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Montréal 2025
The Fantasia commercial, about the Fantasia audience, before the Fantasia screening, really spoke to me.
7/16: Fragment
The festival pulled a fast one on me this year, adding a day to the front end. Arriving at the bus depot just after 5 o’clock, I made it first to my hotel, then to the accreditation office around 6:15: just in time to wander into Kim Sung-yoon’s directorial debut. Fragment is a well-acted drama about grief and culpability. A little disjointed at the start (as could well be appropriate, considering the topic and title), it finds its footing as the characters creep toward a reconciliation of sorts with their circumstances. The young leads are all commendable, with a special shout-out to the kid sister. She suffers no nonsense. Fragment is not a film made for me, but nonetheless I must admit it left me touched. (A good touch, that is.)
7/17: The Wailing [El llanto]
Pedro Martín-Calero, you fiend! There is a great deal to enjoy about this story of the supernatural: an evil presence (creepy old dead guy, from what I could glean) has haunted a series of women in a family, moving from mother to daughter when the former succumbs to despair. This is something of two movies in one, when I feel it should have been three. The chronicles of the characters are all well paced, and the scares are real. (The hook here is: this entity can only be seen through video capture, be that the large camcorder of the mother as a youth, or the ubiquitous smartphones of the latest victim.) Sound design is dead on, with the titular wailing emanating from a tower block whose second story room is always up for sale. The mood is set, details established, and then, BAM: it’s over.
I suppose there are greater sins in filmmaking than leaving me all too curious how this occult situation is resolved.
7/18: “Nyaight of the Living Cat”, Episodes 1 – 4
Tomohiro Kamitani and Takashi Miike, judging from their specially recorded video introduction for the Fantasia screening, are two chill middle-aged guys with a love for cats. Or at least a love of global apocalypses involving cats. Although, perhaps the feline menace is safely contained in Japan; it’s not clear, and it doesn’t matter. What does matter are the cats, and the harried survivors fleeing from their cute, friendly swarmings. A stoic martial artist, a cocky muscleman, and a no-nonsense café manager are all on the run from the cutest horde imaginable. “Nyaight” combines fluff-fanatical ridiculousness with all the best tropes of contemporary zombie apocalypse films and TV series, resulting in an often hilarious, often tense, pleasingly dissonant survival yarn. (Oops, shouldn’t have said “yarn”; cats may be nearby.) Once the first season of this romp is wrapped up, it merits a further look from the 366 team.
7/19: Anime no Bento (Anthology)
“Loca!” – dir. by Yuta Uchiya and Ion Miyamoto
spiral-spin leg run / two girls travel green ruins / choo-choo to the screen
“Dreaming of a Whale” – dir. by Shuzuku
verse through wave signal / awed pursuit by girl and dog / in lighthouse, alone
“Mamiko’s Poop” – dir. by Yasuteru Ohno
revenge by thunder / line and music swell and roar / so short, astounding
“Dungeons & Television” – dir. by Junchukan Bonta
newscaster heroes / sword and sorcery and news / more dragons, after this!
“Redman” – dir. by Kim Sung-jae
super-man, tough break / who is killing off the team? / humdrum, bleak, and strange
“Beyond the Trail” – dir. by Ryusei Hasegawa
spiffy body morph / Wehrmacht imagery abounds / oh yeah, “Rommel”, too
Cielo
The Fantasia blurb for this film describes the young main character as “plucky,” a word that now, it seems, can stretch to include someone who commits a double homicide. Don’t misunderstand me: Alberto Sciamma’s film is a charming delight, and the lead actress (seven years old at the time, I believe) is a pleasant wonder to behold. It’s just that death is a bit different here, and Cielo is a bit different, too. Just shy of candidate status, events kick off with little girl heading to the sea, with her fish-friend in a bucket (to keep the fish contained somewhere just above her belly), and her dead mother—salted, mind you—in a forty-gallon drum on the back of her cart. She then trades two sacks of potatoes and some blankets to a nearby priest for his truck, which she then drives off into the desert.
