Category: Narrative

By Joe Bendel. They still wear turtlenecks in the future. In fact, the retro-1960s fashion and décor are rather reassuring. The passengers on this exploratory vessel will take their comforts where they may. They do not know where they have come from or where they are going, but at least the canteen is fully stocked in Philippe Fernandez’s boldly philosophical Cosmodrama, which screens today during the 2015 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.

The travelers aboard this generational spaceship have just been awakened from their cryogenic slumber to find they are all suffering from amnesia. They have no idea what they are supposed to be doing, but more or less find their assigned roles through instinct. By far, the Astronomer is the most productive among them. He quickly traces their trajectory and analyzes their apparent destination. To find out where exactly they are headed, he will determine where they have come from, but in this case, he means the point at which life in our universe originated eons ago.

As the Astronomer announces his findings, the Reporter sends them back through space in his dispatches. Everyone seems to acknowledge his research into the very nature of existence should be the focus of their mission, even though the Psysiologist and the Semiologist have had great success teaching a primate to communicate with flashcards. Except for the increasingly erratic Psychologist, everyone settles into their routines fairly smoothly, even when forced to cohabitate with doppelgangers created by time-shifts.

It might take years for Cosmodrama to reach the audience it deserves, but eventually it should be hailed as a classic. Fernandez takes all the familiar science fiction tropes and turns them into a unabashedly cerebral philosophical inquiry. Think of it as the Star Trek episode Umberto Eco and Carl Sagan never collaborated on. It looks just as trippy-groovy as the mildly disappointing Space Station ’76, but it pitches its material at an infinitely higher level. You really need to see it a few times to absorb all the conjecture, but even if it is all gobbledygook, it sounds absolutely convincing.

Yet, there are also very strange psychological dramas percolating below the surface. Despite the lack of conventional genre conflicts, there are real stakes involved, as well as some seriously chewy dialogue. Jackie Berroyer is terrific as the Astronomer (and his double), completely selling some heady speculation. Bernard Blancan also makes a compelling everyman as the Reporter, while Sascha Ley further piles on the braininess as the Biologist. If anyone overplays their hand, it is Emmanuel Moynot doing the Full Monty as the Psychologist.

This is genuinely virtuoso filmmaking in the fullest sense. Eventually, Cosmodrama will be a Criterion Collection title and a mainstay on critics’ lists. It is like all the really inspired scientific bits from the last twenty years of SF film and television seamlessly assembled into a mastercut. Very highly recommended, Cosmodrama is a must-see film when it screens tonight (8/3) and tomorrow (8/4), as part of this year’s Fantasia.

LFM GRADE: A+

Posted on August 3rd, 2015 at 5:42pm.

By Joe Bendel. Provincial West Yorkshire is a tough area to find work, but it ought to be the perfect spot to lay low. Unfortunately, it is not far enough off the grid for one Pakistani woman and her Scots boyfriend. When discovered by her family and its hired thugs, they have no other options except desperate flight in Daniel & Matthew Wolfe’s Catch Me Daddy, which opens this Friday in metro Los Angeles.

Maybe Aaron is not the world’s greatest catch, but you cannot question his willingness to commit. By continuing his relationship with Laila, he is knowingly risking his life. As the film opens, he is far stricter when it comes to security than the somewhat in-denial Laila. Of course, his concerns will be vindicated when her brother Zaheer catches her flat-footed in their trailer. She barely escapes in the subsequent struggle, rendezvousing with Aaron in town. Her father’s associates and a pair of Anglo strong arm men follow hot on their heels, looking for any weakness they might exploit.

Rational parents simply endure it as best they can when their daughters get involved with disappointing boyfriends, whereas Muslim fundamentalists, like Laila’s restauranteur father, plot to murder their daughters and their forbidden significant others. These are called “honor crimes,” but there is nothing honorable about them. Although systemically under-reported, the number of recently recorded honor crimes committed in the UK is significant enough for even the BBC to take notice. Not surprisingly, Catch touched a bit of a nerve with British audiences, even though the Wolfe Brothers scrub the film of any references to Islam, leaving viewers with the impression this must be some sort of dark manifestation of Punjabi culture.

