No visitors? No visitors. Just a full day that had me really scrambling out of "the office" early enough that I feel like I'm going to have to make some of this week up somehow and just enough time between Crumbs and Marshland to grab dinner with Gabriella, who suffers from much less option-paralysis as I do in this situation.
Not a whole lot to say, otherwise. It was a very solid day - even the kind of disappointing film, The Invitation, had things it did very well, and Tag deserves a little more mulling over.
One thing that didn't make it into a review because it really doesn't matter, but "Javier Gutierrez" felt like it was Spanish for "Michael Keaton" in a way that was almost distracting while watching to movie; they not only look similar, but Juan is this charming/funny character with the potential for darkness that is right in Keaton's warehouse. If they were going to do an English-language remake, he would kill in that role. Of course, taking this movie out of post-Franco Spain would gut it, but I'm almost willing to accept that with this hypothetical casting.
Kkeut-kka-ji-gan-da (A Hard Day)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
"Chekhov's _____" is an extremely easy joke to make when watching and reviewing thrillers and the like, and like most trope-related comments, folks often say that in terms of "don't do this" as opposed to "make sure you do it well". I mention this because A Hard Day has a fake-out/play-out that delighted me, and making sure that people who know movies knew something was coming was a big part of why it worked. Writer/director Kim Seong-hun does a lot of that, setting things up in plain sight but creating delight from how the situations he's created evolve.
Just look at how this begins: Detective Ko Gun-su (Lee Sun-kyun), speeding away from his mother's funeral (much to the disdain of his sister) because his fellow corrupt cops need him to help out with hiding evidence with Internal Affairs on the way. But wouldn't you know it, he hits a man with his car while swerving to avoid a dog. Covering everything up is a real pain, and that's before it turns out that the man he hit was not some anonymous vagrant - and that someone knows he's hiding something.
Kim piles a whole lot on the audience from the word go, but in doing so he allows the rest of the film to switch into problem-solving mode, and for all that Gun-su is a character who is not going to immediately endear himself to the audience for his pure heart and good intentions, there is a real delight in watching him, faced with a high-stakes puzzle, come up with a clever way to use what's available and still sweat because he's pressed for time. The film has a number of scenes like that, and while it doesn't always prefer them to a straight-up fight, turning a fight into a situation where the audience is keeping track of stuff tends to work better than Gun-su just slugging away.
Full review on EFC.
"Fish Out of Water"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
Someday, someone should curate a post-apocalyptic anthology film where each segment is something like "Fish Out of Water", showing how the same end-of-the-world scenario plays out around the globe, even in such unconventional locations as Northern Canada, where this short has a scarred hunter and ice-fisher (Mira Hall) struggling to make ends meet when the ice is endless and the fish are mutated before finding another survivor (Ella Bertelsen).
It's an impressively atmospheric piece, leaving out all the irrelevant backstory about this world and woman but making the everyday details of it specific and intriguing. Indeed, much of the short's ten minutes seems to be about getting the feel of the place, making the actual horror of the piece quick and, while a bit out of left field, particularly tragic for that. Throw in some nice creature and make-up work, and "Fish Out of Water" becomes quite the impressive and unique story of life after the fall.
Crumbs
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
Science fiction films about a man on a quest in a post-collapse wasteland are so far from uncommon that entries in the subgenre need something truly special in order to stand out from a low-budget haze of deserts, abandoned buildings, and pessimistic philosophy. Well, Crumbs comes from Ethiopia, and it's a comedy of sorts. It may not be to everyone's taste, but writer/director Miguel Llansó certainly made something that audience have seen a thousand times into something of which they've seldom seen the like.
According to the "History Written for No-One" at the start, humanity is more or less dying out of its own accord,no longer interested in creating new life as its creations fail. That means hunchbacked scavenger Candy (Daniel Tadesse) has relatively little competition as he picks over the scraps of fallen civilizations. It not just his latest finds that send him on a rater quest, though - the spaceship that has been hovering over the land since the last war has become more active, throwing off magnetic pulses that briefly activate the electricity in the bowling alley and his beloved, Sayat (Selam Tesfaye), call home. He consults with a witch (Shitay Abreha), who tells him to let the train guide him to the city, where he will find Santa Claus (Tsegaye Abegaz).
It is actually stranger than that: As Candy heads toward the city, Sayat finds the alley's ball return turning on and mostly spewing out bowling balls, although the occasional variation is disturbing. A thrift-store owner (Mengistu Berhanu) may lowball scavengers on the pieces of 20th/21st-Century pop culture detritus they find even while spinning tales of how they were valued by the possibly-mythical Molegon Warriors, and it's not hard to see the thrust of that, at least - the effort our civilization has put into promoting its frequently silly and hollow pop culture and exporting it around the world means that it's what will last and be treated as having significance. It gives the film a world where Michael Jordan is still worshiped as an idol and Michael Jackson LPs can be a nest egg despite a lack of context for them, and where the myth of Superman is badly misinterpreted.
Full review on EFC.
La isla mínima (Marshland)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
While, to a certain extent, murder is murder, a story that could be easily set in any era becomes much more fascinating when placed in a specific time, and not just because cell phones, GPS, and security cameras make things "too easy". Marshland, for instance, could easily be done in the present day, but setting it in 1980, a time when Spain was very much in transition, makes it even more thrilling.
The period is most visible in the detectives sent to a small town to investigate a pair of missing sisters - Juan (Javier Gutierrez) has had a long career under the Franco regime, and tends to think in terms of having dictatorially-backed authority; Pedro (Raul Arevalo) is younger and has seen his career stall as a result of writing a liberal-leaning letter to the editor he wrote. It's soon clear that mother Rocio (Nerea Barros) has something to share and father Rodrigo (Antonio de la Torre) has something to hide, but even more importantly, the father of another girl who went missing a year earlier convinces them that this may be the work of a serial killer. They soon have a suspect (Jesus Castro), though forensics seem to imply it wasn't him, and a potential next victim (Ana Tomeno) - but can they uncover the truth while still acting within the law?
That, arguably, is the real story that director & co-writer Alberto Rodriguez is telling, and it's one that never truly gets old: The very nature and importance of police work lends itself to abuse of authority that creates mistrust, and those who would attempt reform and the old guard are never going to see eye to eye. Rodriguez seldom has Juan and Pedro actively opposing each other - indeed, Juan seems to support Pedro in principle even if he tends toward the pragmatic - but there's a tension underneath that he constantly fans, and the difficulty of having police with different values and histories working together is the idea that the film ends on and wants the audience to ponder afterward.
Full review on EFC.
The Invitation
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
That I was asking myself when the stabbing was going to start fairly early on in The Invitation implies bad things, either about my character or the filmmakers' performance in terms of telling a story that, in fact, need not have that sort of violence at all. So which is it? Well, I'm fairly sure that I'm not a terrible person, enough so that I'll at least entertain the idea that this was a sign of building tension.
Tension is certainly understandable; it starts with Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) on the way to a dinner party with a fancy invitation and a reason to be uncomfortable: It's being hosted by Will's alarmingly cheerful ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband David (Michiel Huisman) in the house where Will and Eden lost their son - and Eden had more or less dropped off the radar for the previous two years. Five out of six long-time friends of Will and Eden are already there, as is Sadie (Lindsay Burdge), a houseguest they met while spending time in Mexico. Another acquaintance from that time with "The Invited", Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch), also joins them, and they show an video which throws the already edgy mood even further off.
The reasonably clever thing about the script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (against whom director Karyn Kusama apparently holds no feelings from their also writing Aeon Flux) is that it does not, necessarily, need to develop into a thriller. In fact, for the first good chunk of the movie, the drama is all driven by conventional things - Will is still obviously a wreck years after his son's death while Eden's deciding not to bother with negative emotions seems obviously unhealthy (if also practical) and a contrast to how the house seems to be locked down like a fortress, and the tension between Will and David is obvious. Even the obviously heavy foreshadowing of Will having to put down a coyote he hit on the drive up may perhaps only be reflected in that video of an assisted suicide. There's meaty material there, although the sort of movie where people simply confront each other about their past and emotions could probably be done with roughly half as many characters.
Full review on EFC.
Real Oni Gokko (Tag)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Tag is the most recent of three films at the festival by Sion Sono, who is having an absurdly productive year, and there are points where it seems like this frantic pace is overtaking him, like you can't expect him to crank this much out and still expect all of it to have some sort of plot that makes sense. He almost seems to be asking us to just take the often jaw-dropping scenes, accept that the weird ways they're being strung together have some weight, and accept that such an assembly is more entertaining than most movies. If that were the case, he wouldn't be wrong.
After all, he does start the movie with one of the bloodiest school outings ever before immediately slipping into upending everything for main character Mitsuko (Reina Triendl) on a regular basis, right down to her situation and name, swapping in a new actress with each of those major changes. Nothing seems off-limits, and the over-the-top absurdity initially seems to have no pattern other than the complete lack of men on-screen, and just as soon as that seems firmly established, it's time to change things up again. These scenes seem impossible to link up even though Sono has them run right into each other; it's a contradiction that says amazing things about what a filmmaker of Sono's innovation and energy can do.
And yet, even as Sono establishes an even stranger sci-fi premise, things click into place, and what initially seems like a gentle satire about the male gaze snaps into sharper focus. Video games seem to be the biggest target, specifically referenced in the dialog while also building a sort of demure fantasy woman who can kick ass but only with the gamer's guidance. Not that the medium has any sort of monopoly on this, but the last act certainly cries out for breaking out of the control of men and stereotypes, even if Sono's not going to give Mitsuko/Keiko/Izumi any sort of speech about it. The audience is expected to unpack this on its own, and I suspect it may take a few more viewings before I truly manage that.
Which is fine, because Sono has made an immensely entertaining movie that will be a blast to revisit (though comparing it to The Chasing World, he seems to have retained very little beyond the idea of analogs on multiple worlds from the source material). This got the best of festival award, as did Triendl - I do kind of wonder if the judges realized she shared the role with two other actresses - and while I don't necessarily see that right away, I wouldn't be shocked if I could be convinced.
Friday, August 07, 2015
Wednesday, August 05, 2015
The Fantasia Daily 2015.20 (2 August 2015): Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, Outer Limits of Animation, Experimenter, Ninja the Monster, and They Look Like People
I think this is about where I start falling way behind every year, for a number of reasons from these short programs taking an undue amount of time to write up to just having written a relatively large number of words for twenty days straight along with seeing a bunch of movies and pumping my body through of more less-than-ideal foodstuffs than usual. I don't really feel burnt out on the festival, even if I won't mind going home, but at some point, the writing just slows down. I think there are also more early shows at this point, and with the tablet busted...
It's time for the annual "Jay tries to match people to names despite not catching much of the French in the introduction" game! Left to right, I believe we're talking to:
1. Annie Amaya, who directed "Office Paint" and introduced herself in English,
2. Maude D'Amboise-Courcelles, who directed "Noir Manhattan" and mentioned un detectif in her introduction,
3. Alvaro Marinho, perhaps
4. Gabrielle Le Blanc? I caught very little of what she said.
5. Max Woodward, who directed "A Free Lunch" and introduced himself in English.
6. Kelly Harpes?
The lesson, as always, is that I really need to bone up on my French before coming here next year, because I feel terrible wanting to give these talented local animators their due among all the other things looking for their due but only being able to do so halfway.
The next Q&A of the day had Ken Ochiai, director of Ninja the Monster and the terrific Uzumasa Limelight from a couple years ago, giving a remarkably candid Q&A. That doesn't mean it was all about "I know I made a movie that isn't very good and here's how things turned out that way", more that he got into details about the making of the movie that remind you that making things intended to be commercial, there are things not mentioned. I'm not sure how thrilled his producers would be at him describing how this was actually shot a couple years ago and two years were spent on the FX - because instead of hiring a special effects house, they farmed it out to students at a VFX school who would work for free, and were really starting from scratch, many having never touched the software they were using before. They did a fairly good job, and it's probably a more common practice than one might think, but it's kind of not cool.
He also mentioned that it was a project initiated by a new "Blue Line" imprint of Japan's Shokichu studio which was mostly focused producing films for international audiences, with the irony being that if you want to make a ninja or samurai film these days, that's probably the best way to do it, because Japanese audiences generally don't go for that in large numbers unless it's an adaptation of a popular manga (and before you tut-tut, Americans, how many big-budget westerns are we cranking out these days?). They started with little more than a title - and Ochiai, who spent 15 years when younger in Los Angeles and admits to feeling a little bit like a foreigner whether in North America or Japan, did argue the grammar and punctuation with the studio bosses - and shot for ten days around Kyoto. I kind of wonder if it was one of the studios that used to crank out samurai pictures like a factory mentioned in Uzumasa Limelight. Some fun low-budget independent filmmaking talk there - when asked about the locations, he said that in some cases, they would be shooting in the same bamboo forest just outside of Kyoto, but pointing the camera one direction for mountains and the other for water, making it look like they'd traveled farther.
He also talked about how, when he cast Dean Fujioka and Aoi Morikawa, they were rather less well-known, with Fujioka having mostly worked in Taiwan and Morikawa (I think) not yet having done The World of Kanako or Fatal Frame. Interestingly, while mentioning Fujioka's work, I don't think he brought up The Pinkertons, a Canadian mystery series set in post-Civil War Kansas City which is in part funded by Japanese broadcasters, a kind of genuine oddity which might have been applauded for being Canadian.
