Figured I’d try to get around to posting this before we got quite halfway through July. There’s a pretty good range on here this month, thanks to a few screenings at the LA Film Festival. I usually get to fifteen or twenty screenings there, but this year I cut it back so I wouldn’t be quite so exhausted, and only ended up at eight total, but I think it was overall a good choice. I was able to process and appreciate the ones I saw more. We’ll see if I remember that come time for AFI in November, when I also usually overschedule myself.

What I Loved

The History of Future Folk

I went into this one at the LA Film Festival fairly blind, but came out pretty much loving it. A sweet little film about an alien who comes to Earth hoping to find a place for his people to live before an approaching comet destroys his homeworld. Instead, he discovers music and settles down…until another alien is sent to kill him and continue his mission. But the film focuses on the music and the relationships rather than the sci-fi elements, though when some special effects are needed, they’re surprisingly excellent. There’s a refreshing tenderness to the script and the characters are very appealing (they’re actually a real band who have been using the alien personas as their backstory for quite some time – the movie just expands and streamlines it). A hidden gem for sure, and worth seeking out. Full review on Row Three

2012 USA. Director: John Mitchell and Jeremy Kipp Walker. Starring: Nils d’Aulaire, Jay Klaitz, Julie Ann Emery, April L. Hernandez, Dee Snider.
Seen June 17 at the LA Film Festival, Regal LA Live.
Flickchart ranking: 437 out of 2990

Safety Not Guaranteed

When a local paper runs an ad for someone wanting a partner to travel back in time with him, a human interest magazine can’t resist going to try to find out what this guy’s all about – does he really think he’s built a working time machine? Over time, though, this sort-of time travel investigative comedy turns into a very good, very poignant drama about people and relationships. It would be almost incredibly easy to screw this up – make it too cutesy, or too weird, or too maudlin, or too cliched, but even though it’s clearly in a specific American indie genre, it avoids every pitfall and ends up being one of the standout films of the year. The more I think back on it, the more I love it, and a lot of that is thanks to a very strong script and a fantastically grounded lead performance from Aubrey Plaza, who’s quickly becoming a must-see favorite of mine.

2012 USA. Director: Colin Trevorrow. Starring: Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, Jake M. Johnson, Karan Soni, Kristen Bell.
Seen June 16 at AMC Burbank.
Flickchart ranking: 572 out of 2990

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And here we are, finally to the last day of the longest festival I’ve attended. Well, technically I was at LAFF last year, but not with a pass, and I didn’t go every day. It was a marathon, but it was totally worth it. I saw several films I loved, and there weren’t any I really disliked. I call that a good time. Only two films today, since I didn’t go to the closing night premiere of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark – that required a separate pass that I didn’t bother to get, and besides, I think 25 films is sufficient.

First off, Love Crime, the final film of French director Alain Corneau, who died shortly after completing this film. He’s known for his crime thrillers, and this fits right into the mold. Kristin Scott Thomas is Christine, an ice-cold executive of an international firm who seems to be grooming up-and-coming exec Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier), partnering with her on various business deals and pitches to clients. They also have kind of a complicated personal relationship that Christine calls “love” – it certainly has a sexual aspect to it, though both women also date men…the same man, actually. Turns out Isabelle is potentially even better at her job than Christine, and soon they’re vying professionally and on cool terms personally. The crime plot that follows is twisty and will keep you guessing, even though you know exactly what happened – it’s Hitchcockian, really, in its ability to tell you who did it up front and still keep suspense very high. Both actresses are great; my only real complaint is that it’s shot very flat and uninterestingly (which is very unHitchcockian). Once the plot really got going it wasn’t an issue, but early on when relationships were still being set up, the bland photography and composition was a little distracting.

