Category: Culture

So this is easy: it was a big collection of short films, everything from trailer remixes to Flash animation bits to traditional animation. It was fairly good. I guess you could reasonably stick your name on this kind of thing if your cutting and editing of shorts was really innovative, but in this case a bit of static between shorts doesn’t count. It was still fun to watch. I’d probably go for taking a break instead of watching one of these again next year, just cause it’s all viewable elsewhere fairly easily.

Grade: I dunno, how do you grade a compendium? I liked it.

There’s a difference between horror and terror. Terror is being scared; it’s the long creepy shot of the end of the corridor in the split second when the monster appears. It’s the adrenaline rush. Fear. Terrified. Horror, on the other hand, is the knowledge that something incredibly awful is going on. It’s the grim certainty that a monster will appear: gut-churning time. Horrified.

Reincarnation is interesting, cause you expect J-horror to be a lot of each. In good J-horror, there’s lots of built up tension plus the oft-gory rush to judgment. Reincarnation really isn’t very terrifying; it didn’t leave me looking over my shoulder on the way home. But man, the slow patient playing out of fate is amazingly horrifying.

This is perhaps because it’s so non-surreal. The blurb in the program really wanted this to be the same sort of blurred Takashi Shimizu horror that he’s known for with the Ju-on films. It’s not; the horror comes from the clarity with which the inevitable plays out. You need to see the future clearly in order to understand how doomed the cast is.

Bonus points for clever use of film within a film, not just once (the movie being made about a senseless set of murders in a hotel), but twice (the 8 mm film shot by the hotel murderer himself). That provides the opportunity for a triple overlay of events, which is damned effective. So is the rest of the movie.

Grade: A.

From one low budget horror film with a message to another. The Descendant is very earnest, and better filmed than Subject Two — less polished, but better pacing, and better acting on the whole. The protagonist, Jamie, is somewhat stiff, but his grandparents and the reclusive denizens of Ste. Harmonie make up for him performance-wise.

It’s hard to describe the movie without giving away too much. Jamie’s mother dies, and he goes to find out why she didn’t talk to her grandparents in twenty-odd years. The town they live in has a secret, and that’s the movie right there.

The earnest part comes in when you hit the plot twist. This is, I think, the movie M. Night Shyamalan should have made instead of The Village. It’s his sort of gut-punch impact, or it would be if it had been made with a bit more skill.

The message is powerful, but the desire to get the point across seems to have led Philippe Spurrell, the director, into skimping on plausibility. His desire to make the crimes of the village as immediate as possible instead make them so implausible as to weaken the whole movie. A step back from the material would have benefitted the whole thing immensely.

Grade: C+ for the movie, B- for the intent.

It’s a bad sign when the promotional material for a movie spends a lot of time talking about how it was shot under adverse conditions. Say, the whole movie was filmed in 8 days several miles from “civilization” in a cabin with no electricity in the middle of the winter. Me, I’m hard-pressed to say you’ve left civilization if you’re close enough to get back via snowmobile in less than an hour, but that’s me. Either way, the shoot shouldn’t be the most important thing about a movie.

The promotional material for Subject 2 also talks a lot about how it’s a new take on the Frankenstein legend, and that’s true enough. It’s the strength of the film. Mad scientists, nanotechnology, and hints of darker stuff are pretty effective. The concepts are great, and the setting is pretty good too.

However, the acting is wooden and the script doesn’t inject the concepts with life. Further, the movie squanders its sense of isolation a little more than halfway through when a visitor shows up. There’s a nasty little twist at the very end, but that’s the only place where the movie shows any sense of humor. It’s a regrettable waste of a pretty decent idea.

Grade: C-.

It’s a bad sign when the promotional material for a movie spends a lot of time talking about how it was shot under adverse conditions. Say, the whole movie was filmed in 8 days several miles from “civilization” in a cabin with no electricity in the middle of the winter. Me, I’m hard-pressed to say you’ve left civilization if you’re close enough to get back via snowmobile in less than an hour, but that’s me. Either way, the shoot shouldn’t be the most important thing about a movie.

The promotional material for Subject Two also talks a lot about how it’s a new take on the Frankenstein legend, and that’s true enough. It’s the strength of the film. Mad scientists, nanotechnology, and hints of darker stuff are pretty effective. The concepts are great, and the setting is pretty good too.

However, the acting is wooden and the script doesn’t inject the concepts with life. Further, the movie squanders its sense of isolation a little more than halfway through when a visitor shows up. There’s a nasty little twist at the very end, but that’s the only place where the movie shows any sense of humor. It’s a regrettable waste of a pretty decent idea.

Grade: C-.

The program book makes all these wild claims about how The Echo (aka Sigaw) is the most gorgeous thing since sliced bread. If they’re to be believed, Yam Laranas, who wrote, directed, and shot the film, is a peer of Christopher Doyle in his cinematography. The praise is nigh on fulsome.

