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.

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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.

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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.

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I’m going to break from the chronological record I’ve been keeping of the Fantasia Festival to write a bit here about a movie I saw last night. I’m going to do this on the off chance that my doing so may help some of you decide what you’ll be doing with a couple hours of your upcoming weekend. On Tuesday at 7:30, Fantasia presented the Canadian premiere of Guardians of the Galaxy and I was there.

It’s a fun, fine movie. It’s not a great movie, I feel, and not even the greatest Marvel movie — I didn’t think it was as good as The Avengers or Captain America 2. But it’s another solid entry in Marvel’s growing filmography. That said, it’s not really a super-hero movie, but space opera: a group of ragtag adventurers in outer space come together when the retrieval of a mysterious artifact from a dead world leads to the emergence of a threat to the galaxy. Directed by James Gunn from a script by Gunn and Nicole Perlman, it moves swiftly and easily over familiar terrain, primarily using ideas and concepts from Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning’s excellent run on Marvel’s space-oriented comics — notably Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy.

It’s filled with adventure and action scenes. It’s also filled with humour, and largely successful humour at that. The characters are engaging, with each of the heroes distinctive and developed as individuals — though the villains of the piece are underplayed. There are moments of real strangeness, though I’m not sure the richness of the ideas in the original comics always come across. And the worldbuilding — or galaxybuilding — is so minimal that the scope of the film feels limited as a result. Still, this is a tightly-constructed high-velocity movie with a surprising amount of warmth. It’s a story about outcasts coming together for the common good and learning to be better as a group than they could have been apart. There’s nothing revolutionary about that, but Guardians does the old idea well.

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I’ve mentioned before that the Fantasia Festival has, logically enough, programmed what look to be their most popular movies in the big Hall Theatre. That often means unabashed genre movies — movies that aim at telling a certain kind of story a certain kind of way. A genre’s a set of conventions and a storyteller can play against those conventions or use them to get at whatever they want, as they see fit. And, especially as genres become better-known by audiences, there’s a natural inclination to mix conventions, to set genre against genre within a single story. The trick, of course, is that whichever angle you take, you should try to do it well.

Last week from Monday (the 21st) through Wednesday, I saw three genre movies at the Hall: Cold in July, directed by Jim Mickle from a prose story by Joe R. Lansdale; The Fatal Encounter (originally Yeok-rin), a dark, violent period piece from Korean director Lee Jae-kyoo; and The Huntresses (originally Joseonminyeo Samchongsa), a much brighter period piece from Park Jae-hyun. They all aimed at a certain target, and to various degrees hit what they were aiming at. They were all working in different genres, producing different effects. But they were all intensely conscious of how genre worked.

Monday was Cold in July, scripted by Mickle and Nick Damici from Lansdale’s 1989 novella. I haven’t read it, so I can’t speak to the faithfulness of the adaptation; but the story on screen did some interesting things, starting out as a certain kind of thriller, then changing tones, then changing tone again. It begins with a man in a small town in Texas in the late 1980s, a picture-framer named Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall), who surprises an intruder in his home and accidentally shoots him dead. This leads to the dead man’s ex-con father, Ben Russell (Sam Shepard) swearing revenge. But then Dane makes a discovery that throws into question what he thinks happened, and suggests that the authorities are lying to him and Russell. A private investigator (and pig farmer) named Jim Bob Luke (played with tremendous humour by Don Johnson) enters the picture. The plot thickens. Ultimately, things resolve in a violent third act mission.

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Last Sunday, June 20, I saw four movies. I’ve already written about one of them, Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem, which deserved its own post. But that’s not to say that all the other films I saw that day were poor. It was in fact an odd mix; out of the three other films I saw, I’m quite glad to have seen two of them, while the third at least had points of interest.

Things began with Takashi Murakami’s children’s fantasy Jellyfish Eyes (Mememe no Kuragi in the original Japanese), which was followed by The Zero Theorem, both at the Hall Theatre. Then I went across the street to the De Sève to watch an utterly fascinating silent film from 1914, Edward Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters, which mixed an early attempt at anthropological documentary into a fantasy adventure. My day concluded with Dan Bush’s intelligent low-budget sf film The Reconstruction of William Zero. Put them all together, and it made for a memorable cinematic experience.

That said, Jellyfish Eyes was something of a disappointment. Murakami’s an internationally-renowned artist, known in particular for creating or identifying the ‘superflat’ style of art — the word’s meant to refer not only to Murakami’s own style, but to the Japanese artistic tradition in general. Which emphatically includes popular art. Anime and manga artists have been exhibited in ‘superflat’ gallery shows, and Murakami’s own art has been said to be inspired by anime. The impression I get from what I’ve read is that it’s almost a take on the idea of pop art, combining Japanese popular culture with certain aspects of graphic design as a way of critiquing consumerism. So, all in all, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that Murakami’s first film was an anime-inflected mash-up of Pokémon, kaiju, even a bit of Spielberg; nor surprising that its potential is largely nullified by a bluntness of approach.

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Before continuing my Fantasia diary with a look at the movies I saw last Sunday, I want to focus in on one specific film that struck me as an utterly brilliant piece of science-fiction satire. I think it divided the audience; I’ve heard and seen reactions from people who were left cold by it as well as from people who loved it as much as I did. Perhaps that’s not surprising. The movie is The Zero Theorem, directed by Terry Gilliam from a script by Pat Rushin, and it is as idiosyncratic and persistently individual as you’d expect from Gilliam.

Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz) is an eccentric solitary in a hyperconnected future. He works for a corporation, Mancom, plugging numbers together — which he does by manipulating blocks on a screen with a joystick, effectively playing video games. A chance encounter with Management (Matt Damon) allows him to work from home, a deserted church, trying to put together the zero theorem, a mathematical proof of the pointlessness of life — which Management believes can be leveraged to make money. Qohen’s pleased, since what he wants more than anything else in life is a phone call he believes will come out of the blue and grant him enlightenment, and now he can sit at home and wait for the phone to ring. But his solitude’s plagued by outsiders, including the seductive Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry), and Management’s son Bob (Lucas Hedges), an even sharper computer whiz than Qohen.

The Zero Theorem is visually startling, steampunk gone day-glo. It’s a perceptive, idiosyncratic take on the Wired World Of Today, here depicted as Brave New World gone berserk. In fact, Gilliam considers this movie part of his ‘Orwellian trilogy,’ along with Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, but it certainly feels more like Huxley. It depicts a world commercialised and infantilised, where ads for the Church of Batman the Redeemer float above the street. It’s a sharp criticism of easy escapism, but seems to question as well where contrasting meaning is to be found, whether religious transcendence is valid or whether belief is just another form of escape. The movie’s more interested in questions than answers, even questioning itself and its own metaphors on occasion. Days later, I’m still thinking about it, arguing with it, astounded by it.

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To my mind, if you’re a critic of any integrity, sooner or later the criticism you write will lead you to challenge your views of yourself as well as your views of the art you experience. That’s the nature of much truly effective art: it makes you look at yourself and think about yourself in new ways. If you’re trying to articulate your reaction and assessment of such a work, honesty will compel some self-examination as well. Powerful art requires an acknowledgement of one’s subjective response.

I mention this because the films I saw at the Fantasia festival last Saturday evening both did this in different and complementary ways, leading me to similar conclusions. The first was a South Korean movie called Han Gong-ju, written and directed by Lee Su-Jin. The second was Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, directed by Josephine Decker from a script she co-wrote with David Barker; Decker’s earlier short feature Butter on the Latch screened afterwards.

The eponymous lead of Han Gong-ju is a Korean schoolgirl who, as the movie opens, is being transferred from her old high school to another school in a different city. Why? We don’t know; but it’s clear that something grave has happened. The mother of one of her teachers takes Gong-ju in, and the movie alternates between showing Gong-ju’s new life and flashing back to slowly answer the question of what caused this sudden and massive change.

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Saturday was my first really big day at Fantasia. On weekdays, the festival usually starts its screenings at 5 or 6, with the occasional matinée at 3. Weekend days kick off around noon, meaning many more movies are on offer. Which also incidentally increases the risk of losing track of the need for a meal. I ended up seeing five movies last Saturday, with a dinner break after the first three. So this post will cover those first three films and I’ll have another up shortly looking at the next two. (In general it seems like I’m going to have more Fantasia posts than I’d thought, as I try to keep up with the films I’ve watched.)

I started at the Hall Theatre at 11:40 with an animated film from Korea called The Satellite Girl and Milk Cow. As soon as that ended, I ran across the street to the smallest of the three main Fantasia theatres, the J.A. De Sève, where I watched the wild Shaw Brothers kung-fu film Demon of the Lute. After which I stayed with the De Sève to watch the Canadian feature Patch Town, which turned out to be a charming, surreal fantasy. It was a good, if somewhat lunatic, afternoon.

(Incidentally, the reason why I mention the theatres in which the movies are playing is because after a few days, it seems like each one has developed its own personality. Big broad-appeal films play at the Hall — bearing in mind that ‘broad appeal’ at Fantasia can mean something like Zombeavers as well as Guardians of the Galaxy. The D.B. Clarke seems to host a lot of thoughtful films with fairly high production values. And the De Sève has featured a number of experimental films and documentaries, as well as screenings of older films and the occasional thriller or horror movie.)

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On Friday night, the cats came out at Fantasia.

They may have been around on Thursday, too, but this was the first I’d heard them this year. It’s one of the traditions that’ve sprung up at Fantasia: some years ago a series of short films called Simon’s Cat fostered an outbreak of meows among the audience (or, for the francophones, miaous). Somehow it spread to the rest of the festival. And then returned the next year. So, now, when the lights go down for a film — but before anything starts playing on the screen — you’ll hear the audience calling out meows. And the occasional ‘woof’ or ‘baa,’ just for variety.

Friday night, I saw two films welcomed by meows. Kite, a bloody near-future sf film, played at 6:35 in the big Hall Theatre, preceded by a short comedy, Raging Balls of Steel Justice. Then I headed downstairs to the D.B. Clarke Theatre to catch a twisty thriller called Open Windows. I don’t think either feature was entirely successful, but both qualified as ‘interesting,’ the latter rather more than the former.

Let’s begin with the short. Steel Justice is a violent, raunchy parody of 80s action movies, done in claymation. A Sledge Hammer!-style supercop and his horny robot sidekick have to save a prominent banker who’s been kidnapped by a barn full of escaped convicts. Much carnage ensues. It’s quick, fluidly animated, and extremely gross. As the saying goes: people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. The humour wasn’t quite to my taste, and it did feel quite a lot like the aforementioned Sledge Hammer! without network content guidelines. For some, that’ll be enough to make it different; as it happens, not for me. At any rate, what it does, it does competently.

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