The last film of the day was one of the bigger name ones at the fest, with John C. Reilly anchoring coming-of-age, awkward high school story Terri as the unorthodox school principal who befriends the overweight, friendless title character. Terri himself is played by newcomer Jacob Wysocki, and he does quite well in the part, refusing to let Terri fall into either pity territory while also acknowledging his difficulty with interacting with others. There are some really great parts, like when Terri arrives at the edge of school property (he walks through the woods from his uncle’s cabin), then waits in the trees for the other students to pick up their bags from where they’d been hanging out on the soccer field and head into school before tossing his bag on the field and going to pick it up before going to school. That little gesture of wanting to do what the other kids do, but not wanting to be with them and risk ridicule was probably my favorite thing in the film. Other things didn’t fare quite so well with me. Reilly is great, as usual, and his relationship with Terri was different and fun, but some of Reilly’s more serious dialogue didn’t ring true to me at all. Some of the directions the story went with Terri, his weird “friend” Chad, and Heather (a girl Terri helped early in the film) didn’t feel right to me, and took me out of the film. A lot of the side characters seemed to be there only to add weirdness (exception made for Creed Barton, who is surprisingly good as Terri’s uncle struggling with dementia). Ultimately, there were a lot of individual elements I liked a lot, but just as many that put me off, and the whole film doesn’t come together or distinguish itself above the dozens of other coming-of-age-high-school movies. I ended up being more disappointed by it than most anything else at the festival. Maybe I’m starting to get over pseudo-indie posturing.

And that’s it. Ten days, twenty-five movies.

Well, I was doing so well at getting these out on a fairly regular schedule, and then the festival actually ended and I lost all motivation. But I don’t want to leave the last two days hanging, so I’ll try to finish these up and get them posted rather quickly. After a week of working plus festivalling, it was wonderful to get to sleep in on Saturday morning; the first screening of the day wasn’t until 1:30, leaving a nice leisurely morning to recover a bit from the week. But then I’d gotten used to the lighter attendance during the week, and ended up further back in line for every screening on Saturday than I wanted. Ah, well. I still got into everything fine, so I can’t really complain.

First up was Disney’s new version of Winnie the Pooh, and it was only the second screening of the festival (that I went to, anyway), that was doing a bag search and checking computers/cameras. They did leave us cellphones (Drive did not), but still. I get why big studios like Disney are paranoid about their films leaking, but it was still kind of annoying. I’ve successfully managed not to pirate 24 other films at the festival, most of which will be lots harder to come by in the future and thus more ripe for pirating. Anyway. The film was delightful, an extremely faithful hand-drawn throwback to the original Winnie the Pooh shorts, even down to the live-action opening with the narrator telling us about Christopher Robin’s stuffed animals and their adventures in the Hundred Acre Woods. The story is largely a combination of finding Eeyore’s lost tail and trying to capture the monstrous Backson (which they believe has kidnapped Christopher Robin), both well-worn in the Pooh universe, but woven together really well here. The film is explicitly literary, with the characters interacting with the narrator and the very words on the book’s page as the narrator reads it – I love this sort of thing, so I was enamoured right the way through. The humor is warm and gentle, and in every way, this is a film I’d 100% rather see and take my kids to (if I had kids) than most of the animated fare out these days, Pixar notwithstanding. I do so hope Winnie the Pooh does well when it comes out in a couple of weeks, so we get more movies like it from Disney in the future.

