Fantastic Fest Recap: Part 2
Film festivals are a wonderful time to see off the radar films, go to fancy parties, and meet interesting people from all over the world. Film festivals are not a good place to find time to write about film festivals. That being said, here’s part two of my Fantastic Fest recap, only a week after the last. My work ethic is astounding.
Summer Wars – This is the only anime I saw at the fest this year, and one of the only new animes I’ve seen in years. That should make it clear that I’m not a huge anime fan, and am maybe not the most reliable person to pass judgement on one. That being said this was a totally enjoyable, if not particularly mind blowing, flick about an all powerful social network going rogue and threatening all life on Earth. So if you are interested in The Social Network but thought it needed flying bunny avatars and epic online card battles then this is the movie you’ve been waiting for.
I Saw The Devil – This was the first of the secret screenings at the fest. Every year, Fantastic Fest hosts several of these and they are generally the most difficult films to get into as the expectation is they will be something completely awesome and anticipated. I would guess that at least half of the idle conversation among festival attendees revolves around trying to guess what these might be. No one is ever right. Secret screenings are also dangerous because you could be getting a horrible film and you’d hate yourself for missing out on the better films. Fortunately I didn’t fall victim to that here. I Saw The Devil is a revenge flick out of Korea that is absolutely amazing. The movie plays like a lean and mean (really mean, this thing is brutal) genre flick but it is well over two hours and takes a number of turns that really turn the formula on its head. One of the best cat and mouse stories I’ve ever seen and full of some of the most visceral action scenes I’ve seen in ages.
30 Days of Night: Dark Days- This is hard to say after having a nice conversation with the director and star of the film, but this was horrible. Easily the worst thing I saw at the festival (at least Ong Bak had the decency to be unintentionally funny). Dark Days manages to completely void of anything compelling aside from a couple of good gore moments. It does stick fairly close to the source material, so if you are a HUGE fan of the books maybe there will be some enjoyment here, but the presentation is so lackluster you could probably pull off something better with your friends and cheap camcorder.
Red Hill – I didn’t know anything about this movie going into it but was pleasantly surprised to find a really solid modern day western. This sticks so closely to genre conventions and wears its influences so blatantly on its sleeve that you can’t possibly be surprised by the proceedings but that’s never much of a hindrance. Red Hill features a formidable antagonist who recalls Anton Chigurh in a more than passing way, in fact there is a huge chunk of the film that feels kind of ripped from No Country For Old Men but if you’re gonna copy somebody, copy the best. Westerns are still somewhat of a rare treat (despite a recent resurgence) so check this one out.
I Spit On Your Grave – I was really interested in how they would pull off this remake of one of the more brutal exploitation films of the 1970’s and unfortunately this feels very similar to the recent Last House on the Left remake. It’s plenty brutal, which extreme cinema fans will appreciate, but it’s too glossy and completely devoid of the social commentary (intentional or not) that made the original more than just a sick display of rape and torture. Despite the amount of nudity and gore on display here, I was mostly just bored.
And that’s it for this round of reviews. I’ll be back with one more in a couple of days, along with my picks for best of the fest.
