Trailer Tuesday – Fantasia 2021

The 2021 edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival is just around the corner and MMC! is happy to report that it will be covering this year’s FIFF once again! Fantasia’s full slate of films and special events are now lined up and its merch store is online and ready to take your money. MMC! will provide round-ups of the Festival like last year as well as find some worthy titles for potential spine-numbering, but ongoing coverage can be found at my Letterboxd list for the Fest. (I’ll try to set up a separate list for short films but there’s sooooo many short films being shown at Fantasia…)

In the meantime, let’s check out a few trailers from FIFF’s various programs that have piqued MMC!’s interest!

“The titan Takashi Miike takes us back to the magical world of the Yokai as a war threatens to destroy Tokyo. An irreverent fairytale!”

Fantasia’s “Cheval Noir” section is its flagship, juried competition and MMC! can’t help but be drawn to Takashi Miike’s The Great Yokai War – Guardians. The film returns Miike to the wacky world of his 2005 movie The Great Yokai War and features a pair of boys who discover they are the last descendants of a legendary fighter and the only hope to save some gentle demons and the city of Tokyo. And in an elegant bit of programming, Fantasia has slotted Miike’s latest to close the 2021 Festival, book-ending it against the director’s earlier film that opened the 2006 Festival.

Trailer Tuesday – La Casa (Jorge Olguin, 2019)

It’s Tuesday and MMC! is aiming its spotlight at La Casa (2019), Jorge Olguin’s latest which drops on VOD today! Tired of his recent forays in big film productions and having seen a five year project fall apart, Olguin’s latest is a lean 75-minute effort that he calls “a full-on, classic haunted house movie.” He served as his own  writer, director, cinematographer, sound designer, composer, and editor on the project and his mere three-night shoot took Olguin a year to assemble in post-production. Olguin’s reward for his effort was a premiere of La Casa at the 2020 edition of the prestigious Sitges Film Festival.

La Casa is set in 1986, amid the brutal and repressive regime of Augusto Pinochet, and is based on accounts of the Casona Dubois, an infamous Santiago residence associated with various urban legends of unnatural mysticism and paranormal activity. Officer Arriagada (played by acclaimed Chilean actor Gabriel Cañas) is on duty one night patrolling the empty streets and enforcing the government-imposed curfew. Already troubled and distraught, Arriagada is sent to investigate complaints about noises emanating from a nearby home and he is drawn into the building by screams of a woman. Once inside, Arriagada in confronted with horrors connected to personal and national traumas that threaten him both physically and psychically. La Casa resembles contemporary found-footage horror cinema with its single-camera perspective, its concealed edits, and its progression in real-time, and Olguin’s technique is commendable, masking what is likely a limited budget and modest effects with a constrained point of view, evocative lighting, and an electronic score that would easily be overbearing were it not proceeding in such tight lockstep with the film’s visuals. The result is intensely impressionistic, making La Casa almost feel more like a walkthrough than a film, more like a ride than a story. It’s a highly affecting experience which is hardly subtle but thoroughly engrossing if you acquiesce to being pulled into its dark undertow. This trailer precisely expresses the experience of viewing La Casa and so, if you wish this minute and forty-second audio-visual experience could last another 73 minutes, Olguin’s film won’t disappoint.

Trailer Tuesday

Whoa! It’s been quite a while since we put up a “Trailer Tuesday” post.  Let’s fix that by going over some stuff banging around in the MMC! dome!

The next best thing to having an MMC! proposal made real is having a label beat MMC! to the punch. This happened just last week when Criterion announced that Bing Liu’s amazing documentary Minding the Gap (2018) would be joining the Collection. We’ve already declared our admiration for Liu’s brilliant coming of age doc set among the skateboarding community of Rockford, Illinois, putting it among our top 20 films of 2018, and it was set to be our next Criterion proposal once we were done with our favourite films from the 2020 Fantasia Festival. The upcoming Criterion edition has some great special features, not to mention the Collection’s January 2021 slate includes the return of Luis Buñuel’s “Search for Truth” trilogy. That’s a one-three punch of documentary realism and surrealist audacity!

The Movie Orgy (Joe Dante, 1968)

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents The Movie Orgy.

A send-up and a celebration of mid-century American kitsch, Joe Dante’s epic pop culture mash-up, The Movie Orgy, entertained college campuses through the late 1960s and 1970s, drawing upon an ever-changing library of ’50s drive-in movies, vintage commercials, TV westerns, and political speeches. Re-discovered and re-cut by Dante for a revival screening in 2008 into its 280 minute “Ultimate Version,” this legendary cinematic event is now available outside of theatres for the first time. SEE a colossal collage of nostalgia! SEE an experience of mind-rotting celluloid hysteria! SEE thousands of performers in roles that earned them obscurity!  SEE bosomy starlets, juvenile delinquency, Christian puppetry, Elvis Presley, Groucho Marx, and Richard Nixon!

SPECIAL FEATURES

• High-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Joe Dante, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interview with Dante
• Rated Z, archivist David Neary on the history and significance of The Movie Orgy
• Posters and promotional materials
• PLUS: An essay by director John Sayles

Trailer Tuesday

The 2019 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, announced its first wave of titles late last month and a second wave of titles earlier today. The Festival is shaping up nicely with an exciting line-up of expectedly peculiar movies. MMC! is stoked for some of these films, so let’s take a look at a dozen bonkers trailers (and read some brief Fantastic Fest summaries) before this Tuesday runs out!

(MMC! doesn’t have any plans to be around Austin during September 19 to 26, but if anyone wants to throw some press credentials at our lowly corner of the blogosphere, MMC! wouldn’t stop you!)

Opening night of Fantastic Fest kicks off with the premiere of Taika Waititi’s JoJo Rabbit (2019). This anti-hate satire apparently made Disney execs less than comfortable during a screening last week and reports state that the studio is more than a bit nervous about this inherited Fox project. That alone make JoJo Rabbit sound worth its ticket price!

“Writer-director Taika Waititi (THOR: RAGNAROK, HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE), brings his signature style of humor and pathos to his latest film, JOJO RABBIT, a World War II satire that follows a lonely German boy (Roman Griffin Davis as JoJo) whose world view is turned upside down when he discovers his single mother (Scarlett Johansson) is hiding a young Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) in their attic. Aided only by his idiotic imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi), Jojo must confront his blind nationalism.”

Trailer Tuesday

For every MMC! proposal that turns into an actual spine numbered release, there are numerous other films that get swanky editions before this blog ever gets to imagine one. These films are unfortunately struck from MMC!‘s list of potential titles with no fanfare, never achieving the glory of stepping into our fantasized spotlight. Today’s “Trailer Tuesday” post celebrates a few of these films recently denied the chance to shine MMC!, but first we’ll celebrate an overdue title proposed for a spine number 6½ years ago!

As a longstanding favourite of MMC!, we’re naturally overjoyed with news that Severin Films is debuting a new 4K restoration of Álex de la Iglesia’s Perdita Durango (1997) at the 2019 Fantasia Film Festival and that a Blu-ray release is expected to be announced later this year! Personally, I can’t wait to decommission my two bootleg copies of the film and finally get to discuss with others the genius that is Rosie Pérez and the further proof that the quality of a film is directly proportional to the craziness of Javier Bardem’s hair. Thank you Severin! Better late than never!