The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.06: The Stranger, Everly, Automata, The Guest, and Dead Snow 2

Photos:



Everly director Joe Lynch!



Automata director Gabe Ibáñez, with Harry Knowles leading the Q&A.



Scott Weinberg (l) questioning The Guest writer Simon Barrett.

Funny Q&As today; I'll fill in when I'm not running off to movies.

Which are: The Man from Reno, The Absent One, Haemoo, Local God, and a second shot at Necrofobia unless I can get my hands on a ticket for It Follows

The Stranger

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #1 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

The Stranger is the intersection of two trends in genre filmmaking that aren't bad in and of themselves, but can be kind of limiting: Sacrificing a sense of place to make your movie palatable for an English-speaking audience and taking genre concepts that are basically absurd very, very seriously. You can make a decent movie this way, as filmmaker Guillermo Amoedo and his team do, but it's tough to make a great one.

The stranger in question (Cristobal Tapia Montt) knocks on 16-year-old Peter's door one night, looking for someone who used to live there, only to be sent to the cemetery. That would be the end outings, especially since this guy runs afoul of three punks led by Caleb (Ariel Levy), who would have beaten him to death if Peter (Nicolas Duran) hadn't happened by on his bike. He flags down lieutenant De Luca (Luis Gnecco), which seems like a good idea, but turns into a bigger mess than any of them - or Peter's mother Monica (Alessandra Guerzoni), a nurse - is prepared for.

That's actually a pretty strong noir-thriller setup, and if Amoedo and his team would have gone with that, it would likely still have been a movie with a lot of potential, especially as the route he chooses does involve never saying a certain word (it's the sort of movie that uses euphemisms like "contagious"). It puts the movie into a bit of a no-win situation at times - it's dependent on mythology that it won't directly acknowledge, either as commentary on the genre or to really dig into what weighs on the stranger. Going for that sort of restraint also means that the admittedly sort of melodramatic themes and parallels get buried fairly deep; they could have been a lot more involving closer to the surface.

Full review at EFC

Everly

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

I kind of wonder why folks like Salma Hayek take jobs like Everly; is there some movie-star calculus where the lead role in an English-language action movie almost certain to go straight to video on demand is worth more than a Spanish-language drama or an ensemble part on television, either in terms of money or ego? I'm not complaining about her and others whose careers are at the same spot taking these jobs, you understand, I like these movies and like them even more when the star is someone who can do a little more than look good on the cover. And, hey, if she's willing to do something this nuts, so much the better.

She plays the title character, who was kidnapped four years ago and kept for yakuza boss Taiko's pleasure, presumably via threats to kill her mother and now five-year-old daughter if she got out of line. As the movie starts, it looks like Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe) has learned that she's been contacted by the Feds and sent a bunch of men to rape and kill her, unaware she's got a phone and gun stashed in the bathroom. And while that may be enough for this group of thugs, Takio owns the building and the cops, so what was planned as an escape is looking an awful lot like a last stand.

This is not a set-up that makes a tremendous amount of sense at any point, so it's probably for the best that everything that got Everly to this place happens off-screen without anything in the way of flashbacks and only the vaguest sort of explanation; director Joe Lynch and screenwriter Yale Hannon wisely let the audience try and insert their own sense-making version of events if they're so inclined. Even with that out of the way, there's still a lot of really goofy action-movie silliness going on, such as Everly somehow being a crack shot despite likely being four years out of practice while only sustaining one through-and-through wound that doesn't seem to slow her down that much. Or her conveniently having the building's security system connected to her TV. Or her being targeted by waves of colorful assassins rather than what would seem likely to be more effective measures not deployed until later.

Full review at EFC

Automata

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

For the purposes of Automata, filmmaker Gabe Ibáñez reduces Asimov's traditional three laws of robotics to two: Do not harm a living thing, and do not engage in self-modification. Most movies about rogue machines would concern themselves with the first, so it shows just what sort of movie Ibáñez is trying to make in focusing on the second.

The ROC Pilgrim 7000 robots with those directives installed are ubiquitous in 2044, a generation after increased solar flare activity has drastically reduced the human population and crowded them into a few remaining cities, with walls trying to keep the encroaching desert out. Occasionally things go wrong, and when it does, insurance adjuster Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas) works on behalf of the company to attempt to avoid a payout. In what is hopefully his last case before a transfer to a seaside district with his pregnant wife Rachel (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen), he investigate the claims of a cop (Dylan McDermott) who claims that the unit he shot was repairing itself. He soon finds that something was up, and his search leads him to "clockmaker" Dr. Dupre (Melanie Griffith) - and areas his bosses from old friend Robert Bold (Rober Forster) on up would like kept quiet.

The themes explored in Automata - evolution, personhood, and the like - are potentially fairly heavy material, and Ibáñez treats them with the appropriate weight. The newly ungoverned machines are not suddenly more mature than their human progenitors, exploring their situation gradually and often having halting conversations on the subject rather than giving us straight lectures. That sort of philosophical intelligence isn't always reflected in in the moment-to-moment cogwork of the script - there are times when a walk through the desert seems to be happening in real time, with characters withholding information for no good reason and Rachel dragged along mostly because the film needs her around for the finale. That Ibáñez doesn't want his sci-fi movie to be men and robots shooting each other is admirable, but there are moments when they should be doing a bit more than they are.

Full review at EFC

The Guest

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

I didn't necessarily think much of The Guest as it started; it quite frankly seemed like a step back for the team of writer Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard. It introduced a pleasant enough cast and set up a kind of familiar "stranger in the house is more dangerous than anyone knows" situation which the group is good enough to make go well, but, ho-hum... And then a thoroughly unremarkable scene starts a chain that gets Lance Reddick involved. After that, it's still the same movie in a lot of ways, but it gets bigger and crazier.

And that's a real kick, to be honest, what looked like it was going to be just a typical indie thriller gets just big, nuts, and self-aware enough to drop jaws in a good way. It's already hitting theaters, and shouldn't be missed.

Full review on EFC

Død Snø 2 (Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Saw this back at Fantasia, but kind of felt like I was missing ten minutes or so. Turns out I was, but they weren't of huge consequence. I missed a different ten minutes or so this time, so now I've seen the whole thing, more or less.

I liked it a bit more, although I still say I'll be more excited for the Hansel & Gretel sequel.

Full review at EFC

The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.05: The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Purgatory, Realiti, From the Dark, and I Am a Knife With Legs

Zero time this morning; will update later.

Today's assignments: The Stranger, Everly, Automata, The Guest, and Dead Snow 2

Kaguya-hime no Monogatari (The Tale of Princess Kaguya)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Though Hayao Miyazaki's retirement from directing animated features with The Wind Rises deserved all the attention it got last year, there is somewhat less noise being made about Isao Takahata's swan song, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, though Takahata has made a number of classics at their Studio Ghibli production company that have not gained the same sort of traction in America. As such, is not necessarily a surprise that Takahata says goodbye with a movie that may be a tough sell in the U.S., but is just as brilliant as its companion.

In this one, bamboo cutter Sanuki no Miyatsuko (voice of Takei Chii) observes a strange shoot growing impossibly fast, and is doubly surprised to see the to open to reveal what looks like a tiny princess, inches tall. The sprite becomes a regular-sized baby at the touch of the man's wife (voice of Nobuko Miyamoto), and will continue to be subject to growth spurts that have the village children calling her "Li'l Bamboo" as she surpasses them in age. As she becomes a teenager, the first presents her father with other gifts that would allow him to fulfill what he believes is her destiny to become a princess, though the girl (voiced by Aki Asakura) is not a natural fit for the capital whether the newly christened Kaguya is dealing with tutors or suitors.