Last visitors of the day were actors MacLeod Andrews & Margaret Ying Drake and writer/director/many other things Perry Blackshear of They Look Like People, and yes, that's the best picture you're getting from this angle.
Another really fun one, both for their making movies with nothing stories (it was shot in the director's apartment, and they basically forced themselves to get something done by booking tickets before they had a script) and for how this was their first festival with a genre focus - the film has been good enough to more mainstream-oriented fests, so when they name-dropped Absentia during Q&As there, people would just sort of look at them blankly, while at Fantasia it was "oh, yeah, that played here in this room!" Well, they also got a good response at the Brattle in Boston (mentioning them by name) in part because IFFBoston teamed with BUFF for the presentation, so it was a bit more of a horror-loving audience.
SPOILERS!
I also really liked how, when asked about alternate endings, they talked about how when you're doing something like this, you've always got the "gotcha!" ending in mind or the nasty one, but that wasn't really what this movie was about, and how sticking that on may be exciting and kind of satisfying to the gorehounds who were potentially a big part of their audience, it wouldn't be what was best for the the story, which has to lead somewhere. I wish a lot of horror filmmakers would take that to heart.
!SRELIOPS
Well, this being late means that I'm skipping the "where I'll be" for Monday and Tuesday and just saying I'll hit A Christmas Horror Story at 7:30 and then likely try in vain to get into Attack on Titan with my pass afterward. Deathgasm, Assassination Classroom, and Cop Car are all good fun if you want one last bit of Fantasia yourself.
Khalil Gibran's The Prophet
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
Khlail Gibran's The Prophet is a labor of love for producer Salma Hayek, and like a fair number of those projects, it's got some rough edges as the desire to realize a complicated project within a window of opportunity may have taken priority over waiting until it could be perfect. Or maybe not; the production may have been perfectly smooth, and some spots are certainly excellent enough to justify the enthusiasm for the film.
The main story is okay. It introduces a trouble-making little girl, Almitra, who has squawked to a seagull but not spoken to anybody else since her father died two years ago. When her mother Kamila (voice of Salma Hayek) is not trying to wrangle her, she's the housekeeper for Mustafa (voice of Liam Neeson), a poet and painter who has been under house arrest for seven years. On the day Almitra follows her mother to work, a man from the government comes to tell Mustafa he is being set free and returned to his home country - although Almitra hears different.
Don't get me wrong, this framing piece isn't bad; it's got a nice voice cast with Hayek, Neeson, Quvenzhané Wallis, John Krasinski, Frank Langella, Alfred Molina, and John Rhys-Davies. The Lion King's Roger Allers directs, and while he doesn't have the same resources he did with Disney, the mostly hand-drawn images move smoothly, the storytelling is clear, and the characters expressive. When he gets to take a flight of fancy, it's neat to see, as are the humorous moments when he can stretch his cartooning muscles. Sometimes I suspect that he has a hard time connecting the heavy and heady material with an intended young audience - this is the story of a man who is a political prisoner in part for publishing philosophy, and trying to present that in a way palatable to kids Almitra's age can leave it feeling like an introductory lecture to older viewers.
Full review on EFC.
"Aubade"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Director Mauro Carraro credits a Mich Gerber concert as the inspiration for this short film of people emerging from a lake, a black sun casting shadows, and paper boats the size of barges, and Gerber's music on the score makes a gorgeous film even more memorable. The whole thing is arguably his introduction, and he gets something akin to a curtain call at the end.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this film, though, is what Carraro does with lighting. This film isn't quite built to look like conventional animation, but is still relatively flat, but the lighting is designed to glow, reflect off the water, and have shadows come from the sun rather than be dispelled by it. It seldom seems the primary purpose, but it's a big part of the impression the film makes.
"Be the Snow"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
The description of this one involves a pillow running away from home and then getting homesick, and I don't know if I necessarily got that from the storytelling, more seeing it as the pillow going out to run errands initially then wondering what the skydiving was about. It doesn't really matter, I suppose - the jokes are pretty funny and cleverly animated regardless, and the combination between live-action and the animated pillow character is impressively seamless.
It's super-cute all around, although it shows just how tricky dialogue-free filmmaking can be, especially when you're also relying on FX shots that probably have to be rationed pretty tightly. Not that I'd want this short done any other way, especially since it's quite possible I missed a cue or two at the start. And, hey, any film with a credit for "...as blonde cheating cat" at least has that going for it
"Poussières d'étoiles"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
One minute long, but it has some impressive animation. Most impressively, it seems to tell a clear emotional story - a young person going through cancer treatment and being comforted by his teddy bear - without ever spelling it out. Director Gabrielle Le Blanc may be just out of school, but she may have a bright future with this as her calling card.
"Timber"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
"Timber" starts out feeling kind of clever, with anthropomorphic logs from sticks to stumps shivering in the midst of a forest that has been clear-cut, and the pairing we get initially - an enthusiastic young twig and a weathered trunk segment - immediately work as characters. The hint of fear they show when the campfire is first lit is a tease, but then things get crazy.
What comes after that is mean cartooning only partially ameliorated by the cute designs, working in large part because it does get at an underlying truth, that it can be far easier for the poor to turn on each other than the people actually responsible for their situation. It's an even sharper barb that the short started out with, making it even more memorable.
"A Free Lunch"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
One of two shorts in the program inspired by the same school assignment, and I think my perception of it may have been skewed by hearing as much, and that it was about a guy who finds an apple, though told via ink blots and sound effects. It works well enough, but I wonder if I would have found the apple munching just random sounds otherwise.
"Poussières d'étoiles"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Not a whole lot to say about this one. It's two minutes of multicolored grains that form images, and I dig it in the same way I really like the work of PES. There's also a context to it that kind of got buried for me in the middle of a 90-minute program
"Junk Girl"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Oh, no, now other people are explicitly making Tim Burton movies!
I kid; after all, I found myself liking this movie about a sad young woman "made of junk" who tries to scrape by in a presumably-Iranian city (the clothing matches, although the headlines in the paper are mostly Harry Potter gags) only to face disgust and occasionally violence. It's very nicely done, if a downer, with the expressiveness of the characters' faces seemingly much higher than is typical for stop-motion, or CGI made to resemble stop-motion.
"Late Night Live Jazz"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A very nifty little short by Mathias Menten from Belgium, which starts with a busker getting thrown off the Metro and seeming to have nowhere to go until he finds a card from "Le Club" among his change. Maybe he should have been suspicious upon seeing that this place was located in a scary-looking castle.
Menten's got a distinctive style for animation, and the thick blacks do a neat job of conveying the shadowy environment while still the audience to see plenty of what's going on. The jazzy soundtrack is pretty nice as well, and, hey, at least the cute vampire vocalist seems fond of our hero at the end!
"Last Dance on the Main"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Animated documentaries are odd things, and I'm certain that I didn't get as much out of this primarily French-language one as I might have some others, but I liked it. Rather than just rotoscoping talking heads, filmmaker Aristofanis Soulikias gives this picture a cool style that suggests the shabby-but-beloved neighborhood it focuses on - although also tying in with how, at the time Hydro Quebec wanted to demolish it for a new, modern building, it had remained an artistic haven but become more upscale.
It's a nifty little film; I'd like to see it with English subtitles at some point.
"Molinari Mouvement"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
What you get when abstract animation is inspired by abstract art: Director Alvaro Marinho takes works of Guido Molinari and sets their shapes in motion, blending it with music to create a pleasing set of images. Admittedly, I'm artistically ignorant enough that I initially thought Marinho was playing with a test pattern, but it was still nifty to watch.
"Office Paint"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
This is the other short film that came from the same assignment as "A Free Lunch", and I liked it a bit more. Not just because I didn't have an intended plot laid out, but because director Annie Amaya seemed to let the sounds guide the animation, creating something that feels like a new way to see something familiar.
"The Mortal Flame"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A nifty little adventure in which a maquette that seems to start out just wandering around an artist's studio which then becomes a larger, stranger world. The adventure itself is not that memorable - it's another one where I can kind of see what it was going for after reading the description, but not necessarily at the time. I really liked the imagery, though, especially the typewriter revealed as the snow around it thawed.
"Noir Manhattan"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A minute long and pretty much leading up to one joke, but I kind of love this one. Director Maude D'Amboise-Courcelles gives her short a style that's kind of film noir and kind of pin-up, depending on which of the two characters we're looking at, and I love the voice actor she found for the detective, even if I only understood bits and pieces of the untranslated French.
It hit the target, and did it well.
"Semi Sauf"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Another really short one, but it gets some weird but cool cartooning in quickly, as a Frankensteined frog-mouse escapes a lab, discovers a mouse-frog, and... Well, that would be telling.
Quick, adventurous, and darkly funny. I'd like to see director Kelly Harpes do more with this world and its characters, although I'm sure whatever comes next will be worth seeing.
"Deep Space"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Seven minutes makes this one of the longer parts of the program, and it's also one of the most entertaining, although in pretty divergent ways. On the one hand, the art style is very cool and the music was funky in a way that complemented it perfectly. On the other hand, my notes for the film basically read "weird creatures fucking". Which, don't get me wrong, turns out to be very funny indeed, especially as the poor astronaut trying to find one form of intelligent life on this place so he can get home has to deal with a whole planet full of animals with one thing on their minds.
There were some in the audience who felt that this wore out its welcome, but seven minutes doesn't quite get it there (though the final bit is admittedly a bit tired). It's a very funny little picture, although obviously not for everyone.
"Missing One Player"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
The latest from Chinese animator Lei Lei ("Ray Lei" in the subtitles here) is a bit more story-oriented and less abstract than some of his previous shorts, although maybe just barely so. It's got an asteroid heading toward Earth, a panicking population that has many acting out, and three people who just want to play mahjongg but need a fourth.
Like his other shorts, this looks like very little else, put together from what look like cutouts from propaganda posters and sometimes limited in small movements but with great sweep on the larger scale. The music by Stars Lee is pretty great too, making for a short that seems to pack a lot into four minutes.
"Disconnector"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A very spiffy little thing by Faiyaz Jafri who did everything from music to animation, and while sometimes it's got the feel of a one-man show in that the animation is a little too smooth, it's a look that works for it: By resembling the too-slick look of dance games, it makes the link the the virtual reality harness feel more natural, making it much easier to get across how synthetic those experiences are, even if they do resemble the world outside.
It's fun to listen to, as well - the poppy music fits the story perfectly and makes the whole exciting, even if the ultimate message is that something real is certainly better.
"Oh Wal"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Oooo-kay. Notes on this one: "Cat riding in [fake] fish's mouth. Kills land whale w/ sushi kingdom".
It's certainly a trippy little short, though, kind of enhanced by looking like an "Itchy & Scratchy" cartoon from The Simpsons in spots. Only in spots, though, as this is very much its own thing that goes in its own weird, surreal directions. It is, sometimes, kind of weird for the sake of being weird, but it pulls the audience along with its strange internal logic and cute-but-violent world.
Experimenter
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I really hope that this one opens in Boston soon, because I'd like to give it a second look. I came out of it with an odd sort of ambivalence, liking almost all of what it did but feeling like there should have been more heft, especially with all the unusual techniques writer/director Michael Almereyda was using to make sure the audience was paying a little more attention. That's kind of unfair, though - isn't one of the things that usually makes biopics kind of eye-rolling the attempt to make a person's individual life a symbol of something else?
Indeed, in some ways I think that Almereyda is explicitly trying to buck this trend with Experimenter, even as he does look to make a point: It spends a lot of time focusing on the work of Stanley Milgram, detailing experiments well beyond the (in)famous "teacher/learner" experiment and pointedly mentioning that he wished he could be remembered for the quality and results of his work rather than the vaguely uncomfortable feelings it inspired in people who had not actually read it. It's paradoxical - it's about trying to take the simple emotional reaction out of an assessment of someone's life and how people behave, but in doing so it lacks the sharpness to puncture those preconceptions.
Maybe it works once given a chance to roll over in my head and recognize that I'm doing something I don't really want to do in judging this on first impressions. I'd kind of like another chance, because it's a really nifty fourth-wall-breaking, stylish-but-understated movie otherwise.
Full review on EFC.
Ninja the Monster
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
Director Ken Ochiai was unusually candid in his Q&A after this film, and one of the things he mentioned was that Japanese movies like Ninja the Monster are made with more than an eye toward the foreign market, opening on maybe five screens back home and hoping to make more money on home video elsewhere, and one can feel it straining for accessibility and against budget.
It looks and feels very flat - not bad, per se, just a bit underpopulated in some areas and with Aoi Morikawa putting in performances that feels muted as the Princess and many of the others in the cast seeming to be very one-note without regard to what's going on with the other actors or elsewhere in the movie. The camera is pointed at beautiful things when they're outside, and the sets and costumes are fine, if kind of off-the-rack, but there's very little that's distinctive.
On the plus side, the monsters are pretty great when we get a look at them, although it limits the action to something more FX-based than the actual swordfights you might want from a movie featuring samurai and ninjas. On the other hand, Ochiai does a fine job of making a horror/monster movie, with some cool moments and interesting designs. It just can't help feeling like such a targeted product in some ways, rather than a movie someone wanted to make.
Full review on EFC.
