For the second year running, I will be spending some time in one of my favourite Canadian cities during the Festival des films du monde. The Montréal World Film Festival, as it is known in English, is celebrating its 34th edition with a wide-ranging program of more than 400 films from 80 countries. The festival takes place from August 26th through September 6th, though I’ll only be there from August 28th through September 1st. Here are some films that are catching my eye so far:
- Pete Smalls Is Dead — starring Peter Dinklage, Tim Roth and Steve Buscemi, and directed by Alexandre Rockwell (In The Soup)
- Wenecza (Venice) — Polish WW2 coming-of-age story about a boy whose dreams of visiting Venice are crushed by the war. Down in the flooded basement of his aunt’s mansion, he’ll bring Venice to life.
- Bjarnfreðarson — based on a popular Icelandic sitcom, title character Georg is a son, a father and a communist megalomaniac with a chronic compulsion to control his environment, yet at the same time unable to control his own life.
- Los caminos de la memoria — doc about the period of the Franco dictatorship in Spain.
- Adem (Oxygen) — two young men with cystic fibrosis form a bond and help each other face the prospect of their early deaths by embracing life.
Best of all, compared to TIFF, this festival is very affordable and easy to navigate. Passports which get you into any film in the festival are just $100 and books of 10 tickets are just $65.
Tagged as:
#mwff10,
Montréal
Phobia 2 (Ha phraeng) (Directors: Banjong Pisanthanakun, Paween Purikitpanya, Songyos Sugmakanan, Parkpoom Wongpoom ): From Thailand comes this omnibus of 5 short horror tales. I never saw the original Phobia (or 4bia as it was cleverly titled in some places), but the idea of a collection of shorter horror stories appeals to me, mostly because I’m a big fraidy-cat and knowing that we’ll be moving on to a new story every 20 minutes or so makes me less afraid.
That being said, it’s a truism that most anthology films are wildly uneven. So part of the overall surprise of Phobia 2 is not only that it’s fresh and innovative, but that each segment is equally fresh and innovative, with very high production values throughout. As a latecomer to the Thai horror scene, I was very pleasantly surprised, but I needn’t have been. The filmmakers are some of the same people who are behind some very polished and popular horror films (Alone, Shutter, and of course, Phobia). Here is a brief summary of each story:
- Novice: a young man is packed off to a rural monastery after a teenaged prank goes horribly wrong. In the forest, he comes upon a shrine where people have made offerings to the “hungry ghost.” Soon he’ll be pursued by the ghost leading him to a true sense of remorse and a terrible tranformation.
- Ward: confined to a hospital bed after a motorcycle accident, Arthit is disturbed to discover that the old man covered in tattoos in the next bed is on life support and the leader of a strange cult. In the morning, his followers will make the decision to pull the plug. Arthit just has to spend a very creepy night next to him.
- Backpackers: Two Japanese tourists are picked up hitchhiking by an old truck driver and his young partner. They soon realize the truck is carrying a terrifying cargo.
- Salvage: Mrs. Nuch runs a used car dealership, but doesn’t tell her customers that all the cars have been rebuilt after being involved in deadly accidents. When her young son goes missing after playing in the lot one night, it seems that she will be forced to confront the tragedies that have fuelled her success.
- In The End: It’s a brilliant decision to end with this very funny segment, a parody of the Thai horror filmmaking business. Filming a sequel to Alone, the film crew are unsettled when the actress playing a heavily made-up ghost become sick and has to go to hospital. When she returns unexpectedly, they don’t know if she’s human or a ghost, especially when the hospital calls to inform them that she has died.
An interesting insight is that in three of the segments, the concept of karma is central to the narrative. These hauntings are never without a reason, and this gives the horror a fatalistic sense of inevitability that is quite effective. I was also quite impressed with the camera work in each segment; in particular, the beginning of Ward where the camera is locked to the wheels of a hospital gurney while the soundtrack features the revving engine of a motorcycle.
I would say that Phobia 2 is a great calling card for these directors, and for Thai horror cinema in general. It’s certainly been successful in getting this horrorphobe to seek out the filmmakers’ other films.
Official site of the film
(8/10)
Tagged as:
#afterdark10,
horror,
thailand
High School (Director: John Stalberg): I’m happy when a genre festival like Toronto After Dark decides to colour outside the lines a bit and bring in something that’s not specifically a horror, science-fiction, or martial arts film. Not that “stoner comedy” hasn’t become a genre unto itself, but sometimes it’s good to reach the non-horror crowd. So I was excited to see High School, (somewhat) fresh from its screenings at Sundance. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a dud.
When Henry, the smartest kid at his high school, decides to smoke a joint for the first time with his onetime childhood pal Travis, he has no idea that fascist principal Gordon is about to introduce mandatory drug testing for all students, THE VERY NEXT DAY! When he finds out, he and stoner Travis decide that the only way to avoid failing the test is to make everyone at the whole school high. It’s an excellent coincidence that the school is having its extremely popular bake sale, also THE VERY NEXT DAY! They just have to steal some very potent flakes of concentrated THC from the most psycho pot dealer in the world, bake hundreds of brownies, and then switch them with the regular brownies. No problem for the smartest kid in the school and his new friend. Along the way, there’ll also be some male bonding and Henry will win the girl of his dreams and still get to be valedictorian.
