Black Gate

Alien (20th Century Fox, May 1979). Directed by Ridley Scott, screenplay by Dan O’Bannon

I am constantly making Alien/Aliens references to my wife and she is constantly reminding me that she has not, in fact, ever seen any of the Alien movies except Prometheus (damn the luck). Having just finished up the 1979 cadre of sci-fi magazines, and noting that many of them had references to the movie Alien, it was finally time to fix this situation — at least with Alien, Aliens, and that part of Alien 3 where half of Lance Henriksen steals the whole movie.

So, we finally watched Alien. And it appears that nobody at Black Gate has ever reviewed it. In fact, it is such a pop culture touchstone that most people know the story without, well, having seen the story. I’m going to start this review by coming out swinging: Alien is one of those movies, kind of like Blade Runner (another Ridley Scott film) – a movie that is far better than it deserves to be, a movie whose every misstep manages to ‘fall up’ as it were.

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Straight to VHS (Directamente para Video) is a new documentary from Uruguay that investigates a video oddity from 1988. Act Of Violence In A Young Journalist (Acto de violencia en una joven periodista) is that oddity, an Uruguayan-made direct-to-video film from thirty-three years ago in which directing, writing, cinematography, soundtrack, and editing were all done by one man, Manuel Lamas. None of those things are done particularly well, but for some viewers the movie still has a strange power. The documentary looking at Lamas’ film comes to us from Emilio Silva Torres, and without claiming its subject is any good, it attempts to evoke the feel of looking at weird cinema of uncertain provenance without an internet to explain what you’re seeing. The Fantasia Film Festival bundled the two movies together, so I was able to see the thing itself and the investigation into its background back-to-back.

I started with Act of Violence, and I’m still unsure whether that was the best decision. It’s a movie about a woman journalist, Blanca (Blanca Gimenez), who is compiling a report on the causes of violence. Periodically the story of the film pauses for several minutes as she interviews people about the rise of violence in society; sometimes those people are psychologists from the health department and sometimes they’re soccer commentators. Much of the film is actually about Blanca’s personal life, though, particularly her relationship with Carlos, an Uruguayan businessman with ties to Canada. Except that by the time she meets him Blanca’s already given a piece of simple advice to a friend, which will turn out to have tragic and indeed violent consequences.

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“MonsterDykë” is a four-minute Canadian short directed and written by Kaye Adelaide and Mariel Sharp. It stars Adelaide as a trans sculptress who’s being pestered for a date by a manipulative guy; she hangs up on him and turns to her work-in-progress. At which point the movie turns into an update of the Pygmalion myth. It has an interesting look, shot on back-and-white 16mm film, and is both sweet and explicit. The design of the sculpture’s imaginative, and if the story’s not surprising, at less than five minutes it doesn’t really need to be.

The feature that was bundled with the short was Giving Birth to A Butterfly, which would prove to be one of my pleasant surprises of the 2021 Fantasia Festival. It’s the first film from director Theodore Schafer, who co-wrote it with Patrick Lawler. And it’s a surprising work that seems to change shape as it goes along. The air of surrealism is constant. But the degree of surrealism is not, and what starts at first like a domestic comedy with an odd edge delves into more dreamlike and indeed mythic terrain as the story goes on.

Diana (Annie Parisse) is married to the optimistic but unaccomplished aspiring restauranteur Daryl (Paul Sparks), and is the mother of teens Danielle (Rachel Resheff) and Andrew, AKA Drew (Owen Campbell). Shortly after the movie starts, Drew introduces the family to his new fiancée, Marlene (Gus Birney), who is pregnant and not with with Drew’s child. Diana is not terribly pleased about this situation, but when her identity is stolen she must turn to Marlene to hep her drive to the address of a mysterious company where she hopes to resolve the situation. Meanwhile Danielle’s working backstage on the school play, and Marlene’s mother (Constance Shulman), who sees herself as an actress, is losing touch with reality.

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“Munkie” is a 15-minute short film from New Zealand written and directed by Steven Chow. It follows Rose (Xana Tang), a youth with controlling parents who are immigrants or of recent Asian ancestry. Rose has a plan to stop their interference in her life. But things do have a tendency to go wrong. It’s a fictional story based on a true crime, and it’s very well-done, sketching character and atmosphere coldly and even brutally. It’s a shocking story, and ends in a strong place — that is, a place which leaves the viewer briefly wanting more. In fact it’s a tightly-structured story that does its damage and gets out at the right moment.

