simple, just a fast-moving silhouette, showing it to us from the crew's perspective so that we can share their awe. Soon after, the movie gets down to business, and the lavish visuals start to service tension as much as delight, but even when the cold equations are killing the cast, there's a savage beauty to it.
The filmmakers do, of course, start reducing headcount, and once they start, the tension skyrockets. The middle part of the film is all about this - space is a dangerous place with no margin for error, and one little mistake that anybody could make starts a chain reaction of problems. There's a few scenes in here that would make the John W. Campbell proud - for instance, when a spacewalk to repair the ship's heat shield turns dangerous. We understand the danger, but we're still taken in by the sheer spectacle, all without things setting off alarms about the belief suspension levels being inadequate. Once that happens, Boyle and company never really let up - things keep getting worse, with just enough breathing time between episodes for the audience to start to wonder how things could get worse.
The last act is, admittedly, problematic. On the one hand, even though the filmmakers have done a fine job of setting up how months in a confined space with the same people on a mission so vital it beggars comprehension can get to people (check out Searle's increasingly nasty sunburn for a constant reminder); on the other, they've done so well at making the hostile environment so compelling that people having to fight other people seems almost too conventional Boyle handles it well, making it almost as tense as what came before, but there is a definite feeling of disconnection. He misdirected us a bit too well earlier; looking back, there were all sorts of signs that it could come to this, but we were too distracted with cooler things.
I haven't spoken much about the cast; the trouble with this type of movie is that the characters are, of necessity, too competent and focused on the mission to give the cast easy hooks upon which to hang a performance. Cillian Murphy's physicist still seems a little jittery away from terra firma, and Cliff Curtis does a good job of adding creepy to mostly harmless, but Hiroyuki Sanada's slightly aloof Captain Kaneda is more likely to be the norm. Michelle Yeoh, Rose Byrne, Benedict Wong, and Troy Garity make their characters individual and likable, but even under extreme conditions, they're mostly going to stay professional. Chris Evans gets to have a little more fun - he gets the play the prick. You know, the guy who doesn't care about anything but the mission, speaks his mind regardless of whose feelings get hurt. It's a fun role, and he has a good time with it.
I love this movie, although I freely admit that it may not be a great movie. It is, however, a very good one, which hits things that I have a particular fondness for. We don't get many hard science fiction films, though, and I'm thrilled to have one this good come along.
(Formerly at EFC)
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Fantasia Day Eleven: Kiltro, Ultraman Mebius & Ultra Brothers, Mulberry Street, et Memories of Matsuko
Eleven days is just about my limit for Fantasia, or at least I'll say that for as long as I can only do eleven days. I admit to kind of going through my last day in Montreal in a daze - I didn't even write any reviews in my note pad. No breakfast will do that to you; by the time I got the two Death Note reviews written, got my luggage packed, and had the hamper bag stowed in a bus station locker until later, it was practically time for Kiltro to start at noon. Let me re-iterate: A Kit-Kat and a cranberry juice drink does not make for a healthy meal.
Anyway, Kiltro was pretty good stuff, good enough that when the producers said that the crews second movie was even better and showing at seven-thirty, I kicked myself for not requesting a screener, because no way was I missing Memories of Matsuko. After that, I went to the office to pick some DVDs up, came back for Ultraman. You sort of have to see a kaiju or sentai movie at these festivals, and since Toho's not making Gojira movies any more, we get stuck with this. The crowd loved it, though - I guess they were old-school Ultraman fans; they went absolutely nuts when "Zoffy" and "Taro" showed up at the end. I can't mock them, though - I did willingly pay for a ticket to Transformers just before the festival started.
Another wait (my movies were oddly spaced this afternoon) and then Mulberry Street, which is going to make Lion's Gate (according to the program) a ton of money. That's in part because it's a darn good horror movie, and in part because it cost very little to make; the director quoted us a five figure number, and a big chunk of that was music clearance. The stories of the filmmakers' ingenuity in shooting the movie were impressive - they redressed the star's apartment several times to use it as the set for every apartment in the place, they shot people racing to get to the fireworks on the Fourth of July and called it footage of people fleeing the city, they probably covered a fair amount of make-up by using available light. Studios should take notice of these guys, because they might be able to do amazing things with even a little money.
Then, finally, Memories of Matsuko, which is going to be hard to do justice. I'm pretty sure that if you don't cry during the final sequence, you've got a rock where your heart should be; I was thinking of bits of this and welling up throughout the seven-hour bus ride home. It's a ridiculously audacious bit of filmmaking: A fast-cut, day-glo-colored musical tragedy about a woman who dies alone after a lifetime of being ill-treated, it was slotted into the same spot Train Man had last year, and about where the director's Kamikaze Girls was two years ago. It's a great way to end the festival - a legitimately great movie from Japan that doesn't fit into the reasons I originally started going to the festival but which I almost cannot imagine stumbling across anywhere else. I hope like heck that this one shows up in theaters around here, because I don't know if I'll see a better movie all year.
And now, back to work. --sigh--
Kiltro
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Concorida (Fantasia 2007)
There's an opening for someone like Marko Zaror in the action world, especially for martial arts movies: All the guys who hit it big in the eighties are getting older, and there doesn't seem to be much of a next generation around (a man can't live on a diet of Tony Jaa and Wu Jing alone). Chile may be an odd place to find the next martial arts star, and Zaror's acting could use some polishing, but the guy can fight.
His character in this movie, Zami, fights a lot; he's got a crush on Kim (Caterina Jadresic), a half-Korean girl he saved from being raped a few months earlier, and tends to lay out anybody who touches her. Annoyed, she tries to get him off her back by having her father's entire tae kwan do class fight him; he tells Zami that though his father was a great fighter, he is little more than a brawler. Still, Teran (Man-soo Yoon) and Kim will need his help when Max Kalba (Miguel Angel De Luca) returns to town: Kalba has a grudge against Teran and other members of his martial arts sect that goes back seventeen years, and he's looking to collect. He wipes the floor with Zami in their first encounter, but that just pushes him to head north to be trained by master Jose Soto (Alejandro Castillo) before coming back to kick some ass.
First and most important things first: Marko Zaror's got some chops as a martial artist, even if he's still very raw as an actor. He won awards as Duane "The Rock" Johnson's stunt double in The Rundown, and though he's got about the same build (a little over six feet, built like a truck), he's extremely quick and agile for a guy his size. He can (and frequently does) get up in the air and move quickly enough to take on multiple opponents. Zaror also handles the fight choreography, and my only real complaint with it is that the fight scenes tend to be too short; except for the finale with De Luca (Zaror's original teacher), they are, by and large, mismatches. The flip side of that is that they do look like actual fights, rather than something staged for the camera.
(Interestingly, the producers said afterward that they were precisely blocked while the action in Zaror's new movie, Mirageman, is much more improvised. I wish I'd had time to see that!)
Full review at EFC.
Ultraman Mebius & Ultra Brothers (Urutoraman Mebiusu ando Urutora Kyôdai)
* * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2007 in D.B Clarke Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
If you're already a fan of Ultraman, you can probably ignore that low-to-middling rating: In the same way that I enjoy bits of Transformers in spite of myself and am a mark for things like the Dukes of Hazard reunion TV-movies, this movie is made for you. Not having been exposed to Ultraman at an impressionable age, I don't share your enthusiasm, but I don't begrudge you any enjoyment you may get from this film.
Twenty-five years ago the Yapool, a particularly nasty alien menace, landed on the moon and fought the Ultraman brothers by controlling a "U-Killersaurus" monster. It makes it to Earth, but the brothers create a "final force field" to imprison him in the ocean near Kobe, at the cost of their special energy and ability to transform into Ultramen. Now, young oceanographer Aya Jinguuji (Aiko Ito) is detecting something anomolous, so international paranormal respone team GUYS sends Mirai Hibino (Shunji Igarashi), who is secretly the alien hero Ultraman Mebius, to investigate. A team of four aliens are planning to attack the city and fight Mebius. Meanwhile, Mirai befriends Aya's seven-year-old brother Takato (Ouga Tanaka), who used to be a big fan of Ultraman and GUYS but has become timid since encountering a giant monster while playing.
The Ultraman Seven and Ultraman Mebius television series upon which the film is based are kids' shows, and the film is aimed directly at the pre-teen audience: All of the characters aside from the original Ultraman Brothers and Takato are barely out of their teens, a lot of time is spent on Takato and his dog, and the monsters are all men in brightly-colored suits, far from realistic enough to scare anyone. The story is as simple as they come, and it seems like a story a kid would tell, with things changing in the middle and new characters showing up out of nowhere. Adults may find themselves growing impatient at times, maybe even snickering if the film has no particular power of nostalgia over them.
Full review at EFC.
Mulberry Street
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2007 in D.B. Clarke Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
There are certain elements of a good horror movie (of a certain type) that don't necessarily come as easily as expected: The slow build, the characters we genuinely care about, the sense that there may be nothing that can be done. Mulberry Street has all that and more; it's got something to say on other subjects without getting away from the rat-borne plague.
The day starts off with a certain amount of potential - former boxer Clutch (Nick Damici) is expecting his daughter Casey (Kim Blair) home after her tour in Iraq. Of course, while he prepares for her return, he's awkwardly dealing with the attentions of a still-attractive single mother (Bo Corre) and engaging in idle chit-chat with his neighbors about how they'll all probably be out soon because the city has used eminent domain to seize the building for a developer, which is also one of the lead stories on the local news, at least for a while. Then there's a nasty rat attack on the subway, and another, and the victims are acting strange. Soon Manhattan is being cut off from the rest of the city, the building's super has been bitten by an unusually large rat, and while the Mulberry Street residents are trying to lock things down, Casey is trying to get home through an unusually quiet and dangerous city.
The screenplay by star Nick Damici and director Jim Mickle is a thing of well-measured beauty and attention to detail. Native New Yorkers, for instance, will appreciate that Casey's journey home has fairly accurate geography. This may not matter to 99% of the film's prospective audience, but it lets the people who do know such things play along a bit, and rather than taking them out of the movie even a little bit, it enhances the suspense, as they know how far she has to go and what obstacles may be in her path. There's also a certain subtext to her journey home, in that every veteran finds what was once familiar somewhat alien after having been through combat. It's also not hard to connect the dots between the rats destroying the heart of the city and its most vulnerable residents from within and the developers about to displace these characters - not to mention the nasty double meaning of the development's (and movie's) tagline of "The Neighborhood Is Changing". It's tough to miss parallels to New Orleans at how characters assume the government will do something, but they remain invisible.
Full review at EFC.
Memories of Matsuko (Kiraware Matsuko no Issho)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Concorida (Fantasia 2007)
I don't want to describe Memories of Matsuko glibly. It would be so easy to point out the huge difference between the story's subject matter and the methods used to tell the story in a way that sounds like I'm being sarcastic, comes across as trying to show off how sophisticated I am because I love something off the beaten path, or simply makes it sound distasteful. It's too good a movie for that. Lord knows I was put off by the premise - a brightly colored musical about the life of a lonely woman found murdered in a field - until I recognized the director.
That director is Tetsuya Nakashima, whose previous film Kamikaze Girls was a particular favorite of mine when it played two years ago, and the style of the two films are very similar: Bright colors, fanciful compositions, larger-than-life personalities and a great deal of jumping back and forth in time. While many might choose to tone things down for the darker subject matter of Matsuko, he instead adds an extra layer of exuberance, with elaborately staged musical numbers. It works - with the high points of the title character's life so beautiful, the lows become even more ghastly.
The story starts with Sho Kawajiri ("Eita") waking up to find his father Norio (Teruyuki Kagawa) in his apartment, idly looking through his porn. The two haven't spoken since Sho came to Tokyo to try to make it as a musician two years ago, and it turns out that this isn't a first for Norio: He had an older sister, Matsuko (Miki Nakatani), who left home thirty years earlier (Sho didn't know she existed) and has just been found murdered. Norio is bringing her ashes home, but asks Sho to clean out her apartment. It's filthy, but soon begins to offer up tantalizing glimpses of Matsuko's history: There's a picture of her making a funny face as a child and a poster of a recent boy band. A garishly tattooed but gregarious neighbor mentions a scarred man who had been lurking about recently, and the lead detective mentions that she was a popular teacher thirty years ago. From there, Sho starts to piece together the story of her life.
