Fantasia 2023: Halfway There

[bryant]

We had eight days of movies scheduled; we have completed four days. Halfway mark! I am tired but very happy; our hotel continues to be perfectly positioned and the food’s still quite good. There’s this little counter service Chinese place next to the hotel which is unexpectedly tasty.

Highlights so far: Lovely, Dark, and Deep, which is some of the best cosmic horror I’ve seen in a while. Not Lovecraftian. It lays out the situation in the first fifteen minutes, so that as Georgina Campbell discovers the scope of the horror, we have the same retroactive realizations she does. Smart movie.

Also great: Talk To Me. The Philippou brothers may be YouTube bros but they’re good filmmakers who care about their craft, and their insight into teens being teens is strong. Very kinetic, certainly terrifying.

On the non-horror side of the fence, I greatly enjoyed The First Slam Dunk. I’m not a huge anime fan and I almost didn’t get tickets for this one, but I’m so glad I did. Director Takehiko Inoue really loves basketball, as I discovered afterwards, and it shows. I can’t think of any sports movies structured like this one — the climatic game is the spine of the movie, with flashbacks explaining how the characters got there — and it’s very cool.

We also learned something very important. If you’re doing back to back movies, you can tell the volunteers when you get out of the first one and they’ll shuffle you off into a little holding pen and you get seated first for the next one. I don’t care so much about my exact position in the theater but it’s nice to maximize sitting down time.

The in-room laundry is running. It’s crappy but it’s better than a laundromat.

[Crossposted from Population: One; go here for the original post.]