And as you no doubt knew with an opening paragraph like that, it’s pretty much accurate. The Echo is a ghost story set in a ramshackle old condo complex. It’s minimalist in cast, without ever putting too many people on screen at once; it’s one of those movies where the haunted building is perhaps the most important cast member. The cinematography has a key role, thusly. It bears the burden well. Almost every shot uses natural light, and Laranas must have had perfect timing and an unerring sense for appropriate times in order to make the long decrepit hallways and looming doorways as perfect as he did.

This is paired with a deft sense of horror. The Echo is, in fact, a pretty scary movie, which is a neat accomplishment considering that nothing ever lays a hand on our protagonist. The tension ratchets up nicely over the repeated course of a circular haunting, as if the worn patterns of the ghosts were building momentum until they must by the laws of physics break their wheel and careen into the lives of those around them.

When this played in L.A., Laranas was pretty much an instant hit. He’s signed up for a Hollywood remake, he got an agent, and from his blog (linked above) he’s pretty much on top of the world. I hope he keeps making movies with this kind of talent.

Grade: A- (and I’m not actually a big ghost movie fan).

(Yeah, it was Scandinavia night up at the old film festival.)

So Pusher 3 is advertised as a crime drama, which I guess is accurate in that it’s not a comedy or a thriller and it’s set in a criminal milieu. On the other hand, before the movie Nicolas Winding Refn, the director, told us that he was inspired by reality TV. That’s a lot more of the feel right there.

It’s a bleak night in the life of Milo, Copenhagen drug dealer. He’s attending NA meetings to try and kick his habit, cooking dinner for his daughter’s 25th birthday party, and dealing with the unexpected arrival of 10,000 Ecstasy tabs instead of the heroin he’d expected. If that sounds like there’s a comic aspect — yeah, there is, but it’s used to highlight the empty grind that’s Milo’s life.

His cooking and his human interactions are a tired hulk of a man bulling his way through an existence he doesn’t particularly enjoy. He doesn’t want to engage in the sudden bursts of violence that come later in the movie, but he’s got to do it. There’s no path that’d take him out of the swamp.

Not so much plot. It’s a slice of life; it’s reality TV focusing on criminals. Things happen, and Milo doesn’t particularly change as a result of them. It’s Zlatko Buric’s performance as Milo that binds the movie together. He’s ugly, tall, and weary in every moment of film. Refn isn’t afraid of the long wordless reaction shot; Buric bears out the director’s trust. This was probably my favorite performance of the festival so far.

Grade: A-.

Storm is an odd duck of a movie. It’s a psychological thriller about memories and childhood dressed in a supernatural, apocalyptic thriller’s clothing. The opening is a classic Matrix-inspired chase scene, right down to the tough female protagonist, and our shallow hero — DD — slips right into the Neo role. But then the midsection of the movie lurches over into Memento territory and the movie never really recovers.

The problem for me was that I couldn’t bring myself to want DD to be redeemed. Hm; the more I think about it, the more I think Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein (our writers/directors) were trying to do the Matrix all over again. But DD is no Neo, and his sins are not as easily forgivable for me as the movie might have liked them to be, which left me detached from the movie’s emotional core.

And then there’s all that comic book and video game imagery. After a lot of post-movie conversation with S., I couldn’t decide if those images were hanging on a coherent core structure, or if they were just thrown in to look cool. Why does Promise appear to have a real comic book existence? Who knows? My benefit of the doubt theory is that she and her opponent are too grand, too awesome, too angelic to be seen as they are by human eyes; that the comics and the video games are the filters through which DD and others see them. There’s nothing to prove or disprove that theory, though.

Still, it was a gorgeous movie. The sense of style was solid without getting in the way of the narrative. Apparently the whole thing was filmed on three million dollars, which staggers me. So it was enjoyable, just not entirely filling.

Grade: B-.

A special note to someone, anyone who can help:

Please to make sure the Theater Hall Concordia seats are repaired before next year’s festival. While I imagine they’re not so bad for an hour-long college lecture, they are really kicking my ass for six hours of movies in a row. Ow.

The Gravedancers is a home for bad acting, in no way saved by poor directing, a bad screenplay, and half-hearted special effects.

The bad acting was the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed was the regrettable tendency towards teasing direction — in a horror flick, I tend to feel that shock jump cuts should have some kind of underlying rationale. Jump cut to the monster’s perspective, jump cut to reveal a new perspective, but don’t jump cut for cheap thrills. Alas. By the time the second or third monster-eye cam shot turned out not to be a monster’s point of view at all, I’d decided that Mike Mendez wasn’t going to be particularly honest with his scares, and a lot of his tricks for scaring me went out the window.

The setup — dance on a grave, earn the hatred of the inhabitants — wasn’t bad. But it was wasted. Three monsters is too many to distinguish if you’re not even gonna begin to differentiate them until two thirds of the way through the movie. Bah.

Oh, and some of you will remember Clare Kramer as Glory in Buffy. Don’t expect too much from her. Sorry.

Grade: C-.