Fantastic Fest 2009

"Captain?"

The disassociative gun was charged and whining, pointed dead at the door, before he realized he was awake. On ship. And apparently sane for all he could tell. He ran through a few quick sanity-rationality protocol matrices, each cross-indexed with cyclic self-reinforcing super-ego engrams. Tried a bit of tantric empathy, attempting to attach himself to the reality of others around him. And then he knew where he was, and wished to the gods that he didn't.

In the dream, oh lords almighty, in the dream it was mostly Inverness 27. Fucking other name for hell. It was dark, Because it was always fucking dark. And it was hot. Because it was always fucking hot. Heat came at you in waves off the baking iron of the night sky. At first -- in the dream -- there was the godsawful quiet. You sweated, you burned, naked and alone, every part of you straining outwards towards the sky and the dark trying to find something. Maybe that was why it came. Or them. One was very much the same as the other. But that was the moment when you knew your mind was breaking.

He really fucking hates that dream, and yet, it seems rather comforting now. He slaps the com switch, ponders setting the pistol down for just long enough to take a swig of Jasminian nullethene, decides against it.

"Tell me it's not the goddamned AI. I'm just... I'm just not in the mood."

"No, Captain, the AI is currently operating in sublimely divinitional mode."

"Okay, good. Because I was wondering about that. It's not the body-mass generator, is it? We had the fucking zombies --"

"Actually that was a corporeal manifestation of slide-shifted cross-sectional entities."

"I don't want to -- what?"

"Captain?"

"No, explain that last bit."

"Of my previous statement?"

"Yes. Specifically the cross-dissected alien thing."

"Rather than operating in parallel to a dimensional or temporal flow, their consciousness bisects multiple timelines and parallel universes. They are unable to manifest corporeally, however, and have chosen a belief system in which -- to paraphrase our linguists -- 'meat is a tool,' and so they occupy, or in their parlance, 'ride' a deceased body which is then possessed with a ravening appetite for protein-rich food in order to fuel the anti-necrotic processes necessary for their continued manifestation."

"Okay. So, these demon-things like to make dead bodies get up, walk around, and eat people. And because all of our dead bodies go into the creepy-ass body-mass generator, that was why Crewman Jensen was ripping the ear off of Science Officer Wachowski earlier in the cycle? And, honest to gods, that was his best feature. Godsdammit."

"Approximately, Captain."

"Thanks. Sometimes it's hard to keep it all straight. I had the goddamned dream again and... fuck it. Probably fucking precognizance or dream implantation. I hate fucking dreaming. It's just the alternative is so fucking worse. Look, I'm rambling. I just woke up. I've still got the pistol charged."

"That's probably prudent, Captain."

"Okay, so go ahead and -- no, wait. Please tell me it's not a temporal purse? I really, just, it's too goddamned early for that. Just tell me it's not anything temporal. Or psycho-boxing. I can deal with some mood avitics or empathic linkage or whatever, but just not the psycho-boxing."

That was his morning. That was actually a fairly slow start to his morning. Any morning, really, on which he didn't wake up to the sound of klaxons or fists banging on doors or writhing alien polymorphs attempting to implant their geneline constructs into his tear ducts was a morning to be treasured. He turned to the bedside table and took the pills in order:

Blue was an anti-telapathine histamin. Clear orange was a long-chain sugar compound that fed the nanoline constructs battling throughout his bloodstream to hold off the ravages of the Neumann Pathogen he'd carry for the rest of his life. Dark orange, blue, and white were respectively a multi-vitamin complex, anti-viral boost, and a maxisprin for a pulled muscle in his lower back. The shiny black one was a half-component poison, the other half nestled into a vessicle imbedded in a maxillary tooth. The square pink, brown triangle, and bit of loose leaf were various forms of slow-pull amphetamines that would keep his nerves singing all day long, and if their voices started to crack, that's what the purple cubes were for. The gold ones he took just because they made him feel stupid and reckless and otherwise he'd probably just sit in his room and scream all day long.

"It's none of that, Captain."

"Fantastic. Okay. I'm good. Hit me."

Update 10-01-30: I obviously never got around to finishing up my intended epic summary of Fantastic Fest 2009, but for what it's worth, here are a few of my final thoughts on what was certainly one of the highlights of the last year for me. In the meanwhile, I'm working on my own scripts and hoping to return for Fantastic Fest 2010: The Revengening.

I can't quite shake the feeling that next time I drive down to the Alamo South Lamar there will be a vacant lot and an old man sitting on a chair who just shakes his head and says "Alamo? Ain't been no Alamo here for going on thirteen years, ever since the old place burned down..." Which is to say, the whole experience of Fantastic Fest was a bit phantasmagorical. Speaking as someone who generally feels one of the things I should do every day is watch at least one movie, even I was a feeling a bit of sensory overload by the final day of the show (and a certain amount of relief to get back to something like a normal schedule, hence the delay in writing this post).

The festival experience itself was largely fun, even if I didn't feel like I was truly connected into the larger geek ecology on display, but I got the chance to meet some cool folks (shout-outs to Jason and Michelle) and had a lot of fun hanging out in the virtual community that sprung up on Twitter around #fantasticfest (something that also proved to be a surprisingly useful way to get hard info about lines and showtimes during the general confusion of the Fest). Collected my own list of small war stories, managing to squeak into sold-out showings, and brushing up against the pseudo-famous while standing in line outside the single restroom; apparently some people found the line outside the men's room more than a little amusing. But mostly it was about watching movies, hustling out of one theater and turning the corner to hustle into the next one, sometimes playing a friendly game of "avoid the hall monitor" when showings were running late. Props to the Alamo staff who were amazingly courteous in the crush of glazed-eyed film fans, and to the Fantastic Fest personnel who managed to pull off a surprisingly well orchestrated bit of controlled chaos (yeah, yeah, #chaosreigns). Though I still think this note was pretty damn funny.