It's a charming, episodic little story, breaking out into a number of smaller, often funny tales, each with a rhythm of its own, strung together in a way that the audience doesn't really feel the film's long running time - 137 minutes is highly unusual for an animated picture - at all. There are bits that feel like they could be cut down - does one really need five princes and ministers attempting to woo Kaguya? - but each is small enough that removing it wouldn't tighten things notably and a couple of good moments would be lost. It's a leisurely pace that can encompass an entire life, even if there's some irony in that parts of Kaguya's are accelerated.

Full review at EFC

Purgatorio

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

I didn't think much of Purgatory for a good chunk of its short running time; as much as Oona Chaplin did a fine job of holding the screen, there didn't seem to be much story, and it just felt like someone doing the best that they could with artificial constraints. It had a few good moments, but was kind of forgettable.

Then it got to its double-barrelled twist action, and while the quick-arriving second one didn't do much for me, the first seemed legitimately shocking and angering, providing a pretty fascinating context for the rest of the movie. I don't know that this elevates it that far, but I was interested by the situation by the end, and can't deny I felt some chills.

Plus, the movie is around 80 minutes, pretty close to the ideal length for a horror movie.

Realiti

* * (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Realiti has a couple of entertaining performances in it - I loved every time that Graham McTavish appeared on screen as a sinister corporate lawyer - and Nathan Meister is an amiable enough lead, but for the most part it's very bland. Director Jonathan Kind and Chad Taylor seem to be onto something in their basic concept - a media organization behind the "what is real and what is illusion" mystery - but they don't really have what is necessary to make it really fascinate. I sort of lost track of what was going on for a while, and just didn't care that much when things were coming to a head.

From the Dark

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Give Conor McMahon credit for building a reasonably solid horror movie out of almost nothing here, but it really strains against its tiny budget. The premise of it - a light-averse peat bog zombie thing - requires darkness, but there are long stretches of this movie where I felt like I couldn't see anything either because of the dark or because there were lights being shone directly in my eyes, and it was more frustrating than eerie.

On the other hand, Niamh Algar absolutely owns this movie as the heroine, and when McMahon is able to ust show her gutsily and cleverly try to escape, it's a lot of fun. Even if she does have a really frustrating habit of losing light sources.

I Am a Knife with Legs

N/A (out of four)
Seen 22 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Hey, would someone in Boston pick this up and show it at 7pm or so? Thanks. It's got some big laughs, but this is the second festival where I've tried to watch it and fallen asleep just as it's getting really weird.

The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.04: "Pandas", Wastelander Panda, Shrew's Nest, The Tribe, Tokyo Tribe, and The Man in the Orange Jacket

Say this for Fantastic Fest: It fills your day from start to finish, even if there is a little more dead space than I might be used to in between. So, one bit of horrible photography and then off:



Hey, Man in the Orange Jacket director Aik Karapetian and producer Roberts Vinovskis - why no trip to Montreal in July? An enjoyable little Q&A, at least - I hadn't realized just how long this film took to shoot (three years, a few days at a time).

Today's plan: The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Purgatory, Realiti, From the Dark, and another midnight secon chance for I am a Knife with Legs.

"Pandy" ("Pandas")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

I half-suspect that "Pandas" is at least partly the result of writer/director Maths Vizar having a few had ideas that could potentially be combined with the panda-specific bits. If that's the case, it works out fairly well; there's a steady stream of funny, frequently gross jokes, both within a funny "evolution of life" sequence, and more pointedly during the bits where the panda seeming like a genuine evolutionary dead end is the gag.

That, though, is what winds up tying the whole thing together: That the panda has survived in such a narrow niche environment, but just barely; its diet doesn't give it the capability to actually do much, and now the ones surviving in captivity can't even be bothered to reproduce, like they know that there's no future for them as a species and they might as well just end it. Contrast that with rats, a tremendously successful species, even if they're not nearly as cute as the panda.

Wastelander Panda

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

If you're going to do yet another thing movie/series with people wandering through a post-apocalyptic (or otherwise arid and sparsely populated) world, you might as well have some characters be pandas. It at least makes the movie unique to look at, and with any luck, it will mean the people behind the camera a are genuinely inspired rather than just going through the motions.

The journey into the wasteland begins after Isaac accidentally kills kills a fellow resident of Legion, one of the few self-sufficient cities in the world, but he offers an alternative before they stone him to death - he finds another young woman and brings her back to take her place. To keep him from running off, brother Arcayus and mother Hannah are exiled with him. Isaac joins a group of bandits led by Varrick Helm (Chantal Contouri), and spots Rose (Lily Pearl) just as his hitch is winding down. But, of course, lies and double-crosses will lead to a chase through the Obsidian Forest.

Isaac, Arcayus, and Hannah are pandas, although that is mostly a matter of physical appearance; they are not, at any point, portrayed as fat and lazy furballs who can't be torn away from eating bamboo long enough to reproduce. On the plus side, they are portrayed by actors in suits rather than being CGI creations, and while the masks may not be the most articulated, the mouths move well enough to keep scenes where they talk from breaking the illusion. Sometimes the relatively static expressions on their faces make for an odd juxtaposition to the action, but it works better than one might expect much of the time.

It does set the family apart as outsiders, even if other characters terms to treat panda-people more as unusual than bizarre enough to require explanation. If director/co-creator Victoria Cocks and the rest of the team get to make more - the feature version playing festivals is six ten-minute web episodes strung together - there's room to do some interesting things mostly hinted at here, from the various species populating the world to how women of childbearing age are treated as commodities.

The main character is portrayed by actors under masks, although they don't seem to be too physically limited by it when the time for action comes, with the voice work by NAME fairly strong. Lily Pearl is good as Rose, and Chantal Contouri especially memorable as the bandit leader. All involved play things straight, as opposed to some sort of tongue-in-cheek mash-up.

Do I have a lot of interest in Wastelander Panda without the panda angle? To be honest, probably not; this sort of wandering-through-the-desert action movie is kind of dime-a-dozen. So the hook helps, and the thing you find upon watching it isn't bad at all.

Musarañas (Shrew's Nest)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #1 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Shrew's Nest is designed to stuff a lot of movie into a small space, and on that count it succeeds quite nicely: Even if it's not as constrained to one location as that apartment's agoraphobic resident, it's got a gravitational force that pulls one back during the brief sojourns away, and enough going on inside to keep it interesting.

The resident of that apartment is Montse (Macarena Gomez), a severely agoraphobic dressmaker who hasn't left in years, serving loyal customer Doña Puri (Gracia Olayo) and having her younger sister (Nadia de Santiago) who just turned eighteen, deliver others. Not that she's totally alone when her sister is at work; she imagines the father who abandoned them fourteen years ago (Luis Tosar), and one day Carlos (Hugo Silva) falls down the stairs from his apartment on the next floor, knocking himself unconscious and breaking his leg. This stirs new feelings in the deeply religious Montse, although with three people in one apartment keeping secrets from each other, a situation that was already becoming stressed is guaranteed to break.

And while things do break in fairly spectacular fashion, the build-up is perhaps even more accomplished, as the filmmakers get us to watch the sisters play out a few days that are maybe not quite normal for them, but which don't quite feel like tipping points. Directors Juanfer Andres and Esteban Roel (working from a screenplay by Andres and Sofia Cuenca) do an excellent job of increasing the tension as they reveal the different sides of Montse's instability while also building a situation that it would be difficult to just leave. It's ace work, telling the audience everything it needs to know while also leaving empty spaces in the structure that can either be filled in during the rest of the film or used to make things collapse.

