Fantastisk Filmfestival, first review post
Now that I have a big screen again, it's time to talk about the FFF movies. I'll make it into three posts - two for features and one for shorts - to make each post a bit shorter.
Starting with the opening film, The Box, I was very eager to see it, for the simple, shallow reason that James Marsden is in it. What's the point of being a fan if I can't make kneejerk choices like that, right?
Having actually seen the film now, I can say that it was probably a pretty good film - but that it pissed me off in too many ways for me to like it.
Part of it is my own fault. In my curiosity, I had looked up the story on wikipedia and learned about the original short story Button Button as well as the Twilight Zone episode. The basic setup is the same in all three stories: Your average husband-and-wife couple are given a mysterious empty box by a strange man. On top of the box there is a button. The man explains that pressing the button will cause two things to happen. One, the couple will get a large sum of money. Two, someone they don't know will die.
In the original story, the husband is run over by the train and the money turns out to be settlement money. The stranger explains to the wife that she never really knew her husband. In the Twilight Zone episode, both husband and wife survive, but the stranger shows up, giving them the money and taking away the box, which is now to be given to "someone you don't know."
From that information, I expected a psychological thriller/drama about making choices, and I was curious to know which of the endings would be chosen, or if there'd be the new one.
Turns out they chose the Twilight Zone ending... except it takes place about 45 minutes into the film, and the rest of what happens makes no goddamned sense whatsoever and is angry-making to boot.
That's why I say it's partly my own fault. If I had gone in blind, I would have been more prepared to accept whatever was given to me, and now caught up in erroneous assumptions. That would probably have been better.
But the film still wouldn't have made any sense. I can take that the stranger had been hit by lightning and that the lightning gave him superpowers, which are never properly explained. I can take that he's now working for mysterious Somebodies whose identity are never expanded upon but who will annihilate the earth if people continue to be greedy bastards and press the button. (Though I must say that I find this addition rather tacky - what, killing somebody isn't bad enough? You have to be causing the end of the world for button-pressing to be the wrong choice?) I can take that somehow he's controlling various people who all get nosebleeds and have to move from place to place to prod new couples who have been given the box.
But why do the mind-control people give vague hints about what's to come? They're mind-controlled. Either the Somebodies want the couple to know certain things or they don't. Why the guessing games? And then there's a mysterious library with three gateways made of water, one of which leads to salvation and two to damnation, and the vague clues make husband choose one gateway which may or may not be the right one, because as I said nothing makes sense at this point and the closest thing we get to an explanation is the quote that ”any sufficiently advanced science is undistinguishable from magic.”
And then there's a bullshit last choice in which the stranger comes back and goes, Gee, I'm really sorry but actions have consequences, you know, so therefore the Somebodies have made your son deaf-blind, and you have to choose between letting him stay that way or you, Mr. Husband, shooting your wife. Oh, and there's only one bullet and it only works if you shoot her, so no heroic suicide thingy, m'kay? Good luck, and remember, in the end we can only choose whether or not we're free.
Which made me draw the following conclusions:
1.The Somebodies are dicks who are now completely cheating on the rules of their original test which had a freaking right choice.
2.”Actions have consequences” only works as an explanation if there are actual consequences rather than punishments. Those are not remotely the same thing. If pressing the button and walking through the water gateway caused the bullshit last choice to happen, I fucking want to see how.
3.In which way are the couple possibly ”free” in that stupid situation? It's about as un-free as you can get. They don't have the chance to say ”fuck that noise, I'm out of here.” It's as much a rock and a hard place as ”Children of Earth”, except there at least the authors made some sort of effort to make it look like cause and effect.
4.I'm really really not comfortable with the way the film implies that a disability - even an admittedly very serious disability like deafblindness - is per definition a fate worse than death. Though it could just be that they're assuming that the kid is always more important than the mother. (Which is somewhat more acceptable, at least to me. No parent would want their kid to suffer.)
