Category: Film Festivals

Wow, that was a lot of movies I just saw there. I’m still a little dazed. But while the cinematic extravaganza is fresh, I will provide a nifty capsule guide to everything I saw.

First, though, some notes. The samurai movie “I badly want to see, but which I did not catch the name of, so all I know is that there’s a young woman who apparently trains to be a samurai when her… brother? is killed…” is Azumi by Ryuhei Kitamura, who also directed Versus. This makes me want to see it all the more.

Enter… Zombie King! is in fact in the IMDB under the title Zombie Beach Party. I’ve submitted a change to the title, since as far as I can tell it wasn’t actually released as Zombie Beach Party, and will contentedly allow the smart people at IMDB to determine whether or not I’m right.

And now, the movies. I’m stealing my grading system from Chris; as he says, it’s too hard to rank these, so everything’s either great, OK, or not worthwhile. Great movies I want to own. OK movies I liked but don’t want to own. Not worthwhile movies suck; if any filmmakers are reading this, please don’t make any of those.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

Cutie Honey, live action anime which is so cute my eyeballs exploded. But they did so cutely.

Enter… Zombie King!, a movie about wrestling and zombies and rock and roll music. If I hadn’t already written part of a game about wrestling and zombies, this would have made me want to write a game about wrestling and zombies.

Executioners From Shaolin, a Shaw Brothers movie about revenge and kung fu and stuff. Big inspiration for Tarantino.

Into The Mirror, a Korean cop movie pretending to be a slasher flick. Superb use of mirrors. Creepy.

One Missed Call, Takashi Miike’s exceedingly disturbing entry into the Japanese postmillenial horror genre. Also a pointed critique of the Japanese obsession with cellphones and reality television, but mostly I remember the disturbing bits.

One Night Stands

The Bodyguard, a Thai comedy action flick which probably wouldn’t have made this category except I’m soft-hearted for romance.

Deadly Outlaw Rekka, a Takashi Miike yakuza story told in swift brutal bites.

Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace was basically a high-grade fan film with some funny bits; I’ll cut it some slack for being a workprint, and also for a very funny gag about the obligatory training sequence.

Red Vs. Blue, funny machinima with an excellent sense of how best to use the tools available to the filmmaker.

Robot Stories, a great anthology science fiction film that’s about people rather than ideas.

Toolbox Murders, awfully good Tobe Hooper slasher movie. Whoever wrote this has a very good understanding of LA occult history; if I bought more horror DVDs I’d want to own this one.

My Eyes, My Eyes

Hillside Strangler, a self-indulgent exploitation flick pretending to be an art movie.

Malice@Doll, a self-indulgent CGI anime flick pretending to have a point.

Saving Private Tootsie, which deserves better than to be relegated to this category but which — looking back — just didn’t work for me. I am not the appropriate audience.

It’s probably not the case that all Thai movies are deliriously loopy; my sample size of three is far too small. However, The Bodyguard is deliriously loopy. It’s like a goofy 80s Hong Kong cop movie, except much more so.

I wanted to see this one because it stars Petchtai Wongkamlao, aka Mum Jokmok, who was in the incredibly cool Ong Bak. Phanom Yeerum, the lead from Ong Bak, has a cameo appearance as well. Alas, his cameo is the only serious martial arts moment in the movie — the Riverdance sequence later on doesn’t really count — and The Bodyguard is emphatically more of a comedy than an action movie. Think Chris Rock, but without Jackie Chan around to provide butt-kicking.

I still kind of enjoyed it, particularly because of the romance subplot with Pumwaree Yodkamol (also in Ong Bak, and possibly the cutest tomboy beanpole on the planet) and Pipat Apiratthanakorn. Alas, the action was not crisp and the in-jokes mostly went over my head. I don’t regret seeing it but I wouldn’t recommend it.

And whoa, that’s all 14 movies. Next: the executive summary of the festival, and maybe some other bits and pieces and notes.

I figured Into The Mirror was going to be just another postmillenial Asian horror film. (How quickly we become jaded!) Turns out it’s a cop movie about the redemption of a man who got his partner killed and now labors as a security guard. His story just happens to take place in the context of a clever slasher movie with Asian horror elements to it.

The lead, Ji-tae Yu, was the antagonist in Oldboy, and while I didn’t like Oldboy that much, I remember thinking he was good. I’m coming perilously close to having enough of a handle on Korean cinema to go out hunting obscure DVDs. Gotta keep a handle on that tendency.

