Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.06: In My Mother's Skin, Lovely, Dark, and Deep, Les Rascals, and Marry My Dead Body

Not a big guest day - Lovely, Dark, and Deep director Teresa Sutherland was there to introduce her film but couldn't stay for a Q&A. In previous years I might have said something like, man, if I had a movie at a film festival and it had two shows a day apart, I'd be there for both, hanging around to watch movies, and so on. On the other hand, almost every flight I've tried to schedule lately has either been at a stupid times or ridiculously expensive, and hotel rooms ain't cheap either. Combine that with all the stories you hear about just how middle-class people in this business actually are during the strike, and, well, I get it a bit better now.

Next up: A Chinese Ghost Story, Booger, Insomniacs After School, Things That Go Bump in the East, and Devils. And because this took such an unconscionably long time to post (some early starts and work I couldn't just half-pay attention to), I'll drop two tentative days worth of "where to say hi" in that I'm planning to attend My Animal, Killing Romance, and Mad Cats today (4 August) and God of Cookery, the International sci-fi shorts, Molli and Max in the Future, Onyx the Fortuitious and the Talisman of Souls, and Suitable Flesh tomorrow (5 August), with Piaffe noted as at being least interesting.


In My Mother's Skin

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

The sort of horror movie that can frustrate me, personally, because I've got a brain intent on decoding its uncanny events and true horror in some ways comes from how it resists being figured out or assigned values. That's especially the case when they take place from a child's point of view, and maybe part of the point of movies like this is that the world runs on rules that one can't grasp when it's not just randomly cruel.

So it is here, in the home of a comfortable family in the Philippines as World War II stretches on in 1945: Father Romualdo and mother Ligaya (Beauty Gonzalez), children Tala (Felicity Kyle Napuli) and Bayani, with servant Amor (Angeli Bayani) looking after their needs. A collaborator by the name of Antonio has accused "Aldo" of stealing and hiding some Japanese gold as he prepares for a trip into town, leaving the oft-sickly Ligaya to watch the children. As the food runs out, the practical Tala goes to search the woods, finding a mysterious building with a Fairy (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) who sees all through the local insects, and offers some help - and though Tala is smart enough to know these offers seldom come without strings, the situation feels desperate.

There's a strange tightness to this film, with the opening suggesting a much wider wartime-horror scenario and both the question of the gold and Aldo's absence lingering over the story but not actively engaged with. Which is not to say that individual stakes are not worth one's concerns, just that they sometimes wobble - the mix of how even children must do desperate things to survive during wartime, the sins of the parents being visited upon them, and the war perhaps being smaller than the greater forces around it don't always gel into something that really drills into one part of a viewer's mind, unless there's a specific phobia of having insects burrow under one's skin in play. The film winds up trading largely on atmosphere.

Heck of an atmosphere, though: It all takes place in and around this isolated manor that almost feels safe but soon clearly isn't: It's not a grandiose mansion, no, but the ceilings are clearly too high to be in scale with Tala and Bayani, and one can sense that a fair amount of time has passed without Aldo's presence by how the characters have rationed the food down to the last sweet potato. It's just enough for them to have felt safe before the chaotic forces of nature and decay began pushing their way in, so that even without making it a classic creepy house, the danger of the place reveals itself. It's no wonder the Fairy is able to find an easy mark in Tala, as the film's designers make her otherworldly but vibrant, with Jasmine Curtis-Smith doing an excellent job of sweetly smiling as she tells Tala that this is going to cost her dearly while leaving just enough doubt and suggesting that she's a smart and responsible enough child to handle it.

That plays off a very nice performance by young star Felicity Kyle Napuli; she's got the lack of seeming sensible and mature but revealing innocence as the film goes on, which is often the opposite of this sort of film's path, where the unsuspecting heroine discovers inner strength. The audience wouldn't be with her if she were any sort of fool. Beauty Gonzalez seems to have quite the time moving between the weak but respectable mother and the moth-possessed monster.

It builds up to an impressively gory finale, albeit one that has me thinking "so, now what?" as the credits roll. Ultimately, the atmosphere and interesting images are enough.


Lovely, Dark, and Deep

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

As a person who quite likes looking at the great outdoors but finds little to be scarier than being stuck in it, I'm an easy mark for movies like Lovely, Dark, and Deep, although it seems like few ever come up with a more interesting idea than making hikers have to deal with serial killers. This one, on the other hand, has some genuinely scary material that it takes its time unwrapping, and the end result may be the best thing the genre has produced in years.

After an ominous opening that explains why there's a job opening at Arvores National Park, we meet Lennon (Georgina Campbell), a newly-transferred ranger who has listed it as her dream job ever since she signed up. Many of the other rangers seem to think something is off about her without hearing the conspiracy-theory podcasts she was listening to on the drive in, but you've got to be kind of off to spend a month in a cabin mostly contacting other rangers by walkie-talkie, though her neighbor Jackson (Nick Blood) is very friendly. What she doesn't advertise is that her little sister disappeared in this park on a visit twenty years ago, and she intends to spend her time looking for any trace, and making damn sure it doesn't happen again when someone like Sara Greenberg (Maria de Sá) disappears from her party, even though head ranger Zhang (Wai Ching Ho) tells her to stay at her station.

Boredom and intermittent strangeness can make a person paranoid or give them heightened awareness of anything just a little bit off, but the trick with a movie is to make this thing that happens over weeks happen in days. What gives Lovely the makings of a nifty little thriller is that writer/director Teresa Sutherland believably gives it a jump-start, in that Lennon is already into a rabbit hole explained by flashbacks and a constant early flirting with the line between reasonably irresponsible. This allows Sutherland to go a good long time without really getting serious about its potential supernatural elements but keeping them around so that the last act needn't feel like a betrayal, and everything winds up fitting together with a little thought.

And even when Sutherland does open things up enough to hint that there may be a pattern beyond Lennon's sister, she's smart to present even the trippiest situations filled with unsettling effects, camerawork, and editing through Lennon's prism. That's great not just because it preserves ambiguity about whether this is something paranormal or just in her mind, but because it means that no matter how strange or unreal things may get, Lennon's obsession and potential ability to find a way to channel it into something positive rather than self-destruction is going to be at the heart of it. No matter how strange things may get, this is Lennon's story, and consequential.

That calls for a pretty nice piece of work by lead actress Georgina Campbell, who manages an impressive level of intensity and obsession even though she's mostly on her own and doesn't have someone else to inflict it on or be measured by. It's the sort of thing that could lead to a lot of gritted teeth or defiant exposition, but instead you get the feeling of someone who has become capable and professional as a sort of by-product of their mania - Lennon is going to be tempted by a lot of things, but isn't necessarily going to scream about them. Interestingly, the three biggest roles are different takes on the professionalism this job in general and the unique circumstances of the park require, with Nick Blood finding a way to jump from gregarious to curt when lives are on the line, and Wai Ching Ho not necessarily having something soft under Zhang's quiet and stern exterior, but perhaps surprising empathy.

(Mai Ching Ho is perhaps the movie's most interesting casting; an accent that implies she immigrated as an adult and appearances in Lennon's flashbacks suggests an interesting backstory beyond how her life intersects with Lennon's and reinforces an idea that these parks belong to and can be enjoyed by everyone that runs counter to a potential "keep out!" message.)

There's something unsettling by the time Lovely, Dark, and Deep ends beyond knowing what happened twenty years ago or during Lennon's first summer as a ranger that's kind of clever: By the end, it has quietly articulated how one can both love the great outdoors and be wary of it, even if that's not always what is going on up front.


Les Rascals

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Typically when one calls a movie frustrating, it's a negative, something said about bad craftsmanship, but at other times, as in Les Rascals, one can take it as a sign of just how well the film has one looking at the rest of the world. Even if you don't know the specifics of how mid-1980s Paris was priced for violence, or exactly how ascendant the far-right is there now, this film tracks in a number of ways, because the where and when of such events seldom changes the forces at work.

It opens in 1977, as Ruddy, a kid from a West Indian family, and his nephew Michel run into Ahmed and his friend ready to take their own frustrations out on the black kids, at least until the chase leads them into a back alley where street tough Loki (Pierre Cevaer) and his friends opt to teach them a lesson and the younger kids forge a bond. Seven years later, Ruddy (Jonathan Feltre), Ahmed (Missoum Slimani), now going by "Rico", and three other friends are calling themselves "Les Rascals", with matching jackets and the like, with "Mitch" (Emerick Mamilonne) a hanger-on despite his brighter academic prospects, but they're mostly just punks even if they exist on the fringes of actual serious criminals - at least until Rico recognizes Loki working in a record store and delivers a beating that puts him in the hospital. Ironically, Loki seems to feel like he had this coming for the sins of his youth, but his younger sister Frédérique (Angelina Woreth) doesn't see it that way, especially once a professor asks her to see grad student Adam (Victor Meutelet) as a tutor. Adam may be handsome and clean-cut, but he's also quite skinhead-adjacent.

