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  • A Zed And Two Noughts

    What the utter fuck was that?

    Two zoologist brothers lose their wives in the same car crash, when a swan flies into the windscreen. What follows is a meditation on grief full of absurdist dark humour and a yearning for completion.

    Let me take a moment to sketch out the world this takes place in. Fallast, played by Geoffrey Palmer (from As Time Goes By, and Butterflies, and a hundred other things), owns a zoo. He prefers black and white animals because he’s colour-blind. He is good friends with Van Meegeren, a surgeon who occasionally comes over to the zoo and, at the request of Fallast, amputates a limb off an animal to give it a unique selling point.

    Van Meegeren is a bit too enthusiastic about amputations. And Vermeers. He’s constantly trying to get people to sit for reconstructions of Vermeer paintings. He’s hoaching and weird. He’s shagging this woman in a red hat and zebra knickers, but he wants to be shagging Alba.

    Alba is the other woman in the car with the two zoologists’ wives. She was driving when the swan ploughed through the windscreen. She survives but Van Meegeren amputates one of her legs. This causes her a variety of emotions, one of which is a rancour at the lack of symmetry in her body.

    The zoologists come to visit Alba regularly in order to ask her questions that might help them come to terms with their grief. Eventually both of them become her lovers and father a child by her.

    Simultaneous to this, they become obsessed with decay. They watch on loop a David Attenborough documentary about the origin of life, and its evolution into many species, and then try to see its end by taking time-lapse photography of each animal decomposing. This starts small with some shrimp, and soon escalates to them nicking anything that kicks the bucket around the zoo.

    They are both enabled and ratted out to the boss by tour guide and scamp Plate, played by Jim Davidson (from Big Break, and racism). There’s also cutting about at some level of intermediate management in the zoo Van Hoyten, played by Joss Ackland (also from a thousands things such as Marple and the like, but notable for being the voice of Watership Down’s Black Rabbit of Inle), and Milo, played by Frances Barber (again from Marple and Poirot, and for you WoWheads out there, the voice of Lady Ashvane). The pair of them spend the film shagging or talking about shagging, and I’m not really sure what other purpose they serve, if any. Also a dude wae nae legs kicks about on crutches.

    As the brothers’ obsession with decay grows, so too do they regress, adopting identical dress and acting in unison. Turns out they are Siamese twins who have separated, and now they long again to be whole. Alba also has this sense of being unfinished, and puts herself back under Van Meergen’s knife, even though he tries to do her hair like Vermeer models while she is out under anaesthetic.

    The film ends as the brothers seek to find a human subject they can film decomposing.

    Bizarre doesn’t really cover it. I’ve tried to tell things logically and clearly, but actually watching this feels like smoking bad hashish. It’s shot beautifully, with bright, violent colours, and thematically satisfying symmetry. But wow, do you really not know where this is going if you come in with no background. The soundtrack reminds me of Requiem For A Dream, all strings and longing.

    An interesting watch. Trips balls.

  • GFF22 is done!

    Oh my god, I am so tired.

    I beat my personal best, seeing 64 films and 2 shorts. This is what a press pass gets you.

    I decided to change things up this year, and instead of ending the festival ill, started it ill. A totally foul cold that got me sent home from work and made me lose my voice. Spent the first days of the festival getting the GFT bar staff to make me hot toddies. Drank 2 bottles of Buttercup cough syrup. Ate 4 packets of Lockets.

    It also didn’t help I got no sleep. I must have been too wired for the festival coz I had 4 hours sleep for the 3 nights running up to it, and continued to get between 4-6 hours each night, as I tried to post up reviews last thing, before rising for my first film in the morning.

    Worth it though. Such a good festival. Such great movies.

    Just wish I wasn’t allergic to caffeine. This would be so much easier on caffeine.

    The Hermit of Treig won the Audience Award, which I am delighted with. Director Lizzie McKenzie seems a real sweetheart.

    And we already have the dates for next year’s festival – 1st to the 12th March 2023. It’ll be round sooner than you know it.

