Concordia summer students passed through buildings alternately confused and intrigued that long lines, film posters, and little patches of red carpet had sprung up in the midst of their school.
Fantasia Festival workers debated how to set up the line outside one of the theaters. Whether the ticket holders line should be on the right or left of the badge holders line. Where, further, to put the signs indicating which line is which? The tall man in the suit jacket and Fantasia t-shirt combo had strong feelings about this. It made intuitive, obvious sense to him that one line would be to the right and the other to the left. No one argued and now the lines are just as he wanted them.
A larger pigeon, a smaller pigeon, and a couple of those dirty little brown birds fought, tentative hop and peck by tentative hop and peck, over what turned out to be part of a sponge for like twenty minutes until a McKibbin’s worker took out the garbage and scared them all away.
Three journalists, in line ahead of us, talked about the difficulties they faced during 2020. It wasn’t a conversation, but three monologues with considerable thematic overlap. They had a hard time. We didn’t check to see if - when we finally filed into the theater - they decided to sit together or not.
A commercial before the movies looked like it was for some humanitarian enterprise - touchingly committed to young folks and community and the elderly and the good of all people. It’s a commerical for a bank, of course. Isn’t it enough that finance capital is the rotting center of everything without that rotting center being recast as a boon to humanity as a whole? Setting aside the weirdness of presenting financial institutions as engines of social good, it seems weird that banks advertise at all - no? Are folks making their banking decisions based on marketing material? How many people are in debt because a bank made them think fondly of their nana on TV?
[We have, now, seen this ad so many times that we’ve involuntarily memorized it and consequently vowed never even to use an ATM by this particular bank. Holding useless grudges is the new not giving a fuck.]
There is a long tradition at Fantasia to meow and make assorted cat noises when the lights go down for the feature. It started because, as far as we can tell, someone once made short films about cats? In any case, if you see a movie and wonder about the cat noises now you know that it’s just a tradition. Feel free to join in. We don’t, but you do you. Meow away.
Mami Wata (directed by C.J. “Fiery” Obasi) is the most beautiful (and low-key frustrating) films we’ve seen in a while. It’s a glacially slow, mythical narrative set in a rural West (?) African village where two women wrestle with their relationship to their mother (an intermediary to the titular a water goddess, Mami Wata). They tarry with their relationships to tradition, spirituality, civic development, love, and community. They worry over how to improve the lives of the villagers who, for the longest time, relied on the grace and benevolence of Mami Wata and now find their faith slipping and their hopes invested in the (questionable) secular leadership of others. The film is nearly a chamber piece about every big idea there is. The black-and-white photography, production design, hair, and costumes are so gorgeous that, much of the time, we (mostly) didn’t mind that the pacing of the film was trying and the story a little thin. There was something recalcitrant, something more felt than expressed, at the center of this film and we’re still thinking about it days later.
An old friend walked right by without seeing us. She looked to be in the middle of an argument with the guy she was with. It’s possible - likely even - that we’re misreading the situation. There may not have been an argument at all. She may have been super delighted, but we caught her expression at an odd moment. We didn’t want to interrupt either way, so just watched her walk by.
There are so many movies playing here that we do not want to see even a little bit. How does that work? It’s so obvious that a film’s marketing material - poster, trailer, synopsis - isn’t ever really accurate. We know this. AND YET, can get so easily turned off by something as simple as a title or the suggestion of a theme. Did not see [redacted] mostly because watching the trailer felt like an act of self-harm. Maybe this movie is, as we later overheard, “hilarious.” We know we’re going to watch it despite our (wrongheaded?) pre-judgment, but why is that so hard to overcome? Why are we so certain that our experience will take a certain shape prior to having the experience itself?
The movie about the scientist and the movie about the doll came out. It’s fun that there is no possible position to take on either of these films that isn’t predictable or objectionable. These two movies inspire, as it were, anti-discourse. We exist now on the event horizon of the sucking vacuum created by these objects.
[Can’t resist recommending The Fifth Seal (1976) and Josie and the Pussycats (2001) as a double-bill if WWII-set explorations of difficult moral dilemmas and candy-colored late-capitalist satire are your very particular bag.]