But back to the movie. It was exceedingly slick and well-done. All the Korean movies I’ve seen over the last year or so have had excellent production values. The horror gimmick in Into The Mirror is, of course, mirrors — the department store in which various awful things take place is full of them, and plenty of other reflective surfaces. The cinematography rocked the house; once the mirror theme was established, you couldn’t blink without getting creeped out.

The director made pretty top-notch use of the theme, too, all the way through to the truly disturbing ending. I think it was effective because, as we all know, mirrors are a little creepy, and they do feel like a window into another world. Into The Mirror nails that feeling in the same way as — bear with me, this is an odd comparison — Alice In Wonderland.

The other thing I found interesting is that, insofar as it uses horrific elements, it draws more on slasher movies than on recent Asian horror cinema. Sure, there’s a mystery and a spirit and a unifying theme, but… it doesn’t have the linear elements I associate with the Asian stuff, and it doesn’t have the predetermination aspects. C.f. Ringu and One Missed Call, in both of which you know you’re going to buy the farm.

Of course, the spirits and the tragic motivating intelligence behind it all are still there, so maybe my distinction is without merit. I’ll have to ponder on it.

We also got a new trailer before this one: Dark Water, the new-to-North-America movie from Hideo Nakata, who directed Ringu. It looked pretty good. Hm, and looks like he’s directing Ring 2 over here in America. Interesting.

The biggest obstacle in the path of machinima is the lack of expressiveness in 3D game engines. Of course, Malice@Doll’s characters were completely without expression, so maybe it’s not such a big barrier after all. Red Vs. Blue gets around the problem by using characters in powered armor. This works out just fine.

Burnie Burns, the director and creator, has enough of a handle on what he’s doing to pull off double-takes, both in the character animations and with the camera, which is more than I can say for some traditional directors. He’s got the chops to make machinima believable as cinema. He also knows how to protect his weaknesses: for example, shaky voice acting is fixed up by filtering everyone through radio static, which makes perfect sense in the powered armor context.

As a movie, Red Vs. Blue is ambitious. Much of the story is twenty-something gamer humor; the characters aren’t futuristic soldiers, they’re a bunch of geeks in powered armor behaving like you’d expect geeks in powered armor to behave. Albeit ones who’ve been through basic training. Burns goes for real emotion here and there, and sort of hits the target, but if this was a live action film it wouldn’t be worth more than a few chuckles.

Notwithstanding, it’s tremendously cool as a signpost and it succeeds on its own terms. It’s — ah. It’s not amateur, it’s proficient. It proves that the tools can do what they need to do in order to make a real movie. The remaining barrier is facial expressions, That’s a problem which game publishers want to solve, for many of the same reasons; it won’t surprise me if ten years from now machinima is as mainstream in the same way that print on demand publishing is mainstream today. Which is to say “marginally” but also “promising.”

Was that another day? I think so. I lost track of reality around the time I walked out of Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace, which drew so heavily on action movies and the vocabulary of action established by Hong Kong kung fu movies, and walked into Executioners From Shaolin. When I woke up this morning, I expected the television to speak to me in Japanese. I’ve seen movies in four languages and trailers in a couple more, and I’m not even talking about the cinematic vocabularies I seem to be obsessing on in other posts.

Watching the permutation of the audiences has been fascinating. Toolbox Murders was clogged with people in death metal T-shirts who cheered when victims bought it. The Miike movies had a gender-balanced audience, somewhat to my surprise. Perhaps he has intellectual street cred, these days. Executioners from Shaolin drew a male, vocal audience. The guy with the Exalted rulebook didn’t attend any movies I saw, but I walked past him two or three times today.

And everything outside is in French. There’s some terminology around apartments that I can’t figure out; everything’s a 1 1/2, or a 2 1/2, or a 3 1/2 — like that. I’m guessing it means rooms, but I’m not sure. There was a big chunk of mayonnaise on my shwarma this morning next to the tahini. This area of Montreal is pretty multicultural, too: Chinese and Thai and Vietnamese and Middle Eastern. Funky and fun.

This is exactly why I decided to see 14 movies in three days. It was the right decision. Can’t wait for tomorrow.

Malice@Doll. Uh. Fetishistic 3D CGI adult anime set in a future without people. Malice is a sex doll who encounters some sort of monster that changes her into a human and gives her the ability to do the same to other machines. There are tenticular penises involved, sometimes, but not always. Things do not go as well as the newly human Malice had hoped.

I think it was some kind of allegory for the danger of letting women and robots get uppity, although Malice does get to transcend at the end. Everyone else goes back to normal, though. A fair number of people walked out during the movie, and Hillside Strangler has been displaced as the worst movie I’ve seen so far.

