Rejoice oh faithful. The Brussels Festival of Fantasy Film is back in town. And after numerous (well, one) complaints about having abandoned my traditional summaries, informed advices and reports straight off the festival floor last year, I will better my life and resume said efforts for the 2010 edition.
The times have changed however. My rather late adoption of the whole range of social networking and blogging opportunities provided by our “the future is now”-world cancels the need for group-emails. This year I will collect everything I have to say on a blog, and alert the entries to you, dear reader, via Facebook.
So what better subject for the very first entry in my new blog then a complete rundown of the program of the 2010 BIFFF? Let's get started, while, appropriately, in the background the Duncan Jones SF-movie “Moon” is playing...
I always do this: I look at the program and get all excited, but by the time the festival is over I have to admit to almost as many disappointments as high hopes I initially entertained. Nevertheless, after having a look at the program for this year's festival that has just today taken it's final shape, I still feel it is going to be a really good year. It becomes a bore to say it, but I see again a perfectly balanced collection of brutal horror and gore, stylistic experiments, big-budget USA, Asian fantastic cinema and anime and a generous selection of European genre films you might otherwise not encounter at your local movie complex.
I do hope that some of our digital tv-providers are taking notes, because their technology for renting films “online” allows for a new distribution channel by which these films might find an audience. Hey you, Jan Verheyen with your little advisory job for Belgacom tv, why not create a special category this April with movies from last year? Then repeat...
Anyway, back to the program.
Full disclosure: everything I say from now on is entirely based on bias and prejudice, with the exception of the handful of movies I have already seen. I reserve the right to recant everything I confess.
Thursday 8/4 - Opening Night
“Well girls”, said the stoic detective looking out the window in the middle of the 80s classic Night of the Creeps, “I've got some good news and some bad news...”
“Oooh”, chirped a bunch of girls in the dormitory, all ready for their senior prom, “what's the good news?”
- “Your boyfriends have arrived”
“Oooh”, they chirped, excitedly, only to lower their voices for the inevitable: “But what's the bad news??”
- “They're DEAD.”
So I have some good and bad news too: the good news is you can save your money for the expensive opening night movie. The bad news? That you should save it, I guess.
The Fourth Kind is the slightly less comfortable encounter with UFO's then Spielberg's happy-go-lucky Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The fourth kind, we are told, also entails contact with extra-terrestrials but with the unpleasant addition of an alien probe inserted somewhere in your body where the sun don't shine. At the start of the movie, actress Mila Jovovich approaches the camera and announces she will be playing the part of a doctor in a dramatization of real-life interviews taken with people who have experienced alien abductions. As the movie progresses, the scenes are interspersed with footage from the original interviews.
Now, only people with their heads stuck between the gates of Area 51 can be stupid enough to believe that this footage is actually real. Of course, these scenes are also filmed with actors, just different ones, and with a low-quality camera, all with the intent to launch some kind of “meme” on the internet that resembles the marketing campaign that catapulted The Blair Witch Project into movie history.
That is all good and well, and I actually like a lot of these “live captured” movies like REC and Cloverfield. The technique they use is an innovative form of “folding”, something that will get more explanation at a later date. But this movie is more akin to the recent Paranormal Activity. Inexplicably, some people some of who's opinions I respect, really liked that movie but I have to give it the dreaded IMDB forum post title “WORST MOVIE EVER”. The problem I have with it is that the story just doesn't go anywhere. By the time you think it finally picks up pace, you have arrived at the final shot of the movie. Again, it seems to be scary only to people who are already inclined to believe these things do happen in real life.
Maybe this total lack of narrative is somehow the point. Maybe the idea is to create some kind of atmosphere, to exist “in the moment”. Maybe there is some drug somewhere you can take to make the experience feel real but otherwise I can discover no redeeming quality to that movie.
Likewise, The Fourth Kind never goes beyond it's interviews in which people in increasing states of agitation or hypnosis recall some vague and undefined traumatic experience. We never get to see aliens or UFO's but for the briefest of shadows. I'll grant that The Fourth Kind has some more variation to it than it's predecessor and that the conceit of “dramatizing” the original footage allows for a movie that is at least better shot and looks prettier for most of it's running time. But still. “What was the point??” is the feeling with which I watch the credits. If you insist on seeing it anyway, you can come and enlighten me while I sample the sponsored drinks at the bar.
