Black Gate

Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645) was one of the greatest samurai and greatest swordfighters ever to live. By his own account, he fought over sixty duels and won all of them. Stories about Musashi have been told and retold over the centuries, notably including the great novel Musashi (1935-39) by Eiji Yoshikawa. Films about him have proliferated, the most famous likely being Hirohi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy (1954-55) starring Toshiro Mifune as Musashi.

One of Musashi’s greatest recorded battles was a conflict with the Yoshioka clan. Following two duels with successive heads of the clan in Kyoto in 1604, Musashi fought the remainder of the clan who attacked en masse with various allies. Musashi killed the leader of the clan, among others, and escaped, in the process developing a new style of swordsmanship.

So much for history. Now comes Crazy Samurai Musashi (狂武蔵) a dramatisation of the battle against the Yoshioka. If ‘dramatisation’ is the right word: the 92-minute film consists of a relatively brief prologue and epilogue to either side of an uninterrupted 77-minute shot of Musashi fighting the Yoshioka and their mercenary allies. Directed by Yûji Shimomura, it stars Tak Sakaguchi (Kingdom) as Musashi and was written by Sion Sono (director of Tokyo Vampire Hotel). And it’s not exactly what you might expect from all of the above.

Unlike most movies centred around swordplay, there’s little complicated choreography. Nor are there complex set-pieces of ambushes and attacks from the shadows. And there’s a surprising absence of blood, though CGI splatter is used with thoughtfulness to add impact to a sword-strike; little plumes of blood are used as a storytelling technique, and quite effectively.

This fits with the odd reality the film builds. Musashi begins the fight in a mass battle, one man against 100 of the Yoshioka clan plus 300 mercenaries. When they attack as a group it quickly becomes clear he can kill any given one of his opponents effectively at will — because he is that good — but is at risk from their sheer number. On the other hand, his opponents don’t want to launch a mass charge because no one of them is prepared to give his life. So after a while the mass of opponents divide up into groups of 20 or so, and Musashi moves from area to area, fighting these small bands.

Occasionally, he will find a single tougher opponent. These fights are set up to look like boss fights; meaning that where it takes Musashi 2 or maybe 5 seconds to kill a typical enemy, the bosses take 10 or 20. Because he’s Miyamoto Musashi, and, again, he is that good. The video-game feel’s intensified by the way Musashi finds bottles of water here and there in empty houses or the like: power-ups as his life-energy runs low.

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The chain of inspiration behind a work of art can be stunning to behold. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman was a musician, critic, and fiction writer in the early nineteenth century whose surreal and gemlike short stories are wonders of early fantasy. Some of those stories were worked into the libretto of Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera Les contes d’Hoffmann. Adapted to films at least three times, most notably by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1951, Offenbach’s work would inspire the great manga creator Osamu Tezuka in 1973. A sexually-charged tale with elements of the occult, Tezuka’s Barbara was an erotic story about a frustrated manga creator who met a woman who might be a literal muse. Now Tezuka’s Barbara is a film directed by Macoto Tezuka, Osamu’s son, with a script from HIsako Kurasawa; and it played at the Fantasia Festival on August 25.

The movie begins with bestselling writer Yosuke Mikura (Gorô Inagaki) meeting an apparently homeless young woman in a subway tunnel, and taking her home with him. This is Barbara (Fumi Nikaido, Fly Me to the Saitama and Inuyashiki). She critiques his writing, accusing him of being too safe and commercial, but soon she’s saving him from voracious women who turn out to be mannequins or dogs. Mikura pursues Barbara, but to win her he must convince her mother, an antique-store owner named Mnemosyne (Eri Watanabe) — but she has strange connections, and tragedy lurks in the wings.

