Friday, July 28, 2006

Rare Noir & The Hidden Blade

More Fantasia is up: Tokyo Zombie, SARS Wars, Blood Rain.

I like the Brattle. They know me there. When I went to Trailer Treats last week, some of the folks asked if I'd seen The Hidden Blade yet, and I had to say that I'd been out of town inhaling a whole bunch of other Asian theater. The way things worked out, I didn't get a chance to see it until Wednesday night, when it was down to one screening a night, and not much chance to give the last day a hard sell.

Still, that doesn't mean that the best part of Tuesday night's Rare Noir double feature wasn't seeing the Psycho trailer twice. Some of these things are rarely screened and not available on video because they're just not very good. The Captive City is mainly just overly earnest, Witness to Murder just invites a pun involving the use of the word "witless" for a tagline.

Hitchcock & Friends at the Brattle this weekend - I fully intend to make Matt come to Rear Window on Sunday, because it's Rear Window, darn it, and the boy has never seen it but liked Dial M For Murder in 3-D last year and more Grace Kelly is a good thing. Hopefully I'll be able to do The Birds and Jaws tomorrow. I have, to my shame, never seen Jaws. And I love Spielberg. So even if I don't particularly love The Birds... Yeah, I'll probably skip whatever I was planning to see after The Ant Bully at the furniture store. Hitchcock and Spielberg, after all.

The Captive City

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2006 at the Brattle (Rare Film Noir)

There's something almost quaint about this movie by cinematic chameleon Robert Wise. I can't imagine a movie inserting a member of the U.S. Senate so prominently and in such an unambiguously positive light as Estes Kefauver's cameo appearance here. The characters go out of their way to define what the mafia is, and their primary concern seems to be gambling. Mention is made of vice and narcotics, but only briefly. It's almost like the filmmakers are willing to scare the audience about the mob being in their town, but they're not going to imply the presense of prostitutes or drugs.

Still, pretty cut and dried. John Forsythe's reporter never seems to seriously think about backing down, so it's just a matter of time before we're back at the beginning, where he started telling his story in flashback - at which point the tension just dissolves.

Full review at HBS.

Witness To Murder

* * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2006 at the Brattle (Rare Film Noir)

Still, that's better than this thing. I mentioned the greatness of Rear Window earlier, and while this starts from the same basic premise - person sees a murder in the neighbor's apartment, but has no proof - but this just goes completely off the tracks. Stanwyck is clearly too old for the part, and the relationship between her and the detective played by Gary Merrill is just peculiar. How great a romance can you get when the man is constantly trying to convince the woman that she was just seeing things? It's weirdly paternalistic and vaguely mysoginistic, I think. Still, props to George Sanders as the oily villain of the piece, especially when he gets to go into Nazi mode toward the end.

Full review at HBS.

The Hidden Blade (Kakushi ken oni no tsume)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2006 at Landmark Kendall Square #9 (First-run)

I came into this expecting to like it, but a little wary, because I figured that a lot of what made The Twilight Samurai was how self-representative it was; there was a clear line to be drawn between Yoji Yamada and his hero, both being loyal soldiers who finally, at the end of their runs, got to show what they really capable of (but regretted nothing becaues family came first).

Which meant I was very pleasantly surprised by the actual result. This is a sweet, lovable movie starring Masatoshi Nagase as a samurai whose sense of duty compels him to do more (and less) than obey orders. He loves Takako Matsu's Kie, but they can't be together because of the differences in caste. It's tragic but real, which makes the last scene just a thing of beauty.

I also love the way samurai are portrayed in these movies. They are, today, revered as a class of honorable warriors, but they're also just guys. Nagase's character can be a guy who is acknowledged as a great swordsman, but he and the other samurai aren't out of place in scenes teasing his little sister, finding themselves uncomfortable with new modern warfare, and the like. I can't think of many other movies which do such a good job of portraying characters both as noble warriors and regular guys.


The backlog: 11 Fantasia films, 13 from around here. It seems almost possible to catch up sometime in August or September.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Eight Weeks of Film History: 1895-1939 - Buster Keaton and other things

More Fantasia is up: The Art of Fighting.

If I've got any regrets about Fantasia, its that it and going back to Maine for the Fourth of July have resulted in me missing a whole bunch of the Harvard Film Archive's great "Eight Weeks of FIlm History" summer program, and the Brattle's vertical schedule will do a number on the rest. Last night was the first part of the series I was able to get to. Fortunately, the early cinema is playing Mondays, so I should be able to see a good chunk of that. Silent films are just delightful, especially comedies.

(Really, somebody ought to get Jim Carrey to do a silent comedy. Rock stars play acoustic sets, so why shouldn't movie stars do something like this?)

I would have liked more Buster Keaton and less Soviet strangeness, but it was a fun show. I love how people bring kids to silent comedies whenever they play in the area, especially when it's not a relatively expensive Alloy Orchestra show.

"Glumov's Diary" ("Dnevnik Glumova")

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Eight Weeks of Film History)

Uh... OK. This is five minues of clowns, often turning into other things. It's bizare and surreal, and I imagine it makes a lot more sense when seen as originally intended, as part of a play Sergei Eisenstein was directing at the time. As a free-standing thing... Uh, whatever.

A Sixth Part of the World (Shestaia Chast Mira)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Eight Weeks of Film History)

An interesting film, created by the director of The Man with a Movie Camera to sell Soviet products. As with a lot of Soviet propoganda, the message is rather heavy-handed, especially toward the end; I notice that early in the movie, a cross is shown without any comment, but by the end, the intertitles extolling communist virtues are saying "here, people are still trusting in Jesus" (and Buddha and Allah) with an almost-astonished air of superiority. I wonder if there was a tacit understanding between the filmmakers and audience that the indoctrination wouldn't come until the end, and you could slip out early if you wanted.

As I said, it's interesting - Dziga Vertov does some very neat things with editing, cutting between locations to call attention to both their distance and closeness. There's a very poetic structure to it, and it must have been a very daunting undertaking in 1926 to get documentary footage from the entire sweep of the Soviet Union. I seldom tend to think of Russia now or the USSR before as ethnically and culturally diverse, but it must be, just from the sheer amount and variety of territory it includes. Still, even at just over an hour, the poetic feel without a narrative is trying at times. It's a nicely assembled series of images, but it sort of goes on and on.

Full review at HBS.

"The Baloonatic"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Eight Weeks of Film History)

So, what's 23 minutes, two reels? Two reels of funny, that is. Buster Keaton strings gag after gag together, first at a boardwalk of hazardous amusements, then in a balloon that accidentally launched while he was affixing a flag to the top, and finally in the woods where he has trouble fishing and encounters a pretty girl out camping.

I didn't think about it at the time, but good job on faking the aerial bits. At no point did I think that the balloon was earthbound or shot against rear-projection, although I did occasionally notice some odd cropping. As great as Keaton was as a performer and gagman, he's also a darned good director.

(So, today, Buster's #1, Harold Lloyd's #2, and Caplin's #3. But that could change the next time I see one of their movies)

Shrelock Jr.

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Eight Weeks of Film History)

I don't know if this is as consistently and constantly brilliant as The General or Steamboat Bill Jr., but it's got arguably the greatest dream sequence in movie history. Consider how clear it is that Buster inserting himself and the rest of the cast into the movie his character is projecting is a dream sequence, and then try and remember how many other times you've gotten invested with the events in such a sequence. The dream/film-within-a-film in Sherlock Jr. matters to the audience even though we know intellectually that it will have no consequences.

It's also filled with some of the most brilliant slapstick of the tight forty-five minute film, from broad cartoonish set-ups to pool shark manouveurs. We're quite pleased to dispose of the plot in the real world and watch it play out in the dream instead. And, of course, Buster's moving in and out of the screen is great shooting and editing.

Full review at HBS.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Weekend update: 22-23 July

Went to the Brattle's "Trailer Treats" event on Thursday. It's kind of a good time, and the money raised goes to keeping the place open, which everybody who enjoys film wants to see happen. I wound up making out like a bandit - answering a trivia question (Crispin Glover starred in the remake of Willard) to win a Marx Brothers box set, and then literally minutes later being having my raffle ticket drawn to win the gift bucket full of crap (and a Coen Brothers box set). I wound up letting anyone who wanted to pick over it take what they want, and I'll probably wind up selling the movies I have duplicates of on ebay and giving the procedes to the Brattle. There's still a bunch of stuff I have no idea how I'll ever use them.

Still, Ned, Ivy and company must be taking my threats for what I'd do if I win their Guaranteed request raffle a little more seriously. Here's what I've come up with as double-feature possibilities:

Survive Style 5+ and Funky Forest: The First Contact - see just how much Japanese randomness an audience can take.

The Great Yokai War and Zebraman - someone's going to screen Yokai for me, since it ran in Cambridge when I was in Montreal and Montreal when I was in Cambridge, and another family-ish thing from Miike sounds like a fine companion. Or A Chinese Tall Story.

Crimewave and The Hudsucker Proxy - Raimis. Coens. Bruce Campbell. Good luck finding a non-sucky print of Crimewave.

SPL and One Night in Mongkok - two recent Hong Kong action movies I've heard excellent things about.

It's a Fantasia-centric list, which gives me an excuse to mention two more completed reviews: Black Kiss and Bad Blood. This leaves me with 15 Fantasia films and 8 others in the backlog. Forty movies in eleven days can really make getting caught up tough, as can seeing more movies than you right up in a four-day period. The three new ones are...

Monster House

* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2006 at AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run) (digital 3-D)

I told Matt, hey, let's go see some cool technology yesterday morning, and Monster House delivered. The movie is a fun little scary story for kids, and if it relies on familiar gags when the kids are talking with each other, it's still full of energy. At one point during the big action finale I leaned over to whisper that this scene alone was worth the extra $2, and it was. The 3-D isn't quite so well-utilized as in The Polar Express, but it's a better story.

The same technology is used as was used with Chicken Little, apparently shooting video out at 144 frames per second (72 per eye), resulting in an exceptionally smooth picture. I generally avoid digital projection whenever I can, and still maintain that film looks better in most all situations, but this is something special.