One of the first notes things I remembered noting during the screening was that, for something taking place in the mid-1980s, it often gave off a 1950s vibe in the costumes, decor, and music choices, and it turns out to be a really clever bit of construction on the part of the filmmakers: Though much of the early going seems to be looking to trigger nostalgia, even if it's a clear-eyed one that acknowledges racism and violence, the filmmakers remember that the early 80s had an awful lot of looking back at the 1950s - this was the age of Grease, Happy Days, and Back to the Future in America and the French have always had a fondness for that sort of Americana, despite stereotypes otherwise - and the chain formed this way has a lesson about how some dissatisfied people are always looking back, but that you can probably follow that string back forever and not find a golden age. It's no coincidence that Ruddy's family is placing their hopes in Mitch, who is breakdancing rather than appropriating rockabilly; he's the future.

If the family has a future, that is, because Les Rascals is a ticking time bomb of a movie: As Ruddy finds himself kind of adrift - he's not a great student, isn't naturally ruthless enough to be a particularly effective criminal, and can't find a job until he's completed military service that gives him qualms as a black man in a country that hasn't put its colonialist past behind it - the segments with Fred are showing just how easy it can be to slip into radicalism - and how easily calmer voices can be discarded, considering how Loki is sidelined as an influence on his sister once Adam has his claws in her. There's a sense of the whole cast being funneled toward their final confrontation.

It's a nice cast as well, especially Jonathan Feltre, who gives off a ton of quiet frustration as Ruddy grows out of youthful foolishness but doesn't have an appealing way forward, and can't quite articulate how frustrating it is that his own mother seems to think he's hopeless and thinks less of him than her other son, Mitch's father, who is in prison. He projects a fierce but not necessarily virtuous loyalty, like it's the only thing in the world he's got to cling to. On the other side, Angelina Woreth and the filmmakers exploit how quick and easy an earnest young white woman can gain sympathy to create nifty moments of tension entirely built around whether Fred will be seduced by Adam and his way of thinking, hitting sympathetic beats well enough that one maybe doesn't realize just how lost she is until it's far too late.

This leads to a finale of often-shocking violence which director/co-write Jimmy Laporal-Trésor deploys ruthlessly, taking the time to sideline the characters who have no stomach for it on-screen, and while there's often tension, it's never exciting violence that feels like a way to prove righteousness. Indeed, as it goes on, anything like Ruddy swinging his fists, screaming at the person who deserves it, will be reduced in importance, and the politicization will increase, from skinheads attacking more moderate rivals to which bits of bloodshed get used for a narrative in the media.

It's sadly familiar, of course, even across an ocean and forty years. But, then, the good old days are always just one generation back, and breaking the cycle is hard.


Guan yu wo han gui bian cheng jia ren de na jian shi (Marry My Dead Body)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

There's a really strong "sure, why not?" vibe to this that I really like even if it may be kind of iffy in some areas - it's willing to go for the joke and surprisingly good at selling it when it's out there. The high concept and the cop story don't really feel like they belong together at times, but the filmmakers execute well enough to realize that they've actually got a situation where people will accept "it's fate!" if they don't abuse it.

The cop in question is Detective Wu Ming-Han (Greg Hsu Kuang-Han), who is homophobic enough after busting a gay man in a gym's locker room for it not to seem like a good look, especially to co-worker Tzu-Ching (Gingle Wang Ching), who is exceptionally competent but mostly gets assigned to duties that highlight how good she looks in her uniform. After they run down drug dealer A-Gao (Chang Tsai-Hsing), Wu picks up a red envelope while gathering evidence, only to find it was planted by an old lady (Wang Man-Chiao) looking to arrange a "ghost marriage" for her gay grandson Mao Pang-yu (Lin Po-Hung). Not going through with it would be extremely bad luck, even beyond being reassigned to a tiny police station, but when Wu discovers he can see and hear "Mao-Mao", they decide that the best way to get him to reincarnate is seeing to his unfinished business, either with boyfriend Chen Chia-Hao (Aaron Yan) or tracking down the car that hit him, which turns out to be tied to the crime boss Tzu-Ching and the rest of Wu's former colleagues are investigating, Lin Hsiao-Yuan (Tsai Chen-Nan).

Writer/director Cheng Wei-Hao is likely best known for directing the first two movies in Taiwan's The Tag-Along horror series, but is obviously going for a much lighter sort of ghost story here, hitting quite a few familiar beats: Wu talks a lot to someone everyone else can't see, while Mao tries to help by giving him information he couldn't actually know, at least once he's through making Wu squirm for being a prejudiced jerk that he doesn't really want to be attached to. Some of the jokes about gay guys and straight guys have whiskers on them - Wu comes off as the sort of man who likes to dress to impress right up until it's time for Mao to sadly shake his head, for instance - but there's also some kind of interesting material about how Taiwan actually making same-sex marriage legal kind of messed with a culture built on the assumption of being an outsider.

Making a movie is in large part execution as much as creativity, though, and a lot of this one is just plain done well. Take that car chase in the first act, for instance; it has a really good rhythm even if it also feels like a lot was built inside a computer; it went from storyboard to shooting to effects very well indeed. Cheng and his co-writers have a good handle on how to manage a zany but friendly tone without making the audience balk at taking shortcuts, both in how it quickly establishes that most everyone here from cops to grannies treats homophobia as, at best, embarrassingly old-fashioned and in how it uses the same sort of supernatural belief in fate that weds Wu and Mao to tie the pieces of its story together without relying on lucky coincidences. Bits like how actually possessing someone isn't good for a ghost keep things from being too easy but also lead to enjoyably goofy things like the visual of Mao taking a deep drag of burning incense to recharge and reform.

Greg Tsu and Lin Po-Hung make a likable enough odd couple; their scenes together are better than just being perfunctory but they fall a bit short of actually growing into buddies rather than people who don't actually dislike each other. They're likable enough once the initial friction is past, and Hsu has Wu grow out of his bad habits nicely. As is often the case, the supporting characters often get to have more fun: Wang Man-Chiao seemingly has a ball as a matchmaking-granny stereotype who is aggressively up for applying that to Mao, while Gingle Wang is exceptionally good at having Tzu-Ching know she's much smarter than a himbo like Wu without pushing it past where it's funny.

One kind of wants more of Gingle Wang despite also being glad that this isn't a movie about a gay person helping two straights get together, and the fact that someone like Tzu-Ching simultaneously gets a lot of attention and overlooked does pay off. The resolution may ultimately be a little long on "okay, I guess that happened", but what can you do when one of the main characters was dead to start with? This sort of broad comedy didn't need more weight at the end than that anyway.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 4 August 2023 - 10 August 2023

Still north of the border, ready for Fantasia Week Three, looking a little bit nervously at whether certain things will entirely be around when I get back home.

• Meg 2: The Trench winds up splitting some of the premium/3D screens with the new TMNT movie, and it's an odd-looking thing, with Jason Statham returning but not Li Bingbing, although Chinese superstart Wu Jing makes what I believe is his English-language debut. Directed by Ben Wheatley, known more for off-putting British indies more than big action (although he did do Free Fire), so who knows what this will be? It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, West Newton, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D), South Bay (including Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D), Arsenal Yards.
  
  Dreamin' Wild, about relatively unknown-in-their-time musicians Donnie & Joe Emerson, has a heck of an interesting cast in Walton Goggins, Casey Affleck, Zooey Deschanel, and Beau Bridges, and comes from Bill Pohland, who did Love & Mercy. It's at Boston Common; the Common also gets the Disney100 special run of Frozen.
  
  There are early access shows of Bottoms at Boston Common on Saturday and Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story at Boston Common (Imax Xenon) and South Bay (Imax Xenon) on Tuesday, with the latter also at Boston Common (Dolby Cinema), South Bay (Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (Dolby Cinema), and Arsenal Yards (CWX) on Wednesday. Holocaust drama The Hiding Place plays Boston Common Saturday. Shrek 2 plays Boston Common on Wednesday morning (no Saturday matinee, apparently).
• Shortcomings, director Randall Park's adaptation of Adrian Tomine's graphic novel, opens at Landmark Kendall Square and Boston Common.
  
  The Tuesday "Happy Birthday, Mr. Hitchcock" Retro Replays at Kendall Square is Rear Window.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre opens Afire in the Goldscreen, the latest from Christian Petzold in which an already simmering situation is heightened by an approaching forest fire.
  
  Midnights at the Coolidge are part of the "Hip Hop at 50" programming, with Posse playing on 35mm Friday night and Beat Street on Saturday, while 8 Mile plays on 35mm Tuesday evening with a post film-panel discussion and Get Rich or Die Tryin' on film Wednesday, and Straight Outta Compton playing as a Cinema Jukebox show on Thursday. Monday's 35mm Big Screen Classic is Cool Hand Luke.
• Apple Fresh Pond plays Hostel Hudugaru Bekagiddare, a Kannada-language comedy shot verite-style with a bunch of different stories intersecting over one night in a youth hostel, from Friday to Tuesday, Tamil horror-comedy DD Returns Friday to Tuesday, Bengali crime story Surongo playing from Saturday to Tuesday, a re-release of 2012 Telugu action movie Business Man on Tuesday, and Tamil action-comedy Jailer opening Wednesday. Bollywood romantic comedy Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani continues at Fresh Pond and also opens at Boston Common.
  
