Review: "I Saw the Devil"

I missed Ji-woon Kim's excellent Korean-made The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a colorful and kinetic homage to spaghetti Westerns, at Fantastic Fest a couple of years back and was forced to catch it later in its limited art house release when it rolled through Denver. Pretty impressive stuff, and Kim showed enormous flair and style. So, when I was sat down for the first Secret Screening of the 2010 incarnation of Fantastic Fest and found out that they were screening Kim's new flick I Saw the Devil, I was quite pleased. Alas, that feeling did not last long.

As most genre fans know by now, the Koreans really dig their vengeance movies, and the more brutal whup-assery there is, the better. I don't know a whole lot about their national psyche, but I can for damn sure say that I'm gonna be very careful never to offend anyone from Seoul, lest I end up on the wrong end of a hammer beat-down. Kim capitalizes here on this fetish for revenge, and ups the ante by playing it out in a reciprocal cycle, where the good guy gets his vengeance on the bad guy, who then gets his back on the good guy in turn, who is left with no choice but to come back for an escalated level of pain-dealing, and so forth, until ultimately there is scarcely any difference between hero and villain.

Min-sik Choi is a psycho killer who opens the film by kidnapping a woman and hacking her to pieces at his leisure in his secret lair, because that's what he does. Unfortunately for him, she was the girlfriend of Byung-hun Lee, a secret service agent who manages to track down the murderer fairly quickly. But Lee's grief-driven lust for vengeance cannot possibly be satisfied with a mere arrest of the criminal--he has to make Choi suffer first. Hence, he manages to surreptitiously tag Choi with a tracking device, so he can release him back into the wild, and then crash down upon him repeatedly with maximum force, unleashing a world of hurt. Naturally, though, Choi eventually figures out how he's being found again and again, and who it is that's hunting him, and contrives to turn the tables. And then, as is inevitable, the hunter becomes the hunted.

Technically, this is a competently executed movie and the lead performances are solid. However, when Choi resumes his killing spree roughly five minutes after Lee initially tags him and lets him flee, the viewer's sympathy for the alleged protagonist is quickly challenged. Especially since the lawman soon realizes what's going on, but doesn't put an end to his plan, even after he has to intervene again and narrowly save a female victim from being raped and murdered by Choi.

Indeed, horrific violence against women is a major theme of this movie. Just about all of the victims are female, and where the males usually are dispatched rapidly, the women are subjected to lingering terror, torture, and degradation. Certainly, horror and suspense movies are notorious for how often the female characters are brutalized, but Kim definitely lets the camera linger for a long time on their suffering here, and they can barely be considered characters--they're mere vehicles for disturbing voyeuristic impulses. While there's a perfunctory effort to show that at least three of them get away, as soon as they run off the edge of the screen the movie completely loses interest in them. Their getaways are the equivalent of watching the bad guys from COBRA parachute to safety right after the righteous G.I. Joes blast their jets to smithereens--you get to enjoy your guilty pleasure of watching exciting violence while being assured that gee, no one was killed, so it's all good.

Ultimately, the movie relentlessly pursues its theme of "To hunt the psycho, you must become a psycho" to a predictable end, one in which the hero's final justice brings no satisfaction to anyone, and actually ends up scarring innocent bystanders. I have nothing against bleak endings per se, but the motifs explored in I Saw the Devil are really nothing new, and the only thing it really has to offer is bone-snapping levels of naturalistic violence, Korean-style. Oh, and the lesson that the country is strangely awash in serial killers. Perhaps it's no wonder that so many people there are wandering around, seeking revenge.

Review: "A Serious Man"

I've come to accept that some of the films that sneak into Fantastic Fest under the cloak of a Secret Screening have only the most nebulous connections to the genre world. I mean, last year's "The Brothers Bloom", despite its merits, of which there were a handful, doesn't really feature zombies, kung-fu fighting, aliens, psycho killers, giant Japanese robots, Korean gangsters, or any of the other things we've come to expect in the typical Fest flick. But at least it was a madcap caper, and there's some precedent for those to be shown here.

I have no explanation for why "A Serious Man" was selected, unless (and I am most reluctant to entertain this theory) the programmers, in a moment of weakness, succumbed to the increasing Hollywood attention being directed their way and simply scheduled it just to bag another claim to a big premiere. I would hate to see the Secret Screenings degenerate to that level, where some studio looking for a little bit of hipster buzz manages to cram some mainstream schlock into our beloved gathering.

I'm not saying that "A Serious Man" is schlock, although had it been, it would've proved more entertaining. No, this movie is well-made and features solid performances (particularly on the part of the dude who played Sy Abelman), but it is apparently about Big Ideas, and those themes are presented in a completely aimless way. The movie keeps promising that it is about something, and clearly intends to provoke thought, but it turns into an endless waiting game where things are suggested but never developed or completed.

Clearly, the Coen Brothers want to replay the tale of Job here. The protagonist, of a sudden, is beset on all sides: his bid for tenure is being threatened by an anonymous source making serious allegations about his character, his wife asks for a divorce, his unemployed brother is leaching off him, his neighbor is slowly taking over his backyard, and one of his students is trying to extort a passing grade out of him. Obviously, if he had a herd of cattle, it would be contracting hoof-and-mouth disease, just to complete the Jobian parallel.

Desperate, he seeks advice from rabbis and legal aid from lawyers. But the first two rabbis he consults prove to be no solace, and his lawyer can only promise that he's in for a tough time. There is a revered and aged senior rabbi in town, but he refuses to see our hero. And just as a senior partner at the law firm is about to deliver a cunning plan to help fight the neighbor's property grab, he drops dead without ever saying a word. (I have to guess that these two senior citizens are stand-ins for God: the rabbi, who is reputed to be a fount of wisdom, makes himself unavailable, and the veteran lawyer never delivers his insight to our beleagured protagonist. Thus the Job stand-in remains essentially alone and must be reliant only upon his own faith and resources.)

The story of Job is really one of the most bizarre tales in the Bible. It's one of the few times we see God in non-smiting action, and what is he doing? Cheerily chatting up Satan and making a bet with him about how a random sucker will react when his world falls apart. God is keenly interested in making a point to Satan, but rather less so when it comes to dealing with Job himself. When Job finally cracks, God pimp-slaps him nine ways to next Sunday in one of my favorite passages, which basically boils down to "Yo, when I was, you know, designing and building Earth and the birds and volcanoes and rain and hedgehogs and peanut butter and what-not, I surely don't recall you hanging around, offering advice. Were you there? Are you God? No? Then how about taking this giant cup of STFU?" Which may have been the first documented case of being told both "You'll understand when you're older" and "Because I said so."

There are a lot of dimensions to the rendition of the woes of Job and a hell of a lot to consider, but there are few straight-forward conclusions. There's no nice and succinct message to be kind to others or to give money to the poor or to honor your elders. You could maybe take away that this corporeal existence is meant to be one that both blows and makes no sense, except there's that little coda where God, as a kind of after-thought, gives Job a bigger ranch, a larger herd, more money, and a totally cooler family. Which in our times just seems a bit creepy on His part: "Hey, Job, I killed your wife, but here's a replacement for her--and as a bonus, she's really smokin'." Ultimately, I sometimes wonder if the whole story is one giant Zen koan.

So, not really the best source material in terms of coming to any sort of tidy, logical, and meaningful resolution, happy or otherwise. And the end that the Coen Brothers ultimately thrust upon us, after a great deal of plotless rambling, is pretty abrupt and very much in the spirit of "Life sucks and then you die." This may be a particularly Jewish conclusion. Not being Jewish myself, I can't say with any certainty, but this is unabashedly an extremely Jewish film, so I may completely be missing some major cultural nuances that would help inform my viewing.

There's also a prologue to the movie which involves a dybbuk, and that part is excellent. And completely unrelated to everything else, except to indicate that no one can actually know anything in this world, and however you choose to act, you're probably wrong and will end up just screwing yourself. So, on second thought, it may have *everything* to do with the remainder of the film.

