FWWeekly's Coverage of LSIFF: Dark and Disturbing Times

Wow, the 2nd day of LSIFF sure served up a lot of angst and outright horror. Primarily I'm thinking of the shorts program that started off the evening. The Wonder Hospital is a disquieting Dali-esque animated Korean film around a daughter who goes into a hospital for cosmetic surgery and has it go very wrong indeed. That was followed up by Pinched, another animated film (this one from the U.S.

about a pickpocket battling schizophrenia, personified by a giant dreadlocked gorilla with a Caribbean accent. The racial caricature made me uneasy, as did the conclusion implying that a girl's love can cause mental illness go away. Yet there's no denying the trickery of David Vandervoort's drawing style, about midway between Jules Feiffer and Gorillaz' music videos. I wasn't offended by it, though, like I was with Matthew Morgenthaler's Love Me Tender, a slasher flick about a wholesome girl seeking a "white horse" and hacking to end any boy who doesn't measure up. I'm told the intentions were satirical; any humor the picture had was confounded on me. Then there was a Swedish film called An Intimacy With Dolls, which told much the same level but in more effective terms, with a woman in her 30s dressed up as a doll (knee socks, frilly blouse, short tutu) and playing out a level with dolls that ends with her committing violence against both dolls and people. What is with all these unhinged women early in the release? The Swedish film is nicely hinky, but Marwencol addressed dolls in more creative terms yesterday.There was a much funnier entry with the Finnish short The Patient, which is almost a security guard at a mental hospital who's making rounds later at night when he runs into a patient outside the guard who claims to be an angel. The twist is that the patient may be right, but there's one more twist after that. The dead is good of that deadpan Finnish sense of temper that one sometimes hears about, as the guard unleashes an astonishing monologue that goes seamlessly from "What was in the world before the Big Hit?" to "Why does the Easter Bunny exist? And isn't it unusual that a bunny lays eggs made of chocolate?" The most frightening short film was S. Vollie Osborn's Monsters Down the Hall, in which a kid in New York City sees his heroin-addicted mom coming out of an apartment down the hall and is told by her to never go in there. Naturally, he imagines the post as good of monsters. The filmmakers do an excellent job of devising that apartment building appear like something in one of Hell's sleazier neighborhoods, and the creatures there would do any haunted house proud.The have I saw was Monogamy, the first fiction film by Dana Adam Shapiro, whose documentary Murderball was my favourite movie of 2005. I had high hopes for this thing, which only set me up for disappointment. Chris Messina (from Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the recent Devil) stars as a New York City photographer who's hired by several people to take candid shots of them from afar as they go around their business. One hot young womanhood who hires him starts masturbating in public, visible only to his camera lens. Then she starts engaging in high-risk sexual activity for the welfare of his camera. His fiancee (Rashida Jones) knows about this from the beginning. I guess later on his obsession starts driving them apart somehow. It's not very clear. The picture does leave us Rashida Jones singing and playing guitar; it's no storm that Quincy Jones' daughter is musically talented. Still, what starts out as an intriguing erotic thriller with psychological overtones turns into a tedious disquisition on pre-wedding jitters. That's no fun.I went directly to Mark Claywell's documentary American Jihadist. I lost the first few minutes, but I caught the effect of this profile of Clevin Holt, an African-American U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who converted to Islam in the seventies and changed his call to Isa Abdullah Ali. Isa went rogue and travelled to Iran, Afghanistan, and Bosnia to aid revolutionaries spread the book of Allah and oppose the Shah, occupying Soviets, and genocidal Serbs. The CIA kept careful tabs on him the all time, yet they were powerless to save him out of Us or off any planes because he merely provided training for the Muslim insurgents/guerrillas/freedom fighters/what you will. There's no evidence that he always took office in any war crimes or terrorist acts. He has since settled in Bosnia, and if he has any sort of thought on the terrorists currently waging war on Islam's behalf, I lost it. The insights into him aren't deep, but his account is interesting enough to be worth hearing.The festival is running humorous locally made segments before showings about people applying movie logic to real-world situations. I view the one before Marwencol would be the just one, but there was another one before the shorts program, so apparently there'll be more of these. The beginning was a pretty lame bit about a dude trying to do an inception on his girlfriend so she'll let him watch football on Sundays. The moment was often better, with a guy deciding to cut an animal bite that he sustains while gardening. ("It's likely a bat! I'll go into a vampire! We'll be wealthy and I'll have diamonds in my skin!") I badly needed the dosage of wit on this night. If there are more of these, I'll spend the book along.