  The GhibliFest selection at Boston Common is Princess Mononoke, playing subtitled Saturday/Tuesday and dubbed Sunday/Monday/Wednesday. The First Slam Dunk is also playing if you head out to the Liberty Tree Mall.
  
  Boston Common holds over Chinese flick Never Say Never.
• The Brattle Theatre has a weekend of 35mm "Rick Dalton Memorial Screenings" of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood from Friday to Saturday, and I don't know whether to be amused or impressed by Tarantino announcing the fictional character had died and getting his movie a little more attention.
  
  The week's Warner 100 movies are a 35mm print of High Sierra on Monday and and Edward G. Robinson double feature of Confessions of a Nazi Spy & Larceny, Inc., the second on 35mm film, on Tuesday. The Dede Allen feature on Wednesday is Reds, with Thursday's Thrill Ride Horror a 35mm print of The Conjuring.
• The Harvard Film Archive is nearing the home stretch of "Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro", with this week's 35mm presentations of The End of Summer (Friday/Sunday), An Autumn Afternoon (Saturday), Equinox Flower (Saturday), and Early Spring (Monday). The program also includes Wim Wenders's Tokyo-Ga, playing via a DCP on Sunday evening.
• The Capitol has Anthony Duva's horror-thriller Lost Soul on Friday, and his drama Gabriella on Saturday.
  
  The Somerville Theatre picks up Theater Camp, and also plays Roadhouse in 4K as Saturday's Midnight Special, with most of the other rep on hold because the 70mm print of Oppenheimer is good and dug in on the main screen.
• If you don't have tickets for Oppenheimer on the dome at The Museum of Science, bummer, because it's sold out, but the "Summer Space Film" series starts next week with 2001.
• The West Newton Cinema adds Meg 2 and Theater Camp to Haunted Mansion, Barbie, Oppenheimer (35mm), Asteroid City (Sunday matinee), Super Mario Brothers (Saturday matinee). Open all week!
  
  The Lexington Venue continues Oppenheimer and Barbie all week (except Monday).
  
  The Luna Theater has Earth Mama Friday, Saturday, and Thursday; Lynch/Oz on Saturday; Pee-Wee's Big Adventure all day Sunday, as well as a Weirdo Wednesday show.
  
  Cinema Salem has Talk to Me, Barbie, Oppenheimer, and TMNT through Monday. True Romance plays Saturday and Sunday afternoon, there's a "Miz Diamond Wigfall Presents" show of Twilight late Saturday, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan on Thursday.
• Outdoor screenings listed at Joe's Free Films include The Goonies at the Hatch Shell Friday, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish at the Prudential Saturday, Ghost at Christopher Columbus Park on Sunday, Minions: The Rise of Gru at Moakley Park Monday, an as-yet-unannounced film in Inman Square Tuesday, Mamma Mia at Boston Landing Wednesday, and Strange World at Somerville's Seven Hills Park on Thursday.

Still in Montreal, so maybe I'll see The Meg 2 if it looks like it won't make it to a second week in 3D in Boston, but mostly just living at the Fantasia Festival.

Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.05: The Fantastic Golem Affairs, Stay Online, The Primevals, Tiger Stripes, "Paragon", and Restore Point

Didn't expect my first five-movie day of the festival to be a weekday, but somehow it worked out that way. It's doubly funny because I saw two separate "how do people watch two movies in a row" and "stop making long movies" threads on social media by people who just apparently couldn't handle Barbie and/or Oppenheimer this weekend.

Lightweights.

Things kicked off with Nando Martinez and Juan González visiting with their movie The Fantastic Golem Affair, a title which sort of makes them scratch their heads (especially the English translation, which had them asking "what's an affair?"). Apparently it's just "Golem" as far as they are concerned , but this is their first time working with outside producers, and while those producers trusted them with a free hand in making the movie, they had a lot to say about marketing, and if they said "Golem" sounds a little too much like a horror movie versus this sort of comedy, well, that's what they know.

A fun bit of the Q&A came with the inevitable "influences" question, which I'd be very tempted to answer "every movie I've ever watched" every time. They were asked about Alex de la Iglesia, and said that they didn't really consider him a big influence, although they understand why an audience that doesn't watch a lot of Spanish comedy might see that, as they both come from the same basic background, but they consider their work much more upbeat and less cynical. They talked about how Wes Anderson was someone they could see as a much more direct influence, in the deliberate staging, use of color, and just generally meticulous control they exercised over every detail on screen.

Next up was Stay Online, with director Yeva Strielnikova (left) and producer Anton Skrypets (right), plus a translator, talking about how, as you might imagine, making a movie in a war zone is a hell of a thing. This one was shot in large part in a house just outside Kyiv, so it wasn't a direct target for rocket attacks, but there were still some that happened quite nearby, enough that one or two folks on the production staff would deal with PTSD afterward. In some ways, what sticks with me the most about the movie is related to that - as a "ScreenLife" movie, it mostly simulates looking at a character's computer desktop, and there are endless pop-ups and alerts about air raids and news, and that's a lot over a 110-minute movie; I am extremely glad I don't have to think of that 24/7 with every one potentially informing me of a life-or-death situation.

One thing brought up was that the post-production involved a lot of translation, which is why most of what we saw on those screens was English, which is kind of an odd compromise, as the characters are speaking Ukrainian with bits of Russian and English thrown in, and it does hit a kind of odd stop in my brain, which was on the one hand was able to digest what was happening easily enough but on the other was sort of wondering why all this was in English. It's also kind of strange to think that I wasn't really watching an original/authentic version of the movie, but what was the best alternative? It already had a fair amount of subtitles that were less translating some material than indicating that this song was a patriotic ballad, or some similar bit of information.

Also, in a sort of odd reversal to what the folks before them said, they mentioned that "Stay Online" as a title is very apt - it has become a thing Ukrainians say to each other, hoping for constant contact and assurance that one is safe - even if it's not entirely well-known outside of Ukraine.

After that, I was hoping for a Q&A with the guests from The Primevals, but producer Charles Band and effects artist Chris Endicott had to leave to catch their flight midway through the movie, so that didn't happen. It's a shame, as the story behind the movie - there are sections in the credits for 1978, 2002, and 2019 - is kind of crazy, and hearing the whole of it would have been something.

Last guest of the night was Colin Treneff, who directed the short "Paragon", which played before Restore Point. The short was fun, although the retro-tech fetish is kind of odd for someone who was screwing around with Apple //e's during that time period.

So - long day! Tuesday would be a bit shorter, as the festival inadvertently supports my day-job work schedule but not starting until 2pm. The plan is In My Mother's Skin; Lovely, Dark, and Deep; Les Rascals, and Marry My Dead Body. And since I'm posting this on Friday, say hi if you're at Aporia, Pett Kata Shaw, River, or The Sacrifice Game.


El fantástico caso del Golem (The Fantastic Golem Affairs)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

The Fantastic Golem Affairs is such a breezy, absurd comedy that its biggest failing might be that it seemingly jumps past any scene that doesn't have a joke in it as it approaches the end where bits of story have to be resolved, such that the last act has a lot of moments where the story certainly could have gotten there, but maybe hasn't actually done the work. Or, perhaps, that's a sign of filmmaking strength: If it just feels like scenes have been skipped, rather than avoided because they wouldn't make sense or would kill the vibe, are they really needed?

It opens by introducing Juan Martinez (Brays Efe) and his best friend David (David Menéndez), playing a game of movie charades on the roof that, somehow, winds up with David naked on a ledge - and then falling over it, and shattering like a ceramic urn when he lands on a neighbor's car. Confused, Juan seeks out others who have seen something like this, only hearing back from Maria Pons (Anna Castillo), whose stepfather once shattered his hand in a similar way, although she mainly is looking to hook up. In the meantime, two lovers who also work for a mysterious "golem" company (Javier Botet & Roger Coma) are following Juan, and without CEO David, the company run by Juan's father Toni (Luis Tosar) and aide-de-camp Clara (Bruna Cusi) is having trouble resolving a stuck algorithm, the owner of the car damaged by David's death is looking to sue, and things are getting steadily more peculiar as Juan stumbles around trying to solve a mystery even though he's never had to figure anything out before.

That's potentially the recipe for an annoying protagonist, and Juan does seem like he's roughly one bad decision from being a really insufferable dumbass, but actor Brays Efe and the filmmakers find the spot where the audience believes that, though he's kind of a fool, he's been held back because he everyone feared that he would be one, and it became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Efe plays Juan as lazy and not always great at putting two and two together but maybe not inherently that way, and as a result he's the source of silliness but also great at reacting to it.

He's surrounded by a very solid group, many fairly big names in Spanish cinema, that make for similarly interesting characters: Luis Tosar plays his father with a comic obliviousness that masks a man so confused by the world he wants to escape it, while Bruna Cusí gets to play Clara as feminine and ambitious in a way that works for her but which others find challenging. Anna Castillo takes a woman who puts on a front that reads as elaborately outgoing and grabs hold of how intensely guarded Maria can be. Javier Botet and Roger Coma have very funny banter that makes the idea of one on his own seem off-kilter.

