Finishing our Fantastic Fest coverage, Jonesy wrote about her favorite films here, and now its my turn.Piggy backing off what Jonesy said in her top movies of the festival, this was a hard festival to pick from. In the last few years, there have been some major standouts and this year really didn't have any, but not due to any fault of the programmers, it's actually because everything was that great.
So check out them picks after the break.
This was a movie I needed to think about for a while. In my original review, I was mixed positive on the film, and the more I think about it, the more I like it. I saw what I considered to be the big three "surreal" movies: ESCAPE, A FIELD IN ENGLAND, and THE CONGRESS. I think that ESCAPE is the best out of these three because all of the surreal The images from the film have ingrained themselves in my head and has left me thinking about it ever since I exited the theater.
Alex De La Iglesia is a man after my own sensibilities. Like a less sci-fi focused Spanish version of Guillermo del Torro, De la Iglesia find a way to subvert and improve on the genres of his movies. This time, tackling horror comedies, he manages to make a feminist-leaning comedy that happens to have witches as the main bad guys. The pace of the movie is tight, the characters are loveable goofballs and the horror comedy is top notch.
LFO
This would have to be the most "slow burn" that I saw during the festival. The movie deals with a man that discovers a frequency that can illicit a hypnotic state which makes the people that hear it susceptible to mind control. I loved the way that the movie escalates and focuses on Robert, the man who finds out this frequency. He is not all right in the head to say the least, especially when it comes to his relationship with his wife. Being into music and recording, the movie's sequences with the equipment and the sound design were top notch and really interesting. On a story level, it illustrates a really warped sense of morality in Robert's use of the frequency. First, to "research" its effect on his neighbors, then for his own pleasure and for a more altruistic purpose. For such a quiet and small movie, its ending is amazing in scope and was definitely one of the best of the festival.
I am so glad that I caught up with this film post-festival. I skipped this movie originally due to the fact that I could watch it as a screener, and now I regret it. The hilarity and insane violence of this movie has to be experienced with a crowd. It's does the impossible in that it's over two hours long, but you never feel it. I loved the reverence that the movie has in 35mm in the form of the Fuck Bombers. When the movie gets to its end, I realized this was one of the best movies about making movies.
I was lucky to see this movie in the first day of the festival and it has remained in my top list even throughout the whole festival. What I love about this is that the movie shows off something that is sorely missing from most movies, a strong script and a great cast. Showing off that science fiction can still be used in order to tell some very important issues about life and about our personalities, and how we make the choices that we make.
That's going to be it for our coverage of Fantastic Fest 2013. One last note, I do hope that you will all read my review of the shorts blocks. They are something that I am very passionate about, and I love to give new or up-and-coming filmmakers a little bit of spotlight. My recaps of the Drawn and Quartered, Fantastic Shorts, and Short Fuse can be found if you follow the links.
Thanks for reading, everybody! We'll see you in Austin next year.
Thanks for reading, everybody! We'll see you in Austin next year.
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