    I’m away to sleep for 24 hours.

  • Murina

    Murina is the story of Julia, a teenage girl under the thumb of her controlling, abusive father. They live on this idyllic Croatian island, across the sea from Italy. Everything looks like paradise, but for Julia, it’s a gilded cage.

    At the start of the movie, Julia goes along with her father’s commands, but her compliance is more the weary exhaustion of an unpleasant status quo. Inside her spirit is unbroken. She knows her father is wrong, she believes her and her mother deserve better.

    Then better seems to arrive in the form of Javi. He is her father’s old friend, from their days as young men. He seems to have been a rival for her mother’s affections back in the day. He is a billionaire now, and her father has brought him to the island to bilk him for money with a phoney investment.

    When Javi shows up, Julia looks at her mother like, “You had a chance to marry him, and you chose Dad?!” Javi is everything her father is not, kind, considerate, romantic, charming, proficient and wealthy. He is encouraging of Julia and praises her qualities. Julia’s clearly not had this much positivity in her life for a long time, and despite her initial hesitancy, begins to think he is her way out.

    Her mother’s a bit more of a dark horse. She and Javi have history, and although she flirts with him and remembers their time together, she is not serious about running away with him. Unlike Julia, she doesn’t have an idealised version of who he might be, she knows who he is. And for whatever reason, has chosen her husband over him. At first she and Julia are on the same page, being charmed by Javi, but they start to diverge as she realises Julia is serious about getting away. She tries to warn Julia that Javi is full of pretty words, but he won’t be there for them, unlike her father. For her, she would rather stay with an abusive man who is determined to keep her, than a kinder man who might let her down and leave her.

    Leon Lucev expertly plays the repugnant father. He is narcissistic, petulant, bragging, spiteful, and domineering. He has the mood swings and temper of a child. He sees his wife and daughter merely as extensions of his will whose purpose is to meet his wants and wishes. Despite his rigid control over his wife, he allows her to flirt with Javi as an ends to luring the money from him.

    The opening scene of the film is Julia and her father spearfishing murina, the moray eel. While it hides in rocks and crevices, it is a violent prey, and if trapped, will bite at its own flesh to free itself. Julia is the murina of the film’s title. This story is how she bites at her confines, and the lengths she is willing to go to to be free.

  • Moon, 66 Questions

    I dunno if I get this movie.

    It’s about a lassie who decides to care for her estranged father as his multiple sclerosis worsens. But I was left with a number of unanswered questions. Firstly, why is she there? One great thing about estrangement is you can opt out of this shit. Why has she decided to stop her life, travel to what we are told is a fairly remote house, to look after someone she has little relationship with, for what might be, given the progress of MS, years?

    You could say she is yearning for a relationship with her father, but you don’t really get that sense. There’s a curiosity, but not a longing. She seems starved of affection but not wounded exactly. I just don’t see a drive great enough to make this major life change and commitment.

    Secondly, he has other family nearby. He has brothers and sisters, who seem wealthy enough to hire a cleaner (although we never actually see her outside of the job interview). Now they seem like they’ve got their own issues – everyone talks over one another, no one listens – but that’s not a big deal in the realms of being able to coordinate a paid carer. If they can hire a cleaner, they can hire a carer. Given that there’s so little relationship between the dad and his daughter, a professional carer might be preferable.

    Also, none of them pitch in. They never visit, except to gawk when the physio therapist first comes by. They encourage the daughter to learn how to lift and support the dad physically, but don’t bother to learn themselves. They’re in their 50s, not too old or infirm to do it themselves, so why don’t they? Why are they so sure they’re never gonna need this info or be around to use it?

    Also, like, what age is the daughter? Maybe late 20s, early 30s? Why is this all on her? She’s meant to building her life at this stage. She has no partner and no kids, which, yeah, might be read as she has no other commitments, but could equally be read as she has yet to start building her own family. Like, why is she being chosen to give up her life at a time when she’s barely begun to live it? Yet her aunts and uncles, who have families who can support them, basically bounce. Even the mother, the dad’s ex-wife, never shows up to help. Which is bizarre, because the daughter obviously has a relationship with her mother, so why wouldn’t she show up even just to support her daughter? It makes very little sense to me.