It's a life of extremes, and several of the episodes have a similar feel: They start with Matsuko happy, and singing, maybe in love, only to have things collapse into physical abuse, betrayal, and disappointment. But watch Miki Nakatani's performance closely; there's more going on than her hairstyle and costumes changing with the times; as much as Matsuko seems resilient and able to bounce back from her latest disaster, the bounce is a little less far, and a little less genuine, each time. Some of what Nakatani does is very broad comedy and some is heartbreaking, and it's quite impressive to watch what she does turn on a dime and turn back again, without making the character seem schizophrenic or disjointed. And she can sing, too.
Full review at EFC.
Anyway, Kiltro was pretty good stuff, good enough that when the producers said that the crews second movie was even better and showing at seven-thirty, I kicked myself for not requesting a screener, because no way was I missing Memories of Matsuko. After that, I went to the office to pick some DVDs up, came back for Ultraman. You sort of have to see a kaiju or sentai movie at these festivals, and since Toho's not making Gojira movies any more, we get stuck with this. The crowd loved it, though - I guess they were old-school Ultraman fans; they went absolutely nuts when "Zoffy" and "Taro" showed up at the end. I can't mock them, though - I did willingly pay for a ticket to Transformers just before the festival started.
Another wait (my movies were oddly spaced this afternoon) and then Mulberry Street, which is going to make Lion's Gate (according to the program) a ton of money. That's in part because it's a darn good horror movie, and in part because it cost very little to make; the director quoted us a five figure number, and a big chunk of that was music clearance. The stories of the filmmakers' ingenuity in shooting the movie were impressive - they redressed the star's apartment several times to use it as the set for every apartment in the place, they shot people racing to get to the fireworks on the Fourth of July and called it footage of people fleeing the city, they probably covered a fair amount of make-up by using available light. Studios should take notice of these guys, because they might be able to do amazing things with even a little money.
Then, finally, Memories of Matsuko, which is going to be hard to do justice. I'm pretty sure that if you don't cry during the final sequence, you've got a rock where your heart should be; I was thinking of bits of this and welling up throughout the seven-hour bus ride home. It's a ridiculously audacious bit of filmmaking: A fast-cut, day-glo-colored musical tragedy about a woman who dies alone after a lifetime of being ill-treated, it was slotted into the same spot Train Man had last year, and about where the director's Kamikaze Girls was two years ago. It's a great way to end the festival - a legitimately great movie from Japan that doesn't fit into the reasons I originally started going to the festival but which I almost cannot imagine stumbling across anywhere else. I hope like heck that this one shows up in theaters around here, because I don't know if I'll see a better movie all year.
And now, back to work. --sigh--
Kiltro
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Concorida (Fantasia 2007)
There's an opening for someone like Marko Zaror in the action world, especially for martial arts movies: All the guys who hit it big in the eighties are getting older, and there doesn't seem to be much of a next generation around (a man can't live on a diet of Tony Jaa and Wu Jing alone). Chile may be an odd place to find the next martial arts star, and Zaror's acting could use some polishing, but the guy can fight.
His character in this movie, Zami, fights a lot; he's got a crush on Kim (Caterina Jadresic), a half-Korean girl he saved from being raped a few months earlier, and tends to lay out anybody who touches her. Annoyed, she tries to get him off her back by having her father's entire tae kwan do class fight him; he tells Zami that though his father was a great fighter, he is little more than a brawler. Still, Teran (Man-soo Yoon) and Kim will need his help when Max Kalba (Miguel Angel De Luca) returns to town: Kalba has a grudge against Teran and other members of his martial arts sect that goes back seventeen years, and he's looking to collect. He wipes the floor with Zami in their first encounter, but that just pushes him to head north to be trained by master Jose Soto (Alejandro Castillo) before coming back to kick some ass.
First and most important things first: Marko Zaror's got some chops as a martial artist, even if he's still very raw as an actor. He won awards as Duane "The Rock" Johnson's stunt double in The Rundown, and though he's got about the same build (a little over six feet, built like a truck), he's extremely quick and agile for a guy his size. He can (and frequently does) get up in the air and move quickly enough to take on multiple opponents. Zaror also handles the fight choreography, and my only real complaint with it is that the fight scenes tend to be too short; except for the finale with De Luca (Zaror's original teacher), they are, by and large, mismatches. The flip side of that is that they do look like actual fights, rather than something staged for the camera.
(Interestingly, the producers said afterward that they were precisely blocked while the action in Zaror's new movie, Mirageman, is much more improvised. I wish I'd had time to see that!)
Full review at EFC.
Ultraman Mebius & Ultra Brothers (Urutoraman Mebiusu ando Urutora Kyôdai)
* * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2007 in D.B Clarke Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
If you're already a fan of Ultraman, you can probably ignore that low-to-middling rating: In the same way that I enjoy bits of Transformers in spite of myself and am a mark for things like the Dukes of Hazard reunion TV-movies, this movie is made for you. Not having been exposed to Ultraman at an impressionable age, I don't share your enthusiasm, but I don't begrudge you any enjoyment you may get from this film.
Twenty-five years ago the Yapool, a particularly nasty alien menace, landed on the moon and fought the Ultraman brothers by controlling a "U-Killersaurus" monster. It makes it to Earth, but the brothers create a "final force field" to imprison him in the ocean near Kobe, at the cost of their special energy and ability to transform into Ultramen. Now, young oceanographer Aya Jinguuji (Aiko Ito) is detecting something anomolous, so international paranormal respone team GUYS sends Mirai Hibino (Shunji Igarashi), who is secretly the alien hero Ultraman Mebius, to investigate. A team of four aliens are planning to attack the city and fight Mebius. Meanwhile, Mirai befriends Aya's seven-year-old brother Takato (Ouga Tanaka), who used to be a big fan of Ultraman and GUYS but has become timid since encountering a giant monster while playing.
The Ultraman Seven and Ultraman Mebius television series upon which the film is based are kids' shows, and the film is aimed directly at the pre-teen audience: All of the characters aside from the original Ultraman Brothers and Takato are barely out of their teens, a lot of time is spent on Takato and his dog, and the monsters are all men in brightly-colored suits, far from realistic enough to scare anyone. The story is as simple as they come, and it seems like a story a kid would tell, with things changing in the middle and new characters showing up out of nowhere. Adults may find themselves growing impatient at times, maybe even snickering if the film has no particular power of nostalgia over them.
Full review at EFC.
Mulberry Street
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2007 in D.B. Clarke Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
There are certain elements of a good horror movie (of a certain type) that don't necessarily come as easily as expected: The slow build, the characters we genuinely care about, the sense that there may be nothing that can be done. Mulberry Street has all that and more; it's got something to say on other subjects without getting away from the rat-borne plague.
The day starts off with a certain amount of potential - former boxer Clutch (Nick Damici) is expecting his daughter Casey (Kim Blair) home after her tour in Iraq. Of course, while he prepares for her return, he's awkwardly dealing with the attentions of a still-attractive single mother (Bo Corre) and engaging in idle chit-chat with his neighbors about how they'll all probably be out soon because the city has used eminent domain to seize the building for a developer, which is also one of the lead stories on the local news, at least for a while. Then there's a nasty rat attack on the subway, and another, and the victims are acting strange. Soon Manhattan is being cut off from the rest of the city, the building's super has been bitten by an unusually large rat, and while the Mulberry Street residents are trying to lock things down, Casey is trying to get home through an unusually quiet and dangerous city.
The screenplay by star Nick Damici and director Jim Mickle is a thing of well-measured beauty and attention to detail. Native New Yorkers, for instance, will appreciate that Casey's journey home has fairly accurate geography. This may not matter to 99% of the film's prospective audience, but it lets the people who do know such things play along a bit, and rather than taking them out of the movie even a little bit, it enhances the suspense, as they know how far she has to go and what obstacles may be in her path. There's also a certain subtext to her journey home, in that every veteran finds what was once familiar somewhat alien after having been through combat. It's also not hard to connect the dots between the rats destroying the heart of the city and its most vulnerable residents from within and the developers about to displace these characters - not to mention the nasty double meaning of the development's (and movie's) tagline of "The Neighborhood Is Changing". It's tough to miss parallels to New Orleans at how characters assume the government will do something, but they remain invisible.
Full review at EFC.
Memories of Matsuko (Kiraware Matsuko no Issho)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Concorida (Fantasia 2007)
I don't want to describe Memories of Matsuko glibly. It would be so easy to point out the huge difference between the story's subject matter and the methods used to tell the story in a way that sounds like I'm being sarcastic, comes across as trying to show off how sophisticated I am because I love something off the beaten path, or simply makes it sound distasteful. It's too good a movie for that. Lord knows I was put off by the premise - a brightly colored musical about the life of a lonely woman found murdered in a field - until I recognized the director.
That director is Tetsuya Nakashima, whose previous film Kamikaze Girls was a particular favorite of mine when it played two years ago, and the style of the two films are very similar: Bright colors, fanciful compositions, larger-than-life personalities and a great deal of jumping back and forth in time. While many might choose to tone things down for the darker subject matter of Matsuko, he instead adds an extra layer of exuberance, with elaborately staged musical numbers. It works - with the high points of the title character's life so beautiful, the lows become even more ghastly.
The story starts with Sho Kawajiri ("Eita") waking up to find his father Norio (Teruyuki Kagawa) in his apartment, idly looking through his porn. The two haven't spoken since Sho came to Tokyo to try to make it as a musician two years ago, and it turns out that this isn't a first for Norio: He had an older sister, Matsuko (Miki Nakatani), who left home thirty years earlier (Sho didn't know she existed) and has just been found murdered. Norio is bringing her ashes home, but asks Sho to clean out her apartment. It's filthy, but soon begins to offer up tantalizing glimpses of Matsuko's history: There's a picture of her making a funny face as a child and a poster of a recent boy band. A garishly tattooed but gregarious neighbor mentions a scarred man who had been lurking about recently, and the lead detective mentions that she was a popular teacher thirty years ago. From there, Sho starts to piece together the story of her life.
It's a life of extremes, and several of the episodes have a similar feel: They start with Matsuko happy, and singing, maybe in love, only to have things collapse into physical abuse, betrayal, and disappointment. But watch Miki Nakatani's performance closely; there's more going on than her hairstyle and costumes changing with the times; as much as Matsuko seems resilient and able to bounce back from her latest disaster, the bounce is a little less far, and a little less genuine, each time. Some of what Nakatani does is very broad comedy and some is heartbreaking, and it's quite impressive to watch what she does turn on a dime and turn back again, without making the character seem schizophrenic or disjointed. And she can sing, too.
Full review at EFC.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Fantasia Day Ten: Death Note, Death Note: The Last Name, Puritan, Isabella, et Midnight Ballad For Ghost Theater
All day at the movies yesterday, including the pretty decent Death Note double feature, hosted by Shusuke Kaneko, who strikes me as a pretty cool guy - low key and friendly, and seeing as it's his third or fourth time presenting something at Fantasia personally (he must have been too busy working on these movies to come last year), I imagine he just likes coming here, too, which is a nice perk if you can get it. I found the first movie to be very good, and I wish the second had been up to it. It wasn't bad, but I think it might have been more convoluted than necessary.
If you're in Montreal for the festival, I can recommend both Death Note films and wouldn't talk anyone out of The Fox Family. I'll be seeing Kiltro, Ultraman Mebius & Ultra Brothers, Mulberry Street and Memories of Matsuko. I didn't realize the last was from the director of Kamikaze Girls until a couple days ago, so it it jumped to the top of my radar pretty quickly.
