Filmmakers help three children to realize their imaginary fairy tale characters; one is a giant clown with a child’s head.
Tag Archives: 2025
2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART THREE
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Montréal 2025
More than once I was quickly impressed by a film’s animation only to discover that I was only watching the production company credits.
7/30: Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo
Crank down the musical score by half, and this would land in a far better place. Tsai Chia Ying attempts something risky here as he aims to fuse deep character emotion with ghostly horror. Chia Ming awakens every morning from an overhead drip. Every morning: this love-struck fellow is stuck in a loop wherein he witnesses the object of his affections die somehow while on a hiking trip taken to search for the remains of a mutual friend lost to the haunted mountains. Major No-No Points are awarded to the original trio, who decide to cut through a rather creepy barrier in the surrounding woods, accidentally disrupting an esoteric ceremony. Very nearly ending badly, the movie upgrades from regrettable to merely “meh” with its final, actual, conclusion.
$Positions
Mike meets his daily struggles with unwavering optimism and friendliness, which is no small feat in face of director Brandon Daley’s ceaseless abuse. Crypto (oh how I loathe you) sinks its talons in our hapless hero, clouding his judgment with every dip and spike. We follow a series of increasingly nasty twists of fate (and concurrent ill-decisions) as Mike’s already crummy life hits rock bottom—making true an early, optimistically-stated declaration that no, he’s “nowhere near the bottom yet!” With polyamory, drug addiction, medical debt, and somewhat more urine consumption than I might have preferred, $Positions is simultaneously icky, wacky, and heartfelt. Special shout-out to leading man Michael Kunick. I passed him after the screening commending his performance as one of the best depictions of Job to hit the screen.
Désolé, Pardon, Je m’excuse
Like many of her generation, office-worker Ella loves Internet videos. Unlike many of her generation (at least, I hope), she loves Internet videos released by a Continue reading 2025 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: TRADITIONAL CUISINE, PART THREE
FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BUFFET INFINITY (2025)
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Buffet Infinity is now available to rent or purchase on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Simon Glassman
FEATURING: Kevin Singh, Claire Theobald, Donovan Workun, Ahmed Ahmed, and the voice of Simon Glassman
PLOT: An all-you-can-eat restaurant competes with neighboring stores at a strip mall as a sinkhole appears, strange noises plague the area, citizens go missing, and an occult presence seeps into the transmission.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: A narrative told through channel-surfing and a combo platter of the ridiculous and the sinister make Buffet Infinity a necessary addition to the Apocrypha menu.
COMMENTS: Westridge County is small, down at the heel, and more than a little boring. The local TV stations showcase a cavalcade of staid businesses: a doggie daycare on the verge of collapse, a pawn shop with a worryingly growing inventory, an insurance broker ready to cover questionable life events, a sandwich shop offering several types of sliced pig along with its signature sauce, a shyster lawyer happy to capitalize on his bitterness, a used car dealership suffering a violent aversion to high prices, and a buffet with suspiciously good deals and no apparent staff. Surfing the area’s TV broadcasts for one-hundred minutes, however, we glean the story of how Westridge County becomes increasingly derelict, dangerous, and decimated.
Simon Glassman is a fellow of who remembers, and, in a way, is nostalgic for a particular broadcast phenomenon which has all but disappeared. His chronicle of Westridge County’s collapse from crummy to cursed cranks true-to-life advertisements and news flashes one further turn on the dial to the absurd. The passive-aggressive war between Buffet Infinity (where something possibly extraterrestrial, and certainly evil, is going on) and Jenny’s Sandwich Shop ratchets up snarkily; though both cheerfully announce the ample parking “in the front”. (The sinkhole growing in the back-lot is the first indication something’s a bit off.) Public service warnings from “The Westridge Society for Religious Freedom” sound typo-ridden alarm bells about an impending supernatural intrusion that will rob the county of its people. But Ahmed Ahmed, the bad-rapping proprietor of the pawn shop, is ready to raise spirits through low prices on goods ranging from sound blockers to personal defense.
Glassman pulls aside the curtains drape by drape, with each surf through the channels unveiling a little more tension and a little more desperation. Glassman remarked during the Q&A session following Buffet Infinity that the film is ultimately just him dumping on a local strip mall. This much is certainly true, but the movie is much more. It dissects quotidian fears and challenges, with a heartier and heartier dose of the surreal, culminating in absurdly large portions of spectacle.
So head on down to Buffet Infinity! Its eighteen-to-twenty staff, each with their own homes and government ID numbers, will serve up platefuls of curious delights in the ever-expanding dining facility.
Just don’t enter the door marked “Prohibited”.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CHAO (2025)
チャオ
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DIRECTED BY: Yasuhiro Aoki
FEATURING: Voices of Ouji Suzuka, Anna Yamada, Ryôta Yamasato, Kenta Miyake, Kavka Shishido
PLOT: Stefan, a mild-mannered company drone with a dream, finds he is the key to peace between landmen and mermen when Neptune’s daughter chooses him to be her husband.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: This collision of Plymptonian flourish and anime fundamentals is an hour and a half of wild lines, vibrant colors, giant heads, small heads, robo-antics, and the pratfalls of a literal fish out of water. Intense. Cute, too.