"A Serious Man" did succeed in making me think, but mainly about how the Coen Brothers have about a .200 batting average, which is barely tolerable for a Golden Glove shortstop, but not so good for major filmmakers. This is a complete misfire and in its amorphous and interminable rambling doesn't even hit the smirking level of "I don't know--what do *you* think it means?" To be avoided by any except those of a Germanic nihilitic bent.

Review: "Terribly Happy"

I would venture to say it was the Year of the Zombie at the 2009 incarnation of Fantastic Fest. I saw three zombie-themed movies myself, and that did not include headliners "Zombieland" and "Survival of the Dead". Besides the profusion of epics devoted to shambling brain-eaters, chop-socky actioners abounded: I saw three movies that would best be tagged to the martial arts genre, and three or four others had kung-fu escapades as essential parts of their plots. (Yes, I realize the martial arts world is rich and complex and is filled with hundreds of disciplines, schools, and styles, including judo, karate, capoeira, muay thai, taekwondo, savate, and so on, but I use kung-fu here as a shorthand. Primarily because while my nerdness is strong, I don't want to take it to the level of the martial arts geek who can knowledgeably discourse on assorted open-hand versus closed-fist attack modes, the virtues of knee strikes versus grappling, and whether Jackie Chan could defeat Jet Li.) (Besides, personally my martial arts hero is longtime Captain America foe Batroc the Leaper.)

Perhaps because so many movies were swimming in the same pools, as it were, I found that the ones that most impressed me were those that offered up something that was new to me, or that zigged when I zagged and then circled around to sucker-punch me in the kidneys (with a closed-fist blow, after which they swept my legs). And so it is that the Danish "Terribly Happy" has lodged itself in my brain for several days now.

Comparisons to various Coen Brothers films, and particularly "Fargo", have been made, and these are apt (although the actual Coen Brothers movie shown at the Fest this year, "A Serious Man", was godawfully bad and infuriating in its interminable plotlessness). You have an isolated small town with its own rules and ways, suspicious of and hostile to outsiders. You have a bunch of oddball locals and strange incidents that are barely hinted at. And you have a flawed POV character (I certainly wouldn't say "hero" or even "protagonist") who has his own secrets and who isn't entirely on the side of law and order, despite being a police officer. Because in this case, he's a disgraced cop sent to be the one-man police force in a backwoods town in the middle of nowhere, serving penance and laying low until he might get called back to the big leagues in Copenhagen. He quickly finds that the town doesn't really want him and that it has its own code of behavior and ways of enforcement, the most extreme of which is to escort the miscreant on a one-way walk to the local bog.

The pace is measured and deliberate without being somnambulent, and the isolation of the wide-open muddy wastes and brooding skies is very well-captured. Characterization is subtle and developed through suggestion and nuance rather than delivered through broad strokes hammered over the viewer's head. Almost no one is what they seem at first glance, nor is anyone "good" or "bad". They simply just are. And this is true of the lead character as well, especially in the conclusion of the second act, when there is a most unexpected development that changes up the whole thrust of the story.

This twist is nicely and naturally delivered, and the ensuing consequences are intriguingly played out. It all leads up to a conclusion that mainstream Hollywood would be loath to embrace, which just makes this movie all the better in my estimation.

After last year's "The Substitute" and "Just Another Love Story", I've got to say that the Danes are developing a nice sideline in oddball little movies. True, they lack zombies and have few martial arts duels-to-the-death, but they have a lasting and offbeat charm, and for that have been among the better offerings over the last couple of years. I look forward to the 2010 Fest to see if Denmark can keep up this winning streak.

Review: "Rampage"

I found that a lot of the movies at 2009's Fantastic Fest were variations on standard themes and were executed competently and in many cases with enthusiasm, but were without the fresh vision, startling twist, or new angle to lift them from serviceable to memorable. This becomes all the more apparent when one takes in 20 to 30 movies over the course of the festival, as I typically do. Almost all of them are pretty good--very few are flat-out bombs without any redeeming features. But the sheer viewing intensity endured during this compressed period means that any given movie really needs to fight hard to rise above simply being the best available selection for the three o'clock slot on Tuesday. After awhile, it's easy for a bit of numbness to set in and for the movies to blur together. So what I'm looking for is those that manage to stick in my mind afterwards.

