Category: Film Festivals

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

The Fantasia schedule is up!

My current schedule for the 2006 Independent Film Festival of Boston, which I will have the pleasure of sharing with my sweetie:

Friday 4/21

Edmond, Somerville 1, 8 PM
Mamet, William H. Macy. That does it for me.

District B13, Somerville 5, 11 PM
Cool as crap French sci-fi action flick with tons of martial arts.

Saturday 4/22

Shadow Company, Somerville 3, 12:45 PM
This is a maybe due to timing, but it’s an interesting-looking documentary. See also Kathryn Cramer’s writing on this subject.

Chalk, Somerville 3, 3:30 PM
Placeholder; we won’t have a ton of time this visit (which is why we’re not being all social), but just in case I wanted to have a record of this.

Death Trance, Brattle, midnight
Can’t have too much Japanese surreal samurai action. The link to Versus intrigues.

Sunday 4/23

The Legend of Lucy Keyes, Somerville 1, 6:30 PM
Looks like a good gothic New England horrory piece. With Julie Delpy!

Monday 4/24

The Proposition, Somerville 1, 8 PM
Aussie Western with Guy Pearce? How could one miss this?

Creep is pretty much your standard nouveau horror flick (see also Cabin Fever, Cube, etc.). Franka Potente is trapped in the London Underground late at night, and must flee a scary homicidal creature who kills and eats for reasons never exactly explained. It’s pared down, tense throughout, self-aware, and so forth. I left feeling sort of apathetic, though.

I was scared — Christopher Smith is a dab hand with the jump scare. He’s also really good at using the well-lit Underground in contrast with dank side tunnels for effect; light is not a significator for “safe” in this movie. Perhaps in accordance with this, the monster is fully revealed about two thirds of the way through — no shadows. That worked fairly well, I thought. It means the movie was working without a net, however.

Tension-wise, that was fine. Smith got tension even when we knew exactly what the thing looked like. On the other hand, he veered into Grand Guignol territory with at least one scene that I found gratuitous; it didn’t raise the tension, it didn’t make the monster scarier, it didn’t raise the threat level for the protagonist, and it didn’t reveal a whole lot about the backstory.

What you had, I think, is a bad script. (Smith both directed and wrote.) This shows in a few places. The mythology of the monster is somewhat muddled. There’s a nice bit where the monster’s presence is signified by the arrival of rats, but there’s no reason why that would happen — he’s probably not a supernatural evil — and the rats are more or less dropped after a couple of scenes.

Further, and probably the most damning, Potente’s character is not sympathetic. She’s kinda shallow, she’s distinctly bitchy, and she’s too dumb for words. Yeah, dumber than your usual slasher movie hero. The first time she failed to do the smart thing, I lived with it. The second time I got a little grumpy. The third time I considered rooting for the monster. She wasn’t just dumb, she was obtrusively dumb. Also not sympathetic. In fact, she was kind of wimpy.

So about middle of the road, all in all. The directing was really good; Smith probably just needs to not direct his own scripts. And Potente was excellent, unsurprisingly.

OK, so, now, Izo…

I got nothing. I walked out of the theater completely baffled. I can’t say good, I can’t say bad. Izo, who was a real historical figure, is executed in the 1800s and returns to cut his way through everything that stands between him and… something. The Emperor? He’s the irrational, we’re told, expelled by a perfect rational system. His karma is so horrible that he’s made to suffer in this way. There’s a folk singer who shows up from time to time to advance those themes. He dies, he comes back, he kills more people. He is the embodiment of rage. Towards the end, he meets up with a woman who says she’s part of his spirit, and that she was supposed to meet him but hasn’t. She’s the compassionate part. The mysterious council of rulers explain that they’ve created an illusion in order to maintain perfect control. (They do wind up dying, yes.) Izo reaches the Emperor, worn out from his struggles — kills the guards, one of whom then transmutes into a caterpillar — and…

Is blown over by a single breath from the Emperor. Then, over the credits, the folk singer explains that “You are free to go anywhere.”

I got nothing. Maybe it’s about rejecting control, but Izo loses, so who knows? The historical Izo was an assassin who killed supporters of the Shogunate. Seriously, I got nothing, and I can usually engage with Miike movies. Or Lynch movies. But this was beyond me.

