Steven Kostanski in person provides impressive contrast to his creations. Starting his career in make-up and prosthetics, Kostanski has dabbled in animation and, indeed, most of filmmaking’s many avenues. The day after the world premier of the bombastic chuckle-fest, Frankie Freako, he was good enough to have a quiet and informative chat with 366. Tune in for comedy advice, back-story, and an HO gauge-drop from the interviewer.
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Montréal 2024
Testing has confirmed that my Fantasia press badge does not, in fact, open up my hotel room door.
8/1: “Lantern Blade”; Episodes 1-3
Stop-motion? Wuxia? Eldritch? Yes, yes, and, oh yes. Ziqi Zhu and his team at Tianjin Niceboat Animation tell a fast-paced story with action, comedy, and mystery. Powerful factions collide in pursuit of an ancient force and the power it holds. An undead Samurai protects a catalyst for peace or destruction, embodied by the Bride who somehow survived her wedding massacre. Also enter: the Hoof gang; a trio of specialized warriors under the command of an unlikely leader; and a mysterious stone carver, hiding in a ramshackle temple. Ziqi Zhu demonstrates a clear sense of action in the many fight-scenes-in-
miniature. Recommended for any lover of genres listed above.
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
One of the more violence-filled of the many violence pictures I’ve enjoyed over the festival, Soi Cheang’s Twilight Warriors takes advantage of its locale for many compelling martial arts set-pieces. The action unfolds in Kowloon Walled City, a derelict cluster of city blocks ungoverned by the municipal authority. Instead, it is the turf of master fighter—and capable barber—Cyclone, who oversees this sanctuary of sorts after winning control during a gang war some decades prior. The uneasy peace between the Walled City and a rival gang (headed, of course, by “Mr. Big”) begins to rupture when an illegal migrant seeks refuge within its walls after a boxing match gone sour. There are so many breath-taking fights to witness, with an upward trajectory of epic intensity. That makes sense, though, as Twilight of the Warriors is not only a story of legends, but features a number of Hong Kong’s silver-screen legends of the genre.
8/2: Azrael
E.L. Katz, you very nearly lost me. Thank goodness Azrael ended on a cute & horrible reveal after an hour and a half of action that managed to be both interesting and a bit tedious. Azrael Continue reading 2024 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: AND THE REST, PART TWO & ONE-HALF
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DIRECTED BY: Nick Johnson
FEATURING: The voices of Diana Kaarina, Kathleen Barr, Laara Sadiq, Brian Drummond, Tabitha St. Germain
PLOT: After a car crash, teenager Frankie searches the desert for his father, who has been abducted by the Cactus King.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: An unlikely candidate, Sunburnt Unicorn is, objectively, a children’s adventure ‘toon with broad humor and a simple structure. However, it is also objectively a movie about a kid wandering the desert with a glass shard sticking out from his forehead being guided by a tortoise whose rear half has been crushed by a car.
COMMENTS: Every festival, I make it a point to see as many cartoons as scheduling allows. This is not just because I enjoy bright colors and moving objects (that said, I do much enjoy bright colors and moving objects), but also because I’m on the hunt for weird movies with a broader age appeal than, say, El Topo, Tetsuo: the Iron Man, or The Devils. So it is with a missionary’s—or pusher’s—”get ’em while they’re young” zeal that I seek out kid-friendly weirdo cinema. Nick Johnson’s Sunburnt Unicorn is just such a film, appealing to, judging from the audience, middle-schoolers and middle-aged reviewers alike.
First, the wholesome part. Frankie is on a road trip with his dad, who has insisted the pair of them visit the engineering college that the patriarch (and patriarch’s patriarch) graduated from—no doubt with honors. Frankie, aged somewhere in his early teens, wants nothing to do with this serious, analytical nonsense, and instead wants to pursue a career in writing. The two argue under the withering glow of the hot sun and the uninterested gaze of a insect-seeking lizard. Brakes peal, then smashcrackbang, and so begins Frankie’s exposure to the outdoors, where he undergoes challenges, earns opportunities for growth, and shares humorous banter with various animals, in particular a helpful tortoise who witnesses the car crash.
Now, the weird part. This tortoise witnessed the accident because it risked crossing the desert road, and paid for it by losing the back half of its body. From the moment we meet it, Tortoise moves, observes, and pontificates with good-natured wisdom; all the while, its jelly-pink organs dangle from its behind. During stretches of travel and talk you forget this strange state of affairs, only to be smirkfully reminded by a change of the camera angle. The reason this tortoise, and many other animals—including a trio of, heh heh, self-sacrificing desert fox cubs—aid Frankie is that every animal-jack of them believes him to be a unicorn. If memory serves, the first time we see the boy is after the crash, and a glorious, jagged shard of cracked windscreen thrusts nobly from his forehead throughout. It has its effects, and even a super power. Though it pains him greatly, he can flick it to emit a resonant and useful twing.