5.He shoots her, obviously. A previous man also shoots his wife. By the end, the box is given to yet another couple, where the wife presses the button. Meaning - that's right - in all three families the wife is the greedy one who gets to die for the trouble. Lovely. I hate the world.
6.I have a high tolerance for timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly stuff, but it's not this high. If cause and effect no longer seem to work, I want some kind of explanation, even if it's in pseudotechbabble. I'd even take midichlorians at this point. Instad, I felt like this:
”So, kicking puppies makes fire rain from the sky.”
”What? I mean, I'm no fan of kicking puppies, but I don't see the link between...”
”FIRE rain from the SKY!”
”That makes no sense!”
”Any sufficiently advanced science is undistinguishable from magic.”
”Well, fuck you too, then.”
The acting was good, the pacing and suspense quite effective, but I left the cinema more pissed off than anything else.
The second day I was working the ticket booth and couldn't see films, which I compensated on the third day by seeing three of them, all animations.
The first of the animations was a French tale called Mia et le Migou. It was a sweet little film, though it seemed a tad too inspired by Miyazaki. For one thing, the animation was vaguely anime-like, even if the pleasant sketch-and-watercolours feel to the background was quite different, but the look of the film wasn't all that made me think of Miyazaki.
The story is of a brave little girl, Mia, whose father is lost when a hotel building site caves in. She goes to find him, and on the way befriends the Migous, a kind of creatures that protect the tree at the center of the world, without which the whole world will die. The tree is in danger from the building site, as well as the mad vengeful ambition of the hotel owner, Mr. Jekhide. (His name isn't accidental - even this villain has a soft side that appears towards the end.)
In other words, we have a missing parent, a resourceful young heroine, supernatural creatures, a villain who's eventually reformed, and an ecological message. There are no flying dragons, but I think that's about the only thing missing to make it a Miyazaki story. This is unfortunate, since raises comparisons between a good-enough tale and something even better. On its own, Mia et le Migou is very likeable, if a bit too slow for me (which makes me suspect it's much too slow for most kids old enough to see it.)
The second animation, Mary and Max, was freaking awesome. It's a clay animation, largely in bleak greys and browns with the occasional splash of red - and if by the end of the movie those animated figures aren't more real to you than most live action characters, you have a heart of stone.
The titular Mary is an eight-year-old lonely girl in Australia whose mother is a lush and father a taxidermist. She has been told that Australian babies come from beer glasses - but where do American babies come from? Cola cans? To get an answer, she picks a name out of an American phone book and writes a letter, which ends up being read by Max, a 40-year-old oddball in New York who is so upset by this change in his routine that he sits rocking for hours before he can contemplate answering the letter. But he does answer, and the penpal relationship that develops between the two of them rivals Charing Cross Road 84 for the most beautiful in movie history.
The humour of this film is often dark, and the tragedy even darker, and it's not easy to say if the ending is happy or sad or both - but the film has such heart that I still walked out of it with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. (And ”Swinging Safari” playing in my head. Did you know, btw, that you can sing that one and ”The Lion Sleeps Tonight” simultaneously?)
The third animation, The Secret of Kells, suffered a bit by coming after Mary and Max. (In truth, every film I saw later during the festival suffered by coming after Mary and Max.) Still, it was a very nice film, and I loved the animation, which was very stylized and often looked like mediaeval paintings - which is very fitting, since such paintings are at the center of the plot.
Our hero, Brennan, is a little boy living in a monastery, where he's raised by his uncle the abbot, who is very stern and overprotective - understandably so, since the monastery is under constant threat of being destroyed by the northmen. When renowned illuminator brother Aidan arrives, after his own monastery has been destroyed, Brennan befriends him (and his mysterious cat Pangur Ban) and gets to see the wonders of the Book of Iona; a book that is not yet finished. Sneaking away from the monastery to help Aidan get paints and other things for the book, Brennan also meets a little fairy girl called Aisling, who helps him on his tasks even as they grow more dangerous.
