Fantasia Film Festival 2015

ArtsFestivalsFilmFriday Film Review

We’re into the last week of Fantasia, and our coverage here at FTB is almost at an end. But it’s not over yet, and here’s three more reviews from my Fantasia experience.

Director's Commentary posterDirector’s Commentary: Terror of Frankenstein

Sometimes, a really, REALLY good idea is all you need, and Director’s Commentary: Terror of Frankenstein does indeed have a really good idea at its core. The film takes Terror of Frankenstein, an almost entirely forgotten 1977 Frankenstein movie and creates an entirely fictitious director’s commentary for it.

In the world of the commentary, the film took on a cult following after a serial killer cut his way through the cast and crew of the film over several years after the production wrapped. The director and writer, two of the only survivors, are now recording a new commentary shortly after the killer’s execution, and over the course of the recording, all the old baggage comes to the surface, bringing new revelations along with it.

On paper, Director’s Commentary is actually kind of brilliant. Taking the DVD director’s commentary and turning it into a way to tell a story in itself is a really interesting idea, and you have to wonder why it took so long to hit on. It’s a really clever example of remix culture, one that will probably have some imitators in the next few years. For good or ill.

The only serious problem arises in the execution. Of the two actors performing the film (there’s also an appearance by Leon Vitali, one of the actual actors from the original film, playing an alternate version of himself) one isn’t quite up to the level you’d really want, often coming off a bit too hammy. There’s also a lot of silence where we’re just watching the original movie, and it would have helped the authenticity of the thing if they’d thrown in a lot more of the usual director’s commentary babble to fill the time between major revelations about the story. But still, it’s a really interesting film. A really solid idea that just needed another ten percent in the execution.

Lupin IIILupin poster

I’ve never really been into the Lupin III series, the ridiculously long-running anime and manga franchise about the grandson of legendary French thief Arsene Lupin. What I am into is Ryuhei Kitamura, the maverick director who brought us Versus and Aragami. Kitamura’s films have a swagger, a kind of rock and roll confidence to them that appeals to the angry teenager in me, the one who still thinks that Katana plus trenchcoat is the most rockin’ combination ever.

So when I went in to his new live-action Lupin III movie, it wasn’t for the source material. It was for the style. And style is something the film has in abundance.

Kitamura’s signature over-the-top action, the nonchalant, sneering “cool guys” who can cut a truck in half while maintaining the kind of facial expression that says “this is as exciting to me as waiting in line at the bank.” It’s all there for fans of his to appreciate.

Problematically though, it’s also frequently buried under a lot of really choppy, incoherent editing. I’m not who’s responsible for this, but the action scenes frequently wound up frustrating for me to watch, because the flow and geography of the action scenes often got completely and utterly lost in a storm of quick cuts that seemed hastily put together.

And then there’s the Engrish. Oh ye gods, the Engrish. Again, not sure who’s idea it was to have half the dialogue in the film spoken in awkward English by the mostly Japanese cast but much like that dodgy editing, it just felt distracting and weird.

Is it still fun? Of course. You’ll probably have a fun time watching it. Is it Kitamura’s best film? Absolutely not.

Ninja The MonsterNinja the Monster Poster

With a title like Ninja The Monster, you probably already have an idea of what to expect. Something akin to Aliens Vs. Ninja perhaps, an over-the-top action fest full of gushing blood geysers, about as tongue in cheek as something Noboru Iguchi might do. And yet when you watch the film, you quickly realize that that isn’t the case.

A slow paced, moody affair, Ninja The Monster sees a samurai and a ninja team up to escort a princess through a forest plagued by monsters. Of course, the samurai is distrustful of our broody ninja hero, and they stand as much chance of killing each other as they do being killed by the monsters.

Speaking of the monsters, I throw the phrase “big pile of CGI” around fairly willy-nilly sometimes. It’s refreshing for once to see a movie where that description is entirely accurate, however.

The creatures that menace our heroes are some kind of slime or water based monsters, big floating blobs of liquid that occasionally coalesce into a monster-like shape. As creatures go, it’s fairly dull, and the fact that they’re never really explored or exposited upon goes a long way to making them the most boring part of the film.

I will give it this, though, it’s a lot better assembled than I expected. Given I was expecting something schlockier and cheaper, it was a pleasant surprise to see how much care went in to the compositions, atmosphere, and mood.

ArtsFilmFriday Film Review

The Fantasia Film Fest is already nearing it’s midway point, and man, has it been a good one so far. While my FTB co-horts are off covering indie horrors and moody, introspective character pieces, I’ve been happily chewing away on Asian films and cinematic oddities, so let’s dive in.

