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Mini-Reviews from the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival
Mark comes back from Canada laden with reviews of the SFF movies
Bright Future, Code 46, Cypher, A Problem With Fear, Nothing, and
Le Temps Du Loup.
The following are mini-reviews of films that I saw at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival. Each film is rated on a scale in which -4 is the worst and +4 is the best a film can receive. BRIGHT FUTURE Rating: high 0 Rating: high 0 For quite a while I have been claiming that the two best horror film directors currently working are Guillermo del Toro and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. While other horror film directors seem to feed off of older ideas and styles, these two are inventive. And of the two Kurosawa is probably the more inventive. Truly his films are weird enough that they frequently leave the viewer behind. I have seen his SEANCE, CURE, and PULSE, and would definitely recommend CURE and PULSE. His new film is certainly a weird story, though not strictly speaking in the horror genre. With A BRIGHT FUTURE Kurosawa says that he is making a non-horror film. However if this is not a horror film it is something very much akin. It certainly is bizarre. Yuji and Mamoru are two workers in a laundry who are friends. As a hobby Mamoru has a project to take poisonous jellyfish and adapt them so that they can live in fresh water. Their supervisor at the laundry picks these two out to be friends in spite of their disinterest in them. He starts insinuating himself on them more and more. He visits Mamoru's apartment and watches sports on Mamoru's television. When he sees the jellyfish he wants to poke fingers into its water. Yuji is ready to warn him that the jellyfish is very dangerous, but Mamoru gestures to Yuji not to interfere. But nothing happens. The boss discovers that the boys almost let him be killed and realizes they hate him. He fires them both. Yuji is so angered that he goes to the boss's hose to kill him, but when he gets there he discovers that Mamoru has been there already and has murdered the boss. Mamoru is convicted of the murder and sentenced to be executed. In prison Yuji and Mamoru's long-lost father visit Mamoru. Yuji determines to finish Mamoru's project to adapt the jellyfish to fresh water. Mamoru commits suicide in prison, but Yuji is still dominated by Mamoru's vision. The dead man's spirit still seems to dominate Yuji and Mamoru's father. In spite of Kurosawa's claims and the title, this is a very bleak film. The jellyfish is filmed hypnotically and the film carries us to the conclusion that seems inevitable. This film may not have the appeal of Kurosawa's CURE or PULSE, but it nonetheless is like no other film I have ever seen. Kurosawa's greatest gift is his originality and uniqueness. Rating: 0 CODE 46 is a very odd piece of science fiction. It is a film with some very nice material that tries some interesting ideas, but it fails to capture the viewer. Its flaws outweigh its virtues. It is an extrapolation of the global community twenty years into the future. The world is very different and the differences are often not explained. Giant cities now seem to have the status that countries do today. Global warming has turned most of the rest of the world into a desert. (Much was filmed in Dubai, which stands in for Shanghai.) Rather than simply carrying identification people need to identify themselves with their insurance identification document, called a "papelle." Without a papelle you are exiled to the desert. William (Tim Robbins) comes to Shanghai looking for someone smuggling papelles out of a security building. To aid in his investigation he has infected himself with an empathy virus that allows him to know everything about a person if they will just tell him one thing about themselves. (Oddly, some people are very surprised he has this power, though it seems to be common knowledge other places in the society. It is one more detail not well explained.) With his power it does not take him long to track down Maria (Samantha Morton) who is his smuggler, but he is not sure he wants to turn her in. They are attracted to each other. But soon they find that their lives are connected by more than just their attraction. The story telling is just not very involving, unfortunately. The plot just does not go anywhere. The viewer is kept interested in the background of this world but there is little development of the foreground. The plot resolution seems to come out of left field just when the writer gets tired of writing. Director Michael Winterbottom captures a style reminiscent of both BLADERUNNER and GATTACA, but those films had more interesting characters and action. This film is static and uninvolving. Rating: +3 Many science fiction films of the last few years are based on the writings of Philip K. Dick. Somehow his paranoid view of the nature of reality, and how it can be completely different than it is perceived is an idea that appeals to filmgoers. CYPHER is not a film that is based on any Dick story, but Brian King's script captures the Dick feel perhaps better than any other film. Morgan Sullivan (played by Jeremy Northam) is a nerdish sort dominated by his overbearing wife. But the job he is taking is anything but nerdish. DigiCorp and Sunways are among the two most powerful corporations in the world. They are vicious rivals. DigiCorp has hired him to spy on Sunways. His job is to not be very noticeable. He is to attend conferences under the false name Jack Thursby and during the conference to turn on a recorder disguised as a pen. Sullivan is fascinated by his new world of codes and skullduggery and allows himself to be pulled into the strange labyrinth of industrial espionage and the cold war of the two giant corporations. Almost immediately the boring conferences get more interesting when he starts seeing an Asian woman (Lucy Liu) who may also be playing the same game. Though films with a similar plot have been made, I found this one genuinely exciting, and to me it has the feel of a science fiction novel. While some of the ideas now familiar, standard paranoiac fantasies, I think the execution is great, creating genuine excitement. This is a lot for a seven-million-dollar production to do. The film has little homages to films like NORTH BY NORTHWEST, SECONDS, and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. There are some interesting visual tricks. The film begins almost black and white as Sullivan is unsure of himself in the shadowy world of industrial espionage. As his character develops and becomes more sure of himself the colors fill in more and more vivid. Sullivan's very world has changed. Jeremy Northam traverses the path from nerdish to superman with impressive grace. Director Vincenzo Natali (CUBE, NOTHING) has a sure hand and could be a major talent. Rating: +2 Vincenzo Natali could well be a major talent of Canadian cinema and perhaps even international cinema. Previously he made CUBE and CYPHER. NOTHING starts as a comedy but soon becomes an original fantasy. And few films we see really are so original. Andrew and David have been the picked on by others since they were boys. They have formed a strong friendship and an alliance based on self-defense. They share a really ugly house (uh, half a house), apparently right under a freeway. Life is not great but at least they have each other. But the time has come to break their partnership and each to go his own way. David has a girl and is going to move in with her. Or so he thinks. In one day each has his world fall apart. David loses his job, and discovers he never had a girl to lose. David returns home. Meanwhile Andrew is wrongly accused of child molestation, David of embezzlement, and the city has determined to demolish David and Andrew's house. The locals are besieging the house throwing rocks through the windows. The two are left cowering on the floor. When suddenly . . . . There is a white flash and after it Andrew and David hear nothing. Cautiously they step outside the door and find the reason they are hearing nothing is that that is what now surrounds their house. Nothing. Beyond the property line there is a great white expanse of nothing. Alex and David have been given the ability to wish things out of existence and everything outside the foundations of their house is gone. It seems that Andrew and David have the power to erase things from reality. This is a premise that rates about a B+. But Natali is quite clever in his search for implications of this strange power. Natali's script is constantly inventive in finding implications of this power. NOTHING has the dimensions of allegory in among other things being a story that dissects human behavior and the nature of aggression. The premise is reminiscent of the Jerome Bixby story "It's a Good Life," best known for being adapted as one of the best-known of the TWILIGHT ZONE television series. The special effects used are not expensive, but the plot allows them to be used very effectively. Note: This is a very inconvenient title for a film. "What did you see last night?" "NOTHING." "Then where DID you go?" Rating: +1 This is a quirky science fiction film with some odd approaches. The viewer never knows what is going on. Something is being done to the people in a major Canadian city. We know who is responsible for the strange things we are seeing but not how they are doing it or even what it is they are doing. What is happening is a man-made "fear storm." People are letting their fears--any kind of fears--get the better of them. There are strange incidents of bad luck and they become front-page news. The phobic Laurie Harding (played by Paulo Constanzo) is the center of this fear storm. Listing Laurie's fears could go on for a long time. He fears escalators, pasta with red sauces, elevators, just about everything. He is the perfect customer for Global Security Corporation, a corporation that monitors their customers, predicts accidents, and dispatches police where needed. The system is called Early Warning System 2. It has made Global Security a powerful international corporation. The fear storm is not a chance event. It is all a plot. Global Security is secretly producing the fear storm to boost sales. And Laurie is somehow the eye of the storm and we follow him and his insecure girlfriend Dot (Emily Hampshire), a sociology student, to whom he is afraid to commit. Laurie is protected by his security system, but it seems to distribute bad luck to all those around him. And there is a strange man who seems to know Laurie is doing this and is chasing Laurie, trying to convince him to kill himself. The city is paralyzed with strange fear and the stock market is crashing. Newspapers are taking freak accidents and turning them into banner headlines. When one high school girl get the hiccups, it becomes an epidemic of mass hysteria. So much is unexplained the film has aspects of both weird comedy and horror. Certainly the acting and characterizations are in a tongue-in-cheek style to keep the nightmarish potential in check. So what is this all about? The director says it is about people dominated by fears. Perhaps it is making a statement about the post-9/11 United States, but the film's incoherence gets in its way. It is more a set of strange off-the-wall sketches. Director Gary Burns shot a large part of the film in a shopping mall, much like his WAYDOWNTOWN. This is a film with some interesting ideas but the film's elliptical approach limits its appeal. (Although this film supposedly is set in Canada, the local TV station is KPYT, call letters that would be assigned only to a station in the United States.) Rating: high 0 What has happened is never explained. There is no more government. There are no police. Order has broken down. People are banding together in small societies for protection. There are hints that cattle have died from drinking contaminated water, but whether that is a direct result of something like fallout or if it is just something that happened after the disaster we don't know. As the film open a family of four is going to their summer house in the woods. They find a family already there who have broken in and are squatting. Within minutes our family of four is reduced to a mother and two children. With nothing but a bicycle they are looking for a place of safety. So begins the chronicle of one family in the worst of times after the unnamed disaster that has reduced the world to barbarism. It is difficult to decide what happened what happened. The disaster does not seem to have left radiation. There is no widespread disease (yet). There just seems to be no government, but trains seemed to have been seized by someone and still seem to be moving on tracks. There is little food available but people seem to be surviving. By not specifying what has left the world in this state, the filmmakers have headed off some accuracy complaints. This was probably a very low-budget film since this is a science fiction film in which there are no expensive sets, no special effects, and no special costumes. In addition there is no musical score, which actually enhances the raw effect. Not all but most scenes are set at night. To minimize camera setups and shorten the script and the acting required, many scenes are very long takes with little action, in the style of Tarkovsky. The final scene may even be an homage to Tarkovsky's STALKER. This is a very simple, quick, and dirty way to turn out a science fiction film. Mark R. Leeper (c) Mark R. Leeper
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OTHER CONTENT - December 2003
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Once
a year my wife and I have the ultimate film experience in Toronto.
Ten days of solid film watching. Most of those days we are watching
five or six films a day. Then we each review the films we have seen.
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