After a refreshing iced coffee and stroll around LA Live in some rare between-screening down time, I headed in to see Miranda July’s new film The Future. July is well-known in a certain corner of the artistic community for her quirky and thoughtful, if sometimes a bit twee, outlook expressed in many art forms from feature and short films to short stories and essays to performance art and experimental albums. This is only her second feature film, following 2005′s You and Me and Everyone We Know, which I liked but wasn’t totally won over by, so I came into The Future interested but not set on loving it. I actually liked it more than You and Me and Everyone We Know, but not everyone will. First off, it’s narrated by a cat (voiced by July) that couple July and Hamish Linklater rescue and take to the vet with a broken paw. The prospect of adopting the cat in exactly 30 days (after the paw heals and before the hospital euthanizes her) sends the couple into an existential crisis, thinking about how much they wanted to accomplish by this point in their lives and haven’t. So they quit everything and try to make this 30 days count. Meanwhile, the cat pops in with narration every once in a while looking forward to the prospect of being adopted and not living on the street anymore. The voiceover will be VERY grating for many, and I found it the weakest part of the film (though I did like the content of the voiceover by and large). The fact that something so simple as adopting a cat would cause so many repercussions in these people’s lives seems a bit unbelievable, but it works in the film, and so do the faint sci-fi elements. But there were some plot elements that I didn’t quite believe, like the major conflict of July’s character’s affair with another man. By and large, I enjoyed the film and thought July’s sensibility carried it off quite well, but like You and Me and Everyone We Know, there were a few elements that just didn’t sit quite right with me.

Despite finding it really interesting, I had to leave Miranda July’s Q&A session in the middle to try to obtain a good spot in line for Mysteries of Lisbon, my marathon film of the festival. Clocking in at 4 hours and 17 minutes (thankfully they did include an intermission), the film presented a challenge to me I just couldn’t pass up. I did want a seat behind the railing, though, which allows for putting your feet up and increasing the comfort level by roughly 63%. Alas, the guy in line right in front of me snapped up the last of the railing seats. DRAT. I still managed through okay, though, and even though I will admit to drifting into a bit of a stupor a few times, the film remained intriguing throughout the epic run time. Directed by Chilean expat Raul Ruiz, now working in Europe, the film is based on an epic Portuguese novel that follows a fatherless boy in a parish school, but tangents off frequently into lengthy related stories – such as how his mother and father met and were driven apart, how the priest who cares for him came to be a priest, and even about the neighboring nobleman who intersects with his life a few times. Well, the stories seem tangential but actually intertwine quite closely and ingeniously. The fact that you’re actually watching several interrelated stories of many different characters makes the running time not quite so much of a burden, and then the ending will have you wondering about everything you just saw. It’s paced fairly slowly, but gives a languid sense of the setting and society of the 19th century – that plus the length give plenty of time to maneuver around all the different characters and their different personas throughout the multiple storylines. It’s a masterwork of narrative structure, and I definitely want to revisit it to get nuances I missed when zoning out here and there.

Nine days down, one to go. Twenty-three films down, two to go.

Friday’s screenings didn’t start quite so early as Wednesday’s and Thursday’s had, so I was able to sleep a little bit more before heading to work. Not sure if that extra half-hour or so made that much different, or if my body managed to adjust to four hours of sleep, but I was much less tired all day on Friday, and didn’t really have any issues with being sleepy during films. I figured it would get worse throughout the week, not better. Interesting. The reason I’m so fascinated with this aspect is that this is by far my most ambitious film festival schedule. I had twenty-five films plus a shorts program scheduled, running from 4pm to midnight almost every weekday and 1pm to midnight for two weekends. That’s basically full-time job hours on top of my full-time job, so I was actually expecting to fade toward the end of the week and have to start skipping screenings, but it didn’t happen. I made it to everything I had planned, and though I did fade in and out of some of the later films, it was far more minimal than I expected.

The festival was running a special sidebar of films from or focusing on Cuba, and I wanted to make it to one of those at least to fill out my fest experience. I chose Suite Habana, a film from 2003, both for scheduling reasons and because it sounded like a Havana-set version of Berlin: Symphony of a City or Man With a Movie Camera, a sort of documentary-esque tone poem focusing on a specific city. And that’s exactly what it is – it follows a group of people around their daily lives in Havana for a twenty-four hour period. We see a man and his nine-year-old son, a construction worker who dances ballet at night, an old woman who sells peanuts, a drag queen performer, and many others. At the time, Cuba was still suffering greatly from the blockade of the US and the loss of economic support from the Soviet Union, and that shows in every frame, and yet the people go on, pursuing their dreams and taking care of their families with hope. The whole film is lovely and sometimes sad, with a great score to underscore the basically wordless action. The very end is extremely effective, introducing us to each of the people we’ve been watching with their name, their job, and their dream, after we’ve already gotten to know them a bit just by watching them. The cinematographer of the film was there answering questions, and it was great to hear that a lot of them are having their dreams fulfilled – the ballet dancer is with the national Cuban ballet company, and was actually in LA last week performing with them. Originally there was meant to be several films to go along with Suite Habana, with different directors showing their home cities for a 24-hour period, but funding fell through and Suite Habana was the only one completed. I’d love to see more “city” films like this – I find them quite fascinating.

