Canadian horror and Japanese animation were on the cards for day six of the festival, with a special guest appearance by the freezing fucking cold that's just hit Sydney town.
Pontypool
Pontypool is half of a great film. Then it doesn't so much derail as jump to a new set of tracks completely. It's easiest to refer to it as a zombie movie, but it's not, in the same way that 28 Days Later isn't. Here the threat is an infection that causes a vicious madness in people, spread not through the air, or through biting, but through language.
Steven McHattie is Grant Mazzy, a grizzled radio announcer posted in a small radio station in a church's basement in the Canadian town of Pontypool. He's always at odds with his producer, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle). Also at the station is Laurel Anne (Georgina Reilly), the technical controller back from Afghanistan. On a cold Valenitine's morning, the three are together in the station when a series of ever-more-strange reports start leaking in.
Here's where the film works best. The claustrophobia and confusion is palpable as it's not clear if there is a growing threat outside, if there is even a threat at all. Tension is created – fittingly enough, given the film's focus on language – through words alone, sometimes from voices from the outside, sometimes through the three core characters speculations.
There are two snags the film hits. When the threat does come to the church, it's just not as scary as when it was just talked about, even though this is when our characters are in actual danger. The film is based on the novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess, who also wrote the screenplay. What the madness does to people seem as if it would come off as more effective in the book; here, speculation suggests that the budget just doesn't allow this to completely be shown. This third act slump is a common affliction in horror, and it doesn't destroy what came before it. The bigger snag comes with the arrival of a character to the studio, one talked about previously in the film. He arrives as a bizarre deus ex machina spouting unnecessary exposition that somehow manages to confuse things more than before he arrived. His arrival brings an absurdism not present in the first slow burning part of the film that doesn't quite leave even after he does.
Nonetheless, the strength of the concept and the first half (not to mention McHattie's performance, and his amazing voice) of the film make this worth seeking out. The rest seems like it would work better in novel form, so perhaps Pontypool Changes Everything is, even moreso than the film, one to track down.
6/10
I'm not what you'd call an anime fan, so asking me for an opinion on most anime films for me is like a vegan commenting on a cheeseburger. Nonetheless, here it is:
The Sky Crawlers
Mamoru Oshii's work is beloved by anime fans, and even has crossover appeal. Ghost in the Shell had robot sex or something in it, and who doesn't love a good bout of robot sex? His latest, based on the manga series by Mori Horoshi has fighter pilots in permanent adolescence in an alternate reality that mixes today's world with that of the Second World War. Well, that's kind of cool too. Also they smoke and occasionally fuck, but never with robots.
The Sky Crawlers is rich in ideas and plot elements which leak out over the course of its two-hour running time. Our main character, Yuichi, is trying to find out what happened to the pilot he replaced at the academy, while audience is trying to figure out exactly how the world we're watching functions. That's a problem. Most of the characters know most of what is revealed; even Yuichi knows much of what's going on, and his investigation less resembles detective work than sleepwalking into explanations. But the fact that information known to every character in the film is kept from the audience is frustrating rather than intriguing. It's a shame since these ideas are interesting; if the world was set up clearly early in the film, we could have been in for a deeper examination of it. The animation is quite stunning, although the mix of intricately detailed backgrounds with rather basic character design is nearly as distancing as the film's plot and snail-like pace.
It's not a total loss: the aforementioned concepts have some merit, and late in the film a character has a great monologue on the nature of war. The airborne battle scenes, too, are quite stunning, although it's often difficult to tell who is fighting who – given the film's themes, this maybe a deliberate choice. It's not enough, though; not to justify the film's running time, nor to recommend it to anyone who isn't an anime fan.
4/10
I have watched Perfect Blue and Paprika and enjoyed them, and Spirited Away was really, really quite pretty. For the sake of full disclosure. But on the whole, anime? It leaves me chilly.
Lessons Learned
- If you're worried about seeing someone you don't want to talk to at the festival, wear a hoodie! There's no disguise more perfect or subtle.
- French Canadians are dangerous. I think that was the moral of the story in Pontypool, anyway.
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