Day: May 18, 2024

Tenement was watched as part of the Seattle International Film Festival 2024! It had its showing on Friday, May 17th as part of the festival, and it was the North American premiere of this film!

Sorya (Thanet Thorn) is a Japanese-Cambodia woman and a Manga artist, who has already hit a wall in life. She likes what she does, but it isn’t challenge, and she wants to make a horror manga. Also, her mom died. That is important. Because of the death, and wanting to make the book, Sorya wants to go back to her ancestral home in Cambodia, to the same apartment complex where her mom used to live, to help for inspiration, and her own life in general.

And heck, this place is a dumb. People seem friendly, but you can tell it has not been maintained in any level, and its just rubble. Her boyfriend Daichi (Yoshihiko Hosoda) joins her on this adventure, and she is also able to meet her Aunt Mao (Sveng Socheata), who still lives there. This surely will be a great place for inspiration.

Unfortunately, they didn’t know how apt the horror would be. With basically cults running around and rituals, it turns out their stay here as tenants might not be that long.

Also starring Sahrah Pich Manika, Rous Mony, and Touch Narady.

Exactly what I like waking up to see. All of my neighbors with candles watching me, for protection. Tenement feels almost meta in a sense. The lead couple wants to go to this complex, specifically to get a horror feel, and of course that is what they get. They get weirdly terrorized in their sleep. They have creepy kids singing songs. They get to worry if everything is just a dream.

But all of these elements just felt like regular horror staples. It was interesting that they were so up front with the horror aspects at the start. They didn’t keep things in the dark and rely entirely on jump scares or anything like that. It just failed to capture me at all on the story. It was boring, with a few interesting scenes thrown in. And, I can also say that I didn’t like the ending that much.

Now, there can be a lot more to this story that I am unaware of. Like Cambodian history, or the area, and that all might have deeper meanings, but I am just a lost American, looking for scares, and getting a movie that felt disappointing in that aspect.

Oh well. Might still be worth a watch for the visuals, but my overall disappointment in the matter is what judged this rating.

1 out of 4.

We Strangers was watched as part of the Seattle International Film Festival 2024! It had its showing on Friday, May 17th as part of the festival, and it was the Seattle premiere of this film!

Ray Martin (Kirby) has a shitty job, that frankly, she doesn’t love. She is a room/home/building cleaner. She works for a service, they provide the jobs and locations, she does the work, she gets paid. It is one of those things where she knows they obviously pay the company a lot and she only gets a fraction of the services, but at least she gets to mostly work alone and not interact with the clients.

After working on an office building that a new client bought, but needed it de-trashed, sees how she did, he wonders if he can hire her personally. Just some rich doctor guy, let her say a much higher value than she normally makes, and he said sure. He just needs his own house cleaned, and is willing to pay top dollar.

Now, during that clean? A neighbor sees her, questions her, and apparently talks to the client about it. Because now she wants a cleaner. The doctor weirdly pays for it, but hey, money is money. This leads her to suddenly more and more clients, who have their own intricacies and secrets that she is going to discover. Like, one of the clients believes in ghosts and mediums. Seems like a great time for Ray to mention she totally can do that as well, and make house calls. Talk to ghosts? For cash? Sure. Why not.

Also starring Hari Dhillon, Maria Dizzia, Paul Adelstein, Sarah Goldberg, and Tina Lifford.

Sometimes you just gotta stare off, to help find those ghost spirits. Yeah, fuck the rich. Spending lavish money on services, but treating the people in those services as lesser individuals. I think that is a big theme at SIFF this year. Fuck the rich.

Kirby does a great role as the lead. She isn’t overacting in any sense. She just seems like a normal person. It is the rich people with the eccentricities who are acting strange comparatively, even when Kirby is talking to spirits. The secrets between the rich folk are pretty obvious to discern, and not as extra as one would hope. You know, me, a movie goer, looking for drama.

Unfortunately for We Strangers, which I can say is well made enough, well acted enough, is just an okay variation of this story. No giant “fuck yous” as the end. Everything remains subtle. Everything stays chill. Just too chill for it to have higher than a 2 rating.

2 out of 4.

Resynator was watched as part of the Seattle International Film Festival 2024! It had its showing on Friday, May 17th as part of the festival, and it was the Seattle premiere of this film!

You can trip on my Synthesizer, electronic world for every boy and every girl.

The synthesizer is probably the best new instrument since…I don’t know? What was the last instrument invented after all the drums, brass, woodwinds, strings came out hundreds and hundreds of years ago? The accordion? Who knows. But the synthesizer helped transform music, and how to play music, and gave me a lot of danceable tracks and I appreciate it.

Now, for Alison Tavel, the director and theoretical subject of this documentary, she grew up hearing that her dad invented the synthesizer, and worked with all of these famous people. Her dad whom she never met, because he died when she was just ten weeks old in a car accident. She never knew what to believe, figured a lot of it was just weird lies, and never questioned it. But now that she is in her mid 20s, she wanted to know the truth, and unpacked his creation packed away in a box in their attic, the Resynator.

And this documentary is about that journey. The journey to find out what the Resynator was, why it isn’t famous, what could it do, does it still work, and what happened with her father. And you know, of course, learn a little bit more about herself along the way.

This is when she realized she shouldn’t have lost the user manual. As like any good documentary, Alison is going to find out some harsh things about her dad. Things her mom kept from her, because it wasn’t relevant. But things that were also great and accurate about things he did and accomplish.

And in the journey, she wants the good and the bad, she finds out what stories were tall truths and which ones were mostly correct. That’s how we get sections of this documentary with people like Peter Gabriel, who was said to have bought three Resynators, and he is able to confirm the accuracy of the story and be a nice win.

This is a feel good documentary overall, of a woman discovering herself, and coming to terms with things that were kept from her for good reason. And that is a fine idea for a documentary.

But real life can mimic other things, and sure enough, this just feels like a story I have heard over and over again in terms of documentaries. Someone going off to discover the truth about a relative, who died when they were young, and not liking the overall picture they find. For some reason, they also put this on camera for us all to see. It is a very common type of documentary. And Resynator, with some cool information on a synthesizer machine that did not get to the mainstream as many thought it might, was interesting for sure. And unfortunately the rest is just more of the same.

This is all very strange to say for documentary since it isn’t fiction, but like I said, see enough of these things and you can see the commonalities. Oh well. Plenty of people will watch this documentary and probably love it! So if the topic sounds interesting, it certainly will deliver on that front.

2 out of 4.