Death Note (Desu Noto)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Concorida (Fantasia 2007)
It's almost pointless to write a review of Death Note alone; its Japanese release was similar to that of Kill Bill, with what is arguably one five-hour epic split in half and the two parts released several months apart. Still, as I write this particular paragraph during an intermission between the two parts, I will say that the first movie ends with one of the nemeses seeming to gain a huge advantage, and it has certainly left me stoked for The Last Name.
Across Japan and around the world, criminals are dying on their feet, victims of heart attacks despite no medical reason for it to happen. One falls in the middle of a hostage situation, and that's when we find out that the deaths are caused by law student Light Yagami (Tatsuya Fujiwara) writing their names in a magical notebook - the "Death Note" of the title. It was given to him by death god Ryuk (a CGI creation only Light can see), and Light has vowed to use it to rid the world of evil. Popular sentiment is with Light (code-named "Kira" by the police and news media), although Light's girlfriend and fellow law student Shiori (Yu Kashii) doesn't share that opinion. Neither do the police, who have assigned a high-ranking detective (Takeshi Kaga) to the investigation, and are also consulting with a mysterious investigator known only as "L". Fearing (rightly) that Tokyo's MPD has a leak, he has also called on the American FBI, notably Ray Iwatari (Shigeki Hosokawa) and his fiancée, Naomi Misora (Asako Seto).
Death Note doesn't go in for moral ambiguity as much as complete amorality. Light seldom if ever discusses the idea of whether or not writing someone's name in the book is simply wrong, and it doesn't come up much in the debates we see among students and in flashes of newspaper clippings and text messages. The point is made several times that "Kira" is having a powerful deterrant effect, both by noting that violent crime statistics are down and a simple text message from an unknown teen saying "no-one bullies me any more". Ryuk flat-out says he's on neither Light's nor L's side, and more to the point, Light doesn't even blink when he first attempts to kill L, nor attempt to justify the action in terms of how many more lives he'd be able to save. Of course, L does something pretty lacking in conscience to fight back.
Full review at EFC.
Death Note: The Last Name (Desu Noto: The Last Name)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia 2007)
Death Note: The Last Name came out hot on the heels of the first film (about four months later), and fulfills the promises made at Death Note's finale. It's got a more complex story than its predecessor, not always to its benefit, but it's far from being one of those sequels that undoes much of the goodwill of the first.
(If you haven't seen the first movie, don't read any farther: There will be spoilers.)
Full review at EFC.
Puritan
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
The atmosphere is thick in Puritan, and sometimes it feels as if the film is constructed entirely out of atmosphere - you could get lost in the shadows, the strange lighting, the hints of the paranormal. Underneath it all is a classically-structured film noir, one which plays by the rules of that sort of film while at the same time injecting something supernatural without the two feeling in conflict.
Simon Puritan (Nick Moran) used to be a reporter, but has made his living by giving "psychic" readings in between migraines ever since his father died. Before one reading, a terribly burned man (Pete Hodge) tells him that his wife will be coming in for a reading soon, and gives him a little information about her dead sister. Simon, of course, will fall for the beautiful Ann Bridges (Georgina Rylance), but soon discovers that she is married to a wealthy and unscarred American self-help author (David Soul). The burned man shows up again, saying to stay away from, because she'll only bring trouble - but once someone like Ann has you...
Simon may not truly be able to contact the dead, but he hangs around in eerie places. The house in Whitechapel that he inherited from his father was once the property of Aleister Crowley, and there are stories of hauntings ever since he summoned the devil himself there one night. It was built , as were several nearby churches, but Nicholas Hawksmoore, said to be a pagan who imbued his buildings with dark magic. All of this is, of course, almost completely irrelevant to the main plot of the film, but they are interesting little facts and details on their own, the sort of thing that makes a person pay closer attention and maybe pick up on truly important bits of information.
Full review at EFC.
Isabella
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
It's easy to say what Isabella is about - a middle-aged man coming to terms with the daughter he never knew he had - although it's a little more difficult to nail down the specific plot, especially while it's playing. After a while it doesn't quite matter, though, since we're getting very nice work from Chapman To and Isabella Leong.
The film takes place against the background of Macau just before its handover to mainland China; as the occasional on-screen text informs us, the local police department has been rocked by a corruption scandal and is trying to put its house in order before the new bureaucracy does it for them. Shing (Chapman To) doesn't look like a particularly honest cop, so he's got enough on his plate when one of the teenage girls he has been hitting on tells him that he is her father, and needs his help to get into her apartment to rescue her dog. Yan (Isabella Leong) doesn't expect Shing to actually act like a father, but the orphaned girl inspires something in him beyond the usual apathy and scuzziness.
The title of the film refers to the name of Yan's dog, but one can be easily forgiven for believing the film is named after its lead actress. Isabella Leong first gained fame in Hong Kong as a pop singer, though she has been doing a bunch of films over the past two years, and she certainly seems to have an aptitude for it. Her Yan probably thinks that she's old for her years, but while she's certainly had to deal with more troubles than a girl her age should, she's always wearing her young heart on her sleeve. Yan tries to mask it, by being deliberately pushy when she first meets Shing or misrepresenting her relationship to Sing to a boy at school with a crush on her, but Ms. Leong never loses sight of how Yan is still a kid who needs a parent, rather than someone who grew up fast.
Full review at EFC.
Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater (Samgeori Geukjang)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
In an odd quirk of festival programming, I somehow wound up seeing four musicals at Fantasia this year (or, at least, four films with multiple musical numbers), which under normal circumstances is roughly what I would see in five years. One of them (Memories of Matsuko) was possibly the best film of the festival; most of the others, including Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater, are hit-and-miss (generally more hit than miss), though in the case of Ghost Theater it's got little to do with the film being a musical.
The premise is promising enough, and might strike a chord with many moviegoers: Late one evening, Seong So-dan's grandmother goes out, saying she has to see a movie at the Sam Geo Ri theater, but doesn't return. So-dan (Kim Kkot-bi), already without her parents, first has to find the theater - like many old single screen theaters the world over, it's on its last legs, and even though it's not far from home, So-dan has never heard of it. They haven't seen her grandmother, but have an opening at the box office, which So-dan takes - after all, if Grandmother says she is coming here, then she'll probably make it eventually.
Of course, this is no ordinary theater - when So-dan stays late one night to close up, she sees the ancient, listless staff literally transformed, like some sort of ghosts: The overweight woman at the candy counter is Elisa (Park Joon-myeon), a lost princess; the custodian is Hiroshi (Jo Hee-bong), a Japanese soldier from WWII; the projectionist is Mosquito (Park Yeong-soo), an acrobatic clown; and the usher is Wanda (Han Ae-ri), a sexy goth girl. All, like So-dan, once came to Sam Geo Ri and never left. Then there's the owner (Cheon Ho-jin), whom So-dan finds out once made a movie, now believed lost, starring her grandmother. Maybe finding that movie can fix everything!
Full review at EFC.
If you're in Montreal for the festival, I can recommend both Death Note films and wouldn't talk anyone out of The Fox Family. I'll be seeing Kiltro, Ultraman Mebius & Ultra Brothers, Mulberry Street and Memories of Matsuko. I didn't realize the last was from the director of Kamikaze Girls until a couple days ago, so it it jumped to the top of my radar pretty quickly.
Death Note (Desu Noto)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Concorida (Fantasia 2007)
It's almost pointless to write a review of Death Note alone; its Japanese release was similar to that of Kill Bill, with what is arguably one five-hour epic split in half and the two parts released several months apart. Still, as I write this particular paragraph during an intermission between the two parts, I will say that the first movie ends with one of the nemeses seeming to gain a huge advantage, and it has certainly left me stoked for The Last Name.
Across Japan and around the world, criminals are dying on their feet, victims of heart attacks despite no medical reason for it to happen. One falls in the middle of a hostage situation, and that's when we find out that the deaths are caused by law student Light Yagami (Tatsuya Fujiwara) writing their names in a magical notebook - the "Death Note" of the title. It was given to him by death god Ryuk (a CGI creation only Light can see), and Light has vowed to use it to rid the world of evil. Popular sentiment is with Light (code-named "Kira" by the police and news media), although Light's girlfriend and fellow law student Shiori (Yu Kashii) doesn't share that opinion. Neither do the police, who have assigned a high-ranking detective (Takeshi Kaga) to the investigation, and are also consulting with a mysterious investigator known only as "L". Fearing (rightly) that Tokyo's MPD has a leak, he has also called on the American FBI, notably Ray Iwatari (Shigeki Hosokawa) and his fiancée, Naomi Misora (Asako Seto).
Death Note doesn't go in for moral ambiguity as much as complete amorality. Light seldom if ever discusses the idea of whether or not writing someone's name in the book is simply wrong, and it doesn't come up much in the debates we see among students and in flashes of newspaper clippings and text messages. The point is made several times that "Kira" is having a powerful deterrant effect, both by noting that violent crime statistics are down and a simple text message from an unknown teen saying "no-one bullies me any more". Ryuk flat-out says he's on neither Light's nor L's side, and more to the point, Light doesn't even blink when he first attempts to kill L, nor attempt to justify the action in terms of how many more lives he'd be able to save. Of course, L does something pretty lacking in conscience to fight back.
Full review at EFC.
Death Note: The Last Name (Desu Noto: The Last Name)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia 2007)
Death Note: The Last Name came out hot on the heels of the first film (about four months later), and fulfills the promises made at Death Note's finale. It's got a more complex story than its predecessor, not always to its benefit, but it's far from being one of those sequels that undoes much of the goodwill of the first.
(If you haven't seen the first movie, don't read any farther: There will be spoilers.)
Full review at EFC.
Puritan
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
The atmosphere is thick in Puritan, and sometimes it feels as if the film is constructed entirely out of atmosphere - you could get lost in the shadows, the strange lighting, the hints of the paranormal. Underneath it all is a classically-structured film noir, one which plays by the rules of that sort of film while at the same time injecting something supernatural without the two feeling in conflict.
Simon Puritan (Nick Moran) used to be a reporter, but has made his living by giving "psychic" readings in between migraines ever since his father died. Before one reading, a terribly burned man (Pete Hodge) tells him that his wife will be coming in for a reading soon, and gives him a little information about her dead sister. Simon, of course, will fall for the beautiful Ann Bridges (Georgina Rylance), but soon discovers that she is married to a wealthy and unscarred American self-help author (David Soul). The burned man shows up again, saying to stay away from, because she'll only bring trouble - but once someone like Ann has you...
Simon may not truly be able to contact the dead, but he hangs around in eerie places. The house in Whitechapel that he inherited from his father was once the property of Aleister Crowley, and there are stories of hauntings ever since he summoned the devil himself there one night. It was built , as were several nearby churches, but Nicholas Hawksmoore, said to be a pagan who imbued his buildings with dark magic. All of this is, of course, almost completely irrelevant to the main plot of the film, but they are interesting little facts and details on their own, the sort of thing that makes a person pay closer attention and maybe pick up on truly important bits of information.
Full review at EFC.
Isabella
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
It's easy to say what Isabella is about - a middle-aged man coming to terms with the daughter he never knew he had - although it's a little more difficult to nail down the specific plot, especially while it's playing. After a while it doesn't quite matter, though, since we're getting very nice work from Chapman To and Isabella Leong.
The film takes place against the background of Macau just before its handover to mainland China; as the occasional on-screen text informs us, the local police department has been rocked by a corruption scandal and is trying to put its house in order before the new bureaucracy does it for them. Shing (Chapman To) doesn't look like a particularly honest cop, so he's got enough on his plate when one of the teenage girls he has been hitting on tells him that he is her father, and needs his help to get into her apartment to rescue her dog. Yan (Isabella Leong) doesn't expect Shing to actually act like a father, but the orphaned girl inspires something in him beyond the usual apathy and scuzziness.