    Also, we don’t really see anything of the life the daughter is giving up to go do this. There are a couple of scenes with her hanging out with folk her own age, playing ping pong and such, but we are never told if she has a lover or friend, no one phones from her old life to ask how she’s doing. What was her life before this? What did she give up to do this? Was she studying? Was she working? Did she have career goals? Her sacrifice doesn’t make sense because you have no idea what she’s sacrificed. And she doesn’t seem to miss it or think about it much. She just seems totally focused on her father, who, again, we are told she had virtually no relationship with.

    The whole thing just doesn’t make sense to me. The plot is that she and her father get closer the longer she acts as his carer. Which might elicit an awww from some people, but gives me a bit of an ick, because it’s like you could only bond with him when you could attribute his silence and stubbornness to a sickness, rather than his shitty personality. Also, she finds out her dad has lived his life as a closeted gay man, and is in a relationship with one of his neighbours. Which, fine, might give you a bit of sympathy for him, but still doesn’t explain or excuse why he has been such a crappy dad, or can’t answer a frigging question, or has almost no interest in talking to her, even when she’s right there on the couch next to him, giving up her life to look after him. I also don’t understand why she thinks it does, either.

    I get what they were going for with this story. And Lazaros Georgakopoulos is excellent as the ailing father. But I found the daughter’s character underdeveloped. What was her life? What does she want? What drives her need to care for her father if their relationship was so poor? Why is she willing to make so big a sacrifice? Why does she feel uncovering his secrets excuses his lack of affection? I dunno, I felt I didn’t really get to know anything about her.

  • Hold Your Fire

    Powerful documentary recounting the events of the 1973 hostage taking inside John and Al’s Sporting Goods store in Brooklyn, New York. It speaks to all the people involved, cops, hostages, gunmen. And because the incident became a media circus, it’s full of contemporary footage showing exactly what went on.

    For me, this is another one for the file marked All Cops Are Bastards. Although, maybe two exceptions can made in this case. Ben Ward, the only cop the gunmen trusted to arrest them, who was the first African-American police commissioner in New York. And Harvey Schlossberg, a beat cop with a PhD in Psychology, who from this incident goes on to have a world-renowned career in hostage negotiation and de-escalation tactics. He, along with Jerry Riccio, are the heroes of this film, responsible for saving the lives of as many people as possible.

    Guns, racism and toxic masculinity are the major problems in this, and maybe not in that order. The cops’ blatant disregard for life is sickening, and the hostage takers have an entirely accurate idea of what awaits them if they step outside. So the innocent bystanders in the shop become their only bulwark against wholesale slaughter, and thus they in turn terrorise others to feel safe.

    The story begins before they ever set foot inside the store. Shuaib Raheem was a 24-year-old African-American Sunni Muslim from Brooklyn. After a troubled youth, he converted and found peace. However, he drew the ire of the Nation of Islam for debating doctrine with their members. Without having time to go into it, I’ll just say the Nation of Islam is to Islam what the Mormon church is to Christianity. This was very dangerous at the time because the Nation of Islam included many fanatics, who attacked non-Nation Muslims.

    After he started receiving death threats, and in fear for his family’s safety, Shuaib applied for a license for a gun. But even while filling it out, they were like, ‘You know you’re not gonna get this right? You’re a Black Muslim with a history of troublemaking.’ Cue total silence from the NRA. Then the Hanafi Muslim Massacre occurred, where 7 Sunni Muslims were murdered by Nation of Islam members. And Shuaib felt he couldn’t wait any longer. He made the decision to rob the John and Al’s Sporting Goods store, and take 4 guns, one for him and one for each of his three friends who were experiencing the same intimidation.

    Jerry Riccio was the owner and working the cash register that day. Four men burst into his shop, drew a handgun on him and demanded 4 shotguns in a bag with plenty of ammo. He kept calm, complied, and tried to keep the robbers calm too.