It all takes place in a heightened, cartoonish world that never feels as rigid as a Wes Anderson film but instead relaxed, with the camera moving between rooms of an apartment or office like it's in a 1960s Frank Tashlin sex comedy with knowing winks to Almodóvar, with characters winking at the goofy elements but sort of shrugging and moving through them. The soundtrack is terrific, the running gags run exceptionally well, and when characters exit with impressively slapstick violence, it allows characters to react but doesn't entirely stop the movie dead. It's charming and silly but meticulous enough that it doesn't have to make a big deal of maybe having something underneath.

That said, it doesn't feel like the way things shake out is the natural result of what happened; it's reasonable enough, but not entirely satisfying, especially when a reporter in a press conference scene asks a question that is basically "so, this is still a rich person thing?" and it highlights how these matured characters have still been placed in comfortable positions, which hadn't really been a thrust of the movie and maybe keeps that ending from being completely satisfying.


Stay Online

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, digital)

I know, when I look at my own behavior, that I'm not necessarily any better in this regard, but I imagine that it's hard to watch this movie and not think "young people just will not put down their phones even in the middle of a war zone, huh?" The format of these movies can't help but warp the story, but it's also kind of practical for filming what turns out to be a pretty decent thriller in a place and time when its events make that otherwise impossible.

That place and time is, very specifically, 9 March 2022, mere weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, starting at about 11am. As the opening titles explain, many Ukrainian companies have donated laptops and other materials for the war effort, in this case a work laptop that volunteer Katya (Elizaveta Zaitseva) is to install a GPS tracking system on so that it can be passed on to the army, particularly her brother Vitya, who has not informed their mother that he has enlisted. While the software installs, she talks to an aid-worker friend, Ryan, and then discovers that the original owner's account is still active when his son Sawa calls. Father Andriy was last seen near Ryan, so Katya tries to use the resources she has to track him down.

Every found footage or "Screenlife" movie hits a point where the viewer wants folks to just put the camera down, and that feels like it happens five or six times here, although it's generally followed by a realization that, okay, maybe folks need to reach out and record in this situation. It's an odd tug of war, between the format causing extreme verisimilitude and disbelief. In some ways, the best use of the format is for something that one might not even think of casually removing from a more conventional film to streamline it: The constant barrage of pop-ups and messages that are undeniably useful but which also produce a constant state of heightened anxiety, including news stories that exist mainly to stoke patriotism - even if the audience isn't reading them constantly, the constant pressure is an important part of the environment.

That tension gives rise to what is ultimately at the center of the movie, the idea that war provides opportunities to be heroic and monstrous, and the practical path in between is often less satisfying. Before Katya connects with Sawa, we see her tracking down the mother of a dead Russian soldier to taunt the woman, getting plenty of bile in return but allowing the audience to feel some of the rush of going on the offensive and doing something, even as Ryan warns it's bad for her soul. Helping Sawa feels much better - he's a cute, Spider-Man loving kid, and Katya gets to position herself as a superhero in his eyes, at least until she has to sift through photographs from the war zones to learn where his parents are. Some soldiers are presented as eager to do something actively good; others revel in exerting power, and "what would your mother think?" is a question that continually comes up but doesn't necessarily have a single, helpful answer.

The story itself is fair, a bunch of "then this happens" in the way that war stories can be, although one which seems oddly willing to take things at face value on occasion: There are a few moments when a call being faked to lure soldiers into a trap seems the most likely situation and the question isn't even brought up, let alone explained, which seems like an especially noteworthy gap considering how well most in the audience will know that social media can be filled with distortions and lies. The cast is good, even beyond how this project must be a Hell of a thing to work on near Kyiv, given the circumstances, with Elizaveta Zaitseva particularly notable for how much she takes on over the course of the film, particularly in the nervous, impatient moments when Katya is waiting for a call to go through.

Stay Online gets a boost for timeliness and for being a thing whose very existence is impressive, and it's an often thrilling movie at the ends despite a somewhat mushy middle. I don't know that I truly love it as a film, but I sure respect the heck out of it.


The Primevals

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, digital)

The Primevals is pure unrepentant pulp whose 40-odd years of efforts at production combine exceptionally well, given the circumstances. The acting may be a bit wooden, and the story more than a little threadbare, but given that the old-school visual effects are the draw, it's only right that everything is roughly on the same level.

In Nepal, a yeti has recently been not just seen in the wild, but killed after attacking a Sherpa village, with the ten-foot carcass brought to America for study. Veteran scientist Claire Collier (Juliet Mills) recruits Matthew Connor (Richard Joseph Paul), whose doctoral thesis on the yeti she had rejected for being too speculative, on an expedition to find a live specimen, as well as explaining the apparent advanced neurosurgery that had been performed on the one they found. They stop in India to recruit Rondo Montana (Leon Russom), a former big-game hunter who has grown disillusioned with the safari set, before meeting up with anthropologist Kathleen Reidel (Walker Brandt) and local tracker Siku (Tai Thai), whose brother was killed in the previous attack. They set out to find where the yeti have come from, but soon discover far more.

What they find is one crazy damn thing after another, giving a couple generations of animators chances to integrate strange creatures into scenery that likely felt a serial-era throwback when most of the film was shot in 1994 (there are notes about work done in 1978 in the credits, but that seems like early proof-of-concept stuff). The stop-motion and puppetry is at times stunning - the yeti is pretty near flawless, for example, convincing as it stands in the middle of a large university hall and as it moves. Some crowd scenes certainly seem like the plan is that volume may make up for any individual issues, but the motion has the same sort of quality as that in Ray Harryhausen adventures, where the detail on a small figure maybe doesn't entirely scale and one can sense the armature inside, but it still fools the eye. That said, those crowd scenes don't look like one model multiplied a hundred times, but a lot of individual personality.

Mostly, there's a lot of affectionate love for old-school pulp with its scientist heroes, mostly played by folks who have worked steadily if not notably over the past 30 years, by and large committing to playing their archetypes in straightforward, competent fashion. One won't remember much of their work, but probably won't howl at it, either. Writer/director David Allen, who passed in 1999, seems to revelin pulling back a curtain to reveal a whole other lost world, with a curtain of its own, and earnestly jumping in. It also does a pretty fair job of doing what it can to get a little distance from the genre's more colonialist tropes without seeming smug about its evolution.

Part of the irony of The Primevals being a long-delayed project is that there are parts of this B-movie that likely would have gone direct to VHS had it been released in the mid-1990s that look better than many of its modern equivalents - shooting real sets on film can still look pretty good if the folks involved are reasonably competent, and Full Moon Studios managed to squeeze enough out of a budget to get that result. The folks who crowdfunded the completion in 2019 were clearly working on a labor of love and tribute, so it never feels like corners were cut where monsters are concerned. So while this is no lost classic, it's nice to have it out there, and can proudly share a shelf with other guilty pleasures or movies that do one thing very well even if the rest is average at best.


Tiger Stripes

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

As much as I sense there's got to be something universal here, I also feel like my never having been a tween girl, Muslim, or Malaysian means that it's a pretty tough stretch for me to get there, on top of there being parts I just don't get. Like, I am never going to fully grasp horror stories about a girl's first period where she is actually becoming a monster.

The girl in question is 12-year-old Nur Zaffan bini Azzam (Zafreen Zairizal), more boisterous than her friends Farah (Deena Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa) already, and while mother Munah (June Lojong) could probably have done better than describing her as "dirty" when she wakes up in the middle of the night with blood on her sheets, but it's not all bad - she gets to skip daily prayers, for instance. But soon, not only are her symptoms hard to bear, but Farah turns on her, dragging Mariam with her, and she starts to take on new characteristics more reminiscent of a tiger than a human woman.

It's the sort of thing that could easily be played up as a metaphor or mostly inside Zaffan's head, except that it gets harder and harder to credit that as the movie goes on and folkloric legend "Ina" shows up more often and what happens to others as the film goes on gets harder and harder to credit if she's not becoming something else, eventually asking the audience to rewrite a lot of the movie if that's what they feel is happening. On the other hand, it's not much of a creature feature; the seemingly-contagious hysteria of the second half is a fuzzy story that's not particularly about Zaffan, who often seems frustrated but not really dangerous even as a developing cat-person.

On the other hand, I do love the girl who is going through that madness: Zaffan is the sort of girl who seems like she could be a lot of effort to be friends or family with, especially when you need something predictable, but she's initially joyful even as she's got a tendency to keep pushing. Her nature is to be too independent to really shame, and Zafreen Zairizal captures how, even when she's feeling diminished or rejected, that's likely to lead to more anger than submission. She and filmmaker Amanda Nell Eu navigate the area between "what local society will accept" and "what is natural and reasonable" very well, such that one knows when she has stepped over that second line. Deena Ezral is a kind of impressive counter, similarly smart and forceful but rigid in different places.

The film is so earnest and ready to to deal with the rawness of its' kids emotions that the moments of clear, sarcastic satire almost don't fit in, even though they are some of the best parts of the movie: The vice-principal type who seemingly can't disguise her apathy verging on contempt for her students is probably found in real life far more often than one would like, but the dryness with which she delivers some lines is fine deadpan comedy. The last act is one of the more enjoyable "exorcist gets into more than he bargained for" sequences I've seen in a while, with Shaheizy Sam a charlatan with superficial charm until he gets to Zaffan, who is not nearly so easily cowed. The last bit of that section is a moment that is truly, universally satisfying.