The title of the film refers to the name of Yan's dog, but one can be easily forgiven for believing the film is named after its lead actress. Isabella Leong first gained fame in Hong Kong as a pop singer, though she has been doing a bunch of films over the past two years, and she certainly seems to have an aptitude for it. Her Yan probably thinks that she's old for her years, but while she's certainly had to deal with more troubles than a girl her age should, she's always wearing her young heart on her sleeve. Yan tries to mask it, by being deliberately pushy when she first meets Shing or misrepresenting her relationship to Sing to a boy at school with a crush on her, but Ms. Leong never loses sight of how Yan is still a kid who needs a parent, rather than someone who grew up fast.
Full review at EFC.
Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater (Samgeori Geukjang)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
In an odd quirk of festival programming, I somehow wound up seeing four musicals at Fantasia this year (or, at least, four films with multiple musical numbers), which under normal circumstances is roughly what I would see in five years. One of them (Memories of Matsuko) was possibly the best film of the festival; most of the others, including Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater, are hit-and-miss (generally more hit than miss), though in the case of Ghost Theater it's got little to do with the film being a musical.
The premise is promising enough, and might strike a chord with many moviegoers: Late one evening, Seong So-dan's grandmother goes out, saying she has to see a movie at the Sam Geo Ri theater, but doesn't return. So-dan (Kim Kkot-bi), already without her parents, first has to find the theater - like many old single screen theaters the world over, it's on its last legs, and even though it's not far from home, So-dan has never heard of it. They haven't seen her grandmother, but have an opening at the box office, which So-dan takes - after all, if Grandmother says she is coming here, then she'll probably make it eventually.
Of course, this is no ordinary theater - when So-dan stays late one night to close up, she sees the ancient, listless staff literally transformed, like some sort of ghosts: The overweight woman at the candy counter is Elisa (Park Joon-myeon), a lost princess; the custodian is Hiroshi (Jo Hee-bong), a Japanese soldier from WWII; the projectionist is Mosquito (Park Yeong-soo), an acrobatic clown; and the usher is Wanda (Han Ae-ri), a sexy goth girl. All, like So-dan, once came to Sam Geo Ri and never left. Then there's the owner (Cheon Ho-jin), whom So-dan finds out once made a movie, now believed lost, starring her grandmother. Maybe finding that movie can fix everything!
Full review at EFC.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Fantasia Day Nine: The Unseeable, The Matrimony, End of the Line, The Fox Family, et The Rage
Updated Tuesday's post about Monday with a like to my EFC review of Once in a Summer.
Much rain to start yesterday before it cleared up and got humid. It was a horror-themed Friday the Thirteenth, with ghost stories from Thailand and China, gore flicks from Quebec and Ohio, and an offbeat musical comedy about circus performers who want to kill you and eat your liver from Korea.
Not much else to say, as I was in the theater all day, but walking home at 2.30am, I came upon a head-scratcher: Le Festival Juste pour Rire is set up along Rue Maisoneuve, and along with stages and concession areas there are what look like stationary parade floats of some of the great comedians: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Jacques Tati, Mister Bean, Mike Myers...
Wait a minute. Mister Bean, I'll give you, especially as his silent comedy is pretty universal, but Mike Myers? Seriously? I think Myers himself would ask that you show Peter Sellers some respect first, and Myers probably thinks he's done something funny in recent memory.
Anyway, back to seeing movies. I can recommend The Matrimony if you're at the festival today. My plan is the Death Note & Death Note: The Last Name double feature before heading across the street for Puritan, Isabella, and Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater
The Unseeable (Pen Choo Kab Pee)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
Wisit Sasanatieng isn't exactly a secret that die-hard film buffs are keeping to themselves; his films have just been hard to stumble upon in the west. Miramax, unable to figure out how to market a garish Thai Western, sat on distribution rights for his first, Tears of the Black Tiger, for years before Magnolia bought them out; his second, Citizen Dog, managed to be even more peculiar. The Unseeable, however, is pretty straightforward: A good old-fashioned story of a creepy house with a creepy mistress and creepy servants.
Nualjan (Siraphan Wattanajinda) comes to this place looking for her husband; he left several months ago to take care of something in Bangkok but has yet to return. The very pregnant Nualjan stops at the estate for the night, only to find the next morning that taxis won't sop at the place because of the various dark magics that seem to haunt the house. She winds up staying in the servants' quarters, and her talkative new roommate fills her head with stories of vampires and the twisted old woman who lives in the shed. Nualjan sees strange things herself - a little girl who seems to disappear when she rounds a corner, an ominous chest that housekeeper Somjit (Tassawan Seneewongse) screams at Nualjan for approaching, and all the rules Somjit lays down. There's no need for supernatural explanations to find Madame Ranjuan (Suporntip Chuangrangsri) off-putting; she's been a recluse since her own husband vanished, and her behavior around the baby after Nualjan give birth is rather odd.
As you can see, there's a bit of an "everything including the kitchen sink" feel to Kongkiat Khomsiri's story. Nualjan encounters nearly every type of supernatural entity known to film (with a couple of ice queens thrown in for good measure, receives cryptic warnings, and has disturbing flashbacks. Gratifyingly, it doesn't feel like overkill; Khomsiri and Sasanatieng prime and tease the audience by contrasting the unnerving things Nualjan sees with how laughable things sound when her excitable, superstitious roommate Choy describes them to her. It's clever reverse psychology; we go in expecting a ghost story, and we get things that look supernatural, but we're inclined to look for a rational explanation because they make the alternative sound like superstitious nonsense.
Full review at EFC.
The Matrimony (Xin Zhong you Gui)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
The Matrimony takes the gothic romance out of storage, puts a (relatively) modern coat of paint on it, and lets it loose. The result is surprisingly appealing: A ghost story that for the most part delivers everything this sort of film should be while at the same time feeling new and exciting as opposed to played-out. It falters a little toward the end, but the meat of the story is prime stuff.
Xu Manli (Fan Bingbing) is a stylish modern woman in 1930s Shanghai: She's got a Louise Brooks haircut, a job as a disk jockey playing jazz on a local radio station, and she knows her boyfriend, cinematographer Shen Junchu (Leon Lai) is about to propose to her. Just before he can, though, she's killed when a car plows into her on her bicycle, killing her instantly.
A year later, Junchu's mother has arranged a marriage to country girl Sansan (Rene Liu), but he shows her no affection, saying he will never think of her as more than a guest in his house - whose attic is filled with Manli's things. It's while investigating this that Sansan encounters Manli's ghost, who proposes a deal: Seeing Junchu sad hurts her too, and when Manli touches someone as a spirit it makes them ill. If Sansan allows Manli to possess her body on occasion, Manli will teach her how to make her husband happy. Sansan agrees - she really does love him - and at first it seems to work, but Sansan should have realized that deals with spirits always have a higher price than appears at first glance.
The basic story here wouldn't seem too far out of place if it were set in a stone mansion somewhere out in the foggy English countryside - big house, new young wife, jealous ghost, attic filled with old memories covered in sheets. Instead of being set in a remote place bound by restrictive traditions, though, it takes place in a bustling, prosperous city: The house is well-lit and full of modern amenities such as radios and even a film-editing station, Sansan is an active participant in her story rather than just a naif assaulted by the forces around her, Manli is an independent woman rather than someone who only exists as Junchu's one time lover. The costumes and production design are sumptuous: Shanghai looks like an exciting place that would naturally produce someone like Manli, the house is both intimidating and a place Sansan would want to become her home. The flashbacks of how Junchu and Sansan met are perfect, too, with a snow that is both a fitting backdrop to what Sansan considers a magical first meeting and a reminder of her humble origins. Rene Liu's performance in those scenes is especially important, since otherwise a modern audience could look at Sansan's arranged marriage as a job and think less of her; instead, we want Junchu to really love her, not just treat her better because she's nice and also thrust into an uncomfortable position.
Full review at EFC.
End of the Line
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
Maurice Deveraux is a perennial favorite at this festival, a local filmmaker who has always had more ambition than his low-budget slasher flicks have let on. This movie could be his ticket to bigger things; it's another horror movie, sure, but it's a smart, well-made one.
Karen (Ilona Elkin) is a nurse in a Montreal psych ward who is feeling a little bit unsteady herself; a troubled patient (Christine Lan) who had visions of demons attacking has just killed herself by jumping onto the subway tracks. When she heads home for the evening, she encounters a couple of men on the subway platform: Patrick (Robin Wilcock), who comes on too strong, and Mike (Nicolas Wright) fakes being an old friend to keep him at bay. That's not the worst trouble they'll face; also on the train are a bunch of well-dressed, clean-scrubbed types who have just been to an evangelist's rally. Midway through the ride home, those God-fearing people will get a call on their pagers: The apocalypse is coming tonight, so save as many people as you can.
And by "save", Reverend Hope (David L. McCallum) means "stab them to death with your cross-shaped daggers before the demons I say are coming get to them".
Devereaux could have gone the route of having the folks with the knives be this oncoming wave of effectively brainwashed zealots, but he does something a little more interesting: He lets them have doubts, for various reasons. Some get squeamish about killing people. Some are sociopaths using this as an excuse to rape and kill. Teenage Sarah (Nina Fillis) makes out with her boyfriend John (Tim Rozon) and has big-time doubts about the whole program. One guy is only a member of the sect because his wife was. What doing this does, aside from provide some exposition to the band of survivors trying to make their way to the surface, is make the marauders a little scarier. In part, it's because it means these people have all chosen to do something horrific individually, which is a scarier prospect than one central puppet master. But in part, it's because the people who have decided to switch sides aren't sure, while the others remain resolute - maybe these guys really do know something.
Full review at EFC.
The Fox Family (Gumiho Gajok)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
The Fox Family vexes me; I'm not sure who the audience for it is. On the one hand, it certainly feels like a kids' or family film with its songs and fanciful story about a family of foxes wishing to be human. But how many kids' movies would have a subplot about a serial killer? Maybe it's not really for kids... Or western kids and/or their parents are just wimps. Still, I'm not quite sure who out there is going to really love this movie.
A "kumiho" is a sort of fox spirit in Korean mythology, and is the name a group of them take when they assume human form. They're a family - father (Joo Hyeon), son (Ha Jeong-woo), older daughter (Park Si-yeon), younger daughter (Koo Joo-yeon) - and they've assumed human form, posing as a circus until a once-in-a-century eclipse when they can become human for real - if they each eat a human liver. Meanwhile, a grifter (Park Joon-gyoo) stumbles upon their camp looking for a spot to hide from some mobsters he owes money, and takes an interest in the older sister, and there's a serial killer preying on women with small dogs - the kind whose livers the younger sister finds particularly delicious - and a sad-sack detective (Yongnyeo Seon-woo) is on the case.
It's a bit tough to connect with the Kumihos in part because they really do feel non-human. The writing has them kind of oblivious to the everyday world, and their circus act scares children in a hilariously bloody way. There's a very peculiar amorality to them when they talk about their plans to kill people and eat their livers in order to become human; they just don't give any thought at all to how this is really would not be a particularly auspicious start to their lives as humans. I'm also a little unclear as to how long the family has been in human guise; sometimes, the subtitled dialog makes it sound like it's been for a long time, although they seem kind of ignorant of human society to have been around that long.
Full review at EFC.
The Rage
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
If you like horror movies, you've probably liked some of Robert Kurtzman's work. The "K" in KNB, he's created some of the bloody and otherwise great make-up effects for scores of movies over the past twenty years or so. As expected, he serves up a heaping helping of the nasty stuff as a writer/director. As might also be expected, when it comes to everything else, there's a good argument for sticking to what he knows.
So, you've got these two groups of people. One are a bunch of teenagers in a fan heading somewhere; the other is a mad scientist (Andrew Divoff) who is experimenting with a rapidly mutating virus that causes rage, enhanced strength, craving for human blood/flesh, etc., and his subjects. One of the subjects from group B gets loose but doesn't last long. The real trouble starts when the vultures go for his body, get infected, and... well, you know.
When Kurtzman has his make-up effects hat on, he is really good. The raving, flesh-eating infectees look good and nasty, with sores and pustules and cracks appearing in the skin, sunken eyeballs, and icky stuff coming out of the mouth. People get hit with all manner of blunt and sharp objects, or cut up for all sorts of nasty wounds and viscera being torn out. If all you're looking for is gross-out stuff, this is close to a five-star movie.
Full review at EFC.
Much rain to start yesterday before it cleared up and got humid. It was a horror-themed Friday the Thirteenth, with ghost stories from Thailand and China, gore flicks from Quebec and Ohio, and an offbeat musical comedy about circus performers who want to kill you and eat your liver from Korea.
Not much else to say, as I was in the theater all day, but walking home at 2.30am, I came upon a head-scratcher: Le Festival Juste pour Rire is set up along Rue Maisoneuve, and along with stages and concession areas there are what look like stationary parade floats of some of the great comedians: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Jacques Tati, Mister Bean, Mike Myers...
Wait a minute. Mister Bean, I'll give you, especially as his silent comedy is pretty universal, but Mike Myers? Seriously? I think Myers himself would ask that you show Peter Sellers some respect first, and Myers probably thinks he's done something funny in recent memory.
Anyway, back to seeing movies. I can recommend The Matrimony if you're at the festival today. My plan is the Death Note & Death Note: The Last Name double feature before heading across the street for Puritan, Isabella, and Midnight Ballad for Ghost Theater
The Unseeable (Pen Choo Kab Pee)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
Wisit Sasanatieng isn't exactly a secret that die-hard film buffs are keeping to themselves; his films have just been hard to stumble upon in the west. Miramax, unable to figure out how to market a garish Thai Western, sat on distribution rights for his first, Tears of the Black Tiger, for years before Magnolia bought them out; his second, Citizen Dog, managed to be even more peculiar. The Unseeable, however, is pretty straightforward: A good old-fashioned story of a creepy house with a creepy mistress and creepy servants.
Nualjan (Siraphan Wattanajinda) comes to this place looking for her husband; he left several months ago to take care of something in Bangkok but has yet to return. The very pregnant Nualjan stops at the estate for the night, only to find the next morning that taxis won't sop at the place because of the various dark magics that seem to haunt the house. She winds up staying in the servants' quarters, and her talkative new roommate fills her head with stories of vampires and the twisted old woman who lives in the shed. Nualjan sees strange things herself - a little girl who seems to disappear when she rounds a corner, an ominous chest that housekeeper Somjit (Tassawan Seneewongse) screams at Nualjan for approaching, and all the rules Somjit lays down. There's no need for supernatural explanations to find Madame Ranjuan (Suporntip Chuangrangsri) off-putting; she's been a recluse since her own husband vanished, and her behavior around the baby after Nualjan give birth is rather odd.
As you can see, there's a bit of an "everything including the kitchen sink" feel to Kongkiat Khomsiri's story. Nualjan encounters nearly every type of supernatural entity known to film (with a couple of ice queens thrown in for good measure, receives cryptic warnings, and has disturbing flashbacks. Gratifyingly, it doesn't feel like overkill; Khomsiri and Sasanatieng prime and tease the audience by contrasting the unnerving things Nualjan sees with how laughable things sound when her excitable, superstitious roommate Choy describes them to her. It's clever reverse psychology; we go in expecting a ghost story, and we get things that look supernatural, but we're inclined to look for a rational explanation because they make the alternative sound like superstitious nonsense.
Full review at EFC.
The Matrimony (Xin Zhong you Gui)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
The Matrimony takes the gothic romance out of storage, puts a (relatively) modern coat of paint on it, and lets it loose. The result is surprisingly appealing: A ghost story that for the most part delivers everything this sort of film should be while at the same time feeling new and exciting as opposed to played-out. It falters a little toward the end, but the meat of the story is prime stuff.
Xu Manli (Fan Bingbing) is a stylish modern woman in 1930s Shanghai: She's got a Louise Brooks haircut, a job as a disk jockey playing jazz on a local radio station, and she knows her boyfriend, cinematographer Shen Junchu (Leon Lai) is about to propose to her. Just before he can, though, she's killed when a car plows into her on her bicycle, killing her instantly.
A year later, Junchu's mother has arranged a marriage to country girl Sansan (Rene Liu), but he shows her no affection, saying he will never think of her as more than a guest in his house - whose attic is filled with Manli's things. It's while investigating this that Sansan encounters Manli's ghost, who proposes a deal: Seeing Junchu sad hurts her too, and when Manli touches someone as a spirit it makes them ill. If Sansan allows Manli to possess her body on occasion, Manli will teach her how to make her husband happy. Sansan agrees - she really does love him - and at first it seems to work, but Sansan should have realized that deals with spirits always have a higher price than appears at first glance.
The basic story here wouldn't seem too far out of place if it were set in a stone mansion somewhere out in the foggy English countryside - big house, new young wife, jealous ghost, attic filled with old memories covered in sheets. Instead of being set in a remote place bound by restrictive traditions, though, it takes place in a bustling, prosperous city: The house is well-lit and full of modern amenities such as radios and even a film-editing station, Sansan is an active participant in her story rather than just a naif assaulted by the forces around her, Manli is an independent woman rather than someone who only exists as Junchu's one time lover. The costumes and production design are sumptuous: Shanghai looks like an exciting place that would naturally produce someone like Manli, the house is both intimidating and a place Sansan would want to become her home. The flashbacks of how Junchu and Sansan met are perfect, too, with a snow that is both a fitting backdrop to what Sansan considers a magical first meeting and a reminder of her humble origins. Rene Liu's performance in those scenes is especially important, since otherwise a modern audience could look at Sansan's arranged marriage as a job and think less of her; instead, we want Junchu to really love her, not just treat her better because she's nice and also thrust into an uncomfortable position.
Full review at EFC.
End of the Line
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
Maurice Deveraux is a perennial favorite at this festival, a local filmmaker who has always had more ambition than his low-budget slasher flicks have let on. This movie could be his ticket to bigger things; it's another horror movie, sure, but it's a smart, well-made one.
Karen (Ilona Elkin) is a nurse in a Montreal psych ward who is feeling a little bit unsteady herself; a troubled patient (Christine Lan) who had visions of demons attacking has just killed herself by jumping onto the subway tracks. When she heads home for the evening, she encounters a couple of men on the subway platform: Patrick (Robin Wilcock), who comes on too strong, and Mike (Nicolas Wright) fakes being an old friend to keep him at bay. That's not the worst trouble they'll face; also on the train are a bunch of well-dressed, clean-scrubbed types who have just been to an evangelist's rally. Midway through the ride home, those God-fearing people will get a call on their pagers: The apocalypse is coming tonight, so save as many people as you can.
And by "save", Reverend Hope (David L. McCallum) means "stab them to death with your cross-shaped daggers before the demons I say are coming get to them".
Devereaux could have gone the route of having the folks with the knives be this oncoming wave of effectively brainwashed zealots, but he does something a little more interesting: He lets them have doubts, for various reasons. Some get squeamish about killing people. Some are sociopaths using this as an excuse to rape and kill. Teenage Sarah (Nina Fillis) makes out with her boyfriend John (Tim Rozon) and has big-time doubts about the whole program. One guy is only a member of the sect because his wife was. What doing this does, aside from provide some exposition to the band of survivors trying to make their way to the surface, is make the marauders a little scarier. In part, it's because it means these people have all chosen to do something horrific individually, which is a scarier prospect than one central puppet master. But in part, it's because the people who have decided to switch sides aren't sure, while the others remain resolute - maybe these guys really do know something.
Full review at EFC.
The Fox Family (Gumiho Gajok)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
The Fox Family vexes me; I'm not sure who the audience for it is. On the one hand, it certainly feels like a kids' or family film with its songs and fanciful story about a family of foxes wishing to be human. But how many kids' movies would have a subplot about a serial killer? Maybe it's not really for kids... Or western kids and/or their parents are just wimps. Still, I'm not quite sure who out there is going to really love this movie.
A "kumiho" is a sort of fox spirit in Korean mythology, and is the name a group of them take when they assume human form. They're a family - father (Joo Hyeon), son (Ha Jeong-woo), older daughter (Park Si-yeon), younger daughter (Koo Joo-yeon) - and they've assumed human form, posing as a circus until a once-in-a-century eclipse when they can become human for real - if they each eat a human liver. Meanwhile, a grifter (Park Joon-gyoo) stumbles upon their camp looking for a spot to hide from some mobsters he owes money, and takes an interest in the older sister, and there's a serial killer preying on women with small dogs - the kind whose livers the younger sister finds particularly delicious - and a sad-sack detective (Yongnyeo Seon-woo) is on the case.
It's a bit tough to connect with the Kumihos in part because they really do feel non-human. The writing has them kind of oblivious to the everyday world, and their circus act scares children in a hilariously bloody way. There's a very peculiar amorality to them when they talk about their plans to kill people and eat their livers in order to become human; they just don't give any thought at all to how this is really would not be a particularly auspicious start to their lives as humans. I'm also a little unclear as to how long the family has been in human guise; sometimes, the subtitled dialog makes it sound like it's been for a long time, although they seem kind of ignorant of human society to have been around that long.
Full review at EFC.
The Rage
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
If you like horror movies, you've probably liked some of Robert Kurtzman's work. The "K" in KNB, he's created some of the bloody and otherwise great make-up effects for scores of movies over the past twenty years or so. As expected, he serves up a heaping helping of the nasty stuff as a writer/director. As might also be expected, when it comes to everything else, there's a good argument for sticking to what he knows.
So, you've got these two groups of people. One are a bunch of teenagers in a fan heading somewhere; the other is a mad scientist (Andrew Divoff) who is experimenting with a rapidly mutating virus that causes rage, enhanced strength, craving for human blood/flesh, etc., and his subjects. One of the subjects from group B gets loose but doesn't last long. The real trouble starts when the vultures go for his body, get infected, and... well, you know.
When Kurtzman has his make-up effects hat on, he is really good. The raving, flesh-eating infectees look good and nasty, with sores and pustules and cracks appearing in the skin, sunken eyeballs, and icky stuff coming out of the mouth. People get hit with all manner of blunt and sharp objects, or cut up for all sorts of nasty wounds and viscera being torn out. If all you're looking for is gross-out stuff, this is close to a five-star movie.
Full review at EFC.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Fantasia Day Eight: Special, Ghosts of Cité Soleil, et Silk
Updated Monday's post about Tuesday with a review of The Show Must Go On.
'Twas a very nice day to spend out in the Old Port. I looked at the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the science museum, which was educational and kind of nasty, although some of the compositions (like the "exploded" man) were kind of cool. I don't think this version has come to the Boston Museum of Science yet.
Whoever is running the vending machines has apparently not caught up with how strong the Canadian dollar is, though. $2.50 Canadian for a 600 mL soda works out to about $2.38 American, and that is WAY above the going rate in Boston. Like, a dollar more. Sure, the fact that these machines are placed a good distance away from the nearest convenience store works into it, but boo, Pepsi. Boo. You are ripping the good people of Montreal (and visiting tourists from America) off.
Today's plan: The Unseeable, The Matrimony, End of the Line (which I had really wanted to see at BUFF), The Fox Family, and maybe The Rage (I've been kind of dragging at the end of the day, so the question of whether or not I should stay up for a retro gore movie is an open one). Amazingly, it looks like I might get an hour-long dinner break for the second night in a row between Matrimony and End of the Line. That just usually doesn't happen without skipping movies. If you're in Montreal for the festival, I can recommend Ghosts of Cité Soleil with some caveats and The Signal without reservation.
Special
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
Special has a very fine line to walk - we've got to basically like its main character, and we've got to like him for the very same things that make us laugh at him, and make him an object of our pity. It's tricky to make a movie about someone who is not that bright, and I don't know if the people making Special quite pull it off the way they'd like.
