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Fantastic Fest – Solomon Kane!

Posted on September 25, 2009 | 2 comments

I was not to be thwarted by it being sold out, and was first in the standby line to get into Solomon Kane.  Solomon Kane, the Puritan adventurer, is one of Robert E. Howard’s fictional creations (along with Conan, Kull, and Bran Mak Morn).   Writer and director Michael J. Bassett (Wilderness, Deathwatch) was in attendance.

The movie was very good – I would sum it up as “Van Helsing, but without the suck.”  James Purefoy (Mark Antony from HBO’s Rome) stars as Kane.  Bassett decided to make an origin story for Kane instead of directly adapting an existing story.  Kane is a tortured soul; he starts the movie as a piratical badass but upon discovering that the Devil is eagerly awaiting his soul, forsakes his life of violence and embeds himself in a hermitage.  There’s pathos in his being forced back into a life of violence by Devil-insipired armies besetting the land – the movie doesn’t bear this as well as, say Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider, but then again who does.

Bassett makes great use of snow and rain and atmospherics, making the overall film feel much like a Howard story tells – dark, gritty, full of blood and steel and violence.  The movie’s cinematographer, Dan Laustsen, also worked on Brotherhood of the Wolf (also an excellent movie), and you can see the visual similarities.  One of my favorite shots is where Kane beheads an opponent, but it takes three brutal strokes to do it; more “chopping meat” and much less the light, airy pseudoviolence of many recent fantasy movies and TV shows.    (After the film, Bassett told a story about how they got a pig cadaver and had at it with various weapons to try and get a feel for what real weapon brutality would be like.)   Pete Postlethwaite, Max Von Sydow, and other notables fill out the cast.  CGI makes an appearance but is kept to a minimum (except with the too-balrogey demon in the end battle) – Bassett’s preference, as well as a budgetary limitation – the movie was not studio backed, but funded by its producers.

I’m sure there’s some deviant somewhere who will complain that this story isn’t a “pure Howard” Kane story, but it sure gets the tone right, and if successful Bassett wants to go on to make more Kane movies to tell some of Howard’s stories more directly.  I found it to be very enjoyable, similar in tone to The Thirteenth Warrior or Brotherhood of the Wolf.

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Fantastic Fest – Merantau

Posted on September 25, 2009 | 3 comments

“Merantau,” where the film gets its name, is a kind of vision quest or walkabout for practitioners of silat, an Indonesian martial art.  Indonesia used to export a bunch of B action and martial arts movies until about fifteen years ago when they just plain stopped.  This is pretty much the first one since then.  As the story goes, a Welsh director, Gareth Evans, was in Indonesia making a documentary about silat when he thought “Hey, this looks pretty bad ass, I should make a proper martial arts movie with this.”  He found the star of Merantau, Iko Uwais, driving a truck for a telecom company.

The plot is bog standard – Yuda (Uwais) leaves his country home on his merantau, goes to the big city, falls on hard times (as in real life, apparently, being a super ninja doesn’t pay the bills) and immediately comes across a girl and her scrappy little brother who are in trouble.  A slick gangster is looking to force her into a life of sex slavery with some ruthless white international crime bosses (of uncertain provenance – Dutch?  South African?) .  Only ass kicking can save the day.  So far, this sounds like “Ong-Bak: The Indonesian Version,” right?  Interestingly, however, the movie is well done – the story is about 50% more coherent and the acting about 100% better than Ong-Bak and similar B movies. There are some great scenes between Yuda and his family, especially his mother, played by Christine Hakim.  We were told afterwards that the version of the movie we were screening had 45 minutes of “family drama” cut from it to get to the action more quickly – from what I can see of the actors’ work, that is a shame.  All the characters are interesting and have some depth to them, even the villains – I particularly liked Alex Abbad’s “Jonhi” as the Indonesian pimp/thug trying hard to impress his bosses in a no-win situation; it was played for comedy but with a very light hand.