But take this with a grain of salt; I'm a nearly-50-year-old white guy in North America, pretty darn far from being Zaffan, and this movie exists to entertain girls like her more than it does to teach me. I enjoyed the movie and more or less recommend it, but actual insight is likely to come from someone closer to it.


"PARAGON"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, digital)

You can see the Rule Of Three at work in "PARAGON", as an MIT student (Jacob Ost) in 1984 feeds questions into a computer program he's apparently written that is built to look up anything he wants to know: Normal response, normal response, weird one; innocuously weird answer, innocuously weird answer, plot-advancing revelation. It's a short film with just one character, and there's not much else other than clever production design to distract you.

It's the sort of period fetishism that doesn't quite beg you to find fault with it, even beyond how those of us who were screwing around computers in 1984 are going to tell you that you're probably not going match up an Apple IIe's version of Basic with a book from Radio Shack, and the online knowledge repositories needed for this thing to work just didn't exist (yeah, I'm an old man reminding kids that Google had to be invented). It's kind of funny that if you shot this exact same movie in 1984 - and you probably could have! - it would feel like clever science fiction rather than a retro fetish.

Under it, though, is a kind of fun concept that would have been fun at the time, and writer/director Colin Treneff escalates things nicely the couple of times it's called for, even if it ends on something of a non-sequiter so that it can actually end. I don't know how well it plays for those who don't feel some nostalgia for the old Apple checkerboard cursor, but it manages its elements well enough to work.


Bod obnovy (Restore Point)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

I do enjoy a nifty sci-fi mystery that's got the feel of something that could become a series, what with the nicely determined detective who doesn't need to be directly connected to the story to be interesting, the smartly-visualized future world, and the premise that offers its own unique issues but also something which resonates further. Restore Point can hang with Minority Report, and looks pretty darn slick for a movie apparently made for Czech television.

It's 2041, and in Prague, at least, there is a "restore point" technology that allows one to be revived from a backup, though it is dangerous if more than 48 hours have passed, as happens in the opening sequence, where Detective Emma Trechinow (Andrea Mohylová) seeks to free hostages who have been held for nearly that long by River of Life terrorists; killing them at that point would be "absolute murder". Her next case could be even more explosive - a key developer of the system (Matej Hádek) and his wife (Agáta Cervinková) have been killed, with their backups erased from the system, on the cusp of the company looking to become a private business. The developer, David, is resurrected using a four-month-old backup and leads Trechinow to a suspect (Milan Ondrík), but there is clearly more going on than meets the eye, especially since Europol detective Mansfeld (Václav Neuzil) has been brought in to supervise.

One of the first things a viewer notices in Restore Point is how impressively immersive its world is, with lots of things that say "future!" but where audiences can feel as at home as the characters because everything has been pushed a bit in interesting, logical directions, with a good balance between what makes good noir cinema and good sci-fi. The animated newspapers should probably be tablets, but this looks better for a mystery and they aren't overwhelming, for example; there's also a lot of harsh lighting coming off police badges and vehicles to help give that little hint of dystopia even though Trechinow seems pretty trustworthy (and more than a hint of that when she and David have to use some illicit means). Everything still looks kind of nifty without being overstated or showy.

It's also a clever enough mystery, one that maybe doesn't have a lot of potential solutions but which gets to the point where the mess of motives is as much the point as the final answer. That's something you kind of have to do with this intersection of genres, because the science fictional matters are not well served if some can be dismissed because they did not, in this case, lead to murder. It's a sign of the times, perhaps, that the eagerness of the Restore Bureau to privatize and make it exclusively available to the wealthy is seen as a greater threat than playing God in general, and the filmmakers are smart in making relatively limited use of Restoration as a plot device, saving it for when it counts.

There's a pretty nice cast, too, with Andrea Mohylová a very solid center, not given to over-emoting but not particularly coming off as cold or aloof, either. Matej Hádek makes a good de facto partner, nailing how fundamentally weird the situation is for him - he may effectively be the lead of both Memento and D.O.A. here - while Václav Neuzil is a more interesting investigation-usurping rival than usual because Mansfeld actually seems to respect Trechinow. As they dig deeper into the mystery, a lot of folks playing more out-there characters are able to step in and steal scenes.

All in all, Restore Point is a genuinely nifty little mystery that hopefully gets some good North American distribution - it's smart, slick, and unpretentious science fiction that goes down pretty easy.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 28 July 2023 - 3 August 2023

Gonna try and do this super-quick this week since I'm not in Boston and won't have much chance to see non-Fantasia movies

• The latest A24 horror thing, Talk to Me, comes from Australia an is built around an embalmed hand that can supposedly put those who touch it in communication with the dead, and you just know the girl who recently lost her mother is going to abuse that. It's at the Somerville, the Capitol, Boston Common, Kendall Square, South Bay, Assembly Row, and CinemaSalem. A24 also offers Circus Maximus, which sees musician Travis Scott collaborate with five interesting filmmakers on segments inspired by his forthcoming album "Utopia". That's at Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row.
  
  For more kid-friendly spookiness, Disney's has a new Haunted Mansion movie, with a cast full of likable people and lots of flashy visual effects. It's at The Capitol, Fresh Pond, West Newton, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Kendall Square, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Drama War Pony, about two Lakota men on the Pine Ridge reservation, plays at Fresh Pond.
  
  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, the latest reboot of the venerable property that looks to play of the teenage as much as the ninja, has a sneak preview at Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row on Saturday and an Early Access fan event on at Boston Common (Dolby Cinema), South Bay (Dolby Cinema), and Assembly Row on Monday before opening Wednesday (well, with previews early enough Tuesday that we may as well just say Tuesday) at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D), Kendall Square, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema/RealD 3D), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  The kids' matinee at Boston Common this Saturday & Wednesday is Boss Baby: Family Business. There are 35th Anniversary screenings of Heathers at South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards on Sunday. Boston Common has an "investor connect" advance screening of Gran Turismo on Wednesday. Holocaust drama The Hiding Place plays Boston Common on Thursday.
• The Brattle Theatre has The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future, a magic-realist drama that I liked at Fantasia last year, through Monday. The original Godzilla takes the late shift on Friday and Saturday, and there's also a special screening of documentary Our Body with filmmaker Clair Simon on-hand Sunday evening.
  
  The week's Warner 100 movies are a double feature of Jewel Robbery & One Way Passage, both starring William Powell & Kay Francis, on Monday, with The Mystery of the Wax Museum & Captain Blood, the latter on 35mm film, on Tuesday. The Dede Allen Centennial continues on Wednesday with Dog Day Afternoon & Serpico, the second on 35mm, while Thursday's Thrill Ride Horror double feature is Jennifer's Body & Drag Me To Hell, with Raimi's movie on 35mm.
• Three new ones from India at Apple Fresh Pond this week: Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani looks to be a big, old-school Bollywood masala picture with Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt in the title roles; Bro is a Telugu-language flick about a selfish man given a chance to make right after death, and LGM: Let's Get Married is a Telugu-language romantic comedy.
  
  Anime The First Slam Dunk, a pretty-terrific side-story to the popular manga and anime series directed by the original creator, opens dubbed at Boston Common (you can see it subtitled out at the Liberty Tree Mall).
  
  Boston Common also opens Never Say Never from China, with writer/director/star Wang Baoqiang as a former boxer who winds up training kids in a rural orphanage.
• The Museum of Fine Arts and Wicked Queer pull 1996 feature Chocolate Babies, about a group of New Yorkers fighting HIV by any means necessary, from the vault for a screening Friday night.
• This weeks "Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro" selections at The Harvard Film Archive, all on 35mm film, are Late Autumn (Friday), A Mother Should Be Loved (Saturday), A Hen in the Wild (Saturday), Early Summer (Sunday), What Did the Lady Forget? (Sunday), and Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (Monday). A Mother and Where Now are silents, with Robert Humphreville providing accompaniment.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre once again sticks with what worked last week, and thus really only has room for a little rep, having to push Barbie to one of the little rooms for it: Stage Fright at midnight Friday, the 2009 Friday the 13th at midnight Saturday, Waiting for Guffman as a Big Screen Classic on Monday, plus Hip-Hop at 50 shows of Wild Style on Tuesday (with guests) and Scratch on Wednesday.
• The Somerville Theatre has a 35mm print of The Outsiders as their Midnight Special on Saturday.
• The New England Aquarium has two more screenings of Jaws on the Imax screen on Friday and Saturday.
  
  And, wow, The Museum of Science has sold out all three weekends of Oppenheimer on the dome, but they've announced a "Summer Space Film" series to follow, with 2001, Interstellar, Gravity, and The Martian.
• Geez, Landmark Kendall Square is almost all stuff playing the bigger multiplexes this week, although they start a month of "Happy Birthday, Mr. Hitchcock" for Retro Replays with The Man Who Knew Too Much (v2.0) on Tuesday.
• Boston Jewish Film has the last entry in their "Summer Cinematheque" series on Wednesday, with I Like It Here followed by a conversation with writer/director/cinematographer/subject Ralph Arlyck
• The Lexington Venue picks up Oppenheimer and Barbiefor the week (closed Tuesday, with just one matinee for Barbie on Wednesday).
  
