Film Festivals

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. ...

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. ...

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 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. ...

(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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

I’m sure it’s not as if Japan is cranking out all the cool SF that we don’t get in the US, but man, Samurai Commando 1549 is completely the cool SF that we don’t get in the states. The premise: the Japanese Self-Defense Force invents time travel by accident, the guys they sent back start changing history, and another group has to go back and fix the problem before history (and modern Japan) are destroyed. Aw yeah. ...

OK, so, you are probably thinking the same thing I was thinking, which is to say, “Ha ha ha, a horror movie about mutant cows. That’ll be a hoot. Possibly laden with mordant Irish wit.” Do not be fooled like I was. Holy shit. Take the mutant cows very fucking seriously indeed. It turns out, who’d have known, that when you film on a ramshackle failing Irish farm with a limited cast, and you get the classic horror tropes of disease and nature gone Gigeresque wrong and slow-mounting tension right, and you threaten the world because one stupid genetic researcher forgets that science will mess you up something fierce, and you do all that stuff? Yeah, that is pretty visceral stuff right there and it is indeed capable of scaring the crap out of you and no, the mutant cows are NOT FUNNY. ...