On the other hand, the warts-and-all depictions of Laila and Aaron are shrewdly effective. Hardly idealized martyrs for pluralistic tolerance, they are realistically messy and flawed, which is precisely why they do not deserve what lies in store for them. Sameena Jabeen Ahmed’s lead performance is quite remarkable. At times she is almost childlike, yet she must deal with some absolutely horrific realities. As her less showy partner, Connor McCarron does yeoman work, keeping their relationship and the film completely grounded. Gary Lewis also adds some potent vinegar to the film, keeping the audience off balance with his portrayal of Tony the cocaine addicted ruffian, who passes for the voice of reason amongst Laila’s pursuers.

Catch is a strange film, in that it wants to spotlight the prevalence of honor crimes, but it does not want to address why they happen. Yet, it is hard to completely sweep the 800 pound gorilla under the rug. Indeed, the implications of Laila’s situation speak for themselves, thanks to some extraordinary performances.

It is all wrapped up in a grittily striking package, thanks in large measure to Robbie Ryan, who has already amassed a filmography that suggests he will be one of the few cinematographers whose work will become the stuff of future retrospectives. Catch just might be his best film to date (or at least the equal of Wuthering Heights). He vividly captures the desolation of the Yorkshire moors evoking a sense of moodier, revisionist westerns. It is an aesthetically severe film, but it has considerable merit and great urgency. Highly recommended overall, Catch Me Daddy opens this Friday (8/7) in LA (Beverly Hills) at the Laemmle Music Box and it screens this Saturday (8/8) in Williamsburg at Videology. Also note, a VOD release is scheduled for 9/1 from Oscilloscope Laboratories.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on August 3rd, 2015 at 5:42pm.

By Joe Bendel. This college coed’s pathological aversion to men is not the product of freshmen indoctrination programs (although that probably did not help matters). She is quite literally insane, but do not judge her too harshly. Maniacal killing runs in her family. Montreal’s loutish frat boys are in for the slice & dice treatment in Nathan Oliver’s satirical Lady Psycho Killer, which screens today during the 2015 Fantasia International Film Festival in that very same Montreal.

Ella is suspiciously naïve and socially stunted. It is not just because she was home-schooled by her clingy mother. There is something off about her that her “edgy” psych professor will inadvertently turn loose. The only assignment of Prof. Douglas’s introductory class is to do something outside your normal bounds of behavior and write a paper about it. Ella decides to go to a strip club. Good choice.

Of course, when the manager inevitably starts sleazing on her, Ella ends up offing the creep. There is a lot of blood, but she likes it. Soon, she starts prosecuting her private war on the sexes, one sexually overbearing scumbag at a time, or in some cases, two at a time. However, she is not sure what to do with Daniel, the lacrosse-playing frat boy. He seems to genuinely like her—and he might be even shier than her. Eventually, her mother realizes what Ella is up to, but she understands. Her long absent father was the exact same way.

Somehow Oliver and co-screenwriter Albert I Melamed pull off quite a nifty trick in LPK. They have written a film all about gender politics that touches on just about every hot button social issue you can think of, yet it never comes across as didactic or hackneyed. The gory humor undoubtedly helps a lot. The crazy casting is also sure to please genre fans. If you have Michael Madsen, Malcolm McDowell, Daniel Baldwin, and Ron Jeremy on your Rotisserie B-movie team, than LPK will score you a lot of points, including a bonus for McDowell serving as executive producer.

The idea of Michael Madsen as an aging hipster freshman psych professor should unnerve any parent. Even though he tries to play it straight, it is hard not to laugh during his scenes. Be that as it may, nobody can top Kate Daly’s big screen debut as Ella. She is over-the-top nuts, but still projects a sense of pathos, while also nailing some wickedly droll narration. It is sort of like Reese Witherspoon’s arrival in Legally Blonde, but with buckets of blood.