The Boston Fantastic Film Festival schedule is out. It’s what you might call slightly heavy on the horror; they’re also showing The Muppet Movie. Intriguing contrast — since they showed Five Children and It last year, I’m assuming there’s a tradition of having a children’s movie.

Hm. Thursday night looks good, with Creep and the inevitable Miike. Friday, likewise, for Marebito and R-Point. More the latter. I could miss Friday night without shedding too many tears.

Saturday has nothing I’m dying to see but Dark Hours, although I quite wanna see that. Reeker? Maybe. And then Sunday… I keep going back and forth on Three: Extremes. I was chatting about it with my sweetie, and the truth is, I just don’t dig Chan-wook Park that much. I dunno. If Miike expands his segment (Fruit Park expanded his), I’d see that.

It’s a pity we’re not getting more non-horror this year, but it hasn’t been a great year for that. Night Watch would be nice, as would some Hong Kong action, but the BFFF hasn’t ever been oriented towards Asian action flicks so I can’t fault them there. And this is a nice festival all in all.

Take one on a possible Fantasia schedule. Times are rough and not completely accurate. The 5:20 Sunday slot is probably a rest slot, since my tolerance for goofy doesn’t necessarily extend to bad Turkish movies… although damn. Tempting. Note that I’m also assuming a Thursday arrival, since I’m thinking about that, but the two Thursday movies aren’t essential.

7/21

7:30 El Lobo
9:30 Ghost House

7/22

5:00 All Babes Want To Kill Me
7:30 Spider Forest
9:45 Some
11:45 Three… Extremes

7/23

12:30 Ghost Talker’s Daydream
2:45 Ultraman: The Next
5:15 Spin Kick
7:20 Night of the Living Dorks
9:20 Survive Style 5+
11:40 Shadow: Dead Riot

7/24

12:00 White Dragon
3:00 Heroes of the East
5:20 G.O.R.A.
8:00 One Nite in Mongkok

Blah.

To my infinite annoyance (and resigned acceptance), I find that I am unable to attend FanTasia this year in the manner I had hoped. We have a product launch the second week of the festival, and I can neither be out the week before that launch or the week after.

I may be able to make a long weekend of it again. I’m a touch dejected just now. We’ll see what the schedule looks like.

I am fantastically excited: Fangoria has the first peek at the FanTasia film festival lineup. As I’d hoped, Night Watch and Kitamura’s Godzilla: Final Wars will be there. Night Watch is the Russian conspiracy modern fantasy epic which has a ton of buzz, and Kitamura is of course the director of the insanely spirited Versus. Those were the movies I’d really wanted to see.

Lots of other cool stuff, too. Lion’s Gate has a small slew of J-horror sequels, which I’ll see if it’s convenient, and the horror anthology film Three… Extremes by Miike, Fruit Chan, and Chan-wook Park. I’ll see that for shock value. Lots of zombie movies. Hm, and Paul Spurrier’s “P” — made in Thailand by a British director, looks interesting, gives me some creepy vibes. I love fusion and I want to see that one badly.

Speaking of creepy, Creep looks intriguing as well. I don’t know a lot about it, but I like subway movies and I like Franka Potente. There’s a capsule review of it on Twitch, from whence I also got the Fangoria link.

I love this festival so much.

The Independent Film Festival 2005 is coming: April 21st through April 24th. Tight schedule. Just about all the narrative movies look good, and I hear great things about the documentary Murderball. I’m also intrigued by The Fall of Fujimori.

OK, let’s rough out a schedule, here…

Friday

5:15 PM, Somerville: Abel Raises Cain (work permitting)
8 PM, Somerville: Blackballed (Rob Corddry stars)
10:30, Brattle: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things

Saturday

2 PM, Coolidge: Spew: The World of Competitive Debate
4:30 PM, Coolidge: The Fall of Fujimori
7 PM, Brattle: Murderball
10:30 PM, Somerville: White Skin

Sunday

Noon, Brattle: The Girl From Monday
2:30 PM, Brattle: Stolen (documentary about the Isabella Stewart Gardener theft)
7 PM, Somerville: Childstar

10 movies? Aggressive but not unreasonable if I really devote to it.

The San Francisco International Film festival film schedule is up. There are a lot of movies I wouldn’t miss if I lived in San Francisco; in particular, I’d recommend Layer Cake and Murderball (based on word of mouth), but it all looks good. Via Twitch.