Black Gate

As the Japanese economy recovered from the disaster of World War II, its film industry rebounded as well, though under the American occupation the kinds of films that could be made were strictly limited. Censorship on themes of nationalism and warfare was in force until 1952, but once the ban was lifted the industry returned to the popular genre of historical dramas, making some of the finest films ever produced in Japan.

Rashomon

Rating: *****
Origin: Japan, 1950
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Source: Criterion Collection DVD

Although this is director Akira Kurosawa’s first samurai film, it arguably doesn’t belong in the Cinema of Swords as it’s not really a chambara — a swordplay movie — but rather a historical crime tale. You probably have a general idea of what it’s about even if you’ve never seen it, as its title has come to stand for the principle of the unreliable narrator, the same story told differently from several different viewpoints. In this case it’s the history of a crime, a rape and a murder in a lonely grove on a remote wooded mountain. The tale is told from four different points of view, and the viewer is left to tease out the truth for themselves.

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Here’s thirteen movies in five groups suitable for double, or, if you have the stamina, triple feature viewing. Have a safe and fun Halloween!

British Films

We begin with two British films which couldn’t be more diverse in their approach.

Curse of the Demon/Night of the Demon

One movie, with two titles, this 1957 film starring Dana Andrews was directed by Jacques Tourneur who also directed Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie. The U. S. version, (Curse of the Demon) is an 83 minute version of the original 95 minute British release, which is the better film.

Andrews plays an American psychologist who travels to England to attend a scientific conference and gets caught up in investigating the death of a colleague, possibly at the hands (or claws) of a satanic cult. Andrews is so superciliously smug that you may find yourself rooting for the cultists. The screenplay is based on the classic M. R. James short story, “The Casting of the Runes.” Commonly and cheaply available on DVD (one release contains both versions), the truncated version is also available to rent on Prime Streaming.

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Ronald Colman and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was a fine actor with a considerable range, but he never got out of the shadow of his more famous father. Douglas Fairbanks Sr., after all, was more than a fine actor, he was a force of nature who single-handedly established the conventions of the cinematic swashbuckler in a series of grand, albeit silent epics. Doug Jr.’s parents divorced when he was young, and against his father’s wishes he was raised in the movies, starting in the silent era as a child star with his own studio contract. He played mostly romantic and dramatic roles as he matured, but inevitably he made some swashbucklers of his own, showing that he had, unsurprisingly perhaps, a natural talent for them. His Rupert of Hentzau is certainly one of the most memorable portrayals in all swashbuckler cinema.

The Prisoner of Zenda

Rating: *****
Origin: USA, 1937
Director: John Cromwell
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

David Selznick bought the rights to The Prisoner of Zenda as a starring vehicle for Ronald Colman, who was at the height of his fame coming off Lost Horizon (1937). Colman played the dual role of Rudolf Rassendyll and King Rudolf, and Selznick surrounded him with a first-rate cast, including the glowing Madeleine Carroll as Princess Flavia, and C. Aubrey Smith and his whiskers as the king’s loyal Colonel Zapt. But best of all were the villains: Raymond Massey, looming and ominous as the would-be usurper Black Michael, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as the raffish rogue Rupert of Hentzau, who stole every scene he appeared in (as Rupert does in every version of Zenda).

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Last year I almost reviewed a movie at Fantasia called 1BR. But exhaustion got to me as the festival wore on, and I passed on the film. I’m never happy about having to compromise with fatigue, though, and since 1BR recently came to Netflix — where for a while it was among their 10 most-streamed movies, at one point even reaching the top 5 — I decided to rectify last year’s omission and take a look at it now.

Written and directed by David Marmor, his first feature film, it follows Sarah (Nicole Brydon Bloom), a young woman who feels estranged from her father (Alan Blumenfeld). Working in Los Angeles as a temp with aspirations to become a costume designer, she finds her first apartment as the film opens. Though the plumbing makes strange noises, her neighbours seem nice and Sarah befriends an old former actress named Edie (Susan Davis) while being drawn to the handsome Brian (Giles Matthey). But creepy one-eyed Lester (Clayton Hoff) keeps trying to push a weird old book about community. And Sarah’s got a secret: she moved in with her cat, Giles, even though building manager Jerry (Taylor Nichols) told her there were no pets allowed.

In fact things are worse than Sarah imagines. It turns out the book about community’s a bible for the apartment block — and that all the residents are part of a cult-like group prepared to force Sarah to join them. Acts of physical and psychological torture follow. Sarah is broken down and slowly builds herself back up, and it all builds remorselessly to a powerfully symbolic final shot.

The movie works because it pays so much attention to Sarah’s character, as well as the people around her. Bloom brings out Sarah’s flaws as well as her strengths. She is thoughtless enough to sneak the cat into a pet-free building without thinking about other people’s allergies. And she is weak-willed, unformed in certain ways as the film starts. The story has a strong subtext investigating her feelings about her father and unconscious search for replacement father figures; it’s a horror-thriller as bildungsroman, building to an overtly Freudian choice with an icepick.

