Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 12 August 2011 - 18 August 2011

Been a while since I've done one of these, so if I'm not clear on what's a new release in Boston and what isn't, bear with me.

• The big opening this week appears to be Final Destination 5, which was a last-minute addition that I didn't see at Fantasia because I figured I'd have to get to the Scotia Bank Cinemas quickly after my last screening of the day, and a midnight film when you have to work the next day can be rough. Oh, and I haven't seen any of the first four. I'm hearing mixed things, although apparently even some of the usual 3D-haters are saying that this looks pretty good in that format.
  
  Also opening in 3D (for a two-week limited engagement) is a Glee 3D Concert Movie, and that's certainly a thing that exists. Civil rights drama The Help opened Wednesday, and looks pretty good for a "civil rights seen through the eyes of privileged white people" movie. And then there's 30 Minutes or Less, a comedy with Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, and Danny McBride where a group of friends must rob a bank or be blown up by a bomb strapped to one's chest.



• Landing between mainstream and boutique (both in terms of distribution and on this list) is The Guard, a buddy movie that teams Brendan Gleeson as a small-town Irish Constable and Don Cheadle as an uptight American FBI agent. The premise is somewhat generic, but since both Gleeson and Cheadle are really good, I'm guessing that they elevate it. This plays at both AMC Boston Common and the Landmarks in Kendall Square (Cambridge) and Embassy Square (Waltham). Both are still playing The Devil's Double, which I saw at Fantasia (it's decent), which is more than can be said about Cold Fish (apparently its lack of an MPAA rating is keeping it out of AMC and no other place in Boston is picking it up).



• Kendall Square gets one new film, one second run, and one re-issue this week. The new one is Point Blank, a French action-adventure about a man forced to break a gangster out of the hospital or his pregnant wife gets it. Looking forward to this, as the French do not mess around with their genre films. The second run is for The Tree of Life - at least, I don't think it was playing last week (I'm pretty sure it was done before I left for Montreal). And the one-week calendar booking is for a new 35mm print of David Bowie in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth.



• The two new films at the Coolidge this week opened at Kendall Square last week, but Sarah's Key is playing the main screen in Brookline, and wouldn't you rather see it there? It features Kristen Scott Thomas as an American journalist who learns that her French husband's family home was seized from a family of Jews during WWII and strives to discover what has happened to them. Meanwhile, The Future is playing in the screening room, and features a self-centered couple doing ridiculous, selfish things when confronted by the awesome life change that is owning a cat.
  
  Going back to the big screen, Friday and Saturday feature Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness at 11:59pm. Should be a blast, although be warned: The audience is almost guaranteed to be quoting it non-stop. Monday night (the 15th), there's a "Summer Fun Flicks" screening of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - the 1970s version with Gene Wilder in 35mm.



• The Brattle is being used for the National Poetry Slam Semi-Finals tonight (with a digital screening of poetry-slam movie Louder than a Bomb at 11pm), but has a bunch of exciting programs for the rest of the week. Saturday (13 August) - Monday (15 August), there's the original 1957 3:10 to Yuma, which is just as good as the more recent version and should look fantastically crisp in a new black-and-white 35mm print. It doesn't get a whole day to itself, though; on Saturday and Sunday, the 9:30pm show is Skatetown USA, a roller disco movie featuring Scott Baio, Flip Wilson, Maureen McCormick, and Patrick Swayze which hit theaters just as roller disco died, and is thus apparently ripe for unearthing.
  
  Monday, meanwhile, features matinees of the Bernard Hermann-scored double feature also playing on Tuesday (the 16th) - The 7th Voyage of Sinbad & Jason and the Argonauts. That's Bernard Hermann and Ray Harryhausen, folks. The other composer centennial series runs on Thursdays, and the 18th features another matched pair - Nino Rota scoring two Franco Zeffirelli Shakespeare films, Romeo and Juliet & The Taming of the Shrew. In between, on Wednesday the 17th, there's a double feature of "Recent Raves" - The Runner, in which a marathoner escapes from bank robberies on foot, and Viva Riva!, in which a small-time Congolese crook makes it big and has to face down other players in the African underworld.



• A few doors down, the Harvard Film Archive has programs that feature three very different directors. On Friday and Saturday evenings, two of George Kuchar's "Weather Diaries" films will screen (#1 on Friday, #3 on Saturday, both with other shorts). Most of the rest of the weekend is the tail end of a Monte Hellman retrospective ("All Roads Lead to Nowhere"), featuring Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! on Friday at 10pm, Iguana and Cockfighter on Sunday (5pm & 7pm, respectively), and Fight to Fury on Monday at 7pm, the latter playing with "Stanely's Girlfriend", his segment of the otherwise-unimpressive Trapped Ashes anthology. And on Saturday night, there's a rescheduled screening of Somewhere in the Night, part of a "Complete Joseph L. Makiewicz" series.



• The Museum of Fine Arts is spending most of August on a series of New and Restored Prints, all struck from the original negatives. This weekend (the 12th-14th), the films in question are The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963) and Age of Consent (Michael Powell, 1969); next weekend's selection (starting Wednesday the 17th) is Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942), along with new Peruvian film Octubre.



• And, finally, the Indian movie playing at Fresh Pond this week is Aarakshan, a drama and romance that apparently is courting some controversy on the subcontinent because the subject that serves as its backdrop (an educational quota system for different castes and ethnicities) is in the news there thanks to a recent court decision.

My plans? Man, I don't know - I'm just a bit burnt out after Fantasia (71 films in 22 days is a lot, and I've only reviewed half of them!). I suspect I'll take in Point Blank, The Guard and maybe The Man Who Fell to Earth, maybe making my way out to the museum to see Age of Consent so that Helen Mirren when she was young and sexy can blow my mind. Plus, there is a bit of catch-up of what I missed while north of the border.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.16 (29 July): Absentia, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Rabies, and Horny House of Horror

It's possible that I could have fit another movie into my third Friday in Montreal - there's a gap of a couple hours between Beyond the Black Rainbow and Rabies - but the scheduling wound up being very tight. Little Deaths was scheduled for 7:30pm and was listed as running an hour and a half, which in theory gives me twenty minutes to get across the street for the 9:20pm show in Hall, but as anybody who's attended a film festival knows, those times are the earliest something will play. Since 7:30 came and I wasn't yet in my seat, I walked away from the line, got some pizza, and probably wrote for a bit.

The night ended with a dud - as you might expect, Horny House of Horror is Not Very Good. It was exacerbated by a couple people a row or two behind me who just wouldn't shut up. Now, again, it's not very good, so it's hard to use "show some respect" as a retort - and lord knows that this is the sort of turkey that might be made tolerable by some audience participation - but these folks were not that clever. When one said she was glad she smoked a joint before coming to see this movie, that pretty much explained it.

And now, before getting to reviews, the requisite terrible photography:


Absentia folks: Co-stars Justin Gordon (?) and Morgan Peter Brown (?), writer/director Mike Flanagan, and producer Jason Poh.

Another good bunch of people who spent some time talking about the mythology they constructed for their movie and the challenges of making something this independent. Like many movies this size, the film was written to the locations and cast, to the point where they decided to include co-star Courtney Bell's real-life pregnancy (not that this was a surprise that caused frantic re-writes; she and Flanagan are married). It absolutely works in the movie, but it also forced them into a very specific shooting schedule.


Mitch Davis leads Rabies directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado in an animated Q&A.

An very good Q&A, with some information worthwhile enough to make it into the review (I sometimes think that doing that is bad form, since the movie should be judged on its own merits). That the cast was apparently made up of people who are fairly popular in Israel was surprising to me; on the surface, this seems like the sort of thing that would be made with the filmmakers' friends who were willing to work for nothing - one director just out of film school, the other his teacher, a genre that has never been much supported in the country. You can add Israel to the list of countries whose young genre filmmakers grumble about the lack of public arts funding for movies that are not wrenching dramas, apparently (I've heard the almost exact same complaint, almost word-for-word, from South African and Costa Rican directors; only the examples of what was acceptable material changed).

(Potential spoilers in this paragraph) The talk about how the story was meant to represent Israel was interesting, too. The thrust seemed to be that left to themselves (or given the slightest push), the country will tear itself apart without any outside help. Thus, even though the typical slasher-movie villain gets knocked out of the movie early, things continue to go wrong. The crude real-world parallel, I guess, is that even if you take away the dangers in that country which regularly make the news, there's a lot of internal conflict there (which I can imagine - serious generational and class differences and immigration not driven by economics can make a mess out of a country).

Or everybody thinks their own country is a special mess. There's likely a bit of that going on, too.

Absentia

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

It's almost a shame that Absentia goes the direction it does, because there is a fantastic mystery or film noir to be built on the same characters and set-up. Of course, what writer/director Mike Flanagan comes up with is quite good as well - impressive enough given its very limited resources to qualify as a hidden gem.

