scifi

Fantasia International Film Festival 2010

by James McNally on July 15, 2010 · 1 comment

in Film Festivals

Fantasia International Film Festival 2010

Running from July 8–28, Montréal’s Fantasia International Film Festival is argu­ably North America’s biggest and best genre film fest­ival. Stretching over nearly three weeks, it’s an extremely tan­tal­izing pro­pos­i­tion for this film lover to embark on a weekend road trip, but unfor­tu­nately, it’s rather unlikely this year. It’s become even more tempting after I received the hefty cata­logue in the mail yes­terday. As always, the fest­ival has included a DVD packed with more than three hours (!!) of trailers for films screening at the fest­ival. And yes, I’ve watched the whole thing already.

The good news is that friends from some Toronto fest­ivals like Reel Asian and After Dark are attending, and will be scouting for gems to bring to Toronto in the next few weeks and months. If they’re reading, here are some for the wish list:

  • 1 (Hungary, Director: Pater Sparrow): A sci-fi film remin­is­cent of the work of Jose Saramago (Blindness). A bookstore’s books sud­denly all trans­form into a book called 1, filled with random-seeming stat­istics. As sci­ent­ists race to decrypt the book’s meaning, the store’s employees are con­fined to a mental hos­pital. Sounds com­pletely unique.
  • Chernaya Molniya (Black Lightning) (Russia, Directors: Alexandr Voytinskiy and Dmitriy Kiselev): A super­hero film about a young man with a flying car. This looks better than some­thing like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice though I expect it will have a pretty sim­ilar plot and char­acter arc. And the car’s a Soviet-era Volga, so that’s awe­some, right?
  • First Squad: The Moment of Truth (Russia/Japan, Director: Yoshiharu Ashino): Anime based on a World War II battle between the Soviet 6th Army and the German Ahnenerbe, a secret occult divi­sion of the SS. Undead sol­diers on both sides fight each other to the, er, well? Some alternate his­tory ele­ments make this inter­esting, and appar­ently the Ahnenerbe really existed.
  • Golden Slumber (Japan, Director: Yoshihiro Nakamura): From the dir­ector who brought us Fish Story (a hit at last year’s Reel Asian fest­ival, another story of inter­secting lives and actions. This time, a “chance” meeting with an old col­lege friend leads to a man’s unwit­ting involve­ment in an act of polit­ical terrorism.
  • Rubber (France, Director: Quentin Dupieux): A satir­ical horror film about a mur­derous tire. Enough said.
  • Sawako Decides (Japan, Director: Yuya Ishii): A coming-of-age-in-the-countryside film that the Fantasia cata­logue also describes as “a grim feel­good movie.”
  • Secret Reunion (South Korea, Director: Jang Hun): A sort of espi­onage buddy-cop movie with Song Kang-ho (The Host, Secret Sunshine, Thirst) as an older agent trying to catch a North Korean spy. From the dir­ector of last year’s excel­lent Rough Cut.
  • Tears for Sale (Director’s Cut) (Serbia, Director: Uroš Stojanovic): I reviewed this when it played at TIFF in 2008, but it’s never appeared on DVD, and now Fantasia is showing an extended director’s cut with 14 addi­tional minutes of eye-popping visuals. I’d love to intro­duce more people to this one-of-a-kind film.
  • Technotise: Edit & I (Serbia, Director: Aleksa Gajic): Cyberpunk anime from Serbia, about an indes­truct­ible young woman. Yes please!

If you do have the oppor­tunity to be in Montréal this month, don’t miss Fantasia. Though the city is wel­coming and beau­tiful, treas­ures await you in its darkened cinemas.

Tagged as: #fantasia2010, fantasia, genre, horror, Montréal, scifi

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Sci-Fi Shorts: Out There

by James McNally on June 10, 2010 · 2 comments

in Film Festivals

Vostok Station

Always one of my favourite pro­grams at the Worldwide Short Film Fest, the sci-fi shorts this year were also very strong, and less “retro-kitsch” than last year’s. Nice to see entries from such sci-fi hot­spots as New Zealand and Africa too!

