Film Festivals Archives - Page 5 of 48

Fantasia Festival ’23: New Life

August 8, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

**½/****
starring Tony Amendola, Hayley Erin, Sonya Walger, Nick George
written and directed by John Rosman

by Walter Chaw I respect the directness and simplicity of John Rosman’s New Life, the way it addresses a double-edged problem through two women in separate storylines who represent the point and counterpoint of a debate without an easy answer. How does one balance the individual good versus the interests of the collective? Easy enough to say that any individual must be sacrificed for the sake of society until one humanizes the individual. Plenty of films tackle this question: John Frankenheimer’s The Train measures the value of a man’s life against a priceless work of art; Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s extraordinary 28 Weeks Later and Breck Eisner’s remake of The Crazies wonder how many people must be sacrificed for the greater good, no matter how heroic the lengths they’ve gone to survive. New Life‘s stakes are similarly big, although its focus is smaller–the “Trolley Problem” where one of the hero’s choices is to kill a person she likes in order to save a planet full of strangers. Complicating it all is that the hero herself, Elsa (Sonya Walger), is afflicted with a progressive neurological disorder, meaning her time is limited regardless of what she chooses. If she does the difficult thing, in other words, she’s not even doing it for herself.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Sympathy for the Devil

August 1, 20232023, Action, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Netherlands, Nicolas Cage, Thriller, UK

½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joel Kinnaman, Kaiwi Lyman
screenplay by Luke Paradise
directed by Yuval Adler

by Walter Chaw A History of Violence for Dummies, Yuval Adler’s slow-moving, never-ending Sympathy for the Devil is a Nicolas Cage vanity project in which America’s slavering hambone tries on some kind of accent, a scarlet dye-job, and a half-assed high-concept that’s familiar to everyone, it appears, except those responsible for carrying it off. Cage is The Passenger, a mysterious lunatic with a gun who carjacks father-to-be The Driver (Joel Kinnaman) in a hospital parking garage and forces him to drive down the Las Vegas strip to a neon-lit Edward Hopper bar where screaming fits can be engaged in for the bemusement of the easily bemused. “There he goes again,” one might say of Cage as he bares his teeth, bangs on the table, flashes his eyes, and raises his voice. Lest one think he’s merely punching the clock here, he’s also listed as one of the producers, so I have to believe that phoning it in, all dials turned to “11,” is the creative choice he’s making at this point in his career. Cage can be an exceptional actor when he wants to be, don’t get me wrong. I just wish he wanted to be more than once every ten years.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Raging Grace

July 29, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Leanne Best, Jaeden Paige Boadilla, Max Eigenmann, David Hayman
written and directed by Paris Zarcilla

by Walter Chaw What sets something like Paris Zarcilla’s Raging Grace apart from similar servant/master, immigrant/colonizer stuff like Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo is how it offers glimpses of joy amid the suffering. We see a community at play and worship, united in song, celebrating one another, exultant and safe–at odds with how their oppression is generally centred in otherwise sympathetic texts. Jubilation, it turns out, is a useful tool to ratchet up the tension in a film about isolation and domestic enslavement. When you grasp what can be lost, the stakes become unbearably high. Raging Grace isn’t a happy film, but there’s happiness in it, starting with the hopefulness of its hero’s name, Joy (Maxene Eigenmann). Joy’s a homeless Filipino house cleaner on an expired visa to the UK struggling to care for her impetuous daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), on very little money and under the constant threat of discovery and deportation. The two survive by squatting in clients’ homes while they’re away, and Zarcilla has a lovely touch with the stolen days where mother and daughter pretend to have a place of their own. The rest of Joy’s life is a hustle: to get more work, to hold onto existing work, to keep her kid entertained and hidden, and to try to leave the panic out of her voice when she talks to family she’s left behind in the Philippines. Before Raging Grace becomes a horror film, it’s already a horror film.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Aporia

