A Constant Visual Feast

Man, Fantasia. What a festival. Not unlike Fantastic Fest, and I don’t mean that just because their names are within a hair of one another. Maybe one of these days, I’ll go to one of those places.

Every now and again I marvel at how much I’ve wedded myself to genre, to the extent that I’m covering niche movies very few people even in my professional network will ever see; this may be in part because there are only so many movies a person can watch in a lifetime, because these niche movies don’t always get distribution in the U.S., or, and this is the one that sticks out most to me, because an embarrassing number of U.S. film critics don’t really care. If it’s Asian, and if it isn’t by a recognizable director, then it’s not worth their time.

A shame. Ghost Cat Anzu may end up among the best animated movies I see all year long, and Baby Assassins – Nice Days may end up among the best action movies I see all year; I also think the effect of the Terrifier movies on This Man can’t be overstated in terms of importance (a’la the global growth of horror cinema and the speed with which it appears to be responding to Damien Leone’s uncompromising visions of sadism). Then there’s Penalty Loop, a movie seemingly tailor-made to suit me as a longtime scholar of revenge cinema*, and which speaks to the taste writ large though no one will likely pick up on that; this is the kind of unique genre movie that could find an audience here in the States, and I truly hope it does, even if I’m skeptical that it will.

And if it doesn’t? Thank goodness for Fantasia for giving it a platform in North America. You can read my full write-up here, for JoySauce.

*A fancy way of saying “I watch a lot of movies about people exacting vengeance on other people.”