Encounters Short Film Festival 2009

Celebrating its fifteenth year, Bristol's Encounters Short Film Festival runs from 17-21 November, screening the best in short films from around the world. This year's field is as usual a bewilderingly eclectic mixture of local and international talent, featuring more than 150 films in competition from 58 different countries, as well as guest appearances from such luminaries as Andrea Arnold, Andrei Khrzhanovsky, Jem Cohen and triple Oscar winner Richard Williams. Details can be found here, and follow me and my fellow festival bloggers at the official blog here as well as up-to-the-minute updates on Twitter here.

Jennifer's Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009, USA)

The curious thing about the success of Juno (2007) was that it made the bigger star not of its director Jason Reitman, nor its lead actress Ellen Page, but its writer and creator Diablo Cody. Perhaps on a surface level this was as a result of the distinctiveness of its relentlessly verbose, heavily stylized dialogue, but looking beyond this the film's lasting appeal derived from the fact that at its core was an original and captivating story which did not seek to patronise its viewers or descend into nauseous Sundance kookiness.

A move to horror is perhaps unsurprising for a writer whose first film name-checked Herschell Gordon Lewis and Dario Argento, and Jennifer's Body betrays on Cody's part a clear understanding of, and affection for, the High School Horror sub-genre. However, the precedent to which Juno owed the most to was Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World (2000), and once again in Jennifer's Body that film is a key reference point, foregrounding as it does an increasingly strained central relationship between two adolescent female characters. Anita – nicknamed "Needy" - is the caricature of the bookish nerd, but who has also enjoyed a close friendship with popular cheerleader-type Jennifer since childhood. They appear to share little in common, and their chalk-and-cheese relationship is met with bemusement by their peers, yet there is a ring of truth about it; how many childhood friendship are forged as a result of circumstance and location rather than personality?

One evening, the unlikely partners head off to a local bar to see a ropey indie band whose lead singer Jennifer has taken a fancy to, a man who it turns out has a fixation on whether his young fan is a virgin or not. Soon after the gig begins, the venue becomes engulfed in a massive fire, killing several people. Jennifer, in shock, is whisked away from Needy by the singer to his tour van, only to return to her concerned friend's house late that evening covered in blood and ravenously hungry, seemingly in the grip of some form of possession. By the morning, however, Jennifer is seemingly normal again, only now much bitchier towards her friend and with an unhealthy appetite for promiscuity.

The film is exploring terrain similar to hormonal horrors, much closer to Ginger Snaps (2000) than to Carrie (1976), and it is praiseworthy that it tries to subvert the old horror paradigm of approaching the monstrous feminine through the mediating eyes of the male; in positioning Needy as our cipher and illustrating the conflict at the ending of her pre-sexual friendship with Jennifer, the narrative arc breaks away from the usual over-played phallic symbolism and tiresome gender-based tropes. Cody's continuing examination of the relationships of young females through popular mainstream cinema should hopefully encourage other filmmakers to do the same, whilst once again her script shows a keen ear for witty dialogue, creating its own distinctive world of plausible if overly-articulate teenspeak.

However, while there is much to comment on in terms of its themes, the surface of the film falls down on several counts. Firstly, it appears that the confines of genre do the script little favours; the narrative freshness which made Juno such a pleasingly original watch is stifled when confined in the straightjacket of horror convention, and as such the film becomes something of a tiresome spectacle of predictable plotting interspersed with stray snippets of snappy dialogue. Megan Fox is well cast personality-wise as the dislikeable prom queen but is clearly not the physical embodiment of awkward adolescence, while Amanda Seyfried, nicely cast as Needy against her previous Mean Girls (2004) persona, lives up to her nickname far too much to be a likeable protagonist. As such, there is a central lack of sympathy which makes the revenge story trajectory much harder to sustain.

Karyn Kusama, whose previous work includes the under-regarded Girlfight (2000) and the overly-ridiculous Aeon Flux (2005), provides functional if unspectacular direction, never quite pitching the horror at the correct level of scare to sate the thirst of the genre fans, nor sufficiently getting to grips with the comedy to appease the Juno crowd, usually falling between the two stools rather uncomfortably. There are visual nods to Twin Peaks (1990), particularly in the contrasting warm/cold inside/outside lighting, but if David Lynch's work is an intended yardstick, Jennifer's Body is sorely lacking in bite.