  The West Newton Cinema gets Haunted Mansion and holds over Barbie, Oppenheimer (35mm), Past Lives, Indiana Jones,Asteroid City, Super Mario Brothers. Open all week!
  
  The Luna Theater has Lynch/Oz on Friday, Saturday, and Thursday; The League and Past Lives on Saturday; the original Ghostbusters all day Sunday, as well as a Weirdo Wednesday show.
  
  Cinema Salem has Talk to Me, Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Mission: Impossible through Monday. There's a late show of Escape from New York on Saturday, Twister matinees on Saturday and Sunday, and True Romance on Thursday.
• Outdoor screenings listed at Joe's Free Films include Puss in Boots: The Last Wish at the Hatch Shell Friday, Lightyear at the Prudential Saturday, The Secret Life of Bees at Christopher Columbus Park on Sunday, and Top Gun: Maverick at Somerville's Seven Hills Park on Thursday.

Still in Montreal, seeing So Many Movies not listed above.

Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.04: Ride On, Sand Land, and Raging Grace

Festival-ing tip: The hole in the middle of the day is okay. You can get some errands run, catch up on your Letterboxd entries, really relax as you eat a meal, or the like.

Why do I bring this up, well, I knew today was going to be tight, and not just because I got Saturday's recap up just in time to get on the Metro and had to Concordia for Ride On, which I should have seen three months ago - the AMC at Boston Common still has a standee for it in the lobby! - but which didn't come to Boston. No, it's the way the end of the day shook out.

I only got a picture of Sand Land director Toshihisa Yokoshima in an autograph line, because I assumed there'd be a Q&A and didn't get one before. I was a bit surprised when Animation programmer Ruppert Bottenberg mentioned Yokoshima had been at the festival six years ago with "Cocolors", because even if I couldn't remember a lot from the movie - my brain's filing system apparently doesn't do that so well - I did recall really liking it (more reliable records say: true!). The thing that really threw me, though, was that only a few of us raised our hands and applauded when asked who had seen it. Sure, it had played as part of a shorts block, but it also indicates how this festival, especially, is kind of a living thing and those of us who have been coming forever are outliers.

And then, for what turned out to be the final movie of the day, I hit Raging Grace with writer/director Paris Zarcilla (right) on-hand, even though it would play later in the festival, because I really wasn't interested in Talk To Me (the trailers make it look like it's really good at telling a dumb story, and it's A24, so if it's actually as good as people think, it will probably hang around). It was a pretty decent choice - he had a lot of things to say about how his immigrant parents had influenced the story and how colonialist attitudes have not vanished.

That part of the day turned out to be scheduled tight, so there really wasn't any chance to make it across the street for New Normal, which is a bummer, because that only had one screening, and while Lovely, Dark, and Deep was sold out, a pass might have gotten me in. On the other hand, it is playing today and I got a Q&A.

So, today's plan is going to be a long one as some "maybe laters" catch up with an oddly uneven De Sève schedule (sometimes they start at 11, sometimes at 4): The Fantastic Golem Affairs, Stay Online, and The Primevals on one side of the street followed by Tiger Stripes and Restore Point on the other.


Long ma jing shen (Ride On)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

There are moments in Ride On where Jackie Chan feels like Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and they're terrific for the same reason, a lifetime of wear atop something we are already fond of. The trouble is that there are far more where he's making a connection to his real history, and that feels more problematic. It becomes a movie where this character is meant to be humbled but still can't admit he's wrong.

Here, Chan plays Luo Zhilong, once the greatest stuntman in Hong Kong, but now living in the mainland, tending Red Hare, a horse a friend gave him in lieu of paying a debt, offering pictures and rides outside a studio instead of actually doing stuntwork. Bills are coming due, though - collection agent Da Mi (Andy On Chi-Kit) it looking to repossess his house, and the company that acquired his old friend's business believes they have a claim to Red Hare. His last two students, "Shrimp" Xia Mao (Yu Ailei) and Ying Zi (Joey Yung Tso-Yi) say he needs a lawyer, but he can't afford one. What he does have is a daughter, Bao (Liu Haocun), who is a law student and has a fiancé, "Mickey" Lu Naihua (Kevin Guo Qilin), who just began practicing. Bao and Zhilong are estranged, but she is apparently won over by the horse, if not her father.

Jackie Chan has been a lightning rod among Hong Kong film fans and a global audience that discovered him from his Hong Kong work in his later years as a result of his political alignment, but he's also at times struggled with the inevitable transition that a star who has built his career on physical prowess must make, where even if you have spent your career building up your chops as an actor and director, as Jackie has done, and genuinely want to move on to more dramatic roles as you age, it's hard not to be pulled back into old habits that have always been good to you and make a movie a less risky proposition. Chan can, at this point, play haunted and worn-down quite well - even in Western movies like The Foreigner, but there are other moments when he flashes the same goofy grin he's used for decades, and others where it feels like he can't quite put his ego aside. Clips of his most famous stunts appear at various points in the movie and aside from how Master Luo is supposed to have been an anonymous stuntman and these clearly show his face, Jackie is no longer beloved enough that blurring the line between the character and the actor necessarily does the character favors.

Beyond that, the movie often feels kind of dull and thrown together. There are a few impressive action scenes that remind you that Jackie is still kind of great at this, but not enough to make it a good action movie, and occasionally awkward fits for a more serious drama. The vibe switches from wanting to be a mature drama that deals with age and regret to kiddie-sitcom plotting and back several times. It drags at times, and there is something profoundly weird and misbegotten about a sequence about how dangerous and thrilling doing a stunt for real is where the actual stunt is obviously digital. The cast is sometimes such as to make the horses seem like the most interesting co-stars, with Liu Haocun pretty but kind of insubstantial as Bao. It's also kind of frustrating that Yu Ailei and Joey Yung get memorable introductions as Luo's students in the first act and then sort of fade away.

Maybe someone other than writer/director Larry Yang Zi could have taken a firmer hand and worked things that so that the film works in self-referential fashion, especially since there is something unexpectedly affecting when Wu Jing shows up for a torch-passing moment and the film reaches for something about how he and Jackie are different action stars for different eras. That could have been something really special, but it doesn't manage quite the level of self-examination.

And yet, I still look forward to The Diary, Chan's long-in-production drama as a director. Despite everything, it's hard not to look at Jackie Chan and want to see him reinvent himself and showcase his other skills now that the things which initially caught our attention are becoming harder.


Sando rando (Sand Land)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: Axis, DCP)

I feel like I missed a Golden Age of shonen manga by being born too early and not really aware that these series that seemed to owe more to children's cartoons than the serious sci-fi anime that hooked my generation were, in fact, epic adventures... At least, not until they were so intimidating in scale that getting into them looked to be a major commitment that would displace a lot of other great pop culture. As such, Sand Land is a delightful find for me and perhaps others - it's obviously got the same DNA as Dragon Ball, but it's a manageable size despite being a little of everything.

It opens with an army transport of water through an endless being attacked by demons, although we soon discover that perhaps those demons have given some to human kids in a local town. The town's sheriff, Rao (voice of Kazuhiro Yamaji), a wiry old fellow, takes that it while also noting that there are birds that feed on freshwater fish nearby, and goes to the demon town with a proposal, that they find the spring that must be nearby and use it so that both demons and humans can survive. Youthful "fiend prince" Beelzebub (voice of Mitsumi Tamura) is eager to set off on an adventure, dragging reluctant gnome-like sidekick Thief (voice of Chô) along. There are dangers along the way, though which have them abandoning their vehicle and stealing an army tank to continue on - though it turns out that Rao may be more than meets the eye, which puts mercenaries and the army led by cyborg General Zeu (voice of Nobuo Tobita) on their trail.

When I say Sand Land is a manageable size, that just means it's feature-length - it's still packed full of everything, including not just a part-apocalyptic desert wasteland that includes a demon city and tanks, but a foolish capitalist king, insect men, super-powered adversaries, and enough backstory that characters will gasp at a revelation of what really happened thirty years ago. This all exists in a big storytelling stew, but the filmmakers expand things casually, seldom to the point where you question why they didn't do that an hour ago or where the entire story didn't make sense (maybe the world collapses under more scrutiny, but who cares?). Writer Hayashi Mori and director Toshihisa Yokoshima take the original manga by Akira Toriyama, which I suspect was throwing out something new and crazy every week, and make it feel like anything can happen but that they'll play square once the general vibe is introduced.

And, from there, it's fun. The character design is bold and solid-looking, and they represent their types well with solid voice acting - I kind of suspect that I've heard Kazuhiro Yamaji and Mutsumi Tamura voicing characters cut from the same cloth as Rao and Beelzebub before, but it works because they fit the types so well and can still figure out what makes them individual. There's no shame in the movie being designed for kids to the point where killing is explicitly off the table, to the point where tanks almost look like toys and their battles are mostly going to be knocking each other around. The pace is quick but never frantic, smoothly moving on to the next stage whenever the story demands it, and the action a fun game to watch play out, even at its most high-stakes.