When somebody goes missing without a trace, it generally takes seven years before they can be declared dead in absentia, and that landmark is coming up in the case of a California man. Though his wife Tricia (Courtney Bell) still regularly makes sure fresh posters are visible around the neighborhood, she is ready for some form of official closure - and her very visible pregnancy suggests that she's at least starting to move on. Arriving to provide support is youngr sister Callie (Katie Parker), who has spent a lot of time off the map herself over the last five years, but has now found God and gotten on the straight and narrow. What should be an emotional but cathartic process takes some strange turns - for instance, Tricia's vivid hallucinations of her husband (Morgan Peter Brown), and a weird encounter Callie has with a homeless man under a nearby bridge. When things become a little more tangible, the detective who has been working the case for the past two years (Dave Levine) comes in to investigate.

Mentioning that weird things may be going on is almost giving too much away, although even with only conventional elements in play, Flanagan is able to create a situation that offers plenty of opportunities for twists and turns. The film may not necessarily become even an unconventional whodunit, but very little of this set-up is wasted - every comment that could portend a plot twist also serves to increase tension as the characters are being put under more pressure toward the end of the film. It goes to show what a nice set of human, believably flawed characters Flanagan and the cast have created: There are very few moments where the characters do something unreasonable, given what we learn about them.

Full review at EFC.

Beyond the Black Rainbow

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

Depending on what sort of film fan you are, you may find yourself vaguely giddy - or confused - as this movie opens. After all, while it's not uncommon to see the grindhouse and horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s revisited with lots of admiration and affection, the distinctive science fiction of that era gets very little love. Beyond the Black Rainbow is a dead-on recreation of that sort of film, and while it's very cool to revisit that aesthetic, there's a reason you don't see many like this nowadays.

In a sterile underground base, there lives a silent girl named Elena (Eva Allan). She encounters very few other human beings - mainly Margo (Rondel Reynoldson), her caretaker, and Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), a scientist who occasionally summons her to a room for experiments meant to measure her emotional response. This has been going on for some time, but things are about to get even stranger, as the visionary behind this project, Mercurio Arboria (Scott Hylands), is dying, and Nyle is growing more detached from his wife Rosemary (Marilyn Norry) and humanity in general.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is very much an attempt to recreate a specific time; look at what dates, fashions, and equipment show up on-screen, and the movie is set firmly in the early to mid-1980s. That's about when movies like this finished dying out, as Star Wars became the model for big-budget sci-fi rather than the austere descendants of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and George Lucas's THX-1138. Writer/director Panos Cosmatos and production designer Bob Bottieri capture the look of this sort of movie perfectly, with walls that glow purple, large monochrome rooms, and a great deal of communication done through dehumanizing video screens. The soundtrack is dead-on as well, all synthesizers that seem less like music than an ominous mechanical pulse.

Full review at EFC.

Kalevet (Rabies)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

The title of Rabies, billed as Israel's first horror movie, may be a bit deceptive; the movie is not a take on the zombie-virus genre at all (in Hebrew, the word is apparently closer to the original Latin root's meaning of "rage"). In another perhaps-unexpected turn, filmmakers Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado have opted to skip over simply handling the basics of the genre and go straight for subversion. The movie still has plenty of blood, guts, and suspense, but it's in the service of black, satiric comedy more than formula.

It starts out looking conventional before the credits - Tali (Liat Harley) and Ofer (Henry David) have run away from home, and Tali has fallen into a trap of some sort in the woods, only able to hear screaming when her brother runs for help. Then the rest of the potential body count shows up: Rona (Erfat Boimold) and her boyfriend Menashe (Menashe Noy) are forest rangers, patrolling a national park with Menache's dog Buba. Mikey (Ran Danker) has gotten lost driving his obnoxious friend Pini (Ofer Shechter), Pini's crush Shir (Yael Grobglas), and Shir's friend Adi (Ania Bukstein) to a tennis match. Police officers Yuval (Danny Geva) and Danny (Lior Ashkenazi) are also in the area, and will naturally be called in, although Yuval's bad attitude and Danny's reluctance to stand up to it are not going to be a great help.

The tone of a horror-comedy like Rabies can be incredibly difficult to get right; it's extremely easy for the jokes to seem out of place or for the danger to be undercut. Keshales and Papushado avoid this pitfall by having the comedy get darker as it goes along. What starts as somewhat tired material gets edgier and more surprising as the film continues. Sometimes the comedy is the result of broad absurdity (of course running from one thing leads characters into a minefield); other times the movie takes on the form of a slapstick farce, except that blows to the head lead to horrible death rather than comic unconsciousness. And then, moments that could be funny in a way that engages the audience's mean streak become tragic.

Full review at EFC.

Fasshon Heru (Horny House of Horror)

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

Horny House of Horror is disappointing. Now, many reading this will think "well, duh, film-critic-guy, if you go in expecting every movie to be Citizen Kane, even ones titled 'Horny House of Horror', you'll always be disappointed!" But ponder for a moment - what if my expectations were properly calibrated for low-budget smut? What does "disappointing" mean then?

It means a steaming pile, is what it means. This one involves Nakatsu (Yuya Ishikawa) and his friends Uno (Toshi Yanagi) and Doshida (Wani Kansai) going to a cheap "fashion health" massage parlor after their last amateur-league baseball game together to give the engaged Nakatsu a proper send-off. However, it turns out that the girls at this place are more than just prostitutes - Kaori (Mint Suzuki), Nonoko (Asami), and new hire Nagisa (Saori Hara) are killers, too!

Now, bear with me for a moment, because I'm about to apply much more thought to this situation than writer/director/editor Jun Tsugita did, but... What is this place's business model? Killing the clientele on their first visit certainly doesn't get you repeat business, and the low, low prices mean that you probably aren't going to attract people with a lot of money to steal. Sure, the rent on the pit where they work is probably low, and without word-of-mouth, daily business must fluctuate wildly. Does that support three girls and a bouncer (Akira Murota)? Especially when it's revealed that this place is only one of many?

Full review at EFC.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.15 (28 July): Abolition, Art/Crime, and Foxy Festival

I should have been taking notes on where/when I ate on various days. I had an hour and a half between knocking off work and my first film of the day, and to be totally frank, on the days I work, which fancy gourmet burger place I ate at did a lot to distinguish the day.

Now, if I were ambitious, I'd go through my debit card charges online and try to figure this out. But I suspect the various burger places in and around Crescent Street are not exactly what people visit this blog for, so let's just hit up the terrible photography before getting to the reviews.


King-Wei Chu, the Abolition filmmakers, and someone who probably got a much better picture than me.

Not a whole lot to say about Abolition. Its position on the schedule - one screening, in de Seve, on a weekday afternoon - kind of marks it as filler, and it's better than that, but not by a huge amount. The filmmakers were nice enough, but there weren't a whole lot of questions; it's just another antichrist movie, to a certain extent.


Art/Crime director Frédérik Maheux and subject Remy Couture.

A couple more fine folks with a Q&A that wound up very chummy, which is fair - when you're premiering a doc about an injustice in your hometown, with an audience that was likely fairly familiar with the situation beforehand, that's how it goes.


Foxy Festival director Lee Hae-young and translator. As you might expect, the director of a film named "Foxy Festival" had a smile when she joined him on stage.

As those who have seen promotional stills from the movie (like the one on this page) will no doubt expect, one of the questions asked was if he took a ride on a certain prop. Honestly, I suspect a lot of cast and crew did.

Aboltion

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

Abolition is a serviceable enough take on a certain horror subgenre, and the decision to put a figure seldom given screen time commensurate to his importance under the microscope instead of looking at the big picture is interesting (and also practical on an indie-movie budget). This approach does carry the risk of the audience feeling like the movie ends just as things are starting to get good, even if that is arguably missing the movie's point.

After a bloody opening flashback, the film focuses on Joshua (Andrew Roth), a janitor putting a great deal more effort into a falling-apart detox facility than anybody else. He's given a bonus as it shuts down that a homeless friend squanders, and an ugly incident afterward reveals that he has incredible powers and that it's time to move on. He's soon taken in by Matthew (Reggie Bannister), a former priest who could use a hand doing maintenance on a building he manages. By coincidence, one of the tenants is Mia (Elissa Dowling), whom Joshua met when she visited her suicidal ex-boyfriend at the hospital, and whose husband doesn't much appreciate how friendly she is to either the ex-boyfriend or the new handyman. As Joshua has trouble resisting temptation, Matthew is frightened by the symbols his new friend absently draws and sees around him, knowing their meaning. Perhaps a trip to see his mother Eva (Caroline Williams) will clear things up.

Director Mike Klassen and his fellow filmmakers (including co-writers Chantelle Kadyschuk and Chris Lawson) do a lot of interesting things right in Abolition. It's got a couple of solid hook scenes toward the start: The opening is soaked in blood but still manages to come off more as eerie and foreboding than just going for familiar shocks, and the Joshua's first outburst pays an already-tense scene off remarkably well. The sequence at Eva's house is as tense and off-kilter as it should be, allowing for the cast to hint at much more than they are saying. A lot of supernatural thrillers would sell their souls to have three bits that good in them, and the movie at least seems set up to reward repeat viewing: I find myself curious to re-examine the early scenes to figure out whether Joshua is drawn to bad situations or whether they are drawn to him, as well as if he influences them in one direction or another just by being nearby.

