What is it about Vancouver and Seattle and the ffilm fests up there that attract such film-literate spies? Whatever it is, both of our spies today writing in from Vancouver really did great work. Check this out.
This time 4 reviews. VIFF is really burning me out now but here it goes.
TEN NIGHTS OF DREAM
I might be a bit more lively with this review but only because this within the series of collected short films I found an AWESOME surprise. The title speaks for itself as we go through 10 different dreams directed by 10 different Japanese directors basing their films on Soseki Natsume's book of the same name.. Some of them might be familiar to the audience whereas others might leave heads scratching. I love films about dreams because it just opens a can full of oppurtunities for imagination and wackiness. However I must say that I was disappointed with some of the shorts.
Half of the collection shows how disappointed I am with the showing as a whole. As much as I like art and the wonderful pretentiousness that a lot of art produces since I'm an art geek myself. However even I have my limits when some films feel more like performance art rather than an excursion into the dreams and their possiblities. Some people might enjoy it, but I'd prefer craziness as opposed to the cryptic and symbolic.
Some the shorts that people should look out for though are the 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th and 10th dreams.
The 3rd one directed by Takashi Shimizu is pretty unnerving and is a subtle nightmare featuring one of the scariest blind child you will ever see for quite a while. The 4th one is a nice little romp about trying to remember a dream and a past at the same time which has some great visuals and started to set the tone for real dream like sequences. The 6th dream directed by Suzuki Matsuo is just fucking AWESOME. It features a popular Japanese hip hop dancer Tozawa who does the Robot like he was fucking built for it. In this case he's a famous sculptor in turn of the century Japan who dances in order to prepare himself for sculpting with hilarious results. The chereography with the music is just amazing to watch. The 10th dream is directed by Yudai Yamaguchi who you probably know as one of the writers for Versus. This was the short that made me want to watch the film in the first place because if you ever wanted to see a boxing match between human and nightmare demon pig, this is it. It's slapstick all the way and is just full of the crazy stuff we expect dreams to be.
Going backwards a bit, this brings us to the 7th dream which is an animated short and which I loved the best. I didn't know what to expect from it, by now the 6th film had already changed my mind that this film was beginng to be a waste of a ticket. But once the title of the 7th dream and the credits for the directors shown I got a chill down my spine. I saw Yoshitaka Amano's name.
Yoshitaka-Fucking-Amano of Vampire Hunter D fame and IMHO more importantly the artist for the first half of the Final Fantasy (FF) franchise. I should say from the start, the dialogue is shit as is the voice acting which is the only one in English. The story itself is alright, but what everyone should really see is the visuals.
I've always wondered if they could ever make a game using his style of water colour and wispy artwork which is just awesome to see; but actually seeing it live, breath and be in MOTION is just a fanboy's dream come true. Even though the voices were grinding on my nerves, the visuals are so breathtaking and I was so surprised by this that I totally ignored it. This reminds me of when the artist Dave McKean decided to direct MirrorMask who also had an art style that I would have loved to see in motion. Problem was it did seem a bit lower on the quality end in terms of the CG. However with Amano, you can see they went all out to translate his artwork into film. Whatever makes his art style his...is in it. Crazy stalagmite castle towers? Check. Huge monsters dwarfing human characters? Vibrant multicoloured visuals? Check. He even has the protagonist look like his Vampire Hunter D design. Sometimes you forget that it's even CG and more like a living water colour moving before your eyes. Even though the animation is a bit stiff and not as smooth as most other CG films out there, the visuals totally make up for it. Many people might not share my POV on this short, but I imagine that plenty of game fans here would probably be interested. If the Pre-FF7 games were ever to be remade on consoles, the ones Amano did the designs for, this this is the animation style that I hope they will use. That art style is much better suited for those games than the more photorealistic FF7-Advent children application for the FF7 onwards games (excluding FF9 of course). This was seriously the best thing I've seen at the VIFF because it was such a surprise for my game geek self.
All in all there are a few hits and a few misses, but I'd recommend 10 Nights of Dreams just to see it for some of the more wacky stuff there. Who knows, perhaps they'll be appearing up on youtube future someday.
JUST BURIED
I love watching Canadian films because they are the complete underdogs for me. We have so much great talent and a growing industry I just wonder why we can't make better films. It's sort of a problem because we don't want to be Hollywood or make Hollywood like films, however there's a certain pride to making films of the same calibur with Hollywood. waydowntown and Bad Cop, Bonne Cop are one of the few films that I've seen that are great without having to be a stodgy Canadian film about aboriginal issues or rural Canada. There's nothing wrong with the last two genres, but it's just that if you know Canadian films...a huge bulk of those films are littered throughout the Canadian film industry.