To its credit, the humor in LPK is consistent funny and it flows organically from the dramatic situations, reflecting a fan’s appreciation of the slasher genre. Despite its themes and motifs, it never feels like a Ms. Magazine article grafted onto a psycho killer story. It gets everything right that a film like Girls Against Boys gets wrong. In fact, it is quite a bit of fun in a grisly, blood-splattered kind of way. Recommended for fans of sardonic horror films, Lady Psycho Killer premieres this evening (8/2), after services, at this year’s Fantasia.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on August 2nd, 2015 at 6:39pm.

By Joe Bendel. Evidently, humanity is a lot like Microsoft Windows. Future editions might have new features that sound really cool, but they are far less stable. In the 1990s, two very different secret experiments attempted to hasten the next stage of human evolution. Both endowed their test subjects with super-powers, but left them with drastically shortened life expectancies. One group faithfully serves as the project leader’s clandestine task force, while the other went underground, but they will face their destiny together in Takahisa Zeze’s Strayer’s Chronicle, which screens today during the 2015 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.

Based on Takayoshi Honda’s novel, Strayer will be inevitably compared to the X-Men no matter how strenuously it objects. The similarities are obvious, but there is a dramatic difference in tone. While the Marvel franchise uses mutants as a metaphor for intolerance, often lurching into ham-fisted didacticism, Strayer is more concerned with its heightened sense of mortality. These super-heroes will all die soon, but straight-laced Subaru’s government-aligned team appears to be doing better than Manabu’s outlaw Ageha group.

Subaru has loyally served Koichiro Watase, the scientist responsible for his condition, but he is concerned about the recent “burn-out” of a team member. Their next assignment will be protecting a prominent molecular scientist and ethicist, whose insight into their condition attracts the attention of Ageha as well. Naturally, they mix it up during their initial encounters, but their attitudes towards each other soften as both factions get a fuller sense of the big picture. In fact, Manabu will send one of his members to Subaru’s group, because they will be better able to protect her. Having determined Aoi is able to reproduce, unlike her sterile comrades, she might actually have a future to protect.

Even if Strayer “borrows” some concepts here and there, it develops plenty of cool twists of its own, like Subaru’s power to see a few seconds into the future, which means he always knows where and when to move in a fight. On the other hand, the power stealing abilities of Shizuka (played by Sara Takatsuki, who does not get enough screen time) closely resemble those of Rogue. The multi-leveled government conspiracy also has no shortage of forerunners, but it takes on eerie apocalyptic and existential dimensions in Strayer.

Perhaps Zeze and co-screenwriter Kohei Kiyasu do not reinvent the mutant wheel, but they stage some wildly cinematic action scenes. What really distinguishes Strayer from the rest of the super hero pack are the very real stakes involved. Far from invulnerable, any character could go at any time, as if they are on Game of Thrones. After all, they are literally dying before our eyes. Featuring some vividly realized special effects and a popular youthful cast, Strayer is an impressively ambitious foray into superhero movie making by Zeze, the former indie auteur. Recommended for fans of near future science fiction and conspiratorial thrillers, Strayer’s Chronicle screens tonight (8/2), as part of this year’s Fantasia.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on August 2nd, 2015 at 6:39pm.

By Joe Bendel. Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder knew there were eight million ways to die, but Vinnie Jones only gets six. At least he will make full use of each of them. He will not merely kill his nemesis, Sonny “Sundown” Garcia, he will target the drug lord’s reputation, money, loved ones, sentimental attachments, and his very liberty. However, narrative logic will be the first casualty of Nadeem Soumah’s 6 Ways to Die, which opened this Friday in New York.

“John Doe” has it in for Garcia. He has his reasons, but he is very Picard about it all, never setting foot from his old school Oldsmobuick. Somehow, he gets some of the Los Angeles underworld’s most talented to come to him. He needs their skills to torment Garcia and his valuable inside knowledge will make it worth their while. It would seem that they will succeed spectacularly, since it is all told in a bizarre flashback structure. Oh sure, there is a big reveal that changes everything, but it makes absolutely no sense.

Still, 6 Ways offers an opportunity to watch a veritable B–movie all-star team at work. For the starting line-up we have Jones, Bai Ling, Dominique Swain, Vivica A. Fox, and Tom Sizemore. Most of them have real roles to play, but Sizemore appears in a completely tangential prologue. It looks like Soumah had only one day of shooting with him, so he just improvised something on the fly. In reserve, 6 Ways also features Chris Jai Alex and Kinga Philipps, who maybe aren’t so familiar, but have volumes of imdb credits already.