July 28, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

**½/****
starring Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi, Payman Maadi, Faithe Herman
written and directed by Jared Moshé

by Walter Chaw Titled after a word meaning “irresolvable internal contradiction,” Aporia is a tragicomedy of errors à la The Butterfly Effect in which three well-meaning suburbanites figure out a way to change the past but can’t quite figure out how to avoid causing unexpected temporal fuckups in addition to the ones they’re trying to cause. For what it’s worth, their always remembering their former timelines isn’t addressed in any meaningful way–nor, I guess, does it need to be, given that this is soft sci-fi and not Primer, but I did think about it. I also thought about how the title is probably fair warning against trying to Neil deGrasse Tyson the thing, and so: fair enough. What happens is that grieving widow Sophie (Judy Greer), seven months out from losing husband Malcolm (Edi Gathegi) to a drunk driver, does her best to manage the trauma she and her daughter Riley (Gaithe Herman) are going through, but it’s a losing battle. She confides in her friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) that things are spiralling, and Jabir tells Sophie that he and Malcolm had been working on a time-travel device that could fire a burst of energy to a specific time and place in the past. If they were to kill the drunk driver, they figure, maybe all would be well again in their world. So they do it, and at first it seems like this Monkey’s Paw is one of the rare benevolent Monkey’s Paws. But then Sophie starts feeling guilty over the financial plight the drunk driver’s wife, Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), suffers in the absence of her lout of a husband.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Vincent Must Die + Blackout

July 25, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Werewolf

Vincent doit mourir
***½/****
starring Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, François Chattot, Karoline Rose Sun
written by Mathieu Naert
directed by Stéphan Castang

BLACKOUT
***½/****
starring Alex Hurt, Addison Timlin, Motell Gyn Foster, Barbara Crampton
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw I’ve been angrier lately, angrier than I ever remember feeling in my life–and I was a teenage boy once. I am either more keenly aware of how broken the world always was, or the world is more broken than it’s ever been. Likely a little of both is true. I am frustration unrelieved. I am catharsis in eternal, trembling abeyance. The bad win and escape consequences; the good lose and lack the commitment to fight. The Earth is on fire, and only a handful of Scandinavian teens gluing themselves to paintings seem to have the will to do anything about it. I feel like I’m going to crack at every provocation, however minor or unintended. I wonder if I’ve lost my mind. It’s the old man’s fate to lament the growing incivility of every generation, but I didn’t expect to have so much rage going into my sixth decade. I didn’t expect to be the source of the incivility. I think the fallout from the cascading traumas of the last several years will continue to expose fault lines in our society for decades to come. Fallout is inevitable after an apocalypse, after all, and fault lines cause earthquakes. There’s nothing special about us.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Introduction

July 14, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals

by Walter Chaw I love Fantasia Festival. More than love it, I think it's an important showcase that has provided at least a couple of titles that end up on my Best of the Year list every time I've covered it. Its programming is consistently on point, its courage to wade into deep and hostile waters laudable. This year, I'm most excited to catch Oh Dae-hwan and Jang Dong-yoon in Kim Jae-hoon's Face/Off-inspired debut, Devils, and Jimmy Laporal-Trésor's rise-of-fascism period piece, Rascals. Quarxx has a new flick inspired by Milton and Dante called Pandemonium, and there's a new '80s Satanic Panic documentary called Satan Wants You that dates me, I'll admit. A small part of me still believes I'll start speaking in Aramaic and crawling up the wall every time I spin an Iron Maiden vinyl. I feel a similar mix of nostalgia and dread about A Disturbance in the Force, which dives deep into what exactly was going through everyone's heads while making the "Star Wars Holiday Special".

Story Time: FFC Interviews Bomani J. Story

June 4, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Bomani J. Story, writer-director of
THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MONSTER

I love writer-director Bomani J. Story’s feature debut, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. I love it for its verve, its intimidating intelligence, its righteousness. It’s one of the few Frankenstein adaptations that actually takes Mary Shelley’s presence in the novel into consideration, serving as a very fine horror film on the one side and a sharp social commentary on the other. Story is the rare young filmmaker unafraid of subtext, and he has a genuine humility about him that, to me, is a predictor of future life success. He’s said that going back to Frankenstein the book was, essentially, a bolt of lightning for him, and indeed, I think it takes a minority read of it to fully grasp its revolutionary quality. I was similarly galvanized my first time reading it, too. It probably, by itself, led to my interest in studying British Romanticism once upon a time.

