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| FANTASIA FEST |
FRANÇAIS app de traduction à gauche
This was a strange year for the Festival du in part to the writer's and actor's strike in the US but also for subtle shifts in content. Satan was very present this year and there was more LBGTQ content. What was missing, for me, is a good witch mystery. Fingers crossed for next year. Here are the last films I saw this year, REMEMBER you can check your streaming services and neighborhood theatres for these titles:
SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING Directed by Rachel Lambert
Daisy Ridley of Star Wars fame is Fran, a lonely single woman who lives a dull routine existence in a bleak corner of town. She is so effacing, no one notices when she enters or leaves a room. However, she imagines exotic scenarios of her death. These look like art performances they are so elaborately studied. One day, a new guy comes to work at the office, Robert, played as a perfect counterpart to Fran by Dave Merheje, a Canadian comic. After the success of a series like The Office ( US UK ) producers have realized there is a way to use what appears banal to explore the human condition and the spectrum of human emotions with subtlety and depth.
Robert invites Fran to see a movie with him and Fran's inadequacies are difficult for us to bear. Her difficulty in just making friends is just barely tolerable. The worst part, most of us have encountered those moments of feeling like we don't even deserve to be alive.
The heart of this movie is Daisy Ridley's wonderfully subdued performance.
THE ABANDONED Directed by Tseng Ying-Ting
A dark moody film where a broken hearted detective, Janine Chang as Wu Jie, finds a murdered woman. Wu Jie is a woman widowed by her husband's suicide and she recognizes the investigation of the poor victim thrown in a culvert as a special mission entrusted to her by fate.
We get to meet many characters from an underworld that deals with South Asian illegal aliens looking for an income to help their families. This makes the female migrants perfect targets for a cruel serial killer because no one dares go to the police. This changes when Lin You-sheng, played by Ethan Juan, discovers that the woman he thought had abandoned him is one of the killer's victims.
The strong points of this film is the investigation that is captivating, the moments of discovery of who the killer is and the extent of his macabre perversions as to what he does to the bodies, and we develop a bond with the characters that we want to see succeed and survive. The weakest point concerns the timing and the tempo of certain scenes that are stretched too long. Certain pauses add a poetic moment but when extended too long, they lose their force and we can see through the tactic.
All and all, it is one crazy ride!
RANSOMED Directed by Kim Seong-hun
In the movie, a dissatisfied civil servant, Min-joon played by Ha Jung-Woo, responds to a mysterious call where he recognizes a morse code message he believes is from an important diplomat who had been kidnapped the year before.
Ha Jung-Woo and Ju Ji-hoon, Pan-soo, are two superstars who deliver the goods as one serious diplomat on a mission and his impromptu taxi driver who provides a bit of comic relief during the extraordinarily tense escape in a place where at any moment a band of heavily armed crazed terrorists can appear with deadly intentions.
DO NOT MISS THIS MOVIE!
PIAFFE Directed by Ann Oren
I chose this image from the luscious intimate movie Piaffe because it illustrates the personality of Eva played by Simone Bucio perfectly. When her trans sister who operates a foley artist enterprise suffers from a nervous breakdown, Eva must complete the task of recreating equine sounds for a commercial that features a woman on a horse showing equestrian dressage in the elegant uniform of the sport.
She becomes obsessed with doing a great job after the customer berates her mercilessly. Magically, a horse tail appears on her lower back and this makes her blossom.
The strong points of this movie include the cinematography where scene composition, colour, and decor speak where there is no dialogue. As a matter of fact, there is almost no dialogue. We are in the most intimate moments of Eva's self discovery. For me, the film evoked contemporary art films where the story remains kind of abstract.
She goes on to seduce a man that pleases her, Novak played by Sebastian Rudolf. The transformation of her personality is complete.
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