As for the movies themselves, I just wanted to wrap everything up by mentioning a few of my favorites and maybe a couple of my disappointments (I'm not sure I saw anything truly terrible at the festival, except relative to all the other incredible films I had a chance to see, so "disappointing" is probably the better way to go).

Best Of The Fest

Private Eye was easily my favorite film, a South Korean period thriller set in 1910 Seoul. This film hadn't even been on my radar prior to the festival, but I'm a sucker for detective stories set around the turn of the century and this movie didn't disappoint. Director Park Dae-Min appeared at the showing to answer questions and was quite up front about being influenced by Sherlock Holmes, Chinatown, and even a bit of James Bond, and frankly, you'd have to work really hard to mess up a formula like that for me. I didn't realize at the time that this was his debut film as a director and it's a remarkably assured piece of work for his first movie. Likewise, Jeong-Min Hwang gaves a breakout performance as the titular private eye whose easygoing manner hides a keen mind and a desire for justice that he just can't seem to suppress.

Our Kung-Fu Is Better, And Besides, We Didn't Have The Money For CG

One of the movies I'd really been looking forward to catching was an early sneak of Ninja Assassin, the new movie from James McTeigue (who previously worked as DP on the Matrix films and directed the surprisingly solid Alan Moore adaptation V For Vendetta) and produced by the Wachowskis. The title alone promised some silly fun -- and I'm one of the few people who still professes to love the Wachowskis. Early news around the festival was that it was a surprisingly bloody, violent affair, which is a selling point for me. And the first ten minutes were pretty awesome -- it doesn't hurt to start with Randall Duk Kim and then proceed to outright bloody mayhem as ninjas tear through a bunch of annoying Yakuza thugs, arms, jaws, and other body parts hitting the floor in the process. But after a killer opening, the movie simply runs out gas, descending into a trite, cliche story that only got intermittently interesting whenever Sho Kosugi showed up to chew scenery as Worst Ninja Clan Dad Ever (where's that t-shirt?). But worst of all, the action was boring: the fights were complicated bits of Hollywood choreography but almost every element in them -- from the weapons, to the blood, to half the actors -- was so obviously CG that it was difficult not to see a bunch of people simply dancing in front of a green screen. It was cheesy, ineffective, and as one review noted, animated blood gets splashed around everywhere but somehow never seems to stain the floor... And to top it all off, the movie ends with a ludicrous climax and quite possibly one of the dumbest "twists" I've seen in a long time, even for a movie with the words "ninja" and "assassin" in its title.

Contrast this with Hard Revenge Milly, a pair of hour-long films from the mad warehouse of Noboru Iguchi (Machine Girl) and Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police). Iguchi and Nishimura lead a loose collection of Japanese effects artists, filmmakers, actors, and escapees from mental asylums to create incredibly strange, violent, and funny movies on a budget that could be called shoestring if they hadn't already used the shoestrings for something else in a movie. A new addition to the stable is Takanori Tsujimoto, writer/director of Milly -- I have no idea how he became involved with Nishimura and company, but he's previously worked on the Kill and Women of Fast Food omnibuses from which Mamoru Oshii's new Assault Girls movie was spun out, and was introduced by Nishimura to the audience at Fantastic Fest. This was, by the way, the same introduction where a flame thrower was used to roast yakiniku for everyone in the crowd.

Hard Revenge Milly -- and I never, ever get tired of that title because it is awesome -- is a trip to the land of Postapocalyptica where dust storms blow across deserted highways, everyone dresses like a cattle call for Road Warrior, and extras are standing by with firehoses of fake blood. Milly has (of course) been brutalized by a gang and mysteriously repaired with an array of biomechanical attachments including -- in one of the most inspired no-budget flourishes in the film -- a shotgun leg that she reloads by shoving a shell into the pocket of her leather pants, followed by a kick and the sound of a slide being racked. That put a grin on my face right then, and I'm guessing it cost a millionth of whatever was spent to give Rose McGowan a machine gun leg in Planet Terror. And that's why, in the end, I enjoyed Milly so much more than most of the Hollywood action films I saw during the festival -- no matter how silly the action, it was always real people up on screen. The filmmakers simply had no budget for anything else.

Rather than using CG to supplement or replace the hard work of choreographing an action scene, Tsujimoto and his crew had to go ahead and actually teach someone how to swing a sword, plan their shots, and work out an interesting rhythm in the editing room with whatever footage resulting footage was useful. Sure, half the time they're fighting in abandoned parking garages or random warehouses, but at least the people being hit, shot, and thrown through the air (often all at the same time) had a weight and inertia to them. When blood sprays across the floor or walls in Milly, it's with a liquid splat that renders all the gallons of animated blood in Ninja Assassin weightless and cartoonish by comparison. Rather than spectacle, we get some wit and imagination -- I mean, you knew the nunchuks would have gun barrels, but I nearly fell out of my seat laughing when they also had laser sights. And no slight to Rain, but Miki Mizuno as the titular Milly would kick his ninja assassin's ass without even breaking a sweat. Mizuno has got charisma to burn, and in her leather jumpsuit, trenchcoat, and spiky hair, she strides through these films like a 21st century gender-swapped Woman With No Name. In other words, she's a badass, and when she punches through someone's chest, Tsujimoto is going to make damn sure that you feel the impact.

Will write a summary of some of my favorite (and less so) films from the Fantastic Fest in the next couple of days, but it was a great experience.