Jay's Movie Blog

Aaaaand... Done. Mostly; I came away with five screeners to catch up with over the next month, as I try and catch up on the roughly thirty movies I didn't get to fully write up during the festival. One is Before the Fall, the other four are stuff that I couldn't make time for with everything else playing.

Fantasia is huge, although one thing that surprised me is that 19 days doesn't seem that much more overwhelming that 11. In previous years, I found myself feeling crushed by the end, with one film blending into another, but even though I was there nearly twice as long, the festival experience itself didn't leave me feeling fatigued by the end, just the writing about it. I think the festival's programmers did a great job of putting together a more varied festival, in terms of genres, styles, and cultures represented. I get the folks who say it's too big and too specialized, but if it were to contract, it would likely either become more specialized or lose some of the gems.

Will I try to do the entire festival again in eleven months' time? I don't know yet. It uses a huge chunk of my vacation time, so I'll want to figure out a better way to manage that, and maybe find a better place to stay (the apartment I found did the job, but drove me nuts at points). It's still an event I can't recommend highly enough to fans of this sort of movie.

Ching Toi (The Moss)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

The Moss opens with a little girl narrating a fairy tale, about a princess with a green gemstone who is abducted by a demon the be saved by a knight. By the time it's finished, the time for such stories will have passed. After all, Derek Kwok's second feature doesn't take place in some fairy kingdom, but in one of Hong Kong's slums.

There is a green gemstone, which fat Kei has purchased for his mother, the crime boss of a local neighborhood. On the way home, he stops for a few minutes with a prostitute, which turns out to be a really bad idea - there's a police raid, during which the gem flies away, he hits the girl, and though she doesn't start that fight, she sure finishes it. The gem lands at the feet of Fa (Si Suet-yee), an 11-year-old girl who has come to live with her big sister, a fellow hooker named Lulu (Bonnie Xian), and join the business if it will make her money. When Kei doesn't make it home, "Chong mom" (Susan Shaw) takes action - first calling in a favor from former undercover cop Jan (Shawn Yue), then dispatching a homeless assassin (Fan Siu-wong) to take out the rival she thinks is responsible, "Four-Eye" Tong (Liu Kai-chi). All hell breaks loose, and Jan winds up in the middle of all of it.

There's actually even more than that going on; Kwok and his co-writers have a group of Pakistani armed robbers lurking in the background, too. The Moss is a busy film, especially in the beginning, as the filmmakers throw out a great many characters without tipping their hands too much about which ones will be important and/or active as things get going. Sure, we're likely going to see a certain amount of focus on Fa - she narrates the opening scene and a kid in the middle of a brothel is (hopefully) too unusual and delicate a storyline to consign to the background - but some characters make strong first impressions only to be knocked off minutes later.

Full review at EFC.

Bareuge Salja (Going by the Book)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Going by the Book works on a wonderfully simple comedy principle: As long as you don't repeat gags, a clever underdog getting the best of overconfident people in authority will make people laugh and want more. Once you've got that sort of situation and enough good jokes, it's just a matter of setting them up and knocking them down. At least, a movie as funny as Going by the Book can make it look that easy.

Jung Do-man (Jeong Jae-yeong) is our underdog; a former detective demoted to traffic cop after failing to make a corruption case against the governor stick, he still takes his job seriously, going to work every morning with his uniform spotless and enforcing the law to the letter, including giving he new Sampo chief of police Lee Seung-woo (Son Byung-ho) a ticket for a illegal left turn on an empty street. Sam-po has been hit with a rash of bank robberies, and Seung-woo proposes a special training exercise: They simulate a robbery, allowing the police to publicly demonstrate their effectiveness and hone their skills a little. Everyone has their assigned roles, and the chief personally assigns Do-man the part of the robber. And, remember, Do-man takes his job seriously.

To his credit, he does worry that the chief may regret his decision.

Jung Do-man is a familiar enough character; Simon Pegg played a variation on the type in Hot Fuzz. Jeong Jae-yeong is careful not to make Do-man insufferable; he looks apologetic when the clerk at the video store mentions that since they make their money off late fees, Do-man always returning his movies on time doesn't really help the business. Indeed, part of the reason that the audience can laugh so heartily at Do-man making the entire police department look like fools is that he seems to be taking very little pleasure in it; he wants to be caught but is unable to give less than a full effort. If he was a jerk about it, we might not enjoy the other cops getting their comeuppance quite so much.

Full review at EFC.

Dance of the Dead

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Sometimes writers (and the companies that deliver their works to you) have a devil of a time with finding a title for something, and it will undergo many changes and permutations before they decide that, yes, this is the one that will grab people's interest. And then there are movies like Dance of the Dead, where the title (apparently) comes in a fit of inspiration and the filmmakers seemingly work backwards from that. It doesn't usually work nearly this well.

The situations of the title are laid out pretty straightforwardly in the start: Some sludge from the nearby nuclear power plant (right next to the cemetery) seems to be causing outbreaks of the dead suddenly showing signs of life, much to the annoyance of the gravedigger (James Jarett), while across town the local high schoolers are getting ready for the prom. Organizer Lindsay (Greyson Chadwick) is annoyed that her slacker boyfriend Jimmy (Jared Kusnitz) doesn't seem to take it (or anything) seriously, and opts to go with student council president Mitch (Jeff Adelman) instead; Jimmy's friend Steven (Chandler Darby) is trying to ask his lab partner Gwen (Carissa Capobianco), but the cheerleader has her eyes on Nash (Blair Redford). No girl would want to go with backyard wrestling-loving thug Kyle (Justin Welborn) in the first place. It's a good thing all of them wind up late or not going, though - when the living dead attack the prom, it's up to them to come to the rescue!

Why, exactly, the school dance should wind up the focal point of the zombie outbreak is left somewhat fuzzy; we're to take it somewhat on faith that teenager is a zombie delicacy to the point where they will all naturally converge upon the gym rather than just shamble about randomly. Of course, these zombies aren't quite the Romero standard-issue variety; they're articulate enough to express their desire for brains and a few of them are tool-users. Heck, they've got enough energy to burst out of their graves like their coffins have ejection seats.

Full review at EFC, along with one other review.

Labels: comedy, crime, drama, Fantasia, Hong Kong, horror, Korea, USA, zombies

(4) comments

Today's my last day in Montreal - I leave on the 8am bus tomorrow - and it has been a blast. My only regret is that between trying to get two or three reviews up a day and doing some work for the day job, I wound up not getting to go out and about nearly as much as I would have liked. I'm not sure what the "right" way to do a festival is - I kind of feel obligated to see as many movies as I can and spread the word on them if they're going to give me a media pass, but I have spent way too much time in this apartment typing on a computer.

Ah, well. I've got the place rented through next month, so I'll probably take an unclaimed weekend and just see the city with no obligations at some point.