"Special" is the name of an antidepressant just starting clinical trials, and Les (Michael Rappaport) is one of the first to test it. The comic-book-loving parking enforcement officer says he doesn't feel depressed, but his mood isn't positive either, so he takes the pills and goes about his business. Soon, he discovers that they're having side effects: At first, he can hover in the air; when he tells this to Dr. Dobson (Jack Kehler), he discovers he's telepathic, too - Dobson's mouth is saying to stop taking them, but mentally he's saying to keep going. The only people he tells are the brothers who run the comic book shop he frequents, who are skeptical, but if he doesn't have powers, why do the brothers funding the drug try to kidnap him after he gets on the news by saving Maggie (Alexandra Holden), the pretty clerk at the local all-night market, from a holdup?
This is a low-budget independent film, so aside from not expecting much in the way of eye-popping effects, folks going to see it should temper their expectations of the cast a bit, too. Michael Rappaport is the biggest name in the cast, and having him play the lead as this character makes the film a bit of a challenge for the audience: Les is timid by nature and probably of below-average intelligence, so he's going to spend a great deal of the movie being pushed around and/or looking like a fool. And while I think Rappaport overplays the character a little, he does get across what this guy is like, what goes on in his head. The trouble is that a character like that doesn't quite reach and and grab the audience, and as well as Rappaport plays Les, I didn't quite reach in and grab him, so to speak. It might just be that Rappaport is better as part of an ensemble and isn't a leading man who can appear in nearly every scene; he just doesn't quite have a big enough personality to carry this movie.
Full review at EFC.
Ghosts of Cité Soleil
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
According to the information presented at the start of this film, the Cité Soleil section of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, is considered the most dangerous place in the world by the United Nations. The poorest section of the poorest country on Earth, it is almost completely run by gangs, some of whom the film alleges worked as enforcers for President Aristide - the "chimeres", ghost soldiers.
At least, that's what they tell us. Ghosts of Cité Soleil, which follows two of the city's five major gang chiefs, doesn't present a lot of evidence linking them to Aristide's Lavalas party beyond their own assertions. In some ways, it's somewhat irrelevant; though there are frequent cut-aways to the events in Haiti at large during early 2004, this is a story about the contentious relationship between brothers, with how they effect the world around them a sidenote.
The pair are Wilson "2pac" Jean and James "Bily" Petit Frère. Bily is a more vociferous Lavalas loyalist who according to his brother, seeing himself as a future President of Haiti. 2pac doesn't see any point in thinking that big; he's too practical. While he'll tell the camera that the government provided him with a car and guns, his music expresses more doubt. He also expresses disdain for how his brother runs his gang "like a police station". For all that, 2pac is the one who seems to have the greater charisma and stability - it's Bily who rails about being shown "respect", and who calls a UN relief worker in after he shoots one of his underlings in the foot to make a point.
Full review at EFC.
Silk (Guisi)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
The line between science fiction and fantasy is often blurred, especially in film - many science fiction fans will tell you that most sci-fi is really just fantasy with energy beings instead of ghosts, lightsabers instead of swords, psychics instead of seers. Silk is in some ways like that, but in some ways the opposite - though it is unabashedly a ghost story, it thinks and acts like sci-fi much of the time.
Silk posits that ghosts exist, and can be seen, but are too dim for the eye to see. Enter Professor Hashimoto (Yosuke Eguchi), who has built a fractal structure known as a Menger Sponge, which can trap energy like no other material - including the energy a ghost child in a Taipei apartment. He and his team recruit Tung (Chang Chen), a detective with exemplary eyesight, to help them investigate. The one thing they know is that anyone who makes eye contact with the boy dies horribly; what Tung discovers is that there is a nearly invisible strand of silk that connects the boy with his potential victims.
Now, filmmaker Su Chao-bin may not have the strongest grasp on what a Menger Sponge is - a fractal pattern is a mathematical concept, by definition impossible to construct physically - but once he has introduced the idea, he's enormously clever with how to apply it. Film can be coated with in, for instance, to capture a ghost photographically. Put it in eyedrops, and a person can see ghosts for a bit. Build a big enough one, and you can capture a ghost inside. But it's not just that Su uses scientific jargon in his story, but the way the characters act. They seldom run from the supernatural, but are drawn out of curiosity, and investigate methodically, rather than acting in a foolish manner.
Full review at EFC.
'Twas a very nice day to spend out in the Old Port. I looked at the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the science museum, which was educational and kind of nasty, although some of the compositions (like the "exploded" man) were kind of cool. I don't think this version has come to the Boston Museum of Science yet.
Whoever is running the vending machines has apparently not caught up with how strong the Canadian dollar is, though. $2.50 Canadian for a 600 mL soda works out to about $2.38 American, and that is WAY above the going rate in Boston. Like, a dollar more. Sure, the fact that these machines are placed a good distance away from the nearest convenience store works into it, but boo, Pepsi. Boo. You are ripping the good people of Montreal (and visiting tourists from America) off.
Today's plan: The Unseeable, The Matrimony, End of the Line (which I had really wanted to see at BUFF), The Fox Family, and maybe The Rage (I've been kind of dragging at the end of the day, so the question of whether or not I should stay up for a retro gore movie is an open one). Amazingly, it looks like I might get an hour-long dinner break for the second night in a row between Matrimony and End of the Line. That just usually doesn't happen without skipping movies. If you're in Montreal for the festival, I can recommend Ghosts of Cité Soleil with some caveats and The Signal without reservation.
Special
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
Special has a very fine line to walk - we've got to basically like its main character, and we've got to like him for the very same things that make us laugh at him, and make him an object of our pity. It's tricky to make a movie about someone who is not that bright, and I don't know if the people making Special quite pull it off the way they'd like.
"Special" is the name of an antidepressant just starting clinical trials, and Les (Michael Rappaport) is one of the first to test it. The comic-book-loving parking enforcement officer says he doesn't feel depressed, but his mood isn't positive either, so he takes the pills and goes about his business. Soon, he discovers that they're having side effects: At first, he can hover in the air; when he tells this to Dr. Dobson (Jack Kehler), he discovers he's telepathic, too - Dobson's mouth is saying to stop taking them, but mentally he's saying to keep going. The only people he tells are the brothers who run the comic book shop he frequents, who are skeptical, but if he doesn't have powers, why do the brothers funding the drug try to kidnap him after he gets on the news by saving Maggie (Alexandra Holden), the pretty clerk at the local all-night market, from a holdup?
This is a low-budget independent film, so aside from not expecting much in the way of eye-popping effects, folks going to see it should temper their expectations of the cast a bit, too. Michael Rappaport is the biggest name in the cast, and having him play the lead as this character makes the film a bit of a challenge for the audience: Les is timid by nature and probably of below-average intelligence, so he's going to spend a great deal of the movie being pushed around and/or looking like a fool. And while I think Rappaport overplays the character a little, he does get across what this guy is like, what goes on in his head. The trouble is that a character like that doesn't quite reach and and grab the audience, and as well as Rappaport plays Les, I didn't quite reach in and grab him, so to speak. It might just be that Rappaport is better as part of an ensemble and isn't a leading man who can appear in nearly every scene; he just doesn't quite have a big enough personality to carry this movie.
Full review at EFC.
Ghosts of Cité Soleil
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
According to the information presented at the start of this film, the Cité Soleil section of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, is considered the most dangerous place in the world by the United Nations. The poorest section of the poorest country on Earth, it is almost completely run by gangs, some of whom the film alleges worked as enforcers for President Aristide - the "chimeres", ghost soldiers.
At least, that's what they tell us. Ghosts of Cité Soleil, which follows two of the city's five major gang chiefs, doesn't present a lot of evidence linking them to Aristide's Lavalas party beyond their own assertions. In some ways, it's somewhat irrelevant; though there are frequent cut-aways to the events in Haiti at large during early 2004, this is a story about the contentious relationship between brothers, with how they effect the world around them a sidenote.
The pair are Wilson "2pac" Jean and James "Bily" Petit Frère. Bily is a more vociferous Lavalas loyalist who according to his brother, seeing himself as a future President of Haiti. 2pac doesn't see any point in thinking that big; he's too practical. While he'll tell the camera that the government provided him with a car and guns, his music expresses more doubt. He also expresses disdain for how his brother runs his gang "like a police station". For all that, 2pac is the one who seems to have the greater charisma and stability - it's Bily who rails about being shown "respect", and who calls a UN relief worker in after he shoots one of his underlings in the foot to make a point.
Full review at EFC.
Silk (Guisi)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
The line between science fiction and fantasy is often blurred, especially in film - many science fiction fans will tell you that most sci-fi is really just fantasy with energy beings instead of ghosts, lightsabers instead of swords, psychics instead of seers. Silk is in some ways like that, but in some ways the opposite - though it is unabashedly a ghost story, it thinks and acts like sci-fi much of the time.
Silk posits that ghosts exist, and can be seen, but are too dim for the eye to see. Enter Professor Hashimoto (Yosuke Eguchi), who has built a fractal structure known as a Menger Sponge, which can trap energy like no other material - including the energy a ghost child in a Taipei apartment. He and his team recruit Tung (Chang Chen), a detective with exemplary eyesight, to help them investigate. The one thing they know is that anyone who makes eye contact with the boy dies horribly; what Tung discovers is that there is a nearly invisible strand of silk that connects the boy with his potential victims.
Now, filmmaker Su Chao-bin may not have the strongest grasp on what a Menger Sponge is - a fractal pattern is a mathematical concept, by definition impossible to construct physically - but once he has introduced the idea, he's enormously clever with how to apply it. Film can be coated with in, for instance, to capture a ghost photographically. Put it in eyedrops, and a person can see ghosts for a bit. Build a big enough one, and you can capture a ghost inside. But it's not just that Su uses scientific jargon in his story, but the way the characters act. They seldom run from the supernatural, but are drawn out of curiosity, and investigate methodically, rather than acting in a foolish manner.
Full review at EFC.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Fantasia Day Seven: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society, Km. 31, Big Bang Love, et The Tripper
Updated Sunday's post with are review of Arch Angels.
Yesterday wound up being pretty nice; I spent the few hours I had before movies started in the Canadian Center for Architecture's museum. The exhibit on Bernard Rudofsky was pretty interesting, although the one on 1960s/1970s architecture magazines seemed kind of tedious - I quit reading the information on the walls at somewhere around 1969, and didn't feel it made a lot of sense as a museum exhibition - if you can't flip through them, see how they're organized and read articles first hand, what's the point? I don't claim to know a lot about museums, but the best ones allow you to interact with and experience their material in your own way; this was just looking at covers and reading a description while standing. That's a website, only a website would be better because you'd be in a better reading position and it might let you actually browse the magazine's content. Still, Rudefsky's studies of aesthetics and what we now call ergonomics was pretty interesting. Although, being from Maine and living in Massachusetts, I'm not sure how well those houses that prize harmony with the environment would fly: Around February I tend to want the environment to stay the heck away.
Looks like a short day today; I'm skipping Naruto: Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow because if yesterday's Ghost in the Shell feature taught me anything, it was not to try and access the latest part of an anime you're not familiar with. So I'll head down the La Vielle-Porte before returning here for Special, either Ghosts of Cité Soleil or On Evil Grounds probably the first "well, I should probably see something" decision of the festival), and then Silk.
Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society (Kôkaku kidôtai: Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
Cyberpunk's not quite dead, but it's been on life support for a while. Once everybody started using the internet, it became difficult to make computer-oriented stories seem futuristic and cool without also making them arcane at best and incomprehensible at worst. It's a problem which vexes the latest entry in the Ghost in the Shell franchise, although I imagine that those who have been following the Stand Alone Complex television series will be in much more familiar territory.
As the film opens, Japan's top counterterrorism squad, Section 9, is responding to a hostage crisis at the airport. It ends with the hostage-taker committing suicide, afraid of someone called "The Puppeteer", and he's not the first - other officials of the defunct Seok Republic have also taken their own lives, leading Section 9 to suspect some sort of systematic corruption of their cybernetic implants. Lead detective Togusa and his team investigate, and while veteran team-member Batou is following a lead, he runs into Major Motoko Kusanagi, the former head of the team who resigned two years earlier and is now investigating mysteries that conventional government organizations are ill-equipped to solve, and she's found links to both a seeming plague of missing children and the computer system devoted to the care of Japan's senior citizens.