Full review at EFC.

Art/Crime

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011 - Documentaries From the Edge)

At the end of Art/Crime, the audience is informed that there are still more days in court ahead for Remy Couture, and it's fair to ask if maybe the filmmakers should have waited six months before locking and premiering it. And while the movie could perhaps use a little more material, waiting for that last ruling might make the case less of an interesting illustration of a larger point.

Couture is a gifted make-up artist based in Montréal, and in 2005 he started a website "Mourgue 666" - later renamed "Inner Depravity" - to demonstrate his work. As you might expect from the name, the photo galleries (and two videos) there are not pleasant, generally centered around a masked man tormenting and killing captive women. Eventually, as he got more professional work, Inner Depravity went dormant, but in 2009, on a tip from Interpol, police set up a sting to arrest Couture and search his apartment and studio. Though he can extensively document that nobody was harmed, particularly the child mentioned in the complaint, his case still works its way through the court on obscenity charges.

Are Couture's works obscene? Well, they're decidedly not nice, that's for certain. Seen without context, it would be easy to assume that his photographs are the real thing, and the Inner Depravity works are certainly made to put the viewer in an uncomfortable place, though they're not far removed from the horror movies on which he also works. The laws on this were written long enough ago that "crime comics" are specifically prohibited, but even if they are not generally enforced (and the officers on-scene are more apt to admire Couture's work than recommend throwing the book at him), this is to be a special case.

Full review at EFC.

Peseutibal (Foxy Festival

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011 - Korean Film Spotlight)

Look behind enough closed doors in any community and it probably won't take long until you find something a bit odd, but probably harmless if you look at it without judgment. Well, maybe not totally without judgment - "weird" does qualify as judging something, and without that, Foxy Festival isn't very funny and life isn't very exciting.

Weird can be seen as threatening, though, which is why Seoul's police department has announced a crackdown on indecency in a middle-class neighborhood. Kwok Jang-bae (Shin Ha-kyun) is not terribly interested in enforcing it, at least not until he sees the fancy vibrator that his live-in girlfriend Ji-su (Uhm Ji-won) has purchased. Why, he thinks, having access to his rod should be enough (and she really should be more grateful)! On the other end of the supply chain is Joo Ja-hae (Baek Jin-hee), a schoolgirl who sells her sweaty panties to a sex shop on wheels but can't get Choi-kang Sangdu (Ryoo Seung-bum), a street vendor, to return her interest. Meanwhile, Ja-hae's mother Sun-shim (Shim Hye-jin), a prim traditional dressmaker, discovers that she and Gi-bong (Song Dong-il), the owner of the hardware store across the street, have complementary turn-ons, while her high-school principal Kim Kwang-rok (Oh Dal-su) finds things going in odd directions when he tries to get more intimate with his wife.

It might be a bit of fun here to give the reader a list of kinks to match with the characters as a game (whoever matches the most before seeing the movie wins!), but that runs the risk of spoiling the surprises that writer/director Lee Hae-young regularly springs on the audience. It actually wouldn't be too big a deal, as Lee isn't so much going for jaw-dropping shock as wry smiles as he reveals these predictions - but why take any of the fun out of it? Still, it is worth noting that there is something of a pattern at work, with the more superficially outré activities corresponding to happier relationships, and vice versa. Certainly, Jang-bae's conventional approach seems to be heading toward acrimony with Ji-su, while Sun-shim's and Gi-bong's scenes together are undeniably sweet.

Full review at EFC.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.14 (27 July): El Sol, Burke and Hare, and John Landis

Weird scheduling day for me: I skedaddled from the sublet-apartment-office a bit early to see El Sol and then had a long gap between it and Burke and Hare, with the 5pm show in de Seve being all-French, the 6:30pm in Hall being the 13 Assassins director's cut (which I'd already seen), and the 7:50pm show in de Seve an awfully good bet to bump up against Burke and Hare, what with the short and filmmaker present. So, plenty of time to eat, scribble review-text in the pocket notebook, etc.

I suppose I could have stayed in de Seve and seen one more movie, but I did want to see this one and Landis receiving his Lifetime Achievement Award trophy:





The trophy itself, by the way, is awesome, a winged cheval noir like the one featured on this year's program and signage, a cool combination between classic fantasy imagery and local Quebec folklore. Landis was tickled, commenting about how he has, over the years, received a number of awards, and described them about being how they seemed to be created on the premise of "let's give Landis the ugliest thing we can create" (reminding me of Kevin Kline's initial reaction to his IFFBoston lifetime achievement award, but this one was really awesome.

This led him picking up on Mitch mentioning the 30th Anniversary of An American Werewolf in London, and mentioning that while making that, he visited Ray Harryhausen, who was busily animating the Pegasus for Clash of the Titans. This was the first of a great many tangents that he would go on while accepting the award, introducing the movie, and doing Q&A afterward, which ran for a good hour (I'm told he also stuck around very late to chat with people and sign things in the lobby, too). He's very much an enthusiastic movie fan, but comes at it from a bit of a different angle than many of the fans who have gotten into the industry in recent years, having worked inside the industry from a very young age without ever being an outsider. So while today's fan talks about working in a video store and devouring films, he had an office on the Universal lot lot and a regular lunch date with Alfred Hitchcock, leading to some of my favorite anecdotes of many: One, that Hitch was furious about DePalma's Dressed to Kill being called "Hitchcockian", expressing this in witty profanity because the man was gloriously vulgar in person; and two, that he would screen all the current films of the day in his office and told Landis that he loved The Blues Brothers. That's just a fantastic image.

Anyway, Landis was a great guest, unguarded, eager to give credit to many people but not falsely humble. It was a good thing that Burke and Hare was a fun movie, too - it might have been very awkward if we hadn't liked it!

El Sol

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

If you had to sum El Sol up in one phrase, "screw it, might as well!" probably describes it both inside and out. The filmmakers aren't feeling any particular need to conform to standards of logic or good taste, and the characters are just as free from caring about civility and decorum. This gets it some points for originality, even if it's mostly a mess.

It's been a few years since the bombs fell, and suffice it to say that the mood of no person in Argentina has improved - they're still the same testy lot they were, to hear the narrator tell it, before the apocalypse. "Once" (voice of Jorge Sesán) is a scout of sorts, traveling with pretty junkie Checo (Sofía Gala) to find caches of supplies. This trip, they've stumbled upon the mother lode - the still functioning settlement of Poblar. Of course, that place has problems of its own, such as sending out sacrifices to the Bonitos, a group of cannibal environmentalists.

And then, of course, things get weirder and meaner. El Sol often seems to be South Park-inspired in its stream-of-consciousness animated filmmaking: Crude in both its animation style and sense of humor, very episodic, and having a bone to pick with everybody, regardless of politics, age, class, etc. It's not so much an angry film as a ticked-off one, the sort that growls about how everything sucks but doesn't have anything much more specific or insightful to add to that. Thankfully, "Once" and the other protagonists are fair game, with the film getting just as much mileage from them being selfish, short-sighted jerks as with taking down anybody they encounter.

Full review at EFC.

Burke and Hare

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011 - Lifetime Achievement Award for John Landis)

The true story of 19th Century serial killers Burke & Hare is not a natural fit for romantic comedy, so this take on the characters is certainly going to stand out for that. It works better than one might imagine, though, in large part because there are enough funny and talented people involved.

In 1828, Edinburgh was famous for its several competing medical schools, but the teaching of anatomy in those days required many, many cadavers, and Dr. Monro (Tim Curry) had used his pull with the city to get the supply from the hangman's noose for himself, frustrating rival Dr. Robert Knox (Tom Wilkinson). Meanwhile, across the city, the latest scheme of Mr. William Burke (Simon Pegg) and Mr. William Hare (Andy Serkis) has failed, and to make matters worse, an elderly tenant at the boarding house run bmy Hare's wife Lucky (Jessica Hynes) has died. At this point, the free market does its work, with Knox mentioning that he can always use more bodies. Unfortunately, their supply of dying tenants is short, the militia has stepped up patrols of the graveyard, and Burke is smitten with actress Ginny Hawkins (Isla Fisher), who needs money for her dream of mounting MacBeth with an all-female cast. Burke and Hare are going to need to increase the supply of fresh corpses to stay ahead of the game.

Of course, the movie spends relatively little time on the title characters actually murdering people - the screenplay by Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft aims to present this version of the duo as doing horrible things less due to their own psychopathy than the tacit encouragement of Knox and the pressure to support the women in their lives. It is, at times, a bit of a cop-out; even when we see a montage of the pair's crimes, it's often easy to get the impression of a series of deaths by misadventure that Burke & Hare assisted rather than something that got their hands dirty.

