Black Gate

One of the things people don’t tell you about getting older is that the more books you read and movies you see, the more likely you are to see those stories echoed in other stories. The new books and movies you come across remind to you of the older books and movies you already know. Sometimes there’s good reason for that, as artists try to engage in a dialogue with their forebears. Sometimes you’re just seeing things.

Saturday, July 25, was an interesting series of riddles for me at the Fantasia Festival. I saw three movies that day. Teana: 10000 Years Later is a high science-fantasy 3D CGI animated film from China. Crimson Whale is a traditionally-animated post-apocalypse fable from South Korea. And Denmark’s The Shamer’s Daughter is a live-action adaptation of the first volume of a Danish YA high fantasy. I enjoyed all of them, and saw what seemed to be nods to familiar works within each — though in some cases that might be my imagination running away with me.

Let’s start with Teana (AKA 10000 Years Later, originally Yi wan nian yi hou), which screened at the large Hall Theatre. It’s one of the most visually spectacular movies I’ve seen at Fantasia. Bursting with colour and invention, it moves quickly, introduces a ton of characters, creates a world, and tells an epic story with some very pointed social commentary. I’ve seen some mention online that it’s based on a Tibetan fable, but can find no more specific information than that. Personally, I found myself strongly reminded of The Lord of the Rings, as the film seemed to refer to Tolkien while also inverting certain aspects of his story.

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Late last Friday night, the 17th of July (or early the next morning, to be precise), I was unable to keep from smiling as my city was cheerfully demolished by a crew of Ugandans, cheered on by a Fantasia Festival crowd. It was a wonderful end to an already very surreal day.

After having gotten not quite enough sleep the night before, I was at my fifth movie of the day. Even more than usual, each film had been wildly at odds with the one before it. I’d started at 12:45 with the Austrian period comedy Therapy for a Vampire, in which one of the undead seeks psychological help from Sigmund Freud. I followed that with Bridgend, a dark teen drama with some horror overtones, based on true events. Both of those had been at the small De Sève Theatre, and after a bite to eat, I went to the big Hall Theatre at 7:40 to watch the Japanese comedy Assassination Classroom, in which prep school students try to kill their alien professor before he blows up the Earth. After that, I ran back across the street to catch the world première of the transgressive Indian horror film Ludo. And then stuck around to watch the presentation of Who Killed Captain Alex?: Uganda’s First Action Movie. Which also involved the destruction of Montréal.

But let me go through these things in full, starting with Therapy for a Vampire. In fact, I’ll start a bit before that, with a short film that was screened before the main feature: The Mill at Calder’s End. Directed by Kevin McTurk from his own story, with a script by Ryan Murphy, it’s a gothic horror film set in the late Victorian or Edwardian era. And it’s done with puppets. They’re highly detailed — the IMDB tells me “36 inch tall bunraku rod puppets” — and convey the atmosphere wonderfully. The story follows a young man who’s inherited the family lands, along with the curse accompanying said lands. He investigates, and faces the same horror his ancestors faced before him.

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In the days leading up to the Fantasia Festival I’d look at the schedule and see a dilemma looming on the second day, last Wednesday. The first of many similar dilemmas ahead: which of two movies playing directly opposite each other do I watch? In this case a French suspense film, Un homme idéal (in English A Perfect Man), was up against a Donnie Yen martial-arts movie, Kung Fu Killer. The next day would be simpler, as my girlfriend and I had agreed to see the Japanese teen drama Wonderful World End together. But Wednesday offered two very different things. Which to watch?

By the magic of movie festivals, both. I’d catch one in the screening room, and one in the theatre. Which I’d watch where would depend on what was available in the screening room. I decided Kung Fu Killer would gain a certain amount from the big screen, and likely from the crowd response. It was also more of a known quantity — I thought I had a pretty fair sense of what it was and how good it was likely to be. Un homme idéal was more of a wild card. So if I had my choice, that’d be the one I’d watch in the screening room.

On Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before Miss Hokusai opened the festival, I picked up my accreditation badge and wandered over to the screening room. It turned out to have both films. So I sat down with Un homme idéal, which was in a sense my first movie of the festival this year. The screening room copy was on DVD (so in standard definition) and had a prominent watermark; probably best to factor that into the discussion that follows.

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The Fantasia International Film Festival opened in Montreal on Tuesday night, and this year, like last year, I’ll be covering it for Black Gate. This will be the 19th edition of Fantasia, one of the world’s largest genre-oriented film festivals, and I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of movies. As I did last time, I’m planning to keep a diary-style record discussing the films I see and also recapping some of the special events around them — a lot of screenings are accompanied by presentations, or by discussions with the creators, and I’ll pass along my notes on those.

There are over 135 feature films being presented at Fantasia this year, and looking over the schedule it feels like I want to see almost all of them. The nature of scheduling makes that impossible, but I’ll be striving to look at as many as I can. I’ll be trying to catch films I miss in the festival’s screening room, where I’ll be able to watch them on a computer monitor. That’s a different experience than seeing a movie on the big screen with a crowd, but it’s better than nothing.

Two theatres at Concordia University’s downtown campus serve as the main venues for the festival this year, and on Tuesday I saw two films in the big Hall Theatre. Both movies were warmly received by the crowd, and both seemed to me to be great successes in very different ways. Both, as it happened, were adaptations from comics. The first was an anime called Miss Hokusai from Japanese director Keiichi Hara, an adaptation of Hinako Sugiura’s Sarusuberi, about the daughter of the famed 19th-century artist Hokusai and her relationship with her father. The second was Marvel’s Ant-Man, directed by Peyton Reed. I’ll have more to say about that further below (short version: it’s much better than I’d have imagined an Ant-Man movie could be, and instantly became one of my favourites of the Marvel movies). First, a look at Miss Hokusai, and Fantasia’s opening ceremonies.

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