Film Festivals

I have achieved very little of the Boston Fantastic Film Festival, to my regret: two weeks of extended brutal workload at work is to blame. I was late to Infernal Affairs on Friday, late enough so that I decided to recover instead of seeing the movie — I was up late Thursday thanks to Saw. and since I didn’t leave work until 11:30 PM on Wednesday I had no reserves. I skipped Appleseed and The Bottled Fool on Saturday in hopes that I’d have some margin left today. I may have been wrong. ...

The Boston Fantastic Film Festival is scheduled (original) and for a second-tier fantastic film festival, this is a very impressive lineup. My thoughts on what’s worth seeing for who will come later, but I do want to note in particular Infernal Affairs and Sympathy for Mr. Vengance. I’m also very intrigued by the Nesbit adaptation, Five Children and It, which stars Kenneth Branagh and features Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead.

OK: some people want to see Ong Bak and Dead and Breakfast. (See previous post.) They are both playing a week from today. Ong Bak starts at 7:15 and 9:45 at the Lowes Boston Common; Dead and Breakfast starts at 7:30 and 9:45 at the Copley. Seeing Ong Bak first provides more transit time. (Walk vs. subway?) So that’s the right way to do things. Thus, here’s how it’s gonna work: ...

The Boston Film Festival has a terrible interface. You select which movie you want info on from a pulldown menu, which is bad; the movie pages don’t have information on which dates the movies are playing, which is lame; and the pages for each individual date don’t have links to the movie description pages. Buh. The film list (original) helps a little but not enough. Anyhow, it all starts tonight, and I would be remiss if I did not point out a few movies.

Hillside Strangler was pretty much blah. If you’re in the market for fictional Hillside Strangler stories with semi-pro acting and over-used looping camera work, you’re good; otherwise it’s worth missing. In short, Samantha Stone is a psychologist who uncovers the truth behind Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi’s killings by finding out what Kenneth is hiding. It’s ploddingly predictable. Also, the subplot — Samantha breaking up with her drug dealer husband Jack — is pointless other than as an excuse for a lot of breasts. It doesn’t go anywhere and it doesn’t particularly reflect the main plot. Chris Fisher’s movies aren’t going to pass as an art film as long as there’s so much pointless exploitation riding shotgun. ...

I just unloaded a bunch of FanTasia pictures from the camera in preparation for GenCon; my blog is the beneficiary of this wealth. It wasn’t a heavy picture-taking trip for me but I got a few good shots. Please keep in mind that Montreal is much prettier and funkier than one might think from my photography.

If you were in the mood to get a taste of some cool Asian movies, there are two film festivals coming up in New York and San Francisco. New York has the New York Korean Festival (original), running from August 13th to the 22nd. I haven’t seen any of those movies, but I do hear good things about Memories of Murder (original). The Uninvited (original) also got good reviews at FantAsia. Meanwhile, over in San Francisco on the same dates (original), the Four Star is running the 8th annual Asian Film Festival (original). Note in particular Battlefield Baseball and Azumi. Hm, and not one but two Shaw Brothers flicks: One-Armed Swordsman and Lady General Hua Mulan. Old school 60s swordplay movies, both of them. Plus they’ll be showing both Ju-on and Ju-on 2. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...