Full review at EFC.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.13 (26 July): The Whisperer in Darkness and DJ XL5's Rockin' Zappin' Party

First day of the work week (which this Tuesday effectively was for me) is always the toughest, so it worked out well that I was able to work later than expected and have time for dinner before my first show of the evening because I'd already seen 100 Years of Evil, True Legend, Rare Exports, and Kill Me Please. Always appreciated when it works out that way.

On the other side of the night, I'd also already seen A Horrible Way to Die, which freed me up for the Zappin' Party, one of the unique signature events of the festival. It's a string of short films, music videos, found footage, and clips done up in the style of someone channel surfing. You've got to be able to understand both French and English to fully appreciate the whole thing, and on some occasions it helps to recognize the festival's regulars. It's proudly Québéçois in that way.

Indeed, one of the things about Fantasia that I don't talk about because of my linguistic shortcomings is how dedicated to local film it is. The regular "Quebec DIY" short film programs have expanded to become "Fantastique Week-end du court-métrage québéçois" in the past few years, with this year's group of free local films taking over the main Hall theater during the coming weekend (5 - 7 August). As I'll be returning home and speak very little French, I won't see any of those shows, but the Zappin' Party was a petty nice preview of sorts:



That's DJ XL5 on the left, and a bunch of local filmmakers sharing the stage. This sort of thing being a regular part of Fantasia is a great example of how awesome the festival is and how people don't just love watching movies here, but love making them. I wish there was room and demand for a similar sidebar in some of the Boston-area festivals, quite honestly.

The Whisperer in Darkness

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

There was no small amount of tooth-gnashing earlier this year when Universal backed out of a big-name, big-money production of H.P. Lovecraft's In the Mountains of Madness, and I certainly hope that all those saying that the studio was leaving money on the table are seeking out The Whisper in Darkness. It doesn't have nearly as much money behind it but it has a lot of love for the material and makes that work for it.

Rumors abound in regards to strange things up in the green mountains of Vermont, but Professor Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer) of Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts gives them very little credence as modern, genuine phenomena, though his friend, cult investigator Nathaniel Ward (Matt Lagan), says these beliefs are nonetheless dangerous. Wilmarth has been studying them as folklore, and to that end has been exchanging letters with Henry Akeley (Barry Lynch), a fellow folklorist who lives much closer to the scene in Vermont. Akeley asks his son George (Joe Sofranko) to deliver a strange black idol found in a nearby cave to Wilmarth on his way to California, but George never shows, and when the elder Akeley invites Wilmarth to pay him a visit, things in this small Vermont town seem very strange...

Despite his long-lasting and highly devoted fanbase - and, in some ways, because of how demanding such groups can be - H.P. Lovecraft's works have often been considered unadaptable. This project comes from the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, and like that group's previous go at the task of making a movie from the author's works (2005's The Call of Cthulhu), the first half of this movie is burdened with a great deal of narration that presumably works better on the page than the screen. More so than Call, Whisperer has a number of characters running around with minimal involvement in the plot;, presumably they are significant to the Lovecraft mythos in some other way. Also pulled in - to engage Wilmarth in a debate on science and the unknown - is real-world figure Charles Fort.

Full review at EFC.

DJ XL5's Rockin' Zappin' Party

Seen 26 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

I didn't take a lot of notes for this one, but from what I did get down:

* This is a real movie that exists, although the trailer we saw had it titled "Door-to-Door Maniac" and described it as co-starring The Andy Griffith Show's Ronnie Howard, because this is exactly the sort of movie you sell by associating it with that sort of sitcom.

* A lot of nifty animation coming out of Vieux-Montreal, my two favorites being "Au Cube" and "Maximum Galaxie".

* A couple fun ones from Adam Green, a mainstay of the program.

* The entry from PES, "The Deep", seemed like a bit of a departure from him, with a darker-than-usual pallette, using metallic objects rather than the candy and other brightly-colored things I expect. Done really well; I dug it.

* I've been procrastinating on a short film screenplay for the better part of a year, and now want to start a goofy under-ten-minute one with the eventual goal of getting it in this program.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.12 (25 July): ExpoRail, Don't Go Breaking My Heart, and The Innkeepers

This was my last day of genuine vacation before starting to dial in from work on Tuesday, and I opted not to waste it. There's been a thing I've been wanting to do every year I've come here, at least for the past few, but I've always had a devil of a time making it work. This year, though, I finally made it:


Exporail!

Exporail is a great big railway museum, the sort of thing that requires far too much space to actually keep in the city, but which I have (somewhat ironically, perhaps) found difficult to access by public transportation. To be perfectly fair, my own language skills have been a big part of what made it tough for me to get there; the various transit websites for the area are not particularly English-friendly and my French is, as I may have mentioned, not great.

Monday was not a particular exception; though I finally figured out that I could take an AMT train from Lucien L'allair station to St. Constant, I'm not sure what the point of "verifying" the tickets was, especially since nobody ever checked them on the train like they do on the commuter rail. I also completely spazzed on which door to use to get out of the train at St. Constant, wound up getting at the next stop, and almost wound up in the wrong place because some signage there seemed to indicate that trains going the opposite direction were on the other platform (which seemed to be closed off). Fortunately, I only lost fifteen or twenty minutes to that - there was soon another train coming in the opposite direction, but those were twenty precious minutes, as the line in question has a weird asymmetric schedule - trains out of Montreal all day (though hours apart), but trains back into the city stopped running at 1:15 or so, leaving me with about three hours total.

So, I would have liked to have more time, but I got there, and it was pretty darn awesome. Here's the first picture I took inside the museum's main building.



That's only half of what they've got in the main display area; there's a whole rail yard to walk around, passenger trains to ride on some days, and another building out back with even more engines, cars, and cabooses. I'm kicking myself that I didn't go earlier in the weekend; as part of celebrating the 175th anniversary of Canada's first railway, there was reduced admission and things brought out that usually don't get seen.

Anyway, I've got a bigger album on Facebook, although you really have to be there to get the full effect.

One funny sign I saw (and yes, I know what it really means):



... don't worry, I took all these pictures on an Android device.

And now, the reviews of the day. No guests, but a couple pretty good movies:

Daan Gyun Naam Yu (Don't Go Breaking My Heart)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

Though it is quite possibly in your head just form reading this film's title, a certain 1978 Elton John/Kiki Dee duet makes no appearance on this movie's soundtrack, in any language. It has one part too few, after all - Don't Go Breaking My Heart, the movie, has three fine leads, making for a love triangle that manages to be balanced and very, very funny.

Chang Zixin (Gao Yuanyuan) is a catch - she's pretty, smart, cheerful, kind, and funny. Her ex-boyfriend with the bitchy, pregnant new wife seems painfully aware of this. Cheung Shen-ran (Louis Koo Tin-lok), the hunky investment banker with the office across the street, sees it, silently flirting via messages in the window before asking her out. Fang QiHong (Daniel Wu Yan-zu), a disheveled architect whose drinking has made him fall from the top of his profession, also sees it; he meets her by chance, helps her convert her ex's junk into an upbeat new look (though he keeps the frog), and even lays off the sauce so that he can show her something impressive. However, a pair of missed connections means she winds up dating neither. At least, not in 2008. Three years later, Zixin's company hires Shen-ran as the new head of the Hong Kong office, while a cleaned up QiFong moves into the office across the way that had been vacant since the US financial crash.

Many romantic comedies run on coincidence; Don't Go Breaking My Heart is able to embrace it. This can be a massive cheat, but it works here in large part because the filmmakers see happenstance not as shortcuts or justification (the "it's destiny" play), but opportunities. Zixin encounters the same people repeatedly, yes, but what's important is what she does with those chances. The script has other tricks up its sleeves, of course, and put together they make for a winning combination of surprises and wit.

Full review at EFC.

The Innkeepers

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

Ti West knows how to make his audience jump, which isn't necessarily as easy as it sounds. Harder, though, is leading up to those jumps with light comedy and deep shivers, and West pulls that off, too. The trick is to get all three working well together, and West manages that better than most, though with some bumps along the way.

It's the last weekend before the Yankee Pedlar Inn closes its doors forever, and the owner isn't even on hand for it. The last two employees, college dropout Luke (Pat Healy) and perky teenager Claire (Sara Paxton), have already closed up the top floor and have just two rooms booked on the open second, with two others set aside for their own use. And while the mother on the outs with her husband (Alison Bartlett) is annoying, Claire is a fan of the other guest, former TV star Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis). Still, Claire and Luke mostly plan to spend this last weekend worrying less about customer service than trying to dig up signs of the ghost said to haunt the place.

In some ways, West should perhaps take it as a compliment that I would have been perfectly willing to trade potential haunting for some more annoying guests and maybe interactions with other locals stuck in the service industry. That material is genuinely funny and offbeat, with Claire and Luke having mildly snarky personalities that handle that scene well, meshing nicely but also having their own voices. There's a ton of good comedy in here, but with a sneaky undercurrent of them being friends who might not see each other again after the inn and maybe wanting more. That, there, is an enjoyable film itself.