Assassination-ClassroomAssassination Classroom

I’m not as plugged into the anime/manga scene these days as I was a decade or so ago (the tubes started chafing me), but I gather that Assassination Classroom is something of a big deal these days. How the live action movie (evidently the first in a series) holds up as an adaptation of the manga and anime is something I can’t comment on, but as a complete layman to the series, I can say it’s a heck of a lot of fun. It’s a prime slice of Japanese absurdity in the vein of Takashi Miike, but maybe with a touch less satirical wit.

The film, which tells the story of an alien who teaches a homeroom full of delinquent kids bent on killing him for a reward put up by the government, bears all the earmarks of an adaptation of a larger work, which is the biggest problem the film has. Characters who seem like they should be important come and go, plot points and important items are dropped in out of nowhere, giving the film that feeling of being condensed that you get with a lot of these kinds of works. It also doesn’t entirely have a proper ending, leaving way too many loose threads for me to excuse.

That aside, it has a lot of charm, humour, and surreal visuals that kept me consistently entertained.

The Arti: The Adventure BeginsArti poster

But speaking of movies over-packed with too many characters and story elements, here comes The Arti, a Chinese fantasy adventure brought to life by a combination of intricate puppet work and CGI that walks the line between Wuxia epic and Japanese role-playing game.

I don’t make that last comparison lightly, by the way. The Arti feels very influenced by stuff like the Final Fantasy series, combining martial arts mythology with a metric ton of lore, magical locales, creatures, and increasingly outlandish character designs. While Assassination Classroom more or less held up under the weight of the story it was trying to tell, The Arti feels smothered by all the lore, characters, sudden betrayals, macguffins, and flagrant deus-ex-machina.

Which is a shame, because it’s definitely an interesting film to watch purely on a visual level. The design and implementation of the puppets that make up the film’s cast is at times astonishing, and the copious amounts of CGI actually doesn’t look half bad alongside the puppet work. But it still feels ridiculously over-written in some cases, and under-written in others.

The Case of Hana and AliceThe_Case_of_Hana_&_Alice-p2

From two movies over-packed with story and suffering for it to a film light on story but heavy on charm, we turn to The Case of Hana and Alice. The film focuses on Alice, a teenage girl who finds herself in a new school and neighborhood, who befriends her reclusive neighbor on a quest to unravel a school mystery involving a supposedly dead classmate.

While this is the basic premise of Hana and Alice, the film seems less concerned with the plot as a whole so much as the scenes that make up the film. For long stretches, the quest at large will sort of drop by the wayside for infectiously charming scenes of simple character interaction, comedy sequences, and atmosphere. And throughout these sequences, I never felt myself growing bored or yearning for a return to the main plot.

I think this comes from the fact that the film is loaded with characterization. The cast rarely feels two-dimensional or hollow, everyone is bursting with character, which makes watching them interact and bond continuously fascinating. It’s a ridiculously charming, enjoyable little movie, one that kept me smiling and entranced virtually from the first frame until the last.

RoarRoar poster

I don’t think I’ve seen a movie quite so perplexing in a long time. Roar, a 1981 oddity of a movie that was recently re-released and picked up by Fantasia, is like some weird, tone-deaf mashup of a nature film and a home invasion horror movie. A hilariously All-American family comes to join the patriarch, a nature… scientist of some kind, in a house in Africa where he lives with over 150 lions, tigers, panthers, and other assorted big cats, in a mad scheme to prove that big cats and people can co-exist in the same habitat.

Of course, the family arrives when dad is out, leaving them to get menaced by their new housemates. The film was the demented brainchild of its stars, Tippi Hedren and Noel Marshall, who conceived of the film as a way to raise awareness about the hunting of big cats and to cast them in a new, less threatening light. But in the process, Marshall and co. accidentally managed to craft more of a horror film than anything else. Especially if you’re aware of the fact that the big cats in the film’s feline cast were mostly untrained, Roar is a tense, sometimes terrifying experience. Watching Hedren, her real life daughter Melanie Griffith, and Marshall’s two sons run from big cats that very clearly want to do them no small degree of bodily harm is often more unsettling than anything I’ve seen in Fantasia’s actual horror film crop this year.

Of course, the horror element is often underscored by the bouncy, happy-go-lucky soundtrack that seems to suggest we should be finding all of this terribly amusing. Tell that to my clenched buttocks during the screening. Roar may not technically be a good film, but it is a fascinating one. It’s intriguing to see how colossally misguided and unaware of itself it is. I’m sure you could do a really interesting post-colonialist reading, the thesis statement being “white people are just so goddamn silly”, but sadly, I haven’t the room for that here.