Full review at EFC

Plemya (The Tribe)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Well, that's certainly something I'm glad to have seen, although I'm also sort of thankful that I'll likely never see the like again.

I suspect that what we see in the tribe - a sequestered, young population turning away from their supposed reason for being there but instead wreaking mayhem - happens at a lot of public schools, but seeing it happen at a Ukranian school for the Deaf makes it hit a bit harder. Although no explanations are given, it's not hard to figure out what's going on in these kids' heads: The hearing world finds them a nuisance worthy of only grudging concessions, and this is the first time they they've been able to band together to do what they want, and with that anger it comes out as violence, crime, and sex. There is one classroom scene early on, but after that, academics seem irrelevant - the only time we see the kids doing anything resembling study later, the purpose is immediately undercut.

It's a harrowing ride, with traditional bullying at the start, lawlessness in the middle (which filmmaker Miroslav Slaboshpitsky often uses as a perverse way to show students coming together), and horrors the audience might wish to unsee at the end. It's a bleak movie that often elicits cringes, but to his credit, Slaboshpitsky never seems to just be engaging in exploitation; everything moves the story of new student Sergey forward in some way.

The movie looks striking - the school in Kiev where we spend much of our time isn't quite run down but hasn't been upgraded in a while, and much of the rest of the action takes place in the dark. Sound is also an intriguing part of the film - with no music and no spoken dialogue (no subtitles for the sign language, either), the incidental noises tend to ring out sharp and clear, but Slaboshpitsky and his crew do an excellent job of making sure that they are somewhat inessential. The hearing audience is not going to get any sort of heads-up that the Deaf audience misses, and even incidents where we notice that there's a lot of noise being made that the characters won't hear are kept to a minimum. It's a precisely-made film in that way, even if it does embrace a certain amount of chaos.

Full review on EFC

Tokyo Tribe

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #4 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Sion Sono has never really been the quiet, contemplative sort of art-house director, but his last few films seem to have been brimming with the sort of constant action that would make genre filmmakers jealous, with Tokyo Tribe an almost non-stop barrage of over-the-top insanity once the fighting starts. The surprising thing is that an audience can be somewhat forgiven for not registering that fact, since the veneer on top of it - a busy manga adaptation told as a hip-hop musical - is crazy enough in its way that it may be what the audience remembers.

And that's not exactly unfair. That style has Tokyo Tribe moving forward at a constant fast pace, with jokes and details packed into every corner, more characters than the audience can possibly process, and moments of jaw-dropping insanity that you can almost imagine Sono giggling as he put them into the script for how silly they are (the beatboxing server in a banquet scene may have been my favorite thing Sono has ever gone for while she was on-screen). It's colorful, bizarre, and sometimes tacky as heck, enough that it may take a bit of time to realize that what the action crew is doing is actually really amazing.

There's a real exhilaration to the film in general, as well, as it is about various factions coming together rather than pulling apart. Like a lot of Sono's best recent films, there's a gigantic heart underneath the frantic violence and chaos, and it's almost sure to send the audience out with a smile on their faces.

Full review on EFC

M.O.Zh. (The Man in the Orange Jacket)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Having already seen all of the midnight selections before, I opted to use this opoprtunity to revisit one I saw at Fantasia but came out of kind of fuzzy. End result: Not quite so fuzzy, but sort of went "huh?" in one of the exact same places, so I don't know whether filmmaker Aik Karapetian was trying for that reaction of if it's just me.

Full review at EFC

The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.03: The Duke of Burgundy, The Babadook, Tommy, The World of Kanako, and The Editor

Again, not much time in the AM, so just some quick horrible photography before the reviews:



Left to right, that is Adam Brooks, Conor Sweeney, Matthew Kennedy, and Tristan Risk of The Editor. Funny folks who certainly love making movies and the movies that they are spoofing. Sadly, I hit the wall during their movie and am kind of chagrined to see that its only other showtime is another midnight. We're not all night owls, folks.

Today's assignments make for a potentiallly weird day: Wastelander Panda, Shrew's Nest, The Tribe, Tokyo Tribe, and seeing Man in the Orange Jacket to get it fully inside my head after another "hit the wall" situation in Montreal.

The Duke of Burgundy

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #8 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

It's tempting to interpret the characters' behavior in The Duke of Burgundy in terms of closets and shame; it's sort of the default for this period and would probably be a fascinating way to play it. Peter Strickland has other, potentially more striking directions to go instead, and certainly makes it memorable.

Every day, Evelyn (Chiara d'Anna) rides her bicycle to a mansion where she works as a maid for Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), a demanding mistress who, like many women at the turn off the twentieth century, spends a great deal of her time studying insects. Any slow or substandard work and Evelyn will be punished, subject to Cynthia's strange sexual whims.

Of course, that doesn't tell the whole story; in fact, it is deliberately misleading. Strickland and his characters don't quite hide their true selves under multiple levels of artifice and role-play, but it will take some careful unraveling to reveal just who has what kind of power in the relationship. Strickland repeats scenes and sequences and escalates the situations without necessarily showing immediate cause and effect, and that's potentially important: Relationships and people may have a distinct life cycle just as insects do, and while some of those processes may seem strange to those user to something else, both their state at any point and progression may be completely natural.

Full review at EFC

The Babadook

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #1 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

I love kids, at least from the perspective of being an uncle; I fear that as an actual parent, I would identify far too much with certain parts of The Babadook to be much of a good person, let alone parent. There's no mistaking that this is one of those horror movies where the monster is inspired by specific fears and nightmares, but it's also one where the specificity of its metaphor doesn't hurt it being scary at all.

You'll be forgiven for thinking the film's primary monster is six-year-old Samuel (Noah Wiseman), an incentive kid but one who never stops screaming for attention, doesn't listen, and otherwise makes life difficult for widowed mother Amelia (Essie Davis) - and, yes, he's well aware that his father died the day he was born. He builds wooden weapons to combat the monsters he still believe are hiding under his bed, the latest of which is The Babadook, a dark creature in a top hat with giant weapons for hands, which he learns of in a pop-up book that appeared in the house without explanation. Maybe there's a Babadook, maybe not, but when Samuel gets expelled from school, it's trouble for Essie either way.

A nightmare, really; writer/director Jennifer Kent doesn't have Davis or Wiseman hold back much at all. Samuel just doesn't stop, and while he's not quite shrill, he's written as a very difficult child, the sort where even if he turns out to be right about this monster, it's not going to make Amelia look the fool for doubting him or being frustrated, as is often the case. (Bonus: The other kids are not made to look like little angels in comparison.) Davis, meanwhile, is made to look like Amelia hasn't slept in ages; to look at her from the start is to see someone who is just physically exhausted.

Full review at EFC

"Inherent Noise"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Nifty little short by Karol Jurga here, although I've got conflicting feelings on how it could have been made even better. It's built around a cool, creative idea - a young woman who looks after an old man follows his footsteps by the sound of a recorder he dropped - but the structure around it which gives the short its stakes is kind of vague and filled in after the fact. On the other hand, it takes a minute or two to figure out what she's doing (a non-trivial amount of time in a 17-minute short), and I don't know that it's really highlighted.

Still, it's a nifty idea, and I quickly grew fond of the small cast, even if we mostly see them in sequence as opposed to together. Jurga uses the filmmakers' tools to ramp up suspense quite well indeed, so there is a good, creepy feeling throughout. It's not the sort of short that could be expanded into a featuer without burying the thing that makes it interesting, but it's a nifty little piece from a director whose future bears a watch.

