Black Gate

“The Horse Guessing Game” is a 9-minute short by Xia Leilei. It’s a beautiful piece of work made of stop-motion paper dolls and shadowplay, mostly black-and-white, with colour used briefly and well to heighten the significance of one sequence. I can’t claim to understand it entirely, but it opens with a woman or girl isolated from those around her, and appears to show her entering into a shadow-world with great potential and great danger where she might gain a voice and learn to speak to those around her, or else might be swallowed up and lost. As I read the film, it’s about imagination, a bit like Plato’s cave. But there is a lot of ambiguity to the story, and it took a second viewing for me to properly follow it. The movie takes a bit of effort, in other words, but is worth it. You can judge for yourself, as the film’s online here.

Next came Cryptozoo, written and directed by Dash Shaw. It’s an animated story set in the late 60s, about a woman named Lauren Gray (voice of Lake Bell) who rescues mythological creatures, cryptids, from around the world. She’s part of a team under the direction of an older woman named Joan (Grace Zabriskie) who plans to open Cryptozoo — a place where the creatures of myth can live and work with regular humans. But the American government has nefarious plans to use the Japanese dream-eating creature called the Baku (AKA the Tapir, also seen at Fantasia this year in Hello! Tapir) to eat the dreams of the counterculture. A violent chase to find the Baku ensues, and at its core are the questions of whether the zoo is the best future for the cryptids, and whether they really can integrate into human society.

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One Second Champion is a feature film from Hong Kong directed by Sin Hang Chiu and written by Ashley Cheung, Siu Hong Ho, Ho Tin Li, and Wai Chun Ling. Chow (Endy Chow) was born brain dead for one second, and somehow this gave him the power to see one second into the future — but only one second. As a kid he had a brief period of fame for his oddball talent, but he was never able to find a way to turn it into a lasting career. Then, as an adult, fallen on hard times and with a son to support, he breaks up a fight at the bar where he works, and his ability to see a second ahead turns out to be incredibly useful in a fight. A boxing promoter with a failing gym, Yip Chi-shun (director Chiu, who also contributed to the soundtrack with his band ToNick), happens to see him in the brawl and, struck by his skill, offers to train him and make a career for him in the ring.

And so the movie becomes a sports film, in which Chow rises through the ranks of the local boxing federation while Yip’s family-owned gym starts to make money. There are complications and reversals, and it all builds to a final boxing match. There’s some comedy here, but the film chooses to become more of a drama the further along it goes. In general the fantasy aspect of the one-second precognition becomes de-emphasised, too, a way into the boxing scene rather than an element to be explored on its own. The precognition’s a means to the end of finding a new spin on the form of the boxing movie.

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Don’t Say Its Name is a feature film from director Rueben Martell, co-written by Martell with Gerald Wexler, that had its world premiere at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival. It’s a film set in a northern Indigenous community divided by an offer from a big mining company promising money in exchange for the rights to tear up the land. But then murders start happening, some of them apparently supernatural.

The story starts with the murder of anti-mining activist Kharis Redwater (Sheena Kaine) one night on an isolated icy road. As law enforcement investigates, in the person of middle-aged Betty Stonechild (Madison Walsh), other killings happen — violent deaths, victims torn apart by some invisible force in front of witnesses. Betty deputises Park Ranger Stacey Cole (Sera-Lys McArthur, also at Fantasia this year in the short “She Whistles” in the Born of Woman showcase). But even her experience fighting in Afghanistan, which has left her with a bad case of PTSD, is tested by the mysterious entity.

The film’s been billed as a horror movie, but I’d call it dark fantasy. This genre quibble speaks to the effect of the film. There are horrific killings, and there is a supernatural entity responsible, but the main characters aren’t terrified by it. They’re cautious, of course, as they’d be cautious of a creature like a maddened bear or wolf, but their actions aren’t driven primarily by fear, they don’t break down in terror or even come close, they never panic. Confrontations with the creature are marked by desperation but not mindless terror. The point of this is that the story is not one of an isolated community terrorised by the supernatural, but a story of resourceful and determined women trying to protect their home and loved ones.

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The Duellists (UK, 1977)

In the wake of the surprise success of Richard Lester’s 1973-74 Musketeers movies, there was a spate of swashbuckler films in the mid to late Seventies attempting to replicate Lester’s success — some by Lester himself. The trend peaked in 1977 with a trio of notable films all based, like The Three Musketeers, on classic Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. The Salkind brothers, who’d produced Lester’s Musketeers films, tried again with Crossed Swords, based on Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper and following Lester’s example with another all-star ensemble cast. Britain’s ITV, which had done well a couple of years before with an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo starring Richard Chamberlain (The Three Musketeers’ Aramis), followed up with another Dumas adaptation, The Man in the Iroin Mask, also starring Chamberlain. Best of all was a movie not inspired by the Musketeers films, though it did use their outstanding fight director, Bill Hobbs: The Duellists, directed by Ridley Scott in the vein of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). Let’s check them out.