Today's plan: The Moss, Going by the Book, Dance of the Dead, and probably Tokyo Gore Police, though I might decide I want to end the fest on Dance of the Dead and make sure I get enough sleep to wake up early tomorrow. If you're in town, Alone and La Tueur are good today and The Midnight Meat Train is good tomorrow.

1968 Tunnel Rats

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

So, has this whole "Uwe Boll is quite possibly the worst filmmaker ever!" been an elaborate hoax? I haven't seen any of his videogame-derived movies, which are apparenty unbearably awful, but Tunnel Rats is a pretty solid piece of work. It has a little trouble getting started - the scenes in the camp where we try to get to know a dozen or so characters in very little time wiht not-always-fitting music aren't great - but once it gets down into the tunnels, it's a pretty tense bit of work.

Of course, it seems to still be a bit of a work in progress, as there was just a black placeholder screen for the end credits, so perhaps there's time for him to screw it up yet.

Chaiya (Muay Thai Chaiya)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I'm not generally a fan of boxing films; even so-called classics of the genre leave me cold. Because, let's face it - boxing is about violence and fighting as an end unto itself, and while it's one thing to engage in it for physical fitness or self defense, it's hardly surprising when boxers wind up entangled in crime and thuggery. At that point, it's a question of how compelling the filmmakers make the details and how much style they bring to the story. While Chaiya doesn't stand out too much on the first front, it is exceptional on the second.

We start with three friends in rural Thailand, training under the tutelage of a master at his camp. Samor (Sonthaya Chitmanee), our narrator, suffers from an early leg injury, and misses his chance to perform in the ring himself, and so winds up supporting the other two. Pao (Thawatchai Phanpakdee), is the son of coach Thew (Samart Payakarun) and brother of a champion, and is considered to have the most potential, although he is somewhat timid, being in their shadow. Piak (Akara Amarttayakul), is more aggressive, both as a fighter and in life, as he woos pretty nurse Sriprai (Phreeta Kongpetch) before Pao can make his move. After a time, the four make their way to Bangkok so that Pao and Piak can try to break in as professional boxers. Though Piak has more early success, a false accusation soon has him reduced to underground cage matches - and soon doing "favors" for the man who runs them.

The movie takes place over the course of years during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and as a result feels a bit like a mauy thai version of Boogie Nights. The cinematography takes on a retro feel as well, with lots of grain and the occasional split screen during montage sequences to have Pao's and Piak's paths run literally in parallel. Director Kongkiat Khomsiri and his editors do a very nice job with those sequences, which are both filled with muay thai action and pretty good storytelling. Having this sort of narrative sweep does mean that he has to fit a lot of information into the film's two hours, and that's often accomplished by literally stopping the film and giving the audience names and vital statistics on new figures entering the friends' world.

Full review at EFC.

Geunom Moksori (Voice of a Murderer)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

That title threatens to give the game away, but then again, the outcome won't exactly be in doubt for the film's target audience - the 1991 kidnapping of Lee Hyong-ho is one of Korea's most famous true-crime stories. That's worth remembering when one sits down to watch this movie: For us, this looks like a thriller, but it is perhaps best appreciated as a character study of two parents trapped in their worst nightmare. There's a great scene that sums up the entire movie, as the parents rush to a cable car that slowly makes its way to the top of a tower, watching the kidnapper take their car and ransom while they helplessly wait to reach the top and hope they will find their son there.

Seen that way, it's a pretty strong movie; Sol Kyung-gu's breakdown in the final scene is a thing of terrible beauty.

Faet (Alone)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

When I saw the original Thai version of Shutter at Fantasia a few years back, I told friends that the only way it seemed Thai horror could get less subtle would be to have the ushers actually throwing cats at the audience. That turns out to be an unfair stereotype, but the makers of that movie are back and looking to get the audience to jump again. They manage it, too, throwing in a story that's actually fairly clever besides.

When we first meet elegant Pim (Masha Wattanapanich) and scruffy Wee (Vittaya Wasukraipaisan), they are living in Soeul, South Korea, and seem happy enough - they have friends, a dog, and live comfortably. Bad news comes from their native Thailand when they find out that Pim's mother (Ratchanoo Bunchootwong) has just had a stroke. They fly back to be at her side, but returning home dredges up a lot of bad memories for Pim. She was born a conjoined twin, and her sister Ploy did not survive the separation that she insisted upon. Now, Ploy appears to be appearing in every mirror and any other place she can. Wee and his psychiatrist friend Donai try to convince Pim that it's all in her head... but is it?

Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom made a pretty decent horror movie in Shutter, and though the story here is different, they spend much of the movie keeping to the same template: Introduce the situation, punctuate the film with lots of flashes of a dead girl accompanied by loud crashes in the score, and flesh out the characters' backstory in flashback, including how the twins' first meetings with Wee when they were hospitalized teenagers (Wee for complications from diabetes) set in motion both Pim's desire to separate and Ploy's increasingly hostile nature. (The latter is nice; a haunting makes more sense if the ghost was ornery even before death) The first half of Alone is an unapologetic jump movie, but Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom are really, really good at making the audience jump.

Full review at EFC.

Pig Hunt

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Bloody Radical: Unconventional American Horror)

Perhaps the funniest moment during last night's screening of Pig Hunt was the director and executive producer trying to push it as an allegory for America today and the war in Iraq. Sure, they make good connections, and I don't doubt that was in their mind. Of course, with their next breath they try to claim they were being subtle about their politics, but I don't know if a hunting cabin full of newspaper clippings with "LIES!" scribbled on them qualifies as subtle.

In the end, it's a decent monster movie featuring a giant pig and all the bloody violence they could cram into it. Not bad at all, and it will do you all right if you're looking for some monster-fighting hillbilly action.

Labels: action, Canada, crime, drama, Fantasia, horror, Korea, martial-arts, Thailand, thriller, true-crime, USA, war

(1) comments

Almost got shut out of The Midnight Meat Train last night, which would have bummed me out because I wouldn't have been able to see Ryuhei Kitamura's entertaining Q&A. Hopefully someone will have a transcript up soon, because he was entertainingly honest about his adventures in Hollywood thus far - it sounds like he passed on The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and wound up directing this picture in large part because of a chance encounter with Samuel L. Jackson (who, by being a Kitamura fan, just adds more cred to him being the coolest guy in Hollywood). He mentioned working on an American version of Versus along with some other big, crazy action movies, and the latter part at least makes me happy (although I wonder about the former, considering his comments earlier in the talk about not being interested in sequels, remakes, or otherwise revisiting material).

That wound up letting out at 2:30am. It is probably just a matter of time until I wind up taking some kind of nap in a theater. Hopefully it'll be one of the disposable-looking movies at the ends of my day rather than the nifty-looking stuff in the middle. My plan is Tunnel Rats (will my first exposure to Uwe Boll actually be the one that doesn't suck?), Muay Thai Chaiya, Voice of a Murderer, Alone, and Pig Hunt. If you're in town, Island of Lost Souls is fun, Punch Lady... less so.