Tommy (2014)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

I wonder if Tommy might get dinged a bit for not necessarily being the expected movie that its premise suggests. You know, the one where the underestimated woman at the center is eventually revealed to always be three steps ahead of everyone around her - or if not quite that far ahead, still the smartest person in the room. This one is more about a gamble, which some may not find quite so satisfying.

I dig it, though. Moa Gammel has a neat trick to accomplish in presenting Estelle as someone who could be that woman, and by the same token is someone the characters she encounters is going to underestimate. She's maybe not quite presented as the underdog she could be seen to be, but that's okay; it's a different feel. I do think that the plot could have been streamlined a bit; there are a lot of characters running around that may be difficult to keep straight.

Full review on EFC

Kawaki. (The World of Kanako)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

The latest from Tetsuya Nakashima is not quite so sublime as his mid-aughts peak (Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko is a heck of a one-two punch), and it kind of stretches out too long, padded by some increasingly ugly violence. On the plus side, though, it is energetic as all heck, propelling the audience through the underworld with a protagonist that they're not supposed to like, but who makes it hard to look away. KojiYakusho is pretty great as the title character's terrible father, even if he is playing something of a monster.

Nakashima is still making stylish movies, too - this one takes a lot of cues from 1970s cop films, especially ones from America, but also will make crazy jumps to very modern youth-oriented imagery. There are inserts which poke a little fun at the cartoonish amounts of blood spilled. Generally speaking, he does a great job of keeping the audience in even as this movie comes closer and closer to having a pitch-black heart that might easily push a lot of viewers away.

Full review on EFC

The Editor

N/A (out of four)
Seen 20 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Hit the wall pretty good during this one, which is a shame. I wound up having the same issue with it that I did with Manborg - the Astron-6 guys are tremendously talented, and do some amazing things putting their movies together, but they consistently use those skills on parody/homage of movies that aren't very good. At least with Manborg, I could see where they were taking the best of a genre and executing that well, but not having the same attachment to the giallo films this one brings up, I kind of got worn down, even though the silly jokes were often working better than they had any business doing so.

The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.02: Force Majeure, Redeemer, Over Your Dead Body, "Rabbit 105", "The Chaperone", Necrofobia, and Wyrmwood

Again, not much time (there will be a few hours of dead space later, but I won't be uploading then), so let's get straight to some horrible photography:



From Redeemer, Noah Segan, Marko Zaror, director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza, and host Tim League!

Wish I had more to say, other than that Marko gave us all a sampleof his personal energy drink and... Well, it's different!



From Necrofobia, director Daniel de la Vega and producer Néstor Sánchez Sotelo!

De la Vega - not a fan of 3D, though he used a lot of it.



From Wyrmwood, producer Tristan Roache-Turner, stars Leon Burchill, Jay Gallagher, Bianca Bradey, director Kiah Roache-Turner, make-up wizard Lisa Cotterill, co-stars Meganne West, Catherine Terracini, and Damian Dyke!

All from Australia, all very funny and excited to be here, and probably quite willing to have taken the Q&A even further into the night.

Again, got to run for The Duke of Burgundy, The Babadook, Tommy, World of Kanako, and The Editor. See you there/later!

Force Majeure

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #1 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Danger lurks constantly in Force Majeure, although it's seldom the life-and-limb variety as opposed to the family-falling-apart one. Impressive, given the sheer volume of explosions being set off to cause controlled avalanches. The obvious reminder that there is no such thing serves as the basic premise of the film, and you're not going to see it presented on screen much better.

It's one of those controlled avalanches that really sets things off as a Swedish family on a five-day vacation in a French ski resort - father Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), mother Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), daughter Vera (Clara Wettergren), and son Harry (Vincent Wettergren) - eat lunch in a rooftop restaurant on the second day and see one roll much closer than expected. No harm done, except that Thomas's reaction exposes a potentially much more serious rift in the marriage than the previous talk of how he works all the time or can't turn away from his phone.

That plays into it, of course, but filmmaker Ruben Östlund is not going to reduce the family's issues into something quite that simple. He does key on something rather basic - a fear of abandonment that both spouses and children in a situation like this feel, and while he's not exactly subtle about it at times (after all, subtle isn't necessarily the way it works with kids), the variations are well-chosen, and there are actual counter-examples given on occasion. The idea of the avalanche is well-chosen, too, as one thing has an effect that gets bigger well beyond the immediate and expected radius.

Full review at EFC

Redeemer

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Marko Zaror and Ernesto Diaz Espinoza hadn't made a movie together in five years before re-teaming for Redeemer, and it's kind of nice to see that the formula hasn't really changed: Zaror plays a character that is not just an almost unstoppable force, but colorful besides, and the scenes between him dismantling waves of villains are generally more entertaining and stylish that you might expect from this sort of basic martial-arts action movie coming from an unusual spot like Chile. There's not much rust.

This time around, Zaror plays "The Redeemer" - a man once left for dead and who now wanders the country, listening for prayers for justice in the churches and depositing the weapons of the men he kills on their altars. In Pichidangui, though, he's more proactive, coming to the rescue of fisherman Agustin (Mauricio Diocares) when he sees drug smugglers attacking him. This is not going to stop the men working for Piedra (Smirnow Boris) or his American contact Bradock (Noah Segan), but they aren't the worst of it, for wherever The Redeemer goes, the equally-deadly Scorpion (Jose Luis Mosca) follows.

As stories go, it's not much, a western pulp adventure transplanted into the present day, but that's fine; the idea is to put the title character into situations where he's called upon to dispatch a great many people, primarily by his bare hands. On that count, it succeeds, from a bunch of neo-Nazis being taken out at the start to the last one-on-one, and if the material in between seems perfunctory, it's at least making a stab and enjoyable melodrama and a little humor.

Full review at EFC

Kuime (Over Your Dead Body)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #8 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

In addition to his film work, Takashi Miike has directed a few stage productions, experience that he likely dipped into for Over Your Dead Body. At times, I kind of wish that was where the film stayed; it has all the material for an intriguing backstage drama and the diversion into horror is kind of all over the place.

Not that it's ever boring - if there's one thing you can count on from Miike, it's that he will go to weird places and present what he finds in a memorable way. It's just that, as is often the case, he, writer Kikumi Yamagishi, and the film itself go to so many different strange places that the story starts to seem random once the supernatural becomes involved. Strict rules aren't necessary but not having every scare pulling in different directions would probably help. The individual results are certainly disgusting in memorable ways, at least.

Meanwhile, watching how how the cast members of the play Yotsuya Kaiden are coming to resemble their roles is going quite well, with Kou Shibasaki especially excellent in the "Iwa" role even before she startsdescending into genuine madness. One also hopes that this was a real production, because it looks downright amazing, although the well-appointed kitchen of Shibasaki's character rivals it in eye-candy. I would have been happy with either the play itself or the movie built on top of it; the horror, alas, sometimes seems to be one layer too much.

Full review on EFC

"Liebre 105" ("Rabbit 105")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

There's a jump in "Rabbit 105", when it goes from being a good idea for a horror movie to actually placing the character in the middle of one, that I'm not sure is quite executed as well as one would hope. It's a little to the film's detriment, because even with a short film's running time, it feels like directors Sebastian & Federico Rotstein could have milked the idea of whether the main character was really in any danger or just jumping at shadows for a while more.

On the plus side, they do manage pretty good work in whatever mode their in at a given time, whether it's a somewhat funny setup of Ana (Gisele Motta) being a vain little brat on the phone or running for her life, hiding in a panic, or trying to push through it. Motta is similarly good with whatever the Rotsteins throw at her as well as game for whatever the make-up guys have for her. It's a basic premise, but one executed fairly well.

