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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. ...

Yah, so, J-horror, long black hair as a signifier of angry spirits, everyday object as a carrier of the horror… Red shoes, actually. Except these were more fuchsia. And yes, the idea is to evoke Hans Christian Andersen, but it didn’t work out very well. Lots of ballet, but no horrific mandate to dance forever, more’s the pity. The twist, as seems to be obligatory in Korean J-horror influenced movies, has to do with family dynamics. Sadly, the director didn’t manage to overlap the ghost story and the family horror story at all, which meant that the last twenty minutes of the movie felt like an overdone coda: “Ah, you’ve resolved the ghosts? Now we will show you the real ending, because the dramatic tension we just built up and resolved was only the beginning!” ...

OK, so the whole theory about unpleasant people trapped in an unpleasant situation making for bad movies? It needs a revision. Wilderness taught me that it’s all about seeing ‘em get their comeuppance — which means, actually, that it’s all about having characters who you’re invested in, whether you like ‘em or not. The reformatory lads of Wilderness were pretty much the latter, so there’s a lot of joy to be had from seeing them stuck on an island with something dark and terrible stalking them. Said joy was aided and abetted by excellent acting on everyone’s part. ...

Meh, Junk. I’d had high hopes, but it turned out to be royally dull. Reporter gets stuck in a bad place, which is pretty clearly a metaphor for something cause it’s completely stupid for her to be stuck there, and encounters people, including someone who may or may not be a serial killer. Speeches ensue. At no point is our heroine proactive. Nobody’s really proactive, in fact. There’s a vague attempt at pretending there’s a coverup. Russia decays. Etc. ...

Awwww! Train Man! Awwwwwww! OK, that was the sweetest little romantic comedy ever. Sort of like a Douglas Coupland novel without the reflexive defensive snarkiness, or like Megatokyo without the self-loathing. As S. pointed out, the characters were all treated with respect, even our adorable otaku (who should be played by Jason Schwartzman in the inevitable remake). It’s a nice love story that doesn’t depend on coincidence or amusing accident to move it along. ...

So you see a big budget Korean blockbuster like (say) Vampire Cop Ricky, and you get… I liked Independence Day, but it didn’t stick with me. This was about the same. South Korea, from my limited experience, has less of a national character when it comes to film than Japan or Hong Kong; the technique and acting is on a par with and deeply influenced by Hollywood film, without the minimalism and immediacy of so much Japanese film or the visceral propulsion I associate with Hong Kong cinema. I know Korean cinema is not a new institution, but it feels to me like they’re still finding their way, at least as far as mainstream big budget stuff goes. ...