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Author: Bryant

Fantasia 2006: Day 0

July 16, 2006
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No clever titles this trip. It’s gonna be a long one.

The drive up was nice, excepting the insane Big Dig traffic in Boston. Taking 89 up through Vermont is a win from an aesthetic standpoint; it was a bit late for much of a view of the islands, but on the way back S. and I expect to be able to bask in natural beauty. Customs happened. This year, our maps were accurate and we found our Montreal domicile without trouble.

Said domicile — well, 210 square feet is 210 square feet. Clearly, the owner took an apartment that covered the entire first floor and chopped it into three apartments for short term rental. The flaw is a lack of apparent air conditioning and no windows; it’s substantially hotter in the apartment than it is outside. Also, I have not yet figured out their wireless. So it goes. [Update: wireless!]

We’re three subway stops away from Guy-Concordia and the venues. Tim Horton’s makes good coffee. Right now — 11:20 AM — I’m waiting for the box office to open up so I can horrify the nice young lady by asking her to print out 64 tickets. Eventually they’re going to figure out a better system for this.

Weekend One

July 11, 2006
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Really, the festival is pretty much what I’m thinking about right now. The links here go to IMDB, rather than the Fantasia site (like the ones in the last post).

Saturday

Three Mighty Men: bad Turkish 70s flicks are really hot on the festival circuit right now, and I kinda wish I was kidding, but I kinda don’t because if I was kidding I wouldn’t have the chance to see this one. This is also the only movie I’ll see at this year’s festival with a masked wrestler, unless someone else holds a surprise for me.

All-Out Nine: Field of Nightmares (no IMDB page): come to think of it, I’m probably stoked about this because I liked Cutie Honey so much; I’m hoping we get another mega-enthused translation of manga to film. And, OK, as a sports fan I can’t but be intrigued by the subject it parodies. Japanese Bad News Bears, right?

Hell: I’m really curious to see if Thai film’s changed much in two years. As devoted readers will recall, Saving Private Tootsie and The Bodyguard did not me overwhelm in 2004. Also, grand guignol is fun.

Shinobi: big gloss. Action. The trailer is pretty awesome. Tak Sakaguchi, who rocked my world in Versus and who did action direction in Death Trance which I really gotta see, is in it. So yes.

Arthouse Ultraman (no IMDB): Double Miike! Doing television! Ultraman! Sure!

Sunday

Vampire Cop Ricky (no IMDB): I’m pretty much all about the Korean SFX action slash sex farce horror flicks, sure.

Samurai Commando 1549: more widescreen Japanese action! I’m either gonna be really burnt out on the stuff or very happy by the end of the weekend. This doesn’t have a pedigree that turns me on, but I like the premise, so why not?

Train Man: OK, this just seems really sweet and cool and touching. And maybe a true story! So it’ll be a good breather from the action and the horror and so on.

Junk: Fantasia’s doing a lot of Russian films this year — it’s a focus — and that seems like a good thing to take advantage of. The story is not wacky or weird or anything, which makes this a good chance to see how a different culture works with the basic tropes of suspense.

It'll be like this

July 8, 2006
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It looks like this:

Three Mighty Men
All-Out Nine: Field of Nightmares
Hell
Shinobi
Arthouse Ultraman
Vampire Cop Ricky
Samurai Commando 1549
Train Man
Junk
Wilderness
Red Shoes
Isolation
Synesthesia
The Gravedancers
The Kovak Box
Storm
Pusher 3
The Echo
Subject Two
The Descendant
Reincarnation
DJ XL5 Zappin’ Party Cavalcade
Ressonances
Evil Aliens
The Order of One
Five Deadly Venoms
Aziris Nuna
The Great Yokai War
Executive Koala
Arcanum
My Dead Girlfriend
Kebab Connection

Commentary perhaps later.

The lineup, please

July 8, 2006
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It looks like this:
Three Mighty Men
All-Out Nine: Field of Nightmares
Hell
Shinobi
Arthouse Ultraman
Vampire Cop Ricky
Samurai Commando 1549
Train Man
Junk
Wilderness
Red Shoes
Isolation
Synesthesia
The Gravedancers
The Kovak Box
Storm
Pusher 3
The Echo
Subject Two
The Descendant
Reincarnation
DJ XL5 Zappin’ Party Cavalcade
Ressonances
Evil Aliens
The Order of One
Five Deadly Venoms
Aziris Nuna
The Great Yokai War
Executive Koala
Arcanum
My Dead Girlfriend
Kebab Connection

Walking it home

June 27, 2006
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Stupid baseball.

