The third day of the Fest was my most dreaded, with the day culminating in the Fantastic Debates, in which I was slated to debate – and fight – Noah Segan of Looper, Brick and Deadgirl. But first, there were movies to see.
DRAWN & QUARTERED: ANIMATED SHORTS
Shorts programmes often tend to be a mixed bag in festivals – the various tastes of all the programmers clumped together won’t necessarily reflect the tastes of any individual viewer – but the animated shorts are always worth checking out at Fantastic Fest, if only because they seek out shorts made using unusual animation methods. Highlights were Bill Plympton’s warped animated poem about a Western town drunk; a short made up of cut-outs and clips from old radio dramas; and the Auckland winner of 48HOURS, the hallucinogenic musical Sleep Clinic.
THE UNKNOWN KNOWN
The new Errol Morris doc was one of my picks going into the festival, and the master didn’t disappoint. Well, he did, in that he couldn’t make it in person at the last minute, but the film is fantastic.
More than being a portrait of its subject and sole interviewee Donald Rumsfeld, it’s an investigation into the malleability of truth. Reading his own archived memos to camera, Rumsfeld constantly rephrases or redefines questions and even facts, in ways that don’t necessarily turn them into outright lies but make them more palatable to him. His piercing gaze straight into the lens is intimidating as hell – you can see why the guy was Secretary of Defense – and he never once breaks his focus.
It’s not the content but the delivery that makes this a highlight.
CONFESSION OF MURDER
My experience of this film was hampered by tiredness and poor sound (it looked like they may have been forced to resort to a backup DVD for the screening). Acutely aware of the looming Fantastic Debates, I left after the first quarter of an hour to rest and gather my strength. That quarter of an hour was great though: hyperkinetic stunt sequences and an energy that sits comfortably with the best of Korean cinema. I look forward to finishing watching it outside of the festival.
JODOROWSKY’S DUNE
It’s a big call this early in the festival, but Jodorowsky’s Dune may be the best film in the programme this year. A documentary on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s legendary aborted production of Dune from the mid-’70s, it’s part post-mortem, part recreation and part celebration of the possibilities of cinema. J
odo’s version of Dune would have pushed the boundaries of cinema in the way that 2001: A Space Odyssey did – though it just as likely could have been a complete disaster, jamming the likes of Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, Pink Floyd and H.R. Giger together – but because it never got made, the only record left is a book of storyboards and design sketches, and the mind of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Jodorowsky himself is a sparkling fountain of energy and passion at the age of 84, and his fiery speeches about how cinema can and should change the world left everyone in the cinema eager to be one of his “spiritual warriors”.
Newly-created animatics of Jodorowsky and Moebius’ storyboards give an idea of the visual splendour of the project, but the real draw is the story of how the movie never happened.
FANTASTIC DEBATES
The Fantastic Debates are hard to get into. They’re certainly the most popular of the festival’s signature events – where else do you get to see journalists and filmmakers literally fighting each other over nerdy topics like “Sylvester Stallone is the greatest action star of all time” or “28 Days Later is not a zombie movie”? A few days prior, I had been asked – which must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel – to take part in the Debates, competing against Looper‘s Noah Segan around the moot of “Good-looking and well-adjusted people have infiltrated and destroyed nerd culture”. The format was: two two-minute speeches each, then two one-minute rounds of boxing.
The spoken segment was a tough battle, with Noah’s genuine nerdery (despite his good looks) forming a strong counterpoint to my apocalyptic, genocidal preaching. But the fight was what I was terrified of going in. I had been given some tips from director Ti West and martial artist/actor Scott Adkins, but unless you’re a pro, once you get in the ring (and lose your ability to see, in my case), all that goes out the window.
My one goal was not to go down in the first ten seconds like Devin Faraci did against Joe Swanberg last year, and miraculously I succeeded. At the end of the first round I could barely stand from exhaustion (which NOBODY tells you about), but rallied all my rage to keep punching and being punched through another, seemingly endless minute. It must have been that determination that led to the audience picking me as winner, but they did. I yelled “Adrian!”, stumbled off stage, and collapsed, cradling my head as festival founder Tim League debated Keanu Reeves and got his ass kicked by Tai Chi master Tiger Chen. Afterwards, I got a hug from Keanu while I cried from how overwhelming the whole experience was.
Truly, it was the night I became a man.
Day 4 was a very light day for me following my getting hit in the head lots of times the night before. Being able to lie down those extra couple hours made all the difference. I was able to see, however, one of my most anticipated titles and one of the highly sought after secret screenings, before heading to defend my Nerd Rap title.
WHY DON’T YOU PLAY IN HELL
Sion Sono made a big splash at NZIFF a few years ago with his four-hour upskirt epic Love Exposure. This film is surely his tightest, slickest movie to date, and it’s a glorious action-packed romp about the love and death of 35mm film.
A squad of kid filmmakers have a run-in with a yakuza gang, and ten years later they’re hired to help the yakuza make a movie to honour their fallen comrade. You get the comedy of gangsters incompetently trying to make a movie, and the rather excellent action of the same gangsters being gangsters. In true Sono form, the movie is also kind of insane – there’s a significant subplot involving a weird romance between a yakuza boss and a former toothpaste-commercial child actress – but also full of heart. It’s not hard to see why Drafthouse Films picked this up for distribution, because it’s one of the best films in the festival.
SECRET SCREENING: THE GREEN INFERNO
Eli Roth came out before the start of this unannounced screening of his new cannibal movie to tell the audience that “this is basically the same movie I’ve made multiple times before”. It is that – the college kids travelling abroad (the Amazon in this case), the gore, the mixed-quality acting, the ham-fisted and confused socio-political messages – and Roth’s apparent refusal to direct new things is really starting to grate at this point. There are moments in Inferno that make great cinema, and Roth gets in some good digs at the Kony 2012 era of slacktivism, but it’s a slog apart from that.
The credits feature a list of the notable films (mostly Italian) from the cannibal subgenre, which is great in that it’s a forgotten genre nowadays, but all it did for me was make me wish I was watching one of them instead – where the tone was more unhinged and dangerous. And also in comparison to the Italian cannibal originals, this production somehow felt more exploitative in its use of actual Amazon tribespeople as its extras. The classic films were definitely exploitative as well – going as far as using actual animal violence – but somehow, with this being a modern-day, American, well-funded production, Green Inferno comes across as arrogant.
Roth’s defence in the Q&A that it was okay because the production introduced their host tribe (who didn’t even have any concept of what a movie was when they arrived) to the likes of selfies and Justin Bieber doesn’t make the impression any better, either.
NERD RAP THROWDOWN
One of the principal reasons I came back to Fantastic Fest this year was to defend the Nerd Rap title that I won last year. This year there were four competitors: Aaron Hillis, Alamo founder Tim League, former nerd rap champ Damon Jones, and myself. In all honesty, my rap about Tom Cruise’s running prowess paled in comparison to Damon’s masterful double-act with a Henson-style puppet of himself (rapping and singing about Christopher Reeve’s Superman superiority), but I got into the final two, which meant it went to freestyle. Luckily, my years of experience performing improv came through for me and I held onto the title for another year.
After the competition, the floor opened up to hip-hop-only karaoke, which lasted well into the wee hours. I also got hugged tight by Timecrimes and ABCs of Death director Nacho Vigalondo, who rubbed my face with his beard and told me in his seductive Spanish accent “I want this moment to last forever”.
It was a suitable ending for a whirlwind weekend.