Due to loss of a second theater, no big loss if you ask me since that little side room consistently suffered from technical difficulties and ambient noise from outside, the festival starts much earlier than other years, to wit at around 14h00 most of the days. Hey, it's more or less holiday season.
The 20h00 spot of the first actual day of the festival, for some reason, has always been the place to find something that if it doesn't grow into a full scale classic, like the first Scream movie once did, still typically hosts a pure BIFFF movie that defines the festival and is virtually guaranteed to provide a good time. This year a childhood memory comes to the big screen. Luc Besson, french director of huge movies like Leon or The Fifth Element has turned the comic book series Isabelle Avondrood by legendary artist Jacques Tardi into a feature film and this is going to be big, sexy and cool. Imagine early 20th century Paris, a beautiful parisienne as heroin, a kind of steam-punk atmosphere but with a pterodactyl instead of a robot hovering over the city streets... Now throw in the budget a man like Besson can generate and you will have Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec. (I know, the dutch translation of her name does not at all resemble the french original – sounds just as good all the same). For the recreation of pre-war Paris alone, this is going to be worth your while.
Friday 9/4
OK so we're off to a bad start. Let's call it the bad rehearsal before the great show. This show starts now.
Not to be missed:
Due to loss of a second theater, no big loss if you ask me since that little side room consistently suffered from technical difficulties and ambient noise from outside, the festival starts much earlier than other years, to wit at around 14h00 most of the days. Hey, it's more or less holiday season.If nevertheless you can make it, you could do worse than catching Blood River, the third movie by Adam Mason. Mason is a cool guy I had the pleasure of interviewing for The Devil's Chair two years ago and before that brought the brutal Broken to the BIFFF. Both were fine movies realized with limited means. He likes to reach out to his audience too, including with podcasts that you can find online. And the guy makes his own movies, without holding back or compromising. Plus he seems to have an instinct for making the right decision just before shooting finishes, steering his movies in the right direction before disaster can strike. I hope to be pleasantly surprised a third time in a row on his Blood River.
The 20h00 spot of the first actual day of the festival, for some reason, has always been the place to find something that if it doesn't grow into a full scale classic, like the first Scream movie once did, still typically hosts a pure BIFFF movie that defines the festival and is virtually guaranteed to provide a good time. This year a childhood memory comes to the big screen. Luc Besson, french director of huge movies like Leon or The Fifth Element has turned the comic book series Isabelle Avondrood by legendary artist Jacques Tardi into a feature film and this is going to be big, sexy and cool. Imagine early 20th century Paris, a beautiful parisienne as heroin, a kind of steam-punk atmosphere but with a pterodactyl instead of a robot hovering over the city streets... Now throw in the budget a man like Besson can generate and you will have Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec. (I know, the dutch translation of her name does not at all resemble the french original – sounds just as good all the same). For the recreation of pre-war Paris alone, this is going to be worth your while.Also tonight:
16h00: The Collector comes out of the neighborhood that set the Saw-franchise loose upon the world. This may be a bit more mainstream, and it may also try to hard too launch a new franchise. Freddies don't grow on trees though, so I have my doubts. Anyway, you are sure to catch it in theaters after the festival.
18h00: I have no idea about this Hidden so I'll leave that one to your coin toss.
22h00: Hardly out of the theater from Adele Sec-Blanc you may be tempted to go back in for the umpteenth zombie-movie by George Romero. Let's remember two things about this man. First he not only invented the genre but made the best zombie movie ever with (the original) Dawn of the Dead, a movie so good it's poster has earned a place on my wall. Secondly, his belated return to the genre with Land of the Dead was a toe-curling disaster of left-wing political correctness in which the zombies represent the misunderstood muslims about whom the evil capitalist humans have no reason to complain when they run over their big tower building. Get it? Not only are Romero's political allegories as daft as Chomsky's, but at a deeper level, it is profoundly unwise to try to turn the dead into “good guys”. Because something that is dead and walking is evil. Something prehistoric inside our brains knows this, and you mess with that at your peril.
Ironically, his next one, Diary of the Dead was great. Again using the technique of the in-movie camera, we follow a film crew that while filming a horror movie, gets caught up in a real-life zombie infection and decides to just keep on filming. This movie worked like a charm because every single scene was familiar from previous Romero movies, and the “breaking out” of these scenes into the world of the movie-makers, which also happens to be yours and mine, was profoundly effective. Again an example of the “folding”-effect. Unfortunately it seems Romero struck gold while looking for water: he seemed to think he was making some deep political commentary on “the media” while in reality he managed to only make a comment on... Romero zombie movies.