Full review at HBS.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2006 at AMC Fenway #5 (first-run)

There's a good chance others don't like this movie as much as I do, but I laughed from start to finish. Luke Wilson does great reaction shots, Uma Thurman is gorgeous and funny, there are no unfunny supporting characters who exist just to move the plot along. And there's the shark, which is even funnier in the movie than it was in the preview.

Also, I like its approach to telling a superhero story. Even comic books not allied with DC and Marvel often feel the need to create a whole planet full of superheroes when you probably just need one or two to tell the story you're interested in. It's been about ten years since G-Girl's first appearance, so we don't get a lot of how a superhero appearing upsets the world order; we just assume they've dealt with it. And they don't give her a spandex costume, but just let her dress in stuff that looks good and identifies her. I mean, really - does anybody really think a female superhero would just have the one costume? Yeah, it's a stereotype, but it works here.

Full review at HBS.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2006 at Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run)

I joke that I don't like the idea of electric cars - after all, I'm a pedestrian, and I wouldn't hear one of those silent things coming. I like the idea of a zero-emission vehicle a lot, though, and if I ever had to own a car, I'd like to think it would be something like the Saturn EV-1 which serves as the main focus of the movie.

I can't, though, since as filmmaker Chris Paine documents, General Motors not only discontinued the model, but took all the existing cars back and destroyed them; similar things happened with other EV models. The story of why and how this happens is almost too strange to be non-fiction, but is presented in a calm manner that manages to advocate without attacking the audience that's not already on its side. Paine relies on the famous and near-famous a little too much, and has to rely on stock footage because the cars had been recalled when he started the film to actually show the EV-1, but give him credit: This is the rare documentary that might actually convince somebody, rather than just repulse people on the other side.

Full review at HBS.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Rare Film Noir Week 1: Pushover and Nightfall

Rested Monday evening by watching the ballgame, but was back on the two-movies-a-night horse on Tuesday, as the Brattle started its summer "vertical" calendar wtih the first week of their "rare film noir" series, which they're pitching on the calendar as all-new 35mm prints. The two shown last night did look pretty darn good. Only two of the nine films in this series are available on video, and though I'd normally look at a bunch of new prints and say, well, they've got to be coming soon, right?, tonight's were from Columbia, and Sony really doesn't seem to be interested in exploiting their catalog like Warner does.

Pity; these are fun little crime movies. I don't know if there's really a place for movies like these two any more; they're designed to be part of a double bill, and are neither prestige pictures or event movies. They're simple crime stories, under ninety minutes, with a pretty girl and a definite conclusion. They're really almost too simple for today's film or TV, but they're an enjoyable watch.

Worth mentioning: This was the most crowded I've seen the Brattle for a "regular" series in a long time; as much as I love it when they have old movies, those generally don't seem to pay the bills nearly as well as the weekend special features or festivals. Last night, though, was pretty close to packed - I had people in one of the seats next to me and had to mill around to find a seat I liked. I don't know whether that's a result of it being ridiculously hot and the place having air conditioning or whether something not being available on video is a big draw. At any rate, good show.

Pushover

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)

A nicely twisty story of a cop (Fred MacMurray) who falls for the woman he and his team are investigating as being connected to a bank robbery that left a guard dead. The crook barely appears; instead, we get Kim Novak in her first big role doing the femme fatale thing, corrupting MacMurray's detective to the point of murder.

The weird thing: The good cop working with MacMurray's Paul Sheridan, played by Philip Carey, winds up as the hero but he and the other cops watching Novak's apartment from across the way have their binoculars wander into other apartments an awful lot, particularly that of Dorothy Malone's neighbor. I imagine it must happen, although nowadays you'd probably use a stationary camera hooked up to a VCR and not leave a record of your peeping. Also, cell phones would completely destroy this plot, as I imagine they would for a lot of old suspense stories.

Full review at HBS.

Nightfall

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)

There's something almost caper-y about this one, at least in a segment where Anne Bancroft, playing a model Aldo Ray's fugitive meets in Los Angeles, tries to warn him of imminent danger during a fashion show. Ray's a likeable protagonist, on the run from both the police and the hoods who killed his best friend and framed him for both that murder and a bank robbery; only Bancroft's Marie and James Gregory's insurance investigator seem to think he might be innocent, while Brian Keith and Rudy Bond are menacing as the men chasing him.

Unlike a lot of noirs, this one spends a fair amount of time in the "blanc", as the final sequence takes place in Wyoming, with the road just plowed enough for all the characters to find the stolen loot at an ice-fishing shed. This scene also features a potentially gruesome use of a snowplow, and I have to admit, a week and a half of modern genre film at Fantasia had me slightly confused when blood and guts weren't splattered all over the place.

Full review at HBS.

Speaking of Fantasia...

Reviews for The Woods and Tape 31 are up at HBS/EFC (the corresponding blog entries have been expanded a bit, too). So including the two movies above, I've got 17 Fantasia films and 5 "others" before I'm caught up.

Monday, July 17, 2006

Fantasia '06, Day 11: And that's a wrap (for me, at least)

Two from Saturday are up: The Gravedancers and The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai. Both of them are playing today, if you're lucky enough to still be in Montreal for the festival.

Got up, checked out, and stowed my big gym bag of laundry at the bus station before heading for my last taste of Cocktail Hawaii for another year and a full day of movies. I admit, by mid-afternoon, I was strongly considering seeing if their was an earlier bus; I think I could have slept through a half-hour of Vampire Cop Ricky without noticing I'd slept through a half hour of it (it's really back-loaded); the three featurettes from Japan that I thought I'd get through easily turned out to be trying in their own way. Maybe, I thought, arriving in Boston at 6.30am tomorrow and then heading straight to work is a bad idea I could avoid by going home now.

Fortunately, things started looking up from there. Samurai Commando 1549 was kind of a blast, as any combination of feudal samurai and twenty-first century tanks must inevitably be. And Train Man wound up being pretty darn adorable, almost as good as Viz's entry to the festival last year, Kamikaze Girls (which I still adore; I wish I could have made Friday's outdoor screening). And I think it was really good to end my time at the festival on a romantic comedy; I was just about completely serial-killer-ed out by the end of last week. Train Man is a delight, though - I hope Viz gets it more than the two screens Kamikaze Girls got.

Today's plan, if I were still in Montreal: The Red Shoes, Isolation, and Synesthesia. But I'm not and I've got no screeners. Stupid day job.

Vampire Cop Ricky (Heup-hyeol-hyeongsa Nadoyeol)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Vampire Cop Ricky opens with a scene that strikes me very funny - in a dark Transylvanian castle, Count Dracula's coffin opens and he rises to begin a night of terrifying the nearby village. But there's a mosquito buzzing around, and it's driving him nuts, sending him into a fit of rage when it bites. As the mosquito flies away, only the encounter an oncoming plane, we see Dracula howling in completely disproportionate fury. And I'm thinking, man, if the film can keep this kind of off-kilter vibe up for another two hours...

Of course, hitting the plane doesn't kill the mosquito - it is now a vampire mosquito, and as such is hardier than its non-undead breathren. In the meantime, though, we meet Do-yul (Kim Su-ro) - the "Ricky" of the title, though I don't see where that name comes from - on a raid to bust illegal betting kingpin Tak Mun-su (Son Byung-ho). But Tak's been tipped off - as we later learn, but Do-yul himself. Do-yul, of course, gets bitten by the mosquito, and starts to gain vampire abilities (and weaknesses) even as his corruption is uncovered. And as if Tak's gang and his fellow officers aren't enough trouble, the Vatican has dispatched a vampire hunter (Oh Kwang-rok) with an ultimatum - stop using your vampiric abilities right away, so that you can possibly revert to humanity, or get a stake through the heart.

There's a good deal of entertainment to be had in this movie, but it's got a fairly bloated midsection; one fellow near me took a thirty or forty-five minute nap and I really don't know if he missed anything particularly important. After the initial half-hour kicking things off, things settle down while the characters go through their motions until director Lee Si-myung and his three writers suddenly seem to remember that they pitched this movie as an action-comedy with about forty-five minutes to go.

Read the rest at HBS.

"The iDol"

* * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

"The iDol" comes in at a notch under an hour and still feels twice as long as it needs to be, with its meandering story of a toy given to a bum by an alien that eventually finds its way into the hands of a die-hard collector. The biggest laugh comes when a model confesses that she collects 1940s/50s Soviet propoganda items, especially ones which focus on Joseph Stalin. A few more moments of character absurdity and much less musical montage would have gone a long way.

"Sukeban Boy" ("Oira Sukeban")

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

The most exuberant of the day's triple bill, "Sukeban Boy" shoots for guilty pleasure and lands in that general area with a gender-bending plot about a boy with the face and voice of a pretty girl. His biker father sends him to a girl's school, where he soon finds himself plunged into a bizarre example of every schoolgirl-fetish cliché imaginable, and some that probably don't bear imagining. Plenty of nudity and over-the-top girls in schoolgirl outfits fighting, and, hey, who doesn't like pretty naked girls?

"Negadon: The Monster from Mars" ("Wakusai Daikaiju Negadon")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

This one has been getting a lot of praise, and the way it captures the cinematography of early Japanese science fiction is really kind of incredible. It stands alongside "Voices of a Distant Star" as an incredible example of what one person can do with CGI when he puts his mind and time into it these days. Unfortunately, Jun Awaku's story is not nearly as strong as Shinkai's. I get that it's supposed to be a tribute to classic kaiju, but it seems both too slow-moving and melodramatic for a 25-minute short.

Samurai Commando Mission 1549 (Sengoku Jietai 1549)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

If someone comes out of Samurai Command Mission 1549 disappointed, it is because the potential is so ridiculously good; I mean, we're going in with the potential for both samurai slicing their opponents up and helicopters exploding. That's two of the four basic action/adventure movie food groups right there. Not enough for a balanced diet, but certainly a tasty snack.