"The Cahperone"

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, RealD DCP)

I missed the short program which included this one at Fantasia (probably one of the mostly-French ones during Fantastic Week-End), which is a crying shame. It is a ton of fun, and if it played so well in Austin, I can't imagine the reception it received on its home turf of Montreal.

It's a tremendously fun short that mixes animation and live action, including a few rotoscoped "animated documentary" scenes, to tell the tale of an incident in 1973 when a bunch of bikers tried to ruin some kids' Friday night dance and the seemingly mild-mannered high school teacher there to chaperone who flat-out kicked their asses. The mix of animation styles is fantastic, from stop-motion to hand-drawn to a bunch of crazy live-action, including a short-within-a-short ("The Kneebreakers") that is itself just a great little pastiche.

The jumping between styles works much better here than in many shorts that try it, as it really sells the way narrators Ralph Whims and Stefan Czernatowicz might jump around while telling this story, and it mostly serves to enhance the silliness of already goofy bits. It's a genuine pleasure to watch, even more so in 3D.

Necrofobia

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #6 (Fantastic Fest, RealD DCP)

I may circle back around to this one later in the week, although I'm not sure a midnight showing will have me any less sluggish and worn down during it. I think a big part of the issue with this one was the subtitling - placed underneath the 3D box, it messed with my depth perception something fierce and proved much more of a barrier than the combination of subs and 3D usually does.

Of course, this thing is also a lot more giallo than I was expecting, and I don't really love that form of thriller the way some do. In some ways, the story seems a little much, playing on twins (one recently passed on) with the same sorts of paralyzing fears. For me, the paranoia gets in the way of really getting into the mystery, which is a shame; both of those elements are done well, and it's just the combination that's not working for me.

Director Daniel de la Vega mentioned not really liking 3D during the Q&A afterward, but for someone with that attitude, he and cinematographer Mariano Suarez sure used a lot of it, right on the border of "cool-looking" and "getting in the way". I think one of the tricks with 3D is to really direct the audience's eye to one thing, with the rest there to provide spatial context (with post-conversion perhaps serving to get everything in focus), and there were a lot of scenes in this one where that really didn't happen as well as it could.

Wyrmwood

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #9 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

It's no bad thing, I say, that Wyrmwood feels like a season's worth of an eventful TV series packed into an hour and a half; it's an exhausting ride at times, but there's not ten or fifteen minutes anywhere in the movie that don't come across as exciting or have at least one really cool thing in them. Though making it over four years surely has brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner ready to take a break for a while, it's one of the rare movies where the audience's inevitable requests for a sequel seems like a great idea.

After all, it is packed with action, starting crazy and not letting up for the first half hour, and the various twists on the zombie genre tend to be both useful to the story and entertainingly nuts. There is a point in the middle where it starts to run down a bit (a little too much "evil government/business eager to kill the remains of an already reduced population" for me), but it picks back up for the finale.

I may double-dip on this one too, either later in the festival or when it (hopefully) gets a bigger release.

Full review on EFC

The Fantastic Fest Daily 2014.01: Hardkor Disco, As Seen by the Rest, and Cub

Not a whole lot of time to relate yesterday's airborne adventures, since FF's lottery system means that there must be consequences for missing a movie beyond actually missing the movie. Maybe come T.W.I.T. time.

Today's line-up: Force Majeure, Redeemer, Over Your Dead Body, Necrofobia, and Wyrmwood.

Hardkor Disco

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #7 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Krzysztof Skonieczny seems to want the audience to assume the worst in Hardkor Disco, although he and co-writer Robert Bolesto are very careful not to tip us off completely as to what it all means. Which, combined with the very precise way that Skonieczny goes about putting it together, it's got the potential to be a great "no, this is what's really going on!" movie.

After a few scenes that are most definitely up to the audience to interpret, a good-looking young man (Marcin Kowalczyk) - though one who had been playing with a knife a few scenes earlier - approaches an apartment and seems a little surprised when a young woman (Jasmina Polak) answers the door. He follows her, scares off the guy she's with, and lets her bring him home, thus meeting Aleksander (Janusz Chabior) and Pola (Angieszka Wosinska) at breakfast the next morning.

Interspersed with all of this are old videos of a young girl, possibly Ola and possibly not. Is there something about her that would explain why Marcin (the name he gives) would be coming to Warsaw to kill Aleksander & Pola? Possibly. Skonieczny and his cohorts drop enough hints that the viewer can continue to refine their theories throughout the film without often contradicting whatever is going on in the viewer's head - or, at least, that's how it worked for me. That's a delicate business; too often it can lead to audience frustration as filmmakers seem to go out of their way to give information, but Skonieczny just plays things close to the vest in a way that seems natural and invites the viewer to collaborate.
Full review at EFC

Ulidavaru Kandanthe (As Seen by the Rest)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 18 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #8 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Whenever I travel, something gets sacrificed to the cruel gods of jet lag made worse by an unusually early wake-up time, and hopefully this will be the only thing I punt review-wise or just plain getting-through-wise for Fantastic Fest. A two and a half hour Indian movie that requires close attention just may not have been a bright idea for this slot, and I don't remember whether it was my first, second, or third choice and thus something I can blame on the festival's random number generator.

That I was in an out is a shame, because I liked a whole lot of what I saw. The Rashomon hook of trying to piece together a crime through the individual and contradictory accounts of those involved never really gets old, and it allows writer/director/star Rakshit Shetty to do a lot of stylistically vey cool things, including some downright nifty-looking shots which seem to be inspired by some combination of comics and video games. Other eye-popping images, like the tiger dancers or the chantin fishermen, are great uses of the local color to dress the movie up. It's not quite a musical with people breaking into song, but it's got the feel without derailing the more realistic aspects.

There were a couple of moments when things got a bit too silly for my taste - the blatant Pulp Fiction reference that didn't serve to do much but reference Pulp Fiction, for instance, and the earnest wrappers with Sheetal Shetty as the reporter putting the story togther were kind of wobbly. I must admit to being curious as to whether this played at Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond earlier this year, because if it did, it's another example of how I know I'm missing out on some good stuff there both because it isn't subtitled and because what I can dig up about many Indian movies that play makes them look far more generic than they possibly can be.

Welp (Cub)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 September 2014 in Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #5 (Fantastic Fest, DCP)

Cub (or Welp, as it is called in its native Belgium) initially seems premised on the sort of attitude that makes those who aren't into horror movies rightfully squeamish: That if killing college kids who go out into the woods doesn't get a rise out of the audience any more, maybe killing cub scouts will. The good news in this case is twofold: One, filmmaker Jonas Govaerts does have more on his mind than cheap exploitation when all is said and done; and two, he and co-writer Roel Mondeaers are coming up with great horror movie bits from minute one.

Speaking of minute one, the newest member of an Antwerp cub count troop, Sam (Maurice Luijten), is running late for the camping trip, which means lots of push-ups and such, as he is far from the favorite of the older troop leaders, Baloo (Sef Aerts) and Chris (Titus De Voogdt), with Baloo and some of the other kids particularly seeming to have it in for him. Only his friend Dries and Baloo's girlfriend Jasmijn (Evelien Bosmans) seem to care for him at all. But when a couple of local punks racing their go-kart around the planned campsite sends the troop deeper into the woods than they had planned... Well, could there actually be something to those stories about werewolf boy Kai that Chris and Baloo were telling to make things more exciting?