ArtsFestivalsFilm

Produced by the Duplass Brothers and directed by Sean Baker (Starlet), Tangerine is a bold and energetic look at a side of Los Angeles rarely seen on screen. The film follows two transgendered prostitutes over the course of one day, Christmas Eve. Shot completely on iPhones, the rough around the edges look of the film compliments the tough and unglamorous lives of the characters.

Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) has just been released from a stint in jail. While reconnecting with her bestie Alexandra (Mya Taylor), she hears some upsetting news that sets her off on a tear to find her pimp boyfriend. Quickly deciding to abandon her friend, Alexandra, meanwhile, tries to convince people to come to her show happening that night. The best friends’ storylines are also intercut with a married cabdriver Razmik (Karren Karagulian) who has a penchant for transgender prostitutes.

The plot in the film is pretty thin. And the climax of the film involves all of these characters screaming at each other at a donut shop. More than once Tangerine verges on crossing the camp line into just plain ridiculous. But as an audience member, you stay along for the ride because thankfully that line is never quite crossed. The non-stop pace of the film also helps one from ever getting bored; as Sin-Dee goes on her tear of some of the poorest blocks in the city of angels you never know what drug dealer, hooker or client she’s going to meet next.

The chemistry between Rodriguez and Taylor is the real reason Tangerine is worth the cost of admission. These two real-life friends display some of the sweetest moments of friendship ever caught on camera. The last scene in the laundromat for instance is filled with such tenderness you’d have a heart of stone not to be affected by it.

Tangerine opens in Montreal on July 31.

ArtsFilmFriday Film Review

It seems like in the last few weeks that the lumbering walrus that is summer finally reared its head and dropped its heaving, sweaty bulk on the people of Montreal, because MAN has it been hot lately. Thankfully, the Fantasia Film Festival is here to give us the perfect excuse to stay inside, bask in air-conditioned comfort and take in the latest cinematic delights they’ve brought us this year. I’ve only been able to take in two films so far (curse my need to work and write) but judging from Fantasia’s first offerings, we’re in for a good three weeks.

Miss Hokusai

Even though I’m not much of an anime watcher these days (at least when it comes to series) I always make a point of checking out as much of Fantasia’s anime content as I can, and this year the fest started on some, with Miss Hokusai making its North American Premiere.

Miss Hokusai PosterMiss Hokusai tells the sorta true story of O-Ei, the daughter of a famous Edo period artist. For the most part, the film is a fairly light slice-of-life affair consisting of short vignettes taking us into daily life in the period, O-Ei’s troubled relationship with her father, and her close bond with her younger sister.

Where Miss Hokusai feels a bit muddled and off-topic however, is the odd paranormal/ghost story sub-plot that sees O-Ei, her father, and his student helping a local courtesan with a ghost problem. It’s the best example of the only real problem the film has, which is a bit too much variety for its own good.

The soundtrack, for example, will alternate between contemporary rock and soft, period-accurate woodwinds and percussion instruments, giving the film an unpredictable, almost discordant soundscape. Similarly the sudden switches between slice-of-life drama and paranormal spook-ery may leave a lot of audience members confused about what the aim of the movie really is.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the episodic nature of the narrative makes it somewhat hard to get swept up in the narrative. Maybe if there were one vignette less, so the rest could feel more fleshed out, perhaps this problem would be lessened.

That being said, Miss Hokusai is still a perfectly pleasant and enjoyable experience, and got Fantasia 2015 off to a great, if inoffensive start.

Kung Fu Killer

If there’s anything that says Fantasia more than anime, it’s Donnie Yen kicking someone in the head, and Fantasia delivered that on Day 2 with Kung Fu Killer, a Hong Kong beat ’em up that delivers exactly what you want it to: action, style, melodrama and intense Donny Yen faces.

Kung Fu Killer poster

Yen plays Hahou Mo, a former martial artist serving a prison sentence for killing a man in a duel. But when a mysterious serial killer starts tracking down and killing martial arts masters, Mo is brought in to help the Hong Kong police bring the killer to justice.

Kung Fu Killer is a definite crowd-pleaser, since it gives you exactly what you want going in. The fight scenes are fast paced, well shot and full of style, the pace stays brisk and to-the-point practically from the word go, and Yen does what we all know and love him for: kick ass and look intensely off into the middle distance while swearing revenge for this, that or the other thing.

The one problem is that for a gritty martial arts flick, Kung Fu Killer seems too reliant on digital effects, greenscreening and wirework. Not that there’s anything wrong with “wire-fu” in general, but in a contemporary-set Donnie Yen vehicle, focused more on grit and realism than Wuxia movies, the few uses of wirework seem out of place and distracting.

And that goes double for the film’s post-production visual effects, the most egregious example being a terrible looking CGI boat jump. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t a stunt I’ve seen done for real in at least a dozen movies. Who knows, maybe they had a good reason not to attempt the stunt for real, but the sudden CGI took me out of the moment hard.