In 2002, an experimental force field developed by Rei Kanzaki (Kyoka Suzuki) failed to work as expected - it sent the armored division testing it back to the year 1547, where they are promptly attacked by a local army. Two and a half years later, in the present (2005), sunspot activity or whatever sent the project haywire may allow for a second trip into the past, and it's necessary - whatever Colonel Matoba (Takeshi Kaga) has done in the past is starting to have repercussions in the present - black nothingness with the potential to eat the world repercussions. So Kanzaki recruits Yusuke Kashima (Yosuke Eguchi), a former protege of Matoba's, and Shichibe Iinuma (Kazuki Kitamura), a samurai who was thrown forward in time by the same event that threw Matoba back, to make a trip back to 1549 and set things right. What they find is worse than they expected - Matoba has taken over the court of Nobunaga Oda, and intends to devastate and rebuild the country with modern technology, giving Japan a five hundred year head start on the rest of the world.

That's a lot of plot, and it's a little challenging for a westerner like myself who really doesn't quite know who Nobunaga Oda is (as it should be; I wouldn't expect a movie about people traveling back to the American Civil War to explain who Lincoln is just because someone in Japan may not get it). Since we're joining the story two years after Matoba has arrived, we've got to play catch-up along with Rei and Yusuke, and we may wind up holding on to their mistaken assumptions slightly longer than they do. It is worth noting that this film offers a great many places for the audience to be confused - it throws a great deal of technobabble, the history of feudal Japan, and a few pre-existing relationships at us - but does a pretty good job of keeping us up to speed without resorting to large swaths of expository dialog.

Read the rest at HBS.

Train Man (Densha Otoko)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Train Man has conquered the Japanese media quickly and thoroughly. It first captured the public's interest as a blog that was posted as the events took place; it soon became a novel, a series of manga, a television series, a stage play, and, of course, this film. It's not hard to see why - it's a sweet love story that can appeal to all ages, but it's also arguably one of the first movies to really get communications and community in the twenty-first century.

Takayuki Yamada plays the title character, a self-described "gaming and manga otaku" (computer/comic nerd, in American), and he fits the stereotype - he's a shy twenty-two year-old who has never been on a date, works in I.T. tech support, and goes home to an apartment filled with stuff but no other people every night. He's taking the train home one day when a drunken salaryman comes on board, and our otaku stands up and tells him to stop as he's starting to get really obnoxious to a willowy beauty (Miki Nakatani). The transit police take the drunk into custody and ask those involved to fill out a report. Amid his apologies for causing inconvenience, she asks for his address so she can send him a thank-you gift. He posts about it on a message board (signing the message "Densha Otoko", or "Train Man"), and when the gift is an expensive Hermes tea set (tagging the woman with the nickname "Hermes" or "Hermess"), the people responding to the conversation encourage him to pursue her.

Unless I'm mistaken, we never actually learn the characters' real names - they don't come up in the dialog, and they are simply "Train Man" and "Hermes". They're almost abstractions, with Train Man representing what is nerdy or socially maladroit in all of us and Hermes representing an ethereal ideal. But more than that, it's because Train Man's blog entries and the responses are a crucial part of the film - they expand the film's narration from a monologue to a chorus, even while we see things almost entirely from Train Man's perspective. It gives him a sounding board while still leaving him very much on his own. And it gives us a chance to examine the kinds of new, ad-hoc communities that the internet has had a large part in realizing.

The simple, traditional approach would be to point out that Train Man needs to stop looking for his social life on-line and start interacting with people in the real world. Certainly, the nervousness that borders on genuine terror that we see from him in his awkward first dates with Hermes suggests that important parts of his social development are woefully inadequate - although he is, maybe, not the saddest case we see. Most of the people we see responding to the blog aren't other nerds (a trio of gamers is the boisterous exception). There's Rika (Ryoko Kuninaka), a nurse; Michiko (Tae Kimura), a housewife; Hirofumi (Eita), a student; and Hiashi (Kuranosuke Sasaki), a businessman. We get only brief glimpses into their lives, but we learn enough to fill in blanks and to see that the social network they form benefits them all.

Read the rest at HBS.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Fantasia '06, Day 10: Oddness

First, check out some new reviews added for previous days: My Scary Girl and Wilderness.

Went to the office yesterday hoping to find someone in, didn't. I'm not too bummed about not getting screeners; although some of these films will likely be hard to come by unless Ned programs them for the BFFF this fall (or the Brattle in general), I'll have seen about forty movies by the time I go home tonight, and trying to take five more home with me would just be being greedy. Of the 36 I've seen so far, I've only written 17 reviews, so I'll probably be finishing these up through the end of July.

Breakfast was a crepe with strawberries, bananas and chocolate at Cocktail Hawaii, dinner was a combo special at Mr. Steer's. All else was movies.

Today's plan: Check out, stow my bag-o-laundry at the bus station, watch Vampire Cop Ricky, the "Sukeban Boy"/"The iDol"/"Negadon" collection, Samurai Commando 1549 and Train Man, then maybe find something to eat before catching the 11.15pm bus home. The idea is to sleep on the bus after crossing the border and be some sort of zombie at work tomorrow. I'm not claiming it's a good plan, but I'm stuck with it.

3 Mighty Men (3 dev Adam)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

For a long time, this movie was thought destroyed in a fire, and if I were the man investigating that, I would have checked to see if Stan Lee or Steve Ditko were anywhere near Turkey at the time. After all, it's bad enough that they just appropriated Captain America without asking, but you've got to think that making Spider-Man the villain of the piece would tick the folks at Marvel off that much more.

Okay, the villain is named "The Spider" and his costume features green instead of blue, but there's no mistaking who he's supposed to be. His plan is to sell stolen artifacts in the Western Hemisphere and then repurchase them with counterfeit cash. He's done it so much that it threatens to destabilize the world's economy, so when he runs to Turkey, three New World heroes follow him to form a special task force with the Turkish police: Captain America (Aytekin Akkaya), the United States's famous super-soldier; Santo (Yavuz Selekman), Mexico's greatest luchador; and Julia (Deniz Erkanat), a very pretty girl from Brazil.

The story, of course, is just an excuse to string together a few action scenes and stick colorful (and maybe recognizable; how popular were Marvel Comics in early 1970s Turkey?) images on the poster. It really doesn't make a lick of sense, and at times is almost contemptuous of the concepts behind it: When the man heading up the Turkish government's investigation asks Captain America why they wear colorful costumes, he snorts that Spider does because he has the mind of a psychotic child, though he himself does because it draws the insane man's attacks. And his is bullet-proof. The second half of the movie also suggests that there must be more than one Spider (though all have the same bushy eyebrows poking out of their costumes), but when a new one pops up immediately after the last one dies, the characters just seem to shrug it off as something that's to be expected, though they hadn't mentioned it. You'd think that if Spider was a criminal mastermind, the heroes would be interested in making sure that they captured the right one, rather than a goon dressed in the costume (or killed him; superheroes seem to have fewer qualms about using deadly force in Turkey than they do in America).

Read the rest at HBS.

All-Out Nine: Field of Nightmares (Gyakkyou 9)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

I've got no idea what "Gyakkyou" literally translates to, but I appreciate the pun that Gyakkyou Nine's English title represents - are these players the "All-Out Nine" because of the all-out effort they put into the game, or because, in spite of that effort, they suck, and thus all make outs? That's about the closest thing you'll find to subtlety in All-Out Nine, but it doesn't matter. Sure, it beats you over the head with a hammer whose head is made of sports-movie clichés, but it's so over-the-top that it also functions as parody.

As the movie opens, Toshi Fukutsu (Tetsuji Tamayama), the captain of All-Out High's baseball team, is called into the principal's office. The principal (Hiroshi Fujoka) hands him some bad news - he's eliminating the baseball team and giving their meager facilities over to the soccer team. The news hits Toshi like a blow, sending him flying across the room, and he begs the principal for a reprieve - if he can lead the baseball team to the national tournament, surely he'll reconsider. The principal grudgingly allows him to try, and when they "win" a scrimmage against a regional powerhouse (there's a Biblical rain going on, and the other team opts to practice inside, forfeiting the game), there's hope... So the team is assigned a faculty adviser/manager who has, apparently, never seen a baseball game before. That doesn't matter to Toshi - after all, any obstacle in his path is sweet Adversity that makes his struggle all the more worthy!

This film is a broad, over-the-top comedy, quite frankly cartoonish in its slapstick and melodramatic reactions, not hiding the fact that it is adapted from a comic book at all. Indeed, it uses a lot of manga conventions (text-based jokes, a monolith with an accusation appearing in front of the characters, expositional flashbacks squirted at the viewer at lightning speed). The audience may be more accepting of it if they remember a few points about contemporary Japanese life going in: First, comic series based on sports are very popular in Japan, whether playing it straight, using the game as a backdrop to romance, or going for broad comedy as with Gyakkyou 9; which I presume is a relatively popular series. Second, the annual high school baseball tournaments occupy roughly the same place in sports fandom that the NCAA college basketball tournament occupies in the United States; the intensity with which the local community concentrates on the TV coverage of these games is probably not exaggerated that much. And, finally, Japan and South Korea co-hosted a recent World Cup, so that sport's popularity was probably at a very high level when the comics and film were made.

Read the rest at HBS.

Shinobi: Heart Under Blade

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

You know what? I've got no patience with Romeo and Juliet. Grow a pair of freaking spines, leave town, start a new life together, and don't make it complicated. Just friggin' DO it; you're only tragic because you insist on being tragic. Here, that story is transplanted to Japan at the end of the age of ninjas, with the Koga and Iga ninja clans serving as Montagues and Capulets.

As the film opens, Oboro (Yukie Nakama) of the Iga clan and Genosuke (Joe Odagiri) of the Kouga clan meet in an isolated spot and are instantly attracted to each other. Alas, their clans are deadly enemies, living in hidden villages, training in deadly techniques but forbidden from fighting each other or selling their services. They're able to see each other secretly, sending messages via bird when they aren't meeting. But things are about to change. The Shogun insists five of each clan's greatest warriors face off in a battle for the death, and aside from the star-crossed lovers, they're all too eager to test their skills to think, hey, maybe the Shogun is trying to weaken us so that we can be crushed and he'll have no obstacles between himself and absolute rule.

