The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  July 20:

  78/52 (USA, dir. Alexandre O. Philippe)

  Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is unquestionably one of the most influential films in horror history, and one of the ultimate achievements in an incredible career. But one scene in Psycho truly set it apart from anything that had come before. Hitchcock meticulously planned and shot the shower murder scene over the course of several days—the title refers to the 78 camera setups used to shoot the scene and the 52 cuts employed in the finished version--and the effect on audiences was profound. This documentary speaks to a number of filmmakers including Guillermo del Toro, Peter Bogdanovich, Danny Elfman, Bret Easton Ellis, Bob Murawski, Gary Rydstrom, Karyn Kusama, Oz Perkins, and Jamie Lee Curtis among many others. Everyone approaches their discussion of the scene from their personal experience and/or particular discipline: Elfman talks about Bernard Herrmann’s score, Murawski examines George Tomasini’s editing, Bogdanovich recounts seeing a press screening of the film just before its original release. It’s a surprisingly wide-ranging documentary for something with such narrow focus, but everyone here has great stories and insight, and it’s fun to feel like they’re all just hanging out talking about what they love.

  Made in Hong Kong (1997, Hong Kong, dir. Fruit Chan)

  Fruit Chan’s 1997 feature Made in Hong Kong is notable for being the first independent film to come out of Hong Kong after its handover to China, and for its star-making lead performance by Sam Lee. For the film’s 20th anniversary, it has been given a full 4K restoration, and the results are beautiful. The film very much has the feel of the scrappy “indie” films of the 1990s, including some details which instantly dated the film (Lee’s character has a Natural Born Killers poster in his bedroom) but also add to its charm. There are hints of Hong Kong gangster cinema here, but Fruit Chan is much more interested in mood and character than typical crime movie action. Writer/director Fruit Chan supposedly shot the film entirely on short ends of 35mm film, and the new restoration lovingly replicates the grainy look of its original celluloid presentation rather than sharpening and cleaning the image to make it look more modern. Made in Hong Kong is an underseen (in the States, anyway) classic of 90s independent and Hong Kong cinema, and this new restoration is a fantastic way to introduce it to modern audiences.

  July 21:

  The Laplace’s Demon (Italy, dir. Giordano Giulivi)

  A group of research scientists attempting to work out a mathematical formula to predict future events are taking a boat to an isolated island to share their findings with a like-minded scientist who has holed up on the island in an imposing manor. As soon as they enter the house, they’re locked in, and they discover a small model of the house set on an intricate clockwork. They find a videotape from the mysterious scientist, who informs them they are now a part of his experiment: the model runs on clockwork that exactly predicts and mimics the movements of the people in the house in real time. But they’re not alone, and something is stalking them. Will anyone live to see the morning, or will the experiment be a fatal success? The Laplace’s Demon is a black & white sci-fi/horror tale that is reminiscent of Isaac Ezban’s The Similars (2015), in that it takes place in a confined space and feels very much like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone. But while Ezban’s film had a stagey low-tech feel, The Laplace’s Demon uses CG backdrops and animation that has its own retro charm. It looks nice and has some interesting ideas, but by the end it’s clear director Giordano Giulivi and his writing collaborators painted themselves into a corner leading to the film’s final moments. Still, this is an intriguing hybrid of film noir, 1960s horror, and the live action cut scenes from a 1990s PC adventure game that’s worth a look for the novelty value alone.

  Lowlife (USA, dir. Ryan Prows)

  Teddy (Mark Burnham) is a sleazy crook whose grimy fast-food taco place hides a chamber of horrors where he engages in human trafficking, involuntary organ transplants, drug dealing, and any other number of unsavory activities. His muscle is El Monstruo (Ricardo Adam Zarate), youngest and smallest son of the legendary luchador of the same name, whose blackout-inducing rages have contributed to his fall. But El Monstruo is blinded to Teddy’s evil by his own loyalty and the fact that Teddy introduced him to Kaylee (Santana Dempsey), a struggling addict who is carrying El Monstruo’s child. When Teddy orders accountant Keith (Shaye Ogbonna) to track down Kaylee and bring her to the taco shop in order to make up for embezzling from Teddy’s side business, Keith’s freshly-paroled best friend Randy (Jon Oswald) and harried motel owner Crystal (Nicki Micheaux) are dragged into a violent and confusing afternoon that obviously will not end well for much of anybody. Lowlife is the feature directorial debut of Ryan Prows, who co-wrote the film’s screenplay with his writing collaborator Shaye Ogbonna and their co-writers on the web series Boomerang Kids. It makes sense to be apprehensive when the opening credits list five screenwriters, but the final result certainly doesn’t feel like the kind of tonal patchwork many films with so many writers have. The film is gruesomely violent, but it’s also hilarious and touching, thanks to a spectacular cast. Its fractured timeline and criss-crossing cast of low-level criminals obviously owes a debt to Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction in particular, but Lowlife has its own highly unique charms and never feels like anything but itself. This is one of the best independent films of the year, and it sets a damned high bar for Prows and company to clear for their next feature outing. Whenever and whatever it is, I can’t wait to see it.

  Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Dispatch #4

  Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 30 July 2017

  July 22:

  A Day (South Korea, dir. Sun-ho Cho)

  World-famous surgeon Jun-young (Myung-min Kim) is flying back to South Korea after an extended stint helping treat refugees abroad. The trip has caused him to miss his daughter’s birthday, and he’s anxious to see her, but little things keep getting in the way like an ambush press conference and saving the life of a kid choking on a piece of hard candy. He’s running late to meet his daughter when Jun-young happens upon a car accident. He stops to help, and when he crosses the street he makes a tragic discovery. Suddenly, he finds himself back on the plane 30 minutes before landing, the day having “reset” itself exactly as it was before. He ends up at the traffic accident again, and the day abruptly starts over. When Jun-young figures out what’s happening, he makes it his mission to stop the accident before it happens, but he finds himself confounded every time. The situation becomes even more complicated when he discovers he’s not the only person stuck in this temporal loop. It feels like the Groundhog Day-inspired “time loop” movie has been really popular lately, with teen fantasy/drama Before I Fall hitting U.S. theaters earlier this year and the imaginatively titled horror film Happy Death Day coming to the big screen in time for Halloween. A Day is completely uninterested in the mechanics of its time loop and entirely focused on the relationships between the characters who find themselves stuck in it. Each one naturally must discover why they are in this situation, and the cast is great at conveying their anger, fear, frustration, and heartbreak. While it does a little of the tonal see-sawing of typical in popular Korean cinema, the film runs a brisk 90 minutes and debut feature director and writer Sun-ho Cho keeps the action moving. The ending is somewhat anticlimactic, but A Day has enough surprises to merit a watch.

  Ron Goossens, Low-Budget Stuntman (Netherlands, dir. Steffen Haars & Flip Van der Kuil)

  The Dutch film industry is in a crisis. Union stuntmen have driven the cost of film production through the roof. When career alcoholic Ron Goossens (Tim Haars) becomes a Youtube sensation for crashing his car while trying to jump a raising bridge and emerging from the water with the year’s hottest catchphrase (“I’m like totally shitfaced!”), a producer approaches him in hopes of hiring him as cheap stunt labor. Ron isn’t interested—he has just enough money to drink himself stupid every day, and that’s all he really wants out of life—but then his wife Angela (Maartje van de Wet
ering) announces she’s pregnant and gives him an ultimatum. If Ron can get Dutch superstar Bo Maerten (playing herself) into bed, Angela will let him stay. So Ron takes the gig and begins implementing his master plan, which mostly consists of suffering one grievous injury after another while he tries to do stunts completely drunk and occasionally harasses Ms. Maerten. Ron Goossens is the latest feature from Steffen Haars and Flip Van der Kuil, creators of the hit New Kids TV series and films. While there is plenty of goofy slapstick humor that transcends cultures, there’s also no doubt a familiarity with popular Dutch cinema would probably be helpful. Several people play themselves including Maerten and musician Dennie Christian, and there are a number of direct references to the New Kids films. Still, there’s a lot of very funny stuff here and a lot that will probably make North American audiences a bit uncomfortable. Ron Goossens is probably best enjoyed with a beer or two (or five, or more), but it’s still pretty funny if you’re sober. Just probably not as funny.

  July 23:

  Junk Head (Japan, dir. Takahide Hori)

  Thousands of years in the future, mankind has built cities reaching far into the skies. Somewhere below live the descendants of a class of cloned workers who rose up against humanity nearly two millennia ago. When a crisis arises among the human population, an explorer is sent down the lower levels on a desperate mission, but before he even lands his ship is destroyed and his head (encased in a robotic helmet) removed from his body. A scientist puts the head on a new body, but the explorer has forgotten who he is, and plunges into a series of misadventures with the bizarre inhabitants of the lower depths. Junk Head is an astonishing technical achievement, a nearly two-hour stop-motion sci-fi epic made by Takahide Hori and a handful of collaborators over the course of several years. Like Nick DiLiberto’s hand-drawn animated feature Nova Seed (which played Fantasia last year), Junk Head is an undiluted vision that looks to have been beamed directly from Hori’s brain onto the screen. The creature design is imaginative and nightmarish, but for all the scary stuff happening Junk Head is surprisingly funny. Its characters speak in multiple invented languages, so there’s not a single word of decipherable dialogue for the entire film, but the subtitles and expressive character designs ably tell the story. It’s such an impressive feat that the abrupt ending is a massive letdown; the film ends at what feels like the start of the third act. Here’s hoping Hori and the citizens of his crazy little world return with a sequel to finish the story sooner than later!

  Dan-Dream (Denmark, dir. Jesper Rofelt)

  Thorkil Bonnesen (Casper Christensen) is stifled at his day job by his superiors’ lack of vision. When they ridicule his insistence that every home will have a computer before the 1980s are over, he leaves the company to start his own and invent something important. When he meets electrical engineer Jens Knagstrup (Frank Hvam) and sees the electric battery Jens has rigged up for his bicycle, Thorkil is struck with inspiration. He recruits a team and moves them to a small town to start research and production, but tensions in the partners’ families and outside their company threaten the project. The people in the town hate Thorkil and his fellow “city people,” automotive expert Vonsil (Magnus Millang) keeps making inappropriate jokes at the expense of Thorkil’s African girlfriend Grace (Louisa Yaa Aisin), and Jens’s wife Kirsten (Stine Schrøder Jensen) is bored and endlessly scornful of both Jens’s ambitions and their daughter Fanny (Jelina Moumou Meyer). Dan-Dream reunites writers and stars Christensen and Hvam from the Klown TV series and films, importing a similar sense of humor to a very different milieu. As in Klown, there is no shortage of deeply uncomfortable humor, frequently toeing a very delicate line dealing with some seriously volatile material. Some of this pays off in surprising ways, but there’s no question some viewers are going to find much of the comedy here to be “problematic.” It’s not quite as adventurous or outrageous as the Klown films, but Dan-Dream has a slightly more optimistic tone and is much more interesting visually than those films, which borrowed the semi-verite approach to shooting handheld with digital cameras from the Klown television series. Veteran television director and first-time feature director Jesper Rofelt takes advantage of the early 80s setting to great effect, and the cast has fantastic comedic and dramatic chemistry.

  November (Estonia, dir. Rainer Sarnet)

  In a remote village, the beautiful young woman Liina (Rea Lest) pines for handsome Hans (Jörgen Liik). But his heart has been stolen away by the lovely Baroness (Jette Loona Hermanis) come from Germany to visit the Baron (Dieter Laser of The Human Centipede) in his vast estate that towers on a hill near the village. As any self-respecting woman would, Liina seeks the counsel of the local Witch (Klara Eighorn) to change the mind and heart of her beloved. This is no ordinary village: villagers make deals with the Devil (Jaan Tooming) at a crossroads deep in the forest to acquire souls for kraat (shambling golems built out of whatever happens to be laying around) to help them around the house, the plague occasionally wanders into town in the guise of different creatures or objects in hopes of tricking the people into contracting it, and spirits of the dead regularly return on a pilgrimage to get a hearty meal before returning to the other side. November is a stunning, strange portrait of life in a surreal world where magic is commonplace and Christianity inspires more superstitious rumor than comfort or goodwill. While no doubt some audiences will be reminded of The Witch—another “folk tale” set among simple folk in an isolated location—this calls to mind more the obsessively detailed medieval world of Hard to Be a God and the grim depiction of daily life in difficult conditions of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. The gorgeous black and white photography (with some footage shot with infrared cameras) by Mart Taniel and excellent score by Jacaszek give November a unique tone, but even at its bleakest the film never takes itself too seriously. This is one of the best films of the year, and when it hits the big screen later this year in North America via Oscilloscope, any cinephile who has the chance catch it during its theatrical run should make it a priority.

  Fantasia International Film Festival 2017: Dispatch #5

  Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 31 July 2017

  July 25:

  The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue (Japan, dir. Yûya Ishii)

  Shinji (Sosuke Ikematsu), a half-blind construction worker, and Mika (Shizuka Ishibashi), a nurse who moonlights at a “girlie bar,” keep crossing paths in Tokyo. Shinji is socially maladjusted with no filter between his brain and his mouth; Mika is preoccupied with death. These two miserable twentysomethings sulk around Tokyo for the better part of two hours while the people around them make bad decisions and/or die before a glimmer of hope appears in the film’s final shots. This fiction narrative and the documentary Tokyo Idols (also playing Fantasia this year) paint an exceedingly bleak picture of life in urban Japan. The lead performances are good, but the film as a whole is oppressively dour. Stretches of it would work nicely as a nighttime travelogue through Tokyo, but during those moments it’s tough not to think this would be a much more enjoyable experience if that’s all the movie was.

  Town in a Lake (Philippines, dir. Jet Leyco)

  Two high school girls are abducted and taken into the jungle surrounding the small town of Matangtubig, and the next day the body of one of them is discovered but the other is still missing. The people of the quiet town are horrified and angry, and the shock waves ripple well beyond their borders. While the police and townsfolk try desperately to find the missing girl, a fisherman who saw the abduction is wracked with guilt but certain no one would believe him if he made an official accusation. As tensions rise and a massive storm looms, can the perpetrators be found before they kill again or will Matangtubig be doomed to live in fear? Town in a Lake calls to mind the quiet “magical realism” of Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, both in its dense, green locations and in its patient unfolding of detail in the lives of its characters. This is less a murder mystery/thriller than it is a slice of life in this small town at a very difficult time.
The final act takes the story into highly unexpected territory, and no doubt Town in a Lake would benefit greatly from repeat viewings.

  Friendly Beast (Brazil, dir. Gabriela Amaral)

  Fifteen minutes before closing time at a high-end restaurant in a low-rent part of town, and everyone is ready to leave; owner Inácio (Murilo Benício) is already counting out the drawer. But there’s one customer left finishing his meal when a rich couple rushes in, lingering over the wine list and ridiculing harried waitress Sara (Luciana Paes). Head chef Djair (Irandhir Santos) sends the rest of the kitchen staff home, which infuriates Inácio, already about to snap from the pressure of an upcoming restaurant review and his wife’s nagging. When two young men break in and attempt to rob everyone, Inácio tips over the edge. Rather than just call the police he wants to teach these young criminals a lesson, and if anyone else in the restaurant won’t go along with it, maybe they need one as well. Inácio enlists the help of Sara to tie everyone up while he figures out what to do next, and the situation rapidly deteriorates as they become drunk with the possibilities before them. Friendly Beast is the debut feature from writer/director Gabriela Amaral, but it feels much more assured than many first features. What starts off as something like a “home invasion” thriller turns into something much more unsettling as the power dynamic shifts between the characters. The entire film takes place in the confines of the restaurant, lending it a claustrophobic intensity stoked by a pair of great lead performances by Luciana Paes as Sara and Murilo Benício as Inácio. Gruesome, tense, and bleakly humorous, Friendly Beast is worth a look for its defiant unpredictability alone.