Fantasia 2020 Capsule Reviews
For the 24th installment of the Fantasia Film Festival, the entire event is moving online. The annual gathering in Montreal, Canada known for assembling the best in genre filmmaking continues its legacy by showcasing some of the strangest, weirdest, most rule-breaking, out-there films, and this year is no different.
For the next ten days, we’ll be covering as many films as we can from our quarantine bunkers and sharing our thoughts on what we’ve seen. Come back daily to see what we’ve been watching from this year’s virtual Fantasia film festival.
Legally Declared Dead
“Our protagonist for this story is Sean Yip, an insurance broker tasked with assessing life insurance claims. Life for this Hong Kong resident is good. His career is on the up-and-up and he‘s going steady with his criminal psychologist girlfriend. But domestic happiness is disrupted when the insurance policy of Tak and Ling Chu comes across his desk. Tasked with scoping out their policy, Sean visits their home where he witness the apparent suicide of the Chu’s son. Given the recency of their insurance plan, he is suspicious of the Chus. Only 18 months ago they took out this policy and within a month of it going into effect their son ‘conveniently’ dies. It’s not long before the Chus come knocking on the Sean’s door asking for their payout, but for a man committed to his job, it’s a tough sell to buy, and soon he dives head first into an investigative rabbit hole that threatens his life.
Much of Legally Declared Dead’s influence can be traced back to the juggernaut of the genre, Silence of the Lambs, and the similarities are striking. In the same way Clarice enlists the help of Hannibal to psychoanalyze Buffalo Bill, Sean calls upon his girlfriend and her professor to probe the habits of their suspects. As Sean digs deeper and deeper into the death of the Chu’s son, relics of his past start to resurface in a similar fashion as Clarice’s. And both killers in their respective films draw on and evoke the problematic ‘otherness’ trope that vilifies individuals with minority status. Plus, even your insect allegory is present, but instead of a cicada director Kim-Wai Yuen opts for a regional prying mantis. The parallels are clear, but if you’re gonna create a facsimile of another film, at least it’s based on one of the most prolific films in the genre to ever do it.”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Greg Arietta
12 Hour Shift
““You look like you work in a butcher shop,” comments a police officer to Mandy (Angela Bettis), a hospital nurse in writer/director Brea Grant’s sophomore feature 12 Hour Shift. She stands in the morgue covered with blood beside a corpse, literally and figuratively caught red handed. The butcher shop metaphor is unwittingly apt. A subsect of the hospital staff is running a black market organ scheme and Mandy is tasked with the riskiest act of the con: harvesting the organs from their hosts. It is precisely during this act where the officer interrupts her. Fortunately for Mandy, he is too oblivious to catch on, but he won’t be the last.”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Kevin Conner
Clapboard Jungle
“Film financing is a topic that might conjure up images of smoky back rooms with wealthy executives deciding on a whim which scripts from a pile in front of them will be turned into light on the silver screen, but the reality for McConnell is much different. Constant calls with potential backers from his home office give him optimism that any of one of his nearly dozen concurrent projects could be financing. When almost every promising lead does not pan out, month after month and year after year, the doubt starts to creep in. “Opportunity happened for other people way more than for me. I’m always wondering why that is,” McConnell confesses to the audience after what we assumed is a particularly hard turn of events. We see the love of filmmaking unequivocally in him but are left pondering how we maintain that wonder and passion for film during the non-stop treadmill of obstacles it asks us to conquer?
The answer to that question is no doubt an individual one, but we do get the feeling that most filmmakers are familiar with this initial doubt. As McConnell flies around the world taking meetings in the hopes that the next one will be the key to his future, Clapboard Jungle shifts from a ‘pulling-back-the-curtain’ affair to a piece of catharsis. McConnell has laced his own personal story with interviews of filmmakers discussing their same struggles. Some of the talking heads, like Guillermo del Toro, are familiar faces or have recognizable credits, but the vast majority of the expert opinions are folks the audience may not know. These are filmmakers like McConnell, full of passion and drive and expertise in their area, without the creative freedom they strive for. They are still beholden to where the money flows. “You could make a wonderful film and it just doesn’t get seen,” one of them remarks. We get the sense that many of these interviewees have done exactly that.”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Kevin Conner
Crazy Samurai Musashi
“The centerpiece of Crazy Samurai Musashi is a single, unbroken, 77 minute one-take depicting the legendary warrior, Miyamoto Musashi, fight 588 adversaries in battle. After killing the next heir to the thrown, a clan deploys every soldier at their disposal to extract revenge. Wave after wave, enemy after enemy, they pursue Musashi, but despite their efforts, they are no match for the gifted swordsman. Surely such a fabled story should warrant an equally legendary film to match, right?
It is true the tale warrants intrigue, but unfortunately the technical merit backing Crazy Samurai Musashi comes up short. Cardinal among these flaws is the film’s lack of endurance. At the ten minute mark you move out of the film’s opening sequence — a sequence consisting of multiple camera angles, several cuts, and high fidelity video as seen in traditional filmmaking— and into the one-take, but by minute fourteen you quickly realize that the next seventy-three minutes will unfortunately be a hyper-redundant slog that will test your patience.”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Greg Arietta
Detention
““Government kills!” an exclamation loud enough to stymie the momentum of the marching band. It comes from the school’s teacher, Mr. Huang, as he is led away by uniformed guards in a disciplinary manner. “Government kills! Government ki…” Mr. Huang is unable to complete his last sentence before a nightstick lands on the back of his skull with a thud. The guards carry his crumpled form beyond the view of silent onlookers in the courtyard. They do not seem to care each and every student just became a witness to their blatant assault. With some prodding the crowd resumes. “Glorify our nation/Make a better world/Remember those who built the nation in hardship.” Thus begins John Hsu’s directorial debut and the film adaptation of the video game of the same name, Detention.
