Film Festivals

We’re a little more than halfway through Fantasia by any measure. I’ve seen more than half of the movies I’ve got scheduled, it’s the sixth day of a ten day trip, and my ass has been in semi-comfortable lecture hall seats for an awfully high percentage of the day. So far so good. The trip feels a bit longer because I’m really used to flying out here on the first Saturday of the festival, given work constraints. This year we arrived on a Thursday night in order to make sure we could catch Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma so my mental clock is off. Well worth the mental disruption; it was the best thing we’ve seen so far this year and I don’t think anything else will supplant it. It’s a daring exploration of the slasher genre, it’s funny as hell, and Gillian Anderson is great. As is Hannah Einbinder. ...

I am planning to see a grand total of 76 movies at Fantasia, which sounds ridiculous for a week and a half until I remind myself that I’m seeing four of the short films programs so 43 of those are short films. That leaves only 33 features. Maybe that’s still ridiculous. I got impatient to write about the festival so I decided to do a top ten list of my most anticipated features, in no particular order. I’m curious to see how this balances out against my rankings once I’ve seen everything. ...

Well that was an excellent week. Some vacations are a great way to disconnect from work while not being at all relaxing; this was one of those. I came back tired and a bit uncomfortable from a week of trying to navigate diabetes plus campus area quick food plus short blocks of time between movies. Informative on my current physical limits, though, and it was a shining Fantasia in terms of movies. We hope to go back next year, although in the process of going through this blog and tagging all my old Fantasia entries, I’ve found out how often I said that only to hit blockers. 30th anniversary, though! ...

Midway through my week in Montreal for Fantasia Festival, and boy is my ass tired. Losing weight is excellent, it’s just that I don’t have as much padding as I used to and Concordia University lecture hall chairs were not completely designed for two hour stretches. Worth it, though. This is not my look at the full festival — that’ll come next week. Instead, I’ve been spending time thinking about why I cherish this festival so much. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

For reference and for my friends who can’t make it to a Noir City showing this year. (San Francisco, Seattle, Hollywood, Austin, Boston, Chicago. Make it if you can.) I’m just listing movies with subscription/free streams here. Subscription service info is mostly from Lettrboxed (original). One of the many cool features they have: you can click on a movie and find out where you can see it. You can also filter film lists by services, so if I wanna feel classy I pull up the list of TSPDT 21st Century Top 1000 Movies and find out what’s on Netflix. ...

Seattle has a great film scene. It’s on par with San Francisco – no Alamo Drafthouse up here, but we have the Cinerama and SIFF is an excellent film society. I thought I was going to miss Eddie Mueller’s San Francisco based film noir festivals, but it turns out he runs a slightly abbreviated version of the festival up here every year. It’s that time of year! This’ll be my third go-round at one version or another of this festival. Previous years have coincided with lapsed blogging, alas. ...

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. ...