    But as they were leaving, a witness outside the shop had alerted the police, and a cop was standing out front. They tried to exit through the back, and holy god, there was every cop in Brooklyn armed to the teeth and staring down their guns at them.

    It’s here the nightmare began.

    Jerry noted that the bunch of them didn’t seem to have thought this through. They picked a store with a giant glass front, where they could be seen from anywhere on the street. Anybody outside could see them stick up the cashier, and call the cops, and that’s exactly what happened. They hadn’t thought about how they would carry a bag full of shotguns and ammo, which was actually quite heavy and not easy to move.

    In fact most of the guys have never been in any trouble with the police. They were total amateurs, punks with no experience, who were just scared shitless by the Nation. Dawd Rahman, referred to by Jerry as “The Quiet Guy”, was 22, an undiagnosed autistic, and completely out his depth. Yusef Abdallah Almussadig was 23 and Salih Ali Abdullah was 26, all of them Shuaib describes as “squares”. Their lack of experience actually works against them in this situation, as they struggle to understand and anticipate police reaction.

    Shuaib says they actually initially tried to surrender when they first opened the back door and saw all those cops out there. But he had been holding his gun at the time and they just started screaming conflicting instructions at him – “Freeze!” “Put down your weapon!” “Don’t move!” – and he started to lower the gun, they opened fire on him.

    As the police fired blindly at the store, they nearly hit the hostages, who subsequently were moved to the upper level of the shop with a bit more cover. Yusef was gut-shot and looked likely to bleed out there on the shop floor. When Shuaib returned fire to beat a retreat, he injured two policemen. And somewhere among the gunfire, officer Stephen Gilroy was shot in the head. He was 29 years old, had a family, and was just weeks away from taking up his promotion to sergeant.

    Debate has always raged about whether Gilroy was killed by friendly fire or by shots from the hostage takers. The fact the forensics were never presented against them suggests it wasn’t the robbers, because if they were able to match that bullet to their guns, they would all be going to the lethal injection room for cop-killing no doubt in my mind. But as Shuaib says himself, “It don’t really matter”, ultimately he is responsible. If he hadn’t tried to stick up the shop, Gilroy would never have been there. Doesn’t matter whose bullet it was on the day.

    Inside the store, the gunmen were terrified. One of them was badly wounded and lying in a pool of his own blood, they’re listening to the radio to try to find out what was happening outside. They heard reports come over the wireless, saying 4 terrorists from the Black Liberation Army were holding hostages inside John and Al’s Sporting Goods. And their blood just runs cold. Because they realise they are not being viewed as petty criminals who need to be taken in, but as members of a terrorist organisation known for killing cops. This means the police will have no hesitation in killing them, and would probably prefer that outcome to send a message to terrorists in general.

    And then they hear on the radio that a cop has been killed. And know they’ve signed their death warrant.

    How they manage to survive, how Jerry manages to protect the hostages, how Harvey Schlossberg manages to convince the NYPD to use a different tactic to resolve the situation without further loss of life, is one of the most fascinating, compelling, and moving stories.

    Honestly go see this, it’s incredible.

  • Carajita

    God, that was tense!

    Carajita is about Sara and Yari, and their relationship. Sara is a rich white kid. Yari is the Black woman who works as her nanny, sending money back to her sister who is raising her child at home. Sara and Yari are both very close, and both of them at times like to let go of the awareness that they are not mother and daughter, and drift into their blind affection for each other.

    Sara comes from a wealthy family of white Argentinians, but has been looked after from birth by Yari, a Dominican. Her father is a corrupt business man, known for his connections and friends in high places. Her brother is a typical spoiled kid party boy. Sara doesn’t feel at home with her biological family, she doesn’t want to be like them, and finds them faintly disgusting.

    This film is about whiteness. Sara wants to be Yari’s daughter. She wants to look like her, be like her, be Black like her. When she meets Yari’s daughter, Mallory, she’s jealous of her. Sara thinks her rejection of her family’s privilege makes her one of the Good White People.