"The Strange Lives of the Not So Destined"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
I was caught up in "The Strange Lives of the Not So Destined" (which I don't think ever had such a memorable title on-screen) enough while watching it that it's a bit of a surprise that, writing three days later, I have a bit of trouble remembering what the thrust of it was. It gets some good humor and anguish out of a man (Adam Busch) who, on a lark, goes in to talk to a palm reader (Ashley Donigan) who knows everything, but what are we supposed to get out of it?
Understand, it's a kind of pleasant surprise that it doesn't lead to them pairing off, although their mindsets are too negative at the time for that to really be entertaining. It doesn't really get into what it must be like for her to know everything and see the Universe as completely deterministic, or him trying to fight his destiny, or maybe she's working with his disbelief to set him down a different path. Instead, things kind of seem to peter out without really saying anything.
They Look Like People
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It feels a bit spoilery to say that They Look Like People is seldom the movie it's expected to be from the description, which talks about how Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews) can see that most of the people around him are being taken over by aliens or demons or the like and is torn about recruiting his friend Christian (Evan Dumouchel) to the cause of stopping them. They don't hide that it's a "he might be crazy" movie, but the truth is, if you'll pardon the grammatical sin, "might" is pretty much superfluous in that description.
The neat thing is, filmmaker Perry Blackshear doesn't really try to play into the possibility that genre film fans might be so used to how these things play out - ambiguously-to-"he's right!", or with obliviousness leading to tragedy - that going a different direction might be a shock. From the very start, it's pretty clear where things stand, and rather than being tragic, there's a great deal of hope to the film, because Wyatt doesn't want to be that way, even if Blackshear and MacLeod do a really fantastic job of presenting just how convincing his delusions are.
A large part of the success may be down to how, while it's Wyatt's delusions that drive the film, it often feels much more like a small ensemble piece. Evan Dumouchel's Christian has his own thing going on that could spin off into a movie itself, and Margaret Ying Drake is a lot of fun as his potential girlfriend (also his boss, promoted over him). They are an entertaining group as opposed to just "normal" people, and that both means that we're able to take occasional breaks from building his world and that he's got a good place to come back to, if it goes that way.
Full review on EFC.
It's time for the annual "Jay tries to match people to names despite not catching much of the French in the introduction" game! Left to right, I believe we're talking to:
1. Annie Amaya, who directed "Office Paint" and introduced herself in English,
2. Maude D'Amboise-Courcelles, who directed "Noir Manhattan" and mentioned un detectif in her introduction,
3. Alvaro Marinho, perhaps
4. Gabrielle Le Blanc? I caught very little of what she said.
5. Max Woodward, who directed "A Free Lunch" and introduced himself in English.
6. Kelly Harpes?
The lesson, as always, is that I really need to bone up on my French before coming here next year, because I feel terrible wanting to give these talented local animators their due among all the other things looking for their due but only being able to do so halfway.
The next Q&A of the day had Ken Ochiai, director of Ninja the Monster and the terrific Uzumasa Limelight from a couple years ago, giving a remarkably candid Q&A. That doesn't mean it was all about "I know I made a movie that isn't very good and here's how things turned out that way", more that he got into details about the making of the movie that remind you that making things intended to be commercial, there are things not mentioned. I'm not sure how thrilled his producers would be at him describing how this was actually shot a couple years ago and two years were spent on the FX - because instead of hiring a special effects house, they farmed it out to students at a VFX school who would work for free, and were really starting from scratch, many having never touched the software they were using before. They did a fairly good job, and it's probably a more common practice than one might think, but it's kind of not cool.
He also mentioned that it was a project initiated by a new "Blue Line" imprint of Japan's Shokichu studio which was mostly focused producing films for international audiences, with the irony being that if you want to make a ninja or samurai film these days, that's probably the best way to do it, because Japanese audiences generally don't go for that in large numbers unless it's an adaptation of a popular manga (and before you tut-tut, Americans, how many big-budget westerns are we cranking out these days?). They started with little more than a title - and Ochiai, who spent 15 years when younger in Los Angeles and admits to feeling a little bit like a foreigner whether in North America or Japan, did argue the grammar and punctuation with the studio bosses - and shot for ten days around Kyoto. I kind of wonder if it was one of the studios that used to crank out samurai pictures like a factory mentioned in Uzumasa Limelight. Some fun low-budget independent filmmaking talk there - when asked about the locations, he said that in some cases, they would be shooting in the same bamboo forest just outside of Kyoto, but pointing the camera one direction for mountains and the other for water, making it look like they'd traveled farther.
He also talked about how, when he cast Dean Fujioka and Aoi Morikawa, they were rather less well-known, with Fujioka having mostly worked in Taiwan and Morikawa (I think) not yet having done The World of Kanako or Fatal Frame. Interestingly, while mentioning Fujioka's work, I don't think he brought up The Pinkertons, a Canadian mystery series set in post-Civil War Kansas City which is in part funded by Japanese broadcasters, a kind of genuine oddity which might have been applauded for being Canadian.
Last visitors of the day were actors MacLeod Andrews & Margaret Ying Drake and writer/director/many other things Perry Blackshear of They Look Like People, and yes, that's the best picture you're getting from this angle.
Another really fun one, both for their making movies with nothing stories (it was shot in the director's apartment, and they basically forced themselves to get something done by booking tickets before they had a script) and for how this was their first festival with a genre focus - the film has been good enough to more mainstream-oriented fests, so when they name-dropped Absentia during Q&As there, people would just sort of look at them blankly, while at Fantasia it was "oh, yeah, that played here in this room!" Well, they also got a good response at the Brattle in Boston (mentioning them by name) in part because IFFBoston teamed with BUFF for the presentation, so it was a bit more of a horror-loving audience.
SPOILERS!
I also really liked how, when asked about alternate endings, they talked about how when you're doing something like this, you've always got the "gotcha!" ending in mind or the nasty one, but that wasn't really what this movie was about, and how sticking that on may be exciting and kind of satisfying to the gorehounds who were potentially a big part of their audience, it wouldn't be what was best for the the story, which has to lead somewhere. I wish a lot of horror filmmakers would take that to heart.
!SRELIOPS
Well, this being late means that I'm skipping the "where I'll be" for Monday and Tuesday and just saying I'll hit A Christmas Horror Story at 7:30 and then likely try in vain to get into Attack on Titan with my pass afterward. Deathgasm, Assassination Classroom, and Cop Car are all good fun if you want one last bit of Fantasia yourself.
Khalil Gibran's The Prophet
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
Khlail Gibran's The Prophet is a labor of love for producer Salma Hayek, and like a fair number of those projects, it's got some rough edges as the desire to realize a complicated project within a window of opportunity may have taken priority over waiting until it could be perfect. Or maybe not; the production may have been perfectly smooth, and some spots are certainly excellent enough to justify the enthusiasm for the film.
The main story is okay. It introduces a trouble-making little girl, Almitra, who has squawked to a seagull but not spoken to anybody else since her father died two years ago. When her mother Kamila (voice of Salma Hayek) is not trying to wrangle her, she's the housekeeper for Mustafa (voice of Liam Neeson), a poet and painter who has been under house arrest for seven years. On the day Almitra follows her mother to work, a man from the government comes to tell Mustafa he is being set free and returned to his home country - although Almitra hears different.
Don't get me wrong, this framing piece isn't bad; it's got a nice voice cast with Hayek, Neeson, Quvenzhané Wallis, John Krasinski, Frank Langella, Alfred Molina, and John Rhys-Davies. The Lion King's Roger Allers directs, and while he doesn't have the same resources he did with Disney, the mostly hand-drawn images move smoothly, the storytelling is clear, and the characters expressive. When he gets to take a flight of fancy, it's neat to see, as are the humorous moments when he can stretch his cartooning muscles. Sometimes I suspect that he has a hard time connecting the heavy and heady material with an intended young audience - this is the story of a man who is a political prisoner in part for publishing philosophy, and trying to present that in a way palatable to kids Almitra's age can leave it feeling like an introductory lecture to older viewers.
Full review on EFC.
"Aubade"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Director Mauro Carraro credits a Mich Gerber concert as the inspiration for this short film of people emerging from a lake, a black sun casting shadows, and paper boats the size of barges, and Gerber's music on the score makes a gorgeous film even more memorable. The whole thing is arguably his introduction, and he gets something akin to a curtain call at the end.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this film, though, is what Carraro does with lighting. This film isn't quite built to look like conventional animation, but is still relatively flat, but the lighting is designed to glow, reflect off the water, and have shadows come from the sun rather than be dispelled by it. It seldom seems the primary purpose, but it's a big part of the impression the film makes.
"Be the Snow"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
The description of this one involves a pillow running away from home and then getting homesick, and I don't know if I necessarily got that from the storytelling, more seeing it as the pillow going out to run errands initially then wondering what the skydiving was about. It doesn't really matter, I suppose - the jokes are pretty funny and cleverly animated regardless, and the combination between live-action and the animated pillow character is impressively seamless.
It's super-cute all around, although it shows just how tricky dialogue-free filmmaking can be, especially when you're also relying on FX shots that probably have to be rationed pretty tightly. Not that I'd want this short done any other way, especially since it's quite possible I missed a cue or two at the start. And, hey, any film with a credit for "...as blonde cheating cat" at least has that going for it
"Poussières d'étoiles"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
One minute long, but it has some impressive animation. Most impressively, it seems to tell a clear emotional story - a young person going through cancer treatment and being comforted by his teddy bear - without ever spelling it out. Director Gabrielle Le Blanc may be just out of school, but she may have a bright future with this as her calling card.
"Timber"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
"Timber" starts out feeling kind of clever, with anthropomorphic logs from sticks to stumps shivering in the midst of a forest that has been clear-cut, and the pairing we get initially - an enthusiastic young twig and a weathered trunk segment - immediately work as characters. The hint of fear they show when the campfire is first lit is a tease, but then things get crazy.
What comes after that is mean cartooning only partially ameliorated by the cute designs, working in large part because it does get at an underlying truth, that it can be far easier for the poor to turn on each other than the people actually responsible for their situation. It's an even sharper barb that the short started out with, making it even more memorable.
"A Free Lunch"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
One of two shorts in the program inspired by the same school assignment, and I think my perception of it may have been skewed by hearing as much, and that it was about a guy who finds an apple, though told via ink blots and sound effects. It works well enough, but I wonder if I would have found the apple munching just random sounds otherwise.
"Poussières d'étoiles"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Not a whole lot to say about this one. It's two minutes of multicolored grains that form images, and I dig it in the same way I really like the work of PES. There's also a context to it that kind of got buried for me in the middle of a 90-minute program
"Junk Girl"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Oh, no, now other people are explicitly making Tim Burton movies!
I kid; after all, I found myself liking this movie about a sad young woman "made of junk" who tries to scrape by in a presumably-Iranian city (the clothing matches, although the headlines in the paper are mostly Harry Potter gags) only to face disgust and occasionally violence. It's very nicely done, if a downer, with the expressiveness of the characters' faces seemingly much higher than is typical for stop-motion, or CGI made to resemble stop-motion.
"Late Night Live Jazz"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A very nifty little short by Mathias Menten from Belgium, which starts with a busker getting thrown off the Metro and seeming to have nowhere to go until he finds a card from "Le Club" among his change. Maybe he should have been suspicious upon seeing that this place was located in a scary-looking castle.
Menten's got a distinctive style for animation, and the thick blacks do a neat job of conveying the shadowy environment while still the audience to see plenty of what's going on. The jazzy soundtrack is pretty nice as well, and, hey, at least the cute vampire vocalist seems fond of our hero at the end!
"Last Dance on the Main"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Animated documentaries are odd things, and I'm certain that I didn't get as much out of this primarily French-language one as I might have some others, but I liked it. Rather than just rotoscoping talking heads, filmmaker Aristofanis Soulikias gives this picture a cool style that suggests the shabby-but-beloved neighborhood it focuses on - although also tying in with how, at the time Hydro Quebec wanted to demolish it for a new, modern building, it had remained an artistic haven but become more upscale.
It's a nifty little film; I'd like to see it with English subtitles at some point.
"Molinari Mouvement"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
What you get when abstract animation is inspired by abstract art: Director Alvaro Marinho takes works of Guido Molinari and sets their shapes in motion, blending it with music to create a pleasing set of images. Admittedly, I'm artistically ignorant enough that I initially thought Marinho was playing with a test pattern, but it was still nifty to watch.
"Office Paint"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
This is the other short film that came from the same assignment as "A Free Lunch", and I liked it a bit more. Not just because I didn't have an intended plot laid out, but because director Annie Amaya seemed to let the sounds guide the animation, creating something that feels like a new way to see something familiar.
"The Mortal Flame"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A nifty little adventure in which a maquette that seems to start out just wandering around an artist's studio which then becomes a larger, stranger world. The adventure itself is not that memorable - it's another one where I can kind of see what it was going for after reading the description, but not necessarily at the time. I really liked the imagery, though, especially the typewriter revealed as the snow around it thawed.
"Noir Manhattan"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A minute long and pretty much leading up to one joke, but I kind of love this one. Director Maude D'Amboise-Courcelles gives her short a style that's kind of film noir and kind of pin-up, depending on which of the two characters we're looking at, and I love the voice actor she found for the detective, even if I only understood bits and pieces of the untranslated French.
It hit the target, and did it well.