Freaking ninjas. Even the ones with super-powers are dumb, dumb, dumb. It's a reasonable enough stupidity, though - these clans have been waiting for an opportunity to wreak chaos for generations, and some of them have powers that are as much curses as gifts. Consider Kouga's Kagerou (Tomoka Kurotani), who has been fed poison since infancy so that now her very sweat can be toxic. She is not likely to accept either her clan's prince with an Iga girl or that her entire life has been spent making her a weapon that would never be used.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Gravedancers

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
When you get right down to it, most supernatural horror movies are based on fairly stupid ideas. The Gravedancers starts from a particularly dumb premise (not just accidentally angering the dead by dancing on their graves, but really choosing the wrong dead people to anger), but throws itself into its story with zeal and humor which never does too much to undermine the thrills to be had.

Despite living in the same area, Harris McKay (Dominic Purcell), Kira Hastings (Josie Maran), and Sid Vance (Marcus Thomas) haven't seen each other for years; they only meet up now because a friend has died in a car crash. After the reception, they return to the cemetery, where they read a condolence card which suggests dancing and being happy in the graveyard. Really bad advice, as it's not long before things in their house start moving, they hear strange noises, and even small fires start appearing. Fortunately, Sid has seen and answered an ad (which promises a cash reward) from Vincent (Tcheky Karyo), a professor of paranormal studies, so he and research assistant Frances Culpepper (Megahn Perry) are on the case...

...and stealing the movie. The main characters are, really, kind of drab. Dominic Purcell is as dour and mirthless as he always seems to be, and Clare Kramer is just fine as his understanding wife. Josie Maran is nice enough as the old friend who still has a torch for Purcell's character, and I'll give the model some credit for spending most of the movie looking like an assault victim (she screams well when called upon, too). Marcus Thomas takes ne'er-do-well duty, at roughly 2/3 slacker and 1/3 schemer; he's basically harmless, although he's fun in that the way he acts isn't nearly as predictable as the others. They're fine, we like them, we don't want to see ghosts beat them, burn them, or chop them up with axes. But Vincent and Frances are more fun. They're initially coming at the situation from scientific curiosity rather than fear for their lives, and as outsiders they can look at the other characters' interpersonal issues as, well, someone else's issues. Tcheky Karyo is dry and witty; Megahn Perry is humorously detached, not quite aware she's a character in a movie, but still kind of sounding like she doesn't quite believe the coincidences even as she's being matter-of-fact about the supernatural stuff. That Meaghan Perry is the cutest girl in a movie with two more obviously glammed-up beauties is a bonus.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (Hanai Sachiko no karei na shogai, aka Horny Home Tutor: Teacher's Love Juice)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Usually, if someone claims to admire the perversity of a skin flick, they mean it in a different way than the statement applies to The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai. Of course, the standard definition works too, but let's face it, as a piece of soft-core pornography, what's remarkable about about this movie is just how unconcerned it is with getting its audience off.

We start with prostitute Sachiko playing a game of tutor-and-student with a client. She goes to the wrong café (in more ways than one) to meet her "boss"; instead of her pimp, she runs into a black-market sale gone bad, winding up with the disputed merchandise in her purse and a bullet hole in her forehead. This somehow leaves her brain supercharged (as opposed to hamburger), and she's soon become a philoophy professor's live-in mistress - they debate Chomsky during intercourse - and, as far as his wife is concerned, their son's tutor. It would be idyllic (though strange) except that the man who shot her wants what she has - a finger cloned from George W. Bush that can be used to launch a nuclear strike.

When director Mitsaru Meike took the job, he was probably given a to-do list with items like "2 ejaculations, at least twenty-five minutes of bare breasts, five panty peeks, symbolic penetration" on it. And he hits every one, though often in a perfunctory of self-mocking manner. Granted, the women in these movies get horny before the proverbial dropped hat hits the floor, but seldom when discussing Susan Sontag or Friedrich Neitzche. There's also something not quite satirical or ironic, but at least amusing, about how Sachiko's method of tutoring mirrors the role-playing session that opened the film.

Read the rest at HBS.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Fantasia '06, Day 9: All over the place

I can't believe I didn't get a chance to go on the river yesterday; the place I went needed four to load a boat, and there were never more than three of us at the time I was there. Ah well, it was a nice day to sit in the sun and get started on writing a review (but not finishing it; this is the point in the week where my writing slows to a crawl). The exhibit on prehistoric Japan at the archeological museum was very cool.

Quality took an upturn at about nine last night - Square Jaw Theater was unmemorable aside from the kickass "Green Hornet" short, and God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand was bloody godawful. Brutality against kids and it looked amateurish. Wilderness was a blast, though, and the director did a good Q&A afterwards, and Meatball Machine was a fun, cheap gross-out flick with aspirations to be more.

Today's plan: Hopefully get a call from the press office about screeners - by the time they sent me an email, I was away from the laptop. That'll teach me to include a phone number next time. Then it's a day at the main hall for 3 Mighty Men, All-Out Nine: Field of Nightmares, a dinner break because I'll be hungry and not interested in Hell, then back for Shinobi, The Gravedancers and (depending on how wiped out I am) The Glamorous life of Sachiko Hamai

God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand (Kami no hidarite akuma no migite)

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Director Shusuke Kaneko opens the film by dedicating it to his late mentor, Hiroyuki Nasu, which seems like a very poor way to respect the dead. Kaneko took the film over after Nasu's death, and whether you feel that Nasu would have done a better job with the film or that it's so flawed at a basic level that his dying before he could shoot it rather than after was a kindness, he probably deserves better than having his name tied to this miserable bit of nastiness.

Six year-old Sou Yamabe (Tsubasa Kobayashi) has terrible nightmares involving grisly murders, a recurring one being where he's a little girl who can't walk. He confides in his teenage sister Izumi (Asuka Shibuya), who witnesses one come to horrible life, leaving Sou missing a lot of blood and in the hospital. Then it starts for her, as Sou appears in her dreams to cryptically guide her to another town, where Yoshiko Tani (Ai Maeda) is searching for a lost friend. Meanwhile, bedridden little Momo (Momoko Shimizu) eagerly awaits the new storybooks her father (Tomorowo Taguchi) gives her. They're grimmer than Grimm, always seeming to end with a troublemaking teenage girl being brutally murdered. Hmmm.

When a movie more or less opens with a sharp object emerging from inside a sad little first-grader to leave him all but dead in a pool of his own blood, it's almost guaranteed to make a strong first impression. For me, it was disgust, followed by the crushing realization that horror films try to top themselves, and we were only ten minutes in. What's going to be worse than this?

Read the rest at HBS.

Wilderness

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Wilderness has a cast just primed for whittling. We're introduced to seven youthful offenders in the opening segment; it's not long after they're sent to an abandoned island for an exercise in teamwork that three women join them. Don't expect the island's population to stay in double digits for long, though - and don't expect the culling to be anything less than nasty.

The lads are doing the outward bound thing because one of them, Davie, slit his throat in response to the constant bullying he and Lindsay (Ben McKay) received, mostly at the hands of skinhead Steve (Stephen Wight) and his mate Lewis (Luke Neal), though the others in their bunkroom - Blue (Adam Deacon), Jethro (Richie Campbell), and newcomer Callum (rumored to have killed a fellow inmate at a previous facility) - haven't exactly done much to stop it. The island their guard Jed (Sean Pertwee) takes them to is former Army property now given over to the prison system. They're supposed to have it to themselves, but Louise (Alex Reid) and her two charges, Jo (Karly Greene) and Marcy (Lenora Crichlow), are there "building character" as well. And none of them know who (or what) else they're sharing the island with.

The revelation of the island's other inhabitant(s) comes earlier than it might, but it's late and important enough to be a surprise worth preserving. Part of the answer is "dogs", big German Shepards numerous and vicious enough to be described as a pack. Your garden-variety German Shepard is as imposing a marauder as any number of made-up predators, and these are not simple wild dogs. Even if they were, that would be quite enough; the lads are all city boys and quite un-used to dogs being such an actively hostile (and out of their control) part of the environment.

Read the rest at HBS.

Meatball Machine

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

It's the old, old, story. Boy meets girl after admiring her from afar. Girl is attacked by an alien parasite which makes her a gladiatorial cyborg. Boy loses girl. Boy meets other girl and her mad scientist father, boy is attacked by alien parasite but retains mind. Boy and girl fight to the death. How many times do we need to see the same ideas recycled before Hollywood and Tokyo come up with something new?

All kidding aside, Meatball Machine is the second take on the material; filmmaker Jun'ichi Yamamoto made a 1999 short with the same name and concept. For the feature version, he's teamed with two notable names in Japan's recent popcorn movie boom: Writer Jun'ya Kato worked on the screenplay for Death Trance ; co-director Yudai Yamaguchi directed Battlefield Baseball and the Cromartie High School live-action movie and also worked on Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus and Alive. Their work has on occasion been uneven, but just as often impressive; with Meatball Machine, they appear to be having fun making the best low-budget gore movie that they can.

The premise of the film posits aliens among us on Earth, here not for conquest but combat with each other, winner eating the loser. This causes problems for us not just because of the damage their techno-organic weapons do, but because these slug like things wield them by bonding to a human being, taking over their nervous systems and converting them into "necroborgs" (think Star Trek's Borg with bulkier armor and arms that can shape-shift into a variety of weapons). After one such fight, blue-collar worker Yoji (Issei Takahashi) finds a seemingly-inert pod that looks like a giant metal beetle and stows it in his closet for later tinkering while he nurses his crush on Sachiko (Aoba Kawai), the prettiest girl working at the day-care center next door. His first date with her has a bad end, though. Two, actually - first he gets squeamish about the scars and burns she exhibits from an abusive childhood, and the pod decides she would make an good host.