But these gripes aside, I had a lot of fun with Kung Fu Killer. The action is solid and the melodrama thick enough to cut with a knife, which kept the audience sufficiently amused, and I was right along with them.

If nothing else, watch it for the villain’s hilarious lack of any subtlety when it comes to facial expressions. He’s like the Chinese Matt Smith, in every second shot his face is contorted into some weird cartoon-approximation of what a normal human expression looks like and it’s hilarious and endearing every single time.

ArtsFilmFriday Film Review

The three weeks that make up the Fantasia International Film Festival are always my favorite of the year, twenty-one heady days of filmic delights and unwise dietary choices broken up only by manic writing sessions and bleary-eyed journeys home on the night bus. This will be my fifth year covering the fest, my third for FTB, and already I can feel the pure Dionysian joy that awaits me.

The main release of the 2015 schedule has yet to happen, but the fine folks at Fantasia have already released more than enough of what’s to come to get me and every other film nerd salivating with anticipation, and this week on FFR we’ll be looking at some of the highlights of this year’s Fantasia line-up.

Assassination Classroom

It wouldn’t be Fantasia without something delectably weird and inimitably Japanese, something that by all sanity shouldn’t be a live-action film, but somehow is. I’m sure we’ll get several such films at Fantasia this year, but the one that’s caught my eye so far is Assassination Classroom.

Based off the hit manga and anime, the film centers on an all-powerful alien lifeform that comes to Earth, partially destroys the moon, and…..becomes a homeroom teacher. Naturally, the Japanese government places a reward of 10 billion yen to any student who can manage to kill the alien before it destroys the planet, meaning every student has come to class armed for war.

So it’s basically Great Teacher Onikuza meets Battle Royale with a grinning, yellow, be-tentacled monstrosity at its center. Yep, that’s a Fantasia movie all right. And I’m DOWN.

The Hallow

What’s that now? Practical monster effects? Congratulations, with those three words you’ve piqued the interest of every old-school horror buff worth his or her salt, myself included.

The Hallow looks like a classic creature feature, playing on well-worn but still rich themes of nature and old world monsters and myths wreaking havoc on the lives of us ignorant city folk. In this case, a married couple move to a remote village in Ireland, only to be warned by the local Scary Older Gentleman to stay out of the woods, lest they disturb something best left to itself. Naturally, they don’t, and much screaming ensues.

The Hallow is already garnering great reviews from its run at Sundance, and should be drawing additional attention for its director, Corin Hardy, who will sit in the director’s chair on the long-gestating remake/reboot of The Crow.

Deathgasm

Want something that’ll get a Fantasia crowd pumped? Get something loud as a piledriver, gory as a weekend internship at a slaughterhouse, metal as Optimus Prime’s ass and involving at least one chainsaw.

Deathgasm looks to be all those things. Coming out of New Zealand, home of such favorites as Brain Dead and Housebound, Deathgasm looks like the quintessential “Hall Theatre Midnight Screening” experience. This is the movie you go to see with a raucous audience of devoted gorehounds and metalheads, the movie Mitch Davis spends five minutes gushing over before the screening, God bless his heart.

The director, Jason Lei Howden, already has an impressive resume working on big Hollywood features in the digital effects department, and with such experience under his belt I think we may be looking at a festival favorite with this one.

Big Match

Past readers will recall me being a bit cynical about Korean films in the past, harumphing at the gray and blue action thrillers and raising an eyebrow at the period dramas. Korean film is something that I have a hard time connecting with, for one reason or another, but Big Match looks more up my alley and may just be the film to turn me around.

Zombie, an MMA fighter, is thrown in the clink on suspicion of kidnapping his coach and older brother. But just as quick, Zombie is released and finds himself a pawn in a city-wide board game masterminded by a mysterious genius.

Big Match looks, above all else, fun. Bright and colorful, not-too-serious, and with plenty of well-choreographed stunt work and fight scenes. I’m sure there will be more than enough dead-serious political action thrillers out of South Korea at Fantasia this year, but Big Match looks more my speed.

Miss Hokusai

Of course, it wouldn’t be Fantasia without anime, and this year’s fest will be opening up to the tune of Miss Hokusai, the story of Oei Hokusai, daughter of famed Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, who produced woodblock prints during the Edo Period.

What draws me to this film most is the director, Keiicha Hara, a relatively recent talent who got his start on the Shin-Chan movies. Miss Hokusai also comes from Production IG, a studio whose watermark is usually a stamp of quality, and who have previously wowed me with efforts like Giovanni’s Island and A Letter To Momo at previous Fantasia Fests.