"Semi Sauf"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Another really short one, but it gets some weird but cool cartooning in quickly, as a Frankensteined frog-mouse escapes a lab, discovers a mouse-frog, and... Well, that would be telling.
Quick, adventurous, and darkly funny. I'd like to see director Kelly Harpes do more with this world and its characters, although I'm sure whatever comes next will be worth seeing.
"Deep Space"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Seven minutes makes this one of the longer parts of the program, and it's also one of the most entertaining, although in pretty divergent ways. On the one hand, the art style is very cool and the music was funky in a way that complemented it perfectly. On the other hand, my notes for the film basically read "weird creatures fucking". Which, don't get me wrong, turns out to be very funny indeed, especially as the poor astronaut trying to find one form of intelligent life on this place so he can get home has to deal with a whole planet full of animals with one thing on their minds.
There were some in the audience who felt that this wore out its welcome, but seven minutes doesn't quite get it there (though the final bit is admittedly a bit tired). It's a very funny little picture, although obviously not for everyone.
"Missing One Player"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
The latest from Chinese animator Lei Lei ("Ray Lei" in the subtitles here) is a bit more story-oriented and less abstract than some of his previous shorts, although maybe just barely so. It's got an asteroid heading toward Earth, a panicking population that has many acting out, and three people who just want to play mahjongg but need a fourth.
Like his other shorts, this looks like very little else, put together from what look like cutouts from propaganda posters and sometimes limited in small movements but with great sweep on the larger scale. The music by Stars Lee is pretty great too, making for a short that seems to pack a lot into four minutes.
"Disconnector"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
A very spiffy little thing by Faiyaz Jafri who did everything from music to animation, and while sometimes it's got the feel of a one-man show in that the animation is a little too smooth, it's a look that works for it: By resembling the too-slick look of dance games, it makes the link the the virtual reality harness feel more natural, making it much easier to get across how synthetic those experiences are, even if they do resemble the world outside.
It's fun to listen to, as well - the poppy music fits the story perfectly and makes the whole exciting, even if the ultimate message is that something real is certainly better.
"Oh Wal"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Outer Limits of Animation, HD)
Oooo-kay. Notes on this one: "Cat riding in [fake] fish's mouth. Kills land whale w/ sushi kingdom".
It's certainly a trippy little short, though, kind of enhanced by looking like an "Itchy & Scratchy" cartoon from The Simpsons in spots. Only in spots, though, as this is very much its own thing that goes in its own weird, surreal directions. It is, sometimes, kind of weird for the sake of being weird, but it pulls the audience along with its strange internal logic and cute-but-violent world.
Experimenter
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I really hope that this one opens in Boston soon, because I'd like to give it a second look. I came out of it with an odd sort of ambivalence, liking almost all of what it did but feeling like there should have been more heft, especially with all the unusual techniques writer/director Michael Almereyda was using to make sure the audience was paying a little more attention. That's kind of unfair, though - isn't one of the things that usually makes biopics kind of eye-rolling the attempt to make a person's individual life a symbol of something else?
Indeed, in some ways I think that Almereyda is explicitly trying to buck this trend with Experimenter, even as he does look to make a point: It spends a lot of time focusing on the work of Stanley Milgram, detailing experiments well beyond the (in)famous "teacher/learner" experiment and pointedly mentioning that he wished he could be remembered for the quality and results of his work rather than the vaguely uncomfortable feelings it inspired in people who had not actually read it. It's paradoxical - it's about trying to take the simple emotional reaction out of an assessment of someone's life and how people behave, but in doing so it lacks the sharpness to puncture those preconceptions.
Maybe it works once given a chance to roll over in my head and recognize that I'm doing something I don't really want to do in judging this on first impressions. I'd kind of like another chance, because it's a really nifty fourth-wall-breaking, stylish-but-understated movie otherwise.
Full review on EFC.
Ninja the Monster
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
Director Ken Ochiai was unusually candid in his Q&A after this film, and one of the things he mentioned was that Japanese movies like Ninja the Monster are made with more than an eye toward the foreign market, opening on maybe five screens back home and hoping to make more money on home video elsewhere, and one can feel it straining for accessibility and against budget.
It looks and feels very flat - not bad, per se, just a bit underpopulated in some areas and with Aoi Morikawa putting in performances that feels muted as the Princess and many of the others in the cast seeming to be very one-note without regard to what's going on with the other actors or elsewhere in the movie. The camera is pointed at beautiful things when they're outside, and the sets and costumes are fine, if kind of off-the-rack, but there's very little that's distinctive.
On the plus side, the monsters are pretty great when we get a look at them, although it limits the action to something more FX-based than the actual swordfights you might want from a movie featuring samurai and ninjas. On the other hand, Ochiai does a fine job of making a horror/monster movie, with some cool moments and interesting designs. It just can't help feeling like such a targeted product in some ways, rather than a movie someone wanted to make.
Full review on EFC.
"The Strange Lives of the Not So Destined"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
I was caught up in "The Strange Lives of the Not So Destined" (which I don't think ever had such a memorable title on-screen) enough while watching it that it's a bit of a surprise that, writing three days later, I have a bit of trouble remembering what the thrust of it was. It gets some good humor and anguish out of a man (Adam Busch) who, on a lark, goes in to talk to a palm reader (Ashley Donigan) who knows everything, but what are we supposed to get out of it?
Understand, it's a kind of pleasant surprise that it doesn't lead to them pairing off, although their mindsets are too negative at the time for that to really be entertaining. It doesn't really get into what it must be like for her to know everything and see the Universe as completely deterministic, or him trying to fight his destiny, or maybe she's working with his disbelief to set him down a different path. Instead, things kind of seem to peter out without really saying anything.
They Look Like People
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
It feels a bit spoilery to say that They Look Like People is seldom the movie it's expected to be from the description, which talks about how Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews) can see that most of the people around him are being taken over by aliens or demons or the like and is torn about recruiting his friend Christian (Evan Dumouchel) to the cause of stopping them. They don't hide that it's a "he might be crazy" movie, but the truth is, if you'll pardon the grammatical sin, "might" is pretty much superfluous in that description.
The neat thing is, filmmaker Perry Blackshear doesn't really try to play into the possibility that genre film fans might be so used to how these things play out - ambiguously-to-"he's right!", or with obliviousness leading to tragedy - that going a different direction might be a shock. From the very start, it's pretty clear where things stand, and rather than being tragic, there's a great deal of hope to the film, because Wyatt doesn't want to be that way, even if Blackshear and MacLeod do a really fantastic job of presenting just how convincing his delusions are.
A large part of the success may be down to how, while it's Wyatt's delusions that drive the film, it often feels much more like a small ensemble piece. Evan Dumouchel's Christian has his own thing going on that could spin off into a movie itself, and Margaret Ying Drake is a lot of fun as his potential girlfriend (also his boss, promoted over him). They are an entertaining group as opposed to just "normal" people, and that both means that we're able to take occasional breaks from building his world and that he's got a good place to come back to, if it goes that way.
Full review on EFC.
Sunday, August 02, 2015
The Fantasia Daily 2015.19 (1 August 2015): Battles Without Honor or Humanity, Sunrise, Poison Berry in My Brain, and Nina Forever
I'm generally a pretty good planner with this festival, so days like Saturday where I wind up seeing pretty much the opposite of what I laid out at the start are rare. But, last-minute-ish, I decided that 90+ minutes of "experimental" shorts was more than I can handle, and besides, one of the hosts entered a plea for more people to see Battles Without Honor or Humanity, so I did that even though I suspect it will play the Brattle sometime this fall. Sunrise got the nod over Manson Family Vacation, because even though I suspect it's got less Manson stuff than the name implies, I'm not big on "bonding over shared darkness", either. I actually stood between theaters hemming and hawing before choosing Poison Berry in My Brain over Orion, but a goofy Japanese romantic comedy sounded better than "post-apocalyptic but also its own kind of fantasy".
Nina Forever, at least, was going to be in the last slot of the night. Festival programmer Mitch Davis, who waxed extremely effusive, is on the left; co-writer/co-director Ben Blaine on the right. You know something is a small independent movie when the filmmakers are talking about how expensive it is to fly from the UK to Montreal, which is why only one of the team of brothers is there. Kind of a pity, because while it sounds like the original idea was Ben's, it also sounds like his brother Chris was the one to help him refine it into something that works as a movie, and it might have been really interesting to hear how that collaborative process worked from both participants.
Ben did talk about how the movie sprang more from one of the supporting characters' stories than the main thread, and wound up being revised into what it was as other ideas aggregated to it, including thoughts on female characters who exist mainly to help the main character deal with his issues. He also joked about how Cian Barry did an impressive job of making his character eventually boring, because that's how it kind of works - the "fixed" guy isn't quite the draw as the original version.
Today's plan: My whims could change, but I'm thinking Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, The "Outer Limits of Animation" package, Experimenter, Ninja the Monster, and They Look Like People. Minuscule is fantastic, and folks I know from back home have their pretty good short "Postpartum" attached to the Lady Psycho Killer screening.
Jingi naki tatakai (Battles Without Honor or Humanity)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2015 in the Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: Retro & Restorations, DCP)
There's a pretty good mob movie in the middle of Battles Without Honor or Humanity, but it is with the ends that make it brilliant: It starts with images of the mushroom cloud and Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the war, but then jumps into images so frantic that it's almost impossible to absorb them fully - even when they're freeze-framed, it's on a blur. Director Kinji Fukasaku is making introductions, but most characters will need a second appearance to be recognized.
It finishes with a funeral, as it must with all the violence being handed out, but one where the disgust at all the violence can't overcome how it is the only thing some of these guys, including the one making the statement, know.
In between, Fukasaku and the writers tell a story that plays like a rapid fire recitation of events - dates appear on-screen, narration fills in gaps, and the main character is sidelined as the film follows the events of the yakuza wars in Kure City, Hiroshima, and only the highlights. As that does on, though, the film starts making that a statement about how, despite whatever romantic notions Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) may have had about the yakuza before, the modern version is about little more than self-perpetuation and protection. Any of the historical tendencies of the yakuza to be part of the community, and any forays into legitimate business, are in the background. Fukasaku keeps things exciting, sure, but also makes sure that the hollowness of the action is never far behind.
It's almost having your cake and eating it too, and the ability to pull that off makes Battles perhaps one of the greatest crime films ever made.
Full review on EFC.
Sunrise
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Writer/director Partho Sen-Gupta takes certain things very literally in Sunrise, but it's kind of a delight when he does, because the effect is nifty and exhilarating in the midst of a film that can use a bit of that as it tries to sap the audience's hope. Even with the obvious flourishes, he's still made a tight film that may obviously trumpet its cause but is engrossing nevertheless.
Child abductions are frighteningly common in India; Inspector Lakshum Joshi (Adil Hussain) of the Mumbai Police Social Services Division foils one on his way home from work one night, although he is unable to catch the perpetrator, seemingly losing his trail at Paradise, a fancy-looking nightclub out of place in this run-down neighborhood. the next day at work, another missing girl is reported, and we soon see Naina (Esha Amlani), about seven, brought into a "dorm" with mostly teenage girls with one, Komal (Gulnaaz Ansari), told to look after her. It's one of many such cases the under-staffed, under-funded department has to investigate, and Joshi is still reeling from his own daughter Aruna (Komal Gupta) being taken from in front of her school - made worse by coming home to his wife Leela (Tannishta Chatterjee), whose mind seems to have completely rejected that Aruna is gone.
I suspect that most filmmakers in India do everything they can to avoid monsoon season, but Sen-Gupta embraces it here, shooting nearly every exterior scene in a torrential downpour and having it audible on the soundtrack when inside. It's a numbing sound that sometimes seems to keep the squad inside and at their desks, sending out alerts to other departments but often seeming inactive and ineffective. It's reinforced when Joshi will spot something and run after it, getting drenched or running through streets where the water is above his ankles. Attacking the problem seems to get them nowhere and coming out when things have run their course and there's a body to deal with becomes a pain.
Full review on EFC.
Nounai Poison Berry (Poison Berry in My Brain)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I'm not sure when Inside Out opened in Japan, but I do wonder how many folks there saw it as less incredibly creative and insightful compared to their American counterparts, considering that the Poison Berry in My Brain manga has been running since 2009 and this live-action adaptation came out in May. The similarities are obvious - a female protagonist with a committee of five personality fragments debating over her next actions in her head, and some similar imagery - although I suspect that the romantic comedy plot gives it much less heft than Pixar's movie made for a younger audience.
There are times when being a romantic comedy makes Poison Berry rather frustrating - it keeps what is going on in the head of Ichiko Sakurai (Yoko Maki) too focused on one aspect of her life when there is clearly more going on; for example, that she's writing a novel sometimes seems more like a way to bring an alternate suitor into her life than a major deal on its own. It also obscures that her near-paralysis when it comes time to make decisions is perhaps the root of her problems, which should make the "internal" story focus more on how her various personality traits can work together, and the screenplay by Tomoko Aizawa doesn't have a great grasp on that. It seems even more unhealthy in terms of how it deals with Ichiko's sexuality, although that may come from Setona Mizushiro's source material.
