Fantasia Film Festival 2011 – First week reviews
Attack the Block (2011)
Joe Cornish’s homage to 80s movies about kid gangs and/or alien monsters, transposed onto a UK council estate – drugs, guns, race and class tensions, and a vernacular far removed from Spielbergian Americana. The entire movie does indeed take place pretty much within one tenement block, seemingly over the course of a night; obeying the Aristotelian unities means you save money by redressing the same corridor half a dozen times and having people run down it in different ways. Meanwhile, JJ Abrams’ own, more sentimental and self-referencing Spielberg homage – Super 8 – passed through theatres and got comparable plaudits for five times the budget (mind you it looked like ten, so not bad). Both movies are well-trodden stories well-told. Super 8 has a love letter to baby filmmaking on its side; Attack The Block does better at making the “dangers of Othering” message relevant, since it – among other aspects – contains actual black characters, which JJ’s film did not do. It also runs a brisk 88 minutes and has a great bass music soundtrack.
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010)
The first Chinese film I’ve seen with a native steampunk sensibility, i.e. not just set design trappings. It starts with a Spanish-speaking ambassador in Roman(?! the year is 690AD) garb being given a guided tour of a 60-storey tall mechanical statue of Empress Wu in the guise of Guanyin, and goes on from there. Andy Lau corresponds to my mental image of Dee like RDJ to my mental image of Holmes, i.e. not at all, but I can live with the casting – which, by the way, Tsui Hark clearly watched the Guy Ritchie movie and found no reason why historical Luoyang couldn’t be given the full London Below treatment. Indeed, if you were going to steampunk a Chinese dynasty, you may as well go with the cosmopolitan high-barbarian Tang, with its polo parties and drunken poets and ruthless, powerful noblewomen. It’s probably the only period where you could portray a female official going around investigating a murder and not have anyone even take notice that she’s wearing men’s clothes. The mystery itself’s not awful. Just remember the Chinese fair play rule variant: wuxia falls under improbable, not impossible.
Ip Man: The Legend Is Born (2010)
Arguably better than the second movie, despite absence of Donnie Yen, and increasingly outlandish plots attributed to evil would-be colonialists. I mean, it’s pretty clear which parts must’ve hewn fairly closely to real life, and which were pastede on. Ip Man is such a low-key protagonist (the anti-Bruce Lee in some sense… I really want them to hoist the third movie in the trilogy out of development hell, guys; not the Wong Kar Wai one, that’s a whole other beast) that it’s no bad thing for the movies to be a bit more low-key as well.
Another Earth (2011)
Co-written by Brit Marling, the lead actress, who spends a lot of time letting her body language speak for her. Essentially a tearjerker human drama in which the SF element acts as deus ex machina and brickbat metaphor, but also a love letter to a certain idea of space exploration – an elegiac one, despite the film assuming Virgin as de rigueur method of transportation rather than NASA. (This came… two weeks?… after the U2:360 show I watched from my bedroom window, during which Bono managed to ambush me with unexpected emotion(tm) with harping on the leitmotif of “Space Oddity”.) It’s more a Sundance film than Fantasia or even SXSW; you can tell because it brought out humourless science dudes on imdb. Such a scenario would have disastrous consequences on Earth’s gravity, yes, fancy that.
Trollhunter (2010)
Immensely likeable gonzo nature mockumentary about a dude who blase-ly works a job no sane human being ought to hold down. Deploys horror movie flourishes of the “Blair Witch” strain, but way too funny to be truly scary. (Words that sound the same in Norwegian and English: “troll piss”.) The screening was preceded by a stop-motion animation short about a troll, narrated by Max Von Sydow – a troll double header, as it were – which served as a helpful brush-up on the mythology, so by the time the put-upon eponymous protagonist started tying goats to bridge posts the audience was legit dying.
In light of the recent news, it’s worth one’s time to watch a film that makes Norway seem like a nice place to live. Not because of the weather – the majestic landscapes look dingy and muddy in digital video, and it’s always damp when it’s not snowing outright – but because the underlying satire on social democracy is an affectionate one. The veterinarian who worries about the cruelty of troll euthanasia via blacklight; the wildlife agency with its endless licenses and forms and bumbling coverups that no one bothers to uncover. If that’s the worst it gets, one thinks… At one point the Scooby Doo kids hire a new camerawoman. Ixnay on redblooded Christian men, they ask the trollhunter, but what about a devout Muslim woman? The dude is taken aback, then shrugs. “You know, I haven’t a clue,” he says. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Milocrorze: A Love Story (2010)
An omnibus of loosely related shorts in the grand tradition of Funky Forest (extracts of which have 1M+ views on Youtube, not to mention 500K+ comments along the lines of “LOL Japan”, “WTF did I just watch”, “my eyesssss” and so on). Milocrorze isn’t quite as searingly memorable: it hits notes other than polymorphically perverse surrealism and Alice-in-Wonderland social anxiety**, in fact turns on the straightforward sentimental theme of loving (winning, losing, even ultimately getting over) an unobtainable girl. These days I suspect the ultimate purpose of these movies lies in epic GIF-making, if a digital version were to become available via variously legal means.
** Which is to say, the sensation one has in dreams of social anxiety being attached to actions and events that should be absurd or meaningless. Throughout Funky Forest, one is constantly trying to get an emotional reading of the characters in order to grasp the context of what’s happening onscreen, and the bead keeps slipping. It may be the most Japanese movie ever made.