De Fortabte sjæles ø (Island of Lost Souls)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I hate to bring up Harry Potter when describing Island of Lost Souls, but there wouldn't be so many movies of this type - kids fighting supernatural threats - if it wasn't such a phenomenon, and it is an easy point of reference. Nikolaj Arcel's taken on the idea is maybe not so grandiose as the most well-known, but it is still a ton of fun, and better in some ways.

14-year-old Lulu (Sara Langebæk Gaarmann) and her little brother Sylvester (Lucas Munk Billing) have just moved to the quiet seaside town of Broby with their mother Beate (Anette Støvelbæk) after her divorce. Lulu's got a keen interest in magic and the occult, and one of the first thing she does is pull out her Ouija board and see if the new house contains any spirits who would like to talk to her. It doesn't seem to have much effect, but later that night a glowing light comes out of their closet and is absorbed into Sylvester. It turns out to be the soul of Herman Hartmann, who in 1871 was part of a secret lodge dedicated to fighting supernatural evil. And while Herman mainly wants to return to the sweet oblivion of death, he's stuck in Sylvester's body unless some sort of mystic can be found to release him. 13-year-old neighbor Oliver (Lasse Borg) suggests his mother's "psychic physical therapist", Ricard (Nicolaj Kopernikus), who turns out to be surprisingly helpful.

There are a lot of things I like about Island of Lost Souls that other juvenile fantasies don't do, to their detriment by my way of thinking. One of them is that Lulu is not any sort of Chosen One, descendant of the mystics from the prologue, or prophesied savior; she's just a brave and smart girl who steps up when stepping up is called for. Sure, it's a nice fantasy that you're secretly more special and important than the other kids around you, but the fact that these kids do cool things on their own makes them even more impressive.

Full review at EFC.

Seven Days

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Is it petty for me to be pleased that the screening of Seven Days was not packed with Lost fans coming to see that program's Yunjin Kim, though they would not otherwise go near a Korean film? Probably. I'm a little surprised that didn't happen, although maybe Lost isn't as big a deal in Quebec as it is elsewhere.

The movie itself is a decent enough thriller, although it's the sort that would have me questioning the legal processes like mad if it were set in the United States, and I still wonder about it even though I know next to nothing about South Korea's justice system. Within that ridiculously accelerated context, though, it's an enjoyable enough mystery.

See Prang (4bia)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I must admit, I wasn't expecting this to be such a complete delight, but it winds up being one of the more enjoyable horror flicks at Fantasia. It's a sort of Thai-horror sampler, in turns creepy, gory, funny, and just plain scary, with the four loosely connected stories each entertaining in their own way. Well worth checking out if you get the chance.

Sasori

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

This one is kind of a mess, but it's a slick mess. The mix of Hong Kong and Japanese style action is interesting, but I think it suffers a bit from seeming to compress a long-running manga, cramming a whole bunch of wild characters and ideas into a bit over an hour and a half without much time to really get into them.

The Midnight Meat Train

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival - Bloody Radical: Unconventional American Horror)

Assigning a star rating to The Midnight Meat Train puts me in a quandary. On the one hand, I think that something like 90% or more of this is fantastic, some of the best recent horror filmmaking you will see. On the other, I really like endings, especially ones where the end feels like the logical culmination of what had come before, and my reaction to the movie's ending was, well, that it was something else. And yet, I'm told that most of the original short story is contained in that ending, and it's handled faithfully, which is generally a good thing on principle. So, you see, there it is: A quandary.

We start with Leon Kauffman (Bradley Cooper), a young photographer making ends meet with crime-scene work while hoping to put together better things. His girlfriend Maya (Leslie Bibb) and friend/agent Jurgis (Roger Bart) have finally gotten noted gallery owner Susan Hoff (Brooke Shields) to look at some of his work, which elicits a comment about how he's not really capturing the city the way he wants to. What he does wind up capturing is the last shot of a model before she disappears on the subway. He connects it with another picture, this one of Mahogany (Vinnie Jones), a silent, imposing butcher whom we've seen ambushing people on the late night trains, brutally murdering them. Soon, Leon becomes obsessed with proving that this man is behind a rash of disappearances.

Clive Barker's short story is apparently a popular one among horror fans, though I've never read it. For me, the big drawing card was Ryuhei Kitamura's English-language debut, and Barker's fans should be pleased to see that the story is in good hands. Often described (or accused, depending on who is making the statement) of having a Hollywood sensibility in Japan, and he doesn't make The Midnight Meat Train into a J-horror-styled picture at all. He and director of photography Jonathan Sela do shot the heck out of the film, though, finding all the nifty angles and great compositions that a movie about a photographer really should have. He does a lot of nifty things with the camera, from the continuous static shot of Mahogany's first kill to the way the point of view whips around the subway car in the big climactic fight, emphasizing the cold brutality in the first and the increasing frenzy in the latter.

Full review at EFC.

Labels: adventure, comedy, crime, Denmark, family, Fantasia, fantasy, Hong Kong, horror, Japan, Korea, Thailand, thriller, USA

(0) comments

Sometimes, having a media pass works against you - if I had bought a ticket, I would have gotten into Repo! The Genetic Opera, but it was so sold out and popular with the media/VIPs that about half of us were left out. Not that I think it's unfair - I got the email about the press screening, which I passed on of my own free will in order to see An Empress and the Warriors and May 18, and it would be downright churlish to act like I haven't made out like a bandit seeing dozens of movies over the past few weeks and often being first in line to get seats. Besides, it gave me time to have a late dinner, and that was a pretty good steak and baked potato.

Also, it helps to speak French. I sat through the La Bête du Lac Q&A hoping in vain for someone to either ask a question in English of for my 15-years-dormant high school french to suddenly kick in, but to no avail.

Today's plan is to camp at the Hall theater, where the movies are somewhat spread out: Island of Lost Souls, Seven Days, 4bia, Sasori, and Midnight Meat Train (with Ryuhei Kitamura present). If you're here, I can recommend The Rebel highly, Le Grand Chef with reservations, and wish I could make Triangle work for me.

Kod (Handle Me With Care)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

When you're born with a third arm, losing your tailor is far more traumatic than losing your girlfriend.

At least, that's the impression one gets from Kwan Traithep (Kiatkamol Latha) at the start of Handle Me With Care. His high-school girlfriend Lin is getting married, and his current girl Ann has just broken up with him, but it's the sudden death of "Uncle" Tawee, the tailor who makes his special three-sleeved shirts, that apparently pushes him to take a Bangkok clinic up on their offer to amputate his extra left arm. Getting there from rural Lampang will be something of an adventure - his car is busted, so he winds up hitching a ride with his friend Lorlee, who is delivering a bus there. On the way, they meet up with Na (Supaksorn Chaimongkol), also on her way to Bangkok to find the husband who she hasn't seen for a year.