Reality and dreams blur over the course of the film, and I’m not convinced the movie does a good job setting up either a coherent reality or an effective oneiric sense. In part as a result, I also did not feel the movie gained anything in its mix of real and dream. The conclusion in particular moves past tragedy to almost insist it’s a hallucination, but where that hallucination started is less clear. It’s possible, maybe even intended, to read the whole movie as a reverie in the head of Mikura. But I find no particular thematic weight in that approach. Whether viewed entirely or partially as a dream, Tezuka’s Barbara resists cohering into a meaningful story.

Which again might be the point. The movie does strain mightily after a sense of strangeness. I would say it largely fails to reach any consistent surreal atmosphere. There is a lot of sex, but a countervailing coldness leaves these scenes clinical and not passionate; as an asexual I can’t claim to be very perceptive when it comes to sex scenes, at this point in my life I can usually at least see what a film’s trying to do. In this case I think it’s trying to create a feverish sense, trying to speak about a fusion of sex and art. Certainly it investigates the idea of the muse from a number of angles. But nothing comes out of it. It never really takes flight.

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Day 6 of Fantasia 2020 started for me with a panel on folk horror. While you can find the occasional early example of the term, it was first used in its current sense in 2003 by director Piers Haggard to describe his 1971 film The Blood on Satan’s Claw; Mark Gatiss picked it up in his 2010 TV documentary A History of Horror to refer to Claw along with The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General. The panel I watched was presented by Severin Films and titled “Narratives of Resistance in Folk Horror.” Hosted by Kier-La Janisse, director and producer of the upcoming documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, it gathered a group of writers and journalists to discuss folk horror with a focus on stories from beyond the British Isles. (Unfortunately, this panel’s the only one of the year not currently available on YouTube.) While it never really settled on a definition of the phrase, it was an often-interesting discussion about history, folk magic, and ritual, touching on works ranging from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” to the 1991 film Clearcut to Marcin Wrona’s 2015 movie Demon.

Following that came one of my favourite Fantasia traditions, the annual International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase. This year brought three movies from the US, and one each from Canada, Spain, Australia, South Korea, and Germany. As it happened, most of the shorts dealt in some way with the theme of isolation, meaning the showcase felt especially timely.

The Canadian film was first, the 13-minute “Toto,” directed by Marco Baldonado, who co-wrote it with Walter Woodman. In the near future, Rosa (Rosa Forlano), an old Italian-speaking grandmother in North America, buys a robot to help her prepare dinner for her granddaughter (Gabriela Francis), who is soon dropped off for a visit by Rosa’s daughter. By this time Rosa’s formed an odd bond with the machine, but will young Santina’s excitement at seeing the robot change things? This is a lovely small-scale story about intergenerational communication and the pace of change, both bitter and sweet. The grandmother, her daughter, and her granddaughter all relate differently to the robot, and all have different levels of fluency in Italian, meaning the bot and the language use both bring out the theme of change across generations; the movie says the same thing two different ways, enriching both, and one of those ways is distinctively science-fictional. It’s an excellent bit of domestic science-fiction, and one particular moment, with Rosa in the foreground while Santina and Toto dance together behind her, is a sweet and sad crystallisation of idea and emotion.

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After the box-office success of RKO’s The Spanish Main (1945) and Sinbad the Sailor (1947), in 1948 Warner Bros. re-released The Adventures of Robin Hood to theaters, where it did almost as well as its first time ‘round in 1938. The rest of Hollywood took notice, and soon every studio had two or three historical adventures in the development pipeline. The postwar swashbuckler boom was on!

Walt Disney wasn’t about to be left behind. With a pile of money parked in European banks, he decided to open a British studio to make his first live-action films, using The Adventures of Robin Hood as the template: historical adventures with broad appeal based on familiar stories from public domain sources (because why pay royalties?). And he hit a home run the first time at bat with Treasure Island.

Treasure Island

Rating: ***** (Essential)
Origin: USA/UK, 1950
Director: Byron Haskin
Source: Disney DVD

Walt Disney liked to adapt well-known classic tales, so when he decided to make his first live-action feature, it’s not surprising that he chose Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, with its child protagonist and adventures in exotic locales. What is surprising is how hard-edged and gritty it is, considering Disney’s later (well-earned) reputation for peddling bland conformist mediocrity. This 1950 film is as tense and dynamic as its pre-Hays Code 1934 predecessor, and just as closely adapted from the novel, though exact choices of scenes and dialogue vary between the two. Moreover, the Disney version is in vibrant full color.

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Mickey Reece is a musician turned underground filmmaker with over two dozen features to his credit. In 2019 he came out with Climate of the Hunter, which he directed and wrote with John Selvidge. It streamed on-demand at this year’s Fantasia Festival, and it’s billed as a cross between old-fashioned movie melodramas in the style of Douglas Sirk — what is sometimes called a “woman’s film” — and 70s vampire movies. That’s an intriguing blend of genres. But I didn’t think the result did justice to either.

Climate of the Hunter starts with the glimpse of a psychiatric case file dated 1977, after which we see the subject of the file: Alma (Ginger Gilmartin), a sculptor in late middle age. She and her lawyer sister Elizabeth (Mary Buss), both single, are waiting for their childhood friend Wesley (Ben Hall) to join them at the cottage where Alma’s now living. Wesley turns out to be a well-travelled Goethe-quoting man of the world, and over the course of several dinners together a romantic tension develops among the three of them, which grows worse as first Wesley’s son (Sheridan McMichael) and then Elizabeth’s daughter (Danielle Evon Ploeger) arrive. Alma, meanwhile, has begun to harbour dark suspicions about Wesley — who she comes to believe is one of the undead.

This is a solid enough structure, but the execution doesn’t work. There’s a lack of tension to both the development of the romance and the mystery of Wesley’s nature. The tone is one of uncommitted irony, flatness without humour. It’s not just that there’s no sense of building horror, there’s no involvement in the characters.

That’s partly because those characters seem to belong in different movies. Elizabeth and to an extent Wesley have the earnestness of melodrama, but the disaffected Alma has no particular narrative chemistry with either. She spends much of her time smoking pot with her rustic neighbour (Jacob Snovel), who rejoices in the name BJ Beavers and acts like it. That sounds like a jarring tonal clash with a story about a creature of the night, and so it is. The actors individually give fine performances, but collectively don’t mesh. The tone is inconsistent, each one nailing a slightly different register of irony.

The plot’s simple enough, but nevertheless manages to be unlikely. Alma’s family worries about her mental health because she chooses to live in a fairly large cottage in the woods instead of a condo in the city. Elizabeth’s daughter throws herself at Wesley for reasons that, to be polite, remain unclear. The question of Wesley’s nature is apparently resolved, then the movie proceeds as if it weren’t.

Visually, the movie’s interesting. Although clearly shot on a relatively low budget, 1970s-vintage lenses on the camera produce a distinctive period look; a certain cruciform twinkle to glints of light recalls a past era. The aspect ratio’s 4:3, further making it feel like a TV soap opera. And there’s a nice use of deep dark shadows, sometimes obscuring even the actors’ faces. Add to that a few interesting formal touches — for example, the way a voice-over names every part of a meal as it’s served, while the dish is photographed at its most luscious. There are ideas here, and some craftsmanship. But it doesn’t come out to much.

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Nobuhiko Obayashi, the director best known for the surreal 1977 horror film House (Hausu, ハウス), died on April 10 this year. His final film is Labyrinth of Cinema (海辺の映画館 キネマの玉手箱), which he wrote as well as directed. Just as visually extravagant as House, it grapples with weightier themes — specifically, the nature of cinema and of war, and how film can be used to protest war. It’s therefore also a rumination on history, specifically the history of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how that history was depicted in the movies of its time. And Labyrinth gets at these things through the frame of a fantasy story about movie spectators unstuck in time and narrative. Obayashi swung for the fences with this film, a three-hour long experience that feels like a career summation, a director reflecting on his life and craft and art.

It begins in an almost essayistic manner, with the musings of a narrator named Fanta G (Yukihiro Takahashi), floating among memory fragments in a time machine that eventually brings him to the present day and the seaside city of Onomichi (Obayashi’s home). The last cinema in town will be closing at dawn, but before that happens an audience will take in one last picture show. And then some of members of that audience are caught up on the images onscreen — three young men chasing a mysterious teen named Noriko (Rei Yoshida).

The film ranges across the years roughly from 1868 to 1945, talking about Japan’s history, how it played out in film, and how Japanese film itself developed. The decline of samurai and the rise of mass mechanised warfare is seen through a peculiar lens, the garrulous Fanta explaining everything necessary as the film goes along. The characters from the audience take on different roles, playing out different stories across different genres and forms. If the frame concept of the Onomichi movie house is self-consciously surreal, the scenarios that incorporate the audience members grow more serious as the film goes on.

The movie begins with a blitz of images and ideas, introducing concepts at a furious pace to the point that ten minutes in I almost stopped taking notes. Not only do we get Fanta G’s time travelling, and then the cinema, and then an assortment of characters, but we’re told that the film will be referring to the writings of poet Chuya Nakahara (1907-1937), and soon get dance numbers and black-and-white scenes and title cards and even passages like silent film. And a visual approach seemingly based on collage, compositing together images like an odd kind of cartoon. Thankfully, it slows down, and in fact continues to slow as the film goes along. But not before a range of genres appears onscreen — musicals and yakuza films and samurai movies — somehow all coexisting.

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Day 5 of Fantasia began for me by watching Simon Barrett give bad career advice. Barrett’s the writer of horror movies such as The Guest and You’re Next, and he took questions from an online audience for what turned out to be more than two hours in a self-effacing discussion about how the modern movie industry works (or fails to), and how aspiring filmmakers can prepare themselves for entering that world. It was a funny, detailed, and generous discussion, which you can find here.

After that I watched my first feature film of the day, Detention (Fanxiao, 返校), a movie from Taiwan directed by John Hsu (his first feature, in fact) from a script Hsu wrote with Fu Kai-Ling and Chien Shih-Keng. It’s based on a game from Red Candle Games, conceived by Yao Shun-Ting, which has apparently become a cultural phenomenon in Taiwan. There’s already been a novelisation of the game; the movie version of the story was released in Taiwan late last year, and became a box office smash.

It’s set in 1962, during the decades-long period of martial law in Taiwan known as the White Terror. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, wake up in their school. They don’t remember falling asleep, the school looks different and eerier, and they’re apparently alone except for demonic versions of their teachers and creatures that might be ghosts or demons. A flood hems them in the school grounds. They have to survive and figure out what’s happened to them, and this set-up suggests the story’s video-game roots.

But the development of this concept’s surprisingly powerful. We start with the perspective of the young woman, Fang (Gingle Wang), but soon learn that the young man, Wei (Chin-Hua Tseng), was involved with a secret book club, copying and reading the work of forbidden authors like Rabindranath Tagore. As the two explore the school and deal with the horrors therein, we learn more about the book club and the two faculty members guiding it, Chang (Fu Meng-Po) and Yin (Cecilia Choi). The dangers that come with being part of the club are made clear, and we see the punishments handed out to people merely suspected of possessing literature deemed subversive. (So, yes, the first rule of book club is nobody talks about book club. And for good reason.)

But we also get an early flash of imagery suggesting Wei has or will meet with a rough fate. In fact the movie plays with chronology a lot, and very effectively. As we learn about what’s brought the two youths into the darkened school, we see past events from multiple angles, with different levels of knowledge, and the film does an excellent job of letting us know just enough at just the right time. Nor do the flashbacks slow the story down overmuch. In fact one particularly extensive flashback struck me as perfectly placed — taking us away from the nightmare environment long enough, and at the right place, that it keeps the horror from becoming normalised: we return for the climax, and the place is still disconcerting.

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