It seems like I put very few straight dramas on my schedule – almost everything is a genre film of some sort or a comedy, or a black comedy. But Kawasaki’s Rose is one, and an extremely good one. I was first drawn to it because it’s Czech, and I’m kind of fascinated by the Czech Republic and its history, and then I discovered it’s the same director (Jan Hrebejk) who did Divided We Fall back in 2001, a film that just bowled me over when I saw it. Like Divided We Fall, Kawasaki’s Rose deals with the issue of collaborators and dissidents during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, but from the other side. Main character Pavel (well, it’s a pretty solid ensemble cast, so after seeing it, it’s difficult to pin anyone as the main character) is about to receive an award for his outspoken dissident efforts, but as a pair of documentarians (one of them his son-in-law, the other his son-in-law’s mistress – yeah, it’s complicated) work on the story, they discover that at one time, he had collaborated with the KGB. There are a ton of plot threads in this film, of Pavel and his wife Jana, who may or may not have known about his activity; their daughter Lucie, who not only has a straying husband, but a kid who’s a bit of a punk and a rare medical condition; Jana’s former lover Borek, a dissident who fled Prague not long before Jana and Pavel married, and Borek’s Japanese expat buddy Kawasaki, and more. But they all manage to find their way back to the center, unveiling layers like the origami rose Kawasaki paints which gives the film its title. It could get soapy, but it doesn’t – it has a lot of depth to it, stemming both from the characters and the historical background. I’m not sure it’s quite as amazing as Divided We Fall was when I first saw that, but together they make a darn good double feature about the Czech experience.

A horror-thriller about a barista in Silver Lake, with what seemed like a stalker angle? Sign me…up? Heh, I’m always curious about indie horror films, even though there are a lot of them, that seem to take more of a thoughtful point of view on the genre rather than just going for the whole slasher thing. Funnily enough, the filmmakers’ working title for Entrance was “Slasher,” but it certainly isn’t a typical one. Most of the film is, in fact, a straight drama, with the main character Suzie (played by Suziey Block, who is also a barista in Silver Lake) getting pretty lonely and disaffected, soon deciding she wants to leave LA entirely. This sounds like a dozen other films, because disaffected Angeleno stories are fairly easy things for low-budget LA filmmakers to write and film. But it actually pretty much works on that level, even leaving aside the horror stuff – it’s not particularly distinguished at it, but it’s decent, for which most of the credit goes to Block, who is quite personable and imminently believable. Throughout, an odd undercurrent runs, though, as she wakes to hear footsteps she can’t quite track down, her dog goes missing, her garage doors are randomly open, etc. When the climax comes, it’s quite well done, with a lot of smart choices on the part of the writers and directors; it did get a little drawn out toward the end, though, and I thought that could’ve been tightened up a fair bit. But I still enjoyed myself with it (and didn’t get too scared to move to the Silver Lake area, which I’m still hoping to do EVENTUALLY), and so did most of the rest of the audience – many of whom were there supporting friends in the cast or crew. It was the world premiere of the film, and it’s fun to be in that friendly an audience for that.