With that being said, is "Rampage" actually a good movie? It's...good enough. Not great, not excellent, but competently directed (by the usually reviled Uwe Boll) and with some nice performances. What raises it above the background noise is that it subverts the experience of viewing a horror movie. We have no problem watching a group of young people bumble into trouble and get slaughtered for their transgressions, howsoever minor those might be, down to the level of just being naive and dumb enough to fall into a killer's snare, as in this year's "Macabre". Of course, the implicit pact of most such slasher flicks is that escape is possible, and there's a fighting chance for the clever and determined, and there will at least be a Final Girl. The Other is vanquished, and the social order usually gets restored until the next sequel.

With "Rampage", we follow not the victims, but the killer, and suddenly the viewing experience becomes far less comfortable. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of the victims have done nothing to merit their fate--no one has committed the usual minor sins that invoke a slasher's vengeance, and none of them are trespassing into the forbidden backwoods or that old creepy house. They're minding their own business, walking around on errands in the middle of a drab small town, and they're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have no hope of fighting back and are simply relentlessly gunned down left and right. And it's very chilling to watch.

Of course, this is not, by any means, the first time any filmmaker has tried to rub in our collective face the fact that we enjoy watching people get hacked up in the standard horror flick. But here, at least, the approach is very matter-of-fact, without the smirky superiority of a judgmental "Funny Games". And Boll has another reversal or two up his sleeve to flip the perspective yet again and show the events in another light.

"Rampage" definitely provokes the obvious question of what you would do if you saw this guy coming--would you run, hide, try to be the hero? How can he be stopped? Incidents like this are not at all far-fetched (and the L.A. bank robbery of a few years back by a team of body-armored thugs with automatic weapons is a clear inspiration). But in raising the additional question of why we are watching in the first place, and why we enjoy movie massacres and buckets of the red stuff, and by doing so without artistic pretensions and histrionics, "Rampage" at the very least succeeds in sticking around in the memory longer than the bulk of this year's offerings.

Fantastic Fest 2008 Wrap-Up

I don't know what it says about my sad life that this film festival has become one of the major annual events that I eagerly anticipate each year, but I am quite happily addicted. I've been to all four iterations so far: once as a random off-the-street person buying singleton tickets, then as a full-festival badge holder, and these last two as a VIP. I was lucky enough to bag a VIP pass for next year as well, so I've got 2009 covered.

In addition to watching as many of these great (and, in some cases, far from great) films (for which I took four days of vacation!), I get a great deal of enjoyment out of writing capsule reviews on the various showings and reading those produced by others. So, in no particular order, I'd really like to thank the following for the online contributions they made in sharing their thoughts on assorted festival flicks:

VCSquirrel, SickLiaisons, Concussion, Hornstar, TeleRaven, filmcans, jenab, bnl771, georgialyle, slayer, Oh Steph, Noahphex, and NickRob. It's a true pleasure to see people who were engaged enough in the festival to offer up their opinions. Even though when they were contrary to mine, they were sadly wrong.

Films I planned on seeing, but then was dissuaded by bad ratings and reviews: Wicked Lake and Seventh Moon.

Films I wanted to see but couldn't due to scheduling conflicts or sheer exhaustion: Surveillance, Santos, Secret Screening C (Appaloosa), and Chocolate.

Films that I chose not to see and then regretted the omission in retrospect: The Good, The Bad, and The Weird.

Films that I actually did see and then was sorry: Pulse 2, Vinyan.

And my Top Five films of the festival: Deadgirl (this one was the biggest surprise this year for me, in that I couldn't believe that I so thoroughly enjoyed a movie that is essentially about necrophilia), The Burrowers, Sauna, The Substitute, and Alien Raiders (the movie which I felt most exceeded its budgetary and genre limitations). Honorable mention to Terra, Just Another Love Story, The Brothers Bloom, Zach and Miri Make a Porno and Role Models.