  • Defoe (9 minutes, UK, Director: Ross Neil): An astro­naut crash lands on an inhos­pit­able planet in this visu­ally arresting film. It’s not a new idea, and the short ends abruptly, but great use of makeup and effects. (Official site) (7/10)
  • Schizofredric (15 minutes, UK, Director: Andy Poyiadgi): A nerdy slob signs up for a self-improvement course that involves a worm­hole in his house. Breaks some of the con­ven­tions of cine­ma­to­graphy while hewing care­fully to the con­ven­tions of comedy shorts. (Facebook page) (7/10)
  • Fard (13 minutes, France, Director: David Alapont and Luis Briceno) The only anim­ated film in the bunch, this approx­im­ates the look of a shaky hand­held camera, and the reason soon becomes apparent. Oscar is a drone in a highly regi­mented society. His life is pre­dict­able until a friend asks him to hide a strange package. Though the dysto­pian storyline isn’t new, the con­tents of the package pushed the film into sur­prising and tech­nic­ally impressive ter­ritory. (Watch the whole film on Twitch’s site) (9/10)
  • Vostok Station (8 minutes, New Zealand, Director: Dylan Pharazyn) At an Antarctic research sta­tion, an injured man stumbles from a ter­rible dis­aster before being trans­fixed by a beau­tiful vision. What does it mean? The unusual set­ting and imagery really add to the sense of mys­tery in this short. (Watch an excerpt on YouTube) (8/10)
  • ?E?ANX (The Cave) (11 minutes, Canada, Director: Helen Haig-Brown) Based on a tale from the Tsilhqot’in people, this film adds a sci-fi ele­ment to the story of a bear hunter who crawls into a remote cave and finds a portal to the after­life. Beautifully-shot but fairly straight­for­ward. (7/10)
  • Pumzi (23 minutes, South Africa/Kenya, Director: Wanuri Kahiu) It’s 35 years after the “Water War” and Asha works at the Virtual Museum of Natural History some­where in Africa. It’s a self-contained society where all mois­ture (even urine and sweat) is recycled. One day she receives a mys­ter­ious soil sample from an unknown source. It’s high in water con­tent and free from radi­ation, but when she asks to go and invest­igate its source, she’s denied per­mis­sion to go out­side. Undaunted, she escapes in order to plant a tree. Strong art dir­ec­tion, but the ending is more lyr­ical and dream­like than real­istic, leaving the source of the soil a mys­tery. This helps rein­force the film’s envir­on­mental mes­sage, but left me a bit frus­trated. (Official site) (7/10)

Tagged as: #wsff10, scifi, shorts

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The People vs. George Lucas

by Drew Kerr on May 6, 2010

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

The People vs. George Lucas

The People vs. George Lucas (Director: Alexandre O. Philippe): The concept of The People vs. George Lucas is suc­cinctly summed up in its title, presenting the case of the con­ten­tious rela­tion­ship that has formed over the past decade or so between the Star Wars cre­ator and his numerous ali­en­ating mis­steps with the fran­chise, and said franchise’s diehard fans. Lucas apo­lo­gists get into the mix as well, but for the most part it’s the pissed off fan­boys who are granted the most screen time.

The film­makers launched a web­site in 2007 asking for input from the public on the topic, which garnered over 600 hours of raw footage from 700+ sub­mis­sions. The wealth of material involved webcam rants, stop motion movies and skits, draw­ings, com­puter anim­a­tion, and “fan edits” (where someone re-edits one of the movies in the Star Wars series to their own liking). Director Alexandre Philippe refers to the fin­ished product as “a fully par­ti­cip­atory doc­u­mentary”. A handful of not­able fig­ures from the Star Wars uni­verse (including Lucas bio­grapher Dale Pollock and Lucas’ former pro­du­cing partner Gary Kurtz) are also inter­viewed, providing a nice coun­ter­bal­ance to the occa­sion­ally over-enthusiastic view­points from the rabid fans (are these people still arguing about whether Greedo shot first?). One of the most inter­esting inter­views in the film is with dir­ector Francis Ford Coppola, who does little to sug­ar­coat his belief that Lucas squandered his talent by suc­cumbing to the dark side of fran­chise and mer­chand­ising riches. Like many, I thought the newer pre­quel tri­logy was stun­ningly bad and even his involve­ment (as a co-writer and exec­utive pro­ducer) in the recent dis­ap­pointing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull film did Lucas no favours. When you stop to think about it, it truly is mys­ti­fying how someone with the vision and cre­ativity he once pos­sessed can manage to lose it so emphatically.