Read the rest at HBS

Friday, July 14, 2006

Fantasia '06, Day 8: Necromancer and Frostbite

Didn't wind up doing much of anything yesterday - brunch at Eggspectation, a quick walk to the chalet of Mount Royal, then Necromancer, which was probably not a good choice after the mountain had tuckered me out. Give it credit for being a lot more subtle/nuanced than many Thai films I've seen - the jumping back in forth in time hurt my head a little, but at least it's making a stab at complexity.

After that, I thought about supper, but really wasn't hungry. I poked into 1.000.000 Comics to try and fill a few holes (especially that 2000 AD #1478 that is an annoying hole in my recent reading), got a couple issues of Darkman out of the dollar bin, and then headed to the sculpture garden at the CCA to rest and write up the review of Exodus (it, along with the one for Die You Zombie Bastards!, are now up here). Then it was to Hall for Frostbite, a pretty nifty Swedish vampire action-horror-comedy. I admit, I was initially kind of disappointed to hear they'd gone the comedy route, since the polar night can make for a real grinder of a vampire movie if done right, but I figure 30 Days of Night will eventually get made, and in the meantime Frostbite is a whole ton of fun.

Today's plan: Archeological museum - last year's exhibit on Rome has been replaced by one on Japan, and the Canadian exhibits will be more fun now that I don't feel the need to look at every minute coin and chamber pot - and maybe hit the jet boats again, then back to the festival for Square Jaw Theater, God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand, Wilderness, and Meatball Machine.

Necromancer (Jom kha mung wej)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)

My previous (limited) experience with Thai horror films, I admit, led me to paint the country's output in the genre with a broad brush - straightforward, bloody affairs that conform to the standard horror-movie template and lean heavily on sudden flashes of light and loud noises on the soundtrack to do their job. That's the trouble with forming an opinion from a small sample size of what is, evidently, a large population (horror films are very popular in Thailand). Certainly, some must be a bit more ambitious, as Necromancer is.

The story, which cuts back and forth in time, involves two detectives who, in their attempts to apprehend necromancer criminals, attempt to make use of those corrupting magics themselves. As the film starts, "Itti" (Chatchai Plengpanich) has already turned to the dark side, and is being held in a special prison cell designed to contain magic users. Of course, he escapes, seeking vengeance on his former partners. "Santi" (Akara Amarttayakul) is skeptical, but soon becomes obsessed with capturing Itti, though even the people in Itti's sights are saying to let him go - the price of trying to catch him is too steep.

The system of magic used in Necromancer comes straight from Thai superstition, where words written on amulets are meant to give their wearer power and good fortune. The next logical step is to tattoo one's spells on one's skin - after all, it's impossible to be cut off from one's powers if they're a part of you, right? Unless, of course, that other fellow happens to know a spell to do just that. Indeed, part of what sets Necromancer apart from many horror films, especially western ones, is not just the specific logic of its fantastic elements, but that it does, in fact, have a sort of system it sticks to. There's a logic to how the film approaches necromancy that allows it to almost believably be set in our real world.

Read the rest at HBS.

Frostbite (Frostbiten)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

On its own, Frostbite is an entertaining if imperfect film. Stand back a little, though, and it becomes the horror genre in microcosm - it starts out with a simple story to scare its audience, but eventually decides that's not enough, and reworks the concept to try and fit it into a modern world. By the time it's over, much of what made the initial concept actually frightening is being played as black comedy. It's good black comedy, but you can't help but think that something has been lost from when vampires were scary.

The film opens during World War II, as a lost Swedish volunteer unit of the German army, looking for shelter from the cold. What they find are mutilated corpses and a small coffin whose occupant wants out. Plenty of misguided Swedish blood gets spilled. Now, sixty years later, we meet Annika (Petra Nielsen) and Saga (Grete Havnesköld), a divorced doctor and her teenage daughter heading north to a small city in Norrbotten where Annika has taken a job in the hospital. She's excited about working with Professor Gerhard Beckert (Carl-Åke Eriksson), a genetic researcher who puts a stake through the heart of a body brought into the morgue when no-one's looking, and is giving experimental medication to a coma patient. Meanwhile, the kids at Saga's new school have invited her to a party thrown by John (Nilas Grönberg). Saga's new friend Vega (Emma T. Åberg) is in charge of getting the E, which she thinks she's getting from Sebastian (Jonas Karlström), a resident at the hospital. What she thinks is ecstasy is actually the pills Beckert is giving the coma patient, and if she saw the side effects they're giving Sebastian...

The program described Frostbite as the first vampire film to come out of Sweden, or at least the first with any kind of money behind it. You'd think a country that extends far enough north to experience "polar night" - periods up to a month long when the sun stays below the horizon - would be a haven for vampires, and a concept horror filmmakers would have seized upon much more recently. And while this unbroken darkness makes for an unusual visual on occasion - like kids hanging around the school's front entrance before the first bell despite it looking like the middle of the night - the film does almost nothing with it, story-wise. It's something of a disappointment, since the polar night thing is what Sweden's got that would let them make a vampire movie that's uniquely theirs.

Read the rest at HBS.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Fantasia '06, Day 7: Zombies & more

The review of Azumi 2 is up.

A sign of a good vacation is when you have to buy a new pair of shorts because you packed assuming that there'd be a day or two of rain, and the weather is being extremely co-operative.

Spent yesterday poking through the Underground City a bit, which is neat, although not quite so neat as the travel guides make it sound. Had lunch/dinner at Les 3 Brasseurs, and now need to figure out how to make a flamm, which is like a pizza only without tomato sauce and on a thin, crepe-like crust. It's yummy.

The movies were pretty darn good - Tokyo Zombie featured Tadanobu Asano with a goofy afro, which is worth the price of admission on its own, and SARS Wars was another zombie comedy which just shows how mercurial the Thai censors can be - they get all worried about showing a nipple, but the amount of blood and guts and off-color humor is truly astonishing. Blood Rain could use a little tightening up, as it was the screening where I felt the most drained, but it's a nifty period crime piece regardless. Ils hasn't even opened in its native France yet, but should be a big hit - it's a tight, taut suspense picture.

Today's plan: La Musée Juste pour Rire sounds like fun, along with the Black Watch Highlanders museum and the Cinerobotechnique. Should be light on the movies - just Necromancer and Frostbite; I've seen A Chinese Tall Story and Behind the Mask and have little interest in either White of the Eye or Strange Circus.

Tokyo Zombie (Tokyo Zonbi)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)

In addition to being very funny, Tokyo Zombie is educational. I learned that it is possible for an illegal garbage dump in Tokyo to grow so large that it becomes a veritable mountain. I learned that if zombies ever attack, jujitsu is probably the most effective means of self-defense. If there's too many for the jujitsu to work on, try to be swarmed by older zombies, for reasons that become clear toward the end. I was reminded that kids listen to everything their parents say. And, of course, there is a lesson in the true value of friendship.

But mostly, the movie is just silly. Near the base of "Black Fuji", an illegal dumping ground where trash, chemical waste, and inconvenient corpses are disposed of, is a small fire extinguisher factory where Fujio (Tadanobu Asano) and Mitsuo (Sho Aikawa) practice jujitsu when they should be working. While disposing of the body of a manager who discovered their goofing off - these things happen - they witness the bodies buried within Black Fuji coming back to life (all the microbes and toxic waste must have mutated or something) and decide to high-tail it north to Russia, where they'll practice their jujitsu and maybe come back when their fighting skills are so good they can defeat the entire zombie population. They pick up Yoko (Erika Okuda) when they stop to raid a convenience store for supplies, but don't actually get out of Tokyo before the zombie hordes drive them off a bridge. Flash forward five years, and the rich have cordoned off a section of the city and send slaves to battle zombies in the arena as the Romans once sent Christians against lions. They don't like watching Fujio, though - with his jujitsu, the zombies are finished off too fast!

As you might imagine, Tokyo Zombie more closely resembles Shaun of the Dead than Dawn of the Dead. Where Shaun was a romantic comedy at its heart, Tokyo Zombie is basically a buddy movie. Fujio and Mitsuo are a pair of genial slackers who would be quite content if life consisted of noting more than hanging out together and practicing their moves, and in a way, the dead rising gives them an excuse to do so. They bicker, of course - Mitsuo is middle aged and cranky while Fujio is about as smart as a gifted rock - but it's friendly bickering; Yoko will supply the acrimony.

Read the rest at HBS.

SARS Wars (Khun krabii hiiroh)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

SARS was a major health scare a couple years ago, but the panic seems to have died down a little, to be replaced by worry over avian influenza. This seems unreasonable to me; as much as I'm sure bird flu is to be taken seriously even if you are not a bird, does it have the potential to kick off a full-scale zombie epidemic the way SARS apparently does? I doubt it.

Of course, when the film starts, the zombies aren't the problem - a gang of thugs has kidnapped Liu (Phintusuda Tunphairao), the teenage daughter of a rich Bangkok man. He attempts to hire Master Thep (Suthep Po-ngam) to rescue her, but he's getting a little long in the tooth for such action. He does have an apprentice, Khun Krabii (Suppakorn Kitsuwan), who has studied hard but is not terribly experienced or street-smart, but will have to do. Meanwhile, a single SARS-infected cockroach from an infected village in Africa has somehow made its way to the Thai airport, where it bites a disembarking foreigner (Andrew Biggs), who by the time he turns is in the same building where Liu is busily not waiting for rescue. Soon, a party on the first floor is filled with zombies, prompting Health Minister Ratsuda (Naowarat Yuktanan) to seal it off to keep Thailand "virus-free", although virologist Dr. Diana (Lene Christensen) thinks her experimental treatment offers a better option than killing everyone inside. Of course, she doesn't know about the giant mutated zombie snake.

