Fantastic Fest Report: Lucky Times Two; Brit Brutality
Quick takes on Tuesday's offerings, two featuring Lucky McKee (director of the well-received May from a few years back).
Roman (FF info page)
The Woods (FF info page)
Wilderness (FF info page)
Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell (FF info page and trailer)
As delicate and soft-spoken as its title character, Angela Bettis' Roman is the modest telling of a very simple tale. The film, which had its World Premiere last night, was written by McKee, and he stars as a very shy welder. He endures ribbing from his workmates about not having a TV and returns home to his studio apartment to stare at the walls and wait for a very pretty neighbor to walk by his window at the same time every day.
The girl (Kristen Bell) joins him for a beer on the apartment rooftop one day, and that jump starts the movie. The girl is fun and flirty, causing Roman to become more animated and relaxed, until crossed romantic signals terminate the budding relationship. Roman's life appears to return to normal, but then another friendly and flirty female neighbor knocks on his window.
Relying on very few settings and keeping things quite simple, Bettis' unfussy visual style suits the story. The plot bears similarities to May with several notable changes beyond the gender switch. As a whole, Roman washes over the viewer in pleasantly dreamy waves with no particular sense of urgency.
McKee's long delayed directorial follow-up to May screened right afterwards. The Woods has a troubled history. In the Q & A afterwards, he seemed to indicate that he was never fully satisfied with the script, and he ended up shooting 60 hours of footage and trying to carve the movie out of that.
Even if you didn't know any of that, you'd suspect something was not quite right with the finished product. It's easy enough to sit through, and a few individual scenes are quite powerful, yet overall the story about a girls' boarding school never coalesces fully into coherence (for one thing, I couldn't fathom the details of the legend that haunted the school). Incidental pleasures abound in the performances by Agnes Bruckner and Patricia Clarkson as, respectively, a troubled student and the school headmistress, and Bruce Campbell has a nice turn as the student's father, as well as the sound design, color scheme, Argento influences, etc.
To put things in perspective, though, I'd must rather pay money to see The Woods -- even with its current limitations intact --in theaters than unredeemable garbage like The Covenant and The Wicker Man. Unfortunately, the movie won't get a cinematic release before it hits DVD next month.
Normally I'm not a fan of horror movies where there's no rooting interest in the survival of any of the characters, which is why I'm surprised I responded so well to Michael J. Bassett's Wilderness.
Locked up together for various offenses, a group of British teens bully the two weakest guys to the point that one commits suicide. Fed up, the administrator orders that they be taken to a wilderness island for -- er, it's not really explained why they're sent out. Presumably it's for survival training to toughen them up. Maybe.
Realistically, it's a contrived situation to get them on the island, alone and isolated. Not so alone, actually, for they soon come across a women and two teen girls. And a tramp. And someone who's trying to kill them.
Clearly, logic must be tossed out the window with this picture. It's only as I'm typing this up that I recall the contrivances and gaping plot holes, because as I was watching I become completely caught up with the often-bloody action and nasty interplay. If you feel like turning off your mind and guessing when and how the next unlikable character will bite the dust, be sure to play along.
My first screening of the day, Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell, reminded me of an incident in my childhood. My Spanish-speaking grandmother took me and my brother to a Saturday afternoon double-feauture of films starring Mexican legend Cantinflas. The huge auditorium was filled with people roaring with laughter for hours, while my non-Spanish speaking brother and I stared at each other and wondered what was so funny.
So it was for me and Beach Party. Most people in the auditorium were laughing along with this tale of a cracked future America, and much of the time I wondered what was so funny. As with Cantinflas, the slapstick and physical comedy in Beach Party made me laugh, but its other charms escaped me.
A number of people said they really loved it, which proves once again that comedy is just as intensely, personally subjective as horror -- what makes you burst into laughter or cower in the corner may cause another person to question your sanity.
That's the way the axe falls.
