In the gripping Chinese sci-fi thriller Last Sunrise, we’re in a super-hi tech future, powered almost totally by solar energy – which doesn’t look as blissful as it sounds. As befits a dystopian story, there’s a disaster, and this one is just about the worst one conceivable – the death of our Sun.
Wang Sun (Zhang Jue) is very serious astronomy nerd with no apparent non-scientific interests. He doesn’t really know Wu Chen (Zhang Yue), although she lives in a neighboring apartment, and it doesn’t appear that she’s ever thought about anything profound. When the catastrophe happens, the two are forced on the road together in a race for their lives.
Last Sunrise is real science fiction about a plausible (and inevitable) future occurrence, and it’s about real ideas. This isn’t just blowing stuff up in space, which too often passes for sci-fi today.
Losing the sun is pretty bad – it gets dark, the temperature is plunging and humans are running out of oxygen. There may be refuges, but there’s little remaining battery power to fuel people’s escapes. Of course, it doesn’t take long for social order to break down. Last Sunrise becomes a ticking bomb thriller as the couple tries to find a refuge in time.
Of course, with no sun lighting the earth and moon, it is very dark and many more stars are visible. The f/x of the starry skies in Last Sunrise are glorious.
The two leads are appealing, especially Zhang Yue, whose Wu Chen is revealed more and more as film goes on.
The life-and-death thriller is leavened by witty comments on the consumerist, hyper connected culture (pre-disaster). There are very funny ongoing references to instant noodles. And Wang Sun, who is a bit of a hermit, doesn’t appreciate how devoted he is to his digital assistant ILSA (not Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, just ILSA).
This is the first feature, an impressive debut, for director and co-writer Wen Ren. Cinequest hosted the North American premiere of Last Sunrise, the sci-fi highlight of the festival and is streaming Small Time in CINEJOY through October 14.
Writer-director Christopher Munch notes that it’s difficult to have a serious discussion of extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth; he notes that talk of UFOs brings giggles and that “gatekeepers in the media” avoid the subject, fearing that they won’t seem smart anymore. That’s the territory he plumbs in The 11th Green. There are no lovable ETs or terrifying space monsters or flying saucers in The 11th Green, just a life-and-death conspiracy of secrets.
Suppose there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Now it’s not much of a leap that such intelligent life would have visited Earth. If THAT has happened, then maybe humans have noticed the visitors – or maybe even humans have been contacted by the visitors.
The 11th Green starts with the premise that extraterrestrials visited and made contact in the 1950s, but the leadership of that American generation, having experienced Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, has suppressed the news until the public can be prepared not to panic. The conspiracy of secrecy has survived to this day.
Our protagonist, Jeremy Rudd (Campbell Scott), is a DC-based science journalist. He has been estranged from his father, an Air Force General retired from the national security elite. When his father dies, Jeremy travels to his father’s home in Palm Desert, California, to handle the estate. There, he goes through his father’s stuff and meets his father’s peers, including a fascist general, an oleaginous spook and his dad’s nubile assistant.
As Jeremy unpeels the onion of his father’s career, he uncovers the story of the Millennium. And here’s where Munch launches his trademark Magical Realism. Weird shit starts happening – but all with its own internally consistent logic.
Ike and Mamie Eisenhower show up as characters in The 11th Green, along with a retired President Barack Obama and post-war Defense Secretary James Forrestal. (Jeremy’s father had been living in the former winter retirement home of President Eisenhower on the 11th green). You need to suspend disbelief here – do it.
I loved Christopher Munch’s previous film, Letters from the Big Man, a work of uncommon beauty. Munch’s magical realism worked there because he presented it absolutely straight, as if having a lovelorn Sasquatch in the forest setting was as normal as a squirrel. Sadly, Letters from the Big Man is currently difficult to find.
The cerebral and reserved Campbell Scott is perfectly cast as the offbeat, but always contained, brainiac Jeremy. Religiously scientific, Jeremy always follows the data, even when the data takes him to what others would find unbelievable. More than a little OCD, he makes the emergency trip from DC to Palm Desert – on a train!