There's a lot going on here that at least those of us not familiar with Stand Alone Complex - I suspect that storylines about the Seok Republic, the infighting among various agencies, and certain members of the Diet worrying about the influx of refugees' effect on Japan's ethnic makeup are carryovers from the previous series. Director Kenji Kamiyama and his collaborators mostly assume that the audience is up to date, both on continuity and jargon, so if all you've seen before is Mamoru Oshii's theatrical features (if that), I'd recommend being very attentive as you watch, because the details about the world and the specific story can fly past you otherwise.
Full review at EFC.
Km. 31 (Kilómetro 31)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
Km. 31 is a good ghost story, and comes fairly close to being a great one. In fact, I won't argue much with someone who comes out of it saying that it is a legitimately great ghost story, as I seem to be hampered by my insistence that these things make sense.
I don't mean that sarcastically; it's a legitimate blind spot. Ghost stories and other types of supernatural horror are based upon something irrational and unquantifiable happening in an otherwise rational world, but my brain is wired to expect a mechanism that can be understood and worked with. Failing that, I want everything to at least fit in thematically. Km. 31 seems to be doing pretty good in that regard almost literally right up to the final scene, and when the film doesn't give me the conclusion it had seemed to be leading me toward, I feel cheated. Those who find that sort of randomness a virtue will have no problem with it.
But let's back up a bit. The film starts with Agata (Iliana Fox) driving down the highway. At the Km. 31 marker, a small boy jumps out in front of the car, and Agata hits him. She gets out of the car, calls her boyfriend Omar (Raul Mendez), and while looking for the boy (who has mysteriously vanished), she herself is run over. A few miles away, this triggers a sort of reaction in her identical twin Catalina (Fox again), who leads her Spanish friend Nuno (Adira Collado) to where Agata lays, barely alive. The doctors have to amputate Agata's legs and she comes out of surgery in a coma; when Catalina and Omar ask about the boy she mentioned, they're told there was no boy. The search for answers leads Omar to Martin Ugalde (Carlos Aragon), a detective obsessed with the dozens of hit-and-run accidents that have happened at that highway marker, and Catalina and Nuno to an old woman (Luisa Huertas) who sheds some light on the supernatural forces at work.
Full review at EFC.
Big Bang Love: Juvenile A (46-okunen no koi)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
Takashi Miike showed down a bit a couple years ago to take a stab at doing a big-budget family movie, but since then he's gotten back to what passes for normal where he's concerned: Churning out movies at a rate nearly unheard of for other filmmakers, working cheap and occasionally tossing something downright peculiar in among the yakuza dramas and horror films. Big Bang Love is one of the strange ones, an interesting mixture of unusual styles and subject matter that works more often than not, if only just.
After an opening that is deliberately abstract and related to the main story thematically more than literally, we get into the meat of the story: Prisoner Shiro Kazuki (Masanobu Ando) has just been killed, apparently strangled by cell-mate Jun Ariyoshi (Ryuhei Matsuda), who is saying things like "I did it". Still, an official investigation must be made, but it leaves the investigating officers perplexed: Shiro is a timid young man, despite the brutal crime that placed him behind bars, while Shiro was a belligerent repeat offender who had made an enemy of everyone else in the building; even the warden has a motive.
The murder mystery is mainly a framework off which to hang an examination of how these characters never really had any kind of shot, as opposed to a puzzle to be solved. Indeed, there's so little to it that the film occasionally seems to repeat himself, having his detectives run in circles, covering the same material multiple times (once or twice, I suspect, re-cutting the same footage to do it). Instead, Miike gives us vignettes about how the environment Shiro grew up in seemingly offered him the choice of becoming a thug or becoming a victim. Jun, on the other hand, becomes a bit more of a cipher by design, as the film abjectly refuses to stick him in any of the typical gay pigeonholes; indeed, occasionally the audience will find themselves wondering just what his sexual orientation is, or whether that's too binary a concept for someone like Jun.
Full review at EFC.
The Tripper
* * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
I'm not saying that The Tripper should have been a slam dunk by any means, but it does kind of have something for everyone - an axe-wielding Ronald Reagan going to town on a bunch of hippies? There's pleasure to be had there, unless you like both Reagan AND hippies, in which case I suspect you're in a tiny minority. That it's as political as it is goofy is part of the fun, but co-writer/director/co-star David Arquette doesn't quite seem able to harness the potential of his good idea.
After some scathing quotes from Reagan and a "thirty years ago" prologue that we know will be important later, we meet a group of already half-baked, half-drunk slackers heading for a big outdoor concert in their van. Well, one's pretty sober - Samantha (Jaime King) isn't terribly interested in the chemicals, although she doesn't regret leaving her conservative boyfriend Jimmy (Balthazar Getty) behind. They get harassed by some redneck lumberjacks along the way, but eventually make it to see local Sherriff Buzz Hall (Thomas Jane) trying to shut it down as unsafe, despite the graft promoter Frank Baker (Paul Reubens) has paid Mayor Burton (Rick Overton). Now, sure, Buzz is only thinking about the weather, the privacy-loving local pot growers, and the tiny size of his police department, but he certainly seems to have the right idea when some guy in a Ronald Reagan mask starts going after the visiting (faux) hippies with an axe.
Give Arquette some credit where it's due - the man has a clear love for the slasher genre and doesn't hold back from giving the gorehounds what they want. Ronnie takes out a couple dozen people in this movie, and it's seldom off-screen. Axes get buried in heads, people get mauled by dogs, and gallons of sticky red blood spatter all over everything. There's bad jokes, attack dogs, and Ronnie breaking out some of his most famous sound bites before a kill. On a certain basic level, it delivers the goods.
...
It's kind of a shame, actually; the movie is so self-consciously aiming for satire that its failure in that regard negates some of its virtues as a splatter movie.
Full review at EFC.
Yesterday wound up being pretty nice; I spent the few hours I had before movies started in the Canadian Center for Architecture's museum. The exhibit on Bernard Rudofsky was pretty interesting, although the one on 1960s/1970s architecture magazines seemed kind of tedious - I quit reading the information on the walls at somewhere around 1969, and didn't feel it made a lot of sense as a museum exhibition - if you can't flip through them, see how they're organized and read articles first hand, what's the point? I don't claim to know a lot about museums, but the best ones allow you to interact with and experience their material in your own way; this was just looking at covers and reading a description while standing. That's a website, only a website would be better because you'd be in a better reading position and it might let you actually browse the magazine's content. Still, Rudefsky's studies of aesthetics and what we now call ergonomics was pretty interesting. Although, being from Maine and living in Massachusetts, I'm not sure how well those houses that prize harmony with the environment would fly: Around February I tend to want the environment to stay the heck away.
Looks like a short day today; I'm skipping Naruto: Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow because if yesterday's Ghost in the Shell feature taught me anything, it was not to try and access the latest part of an anime you're not familiar with. So I'll head down the La Vielle-Porte before returning here for Special, either Ghosts of Cité Soleil or On Evil Grounds probably the first "well, I should probably see something" decision of the festival), and then Silk.
Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society (Kôkaku kidôtai: Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
Cyberpunk's not quite dead, but it's been on life support for a while. Once everybody started using the internet, it became difficult to make computer-oriented stories seem futuristic and cool without also making them arcane at best and incomprehensible at worst. It's a problem which vexes the latest entry in the Ghost in the Shell franchise, although I imagine that those who have been following the Stand Alone Complex television series will be in much more familiar territory.
As the film opens, Japan's top counterterrorism squad, Section 9, is responding to a hostage crisis at the airport. It ends with the hostage-taker committing suicide, afraid of someone called "The Puppeteer", and he's not the first - other officials of the defunct Seok Republic have also taken their own lives, leading Section 9 to suspect some sort of systematic corruption of their cybernetic implants. Lead detective Togusa and his team investigate, and while veteran team-member Batou is following a lead, he runs into Major Motoko Kusanagi, the former head of the team who resigned two years earlier and is now investigating mysteries that conventional government organizations are ill-equipped to solve, and she's found links to both a seeming plague of missing children and the computer system devoted to the care of Japan's senior citizens.
There's a lot going on here that at least those of us not familiar with Stand Alone Complex - I suspect that storylines about the Seok Republic, the infighting among various agencies, and certain members of the Diet worrying about the influx of refugees' effect on Japan's ethnic makeup are carryovers from the previous series. Director Kenji Kamiyama and his collaborators mostly assume that the audience is up to date, both on continuity and jargon, so if all you've seen before is Mamoru Oshii's theatrical features (if that), I'd recommend being very attentive as you watch, because the details about the world and the specific story can fly past you otherwise.
Full review at EFC.
Km. 31 (Kilómetro 31)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
Km. 31 is a good ghost story, and comes fairly close to being a great one. In fact, I won't argue much with someone who comes out of it saying that it is a legitimately great ghost story, as I seem to be hampered by my insistence that these things make sense.
I don't mean that sarcastically; it's a legitimate blind spot. Ghost stories and other types of supernatural horror are based upon something irrational and unquantifiable happening in an otherwise rational world, but my brain is wired to expect a mechanism that can be understood and worked with. Failing that, I want everything to at least fit in thematically. Km. 31 seems to be doing pretty good in that regard almost literally right up to the final scene, and when the film doesn't give me the conclusion it had seemed to be leading me toward, I feel cheated. Those who find that sort of randomness a virtue will have no problem with it.
But let's back up a bit. The film starts with Agata (Iliana Fox) driving down the highway. At the Km. 31 marker, a small boy jumps out in front of the car, and Agata hits him. She gets out of the car, calls her boyfriend Omar (Raul Mendez), and while looking for the boy (who has mysteriously vanished), she herself is run over. A few miles away, this triggers a sort of reaction in her identical twin Catalina (Fox again), who leads her Spanish friend Nuno (Adira Collado) to where Agata lays, barely alive. The doctors have to amputate Agata's legs and she comes out of surgery in a coma; when Catalina and Omar ask about the boy she mentioned, they're told there was no boy. The search for answers leads Omar to Martin Ugalde (Carlos Aragon), a detective obsessed with the dozens of hit-and-run accidents that have happened at that highway marker, and Catalina and Nuno to an old woman (Luisa Huertas) who sheds some light on the supernatural forces at work.
Full review at EFC.
Big Bang Love: Juvenile A (46-okunen no koi)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
Takashi Miike showed down a bit a couple years ago to take a stab at doing a big-budget family movie, but since then he's gotten back to what passes for normal where he's concerned: Churning out movies at a rate nearly unheard of for other filmmakers, working cheap and occasionally tossing something downright peculiar in among the yakuza dramas and horror films. Big Bang Love is one of the strange ones, an interesting mixture of unusual styles and subject matter that works more often than not, if only just.
After an opening that is deliberately abstract and related to the main story thematically more than literally, we get into the meat of the story: Prisoner Shiro Kazuki (Masanobu Ando) has just been killed, apparently strangled by cell-mate Jun Ariyoshi (Ryuhei Matsuda), who is saying things like "I did it". Still, an official investigation must be made, but it leaves the investigating officers perplexed: Shiro is a timid young man, despite the brutal crime that placed him behind bars, while Shiro was a belligerent repeat offender who had made an enemy of everyone else in the building; even the warden has a motive.
The murder mystery is mainly a framework off which to hang an examination of how these characters never really had any kind of shot, as opposed to a puzzle to be solved. Indeed, there's so little to it that the film occasionally seems to repeat himself, having his detectives run in circles, covering the same material multiple times (once or twice, I suspect, re-cutting the same footage to do it). Instead, Miike gives us vignettes about how the environment Shiro grew up in seemingly offered him the choice of becoming a thug or becoming a victim. Jun, on the other hand, becomes a bit more of a cipher by design, as the film abjectly refuses to stick him in any of the typical gay pigeonholes; indeed, occasionally the audience will find themselves wondering just what his sexual orientation is, or whether that's too binary a concept for someone like Jun.