It's nice to see that Canadian films are actually going into different genres and styles now in the past decade ago which gets me excited about the film industry and it's potential. However Just Buried...isn't what I quite expected.
Even though my patriotism might blind me in this review, I still have enough sense to say that this film is alright. The story revolves around a gawky stringbean of a man named Oliver Waynacht (Jay Baruchel) who just inherited his estranged father's furneral home upon his death. Problem is the funeral home is in a sinkhole of debt; no one is dying in town and if there is any deaths (mainly from a relocated old age home) a rival funeral home is snatching up the goods. After an accidental death caused by Oliver, he and his own mortician Roberta (Rose Byrne) cover it up and cash in on the funeral expenses. This event leads into a pattern of accidental deaths for profit slowly turning into intentional deaths for non-profit during the course of the film.
It's alright for a black comedy. I just wish they just developed some other relationships within the film rather than have Oliver have sex with Roberta from time to time. They could have expanded on the rivalry between the two funeral homes or the relationship with other supporting characters rather than showing Oliver to be the gawky person he is time and time and time again. The plot twist could have been handled far more subtle to have more of an impact at the end, but being a black comedy I guess the point of the genre is knowing that everyone is going to get hurt somehow. Often I find myself thinking that I'm watching a one shot TV episode rather than a movie.
Aside from some humourous parts and a particularly cringe worthy head inflicted wound, there really isn't much going for this film. The actors just plug through the film but you never really feel anything for the characters other than seeing them for vehicles of simple character traits. Yes we realize that Oliver nose bleeds when he's nervous. Yes we know that Roberta is a dirty girl but that's all they seem to be. When an interesting character gets introduced they pretty much get shuffled off their mortal coil far too fast to have any sort of impact.
It does please me that at least there was an effort in trying something different in the Canadian film industry, even though it is a weaker entry. However that doesn't mean there are a lack of good Canadian films. I will be trying to see Poor Boy's Game (written and produced by the director of this film) which I heard good things about. Plus there are a lot of other great Canadian films that are in the lineup this year that really showcases how diverse it is nowadays.
ISLAND ETUDE
The story behind this Taiwanese film is Ming Hsiang (played by Darren Chian Chun-jui) takes up his bicycle and you follow his journey around the coastline of Taiwan. He meets interesting people and groups along the way and he finishes his journey near the end of the film. That's it.
Most of the time you'll see great scenic shots of the Taiwan coastline and various city areas. The movie has little plot, aside from Hsiang trying to bicycle as much as possible around the island with little to no help in forms of transportation, but food and lodgings for the night is always welcomed by Hsiang albeit a bit modestly. The characters that Hsiang meets aren't fabulous, they aren't insane or some kind of wacky character or sidekick in his week long journey around the island. They are just people.
And that's why I love this film.
IMHO this is the greatest escapist film I've ever seen. I say that because you can just let go and enjoy the bike ride along with Hsiang. There is no dominating force of an famous actor or a supporting character that Hsiang meets that suddenly commands your attention, stomping around the screen like he's the most important person there. The dialogue isn't witty, deliberatly insightful or forced and all the emotions you feel in this film feels sincere and genuine. Basically this is a film you would have probably seen off someone's camcorder who happened to record a conversation or just a moment between two people. The conversations that you hear from the characters that Hsiang meets are conversations that you hear everyday; your friends, your relatives, your co-workers, people you know, people you bump into and people who share your interests. That's it, they aren't characters, they are just people. How they talk is as naturally you or I would talk to each other and somehow Huai-en Chen, in his first directorial debut, has managed to make it interesting without forcing us to hear it.
It's like those small moments of quiet time in films where you hear some background crowd say something which kind of brings to life the movie in a very special way. Perhaps because it's the thought that counted that the director actually decided to stress the small details to make the film better, but imagine that focus on that particular detail spread out over the film. It reminds me how Jesse and Celine in Before Sunset just talked. But it's even more natural than that because you don't associate the faces with famous actors or actresses; or even associate them with actors playing these interesting characters. You feel that they plucked them out of reality and you are just there with them, listening in thier real life discussions. It's scary how natural they manage to make dialogue feel to the point that you wonder if it's a documentary but even so it's far more refined than a documentary. Whereas a documentary (or even a travel show for that matter) tends to have a narrator to inform you of certain scenes; there is no such narration in this film. It's like looking at a photo album of a beautiful vacation and drawing your own conclusions as to what is occuring. It's not that I don't mind narration, but I love how subtle this film is in expressing emotions, ideas, culture, characters and personalities without having to hammer it into your head that "Hey...this guy is a gung-ho bicyclist." or "hey,..here's a close bonding moment between strangers." Things just happen. It's a gentle balance between realism and the theatrics of cinema.
The best part of the film? The cinematography and the scenic shots. From the very first frame to the final shot, every single scene has beautiful cinematography. You won't be seeing any crazy ass camera angles or shots going into people's chest cavities only to bouce out of their nostrils. However if Taiwan ever needed a tourism video to show how beautiful Taiwan is; they might as well send this film out to potential tourists everywhere because it's THAT fucking beautiful. I'm a stickler for composition in a shot and I love when a shot is so properly balanced, you can take a still of it and it looks like an artist painted or photographed it. However I was constantly surprised again and again as to how varied and original each scene seemed while shooting what could have been quickly boring scenary. I don't know if the nature of Taiwan is just so nice there that you can point, shoot and never get a bad picture; but even if that is the case, the director Huai-en Chen, truly shows that he painstakingly took great lengths to compose these shots. Considering that this film is over the course of 7 days, it actually took 6 months to film. However I guess being the cinematographer for Hsiao-hsien Hou helps quite a bit for perfecting his craft.
Cinematography aside Darren Chian Chun-jui does a fabulous subtle performance as our protagonist. There's nothing special about him aside that he's deaf. Intentional or not, the film itself kind of reflects that certain quality about him that sort of makes him an alright person. This is also his first film however I think it's great that he doesn't have a star quality about him, so you don't think that he's an actor but he's a human being. All the emotions he expresses actually FEEL genuine and sincere. There's nothing especially bold about some of his characteristics. He's a bit naive, but that's because he's just a good kid; however I wouldn't put that on being stupid but being innocent. He's nice but not generous to the point of being Mr. Perfect. However him being deaf never seems to be such a big detail of the film. He's still human and his disability doesn't make him any more or less special than anyone else in the film.
His journey around the island isn't the point of the story. He isn't doing it for some cause or because he had some sort of mental breakdown, philsophical breakthrough or plot device for him to do it. There's no ultimate goal in him finishing the trip around the island because that's all it is, a trip. No different if I were to fly to backpack in Europe or Asia. I'm not racing against time to meet up with a dying relative or to winback the girl of my dreams and along the way see crazy characters who inspire me to be a better person. It's just a trip that I planned and know that I will finish it and come back. The point of the trip is to just enjoy and have fun with what you're doing.
I know a lot of people probably won't dig this film all that much like I do because quite a few people had left the theatre during the film. It does drag on even to the point where I feel like shuffling a bit too much. However just when I think I need to have a bit of a break, there's just another great scenic shot that brings you back in loving this film for it's simplicity and sincerity. The music is fantastically appropriate for the film and is especially low key. Imagine a snowboarding/moutain biking video but with just a bit more low key soundtrack. Because most of the other times there is no music at all which is never needed because the performances are great.
I never though I would love a film about scenary or having scenary as a prime focus. It kind of reminds me about Gerry with Matt Damon a while back where people said it was a film about scenary and it sort of weirded me out how that would work but in the case of Island Etude...it does work. It is kind of funny considering all the documentariess about climate change are being shown this year at the VIFF (an entire section of the line up is dedicated to it) however this is probably the most compelling film I've seen yet to inspire me to be more active with the environment. It may not be everyone's cup of tea but if you're in the state of mind where you just want to see something different, a film that doesn't need to challenge your wit and taste for 2 hours or want to just see a culture without a grinding narrator telling you what you're seeing; then chill out and just take in this film. It truly is a feel good film without having to force the goodness into you.
DEAD TIME
A police detective named Eros is investigating some peculiar deaths happening around an unnamed city in Indonesia while the narcoleptic Janus holds a secret that links all these deaths together. Classified as a neo-noir crime drama it certainly aspires to be that however it seems to fall short of all the different types of genres that it tries to stuff into the story. Part mystery, part ghost story, part wackiness and apparently the director Joko Anwar said it's part tongue in cheek political commentary a lot of the times attempts at humour falls flat, the wackiness that it could have been was underused, the horror story was minimal and the noir doesn't really feel like traditional noir.
The visuals were alright, it was kind of neat to see a new take on the colour scheme of having a noir film with golden hues and lights. Even during the daytime it felt really dark and menacing. However most of the time this film sort of dragged on with clunky dialogue, characters that really don't interest you and a soundtrack that was probably intentionally cliche, however there's never enough wit on-screen to really drive the point home and make it actually humourous. Apparently Anwar is becoming a leading directing in Southeast Asia and I can see that. He just needs to polish up his techniques a bit and I could see him as a better filmmaker, but here's hoping that'll happen.