Bits of this film were very enchanting, and I loved some of the characters, particularly the Abbot (who for all his harshness seemed very three-dimensional), Aisling, and Pangur Ban. In a very nice touch, Pangur Ban has one blue eye like Brennan and one green like Aisling, making him appear half elfish in nature. As all cats are. :-) With other characters, though, the simplicity of the animation style became almost too simple. I liked that the monastery had monks from different countries, but they were so stereotypically drawn it was hard to enjoy it entirely. And the northmen were little more than beasts; even the wolves attacking at one point seemed more sentient. (Maybe I'm biased, considering my own heritage. * g*) And the plot was a bit... not plotty.
At the book conference I've been to this week, an author spoke about the difference between books for children and books about children for adults. I did feel that this was a film about a child, for adults. Sure, some children might enjoy it, but I feel that the film's main strengths - the animation, the mysticism, and the nuanced portrayal of the abbot - are more likely to be appreciated by adults.
On the fourth day I was working again, but did sneak into the last showing of the day, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl. It had a short film playing before it, Red Rocks, but I missed the beginning, and a big part of the middle (since I realized that my handbag was still in the ticket booth), and tried to see as little as possible of the rest - it seemed very horrifying. So I only saw the feature. (As for the shorts I did see, I intend to make them their own post.)
Truth be told, during the first few minutes of the feature, I went, ”...Do I really want to see this film?” but I was in the middle of a row and couldn't get out easily, so I figured I'd stay for a while, at least. And I'm certainly not sorry I did. :-)
The reason I was sceptical is because this film is gory. It's parodical gore, but, well, remember the scene with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail? The first five minutes of Vampire Girl... makes that scene look like a wonder of restraint. For instance, at one point Vampire Girl bites the face of an enemy and pulls, peeling the skin off like an apple, while the head spins round and round until all that's left is the skull. I was pretty much going OMGWTFBBQ at that point.
The rest of the film is slightly less gory - or maybe I just got desensitized. It's also funny as all hell, and even kind of cute in places.
The narrator is a hapless high school boy who happens to catch the eye of both Keiko, queen bitch of the school, and Monami, the shy new girl. (Wikipedia claims that the boy's name is Mizushima, which I don't believe is what they called him in the film - but I can't remember what they did call him.) As it happens, Monami is a vampire, who lures him into vampirehood with a blood-filled chocolate. And Keiko's vice-principal father is a mad scientist doing experiments in the basement. When a jealous Keiko confronts Monami and is killed, daddy is thrilled - finally a chance to turn his daughter into his ultimate masterpiece!
”Thus started the fight between Vampire Girl and Frankenstein girl,” the narrator says. ”To the death, over love. By the way, has anyone considered my feelings in this?”
The film is hilarious, and while Monami is a blood-sucking monster who very much uses the poor boy, she's also really adorable.
Take warning, however, this is offensive stuff.
...Yeah. There's just no way to get around talking about the characters in blackface. It's not clueless, ”what's so wrong about...” blackface, it's HOLYFUCKWHATDIDYOUJUSTDO blackface. And in a strange way, that makes it less offensive to me, because it's so outrageous it reaches the realm of the absurd. And as I discovered once the characters started talking, it's not a parody of black people but of a Japanese trend called ”Ganguro”. Not to mention that this is a film that also has a wrist cutting rally, and an oversexed school nurse who is introduced as ”the oversexed school nurse” and eventually ends up with hands and eyes on her breasts. Plus, if a director gleefully admits to adding ”all the weird, offensive stuff” to the script, getting offended is just feeding the troll, isn't it? But still, thinking about those scenes makes me embarrassed to like this film so much.
Because I did. I liked it like whoah, and though I doubt I'll see it again, or see another of the director's films (at least not without someone else present to protect me from the gore), I was very pleased to land a poster of it at the after-festival party auction, where I got it with the motivation: ”Because Monami is a brave girl who can provide inspiration to shy women like myself, though I promise to only kill those who deserve it, shower in water, and not trick my slaves into thinking they can stay with me forever.”
So there you have it, the first five feature films I saw at FFF. I plan on making another post with feature film reviews, and then a third one with the shorts.
Starting with the opening film, The Box, I was very eager to see it, for the simple, shallow reason that James Marsden is in it. What's the point of being a fan if I can't make kneejerk choices like that, right?
Having actually seen the film now, I can say that it was probably a pretty good film - but that it pissed me off in too many ways for me to like it.
Part of it is my own fault. In my curiosity, I had looked up the story on wikipedia and learned about the original short story Button Button as well as the Twilight Zone episode. The basic setup is the same in all three stories: Your average husband-and-wife couple are given a mysterious empty box by a strange man. On top of the box there is a button. The man explains that pressing the button will cause two things to happen. One, the couple will get a large sum of money. Two, someone they don't know will die.
In the original story, the husband is run over by the train and the money turns out to be settlement money. The stranger explains to the wife that she never really knew her husband. In the Twilight Zone episode, both husband and wife survive, but the stranger shows up, giving them the money and taking away the box, which is now to be given to "someone you don't know."
From that information, I expected a psychological thriller/drama about making choices, and I was curious to know which of the endings would be chosen, or if there'd be the new one.
Turns out they chose the Twilight Zone ending... except it takes place about 45 minutes into the film, and the rest of what happens makes no goddamned sense whatsoever and is angry-making to boot.
That's why I say it's partly my own fault. If I had gone in blind, I would have been more prepared to accept whatever was given to me, and now caught up in erroneous assumptions. That would probably have been better.
But the film still wouldn't have made any sense. I can take that the stranger had been hit by lightning and that the lightning gave him superpowers, which are never properly explained. I can take that he's now working for mysterious Somebodies whose identity are never expanded upon but who will annihilate the earth if people continue to be greedy bastards and press the button. (Though I must say that I find this addition rather tacky - what, killing somebody isn't bad enough? You have to be causing the end of the world for button-pressing to be the wrong choice?) I can take that somehow he's controlling various people who all get nosebleeds and have to move from place to place to prod new couples who have been given the box.
But why do the mind-control people give vague hints about what's to come? They're mind-controlled. Either the Somebodies want the couple to know certain things or they don't. Why the guessing games? And then there's a mysterious library with three gateways made of water, one of which leads to salvation and two to damnation, and the vague clues make husband choose one gateway which may or may not be the right one, because as I said nothing makes sense at this point and the closest thing we get to an explanation is the quote that ”any sufficiently advanced science is undistinguishable from magic.”
And then there's a bullshit last choice in which the stranger comes back and goes, Gee, I'm really sorry but actions have consequences, you know, so therefore the Somebodies have made your son deaf-blind, and you have to choose between letting him stay that way or you, Mr. Husband, shooting your wife. Oh, and there's only one bullet and it only works if you shoot her, so no heroic suicide thingy, m'kay? Good luck, and remember, in the end we can only choose whether or not we're free.
Which made me draw the following conclusions:
1.The Somebodies are dicks who are now completely cheating on the rules of their original test which had a freaking right choice.
2.”Actions have consequences” only works as an explanation if there are actual consequences rather than punishments. Those are not remotely the same thing. If pressing the button and walking through the water gateway caused the bullshit last choice to happen, I fucking want to see how.
3.In which way are the couple possibly ”free” in that stupid situation? It's about as un-free as you can get. They don't have the chance to say ”fuck that noise, I'm out of here.” It's as much a rock and a hard place as ”Children of Earth”, except there at least the authors made some sort of effort to make it look like cause and effect.
4.I'm really really not comfortable with the way the film implies that a disability - even an admittedly very serious disability like deafblindness - is per definition a fate worse than death. Though it could just be that they're assuming that the kid is always more important than the mother. (Which is somewhat more acceptable, at least to me. No parent would want their kid to suffer.)
5.He shoots her, obviously. A previous man also shoots his wife. By the end, the box is given to yet another couple, where the wife presses the button. Meaning - that's right - in all three families the wife is the greedy one who gets to die for the trouble. Lovely. I hate the world.
6.I have a high tolerance for timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly stuff, but it's not this high. If cause and effect no longer seem to work, I want some kind of explanation, even if it's in pseudotechbabble. I'd even take midichlorians at this point. Instad, I felt like this:
”So, kicking puppies makes fire rain from the sky.”
”What? I mean, I'm no fan of kicking puppies, but I don't see the link between...”
”FIRE rain from the SKY!”
”That makes no sense!”
”Any sufficiently advanced science is undistinguishable from magic.”
”Well, fuck you too, then.”
The acting was good, the pacing and suspense quite effective, but I left the cinema more pissed off than anything else.
The second day I was working the ticket booth and couldn't see films, which I compensated on the third day by seeing three of them, all animations.
The first of the animations was a French tale called Mia et le Migou. It was a sweet little film, though it seemed a tad too inspired by Miyazaki. For one thing, the animation was vaguely anime-like, even if the pleasant sketch-and-watercolours feel to the background was quite different, but the look of the film wasn't all that made me think of Miyazaki.
The story is of a brave little girl, Mia, whose father is lost when a hotel building site caves in. She goes to find him, and on the way befriends the Migous, a kind of creatures that protect the tree at the center of the world, without which the whole world will die. The tree is in danger from the building site, as well as the mad vengeful ambition of the hotel owner, Mr. Jekhide. (His name isn't accidental - even this villain has a soft side that appears towards the end.)
In other words, we have a missing parent, a resourceful young heroine, supernatural creatures, a villain who's eventually reformed, and an ecological message. There are no flying dragons, but I think that's about the only thing missing to make it a Miyazaki story. This is unfortunate, since raises comparisons between a good-enough tale and something even better. On its own, Mia et le Migou is very likeable, if a bit too slow for me (which makes me suspect it's much too slow for most kids old enough to see it.)
The second animation, Mary and Max, was freaking awesome. It's a clay animation, largely in bleak greys and browns with the occasional splash of red - and if by the end of the movie those animated figures aren't more real to you than most live action characters, you have a heart of stone.
The titular Mary is an eight-year-old lonely girl in Australia whose mother is a lush and father a taxidermist. She has been told that Australian babies come from beer glasses - but where do American babies come from? Cola cans? To get an answer, she picks a name out of an American phone book and writes a letter, which ends up being read by Max, a 40-year-old oddball in New York who is so upset by this change in his routine that he sits rocking for hours before he can contemplate answering the letter. But he does answer, and the penpal relationship that develops between the two of them rivals Charing Cross Road 84 for the most beautiful in movie history.
The humour of this film is often dark, and the tragedy even darker, and it's not easy to say if the ending is happy or sad or both - but the film has such heart that I still walked out of it with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. (And ”Swinging Safari” playing in my head. Did you know, btw, that you can sing that one and ”The Lion Sleeps Tonight” simultaneously?)
The third animation, The Secret of Kells, suffered a bit by coming after Mary and Max. (In truth, every film I saw later during the festival suffered by coming after Mary and Max.) Still, it was a very nice film, and I loved the animation, which was very stylized and often looked like mediaeval paintings - which is very fitting, since such paintings are at the center of the plot.
Our hero, Brennan, is a little boy living in a monastery, where he's raised by his uncle the abbot, who is very stern and overprotective - understandably so, since the monastery is under constant threat of being destroyed by the northmen. When renowned illuminator brother Aidan arrives, after his own monastery has been destroyed, Brennan befriends him (and his mysterious cat Pangur Ban) and gets to see the wonders of the Book of Iona; a book that is not yet finished. Sneaking away from the monastery to help Aidan get paints and other things for the book, Brennan also meets a little fairy girl called Aisling, who helps him on his tasks even as they grow more dangerous.
Bits of this film were very enchanting, and I loved some of the characters, particularly the Abbot (who for all his harshness seemed very three-dimensional), Aisling, and Pangur Ban. In a very nice touch, Pangur Ban has one blue eye like Brennan and one green like Aisling, making him appear half elfish in nature. As all cats are. :-) With other characters, though, the simplicity of the animation style became almost too simple. I liked that the monastery had monks from different countries, but they were so stereotypically drawn it was hard to enjoy it entirely. And the northmen were little more than beasts; even the wolves attacking at one point seemed more sentient. (Maybe I'm biased, considering my own heritage. * g*) And the plot was a bit... not plotty.
At the book conference I've been to this week, an author spoke about the difference between books for children and books about children for adults. I did feel that this was a film about a child, for adults. Sure, some children might enjoy it, but I feel that the film's main strengths - the animation, the mysticism, and the nuanced portrayal of the abbot - are more likely to be appreciated by adults.
On the fourth day I was working again, but did sneak into the last showing of the day, Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl. It had a short film playing before it, Red Rocks, but I missed the beginning, and a big part of the middle (since I realized that my handbag was still in the ticket booth), and tried to see as little as possible of the rest - it seemed very horrifying. So I only saw the feature. (As for the shorts I did see, I intend to make them their own post.)
Truth be told, during the first few minutes of the feature, I went, ”...Do I really want to see this film?” but I was in the middle of a row and couldn't get out easily, so I figured I'd stay for a while, at least. And I'm certainly not sorry I did. :-)
The reason I was sceptical is because this film is gory. It's parodical gore, but, well, remember the scene with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail? The first five minutes of Vampire Girl... makes that scene look like a wonder of restraint. For instance, at one point Vampire Girl bites the face of an enemy and pulls, peeling the skin off like an apple, while the head spins round and round until all that's left is the skull. I was pretty much going OMGWTFBBQ at that point.
The rest of the film is slightly less gory - or maybe I just got desensitized. It's also funny as all hell, and even kind of cute in places.
The narrator is a hapless high school boy who happens to catch the eye of both Keiko, queen bitch of the school, and Monami, the shy new girl. (Wikipedia claims that the boy's name is Mizushima, which I don't believe is what they called him in the film - but I can't remember what they did call him.) As it happens, Monami is a vampire, who lures him into vampirehood with a blood-filled chocolate. And Keiko's vice-principal father is a mad scientist doing experiments in the basement. When a jealous Keiko confronts Monami and is killed, daddy is thrilled - finally a chance to turn his daughter into his ultimate masterpiece!
”Thus started the fight between Vampire Girl and Frankenstein girl,” the narrator says. ”To the death, over love. By the way, has anyone considered my feelings in this?”
The film is hilarious, and while Monami is a blood-sucking monster who very much uses the poor boy, she's also really adorable.
Take warning, however, this is offensive stuff.
...Yeah. There's just no way to get around talking about the characters in blackface. It's not clueless, ”what's so wrong about...” blackface, it's HOLYFUCKWHATDIDYOUJUSTDO blackface. And in a strange way, that makes it less offensive to me, because it's so outrageous it reaches the realm of the absurd. And as I discovered once the characters started talking, it's not a parody of black people but of a Japanese trend called ”Ganguro”. Not to mention that this is a film that also has a wrist cutting rally, and an oversexed school nurse who is introduced as ”the oversexed school nurse” and eventually ends up with hands and eyes on her breasts. Plus, if a director gleefully admits to adding ”all the weird, offensive stuff” to the script, getting offended is just feeding the troll, isn't it? But still, thinking about those scenes makes me embarrassed to like this film so much.
Because I did. I liked it like whoah, and though I doubt I'll see it again, or see another of the director's films (at least not without someone else present to protect me from the gore), I was very pleased to land a poster of it at the after-festival party auction, where I got it with the motivation: ”Because Monami is a brave girl who can provide inspiration to shy women like myself, though I promise to only kill those who deserve it, shower in water, and not trick my slaves into thinking they can stay with me forever.”
So there you have it, the first five feature films I saw at FFF. I plan on making another post with feature film reviews, and then a third one with the shorts.