So how is this Survival of the Dead going to fare? That is anybody's guess but the claim can be made that for no other reason than his contribution to horror history, this director deserves the benefit of the doubt.
24h00: We go into the night with a Japanese double bill: Hard Revenge, Milly and Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle. The fact that each movie is hardly longer than an hour and the originality of the title of part 2, should give you some idea of the density of blood-letting per meter film. Japanese movies like this tend to be fun in a so-bad-it's-good kinda way, although by the time they reach this festival, the best of the crop have usually been selected. If interested I got a better idea a few days from now.
Saturday 10/4
Not to be missed:
Also tonight:
14h00: The Japanese manga adaptation Ikigami has me concerned for a number of reasons: it's programmed really early and it's story resembles a bit a lot the classic two-parter Death Note from a few years ago. This has no bearing on the manga, but it might mean this film adaptation was rushed into production to jump on the bandwagon. Nevertheless, one cannot know until one tries. Hey, the ticket is bound to be cheap!
18h00: I will say about the movie Christopher Roth that it has a great poster, but that whenever somebody who is really great at one aspect of movie-making, in this case photography, gets it into his head to become a director, the results are not always guaranteed. It's allowance into the International Competition may be to support a budding filmmaker... Well I'm sure it'll look great.
20h00: Moving on to Solomon Kane: a) you're likely to encounter the film in theaters later. b) It is likely to settle in the middle between good and bad, which at the BIFFF is the worst you can get.
22h00: Remember the scary face of Le Chiffre in the Bond movie Casino Royale? The actor in question is back for the 22h00 time-traveling moral tale The Door. There is something relevant to time-travel movies, because they essentially boil down to a character trying to escape the story of which they are a part. And isn't that the human condition in a nutshell? I'm interested, but conceivably more inclined to save my energy for...
0h00 – 8h00: THE NIGHT!!!!
Tadaa! Bring out the toilet paper, the sirens and prepare to miss the first 15 minutes of the first movie, lost in screams and shouts as the audience goes wild, no berserk, for a full night of horror films.
In truth, this evening does not bring out the best out of the BIFFF audience, as there are always some losers present who don't know when to shut up, or when not to. Amateurs. Hold on to movie 3 or 4 though and they eventually lose their will power (or even better, fuck off to their beds).
Never mind, how about the movies? Are they worth staying up an entire night for?
Well...
Two years ago, with movies like REC and A L'Interieur which I will defend to be a french horror classic to whoever dares to contradict me, the choice was simple. This year, the films seem well chosen for the NIGHT, but perhaps are less interesting to see in their own right. Oh well, at least we are saved from German Star Trek comedies, that one still gives me nightmares and not in a good way.
Starter is Daybreakers, based on an idea that I heard a bunch of young Belgian guys float up in the bar years ago and that sounded just too ridiculous to me. I guess you never know. Not sure if they are involved in any way – I doubt it – but here it is: vampires have eaten up so much of humanity that we have become a scarce resource – allegedly like oil, you know – and some plan needs to be hatched and probably some battle to be fought. Don't know anything more except that this is high-budget USA stuff that will get it's own release in theaters later.
I promised a better alternative to the Japanese blood&gore explosion of the first day, remember? Here it is in the form of Vampire Girl and Frankenstein Girl. Hm. Couldn't they have called it something less repetitive, like Vampire Chick and Frankenstein Cougar? Whatever, from the makers of Tokyo Gore Police and Machine Girl, which says enough to those who have seen these movies, and for those who haven't, yeah, you should watch one of those films at least once.
Next up is the movie that allows you to catch some sleep if need be. Rumah Dara, an Indonesian version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the wife of the house as a Leatherface without the mask. 'Nuff said.
Finally, as should be, some derivative absolutely non-intellectual movie that is not based on a shoot-'m-up game but could be. Soldiers in a VR computer game battle a ghost. This just makes no sense at all. Luckily it is by now too late for good sense. Could these bad movies in the end be chosen to cut down on the number of croissants required afterward? Ghost Machine.
Sunday 11/4
Not to be missed:
Also tonight:
14h00: Already awake for the Swiss SF-film Cargo? I can think of one reason to go: there are not enough SF films made. All the other reasons are for sleeping the previous NIGHT off. This movie sounds too cheap, too politically correct (the Earth's ecological system is history again, oh how I long for the days of Mad Max when a thermonuclear war was required for that, instead of the rise of the world's temperature by a poultry 1.5 degrees Celsius) and on top of it too predictable. Take cover in cryo...