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“Reklaw” is a 12-minute short by Polaris Banks, starring Lance Henriksen playing somewhat against type as the pacifist ringleader of a group of talented vigilantes who drive around trying to keep people out of jail by destroying evidence before the police arrive. We learn this through watching one specific case where they attempt to save a woman from the law only for violence to rear its head. The film moves well, with an interesting structure and a few clever ideas, and there’s a good mix of men-at-work humour with serious commentary on society. But the backstory’s opaque, and probably could have used more room to breathe. There’s an interesting idea here, which could make a feature film or a TV show (and indeed Banks has said the short’s a proof of concept), but is probably not displayed at its best in a single 12-minute short.

Bundled with the short was Yakuza Princess. It’s a Brazilian film, from director Vicente Amorim, who co-wrote with Kimi Lee, Tubaldini Shelling, and Fernando Toste. They were working from a graphic novel called Samurai Shiro, by Danilo Bayreuth, which I have not read. It’s an action movie based in the Japanese community of Sao Paolo, Brazil.

20 years ago there was a massacre of a Yakuza clan in Japan. Today, Akemi (Masumi) is a young woman in Sao Paulo’s large Japanese community who has grown up studying swordplay but unaware of certain key truths about her family. Elsewhere in the city, a young man (Johnathan Rhys-Meyers) with amnesia, nasty battle-scars, and a katana wakes up in a hospital. The film proceeds to bring these things together, with a healthy dose of gunplay and swordfighting.

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Things That Go Bump In the East 2021 was this year’s iteration of Fantasia’s regular showcase of short genre films from Asia. This year brought a collection of eight films from six countries, including the US (“for a dash of diasporic bedevilment,” as the Fantasia program notes observed).

It started with “Chewing Gum” (“Chingum”), from India. It’s an 18-minute piece directed by Mihir Fadnavis, who co-wrote with Srinivas Annamraju. One stormy full moon night, a deceitful man boards a train. But something’s in there with him. And it demands a kind of tribute: chewing gum. He flees, and the monster pursues, and the farther he goes, by whatever means of transport, the faster it follows. This is an incredibly well-done film in black-and-white — mostly black, in fact, as Pratik Shah’s cinematography covers the screen in gorgeous shadows, pushing the classic horror atmosphere. I’ll note that I’ve seen an intriguing review (confirmed by an official synopsis of the film for another festival) that points out a political subtext I didn’t catch; it’s another layer to a stunningly well-crafted spooky film about a supernatural nighttime pursuit, with a subtle soundtrack and a splendid build.

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The Villeneuve Dune is breathtaking. I was literally having trouble breathing during the closing scenes. While I watched, I kept mulling over why this version works so well and Lynch’s fails so badly. Lynch is a genius; he had a strong cast; he had enormous financial resources to deploy.

Villeneuve might just be more in touch with this kind of story. (Despite the POV drifting in and out of consensus reality, Dune is not Eraserhead.) But a more important factor is time.

Lynch’s Dune was 137 minutes long in its theatrical cut. Villeneuve’s Dune is nearly 20 minutes longer and it only takes the audience near (but not quite all the way) to the end of the novel’s Book One, covering less than half the story. The completed version could easily run to more than 6 hours. Lynch simply wouldn’t have been allowed to create a movie that massive in the mid-80s.

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For each of the past several years Fantasia’s gathered together short genre films by women into annual showcase presentations called Born of Woman. I’ve seen all of them, and they’ve all been strong collections. So I was eager to see this year’s version, with eight films from six different countries.

The first was “Lucid,” from Canada, directed by Deanna Milligan from a script by Claire E. Robertson. It’s a 17-minute story about Mia (Caitlin Taylor), an art student in the early 1990s, who presents her class with a self-portrait that’s critiqued remorselessly. The movie that follows shows her digging deep into herself to find a project that will give her a good grade, and presents us with the gory yet oddly cheery results. The film looks very nice, with lush saturated colour, and an impressive long travelling shot at the start following Mia into and through her school. I found the period background didn’t come out very much, though that may be a function of the film trying to speak to the art world and art trends of that time, with which I am basically unfamiliar. At any rate, it’s a funny, weird, and engagingly gross movie.

Next was “Inheritance,” a 14-minute American movie written and directed by Annalise Lockhart, about a Black family in Vermont who are haunted by still silent White ghosts. When the youngest of the family of three, Norra (Victoria A. Villier), inherits the deed to her family’s cottage she sees the ghosts for the first time, and we follow her as she tries to find a way to free herself and her family from constant surveillance on their own property. The end’s a bit surreal, moving from horror or dark fantasy to science-fictional themes with a traditionally Vermont flavour; the way out of past threats is in this case Afrofuturist technology. It works, but there’s also some ambiguity in the solution Norra and her family find. Still, the story has a strong feel, establishing its characters as rich individuals, and memorably insisting on their dignity.

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