Take away the whole third arm thing, and what's left is still quite the entertaining road movie. Writer/director Kongdej Jaturanrasamee plagues Kwan, Na, and Lorlee with a series of disasters that are more challenging than dangerous, and shuffles Lorlee off the stage once he starts just being an interruption to the scenes with Kwan and Na (and it becomes clear that the bus would make things too easy). They meet up with some interesting people, but the emphasis never shifts too much from them getting to know each other.

They're a nice pair to meet for the audience as well. Both of them tend to draw looks for their appearance (many comments are made about the size of Na's breasts, although she seems more generally curvy than notably busty), leaving them more alienated as they feel nobody pays attention to them as whole people. Latha plays Kwan as having a chip on his shoulder for much of the movie, although he's charmingly awkward at other times. Chaimongkol tends to present Na as more extroverted and likely to joke around, but shifts gears to lonely and sad well enough to make it abundantly clear that being seen as sexy isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. The simple and heartfelt way she pays off a sort of annoying series of comments about having a great ringtone is kind of wonderful.

Full review at EFC.

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival, Documentaries from the Edge)

I missed this one at IFFB, so I was glad to catch up with it here. It doesn't quite clock in at feature length at a mere 62 minutes, but does fill that time with an intriguing portrayal of two men trying to do something extraordinary amid their ordinary lives. Director Jay Delaney walks a nice tightrope here, looking at their claims in a way that's not quite skeptical but lets the evidence (or lack thereof) speak for itself, without being too harsh on his subjects.

La Bête du Lac

* * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival, Documentaries from the Edge)

I couldn't find myself nearly as intrigued by Nicolas Renaud's half of the Cryptozoology double bill, though. It drew plenty of local interest by taking part in a Quebec community near the Maine border, but despite being even shorter than Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie, sometimes felt very stretched out. There are some nice bits of underwater photography, and a couple of interesting storytellers, but when you get right down to it, it's kind of repetitive: People say they've seen the lake's monster fish, but can't offer any evidence other than "if you've seen it, you know", even though, as one resident says, when one person says they've seen a monster, everybody starts looking for them.

Le Tueur (The Killer)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Le Tueur is the very image of what the phrase "French film" often brings to mind. It's alternatively talkative and quiet, casually sexual, and deals with matters of life and death with what seems like emotionless detachment. What makes it notable is that it manages to scratch beneath that surface without seeming arch or self-satisfied about it.

We start out with Leo Zimmerman (Gilbert Melki), a reasonably successful financier, doing some shopping with his beautiful daughter Alana. He seems nervous, as if he can sense the man following and filming him. That footage winds up in the hands of Dimitri Kopas (Gregoire Colin), an assassin who has been hired to kill Leo. When Kopas visits Leo in his office, he knows his number is up, so he confronts him and asks a favor - let him live until Saturday, so he can pull off one last big deal and make sure Alana is taken care of. He knows his wife Sylvia (Sophie Cattani) is having an affair with his partner Xavier Franzen (Xavier Beauvois), and the idea of Franzen raising his daughter makes him blind with rage. Kopas agrees - why not? - using the free time to strike something up with Stella (Melanie Laurent), a model he meets in the hotel lobby.

There have been hundreds of cinematic hitmen, so often played as cool to the point where it's become almost impossible to avoid self-parody. Gregoire Colin doesn't quite sidestep that, but he handles it. He's got the cool exterior (and interior, for that matter), but there's something awkward about his isolation from regular people. He trips over his own tongue when hitting on Sylvia, and seems to become keenly aware that he doesn't have much of an existence outside of his job. He is so conditioned to leave no trace of his presence that he sometimes seems likely to disappear entirely.

Full review at EFC.

Special Magnum (Strange Shadows in an Empty Room)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Damn, I wish I hadn't nodded off during this one. Not just because it's apparently not available on DVD, and was only issued cut on VHS, but just because it is a really crazy action movie. The big car chase in the middle of the movie really needs to be seen to be believed (especially since it was apparently filmed without permits of any kind), and even on the 16mm print the Montreal locations looked gorgeous. I really hope this comes out on DVD or Blu-ray soon; I want to catch up.

Labels: action, Canada, comedy, crime, documentary, drama, Fantasia, fantasy, France, Italy, road, Thailand, USA

(1) comments

Again, no time to actually write a whole lot up before getting to today's movies. The object lesson for yesterday seems to be that a 20oz soda with no calories will fill you up, leading to not actually feeling like supper despite having one of the few two hour blocks to eat an actual meal during the course of the festival. I really wanted to visit that steakhouse again, and have a grilled steak rather than (very good, mind you) roast beef. Maybe Monday.

Today's plan: Handle Me With Care, the cryptozoology min-doc double feature, Le Tueur, Repo! The Genetic Opera, and Special Magnum. If you're in town, Our Town isn't bad, and [REC] is pretty darn good.

C+ jing taam (The Detective)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

The funny thing about most memorable film noir detective movies is that they don't actually involve a lot of detection - the private investigator just sort of ping-pongs from one strange situation to another, often winding up in a spot where the whole mess seems contradictory. Why should Oxide Pang mess with tradition?

His Tam (Aaron Kwok) is a P.I. working out of Bangkok's Chinatown, and not a great one. One day, Lung the butcher (Shing Fui-On) knocks on his door, saying that some girl is following him, trying to kill him. Tam looks at the picture, surmises that there's no way this pretty girl has much interest in Lung, and figures it's about stalking by proxy. He's sending Lung home when Lung drops a large wad of bills on the table. Well, it can't hurt to look...

Famous last words, of course - a lead on her apartment brings Tam face-to-face with a dead body, and it won't be the last. Longtime friend Inspector Chak (Liu Kai-Chi) will inclined to call Tam the angel of death by the time it's over.

Full review at EFC.

Dark Floors

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

There are times when I feel guilty about being part of the American audience, which is simultaneously so big that international productions above a certain scale feel they need it to make back their budget, yet so fiercely parochial and well-served by what is made here that it's almost impossible to crack. This leads to things like Dark Floors, a movie conceived by Finnish heavy-metal act Lordi and their music video director, opting to shoot in English and then having the cast they import from the UK affect American accents. I don't know that this movie would have better in Finnish, but it's hard not to watch all the way to the end and wonder if maybe something got lost in translation.

We open with Sarah (Skye Bennett), an autistic girl who finds her MRI frightening even before the machine malfunctions, almost setting on fire. That's the tipping point for her father Ben (Noah Huntley), who decides that this hospital isn't going to do her much good and she might as well be comfortable at home, despite the warnings of nurse Emily (Dominique McElligott). The power goes out while they're in the elevator - shared with impatient businessman Jon (William Hope), mentally unstable Tobias (Ronald Pickup), and security guard Rick (Leon Herbert) - and when it finally comes back on, something is definitely not right: The sixth floor of the hospital seems to be completely empty, for starters, and that's before the ghosts and monsters start showing up.