I am resistant to science fiction generally, But I went with the story, and found The 11th Green to be absorbing and satisfying – and another completely original work from Christopher Munch. You can buy a virtual ticket for The 11th Green – and support the Roxie Theater – at Theatrical-At-Home.
The ingeniously original Prospect is a frontier coming of age movie. It’s just set in space, not in the Old West. The teenage girl Cee (Sophie Thatcher) accompanies her dad (Jay Duplass) as he pilots their tired spaceship from planet to planet, seeking to extract something precious (hence the title Prospect as in prospectors). It’s an enterprise for misfits and hustlers. She has grown into an able assistant. He is a skilled pilot and prospector, but is very erratic in his judgment.
Sure, this is a future version of our world, but these characters live in a bottom-feeding sub-culture; their space travel hardware comes from the surplus store and has the look of NASA’s Mercury program – far less sleekly hi tech than the dashboard of a 2013 Prius. It’s a choice by co-writer and co-directors Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl to reinforce that we’re dealing with folks living on the margins.
Isolated by circumstance on a planet that is only populated by a few other sketchy transients and some disturbing settlers, Cee is thrown into a series of life-and-death situations. She must depend on her wits to survive a sequence of that can only be resolved through negotiation. I saw Prospect before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. In the screening’s Q&A, co-writer filmmakers Caldwell and Earl affirmed that the story is centered on negotiation and that they drew from that under-recognized subgenre, the “loquacious Western”.
Pedro Pascal and Sophie Thatcher in PROSPECT
A key character that Cee must deal with is another rogue prospector Ezra (Pedo Pascal), a man of wit, charm, lethality and devoted self-interest. Pascal (Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) makes Ezra one of the most compelling and funniest movie characters of the year.
Someone has labeled Prospect at “True Grit in space”, which isn’t far off. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is also evoked. A consistently unpredictable plot and superb performances by Pascal and young Ms. Thatcher make Prospect well worth streaming on Amazon, Vudu, YouTube or Google Play.
In the gripping Chinese sci-fi thriller Last Sunrise, we’re in a super-hi tech future, powered almost totally by solar energy – which doesn’t look as blissful as it sounds. As befits a dystopian story, there’s a disaster, and this one is just about the worst one conceivable – the death of our Sun.
Wang Sun (Zhang Jue) is very serious astronomy nerd with no apparent non-scientific interests. He doesn’t really know Wu Chen (Zhang Yue), although she lives in a neighboring apartment, and it doesn’t appear that she’s ever thought about anything profound. When the catastrophe happens, the two are forced on the road together in a race for their lives.
Last Sunrise is real science fiction about a plausible (and inevitable) future occurrence, and it’s about real ideas. This isn’t just blowing stuff up in space, which too often passes for sci-fi today.
Losing the sun is pretty bad – it gets dark, the temperature is plunging and humans are running out of oxygen. There may be refuges, but there’s little remaining battery power to fuel people’s escapes. Of course, it doesn’t take long for social order to break down. Last Sunrise becomes a ticking bomb thriller as the couple tries to find a refuge in time.
Of course, with no sun lighting the earth and moon, it is very dark and many more stars are visible. The f/x of the starry skies in Last Sunrise are glorious.
The two leads are appealing, especially Zhang Yue, whose Wu Chen is revealed more and more as film goes on.
The life-and-death thriller is leavened by witty comments on the consumerist, hyper connected culture (pre-disaster). There are very funny ongoing references to instant noodles. And Wang Sun, who is a bit of a hermit, doesn’t appreciate how devoted he is to his digital assistant ILSA (not Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, just ILSA).
This is the first feature, an impressive debut, for director and co-writer Wen Ren. Cinequest hosts the North American premiere of Last Sunrise, the sci-fi highlight of the festival.
The ingeniously original Prospect is a frontier coming of age movie. It’s just set in space, not in the Old West. The teenage girl Cee (Sophie Thatcher) accompanies her dad (Jay Duplass) as he pilots their tired spaceship from planet to planet, seeking to extract something precious (hence the title Prospect as in prospectors). It’s an enterprise for misfits and hustlers. She has grown into an able assistant. He is a skilled pilot and prospector, but is very erratic in his judgment.
