Huh?

I’ve been scratching my head a lot these past couple of days at the festival. Some of the movies are just too odd, even for me (and I tend to like odd). They’ve been either outlandish, unhinged, nonsensical or just plain all of the above, and right now I’m just not really all that sure what to say about any of them.

Leading the pack is the highly weird South Korean high school comedy Dasepo Naughty Girls. This is one of the most histrionic, all over the place, bizarrely sexual and freakishly outlandish pictures I frankly have ever seen. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it, director Je-yong Lee’s adaptation of what I can only assume (I haven’t Googled to find out yet… sorry) to be a comic book beyond anything you’ve ever imagined.

But beneath the layers of sexual innuendo, karaoke singing, dance numbers, crazy costumes, clingy stuffed animals, one-eyed outcasts and school girl cross-dressing there are actual merits and morals being discussed within this thing. For all the weirdness (and, trust me, any movie featuring a hundred-foot tall sexually ambiguous female snake, a snake which had just been vomited by an elderly male, being repelled by a legion of high school students simulating masturbation has plenty of weirdness) the movie has one of the best dialogues of what it means to be transgender I have probably ever seen.

It is a knock-out moment in a film filled with a legion of head-scratching ones, and almost by itself it raises Dasepo Naughty Girls from being an outlandish curiosity into a thoughtfully perceptive must. Granted, that’s an awfully big almost, and for the life of me I can’t imagine anyone but cult film fanatics going completely crazy over the thing. But it is certainly different, and considering we’re in the middle of the summer Hollywood silly season (Surf’s Up or Spider-Man 3, anyone?) when different is almost a naughty world that makes discovering it at SIFF worth it right there.

Bewildering in a completely different way, Xiaogang Feng’s The Banquet starring Ziyi Zhang (Memoirs of a Geisha) and Daniel Wu (New Police Story) is as perplexing an action-driven melodrama as you’re ever likely to find. A loose (very loose) adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the director makes on major miscalculation here. The main character, brooding sadsack outcast Prince Wu Luan (Wu), is an out disaster. He’s whiny. He’s weepy. He’s unbelievably one-dimensional. He’s also a spectator in his own dramatic play which makes him incredibly uninteresting.

Yet he’s the one all of the women, including the Empress (Zhang) and her handmaiden Qing Nu (Xun Zhou) are hungering for. Their the ones calculating, scheming, loving, learning and doing all they can to both ensure their love’s survival from his Uncle the Emperor’s (You Ge) murderous machinations. But why? The kid isn’t worth either their efforts or their love, his constantly downcast demeanor enough to make even the happiest Care Bear or Teletubby reach for the Paxil.

Thankfully, both women are fantastic. Truly fantastic, actually, both of them turning in such tumultuously complicated performance it is a pity this film hasn’t found a domestic distributor so I could talk about them more come December. It is also glorious filmed, Yuen Woo-ping’s (The Matrix) familiar fight and action choreography not only amazing but breathtakingly beautiful as well. All this makes for discomforting mixed bag, The Banquet filled with moments of pure poetry all of them surrounding a center of painful banality virtually impossible to escape.

Another odd one is the much-hyped New Zealand horror/comedy Black Sheep. I’ve been hearing for months that this gross-out science-gone-wrong B-movie was a true laugh-out-loud original in the vein of Tremors. It isn’t, not even remotely, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a lot of fun. The film can be a blood-soaked hoot, and the first time someone morphed from normal everyday human being into flesh-eating Weresheep I almost peed my panties I was giggling so ferociously.

But the pace is uneven at best, plodding at worst, writer/director Jonathan King not able to keep things moving even with scenes of voracious fluffy white sheep galloping menacingly across the New Zealand countryside. Even at a paltry 87 minutes this thing is far too long, and as funny as the sound of man-eating little lambs are the joke still feels a bit like a Saturday Night Live skit stretched out far past its breaking point.

Finally there was Poltergay, a French comedy about a straight couple moving into an old dilapidated house haunted by a quintet of disco-dancing gay men. The premise seems like it can’t miss, but while there are definitely a few solid laughs overall I sat in my theater seat twiddling my thumbs hoping the next movie was going to be better. It didn’t work for me, and the only thing I wanted to do while sitting in the theater was bolt out the door and see something else.

Luckily, that’s exactly what I get to do today. There’s only eight days left and I, for one, intend to try and make the best of them!