Full review at EFC.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.11 (24 July): Urban Explorer and Wake in Fright

Believe it or not, this two-movie day was a Sunday! I'd seen much of what was playing during the afternoon - Battle Royale, Endhiran, and Detective Dee - and the other presentation was "La Mythologie Hammer + Frankenstein Created Woman", and though I would have totally dug seeing the movie on the big screen, it would come after an hour of panel discussion, which looked to be in French, and since my skill with the language is pretty much at the "catch a few words, read something meant to be understood by children" level, it would have been an awkward start.

Well, there was also Pop Skull, and I missed that the old-fashioned way - paying attention to the MLB Gameday window and not getting there in time. I'm not hugely disappointed by this - I was in the "like, not love" camp for Adam Wingard's entry at BUFF this year (A Horrible Way to Die), missed this one at BUFF four years ago, and just generally found that the Wingard retrospective was stuff I could afford to miss. And it game me time for dinner at m:brgr, one of a half-dozen great burger places you can find around Concordia.

Then, it was time for movies with directors in attendance:


Urban Explorers producer Oliver Thau, co-star Catherine de Léan, and director Andy Fetscher. Nice folks all; it's a shame that their movie had really severe problems, because I admire their ambition and willingness to do crazy things to make a horror movie. Unfortunately, that doesn't always translate to great results. I dissect why a big scene in this movie flops in my review, and it's worth noting that I wasn't the only one laughing during that scene, which was supposed to be thrilling.


Wake in Fright director Ted Kotcheff, who is just a wonderful gentleman. As you can see, he had a lengthy written introduction for the film, and even more to say without so many notes afterward. It was one of the more interesting discussions I've heard at Fantasia (or any festival), because they frequently tend to draw younger filmmakers rather than the men with the wealth of experience Kotcheff has. He's an intelligent man who doesn't have to connect with other fans via pure enthusiasm, which was a refreshing change of pace.

And now, reviews:

Urban Explorer

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

Sort my reviews alphabetically, and this one will wind up next to Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness, a 2006 documentary made on a similar shoestring which also shot plenty of footage in places the filmmakers really shouldn't have been. The subjects of that doc will probably resent this horror movie something fierce - it's one thing to be seen as daring to the point of recklessness, another just to be stupid.

Four tourists have converged on Berlin to do a bit of urban exploring (sneaking into abandoned structures and infrastructure even if it's off-limits). Because of the illegal nature of the activity, they connected online and meet under aliases. "Mickey" (Nick Eversman) is American and excited, while his Venezuelan girlfriend "Mallory" (Nathalie Kelley) is not nearly so enthused. Brash "Haiku" (Brenda Koo) hails from Korea (though her accent when speaking English is quite North American), while camera-toting "Olympia" (Catherine de Léan) is from France. Their local guide, "Dante" (Max Riemelt), has offered to show them the "fahrerbunker", a recently discovered World War II bunker for Nazi party drivers that was quickly resealed to prevent modern hate groups from making a shrine of it. They still encounter some neonazis along the way, but an accidental fall proves a more immediate danger, sending two of the party to find help while the others stay with the injured member. Help does arrive, but in the form of disheveled hermit Armin (Klaus Stiglmeier).

The viewer may wonder, when watching Urban Explorer, whether its characters are meant to actually be any good at urban exploration. Nobody ever says that it's their first time, but none but Dante seem to have any particular skills. Heck, of the girls, only Olympia dresses like someone expecting to be in an environment featuring rusted metal, standing water, and biting animals - although to make up for her sensible clothing, it's her tendency to wander off and flash her camera that leads to many of the group's troubles. Dante is leading this apparent group of novices to a place he's never been before, and he's got an unusually casual attitude toward causing damage along the way. If this is deliberate, it's a bad idea - instead of believing the characters are maybe just a bit over their heads and having the rug pulled out, they seem doomed from the start - and if we're supposed to believe they're capable, well, that's just a huge misfire.

"Huge misfire" seems most likely, though, as the movie soon descends into an ugly morass of clichés and bad execution, including what may be the stupidest sequence I've ever seen in a horror movie. It starts with the "someone awakening handcuffed to a bed" chestnut (albeit only by one hand, making escape possible), has this person watch a friend be tortured and nearly murdered three times before running off (making a lot of noise) to search for a weapon much less effective than the heavy-but-grippable piece of steel bed frame still on the other end of the cuff... And that's without serious spoilers; things get a lot more nonsensical with detail. Sure, there are a lot of thrillers that fall apart in hindsight, but this is laugh-inducingly dumb in the moment, the sort of thing that might perhaps work as satire if there were any sign that this movie had any self-awareness or sense of humor. Instead, it's one of several mind-bogglingly silly action/"suspense" sequences that should have even relatively undemanding audiences asking why even a panicking person would react to a situation like that.

This, obviously, leaves the cast pretty much high and dry. None of the five actors playing the explorers are done a particularly spectacular injustice, at least - they're likable, good-looking kids who sell the material as well as they can and should all land on their feet. The show is inevitably stolen by Stiglmeier's Armin, who is genuinely individual and eccentric in a way that the rest of the cast really can't be, owning every scene he's in. He's the one that the audience can go in any direction at any time because Stiglmeier wrings every last drop of weird out of what he's given.

The whole cast does go above and beyond the usual call of duty, shooting a great deal of the movie on location with minimal doubling. There's a genuine sense of authenticity to these scenes, and for all the many problems the filmmakers have with the story, they sure do shoot the heck out of it, making the surprises found in the dark tunnels and the resulting mayhem look good (in appropriately inky, disgusting ways).

But, ugh, is there a bunch of unforgivable idiocy going on in those dark tunnels! Horror fans will put up with a lot, but there's a much better "urban explorers find trouble" movie to be made than this.

Full review at EFC (dead link).

Wake in Fright (aka Outback)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

Wake in Fright is one of the most lauded films to come out of Australia, but went practically unseen for years (decades!) due to a poor commercial showing and the lack of quality prints. A ten-year search for the original negative and careful restoration has it back in circulation, looking good, and still frequently overpowering.

John Grant (Gary Bond) is an elementary school teacher in the Australian outback, and he hates it there. Christmas is coming, though, and with it summer break, which he intends to spend with his girlfriend in Sydney. Getting there means a stop in Bundanyabba, where he emerges from a night drinking with sheriff Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty) without the money for his plane ticket or even for another night in the hotel. A man at the bar, Tim Hynes (Al Thomas), invites him to spend the night at his place, but the attention Grant pays his wife Janette (Sylvia Kay) doesn't go over so well, although "Doc" Tydon (Donald Pleasence) winds up being agreeable company to the stranded Grant.

"I'm an alcoholic", Tydon informs Grant, "but out here it's scarcely noticeable." And brother, is that ever the case. There may be movies where characters drink more, but likely few in which it is such a constant, desperate activity. The men of Wake in Fright drink like characters in old movies smoke, constantly and with the implication that nobody would conceivably not be doing so, because what would you be doing with yourself otherwise; when Grant briefly opts to do something else, the rest are thoroughly confused. The first half of the movie gives the impression of starting a bender - starting out in control, but with fun/relief not coming; instead, the reasons for drinking seem to come into sharper relief, with the attempts to banish them with more drink only making things worse.

Then the second half becomes a fever dream. By this point, the almost complete lack of any female presence is making the men crazy, fights are being started just to let aggression out, and while director Ted Kotcheff and company don't change the look of the film so much, things get more and more frenzied, with the high (or low) point being a kangaroo hunt that just seems like madness. Kotcheff filmed the actual activity rather than using animatronics or any sort of special effects, so it's not just realistic, but real (though no roos were killed specifically for the film; this was going on anyway), and there's a frightening inhumanity to it. As this part of the movie goes on the audience feels how the combination of heat, isolation, and lack of a positive emotional outlet creates this all-consuming madness.

The cast does so, too. Gary Bond is extremely impressive, hitting every step in Grant's descent from smug superiority to mania squarely, giving us early hints that the possibility of this exists in him from the start, though "The Yabba" is going to bring it out. Rafferty and Thomas play two faces of the place's enforced jocularity, friendly but intolerant and insistent. It leaves Pleasence as the most stable of the bunch, and he knows that he's an utter mess.

It's also an expertly-constructed film visually. Kotcheff and cinematographer Brian West do a really marvelous job of capturing both the grand beauty of the outback when viewed as a panorama and the hot, punishing, fly-infested reality up close. Many little details are perfect, like how the train station clock in the opening shot has no hands. It's all directed to showing just what sort of madness this world can induce.

An amazing film; the idea that it might have been lost forever is genuinely horrifying, but that's thankfully not the case.

Full review at EFC (dead link).

