The Saskatoon Fantastic Film Festival has upgraded the apparatus with its 2018 edition. That means fewer midnight screenings in favour of an extra day of programming, a 3-hour cartoon and cereal party, a snazzy new booklet, new voting ballots, some clever bumpers running before the screenings, sponsorships and promotions from Vinegar Syndrome and Shudder, and even an after party with cast and crew of Supergrid. And with turnout for Day 1 looking robust, Festival Director John Allison and his team must be feeling positive about the prospects for this year. There’s always a desire to find a theme to a given day’s program but finding a common thread between Anna and the Apocalypse (John McPhail, 2018), Rock Steady Row (Trevor Stevens, 2018), Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), and their supporting short films is something of a challenge. At best, it might be said that most of these films attend to breakdowns in community and some very unlikely ways to reassemble them.
Rock Steady Row
My Chattanooga Top Twelve!
I’m back and recovered from the four-day whirlwind that was the Chattanooga Film Festival! Parties, lectures, and workshops abounded at the CFF, but I was there to watch movies and watch movies I did. I can happily say that I went to 21½ screenings and that I’ve now seen 49 of the feature films and shorts shown at the CFF (and I’m still catching up with more titles). A lot were good, some were great, and a few were regrettable. MMC! is all about the movies I love and so here are my top ten twelve picks from the 2018 Chattanooga Film Festival.
(My apologies to those films that I missed. You can find a full account of the CFF’s films and my takes on a large number of them at my Letterboxd list devoted to CFF 2018.)
Make Mine Criterion! 