Full review at EFC.
The Tripper
* * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
I'm not saying that The Tripper should have been a slam dunk by any means, but it does kind of have something for everyone - an axe-wielding Ronald Reagan going to town on a bunch of hippies? There's pleasure to be had there, unless you like both Reagan AND hippies, in which case I suspect you're in a tiny minority. That it's as political as it is goofy is part of the fun, but co-writer/director/co-star David Arquette doesn't quite seem able to harness the potential of his good idea.
After some scathing quotes from Reagan and a "thirty years ago" prologue that we know will be important later, we meet a group of already half-baked, half-drunk slackers heading for a big outdoor concert in their van. Well, one's pretty sober - Samantha (Jaime King) isn't terribly interested in the chemicals, although she doesn't regret leaving her conservative boyfriend Jimmy (Balthazar Getty) behind. They get harassed by some redneck lumberjacks along the way, but eventually make it to see local Sherriff Buzz Hall (Thomas Jane) trying to shut it down as unsafe, despite the graft promoter Frank Baker (Paul Reubens) has paid Mayor Burton (Rick Overton). Now, sure, Buzz is only thinking about the weather, the privacy-loving local pot growers, and the tiny size of his police department, but he certainly seems to have the right idea when some guy in a Ronald Reagan mask starts going after the visiting (faux) hippies with an axe.
Give Arquette some credit where it's due - the man has a clear love for the slasher genre and doesn't hold back from giving the gorehounds what they want. Ronnie takes out a couple dozen people in this movie, and it's seldom off-screen. Axes get buried in heads, people get mauled by dogs, and gallons of sticky red blood spatter all over everything. There's bad jokes, attack dogs, and Ronnie breaking out some of his most famous sound bites before a kill. On a certain basic level, it delivers the goods.
...
It's kind of a shame, actually; the movie is so self-consciously aiming for satire that its failure in that regard negates some of its virtues as a splatter movie.
Full review at EFC.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Fantasia Day Six: Jade Warrior, Minushi, Exte: Hair Extensions, et Right at Your Door
Updated yesterday's post with a revew of Roommates (D-Day).
Yesterday wound up pretty nice outside, so I went up Mount Royal to try and burn off a heavy breakfast from Eggspectation. Nice, as always, then I came back down for four pretty good movies.
I also met Kurt Halfyard from Twitch and we compared notes. It was cool to talk to someone who writes for a site I read every day. I made the Boston film scene probably sound a bit cooler than it is (though it ain't bad), and I hope I didn't make too bad an impression on him by my obvious disdain for some of the Q&A sessions for Hair Extensions and Right at Your Door. I think Sion Sono and Chris Gorak each got asked the same questions several times, but I was also amused by how the need for a translator in Sono's case highlighted just how dumb some of the questions were - she would seem to struggle to find a way to interpret the question so that it didn't seem like a complete waste of time. Major props to Sono for answering "I don't care" to questions about American remakes of Japanese horror and the state of J-horror in general (the first after an extended exchange between Sono, the translator, and host Mitch Davis). I got the impression that he was a guy who just had an idea for a wacky horror movie, and the rest of the industry didn't matter to him.
To close the day, I probably slightly disappointed my father who asks if I'm taking advantage of Montreal's fine dining when I see him online in the mornings by grabbing a 12.30am supper from Burger King. One of the side-effects of having three screens this year is that there seem to be far fewer times without something I want to see playing and fewer gaps between films long enough for me to actually sit down in a restaurant. I'm actually looking forward to just being able to sit down and eat when I get home.
Today's plans: I recommend Right at Your Door to those who are up there; I'll probably be seeing Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society, Km. 31, Big Bang Love: Juvenile A and The Tripper
Jade Warrior (Jadesoturi)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2007 in the J.A. de Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
Some of the hype around Jade Warrior is that it's the first martial arts film from Finland, which kind of misrepresents it - there's a few nice martial arts sequences, but what really makes it tick is everything around the martial arts. We get a story of the destructive things people do to themselves to try to make their love work, and a reminder that Finland's great, epic story, the Kalevala, seldom if ever left its lovers happy. The idea of connecting bits of the Kalevala to Chinese legends is also a pretty nifty idea. I have no idea how it works anthropologically, but if there's anything to it, that's fascinating.
To give the martial arts its due - the big fight scene involves sledgehammers. Don't see that very often.
Full review at EFC.
Minushi
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2007 in the D.B. Clarke Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
As I said to Kurt while waiting in line for the next movie, Minushi is a nice start. I think Tyler Gibb has a way to go on writing dialogue, and the decision to release it online in bits as segments were finished gives the story a very episodic feel, but it also lets us see him developing as a filmmaker over the four years it took to finish the film.
Not bad for a guy working in Flash on his home PC. I think Gibb's still got a way to go before he's in the same category as Makoto Shinkai as far as being a one-man band, but he's on his way (and this film could also help him hook up with some good collaborators).
Full review at EFC.
Exte: Hair Extensions (Ekusute)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
I remember Ned Hinkle calling the likes of The Ring and The Grudge "hair horror" a few years ago. I'm not sure how mainstream the term ever got, but I do dig what Sion Sono has done with the subgenre here. It's the kind of parody that will likely make it hard to do play it straight for a while, because Sono hits the clichés in a way that is both merciless and also, perversely, more effective than a lot of straight horror movies done by less talented people.
I hope it gets a theatrical relase in the U.S. before DVD. It's the rare movie that works very well as both a horror movie and a comedy, both for people who like horror films and those who don't.
Full review at EFC.
Right at Your Door
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
No-one uses the word "terrorism" in Right at Your Door, but that's not because it's irrelevant to the movie. It's all about terror, and the fear that comes from not knowing what just happened, what's going to happen, and what to do next. What it isn't about is terrorists - there's plenty of action movies for that.
Brad (Rory Cochrane) and Lexi (Mary McCormack) have just moved into a new place in L.A., and this morning she's off to her job while he waits for the cable guy and makes some calls to try to help his music career. A fairly ordinary day, until a series of explosions rocks the city. Brad tries to get through to Lexi, but all the circuits are jammed, and police are setting up roadblocks. It gets worse: These were not just explosives, but some sort of chemical/biological/"dirty" bombs, and the authorities are advising citizens to seal themselves in their homes. Brad wants to wait for Lexi, but his neighbor's handyman Alvaro (Tony Perez) shows up needing shelter...
Early parts of the movie move in something close to real time, with what at least feels like unbroken shots of Brad and Alvaro trying to do whatever they can to deal with the situation actively. Whether it be Brad's early attempts to get into the city or the near-panicked attempts to get the house sealed off, there's not a lot of talking, and filmmaker Chris Gorak avoids anything that pulls us away from the immediacy of the situation. Some time must pass between Alvaro's arrival and when they start sealing the house, and by a similar token we don't see them sealing every single window, but it never feels like a montage or as if they've had time to stop and think.
Full review at EFC.
Yesterday wound up pretty nice outside, so I went up Mount Royal to try and burn off a heavy breakfast from Eggspectation. Nice, as always, then I came back down for four pretty good movies.
I also met Kurt Halfyard from Twitch and we compared notes. It was cool to talk to someone who writes for a site I read every day. I made the Boston film scene probably sound a bit cooler than it is (though it ain't bad), and I hope I didn't make too bad an impression on him by my obvious disdain for some of the Q&A sessions for Hair Extensions and Right at Your Door. I think Sion Sono and Chris Gorak each got asked the same questions several times, but I was also amused by how the need for a translator in Sono's case highlighted just how dumb some of the questions were - she would seem to struggle to find a way to interpret the question so that it didn't seem like a complete waste of time. Major props to Sono for answering "I don't care" to questions about American remakes of Japanese horror and the state of J-horror in general (the first after an extended exchange between Sono, the translator, and host Mitch Davis). I got the impression that he was a guy who just had an idea for a wacky horror movie, and the rest of the industry didn't matter to him.
To close the day, I probably slightly disappointed my father who asks if I'm taking advantage of Montreal's fine dining when I see him online in the mornings by grabbing a 12.30am supper from Burger King. One of the side-effects of having three screens this year is that there seem to be far fewer times without something I want to see playing and fewer gaps between films long enough for me to actually sit down in a restaurant. I'm actually looking forward to just being able to sit down and eat when I get home.
Today's plans: I recommend Right at Your Door to those who are up there; I'll probably be seeing Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society, Km. 31, Big Bang Love: Juvenile A and The Tripper
Jade Warrior (Jadesoturi)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2007 in the J.A. de Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
Some of the hype around Jade Warrior is that it's the first martial arts film from Finland, which kind of misrepresents it - there's a few nice martial arts sequences, but what really makes it tick is everything around the martial arts. We get a story of the destructive things people do to themselves to try to make their love work, and a reminder that Finland's great, epic story, the Kalevala, seldom if ever left its lovers happy. The idea of connecting bits of the Kalevala to Chinese legends is also a pretty nifty idea. I have no idea how it works anthropologically, but if there's anything to it, that's fascinating.
To give the martial arts its due - the big fight scene involves sledgehammers. Don't see that very often.
Full review at EFC.
Minushi
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2007 in the D.B. Clarke Théatre (Fantasia 2007)
As I said to Kurt while waiting in line for the next movie, Minushi is a nice start. I think Tyler Gibb has a way to go on writing dialogue, and the decision to release it online in bits as segments were finished gives the story a very episodic feel, but it also lets us see him developing as a filmmaker over the four years it took to finish the film.
Not bad for a guy working in Flash on his home PC. I think Gibb's still got a way to go before he's in the same category as Makoto Shinkai as far as being a one-man band, but he's on his way (and this film could also help him hook up with some good collaborators).
Full review at EFC.
Exte: Hair Extensions (Ekusute)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
I remember Ned Hinkle calling the likes of The Ring and The Grudge "hair horror" a few years ago. I'm not sure how mainstream the term ever got, but I do dig what Sion Sono has done with the subgenre here. It's the kind of parody that will likely make it hard to do play it straight for a while, because Sono hits the clichés in a way that is both merciless and also, perversely, more effective than a lot of straight horror movies done by less talented people.
I hope it gets a theatrical relase in the U.S. before DVD. It's the rare movie that works very well as both a horror movie and a comedy, both for people who like horror films and those who don't.
Full review at EFC.
Right at Your Door
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Condordia (Fantasia 2007)
No-one uses the word "terrorism" in Right at Your Door, but that's not because it's irrelevant to the movie. It's all about terror, and the fear that comes from not knowing what just happened, what's going to happen, and what to do next. What it isn't about is terrorists - there's plenty of action movies for that.
Brad (Rory Cochrane) and Lexi (Mary McCormack) have just moved into a new place in L.A., and this morning she's off to her job while he waits for the cable guy and makes some calls to try to help his music career. A fairly ordinary day, until a series of explosions rocks the city. Brad tries to get through to Lexi, but all the circuits are jammed, and police are setting up roadblocks. It gets worse: These were not just explosives, but some sort of chemical/biological/"dirty" bombs, and the authorities are advising citizens to seal themselves in their homes. Brad wants to wait for Lexi, but his neighbor's handyman Alvaro (Tony Perez) shows up needing shelter...
Early parts of the movie move in something close to real time, with what at least feels like unbroken shots of Brad and Alvaro trying to do whatever they can to deal with the situation actively. Whether it be Brad's early attempts to get into the city or the near-panicked attempts to get the house sealed off, there's not a lot of talking, and filmmaker Chris Gorak avoids anything that pulls us away from the immediacy of the situation. Some time must pass between Alvaro's arrival and when they start sealing the house, and by a similar token we don't see them sealing every single window, but it never feels like a montage or as if they've had time to stop and think.
Full review at EFC.
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