This is a classic zombie set-up - heroes with access to weapons trapped in an enclosed space with the military as much a threat as the walking dead. However, director Taweewat Wantha isn't just looking to make a zombie movie; he's making a spoof film, too, with occasional shots at Star Wars, The Matrix, and others. He spends some time breaking the fourth wall, too, with comments about the movie's budget and what the censors will and won't allow. They movie is not really a parody of zombie movies; most of the time the zombie action plays straight, if over-the-top. Anything else, though, is fair game, and while the jokes are sometimes pretty obvious and broad. SARS Wars winks at the audience "yeah, we know this is silly and well-worn, but we like it, and we know you like it, so here it is at double strength".

Read the rest at HBS.

Blood Rain (Hyeol-ui Nu)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

"CSI: Joseon Dynasty Korea"

Blood Rain has a name fit for horror and the blood to match, and while supernatural thrills are certainly one direction the story could have gone, the film is actually a mystery. It's a heck of a nifty one, too, with an atmospheric setting, an intriguing sleuth, and a conspiracy that is going to be a devil to crack.

In the early part of the 19th Century, the isolated island of Donghwa is relatively prosperous thanks in large part to its paper mill, which produces paper of unusually high quality. Mainland Korea lets them remain more or less autonomous so long as they send regular tribute. This year, disaster strikes, as the ship carrying the paper bursts into flames while most of the crew is ashore. To investigate, the government sends Lee Weon-gyu (Cha Seung-won). He quickly demonstrates his crime-solving expertise on a more recent crime, but as soon as he starts investigating, townspeople start turning up dead. The more superstitious folks on the island lay the blame on the ghost of the mill's founder, who (along with his family) was executed several years ago for his alleged Catholicism. This is of more than passing interest to Weon-gyu, as his father was involved in that prosecution.

Blood Rain resembles a pulp novel, if they'd had them in Korea's Joseon dynasty. The detective is stoic, the world view is cynical, and the murders are frequent and quite bloody. The mystery is, I think, solvable once you've got all the evidence (I don't recall any information withheld from the audience that Weon-gyu wsa privy to), but that's not the whole point. Like any good pulp yarn, the investigated incident is only half the story; the other half is the crime that daily life can be: The mill's owners are wealthy, but the workers are poor; the vast majority of the authority figures look down on the people so that even the ones who genuinely want to help; everybody has a shameful secret. The main difference is that Weon-gyu is less hard-boiled than many pulp protagonists.

Read the rest at HBS.

Ils (Them)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Ils is basic "there's someone or something in the house that means us harm" material. Filmmakers David Moreau and Xavier Palud don't dress it up with a lot of unnecessary frills; they just spend the film's short running time figuring out how to best put the screws to the characters and audience until it's time to roll the end credits.

After a tense opening where a mother and her annoyed teenage daughter encounter something creepy on the side of the road when their car breaks down, the film introduces Clementine (Olivia Bonamy) and Lucas (Michael Cohen), a French couple living in Bucharest, Rumania. Clementine teaches French in a local high school, while Lucas fights writer's block. Clementine passes the empty car on her way home, but doesn't think much of it. They have a nice dinner, and go to bed, only to wake up at about three in the morning by a noise inside their house. There's someone else there, cutting the power, and they always seem to be just around the corner when Clementine or Michael enters a new room.

Rumania is a nice place to set this kind of thriller. Bucharest isn't particularly close to the Transylvania region, but Eastern Europe is full of old, spooky corners. You don't need to bring the supernatural in to create a sense of danger, though; there's monsters of more recent vintage who left the country economically devastated until very recently. While Bucharest proper is fairly safe, the outlying area where the couple's house is located doesn't look nearly so prosperous; there might be folks desperate enough to go after the folks from Western Europe.

Read the rest at HBS.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Fantasia '06, Day 6: Good start, so-so finish.

Wow... Nothing I saw yesterday repeats today, so just capsules to fill in later (and I have been filling some in; the post about Sunday now includes/links to a new Funky Forest review. So this'll be a short one. At least for now.

Spent the first few hours of the afternoon up on Mont Royal, which is a pleasant enough activity - you get to sweat off that big Cocktail Hawaii breakfast, but aren't terribly hot because a lot of the paths up are in shaded areas. Weird how that works out. There's a nifty little artificial lake up there with paddleboats available. All two-seaters, though. There are days I wish I had a girlfriend not because I feel particularly lonely but because the things that were designed for couples look like fun. How's that for selfish?

I would have liked to sit up there a little longer and rest and write - I know that there is plenty of park space in Boston or Cambridge where I can just drop flat on my back and zone out, but I don't take advantage of it - but moviegoing called. Azumi 2 and Black Kiss (aka Syncronicity) were both very good in different ways, and I'll enjoy writing more about them. Bad Blood is the type of subtle horror-as-reflection-of-family-issues movie that has to be better than it is to really get my affection, and Art of Fighting wound up striking me as ugly despite all of its dark comedy.

Today's plan: Maybe do some shopping, since I've spent too much of the morning on writing the Funky Forest review (my plans for the week were heavily influenced by the assumption of more rain than there's been), followed by Tokyo Zombie, SARS Wars, Blood Rain and Ils

Azumi 2: Death or Love

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Wouldn't it be a kick if Shusuke Kaneko shot Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monster All Out Attack at the same time Ryuhei Kitamura made the original Azumi, and then Kaneko wound up making Azumi 2 at the same time Kitamura made Final Wars? The times don't add up, but the reversal is fun to ponder. Fans can debate which director served which series the best, but all four permutations have wound up working pretty well.

As you may remember from the first film (and for those who don't, it's recapped), Azumi was one of ten orphan teenagers raised from early childhood to be assassins, with the intent of snuffing out ambitious warlords and preserving the peace. Then, on the eve of their first mission, they were paired up and ordered to kill their partners to prove their resolve; Azumi was paired with Nachi, her first love. Now, of the original ten, only Azumi (Aya Ueto) and Nagara (Yuma Ishigaki) remain to take down the last warlord, Masayuki Sanada (Mikijiro Hira), in his heavily-guarded mountain fortress. Well, they're not quite alone - they make contact with the priest who sponsored their training, Tenkai (Shigeru Koyama), picking up a perky new sidekick, Kosue (Chiaki Kuriyama) to act as their guide. They also meat a Robin Hood-style bandit, Ginkaku (Shun Oguri) who could be twins with Nachi.

Kaneko is probably best known for his work in the kaiju genre, where his 1990s Gamera trilogy and his entry into the Godzilla series gained raves for not only being action-packed city-flatteners, but for the genuine sense of danger present - those buildings the monsters crushed were pointedly occupied. Here, he's clearly working with a smaller budget than Kitamura had for the first film, but he's able to make up for it by focusing more on Azumi's emotional burden. The kids were naïve and their minds were programmed but good before; now that they've been out in the world a little, they're starting to realize that they've done horrible things, to the extent that Azumi and Nagara are OK that attempting to kill Nagara is likely a suicide mission, not just because they're good, brainwashed little soldiers, but because they're not keen on living with that much blood on their hands.

Read the rest at HBS.

Black Kiss (Shinkuronishiti or Syncronicity)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

It's almost assuring to see that other film industries can occasionally do the things that drive us crazy in America. Consider the case of this pitch-black serial killer movie from Japan that played film festivals under the name of "Synchronicity" back in late 2004 (and that name still figures prominently into the design of the opening credits), but didn't get a theatrical release until 2006, when its name had become "Black Kiss". It's a great, grimy movie, but it must drive a filmmaker crazy to have his work just sit unseen for over a year.

The film opens with a man and a beautiful young woman on a date, and to every outward appearance, it's a "getting ahead in business" date; she's a model trying to upgrade her status to "actress". They flirt, they drink, they check into the "Hotel Bat's". He runs out to get a drink, and when he comes back, he's knocked out, tied up, and... Well, it's gross.

Flash back a week and meet Asuka Hoshino (Reika Hashimoto), a young model who just moved to Tokyo and is living out of her duffel bag. A fellow model introduces her to Kasumi (Kaori Kawamura), who used to be in that business but is now working retail, and whose roommate just moved out. Kasumi is initially hostile, but lets the sugary-sweet younger girl move in. Kasumi is mysterious and unstable; she'll be friendly one minute and then get a phone call that has her screaming, followed abruptly by "I'm going out". It's after one of those calls that Asuka looks out the window and sees the grisly murder from the opener. The police are called, including one (Shunsuke Matsuoka) who has a history with Kasumi; he's told to consult with a retired detective (Masao Takayama) who worked on bizarre cases with the FBI in America, who is a little odd himself.

Read the rest at HBS.

Bad Blood (Coisa Ruim)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

There's nothing particularly wrong with either story Portugal's Coisa Ruim ("Bad Blood" in English). There's material for an interesting family drama, and there's decent material for a ghost story, and a connection between the two. It doesn't come together, though - the supernatural is a constant distraction from the more conventional story, but it's not big enough to really make for a notable horror story.

As the film opens, the Monteiro family is preparing to move from their home in Lisbon to the country house that father Xavier (Adriano Luz) has recently inherited from a great-uncle. No other member of his family is nearly as enthused, though his wife Helena (Manuela Couto) supports him in front of their three children - young single mother Sofia (Sara Carinhas), elementary-schooler Ricardo (João Santos), and Rui (José Afonso Pimentel), a college student who is the most overtly hostile. What they don't initially realize is just how superstitious the local residents are - Father Vicente (José Pinto) regularly performs exorcisms, and they soon make the acquaintance of a self-described medium, along with the young new parish priest, Father Cruz (João Pedro Vaz). There's something creepy about their new home, and it soon begins encroaching on their already contentious relationships.

I probably annoy my theater-major brother by describing a lot of productions he acts in as "yelling plays", by which I mean stories about families who seem to spend so much time shouting at each other that it's hard to spot the actual affection they must feel. They're gritty, real actors' showpieces that the audience can usually relate to and they bore the hell out of me. Coisa Ruim is a yelling play put on film with a ghost story grafted onto the edges which serves as much as an excuse to enter into intellectual reason-versus-faith debates as to actually intrigue us. It's a terribly frustrating way to tell a ghost story, for as much as I agree that it is important for a tale of the supernatural to be populated by complex, interesting characters, focusing too much on characterization takes away from what is unique about the film. I've seen men of faith and men of science challenge each other (with the end result almost always annoying me because the existence of ghosts or other paranormal activities tends to give the men of faith the last word), and it's seldom as interesting as the writers seem to think it is. And I've got no trouble with yelling plays per se, but when you stick them into a ghost story, the presence of some extraordinary element highlights just how petty the arguments are.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Art of Fighting (Ssaum-ui gisul)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

It's an old, old story - kid gets picked on, finds a mentor who can teach him how to defend himself, and later stands up for himself. Maybe, just maybe, the mentor learns a little bit about himself and becomes less of a recluse as a result. The audience can stand up and cheer, safe in the knowledge that things are going to get better.

