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2019 Fantasia International Film Festival final wrap-up and recommendations:
Seek
Somehow I managed to catch sixty-four screenings for a total of sixty-three new movies. You may recall that I watched one film, Koko-di, Koko-da, twice, and that suggests it’s my top recommendation. It was the most talked-about movie among my crew of fellow reviewers, and it elicited strong reactions on both edges of the hate/love spectrum; I did not come across anyone saying something noncommittal about it. So I give it “First Prize.” Tailing close on its heels is Why Don’t You Just Die! This was met with universal approval among all those with whom I spoke, which is quite a coup considering how extremely violent it is. That it’s also extremely funny is just icing on the blood.
The third place designation is a bit a tougher, so I’ll go easy on myself with a tie between Dreamland—for being most atmospherically weird—and The Gangster, the Cop, and the Devil, as probably the best example of straight-up fun and straight-up badassery. But bear in mind, such parsing is a really tough assignment when looking back on over five dozen movies.
Destroy
The bottom three were a lot easier to decide on, as I had already done so as I came across them. Sadoko set the baseline as an achievement in tedium. Flying in the face of critical and popular consensus, I designate Knives and Skin as the Most Pointlessly Melodramatic Film. I do not agree with the two defenses of the movie: strong feminist agenda (so what? There are plenty of feminist movies that have intelligent characters you can care about) and “capturing an emotional mood.” The emotional mood I found in this movie was one of idiocy. I have lived through the teenage years and knew plenty of people who had real problems. The maudlin sob-story of Knives and Skin fell flat.
Jessica Forever manages to combine the shortcomings of both of the above movies. If it’s an example of “alternative French cinema,” I understand the success of “mainstream French cinema.” Disenchanted, blandly handsome young Frenchmen who get the authorities’ dander up “just because” they go on some killing sprees? I don’t know why that seemed like a good premise.
Personal Summary
I quite enjoyed my previous trips to Fantasia, and this year was no exception. And I’m inclined to feel like I’ve become part of the family there; by the end of the festival, all the staff knew who I was and I got to know many of them myself. I’m hopeful that in future I don’t try to match to my new record film tally, but strongly suspect I won’t be able to help myself. Thanks everyone for reading; cheers.
Congratulations to those of you who’ve figured out what I’ve been up to with each of the omnibus sub-headings.
Notice to the authorities: this actually could qualify as Apocrypha. Nobuhiro Yamashita’s melodrama concerns a pair a brothers: the younger, Sakon, is a successful day trader; the older, Ukon, has fallen from grace and is forced to work for an eccentric millionaire, digging in a hole looking for the legendary “shogun’s gold.” Ukon’s only friend is a simpleton also in the millionaire’s employ—that is, until they stumble across a retro-futuristic robot with a ridiculous face and a quantum processor. What makes this one weird isn’t that they stumble across the robot and wacky things happen; rather, they stumble across the robot, and it just blends in. The incongruousness of its appearance does lead to some funny scenes (the trio going to a karaoke bar was particularly hilarious), but in general the robot ends up more as a witness of the unhappiness around him—save for on two occasions. So yeah, Hard-Core is a moody, darkly funny, drama about men who have trouble relating to the world. And their robot friend.
Gigi Saul Guerrero is such a genuinely fun and adorable person, and knowing she was going to introduce and field questions after Culture Shock was actually the main reason I attended. (That, and last year’s La Quinceañera, which she co-created, was 
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I’ve been mulling over what to say about this movie for close to twenty-four hours and I’ve still got nothing. My fear is, I suppose, that if I started going on about the various misteps, I might not stop, and that would send an inaccurate message about Jennifer Reeder’s earnest, feminist, melodramatic feature debut. Various crummy home lives are explored as we observe a small cross-section of No Name, USA, in this movie about people making decisions of varying degrees of emotional stupidity during the aftermath of a student’s disappearance and death.
And boy did it. And in so coming, my faith in J-Horror was restored. Obviously this is mainstream fare—I wasn’t jumping out of my seat or suffering nightmares afterwards—but it had an unsettling edge to it, characters who evolved, and a really gangbusters finale involving exorcists from all known religions, cracking timbers, and blood-soaked caterpillars. Director Tetsuya Nakashima made what will be looked upon fondly as one of my favorite Christmas movies (yep, things come to head on 12/25), as well as one of my favorite dream sequences, where we can see the rice-omelette visions of a cheerfully sleeping two-year-old girl. I’ll admit it was a bit long-winded, but that allowed for a rare, full dissection of all the characters’ motivations—and while I didn’t find them entirely