Hospitals are scary places to begin with, and not necessarily because of the sickness. There's something unnatural about how cleanly-designed and sterile those places can be, and emptying them out makes them even more disconcerting - it increases the feeling of helplessness most non-medical professionals feel there. Dark Floors plays into all that, and then, just at the point where audiences might start taking that for granted, starts messing things up - the lower floors are dirtier and no longer unoccupied - ghosts, monsters, and corpses start appearing, bringing the atmosphere from unnerving-but-safe to outright dangerous.

Full review at EFC.

The Echo

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Apparently the quest to find Asian horror to remake has now expanded its eye to the Philippines, where Yam Laranas's Sigaw was a hit and did fairly well on the festival circuit. The good news about this one is that Laranas transplanted it to New York himself, and appears to have done a pretty good job of making this second version worth the effort.

Meet Bobby (Jesse Bradford); he's just been paroled from prison after serving three years for involuntary manslaughter, and he's not looking for any trouble. When his parole officer asks where he's planning to stay, he says his mother's apartment, though his mother died while he was in prison. It's still full of her things, still bearing all the signs of the mental breakdown that preceded her death. Bobby is able to find a job, working for Hector (Carlos Leon) as a mechanic, though he's on a short leash there. He's isolated most of the time, though - none of his old friends talk to him other than his ex Alyssa (Amelia Warner), and she's as wary as you might expect. And his neighbors aren't helping him get a good night's sleep - Walter (Kevin Durand) makes life hell for his wife (Iza Calzado) and daughter (Jamie Bloch), but what can Bobby do, since he's an ex-con and Walter's a cop?

Laranas plays up how the culture of the big city is all about being careful: Friends tell Alyssa to stay away from Bobby, Hector certainly doesn't trust him to begin with, and while the manager of the apartment building tells Bobby that he and one other person (Pruitt Taylor Vince) are the only ones complaining about some of the sounds on their floor, Bobby is standoffish when the other man wants to talk. It may be the natural response to seal oneself up in a bubble with so much humanity on all sides, but it's not healthy, and it's no surprise when Bobby starts to crack.

Full review at EFC.

Babysitter Wanted

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

And just like yesterday, I find myself running out of time to write even a mini-review if I want to get myself some food before starting the festival. Well, I'll catch up later. In brief: Pretty darn good, even if it does make its plot twist fairly obvious even if you're not looking for one.

Still, it gets the job done, and is legitimately thrilling even while it works a lot of comedy into the mix. During the Q&A, the director mentioned that even though it does a great job of making the audience queasy, there's actually only something like three minutes of gore to it.

Labels: comedy, drama, Fantasia, Finland, Hong Kong, horror, Iceland, mystery, USA

(9) comments

It's probably good that I don't have time to write up my story about sitting next to the same annoying people in consecutive screenings, as that could go on forever and I'd just sound like a crank rather than somebody who was enjoying films. Maybe tomorrow.

Today's plan: The Detective, Dark Floors, either The Echo or Handle Me With Care, late dinner, Babysitter Wanted. If you're in town, neither Who Is KK Downey? nor L: Change the World is a bad choice.

Kwong saan mei yan (An Empress and the Warriors

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

An Empress and the Warriors has ambitions of being a full-on action romance date movie, which makes it sound like more of a mess than it actually is. At any given moment, it is absolutely certain of what it wants to be, and gives that audience all it has.

It is the time of China's ten kingdoms, and the Yan are fighting the Zhao. The Yan king is, like all of his line, a fierce warrior, and his daughter Feier (Kelly Chan) is less the cloistered-in-the-palace-wearing-fine-silks princess than the one who straps on some armor to help out on the front lines. When the King dies in battle, there are three candidates to rule - Wu Ba (Guo Xiaodong), the king's ambitious nephew; Muyong "Hu" Xuehu (Donnie Yen), an orphan who has risen to the position of Lord; and Feier, though women do not traditionally rule. Wu Ba plots to kill Feier before her coronation, thus disgracing Hu, but she is rescued by Duan Lan-Quan (Leon Lai), a doctor who lives in seclusion. Outside the royal circle for the first time in her life, she falls in love with the handsome pacifist, but once her injuries are healed, she must return to the Hall of Swords to deal with Wu Ba and the Zhaos.

Director "Tony" Ching Siu Tung isn't messing around, no matter what part of the movie he's working on: The battle scenes are big and loud, as are the training scenes, the palace scenes, and the... Well, not the romantic stuff; those are extraordinarily earnest, with the music suddenly going from martial to lilting, the costumes going from leather to simple cloth, and combat chick Feier gets fairly girly fairly fast. It's not exactly uncommon for the romantic subplot of a Hong Kong action film to be a sharp detour from the rest of the movie, but the effect is somewhat magnified here: There is a lot of testosterone in the first act without any form of comic relief, so going from Feier sparring with Muyong to getting cute with Lan-Quan is a major tonal shift.

Full review at EFC.

Hwaryeohan hyooga (May 18

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

This one was fairly sparsely attended, which is too bad. It shades a little too much toward romantic comedy goofiness in the beginning, trying a little hard to set the mood as placid with little to worry about, but once it gets going, it is pretty engrossing. Most films about Korea's recent history good enough to make it onto the international festival circuit tend to be that way: The material itself is pretty astonishing, especially as it's the sort of thing that Cold War stereotyping often reserved to the Communist Nations. The combination of that material with a suddenly very strong Korean film industry (as much talk as there is of a slump, it's worth remembering that Korea was barely on the map as a place where great film is found a dozen years ago) creates amazing results.

This one tells of a 1980 protest that became a massacre that became a riot that became a siege. The object lesson for military dictatorships is that the competent soldiers your compulsory military service creates today are tomorrow's unhappy civilians, and look out if they get hold of some guns - as much as the government will have superior firepower, there exists the potential for an incredible mess.

Dong Mau anh Hung (The Rebel

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I don't know how busy a local film industry Vietnam has, although I'm guessing it's small and relatively young - following IMDB links from The Rebel soon leads back to many of the same people and to foreign productions. That's not wholly a bad thing for an action-adventure flick like The Rebel, though - it means limited screwing around with things like wires, padding, stunt doubles, or deceptive camera angles when the fighting starts.

The scene is 1922 Vietnam. The French have established a secret intelligence force to work against the rebels, and while their top team of Cuong (Johnny Nguyen) and Sy (Dustin Nguyen) isn't quite able to prevent the assassination of a French official, they do manage to capture a valuable prisoner - Vo Tranh Thuy (Thanh Van Ngo), daughter of a resistance leader and a fierce fighter in her own right. Though Sy mainly has his eye on career advancement, Cuong is increasingly uneasy with the violence necessary to maintain a system that doesn't seem to be bringing much to the Vietnamese people. This time, he snaps, breaking the girl out of prison. Sy, blamed for his subordinate's rebellion, decides to use this as an opportunity to track them back to the rebel leader.

