Black Gate

I’m going to do something a little different in this instalment of my diary of the Fantasia film festival: I’m going to write about two movies in the reverse order from which I saw them. I watched both on Saturday, July 26, and it so happened that the second one struck me as a perfectly fine movie of the sort of movie that it was, while the first seemed a little bit more.

The second movie was the Canadian premiere of Once Upon a Time in Shanghai (original title: E Zhan), a martial-arts film set in 1930, featuring warring gangsters, a humble youth from the countryside, and sinister Japanese agents trying to gain control of the Shanghai underworld. It was directed by Wong Ching-Po, written by Wong Jing, boasted fight choreography by Yuen Wo-Ping, and starred Philip Ng as the heroic rustic Ma Yongzhen, Andy On as a charismatic gangster alternately Ma’s enemy and friend, and veteran actor Sammo Hung in a major supporting role as Ma’s mentor. The first movie was an animated musical from France called Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (Jack et la mécanique du coeur), co-directed by Mathias Malzieu and Stéphane Berla; Malzieu also wrote the film and performed the voice of the main character. It’s not a perfect movie, but it had a blend of style and imagination I found quite powerful.

But let’s start with Shanghai (a remake of 1972’s Boxer From Shantung [Ma Yong Zhen]). As I said, it’s a perfectly fine movie that does just what it says on the tin: provides for lots of distinctive martial-arts fight scenes against a 1930s period setting, with a distinct patriotic subtext — even the gangsters are opposed to the Japanese or Westerners controlling Shanghai or China. A broad mix of action, comedy, and melodrama, it played in the big Hall Theater and the audience cheered the fights and laughed when they were supposed to and generally had a good time.

…

Read More Read More

In a surprising number of ways the experience of having a pass for a movie festival is not wholly unlike the experience of going to a science-fiction convention. One such similarity is the inevitability of conflicts in your ideal schedule. You’ll see two potentially interesting things on at once. So you pick and choose and guess which of the things looks like it’ll be better.

At 5 PM on Friday, July 25, a Korean film called Mr. Go screened in the Hall Theater, a 3D comedy about an ape that played professional baseball. It sounded like it might be funny (I mean, you know, apes!), but I decided I’d much rather see The Infinite Man at 5:20, an Australian comedy about a man who invents time travel in a desperate attempt to repair his relationship with the woman he loves. After that, a movie called Yasmine, about a young woman studying martial arts, played at 7:50; it’s the first commercial film from the Sultanate of Brunei, but while I thought it’d be interesting to see a country’s first movie, I decided I didn’t want to take the chance of missing a science-fiction film about cloning called Closer to God, which screened at 9:35. I’m still not sure how those choices worked out.

The Infinite Man was directed and written by Hugh Sullivan. It stars Josh McConville as Dean, a somewhat uptight scientist madly in love with Lana, played by Hannah Marshall. They’ve been together at least a couple of years, but their relationship’s in trouble due to Dean’s obsessive need to control things around him. It probably doesn’t help that Lana is being stalked by Terry (Alex Dimitriades, who plays the part with a note-perfect blend of menace and goofiness), an Olympic-level javelin thrower who dated her briefly four years ago. At any rate, Dean decides to rekindle his romance by going back to the resort where he spent a perfect day with Lana the year before. But the resort’s gone out of business. And then Terry shows up. And Lana leaves with him. So Dean does the only logical thing: moves into the resort and builds a time machine so he can go back and set things right. Events don’t go quite according to plan. He has to go back again, and runs into himself, and Lana ends up going back as well, and then so does Terry, and complications feed on complications.

…

Read More Read More

On Thursday, July 24, I saw two movies. One hinted at the supernatural. The other was a surprisingly faithful adaptation of a classic sf story. On the surface, these films didn’t seem to have a lot in common. But to me they raised similar questions about free will, about how people change, and about whether one can really choose that change.

The first was Faults, which screened at 7:15 at the De Sève Theatre. Directed and written by Riley Stearns, it starred Leland Orser as a man who specialised in deprogramming brainwashed cult members; he was trying to undo the damage a mysterious group called Faults had done to a young woman (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who also produced the film). The second movie I saw right afterward at the Hall Theater at 9:45. It was titled Predestination and adapted Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies …” — the title, apparently, was changed to avoid confusion in the marketplace: the filmmakers didn’t want people thinking it had to do with the walking dead. It starred Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook in her first star role in a feature film. Much of the movie was taken directly from the story, the main changes being additions which helped the story work on screen — and which also ultimately challenged the original story, adding a new ending beyond Heinlein’s text.

I’ll start with Faults, which is in many ways an excellent film that does an awful lot right. It’s a period piece set (so far as I could tell) somewhere around 1980. I mention this because this decision affects both atmosphere and plot: there are no cell phones, no Internet. I’ve noticed a number of films at Fantasia set in the 70s or 80s and you can see the logic. The plot becomes simpler to manage. And you can evoke a time with props and costumes that are probably relatively cheap and easy to find. In this case I think it also taps into a fear of cults and brainwashing that was in the air in the post-Jonestown years.

…

Read More Read More