Hot Docs ’23: All You See

May 13, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Netherlands

***½/****
directed by Niki Padidar

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Iran-born, Netherlands-based director Niki Padidar’s All You See isolates its three female interview subjects in small, sparsely-dressed rooms with no fourth wall, shooting them head-on in centre-framed compositions that meet at some nexus of Wes Anderson and Errol Morris. (For her part, Padidar has cited “all Charlie Kaufman films” and Lars von Trier’s Dogville as key influences on the picture’s design.) From inside these cubicles, the interviewees primarily reflect on how people in their adoptive country of Holland respond to them as immigrants. Consider this staging a kind of lo-fi expressionism, then, manifesting their feelings of being under interrogation while also highlighting their exoticism, which is somewhat invisible outside its cultural context. Or is it? It seems naïve to think this movie is about a xenophobia specific to the Netherlands, no matter the notoriety of Dutch racism (e.g., Zwarte Piet) or how superior the enlightened viewer might feel to these ladies’ offscreen tormentors. Beyond its formal daring, the uniqueness of All You See is that it delves into a rarely explored aspect of the immigrant experience likely to resonate with anyone whose conspicuous presence disrupts cultural homogeneity.

Hot Docs ’23: Food and Country

May 8, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

**/****
directed by Laura Gabbert

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda “I’ve spent my whole life working on this project,” NEW YORK TIMES food critic and memoirist Ruth Reichl says late in Laura Gabbert’s Food and Country, a well-researched but muddled look at the changing nature of food in America that considers how an already precarious food system buckled under the additional weight of COVID in the early months of 2020. Reichl’s statement is one of many big promises not quite fulfilled by Gabbert’s tentative approach to her subject, which is also hazily defined: at various points, it’s either Reichl’s research or the author herself. The result is an amiably rambling but overcooked, arms-length essay–partly Reichl’s and partly Gabbert’s–about no less than three major topics: Reichl’s biography in food writing; the state of corporate agriculture and farming in America, which stiffs farmers and shoppers alike and benefits only four major packing conglomerates; and the myriad ways in which the early days of the pandemic caused irreparable damage to both restaurateurs and their providers.

Hot Docs ’23: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

May 5, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Estonia, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

Savvusanna sõsarad
**½/****
directed by Anna Hints

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda “The soul cannot be cut away,” a woman says of her cancer surgery early in Anna Hints’s Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, an evocative and visually striking look at a group of women finding resilience in the face of trauma through community, storytelling, and ritual at a smoke sauna deep in the forest, somewhere in the south of Estonia. Hints’s film makes a timely companion piece of sorts to Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, another dialogue-centred chamber drama about generations of women’s pain and endurance set in a single, remote space. Where Polley’s film is a heavily scripted actors’ showcase reminiscent at times of a talky Stanley Kramer social-issues picture, Hints’s is a more tentative affair. The unnamed women’s stories drip out of them not in crackling monologues but in halting improvised anecdotes–about being perceived as women (first by their mothers, then by men), about their taboo feelings on sexuality and reproductive rights, and about their bare survival against the vagaries of illness, social repression, and sexual violence.

Hot Docs ’23: Praying for Armageddon

May 4, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Norway

**½/****
directed by Tonje Hessen Schei

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Praying for Armageddon is about the mobilization of Christian evangelicals, who, according to on-screen statistics, now make up 30% of American voters. That’s scary, but as the movie makes clear, no number is too small to set off alarms. We meet Pastor Gary Burd of the Mission M25 Ministry/motorcycle club, who says, “I don’t want you to think that I am raising a militia,” but holds his sermons in a bunker and knights his congregants so they may take up swords against whatever windmills the evangelicals are tilting at this week. “Swords” is uttered often in Praying for Armageddon, for what it’s worth. Jesus was a war hawk, according to Burd, who quotes Him in Luke 22 as saying, “Yeah, if you don’t have a sword, go sell your coat and buy one, because the time is coming when you’re gonna need a sword.” But the word has an elastic meaning in Christian evangelical-ese, even though influential figures like Christians United for Israel founder John Hagee insist the Bible–which the odious Hagee fashions into an acronym for “Basic Information Before Leaving Earth”–is “literal from cover to cover.” (Burd’s Jesus sounds like Mark Wahlberg, Hagee’s like Gary Busey.) Swords are swords, but they’re also guns, they’re also nuclear weapons. That’s why the so-called Armageddon Lobby (shudder) has concentrated its resources on indoctrinating U.S. soldiers to its religious crusade, which begins with proselytizing new recruits and baptizing them at the end of Basic Training. Presto! A Christian national is born–a perfect mirror image of the ostensible enemy, incidentally. Michigan-based company Tijicon went so far as to supply the Marines with rifle scopes engraved JN8:12, referring to the passage from John that reads, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” This way, you’re aiming Jesus at your targets.

Hot Docs ’23: Angel Applicant

May 4, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Ken August Meyer

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

By Angelo Muredda Swiss-German surrealist Paul Klee becomes a guardian angel for a chronically ill artist in search of a disabled ancestor in Ken August Meyer’s documentary Angel Applicant, a playful and affecting memoir of the filmmaker’s progress with systemic scleroderma–the same rare autoimmune disease with which Klee was posthumously diagnosed. Self-deprecating and puckish, Meyer walks us through the indignities and aesthetic possibilities of his bodily transformation with a mix of observational footage of himself in and out of hospitals and clinics and magical-realist dramatizations that see him replaced with a lifelike doll whose rigid body stands in for his stiffening skin and joints. He weaves an examination of Klee’s late style into these diaristic musings on illness, pain, and creation in spite of both, drawing inspiration from the artist’s prolific output in his final years living with scleroderma. In the process, Meyer openly wonders if Klee’s turn from intricate to bold lines and surrealist images of disjointed bodies in pain–modernist pieces deemed “degenerate art” by Hitler–might serve as a model for his own uncertain path forward.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Smoking Causes Coughing

March 29, 20232022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, Superhero

Fumer fait tousser
***/****
starring Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra
written and directed by Quentin Dupieux

by Walter Chaw French provocateur Quentin Dupieux’s eleventh film Smoking Causes Coughing is an anthology picture organized around a framing device in which five costumed idiots forced to go on a team-building retreat tell each other horrifying tales around a campfire. I’ve been decidedly lukewarm on Dupieux’s films. They’re the very definition of an acquired taste, and I suspect they’re hit-or-miss even if you’re dialled into their frequency. His best-known film is probably Rubber (2010), a creature-feature about a car tire that causes folks’ heads to explode using “telepathy.” That’s the punchline to the long setup of a tire rolling around to tense music, which Dupieux punctuates with dialogue that’s knowingly campy, dedicatedly stupid, and ramped up with vein-bulging sincerity. It’s the kind of conceit that attracts viewers who like to laugh at movies. I think Dupieux’s sense of humour relies a lot on exaggeration and repetition, with the former landing like grossly performative sarcasm and the latter like the most irritating person you know milking a joke until the doggedness itself becomes the joke. For the most part, Dupieux’s movies don’t think much of the genres they’re mocking and, by extension, they don’t think much of the audiences for them, either.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster

March 28, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror

****/****
starring Laya DeLeon Hayes, Chad L. Coleman, Denzel Whitaker
written and directed by Bomani J. Story

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) is a 17-year-old STEM wunderkind who has a theory–one she shares with the mad oncologist of Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain–that death is a disease and, as such, can be cured. It’s her favourite topic, and she tries to expound upon it during chemistry class, but her teacher, Mrs. Kempe (Beth Felice), doesn’t want to listen. Mrs. Kempe expresses her distaste through microaggressions like mispronouncing Vicaria’s name, then offering to call her “Vicky” because it’s easier to remember. When that fails to intimidate Vicaria, she summons the school’s security officer to forcibly remove Vicaria from the classroom. It’s dangerous when white folks call the cops on Black folks, and Vicaria, sure enough, is thrown from her desk–breaking her glasses–and cuffed for the crime of, essentially, being smarter than expected in a situation where her white teacher feels threatened. The first thing Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is about is the chips and how they’re stacked against women and minorities, especially in the sciences. In just this one scene, he addresses different types of racism (internalized, subtle, overt, systemic), builds a character in the outspoken and unbowed Vicaria, and sets up a confrontation in which Vicaria’s dad, Donald (Chad L. Coleman), demonstrates what it looks like when a father has his daughter’s back. In five minutes, we know everything we need to know. This is exceptional storytelling.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Spaghetti Junction

March 27, 20232023, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi

*/****
starring Cate Hughes, Cam McHarg, Eleanore Miechkowksi, Tyler Rainey
written and directed by Kirby McClure

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw A spirited, earnest, decidedly kitchen-sink pastiche of John Carpenter’s Starman, Kirby McClure’s Spaghetti Junction sports a game cast engaged in a scattershot project too distracted to land. I found it to be a lot like talking to someone on cocaine. Which is to say, I don’t think it’s about nothing, only that whatever it’s focused on for a moment is the most important thing there ever was–but then the moment passes, supplanted by the actual most important thing there ever was. You can follow it, but I’m not convinced the juice is worth the squeeze. Recent amputee August (Cate Hughes), trying not to be a burden to struggling single-dad Dave (Cameron McHarg), is doing her best to get along with rebellious older sister Shiny (Eleanore Miechkowski). Dad wants Shiny to take August with her everywhere, but Shiny just wants to be alone with her loser boyfriend, Antonio (Jesse Gallegos). Though Dad’s motivated by guilt over the car accident that took August’s foot, August is eager to move on with mastering her prosthetic and trying to be seen whole… At least, that’s what I think is motivating her. As Spaghetti Junction doesn’t really articulate the point, I wonder if it was avoided on purpose. Bolstering the read of this as a disability melodrama, Antonio does call August a “cripple” out of frustration at her being a persistent cockblock, but she’s not there to hear it and Shiny doesn’t object, so…whatever you take from the disability subplot of the film, if there is one, depends on whatever inference you’re willing to make from the information provided.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Nightsiren

March 27, 20232022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Mystery, Slovakia

The Nightsiren
***½/****
starring Eva Mores, Iva Bittová, Jana Oľhová, Juliana Oľhová, Natalia Germani
written by Barbora Namerova, Tereza Nvotová
directed by Tereza Nvotová

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw Tereza Nvotová’s Slovakian folk horror Nightsiren joins films like Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015), Lukas Feigelfeld’s Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Tale (2017), Igor Legarreta’s All the Moons (2020), and Goran Stolevki’s You Won’t Be Alone (2022): gynocentric celebrations of the power of women and the lengths to which patriarchal social systems seek, and have always sought, to suppress it. A glance at the Republican docket in the year of their asshole of a lord, 2023, finds it full of extraordinary, unseemly interest in women’s bodies–their reproductive capacity, their allure to troglodytes raised to see women as objects to be owned and mastered, their perceived unfitness in a world most-of-the-way destroyed by the jealous rule of “qualified” men. What these films have in common besides a woman as their centre are the overlapping, parallel superstitions of a range of countries, each fabricated as pretense (and then codified into law) to injure women: socially, physically, mortally if necessary. What’s different about Nightsiren is how the cries of “witch,” the public excoriations and publicly-sanctioned mortifications, happen in the present–in the wilds of a modern Slovakia that feels ancient for its remoteness but eternal for the extent to which “difficult” women are blamed for the plague and end times promulgated by the bestial cupidity of men. Dress it up however you like, but we’ve only evolved the ways we pretend at civilization–and even then, not much, and not consistently. Is it progress that we’ve essentially stopped pretending? We are only shaved apes, so we act accordingly.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Sick of Myself

March 25, 20232022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Norway, Sweden

Syk pike
***½/****
starring Kristine Kujath Thorp, Eirik Sæther, Fanny Vaager
written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw Effectively the Ruben Östlund film that got away, Kristoffer Borgli’s acerbic Sick of Myself (and I can’t say the title without singing it to the tune of the Matthew Sweet anthem of self-loathing) skewers the cult of victimhood that runs parallel to any progressive social awakening, muddying the waters to such an extent that the language of tolerance becomes weaponized, and true gains come clouded with apologies and equivocations. One step forward, 80 years’ worth of steps back. A scene late in Sick of Myself between a poisonous narcissist and the friend and journalist trying to make sense of it all has the malignant party saying they’re the real victim of their own absurd machinations, because, given a choice, no one would ask to be a psychopath. It’s funny because it’s familiar: how self-pity is the easier sensation to bear over shame. And it’s familiar because there isn’t even anything like the illusion of accountability left in this world. The worst of us, given an unprecedented platform to do harm, will never admit to anything like fault or suffer anything like consequences.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: The Unheard

March 25, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***/****
starring Lachlan Watson, Michele Hicks, Nick Sandow, Brendan Meyer
screenplay by Michael Rasmussen & Shawn Rasmussen
directed by Jeffrey A. Brown

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw I consider myself a fairly boring, credulous person who nevertheless, based on a couple of experiences I can’t explain, believes in ghosts and is disturbed by stuff like the Electronic Voice Phenomenon, not to mention the tenuous wisdom of playing with Ouija Boards. Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Unheard catches me right in my irrational fears with its story of Chloe (non-binary actor Lachlan Watson, playing the role of a young woman here), who returns to the isolated Cape Cod of her youth a decade after losing her hearing there from a case of meningitis. Her mother vanished around the same time. She was once thought to be a runaway, but it’s looking more likely that she was the victim of an active serial killer. At least, that’s what Chloe’s hallucinations, for lack of a better word, intimate in the flashes of clarity they offer between the white-noise blatting from the closed-circuit television at her house in Cape Cod. She’s come back to clean up the old place, make peace with her ghosts, and recover from an experimental treatment for her hearing loss from earnest, hopeful Dr. Lynch (Shunori Ramanathan). She hasn’t, I don’t think, thought things all the way through.

SDAFF ’22: The Fish Tale + Stellar: A Magical Ride

November 10, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

Sakana no Ko
½*/****
starring Hayato Isomura, Kaho, Non, Yuya Yagira
written by Shirô Maeda, Shûichi Okita, Sakana-Kun
directed by Shûichi Okita

STELLAR: A MAGICAL RIDE
**/****
starring Heo Sung-tae, Lee Kyu-hyung, Son Ho-jun
written by Bae Se-yeong
directed by Kwon Soo-kyung

by Walter Chaw Sakana-kun lands somewhere between a Temple Grandin for fish and, oh, let’s say a Bill Nye the Science Guy for, uh, fish. A Japanese television/YouTube personality, an illustrator (of fish), an honorary professor of fish and a national ichthyologist who is sometimes asked to testify at Japan’s House of Councilors committee sessions about the importance of assuming a piscine point of view in matters of environmental importance, Sakana-kun–whose name means “Mr. Fish,” leading me to suspect it’s maybe not his real name–is a cultural curiosity who trafficks in Japan’s peculiar penchant for extreme, aggressive, borderline-hostile slapstick adorable. I have no doubt he’s well-intentioned and useful in a Crocodile Hunter sort of way, an ambassador for the wild kingdom who, if The Fish Tale, a film based loosely on his autobiography, is to be believed, has turned his profound neurodivergence into a profession. (Join the club, Sakana-kun, amiright?) I do wonder about a couple of things in regards to The Fish Tale, though: first, the way neurodivergence is made into a fairytale Forrest Gump-ian superpower that deflects aggressions micro- or otherwise; second, how the picture casts a woman, model/singer Non, as Sakana-kun (named Mibou in the film), which feels like an attempt to further exoticize our hero by making his gender itself a challenge to the normals. I will say that as a member of a minority in the United States with its own set of specific challenges, one thing I understand to be universal amongst minorities is the desire to be considered neither exceptional nor deficient: the Goldilocks mean of not superhuman, not inhuman, just merely human.

SDAFF ’22: No Bears

November 8, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Iran, Pseudo-Documentary, San Diego Asian Film Festival

****/****
starring Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Mina Kavani, Bülent Keser
written and directed by Jafar Panahi

by Walter Chaw Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is about imprisonment–a topic near and dear to the Iranian filmmaker’s heart, as he has been, and is currently, a prisoner at the discretion of Iran’s fascist government. First sentenced to six years in prison in 2010 for making films critical of the regime (a conviction that included a 20-year ban on filmmaking of any kind), Panahi spent that time under house arrest but was finally physically imprisoned in July of 2022 for raising a fuss on behalf of director and fellow prisoner-of-conscience Mohammad Rasoulof. Through clever subterfuge, Panahi has continued to direct new movies during his ban, of course–good ones, perhaps none so good as his latest, in which he plays himself, looking for a little peace and a wifi signal in a remote border town. He’s directing a film by proxy, watching from his laptop as his AD, Reza (Reza Heydari), listens to his instructions regarding blocking, camera, even performance, transmitted across a physical and emotional distance through Reza’s earbuds. “It’s not the same without you,” Reza tells Panahi; the energy is off with Panahi working through a surrogate. He can’t pinpoint how, exactly, and Panahi, as he portrays himself, isn’t one to make an awkward situation more comfortable. He listens more than he speaks. He waits for people to finish, then gives them an extra couple of seconds to regret what they’ve said. I’ve seen Werner Herzog do this in his documentaries, too–letting the camera run long past the point at which decorum would dictate relief from scrutiny. Panahi now lives under constant surveillance, after all, so why should any of his subjects suffer less?