Black Gate

It’s unfortunate that Alpha was delayed for a year, given little promotion, and released among more attention-grabbing late summer fare, because it is a literally awesome film — as in the jaw drops in awe at the beauty of it.

The story is a basic one: the young hunter out to prove his leadership who goes through an ordeal trying to get back home with the help of a dog companion. The basic beats of the tale won’t surprise most viewers. But Albert Hughes (the first time he’s directed without his brother Allen) shoots it with intense passion, as if he’s striving for 2001: A Space Odyssey levels of vast transcendentalism — while also appreciating the action/adventure qualities of One Million Years B.C.

It’s rough, strange, dream-like, and both one of the best dog movies and prehistory movies ever made.

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Yesterday I reviewed three of the movies I saw on Monday, July 23. Today I’ve written up my notes on the post-film question-and-answer sessions with the director of all three, Shinsuke Sato. All of what follows comes from my handwritten notes, and so may contain errors that crept in due to my hearing or transcription skills. Further, Sato spoke in Japanese, which was translated into either English or French depending on what language the questioner used, and while my French is competent enough that I caught most of the answers in the first two sessions, by the time the third session wrapped up it was near or past midnight.

First came zombie-apocalypse horror film I Am a Hero. Sato was asked how the movie was accepted by the producers and backers, and he said that it was rare to have this sort of film in the mainstream in Japan. Since roughly 2000, TV stations have been financing films, and they prefer material aimed at a more general audience. This film was backed by Toho, who wanted to make something that could not be made by a TV station. It was a good fit for Sato, as he’d made the two live-action Gantz films with Toho a dozen years before.

Asked if it was important to him to be respectful of the manga, he said the manga was unique; the film ran the risk of coming off as a simple zombie movie. Sato wanted to make a zombie film a little unlike any made before, while the manga creator put a certain amount of pressure on him by asking him simply to make a zombie film he would like. Asked about how he came up with the idea of zombies with a personality (carrying on with what they were obsessed with in life), Sato said that was in the manga, although he imagined a few of his own for the film. He said it was important for him to make Japanese zombies, creatures in some way distinct from American zombies. Zombies often come as hordes, individuals indistinct from each other, but he wanted to have each be individual.

He was asked about an early scene in the film, when Hideo has to confront his girlfriend, Tekko, who has been turned into a zombie; and specifically how he created her uncanny movement. Sato noted that Tekko was a high jumper in the original, and that he wanted to capture that energy. As the first zombie to appear in the film, she would have a high impact. He said he used three people to get her across, the actress, a stunt double, and a contortionist who is in the Guinness World Records. Asked about the lack of narrative payoff for the character of Hiromi, Sato said he’d cut a scene at the end that would have explained she was a hybrid who was the key to curing the virus. He decided it was more important to keep the focus on Hideo’s character arc rather than ruin the flow with explanations.

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I had three consecutive movies I wanted to watch on July 23. All three came from director Shinsuke Sato, all three were live-action manga adaptations, and all three were followed by question-and-answer sessions with Sato (the first at the De Sève Theatre, the second two at the larger Hall). I’ll write up what he had to say about his films in a separate post tomorrow. Today, my impressions of the movies themselves: the zombie apocalypse thriller I Am a Hero, the supernatural epic Bleach, and the science-fictional super-hero movie Inuyashiki. Note that I have read precisely none of the original works these movies were based on, and can speak only to the films I saw.

I Am a Hero (Ai Amu a Hiro, アイアムアヒーロー) was written by Akiko Nogi based on the manga by Kengo Hanazawa. Hideo (Yo Oizumi, Tokyo Ghoul) is a 35-year-old assistant to a manga creator, his aspirations and dreams dead or dying. Then the world suffers a zombie apocalypse from the spread of a deadly virus. Survivors flee to the top of Mount Fuji, because the virus can’t survive in the rarified air high up the mountain. Hideo scrambles to flee urban Tokyo, which is degenerating into mayhem; along the way he picks up a sidekick, a schoolgirl named Hiromi (Kasumi Arimura). Hiromi’s bitten by a zombie but instead of dying shows some strange powers and falls into a coma. The hapless Hideo — “the entire world changed, but I didn’t,” he groans — brings her along as he finds a community of survivors holed up in a mini-mall, and struggles to survive the tensions and suspicions he causes within the group.

The movie’s entertaining but oddly structured. The scenes early on, as Tokyo falls prey to the zombies, are fast and filled with explosions, with an epic scale that drops away for the rest of the film. Hideo’s discovery of the survivors in the mall in particular feels like a real slackening of the tension. And the climax of the film isn’t especially satisfying — it’s a big fight, but not a particularly imaginative one, and the challenges aren’t met by any new development in character or theme. It feels like more of the same rather than a rising to a satisfying end.

Moreover, on a basic plot level, more’s left unexplained and undeveloped than I’d like. Specifically, Hiromi’s powers, established early on, don’t return. She herself never wakes up from her coma. Apparently there was a scene shot for the end of the film which would have established that she held the key to a cure of the virus, but that exchange was dropped for the sake of the flow of the ending; I can understand the thinking, but that information needed to be put into the film somewhere, I think. As it is, Hiromi seems to exist mainly to show that Hideo has some spark of heroism latent within him, as he tries to save her from the madness of the world. That’s fine to a point, but effectively turns her into a plot coupon with no agency of her own.

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I had four movies on my schedule for Monday, July 23. Three of them were the work of one director. But before I got to those, I had an intriguing horror film at the J.A. De Sève Theatre to watch first: The Dark.

That screening was preceded by a short written and directed by Benjamin Swicker, “A/S/L.” I didn’t know what the title meant (an internet abbreviation for ‘age/sex/location’) and briefly thought I was about to see a film about American sign language; I was not. A middle-aged man chats up a young teenager on the internet, gets her to invite him over, and then finds out that all is not what he had thought it was. It’s competent enough, and brief, but I don’t think it gives too much away to say this is basically a vehicle for some admittedly spectacular gore effects. As such, it does the job.

The Dark was written and directed by Justin P. Lange. It’s the story of Mina (Nadia Alexander), a damaged and possibly undead girl who subsists in the woods, known by others only as a monster who kills any who enter her territory. Then one day fate brings to her an abused, blinded boy, Alex (Toby Nichols), who she doesn’t kill at once. In fact the two wounded children develop a strange bond. There’s a search afoot for Alex, though, and both police and volunteer seekers are coming into her woods. The two children go deeper into the wild, looking for some refuge together.

This is an atmospheric but highly graphic film that lets the images carry the story for long stretches. It doesn’t avoid having the characters speak to each other, but seems to invest each line with meaning. For example, it seems weirdly resonant that the first line of the movie is “You have to pay for that.” There are a lot of dark deeds done in this movie and a lot of those things come back to haunt the doer — and sometimes the sufferer. This is a movie about the cycle of abuse and characters trying, however instinctively, to move past it. But the world doesn’t make it easy, and the choices the characters make aren’t always ideal. You can literally see the damage the characters have suffered on their faces in the form of disturbing make-up effects. Whether that damage will destroy them is essentially the theme of the film.

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The third and last screening I saw on Saturday, July 21, was a selection of short films: the 2018 Born of Woman Showcase, presenting short genre works by women filmmakers. This year saw nine movies from eight countries.

First was “The Gaze,” from the United States, directed, written, and produced by Ida Joglar. Mayra (Siri Miller) is a young scientist who seems to be on the edge of manifesting psychic powers. Then her boss, an older and far more renowned scientist (Drew Moore), makes an improper advance; we don’t see exactly what happens, and when Mayra tries to explain it to her friend Jenny (Jennifer Rostami) later, Jenny minimises what she has to say. But later he makes an unambiguous assault on Mayra, leading to a manifestation of power and a lengthy final shot as the credits roll that can be read as either comedy or horror. Or, perhaps, both. The film’s well-shot, particularly a sequence in which Mayra tests her apparent powers with a pencil and a glass of milk, and Miller in particular is very good. It’s not especially subtle, but some things are best not handled subtly.

France’s “Petite Avarie,” directed by Manon Alirol and Léo Hardt, written by Hardt, was next. It begins with a woman (Manda Touré) coming home to her boyfriend (Hardt). She’s just been diagnosed with breast cancer. His response is to break up with her in a lengthy monologue, because it’s going to be too hard on him to stay with her. He leaves the apartment, goes to a nearby bar, and there she catches up with him and lashes back, verbally and physically. This leads to a kind of reconciliation. It all works from the sheer absurdity and cruelty of the dialogue; Hardt delivers his self-pitying speech blandly, like some sort of psychopath. When Touré’s character catches up with him, though, we find out she’s every bit as terrible a human being as he is. The writing here is stunning in its crudity and cleverness, and it’s delivered with an outrageous precision. It’s strong stuff, such that some won’t be able to see the humour in it, but it works.

“Lucy’s Tale,” from the United States, was next. Written and directed by Chelsea Lupkin, it follows a bullied teenager who’s trying to negotiate high school and develop a romantic life — while she’s also developing a tail. Irina Bravo gets across Lucy’s desperation, anger, and the unpredictable surges of emotion she has to deal with. The movie looks nice, often dark, always ominous. It’s about growing up, but growing into something nobody expects. What is Lucy at the end? I’m not sure, and I’m not sure it’s important to be sure. Whatever she is, that’s what she’s become.

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I had three screenings I planned to attend at Fantasia on Saturday, July 21. The last would be a showcase of short films, but the first two were features. The day would begin at the Hall Theatre with The Travelling Cat Chronicles, an adaptation of a Japanese novel about a cat and assorted humans. Then would come Da Hu Fa, a 3D animated film from China about a diminutive martial-arts master seeking a lost prince within a hidden valley.

The Travelling Cat Chronicles (Tabineko ripôto, 旅猫リポート) was directed by Koichiro Miki from a script by Emiko Hiramatsu adapting Hiro Arikawa’s novel. Nana is the travelling cat in question, and she narrates the film in question (voice-work contrbuted by Mitsuki Takahata) as Satoru (Sota Fukushi, also in Laplace’s Witch, the Library Wars movies, and Blade of the Immortal), her human, tries to find her a new home. The reason why Satoru must find a new home for his beloved cat isn’t hard to realise, but at least at first the point is that he takes Nana with him as he travels around to some of his closest friends — all of whom are willing to take her in, but each of whom have various practical difficulties. Flashbacks establish Satoru’s relationships, and his travels with Nana become a way into his life as a whole, leading to some surprising revelations and to a devastating emotional conclusion.

The first thing that has to be said about this movie is that it’s the most ruthlessly effective tearjerker I’ve ever seen. The entire second half of the movie played over a theatre full of sniffles and sobs. I thought at first that I’d never heard so much crying at a Fantasia film, then revised that to “any film,” and by the end to “any gathering, funerals and memorials included.” If it’s a tearjerker, though, it’s a tearjerker with real integrity — it’s so effective in large part because it’s a good dramatic film, not because it’s filled with unearned emotion. (I will specifically note that nothing too bad happens to Nana.)

It’s also effective because every character in the movie is genuinely nice. You sympathise with all of them; you see why they do what they do. And what tragedies of their own they have to cope with. Most notably, a character we barely meet, the father of Satoru’s best friend Kosuke (Ryosuke Yamamoto) at first is described as cruel and abusive, but with a few lines here and there and one twist near the end we come to understand him better, come to see for whatever damage he’s inflicted he’s really a man who simply doesn’t understand people. It’s impressive when a film’s able to humanise a character who barely appears in more than a few frames.

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