    Just a word on Sara’s family. These are not cartoon villains. They are simply people, like any people, who have access to a good deal of wealth, and privilege which insulates them from the rough edges of the world and the consequences of their own behaviour. Do they make shitty choices? Yes. Is being corrupt business owners one of them? Yes. Is hiring a broke teenager to look after their baby day and night? Yes. (You find out Yari must only have been 15 when Sara was born). But they are kinda just doing what is normal to their station. They consider themselves good people. They’re not cruel. They treat Yari well, act like she is one of the family.

    But that’s the problem. At the heart of Carajita is the effects of structural societal racism. They mean Sara and her family can do what they can do, and Yari and Mallory can only do what they can do. Sara’s family can steal, and hire a 15-year-old child to work night and day in their house, and that’s not only not punished, but considered normal, a moral neutral, the injustice of which both they and others will be blind to.

    Sara acts like she wants to renounce all that. But to paraphrase an MC, “Y’all wanna be me, until it’s time to be me”. Circumstances will prove that when it comes time, Sara will find her whiteness useful, and not so glibly discarded.

    SPOILERS ahead! Bail now if you are convinced to go see the film.

    Sara and her brother take Mallory out to a party. They all have a great time, and as the evening tails off, Mallory decides to walk home. Sara’s brother decides to stay at the party, so she drives her boyfriend home. On the way, they have a weird moment, a herd of goats come suddenly out the grass, and one creepy looking motherfucker stares Sara down, standing in the road, looking directly at the car.

    A little unnerved, but ok, Sara continues to drop her boyfriend off at his house. As she is driving home alone, a storm rises, pouring rain and reducing visibility. Then her brother calls her, asking to be picked up, and Sara fumbles for her phone, and . . . she hits something. She’s drunk, she’s driving in the dark, at night, in the rain, in a storm, while using her mobile phone. She is entirely culpable if she has struck someone.

    She sits there frozen, unable to look. She has that sharp, bright sobriety that comes with a bad shock. And it’s like, if she doesn’t look to see what she’s hit, it never happened.

    And then ahead of her, the goats reappear. She sighs, relaxes. It was just a goat. She continues to the party, collects her brother, and drives home. She sleeps the night away, without a care in the world.

    You know how this is going to go. You know what she hit out there.

    Mallory doesn’t return home, and Yari is worried. She calls around and tells Sara’s mother her concerns. They fly into action, like Good White People, and Sara’s father starts ringing round his contacts for help.

    Then Mallory is found. By the side of the road. Her ribs crushed in by impact with a car. She lay out all night in the storm. The impact didn’t kill her outright. She was left to die, face down in the dirt, and drowned in the mud.

    As soon as Sara hears, she knows. She knows in her heart of hearts, it was Mallory she hit on the road last night. And what follows is this sickeningly tense journey, as she hopes against hope it isn’t true. Sara’s family take Yari back to her family, and sit all day with them in mourning. Sara’s father, ignorant of her involvement, offers to pay for the funeral expenses. They want to show they were sincere about Yari being like family. That her loss is their loss.

    Except it’s not. And they leave later that evening to make the dinner party they’ve planned with business leaders and congressmen.

    What I was a bit worried about with this film is that they would stretch out the tension of the possibility of Yari finding out, but the film actually cycles through events quite quickly. Sara is acting off to anyone who cares to see, and she confesses to her boyfriend that night. What follows is not what she expects.

    He says she’s wrong, she hit a goat. When she tries to explain, he repeats. She’s wrong. She hit a goat. He alerts her family to the fact she looks likely to confess to Yari. And all the machinery of privilege goes into motion to protect Sara from her crime.

    Meanwhile Yari’s family are no dupes. They noticed the broken headlight on the car Sara’s family showed up in. They go out to where Mallory was found, and find the same glass there in the mud. Some of her family exult in having proof against her murderer. But Yari is just stunned. She can’t believe it.

    Without saying a word, she returns to Sara’s house. And finds the car and the garage have been washed. There’s not a fragment of glass there. Not only is it true, they KNOW. And they are going to ensure there will be no justice for her, for Mallory.