In 1962, Taiwan found itself in its 13th year of martial law under the Republic of China, a period characterized by mass imprisonment of political dissenters and stifled speech. In total, the 38 years of unrest were deemed the White Terror where an estimated 140,000 people were imprisoned and around 3,000 people were killed. Detention takes this nation-wide, authoritarian evil and moves it to a smaller, more personal scale. It stays largely within the walls of the Taiwanese school where student Fang Ray Shin and teacher Mr. Zhang Ming-Hui face the ever looming threat of imprisonment by the same government that forces them to recite their hollow pledge. But the evil that manifests itself in Detention is more mysterious than your typical historical drama.”
Full Review Can Be Found Here
-Kevin Conner
The Columnist
“In the genre consortium of revenge flick, the infractions that kick start the plot are always personal, but frequently violent. In The Columnist, director Ivo Van Aart and writer Daan Windhorst make the inciting incident a war of words. There is no team of assassins who try to kill you on your wedding day that results in a globe trotting odyssey to extract revenge against your former employer. There is just AlphaMale_69 who’s key strokes carry almost as much weight as a perfectly balanced katana. In the digital era, when discourse online amounts to very little and identities are anonymous, no one is dying (yet). It’s just people expressing their “opinions” and “joking” around on the internet at the expense of a real person on the receiving end. The psychological impact of which is the new revenge tragedy.
At her breaking point, Femke starts tracking down her online haters, and kills them one by one, collecting their middle fingers as a final ‘fuck you’ statement akin to having the last word. With each murder, she gains newfound clarity with her work. She can write with ease. She can meet her deadlines. And she has greater warmth around her boyfriend, Steven, and her daughter, Anna. But as you and I know, online harassment is unending, and it isn’t long before the comments rear their head again and a murder spree ensues.”
FULL REVIEW CAN BE FOUND HERE
-Greg Arietta
FEELS GOOD MAN
“The gentle voice of cartoonist Matt Furie narrates as he draws curved lines and rounded shapes to form an amphibian face. A few practiced strokes of a marker result in a perfectly drawn Pepe the Frog, a content grin on his face. Anyone with an internet connection probably recognizes Pepe, and everyone, for better or worse, associates him with something. Feels Good Man, directed by Furie’s friend Arthur Jones, documents a genie’s escape from the bottle without getting lost in any one of the mind boggling chapter of Pepe’s story. Considering it’s about an internet meme, the film has a very serious grasp on the power of semiotics and works hard to educate its audience about modern modes of propaganda.
It begins by outlining the dangers of decontextualization of phrases and images from their origins, in this case Furie’s comic Boys Club. A comic about four cool dudes who smoke weed, eat pizza, and play video games together features Pepe’s friend asking why he pees with his pants pulled down and Pepe responding casually with “feels good man.” As Furie uploaded the comic to Myspace, he unwittingly offered both the frog and this phrase up for use.
But without any relation to the original text, the simplicity and expressiveness of this little frog is something anyone could project onto, and subsequently relate to a peaceful smiling Pepe, or a crying Pepe, or a smirking Pepe. He is a passive avatar, susceptible to ranges of emotional and paradigms, and when left to the uncontrollable devices of the internet, was hijacked as a symbol of white supremacy and fascism. He was coopted by the likes of Alex Jones and Richard Spencer, and ultimately winded up on the Anti Defamation League’s list of hate symbols. And Pepe truly is the perfect example of semiotics theory run amok; signs are images that communicate a meaning without using language that any conditioned reader will understand. And once a sign is established, its meaning is nearly impossible to change.”
FULL SXSW 2020 REVIEW CAN BE FOUND HERE
-Megan Bernovich
LAPSIS
“In Lapsis’ dystopian future, the gig economy has run amuck, health care costs are exorbitant, and the digital divide has never been greater. For Ray Tincelli, it just means getting by one day at a time. As a currier delivering lost airplane luggage, he’s not bringing in enough money to pay for advanced medical treatments needed for his ailing younger brother. In a last ditch effort, he picks up ‘cabling,’ a job in the gig economy that involves connecting quantum computers across forested terrain. It promises quick easy money, but as he soon finds out, the spoils promised by corporate America, to him and his other contract workers, don’t come without strings attached.
Lapsis has a clever setup. Without heavy exposition, it lays down the foundation of its sci-fi dystopia with clarity. It doesn’t take much to understand concepts like cabling because it feels like a natural extension of where we’re currently at. This future dystopia isn’t like that of say Minority Report, but rather the near future, ten or so years from now, and as such, the film doesn’t need to over explain concepts. It has a pick and go nature to it where you aren’t stuck wadding through exposition or made up concepts, a strength in the realm of science-fiction.”
FULL SXSW 2020 REVIEW CAN BE FOUND HERE
-Greg Arietta