Pigs Eels and Insects: Reassessing Imamura Shohei

If there was any unified conclusion to draw from Pigs Eels and Insects, a symposium examining the legacy of Japanese director Imamura Shohei, it was that there are many difficulties in positioning such a unique and at times contradictory oeuvre within a broader analytical framework. For starters, as Jasper Sharp explained in his outline of the industrial and cultural backdrop to Imamura's film-making, the group of Japanese directors of the 1960s commonly grouped together under the umbrella term Nuberu Bagu (New Wave) could hardly be considered to be part of a homogenous thematic, aesthetic or political movement.

Nor is Imamura's output thoroughly consistent, despite in many respects and for a large part clearly suggesting his status as a genuine auteur; Patrick Crogan's appraisal of the later work Black Rain (1989) found thematic and stylistic kinships with the great Ozu Yasujiro, under whom Imamura worked as an assistant and whose subject matter of quietly-suffering members of the lower-middle-classes is ubiquitously viewed as the younger director's anti-inspiration for choosing to focus on the Japanese underclasses ignored by 'quality' cinema. But Black Rain, with its elegaic tone and focus on familial disintegration shows that perhaps the older master's influence was not entirely negative.

Mark Bould also cast doubts over received critical opinion, in this case that suggesting Imamura to be a pro-female director, a tag which perhaps owes much to the frequent comparisons to his similarly-labelled compatriots Naruse Mikio and Mizoguchi Kenji. Rightly questioning whether the strong-willed protagonists such as those in The Insect Woman (1963) and Intentions of Murder (1964) could be considered in any way female role models, at least according to Western models of feminism; all-too-frequently Imamura's heroines achieve some form of triumph and economic independence only through some form of submission, usually reduced to their biological sexual and maternal fuctions. Bould payed special attention to the difference between the English word feminist and the similar-sounding word used in Japanese criticism feminisuto, whose definition is more connoting of a woman's sexual availability.

Where then to place the director's work? Isolde Standish argued that the focus of his films was placed on marginalised characters largely removed from modern Japanese history in order to overcome not only the Westernisation process being imposed on the country since the Allied Occupation, but so too that of the Meiji State, instead going back to what the director considered a more essential 'Japaneseness' found in the folkloric studies of Yanagita Kunio, and thus free the national cinema both from the channels of 'official' history, and also the imported neo-Confucianism of the Samurai rulers. As a unified theory it holds much water, offering an insight into his choices of subject matters: the early films with their emphasis on the underbelly of society, the mid-period documentaries looking at the subjective nature of truth, and films such as The Ballad of Narayama (1983) and The Profound Desire of the Gods (1968) which focused on the agrarian peasantry.

Taking an aesthetic approach, Alastair Phillips focused mainly on early scenes from Vengeance Is Mine (1979) looking at how Imamura visual style in what is one of his less typical films still manages to emphasise some of his recurring themes. Despite being a film with a much higher shooting ratio, appearing to counter the director's favouring of 'messy' cinema, the use of odd, fractured framing and a careful manipulation of looking relations within the cinematic frame combine to create a feeling of temporal and spatial instability. 'Inside' and 'outside' are prominently defined, and part of a larger aesthetic strategy with undertones of voyeurism and spying – here once again surfaces the often blurred distinction in Imamura's films between documentary and fiction, and parallel ideas about the relationship between society and the individual recur.

One final note: Sharp commented that while the starting point for Japanese 'Pink' Cinema is often taken as being the notorious Flesh Market (1962), some critics in fact consider Imamura's own The Insect Woman as the first example of such a film; another reason along with those others discussed as to why the work of this uniquely distinctive director is ripe for reappraisal.

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009, USA)

Thanks to a resurgence in its popularity following the box-office hits Dawn of the Dead (2004) and Shaun of the Dead (2004) earlier in this decade, the zombie film has been enjoying something of a renaissance in the past few years, culminating in the relatively low-key Zombieland topping the US box-office chart ahead of its bigger budget screen rivals. Its arrival is something of a significant one; while Shaun, and to a lesser extent Dawn, were clearly produced by die-hard fans of the genre, Zombieland's existence appears to be largely a product of the increasing mainstream appetite for what could be happily dubbed the zom-com; in short, the undead have become socially acceptable.