For all its stumbles, though, it's frequently very funny, especially with the rapid-fire debates going on inside her head. Ryunosuke Kamiki and Yo Yoshida are an opposites-attract pair themselves as her optimism and neurosis, and young Hiyori Sakurada is almost always hilarious as her impulsive side, especially when those impulses sound a week bit more adult than the child used to represent them. Yoko Maki may wind up having to play indecision or blurt out things that don't make real-world sense as a result of what's going on with Ichiko's committee, but she's also tremendously charming on her own, though neither Yuki Furukawa as her younger boyfriend or Songha as her smitten editor ever seems like a great pairing.
Indeed, there are a few times I wished Poison Berry in My Brain could have been about everything in Ichiko's life besides dating; it's where Maki is the most magnetic and the film's tendency to avoid sexuality as part of her personality rather than something which occcasionally overwhelms it would be the least troublesome. It's still very entertaining despite that, and maybe there would be room for that in a sequel.
Full review on EFC.
"Teeth" (2015)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
Well, that's a weird one.
It's impressive what filmmakers Tom Brown & Daniel Gray do in this animated production, making something simple like gaining and losing teeth seem really disturbing thanks to their not-quite-grotesque but certainly unpretty art style, sinister narration by Richard E. Grant, and the peculiar words put in his mouth about seeing ones own teeth as abominations until realizing how that attitude is affecting how one enjoys food. The laughter during that part of the film was about fifty-fifty between sincere and nervous, and I kind of like that; you don't see that reaction too often.
After that, though, it gets downright weird, although a seven-minute short is a good use for that sort of weird; it's the sort of thing that would probably be background creepiness in a typical horror movie given a couple minutes to play out in the foreground here. Then, just as it starts to strain credulity, they end it with a gross but entertainingly absurd gag.
Not for everyone, but I think these guys hit their target, and folks who have the same sort of sense of humor should really like it.
Nina Forever
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Ben & Chris Blaine have a heck of a great idea for a movie here - when a Rob (Cian Barry), who tried to commit suicide after the death of his girlfriend but failed, starts seeing Holly (Abigail Hardingham), there are certain weird things about the relationship, but none more than how the bloody, back-broken, naked Nina (Fiona O'Shaughnessy) starts appearing when they have sex. That is something to get past.
It's a really neat trick, actually - as much as hauntings and sex are often connected in horror movies, it's usually immediately violent either in terms of murder or rape (because she doesn't realize who/what she's actually sleeping with at that moment), while Nina mostly brings hurtful words and major cleaning issues. I've mentioned before that ghosts are best used as the past given form, and Nina fits that description perfectly. O'Shaughnessey's dialogue can sometimes be a little hard to make out, but the words that the Blaines give her really nail how the past can be both tremendously cruel and utterly uncaring at the same time, and the film eventually goes into interesting places with where her presence comes from.
And while I stumbled a bit on O'Shaughnessey's accent, her physicality in the role is kind of incredible - she moves a bit, but it's mostly flopping around, feeling like a dead thing without lurches that seem rather ridiculous after seeing this. Barry handles Rob's self-pity well, never making it obviously overwhelming enough for him to not be appealing, and Abigail Hardingham is terrific as Holly. She does a great job of handling how, despite her obvious sex appeal and heart-covered sweaters, she's pretty dark inside despite also having a core that, in most things, really wants to be helpful.
Full review on EFC.
Nina Forever, at least, was going to be in the last slot of the night. Festival programmer Mitch Davis, who waxed extremely effusive, is on the left; co-writer/co-director Ben Blaine on the right. You know something is a small independent movie when the filmmakers are talking about how expensive it is to fly from the UK to Montreal, which is why only one of the team of brothers is there. Kind of a pity, because while it sounds like the original idea was Ben's, it also sounds like his brother Chris was the one to help him refine it into something that works as a movie, and it might have been really interesting to hear how that collaborative process worked from both participants.
Ben did talk about how the movie sprang more from one of the supporting characters' stories than the main thread, and wound up being revised into what it was as other ideas aggregated to it, including thoughts on female characters who exist mainly to help the main character deal with his issues. He also joked about how Cian Barry did an impressive job of making his character eventually boring, because that's how it kind of works - the "fixed" guy isn't quite the draw as the original version.
Today's plan: My whims could change, but I'm thinking Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, The "Outer Limits of Animation" package, Experimenter, Ninja the Monster, and They Look Like People. Minuscule is fantastic, and folks I know from back home have their pretty good short "Postpartum" attached to the Lady Psycho Killer screening.
Jingi naki tatakai (Battles Without Honor or Humanity)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2015 in the Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: Retro & Restorations, DCP)
There's a pretty good mob movie in the middle of Battles Without Honor or Humanity, but it is with the ends that make it brilliant: It starts with images of the mushroom cloud and Hiroshima in the immediate aftermath of the war, but then jumps into images so frantic that it's almost impossible to absorb them fully - even when they're freeze-framed, it's on a blur. Director Kinji Fukasaku is making introductions, but most characters will need a second appearance to be recognized.
It finishes with a funeral, as it must with all the violence being handed out, but one where the disgust at all the violence can't overcome how it is the only thing some of these guys, including the one making the statement, know.
In between, Fukasaku and the writers tell a story that plays like a rapid fire recitation of events - dates appear on-screen, narration fills in gaps, and the main character is sidelined as the film follows the events of the yakuza wars in Kure City, Hiroshima, and only the highlights. As that does on, though, the film starts making that a statement about how, despite whatever romantic notions Shozo Hirono (Bunta Sugawara) may have had about the yakuza before, the modern version is about little more than self-perpetuation and protection. Any of the historical tendencies of the yakuza to be part of the community, and any forays into legitimate business, are in the background. Fukasaku keeps things exciting, sure, but also makes sure that the hollowness of the action is never far behind.
It's almost having your cake and eating it too, and the ability to pull that off makes Battles perhaps one of the greatest crime films ever made.
Full review on EFC.
Sunrise
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Writer/director Partho Sen-Gupta takes certain things very literally in Sunrise, but it's kind of a delight when he does, because the effect is nifty and exhilarating in the midst of a film that can use a bit of that as it tries to sap the audience's hope. Even with the obvious flourishes, he's still made a tight film that may obviously trumpet its cause but is engrossing nevertheless.
Child abductions are frighteningly common in India; Inspector Lakshum Joshi (Adil Hussain) of the Mumbai Police Social Services Division foils one on his way home from work one night, although he is unable to catch the perpetrator, seemingly losing his trail at Paradise, a fancy-looking nightclub out of place in this run-down neighborhood. the next day at work, another missing girl is reported, and we soon see Naina (Esha Amlani), about seven, brought into a "dorm" with mostly teenage girls with one, Komal (Gulnaaz Ansari), told to look after her. It's one of many such cases the under-staffed, under-funded department has to investigate, and Joshi is still reeling from his own daughter Aruna (Komal Gupta) being taken from in front of her school - made worse by coming home to his wife Leela (Tannishta Chatterjee), whose mind seems to have completely rejected that Aruna is gone.
I suspect that most filmmakers in India do everything they can to avoid monsoon season, but Sen-Gupta embraces it here, shooting nearly every exterior scene in a torrential downpour and having it audible on the soundtrack when inside. It's a numbing sound that sometimes seems to keep the squad inside and at their desks, sending out alerts to other departments but often seeming inactive and ineffective. It's reinforced when Joshi will spot something and run after it, getting drenched or running through streets where the water is above his ankles. Attacking the problem seems to get them nowhere and coming out when things have run their course and there's a body to deal with becomes a pain.
Full review on EFC.
Nounai Poison Berry (Poison Berry in My Brain)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I'm not sure when Inside Out opened in Japan, but I do wonder how many folks there saw it as less incredibly creative and insightful compared to their American counterparts, considering that the Poison Berry in My Brain manga has been running since 2009 and this live-action adaptation came out in May. The similarities are obvious - a female protagonist with a committee of five personality fragments debating over her next actions in her head, and some similar imagery - although I suspect that the romantic comedy plot gives it much less heft than Pixar's movie made for a younger audience.
There are times when being a romantic comedy makes Poison Berry rather frustrating - it keeps what is going on in the head of Ichiko Sakurai (Yoko Maki) too focused on one aspect of her life when there is clearly more going on; for example, that she's writing a novel sometimes seems more like a way to bring an alternate suitor into her life than a major deal on its own. It also obscures that her near-paralysis when it comes time to make decisions is perhaps the root of her problems, which should make the "internal" story focus more on how her various personality traits can work together, and the screenplay by Tomoko Aizawa doesn't have a great grasp on that. It seems even more unhealthy in terms of how it deals with Ichiko's sexuality, although that may come from Setona Mizushiro's source material.
For all its stumbles, though, it's frequently very funny, especially with the rapid-fire debates going on inside her head. Ryunosuke Kamiki and Yo Yoshida are an opposites-attract pair themselves as her optimism and neurosis, and young Hiyori Sakurada is almost always hilarious as her impulsive side, especially when those impulses sound a week bit more adult than the child used to represent them. Yoko Maki may wind up having to play indecision or blurt out things that don't make real-world sense as a result of what's going on with Ichiko's committee, but she's also tremendously charming on her own, though neither Yuki Furukawa as her younger boyfriend or Songha as her smitten editor ever seems like a great pairing.
Indeed, there are a few times I wished Poison Berry in My Brain could have been about everything in Ichiko's life besides dating; it's where Maki is the most magnetic and the film's tendency to avoid sexuality as part of her personality rather than something which occcasionally overwhelms it would be the least troublesome. It's still very entertaining despite that, and maybe there would be room for that in a sequel.
Full review on EFC.
"Teeth" (2015)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
Well, that's a weird one.
It's impressive what filmmakers Tom Brown & Daniel Gray do in this animated production, making something simple like gaining and losing teeth seem really disturbing thanks to their not-quite-grotesque but certainly unpretty art style, sinister narration by Richard E. Grant, and the peculiar words put in his mouth about seeing ones own teeth as abominations until realizing how that attitude is affecting how one enjoys food. The laughter during that part of the film was about fifty-fifty between sincere and nervous, and I kind of like that; you don't see that reaction too often.
After that, though, it gets downright weird, although a seven-minute short is a good use for that sort of weird; it's the sort of thing that would probably be background creepiness in a typical horror movie given a couple minutes to play out in the foreground here. Then, just as it starts to strain credulity, they end it with a gross but entertainingly absurd gag.
Not for everyone, but I think these guys hit their target, and folks who have the same sort of sense of humor should really like it.
Nina Forever
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Ben & Chris Blaine have a heck of a great idea for a movie here - when a Rob (Cian Barry), who tried to commit suicide after the death of his girlfriend but failed, starts seeing Holly (Abigail Hardingham), there are certain weird things about the relationship, but none more than how the bloody, back-broken, naked Nina (Fiona O'Shaughnessy) starts appearing when they have sex. That is something to get past.
It's a really neat trick, actually - as much as hauntings and sex are often connected in horror movies, it's usually immediately violent either in terms of murder or rape (because she doesn't realize who/what she's actually sleeping with at that moment), while Nina mostly brings hurtful words and major cleaning issues. I've mentioned before that ghosts are best used as the past given form, and Nina fits that description perfectly. O'Shaughnessey's dialogue can sometimes be a little hard to make out, but the words that the Blaines give her really nail how the past can be both tremendously cruel and utterly uncaring at the same time, and the film eventually goes into interesting places with where her presence comes from.
And while I stumbled a bit on O'Shaughnessey's accent, her physicality in the role is kind of incredible - she moves a bit, but it's mostly flopping around, feeling like a dead thing without lurches that seem rather ridiculous after seeing this. Barry handles Rob's self-pity well, never making it obviously overwhelming enough for him to not be appealing, and Abigail Hardingham is terrific as Holly. She does a great job of handling how, despite her obvious sex appeal and heart-covered sweaters, she's pretty dark inside despite also having a core that, in most things, really wants to be helpful.
Full review on EFC.
The Fantasia Daily 2015.18 (31 July 2015): Cherry Tree, Scherzo Diabolico, Ava's Possessions, The Golden Cane Warrior, Shinjuku Swan, and Turbo Kid
I did not expect the day to go quite so long, but waking up early (7am is early on vacation, even if you're dialing in to work at nine), having most of the movie really stacked one on top of the other, and seeing a media/VIP line for the midnight Turbo Kid and getting into it can sure stretch a day.
Thanks to these guys - Scherzo Diabolico director Adiran Garcia Bogliano and "Iris" director Richard Karpala - for sticking around for the second screening of their films; not every filmmaker does that even when it's the next afternoon. It was a pretty cool Q&A; Bogliano is a guy that the festival has wanted to have come for a while, and he was fond enough of the short playing with his feature to both mention it before the screening and share the Q&A, which is rarer than it should be.
It was a fairly informative session, too; Bogliano talked about how he seldom consciously references other films and directors, but loves De Palma (among others) so much that he has kind of internalized certain things as how you make movies, so that it feels like it's coming from him when he does it. He also spent some time talking about the three scenes he shot with drones - how they were meant to be symmetrical (beginning, middle, and end) and how he wanted the audience to see that the action wasn't completely smooth because he always liked movies where you can see that there is someone making decisions as opposed to just a window into a perfectly clear world. Karpala, meanwhile, talked about how directing stunt work in his short film was more terrifying than anything else; even when stuntpeople are pros who have done much more dangerous things, it's a pretty weird thing for a young director to ask someone to do something with the potential for injury just to make a movie (even with plenty of ropes you've got the technology to erase).