Bundled with that short was Baby, Don’t Cry, an American movie directed by Jesse Dvorak. But the main creative force behind the movie seems to be screenwriter and star Zita Bai, who plays Baby, a teenage daughter of Chinese immigrants to the northwestern United States. An outcast, Baby’s got an almost overwhelming interest in filming what is around her, perhaps less as a way to make films and tells stories than to document and record her life. And then she falls in with Fox (Vas Provatakis), a tall shaven-headed white punk leading a wild but independent life. Flashbacks and moments of surrealism and things seen through the camera lens are integrated well, as Baby finds herself pulled from her parents’ abusive home toward an uncertain adulthood.

It’s a movie that hangs out on the edge of genre. You’re never really sure if it’s about to turn into a full-fledged crime story, and I suppose it doesn’t quite, but the very end of the film suggests it should be read as an unconventional fantasy. Or, indeed, on the edge of fantasy and myth. You could perhaps read it as a mimetic story, but I think that would run counter to the plain meaning of what we see (and a question-and-answer session with the filmmakers, available on Fantasia’s YouTube page, would seem to confirm this). It’s an ending that to me opens up a number of further questions, inviting a second watch to see what plays out differently and what does not have the meaning we thought. And this is no bad thing.

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“The Last Word” (“Le dernier mot”) is a five-minute-long short film written and directed by Lucas Warin. It starts outside a café: a man (Owen Little) is writing in a notebook, turning over phrases as he works on a story. He appears to discover a bizarre power; but appearances can be deceiving. This is a fun piece about the relation between writer and text, and the ability of writing to conjure a character, if only in the writer’s head. And about whether we really get to write our own stories.

The short was bundled with Ghosting Gloria (Muerto con Gloria), directed by Marcela Matta and Mauro Sarser; Sarser’s credited with the script, though it seems both worked on the story during the making of the film. The translation of the title’s a little odd, as Gloria (Stefanía Tortorella) isn’t ghosted in the usual sense. In fact, something of the reverse.

Gloria’s thirty years old, single, has never had an orgasm, and has more or less given up on relationships. Then she moves into a new house, where a man (Federico Guerra) recently died. His ghost remains, and Gloria begins an enthusiastically sexual relationship with the ghost. She experiments wildly; soon finds herself happier than she’s ever been; and her friend Sandra (Nenan Pelenur), a fellow employee at the bookstore where she works, notices her change of mood. But can the living and the dead maintain a healthy relationship?

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In 2020 a group of Japanese directors launched ‘Kaiju Defeats Covid,’ a viral scheme in which kaiju fans were encouraged to send in clips of themselves using the kaiju they had around the house (well, or models thereof) to destroy the COVID-19 virus. There’s something appealing about this idea, enlisting the very large to defeat the very small: like a reversal of War Of the Worlds. At any rate, Director Shunji Iwai took the core of this idea and built a feature film out of it, making first a series of videos for YouTube and then expanding them into a full feature film.

The 12 Day Tale of the Monster That Died In 8 (8日で死んだ怪獣の12日の物語, Yoka de Shinda Kaiju no Juninichi no Monogatari) follows an actor named Sato (Takumi Saitoh, who has been in many things including Haruko’s Paranormal Laboratory and Tokyo Vampire Hotel, here playing a version of himself) temporarily with no work due to the COVID shutdown of the Japanese film industry. To fill the time, he’s bought ‘capsule kaijus’ online, small monsters that hatch from a capsule and will grow; Sato plans to send their final forms to take on COVID (the idea of capsule kaiju, incidentally, is taken from a 60s TV show called Ultraseven). He gets advice about the creatures from a director he knows, Shinji Higuchi (one of the directors behind the Kaiju Defeats Covid project, also the co-director of Shin Godzilla, and the director of, among other things, the live-action Attack On Titan), and watches a YouTuber raising her own capsule kaiju. And he chats with other friends and co-workers. The entire film is in fact a series of video calls, occasionally interrupted by scenes of dancers, or a drone flying through a city, all of it in black and white. (Wikizilla.org claims that this is the first kaiju movie shot entirely in black-and-white since 1965.)

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The Small Gauge Trauma showcase is the Fantasia Film Festival’s annual collection of short genre films. Mostly these are horror movies, sometimes action; science fiction shorts get their own showcase. Small Gauge Trauma 2021 featured 10 movies from a total of 8 different countries.

It started with “Aria,” from the UK. It’s a 13-minute piece from writer-director Christopher Poole, which begins as a couple (Susannah Fielding and Daniel Lawrence Taylor) set up a new security system and digital assistant: Aria. Which soon begins to behave oddly, and surreal moments blur the line between waking and dream. It’s a solid enough story with some ominous touches and memorable images, though I didn’t think the ending really paid off the promise of the earlier oddity.