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.10 (23 July): Victims,Monster Bash,Lulu,Kill Me Please,Blackthorn,Battle Royale

Falling behind with more movies to get to, so here's the photography of guests from Saturday:


Victims director David Bryant (l). Very friendly and happily willing to spill details about the making and writing of his movie. So many folks guard their secrets so tightly, it was a welcome change to not only hear someone say "we did this, this, and this" or how character moments not made explicit on-screen changed during the drafts.


Cast & crew of Monster Brawl. Yes, it's a Canadian film, and a ton of them were happy to make the trip to Montreal.


Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano director Hisayasu Sato. I don't know if I've ever seen a director more excited to be at a film festival. The man was absolutely overflowing with energy, wanting to get pictures with the audience behind him, etc. It's understandable; his previous work has been in various flavors of adult pictures, and this kind of respect and applause was doubtless new to him.

Victims

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011 - Playback in Black: The Next Wave)

Victims has as good a stab at making the zero-cut movie work as any, and while it does have a clever idea and some great moments, the shooting gimmick doesn't necessarily do it a lot of favors. The ability to compress time and get multiple angles are some of the most useful tools a filmmaker has, and director David Bryant doesn't get the greatest return on trading them for real-time, first-person immediacy.

"Record everything." That's the order a masked woman (Sarah Coyle) gives to the cameraman just as Chris McMann (John Bocelli) is being snatched off the street an hour before his wedding. She and a masked man (Andy Cresswell) handcuff him to the inside of a van and start off. Chris, they say, was not born with that name, but that of Neil Adams. Twenty years ago, at the age of eleven, this Neil Adams committed a horrible crime, kidnapping, molesting, and murdering a four-year-old girl. They mean to get a confession, and then...

In some ways, Victims has a remarkably tidy set-up; it initially short-circuits the need for there to be any strong evidence of what Chris's abductors claim by letting the audience know that hte film will be focusing on the moment as opposed to the steps needed to get there. Putting the backstory at arm's length also helps make the situation work in the abstract. The movie can't just be about what Chris McCann would or should do in this situation, because even without the accusations, we don't know who Chris McCann is. We have to put ourselves in the characters' shoes (all of them, including and perhaps especially the masked and anonymous ones).

Full review at EFC.

Monster Brawl

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

Monster Brawl is not a bad idea - the fanbases for professional wrestling and monster movies likely have a fair amount of overlap, and the filmmakers clearly have tremendous affection for both. I'm not sure if this particular way of combining the two is movie material, but the affection is contagious.

The particular way of combining them in question is presenting Monster Brawl in the format of a wrestling pay-per-view special, with matches between Cyclops (Jason David Brown) and Witch Bitch (Holly Letkeman), the Mummy (R.J. Skinner) and Lady Vampire (Kelly Couture), the Werewolf (Skinner) and Swamp Gut (Brown), and Zombie Man (Rico Montana) and Frankenstein (Robert Maillet), with the winners of the last two matches squaring off for the heavyweight championship. The action is called by Buzz Chambers (Dave Foley) and "Sasquatch" Sid Tucker (Art Hindle), with Jimmy "The Mouth of the South" Hart (himself) as the ring announcer and MMA official Herb Dean (also playing himself) trying to keep these duels to the death clean.

It's not at all hard to imagine Monster Brawl as a comedy sketch, and in some ways that's what the movie is, the same sketch repeated five times in a row. That's especially obvious when we get to the final match, where we've already seen the combatants' respective gags and the jokes related to the guys in the booth are also getting a bit drawn-out and stale. Before that, at least, writer/director/producer Jesse T. Cook has at least had a bevy of different monster-movie tropes to draw upon and play with by sticking them in the wrestling show format.

And there are, believe it or not, some pretty good bits in there. It's been so long since I watched WWE with any regularity that I still think of it as the WWF, but it's pretty clear that Cook and company know their stuff - the mic work feels exactly right, whether it's characters going off on stream-of-consciousness rants, spoofing that with inarticulate monsters, or some combination of the two. Nearly every regular turn that the audience expects to see on a wrestling card - going at it outside the ring, managers distracting the ref, guys getting hit with folding chairs, etc. - is represented and pumped up a bit for greater absurdity. All that's missing is a "wait - that's ____'s music!" and an ally sprinting to the right from the backstage area. Cook and company nail the tacit understanding that wrestling promotions have with their audiences - everybody knows that the stories are manufactured and the wrestlers are performers more than competitors, but they put just enough effort into the story to give the audience a sense of continuity and context.

Full review at EFC.

Namae no nai onna-tachi (Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

I've learned a lot more about the Japanese adult film industry via going to Fantasia than I have any desire to know. It's not intentional - one year a Nikkatsu youth drama retrospective mentions that they specialized in "roman-porno" after that; another features a film, Lalapipo, that spends a lot more time with the characters in that world than the upbeat trailer indicates; others feature ambitious but still softcore "pink eiga". Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano is another entry in the second category, and I recommend it on its own. It's just reaching a point where I find myself needing to take longer showers.

Lulu Sakurazawa doesn't exist; the name is just a pseudonym for Junko Ogura (Norie Yasui), a girl recruited off the streets to appear in an adult movie with the promise of "being someone else". It's appealing - she's 22 and cute, but very timid, likely stemming from the promiscuous, bitter mother (Makiko Watanabe) she still lives with. Lulu may be a a cosplay otaku dork, but she can do anything, even make friends with Ayano (Mayu Sakuma), her ex-biker co-star who scares the rest of the set with her anger management problems. There's a limit to how empowering this is, though: Lulu's first fan (Ini Kusano) definitely has stalker potential, Ayano's boyfriend Yuya (Hirofumi Arai) has made a creepy request, and Lulu is starting to take up more and more of Junko's life.

A lot of overtly demeaning and otherwise off-putting things happen on porn sets, but perhaps the most unnerving scene comes early on, as Junko goes shopping for the costume she'll wear in her Lulu persona. This costumed salesgirl comes up to sell her on the fairy wand accessory, and she's just a bit too loud, too committed to her character, and speaking in something that sounds like baby talk. Junk looks a bit startled at first, and there's something even more off-putting than usual about the combined objectification and infantilization of women here. It's a minor theme throughout the rest of the movie, but that moment especially makes anyone in the audience who kind of digs that sort of thing a little complicit as Lulu heads down this road.

Full review at EFC.

Kill Me Please

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

Here's a weird, but interesting little movie. Dr. Kruger (Aurelien Recoring) runs a clinic in Switzerland, ostensibly for the purpose of helping people commit suicide with dignity. The thing is, he is really no believer in this; his true purpose is to convince the despairing that life is worth living. Sadly, his well-meaning life's work ultimately always seems to lead to failure, as patient after patient eventually opts to end his or her life, no matter how initially reluctant.

This is a pitch-black comedy, with a number of odd characters thrown together in odd ways, given an extra shot of surreality by its black-and-white photography and characters who have a cock-eyed view of things even if they aren't planning to kill themselves. It builds up a heck of steam as it goes, getting both more funny and more philosophical as we learn more about Kruger and his patients.

And then the end... I'm a little torn. On the one hand, it's extremely funny, more outrageous than what had come before and filled with little moments that add up to a really crazed last act. On the other, it does sort of seem to come out of nowhere, like writer/director Olias Barco had no idea how to end the movie without some external force coming in and knocking everything over.

Blackthorn

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011)

Also in the "interesting" category, but not quite so entertaining, is Blackthorn, which presents itself as a story of Butch Cassidy's later years, suggesting that he lived in Bolivia for at least twenty years after his supposed death under the name "James Blackthorn", but eventually decided to return to America, unexpectedly finding himself in the middle of one last adventure as a result.

It's not bad - the movie is beautifully shot, and Sam Shepard fits the role of Blackthorn to perfection. The movie itself, though, is deliberately paced and despite its high concept, doesn't seem to have particularly grand or weighty ideas for the audience to contemplate as it goes. There's themes of the call of home and one's potential irrelevance as one ages, but not with particularly special insight.

Batoru rowaiaru (Battle Royale)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

A few weeks ago, my brother's wife was trying to explain why The Hunger Games was worth getting excited about, and I was kind of annoying by responding to each reason with "so... like Battle Royale". Totally unfair of me, as at the time I'd read neither book and hadn't seen this movie. Now that I've at least seen this film, the rest have a lot to live up to.

What I love about it is that director Kinji Fukasaku and his son, screenwriter Kenta Fukasaku, just let it all hang out there. The premise behind the story is loopy - classes of high school students randomly placed on an island and told to fight it out until only one is left alive (and, if there's no "winner" within three days, everybody dies) - and the Fukasakus tke this as license to make everything in the movie just a little larger than life. Or a lot larger than life, as is the case with Takeshi Kitano's murderous, angry teacher who is taking a perverse glee in overseeing the deaths of the entire class who tormented him two years earlier. It's a really fantastic combination of high concept story and gritty action.

