Black Gate

With my Fantasia coverage done for another year, I thought I’d write a final post looking back over what I saw to try to make sense of it all. And to talk about why I’ve done what I’ve done.

I saw over sixty films at Fantasia, almost half of all the features presented. I am tremendously grateful to everyone involved; to the people at Fantasia for putting the festival together, and to John and Black Gate for allowing me to cover it. I tried to focus on fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery films in that order, but also did not scruple to go beyond that broad remit. Sometimes that’s because the film in question seemed to have some element that might be of interest to Black Gate readers. Sometimes it was just because it seemed to fit in a way I couldn’t explain — seeing all these movies at Fantasia makes for a kind of juxtaposition that unites them in some way I can’t easily articulate. It may just be a shared sensibility of the programmers.

So: over sixty films. And yet there were something like a dozen more I wish I could have seen. The Israeli horror film Jeruzalem. The Spanish post-apocalypse zombie movie Extinction. The animated Japanese movie The Case of Hana and Alice. Various others. The programming’s so dense that I’m physically incapable of going to all the movies I want to go to in the short time of the festival. As it was, I averaged three movies a day.

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Concluding my discussion of films I saw courtesy of the Fantasia screening room, I’ll be writing today about three movies: a drama with elements of horror called They Look Like People, the horror-comedy called Nina Forever, and one of the purest horror movies I’ve ever seen, Nathan Ambrosioni’s Hostile. I’ll begin with They Look Like People, written and directed by Perry Blackshear. It’s about two men, one of whom, Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews), appears to be falling into insanity; he believes aliens are giving him messages. He happens to cross paths with his old friend Christian (Evan Dumouchel). They’ve both recently had long-term relationships fall apart — Wyatt’s fiancée in fact cheated on him and then broke up with him. Christian offers Wyatt a place to stay, and Wyatt accepts.

Much of the film is about the two men rediscovering their friendship. It’s a solid character piece, as we see how they come to mean a lot to each other. Christian isn’t mentally troubled the way Wyatt is, but lacks self-confidence, or feels he does; he listens to self-help affirmations we eventually learn were recorded by his ex-girlfriend. We also learn the affirmations aren’t necessarily having the effect he wants. They do give him the courage to ask out his boss, Mara (Margaret Ying Drake); but then Wyatt begins to fixate on her, believing she’s an ally against the evil aliens around them. As things go on, the friendship of the two men is increasingly tested.

The movie’s essentially about the friendship between Wyatt and Christian, and at its best it’s a touching depiction of male friendship, one that’s neither sophomoric nor overdetermined. These aren’t older men with shared decades, they’re acquaintances who become best buddies. They Look Like People is far from being a comedy, but there’s a warmth to the movie that’s quite effective despite the dark things happening to Wyatt.

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By this point I’ve discussed all the movies I saw in theatres at the Fantasia film festival, but there remain a half-dozen more that I saw courtesy of the Fantasia screening room. I’m going to write about them over two posts, for ease of reading. And then I’ll have a coda wrapping up my Fantasia coverage with thoughts on what I saw, and the value of the festival. For now: reviews of the psychological romance comedy Poison Berry in My Brain, the metafictional satire Anima State, and the suspense movie The Interior. All of them, one way or another, directly to do with what happens inside the head.

Poison Berry in My Brain (Nounai Poison Berry) was directed by Yuichi Sato from a script by Tomoko Aizawa, based on a manga by Setona Mizushiro. The idea may sound a little familiar: Ichiko Sakurai (Yôko Maki) is a thirty-year-old woman novelist in Japan who has people living in her head. These five people are dressed in suits, and argue like a corporate board as they try to decide what Ichiko should do in any given situation. They are her emotions, her inner drives. And they get a workout as Ichiko meets and falls in love with a young artist (Yuki Furukawa), and then among the storms of that relationship sees the spark of something between her and her editor (Songha).

Comparisons with Pixar’s Inside Out are inevitable. Or almost inevitable; in fact I haven’t seen the Pixar film, so we can dodge that bullet. I will say firstly that so far as I can gather from Wikipedia, the manga appeared just after Pixar began working on their movie — this is independent invention. Secondly, from what I understand of Inside Out, there’s a bit of a difference here: the descriptions I’ve read say that in that movie the characters who live in the main character’s head all represent a specific emotion. The board members directing Ichiko are more general. They represent tendencies. Dithering but sympathetic Chairman Yoshida (Hidetoshi Nishijima) keeps order but can’t seem to make a decision on his own; Ikeda (Yo Yoshida) is convinced that everying Ichiko does is doomed to failure and she should quit before she stops; the energetic Ishibashi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) always looks on the bright side; young gothic lolita Hatoko (Hiyori Sakurada) is impulsive and childlike — unsurprisingly, being literally a child — while old Secretary Kishi maintains Ichiko’s memories but contributes little to the discussions as he’s so often caught up in the past.

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Tuesday, August 4, was my last day at the Fantasia Festival. It was the official closing day of Fantasia; they’d added a few screenings on Wednesday, but nothing that looked compelling to me. I have some more films to write about after this, thanks to the festival’s screening room. But since I’ll be writing here about the last three movies I saw in a theatre at the 2015 Fantasia Festival, in this post I want to make a point of acknowledging the crowds.

All three movies I saw that Tuesday played in the big Hall Theatre, to packed houses. All of them were more-or-less designed to be big crowd-pleasers, though in different ways. In two cases, they succeeded admirably, even spectacularly. And the third case failed utterly. Given the kinds of movies these were, the audience reactions are worth noting; especially in the case of these audiences. Fantasia crowds are the best I’ve ever found, wildly enthusiastic when a good movie pays off, but critical and even mocking when a bad one implodes. So I’m happy to use their responses in discussing these three movies.

The first film I saw that Tuesday was a late addition to the Fantasia line-up. Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends was the third film in a series, a live-action adaptation of a popular manga that had already been adapted into several anime. Assassination was a Korean movie set during the Japanese occupation in the 1930s, a mix of intrigue and action. Then came the festival’s official closing movie, the first film in the live-action adaptation of Attack on Titan.

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Fantasia was beginning to wind down. After seeing five movies on Sunday, August 2, I only saw four on Monday the 3rd: an Ethiopian post-apocalypse quest called Crumbs; a Spanish crime movie called Marshland; an American suspense movie called The Invitation; and a French science fiction comedy called Cosmodrama. I’d heard good things about each of these movies, and I had cautiously high hopes. Which were mostly fulfilled.

Crumbs was preceded by a Canadian short film called “Fish Out of Water.” Written and directed by Kirsten Carthew, it’s a post-apocalyptic horror story shot near Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories. A fisherwoman tries to catch a fish in an iced-over lake, but is herself caught by a lure she didn’t expect. It’s a solid story, at ten minutes perhaps a little long for something so simple, but then agan you can argue it consciously aims for a slow pace. Certainly the natural photography is stunning.

Crumbs was written and directed by Miguel Llansó, a Spaniard based in Ethiopia. It follows Birdy (Daniel Tadesse), a malformed man — in an interesting interview, Llansó describes him as having “an irregular body and a fascinating look” — who lives in an abandoned bowling alley with a woman named Candy (Selam Tesfaye). A spaceship hangs in the sky, and may be coming to life, powering the bowling alley with electricity. Birdy embarks on a quest to find out the truth, about the ship and about his own past. He’s inspired by the image of Superman, but may be taking that inspiration too far. As he makes his way across a desolate but beautiful land, Candy has some strange encounters of her own in the bowling alley. Meanwhile a peculiar antiquities dealer intersects with the story in odd moments.

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