Toolbox Murders starts out as a simple slasher flick, then takes a sharp right turn into semi-Masonic horror. But the slasher element never gets too far away. Basic plot: nice young couple moves into creepy apartment building with alchemical symbols on the floor. People die. Wife discovers something she will regret discovering, and explores it. That last bit is the sharp right turn, and if you’re the kind of person who really liked the house in The Blair Witch Project and that cave in Jeepers Creepers, you’d really like the places this movie goes.

Despite Tobe Hooper’s fairly good track record, I believe Toolbox Murders went more or less straight to video. Kind of a pity; it’s better than most slasher flicks that hit the theaters. Also, it’s got Juliet Landau (who you may recognize as Drusilla) in it. Most of all, it’s got a tenuous grounding in Jack Parson’s Babalon Working.

Seriously! It’s pretty tenuous, though. Really just a one-line tossaway: “They worshipped a god, a man who mixed magic and rocket science.” Since the movie takes place in Hollywood, and since the antecedent to “they” is Hollywood stars, the reference is fairly obvious. Well, if you’re a Jack Parsons fan. The timeline works out, too, if I’m not mistaken.

Anyhow. I’m not going to say it’s a great work of art, but I will say that Tobe Hooper has a very good sense of how to make a simple movie scary. His use of setting is superb; in order for this movie to work, the apartment building has to be creepy but conceivably a place where people would live, and he pulls that off with flair. I’d definitely recommend looking Toolbox Murders up if you like horror.

Now, see, we’re back to the joys of genre films that don’t wink at the audience again. After Harry Knuckles I was kind of resigned to Enter… Zombie King! being another semi-pro cheese-fest. (Note to self: get some info for this movie entered into IMDB, stat.) As it turns out, Stacey Case is a serious fan of zombies and wrestling and his movie rocks hard.

It’s the same basic precept. Once you accept a world in which masked wrestlers are superstars of justice and zombies roam the earth, there’s nothing in the movie that sacrifices the plot for the sake of laughs. Occasionally the wrestlers serve as top secret consultants for the government, and that’s cool too. Since the movie takes itself seriously, it works.

The wrestling was also fairly decent. Whoever was under those masks either had some actual training or put some time into working on their moves, which is nice. The screenwriter tossed in a couple of technical wrestling terms without being a showoff; also good. And Case clearly also has a handle on the importance of wrestling dynasties and family and honor.

Mind you, you don’t have to be the mad wrestling fan that I am to enjoy this movie. My pal Chris thought it was just grand. There’s honor and battle and zombies and love and at least one very disturbing kiss. The acting was a cut above what one might expect, although that may have been because most of the protagonists were behind masks.

Good clean fun. I want to do something with the concept of a small squad of masked wrestlers working as government agents someday. I also want to find a clean segue into noting that I got an extra kick out of the movie because I wrote part of a RPG supplement with zombies and wrestlers in it, but it’s getting kind of late so I’ll give up on doing it gracefully and just get it over with.

Nothing like seeing a pristine copy of a Shaw Brothers film on the big screen. I think the colors were a little less saturated and the picture was a little more crisp than those on the DVDs I have; I expect the digitization process accounts for both of those. I wouldn’t really say I prefer either. Either way, I’m getting the superb kung fu and the dramatic period pieces and all.

Executioners From Shaolin is one of the inspirations for Kill Bill. Tarantino’s Pai Mei looks precisely like the Pai Mei from Executioners, down to the beard stroking gesture. This Pai Mei was somewhat less sympathetic, though, being the type of person who’d burn down the Shaolin Temple and work towards eradicating every last escapee. Tarantino’s Pai Mei might have done that kind of thing, but you didn’t see any of that on screen. Plus in Kill Bill, it’s the villain who kills off Pai Mei, not the hero.

The cool thing about Executioners is that it takes place over what has to be 30 or so years. Hong Xi-guan flees the temple as a callow youth, but in the next two hours he finds true love, gets married, and has a family. And, of course, does a lot of kung fu.

Plenty of good fight sequences, including a really good pole fight on a staircase about which I will say no more lest I ruin it. There’s an extended period of domestic kung fu which is right up there with the funniest Jackie Chan scenes. Finally, the early noble stand against ridiculous odds, brought to us by the sublime fists of Gordon Liu, is also top notch.

Edit: there was a special trailer for Man of Iron before Executioners. It made me wanna see it — cool period Shanghai piece directed by Cheh Chang. Yeah.