Black Gate

The second feature film I planned to see at Fantasia 2021 came bundled with an eight-minute short by a familiar name. That short was “Let’s Fall In Love,” written and directed by Shengwei Zhou, whose odd stop-motion feature S He I reviewed back in 2019. “Let’s Fall In Love” is gentler than S He, visually as well as narratively. A middle-aged man leaves the apartment where he lives alone, and through the eyes of security cameras in the apartment we see his possessions spring to life and interact. They’re playful and affectionate, and there’s something touching about the way they interact with each other and with their human. The animation gives them each a personality, and it culminates in a sweet ending.

Then the feature: Tiong Bahru Social Club. Directed by Tan Bee Thiam and co-written by Tan with Antti Toivonen, it’s a story from Singapore about Ah Bee (Thomas Pang), a 30-year-old man who loses his job. With the encouragement of his mother (Goh Guat Kian), he gets a new career at the Tiong Bahru Social Club, a housing project that uses algorithms and always-on always-watching AI to ensure perfect happiness for its residents. There are hints of something creepy underneath the surface appearance of the place — but the movie is not that kind of genre story. Mainly we follow Ah Bee as he settles in at Tiong Bahru and makes friends and starts relationships.

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Among the pleasures of the Fantasia Film Festival are the showcases of short films. Some of these feature-length collections get a new iteration every year, while some come and go depending on what’s submitted to the festival. Fantasia’s programmers have a great sense of how to group shorts together, meaning not only are the annual showcases reliably strong work, but new themes are bound to present work of major interest as well. So one of the things that intrigued me the most when I first saw Fantasia’s 2021 schedule was Radical Spirits, a collection of six short films about (broadly speaking) traditional ways of being and traditional spiritual paths. I decided to make it my second viewing of the festival.

The first piece came from Korea: Chu Hyun-a wrote, directed, edited, and animated “A Sip of Water,” a fine 7-minute animated film about the role of shamans in the modern world (like many of these shorts, it’s not on IMDB.com at this writing, so I can’t find the original Korean title). The 2D animation flows from one image into another, with lovely colours and linework. A Korean shaman discussing her perspective on her profession is fascinating — “I am unusual,” she says, “because gods are in me, and I deliver the gods’ message” — but the visual experience is a fitting complement. Recurring water imagery gives the short a rhythm, while it also develops the idea of shamanism in the modern world. Overall it’s a powerful representation of the spiritual experience of shamanism.

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Red Lion (Japan, 1969)

The Tokugawa Shogunate of the samurai military caste ruled Japan for over 300 years, keeping the island nation in a sort of stasis enforced by rigid regulation and an entrenched hierarchy. But outside, the rest of the world was changing, as the western powers of Europe and America developed economies based on global trade on terms backed up by military might. In 1853, when the United States came knocking on Japan’s door, insisting on trade concessions, the Shogunate had only swords and matchlock muskets with which to oppose armored warships, and had to comply with the American demands. Other western nations followed suit, and Japan began to open its borders, resulting in economic and political instability that the Shogunate was too weak and hidebound to manage successfully.

This period before the imperial restoration of 1868, known as Bakumatsu, was a sort of slow-burning civil war in which a number of factions struggled for ascendancy, all sides resorting to death squads and assassinations. The time of the sword, which had ruled Japan for almost a thousand years, was coming to an end.

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Blood Quantum was originally released at the 2019 Cannes Film Market. It is now available online, i.e. via Amazon Prime rental and AMC streaming services.

It is one of the best and most original zombie flicks I’ve seen in years. Character-driven, with plenty of human drama, it is filled with action, blood and violence, and one horrendous scene I’ve never seen in any movie about the living dead.

Great script and direction, the film is set on the Red Crow Reservation in Montana, and there is some dialog spoken in the actual Apsáalooke language. The superb cast is made up of mostly Native American actors, and they deliver. Interesting to note, the director and writer is Jeff Barnaby, who was born on a Mi’kmaq reserve in Canada (Mi’kmaq being of the First Nations indigenous people of North America). He has a history of making ancestry-inspired horror films (i.e., Rhymes for Young Ghouls).

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The Last Valley (UK/USA, 1971)

Was it, though? In the case of the 1972 Treasure Island, absolutely. With a book that good, and with such stirringly visual material, it’s hard to fail at a cinematic adaptation, though this version comes closer than most. However, when it comes to Ivanhoe, give me a screen version, any screen version, over having to read the book again. Brrr! Then, there’s The Last Valley, based on a novel by J.B. Pick that hasn’t crossed my path, so whether the movie is better than the book is a question I can’t answer. Maybe you can, though, so we’ll start with that one. As you’ll see, books win in the end.

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Them (1954: 10)

The Citizen Kane of Big-Bug Movies. The first and probably the best, it set the template for all the rest. Superior script, superior acting by James Whitmore and James Arness, who actually gets to speak this time around. Keep your eyes out for a very young Leonard Nimoy.

Cast: James Arness: The Thing From Another World (1951).

Themes: Law Enforcement, New Mexico State Police, FBI. Military, Army. Scientist, entomologist. Settings, New Mexico desert. Los Angeles sewer system. Radiation, mutant causing. Giant Animal, ants.

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(Goliath and the Sins of Babylon, Italy, 1963)

If you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you’ll like. Between 1959 and 1964, the leading genre of Italian adventure films was the peplum, or sword and sandal movie. The fad for these began in 1958 with the first Steve Reeves Hercules film, and there were a whole lot of Hercules films to follow, but we’re going to save those for another day and cherry-pick our way through the non-Herc movies. Peplum films tended to be made quickly and cheaply: indifferently written, poorly acted, and with weak production values. Even those with larger budgets often ran aground on the rocks of tedium and cliché. But there were a few silk purses among the sow’s ears, so this week let’s point out some fun exceptions that might be worth your time. If, you know, this is the kind of thing you like.

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