Johnny Nguyen is a producer and writer as well as the lead actor, and along with Truc "Charlie" Nguyen (writer, director, executive producer, editor), he's built himself a pretty decent star vehicle. He's maybe not the greatest actor, but he and the filmmakers know how to work his brooding good looks in between action scenes. He's also smart enough to surround himself with good people: The actor playing Cuong's opium-addicted father, Chanh Tin Nguyen, is a local legend; Dustin Nguyen balances Sy's role as the villain nicely with his tension at how the French treat him; and Thanh Van Ngo is good whether asked to serve as the love interest or kick some butt.

Full review at EFC.

From Within

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I'm down to zero time before heading out, so From Within gets the short shrift until I start catching up next week. In short: Not bad, I'd really like to see it on film as opposed to HD projection, and I kind of felt a little cheated by what was going on as the credits rolled.

Labels: action, China, drama, Fantasia, Hong Kong, horror, Korea, martial-arts, romance, USA, Vietnam

(1) comments

Spent the day working on SQL scripts for work, so I can afford to see movies. I'm very tempted just to say I'm using the extra vacation days, though - not only have the expected T-storms not appeared, but trying to work for any period of time here is an absolute back-killer.

Anyway, off to the movies. Today's plan is An Empress and the Warriors, May 18, The Rebel, and From Within. If you're in town, I really dug Akanbo Shojo.

Uri Dongne (Our Town)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

The trailer and description for Our Town had me expecting something a little different - a little more cat and mouse, a little less "it's all connected". It's unfair to be disappointed by that (judge the movie one what it is, rather than what you expect it to be), but the idea of two serial killers becoming aware of each other and looking to take each other out is so good that I hope someone else picks up on it.

This mid-sized Korean town does have a serial killer - four dead girls in as many months, strung up and displayed in public places. Jae-shin (Lee Sun-kyun) is investigating, but the killer is much too careful and meticulous. Meanwhile, Jae-shin's longtime friend Gyeong-joo (Oh Man-suk) is writing a novel about a serial killer, which his editor dismisses as unrealistic despite it being based on true events. As a result, he's having a hard time paying the rent, which leads to a situation where he kills his landlady in a fit of rage. He hits on the idea of staging a scene to look like another killing in the series, putting the cops on the wrong track. Of course, there's an obvious flaw in his plan - when Hyoi (Ryou Duck-hwan) at the general store sees the news about a fifth body, he's more than a little curious about what's going on.

So, it's not exactly dueling serial killers, but there's still an interesting thriller to be had here. The potential trouble comes from writer Mo Hong-jin taking that situation and weighing it down with prior events. It makes a certain level of sense to have it be the chief investigator's best friend be the copycat killer; he's the one with reason to believe that he might get away with it. Then, okay, maybe Gyeong-joo walks into Hyoi's store while the news breaks. Soon, though, there comes a point where the mounting connections between the three leads becomes too much. Each of them is interesting in and of themselves, but at a certain point the cumulative effect becomes just too much.

Full review at EFC.

The End

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

It is a bit worrisome when, prior to a festival screening, the director is offering what can seem like excuses or explanations - they had less money than the short film that precedes it, but it is long for a zero-budget indie, there's a big plot twist in the middle, etc., etc. If you believe in your movie, let it stand, I figure. I'm pretty sure I still would have enjoyed The End without my expectations being managed.

I admit, it may have helped a little. The opening is kind of clunky; we seem to hear about what high school teacher Joseph Rickman (Jeremy Thomas) did sixteen years ago in every other line of dialog before finally getting into details. Back then, as a teenager, he found a missing girl on sheer intuition, and he's starting to get weird hunches again, seeing a strange robed, limping man in a tragedy mask who may be responsible for a rash of recent kidnappings. Joseph's long-time friend, Det. Clara Wilkie (Ella May) worries about him, but is willing to take whatever help she can get with the case - even after Joseph recognizes and shares the unorthodox source of his intuition.

To let that cat out of the bag would be a shame, and I'm not going to do it, but it is one of the rare mid-thriller twists that makes the movie funnier rather than more grim. It's clever and relatively unexpected based upon what had come before, but does make the things that might have seemed irritating earlier on go down easier in retrospect. That doesn't mean the film completely transforms into a comedy; the characters still take the mystery story seriously, and what is funny to the audience is in fact disturbing to the people within the film.

Full review at EFC.

Stuck

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Stuck is based on a true story that made headlines a few years back, although much-beloved cult filmmaker Stuart Gordon has changed almost all the details to make a feature-length film out of it. That's fine, though; the real story was likely not nearly as much fun.

We're introduced to Brandi (Mena Suvari) and Tom (Stephen Rea). Tom is unemployed and his landlord intends to change the locks on his apartment as soon as he's out the door for a job interview, rendering him homeless; Brandi has just been informed she's up for a supervisor's position, but that might just be a ploy to get her to work a second Saturday in a row. While Brandi is unwinding at a club with friend Tanya (Rukiya Bernard) and (drug-dealing) boyfriend Rashid (Russell Hornsby), Tom is learning the ins and outs of homelessness. As Tom is making his way to a shelter, he's hit by Brandi's car. Rather than call the police, she drives back home - with Tom still lodged in her windshield.

To this point, the movie has followed the actual events reasonably closely, although with many of the details changed. Things start to diverge at this point, but the core of what Gordon found appealing in this story is crystal-clear throughout - and despite Gordon's history of gory horror flicks, it's not Tom's broken and bloodied body. Gordon and screenwriter John Strysik see a parable about the inability of people to look outside their own immediate interests - not just Brandi, but nearly every other person in the film. Just about the only exception to this is a homeless man who shares a drink with Tom and sets the new guy up with a shopping cart of his own. Tom is on the receiving end of the callousness most of the time, but even he will look at a waiting room full of people who likely also had appointments at specific times and ask why he can't have his interview right away.

Full review at EFC.

Red

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Ah, I should have written this one up instead of Stuck; there seems to be much more going on to talk about.

I liked it, in large part because it's got a cast absolutely packed with people I enjoy, and I like dogs. It's also the sort of story that could have easily become a violent revenge thriller (and it arguably does), but there's a lack of sadism too it - Brian Cox's character is determined to go about things the right way, and the filmmakers don't choose to use that as justification for throwing up a ton of hollow violence.

I'm kind of curious about the two directors working on it - I remember Lucky McKee talking about this project either at Fantasia or BUFF a couple years ago, and I'm left wondering how it wound up in Trygve Allister Diesen's hands - did McKee abandon it, run out of money, cause trouble, or what? There are scenes toward the end where it seems Diesen could only get a couple of the cast on set at a time, necessitating weird silhouette shots.