The Fantastic Golem Affairs - a film about a man who discovers his best friend was a golem (clay figure endowed with life) after he accidentally falls off a building and smashes into a thousand pieces - is absurd, funny, very horny, and genuinely touching. The story meanders a bit in the middle, but the performances are so charming (and the world and characters of the film such fun) that we truly didn’t care. We just wanted to hang out with these people and visit their world. A truly surprising movie that we want to show to everyone. Made our day. A real pleasure. Will be spending time with the previous features by these filmmakers (Nando Martínez and Juan González) - who go by Burnin’ Percebes - and hope to see more from them and everyone involved in the future.
The line for the Nic Cage movie (Devil something?) was insane. Snaking all the way around the Hall building and up the street almost to Sherbrooke. The appeal of this actor is, maybe, that he doesn’t seem to concern himself with old hat notions of quality? Nic Cage is beyond good and evil. He’s truly Dionysian. He just says “Yes” and everyone laughs and cheers him on and says “Yes” too. “Yes, Nic! Appear insane! YES!” Nic Cage is a totem for the crazy no one else gets to express as often as they’d like. He’s Harpo with better hair.
Our first time at Cinema du Musée and genuinely shocked at this size of this place. It’s very nice in here. We feel underdressed. Not sure what we were expecting - marble busts? cubes of some sort? - but this isn’t it.
The conversations people have while waiting for a movie to start are so unnatural. It’s not small talk, but nor does it ever seem like an actual dialogue. Everyone seems very aware that they can be overheard, but also very self-conscious about saying nothing. So they make dead-end comments (“I heard this was good”) or talk about sense experiences (“Wow, there are a lot of people” or “It smells like popcorn”). We’re guilty of this too. When the lights go down it’s a collective relief from this mode of communication - except for those terrified by their own silence. Those folks will, randomly, turn to company and say a needless phrase or two throughout the film to affirm that they are still alive and still here among others.
The Wild World Itself is a short about two men escaping from a religious cult in a post-apocalyptic world. Some Malick vibes, a touch of No Country for Old Men. It was frequently pretty for all 16 of its minutes, so hard to complain. The cast and crew were in attendance and seemed (charmingly) excited about the screening. The brothers (Dwight and Finn Petrovic) who made the film seemed chill, humble, and stoked to be screening their movie to an almost-full theater of people.
Emptiness - written, produced, and directed by Onur Karaman - doesn’t seem entirely certain about what it wants to achieve. It’s too grounded to be art house horror, but too obtuse to be a mindfuck thriller. It’s, sort of, about three women in a house? It’s unclear why they are in this house or what they’re doing there exactly. For most of its runtime the film is (deliberately?) incomprehensible until the end that (too neatly?) explains everything. It seems like the edit isn’t yet locked (?), so maybe a new version will thread the slowburn psychological thriller / social commentary needle better. As with, legit, most things we’ve been watching - it’s a good-looking movie. There’s something here to be said about shooting on digital, etc. - but we’ll save that for elsewhere.
Walked through a dense pack of boys wearing their finest untucked shirts on their way nowhere good and the catastrophically dense cloud of their combined colognes made our ears ring. Thought about setting up a relief fund for everyone with (formerly) functional sense organs who crossed their path that evening.
Guy, irate, was riding a bike telling anyone who would listen that “vegans are allowed to play drums even if the skins of the drums are made from animal flesh.” Or maybe he was asking? Seeking permission? He seemed distressed and, notably, drumless.
Listening to DJ Nate while walking to the theater and wondering how long it’ll be before a Scandinavian pop producer discovers juke/footwork and the sound gets absorbed into everything. Then Kilo Kish got shuffled into our ears and we stopped thinking entirely.
Not sure what genetic traits allow people to wear full hoodies in this too-hot weather, but we’re low-key envious of these reptilians.
Wapikoni: First Nation’s Genre Cinema was delayed by 30 or so minutes for unclear reasons. The crowd, as a result, roughly halved and it wasn’t a big crowd to begin with. The program promised 21 short genre films by indigenous filmmakers made since 2016 (which, in reality, wasn’t the case - some of the films went back to 2012). The films ran the gamut from silly sketches to anti-drug allegories to experimental animations to ghost stories to documentaries. Most were great, fun or thoughtful. We really hope we get to see more things made by (or involving) Jani Bellefleur-Kaltush, Christopher Grégoire-Gabriel, Martin King, Katia Kurtness, Érik Papatie, and Eve Ringuette. They each made really lovely little movies.