Fans of The Fall, or other hyper-magic-realism features, will love this one. The shots of Bolivian hinterlands are a beauty; even the mountain-pass highway carved out of the sheer rock. (Be wary, vertigo sufferers.) The macabre and the vivacious mingle, and redemption is heartily dosed with down-to-earth comedy.
7/20: Bullet in the Head
John Woo’s favorite John Woo movie, Bullet in the Head has much to recommend it—despite occasionally sliding into an odd double-whammy of datedness. Released in 1990, there is more than a little “late ’80s” feel to the tone, pacing, and sheen during the nostalgia moments, further dated within this context as imaginings of… 1960s era Hong Kong. But! (and this is a big but, I cannot lie), when the focus lands on the dangerous adventures of the three friends as they attempt to make their name and fortune in Saigon during the Vietnam War, Woo does not disappoint. (Not that he ever does otherwise anyway, but particularly not here.)
The bullet-fueled takedown of a local crime baron, via heavy gunnery and TNT cigars, is a delight. The lead friend’s “I Can Make You Happy!” ravings to the Viet Cong officers who force him to execute the other prisoners is still seared in my memory. And the finale, overblown in true, glorious Asian action revenge style, cranks the symbolism to just beyond excessive, making that final bullet to the head one of the most poignant exclamation marks I’ve seen on the big screen.
I Am Frankelda (Soy Frankelda)
Never thought I’d love some opera-stylings in my stop-motion dark fantasy, but you learn something new with every movie. Los Hermanos Ambriz, Roy and Arturo, must have learnt a lot, as Soy Frankelda is their first stop-motion feature; Mexico’s, too. And this one is a doozy. Obviously inspired by Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, but the Ambriz brothers very much tell their own story here: a story about the power and importance of story crafting, storytelling, and, of course, the imagination.
Frankelda is bound by a strait-laced, 19th-century society; but she just wants to write spooky stories. Herneval, the young prince of the Nightmare realm (and, importantly, also a character found in one of Frankelda’s earliest tales), needs a new Court Nightmarer to inspire the fear needed to keep his kingdom, and parents, alive. Seven clans conspire, and civil war percolates—culminating in an operatic battle of grandly sinister proportions.
Fun for kids, fun for the whole family. Soy Frankelda charms the eye and ear from spooky book start to spooky book finale.
7/21: Honeko Akabane’s Bodyguards
Dear Junichi Ishikawa, why does Honeko Akabane need almost two dozen of these? Perhaps if I read the manga source material, I’d know; but then again, perhaps not. It’s one of those mysteries that I’m content to leave aside. For whatever reason, Honeko Akabane has twenty two bodyguards, and then another one: “bad boy transfer student” Arakuni Ibuki. The original team—or at least those performing them—are perfectly over the top as the twenty one specialists (bubbly-smiles Torturer, vaguely nutso Gambler, super shy Disguisor, and so on) led by their card carrying leader. The new guy, alas, felt a little too much. Then again, this is a Japanese adaptation of a fun-time, ridiculous manga. Good action, good pacing, and in my head canon, a disregarded former-MI6-agent sister does end up with Ibuki, with Akabane and her best friend becoming something more.
7/22: Redux Redux
If you had a multiverse traveling machine (and one you could control, unlike the hapless team from Sliders), what better way to use it than to murder hundreds of iterations of the slimeball who murdered your daughter? That’s a decent enough reason, I guess, and certainly more than a decent enough plot-frame for Matthew and Kevin McManus to drape their character study on. It’s about a grief-stricken mother and the abused girl she encounters during one of her many executions of her nemesis. The relationship between this pair is what’s interesting here, as are the compromises required by each to change their life’s trajectory from one of barely surviving into actually overcoming the hold that the serial killer has on them. Played to a packed house, and rightfully so.