Well, there's something; we see Kai in the first shot. The fun thing about that shot is that while it seems to give a lot of the game away - not just that there is a kid who is at the very least feral in the area, but that there are some impressively elaborate mechanics going on as well. It may give too much away - the desire to start the movie off with an action beat (and presumably not build to something most will have already seen on the poster or in the trailer) can under cut a later reveal - but I don't think that's necessarily the case; by the time the film circles around to those images being particularly relevant, the audience should have enough to occupy their minds that they're not just waiting impatiently.

Full review at EFC

The Maze Runner and the last Fantasia catch up.

I actually finished the review for Welcome to New York on the flight from Boston to Houston, so I think it's fair to say that I did, in fact, finish all my Fantasia business before Fantastic Fest, even if I am actually posting from the ground in Austin. Woo-hoo!

Anyway, enjoy The Maze Runner, which I caught as a preview about a week and a half ago; it opens tonight/tomorrow, and it's not bad, just kind of overdoing it on the holding back. You'll certainly see many action movies that aren't put together as well as it is during any given season, and it's got a capable enough cast. Here's hoping there's more to the sequel, if such a thing gets made.

Anyway, not much time to get bagged and lined up for Fantastic Fest day one, where I'll be seeing Hardkor Disco, As Seen By Others, and Cub.

And to close up the old business, here are the last seven Fantasia reviews: Hunter X Hunter: The Last Mission, Real, Ejecta, The Desert, Monsterz, Metalhead, and Welcome to New York. As much as I'm looking forward to the next week, I also can't wait to get back to Montreal.

The Maze Runner

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 September 2014 in Regal Fenway #13 (preview, RPX DCP)

There have been action movie more aggressively stripped of the basic building blocks of story - like character background and motivation - than The Maze Runner, but the better ones are either trying to make some point about basic human nature or engage in some criticism of their genre. Here, it's the generic anonymity of a video game, with player proxies, tasks to accomplish, and the promise of information as a reward. That's all good for as far as it goes; it just doesn't go very far.

Player approximately-38 (Dylan O'Brien) enters "The Glade" the way all of them have, through a cargo elevator that also supplies whatever the couple dozen or so amnesiac boys in this walked valley can't grow or glean themselves, although it's clear that there's something a bit different about him, since if the others have flashes of the outside world in their dreams, they don't seem to mention it. High walls surround The Glade on all sides, with doors that lead into a massive labyrinth, closing at night when the sound of "Grievers" frighten the Gladers (nobody who has stayed in the maze overnight has survived their sting). Things have apparently changed with the arrival of Thomas - names come back in a day or two - as one of the "maze runners" looking for a way out is stung during the daytime, soon followed by an ahead-of-schedule new arrival. This one's a girl (Kaya Scodelario), clutching a note saying she's the last.

A half-dozen our so other boys have roles of some import, and while only a couple get to really show much in the way of individuality - most notably Chuck (Blake Cooper), the youngest, and change-fearing fighter Gally (Will Poulter) - they are, by and large, a group that the audience will generally find amiable enough, although the range of personalities is both kind of narrow and low-key, even with the backstory that implies a Lord of the Flies period that nobody wants to return to in the past. The cast isn't really bland; they're just handed characters who have no history by definition and given a story where, at least in this adaptation of the novel, only ever pivots on the characters' emotional reactions as a distraction.

Full review at EFC

Gekijouban HUNTERxHUNTER: The Last Mission (Hunter X Hunter: The Last Mission )

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: AXIS, HD)

As near as I can tell, there were fifty weekly TV episodes between the two Hunter X Hunter films released in Japan last year, so it's not exactly surprising that The Last Mission does not exactly pick up right where Phantom Rouge left off - and despite this film's title, the weekly anime and manga adventure has rolled on through 2014, meaning another film is not unlikely. And they may as well keep on going; the fans are still there and this is a good time even for those going in relatively cold.

Pre-teen Hunters Gon and Kilua haven't changed that much since the events of Phantom Rouge, although Kurapika is now working as a princess's bodyguard and is apparently on speaking terms with a villain he wanted dead before. Today, Gon & Kilua are attending the Battle Olympiad at Heaven's Arena to support their friend Zushi as are many other members of the Hunter Association as well as various dignitaries. Which means that bit from the beginning of the movie when Isaac Netero, now president of the Association but one of its fiercest warriors decades ago, didn't quite kill rebel hunter Jed before he could cast a "Demonic Grudge" spell, is obviously foreshadowing a pretty massive hostage situation.

As before, there is a fair amount of Hunter X Hunter mythology referenced by characters who don't exactly get a proper introduction, so non-fans may be a bit lost at times. On the other hand, enough of it is in the form of secrets being revealed that it's not hard to catch up with the important stuff, and the script by Nobuaki Kishima makes things a bit easier by sticking close to familiar genre material: This is basically Die Hard, when you get right down to it, albeit with super-powered 12-year-olds in a kilometer-high building. That the resurrected Jed is threatening to reveal the Hunter Association's dark secrets works on its own as a macguffin without the actual nature of those secrets being terribly important, and that his powers come from "on" rather than "nen" isn't that big a deal, either. While some events are probably a big deal for fans, the action and emotion is big and over the top enough to be a blast for the rest of us.

Full review on EFC

Riaru: Kanzen naru kubinagaryû no hi (Real)

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

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has gotten even more interesting in the past few years, after stepping away from horror to do 2008's drama Tokyo Sonata, then immersing himself in teaching before doing a television series, a short feature that's probably as much record promo as stand-alone project, and this bit of science fiction. The interesting thing here is that this is still very much the work of a guy who knows how to scare you, making a pretty straight line between slick futurism and a contemporary world becoming more and more strange.

The science fictional elements are an old standby, an apparatus that one person can use to enter the dreams of another, in this case husband Koichi Fujita (Takeru Sato) trying to reach his wife Atsumi Kazu (Haruka Ayase), who has been comatose since a suicide attempt one year ago. He finds her constantly revising the horror manga she's drawing, saying she could finish and leave the apartment if he could just find a picture of a plesiosaur she drew in fourth grade. He searches for it outside her dream environment, first finding an unpublished comic and then following that to Hikone island where she grew up (and he spent that fourth-grade year), where a buried memory awaits.

The material itself isn't necessarily the most creative - technology to get inside the heads of coma patients is a classic bit of sci-fi - but Kurosawa and his co-writers (and original novelist Rokuro Inui) come up with neat details, such as "philosophical zombies" and jumbled-up dreams. His particular genre-film background comes in especially handy here, as it's no particular surprise when the subconscious mind of someone who writes and illustrates horror stories for a living contains zombies of a non-philosophical bent and other monsters, but beyond that, Kurosawa has always been one whose movies played on the idea of a world where things suddenly don't make sense, perfect for this sort of movie. He's also accomplished enough to pull off an impressively constructed "how'd they do that" scene where Koichi and Atsumi walk into fog in one location and out in another despite it being a single tracking shot.

Full review on EFC

Ejecta

* * (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival: Action!, DCP)

In the Q&A after the movie, the filmmakers described how Ejecta sort of came together as a sort of chimera, with its two distinct tracks being shot well apart and stitched together like a Frankenstein's monster. It's not necessarily a bad idea - I don't really think I'd like to see either stretched to a full ninety minutes, even if each has something worth watching - but it doesn't quite come together as a greater whole.

Though cut together, with both built around talking to the same man, the two parts have distinct styles. One is found-footage, shoot by paranormal documentarian Joe Sullivan (Adam Seybold), who has come to a remote farm to interview William Cassidy (Julian Richings), who claims to have been abducted by aliens, and certainly seems erratic enough to support his claims that they did something to his head. That's certainly bolstered, for the audience at least, by the other scenes, where Cassidy is being held in a black site and interrogated by Dr. Tobin (Lisa Houle), who is also directing a team of government agents very interested in the aliens' latest visitation.

