Tag: fantasia

2023 In Movies

February 5, 2024

Aw, that’s cute, I thought I wasn’t going to watch as many movies as I did in 2022. Instead I went from 423 watched to 508 watched. Remember when I said “I want to spend more time following my whims”? That worked out really well. In 2022, I did a weekly challenge plus a weekly movie watching club plus another weekly movie watching club — it got to be a grind. In 2023 I was more varied about my tastes and I had more fun.

I also went to not one but two film festivals, SIFF and Fantasia. S. came with to Montreal! Including shorts, I watched 36 movies at SIFF and 45 movies at Fantasia, so that’s a pretty big chunk of the additional movies right there. The festivals were immensely fun and I really, really need to remember how much I enjoy that kind of thing.

My time spent watching movies was absolutely worth it. My top ten movies of 2023 were excellent, and there were way more good ones than just those ten. Plus this was the year I really discovered Iranian cinema (A Separation, Certified Copy, No Bears), I got that Bergman boxed set and watched a ton of it, and I dug into 1970s American film in a more serious way.

Directors who were largely new to me who I really liked: Bergman, as per the above; Claire Denis, as a direct result of watching Trouble Every Day and Stars at Noon as a double feature at the Grand Illusion; and Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, thanks to the 2023 Hooptober challenge. I also kept watching more than my share of Aki Kaurismäki.

Oh, and while I only watched one Bela Tarr/Agnes Hranitzky movie in 2023, it was in fact enough to cement them among my very favorite directors. It gets no more grim than this. I’m very glad I got to watch Werckmeister Harmonies on the big screen, and I made a point of making Satantango the first thing I watched in 2024.

My most watched actor was Juliette Binoche, thanks to Claire Denis and a rewatch of Three Colours and a bunch of other good movies. After her it’s a lot of Shaw Brothers character actors — we finished the first volume of the Arrow Shawscope set, and got started on the second — plus some 70s Italian actors which I chalk up to a lot of poliziotteschi. Huh, I watched nine of those grimy nihilistic Italian crime flicks in 2023! Not bad. I did say I was more varied about my tastes.

How about 2024? For the second year running, I’m going to watch more TV. One reason I held off on this post for a month was because I wanted to test that theory out, and in fact I only (ha) watched 24 movies in January. Six a week is a lot of movies, but I also caught up on some Slow Horses and got started on a couple of other shows. It feels good.

S. and I won’t be attending Fantasia, barring something pretty unusual. I do plan to hit SIFF harder, since I got a pass this year, and I’ll be doing Noir City at SIFF this month. I also got a subscription to Radiance Films‘ releases for 2024. Not cheap! But I think of all the boutique Blu-ray labels they come closest to hitting my sweet spot, and S likes the look of the upcoming releases. So that’ll be cool.

All in all, if I had to guess, I’ll probably see close to 400 movies… but no weekly challenges again, other than our beloved Boofest.

As is perhaps obvious, I’ve stopped copying Letterboxd reviews to this blog. I finally figured out how to script downloads of my Letterboxd data, though, so over the course of the next month or so I’ll be writing code to pull my reviews into Datasette, which accomplishes my goal of making sure I control my own words without clogging up a mostly inactive blog.

And just like I said last year, the best video store in the country makes it possible for me to watch a huge range of movies I couldn’t see otherwise. If you have a local video store, and you like movies, support them. They need you.

Fantasia 2023: A Wrap

July 30, 2023

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34 feature length movies and 12 shorts. Towards the end I was having a little bit of trouble connecting scenes into narratives so it’s probably just as well that my last two movies were a magic realism fable and a sociological essay. That was a very good time and I hope to do it again sooner than a decade from now.

Since I’m that kind of person, I made ranked lists for features and shorts. It was a pretty good year. Hippo is particularly good if you like thinking about conspiracies and cult dynamics and such. Baby Assassins 2 Babies has a martial arts fight scene that’s probably going to wind up in my top ten ever. I’m also particularly pleased that the Southeast Asian films I saw were more mature than some I’ve seen in previous years — it feels like the programmers have a solid handle on how to program the good stuff.

I’m a little bummed that I never found the Arrow Video booth, if in fact they had one. Vinegar Syndrome did but their releases aren’t quite as in sync with my tastes. I wanted to ask Arrow when their next Shaw Brothers set was coming out, too.

Gonna be a long flight back. Still all worth it.

Fantasia 2023: Halfway There

July 26, 2023

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We had eight days of movies scheduled; we have completed four days. Halfway mark! I am tired but very happy; our hotel continues to be perfectly positioned and the food’s still quite good. There’s this little counter service Chinese place next to the hotel which is unexpectedly tasty.

Highlights so far: Lovely, Dark, and Deep, which is some of the best cosmic horror I’ve seen in a while. Not Lovecraftian. It lays out the situation in the first fifteen minutes, so that as Georgina Campbell discovers the scope of the horror, we have the same retroactive realizations she does. Smart movie.

Also great: Talk To Me. The Philippou brothers may be YouTube bros but they’re good filmmakers who care about their craft, and their insight into teens being teens is strong. Very kinetic, certainly terrifying.

On the non-horror side of the fence, I greatly enjoyed The First Slam Dunk. I’m not a huge anime fan and I almost didn’t get tickets for this one, but I’m so glad I did. Director Takehiko Inoue really loves basketball, as I discovered afterwards, and it shows. I can’t think of any sports movies structured like this one — the climatic game is the spine of the movie, with flashbacks explaining how the characters got there — and it’s very cool.

We also learned something very important. If you’re doing back to back movies, you can tell the volunteers when you get out of the first one and they’ll shuffle you off into a little holding pen and you get seated first for the next one. I don’t care so much about my exact position in the theater but it’s nice to maximize sitting down time.

The in-room laundry is running. It’s crappy but it’s better than a laundromat.

Fantasia 2023

July 23, 2023

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It’s so good to be back.

Previously: 2004, 2006, 2015. So I guess this is my 20th anniversary Fantasia, which is unplanned but nice. I’d like to go more than once every ten years — remind me in 2028, right? We might have squeezed one in around 2020, but the pandemic.

View of a modernist college building with a line of people curved around the corner.

This year we’re staying in a Sonder hotel which is literally across the intersection from Théâtre Hall, the primary venue. Wait, I have a picture from our balcony. You couldn’t ask for a more convenient hotel. You could ask for a nicer one; Sonder is oriented towards cheap longer stays, so we’re getting a nice discount for staying a week but there are stains on the hallway carpet. Whatever. There’s a washer/dryer unit and a mini-kitchen in the room and a pool on the roof and we’re in the middle of everything.

It’s the morning of the second day right now. We’ve had two satisfying huge breakfasts, a good but slow Mediterranean lunch, a bunch of fast food dinners, and a lot of movies. Since Letterboxd exists, I’m not going to do separate write-ups here. They’ll come along with the Letterboxd mirroring in due time.

I may post longer rambling thoughts. I try not to write reactive reviews on Letterboxd, which means if I want to yell about holding Nicolas Cage accountable for his performances instead of just going “ooooh he was over the top,” I will do it here. Slightly unfair in this case since I think he was pretty good in Sympathy for the Devil, it’s just the movie itself which failed him.

Not that this is a problem. I always see at least one movie I adore here, usually not the one I expected to love, and there’s always a lot of crap. The experience is excellent nonetheless. It’s fun being at a festival where audience reaction is encouraged. There’s a tradition of “meows” before each movie, apparently thanks to Simon’s Cat. That quiets down when the credits roll. The audience roars at good action scenes; yesterday, in The First Slam Dunk, we cheered the basketball game like it was real. We come to this place —

Nah, can’t do it. But Fantasia is always going to be a second home for me.

2022 in Movies

January 2, 2023

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Something weird happened in 2022: I watched 423 movies.

This is pretty atypical for me. It’s over 20% of the movies I’ve watched in my life. I’ve never watched as many as 100 movies in a year before. I’ve been trending up a bit recently, particularly during the pandemic, but 423? Sure, some of them are shorts, but that’s balanced by the 7 hours of Les Vampires and the 5 hours of Fanny and Alexander (TV version) and the 4 hours of Ludwig. At the end of the day — uh, of the year — we’re talking 730 hours of movies. WTF?

Well, I quit playing World of Warcraft, and that’s a huge time sink right there. I also just got into a rhythm. On any given weekday night, it’s easy to catch a movie after dinner. If you’re not doing anything else during a weekend, what’s a movie after each meal? I joined a couple of subreddits that watch a movie a week collectively, I took on a challenge to watch 52 Criterion movies, and about halfway through the year I realized I was on pace for over 350 movies. All those neurons I’d been using on making WoW numbers go up got dedicated to making my movie count go up. Whoops. Fortunately S. is supportive of my whims and obsessions.

An aside: Letterboxd, which I am linking to throughout this post, is amazing. Also a total enabler of my numbers go up obsessions. Worth every penny I pay them as a patron, which is not all that much. It’s been a great way to find movies I might want to see, it’s way more comfortable to use than IMDB, and I just love them to pieces.

At times it was a grind. The trickiest month was October, because S. and I took on a horror movie challenge together. I didn’t love the way I was engaging with challenges in general; I love movies but I want to watch them because I love them, not because they’re leaving my favorite streaming service or because I need to finish a checklist. I am not taking on any challenges next year, although S. and I made a list of 50 date night movies. (Each one has a connection to the one before, and we swapped picks. It was really fun making the list.)

But you know, it’s like anything. If you spend a lot of time on something you love, you’ll discover new depths and new joys and new preferences. Or I guess you’ll start hating it, but that wasn’t me and movies. I’m still not a guy who can breezily analyze Kurosawa in terms of his shot choices, but I know which directors and actors make me happy, which is good enough for me.

Port of Call

August 4, 2015

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Port of Call: A

Excellent Hong Kong drama based on a real murder case from 2008. Aaron Kwok was superb in this; he goes old, with grey hair and a mustache, and really vanishes into the role. It’s a tough part, full of damaged psyches grating against each other in an endless cycle. He plays it whimsical with a ton of pain showing right under the surface: comedy as defense mechanism.

