Hollywood Reel Independent ’17: Seppuku (short)

She goes by Marie, but her parents call her Mari. That gives you an idea of the generational divide separating them. Frankly, the prospective Olympian is not inclined to deal with her family or her heritage, but a possibly career-ending injury sparks a fantastically-charged journey into her subconscious that may very well change everything (one way or another) in Daryn Wakasa’s short film Seppuku, which screens as part of the Shorts 18g program at this year’s Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival.

Mari/Marie holds the record for the 400 meter, but she will probably miss the Olympics due to a torn hamstring. Surgery would be the logical course of action, but Mari is acting on emotion, lashing out at her parents and defiantly training anyway. Her workout looks painful even before she crashes and blackouts.

Suddenly, Mari finds herself in the desert, accompanied by Bettari, a Ghost of Christmas Future-like figure, who also bears some resemblance to the nurse she encountered earlier in the day. Mari will dutifully follow Bettari (presumably a reference to the bridal kimono-wearing “nothing but blackened teeth” Ohaguro Bettari Yokai spirits) to the Manzanar internment camp, where she will face an increasingly strange series of challenges.

Seppuku was shot on-location at Manzanar and a medical office, both of which look like really depressing places to spend Purgatory. However, Seppuku boasts an impressive, feature worthy cast, including emerging star Akemi Look, a former member of the U.S. Rhythmic Gymnastics team, who has the appropriate athleticism and stubborn intensity to convincingly portray Mari.

Tamlyn Tomita (Look’s co-star in the ridiculously underseen Unbidden) is totally believable and ultimately quite touching as Mari’s long-suffering mother Linda and Tomita’s Karate Kid II co-star Yuji Okumoto buttresses the film with his solid, dignified presence as her father, Thomas. It is always great to see them, but in this case, their grounded performances really help anchor the symbolically-charged Seppuku.

Short film-making is usually an adventure in scarce resource allocation, but cinematographer Ernesto Lomeli really makes the desert scenes look cinematically surreal. This is definitely a feature-quality short and the twenty-five-minute running time should be sufficiently long enough for most viewers to emotionally engage with it. Recommended for psychologically expressive, socially-conscious cinema, Seppuku screens this Saturday (2/18) during the 2017 Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival.

Beta Test: Game Hard

Andrew Kincaid is like the Mike Bloomberg of gaming companies. An ardent gun control supporter, he coins the slogan: “keep guns in games.” He is also determined to keep his company’s technology out of the hands of the military. Of course, it is all for the sake of preventing obstacles to his megalomaniacal quest for power. Unfortunately, his toughest critic will literally find himself playing the villain in Kincaid latest video game. The game’s repercussions on real life will also come as a nasty shock to the first test player in Nicholas Gyeney’s Beta Test (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New Jersey.

Max Troy has not left his house for the last two years. He obviously has issues, but also made bank testing and sometimes modifying Kincaid’s releases. The newest first-person shooter seems unusually real, because it is. Thanks to a chip implant, former Sentinel executive and all-around hardnose Orson Creed will helplessly embark on a Grand Theft Auto style crime spree, with Troy at the controls. However, Troy puts two and two together quicker than most movie characters, forcing Kincaid to dispatch a team of colorful henchmen to keep Troy playing the game at gunpoint. Unfortunately, the in-game premise—the abduction of Creed’s wife Abbie, who also happens to be Kincaid’s ex—is similarly all too true.

Gyeney and co-screenwriter Andre Kirkman are startlingly gutsy when they reveal Kincaid has forced a patsy to commit a Columbine-style school shooting to advance his agenda. However, they apparently felt the need to water-down the film’s Second Amendment implications with some clichéd rhetoric castigating Kincaid as a one percenter. It just sounds unnatural coming out of Creed’s rightwing-looking mouth.

At least Creed can fight. Creed is the first lead role in a film for Manu Bennett, best known as Crixus in Spartacus. He certainly has the physical presence and his weird growling voice is actually quite effective. Executive producer Kevon Stover, Edward Michael Scott, and Yuji Okumoto (from Karate Kid II and Awesome Asian Bad Guys) add energy and villainous verve as Kincaid’s hit squad. Linden Ashby is suitably slippery and slimy as the evil gaming tycoon, but unfortunately, Larenz Tate is rather bland and lightweight as the house-bound Troy.

In all honesty, Beta Test often looks like a B-movie in problematic ways. However, there are some impressively brutal fight scenes and it is almost hypnotically compelling to watch the bearded-up and bespectacled Bennett do his thing. Recommended as a guilty pleasure with some degree of implied support for personal liberties, Beta Test opens tomorrow (7/22) at the AMC Loews Jersey Gardens in Elizabeth.