    And Sara, who so eschewed her family’s wealth, privilege, and corruption, the whiteness which protected them from the consequences of their actions, now she will really have to decide. She wanted to be like Yari, until it was time to be like Yari.

  • Pictures From Iraq

    From the success of Pictures From Afghanistan, David Pratt returns with Pictures From Iraq. He’s a photojournalist who has spent most of his career in the Middle East. He returns to speak to his contacts and fellow journalists there.

    Pictures From Afghanistan felt very personal, it was a memoir of his experiences of the country. Pictures From Iraq is more an attempt to put the country itself at the centre, and have it more just be structured around David meeting up with his old contacts. There’s also a foregrounding of Iraqi journalists, of the people who are crucial to telling the story if you want to represent it with any accuracy. Whether you are seeing their work carried through the major media outlets, or just see how they have helped, informed, and contextualised information for non-native journalists, their impact is massive.

    David is a photojournalist who has worked on the front lines of many conflicts in his time in Iraq. He’s mostly been based in the Kurdish region of Iraq, which is just a fascinating area. The situation is hugely complex, it would be impossible to cover everything in an hour-long documentary, but David does his best to sketch out the mix of cooperating and competing interests.

    We visit an officer in the Iraqi-Kurdish peshmerga, Iranian-Kurdish female freedom fighters, and Iraqi volunteer forces. Together they have fought ISIS and sectarian extremists, but their differing causes could put them in conflict once those threats are defeated. Iraqis want a unified Iraq. The peshmerga want to maintain the status of the Kurdish Autonomous Region within Iraq. And the Iranian-Kurds want an independent Kurdish nation, comprised of the Kurdish regions of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. You can see how complicated that could get.

    He speaks to Iraqi-Swedish journalist Urban Hamid, who he worked with back when ISIS were making strides across the country. They drink tea while looking out at the city, and discuss how the situation on the ground has improved, while still having its challenges. He meets up with Iraqi photojournalist Ali Al-Baroodi, who documented his home city of Mosul under ISIS occupation, at great danger to himself. He shares his hopes for the city, unbroken by a lifetime of war.

    Really interesting documentary.

  • The Cellar

    It’s creepy kids in a haunted house season, and our latest installment is The Cellar. Family moves to this big spooky gothic manor house with weird symbols all over it, and don’t think ‘let’s fucking leave immediately’.

    The daughter is the only one with sense, so she has to missing pretty quick. This leaves the daft mum to put together the pieces of the house’s weirdness painstakingly slowly. See if you moved to a new neighbourhood, and you’re wean went missing on the first night, wouldn’t you just not move in? Like, even with no supernatural element, wouldn’t that be enough to call a halt to the move, send your son to stay at grandma’s?

    Anyway, Mum decides to stay and solve the puzzle, hence the film. I thought the daughter, played by Abby Fitz gave the best performance. It’s watchable enough.

  • Freaks Out

    I think this movie won Frightfest.

    In an Italy of 1943, a travelling circus delights people with its wonder and mystery. A magician, a dog-faced man, an electric girl and a man who commands the insects and wee beasties display their talents to a mesmerised crowd. Theirs is an age of innocence and wonder. And it is coming to an end.

    The Nazis occupy Italy, and everyone different is being rounded up and shipped off to the death camps. While trying to help his family of performers escape, the magician, Israel, is caught and put with other Jews on a transport. Mathilde sets out to rescue him, with more than a little help on the way.

    You know what I loved most about this film? It was a world. Most films, even fantasy films, are made around their main character, and the world they inhabit only serves their story. But Freaks Out builds a world where I feel like you could literally follow any side character’s story and still have a movie. And it’s unusual to be able to convey that sense in something that’s not a TV show or a multi-film franchise.

    The villain of the piece is Franz, the ringmaster of the Nazi circus in Berlin, who is a six-fingered pianist, clairvoyant, ether addict, and psychopath. There they showcase the best in Aryan entertainment, and any difference is made to serve the ends of the Nazi ideology. Those whose difference doesn’t, are disposed of.