Sure, this is a future version of our world, but these characters live in a bottom-feeding sub-culture; their space travel hardware comes from the surplus store and has the look of NASA’s Mercury program – far less sleekly hi tech than the dashboard of a 2013 Prius. It’s a choice by co-writer and co-directors Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl to reinforce that we’re dealing with folks living on the margins.
Isolated by circumstance on a planet that is only populated by a few other sketchy transients and some disturbing settlers, Cee is thrown into a series of life-and-death situations. She must depend on her wits to survive a sequence of that can only be resolved through negotiation. I saw Prospect before its release at Silicon Valley’s Cinema Club. In the screening’s Q&A, co-writer filmmakers Caldwell and Earl affirmed that the story is centered on negotiation and that they drew from that under-recognized subgenre, the “loquacious Western”.
Pedro Pascal and Sophie Thatcher in PROSPECT
A key character that Cee must deal with is another rogue prospector Ezra (Pedo Pascal), a man of wit, charm, lethality and devoted self-interest. Pascal (Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) makes Ezra one of the most compelling and funniest movie characters of the year.
Someone has labeled Prospect at “True Grit in space”, which isn’t far off. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is also evoked. A consistently unpredictable plot and superb performances by Pascal and young Ms. Thatcher make Prospect well worth seeking out. It’s currently in a one-week run at San Jose’s 3Below.
The romance I Origins explores the conflict between science and spirituality. Our scientist protagonist (Michael Pitt) is completely empirical and militantly anti-spiritual. He is obsessed with the study of iris scans and patterns of the eye (the “I” in the title is a pun). He is hoping to prove that eyes can be evolved, which he believes will debunk the Creationist pseudo-science of Intelligent Design. He meets a model (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) – and they don’t meet CUTE, they meet HOT. Through a string of scientifically improbable coincidences, he is able to track her down for a second encounter that is sharply romantic. They fall in love – an attraction of opposites because she is mercurial and vaguely New Agey.
Along the way, he gains a new lab assistant (Brit Marling), who is just as smart and more driven than is he. Together they find the lab breakthrough to prove his theory. The main three characters are affected by a life-altering tragedy. Seven years later, the story resumes with the public release of the discovery. As our hero takes his victory lap over religion, he is faced with new evidence that cannot be explained by science…
Writer-director Mike Cahill (Another Earth, also starring Marling) has constructed a story that sets up a discussion on the limits of empiricism. I give Cahill extra points for raising the issue without ponderosity or pretension. Some critics have harshly judged the movie, but they see it wrongly as a corny religion-beats-science movie instead of a contemplation on the possibilities. And they altogether miss the fact that the film is basically a romance, which Cahill himself sees as one of the two central aspects of I Origins. Cahill explores and compares the intense lust-at-first-sight, opposites-attract type of love with the love relationship based on common values and aspirations.
There are, however, two shots involving pivotal moments in the story (and both involving billboards) that are such self-consciously ostentatious filmmaking that they distracted me, rather than bringing emphasis to each moment.
Pitt, an actor of sometimes unsettling affect, is very good here, as he was in The Dreamers and Last Days. Berges-Frisbey and Marling deliver fine performances, too. If Marling is in a movie, it aspires to being good – I loved The East, which she co-write and starred in. Archie Panjabi, without the boots and the upfront sexiness she wears on The Good Wife, is solid in a minor part.
I Origins works both as a scientific detective story and as a meditation on romance. I found it to be smart and entertaining. I Origins is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Skull, an absolutely bizarre film, is intended to be Indonesia’s first sci-fi film. Opening with a beautiful drone shot, Skull lurches forward with bits of mystery, romance, chases and shootouts until its “science unleashes the end of the world” finish.
The discovery of a giant skull threatens the underpinnings of many scientific theories and results in an international secret research project and a coverup by the Indonesian government. Ani ( Eka Nusa Pertiwi), a young woman at the research project is about to become a victim of the coverup when her killer-to-be is whacked by Yos (played by writer-director Yusran Fuadi), and the two escape on a motorcycle roadtrip through the Indonesian hinterlands, ending up with Yos’ mentor in a watchtower high above the jungle.