Oh, and I'm kind of amused by the small-town newspaper being the Portland Press-Herald, the actual name of the paper in Portland, ME. I don't think it was supposed to be set in Maine, but what are the odds of that sort of coincidence?

Full review at EFC.

Labels: Canada, comedy, drama, Fantasia, fantasy, Korea, thriller, USA

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I'll admit, my lack of enthusiasm for From Inside may have come from having worn myself out a little beforehand; the walk up and down Mont Royal can leave a person a bit worn out. The best way to follow that up is not necessarily an hour and a half in a chair having to look up because you arrived just as the movie was scheduled to start, at least not if staying alert and engaged is the goal. Still, blah, doom and gloom nastiness. Not really my thing.

I think I chose fairly wisely with the rest of the evening's films - Shadow Spirits and Gangster VIP were enjoyable, and I got to have supper at a supper-like hour. Hopefully I'll be able to catch up with No Mercy for the Rude and Flick down the road.

Note to self: Apparently, the first Kyogokudo book is coming out in English... next year. I enjoyed Shadow Spirits enough that it's worth looking out for.

Today's plan: Hitting a couple tourist spots (I'll probably wind up telecommuting the rest of the week), followed by Our Town, The End, Stuck (I guess), and Red. If you're in town, Chasing World isn't bad.

From Inside

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival, Animated Auteur Visions)

On the one hand, I'm glad something like From Inside can get made: A feature-length (if just barely) animated feature that represents one man's unique vision, with no interest whatsoever in the family audience. On the other hand... Good lord, this is grim, to the point where even the folks who like their darkness might wonder why they're putting themselves through it.

The world has ended, our narrator Cee (voice of Corryn Cummins) tells us; she and other survivors are on a train, and have been so long that she can't remember getting on. Cee has been given her own cabin, as she is the only pregnant woman on the train. The landscape is hellish, and the conditions on the train are bad enough that she sometimes has difficulty telling the difference between her life and her nightmares. She considers the question of whether or not it is right to bring a child into the world quite a bit.

Filmmaker John Bergin goes to dark imagery right away, with engineers using pitchforks to feed babies into the burner. He gives us actual seas of blood, for instance, which is kind of over the top but serves to point up just how continually unpleasant things are. While Cee is drawn pretty, most of the other passengers and engineers are stylized and grotesque. It's a pretty constant stream of unpleasantness, and maybe could have used a little leavening, especially considering how beautiful the sequence where Bergin allows a little joy to enter the film is - enough so that there was a combination of laughs and groans when the pendulum swings the other way.

Full review at EFC.

Moryo no hako (The Shadow Spirit)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Modern genres and their rules have been fairly rigidly codified for a while now, but it wasn't always thus; the original pulps and serials would mix them up with abandon. The novels of Natsuhiko Kyogoku appear to be throwbacks to that kind of audaciousness, if The Shadow Spirit is any indication.

It starts out looking like a classic detective story, the sort that might show up on PBS's Mystery! series, albeit with an unusual detective: Reijiro Enokizu (Hiroshi Abe) can see a person's memories. After a brief prologue where we see him demonstrate this ability to Shunko Kubo (Kankuro Kudo) during their WWII service, the film picks up in the early 1950s, where Enokizu's uncle, a movie studio executive, wants the private detective to find the missing daughter of one of his stars, Yoko "Minami" Yuzuki (Hitomi Kuroki), who is potentially the heir to a vast fortune. It is not a good time to be a missing young girl, as across Tokyo, a group of writers - Tatsumi Sekiguchi (Kippei Shiina), Atsuko Chuzenji (Rena Tanaka), and Morihiko Toriguchi (Magi) - and cops Aoki (Keisuke Horibe) and Kiba (Hiroyuki Miyasako) are investigating gruesome murders where only mismatched limbs have been found. To get to the bottom of their cases, both groups will have to consult with Atsuko's brother, Akihiko "Kyogokudo" Chuzenji (Shin'ichi Tsutsumi), a rare book dealer whose encyclopedic knowledge of spirituality and the occult serves him well in his avocation of exorcist. Boxes of one sort or another will play a role in the investigation - Kubo, now a pulp fiction writer, finds them comforting, having the opposite of claustrophobia; a strange Shinto sect called the "Purifiers of the Sacred Box" claims they can remove people's ills; and there's a strange box-like building high on a mountaintop where Dr. Koshiro Mimakasa (Akira Emoto) did research during the war.

The Shadow Spirit is actually the second movie adapted from a novel series, so what comes across to foreign audiences as a surprising leaps from one genre to another will likely seem just like how these stories work to the Japanese. It is an interesting marriage of forms, though: The sleuths are a group of charming characters that it's quite easy to grow comfortable with, a fairly perfect fit for the mystery novel feel of the early film - even though set in post-war Tokyo, there is something very Agatha Christie about the movie's first act. They remain that way as the film goes on, even though the crimes have gotten much nastier, and they're now surrounded by the nasty pulp dismemberments and mad scientists out of old serials. The movie takes on the feel of a serial by the end, especially in how they could be quite far afield from how they started by the time they finished.

Full review at EFC.

Burai yori daikanbu (Gangster V.I.P.)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival, Nikkatsu Action!)

I'll catch up on this review when I'm back in Boston and have No Borders, No Limits for reference; after all, despite the success of the touring program, it looks like this won't be available on English-subtitled DVD any time soon (in part because it's the start of a six-film series that the rights-holders would like to package as a box set), and there are only a couple more stops for the tour (Seattle, Vancouver, enjoy!).

It is the most conventional of the movies included, a yakuza film starring Tetsuya Watari as a young gangster with a sense of honor, looking to do the right thing even as everything around him goes to hell. The director describes it as a youth film taking place against a yakuza background, and I see that.

It may not be quite so different as the other Nikkatsu Action films that showed up in the tour, but it is a pretty darn good movie; I'd be interested to see the others in the series.

Labels: action, adventure, animation, crime, Fantasia, fantasy, horror, Japan, mystery, sci-fi, USA

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A pretty good day, all told - it rained like crazy for a while in the afternoon while I was safely inside, but the cheap Japanese sci-fi was kind of endearingly cheap. Tak Sakaguchi showed up to introduce and lead a Q&A of Be a Man! Samurai School, and the ugy certainly brings a lot of energy - he practically ran down the steps in Theatre Hall, looking damn cool in the long white trenchcoat he wore in the film and happily demonstrating action and stuntwork with a fellow action choreographer (man, how cool would it have been to have him and Gordon Liu on the same stage?).