OK, so you have a man on third, two outs, it’s the top of the 11th inning. The score is tied. Your pitcher runs up three balls on the batter, no strikes. You have two choices; you can either pitch to the batter, who knows you’re in a hole, or you can shrug and walk him and go for the next batter.

I dunno, it’s not like I’ve run the numbers, but I can’t see how the second choice isn’t better. You run the risk of additional runs, sure. On the other hand, there is no possible scenario for the third out which does not stay the same or improve if you have the man on first, since you now have the force out at second, removing a possible throwing error from the outcome matrix.

Lots of people know baseball better than me. I’ve never seen a manager turn a three-ball zero-strike situation into an intentional walk. Do they ever? Should they? Is there a remote chance that Coco Crisp, Jason Varitek, and Alex Gonzalez will squeeze out a run and make us suffer through more of this?

Crisp hit a double. That’s something. Varitek flew out. That’s not something. Gonzales fouled out. That’s not something either. Eh, it’s the bottom of the order, we don’t expect miracles. Youkilis has an RBI! I’m still peeved at Francona for not walking Rollins; this coulda ended with that. Loretta walked. Go ahead, make Ortiz a hero again. Yep, Ortiz whacks a single, Youkilis wanders on home, game over.

Nonetheless, I wanna know why you don’t walk the batter with two outs, tie game, extra innings, one man on third.

Smooch & kill

June 7, 2006
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Shane Black wrote Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. That’s a pretty good pedigree. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is his first directorial effort, and it’s sorta Last Action Hero as an semi-indie crime flick. (Warner Brothers distributed it, so not really indie, but you know.)

It’s packed precisely full enough with metasnark. Any more snarkiness, and the schtick would be tiresome. Any less snark, and we might notice that the plot is about as thin as they get. (Which, in all fairness, is no doubt intentional — the whole movie is a deliberate self-referential homage to bad pulp detective novels.) The meta, the breaking of the fourth wall, works because it serves characterization: Robert Downey Jr.’s voice over is not constantly present, and it’s a device to bring his personality to the forefront, so that’s all right.

It’s also more homage, referring back to the Mike Hammer first-person narrative style. Our fictional pulp detective is Johnny Gossamer, which one might well see as the opposite of Mike Hammer, now that I think on it.

I can’t say much about the acting because — well, I suppose I can. Robert Downey, Jr., Val Kilmer, and Michelle Monaghan nailed their roles, delivered the dialogue with panache, and didn’t try and take over the movie. Which is good, cause the screenplay was the real hero, unsurprisingly. If I had to pick a standout, it’d be Val Kilmer, who bulked up and chewed his way through his role nicely. But they were all good. Oh, and a special bonus point to Corbin Bernsen for reprising his real life as a TV actor. S. pointed out that the movie clip in which a young Corbin Bernsen appears is no doubt an actual clip from an actual Bernsen TV movie, although nobody on IMDB has figured out which one.

My big quibble is that Shane Black made some very odd tonal choices. You’re cruising along with a black comedy, and then all of the sudden it veers into seriously dark not-funny stuff. I couldn’t figure out if he thought the seriously dark stuff was funny, or if he thought he had to ground the movie from time to time, but either way? No. It’s OK to do froth even if it’s your cred-restoring comeback flick. Maybe next time.

And in general, totally worthwhile.

Memoriam

June 6, 2006
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Hey, Greg. I guess the accurate way to say it is that our lives intersected around MUDs, and I liked knowing you, and — this is trivial, but every time I pruned my friendslist over on Livejournal, I never wanted to remove you despite the fact that I hadn’t talked to you in years.

The world’s gonna miss you.

Six toes

May 29, 2006
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As Neo-Victorian morality dramas go, the superheroics were pretty good. The intrepid examiner of social mores as viewed through the lens of Hollywood blockbusters might wish to keep a running tally of the number of times females are depicted as safer without their powers.

The plot was thin, the acting was fairly vaporous (except for Pyro, who was suitably adolescent), the love triangles were unconvincing, and the ethical dilemmas… Professor Xavier displayed little angst over his hard decision, Wolverine was completely willing to use a weapon he’d been horrified by as soon as an opportunity presented itself, and Iceman was just a jerk. Power’s there to be used, apparently.

Overall, the word “vapid” comes to mind.