There are times you have to ask just what does this movie think its doing, but not in a resentful way. You sort of have to give it credit for being a grubby striver. It is determined to impress us by riding its bike with no hands, no matter how many times it wipes out on the pavement.

With no action scenes whatsoever, Jones is completely wasted as the mystery man and his role in the big twist defies the evidence of our senses. However, Alex shows real B-movie star power as Frank Casper, the hitman. Bai Ling also adds some serious cool as high class con artist June Lee. Unfortunately, Michael Rene Walton is way too reserved and colorless for a ruthless heavy like Garcia. Fortunately, chewing the scenery is not a problem for Fox, who vamps it up something fierce as the corrupt cop, Veronica Smith.

Soumah has seen way too much Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez for his own good. The resulting product is overly clever and then some. That said, if you enjoy watching B-movie veterans doing B-movie things, 6 Ways will be a satisfying guilty pleasure when it streams on Netflix (which should be imminently). In the short term, it opened this Friday (7/31) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on August 1st, 2015 at 3:42pm.

By Joe Bendel. Whatever place you name, chances are the Vikings made it there. They were quite the navigators, but not the renegade band led by the young warrior Asbjörn. Their ship has foundered on the rocks along the Scottish shore. Fortunately, they can still fight like berserkers, because they will have to in Claudio Fäh’s Northmen: a Viking Saga, which opened this Friday in Los Angeles.

Asbjörn’s father was one of the final holdouts, who sacked and pillaged the old fashioned way, unlike the current crop of sell-out Vikings. After his death, Asbjörn has struggled to hold the last remnant together. Getting shipwrecked in Alba (a.k.a. Scotland) will not help his cause. The locals’ initial reception was quite hostile, but it provided them an opportunity to take a nobleman’s daughter hostage. Her ransom should be enough to buy their way into the Norse settlements towards the south. However, it turns out that was no average lady – it is Princess Inghean, the Scottish king’s daughter.

Naturally, the king mobilizes his entire forces, but his sleazy mercenary commanders will lead the hunt and they have an incentive to prevent her arranged marriage—permanently. To stay alive long enough to make it to the Danish territories, Asbjörn will forge unlikely alliances with Inghean and Brother Conall, a Christian monk who can handle a staff in a manner that would make Friar Tuck proud.

Whenever Asbjörn’s men are fighting, the film is on pretty solid ground. Fortunately, that is pretty much always the case. Occasionally they stop to lick their wounds, but there is absolutely no hanky-panky going on. The upright Asbjörn sees to that.

While the South African landscape doubles for Scotland throughout Northmen, cinematographer Lorenzo Senatore’s big sweeping vistas make it look like Tolkienesque New Zealand. Technically, there are no fantasy elements in the film (notwithstanding their increasingly incredible exploits), but it certainly looks like a land beyond contemporary reason.

This is not exactly the sort of film that will generate a lot of acceptance speeches on the part of its cast. Nevertheless, Ryan Kwanten does some of his best work outside of the True Blood series as Conall. He kicks butt rather nicely, while brooding over his dark past. The film just clicks together better when he is on-screen. In contrast, Tom Hopper’s Asbjörn is a rather bland hero, coming across like Chris Hemsworth’s even more wooden brother. Although hardly the next Angela Mao, Charlie Murphy handles her action scenes well enough and shows a bit of fire as Inghean. Fortunately, a classically trained cat like Darrell D’Silva understands how to chew the scenery as the crusty old veteran Viking plunderer, Gunnar.

When it sticks to hack-and-slash action, Northmen is a lot of fun. Indeed, it rarely gets more ambitious than that, but it is a wise film that recognizes its limitations and adjusts accordingly. Considerably more entertaining than the Norse-themed monster movie Ragnarok, Northmen: a Viking Saga is recommended for action fans as it opens in Los Angeles at the Arena Cinema.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on August 1st, 2015 at 3:42pm.