16h00: The thing to admit about 1 is that it has both a to-the-point and completely non-descriptive title. Also an intriguing poster. The BIFFF pays some attention to Hungaria this year, this is their film. It's claim to fame is that it is based on a short story by Stanislaw Lem, the Russian author of the novel Solaris. Now that is a credential that can count. It's going to be one hell of a busy day though but I'm going to give it a try. What is a BIFFF without a few days of 4 movies in a bloody row?
18h00: Look at the incredible poster of the Japanese anime King of Thorn and give up all resistance. Sure, adapting manga that in this case consists of 36 issues into a below 2 hour movie is always a tricky deal. The legendary Ghost in the Shell once pulled it off, even improving in some ways on the original. Can this one too? It is a fact that one of the directors managed to respect the original story of Appleseed when he made the first adaptation of that story. If he can bring the same balancing act to this anime, this could be interesting even for people who do not dress up like “L” on cosplay day.
20h00: In Ondine Collin Farrell catches a mermaid in his nets. Well, not one with a tail. So we are not in Splash! territory like the young Tom Hanks, but in a more serious psychological drama with ambitions of high art, for sure. Farrell of course played in both Alexander by Oliver Stone and The New World by Terence Malick. He is unlikely to sign on to a bullshit film. Having said that, these mainstream movies sometimes miss the edge I come to expect from a BIFFF movie. The director, FYI, is Neil Jordan who you cannot forget made The Crying Game and more in the genre, In Dreams.
22h00: The thing with the staple anti-racist movie is that it betrays a double superiority complex: everybody is a xenophobe with a mob mentality, except the hero of the piece who functions as – dare I say it – an Avatar for the director who can then put himself on a pedestal of moral superiority, looking down on his uneducated fellow country men. For the accusation of xenophobia to hold, it becomes necessary to paint the foreigner as a “noble savage” who is too innocent to be capable of evil. That attitude is the other side of the superiority complex because it hides a perspective on the “other” that is in essence condescending, paternalistic and even neo-colonialistic. Deliver Us From Evil indeed, especially of this kind...
Monday 12/4
Not to be missed:
Perhaps, under commercial pressure from his unfortunately conservative fans he has repeated himself too much? If this is the case, the title of this movie promises little good as “giallo” is the genre that made him famous in the 70s. It refers to a kind of pulp fiction detective story that distinguishes itself by setting the action in exquisite sets and/or the use of elegant and designed camera moves. On the plus side, an actor like Adrien Brody (The Pianist, King Kong,...) has seen fit to join this project. So maybe it is a return to form for the old master, or else another waste of your time. I refuse to not give it a try but cannot recommend blindly, anymore.
Also tonight:
14h00 & 22h00: Both Savage and Heartless seem to address the same theme: in cities infected by “youth” crime (hm, curious which “youths” it are going to be) single, isolated and traumatized men take justice into their own hands. No heroics from a Charles Bronson or caped crusader here, though. These men seem too far gone to save anybody, certainly not themselves.
16h00: Lighter material may be found in the small-scale Japanese movie Fish Story in which a handful of losers travel back in time and might, or not, save the world from an approaching meteor. It sounds like this movie is going to depend mostly on characters and good scripting. That can be a refreshing change at the BIFFF, sometimes.
18h00: Buffy The Vampire Slayer-fans may be interested to check out Timer because it features Emma Caulfield who played the ex-vengeance demon Anya on that show. I'm sure she can do comedy, not sure if the people who make good comedy are smart enough to ask her. Some of the old Buffy-crew have made it into new, good series, others like Caulfield have hardly been heard from. Nevertheless, the idea here – everybody carries a timer that counts down to the time when they will meet their soul mate – is one of these SF-ideas that takes advantage of the rule you can ask the audience to believe 1 magical thing about your story – all the rest from that moment on has to make sense without further suspension of disbelief. Also, if you are a romantic, you are on the wrong festival here so this may be your only chance.
0h00: The midnight movie Invitation Only, finally, is a category 3 Hong-Kong rip-off of torture porn, a genre I am no great fan of. The genre seems to think the interest in horror movies is because the audience likes to fantasize about being the torturers themselves. I think that is an over-simplification of what we really look for in horror movies, so the torture porn flicks end up being as superficial as their philosophy, and not a little hypocritical to boot.
Tuesday 13/4
Not to be missed:
