Black Gate

Nobuhiko Obayashi, the director best known for the surreal 1977 horror film House (Hausu, ハウス), died on April 10 this year. His final film is Labyrinth of Cinema (海辺の映画館 キネマの玉手箱), which he wrote as well as directed. Just as visually extravagant as House, it grapples with weightier themes — specifically, the nature of cinema and of war, and how film can be used to protest war. It’s therefore also a rumination on history, specifically the history of Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how that history was depicted in the movies of its time. And Labyrinth gets at these things through the frame of a fantasy story about movie spectators unstuck in time and narrative. Obayashi swung for the fences with this film, a three-hour long experience that feels like a career summation, a director reflecting on his life and craft and art.

It begins in an almost essayistic manner, with the musings of a narrator named Fanta G (Yukihiro Takahashi), floating among memory fragments in a time machine that eventually brings him to the present day and the seaside city of Onomichi (Obayashi’s home). The last cinema in town will be closing at dawn, but before that happens an audience will take in one last picture show. And then some of members of that audience are caught up on the images onscreen — three young men chasing a mysterious teen named Noriko (Rei Yoshida).

The film ranges across the years roughly from 1868 to 1945, talking about Japan’s history, how it played out in film, and how Japanese film itself developed. The decline of samurai and the rise of mass mechanised warfare is seen through a peculiar lens, the garrulous Fanta explaining everything necessary as the film goes along. The characters from the audience take on different roles, playing out different stories across different genres and forms. If the frame concept of the Onomichi movie house is self-consciously surreal, the scenarios that incorporate the audience members grow more serious as the film goes on.

The movie begins with a blitz of images and ideas, introducing concepts at a furious pace to the point that ten minutes in I almost stopped taking notes. Not only do we get Fanta G’s time travelling, and then the cinema, and then an assortment of characters, but we’re told that the film will be referring to the writings of poet Chuya Nakahara (1907-1937), and soon get dance numbers and black-and-white scenes and title cards and even passages like silent film. And a visual approach seemingly based on collage, compositing together images like an odd kind of cartoon. Thankfully, it slows down, and in fact continues to slow as the film goes along. But not before a range of genres appears onscreen — musicals and yakuza films and samurai movies — somehow all coexisting.

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Day 5 of Fantasia began for me by watching Simon Barrett give bad career advice. Barrett’s the writer of horror movies such as The Guest and You’re Next, and he took questions from an online audience for what turned out to be more than two hours in a self-effacing discussion about how the modern movie industry works (or fails to), and how aspiring filmmakers can prepare themselves for entering that world. It was a funny, detailed, and generous discussion, which you can find here.

After that I watched my first feature film of the day, Detention (Fanxiao, 返校), a movie from Taiwan directed by John Hsu (his first feature, in fact) from a script Hsu wrote with Fu Kai-Ling and Chien Shih-Keng. It’s based on a game from Red Candle Games, conceived by Yao Shun-Ting, which has apparently become a cultural phenomenon in Taiwan. There’s already been a novelisation of the game; the movie version of the story was released in Taiwan late last year, and became a box office smash.

It’s set in 1962, during the decades-long period of martial law in Taiwan known as the White Terror. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, wake up in their school. They don’t remember falling asleep, the school looks different and eerier, and they’re apparently alone except for demonic versions of their teachers and creatures that might be ghosts or demons. A flood hems them in the school grounds. They have to survive and figure out what’s happened to them, and this set-up suggests the story’s video-game roots.

But the development of this concept’s surprisingly powerful. We start with the perspective of the young woman, Fang (Gingle Wang), but soon learn that the young man, Wei (Chin-Hua Tseng), was involved with a secret book club, copying and reading the work of forbidden authors like Rabindranath Tagore. As the two explore the school and deal with the horrors therein, we learn more about the book club and the two faculty members guiding it, Chang (Fu Meng-Po) and Yin (Cecilia Choi). The dangers that come with being part of the club are made clear, and we see the punishments handed out to people merely suspected of possessing literature deemed subversive. (So, yes, the first rule of book club is nobody talks about book club. And for good reason.)