The movie’s tone and visuals bring this out quite nicely. The film’s drenched with warm sunlight in its exterior shots, presenting a kind of warmth that echoes the self-image of the residents of the apartment block. Interiors of Sarah’s apartment emphasise bare white walls and wooden floors, the unyielding emptiness of unfurnished rooms. There’s a lovely moment early on as Sarah tries to sleep in her new apartment, which I think captures the dislocation of the experience of the first night in a new home. Conversely, later in the film all the homier scenes become unreal, as the rules and philosophy of the community become more detailed. The imagery of the building interiors ironically underscore the extreme rejection of the outer world and the unreality of the residents’ world-view, the willed aversion to external fact they push on Sarah.

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Every year I wrap up my coverage of Fantasia with a last post looking back at the festival, reflecting on the experience. This year’s edition of Fantasia calls for reflection even more than most. I have a couple of posts still to come taking care of loose ends from previous years, but here are a few final thoughts on the all-streaming 2020 Fantasia Film Festival.

First, as always, thanks go out to the team of people who made the festival possible. This time out I want to especially thank the social media team who kept a Discord channel going through the festival, answering questions and maintaining a group space for talking about movies, particularly Social Media Strategist Alyssia Duval-Nguon. The festival was always going to suffer from the inability to hang out with friends in person, but Fantasia’s people did the best they could under the circumstances.

Which I think sums things up for this year. I have no idea what things were like behind the scenes, but from my perspective as viewer and critic the Festival was the best I could imagine it being given the state of the pandemic. Technologically, my experience was as smooth as I could reasonably hope. It’s unfortunate that the festival lasted only two-thirds as long as usual, but the films had the level of quality I’ve come to expect. It seemed to me there fewer big-budget movies, but the range of smaller films meant I didn’t miss them much.

Still, it is clearly obvious that a theatre environment would have been a better way to watch these movies. Some of them, like Hunted, seemed to aim at using sensory power to overwhelm the viewer in a specific way; but all of them would have gained by the theatrical experience. It’s not just a question of the size of the image and the loudness of the sound system, but of the details that come out when you see the picture blown up and when you hear the sensitivity of the speakers. And in my experience films are only helped by watching them along with a Fantasia audience.

I also have to say that while the technological side of the event was run flawlessly by Fantasia, I personally had a couple of issues due to the equipment I was using. My laptop’s not the newest, and had a tendency to stop once or twice per film to buffer for a few seconds. Generally the streaming experience shifts some of the burden of keeping things running onto the audience. Usually to be sure of watching a movie I want to watch, I just have to make sure I’m in the right line at the right time. Watching a stream means I have to be sure that my computer’s not feeling temperamental, which is hard to guarantee; for example, I almost missed Jesters: The Game Changers because my firewall acted up. So there was a bit of unusual stress involved in watching the scheduled movies.

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My final film of Fantasia 2020 promised to be weird, and therefore the perfect way to wind down the festival. It was a take on a particular sub-genre of science fiction film: the alien visitor walking among us. The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Starman, E.T., technically I suppose Superman — all stories about a lone extraterrestrial on Earth dealing with humans. It’s a story form that lends itself to reflection on what it means to be human. But just because a form points in a certain direction doesn’t mean every instance of that form will be concerned with grand themes.

Consider Fried Barry, the debut feature from Ryan Kruger. It follows Barry (Gary Green), an abusive drug dealer in Cape Town who’s abducted by aliens and has an inhuman intelligence planted into his body. Returned to Earth, the alien in Barry’s form wanders about learning of human ways. These ways include, in no particular order, drug use, prostitution, sex, violence, fatherhood, and stranger things.

And that’s more or less the movie. There isn’t much plot beyond loose connections from one escapade to the next. Barry, or the alien inhabiting Barry, doesn’t develop much — the alien’s not established as a character to start with, so it’s impossible to see how the creature changes through the course of the story. Supporting human characters, notably Barry’s wife Suz (Chanelle de Jager) get to develop a little but not really enough to give the tale any kind of centre.

For better or worse, this is a picaresque journey through the bad side of town and of humanity. It’s entertaining, as far as that goes, and unpredictable. There’s a convincing grittiness to the city Barry-the-alien explores, not so much a realism as a reality consistently distorted yet recognisable. The underbelly of Cape Town is believable, at least for the sake of the film, in part because it’s inhabited by cartoons. This is a story about a hapless and mute protagonist falling into one damn thing after another, and not obviously learning from it; so the quality of the scrapes the alien gets into is key to the story, and in that respect the movie doesn’t disappoint. It may or may not be enough for any given viewer, but it’s a film that has its own specific wavelength and will reward viewers tuned into that frequency.

I suspect there are good reasons why the film’s built the way it is. To start with, while Gary Green’s expressive and rubber-faced and a distinctive visual presence, he’s not a formally trained actor. He’s a long-time extra in South African films (so I have learned from an excellent question-and-answer panel with Kruger and producer James C. Williamson), and in 2017 was cast in a short film Kruger was making about a heroin addict freaking out after a hit. That 3-minute piece was titled “Fried Barry,” and drew such a strong reaction Kruger decided to expand it into a feature, designing a story around Green’s presence.

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