As always, my thanks to the Fantastic Fest crew and to the staff of the Alamo Drafthouse, and even to my arch-enemy Harry Knowles. This is really a labor of love on their part to provide such a spectacular event to our particular movie community, and they deserve tremendous credit for putting together what is fast becoming one of the premiere cinematic events in the U.S. Job well done! And much love to my fellow film fans.

Review: "Sauna"

This is a year of heavy Scandinavian representation at Fantastic Fest, and while the Danes have made a very strong showing, the Finns are not to be left out. Offered for our consideration is "Sauna", directed by Annti-Jussi Annila, who previously helmed "Jadesoturi", described as Finland's first and only foray into wuxia.

"Sauna" is not a title to instill confidence in American audiences, since it tends to conjure up images of a bunch of sweaty guys hanging out in a steam bath at the gym. That may be frightening to some, but it's probably not an image from which to build a classic horror movie. Nevertheless, the movie is indeed about a sauna...an EVIL sauna.

It's the late 1500s, and Sweden and Russia have just concluded a lengthy war. (Back in that time, Sweden was a great and fairly aggressive power and was not infrequently boiling over its borders into Russia and Eastern Europe. Finland was a province of Sweden in those days.) A joint Russian-Swedish mapping commission is tracing out the official new boundaries. On the Finno-Swedish side are the Spore brothers. The elder, Eerik, is a long-time cavalry officer who has grown up knowing only war and who harbors both an open hatred for Russians and a somewhat more concealed lust for killing. The younger, Knut, has led a more sheltered existence and is looking forward to a university posting in Stockholm at the conclusion of this mission.

Early on, Eerik kills a peasant who he has labeled a Russian sympathizer and who he claims was about to attack him with an axe, which is a bold-faced lie. Knut, meanwhile, shuts the peasant's daughter into a root cellar, allegedly to protect her from Eerik. But might it also be to lock away an object of temptation? It may be that Knut had been on the verge of his own crime, a violent sin of lust, right as Eerik came looking for him.

Before the murder can be discovered, the brothers insist that the commission push forward, and Eerik demands that they go straight into a giant swamp in order to map the new border right down the middle, but more conveniently to lose any pursuit. They leave the girl trapped in the cellar, and together with three Russians they push into forbidding and mysterious territory.

It is not long before they are encountering ominous signs, and Knut becomes convinced that he is seeing disturbing visions of the girl. Is she a ghost? Is she a figment of a guilty conscience? Knut weakly argues that they should turn back and free her, but Eerik pushes the group onwards.

They eventually reach a strange village in the dead center of the swamp, and here all that has been festering within begins to leach to the surface. Right outside the village is an old abandoned sauna, which the local elders say was there before they arrived years ago. In Finnish tradition, saunas can be used to wash away sins. But this sauna does not appear to be a place of cleansing. Moreover, it turns out the before the villagers migrated here, there was a Russian monastery. But the villagers found no signs of the monks besides discarded robes and various Orthodox icons.

Something is very wrong in this place, and *with* this place. And the longer they stay, the more the Russians and Finns seem to unravel, and the more the portents and signs of doom become apparent.

This movie would be justly described as brooding, atmospheric, moving at a deliberate pace to what seems an inevitable fate, laden with symbolism and hidden meanings. It is indeed the sort of thing that many will find slow and pretentious. Others will find it through-provoking. I tend toward the latter camp, although I admit that without a background in Finnish culture I am very likely missing a lot and misinterpreting more. And it is certainly possible that some elements of the story may not really hang together.

The key to the mystery seems to be the sauna, which predates all known human habitation in these parts. It is connected with various forms of lifelessness: it is in the middle of a trackless swamp filled with decay and stagnation. The villagers have not had a single child since they moved there decades ago. Even the local animals have been known to destroy themselves in some kind of frenzy. I would argue as well that we can understand the monks to represent the absence of life as well, given that they were a closed and isolated group of men sworn to celibacy.