We might be in the minority, but short films are almost always more interesting than features. The crews are smaller, so you get a more concentrated version of the filmmaker’s idea. There’s less money involved in making these films (and almost no promise of making money off of them), so decisions can be made without worrying too much about what audiences might like. They are a treat even when they’re bad. A couple minutes of an attempt to express something almost entirely untethered from the industrial and commercial structures that tend or try to envelop and smother such attempts.
The crowd that showed up to see Talk to Me was manic, almost feral, in a discomfiting way. The theater, by the time we got in, was vibrating with the kind of scary excitement that calls back the colosseum or something. There was a unhinged kind of want. The source and ends of this want were unclear - but we’re guessing it has something to do with the fact that Talk to Me was picked up for distribution by A24 and A24 is (sadly) now vested with a unwieldy amount of cultural capital. They make movies people want to call films. They’re challenging in the sense that they’re not actively stupid. They’re often strange or off-kilter, but not off-puttingly or demandingly so. This sounds like shade, but it’s not. We like a lot of A24 movies. We even mostly liked Talk to Me which - as far as these things go - does not align with what one expects from an A24 movie.
Talk to Me is about a group of teenagers who fuck around with the disembodied hand of a medium (see above). By holding this hand and saying a couple of phrases, a person is briefly possessed with a spirit. Being possessed, it seems, is a good time - but good times, when they involve ghosts or whatever, often go wrong. We won’t say more about the plot, but we will say that it was a really fun time. The sound design for this thing is incredible, the performances compelling, and the writing funny. The film sets things up a certain way in the first half and then doesn’t really follow through in the way we might have liked, but it was a genuinely enjoyable, largely traditional, scary movie.
Based on the audience’s reaction - the dude next to us was jumping all over the place and was legit whispering “no, no, no, no” at various points like he was auditioning for the role of “horror movie audience cartoon character” - we’re guessing it’s going to sell a bunch of tickets. Very strong Bodies Bodies Bodies vibes, but with more pathos and a much less focused central point.
Folks have asked whether we’re enjoying the festival and we haven’t known exactly how to answer. There’s too much - good, bad, and mid - happening to tidily frame the experience. The best we can do, right now, is say that we’re very much enjoying that enjoyment isn’t the primary mover here. Enjoying or not enjoying the movies, the crowds, the lines, etc. doesn’t feel like the point. Instead, it feels like we’re getting to spend time watching in some unprejudiced or straight-up dumb way. We go into the theater knowing little about what’s going to transpire. We show up without expectations. We aren’t overly worried about whether we’ll have anything to say about these films, whether these films will change our life or break box office records. We just look and see to look and see. We’re purely curious and acting without much caution or consideration. We’re having what we guess people call fun? It’s a foreign and strange experience and we’re not quite sure how we feel about it.
There’s something very nice, very basic, about going to see a movie that isn’t based on someone’s recommendation or motivated by a Rotten Tomatoes score or a review or whatever. We could, we recognize, comport ourselves this way always - ignore people and sites and reviews - but that’s easier said than done. It is nice, for now, to be a mere spectator even if - often - the act of spectation yields an entirely mixed bag of pleasure, displeasure, and whatever the middle ground between these states might be. It’s fun to watch movies passively, to engage with culture the way we (try to) engage with everything else - namely, as a brief chance to think something or, in not thinking, feel something that comes from someone or somewhere other than us.
[For real, though, those birds fighting over that sponge were legit as moving and interesting and compelling as many of the produced affairs we’ve seen so far, so kudos to them. Hope they win an audience award and each get a sponge of their own or, better (?), food or something.]
I've committed to watching A24 movie. Partly because I've already seen the majority of them so it seems less daunting than some other kind of challenge but also because, I agree, their "goal" seems to have changed. Still, I find that they're a great distributor for movies people will enjoy that might not have had the reach otherwise. If you were to put them somewhere on a spectrum from niche (I don't care if anyone sees this and plan on going bankrupt) to blockbuster (give me all the sequels and super hero movies you can make) then they'd probably be somewhere towards left of center. Eventually, your studio wins too many awards to be truly art house.
Really enjoyed the social commentary as much as the film "reviews" themselves. I can truly imagine what it would be like to be there, with you, watching the films.
Talk To Me at Fantasia - CROWD VIBES = unhinged and yes feral. I screamed once. for real. otherwise pretty average as far as horror movies go TBH. Def. wanna see The Fantastic Golem Affairs.
"There’s too much - good, bad, and mid - happening to tidily frame the experience. " a description of LIFE ITSELF