Thursday was my earliest day yet, as I booked it up to the theatre for a 4:00pm screening. I’ve actually enjoyed getting to work so early, even if the four-hour nights of sleep were starting to wear on me by Thursday. The commute from 6:30-7:00 is 100 times better than the one from 7:30-8:00. As in, I can make it by 7am if I leave by 6:30, but if I wait until 7:30, I probably won’t get there until 8:30. Gotta love LA traffic. But yeah, this week has been a good experiment in different traffic conditions at different times.

The screening I was running to was of Echo Park-set teen drama Mamitas, which intrigued me both because I like seeing films set in different neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and because the trailer reminded me of Raising Victor Vargas, a Latino-American coming-of-age drama from a few years ago I liked very much. And I wasn’t wrong in my intuition; Mamitas is a really charming understated drama of a teenage boy who puts of a front of being hot stuff – cutting class, hitting on girls, generally acting too cool for school – but shows a much more caring side to his ailing grandfather and one girl who manages to break through his facade. It’s all played very down-to-earth and realistically, with all the actors bringing great warmth and charisma to their roles. A plot development that could’ve gone very eye-rollingly soapy refreshingly didn’t, and I appreciated that immensely. The only problem is that the film is 110 minutes, and it should’ve been about 95, trimming off a couple of false endings. But I was enough charmed that I didn’t care too much.

I’d been looking forward to Another Earth since I first heard about it a few months back – the premise is that one day, a new planet turns up in the sky, and upon further investigation and SETI contact, it becomes clear that not only is it an exactly duplicate of Earth in terms of terrain and geographical layout, but every person on Earth is duplicated on Earth 2, with the same lives and everything. The trailer gave me a bit of pause, though, since it suggested that the sci-fi angle was only background to the story of a woman who caused a terrible car accident trying to find forgiveness and redemption, and that looked like it could go off the maudlin emo deep end in a real hurry. And…it kind of did. The trailer, if you watch it, is quite a good representation of the film. The main character finds the one survivor of the accident and tries to improve his life in any way she can, with the thought always in the back of her mind of going to Earth 2 when a passenger shuttle launches in a few months, hoping that meeting the other her or the duplicates of the accident victims will help her find peace. It doesn’t play as emo as I feared, and a lot of the emotional side is handled really well, to the film’s credit. But it does go to some strange places in tone and content, which I’m not sure were actually helpful to the film overall. Ultimately, I was intrigued by some parts, especially the sci-fi parts that I wanted a LOT more of, and disappointed by other parts, for a rather uneven and unfulfilling experience. I’m not sure who the audience for this is, either – it won’t please hardcore sci-fi fans, but it’s also too downright strange (and I don’t just mean the sci-fi elements, but stylistically) to appeal to the mainstream. The last shot was really good, though, and brought forth a tumult of thoughts and speculation, so I guess I’ll give it props for that.

I was pretty worried that sleep was going to catch up with me during The Yellow Sea, and I must admit to dozing off during quite a few of the more exposition-laden parts, but I still got the basic gist and I certainly was not dozing during the adrenaline-pumping action scenes. This is a Korean crime film, focusing on a Chinese-Korean man living in China who gets assigned a hit in Korea, so he makes the dangerous and illegal crossing over the Yellow Sea to get there. But predictably, stuff goes wrong, and he ends up being chased by the police, the mob leaders (who he thinks ordered the hit but apparently did not and are upset it happened), and the middleman who smuggled him across the Sea. Then all these groups of people get into it with each other, top. So, yeah, it takes a while to get going, but once it does, it’s pretty incredible – and most of it is on-foot chases and knife fights. No guns at all. The most amazing thing is the chases (both on-foot and car) are shot really close and edited quickly, but somehow they managed not to be incoherent the way most American action scenes are – I felt the visceral rush of him narrowly missing being hit or caught, or cars slamming into each other behind him, but I never felt disoriented. I want to watch it again just to try to analyze how they achieved that effect.

Wednesday I got up and went to work early so I could leave by 3:15 to get to a 4:10 screening. Dedication, I tell you. Dedication. Really, though, I’m thankful for how close LA Live is to where I work, and that my boss is so flexible in letting me do stuff like this. It’s a pretty great situation. And the proximity of LA Live almost makes me forgive the Fest for choosing downtown (where it’s very difficult to find fast, cheap food to eat on a festival schedule) over Hollywood, which is more convenient for not starving to death, but an hour away from work in traffic. Ah, well, can’t have everything.

Anyway, my early morning Wednesday allowed me to add Familiar Ground to my schedule, a Quebecois film I’d circled around in planning but had left off before I realized I could get to the 4pm screenings. It was billed as a black comedy about a deeply unhappy family focusing on a sibling relationship, with a random sci-fi element of a man coming from the future (not the distant future, just September), offering warnings to the brother about an accident the sister might have soon. The sci-fi bit I intrigued me, but I wasn’t sure about the deeply unhappy bit. Ultimately curiosity won out, plus I want to see more Canadian film, Quebecois or otherwise. The funny thing about French language films is you can almost always find trailers on YouTube if you search “bande-annonce” – but they’re unsubtitled and I’m utterly unable to understand any Quebecois French, even though I can usually get the gist of France French from bande-annonce clips. Anyway, watching that told me NOTHING about the film, so I was going in pretty blind. Ended up liking it quite a bit, though it’s not really a friendly film. It’s slow and rather antagonistic (as the main characters are), but it is quite funny in an extremely deadpan and slightly absurd way. The lightly techno/synthy soundtrack is really unexpected but works really well. It’s a film I liked much more thinking about it later than while actually watching it. I expect I would like it even more on rewatch.

I had a little bit of time before my next screening, so I went in search of food. And here’s what I mean. There’s food in the theatre, which is what I did last year, but I’d rather avoid that if possible for actual meals. There’s a taco truck across the street, but I was not in the mood for Mexican food. LA Live has a wide range of great restaurants – if you have time to sit and eat and want to spend $15+ for an entree. There’s a Denny’s Diner not too far away, but I did that on Saturday and wasn’t eager to do it again. There was a panini place a few blocks over and I headed toward that, but by the time I found it, it was starting to get late and it was more of a sit-down place than I expected. Then I noticed a Ralph’s grocery store right there and decided to just do that. Even their pasta salad bars were almost $10. I bought a box of Cheez-Its and a Mountain Dew for $4 total. Done. I’ve been eating those for three days now. Healthy? No. But cheap and does the job. Please, LA Film Fest, get some more food trucks other than tacos in the area next year.

After the food odyssey, I got back to join an already lengthy line for The Guard, one of the bigger-name films at the festival thanks to the presence of Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle in the cast. They were also in the theatre and gave a really good Q&A with writer/director John Michael McDonagh after the film. But the film! Right, the film. It was pretty great, one of the wittiest scripts of the year, and an outstanding central performance from Gleeson. Cheadle is good, too, but he’s not given quite as much to do. Gleeson is an outspoken and politically incorrect police guard in Galway, Ireland; his apathetic approach to his job is tested when a murder case he’s investigating turns out to be related to an international drug trafficking case FBI agent Cheadle is working on. Starting off their relationship with “I thought only black boys were drug dealers” doesn’t bode well, but Gleeson’s character is far more nuanced than you’d think. Plus, the film is equal opportunity in its bigotry, insulting English, Welsh, Italians, Dubliners, African-Americans and regular Americans almost in the same breath, and hilariously. And Mark Strong plays one of the villains, and is absolutely fantastic every second he’s on-screen. It’s a really funny movie, with a surprising streak of depth.

My last stop of the night was for one of the Shorts programs. After really enjoying a shorts program at AFI Fest last year, I’m going to try to get to at least one every festival, because these are some really great films, and festivals are just about the only place to see them. What I love about shorts programs is you don’t have any idea what you’re going to get (you can read descriptions, but they’re usually cursory and it can be difficult to find out more), and what you get is incredibly varied. We saw seven shorts, from 5 minute comedies to 16 minute dramas, from stop-motion animation to documentaries, most from the US, but also from Iran, Sweden, and Britain. My favorites among the set were an animated short from the UK called The Eagleman Stag, a unique-looking (everything is totally white) odyssey through the philosophy of time, an Iranian drama of a woman who accidentally locks herself outside without her scarf called The Wind is Blowing on My Street and Sleep Study, a brief comedy about a woman doing all kinds of crazy activities while sleeping. The most talked-about one, though, was easily The Elect, a fly-on-the-wall documentary about one of the leading families in the Westboro Baptist Church – and yes, it was really disturbing for a lot of reasons. It was a really diverse program and a good one, making me wish I’d made it to more of them. Maybe next year. Shorts are great, and ought to get more attention – they’re hyper-focused stories with no time for dross or padding, and allow a great opportunity for experimentation. I just wish there were more opportunities to see them in theaters outside of festivals.

Six days down, four to go. Fourteen films down, eleven to go. Not counting shorts in that number.

Initially I hadn’t planned on trying to see anything that started in the 4:00 hour, figuring it’d be too tight to get there from work, but when I actually did the math, I realized I could get to work like half an hour early and that would leave me plenty of time, since the theatre is so close. Tested the time on Tuesday with a not-too-early 4:40pm screening, and sure enough, it was an easy twenty minutes from sitting at my desk to sitting in the theatre. And with the early screenings not as full as the evening ones, getting a good seat was still pretty simple. So I got to add four more screenings to my schedule. Yay!

Especially yay because the first one I decided to add is precisely the film I was hoping to find here, a low-budget iiiiindie to fall in love with and throw my voice (however small it might be) behind. And to think I almost didn’t add it to my schedule. (Every time I say that I do wonder how many of the other films I actually didn’t add to my schedule are just as amazing, and I may never know.) The Dynamiter isn’t a film I’d ordinarily look twice at, with its small-town Southern setting, coming-of-age story, and general sense of low-income Americana. There’s nothing wrong with those things, but they tend not to appeal to me personally. But something about the description of this one, or the still illustrating it in the film guide, kept me glancing back to it. But choosing low-budget, non-actor, first-time director films can be a crapshoot, and even heading into it, I was thinking, oh, should I switch to something else… But I stuck with it, and I was charmed within ten minutes, and in love by half way through. It finds the lyricism in the story, but never becomes pretentious, and the three non-actors leading the cast are wonderfully naturalistic, but most of all, the script and direction handle the subject with incredible humanity, making you care deeply about the main character, a 14-year-old boy thrust into manhood and caring for his family, in the all-too-brief runtime. My full review is on Row Three.

It was tough to break the mood set by The Dynamiter to go into an action crime movie like Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within, but such are the vagaries of festival scheduling. I will admit, though, that that unwillingness to leave The Dynamiter may have played a part in my reaction to Elite Squad 2. Having heard great things about the original, a crime film set in the favelas of Brazil, my expectations were high, and while the film was good, it just wasn’t great to me. It focuses a lot more on the politics of corrupt cops and politicians than the action on the streets, which is not a bad thing (and I did like it more after the director explained a bit about the politics of the film in relation to the actual politics – most of the film is based on real events, just molded and transformed into a bit more narrative-friendly form), but it wasn’t what I was expecting. The action scenes that are here have a great driving soundtrack, and…fall prey to many of the same quick-editing pitfalls that American action films do. I was hoping its foreign origin would protect from that but I guess it’s becoming widespread elsewhere as well. Anyway. It’s still quite a good film, and from what I’ve read since, the first film actually is what I was hoping for, so I’ll probably try to catch that soon. And I will try this one again when I’m more in the right mood and not quite as tired.

I very nearly decided to go home and get some sleep after Elite Squad 2, but the last film on my schedule for Tuesday was a remake of a ’70s Japanese TV show about young Daimon and his motorcycle, which can turn into a karate-wielding robot on command. It looked utterly over-the-top and ridiculous, which is exactly what I need from a film fest 10pm slot (at least if there’s no midnight timeslot). So I stayed, and yes, Karate-Robo Zaborgar is just as ridiculous and awesome as it sounds. More plot: the evil doctor is trying to build a giant, world-killing cyborg, for which he needs the DNA of various politicians, so he sends his android Miss Borg after them. But Daimon and Zaborgar are out to stop him, and all the other scantily-clad, rocket-powered cyborgs he sends after them. And it just gets crazier from there. It was a ton of fun, and just what I needed to finish out the night.

The festival is half done at this point, five days down, five to go. Twelve films down, thirteen to go.

And so begins five days of rushing to the festival after a full day at work. I can do without sleep for a week, right? I mean, I’ll just catch up later, right? Probably not. But whatever, I’m going all out on this. To be fair, Monday actually wasn’t a rushing day because there wasn’t anything in the 4:00 timeslot I particularly wanted to see, so I had plenty of time to grab dinner and spend some time poring over my Innkeepers review before my first screening at 7:20. Thanks to the LAFF volunteers for leaving me alone sitting by the wall and writing until the queues started forming. Seriously, though, there are like 700 volunteers for this thing, and they’re great – any time I have a question about when and where something’s going on, there’s a white or yellow volunteer shirt within five feet and so far they always know the answer.

Monday night was a foreign-only night for me, starting off with Peru’s The Bad Intentions. This film caught my eye with the festival guide describing it as a black comedy about a nine-year-old girl who’s convinced that she’ll die as soon as her baby brother is born, and the morbid ways she acts out in rebellion to the idea of no longer being an only child. Meanwhile, it’s 1982 and revolutionary groups are wreaking havoc in Lima (a background plot point that would benefit from me knowing more about Peruvian history, but the interactions with the main plot are clear enough for the most part). The film is very darkly funny, especially for the first two thirds or so, thanks to the sardonic script and solid performance from the young unknown playing Cayetana with world-weary innocence. She’s obsessed with Peruvian heroes who died in battle, and with death itself – something she’s clearly just starting to figure out, and her combination of matter-of-factness and naivete is refreshing. The last third of the movie delves a bit into surrealism, as the threat of her brother’s birth looms nearer and she dreams visions of the historical heroes. The turn didn’t totally work for me, but the film is still really solid, evoking a bit of The Spirit of the Beehive in terms of the little girl coming into contact to death, and here, birth, and working to make sense of it within her childish framework. Director Rosario Garcia-Montero mentioned Cria Cuervos, another Spanish film starring Spirit of the Beehive actress Ana Torrent, as a definite influence – it’s been on my list for a while, so I’ll probably knock it up to the top of my Netflix queue next.

Then I hopped straight into Haunters, a Korean supernatural action thriller about a man, dependent on a prosthetic leg and surviving an abusive childhood, who can control anyone within his sight and make them do what he wants. It’s Cho-in’s one source of power against a world that has cast him out. But when he robs a financier’s office, Cho-in finds himself face to face with Kyu-nam, the one man that can resist his control, setting these two into a power struggle as Kyu-nam takes it on himself to stop Cho-in. It’s a fairly modest production (the first feature for director Min-suk Kim, who co-wrote The Good, the Bad, the Weird and also worked on The Host), focusing on a few set-pieces and the psychological struggle between the two. Blending tones the way only Korean films seem to be able to do, it isn’t quite as ambitious as the films I just mentioned, but makes the most of its scale and has a pretty interesting (if a bit Unbreakable-ish) take on the situation. Plus it’s pretty much non-stop fun to watch, once it really gets going.

That’s it for Monday. The rest of this week, I should be catching three films a day and hopefully having to write full reviews of some of them! Once I write reviews of these on Row Three, as I plan to, I’ll add the links to this post. Four days down, six to go. Nine films down, sixteen to go.