I don’t have the energy to write in-depth reviews of all the films I saw at TIFF, so I’ll keep the rest short.

Black Ocean

A Belgian movie about a French naval ship and its crew. Very character-focussed and tried to depict the relationships, friendly and otherwise, between the sailors on the ship. It works up to a point, but after a while, you realize that nothing is happening in the movie except for a bunch of guys hanging out on a boat. It really went downhill for me when they tried to put in an antiwar message near the end by having one of the characters go through an arbitrary and dramatic emotional change. One positive note: the crew has a dog for a pet and he is cute.

1.5 out of 5

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

My friend told me that this Chinese martial arts fantasy was originally meant to be in 3D. It definitely showed up in many of the more spectacular special effects shots as they used camera angles and moves that you wouldn’t normally see in conventional cinema. Beyond the visuals, however, this film didn’t offer much else. The plot’s central mystery started off interestingly enough in an Indiana Jones supernatural kind of way, but soon got way too convoluted for its own good. Spoiler: the real villain is the guy you least expect, which means it was actually the most obvious guy to begin with.

2 out of 5

ANPO

This documentary might have been interesting had I been able to keep up with the subtitles. Watching a documentary with subtitles is like reading a textbook, and it didn’t help that I was watching my fifth consecutive subtitled film. The subject of the documentary—American military presence in Japan as visualized by various Japanese artists—still sounds fascinating to me, but honestly, guys, I was very tired. Nevertheless, there were some powerful images that have stuck with me, e.g. a photograph of an accident involving an American military truck hitting a Japanese girl. The expressions on the soldiers’ faces spoke volumes.

(I don’t know) out of 5

More to come…