Hey, I got to see Turbo Kid! Wonder if this means I'll get into the second show of Attack on Titan as well. Anyway, that is the three writer/directors, Yoann-Karl Whissell, François Simard, and Anouk Whissell, and I can't talk much about the enthusiastic Q&A after the film because my French is terrible. It wound up going very late - the 11:55 start time didn't take into account Shinjuku Swan's length or getting a very psyched-up sellout crowd seated; I think projection started at something like 12:35am. Also extending it: About 19 vanity cards before the film proper started. Folks were counting them out in French, and as much as certain other bits of audience participation bug me, this kind of amused, if only because I tend to count production companies during the opening credits myself.
Then I got home and dropped. A long day, even if I know that Saturday is going to be relatively short.
Today's plan: My whims could change, but I'm thinking Battles Without Honor or Humanity, Sunrise, Poison Berry in My Brain, and Nina Forever. Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal, H., and Excess Flesh are all flawed but interesting.
Cherry Tree
* * (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Cherry Tree starts out kind of silly but promising with its tale of dark-age witches whose evil has been stored in the roots of a cherry tree in the Irish town of Orchard for centuries which leads to a woman apparently killing an old friend so that she can have her job as the local high school's field hockey coach, but once it introduces Faith Maguire (Naomi Battrick) and the characters in her orbit, it becomes a pretty enjoyable little horror film, with touch choices, solid relationships that will hurt when terrible things happen, etc.
But the back end, man. Wow, is that terrible.
The movie never really made a lot of sense - there was always an element of "why now, why her, why this set of steps" to it - but as it goes chugging to the finale, writer Brendan McCarthy and director David Keating just seem to lose all sense of one thing plausibly leading to another. Faith seems to become a video game character being given instructions for what to do next that come from nowhere, and the mythology she's plugged into becomes much more arbitrary. It leads to the movie ending on a stinger that has no punch because it means that the filmmakers just have no idea what the thing or the characters are about.
Full review on EFC.
"Iris"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
"Iris" is a pretty obvious spoof of Apple's "Siri", which is probably coming full circle in terms of the name, and it briefly looks like it's going to be cringeworthy by starting with a product launch, especially since its feature set doesn't seem a whole lot more advanced than the current state of the art. Once it gets into the main story, where Dave (Luke Sorge) is disposing of a body while playing a voice-activated trivia game with his phone, things get fun, as these things are always listening.
The result is pretty funny, as Dave finds himself in dilemmas that stem from both crime issues and familiar tech problems, with the film also getting into thriller territory as well. The tone is almost always just right, and both the location in the Colorado Rockies and fine stuntwork (and decent production design) make for something a lot more impressively polished than many shorts of its nature.
Scherzo Diabolico
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
A nifty thing about Scherzo Diabolico: It feels like a black comedy for much of its running time, but you'll likely struggle to remember any actual jokes afterward. The comedy is almost entirely from the discomfort and absurdity of the situation, adding sparks to a sort of two-part thriller: The first dry and methodical, the second frantic.
It's a nifty little picture. I wondered while watching it if main character Aram (Francisco Barreiro) was meant to be working for a criminal organization which at a certain remove from the immediate work of dealing drugs or intimidating businesses looks like any other corporation or law firm, although I don't thin that's where director Adrian Garcia Bogliano was going. It is a neat story of using crime to get ahead, a seemingly perfect one at that, although that will inevitably blow up in his face.
Bogliano fills it in with nifty details, though, from drone shots setting up a feeling of outsiders looking in that keep the audience from identifying too much with Aram to how his milquetoast ideas of success and sophistication manifest in part as the "best of" collection of classical music on the soundtrack which gets a righteously metallic spin when the girl he kidnaps, Anabela (Daniela Soto Vell), hears it again in her mind. It's a story that lets the audience both admire and hate the perfect crime and feel a thrill of conflict when easily-understood plans have monstrous collateral damage, and does it without feeling like it's trying to be even-handed or mournful.
Full review on EFC.
Ava's Possessions
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Three years ago at this festival, I raved about Jordan Galland's superhero comedy Alter Egos in part out of surprise; it worked its alternate Earth scenario better than a lot of films of its sort and built a remarkably solid cast of characters for a sort of spoof movie. With Ava's Possessions, he does the same thing with the demonic possession genre and turns another high concept into a pretty charming comedy.
It starts where a lot of these movies end, with Ava (Louisa Krause) having "Naphula the Anointed" exorcised from her after being possessed for twenty-eight days. On the one hand, that's great; on the other, her boyfriend has left her, it's not as if Naphula called into work, and he committed a whole bunch of crimes in her body that she'll be accountable for if she doesn't join Spiritual Possession Anonymous, make amends to those she has wronged, and learn how to defend herself from future attacks. It will be tough - group leader Tony (Wass Stevens) is a taskmaster, the new friend she meets there (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) is kind of infatuated with her demon, and maybe it's just them having been there for the exorcism, but her parents (William Sadler & Deborah Rush), sister (Whitney Able), and sister's fiancé (Zachary Booth) seem to be hiding something from her.
Galland has a skill that is perhaps underappreciated in that he's able to build a story out of jokes. Especially early on, most scenes in Ava's Possessions are a sort of gag on how someone who has been through this would have trouble dealing with the fallout and re-inserting herself into society, and they're good jokes, but they also move things forward a bit. Where a lot of comedies that sort of poke at genre staples tend to have jokes that are dismissive in some way, this one uses them to construct both a world that makes a certain level of sense and a mystery within it, while also giving the audience a chance to get to know and like most of its characters. It's a real movie that has fun with its subject matter.
Full review on EFC.
Pendekar Tongkat Emas (The Golden Cane Warrior)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: Action!, DCP)
I talked to folks who passed on The Golden Cane Warrior because the martial arts looked bad in the trailer, which I suspect may be kind of unfair; they were probably cut to ribbons, and even if I am not quite knowledgable enough to always tell okay from good from great, this movie looked pretty good and had Xiong Xin Xin doing action direction. It suffers more from some of the story around those fight scenes.
Not all of it; there's a simplicity to it that's actually quite appealing: World-weary "Golden Cane Warrior" Cempaka (Christine Hakim) intends to step down as the head of her school and must pass leadership, the eponymous weapon, and the knowledge of the ultimate "Golden Cane Encircles the Earth" move to one of her four students. Three of them - Dara (Eva Celia Latjuba), Gerhana (Tara Basro), and Biru (Reza Rahadian) - are children of vanquished opponents she brought in; the fourth is but a child. She chooses Dara, probably the least talented of the group, which incenses Biru and Gerhana, setting them on a path of betrayal and retribution. Not knowing the ultimate technique, Dara and Angin must go on the run, looking for a hidden teacher who can help them even the odds.
It works, mostly, although the story soon becomes dangerously lopsided: While Biru & Gerhana are consolidating power and doing terrible things, Dara spends a lot of time looking kind of useless, not training until later in the game and only becoming anguished at what her former "brother" and "sister" are doing because she herself manages to bring bad attention to innocent people. In a classic kung fu movie, the audience feels the heroine's frustration that perfecting her technique well enough to fight oppressors or take her revenge takes so much time, even as her spirit matures, but co-writer/director Ifa Isfansyah delays that too much hear, even detouring into a long, unnecessary flashback rather than doin the work with Dara.
On the plus side, when she and Elang (Nicholas Saputra) are ready to go, it delivers; the finale is a long mixed-doubles match that lets the stars do their best work after an hour and a half of beating lesser opponents or standing back. It goes on long enough to be a little wearing, but it's quite satisfying to see everyone cut loose, enough to make one wish there was more like that all along.
Full review on EFC.
Shinjuku Swan
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
Like a lot of movies adapted from long-running manga, Shinjuku Swan shows a lot of telltale signs of screenwriters Rikiya Mizushima and Osamu Suzuki trying to cram a lot of storylines and fan-favorite characters into a couple hours. It's a process that has torpedoed a lot of movies, but works out all right here in large part because the script is handed off to Sion Sono, who knows a little something about making dense-but-exciting movies with a fair bit of darkness.
He's got his work cut out for him telling the story of Tatsuhiko Shiratori (Gou Ayano), a frizzy-haired loser who, after getting into a brawl with six goons on the streets of Tokyo's red-light district, is recruited by Mr. Mako (Yusuke Iseya). Not to be gangster, but to be a talent scout, looking for pretty girls who can work in the neighborhood's nightclubs, massage parlors, and other unsavory spots. Of course, even if they're not quite gangsters, the rivalry between the "Burst" agency that employs Mako and the "Harlem" agency is still about to explode into a fight that often involves Tatsuhiko getting the crap kicked out of him.
By focusing on Tatsuhiko, the filmmakers often seem to be seriously downplaying the fact that he and his colleagues are in the business of exploiting women in every way possible, with Tatsuhiko being a cheerful, friendly face for the argument that prostitution and related activities aren't so bad so long as it's handled with care. That's the spoken case made, although I don't think there's any missing that a lot of these girls are not having their interests seen to with pretty horrible results. So what to make of Tatsuhiko, who gets down about this but is always assured that he does more good than harm? That's kind of what makes the movie interesting, because Ayano does a pretty nice job of making him a guy who really needs to believe that he's doing the right thing and is probably eventually able to do a good job of lying to himself about it.
That quality plays well into the story, too, making Tatsuhiko both easy for the more ruthless people around him to manipulate and harder for them to predict, not really having his altruistic bent. As they attempt to outflank each other, Sono does a pretty terrific job of getting a rapid back-and-forth conflict across without boring the audience with excessive details or getting away from Tatsuhiko, for whom a lot of this is over his head (until falling on it). It's a longish movie that moves, and while the high gloss may obscure the everyday tragedies underneath, they're there for those who choose to look.
Turbo Kid
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen31 July 1 August 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Turbo Kid seemed to be on the fast track to being a cult hit well before its release; folks seemed keen on the short film produced as part of a contest connected to ABCs of Death and it seemed to get plenty of early buzz looking for funding and production partners as part of the Fantasia Festival's Frontières co-production market and had people looking forward to it for a year or two. A hero's welcome for the Quebec production was not unexpected at its Montreal premiere; but tat the movie actually is the sort of cheerfully gory retro-sci-fi blast intended is kind of a pleasant surprise.
It takes place in the future world of 1997, when acid rain and nuclear wars have left the world a wasteland. Teenage orphan "The Kid" (Munro Chambers) scavenges what he needs - along with toys and comic books, especially those featuring his favorite, Turbo Rider - while trading them for water. Things are about to get interesting, though - not only has he apparently found a pod full of the sort of gadgets the comic book character uses, but his path has just crossed with Apple (Laurence Leboeuf), a relentlessly cheerful girl from across the wasteland who quickly attaches herself to him. Meanwhile, warlord Zeus (Michael Ironside) controls the water supply with an iron fist, though he worries about arm-wrestling champion Frederick (Aaron Jeffery) leading a revolt.
Most action/sci-fi movies built to be throwbacks to the filmmakers' youth are terrible, for a number of reasons: Sometimes the filmmakers think aping the ineptitude they laughed at is funny itself (it's generally not), often they don't have the resources to do what they need, other times they're just pale imitations without animating spark of their own. I suspect that what gives Turbo Kid that spark is that filmmakers François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell don't just try to imitate the films they watched as kids when their parents weren't looking, but throw in everything else they did at that age: BMX biking, comic books, 8-bit video games, starting to be thrown for a loop by the opposite sex. It feels like they are channelling everything that felt exciting at that age into the movie rather than just one facet (gory movies) which doesn't fit with the things that a filmmaker's adult self puts in. As a result, the movie feels like everything they would have wanted at The Kid's age pulled forward, rather than recaptured.
Full review on EFC.
Thanks to these guys - Scherzo Diabolico director Adiran Garcia Bogliano and "Iris" director Richard Karpala - for sticking around for the second screening of their films; not every filmmaker does that even when it's the next afternoon. It was a pretty cool Q&A; Bogliano is a guy that the festival has wanted to have come for a while, and he was fond enough of the short playing with his feature to both mention it before the screening and share the Q&A, which is rarer than it should be.
It was a fairly informative session, too; Bogliano talked about how he seldom consciously references other films and directors, but loves De Palma (among others) so much that he has kind of internalized certain things as how you make movies, so that it feels like it's coming from him when he does it. He also spent some time talking about the three scenes he shot with drones - how they were meant to be symmetrical (beginning, middle, and end) and how he wanted the audience to see that the action wasn't completely smooth because he always liked movies where you can see that there is someone making decisions as opposed to just a window into a perfectly clear world. Karpala, meanwhile, talked about how directing stunt work in his short film was more terrifying than anything else; even when stuntpeople are pros who have done much more dangerous things, it's a pretty weird thing for a young director to ask someone to do something with the potential for injury just to make a movie (even with plenty of ropes you've got the technology to erase).
Hey, I got to see Turbo Kid! Wonder if this means I'll get into the second show of Attack on Titan as well. Anyway, that is the three writer/directors, Yoann-Karl Whissell, François Simard, and Anouk Whissell, and I can't talk much about the enthusiastic Q&A after the film because my French is terrible. It wound up going very late - the 11:55 start time didn't take into account Shinjuku Swan's length or getting a very psyched-up sellout crowd seated; I think projection started at something like 12:35am. Also extending it: About 19 vanity cards before the film proper started. Folks were counting them out in French, and as much as certain other bits of audience participation bug me, this kind of amused, if only because I tend to count production companies during the opening credits myself.
