Black Gate

I saw my second movie of the day of July 14 in the Fantasia screening room, where critics can watch a movie on a large computer monitor at a time convenient to their schedules. And indeed scheduling had brought me to the screening room to fill a gap between two other films I wanted to see. Note then that I did not see the film I’m about to describe in a theatre; I don’t think the way I watched it affected my reaction, but it’s perhaps best to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Astronaut was written and directed by Shelagh McLeod. It stars Richard Dreyfuss as Angus, a 75-year-old widower and former geological engineer who moves into an old age home shortly after the film starts. An amateur skywatcher, he also enters a contest for a spot on a private spaceship built by tech mogul Marcus (Colm Feore) — and wins, despite being ten years over the cut-off age for contestants. Will Angus fulfill his lifelong dream of going into space? Or is he too old? Or are there other problems lying in wait?

Let me begin with something good: Richard Dreyfuss is excellent. He’s thoroughly convincing as Angus, and engaging enough to carry the movie for quite a while, even in the absence of other positive aspects. The supporting cast is generally fine, especially an almost unrecognisable Graham Greene as Len, a fellow resident of Angus’ retirement home.

There is a sense in which Feore is actually a weak link among the performers. This is of course not due to a lack of ability on his part. But playing a brilliant entrepreneur running a private space-flight company, he has to convince us that his Marcus is believable as a competitor to Elon Musk or perhaps Richard Branson, the sort of man who could be found in their company. And he doesn’t really get enough to work with. Marcus remains more plot device than character, presented in the film as a mature man of integrity and genius as well as the kind of charismatic figure who can draw both investment funding and media attention. There’s a lack of depth to him, no sense that some of his virtues might be in opposition to some of his other virtues.

In truth, that may be the least of the movie’s failings. The plot is a mess, relying far too heavily on coincidence. I don’t mean that it’s coincidental that Angus happens to win a random draw to become part of a group of finalists competing for the trip to space; a movie’s allowed one given, I think, and anyway if that sort of lottery-winning set-up is good enough for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory it’s good enough for Astronaut. But as the film goes on, it turns out that not only does Marcus’ spaceport happen to be very close to Angus’ home, Angus’ earlier career happens to leave him as the only person who could possibly know a certain piece of information vital to the launch of Marcus’ spaceship.

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In reviewing the movies I see at Fantasia I like to mention the theatre in which I see a film, because the room the film’s screened in often gives a hint about the movie’s nature. The smaller De Sève is often a venue for indie cinema and lesser-known pictures. The larger Hall will usually hold more obviously popular movies, meaning a lot of action films and blockbusters. This is not inevitable, and there are a number of reasons why something you’d think you’d see in one cinema gets hosted in the other. But the two theatres do have their own personalities, and sometimes you watch a movie that fits the personality of the place perfectly.

Which is all by way of saying that on Sunday, July 14, I headed down to the Hall to watch The Wonderland (also Birthday Wonderland, originally Bāsudē wandārando, バースデー・ワンダーランド), a new animated film by Keiichi Hara, whose previous film Miss Hokusai had greatly impressed me. Miho Maruo, who wrote the script adapting Miss Hokusai from the original manga, also handles the script for The Wonderland, which is based on a 1988 novel (Chikashitsu Kara No Fushigi Na Tabi, literally Strange Journey From the Basement) by Sachiko Kashiwaba. Kashiwaba’s an award-winning children’s writer in Japan; Hayao Miyazaki once tried to adapt her novel Kirino Mukouno Fushigina Machi (A Mysterious Town Over the Mist), ultimately scrapping the attempt but keeping the bathhouse setting for the film that became Spirited Away. If The Wonderland is any indication, her work and themes have some clear parallels with his.

Akane (Mayu Matsuoka) is a Japanese girl about to turn 13, who goes to the knickknack shop operated by her flighty aunt Chii (Anne Watanabe) to get her birthday present. There, she and Chii are surprised when she encounters the mustachioed and top-hatted alchemist named Mister Hippocrates (Masachika Ichimura) and his assistant Pipo (Nao Tôyama), who reveal that Akane has a destiny in a mysterious otherworld that can only be reached through the basement of Chii’s store. It turns out that in this fantasyland Akane’s the latest incarnation of the Goddess of Green Wind, who is the only one who can save the world from its slow decay into colourlessness. Akane’s opposed by mysterious figures who have their own schemes to stop the erosion of colour, and sets out on a quest through the various lands of this World Beyond to the centre of all things.

This is a straight-ahead well-told fantasy adventure story. Designs are consistently strong and inventive; there’s a prodigality of visual ideas, with elaborate and individual interiors and exteriors. The motif of colour comes across well, as every location is filled with bright eye-popping hues except for those suffering under the entropic plague. Oddly, the real-world settings have almost as much colour to them, making the World Beyond perhaps a trifle less distinct than it might have been. Still, there’s no danger of confusing the two realms; not just the magic but the societies of the other world are different from this one. In that world, technology stopped developing after a certain point: “We were happy enough as we were, I suppose,” one of the inhabitants reflects.

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My second feature film of Saturday, July 13, was at the De Sève Theatre. It was the one-man animated feature Away, by Latvian Gints Zilbalodis. Zilbalodis wrote, directed, edited, animated, designed the sound, and did everything else for this 75-minute wordless fable about a young man trying to cross a mysterious island.

Before it played came “An Eye For An Eye,” a 17-minute animated short from Poland. Written and directed by Julia Ploch, who adapted her own original comic story, it’s about a hero who vanishes and a youth who tries to seek him out. Both characters are frogs, and the hero, the Red Frog, has disappeared after a quest for the secret knowledge held by the mysterious Great Catfish. It’s a structure a little like Telemachus seeking Odysseus, I suppose, but the result’s different.

We see what happened when the Red Frog finds the Catfish, the wounds he suffers and his Jonah-like travails, and get a glimpse of the wisdom he’s learned. That gives the conclusion a powerful heft. The story’s well-told and unpredictable, in (what looks like a) hand-drawn style, sketchy but sinuous, with an understated use of colour. Banners and panels appear on screen with secondary events within them, picture-in-picture storytelling. Dialogue’s replaced by word balloons holding pictures. In a technical sense, it’s a fascinating and effective way to adapt a graphic novel, and the overall story’s a solid and well-structured creation.

Away begins with a youth parachuting into a desert. He’s chased by a shadowy giant to a green oasis in some hills. There, the youth finds a map, a motorbike, and a small curious yellow bird. The map shows us that he’s at one end of an island, and there’s a town at the other end. The youth chooses to get on the bike, with map and bird, and race past the giant. Chased by the dark shape, who is less a physical threat than an entropic force that drains life and energy, the boy tries to reach the town at the far end of the island, passing many strange places along the way.

The movie’s made in an expressive, simplified CGI style with bright but harmonious colours. It’s fluid, with expressive movement and particularly beautiful moments in its sense of scale. The film makes extensive use of long takes, particularly notable when they come in the form of long gliding camera moves tracking across swathes of landscape. Still there’s a constant sense of movement and, dramatically, of a chase — of the need for the youth to keep moving forward. While characters do sometimes feel as though they’re skating over the landscape, or interact with other physical objects in an uncanny fashion, it’s easy to view this as part of the dream-world and dream-logic of the film.

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There’s a critical truism that all art is political. I would prefer to phrase it as “all art can be read politically,” because art has to be interpreted. And no work of art can be read only one way. Individual perspective and changing circumstances will give a work very different meanings, possibly including different political significance. (I once worked out my version of the truism as “all readings of art will depend in part on the reader’s historical and political situation,” which is why I’m not a sloganeer.)

Consider Master Z: Ip Man Legacy (originally 葉問外傳：張天志, romanised as Yip Man ngoi zyun: Cheung Tin Chi). Directed by Yuen Woo-ping, it’s a spin-off from the three Ip Man films that starred Donnie Yen (a producer for this movie), which were loosely based on the life of the kung fu master who taught Bruce Lee. Master Z is the story of one of the masters Ip Man defeated in one of the earlier movies, Cheung Tin Chi (Zhang Jin, also credited as Max Zhang; I’m told this film’s title comes from an alternate way of romanising ‘Cheung’). When we meet him, in Hong Kong in 1961, he’s sunk so far as to have become a semi-principled gangland heavy. As the movie starts, he leaves this life for a more honest path. Complications ensue.

Most particularly, there’s Kit (Kevin Cheng), a hotheaded drug-peddling gangster with a withered arm, and Kit’s sister Kwan (Michelle Yeoh), who leads a crime syndicate she wants to make into an honest organisation despite the corrupt British rule in Hong Kong. After Cheung gets involved in a fight between Kit and a young woman named Julia (Liu Yan) — who’s sticking up for her friend and roommate, the opium addict Nana (Chrissie Chau) — he ends up working in the bar owned by Julia’s brother Fu (Naason), who’s engaged to Nana. Unfortunately, that part of town is where Kit wants to peddle drugs. And what part does restaurateur and community leader Owen Davidson (Dave Bautista) have to play in all this?

Put like that the film may sound complicated or soap-operatic, but in practice it’s all very clear and sets up a plot that’s engagingly complex yet relatively character-centred. The story’s a function of individuals with relatable motivations reacting against each other, and develops accordingly. Those motivations are big bright primary-colour emotions: love, love of power, and revenge. The different relationships among the characters provide complexities and shadings to these motivations, and the variety of strands in the plot are woven with dexterity. If occasionally characters drop out of the film for a time — most notably Cheung’s young son — we don’t notice.

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I’d skipped the first day of the 2019 Fantasia Festival since the only movie I wanted to watch, The Deeper You Dig, played the next afternoon. That gave me three movies on Day 2, and after seeing first an indie horror film made by three people and then an Australian comedy led by a major Hollywood star, I could only wonder what I’d get in the Irish-Danish-Belgian co-production called Vivarium.

Directed by Lorcan Finnegan from a script by Garret Shanley, it was based on a story by Finnegan and Shanley (the same team collaborated on Finnegan’s previous film, Without Name). Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg star as Gemma and Tom, a young childless married couple hoping to buy a home. A strange real estate salesman named Martin (Jonathan Aris) takes them to see a property in a new housing development. The place is eerily perfect and inhuman, the development empty of all other life. Then Martin vanishes, and when Tom and Gemma try to drive away they find geography doesn’t work right; they constantly find themselves back at the front door of the house Martin selected for them, number 9.

Whatever they do, they cannot escape. The streets are a maze that always returns them to the start. Their car eventually runs out of gas. And then a box is delivered, with a baby boy inside, and a note telling the couple that if they raise the child they’ll be allowed to leave. They do start to take care of the infant, but the boy grows quickly into an uncanny child (Senan Jennings) with inhuman reactions. What will he become as an adult? And what will it cost them to see it?

This is a visually striking movie that exploits the formal qualities of CGI and indeed of digital photography. Tom and Gemma are trapped in a world of unreal balloon-clouds; of perfect blue sky and of infinite green houses, their colours boosted just a little, just not quite real. The opening, introducing Gemma at the school where she teaches, is vital in providing a contrast — in showing what the real world looks like. More specifically, the opening shots of the movie show a cuckoo pushing eggs out of the nest it’s claimed; in addition to anticipating the film to come, these first shots are a vivid depiction of actual nature that establishes the sterility of the housing development as a stark opposition to the world of living things.

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My second movie of Fantasia 2019 was in the 750-plus seat Hall Theatre. Little Monsters stars Lupita Nyong’o as a kindergarten teacher who takes her class on a field trip — only to get caught up in a zombie invasion. Written and directed by Abe Forsythe, it’s an occasionally tasteless but surprisingly effective horror-comedy.

The movie begins with an argument between a man and a woman, shown through a montage as one ongoing shouting match over months or years. Quick gags establish that she’s a high-achiever and he isn’t, and that she wants kids while he doesn’t. It’s funny and well-paced, a good way to start the movie and establish the lead character. After the relationship ends in a break-up we follow the man, Dave (Alexander England), as he moves in with his sister and does a terrible job of being a responsible mentor to his nephew Felix (Diesel La Torraca). When Dave falls for Felix’s kindergarten teacher, Miss Caroline (Nyong’o), though, he volunteers to help her lead the class in a field trip to a nearby petting zoo and minigolf course. Which happens to be next door to an American military base. Where the experimental subjects have just gotten loose. Those subjects are of course zombies, and when they swarm the nearby farm Miss Caroline and Dave have to do their best to save the kids — aided, abetted, and more often opposed by children’s entertainer Teddy McGiggles (Josh Gad, the voice of Olaf in Frozen).

It’s a solid comedy film. The jokes are inventive, most of them land, and they’re constructed well: there are set-ups you don’t notice and pay-offs you don’t see coming. This helps tie in the pre-zombie parts of the film to the main course. Themes running through the movie come to the fore under the pressure of action, too. Character is revealed in different ways at different points. Since the humour arises out of recognisable if exaggerated people doing roughly credible things, it’s surprisingly engaging. Add as well solid comic timing, and pacing that always moves quickly and lightly.

There are some jokes that are predictable. Young children are inevitably made to say or see something hideously inappropriate (though not in terms of their exposure to gore, which the movie does not use extensively). Dave’s a loser at the start of the film, so various jokes follow from that. Personally I could have done without seeing Asian tourists with cameras, though one might argue this was not blatantly playing to stereotyped tropes.

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Not long ago I acquired copies of two well-known anthologies: Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions.

(This post is not about the books. This post is the beginning of my coverage of the Fantasia International Film Festival, Montreal’s long-running three-week genre film festival, and is specifically about the first movie I saw there in 2019, an independent horror film called The Deeper You Dig. But it is useful to start with the anthologies, or the idea of the anthologies.)

I’ve yet to read deeply into the books. But I’d always wanted copies, because of the promise of the titles: the promise of art, of visions, that pose a danger to the audience. Stories that will do something to you if you read them. That will change you, in ways you might not understand, through a process you might beforehand perceive as a psychic danger. What I have come to realise is that the art that has meant the most to me has been the art that has changed me the most without my expecting it or being able to stop it. There’s a thrill in art that can rework you and refashion you into something else. It may be a danger, but without danger there is no real adventure.

It is perhaps accurate to say that one is changed by every kind of art, even by every experience one has. But it’s also true that there’s a specific kind of experience that art can give. The nature of this experience is difficult to articulate, but a change in the self that experiences the art is a part of it. In this way the influence of art is difficult to predict and difficult to trace in recorded history, yet is very real.

And this I think is why after several years, after learning much about film as artform and as industry, I’m still drawn to Fantasia. Not every film it shows is an aesthetic success. But many of them are. And many of them are the kind of works that can change you, in that most difficult to define fashion. You don’t know which ones until you watch them, mostly. But the act of finding out, of dedicating time to the perception and experience of art, is a reward in itself.

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