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail (UK, 1975)

So, you think The Green Knight is a different cinematic take on the Arthurian legends? Well, okay, it is, but let’s go back to the early Seventies, the first time the Brits were really breaking the mold of Camelot and rolling out the Round Table.

Arthur of the Britons, Season One

Rating: ***
Origin: UK, 1972
Director: Sidney Hayers, et al.
Source: Network DVDs

Britain’s ITV network had several fine historical adventure shows early on, including The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956) and Sir Francis Drake (1961), but it was a long decade until their next one, Arthur of the Britons, in 1972, and in that time a lot of things changed, including tastes in historical sagas. Hollywood’s Technicolor past was out, replaced by gritty realistic history, at least as it was seen fifty years before now. This series was set during the time of the historical Arthur — if he existed — a time shortly after the Romans left British shores and the Saxons came across the narrow sea to fill the power vacuum. Here, “King” Arthur is one of many Celtic warlords resisting the Saxon advances, but the only one with the vision to see that the Celts must unite under a single leader if they are to hold the parts of Britain still under their control.

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“Choulequec” is a 26-minute short film from France, written and directed by Benoit Blanc and Matthias Girbig, and it’s quite charming in an absurd way. It follows a man, Lucas Lesol (Girbig), searching for Alma (Billie Blain), his missing 16-year-old daughter. On a rural highway he crosses the city limits of the town of Choulequec and finds himself in a bizarre place where an officious sheriff, Chépair (one of two roles for Benoit Blanc), has made up absurd laws. It starts out less like Kafka and more like Alice In Wonderland, possessed of the same left-field logic, and as it goes on becomes increasingly surreal. Fiction bends in on itself, and we’re never sure if we’re watching the characters or watching the characters watch the characters. It’s a story abut stories, and it’s done very well with some very sharp ideas. I’m not sure the end quite resolves anything (in terms of either plot or theme), but the journey along the way is amusing and clever; you can see it for yourself here.

Bundled with the short was Hotel Poseidon, from Belgium, written and directed by Stef Lernous. Lernous is the artistic director of Abattoir Fermé, a theater company founded in 1999. Originally noted for its underground guerilla-theatre style, in recent years the company’s taken cinematic approaches to its staged works (which included an adult adaptation of Alice In Wonderland for the book’s 150th anniversary in 2015). They’ve performed opera and created TV shows, so cinema is a logical progression. Lernous talked a bit about the process of making the film in a question-and-answer session available on Fantasia’s YouTube page; there was only one draft of the script, and he was able to use exactly the actors he wanted in the roles he created. The result is a surreal, grimy film that lurches from sequence to sequence, with intentional swerves in tone and plot. It’s an interesting approach; I don’t think it really works.

The story’s set in the eponymous hotel, a decaying wreck owned by Dave (Tom Vermeir), a passive middle-aged man. He wanders the massive place he inherited some time before, stumbling from one scenario into another. On the same day his friend Jacki plans to host a concert, his aunt dies (with financial consequences for Dave), and a woman (Anneke Sluiters) turns up who insists on taking a room at the hotel even though it’s closed for business. And frankly disgusting: the hotel’s beyond dirty or dingy, an underlit and grotesque near-ruin. We watch Dave stumble through the day, see him attend the concert, see him suffer various humiliations, see him abducted and penned up in a large glass pen that oddly resembles the garden of Eden.

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Back to the Wharf (风平浪静, Feng Ping Lang Jing) is a distinctive mixture of social drama and film noir. It’s a Chinese movie, directed by Li Xiaofeng from a script he wrote with Yu Xin, and has a lot to say about the changes Chinese society’s seen over the last several decades — and says it by exploring dramatic themes: the bonds of the family versus mercenary society, for example. Guilt and atonement. The futility of violence. Whatever specific applicability these things have for China, they’re also things that can play to viewers around the world.

The plot follows Song Hao (played as a youth by Zhou Zhengjie and as an adult by Zhang Yu), who as the film starts is a teenaged student aiming at a scholarship. That’s taken away from him for purely political reasons, and, distraught at the sudden loss of his future, he commits an act of violence. This leads to an accidental death, and his father helps him flee. 15 years later his mother dies, and he returns to his home town, where he cautiously tries to resume relations with his father Jianhui (Wang Yanhui), and starts a love affair with his former classmate Pan Xiaoshuang (Song Jia, Final Master), and goes into business with his former best friend Li Tang (Lee Hong-Chi) — all while trying to make amends to the daughter of the man he killed, Wan Xiaoning (Deng Enxi), without telling her the truth of his crime. But Li’s real estate company has plans for the property where Wan lives, and she’s the final holdout preventing a deal. You can see disaster coming.

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