Then I got home and dropped. A long day, even if I know that Saturday is going to be relatively short.
Today's plan: My whims could change, but I'm thinking Battles Without Honor or Humanity, Sunrise, Poison Berry in My Brain, and Nina Forever. Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal, H., and Excess Flesh are all flawed but interesting.
Cherry Tree
* * (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Cherry Tree starts out kind of silly but promising with its tale of dark-age witches whose evil has been stored in the roots of a cherry tree in the Irish town of Orchard for centuries which leads to a woman apparently killing an old friend so that she can have her job as the local high school's field hockey coach, but once it introduces Faith Maguire (Naomi Battrick) and the characters in her orbit, it becomes a pretty enjoyable little horror film, with touch choices, solid relationships that will hurt when terrible things happen, etc.
But the back end, man. Wow, is that terrible.
The movie never really made a lot of sense - there was always an element of "why now, why her, why this set of steps" to it - but as it goes chugging to the finale, writer Brendan McCarthy and director David Keating just seem to lose all sense of one thing plausibly leading to another. Faith seems to become a video game character being given instructions for what to do next that come from nowhere, and the mythology she's plugged into becomes much more arbitrary. It leads to the movie ending on a stinger that has no punch because it means that the filmmakers just have no idea what the thing or the characters are about.
Full review on EFC.
"Iris"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
"Iris" is a pretty obvious spoof of Apple's "Siri", which is probably coming full circle in terms of the name, and it briefly looks like it's going to be cringeworthy by starting with a product launch, especially since its feature set doesn't seem a whole lot more advanced than the current state of the art. Once it gets into the main story, where Dave (Luke Sorge) is disposing of a body while playing a voice-activated trivia game with his phone, things get fun, as these things are always listening.
The result is pretty funny, as Dave finds himself in dilemmas that stem from both crime issues and familiar tech problems, with the film also getting into thriller territory as well. The tone is almost always just right, and both the location in the Colorado Rockies and fine stuntwork (and decent production design) make for something a lot more impressively polished than many shorts of its nature.
Scherzo Diabolico
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
A nifty thing about Scherzo Diabolico: It feels like a black comedy for much of its running time, but you'll likely struggle to remember any actual jokes afterward. The comedy is almost entirely from the discomfort and absurdity of the situation, adding sparks to a sort of two-part thriller: The first dry and methodical, the second frantic.
It's a nifty little picture. I wondered while watching it if main character Aram (Francisco Barreiro) was meant to be working for a criminal organization which at a certain remove from the immediate work of dealing drugs or intimidating businesses looks like any other corporation or law firm, although I don't thin that's where director Adrian Garcia Bogliano was going. It is a neat story of using crime to get ahead, a seemingly perfect one at that, although that will inevitably blow up in his face.
Bogliano fills it in with nifty details, though, from drone shots setting up a feeling of outsiders looking in that keep the audience from identifying too much with Aram to how his milquetoast ideas of success and sophistication manifest in part as the "best of" collection of classical music on the soundtrack which gets a righteously metallic spin when the girl he kidnaps, Anabela (Daniela Soto Vell), hears it again in her mind. It's a story that lets the audience both admire and hate the perfect crime and feel a thrill of conflict when easily-understood plans have monstrous collateral damage, and does it without feeling like it's trying to be even-handed or mournful.
Full review on EFC.
Ava's Possessions
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Three years ago at this festival, I raved about Jordan Galland's superhero comedy Alter Egos in part out of surprise; it worked its alternate Earth scenario better than a lot of films of its sort and built a remarkably solid cast of characters for a sort of spoof movie. With Ava's Possessions, he does the same thing with the demonic possession genre and turns another high concept into a pretty charming comedy.
It starts where a lot of these movies end, with Ava (Louisa Krause) having "Naphula the Anointed" exorcised from her after being possessed for twenty-eight days. On the one hand, that's great; on the other, her boyfriend has left her, it's not as if Naphula called into work, and he committed a whole bunch of crimes in her body that she'll be accountable for if she doesn't join Spiritual Possession Anonymous, make amends to those she has wronged, and learn how to defend herself from future attacks. It will be tough - group leader Tony (Wass Stevens) is a taskmaster, the new friend she meets there (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) is kind of infatuated with her demon, and maybe it's just them having been there for the exorcism, but her parents (William Sadler & Deborah Rush), sister (Whitney Able), and sister's fiancé (Zachary Booth) seem to be hiding something from her.
Galland has a skill that is perhaps underappreciated in that he's able to build a story out of jokes. Especially early on, most scenes in Ava's Possessions are a sort of gag on how someone who has been through this would have trouble dealing with the fallout and re-inserting herself into society, and they're good jokes, but they also move things forward a bit. Where a lot of comedies that sort of poke at genre staples tend to have jokes that are dismissive in some way, this one uses them to construct both a world that makes a certain level of sense and a mystery within it, while also giving the audience a chance to get to know and like most of its characters. It's a real movie that has fun with its subject matter.
Full review on EFC.
Pendekar Tongkat Emas (The Golden Cane Warrior)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: Action!, DCP)
I talked to folks who passed on The Golden Cane Warrior because the martial arts looked bad in the trailer, which I suspect may be kind of unfair; they were probably cut to ribbons, and even if I am not quite knowledgable enough to always tell okay from good from great, this movie looked pretty good and had Xiong Xin Xin doing action direction. It suffers more from some of the story around those fight scenes.
Not all of it; there's a simplicity to it that's actually quite appealing: World-weary "Golden Cane Warrior" Cempaka (Christine Hakim) intends to step down as the head of her school and must pass leadership, the eponymous weapon, and the knowledge of the ultimate "Golden Cane Encircles the Earth" move to one of her four students. Three of them - Dara (Eva Celia Latjuba), Gerhana (Tara Basro), and Biru (Reza Rahadian) - are children of vanquished opponents she brought in; the fourth is but a child. She chooses Dara, probably the least talented of the group, which incenses Biru and Gerhana, setting them on a path of betrayal and retribution. Not knowing the ultimate technique, Dara and Angin must go on the run, looking for a hidden teacher who can help them even the odds.
It works, mostly, although the story soon becomes dangerously lopsided: While Biru & Gerhana are consolidating power and doing terrible things, Dara spends a lot of time looking kind of useless, not training until later in the game and only becoming anguished at what her former "brother" and "sister" are doing because she herself manages to bring bad attention to innocent people. In a classic kung fu movie, the audience feels the heroine's frustration that perfecting her technique well enough to fight oppressors or take her revenge takes so much time, even as her spirit matures, but co-writer/director Ifa Isfansyah delays that too much hear, even detouring into a long, unnecessary flashback rather than doin the work with Dara.
On the plus side, when she and Elang (Nicholas Saputra) are ready to go, it delivers; the finale is a long mixed-doubles match that lets the stars do their best work after an hour and a half of beating lesser opponents or standing back. It goes on long enough to be a little wearing, but it's quite satisfying to see everyone cut loose, enough to make one wish there was more like that all along.
Full review on EFC.
Shinjuku Swan
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
Like a lot of movies adapted from long-running manga, Shinjuku Swan shows a lot of telltale signs of screenwriters Rikiya Mizushima and Osamu Suzuki trying to cram a lot of storylines and fan-favorite characters into a couple hours. It's a process that has torpedoed a lot of movies, but works out all right here in large part because the script is handed off to Sion Sono, who knows a little something about making dense-but-exciting movies with a fair bit of darkness.
He's got his work cut out for him telling the story of Tatsuhiko Shiratori (Gou Ayano), a frizzy-haired loser who, after getting into a brawl with six goons on the streets of Tokyo's red-light district, is recruited by Mr. Mako (Yusuke Iseya). Not to be gangster, but to be a talent scout, looking for pretty girls who can work in the neighborhood's nightclubs, massage parlors, and other unsavory spots. Of course, even if they're not quite gangsters, the rivalry between the "Burst" agency that employs Mako and the "Harlem" agency is still about to explode into a fight that often involves Tatsuhiko getting the crap kicked out of him.
By focusing on Tatsuhiko, the filmmakers often seem to be seriously downplaying the fact that he and his colleagues are in the business of exploiting women in every way possible, with Tatsuhiko being a cheerful, friendly face for the argument that prostitution and related activities aren't so bad so long as it's handled with care. That's the spoken case made, although I don't think there's any missing that a lot of these girls are not having their interests seen to with pretty horrible results. So what to make of Tatsuhiko, who gets down about this but is always assured that he does more good than harm? That's kind of what makes the movie interesting, because Ayano does a pretty nice job of making him a guy who really needs to believe that he's doing the right thing and is probably eventually able to do a good job of lying to himself about it.
That quality plays well into the story, too, making Tatsuhiko both easy for the more ruthless people around him to manipulate and harder for them to predict, not really having his altruistic bent. As they attempt to outflank each other, Sono does a pretty terrific job of getting a rapid back-and-forth conflict across without boring the audience with excessive details or getting away from Tatsuhiko, for whom a lot of this is over his head (until falling on it). It's a longish movie that moves, and while the high gloss may obscure the everyday tragedies underneath, they're there for those who choose to look.
Turbo Kid
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen
Turbo Kid seemed to be on the fast track to being a cult hit well before its release; folks seemed keen on the short film produced as part of a contest connected to ABCs of Death and it seemed to get plenty of early buzz looking for funding and production partners as part of the Fantasia Festival's Frontières co-production market and had people looking forward to it for a year or two. A hero's welcome for the Quebec production was not unexpected at its Montreal premiere; but tat the movie actually is the sort of cheerfully gory retro-sci-fi blast intended is kind of a pleasant surprise.
It takes place in the future world of 1997, when acid rain and nuclear wars have left the world a wasteland. Teenage orphan "The Kid" (Munro Chambers) scavenges what he needs - along with toys and comic books, especially those featuring his favorite, Turbo Rider - while trading them for water. Things are about to get interesting, though - not only has he apparently found a pod full of the sort of gadgets the comic book character uses, but his path has just crossed with Apple (Laurence Leboeuf), a relentlessly cheerful girl from across the wasteland who quickly attaches herself to him. Meanwhile, warlord Zeus (Michael Ironside) controls the water supply with an iron fist, though he worries about arm-wrestling champion Frederick (Aaron Jeffery) leading a revolt.
Most action/sci-fi movies built to be throwbacks to the filmmakers' youth are terrible, for a number of reasons: Sometimes the filmmakers think aping the ineptitude they laughed at is funny itself (it's generally not), often they don't have the resources to do what they need, other times they're just pale imitations without animating spark of their own. I suspect that what gives Turbo Kid that spark is that filmmakers François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell don't just try to imitate the films they watched as kids when their parents weren't looking, but throw in everything else they did at that age: BMX biking, comic books, 8-bit video games, starting to be thrown for a loop by the opposite sex. It feels like they are channelling everything that felt exciting at that age into the movie rather than just one facet (gory movies) which doesn't fit with the things that a filmmaker's adult self puts in. As a result, the movie feels like everything they would have wanted at The Kid's age pulled forward, rather than recaptured.
Full review on EFC.
Saturday, August 01, 2015
The Fantasia Daily 2015.17 (30 July 2015): Synchronicity, Port of Call, Antisocial 2, and Dark Places
Here's the folks from Antisocial 2:
Left to right, that's director Cody Calahan and cast members Samuel Faraci, Michelle Mylett, and Josette Halpert. Another picture has a bunch of producers and behind-the-scenes people joining them, and I know (from the people who sat around me) that there were even more who didn't come up to the front. I would not be surprised if they booked this one in Hall entirely because they came awful close to selling out de Seve two years ago just off cast & crew, meaning almost no press/VIPs got in. Don't cry for us, but I suspect it meant they left money/audience on the table in other ways.
It's cool to see folks so enthusiastic about making movies and playing a festival, but seeing it was a mistake on my part; it's really not very good (I was very frustrated by the stupid stuff), was chosen over Traders, which could be better, and ran long enough that I couldn't get into Scherzo Diabolico. Fortunately, I had that slated as an open slot today, so I'll just close it up. On the other hand, I had time to go have a steak, so that was nice.
That there's an Antisocial 2 at all is kind of surprising; it's not like the first got a wide release and was some sort of sleeper hit. I joked with some folks that apparently making $10 off a $5 budget is the sort of profit that yields a second picture, but I wouldn't be surprised if the first did okay on VOD and the like; it's pretty good and has a cable-box-menu-friendly title. The other thing, though, is that based on the Q&A, Black Fawn Films seems to be making a ton of movies for Breakthrough Entertainment; this was probably a reasonably safe bet. I've got no idea whether the bulk is part of a problem with this film, but maybe it not being such a factory could have helped.
Today's plan: Cherry Tree, Scherzo Diabolico, Ava's Possessions, The Golden Cane Warrior, and Shinjuku Swan. Maybe I'll try for the Turbo Kid rush line, although I'm not sure how that works.
Synchronicity
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
There's not really a glut of movies like this one out there, although if you spend enough time watching modestly-budgeted science fiction you'll see a fair number of people try to make something that needs the T axis to handle all of its twist, even if few of them are clever or dedicated enough to the details to make the result great. Jacob Gentry is the latest to give the knotty time-travel story a shot with Synchronicity, and he does a fair job of building a complex structure fast enough that it doesn't collapse from its shaky foundation until the end.