The movie is set in seedy Hong Kong, where low-lives and desperate souls live. Occasionally we see glimpses of privilege and wealth. Christopher Doyle is the cinematographer, and he’s unsurprisingly perfect at showing us the contrast between those two places. It’s as if wealth was a source of light, and unwise phototropic souls reached out to it like a lifeline, only to find it was sterile. (Doyle always inspires me to clumsy light-based metaphors. Love his work.)

Other than Aaron Kwok making sad jokes which fail to dispel his pain, there’s very little humor in the movie. There are sequences of explicit death and violence. People are not nice to one another. It gets a lot of power from being unflinching.

The Ninja War of Torakage

August 4, 2015

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The Ninja War of Torakage: B

This was the weirdest thing I saw at Fantasia. Underneath it all you’ll find a pretty standard historical ninja epic about Torakage, this poor guy who just wants to retire from ninjaing and raise a family, but there’s a lot of insanity between the surface of the movie and the core. I don’t know Yoshihiro Nishimura’s work but he’s a special effects/makeup dude who occasionally directs, I guess. This is perhaps obvious from the opening shot in which our protagonist cuts off a couple of heads and we center two spouting fountains of gore for a very long time.

Once we’ve gotten the sense that it’s going to be a reasonably violent action film, Nishimura proceeds to demonstrate that it’s going to be supremely weird by cutting to a Portugese scholar named Francisco who narrates the premise of the movie with the help of shadow puppets. Visually awesome, by the by, once you get over the Japanese actor in Euroface. Francisco shows up to explain the movie all the time, although he doesn’t explain any of the weird stuff.

Other awesome things: the weird creature with wings made of hands and eyes everywhere; the bamboo mecha; the way Torakage’s wife Tsukikage also kicks ass; the Greek chorus in jars. I appreciated this one a lot.

Tales of Halloween

July 27, 2015

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Tales of Halloween: B+

This review is maybe a bit of a placeholder; I did not take notes during the movie and I’d like to come back to it when I can find some better data on who directed what. For now, I will note that this was a totally fun horror anthology with ten segments. They’re very loosely linked insofar as they all take place in one town during Halloween. Unsurprisingly, it’s not a place you’d want to live. Neil Marshall’s closing segment ties together some of the other bits, but otherwise they’re just related by theme and locale.

If I had to bet, I’d say one of the thematic elements the creators decided to work with was revenge. There’s a lot of that going on. Also trick or treating, which is kind of a gimmie for Halloween. Also gore — this is probably going to win my personal Best Gore award for Fantasia — but that’s just because it’s a total love letter to 80s horror.

Which, let me tell you, this movie wears its heart on its sleeve. Lots of horror character actors you’ll recognize, a couple of even more amusing cameos, and so on. The Neil Marshall segment plays like a John Carpenter tribute in the most loving of ways.

I think this will roll into theaters around Halloween this year and if you like gory horror you should see it.

Full Strike

July 27, 2015

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Full Strike: B

This was pretty much OK. Very broad Hong Kong sports comedy with all the usual bits. There’s a drunken master, there’s an evil magistrate, there’s familial tension, and so on. Oh, and a random alien who lands in a UFO that looks like a badminton shuttlecock. Don’t pay too much attention to him, since he’s not actually part of the movie.

Right — the sport is badminton. Serious business! The producer, Andrew Ooi, introduced the movie and explained that they’re all big fans of badminton so why not make a movie about it? Fair enough.

Josie Ho was a standout; her transitions from washed up ex-champion to fierce competitor were a nice bit of acting. That’s the extra effort that you don’t always see in a farce.

Jeruzalem

July 23, 2015

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Jeruzalem: D.

This was a lot of wasted potential. You’ve got a promising if somewhat goofy presence — American backpackers trapped in Jerusalem during the apocalypse. The found footage twist is pretty good: everything’s being filmed on Google Glass by Sarah, our viewpoint character. It’s a nice way to explain why she doesn’t just drop the camera and run away, plus the Paz brothers added some really clever moments around facial recognition and other wearable features.

Unfortunately the acting was really, really bad. I’m not going to pick on anyone in particular, because everyone was fairly wooden. If you’re doing helpless Americans abroad, you’ve got to have sympathetic characters and none of the main foursome was up to that task.

The writing didn’t help. Towards the beginning of the movie there’s an excellent chase scene which uses the Glass conceit to full advantage. You get disoriented right along with Sarah as she runs, you get a real feel for her lack of perspective, and it’s easy to understand how she gets lost in the warren of back alleys. Excellent stuff. It’s undermined by the ceaseless repetition of “hey, stop, hey, you, stop, hey, come back, hey, stop!” It’s as if the filmmakers were afraid of silence.

I could go on. The prelude, which is not presented as found footage, winds up being played for Sarah later. So if you’re going to present it within the found footage context anyway, why start the movie outside the frame? Hold it for later, don’t repeat it, and as a bonus you get to save your demon reveal rather than giving it up in the first five minutes.

Whoops, I went on. Done now. Don’t watch this on cable if you happen to trip over it some day.