And so, sitting there in a cinema, having nabbed this strange beast, I was swept away by the easy flow, quality lessons, and omnipresent grisliness whenever it caught my attention that Sunburnt Unicorn tells the story of two critically injured creatures. This is by no means the weirdest thing under the sun, and there are “family friendlier” films out there, but I am delighted to have experienced Johnson’s fun little ‘toon; it hits a cozy point where conflicting genres intersect.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
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Montréal 2024
I have taken so much complimentary coffee from the drinks stand in the lobby that I’ve grown somewhat furtive about it.
7/25: Rita
It’s impossible to deny the power found in Jayro Bustamante’s follow-up to his prior Fantasia feature, Piggy. The story, based upon a real-life incident that remains unresolved, concerns a 13-year-old girl who finds herself a ward of the state after running away from an abusive father. On the inside, she encounters various themed gangs—angels, fairies, bunnies, stars, and a fifth, more feral group whose nature eludes me—and is quickly taken under wing of the dominant Angels. Each of these form a function, both narratively and visually, and it is with them that Bustamante attempts to paint a fantastical veneer on a horrible set of circumstances. Unfortunately, he hedges his bets: Rita would have been more powerful as a realistic portrayal of the reasons and conditions of this prison; alternatively, it is not nearly wondrous enough, with the hints at fairy-tale trappings (the crone of a social worker makes for a perfect evil witch, and the pixie-dust powers of the Faery gang are a delight to witness) not coloring the underlying bleakness to any great degree. Still, it has some great set-pieces, as well as convincing performances from the few hundred girls cast from around Guatemala. Uneven, but recommended with reservations.
This Man
Dream Scenario meets J-horror in a fast-moving fusion of romance, comedy, frights, and existential philosophizing. Tomojiro Amano pivots around these loci with a story about a centuries-dead dark wizard seeking vengeance on humanity by appearing in dreams, dooming the dreamer. Deaths pile up, both squicky and hilarious (sometimes both), as two affable cops try to get to the bottom of the mystery (the senior of the pair always says, “It could just be a coincidence”; it’s assuredly not a coincidence). The story focuses on a young mother who consults a freelance sorcerer—he left his group because he disapproved of some of their activities—which results first in the tragic death of her daughter (which is also kind of hilarious), and culminates in the most action-packed-yet-action-bereft supernatural showdown I’ve seen. Bravo for thrash-industrial mystic mummery.
7/26: The Silent Planet
I’m always happy to observe areas of Earth that don’t look like they belong on this planet. Wherever Jeffrey St. Jules filmed this Continue reading 2024 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: AND THE REST, PART TWO
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DIRECTED BY: Tilman Singer
FEATURING: Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Jan Bluthardt, Mila Lieu
PLOT: Her family’s relocation to an alpine resort induces Gretchen to boredom—then terror—as strange sights and sounds crescendo in the woods.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: “Well, that’s definitely an Apocrypha candidate, if I may say so!” — Nina Martin, festival-attendee and film scholar.
COMMENTS: Tilman Singer, mein guter Herr, it has been too long. Six years, in fact, since I had the pleasure of catching his feature debut Luz at Fantasia. For Cuckoo, Singer was upgraded to the big auditorium, and the film played for an enthusiastic crowd, without an empty seat in the house. His sophomore effort is an exciting work, but one with something uncomfortable hanging over it.
There is discomfort in the story, naturally. Young Gretchen (an amazing Hunter Schafer) places the viewer squarely in her corner: late-teenage years are bad enough without having to move to some 1970s alpine resort throw-back with your architect father, his new wife, and a new half-sister. Worse still, the hotel owner falls squarely (and immediately) into that creepy-civility found so often in the genre, shticking from the get-go with his archaic-Euro-hipster duds and closely cropped beard. Herr Koenig (Dan Stevens) hits all the right notes for a man that is obviously up to something sinister, but whose words and tone are taken at face value by easily-impressed adults.
This sinister is hinted at in the opening scene, even before the resort, and has much to do with sound. Sound was clearly important in Luz, and here Singer goes all-out with the foley design, bringing door slams into sharp prominence from silence, alternating music-slathered muffles in headphones with the stripped acoustics of the surroundings, and most impressively, accompanying the high shriek of the resort’s woodland entities with a deadly thump of bass, disorienting the listener to the point where time itself skips and loops. As a delightful bonus, Luz veteran Jan Bluthardt plays a detective in Cuckoo: the only character who knows what is going on who is not also a part of the conspiracy.
The “uncomfortable thing” must be addressed, though. As Cuckoo is a much larger production than Luz, it involved compromises with its financial backers. The film’s first half feels like untethered Singer, as disorientation and disquieting mystery are stacked high and unwieldy. (Delightfully so, I should clarify.) The second half, for better or worse, feels like an exercise in tying things together in something of a sensible manner. Various parties I’ve conferred with regret this anchoring, and I largely concede their point: as a general rule, I want a filmmaker to go as full-tilt as their imagination and ability can take them. But I consider Cuckoo‘s conclusion more than capable, and sufficiently saturated with Singer’s sorcery. Gretchen’s alpine ordeal is alive with the sound of mayhem.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: