The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  August 2:

  The Mansion (France, dir. Tony T. Datis)

  Nine friends (and one adorable dog) are heading to a remote mansion for “2000s”-themed New Year’s Eve party at the request of central couple Fabrice (Marc Jarousseau) and Nadine (Nathalie Odzierejko). It’s a creepy, sprawling house surrounded by woods famous for being a good place to hunt wild boar. At dinner, Fabrice and Nadine make a big announcement, but the joyful party atmosphere is torpedoed when Bruno (Ludovik Day) staggers outside to vomit and makes a grisly discovery. The partygoers are not alone, but is the threat lurking in the dark human or something else? More importantly, can Drazic (Vincent Tirel) make enough hallucinogenic mushroom cupcakes to go around? If the setup for The Mansion sounds familiar, it shouldn’t be a surprise. Aside from an unusually large cast of potential victims, this is a by-the-numbers horror/comedy that is never quite funny or gruesome enough to make much of an impression. Aside from laid-back dealer Drazic and shy goth outsider Charlotte (Lila Lacombe), every one of the characters is utterly obnoxious and deeply unsympathetic. Worst of them all is Stéphane (Jérôme Niel), obsessive and temperamental ex-boyfriend of Sam (Vanessa Guide, who also appeared in Going to Brazil at this year’s Fantasia), who is so relentlessly nasty to everyone there seems to be no convincing reason anyone would still talk to this guy regardless of their history. If it had anything to say about horror clichés or any fun tweaks of formula it could have been much better, but as it is The Mansion is happy enough to traffic in uninspired tropes and hope that’s enough to keep the audience watching for a full 100 minutes.

  The Night Watchmen (USA, dir. Mitchell Altieri)

  Beloved clown Blumpo and his circus contract a mysterious disease and die in Romania, and on the return of their bodies to the States Blumpo’s is accidentally delivered to the warehouse of a Baltimore newspaper. Everybody’s working late to finish a big deadline, so it’s an easier shift than usual for the paper’s spectacularly lazy and inept night watchmen, whose ranks include a new guy everyone calls “Rajeeve” (Max Gray Wilbur) because he has to wear the former guard’s uniform and name tag until his are delivered. When creepy head honcho Randall (James Remar) opens Blumpo’s coffin to steal the famous clown’s nose, he unwittingly unleashes a vampiric threat on Baltimore. Can the night watchmen stop the vampires before it’s too late? Probably not, right? Director Mitchell Altieri was previously one half of horror directing team “The Butcher Brothers” with Phil Flores, and has directed a number of features of his own. While his output has been wildly inconsistent, it has previously been at least interesting or ambitiously weird. Unfortunately The Night Watchmen is neither. Instead, it’s a desperately unfunny horror/comedy that leans hard on stupid, lazy stereotypes and “jokes”: black people don’t like camping, some ladies have girlfriends, some guys don’t like people to think they’re gay, weed gets you high, clowns are creepy, poop smells bad, sexual harassment is hilarious, etc. etc. ad nauseum. Its setup is very similar to another recent “vampires in an office” horror/comedy, Brian James O’Connell’s Bloodsucking Bastards, but whereas that film had a sort of low-budget charm and a cast that could sell its modest jokes, The Night Watchmen goes out of its way to be as off-putting as possible. There are a few bright spots, most notably Kara Luiz and Dan DeLuca in the cast (Tiffany Shepis makes a welcome but entirely too brief appearance) and the use of buckets and buckets of practical gore is appreciated, but none of that is quite enough to make this film worth a watch for any but the least discerning and most easily amused horror fans. Here’s hoping Altieri gets back to the really weird stuff that defined his most interesting work next time.

  A Taxi Driver (South Korea, dir. Hun Jang)

  Struggling single father and private taxi driver Man-seop (Song Kang-ho) is too concerned with the immediate difficulties of his life to notice the political and social upheaval happening around him in Seoul. Student protestors take to the streets, but he’s too busy taking care of his daughter and trying to catch up on back rent to give much thought to anything else. When he overhears another taxi driver talking about a foreigner offering to pay a huge fare for a ride to Gwangju, he sneaks away and takes the fare himself. The foreigner in question is Jürgen Hinzpeter (Thomas Kretschmann), a German reporter living in Japan who has caught wind of something big happening in Gwangju. Man-seop drives to the town and finds it barricaded by military forces, but he manages to scheme past a blockade and finds Gwangju all but abandoned. Over the next two days, Man-seop has a difficult awakening as he realizes the importance of getting Hinzpeter and his footage out of the country to tell the world about what is happening. A Taxi Driver is based on the true story of Hinzpeter’s trip to Gwangju to document the massacre there, which proved to be instrumental in alerting the world at large to the situation in South Korea in 1980 and changed the course of that country’s history. Song Kang-ho, a frequent on-screen collaborator with noted South Korean directors Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-Ho, and Kim Jee-woon, gives another excellent and emotionally affecting performance as the titular taxi driver. His realization of the threat to his country and its future—and specifically that of his daughter—is a powerful arc that pulls the action of the film forward. It does feel a tad overlong with maybe one too many set pieces toward the end, but there’s no denying the emotional power of the central relationship between the taxi driver and Hinzpeter, especially given the information about the real story provided at the end of the film. A Taxi Driver is a fantastic film, the best of a strong roster of South Korean films at this year’s Fantasia. It is being released in the States this month, and anyone who gets a chance to see it on the big screen should make it a priority.

  This brings my chronological coverage of Fantasia 2017 to a close, although I will also be posting another “catch-up” breakdown of films I did not catch during their previous screenings at the fest soon. Huge thanks Emmanuelle DiBuono, Ted Geoghegan, and Kaila Hier at the Fantasia press office for facilitating this remote coverage and to Daily Grindhouse for giving me the chance to cover the fest again this year!

  Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Dispatch #8

  Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 10 August 2017

  This year I tried to remotely cover as many of the films screening at Fantasia in chronological order by the days on which they premiered or otherwise played. Naturally there were some that I was not able to catch up with in time to cover them during the festival, so this final update catches up on some features that I didn’t catch before.

  Pork Pie (New Zealand, dir. Matt Murphy)

  Luke (James Rolleston) is on the run from some criminals. Jon (Dean O’Gorman) is a writer way behind schedule on his new novel and desperate to get back his fiancée Susie (Antonia Prebble) after doing something he knows is unforgivable. Their paths cross by chance and shortly thereafter they meet Keira (Ashleigh Cummings), who joins their little team for an impromptu road trip all the way across New Zealand that turns into a nationwide manhunt and media frenzy. For his feature film debut, writer/director Matt Murphy has remade his father Geoff Murphy’s famous 1981 action comedy Goodbye Pork Pie for 2017, keeping the same basic premise and the yellow Mini while updating the cultural specifics. The car chase scenes are a blast, and the three leads have an easy chemistry that helps endear them to the audience even if they’re not entirely fleshed out as individual characters. There’s a lot of beautiful location photography, too, and a fun supporting cast including Housebound and Hunt for the Wilderpeople’s Rima Te Wiata in a small but important role. It’s pretty lightweight, but if that’s what you’re in the mood for Pork Pie is a charming action/comedy well worth spending time with.

  DRIB (Norway, dir. Kristoffer Borgli)

  In 2014, comedian/performance artist Amir Asgharnejad made a series of viral videos of himself trying to start fights with random people on the street and getting his ass kicked. The project worked and he got millions of views from all around the world, but he also got something he never would have expected.
The marketing company working for a popular brand of energy drink approached him to do a conceptual campaign that would be “canceled” and subsequently leaked to the press to generate controversy and tons of free publicity. But what the head of the campaign didn’t know is that Amir’s videos were fake—he didn’t pick people at random, he had actors play the people he approached. But he decided to take the job to see what happened, leading to one of the weirdest weeks of his life. DRIB is a sort of hybrid documentary and narrative fiction feature in which Asgharnejad tells the story to writer/director Kristoffer Borgli in an interview and plays himself in hilarious and unsettling dramatizations of the events of that week. At one point when Amir refuses to take Borgli’s direction, the director muses that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to let his friend play himself “in a story about how difficult he is to work with.” Brett Gelman gives a spectacularly unhinged performance as Brady Thompson, the fictionalized version of the man who concocted the campaign, and actor Adam Pearson appears playing himself in a parallel experience working on a campaign for “Skin Loft” and staying in the same hotel. It’s such a bizarre story that Asgharnejad’s reluctance to embellish details for the film is understandable, but the friction between writer/director Borgli’s instincts as a filmmaker and Amir wanting to tell the story as it happened is part of what makes DRIB so funny and thrilling. The film has been picked up for U.S. distribution by Gravitas Ventures, so hopefully it will find the audience it deserves here sooner than later.

  EXPO 67 Mission Impossible (Canada, dir. Michel Barbeau, Guylaine Maroist, & Eric Ruel)

  The 1967 World’s Fair was held in Montreal, the first time the event was held outside of Europe. Shockingly, the massive fairgrounds built on three man-made islands was built in less than four years. EXPO 67 uses materials from the massive vault of documentation of the Expo—tens of thousands of documents, newspaper and magazine stories, photos, audio recordings, films, schematics, etc. etc. etc.—and interviews with some of the people who worked on the project to tell the story of how this impossible feat happened. There is a lot of absolutely beautiful film footage shot at the park during the six months of EXPO 67, and there’s no denying this is a spectacular story of success against overwhelming odds. If there’s one major complaint to be made about EXPO 67, it’s the rare one that the movie could have easily been much longer. Long stretches of time are completely glossed over, and the footage of the Expo itself is so beautiful and entrancing that it must have been incredibly difficult not to include much more of it. This documentary moves very quickly, propelled by a fantastic soundtrack of swinging 60s instrumentals and with an undercurrent of tension against the ticking clock to opening day in 1967.

  Game of Death (USA, dir. Sebastien Landry & Laurence Morais-Lagace)

  Seven dumb teenagers find a weird old board game while they’re hanging out smoking drugs, drinking, and having sex. They read the rules but don’t realize when it says they will have to kill in order to survive, it’s not just a game. The Game of Death demands 24 victims, and the last player(s?) living when the counter hits 0 wins. Who will it be: Incestuous brother and sister Tom (Sam Earle) and Beth (Victoria Diamond), geeky Kenny (Nick Serino), meek Mary-ann (Catherine Saindon), alpha bro Matthew (Thomas Vallieres), sexually forthright Ashley (Emelia Hellman), or drug dealing pizza delivery guy Tyler (Erniel Baez Duenas)? More importantly, who else outside this group will have to die to ensure these obnoxious kids survive? Game of Death is outrageously gory, and to its credit most of the blood and makeup effects are practical. This is the kind of movie that has multiple exploding heads, all of which are accompanied by appropriate fountains of gore. The characters, as to be expected, are little more than annoying cardboard cutouts set up for an escalating series of kill gags. The movie actually works best when that’s all they are, as when they open their mouths to reflect on their situation or spell out the subtext of the story they become truly insufferable. Fortunately the action moves at a brisk pace so there’s not much time for philosophizing, and there’s a wide array of image styles and sizes--possibly a result of the film originating as a series of 10-minute episodes produced by La Guerrilla (Montreal), Rockzeline (Paris) and Blackpills (Paris)--so it’s never visually boring. Game of Death would make for a fun, brainless midnight movie ride with its buckets of blood, retro videogame-inspired score, and brief running time.

  Cocolors (Japan, dir. Toshihisa Yokoshima)

  In the future, the planet is blanketed with snow in a seemingly never-ending nuclear winter. What’s left of humanity lives in underground cities, spending their entire lives encased in bulky suits and helmets to keep them from breathing the poison ash that falls from the sky. Teams of scavengers are sent out to the surface to find supplies to keep the underground cities running. Childhood friends Aki and Fuyu dream of what the outside world might be, and Fuyu draws a picture of what he thinks it looks like. When they grow up, Aki becomes a scavenger but sickly Fuyu must stay behind. Aki brings Fuyu colored stones, and Fuyu devises a crude method of screenprinting to add colors to the picture of the world he drew as a child. But the population of their city is dwindling, supplies are becoming ever more scarce, and Fuyu’s health is deteriorating. Will he ever see the sky for himself? Cocolors is the latest part of a series of works from production company Kamikaze Douga referred to as “Gasoline Mask,” with roots reaching back to a proof of concept video in 1999 of the same title. The style of animation in this film is somewhat similar to South Korean production company DadaShow (Seoul Station, Senior Class) in that it uses 3D models designed to look similar to hand-drawn animation. But the amount of detail in the character models and especially the backgrounds is exponentially more intricate than those films, recalling the work of comic artist Geoff Darrow. The design of the characters is risky, too, in that they all wear large helmets that make it impossible to see their faces, relying on body language and voice acting to convey their feelings. It works beautifully, and there are some breathtaking moments when all the facets of the production come together for powerful emotional impact. Its world is a little familiar, and it’s maybe a tad too maudlin for its own good, but Cocolors is another standout animated feature at Fantasia in a year with more than its fair share.

  Darkland (Denmark, dir. Fenar Ahmad)

  Zaid (Dar Salim) is a successful heart surgeon and son of Iraqi immigrants to Denmark. His younger brother Yasin (Anis Alobaidi), though, has become trapped in a world of drugs and violence. He comes to Zaid asking for $100,000 to repay a debt, but Zaid can’t do it. Soon after their meeting, Yasin is hospitalized with severe injuries that lead to his death. The police don’t seem too interested in spending resources to investigate the death of a low-level drug dealer, and in frustration Zaid decides to try to find Yasin’s killers himself. He enlists the help of Yasin’s friend Alex (Dulfi Al-Jabouri), to help him track down kingpin Semion (Ali Sivandi), who ran the trap house Yasin sold out of. But as he spends more time in the underworld, his pregnant wife Stine (Stine Fischer Christensen) feels more and more neglected and worried, and Semion is more powerful and dangerous than Zaid may realize. Darkland is a Danish take on Death Wish, a slick and well-mounted action/thriller that feels overly familiar. The only thing it really has going for it to separate it from the countless revenge-film knock-offs that followed in the wake of that hugely influential film is the fact that it takes place in the Danish Iraqi community. The cast is great, especially Ali Sivandi as the menacing Semion, and the photography by frequent music video cinematographer Kasper Tuxen is impressive. The action and fight scenes are solidly staged and choreographed, but ultimately Darkland feels too familiar to be memorable. Perhaps director/co-writer Fenar Ahmad was concerned that making the characters’ world too specific to their community would risk audience identification at large, but developing that angle would have gone a long way toward making the film really stand out.

  Most Beautiful Island (USA, dir. Ana Asensio)

  Luciana (writer/director Ana Asensio) is an undocumented
immigrant living in New York and taking quick gigs for money. She hands out fliers on the street, babysits, whatever she can find to make ends meet on this side of the law. But as hard as she works it’s barely enough, and when she has to visit a doctor the line between the little money she makes and what she needs to survive is thrown into stark relief. Another immigrant Luciana works with frequently, Olga (Natasha Romanova), tells her about a high-paying gig for women like themselves who are hired to attend exclusive parties. It sounds too good to be true, but Luciana takes the information and then spends an exhausting day on a harrowing babysitting job before she can make her way to the party. Once there, she finds it’s not quite what Olga had described. Most Beautiful Island is a difficult film to talk about in much detail without spoiling some of its secrets, and this is one of the few recent films in recent memory that is genuinely surprising. Asensio is utterly assured in front of the camera and, in her feature writing and directing debut, behind it as well. The fact that the film was produced by Glass Eye Pix (and the presence of Larry Fessenden in the cast) will tip off savvy viewers to what might be in store, but the focus of the film is squarely on Luciana, her life, how far she’s willing to go to stay in the city, and why. The final section of the film is almost unbearably tense, but that underlying tension is present throughout the entire film in its long tracking shots following Luciana through the streets of the city. This is an amazing debut feature, and one of the best films of the year.