I have to posit that the sauna was used for centuries by previous inhabitants--and that it reached the limit of the sins it could wash away. The more that people used it for its ritual cleansing purposes, the more the karmic filth began to accumulate. And eventually it became a sinkhole of darkness, and the swamp formed around it. But other explanations are definitely possible.

Another mysterious matter is that the number of villagers equals the number of Russian enemies Eerik has slain. Clearly this is of some significance, but what?

Ultimately there really is no clear explanation for a multitude of matters, and many viewers may find this frustrating or view this refusal to clearly explain everything to be a cop-out on the part of the story. Certain events at the very end certainly suggest a mystical element and not just growing madness and guilt on the part of the Spore brothers. Regardless, no miracles of redemption and salvation occur, and the conclusion does little to dispel the stereotype of Scandinavian bleakness and fatalism.

The ambiguity of the end--was justice served? and if so, whose justice?--is exactly the sort of thing that often infuriated me in a movie, but here I found it haunting and appropriate. (It reminds me of 1984's "Eyes of Fire".) This is a very well-made film for what I heard was an extremely limited budget. The leads are all cast extremely well. Ville Virtanen as Eerik *looks* madly dangerous, and Viktor Klimenko as Semenski seems completely natural as a Russian boyar. The costumes, by the way, are magnificent.

This is not the movie to see if you want a flat-out gorefest, or a quick-moving detour through terror with a readily explicable resolution. But if you enjoy something a little more enigmatic and foreboding, you may find much to like here.

Review: "Deadgirl"

Some of the movies I've seen thus far at this year's festival begin to drop out of my mind even as I leave the theater. This one, though, has stuck with me. I found it to be intriguing,haunting, and very well-executed, yet the material is very troubling, and it's not by any means the sort of thing you can easily summarize to a non-genre fan unless you want to be labeled a disgusting mutant. Short description: "A couple of disaffected teens find an apparently savage and deathless girl chained up naked in the basement of an abandoned insane asylum--and one thing leads to another." And that "one thing" is rape.

But of course the teen who first embarks on his own downward spiral sees it differently. The girl is undead, and apparently virtually mindless. And no one knows she's down here, and no one is missing her. She's a thing. She reacts, but doesn't interact. There's no mind there. And he can do what he wants to her.

And then he begins to tell his friends.

The other teen finds this abhorrent--but he doesn't stop his best friend. Because at the same time, he just might find these possibilities a little more enticing than he wants to admit.

While the premise is fantastic, in the sense that on the face of it it's out there in Cloud Cuckoo Land, the filmmakers sell it skilfully, and the plot has a strong internal logic of its own that in fact has some grounding in reality. You might want to say that real people wouldn't do such things. But when you're young, angry, poor, have virtually no family of your own and no real prospects for a future of anything other than pumping gas, and everyone looks down on you--how WOULD you react to something like this? The more active of the two teens has an essentially nihilistic world view and no fear of consequences. And through him, we become aware of a strange element of class struggle going on. His ongoing rapes of the dead girl--there's no delicate way of puting it--are not entirely about sexual gratification. They're about feeling powerful at last, of being in control.

I don't want to say that the filmmakers set out to present a Marxist critique here, or that they necessarily intended to load the movie with messages. But you can read a lot into it. "She's just a dead girl." That may not be far from "She's just an illegal alien", "She's just a runaway", "She's just some black chick." There are always reasons and excuses, and the worst actions are often accompanied by the dehumanization of the victims, or even by blaming them for what they have coming.

The performances by all are very good, particularly when the best friend has a monologue describing his first encounter with the dead girl. The latter is played with exceptional bravery, I think, by Jenny Spain is a role that had to be emotionally demanding (she is completely nude throughout, although by no means is this eroticized). The asylum setting is exceptional and the directors succeed in creating an atmosphere of dread and foreboding.

The movie can easily be accused of misogyny, but I think that's an easy way out. It is definitely disturbing, but not just for the sake of shocking the viewer or messing with his or her mind. It's hard to watch at times, but if you don't dismiss it out of hand as a simplistic old-fashioned rape/revenge flick, you might find it thought-provoking in its own exceedingly odd way.

Recommended, but it is definitely not for everyone.