The standard formula for this kind of film is a simple one: take some easily-identifiable stock characters, preferably of radically different demeanours and outlooks on life, throw them together and allow them to run amok in their newly-deserted surroundings, give them enough time to learn to rely on each other in a survival situation, add some witty one-liners and some inventive zombie deaths, and wrap things up fairly quickly before the audience starts getting twitchy. Easy, yes? Of course, it really isn't that straightforward, and Zombieland, for its enjoyable performances and at times very witty script, fails to satisfy not for want of containing all of the above constituent elements but on a more basic, fundamental level – the underlying story really isn't up to much.

Not that the setup isn't without promise. We are instantly thrown into the immediately recognizable post-apocalyptic world of the undead, seen first through the eyes of a highly neurotic young man who explains that his very survival is surprisingly a result of these. He narrates us through his Scream (1996)-like list of rules key to the surviving of a zombie invasion, rules which will be pretty well familiar to anyone who has seen more than a couple of these films – fitness, making sure the zombie is fully dead, and the all-important observation of proper seatbelt-wearing procedures – the narration accompanied with the text of the rules graphically incorporated into the unfolding carnage. While it is hard to argue with the rules themselves, the exercise itself is gimmicky, mildly irritating and, on a purely practical level, not nearly comprehensive enough.

Our young guide wants to travel from Texas to Ohio to find out whether his parents have succumbed to the living dead or not, and eventually strikes up with a rather deranged truck driver, insistent that they refer to each other by the impersonal names of their hometowns, Columbus and Tallahassee respectively, in case one needed to expediently dispose of the other one. Tallahassee, it turns out, is also on a mission, though a rather less noble one: to find out if this post-apocalyptic world still contains any Twinkies before they all pass their expiry dates.

There is, however blackly, something inherently funny about a world being overrun by the living dead, and the film-makers here are clearly aiming for the audience's funny bone rather than the cerebellum. In terms of comedy they largely succeed, thanks to their trump card of the choice of actors playing the two male leads - Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson. With the former playing an even more nervous Michael Cera and the latter seemingly playing a less restrained version of the his Natural Born Killers (1994) role, the two together make for as amusing a chalk and cheese duo as could be imagined; not only does the dialogue fizz with glee at their unlikely partnership, but both actors share a gift for physical comedy which is well exploited by director Fleischer.

Zombieland seems to tick a lot of other boxes too. The duration – a crisp 82 minutes – is on the money for a light comedy, and it is creditable that rather than carefully set up the world of the undead we are dropped immediately into it, dispensing with the all-too-common rigmarole of a long-winded prologue. Comedy is clearly what the director is best capable of handling, and in keeping matters light and frivolous never falls into the trap of either lurching into any kind of inappropriate sentimentality, or attempting to shoot anything genuinely nerve-jangling. Last but not least, a cameo in the film's second half, while gratuitously shovelled into the storyline, offers some unexpectedly rich avenues of mirth – just wait for it.

Yet for all of what the film does right, there is too much of a lacklustre feeling to it all. Individual reels are fairly well self-contained, but the narrative threads linking them together are ragged and poorly thought out, and as such the film feels like a series of short sketches rather than a unified homogeneous story. One might easily forgive these inconsistencies in the plotting and tone if the film had more of a sense of charm or innovation, but these appear not within its ambitions. The film actually becomes a something of a bafflingly obtuse genre puzzle, for here is a film with horror elements but which isn't even remotely scary, a road movie but which lacks any real sense of direction, and a character-based comedy but where the most clearly defined motivation is one man's search for a sugar-rich cake snack. Eisenberg may be a funny performer, but his nerdy loser schtick was fleshed out much better in the recent Adventureland (2009), while the main female character Wichita is relegated to being the all-too-easily identifiable Hot And Fairly Kickass Horror Female. In sketching out such predictable, two-dimensional characters, when the film slows down and tries to form a romantic sub-plot, it falls woefully flat.

Zombieland entertains more than most comedies, largely thanks to its two leads, but the flaws in its conception and execution betray a certain degree of disingenuousness surrounding the film. The reflexivity of Columbus' 'rules' appears to suggest an homage to the zombie movie genre, yet the film-makers fail to display this anywhere else; is the film therefore as much a superficial cash-in on contemporary big-name successes as the likes of Scary Movie (2000), Meet the Spartans (2008) et al? It is a mark of how far zombie movies have come from the realm of exploitation into the mainstream consciousness. But like the elusive Twinkie that Tallahassee is seeking to find, Zombieland may taste superficially deliciously sweet, but it leaves an uncomfortable sickly feeling in the stomach afterwards.