It's a pleasant enough fantasy, but not one with a lot of connection to reality. In real life, standing up to a bully often means that they escalate, either bringing in their friends or attacking those close to the target who can't easily defend themselves. There's no ring where things can be settled in a neutral, controlled environment. And a mentor who can teach you how to really fight in a manner that is effective, rather than just aesthetically pleasing, is generally someone you're better off not dealing with.

Such are the problems for Song Byung-tae (Lee Hyun-kyoon). His father recently had him transfered to a vocation school from an academically-oriented high school, reasoning that if Byung-tae isn't college-bound, he should learn a trade. Byung-tae has always been a target of bigger kids, but the worst apples at his new school are a quantum leap over what he's had to deal with before, and things just get worse when the bullies find out his father is a police officer. He spends most of his after-school time hiding out in a local study center until he encounters Oh Man-su (Baek Yun-shik), a disheveled middle-aged guy who doesn't look like much but makes a couple thugs regret trying to mug him. Byung-tae tries to get Oh to teach him how to fight, but the man refuses, on the grounds that violence isn't the answer to his problems. He eventually relents when he sees that violence certainly looks like a better answer than pacifism. But what Oh has to teach Byung-tae isn't specific techniques - it's being willing to fight dirty, to make sure that a guy who goes down stays down, and generally how to meet the bullies on their own terms.

Read the rest at HBS.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Fantasia '06, Day 5: Eh

Spent the day down in the Old Port area, trying to figure out how to get to the public garden exhibit before realizing that admission was being charged. Then I was looking to make a return trip to the Archeology Museum only to see it fermé lundi. Bug-ger. The little 45 minute boat ride around the old port was nice; it delivered a lot of the same information as the jet boating last year, but with much less getting wet. Then it was back to Concordia for a back-and-forth across the street evening, with only the middle movie at the Hall Theater.

I would have done something violent for a steak tip sub last night. I ordered a steak & cheese sandwich and found it piled up with stuff that wasn't steak or cheese. I admit to being a picky eater who will probably have bad things happen to him down the line for never developing a taste for his vegetables, but also, I'm just used to a steak and cheese sandwich being steak, cheese, and bread. You want a salad, you order a side salad, or ask for onions and stuff. I don't know whether it's a Canada thing, an America thing, a New England thing, or a "places I patronize because they don't use valuable roll space for things other than steak and cheese" thing, but either way, expectations weren't meeting with reality.

Not really exceptional movies yesterday. I'd worn myself down before getting to Lost in Wu Song, so I don't know if I really appreciated it while I was watching it - it is very funny, but also smarter than I realized at the time. Murder, Take One has an interesting premise in its live, reality-show coverage of a homicide investigation, but stretches that premise thin and its last act does in a silly an annoying direction. Tape Number 31 was Blair Witch Project-style stuff in rural China, with all Blair Witch's problems (and third-act effectiveness in spite of them). Lost in Wu Song repeats tonight; Murder, Take One Wednesday evening.

Today's plan: Mont Royal, perhaps, before Azumi 2, Black Kiss, Bad Blood, and The Art of Fighting

Lost in Wu Song (Wu Song Da Wo)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)

We're getting closer to being able to make the film we imagine independently, but we're not there yet, not by a long shot, at least not in any consistent way. As nice as it is to read stories about guys who make a great animated film on their home PCs, or of a cast and crew working for nothing but a share in the finished film, we hear about them because those situations are unusual. Most of the time, getting a movie made is very difficult, especially for someone who lacks experience.

Like, say, Men De Song. Like many boys in China, he idolized folk hero Wu Song, who slew a tiger with his bare hands and took fatal revenge on those who killed his brother (said brother's wife and her lover). He intends to make the definitive film of this legend and then, his life's work complete, retire to become a Buddhist Monk. But he's having trouble casting the lead part - nobody in the massive open audition that starts the film had what he was looking for. The major investor wants to cast pop star Li, but he becomes set on Wang Dachuan, the muscular but dimwitted cousin of one of his minor investors. As the film goes on, De Song and Zhang (the major investor) will clash over that and every other aspect of the filmmaking process. He also has to deal with the advances of young actress Mei Li, who would play the treacherous Pan Dailan.

Read the rest at HBS.

Murder, Take One (Baksuchilttae Tteonara)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

The first reaction to Murder, Take One is to dismiss its premise as ridiculous, a strawman created expressly for satirical purposes. But in a world with Cops, CourtTV, Dick Wolf's Crime & Punishment, and the like, is Jang Jin's idea of real-time, all-access coverage of a murder investigation all that far-fetched? Aside from the impossibility of finding a jury that could try the case - perhaps not a stumbling block in Korea, and some American cops and D.A.s would take their chances - what's stopping it?

A woman is found in a hotel room, stabbed nine times, dead only a couple hours. A suspicious-looking man is picked up twenty minutes later, and it looks like an open-and-shut case for Prosecutor Choi Yeon-gi (Cha Seung-Won). Things won't be quite so simple, though - the suspect, Kim Young-hun, refuses to confess, and forensic evidence reveals the case more complicated than the multiple stab wounds would imply. To make matters worse, a television network has obtained special dispensation to follow a murder investigation from discovery to resolution, with a panel of experts in-studio, opinion polls, and no hope of keeping developments under wraps.

Read the rest at HBS.

Tape Number 31

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)

I liked The Blair Witch Project quite a bit, even after the inevitable backlash. This film is cut from the same cloth, with a predominately Chinese crew shooting a documentary for the Discovery Channel about "wild men" in rural China, only to find themselves running afoul of the mysterious, never-fully-glimpsed creatures. It's got all the same faults as Blair Witch - stop filming yourselves, especially when you should be running! - but also the same sort of downright effective final act.

The film opens with a shot of a man turning a camera on, polishing it, and then jumping off a cliff while letting the camera run down. So, how'd he get there? We flash back several weeks, when a 22-year-old filmmaker by the name of Helen is recruiting a crew for a cryptozoology documentary about the so-called "wild men" of rural China. She recruits two cameramen, Dou Yan and Zachary (the sole member of the group who's not ethnically Chinese); two sound operators, Yin Jie and Liu Yuen Yuen, and an archaeologist, Dr. Xia. They leave Shanghai, interview people who claim to have encountered the wild men (and receive conflicting descriptions), and recruit a native guide, Zhou Li Jun. They climb to an isolated plateau, where they find strange symbols carved into trees, and, one morning, into the ground around their tents. Members of the crew want to leave, but Helen's convinced they need to stay to make the trip worthwhile.

It's a familiar template if you've seen The Blair Witch Project, which is both good and bad. There's really not a whole lot cooler than having something nifty and unexpected appear at the edge of the frame so that the alert viewer can seize onto it a second before the characters to, and that's an effect that often seems contrived in a conventional narrative film. The trouble is that in order for that moment to arrive unannounced, the film has to first establish a certain baseline. That process is what's really tricky, since logically the camera would only be turned on when the filmmakers have some sort of expectation of something interesting happening. Too often, the first chunk of this film is either things that are rather dull or just wouldn't seem likely to be taped.

Read the rest at HBS.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Fantasia '06, Day 4: Four on four

A couple longish films make for an actual break during the weekend. I opted to see My Scary Girl instead of the first screening of Azumi 2, and since Feed would have made it awful close with A Chinese Tall Story (and just looked nasty), I instead headed to St. Catherine's street to see if Future Shop had a cheap digital camera (left mine at home) and to visit Mr. Steer's, where you can get a pretty darn good burger and a heaping helping of fries. It's a bit less busy than Bartley's back home, but it's still a good burger. The combo special - a burger with both a pattie and a chicken breast - is pretty good, too.

I was kind of surprised to see a lot of folks rooting for Italy in the World Cup. You'd think Montreal would be full of French partisans, but that wasn't the case.

The movies were pretty good. It's frustrating to see that The Woods is probably going straight to video; director Lucky McKee was there for the screening and he didn't even really seem interested in talking about a theatrical release - the "corporate bullshit" has just worn him down to the point where all he wants is to have a copy on his shelf.

It was a pretty good day for crowd reaction, especially in the main hall. The crowd cheering "stage manager" Daniel Walther's removal of microphones and turning off of lights is a kick, and I always know I'm with my type of people when Bruce Campbell's name in the credits gets a big ovation. Funky Forest: The First Contact got lots of audience participation and applause throughout; it's that kind of string of randomness. And some of the folks around me seriously loved A Chinese Tall Story. A Chinese Tall Story and Funky Forest both repeat on Thursday, if you're up here. As mentioned, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon repeats today, and a review is up.

Today's plan: Something touristy, followed by Lost in Wu Song, Murder, Take One, and Tape No. 31

My Scary Girl (Dalkom Salbeolhan Yeon-in)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)

It is, admittedly, uncool to identify too closely with Kim Dae-woo, the "me" in My Scary Girl (also known as "My Sweet Yet Brutal Girlfriend") - he's a thirty-year-old virgin who has never had a real girlfriend or even kissed a girl. But consider the alternative represented by the title character: She kills people, generally husbands and boyfriends.

Hwang Dae-woo (Park Yong-Woo) and Lee Mina (Choi Kang-hie) meet when she moves in to his building and he nearly throws out his back helping the mover with the refrigerator. He's been the type to make excuses for why he's not dating, but she seems different, and soon his friends are shoving him at her (literally). He gets uncomfortable when her ex-boyfriend shows up, but he soon disappears - and Mina starts shopping for a new kimchee refrigerator when her roommate Jang-mi (Jo Eun-ji) starts complaining about the corpse.