Lucas’ ques­tion­able fran­chise decisions provide ample fodder for dis­gruntled fans to voice their dis­sent and it’s hard to defend him on most of them. A clip shows the dir­ector testi­fying before Congress about the dangers and artistic crimin­ality of col­our­izing black and white films, yet he had no prob­lems “tweaking” Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi for their own “spe­cial edi­tions”, adding CGI effects shots and restoring the ori­ginal master copies (with the revi­sions added) for a the­at­rical re-release and VHS/DVD transfer. That a cleaned up ver­sion of the ori­ginal movies (without the newer bells and whistles) isn’t avail­able is a major source of con­tro­versy within the fan com­munity. Lucas’ com­pany, Lucasfilm, even refuses to rent old prints of the ori­ginals to theatres who want to do ret­ro­spect­ives. This, and some related issues that are covered fall under the umbrella of one com­pel­ling ques­tion: how do you measure the rights of someone who cre­ated a cer­tain piece of art versus the audience’s rights to that art? Especially when it’s some­thing as big as the Star Wars phe­nomenon? The ques­tion doesn’t get a nice, tidy answer in the film, which is okay, since that’s not what The People vs. George Lucas set out to do. What isn’t okay is the repet­itive nature of the inter­views, which tends to recycle sim­ilar view­points from dif­ferent interviewees.

One need not be a Star Wars geek to appre­ciate the doc­u­mentary — I’m cer­tainly not, though all of the films from the ori­ginal tri­logy still rank among my favourite movies. Even if you’re not a fan, there’s no escaping the respect due to a cul­tural piece that has so unpre­ced­en­tedly man­aged to tran­scend its ori­ginal form and take on a life of its own. The film ably cap­tures this aspect of the Star Wars sub­cul­ture, but fails to provide a sus­tained, grip­ping piece on its tit­ular topic, which feels well past its due date at this point. The Phantom Menace, the first movie in the pre­quel tri­logy, came out more than 11 years ago and the last, Revenge of the Sith, was released in 2005. Anyone who has seen all six movies in the series has no doubt already had a con­ver­sa­tion or debate about aspects of this topic with their friends a long, long time ago.

Official site of the film

5/10(5/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs10, fans, scifi

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The Man Who Fell to Earth

by James McNally on January 7, 2010

in DVD,Snapshots

The Man Who Fell to Earth
Editor’s Note: I’m gradu­ally fig­uring out that my Snapshots cat­egory is for films which baffle me a little but whose visual or other ele­ments won’t leave me alone. I’d char­ac­terize myself as someone who’s much more com­fort­able talking about plot and char­acter than about, well, any­thing else to do with film. So please indulge me.

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Director: Nicolas Roeg): It really doesn’t sur­prise me a bit that this film baffled the critics upon its release. Perhaps the pres­ence of David Bowie in his first film role led them to believe it would be a musical. Or per­haps they expected a straight-up sci-fi film like some others from that era (Logan’s Run, Rollerball). What they got instead is some­thing like a sci-fi western satire, which of course makes no sense at all. It didn’t help that in the US, twenty minutes of cru­cial footage was excised.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Roeg wasn’t at all wor­ried about working with a non-actor like Bowie, having worked with Mick Jagger in Performance a few years earlier. He knew that rock stars like Jagger and Bowie were per­formers, able to inhabit a per­sona just as skil­fully as any actor. And Bowie’s per­form­ance is fine; he’s able to har­ness his phys­ical cha­risma per­fectly playing a cipher onto which the other char­ac­ters pro­ject their own needs.