COMMENTS: In an introduction recorded for the Fantasia screening, director Yasuhiro Aoki tells us to enjoy the fun, and that we should keep an eye on the many little details. It is well to heed his soft-spoken advice: his film is stuffed to the gills with sight gags, throw-away visuals, and plenty of narrative slight of hand. As a conjuring trick—for ChaO is nothing short of magical—this account of Stefan’s strange courtship pays off handsomely for the observant viewer. The wild flow of line and form, not to mention the glorious buffet of colors, builds to a fantastical showdown as the lowly hero bumbles from one awkward challenge to another.
The meet-cute between the lovebirds comes like a bolt out of the blue. (Albeit the ocean blue, not the skies above.) Dreaming of fabricating a marine-friendly ship propulsion system, Stefan faces a hectic journey one morning when alerted, and then attacked, by his roommate’s new robot-alarm invention. Shouted at, and ultimately smacked upside the head by, this assertive electronic, he escapes his tiny apartment, tossing a cool drink to the ever-present, never-working rickshaw driver out front. He’s charged with swabbing the deck of his boss’ ship (“Mr Sea”, a Little Tikes Toddle Tot-proportioned opportunist) and before he knows it, the sea king’s daughter singles him out as her suitor—and all of Shanghai is on board for the courtship.
Framed as a recollection from a burnt-out Stefan talking with an eager reporter, ChaO‘s energy is (barely) contained within its anecdotal form. Highspeed chases with feral reporters, inexplicable animated asides, and the omnipresence of ChaO herself—in glorious-pink koi form, five-foot tall, with golden high-top sneakers and jets of blue water flowing from her gills—make for an experience akin to one’s eyeballs being speedily pulled about by an enthusiastic raconteur. So much craft is packed into its ninety minutes that by the breathless, face-scrunching finale on the high seas as Neptune launches his watery arsenal at the hapless Stefan, some may be relieved that the end is in sight.
ChaO is a marvelous experience, with Yasuhiro Aoki batting the optic nerve with cleverness, cuteness, and confusion. (The infinitely long hospital bed, or the casual heaping of spun lavatory paper as Stefan panics in the men’s room, are among the head-scratching moments that could lead the viewer to a new bald spot.) Being so visual in its nature, I can only hope to convey a fraction of the peculiar charm. The child-friendly nature of this romantic comedy fish tale adds to its appeal, landing ChaO as another of the all-too-few gateway films for young weird-o-philes in development. Like Spirited Away and Ghost Cat Anzu, Yasuhiro’s madcap outing compels a manic grin which lingers well after the closing credits.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: EDDINGTON (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Ari Aster
FEATURING: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Deirdre O’Connell, Cameron Mann, Micheal Ward, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Luke Grimes
PLOT: Spurred by his dislike of mask mandates and by personal animosity, an asthmatic sheriff in the tiny town of Eddington, NM runs for mayor, a decision that leads to a web of lies and violence and brings him into conflict with BLM protesters, antifa, and a pedophile-conspiracy cult.
COMMENTS: Come with Eddington and venture back in time to distant 2020, when a plague encompassed the Earth. Remember people’s noses constantly sliding out of their masks? Lining up to enter grocery stores spaced six feet apart? Conspiracists seizing upon citations of the word “coronavirus” from before 2019 as evidence of a “plandemic”? A swab roughly jammed up your nasal cavity at a drive-through testing clinic? Kids with assault weapons becoming YouTube celebrities? Banners hanging off cars bearing messages like “YOUR BEING MANIPULATED” [sic]? Incoherent anger and incipient violence in the air everywhere? It’s all here, in a cinematic memorial marking the moment America broke.
Eddington pits Joaquin Phoenix, a sheriff who commands little respect from his counterparts at the Pueblo tribal police, the populace at large, or even his own frigid wife, against Pedro Pascal, the incumbent mayor who’s cloyingly conciliatory in public, a hypocrite in private, and in bed with a data-center development, to boot. Phoenix’s impulsive plan to run for mayor against Pascal is the first of many poorly planned decisions. Things are complicated by incestuous love affairs in the town of about 2,000 lost souls. The politics of the wider world impinge on this microcosm in a sometimes humorous way; BLM protesters numbering in the dozens “block” Eddington’s main street, and a campaign rally at a Mexican restaurant draws even fewer folks. Still, although the political stakes are small, the body count will eventually be shockingly high.
Aster’s mockery is broad when it comes to the young privileged white kids too-eagerly radicalized by the Black Lives Matter movement—despite the fact that there is only one African American in this dusty hamlet, and he’s a policeman. The conservatives are treated with a bit more nuance. Sheriff Joe’s reluctance to mask up has a reasonable basis in asthma, and his wife and mother-in-law’s seductions into conspiracy culture are well-founded in mild mental illnesses greatly exacerbated by the stresses of lockdown. Aster makes every fevered scenario he dredges up from those dark days feel as crazy and relatable as it really was. The cast is excellent: Joaquin Phoenix stumbles and follows a gut feeling that always leads him astray, Pedro Pascal plays perhaps his least likable character, melancholy Emma Stone mopes in bed until she finally breaks. And, although it is not a particularly weird movie for most of its running time, the climax gets wild and disorienting, as Aster puts Phoenix through misfortunes and anxieties recalling Beau at his most fearful. No one comes out of this experience unscathed; the survivors all suffer from long Covid.
Had Eddington been made in 2015, it would have played like an outlandish satire in the vein of Southland Tales. Coming in 2025, it seems almost like a story you dimly remember scrolling past on your Instagram feed.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: