When we’re not throwing darts at a picture of his face, we put our petty jealousy aside to read up on more of Andrew Todd’s misadventures in Fantastic Fest. Be sure to check out his other fascinating genre film insights from Days 1 & 2 (where he saw Machete Kills and The Green Inferno) and Days 3 & 4 (where he raps about Tom Cruise and gets punched in the face).
Here are more of his thoughts on the films he saw in days 5 & 6:
TALES FROM THE ORGAN TRADE
The black market organ trade is a strange, frightening and little-understood industry full of stories and ripe for an in-depth documentary investigation. Sadly, this movie isn’t it.
Produced by HBO, it’s entirely competent and even well put together as a movie, but the high level of editorialising makes it not only incomplete as a portrait of the industry, but actually kind of dishonest. The filmmakers have a clear agenda to promote legalising payments for organ donations, and go out of their way to make their point by selecting interviewees carefully, demonising (admittedly unpleasant) alternatives to the trade, avoiding any tales of kidnapping or forced organ extraction, and even putting a series of captions at the end to hammer the point home.
The black market organ trade (specifically, the kidney trade, which outweighs those of all other organs significantly) is portrayed as an essentially altruistic system, benefiting both donor and recipient. That this is the only time the notorious surgeon “The Turkish Frankenstein” has agreed to appear on camera speaks volumes as to the one-sidedness of the doc. A disappointing look at a trade that deserves something more thorough.
WITCHING AND BITCHING
Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia’s new film is a buoyant, energetic genre romp that unfortunately runs about 40 minutes too long. In a stupendous opening act, a group of petty thieves rob a jewelery store, only to make their getaway into a nest of witches and a murky soup of gender-issues discussion.
It’s not particularly complex in its look at the battle of the sexes, and makes its joke pretty early on, before continuing to make it for the rest of the running time. The actors all do fine work, as does Iglesia in the moment-to-moment directing, but there are too many digressions – one character in particular is utterly bizarre and interesting but could be shorn from the movie entirely without losing anything – for the film to retain a sense of focus. It even gets to the point that the film feels finished at one stage, only for a second climax, laden with average CGI, to be tacked on the end. A shorter cut of this film would be a terrific, fun jaunt, but this version was a slog.
SECRET SCREENING #2: [Censored]
I can’t say anything about this movie, or even what it is, as it’s embargoed on account of not officially premiering until next week. But I can say that I found myself very moved by it; its lead performance may be the best I’ve seen all year; it’s extremely divisive; and I strongly suspect it will never play in a cinema in New Zealand. I wish I could write more, but I’m just not allowed.
R100
This Japanese treat was a late confirmation for the festival, but oh boy, what a delight it is that they got it. To describe the story – a single father signs up for a bondage service to humiliate him unannounced in his everyday life for a year – is to give the impression that it’s one of the legions of hyperactive Japanese genre comedies that are currently flourishing (see also: Hentai Kamen: Forbidden Super Hero, which makes an interesting flipside to this film). But R100 is nothing of the sort. It’s a rare miracle: a quiet, often meditative film that is also bugnuts insane.
Rather than being in your face with its intensity, it pushes it to the background, being intensely weird in a very restrained fashion (until it picks up momentum in the third act). It’s riveting stuff – hilarious in its depiction of bizarre bondage, and with a surprising emotional punch borne of the central character’s relationships with his son, father and comatose wife. There’s also a sense that the whole movie is a joke on the audience’s reaction to the film – it periodically cuts to a ratings board, which is where the title R100 comes in – which adds extra layers to an already rich film. One of my favourites of the festival for sure.
COMMANDO: A ONE MAN ARMY
I ended up seeing this movie twice – once in the cinema and once on an inflatable screen on festival co-founder Tim League’s front lawn – and the second viewing proved two things: it’s a movie that sings with a primed audience; and it’s not a movie to watch first thing in the morning. At two hours, this Bollywood action epic is much too long, but it’s full of so much silliness that it just manages to sustain it.
The plot is minimal as all hell: a commando (whose fighting prowess is built up to ridiculous levels by his superior officer before he even does any fighting) spends a year in prison thanks to his government’s refusal to acknowledge his existence, then he meets up with a girl on the run from some crooked politicians and vows revenge on them. It’s an almost-viable excuse to link up scenes of ludicrous stunts and fighting, song and dance numbers, and scenes of the bad guy taking his sunglasses on and off. Seriously, this dude removes and replaces his sunglasses multiple times in almost every scene he’s in. The second screening featured a drinking game centred around it, and I finished multiple beers just with the sunglasses. It’s incredible.
After many triple-kicks and improvised traps and entirely too much traipsing about in the jungle, the movie arrives at its desperately dark conclusion, where the audience finds themselves in the odd position of cheering for a public lynching. A clear lesson to keep your sunglasses on.
HENTAI KAMEN: FORBIDDEN SUPER HERO
This film is the psychotic other side of the coin to R100: a superhero movie about a guy who attains superpowers by sniffing panties, calling himself Hentai Kamen and fighting crime in fishnets, mankini and face-panties using pervert-themed superpowers. What makes this film special is that in addition to being a crazy bondage-hero movie it’s a full-blown parody of the superhero genre, particularly the Spider-Man and to an extent The Dark Knight franchises.
For the most part, the plight of Hentai Kamen – who doesn’t WANT to be a pervert, he was just born into it – is played totally seriously. He can’t ask the girl out because what if she found out he was a pervert? It’d be tearjerking stuff if it wasn’t so ridiculous. The overwhelming highlights of the movie are the crime-fighting sequences, which see Hentai Kamen taking criminals down using a series of squirmingly sexualised fighting moves that always, always culminate in some sort of crotch-to-face finisher. As the festival guide states: it’s one joke, but it’s a damned funny one.
SHE WOLF
I picked this film out to see on the big screen thanks to the line in the festival booklet “a punk-rock take on Euro-sleaze”. That’s exactly what it is: it’s got a rough-as-hell black and white aesthetic which complements its story of a killer, played by three separate actresses as the various components of her psyche, who uses sex to lure her victims.
It’s extremely erotic, rather unsettling, and feels fresh and exciting in its lo-fi black and white style. A subplot involving the cops on her tail isn’t quite as gripping, but the three lead performances as the main character are as good as they are totally different to each other. You don’t get many indie erotic thrillers, but this one is pretty damned excellent.
SECRET SCREENING #3: GRAVITY
This was one of the big titles everyone suspected would drop at one of the secret screenings. The timing was right, the venue was right, and the festival brand was right for a tense 3D astronaut thriller by a widely-worshipped but decidedly non-prolific genre director (Children of Men; Harry Potter 3; Y Tu Mama Tambien; the underseen A Little Princess). And drop it did.
My most-anticipated film of the year doesn’t disappoint – it’s 90 minutes of incredibly tense filmmaking that’s masterful without ever being flashy. The presence of Bot And Dolly robot camera credits is unsurprising, given the propensity of director Alfonso Cuaron to shoot this movie in long, flowing takes. The opening shot must be upwards of 12 minutes long, and many other scenes follow similar cutting patterns, but the craft vanishes underneath the drama.
Sandra Bullock is terrific in the lead role of an astronaut under immense pressure – again, not a showy performance, but a great one. The sound design and visual effects are incredibly evocative, enhancing the feeling of isolation in space. But the biggest takeaways are easily the atmosphere – at many points, it’s easy to forget to breathe, making the touches of tension-breaking humour welcome – and the emotional journey of Bullock’s character, who appears to suffer from some form of depression. Even so, it’s a survival story that will play to nearly everyone as a taut, spellbinding night at the movies. See it on as big a screen as possible – IMAX, if you can – and in 3D. There hasn’t really ever been as good a justification for the format as this film.