It's also just a fun thing to look at; every human, demon, and machine has bold enough lines that the introduction of something fragile-looking hits harder, with the visuals right at the point where a kid can understand that, say, Beelzebub may look like something grown-ups tell you is scary but is obviously cheerful and mischievous, while adults shouldn't feel like they're being talked down to. Yokoshima and his crew stage action in something close to classic anime fashion, preferring to give viewers the lay of the land and cut rather than use a swooping virtual camera most of the time, which keeps the style cohesive rather than muddled.

I'm not diving into all the Dragon Ball after this, but I'll probably pay a little more attention when the next thing like it shows up. Who doesn't enjoy big freewheeling adventure that finishes without having to buy 100 volumes of comics?


Raging Grace

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Most festivals don't necessarily give awards for "favorite character", but if Fantasia did, I wouldn't bet against the Grace of this movie's title winning it. She's an indispensable kid in a movie that quickly gets into grown-up horror, a big part of why the movie can keep the audience laughing in genuine fashion before that becomes nervous and then unnerving.

Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla) is the daughter of Joy (Max Eigenmann), a Filipina woman who has been in the UK without proper documentation for years, working under the table as a cleaner while trying to scrounge up the money that a fixer (Oliver Wellington) demands before straightening out her visa and citizenship. Indeed, she and Grace are technically unhoused, spending the summer sneaking into the homes of various employers who have gone away on vacation. The latest offer seems too good to be true - a manor house where Joy can have an actual room, though she still opts to sneak Grace in in her luggage. Grace, however, is a nosy troublemaker who soon begins to suspect that their employer Katherine (Leanne Best) is poisoning her comatose uncle Nigel Garrett (David Hayman), and while Joy doesn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, it eventually begins to nag at her.

It's not unheard of for a thriller/horror piece like this to start out as door-slamming farce, where writer/ director Paris Zarcilla build multiple comic scenes out of Grace sneaking around a room's furnishings or up stairs while trying to stay out of Katherine's line of vision, or gags where Joy casually sits her daughter in a closet. There's props to this, sure - Grace's pranks where she switches food containers has an obvious parallel, and her being a girl who cried wolf keeps things simmering for a while - and there's a contrast to all the stupidly racist things employers say and do around Joy. Still, a lot of people making unambiguous comedies don't set up and execute jokes nearly as well as Zarcilla does here.

He's also undeniably on point when it comes time to get serious, though; every belittling thing Joy goes through eventually winds up having an even darker mirror image, and Grace's frustration at being hidden away erupts in a bit of cruelty that seems like too much, except that it also highlights just how someone a smart and independent as this little girl can maybe be manipulated when the film takes another big turn later on. And there are some good, big turns, although they never feel particularly out of left field. Zarcilla is quite good at hiding the next awful thing in a temporary victory.

I suspect that he and his cast have fun inverting certain tropes as well, especially in how Max Eigenmann gets to play Joy as sensible and grounded, though understandably tense and occasionally on the believable edge of a stressful collapse, while the various white Britons start as a montage of ridiculous caricatures before Leanne Best brings it to the next level with Katherine, riding the line between being obliviously and deliberately awful, while David Hayman gets a late start but makes Garrett a roller-coaster ride of a character, though all the pieces fit together exactly. And Jaeden Paige Boadilla is a delight as Grace, adept at the physical comedy and able to capture how she's a great, if frustrating kid while still tapping into deep frustrations.

Thrown together, it makes for a terrific little thriller that, while it may have a moment or two of talking a little directly to the audience about the real-world situations that inspired it, also does a terrific job of connecting the absurdity and danger of its situations on its way to a classic spooky-old-house climax.

Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.03: The First Slam Dunk, Sympathy for the Devil, "Drumming Makes You Happy", and The Becomers

Or, "the one we should get posted on time because two of these movies hit theaters next week".

It wound up being a late start because the shows in the 1pm slot were things I had already seen, whether in their original release (The President's Last Bang) or the Fathom Events presentation a couple months ago (Shin Kamen Rider), so I spent a bit of time walking down St. Catherine taking in the decorations for Juste Pour Rire.

Very good crowd for The First Slam Dunk, which isn't exactly surprising - the manga and anime have been popular for decades and this has the buzz that it's getting a regular theatrical release next week, although I was kind of surprised just how into it the audience got, as basketball. I remember one time the festival tried to do a genre/sports double feature and the audience wasn't really into it, but this got the sort of response to the game that had me thinking "hey, there's kids watching this movie" when someone cussed as part of their reaction.

Next up after that was Sympathy for the Devil, initially expected to be a big centerpiece presentation with Nicolas Cage getting a Cheval Noir, but the actor's strike means no promotional activities so Mitch was joined by director Yuval Adler and producer Allan Ungar. The writers are also on strike, so that meant that while screenwriter Luke Paradise was there to see the world premiere, he stayed in the audience rather than doing a Q&A.

Which is a real shame for us, because from the way Adler and Ungar described it, this was kind of an interesting script-to-screen story: Adler had apparently seen the script about ten years ago, trying to make it his next movie after Bethlehem, but somebody else got there first. Getting a film made can take ages, though, so it just went through development, with Adler calling every couple years until finally, in 2021 or 2022, it became available and he pounced. It was originally set in New York during the winter, but then Nicolas Cage was cast and it not only wound up relocated to Las Vegas because Cage lives there and his wife was expecting a child soon, but it had to fit into a very narrow window because, in case you haven't noticed, Cage makes a lot of movies these days. He's also a movie star with ideas about his characters, and you kind of wind up bending to that. Adler and Ungar had a bunch of interesting stories about that; they had to find a soundstage, with everyone going through a learning curve with the scenery-projection tech that has become popular since The Mandalorian, with relatively little shot on location, and that cut short by approaching rain, which is a thing you don't think about having to worry about in Vegas. It did mean they got some shots of apocalyptic-looking lightning on the horizon, which fit it pretty well. Not being able to get Cage and Paradise on stage was a shame, because, as much as this is sort of a minor thriller, the talk of how this sort of collaboration happens and winds up coherent is fascinating.

Also, the jacket Adler is wearing there is the same one Cage wears in the movie. I could not pull it off. They mentioned that it was supplied by a clothier in a Vegas hotel, and that four $7,000 jackets gets you a pretty nice logo in the closing credits.

After that, it was across the street to De Seve for The Becomers, with writer/director Zach Clark and producer Edwin Linker. As Clark put it, it is what you get after more or less doing nothing for a year because of a global pandemic, watching a bunch of the original Star Trek, and getting invited to pitch genre movies that can be done cheap and shot in a couple of weeks. The result is genuinely weird and very pandemic-warped, cynical but not quite giving up on humanity.

Clark had some fun stories to go with it, such as how Russell Mael wound up narrating because they both wound up on the same Zoom movie-watch-along during the pandemic and were exchanging emails, and that Clark himself wound up playing the aliens in their natural form because the cast was Chicago-based and the guys fabricating the costumes were in New York, and in this sort of microbudget indie, you limit who is racking up air miles on the production dime. He also couldn't help laughing at how, yes, the weird cultist character were stupid and ridiculous, but have you seen the folks he was basing them on? Just so, so stupid.

Anyway, both The First Slam Dunk and Sympathy for the Devil are opening Friday, 28 July. If I had to guess for the Boston area, Slam Dunk will play Boston Common while Sympathy might show up at Fresh Pond, as Nic Cage movies are wont to do, although who knows with how well the big ones opened this weekend - sometimes a thing opening soft means there are extra screens available, sometimes the opposite means opportunities to run dry up.

As an aside, I probably messed up two promotional photos yesterday, sitting up front and center but not collecting a megaphone for Slam Dunk or sunglasses for Becomers, though not out of any sort of "telling the audience they are part of the entertainment sets a bad precedent" principle; they just weren't handed to me. Hopefully, I won't do the same today, where the plan is Ride On, Sand Land, Raging Grace, and New Normal


"Otamatoon: Let's Play Chirirrin"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: Axis, digital)

These little vignettes by director Novmichi Tosa and Maywa Denki are about a minute long, but cute as heck, in this case pulling a lot of personality out of two baby toys, one of whose face doesn't really move while the other has a big mouth that lets out contrasting wails to his friend's bells.

Adorable. I hope there's more before other animes this week.


The First Slam Dunk

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: Axis, DCP)

The First Slam Dunk is a genuinely terrific sports movie and manga adaptation that, like many, probably benefits some from familiarity with the source material - there are plenty of characters who probably carry a ton of weight in the high school drama parts of the manga spend the bulk of the film on the sidelines, cheering the starting five on. But the laser focus on this one game keeps the movie from getting anywhere close to bogged down, or otherwise getting to the point where you're worrying about what's "really" important.