The film still baffles today, even as it dazzles with some great visuals. The closest I can come to unlocking some its meaning is to say that it’s the story of an alien becoming human. Bowie plays “Thomas Jerome Newton,” a vis­itor from a planet which is dying from drought. His mis­sion is to find water and return with it to his planet. But he quickly becomes cor­rupted by his con­tacts with people and ends up secluded in a huge apart­ment like Howard Hughes. At the begin­ning of the film, his alien intel­li­gence allows him to register some unique pat­ents and form a com­pany that becomes incred­ibly suc­cessful. But his wealth leads those closest to him to betrayal, and the gov­ern­ment, sus­pi­cious of his company’s suc­cess, des­troys his busi­ness, con­fines him and car­ries out med­ical exper­i­ments to see what makes him dif­ferent. There is a mish­mash of ideas at work in the film, but at root it’s the story of an inno­cent cor­rupted by exposure to the venality of human society.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Man Who Fell to Earth

His rela­tion­ships are formed with other out­siders, who are drawn to his vul­ner­ab­ility as well as to his intel­li­gence, wealth or influ­ence. Mary Lou (Candy Clark) falls in love with him, and uses him to escape her life as a hotel maid with a booze problem. When he reveals his true self to her in a mem­or­able scene, she is unable to bear it. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), a col­lege pro­fessor with a weak­ness for co-eds, devotes his life to sci­entific research for Newton. He’s the only one who really guesses Newton’s secret, and he vows to help him develop the tech­no­logy needed to get him back home. And Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry), the man to whom Newton entrusts his com­pany, is a gay man in the 1970s, when dis­crim­in­a­tion would have been much worse than it is now. But each of these trusted con­fid­antes betrays him in one way or another, because of lust, greed, or a desire for power.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Man Who Fell to Earth

At the end, he doesn’t even seem to mind so much. “We’d have prob­ably treated you the same if you’d come over to our place,” he tells Bryce when asked if he’s bitter. The angelic being intro­duced at the begin­ning of the film has become as jaded and cyn­ical as the rest of us. The Man Who Fell to Earth is a strange, sad and haunting thing.

Note: The stills are from the standard-def DVD. The Blu-Ray from Criterion looks very nice indeed, and if you have the option, I’d recom­mend the Blu-Ray unreservedly.

The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Man Who Fell to Earth

A few other tid­bits about the film:

  • The last still above, of Brueghel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is an important touch­stone, as is W.H. Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts which com­ments on it. Both pieces emphasize that Icarus’ fall was pretty much ignored by the rest of the world. Newton’s plight is sim­il­arly smothered by the world; first by its curi­osity, then by its sus­pi­cion and finally by its indifference.
  • Bowie did record some music for the film but it wasn’t used. It ended up as Side 2 of his album Low (1977)
  • Bowie also used the interior of the space travel set (in the fourth still above) for the cover of his album Station to Station (1976)

Essay by Graham Fuller on the Criterion website

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: blu-ray, criterion, scifi

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Toronto After Dark Fest Opens Friday

by James McNally on August 11, 2009

in After Dark,Film Festivals

Post image for Toronto After Dark Fest Opens Friday

Wow. When the Toronto After Dark Film Festival decided to move from October to August, I never real­ized how quickly it would come up again. But even though I’ve been spending most of my time thinking about TIFF lately, I’m still plan­ning to see a bunch of great genre cinema over the next week. Here’s my tent­ative schedule:

Dead Snow

All screen­ings are at the Bloor Cinema (Bathurst subway stop) and indi­vidual tickets are usu­ally $10 in advance, $12 at the door. It’s good to see that all the fest­ival VIP passes sold out again this year, so the Bloor should be rocking at every screening with some of the most enthu­si­astic audi­ences at any fest I’ve attended.

Black Dynamite

Tagged as: #afterdark09, blaxploitation, horror, scifi

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