Since the festival is almost over, I'm trying to watch everything I want to see before it's gone. There's no connecting themes for this group of films that I can think of.
We Need To Do Something
Of course I watched We Need to Do Something late at night as a thunderstorm was rolling in. That may not have been the best idea, since it's a horror movie about a family who gets trapped in their bathroom for several days after a tornado causes a tree to fall across the door. Most of the real horror is generated by the simple fact of being locked in a small space with a hostile and unpredictable alcoholic father, played brilliantly by Pat Healy. However, the supernatural elements simultaneously increase the experiences of terror and shock, and reduce the more depressing family drama. The result is a campy and scary film with a darker undertone. All that unrealistic spurting blood and the flashbacks to creepy witchcraft rituals saved this movie from being so dark as to be unpleasant. The resulting "over the top" experience reminded me of the vibe of Drag me to Hell, which manages to be psychologically scary and visually absurd at the same time. I watched the Q&A for this one as well, and the story of how the movie came to be was almost as weird and funny as the movie itself. It's the first time Max Booth III has written a script; because as he said in the Q&A he's a "book guy." The story is based on a novella he'd written, and he claims to have written the sreenplay to make some money after he lost his regular gig in a hotel to the Corona virus shutdown. The horror of a family trapped together with an unknown horror outside obviously speaks to the real terror of the covid-19 pandemic as well, so this movie is a product of the last horrific year of human history on several levels. While it's gotten mixed reviews at the outset, I think there's a lot going on under the surface of this movie that makes it worth watching - if you can take fairly fake looking 'gross out' horror.
Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres
If you ever wondered why Rolling Stone magazine went down hill as a music magazine in the 1980s, it's probably because they lost reporter, Ben Fong-Torres, the magazine's original music editor, and author of major profiles based on long interviews with Jim Morrison, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye,and other great musicians of the 1960s and 1970s. As the title says, Suzanne Joe Kai's The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres tells Fong-Torres' life story, starting with parents, who were Chinese immigrants in the 1940s. The story of his name alone is a history lesson about U.S. immigration policy. Because of the Chinese exclusion act, which was in place until 1943, Fong-Torres's father, Fong Kwok Seung, entered the country with a Fillipino passport using the name "Ricardo Torres." From that beginning to the end, the movie is fascinating because Fong-Torres has a fascinating life story. The film doesn't just focus on his time at Rolling Stone, but shows his connection to the Bay Area Chinese American community, his education in journalism on his high school newspaper and at San Francisco State, and his activities outside the rock scene. For example, even when he was one of three editors of Rolling Stone at is peak, Fong-Torres also volunteered his time as a writer and editor to the East-West, a Chinatown neighborhood newspaper. After leaving Rolling Stone, shortly after it moved its headquarters to New York in the 1980s, Fong-Torres continued to work as a journalist and community activist, and the film follows him to the present day. The final edit on the film must have been recent, because at one point, you see him working on this column, The Year of the Rat which was published in April 2021. Fong-Torres seems to have been able to do great interviews with legendary people because he's just a cool, unassuming guy who's interested in all kinds of people. The movie isn't formally innovative -there's some very familiar 60s-signifying footage unconnected to Fong-Torres's direct comments and a lot of talking heads - but Kai made a good choice to play the audio recordings of some of Fong-Torres's most famous interviews over archival footage from the 1960s as well.
Souad
I was a bit disappointed by the film Souad whose two lead actresses, playing Souad and her sister, Rabab, won the international best actress jury award at the festival this year. The film is fairly simple, but its climactic moment comes too soon and the second half of the film feels drawn out and meandering. The scenes with Souad and her friends were fascinating, and there could have been more of them to really explore the tension between the religious expectations of Souad's parents and the dynamic life of her peers, which isn't just about social media, but sexuality and attraction to a more secular life.
Wild Men
Wild Men surprised me in the opposite direction, surpassing my expectations. I was a bit dubious about another film in the festival that was "exploring masculinity," but this one's sometimes comic and sometimes wise representations of men trying to figure out how to survive contemporary life - and mostly getting things wrong - really worked. It wound up as one of my favorite films of the festival. I love a tightly-plotted story, and I saw no loose-threads and heard no wrong notes in this Danish comedy / thriller that pokes fun at the current pop-culture craze for Vikings. Between direction and editing, the timing was perfect, and the acting spot-on. I wasn't familiar with the actors playing the lead characters Martin (Rasmus Bjerg) and Musa (Zaki Youssef), two men who improbably find themselves trying to survive in the wilderness together, but I was happy to see Sofie Grabol, (of the Killing) as Martin's wife. It makes sense that this is not film-maker Thomas Daneskov's first film - that was his 2015 feature, The Elite for which he won a "new talent" award. He also had one run of a TV series called Joe Tech that appears to explore similar themes, but it's not available to stream in the U.S. I hope that American audiences will get a chance to see more of his work, and that this movie will be distributed in the U.S., whether in theaters or on a streaming platform. It seems to me to have all the requirements for a "sleeper" and "surprise hit" - if U.S. audiences are willing to read subtitles. From the reviews I've seen so far, it seems like some of the barbed wit of this film missed a lot of the critics, so I'm not feeling optimistic, which is too bad. At least this might mean we won't have to suffer from a hamfisted American remake.
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