Both tracks are ways that filmmakers with a certain set of resources - not a lot of money but a capable cast - might go about making a sci-fi thriller, letting the actors build characters around necessary exposition and saving one's metaphorical and literal bullets for a big payoff. The trouble is, this tends to lead to unreliable narrators teasing the audience with hints rather than telling the bigger story, and while the whole team - writer Tony Burgess and directors/editors Chad Archibald & Matt Wiele - do yeoman's work keeping up the feel of forward motion while keeping actual resolution just out of reach, but there's just not a whole lot to it.

Full review on EFC

El Desierto (The Desert)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

There's a lot to like about Christoph Behl's post-apocalyptic love triangle, and the fact that it can be described as such without coming across as an annoying genre mismatch is just the start. It's a neat little entry into the canon of small stories that take place during the end of the world, albeit one that sacrifices most of the immediate physical damage to do it.

As far as they can tell - and in any real sense that matters - Axel (Lautaro Delgado) and Jonathan (William Prociuk) may be the last two men on Earth, with Ana (Victoria Almeida) the last woman. They've converted a house into a fortress and come up with rules to ensure their survival as well as (hopefully) their sanity, but it's no surprise that they're starting to reach their breaking point. Maybe it could have gone on indefinitely when it was just Axel and Jonathan, but adding Ana makes it a situation that is never going to go smoothly, even if things didn't wind up with Ana and Jonathan together and Axel burning with desire.

The cast is terrific in a situation where one not playing up to the standards set by the other two could have sunk the whole enterprise, or at least reduced it to something much less interesting. Behl makes the somewhat interesting choice of not having Axel's obsession bleed into envy, which makes the scenes with just Delgado and Prociuk a little more interesting. There's a sense of them being perfectly complimentary, with Axel's intensity a bit unnerving but Prociuk getting a certain amount of the same effect by portraying Jonathan as kind of laid-back - not the kind that gets people killed through inattention, but right on the border of detachment, a distinction that is not easy to see immediately.

Full review on EFC

Monsterz

* * (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

2011's Haunters was an excellent Korean movie that established a simple premise - two people with opposite superpowers (mind control and rapid healing) on a collision course - and delivered with entertaining action pieces, a likable cast of characters, and style to complement its straight-ahead drive. I figured it for a US remake, but Japan got there first, and sort of screwed it up.

The initial set-up is, in fact, almost exactly the same: Ten or fifteen years ago, an abusive father tried to kill his son but succeeded only in unleashing his powers to control anyone he sees, with the enraged boy forcing his father to snap his own neck. The boy is grown now, limping through the world on a prosthetic leg, making people give him whatever he needs and occasionally adding control just because he can. Elsewhere in the city, mild-mannered Shuichi Tanaka (Takayuki Yamada) works for a moving company with friends Jun (Taiga) and Akira (Motoki Ochiai), at least until he is hit by a car and recovers impossibly quickly. He eventually winds up taking a job in the driver's guitar shop and getting close to his daughter Kanae (Satomi Ishihara). When the "monster" (Tatsuya Fujiwara) robs the shop, it turns out that Shuichi is not vulnerable to his powers, and that just cannot be allowed!

This version, adapted by Yusuke Watanabe and directed by Hideo Nakata, has some nice details (although giving a kid with immense psychic powers a copy of the Akira manga to read and latch onto may have been a bad idea), but it also does some completely unnecessary things. Much like the recent Ju-on reboot, the cast skews younger than that of the original, and while there's a certain logic to it, there's also a certain bit of weight lost. It's a weird bit of narrow-casting to appeal to a core audience which is also reflected in how Kyu-nam's Ghanian and Turkish friends are now otaku or gay, with no mention of Kanae having a western mother. The unusual diversity of Haunters's cast played into a theme, which is why seeing it reduced is somewhat disappointing.

Full review on EFC

Málmhaus (Metalhead)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Metalhead doesn't exactly sneak up on an audience - it's clear from the start that writer/director Ragnar Bragason has some pretty good ideas for his story about grief and mourning, especially when he trains his camera on the parents of the title character. And yet, is still never quite what the viewer might expect, especially if he or she comes in expecting a simple story of a young woman out of sync with her small town (although that's in there and also done well).

Nine years ago (in 1983), Icelandic farmers Karl (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) and Droplaug (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) sent their daughter Hera to fetch her older brother Baldur for dinner, only to witness him slipping and falling into a still-running thresher. Hera responded by taking possession of Baldur's heavy-metal record collection and immersing herself in that. Now a young woman, Hera (Thorbjörg Helga Dyrfjörd) wait for the bus out of town every morning but never actually gets on - which is more than can be said for her still shell-shocked parents - and her devotion to this music along with her generally hostile demeanor has the conservative farming community alarmed, though the new priest (Thröstur Leó Gunnarsson) may be more understanding than she expects.

After the horrific opening, there's not always that much for Hera to actually do, but Bragason keeps her just busy enough for things to crank along. In this town of Hof, she's the squarest of pegs in the roundest of holes, but by this point all the big clashes seem to be over, and the focus is on how static a situation is: Hera is pointedly not leaving, and is continuing to orbit her lifelong friend Knutur (Hannes Óli Ágústsson) if only because they're seemingly the only young people around. Her drunken acting out is entirely predictable by this point, while Karl and Droplaug are in a similar state of paralysis. It's such an utterly effective look at what it's like to be unable to move past grief or to be stuck in a town that seemingly has nothing for you but your family that one might not notice just how close things have come to a breaking point.

Full review on EFC

Welcome to New York

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Closing Night, HD)

That Welcome to New York is a long, rambling movie is not in and of itself a bad thing. There are times early on where it's a definite plus as the audience is kind of assaulted with the excesses of M. Devereaux (Gerard Depardieu), and compacting either that our what comes later might change the impact. Ultimately, I wonder what it's about. Who is never in doubt: The movie is based closely enough on the Dominique Strauss-Khan case closely enough to have three screens worth of disclaimers at the front, but pointedly fictionalized in a way that causes it to lose a bit of weight.

Devereaux, an official at the World Bank and potentially the next President of France, has tremendous appetites, especial of the sexual variety, and no compunctions about indulging them at any time, whether it be with the attractive and accommodating women he has hired for his office in Washington or the escorts he and his traveling companion hire on a trip to New York. The next morning, a hotel maid walks in on him as he's coming out of the shower...

... and cut to Devereaux checking out, creeping his daughter's Canadian boyfriend out with his enthusiastic sex talk that includes speculation about the young couple's activities, and making his way to the plane while the NYPD takes the maid's statement and discovers just how little time they have to arrest him before he flees the country. When they do, word reaches Devereaux's wife Simone (Jacqueline Bisset) in the middle of a charity dinner, forcing the publishing heiress to come to America and see to his defense, try to salvage her ambitions for him, and see if her husband realizes just what sort of damage he's done.

Full review on EFC

A Master Builder

I'm just going to put this up quick, because it closes in Boston tomorrow (Thursday 18 September 2014) and it's worth a look if you didn't realize it was playing. I didn't even know it was a thing until I saw a trailer about a week ago and thought "Wallace Shawn and John Demme? Hmmm..."

One interesting bit I came across while poking at IMDB as reference was Shawn saying he doesn't have a sense of humor but just does what directors tell him to how they tell him to, trusting that they know why him doing it would draw a laugh. I am not sure whether that is some next-level joke-telling on his part. It's possible, since I can't think of any times when he's really the best part of a movie that is otherwise not funny, but it doesn't seem likely . Adds a little something to a bit early in this one, though, when he's playing Solness as dead serious and snaps at another character for not getting a joke which certainly didn't seem much like a joke.