The film's main gag, of course, is that most of the time Dae-woo comes off as the weird one, completely ignorant of how to behave on a date, with his jokes and attempts to plan banter inevitably proving awkward and cringe-worthy. As smart as he is, he comes pretty close to making the wrong move at every point, while Mina is forgiving and, in general, sensible and practical. We wind up spending our time watching the film hoping Dae-woo can make things work out more because it would be a shame for him to lose a great girl like Mina over some sort of silly misunderstanding or by not going through the proper rituals. The idea that screwing up with her romantically might be a quick route to violent death is a sort of secondary consideration.

Read the rest at HBS.

A Chinese Tall Story (Ching din dai sing)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Dig deep into the archives here, and one of the first movie reviews you'll find will be for a piece of cheese called "Monkey War 2: New Pilgrims to the West". Neither the review nor the film is really worth looking at; I just bring it up as my first encounter with the Monkey King characters and one of my first encounters with Hong Kong cinema that wasn't art-house or standard martial arts action. I couldn't help but think of it while watching A Chinese Tall Story, if only because Jeff Lau's new film manages to trump that other movie in budget (by a long shot), craziness, and all-around fun.

Wukong, the Monkey King (Bo-lin Chen), doesn't isn't around for most of the film, as he and his imp companions are captured by an angry demon. He saves his master, the monk Tripitaka (Nicholas Tse), by strapping him to his magic staff and hurling him far, far away. Tripitaka is the second strange thing to fall out of the sky near the lizard imps that find him recently, after a strange coccoon. He eventually winds up paired with Mei-yan (Charlene Choi), an imp with an unsightly skin condition, on the run from attacking demons and looking for allies to rescue Wukong and the others. Their journey will take them to the heavens, and back, and the allies they'll encounter include Xiaoshan (Bingbing Fan), who was tucked away in the coccoon that the lizard imps had found. She's the princess of a technologically advanced group of humans who fled the earth for the stars before the Ice Age. On the way, Mei-yan and Tripitaka must learn to trust each other and Tripitaka must learn to fight, rather than simply try to subdue his enemies with kind words.

This group of characters has been the basis for movies and television many times - Jeff Lau himself made a couple Monkey King films with Stephen Chow ten or so years earlier - but probably never quite like this. Sure, despite having only watched that one old, cheap version, I can recognize a few elements: Wukong's magic staff, his servitude to the Tripitaka as penance for his crimes against the Celestial Court, the pig-imp sidekick, other imps wanting to eat the monk to gain his power are all present. I'm reasonably confident that the time traveling people in spaceships are new, though, and I doubt any earlier edition has had close to this kind of special effect budget.

The opening battle against a horde of demons that Tripitaka is tossed away from is massive enough for Stephen Sommers to feel a twinge of jealousy, and the film abounds with wire work, CGI characters, bright colors, and fanciful environments. The big final battle is absolutely crazy - demons, kaiju-sized plant monsters, kung fu, guys with machine guns, a massive spaceship control room, and what the magical staff transforms into dropped a few jaws in the audience. Lau's got a handle on what his effects crew are capable of, and what he asks of them is not [i]Star Wars[/i]-prequel perfection; he knows that the more stuff he puts on screen, the less likely it is to all integrate seemlessly. Many elements feel hollow and weightless. But each effects set piece has new sights that may be wholly different from the previous one, so if there are faults, they're not the same ones.

It reminded me of how, when I was a kid, I might have had a couple Transformers, Star Wars toys, and army men, so when playing with them I'd come up with a story that had them all together. Here, sci-fi brushes against animal spirits and monsters, and the staff becomes the same sort of cartoon character that the carpet was in Aladdin. Every new scene brings a surprise, which almost becomes disbelief by the end. And if you're still able to be floored after spaceships have held off a demon horde in ancient China, the film is doing something right. The only hitch I really found is that the last sequence in the Celestial Court is really kind of brutal compared to what had gone before; this is a movie where people say "oh, sugar!" (at least in the subtitles), and the nasty treatment the hero and heroine get is really not what I'm used to in a family movie. There's slapsticky violence involving knives earlier, but this feels different, there's no tongue in cheek.

I like the cast: Nicholas Tse opens the movie with a goofy, innocent charm as the ivory tower monk who really thinks he can solve all problems just by talking and getting people to see each others' point of view. He's kind of pulled through the movie, but handles each new crazy situation with aplomb. Charlene Choi is full of energy and enthusiasm, putting enough childlike glee into her role that kids won't get turned off by the buck-toothed, spotty face the make-up people put on her I'd like to see another movie with more of Bo-lin Chen's Monkey King, although maybe his cockiness is best enjoyed in small doses. Bingbing Fan gives a quirky quality to Xiaoshan that keeps her from being a serious romantic rival to Mei-yan, but that's OK. More knowledgable fans of Hong Kong cinema will likely spot a number of familiar spaces; I just noticed Gordon Liu as the King of Heaven.

There's an equal amount of talent behind the camera. Lau is a guy who hasn't really broken through in the West, either by effort or having his films picked up by a major studio (he was a producer on Kung Fu Hustle, wrote So Close, and worked with Wong Kar-Wai early in the careers), but he does a pretty darn good job here, keeping things moving while also giving us enough time to get to know and like the characters. He's got a pretty nice staff behind the camera, too, with beautiful production design and nice effects work making the film a colorful joy to look at. He gets a soundtrack from Joe Hisaishi, best known for scoring Hayao Miyazaki's animated films. Frequent collaborator Cory Yuen stages the action scenes.

This probably won't get much of a U.S. release; it just doesn't look as polished as domestic family adventure movies, so it's probably kind of a hard sell to parents. That's a pity; give this a good dub job and kids would probably eat this up with a spoon.

Funky Forest: The First Contact (Naisu no mori)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

Man, every time I think I've got a handle on Japanese pop culture, they throw something like this at me.

This review is sort of useless. I can say, hey, you should watch Funky Forest: The First Contact, because it's funny and weird. But if I do that, and I do it really well, you'll probably have little option other than importing the DVD when it comes out, and I can totally see this being nothing but strange if it's not seen in a theater full of crazed people laughing, doing some audience participation, being just as confused as you but along for the ride. Unless you know someone who programs theaters and can talk him into a midnight show, you really just aren't going to get the experience we did in Montreal.

Which is cool. There's no particular reason (other than economical) why something must be built to work just as well as a shared theatrical experience and a solitary televised one. Of course, I may be full of crap here, just because this is how I first encountered it. After all, the first thought that went into my head about what this movie was like was not co-director Katsuhito Ishii's previous feature, The Taste of Tea, or another recent Japanese film that jumped between a series of bizarre intersecting stories, Survive Style 5+, but Monty Python's Flying Circus, and they did okay delivering surreal comedy into the living room.

Although Monty Python doesn't really describe Funky Forest, either. This movie is a two-and-a-half hour set of sketches, some recurring, some not but containing characters who show up in other contexts, and others apparently just being totally strange one-offs. We start with a pair of goofy-looking bickering stage comics, and we'll return to them often, though only for a few seconds at a time. Then there's little Hachiko (Maya Banno from The Taste of Tea), who daydreams about being in a weird spacescape when she should be doing her homework. We'll meet the "Unlucky With Women Brothers", featuring the ubiquitous Tadanobu Asano as "Guitar Brother", while another brother encounters the "Babbling Hot Springs Vixens". There's "Notti & Takefumi", a young girl kind-of-sort-of dating the guy who had been her English teacher two years before, who relate weird, musical dreams to each other. Then there's a "Home Room!!!!!!!" full of weird high school students (and Hachiko, and some grown men...). And just when you've figured out that, the movie hits you with a guy in a yellow costume with a long, tail-like thing coming out of his groin and a probe he needs a pretty schoolgirl to stick in her navel. Then there's a series of grotesque little creatures inhabiting the school.

Read the rest at HBS.

The Woods

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)

I'll admit it; I've been waiting for The Woods because a favorite actor has a supporting role. I'd recognized director Lucky McKee's skill at building atmosphere and creeping out the audience in May, but it was just too much for me; there just didn't seem to be any particular reason to get to the end of that movie. Here, he's working from a script by another writer, and I think it helps make for a more mainstream, but still creepy, work of horror.

The year is 1965, and Heather Fasulo (Agnes Bruckner) is being sent to an exclusive girls' school after a few instances of acting out, including setting a fire in the front yard which nearly destroyed an old oak tree. The headmistress, Ms. Traverse (Patricia Clarkson) informs her that since her father (Bruce Campbell) isn't quite so well-off financially as he appears, she will be tested for a scholarship, which she receives. The school is isolated by trees in every direction, so there's no relief from the usual girls' school issues - she sticks up for a picked on classmate, Marcy (Lauren Birkell), thus earning the enmity of blonde queen bee Samantha (Rachel Nichols). Another girl, Ann (Kathleen Mackey) has just returned from the hospital. As with any old institution, the school has accumulated creepy stories, but Heather is starting to get the impression that they're much more than just stories.

Aside from being McKee's follow-up to May, which certainly got people's attention when it appeared four years ago, The Woods has gained the stigma for being stuck in a studio vault which is unfair. Almost every film on MGM/UA and Columbia's schedule has had its schedule messed with by Sony's purchase of MGM, though few have suffered as badly as The Woods - it's been in the can for at least two years; and just compare Rachel Nichols in this film to her recent work - no way she can play a teenager any more, and she probably wasn't well known enough (from two separate TV series) to have third billing (first under the title) when this was originally planned for release. Bruckner seemed like an up-and-comer back when the film was expected to be released in August 2004; now her star has faded a little. It's the sort of film a studio has issues with, too - it's centered around teenage characters but is set forty years ago and has an R rating, so they spend a lot of time trying to make it more salable. According to McKee, the version screened is his preferred cut and will probably be the one to come out if and when the studio ever releases it.

Read the rest at HBS.