    And when I say Franz is clairvoyant, I don’t mean, “You will soon be taking a trip” clairvoyant. I mean he sees our future exactly, and tries to interpret its meaning through a 1940s perspective. He keeps sketching these strange light-up musical rectangles with a partially eaten apple on the back. Did I mention the film’s hilarious? There’s so much to talk about in this film, I’m only now getting round to telling you it’s hilarious. Franz is known for his huge repertoire of new songs, a seemingly prolific songwriter. The first time you see him at the piano, he sits down and plays Creep by Radiohead.

    Franz is superbly played by Franz Rogowski, from Great Freedom. He is just amazing. What a talent. I need to see more of his films. In Freaks Out, he plays a genuinely horrible person, a Nazi, a gleeful murderer, a total fanatic, and yet, Rogowski makes you feel genuinely sorry for him at times. You actually sympathise with this guy who’s been driven half-mad by his visions, who’s doomed to be, in his own words, “the Cassandra of the Third Reich”. He’s evil, and he’s using his visions to try to avert the defeat of the Nazis, there couldn’t be anything more heinous. Yet you feel for him when he is dismissed and humiliated, when he struggles to get his brother’s respect, and he craves the love of his girlfriend. To the end, he mixes cruelty, comedy and tragedy.

    Anyway, he is searching for four freaks, whose silhouettes he has seen in visions, and who he is convinced have the ability to prevent the demise of the Third Reich. Unfortunately it seems to be a prophecy of Mathilde and her crew.

    While Mathilde sets off to rescue Israel, the others, left destitute by the bombing of their tent, go to try-outs for the Nazi circus. They’ve heard great things of Franz’s talent, and are unaware he’s a maniac. This is a hilarious scene with bug boy Cencio making beetles form a swastika on the floor.

    Mathilde briefly teams up with a group of anti-fascist freedom fighters made from the ranks of injured soldiers. They are all amputees, in one form or another, lead by a cantankerous but good man with a hunchback. They have a camp in the woods where they sculpt their own prostheses and make their own weapons, like the leader’s machinegun-crutch. Like Mathilde’s band, they too are a family. You see them having a kick-about, hitting the ball with their hands, head or crutches, whatever they have. It reminded me of Dix’s painting The Skat Players, and made me wonder if it was a direct reference.

    Anyway, they are able to help Mathilde briefly speak to Israel on his transport, where he warns her to save the others from Franz and let her know where his transport will be going, before the Nazis whisk him away. So Mathilde must save her friends, face off against Franz, and rescue Israel.

    Whoof! I know that sounds like a lot but this film is packed. When I saw it was 2 and a half hours, I was a little worried, as I like my films closer to 90 minutes, and feel too often these days films try to reach the Marvel-set 3 hour mark for no other reason than prestige. I worried Freaks Out would feel like a good hour could be cut from its runtime. But it flies in! You’ll not even notice the time, much less be bored.

    And yet it manages not to overload you, it is dense, but with a clear plot. Rescue friends is its central direction, and it follows it throughout. So well told, it is a feast.

    It’s got its own style as well, reminding me a little of Hellboy, but also Stardust (the novel, not the film, which didn’t work as well). There’s a particular aesthetic and an amazing attention to detail. Like the confetti in the Nazi circus all being little swastikas. And Franz’s study being full of anachronisms, like his Kappa tracksuit with gold Nazi insignia.

    I cannot recommend this film enough. It’s about the forces of difference against the forces of conformity. It’s action packed, hilarious, romantic, tragic, and hopeful. It made the whole room at Frightfest cheer. It’s just the best. Go see.

  • Monstrous

    Monstrous is about a woman who left her abusive husband and is hiding out in a new town with her young son. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, her efforts are undermined when they begin to get visitations from a figure from the lake.

    This is kinda standard creepy kid in a haunted house. There’s a twist that’s hinted at pretty heavily. Christina Ricci plays the mum, with her weird eyebrow terror look.

    It’s fine.