Ryota Miyagi (voice of Shugo Nakamura) is apparently something of a secondary character in the main Slam Dunk manga, but here he is presented as the heart and soul of the Shohoku basketball team, despite his relatively short stature. Just turning 17, he's been a huge basketball fan since he was a little kid idolizing his big brother Sota, who died in an accident soon after they lost their father. Now, though, he is playing for the national championship against powerhouse high school Sannoh, and the starters will get most of the minutes: Hisashi Mitsui (voice of Jun Kasama), a versatile guard; Hanamichi Sakuragi (voice of Subaru Kimura), a former hooligan with red-dyed hair who thinks he's more a basketball genius than he is; Takenori Akagi (voice of Kenta Miyake), a goliath of a center with confidence issues; and Kaede Rukawa (voice of Shinichiro Kamio), Ryota's first friend at this new school, a three-point threat who has a tendency to hog the ball.

Not that is entirely in the game; there are plentiful flashbacks to Ryoga as a 9-year-old kid idolizing his older brother and reeling from the loss, as well as his first days in a new school and on this team. It's mostly good, foundational material, showing what the main force behind these kids' supercharged emotions and showing just how much Ryoga's desire to follow in his brother's footsteps (though he's now older than Sota will ever be) is a strain on his mother. Given that the main line of the original comics and animations primarily follow Sakuragi, it's a nifty way for filmmaker Takehiko Inoue (who also wrote and drew the original manga) to insert a feature into a story that is mostly complete without retreading much. There are moments that longtime fans of the material will probably seize upon, and things that feel like cut subplots to us newbies (like, are Ryoga and team manager Ayako crushing on each other?), but it works, overall.

It's the basketball that people are going to come out of the film racing about, though, and they should: For all that animation carries the risk of looking weightless or letting the filmmakers do an end run around human capability, the action here is heavily motion captured and rendered in a style that keeps the characters rigidly on model as opposed to enabling cartoon-style exaggeration. What the style does allow for is the filmmakers getting the virtual camera right into the middle of the action in a way that could never happen on an actual sports broadcast, sometimes slowing things down maybe 10% so normal people can follow the unfolding action that players can see instinctively, and otherwise just pulling one into the game. It's written to deliver the full roller coaster of an underdog playing a powerhouse, and the festival audience responded like it was a real game.

There are, admittedly, a couple stretches where a flashback goes on a bit long or doesn't seem particularly connected to the immediate game situation and one wants them to get back to basketball, but it's more than enough to give it some heft. And for a first-time director, Inoue handles the push and pull between these two halves very well. He and his animators also do a very impressive job of combining two animation techniques, as the game action is digital but most of the flashback material is a more hand-drawn style, but the transition between the two is unusually seamless, especially considering that the things that looked unreal in the trailer look much better when presented in context rather than quick-cut clips.

It's a heck of a thing for an animated high school basketball game to bring out the same response as attending a game live, but this one manages. It's a heck of a ride, even for those of us who barely know the comic exists.


Sympathy for the Devil

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Confession: As a New Englander, a Nicolas Cage character announcing he's from Southie made me tense up as much as anything else - I mean, folks are going to expect me to have opinions on this. Beyond that, though, the accent is the sort of thing that can just eat an actor up when he's already playing to the rafters, and thus serve as a test for just how big one enjoys Cage going.

It starts smaller, of course, with David Chamberlain (Joel Kinnaman) dropping his son off at his mother-in-law's so that he can get to the hospital where his wife is about to give birth to their second child in her third difficult pregnancy. As he attempts to park, though, a man in red (Cage) casually slides in the back seat and says to drive; when David mentions that this isn't a rideshare, the man pulls a gun and directs him to the outskirts of Vegas. It soon becomes clear that the passenger was looking for David specifically, but why? He's just a nobody, certainly not someone an East Coast hood would be interested in!

And so, the movie becomes Nicolas Cage just Nicholas Caging all over the place for a bit under 90 minutes, and you're kind of either all in for that or not. Cage never mails this sort of thing in, though, and he doesn't here, from the moment he steps out of the shadows with his hair dyed a Satanic red to match his suit to when he eventually, inevitably, sets everything on fire. By now, I suspect writers know that he'll take their script as a starting point to riff and give him more raw meat when he gets attached, and that's what one remembers: Cage takes great joy turning a good line over in his mouth, staring without blinking for far too long, putting more energy into an outburst than is on the page, and walking up to the edge of meta-commentary, both as an acknowledgment that the audience has seen a lot of these movies and hinting that he may be the actual devil who knows how this sort of thing always goes. Still, you can't claim he doesn't actually find something amid the genre trappings; there's undeniably a bit more than the mad-dog killer to his role, even if he's going to let the audience have fun until they really need to see it.

If he's in almost the full 90 minutes, Joel Kinnaman is in more, and though this can be kind of a thankless sort of role, it's worth remembering that the laugh at Cage going big often comes from when the camera cuts to Kinnaman's everyman reacting in the same stunned disbelief anyone else would. Of course, the audience going into the movie is going to have their suspicions that there's more to David than meets the eye, and part of his job is to convince us that, no, maybe there's not, but there still might be enough to him that he can turn the tables at some point in the last act, whether or not he's who his passenger thinks he is.

In the meantime, this is a small but mostly well-mounted little movie. I don't know that it really takes advantage of how Vegas can be a sort of in-between place intentionally; while Boston and New York are mentioned, there aren't any flashbacks, instead relying on Cage telling a story, and it sort of becomes limbo, but not entirely. There are moments that come across more as something the actor can have fun with than the natural response, but the filmmakers make that work as an agent-of-chaos thing, and when the time for action comes, they do a solid job of building suspense from what the audience can see rather than cutting together a lot of action and hoping the vibe is right.

Which is good, because this isn't really a story that hasn't been told before or anything. It's fairly straightforward and has a couple good parts, but even the surprises aren't really surprises. Movies like this fill out a theater on a slow week or are good for an hour and a half when you find it on a streaming service. There's a good chance you'll move onto something else soon enough, but it's better than just fine.


"Drumming Makes You Happy"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, digital)

This thing is two minutes long, so I'm not going to go too deep into it, but I hope that the one note I took during it, "Like Paul Reubens playing a buddhist monk", is what filmmaker Josh Coen and lead actor Chad Jamian were going for. It's cheery and silly and gets dangerously close to its joke being spent in a very short time, but it is certainly good for a couple of laughs.


The Becomers

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival Underground, digital)

The Becomers is an enjoyably odd piece of sci-fi that takes a familiar if not exactly common trope (alien visitors/refugees displacing human bodies) and makes it work in large part by maintaining their point of view and maybe not overthinking it. So many movies playing with this get too caught up in the morality of it, where this one seems to get to those questions at the right pace.

The first alien arrives on Earth in a cloud of pink smoke, possessing a hunter before winding in the body of Francesca (Isabel Alamin), a young woman about to give birth. They get acclimated - with a motel manager seeming a little too eager to be of assistance - before the law starts looking for Francesca. From there, they get a chance to jump to Carol (Molly Plunk), who lives in a nice suburban house, and when their lover locates them, they can take over Carol's husband Gordon (Mike Lopez). Seems like a nice, quiet place to reside after fleeing one's home planet's destruction, but they don't know what Carol, Gordon, and their friends were into.

It's an interesting decision that a lot of the humans these folks encounter are weirdos, rather than doing the thing where they observe normal humans and find our everyday lives strange, but get into an even weirder situation. One could say that they do, and most of humanity is just more twisted than we give ourselves credit for, but it lets the filmmakers ride a line where anything can happen but it's not entirely because of aliens-doing-alien-things randomness, letting writer/director Zach Clark do outrageous surprises while still playing kind of fair. It's actually kind of interesting, because on the surface there's not a whole lot of reason for the aliens to really begin to feel remorse and affection for humanity, but testing that ability manages to strengthen it.

This is a very tight little indie, so there aren't going to be a lot of big set-ups, but Clark offers a lot of weird fun regardless. Russell Mael offers narration that seems just off-kilter enough for one to shake their heads as he describes the Lovers' lives on their home planet but also feels grounded in familiar pleasures, hardships, and threats, just the right sort of us and them. There's a really mean-spirited bit early on that works as a joke (and doesn't entirely turn one away from the first lover) because Clark isn't even trying to make the effects believable, and some alien sex that is appropriately gooey and ridiculous, a nice but nasty companion to Mael's earlier narration about "missing your orifice".

The cast does a fairly nice job of taking these protean characters and making them work, with each Lover played by at least three actors each. I wonder, a bit, if maybe the first has a tendency to backslide and have to relearn in each new body, although Isabel Alamin and Molly Plunk both capture some of the same weird vibe (Plunk, especially, makes one wonder how this redhead isn't already at the stage in her career where she's not only joined the cast of Saturday Night Live but is moving on because she keeps getting all the great zany roles in spin-off movies). Plunk has good chemistry with both characters who play her character's lover, with Mike Lopez an enjoyable straight man who can get weird himself on occasion.

This one's going to be an acquired taste; I can already see people asking me why I would recommend it to them. But it's a pandemic production - I'm not sure whether half the characters wearing masks around their chins is a barbed joke or a compromise - and in all its goofy, cynical, and bizarrely hopeful oddity, it captures how that time made us a little nuts as well as anything can.