Plus, it's got one of the best soundtracks I can remember, especially in the first half. The whole movie is a near-perfect example of really making pulp shine.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.09 (22 July): El Sanatorio, Clown, Detention and Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS

This is from Friday, I think. Friday was the annual trip to see what's new at Pointe-à-Callière, the awesome archaeological museum down by the old port. This year, it was a temporary exhibit on how wine evolved was introduced to Gallic France. A nifty bit of history, and it's always fun to stop and say, hey, that thing in the glass in front of me is thousands of years old.

In keeping with the same theme, I crossed the street to the Science Center where was an Indiana Jones Archaeology exhibit which will almost certainly have a stay at the Boston Museum of Science sometime in the next couple of years. And I will, naturally, hit it up again when it does, because there is in fact a whole bunch of neat old stuff in there which will likely be somewhat localized when it moves to other cities, as well as a bunch of extremely cool props from the Indiana Jones movies. I was good and didn't take pictures, but Ark of the Covenent and Shankara Stones right there, if behind glass.

I do kind of hope that when they do move it to other venues, they find ways to perhaps make it less dependent on the handheld device with the video screen and headphones that they have the visitors carrying around. It's a neat piece of tech with a fun-for-the-kids interactive game attached to it, but it also creates this weird scene of everybody, including families, listening to and watching the machine instead of discussing the exhibits with each other. The design of which clips go with which exhibits also created a certain amount of bottleneck at points.

So, that was neat, but took long enough that I wasn't able to stop in the most succinctly and temptingly named restaurant I've ever seen, "Le Steak Frites", where you bring your own wine and ordering consists of answering the question "how would you like your steak?" Maybe tomorrow.

And now, pictures!


King-wei Chu and El Sanatorio director Miguel Gomez.

Gomez was a guy truly excited to be at festivals in general and Fantasia in particular, with a bunch of fun stories to share, such as how he wound up doing some CGI wire-removal by himself when his effects house flaked on him, or how a character not meant to be someone in particular probably was mocking a real person, now that he thinks about it. One thing he mentioned that I've heard before was how in smaller countries like Costa Rica, getting a movie made often means working with the government's arts funding, and they can be pretty averse to funding horror movies - or really, just anything that works as mainstream entertainment first and a moral lesson somewhere lower on the totem pole. The tools get better and cheaper all the time, but we're not quite at the point where independent film can really explode yet.


Detention star Shanley Caswell, a Toronto rapper whose part isn't listed in IMDB, co-writer/director Joseph Kahn, co-writer Mark Palermo

Another fun Q&A session, although I don't know whether to feel like Kahn has the right attitude or is defeatist when talking about how, after this, he doesn't know about making another movie because the hassle isn't quite offset by the joy, and there are so many strings attached. He talks about how he is currently trying to make as many music videos as he can to pay off the money it took to make Detention, which has to be frustrating. Hopefully it will get a theatrical release and pay him enough that continuing to make movies feels worth it.

Also, Mark Palermo has a great deadpan sense of humor, and apparently got in touch with Kahn after being the only critic who like the director's previous movie, Torque. No, that doesn't give me a small amount of hope, not at all...

El Sanatorio

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011 - Playback in Black: The Next Wave)

Here's how this goes: I tell you that El Sanatorio is a first-person horror movie about a group of young filmmakers who take their cameras inside a haunted building, you groan "what, another?" At this point, I'm expected to say "but this one's different!" And maybe it is; it's Costa Rica's first entry into the horror genre and manages to inject a fair amount of humor into the proceedings. Mostly, though, it's just good.

The haunted building is El Sanatorio Duran, built in 1919 for TB patients, but since used as a prison and an orphanage. Legends have it that the ghosts of orphans and a raped nun haunt the place, among others (it depends on who you ask). The filmmakers are director Luis (Luis Bogartes) and journalist Arturo (Pablo Masis). They recruit a motley crew of others - medium Lulu (Marisa Luisa Garita); techs Papillo (Kabek Gutierrez) and Gaston (Abelardo Vladich); megalomaniac producer Esteban (Olger Gonzalez); musician - and skeptic/atheist! - Kurt (Kurt Dyer); and Mariana (Maria Elena Oreamuno), the researcher that Arturo would like to get closer to. They spend some time learning the lore of the place, but before long, they're in.

That's when the scares start, but no the good times. From the very first scene, cast and crew seem to be having fun with the idea that the characters don't take this activity all that seriously. They snicker during interviews. Luis and Arturo get distracted by the old Nintendo system they find when looking for a tape deck with which to play back the cassettes from an earlier investigation. Arturo is clearly more worried about his crush on Mariana than anything else. Co-writer/director Miguel Alejandro Gomez isn't quite making a comedy, but the high joke density makes what could be the expositional slog portion of the movie entertaining on its own.

Full review at EFC.

Klovn: The Movie (Clown: The Movie)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

After seeing Klovn: The Movie, I find myself both curious about and wary of the TV series it's spun off from. Curious because the movie is damn funny, and if its style of humor is typical of the series, they can get away with some stuff on Danish TV (or it's running on the Danish equivalent of HBO). Wary because I don't know if this sort of crudity would work on a regular basis, and this is potentially a generic sitcom if toned down.

Klovn centers around the adventures of Frank Hvam (Frank Hvam), a decent-enough-seeming fellow with a remarkable ability to screw things up. Somehow, though, he's managed to stumble into a good woman in Mia (Mia Lyhne), but gets a couple pieces of unexpected news at the wedding of Mia's sister: They're going to be watching Mia's nephew Bo (Marcuz Jess Petersen) during the honeymoon, and Mia is herself expecting. Initially, this interferes with Frank's plans to go on a canoeing trip with his friend Casper (Casper Christensen), but he decides to take the boy along to show he has potential as a father. Maybe not the best idea, as Casper is a hedonist who has taken to calling this trip the "tour de pussy".

And, yes, "tour de pussy" is generally indicative of the level of good taste to be found in the movie. Casper, in particular, doesn't seem to believe in restraint of any sort, and the various sex and drug jokes are amplified just by having a chubby 12-year-old hanging around. Similarly, it's generally not enough for Frank to get into strange predicaments; he's got to wind up in his underwear somehow. It's pretty close to a non-stop stream of crude jokes about middle-aged man-children.

Full review at EFC.

Detention

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

So, have you ever wondered what would happen when the oroborus finished swallowing its own tail (well, besides the choiking at the bleeding out and all)? That is roughly what Detention is, a movie that spends a lot of time referencing other movies built on film references, but even when it's diving down that rabbit hole, it is doing so in the most fast-paced, energeting way possible, with director and co-writer Joseph Kahn always having one more bit of insanity up its sleeve. It's actually pretty amazing that a movie with the potential for being arch and smug that this one has instead manages to stay so energetic.

And, in fact, downright clever: Kahn takes the old quote from David Fincher that kids today don't just watch movies, they download them into their brains, and he isn't afraid to pack either his plot or comedy densely. What starts out as a cheap character tic turns into the throroughly bonkers springboard to the second half of the film, actually tying things together a heck of a lot better than most films that are sold on their intricate, labyrinthine plots.

Of course, it also means that the year I graduated from high school is now officially far enough in the rear-view mirror that you can straight up joke about it being nerdishly retro, as opposed to the usual "things move so fast these days that five minutes ago is passé" stuff. So I may have to dock a few points for demonstrating that I am, in fact, old.

Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS

* (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011 - Tribute to John Dunning & André Link)

I could get into this more, but let's face it - just the very idea of this movie should make everybody involved reconsider, from the writer all the way down to the guy with a media pass who could have seen Helldriver again.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.08 (21 July): Petty Romance and The Divide

Funny thing: When I saw the number of films at Fantasia that I would be able to see films without conflicts, but what has wound up happening in several cases is that I'd have days like yesterday, where despite there being five "slots", there were only new films for me to see in three. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it just means that there are a few days like this.


(l-r: Actor Michael Eklund, director Xavier Gens, actor Michael Biehn, actor Jennifer Blanc)

The Q&A for The Divide was, at the very least, lively, with tales of how the movie was shot in chronological order, largely improvised (to the occasional consternation of the lead actress), and how this was possible because they lost financing and wound up having the production largely paid for by the intern's parents. It also became pretty clear that Michael Biehn owns a room like this, and if he wasn't genuinely enthused for this movie, he's an even better actor than I thought.

Jjae Jjae Han Romaenseu (Petty Romance)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011 - Korean Film Spotlight)

The dynamic of a comic book's writer and artist could (at least potentially) be a great formula for a romantic comedy; it's often two strangers brought together by circumstance who find themselves having to work together and adapt to the way the other thinks to create something together. Petty Romance does that fairly well, and gets points for doing it as a mainstream comedy rather than something pitched to the comic-reading crowd, although it could use a talented writer of its own.

Jeong Bae (Lee Seon-gyun) is a manhwa creator with a knack for drawing action but who struggles with dialogue, a weakness that just got a project he'd worked on for years rejected - and he needs the money to get a painting by his father back. The good news is that an editor friend has just announced an international adult comics contest with a $100,000 prize. With the deadlines tight and personal stakes high, he looks for a writer. He winds up with Da-rim (Choi Kang-hee), a translator whose penchant for creativity (despite lacking any knowledge of the subject) just got her fired from translating articles from international women's magazines for their Korean editions.