The frenetic pacing screeches to an abrupt halt while the three banter in front of a static camera for maybe ten minutes – it’s not at all a bad scene, just jarringly different than the pace of the rest of the film. The mentor gets in a couple sniffs of Ani’s hand, then rest of the assassins arrive and there’s a shootout. Afterwards, there’s a visit to a philosopher who might have the key to the mystery.
Along the way, we have a SWAT team wearing skull masks, an exercise in mass voting by text (but is it hacked?) and a character exclaiming, “Dried Shit!”. This paranoid thriller finally concludes with a Pandora’s box ending with odd, but very effective special effects. Skull is also notable for its vivid colors and terrible translation in the English subtitles.
I saw Skull at a Cinequest screening with the cast and crew. Yusran Fuadi made the film in 128 days of shooting over more than three years on 40 different locations in Java. Each time he could save up $180 from his paycheck as a lecturer, he would gather the crew and shoot some more of the movie. He said his major direction to leading lady Eka Nusa Pertiwi was a plea not to get pregnant in the next three years.
7 Splinters in Timehas to be the trippiest film in this year’s Cinequest. The detective Darius (Edoardo Ballerini – Corky Caporale in The Sopranos) is seriously confused. He can’t remember large chunks of his past. And then he’s confronted by an exact look-alike in a most unlikely place. Soon, even more doppelgängers arrive in the story. Darius is trying to figure out what’s going on- and so is the audience.
We go from place to place and, possibly, from time to time. And Darius and/or his lookalikes keep showing up. It’s as if one’s life were depixelated, digitally compressed and then defectively reassembled. Artifacts from other periods of time – Polaroid camera, rotary phone, microfiche viewer – are clues that time travel may be involved here.
Story threads are braided together, some more vividly nightmarish than others. There’s plenty of eye candy and sometimes there’s the feeling of Fellini on Dexedrine. If you like your movies linear and unambiguous, you will likely be impatient until the explanation in the last 20 minutes. But it’s fun to settle in and try to figure out what is going on.
7 Splinters is the feature film debut for writer-director Gabriel Judet-Weinshel. To depict Darius’ different realities (what he calls the “fractured psyche”), Judet-Weinshel used 8mm, 16mm, 35mm film and analog still film, along with the full range of digital, from low-resolution 30-frame video to the large format digital Red Camera. The effect is very cool.
Greg Bennick is excellent as the hyperkinetic mystery figure Luka. Lynn Cohen is a howl as the salty curmudgeon Babs, Darius’ elderly neighbor. Both are effective counterpoints to Ballerini’s chilly and stony Darius.
The beloved character actor Austin Pendleton plays The Librarian, a much more pivotal character than initially apparent. Pendleton has a zillion screen credits, including Frederick Larrabee in What’s Up, Doc? and Gurgle in Finding Nemo. I think I heard his character say, “You are the lizard warrior”. It’s that kind of movie.
Cinequest hosts the world premiere of 7 Splinters in Time. The film is listed under its alternative title of Omphalos, so you can find its screenings here in the Cinequest program.
Greg Bennick and Edoardo Ballerini in 7 SPLINTERS IN TIME
The Shape of Wateris an epic romance from that most imaginative of filmmakers, writer-director Guillermo del Toro. The Shape of Water may become the most-remembered film of 2017.
The story is set in 1962 Baltimore. Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is a mute woman who lives in a dark apartment above an aging downtown movie palace. She and her friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer) work as a janitors on the graveyard shift at a government research laboratory. The Cold War adventurer Strickland (Michael Shannon), a tower of menace, has captured an amphibian creature from the Amazon and has brought him in chains to a tank at the laboratory. The male creature, in the approximate form of a human, has dual breathing systems, so he can survive both under water and on the surface; it develops that he also has intelligence, feelings and even healing powers.
The scientist Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) wants to study Amphibian Man to discover how his species could benefit humanity. Strickland, on the other hand, wants to rush into killing and dissecting the creature. Strickland is a sadist, who enjoys brutalizing Amphibian Man with his cattle prod.
Elisa is repulsed by Strickland’s torture, and she feel compassion for Amphibian Man. She starts showing Amphibian Man some kindness. As Amphibian Man becomes more trusting of Elisa, he feels gratitude for her kindness. She cares about him, too, first with pity and then with the fondness of a pet owner. As Amphibian Man’s intelligence and feelings become more apparent, the two become more equal, and their mutual fondness blossoms into passion.