But we also get an early flash of imagery suggesting Wei has or will meet with a rough fate. In fact the movie plays with chronology a lot, and very effectively. As we learn about what’s brought the two youths into the darkened school, we see past events from multiple angles, with different levels of knowledge, and the film does an excellent job of letting us know just enough at just the right time. Nor do the flashbacks slow the story down overmuch. In fact one particularly extensive flashback struck me as perfectly placed — taking us away from the nightmare environment long enough, and at the right place, that it keeps the horror from becoming normalised: we return for the climax, and the place is still disconcerting.

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This week we’re looking at the spate of Arabian Nights fantasies that came out of Hollywood during World War II, when cinema audiences were looking for colorful distractions from the grim news of the war. And boy howdy, were these films ever colorful distractions, bizarre and often wacky in ways that seem incredible by current standards.

The example was set, not by Hollywood, but by the 1940 British production of The Thief of Bagdad, a serious fantasy film that established the whole genre. We’ll start with that and then introduce Hollywood’s increasingly strange variations on the theme. Hang on to your turbans!

The Thief of Bagdad

Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1940
Directors: Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, Tim Whelan
Source: Criterion Collection DVD

Everybody loves this movie. It’s got heart, magic, music, adventure, romance, and ambitious special effects that alternate between stupendous and hilarious. Hang it, even I love this movie. And yet, to be perfectly frank, it’s a bit of a mess.

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Day four of Fantasia was another quiet one for me, with a single movie on my docket. First, though, came a panel discussion with some of the editors of Rue Morgue magazine. Rue Morgue’s been covering horror and related fields since the late 1990s, and it continues to exist as a print publication even while maintaining a strong web presence. A wide-ranging discussion anchored by Executive Editor Andrea Subissati dealt with, among other things, the challenges of keeping the magazine going, how to start writing for Rue Morgue and in general, and the practicalities of publishing. You can find it here.

Not too long after that I watched The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw, written and directed by Thomas Robert Lee. It’s a solid occult horror film with an original setting, but I found it frustrating as well. While it’s a good movie, the sort of thing that’d make for fine Halloween viewing, I thought a few things done a little differently could have made it truly outstanding.

It opens with an extensive text crawl explaining backstory. In 1873 a group of immigrants from Ireland settled in North America, and maintained the traditions of their era as the world changed around them. In 1956 a curse settled on their lands, at the same time as a woman named Agatha Earnshaw (Catherine Walker) secretly bore a child she named Audrey. It’s now 1973; Agatha’s kept now-17-year-old Audrey (Jessica Reynolds) hidden from the community all her life, but Audrey’s begun to develop strange powers, while the rest of the people continue to struggle with their barren fields.

The movie opens with Audrey, hidden in a box, watching her mother be accosted by townspeople. A young couple’s just seen their boy die, and the father, Colm (Jared Abrahamson), takes out his grief on Audrey, a figure of suspicion because her farm is the only one in the area consistently producing healthy crops. He threatens her, pushes her, and threatens to take her goods before his father, Seamus, the priest of the village, steps in and calms things down. Audrey decides to seek revenge on Colm, and on everyone else who mistreats her and her mother, a quest that threatens the destruction not only of Colm and his wife Bridget (Hannah Emily Anderson) but of the rest of their community as well.

The first thing to be said about this film is that it looks spectacular. Wide vistas show nature in late autumn, dark and barren. The lighting’s spectacular, using what looks like rich natural light, and the muted muted colour palette builds a strong atmosphere. Costumes and props immerse the viewer in the not-quite-Victorian world of the community.

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I had a light schedule on the third day of Fantasia, as I tried to finish off some other business. But at 4 PM I sat down to watch the presentation of the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award to John Carpenter. The ceremony was necessarily less than what it usually was, but the question-and-answer session that followed was rich and generous. I was particularly intrigued when Carpenter was asked about projects he regretted being unable to make, and he said that he’d tried to get Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination to screen but had been unable to get the script structure to work — and now suspects the book’s unfilmable. You can find the entire discussion here.

That evening I sat down to watch a Korean movie called Jesters: The Game Changers. Bundled with it was a short, “Yonorang” (작은 뼈), a visually stylish film directed by Kim Sangdong and written by Lee Sohyun. It’s a mostly dialogue-free story told in 8 minutes, incorporating monsters and swordfights and betrayal. The chronology’s fractured, too, and I found the relationship of the various scenes difficult to parse at one viewing. This is too bad, as it looks lovely (a little like Samurai Jack, but more stylised), and moment-by-moment the drama was palpable. I just couldn’t fit the pieces of the story together.

Jesters: The Game Changers (Gwang-dae-deul: Poong-moon-jo-jak-dan, 광대들: 풍문조작단) was directed by Kim Joo-ho from a script by Kim Jin-wook and Shin Jin-wook. It’s a somewhat-comic historical adventure story with fantasy touches set in the fifteenth century. King Sejo has usurped the country from his nephew and as the movie opens, all across the land jesters — wandering actors — are staging a popular play about the usurpation and the execution of six loyal ministers. Sejo orders the execution of the treasonous jesters, while his chief minister, Han Myung-Hee (Son Hyun-Joo) recruits a team of jesters of his own to present alternative facts and make the people believe that Sejo is the true anointed ruler.

The film follows the troupe as they alternatively propagandise for Sejo and then are alienated from the tyrannical monarch. The leader of the troupe, and the central character of the film, is Deok-ho (Cho Jin-woong, from, among other places, Kundo and Assassination), whose group includes an exiled painter (Yoon Park), a failed fortuneteller (Kim Seul-Gi), an acrobat (Kim Min-Suk), and a puppeteer (Ko Chang-Seok). They concoct incredible stage effects to simulate miracles, sometimes on vast scales, and the set-pieces the film gives us are structured around the inventive if improbable use of period technology to create these illusions. It’s not exactly clockpunk, in that the technology’s a step earlier than clockwork, but they do use things like magic lanterns — in devices that look surprisingly like modern movie projectors.

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One of the new wrinkles to Fantasia this year is the existence of a Discord where filmmakers and critics and audiences can chat with each other about the movies playing the festival. It’s already proved quite useful to me, as seeing other people discussing films has helped draw my attention to a few titles I’d originally dismissed as uninteresting or out of step with this web site’s focus. A case in point was the movie I watched late on Fantasia’s second day, writer-director Ben Hozie’s PVT Chat.

It’s got no element of the fantastic. But it’s a kind of crime story, and indeed from a certain angle is one of the damnedest film noirs I’ve ever seen. While also being sexually explicit (and what I am told the kids these days call kink friendly) to a surprising degree.

The film opens with Jack (Peter Vack), a young New Yorker, alone in his apartment masturbating. Jack spends a lot of time watching camgirls, and we hear him describing to them what he wants (“verbal abuse”) and setting up scenarios to play through. He finds a new girl, Scarlet (Juia Fox), who swiftly becomes his favourite. We find out that Jack doesn’t have much else going on in his life. He supports himself, barely, by playing online blackjack. He seems to be spiralling downward, so desperate for actual human contact he makes friends with the guy his landlord hired to paint his apartment. Then he thinks he sees Scarlet in a neighbourhood store. But Scarlet tells him she lives in San Francisco, and swears she’s never been to New York.

This first act of the movie is well-made and thoughtful, but a little slow, and I found it a bit difficult to care about at first viewing. It’s important for establishing Jack and his situation, though, and it does a solid job of making us question his grasp on reality — was he hallucinating? Or, even though he’s had moments of actual connection with Scarlet, is she lying to a john?

We find out as the movie suddenly sharply expands its focus. We follow other characters, and the story takes some new twists, opening up in unexpected ways. Thematically the film’s focus becomes clearer and more intricate. We get different angles on how the characters are telling stories of their lives, scripting and directing what they want and what they see. Jack’s already lied to Scarlet about his job, concocting an imaginary telepathic technology out of whole cloth. Without wanting to give too much away, we later find out how much she has lied and how much she has told the truth to him; we find out more about her art — she’s already shown him paintings she made — and about her job. As in 2018’s Cam, the parallel between film narrative and webcam porn is examined, both visual media involving scripted fictions.

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