The martial arts action is good and seeing a new martial art is always interesting. Silat is a very sinuous and close-in style, mixing hard strikes with joint locks and throws.  There are a couple entertainingly brutal takedowns – the crowd favorite was one where Yuda is fleeing thugs across a series of rooftops; he jumps from one roof to another and stops to grab a bamboo pole – when the first mook leaps after him, he gets speared right in the chest in midair and then falls three stories.

The action setpieces, decently though not spectacularly choreographed, aren’t as over the top and interesting as Ong-Bak or some kung fu movies, but with the interesting characters and genuinely emotive acting, I thought Merantau transcended being a generic martial arts movie from Undiscovered Country Of The Month and was a truly enjoyable film overall.  I could tell the crowd at the screening felt the same way; there was a general feeling of (very pleasant) surprise at having expected an unpolished martial arts movie but getting a film with depth and character instead.

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Fantastic Fest – First Squad

Posted on September 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

First Squad was interesting, it was written by Russians but animated by the Japanese  Studio 4°C, which did Animatrix and some other stuff, so the art is very high quality.  It’s about a girl named Nadya who is part of  the Russians’ own paranormal intelligence effort to combat the Nazis’.  Her cadre, the rest of the “First Squad,” is killed in training, but when the Nazis summon the ghost of a dead knight to turn the tide of the Eastern Front, she has to journey to the land of the dead to get them to help.

The interesting thing I thought was that it was done in the style of a documentary; the action would break and you’d go to a (real, not animated) crusty old Russian talking about their war experience or war history or whatnot.  Some of the events in the film, notably the starting and ending battles, were based on historical events so this added a very pleasing “beneath the skin of history” layer to it.

Other than that, the plot and action were kinda “standard” anime, though more coherent that some.  I liked it, though wouldn’t rave about it.   It’s probably the most concise thing I’ve seen out of the Russians ever, however, which makes it notable.

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Fantastic Fest – Day 1!

Posted on September 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

In a break from the normal RPG-only content hereabouts, I will be blogging about my visit to Fantastic Fest 2009!  FF is a week-long film festival here in Austin, TX with a focus on the “weird stuff” – horror, martial arts, foreign…  It’s co-sponsored by Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News.  I had a bunch of vacation to take by the end of the year, and decided since I’ve never done a film festival before, it would be a fun thing to try!

They have a pretty streamlined process where you get all your tickets for the day first thing, so you don’t have to stand in line for specific shows just to discover you don’t get in.  I discovered that, sadly, even though I was here early  I didn’t get a ticket to see Solomon Kane, the movie based on the Robert E. Howard hero by the same name.  So my lineup for the day is:

  • First Squad – Russian anime (No, really!)
  • Merantau – Indonesian martial arts.  (No, really!)
  • Short Fuse, a collection of shorts.  This was the Solomon Kane slot, as well as some big premiere for “Gentleman Broncos“, another outing by the Hess brothers, the Napoleon Dynamite guys.  I’m not too interested in Broncos, so I chose the shorts, and am wondering about the possibility of going standby for no-shows for Solomon Kane.
  • REC 2 – The first REC was the movie Quarantine was based on.  This is the sequel, which kicks off immediately after the events in the first one, Halloween 2 style.

This is a short day, subsequent days have like 5-6 slots.  Can my butt stand it?  We’ll find out.

Hooray for the Alamo

It’s made a lot easier by the fact that most of the screenings are at several of the Alamo Drafthouse locations.  For you poor bastards that don’t have something like this, the Alamo has a full service food and drink menu that they bring to your seat; each row of seats has a table-counter-thing in front of it to hold your, for example, pizza and bucket of beer.  Quite civilized.  They play entertaining shorts and old movie trailers and whatnot in the time leading up to the film, too, so the usual procedure is to show up really early, get settled in, order your food while watching the trailers and talking, and then you’re all set when the movie starts.   The Alamo is an Austin institution; there’s 4 in Austin and they’ve spread to San Antonio and Houston (and, weirdly, West Virginia.)

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