A Master Builder

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 September 2014 in Landmark Kenmore Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

Like a lot of people, I tend to have this vague knowledge that Wallace Shawn is more than the guy with the funny voice and the odd face, that he's a playwright and an actor who has been a central part of some of the artiest of art-house films. A Master Builder offers up a glimpse of the more somber, serious-minded Shawn, and it's an eye-opening reminder of what he can do that even his less completely comedic roles don't always hint at. In fact, it's almost strange when something like his frequent screen persona emerges.

Shawn plays Halvard Solness, the architect of the title, who is a petty tyrant even as he receives visitors on his sickbed. First is Knut Brovik (Andre Gregory), father to Solness's apprentice Ragnar (Jeff Biehl) - himself engaged to the firm's secretary/bookkeeper Kaia Fosli (Emily Cass McDonnell) - begging his former student to allow Ragnar to take the lead on an upcoming project, so that he can see something his son built before he dies. Then comes Dr. Herdal (Larry Pine), who is not just the family physician but probably the only friend Halvard's wife Aline (Julie Hagerty) has. And, finally, there is Hilde Wangel (Lisa Joyce), a 22-year-old traveler who claims Solness made certain promises to her ten years ago, an encounter he finds it distressingly difficult to remember.

A Master Builder comes from Henrik Ibsen's play, which translated for Andre Gregory's stage adaptation before writing the screenplay, and there's no mistaking its stage roots. It breaks down into several long conversations, sometimes with participants dropping in and out, but generally finding a resting position in the one-on-one. Between Shawn and Ibsen, the dialog never sounds entirely natural - it's the sort of [screen] play that exists in large part to put meaty chunks of words in actors' mouths - but does a fair job of making scenes between two people feel conversational as opposed to being just ways for them to extract information from each other for the audience's benefit. The play does occasionally err in the other direction, in that folks not enraptured with the performances may occasionally grumble about how these folks are taking far too much care not to mention important things until the moment of maximum dramatic impact.

Full review at EFC

Finding Fanny & But Always

Two days, two day-and-date releases of Asian movies at Fenway, both of which offered the opportunity grumble a bit about how the quality of everyone's English!

In all seriousness, Finding Fanny was kind of weird on that count. If you've ever watched an Indian movie, you'll notice that there are a lot of English phrases dropped right in the middle of Hindi dialogue, but generally still subtitled because it can be hard for one's brain to shift from reading to listening at just the right time. Fanny is subtitled, so it took ten minutes or so for me to realize that the whole thing was actually in English, period, with almost no Hindi dialogue but just a few words dropped in mid-sentence. The subtitles were helpful with the accents, much like Americans sometimes need it with Scots and working-class Englishmen, although I wonder if I'd have been able to understand better if they weren't there as a crutch.

In But Always, well, it's more of the usual - English that probably sounds pretty good to the Mandarin-speakers who make up the film's main audience but off to us Americans, including the supposedly native-speakers they meet in New York. Someday I want to find a polite way to ask someone how it happens - do Chinese studios just grab any western-looking people they can get off the street and offer them $20 for a day's work even if they're not actors or is this conscious direction, getting people who speak English perfectly well to use rhythms and emphasis that correspond to Mandarin much more than the language they're speaking so that the audience will pick up the right emotional cues?

Both of these movies turned out pretty rough in their own ways: As much as Finding Fanny made me laugh big at times, it had some bits in between that you have to grind through. And But Always... look, I'm probably the least gung-ho person I know when the subject of 9/11 comes up, but I felt like it was used pretty cheaply here, a specter raised in the very first scene that doesn't actually mean anything in the story aside from a potential extra tragedy/obstacle thrown into these two people's love story when the movie catches up, then a footnote implying that the world outside China is scary and dangerous and folks should stay home.

Ah, well. At least China Lion no longer seems to be strictly tied to AMC in America any more, and given how the folks booking movies for Fenway seem fairly willing to serve expatriate audiences with the Indian things, maybe they'll be more reliable in picking these movies up than Boston Common was (and if they could get Iceman next week and keep it around long enough for me to get back from Austin, that would be great too).

Finding Fanny

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 September 2014 in Regal Fenway #8 (first-run, DCP)

After a year or so of going to the Indian movies at the local multiplex, one gets a certain idea of what to expect, generally a musical masala picture that's odd by conventional Hollywood standards. Sometimes, though, you get something like Finding Fanny, which is an entirely different sort of weird: A quirky indie-style comedy that's okay when cute but better when the claws come out.

It starts in Pocolim, Goa - the sort of village you won't find on a map and where life passes at the same speed you're moving, to quote narrator Angelina (Deepika Padukone). Ferdinand Pinto (Naseeruddin Shah) is the postmaster there, so it's odd that he has a letter in which he proposed to one Stefanie "Fanny" Fernandes returned forty-six years after it was sent. Angie sees that the only thing to do is to bring Ferdie to Fanny, but actually doing it will also involve Savio de Gama (Arjun Kapoor), just back from six years in Mumbai for his father's funeral, Don Pedro Cleto Colaco (Pankaj Kapur), a world-renowned artist who has recently taken up residence in the town, and Rosalie Eucharistica (Dimple Kapadia), Angie's busybody mother-in-law whom Don Pedro wished to be his voluptuous muse. It should just be a simple morning drive, but it's not surprising that things don't go according to plan for this group.

The initial burst of narration and character introductions may have viewers bracing themselves for an onslaught of too-cute small-town eccentricity, and it's not exactly unwarranted. The movie is filled with oddballs who seem to mostly spend their time being odd rather than accomplishing anything, with Angie fitting into the pixie slot while Savio comes off a bit of a curmudgeon. It's not unpleasant, most of the time, and in fact has some nice little moments as the cast plays off of each other. Director Homi Adajania and co-writer Kersi Khambatta just seem to make the common assumption that weird automatically implies funny or delightful.

Full review at EFC

Yi Sheng Yi Shi (But Always)

* * (out of four)
Seen 15 September 2014 in Regal Fenway #12 (first-run, DCP)

Is it cynical of me to start counting shots between a "New York 2001" caption and the first glimpse of the World Trade Center, or of writer/director Snow Zou for putting the audience in that position? That's not the worst thing about But Always, though; which takes an inoffensive but enjoyable romance and finds ways to make it uncomfortable when a little bit of thought is applied.

After that opening, the film jumps back to 1976 Beijing, when a doctor goes off on a dangerous mission to help earthquake victims, but gives her 4-year-old daughter Anran the dream of following in her footsteps. Five years later, her father sends Anran to a school in a different neighborhood where she meets poor orphan Zhao Yongyuan, although his uncle Ji (Lam Suet) takes him out of town when his grandmother dies. Come 1993, Yongyuan (Nicholas Tse) returns to Beijing, where Anran (Gao Yuanyuan) is finishing college with an eye toward medical school in America. Their paths cross, and they fall in love, but it won't be that easy.

The thing is, it could be that easy. The story pivots on Yongyuan deciding to break things off for Arjan's own good, which is kind of insulting even in the best of uses, but Zou never seems to see it that way, and the New York set latter segments of the movie not only fail to acknowledge this, but actually push Anran's and Yongyuan's reunion to a kind of creepy place. It's that area where men are applying pressure disguised as grand gestures and what choices the woman makes are either born out of guilt or what men will either give permission or deny opportunity to do. It looks romantic because nobody seems to have consciously bad intentions and scenes call back to earlier moments that were the real deal, but there's something not right underneath.

Full review at EFC