It is, by the nature of the genre, almost a given that Bae and Da-rim will wind up together, but to writer/director Kim Jeong-hoon's credit, there's enough genuine antagonism between them at the start that it doesn't necessarily seem like a good idea: Da-rim is a pushy screw-up with an unearned high opinion of herself, while Bae is a bit of a snob and tends to enjoy the moments when gets the upper hand far too much. Kim also has a great time making the traditional buddy characters not the greatest of friends: Bae's fellow artist Hae-ryong (Oh Jung-se) is spying on them for material for his own contest entry, Da-rim's friend Gyeong-sun (Ryu Hyun-kyung) was the editor that fired Da-rim and makes a play for Bae, and Da-rim's twin brother Jong-su (Song Yoo-ha) whose sexual excesses are the inspiration for the comic's villain. They're a thoroughly mercenary bunch.

Full review at EFC.

The Divide

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

What do you want from your post-apocalyptic tales? The Divide lays the two paths out before the us - strangeness and danger outside or paranoia and infighting inside - and then literally seals the characters in. That's not the wrong decision, but, wow, are the glimpses of the other path that the film could have taken tantalizing.

It doesn't matter why, but the bombs are falling, and Mickey (Michael Biehn) is ready; the 9/11 survivor has converted the basement of the building where he's the superintendent into a fallout shelter. He may not have been expecting to ride it out with roommates, but he's got a few: Young couple Eva (Lauren German) and Sam (Ivan Gonzalez); engineer Delvin (Courney B. Vance); mother Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette) and daughter Wendy (Abbey Thickson); half-brothers Josh (Milo Ventimiglia) and Adrien (Ashton Holmes); and their friend Bobby (Michael Eklund). Attempting to explore the outside backfires in a big way, trapping them in the basement, and the situation gets worse when the other characters start to suspect that the already misanthropic Mickey is holding out on them.

That's a pretty strong cast, and director Xavier Gens gives them remarkably free reign, shooting the picture in chronological order and encouraging improvisation. During the post-film Q&A, he mentioned that very little of the original scripted dialog remains in the film, while some actors (most notably Michael Eklund) took this freedom and ran with it, making minor parts into showcases. That's a tricky way to work if everybody isn't on the same page, and to a certain extent the movie does become something of a shouting match, with whichever characters are more psychotic and whichever actors are more willing to play that up ruling the day. Saner characters and actors less apparently willing to just seize their screen time sometimes get pushed to the side.

Full review at EFC.

The Fantasia Daily, 2011.07 (20 July): Hello Ghost, Ironclad, You Are Here, and Underwater Love

I think I need to reboot this computer, so no images today. It just would have been You Are Here director Daniel Cockburn anyway, so you'll have to wait a bit for that.

Yesterday's story short: Two uninspiring conventional movies, a quick trip to Future Shop to get a decent network cable (I can write at the desk now!), the annual stop at m:brgr, and then two wonderfully odd selections from the "Camera Lucida" series, which I suspect may be misnamed - these movies aren't very lucid at all.

Now - wait, work wants me? Oh, I am definitely taking a couple hours back later.

Hellowoo Goseuteu (Hello Ghost)

* * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011 - Korean Film Spotlight)

Hello Ghost makes me feel a little better about Hollywood. Sure, one could take the pessimistic view and see it as a sign that America is exporting the worst aspects of its culture in such quantities that others are assimilating it, but I choose to believe that the impulse to make supernatural comedies with questionable concepts is universal, and that seeing South Korea screw one up indicates that for all the crap people give Hollywood, this sort of thing is harder than it looks.

Kang Sung-man (Cha Tae-hyun) has been suicidal for some time, but has never been able to pull it off. After overdosing on pills fails, he jumps off a bridge, and this time his heart actually stops He's revived at the hospital, though, and now in addition to everything else, he can see ghosts. Four of them - a round, blue-suited chain-smoker (Ko Chang-seok); a woman who cries constantly (Jang Young-nam); a bratty kid (Cheon Bo-geun); and a mildly lecherous old man (Lee Moon-su). He gets the standard spiel from a fortune teller about how they won't move on (and let him off himself) until they have completed some unfinished earthly business with his help. to make things even more awkward, these wishes tend to being him in contact with - and embarrass him in front of - hospice nurse Jung Yeon-su (Kang Hye-won), who is certainly sweet and pretty enough to count as a reason to live.

Give writer/director Kim Young-tak some credit: For a broad comic fantasy, Hello Ghost is a lot more carefully structured than it initially appears to be. The complementary characteristics of Sung-man and Yeon-su are reasonably clever - both are surrounded by people just one on side or the other of death; he's a lonely orphan while her dying father is too much a presence in her life. And certain bits of the story tie together in fine fashion, although the connections are occasionally less elegant structuring than overbuilt plot devices.

Full review at EFC.

Ironclad

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011)

While Ironclad has a truly remarkable amount of crunching, blood-spurting medievel violence, its most memorable moment comes from Paul Giamatti yelling at Brian Cox. If there were a direct-to-video Oscars, he would be a shoo-in for a "Best Villainous Overacting" nomination, at the very least. Sadly, though, filmmaker Jonathan English spends so much time cramming more and more action in that he seldom has a chance to get the best parts of his cast into the same room and let them go at it with something other than swords.

Of course, this is a movie about a siege, and that's not the way sieges work. You've got the good guys on one side of the wall, the bad guys on the other, and except for a person or two having second thoughts on which side is which, it's all about holding fast until the next attack. The siege in question is that of Rochester Castle in 1215 - having signed the Magna Charta, King John (Giamatti) decides he wants to take it back with a vengeance, and sets about eliminating all of the other signatories. The Duke of Albany (Cox) means to stop him, but has only one Templar Knight (James Purefoy), his squire (Aneurin Barnard), and a ragtag band of former allies to stand against John and his army of Danish mercenaries. They hole up in Rochester Castle - to its master's very mixed emotions - with plans to stall him until reinforcements can arrive from France.

Ironclad has three big battle sequences as King John's men attempt to storm the castle, and while English does sometimes have the cinematographer shake the camera a bit more than necessary, the action scenes are not bad at all: The camera isn't constantly in so tight that you can't see what's going on - in fact, there are several pretty good scenes of swordfighting - and most of the actors and doubles look like they know what they're doing. The blood does flow, with nothing romanticized and a fair amount of warfare shown as particularly vicious. There are siege engines, towers, and a thing with pigs I'd never heard of which is insanely effective.

Full review at EFC.

You Are Here

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2011 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2011 - Camera Lucida)

I have friends who are going to seek out You Are Here based primarily on one member of the cast, and they might as well, as it's a weird enough film that it's not necessarily going to play regular theaters or even boutique houses on its own; it'll have to be sought out for some reason, and if that's because it's the second-to-last film Tracy Wright was in before her untimely death, that's as good a reason as any.

It is a truly odd little movie, though, an indie film that is obsessed less with the emotional lives of its characters as with the cerebral ones. Writer/director Daniel Cockburn creates a number of odd little vignettes whose characters someties overlap, but the main unifying element seems to be curiosity about how we think. It's most explicitly laid out in a dramatization of a thought experiment in which a man who does not read Chinese is placed inside a room with a manual for how to respond if a piece of paper with Chinese characters is shoved under the door, but every single segment ties into the idea of how the mind processes information, and what role individual consciousness plays in it.

Interesting stuff, and seldom dry; Cockburn's stories quickly become funnier and more embracing of the absurd after what could be a fairly pretentious start. Ultimately, I do think that there's an sort of cynicism to the end, but You Are Here works pretty well both in pieces and as a whole.

Onno no Kappa (Underwater Love)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2011 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2011 - Camera Lucida)

I'm not sure how many pink films are made in Japan per year. Probably a lot; they tend to be short and low-budget, and there's always a market for skin flicks. Fantasy themes are probably not uncommon. But how many are musicals? With scores and songs by a European pop group like Stereo Total? Creature effects by Yoshihiro Nishimura? Cinematography by art-house staple Christopher Doyle?

That's what Underwater Love is, a combinaiton of wildly disparate ingredients that somehow work together in a way that is remarkably seamless and loopy. It's a simple story about a woman about to marry whose drowned high-school friend returns to her in the form of a kappa to save her life, and as much as that sounds kooky even for Japan, it works because there isn't an ounce of meanness or cynicism to it. It's a joyous bit of softcore, the sort where even the people whose faces were hidden behind kappa masks were smiling.

Another likely reason why it works so well is that director Shinji Imaoka, despite having all those biggish names attached to it, it's not an over-the-top production. Everything is more than a little nicer than the standard pink eiga, but there's no pretension to it. Underwater Love doesn't try to mock or transcend its genre; amid its strangeness, it's just trying to be the best it can be.

Full review at EFC.