Maybe I’m just old. I know these films aren’t supposed to make any sense. And yet, this one rubbed me the wrong way almost from the beginning. Our buddies bore an uncanny resemblance to Michael Cera and Jonah Hill in Superbad, a film I liked quite a bit, despite the similarly unrealistic plot and emotional bonding between two high school seniors going in different directions. The difference is in the writing. Every attempt at relationship-building in the film felt completely tacked on to the madcap action. I can almost see the writer cutting-and-pasting this stuff into the script in a late draft. And apart from Matt Bush as Henry, everyone else’s performance is wildly over-the-top, which is fine in the case of Michael Chiklis playing the evil principal, or Adrien Brody chewing the scenery as Psycho Ed the dealer. But I found the character of Travis Breaux (get it, bro?) and the actor playing him (Sean Marquette) to be insufferably smug. He represents the self-satisfaction of this film, which thinks it’s being edgy but is just charging off in all directions.
I found the treatment of female characters to be particularly poor, bordering on offensive. One of those is an Asian-American whose only function in the film is to provide the filmmakers a way to make repeated bad puns on her last name (Phuc, get it, bro?). The love object has precisely one line, and a number of other women in the film exist only to be ogled, fondled or harassed. This might have been okay in the 80s, but it feels dated and unfunny now.
Worst of all, for a stoner comedy, it actually makes getting high look like the worst thing in the world. Slowing down the audio to make people’s voices sound weird to the stoned isn’t that funny the first time. It’s certainly not funny the third or fourth time, either. Several characters hallucinate and become paranoid after smoking pot, and one decides to ride his skateboard off a ramp into the cafeteria on the next floor down, injuring himself in the process. You might as well have had someone thinking they could fly and jumping off the roof.
There are some very good stoner comedies out there (Harold and Kumar, for a start) so there isn’t any need to see bad ones, no matter how high you are. If this film was trying to be Superbad with weed, it just turned out to be super bad.
(5/10)
Tagged as:
#afterdark10,
stoners
Andrew James is one of the co-directors of Cleanflix (review), an interesting exploration of copyright issues in the context of Mormon culture. I had the good fortune of meeting Andrew and co-director Josh Ligairi at TIFF last year and conducted what I think was a pretty good interview.
Since then, I’ve kept track of their separate projects, and was excited to learn that not only was Andrew working on a new film, but that he was using Kickstarter to help fund it. The brainchild of internet brainiac Andy Baio, Kickstarter is an amazing way for creative professionals to raise funds for their projects by reaching out to their audiences before or during the production process, rather than figuring out a way to reach them afterward. And you’re not donating; rather, you’re pre-buying something, whether it’s just a thank-you note or a DVD of the finished film. It’s beautiful in its simplicity and it’s a joy for me to browse the site regularly, looking for interesting projects to support. Andrew’s is definitely worthy.
Street Fighting Man is a documentary premise that sounds like fiction. In the economically-ravaged landscape of Detroit, a retired cop feels the need to take the law into his own hands after local police abandon his community. Even in the research phase, I think you’ll agree that Andrew has captured some great footage and found a really interesting subject. Check out the teaser trailer and then click on the nifty widget to lend your support.
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kickstarter
Perfume (Director: Tom Tykwer): Based upon the bestselling novel by Patrick Suskind, Perfume certainly sounded intriguing. In 18th-century France, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) is born with a uniquely keen sense of smell. But as the orphaned son of a fishwife, he grows up illiterate and unable to articulate his gift and the overwhelming desire it creates in him to preserve scent, especially the scent of beautiful young women. Before long, he’s become a sociopathic serial killer in his pursuit of the perfect perfume. Tykwer, known for the kinetic and economical thriller Run Lola Run takes the exact opposite approach here, stretching the film out to an excruciating 147 minutes. To make matters worse, Perfume’s episodic structure means that characters introduced early in the film play their parts and then disappear forever (and I’m not just talking about the victims of our serial killer). Worst of all, the film is burdened with a ponderous voiceover, articulating all that Grenouille cannot, and making it clear that this story functioned much better as a book. Having someone offscreen tell us about Grenouille’s inner monologue fails to turn him into a real character, never mind one for whom we’d feel any sympathy.
In contrast to Whishaw’s almost autistic performance as Grenouille, Dustin Hoffman (as an Italian perfumier who teaches Grenouille his art) and Alan Rickman (as a nobleman whose beautiful daughter is a target of the killer) wildly overplay their characters, especially Hoffman. The portrayals of the separate classes in French society is almost cartoonish, with the foppish nobles lounging about in their powdered wigs while Grenouille carries out his grim murders dressed in rags. Their inept pursuit of the killer is played for a kind of comedy that removes us from the horror of the crimes. Perhaps the voiceover contributes as well, distancing us from the time period and from the characters as real people, and allowing us to treat the whole thing as an intellectual curiosity rather than as the confusing (for Grenouille) or horrifying (for the townspeople) situation it would have been in reality.
There are some ravishing visuals, as might be expected from such a sensual story. Each scent that arouses Grenouille’s nose needs to dazzle the audience’s eyes, and regular Tykwer cinematographer Frank Griebe is able to make sight a passable stand in for scent, at least in the early scenes. Near the end of the film, a technically impressive but rather dull orgy scene takes place in a village square, but by that time, the story had entered unbelievable territory and only left me snickering. In the end Perfume’s lingering aroma isn’t a pleasant one.
(6/10)
Tagged as:
basedonthenovel
