Fantasia Diary 2015, Day 19: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal; Remix, Remake, Ripoff: About Copy Culture and Turkish Pop Cinema; Orion; and Socialphobia
Saturday, August 1, would start early for me at Fantasia. At 12:30 I was seeing a Chinese fantasy adventure called Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal. Then I’d head over to the screening room, where I planned to watch a documentary about the Turkish film industry, Remix, Remake, Ripoff: About Copy Culture and Turkish Pop Cinema. Then I’d go to the De Sève Theatre for a pair of films, the post-apocalypse art-house movie Orion and then the Korean drama Socialphobia. Once again, a nice varied day.
Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal (Zhong Kui fu mo: Xue yao mo ling) is a blockbuster loosely based on Chinese myth, directed by Peter Pau and Zhao Tianyu with a script by Zhao, Qin Zhen, Shen Shiqi, Li Jie, Raymond Lei Jin, and Eric Zhang. It opens quickly, with the gods trying to save the city of Hu from the forces of hell. One god, Zhang Daoxian (Winston Chao) offers to send his pupil, Zhong Kui (Kun Chen) into hell to steal a crystal vital to the demons’ scheme. Zhong succeeds and takes the crystal to Hu; Zhang teaches him further magical demon-slaying tricks as the demons scheme to get the crystal back. A caravan of entertainers soon come to Hu featuring the lovely Snow Girl (Li Bingbing) — in reality a demon who shares a past with Zhong. But Zhong’s now gained a magical sword, and an alternate shape as a ten-foot-tall spider-giant. He needs all his new might to turn back the forces of hell, but more is going on than meets the eye.
The plot unfolds nicely, complex and full of twists without being too frantic. The story seems to me to be relatively accessible to people used to Western structures. It’s got a few thoughts about love and society and hypocrisy, but nothing especially elaborate — this is solid big-budget epic filmmaking, with bright visuals and lots of action and heroes and villains. As such, it succeeds.
Friday, July 31, started late for me at Fantasia. My first movie, a horror-comedy called Ava’s Possessions, screened at the Hall Theatre at 5:15. After that I decided to watch the Indonesian wuxia movie The Golden Cane Warrior. Then I’d go across to the De Sève Theatre to catch the surreal science-fictional American-Argentinian movie H. before returning to the Hall for the Friday midnight movie, a Quebec-made tribute to 80s post-apocalypse action movies called Turbo Kid. That would carry me through to something like 2 AM. So if things started late, at least it looked like I had a lot on the agenda.
Thursday, July 30, looked like one of the odder days I had lined up at the Fantasia Festival. I’d head down to the De Sève Theatre early on to catch a new American science-fiction film called Synchronicity, then go to the screening room to watch a dialogue-free horror film called The Dark Below. After that, I’d go back to the De Sève to catch the Irish black comedy Traders, and finally wrap up with an event called Méliès et magie, an event presenting some of the classic short films by the first master of fantasy cinema. It looked like a varied day, though in the end it was less so than I’d expected.
I took a day off from Fantasia on Tuesday, July 28, to run some errands and buy some groceries, then returned on Wednesday to begin a kind of mini-marathon that would carry me through to the end of the festival. I saw four movies Thursday, starting at the De Sève with a wordless 3D animated French film called Minuscule, about a ladybug who falls in with a group of ants who’ve liberated a box of sugar from an abandoned picnic. After that I went to the screening room to see an Australian horror-suspense movie called Observance. Then I went back to the De Sève for the semi-science-fictional German action movie Boy 7. After getting out of that one, I made a snap decision to run across the street to the Hall Theatre to watch the Korean action-comedy Big Match. Which turned out to be one of the better calls I made all festival.