But Strickland’s nefarious plans force Elisa and her supporters into a race against the clock to save Amphibian Man. And so we’re off on a thriller, with a heist-like rescue and a chase, culminating in an ending of operatic scale.
Now this is a romance that transcends species. I totally bought into this. If you can’t, the movie is less moving and much, much more odd. Romance is often consummated sexually, and this one is, too.
Sally Hawkins is not conventionally pretty, yet del Toro didn’t make Elisa a stereotypical spinsterish ugly ducking. Elisa is vital, with a rich inner life, a wicked sense of humor and cultural interests, and who expresses herself sexually. She may only be a night janitor with a disability, but that doesn’t define her. Elisa’s defiant gaze at Strickland is one of the movie’s highlights.
Hawkins’ performance is a tour de force. Shannon makes for a formidable villain, especially when he clenches his own gangrenous fingers. Michael Stuhlbarg, Octavia Spencer and Nick Searcy (Art Mullen in Justified) are all excellent.
Richard Jenkins’s performance as Elisa’s neighbor Giles is very special. This is a very vulnerable man, with his sexuality trapped in a closet, his growing sensitivity to his own aging and his career as a commercial artist becoming obsolete. With his episodes of resolute denial spotted with instances of inner strength, both the character and the performance are very textured. And Giles’ eccentric reactions to the story are very, very funny.
I highly recommend Guillermo del Toro’s interview on NPR’s Fresh Air , in which he discusses many of his choices in developing the story of The Shape of Water, including shaping the character of Elisa and the inspirations from The Creature from the Black Lagoon. In the interview, del Toro explains that, if this movie were made in 1962, Strickland would have been the hero, the Cold Warrior protecting humans from the alien creature. Instead of course, the heroes of The Shape of Water are a woman with a disability, a woman of color, a gay man and a commie spy and, of course, a monster.
None of the characters have any reason to envision that white male supremacy, oppression of gays or the Cold War would end, or even be tempered, in their lifetimes. It’s a graphic time capsule, with the grand movie palace empty, pushing out a sword and sandal epic to compete in futility with the small screen offerings of Dobie Gillis, Mr. Ed and Bonanza. It’s a world in which the coolest thing imaginable is a teal 1962 Cadillac De Ville.
Here’s where Guillermo del Toro’s imagination triumphs. This story could not be told as well in a novel, on stage or in any other artistic medium. It has to be a movie.
This is filmmaking at its most essential and most glorious. Del Toro, along with production designer Paul B, Austerberry and art director Nigel Churcher, create a set of vivid and discrete worlds, each with its own palette. There are Elisa’s and Giles’ dark apartments, the brooding institutional green of the laboratory and the bright mid-century modern domain of Strickland’s family.
This is a beautiful movie. Between del Toro’s filmmaking genius and Hawkins’ performance, The Shape of Water is a Must See, one of the best movies of the year.
In the trippy Hungarian thriller Loop, Adam, a jumpy small-timer, and his inconveniently pregnant girlfriend Anna seek One Last Big Score by double-crossing a ruthless and merciless bad cop, who is stealing the hormone oxytocin from a hospital and flipping it on the black market. At first, it seems like we are watching a heist-gone-wrong neo-noir. But very soon (and before Adam himself figures it out), we start to notice that time and sequence are jumbled. Different realities are sometimes lagging, sometimes jumping ahead, and sometimes concurrent. For example, Adam fast-forwards a contemporaneous video of himself and sees himself murdered!
It all becomes a malevolent Groundhog Day as Adam’s story keeps replaying itself in a loop. He keeps learning from each replay and seeks to relive the sequence to get better results. How many loops will it take for Adam to survive with Anna?
Adam is personally transformed by the threat of losing Anna, and his character gets more sympathetic as the movie goes on.
We become pretty sure that Adam will figure out the puzzle. Ultimately, Loop is more intellectually interesting than thrilling. But it’s worth it just to appreciate Loop’s brilliant construction by writer-director Isti Madarász.
The final scene is very, very clever. Loop’s North American premiere was hosted by Cinequest.