It starts out actually requiring a paradox - physicist Jim Beale (Chad McKnight) is building a time machine, but only has the resources to open one end of a wormhole right now. He and colleagues Chuck (AJ Bowen) and Matty (Scott Poythress) will need to demonstrate that works to investor Klaus Meisner (Michael Ironside) in order to get what they need to later open the other end and send something through in order for the first demo to be a success. At first it looks bad, but then they find something new in the lab, and fortuitous passerby Abby (Brianne Davis) helps to sell Klaus on the project. It's obvious that something is fishy, and as Jim is falling for Abby, the effects of opening the wormhole are doing a number on his health.
The opening need for effect to precede cause indicates early on that Gentry intends to tell the sort of time-travel story that will stand up to a whiteboard test, telling a story where you can list events, draw lines, annotate, and potentially erase in a logical manner. It's a bit fuzzy at points, built on assumptions that time has different rules for people than non-sentient matter on the one hand and offering up an alternate theory that sounds an awful lot like an escape hatch on the other. It's a rickety enough construct, but one that plays reasonably fair by the rules it establishes.
Full review on EFC.
Port of Call
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Port of Call looks like it's going to be a police procedural, and certainly acts like one during the early going. But then the answer to "who killed Wang Jiamei?" presents itself, though Aaron Kwok's Inspector Chong keeps investigating. At first it seems like he thinks Ting Tsz-chung (Nichael Ning) may not have done it, or maybe this is another girl, but, no, he just wants to know why.
As that happens, the movie transforms, becoming a film about loneliness and isolation. Language, appearance, or obsession can be the source, but the emotion looks similar on all three characters. All three cast memebers are impressive in their roles, earning empathy if not always sympathy for how overwhelmed they feel.
Writer/director Philip Yung is impressive with his architecture, dividing his film into chapters but still giving himself room to jump back and forth in time. He fills in blanks as he goes, but not all of them, as there are many case is where it's not needed. It makes for a sad experience, but one that suggests that, at least in some cases, loneliness is not necessary and may be overcome.
Full review on EFC.
"What Doesn't Kill You"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
Saw this at BUFF in March, and my opinion on it is more or less the same: It's a pretty slick, well-executed short with a central conceit that resonates. Seeing it a second time, I was surprised that it didn't quite seem to follow through; I seemed to remember a finale scene that was much more definitive than what we get here.
Antisocial 2
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
When you see something like Antisocial at a festival with the filmmakers there, someone always asks about a sequel, and the response is usually a description of something bigger and different, although everyone there knows that it's not actually going to happen. Sometimes it does, though, even though it may be a bad idea.
In this case, it's a bad idea because there's just not really a level on which this thing makes any sort of sense. As neat an idea as a social network which swallows its users might have been, following through to a post-apocalyptic setting raiss the question of just who is keeping the infrastructure running. Are there power plants and server rooms whose zombies are doing something productive? On the other side of tings, the story rests precariously on nobody every even trying to share information and a mad scientist (Stephen Bogaert) who thinks torture and stress will reveal everything better than asking questions. It's just frustratingly dumb, especially as the people who could see connections just never happen to be anywhere near each other.
It just gets more disappointing toward the end, when there's a chance for a clever revelation or two - what if the feared "upgrade" (who's coding that?) will actually lead to more user autonomy, because what good is a social network whose users aren't creating original exploitable content? It's also the sort of movie which tries to get you to fist-pump for how the first film's survivor now being a badass chick with an axe for fifteen minutes, but then has her cuffed to things and tortured for half the movie. Shame, because Michelle Mylett is still impressive, as is young Josette Halpert as the girl who falls in with her. A few good pieces doesn't make up for the rest, though.
Full review on EFC.
Dark Places
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I'm mildly curious how big a part a secondary character had in the original book; after an amusing introduction (and fairly high billing), he gets streamlined right in the background. It's the right choice - this is a story about people involved in a crime rather than those investigating it, and while that material can be a bit uneven, but when it hits, the results are fairly impressive.
Thirty years ago, Libby Day's mother Patty (Christina Hendricks) and her older sisters Michelle (Natalie Precht) and Debby (Madison McGuire) were killed in one night, with Libby (Sterling Jerins) barely escaping. Her brother Ben (Tye Sheridan) was convicted in large part based on eight-year-old Libby's testimony, and an outpouring of support from across the country gave her a trust fund to live on. Now it's about to run out, and Libby (Charlize Theron), who has never held a job, is approached by Lyle Wirth (Nicholas Hoult) with a chance to earn some money. He's part of a local "Kill Club", which among other things investigates old cases where there has been a miscarriage of justice, and Ben's has a lot of holes even considering how unreliable kids' eyewitness testimony is now considered to be. Time is of the essence, though - as part of budget cuts and consolidation, the records of closed cases that old will be destroyed in three weeks' time, so Libby will have to take an active role in the investigation, despite never having learned much about that part of her life or having any contact with her brother (Corey Stoll).
Libby's ignorance makes an interesting, if sometimes confusing, way to pick up the case. She's the film's narrator, but the film will often flash back to the weeks and days before the murders with details that Libby has not learned in the main timeline. The story has to be told that way - the audience doesn't need that information well before Libby discovers it, though it's better than spending a lot of time in the past toward the end of the movie - but it does create a bit of a disconnect between sleuth and viewer at points. It's a bit surprising that Lyle and the rest of his team sort of fade to the background; one would think they'd be kind of useful in terms of doing legwork or maybe being with her in situations that may turn threatening. There's also something mentioned early on that quickly seems too relevant to not be connected that viewers will be waiting for that to happen.
Full review on EFC.
Left to right, that's director Cody Calahan and cast members Samuel Faraci, Michelle Mylett, and Josette Halpert. Another picture has a bunch of producers and behind-the-scenes people joining them, and I know (from the people who sat around me) that there were even more who didn't come up to the front. I would not be surprised if they booked this one in Hall entirely because they came awful close to selling out de Seve two years ago just off cast & crew, meaning almost no press/VIPs got in. Don't cry for us, but I suspect it meant they left money/audience on the table in other ways.
It's cool to see folks so enthusiastic about making movies and playing a festival, but seeing it was a mistake on my part; it's really not very good (I was very frustrated by the stupid stuff), was chosen over Traders, which could be better, and ran long enough that I couldn't get into Scherzo Diabolico. Fortunately, I had that slated as an open slot today, so I'll just close it up. On the other hand, I had time to go have a steak, so that was nice.
That there's an Antisocial 2 at all is kind of surprising; it's not like the first got a wide release and was some sort of sleeper hit. I joked with some folks that apparently making $10 off a $5 budget is the sort of profit that yields a second picture, but I wouldn't be surprised if the first did okay on VOD and the like; it's pretty good and has a cable-box-menu-friendly title. The other thing, though, is that based on the Q&A, Black Fawn Films seems to be making a ton of movies for Breakthrough Entertainment; this was probably a reasonably safe bet. I've got no idea whether the bulk is part of a problem with this film, but maybe it not being such a factory could have helped.
Today's plan: Cherry Tree, Scherzo Diabolico, Ava's Possessions, The Golden Cane Warrior, and Shinjuku Swan. Maybe I'll try for the Turbo Kid rush line, although I'm not sure how that works.
Synchronicity
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
There's not really a glut of movies like this one out there, although if you spend enough time watching modestly-budgeted science fiction you'll see a fair number of people try to make something that needs the T axis to handle all of its twist, even if few of them are clever or dedicated enough to the details to make the result great. Jacob Gentry is the latest to give the knotty time-travel story a shot with Synchronicity, and he does a fair job of building a complex structure fast enough that it doesn't collapse from its shaky foundation until the end.
It starts out actually requiring a paradox - physicist Jim Beale (Chad McKnight) is building a time machine, but only has the resources to open one end of a wormhole right now. He and colleagues Chuck (AJ Bowen) and Matty (Scott Poythress) will need to demonstrate that works to investor Klaus Meisner (Michael Ironside) in order to get what they need to later open the other end and send something through in order for the first demo to be a success. At first it looks bad, but then they find something new in the lab, and fortuitous passerby Abby (Brianne Davis) helps to sell Klaus on the project. It's obvious that something is fishy, and as Jim is falling for Abby, the effects of opening the wormhole are doing a number on his health.
The opening need for effect to precede cause indicates early on that Gentry intends to tell the sort of time-travel story that will stand up to a whiteboard test, telling a story where you can list events, draw lines, annotate, and potentially erase in a logical manner. It's a bit fuzzy at points, built on assumptions that time has different rules for people than non-sentient matter on the one hand and offering up an alternate theory that sounds an awful lot like an escape hatch on the other. It's a rickety enough construct, but one that plays reasonably fair by the rules it establishes.
Full review on EFC.
Port of Call
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Port of Call looks like it's going to be a police procedural, and certainly acts like one during the early going. But then the answer to "who killed Wang Jiamei?" presents itself, though Aaron Kwok's Inspector Chong keeps investigating. At first it seems like he thinks Ting Tsz-chung (Nichael Ning) may not have done it, or maybe this is another girl, but, no, he just wants to know why.
As that happens, the movie transforms, becoming a film about loneliness and isolation. Language, appearance, or obsession can be the source, but the emotion looks similar on all three characters. All three cast memebers are impressive in their roles, earning empathy if not always sympathy for how overwhelmed they feel.
Writer/director Philip Yung is impressive with his architecture, dividing his film into chapters but still giving himself room to jump back and forth in time. He fills in blanks as he goes, but not all of them, as there are many case is where it's not needed. It makes for a sad experience, but one that suggests that, at least in some cases, loneliness is not necessary and may be overcome.
Full review on EFC.
"What Doesn't Kill You"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, HD)
Saw this at BUFF in March, and my opinion on it is more or less the same: It's a pretty slick, well-executed short with a central conceit that resonates. Seeing it a second time, I was surprised that it didn't quite seem to follow through; I seemed to remember a finale scene that was much more definitive than what we get here.
Antisocial 2
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
When you see something like Antisocial at a festival with the filmmakers there, someone always asks about a sequel, and the response is usually a description of something bigger and different, although everyone there knows that it's not actually going to happen. Sometimes it does, though, even though it may be a bad idea.
In this case, it's a bad idea because there's just not really a level on which this thing makes any sort of sense. As neat an idea as a social network which swallows its users might have been, following through to a post-apocalyptic setting raiss the question of just who is keeping the infrastructure running. Are there power plants and server rooms whose zombies are doing something productive? On the other side of tings, the story rests precariously on nobody every even trying to share information and a mad scientist (Stephen Bogaert) who thinks torture and stress will reveal everything better than asking questions. It's just frustratingly dumb, especially as the people who could see connections just never happen to be anywhere near each other.
It just gets more disappointing toward the end, when there's a chance for a clever revelation or two - what if the feared "upgrade" (who's coding that?) will actually lead to more user autonomy, because what good is a social network whose users aren't creating original exploitable content? It's also the sort of movie which tries to get you to fist-pump for how the first film's survivor now being a badass chick with an axe for fifteen minutes, but then has her cuffed to things and tortured for half the movie. Shame, because Michelle Mylett is still impressive, as is young Josette Halpert as the girl who falls in with her. A few good pieces doesn't make up for the rest, though.
Full review on EFC.
Dark Places
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
I'm mildly curious how big a part a secondary character had in the original book; after an amusing introduction (and fairly high billing), he gets streamlined right in the background. It's the right choice - this is a story about people involved in a crime rather than those investigating it, and while that material can be a bit uneven, but when it hits, the results are fairly impressive.
Thirty years ago, Libby Day's mother Patty (Christina Hendricks) and her older sisters Michelle (Natalie Precht) and Debby (Madison McGuire) were killed in one night, with Libby (Sterling Jerins) barely escaping. Her brother Ben (Tye Sheridan) was convicted in large part based on eight-year-old Libby's testimony, and an outpouring of support from across the country gave her a trust fund to live on. Now it's about to run out, and Libby (Charlize Theron), who has never held a job, is approached by Lyle Wirth (Nicholas Hoult) with a chance to earn some money. He's part of a local "Kill Club", which among other things investigates old cases where there has been a miscarriage of justice, and Ben's has a lot of holes even considering how unreliable kids' eyewitness testimony is now considered to be. Time is of the essence, though - as part of budget cuts and consolidation, the records of closed cases that old will be destroyed in three weeks' time, so Libby will have to take an active role in the investigation, despite never having learned much about that part of her life or having any contact with her brother (Corey Stoll).
Libby's ignorance makes an interesting, if sometimes confusing, way to pick up the case. She's the film's narrator, but the film will often flash back to the weeks and days before the murders with details that Libby has not learned in the main timeline. The story has to be told that way - the audience doesn't need that information well before Libby discovers it, though it's better than spending a lot of time in the past toward the end of the movie - but it does create a bit of a disconnect between sleuth and viewer at points. It's a bit surprising that Lyle and the rest of his team sort of fade to the background; one would think they'd be kind of useful in terms of doing legwork or maybe being with her in situations that may turn threatening. There's also something mentioned early on that quickly seems too relevant to not be connected that viewers will be waiting for that to happen.
Full review on EFC.
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