Special Coverage: Fantasia Film Festival 2024, Part 1 - Features
And so, we begin with a double set of selections.
Dear Moviegoers,
We’re now in the waning days of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, where screenings are winding down and award winners are being announced.
I’m very thankful to be doing more reviews for the event this year, and have come up with my own program of interesting selections - features & shorts (though there were others that I unfortunately dropped for time).
Enjoy!
All of the films that star Joshua Burge (Relaxer, Pratfall), that I’ve seen, are incredible. Few actors of the independent variety have such a streak of quality productions, not to mention a catalog of great performances. The man blessed with the face of Buster Keaton, Burge can evoke angst, anger, anxiety, frustration, and exhaustion with such aggressively calm unease, give or take to the roles he’s cast as. Vulcanizadora, directed by the equally great Joel Potrykus (Buzzard, The Alchemist Cookbook), continues this trend as set by such strong writing and brilliantly interpreted acting. This was my first watch from Fantasia 2024, and it blew me away, that only a homemade firecracker could.
Is the word “vulcanizadora” in the American dictionary, or any for that matter? I have chosen not to look it up, as it could alter my current thoughts on the film - which I prefer to keep as they are. In this moment, Vulcanizadora represents a complete shift from Jackass: The Movie to Faces of Death, which I feel director Potrykus has been working toward his whole career. If Buzzard was a shopping cart running into a curb without accountability for potential injury, Vulcanizadora IS that accountability. Vulcanizadora IS the apocalyptic reckoning and emotional adult fulfillment from years of teenage and man-child audacity. It’s worrisome and it’s right.
Starring Burge and Potrykus as two friends who embark into the woods and onto a beach with a special pact in mind, Vulcanizadora brought to my mind Buzzard once more, which had sequences of the two in simarly casted roles, just messing around as the hours on a clock slowly move forward. I recall Burge places Bugle snacks on a running treadmill, for Potrykus to eat quickly in order. Modern Times adjacent? Yes. In fact, that bit was on point with Chaplin’s film when it came to the early 2010s, when it came to young adulthood. Burge and Potrykus are a comfortably toxic and easily relatable pair, Burge being the dominant leader and Potrykus playing the nervous but dedicated follower. Vulcanizadora might as well be a spiritual sequel to Buzzard - the two mess around as a proverbial clock moves all too fast, the two eat lots of junk food, and the two continue their toxic but heartfelt (more so here) relationship. From there, things get wicked. Things get serious. Things get real.
Blown away, I was and still am. I’m still in a state of shock, bloodied and second-hand shamed for having been the pre-version of these two guys in my mid-teen years. I’m thankful to have grown away from that, to have become a viewer of Jackass and no longer a replicator of it. I don’t have to “face” the “death” in Faces of Death, because I understand what the real world variation would be. Keep it on VHS and away from your hands. Grow up. Mature. 5/5
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To paraphrase and alter a famous line from beat author William Burroughs, “Everything is true, nothing is permitted.” The Code takes this act of making up and changing quotes from famous artists too, by beginning with an A.I. generated image of filmmaker Orson Welles, and an artificial quote that plays into the theme of the film (and transitions to its title as well, in a statement of all-too-cuteness). Going for broke boldness and brash abandon from the onset, The Code settles into what is THE visual language of our times - surveillance by choice. Cameras and microphones are all over, and whether directly or indirectly, we’re ok with that. For all of the terms & service agreements and the multitude of apps on our phones, this movie takes Edward Snowden’s tech nightmare and makes a romantic comedy out of it. And, indeed, why not.
In fact, why wasn’t this done as a feature film sooner? Has it?
I refuse to compare The Code to something that we’ve been sold as representative of a generation like The Graduate, but I will relate it to something like a Nora Ephron flick. Sure, there’s more than one shot of penises here, and quite a lot of swearing and some mild but positive depictions of sex, but Ephron seems to match in story. A young couple in the middle of sexual and romantic frustration rent a house in California to spend a week or so making a Covid-19 pandemic documentary, during that height of it all. Or so that’s the excuse. The girlfriend, played by a typically rambunctious Dasha Nekrasova (The Scary of Sixty-First, Wobble Palace), is armed with digital cameras upon digital cameras, as is her boyfriend, played by the male-gazed and paranoid Peter Vack (Assholes). Switching from perspective to perspective, from webcams to screen captures to security cams to everything possible and all the ways they can be used for communication and for observation, The Code is brilliant. F**king brilliant.
When I emailed director Eugene Kotlyarenko (Spree, 0s & 1s) about The Code, I brought up Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain and F for Fake by Orson Welles. This is Eugene’s F for F**k. This is his “is this life reality? No. It is a film. Zoom back camera.” This is his masterpiece. And, there’s no going back. No backsies, so to speak.
Surveillance state? Nah. State of us? Yes. Cinema is now in the hands of TikTok filmmakers and Instagrammers (yes, they are filmmakers), or at least users of all ages. At least individuals who were already minded that way. At least experimenters and dreamers. At least in the observers. At least in everyone willing to pay attention. Crack the code if you want, and heed the answer - however you understand it. 5/5
More to come. Stay inboxed.