After that came Akanbo Shojo, and it's kind of weird to read the other reviews of that. There's not a lot, since it doesn't officially open in Japan until next month, but everything out of the New York Asian Film Festival plays it up as wacky and kind of self-parodying. I guess I can see that perspective, but I did see it as an effectively scary horror flick first, with Yamaguchi having fun on the edges.

Finally, there was a break before Trailer Park of Terror, which is plenty of fun although I can see why the MPAA kept hitting it with an NC-17; it is pretty gory toward the end.

Today's a weird day, schedule-wise; the one hat frustrates me the most. From Inside to start at 3pm is a given, but after that Shadow Spirit overlaps with No Mercy for the Rude by fifteen minutes, and then at 9:40 there's the nifty looking Faye Dunaway zombie movie Flick and one of the Nikkatsu Action movies I didn't get to see at the Brattle, Gangster VIP. It's the first really nasty choice of the festival.

Also enjoyable: Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane.

Robo Rock

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Somewhere in Japan, the makers of Robo Rock have to be wondering how their little movie wound up in a North American festival; it plays so much like something made by friends screwing around with a video camera and some special effect software. It might be; looking at IMDB, it seems that most of the cast and crew have worked on the same projects together.

The acting winds up being kind of amateurish and goofy, but the story is often just off-kilter enough to be fun, and the giant robot is a very cool design.

Riaru Onigokko (Chasing World)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Parallel universes could very easily become the new post-apocalyptic future if given a chance to catch on. After all, it takes even less to build one of those and say it's a science fictional milieu - where the apocalyptic movies would require beat up locations a parallel Earth can look just like ours, maybe with a little cheap CGI to add differences. So you can get movies like Chasing World, not-bad little sci-fi adventures done on a budget.

The film opens with several people dying sudden and bizarre deaths; a news report says they're all named Sato. Tsubasa Sato (Takuya Ishida) isn't terribly concerned; Sato is the most common name in Japan, after all - sister Ai (Mitsuki Tanimura) has been in a non-responsive state for as far as he can remember, and father Teruhiko (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) is a pretty useless drunk. And he's constantly being chased by would-be yakuza and former childhood friend Hiroshi (Shunsuki Daito), but if Tsubasa has one skill, it's running and escaping. He'll need it - when Hiroshi and company finally catch him, they suddenly disappear - although from their perspective, he's the one who disappears. He soon finds out he's somehow slipped into a parallel world, where for the past week the King of Japan has been running a "Death Chase", with everyone named Sato the target. Here, Ai is up and about, and Hiroshi is not a jerk... But there are "its", as in a game of tag, trying to round Satos up, killing anyone who tries to escape.

Screenwriter/director Issei Shibata is working on a fairly limited budget, but he does manage to squeeze a fair amount out of it at certain points. Takuya Ishida or his stuntman does some pretty neat tricks as he runs, so the foot chase scenes are more fun and visually interesting than one might expect. The "its" are a simple, yet effectively creepy design: The hooded jackets that overlap masks that suggest a too-wide smile with glowing, unblinking red eyes manage to look both practical and threatening without being overly elaborate, and positing that the individual "its" would decorate their masks is a nice touch. Those foot chases can't last the entire movie, but Shibata stops short of them becoming tiresome.

Full review at EFC.

Sakigake!! Otokojuku (Be a Man! Samurai School)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Tak Sakaguchi wears a lot of hats for this goofy little picture - writer, director, star, action choreographer - and it's a good thing he's a charismatic presence enough to sell it. Like Cromartie High School, it's a series of goofy vignettes that have a story grafted onto them by the end, where Sakaguchi and company can do some fighting. Also, none of the cast look like believable high school kids, with a really surprising number in full mustaches.

Akanbo Shojo (aka Tamami: The Baby's Curse)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival, From Manga to Screen)

For all I know, Kazuo Umezu, the creator of the manga series on which Akanbo Shojo is based, may be one of the sweetest folks a person could ever meet, as was Vincent Price by all reports. You wouldn't be able to tell that from his body of work, though, which is full of exceptionally bloody horror comics, often featuring children as villains and victims. Not my thing, generally, but I found myself loving Yudai Yamaguchi's adaptation of this particular series.

It starts as many horror movies might, with a young girl coming to a scary house. Taxis from the train station would rather not take Yoko (Nako Mizusawa) and her chaperone Yoshimura to Nanjo mansion, and the elderly housekeeper immediately tries to send them away, saying Mr. Nanjo isn't seeing any visitors. While Yoshimura goes to talk with Mr. Nanjo, Yoko warms herself by a fire, until she hears a baby crying. This leads her to a creepy room filled with dolls and a door that suddenly lockes her in, but when she awakes after escaping she's told it's just a dream. Something's not right, though - though Mr. Nanjo seems to be nothing but elated to be reunited with his long-lost daughter, Mrs. Nanjo carries around a stuffed animal that she calls "Tamami", refusing to acknowledge Yoko. And it soon becomes very clear that the Nanjos and their servant are not alone in the house.

Akanbo Shojo is directed by Yudai Yamaguchi, and initially seems quite the change of pace for him: Yamaguchi comes from the group that burst onto the scene with Versus nearly a decade ago, and his previous work has been outrageous, full of (sometimes gory) slapstick and comedy; even his segment of Ten Nights of Dream was a wild ride. He does a surprisingly good job of slowing things down in this movie's first act, letting the audience be antsy about what might happen rather than laughing at the latest bit of mayhem on-screen. It sets quite a mood for when the crazy stuff starts happening.

Full review at EFC.

Trailer Park of Terror

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

A great deal of schlocky fun. The director mentioned in the Q&A that he hadn't really wanted to do it as "six kids wind up in zombieland and get picked off", and you can kind of see that in how he really does seem to be enjoying the parts set before that, with Nichole Hiltz's Norma making her deal with the devil (Trace Adkins!) and generally loathing the creeps she's stuck with.

Once he gets rolling, though, it is at least a good dead teenager movie, with one or two worth cheering for and the rest providing enjoyably nasty kills. The ghoulish makeup is pretty darn good for such a low budget movie (the FX house was a partner in the production), and the cast dives into it with relish.

Labels: action, comedy, drama, Fantasia, horror, Japan, sci-fi, USA

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Long day yesterday, highlighted by All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and Shamo. I could tell by the end of Shamo that I wasn't going to make it through another movie, so I wound up going back here and to bed instead. The way the schedule has been shuffled means I still have a pretty good chance of catching Tokyo Gore Police should I choose to on closing night, although the guests likely won't be there.

Today's plan is Japan-heavy: Robo Rock!, Chasing World, Be a Man! Samurai School (with Tak Sakaguchi apparently present), Akanbo Shojo, and Trailer Park of Terror. If you're in town, I can recommend A Colt Is My Passport.

L: Change the World

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Kenichi Matsuyama's performance as "L" may not have been the best thing to come out of the Death Note double feature, but it's certainly one of the most memorable. Fans mainly familiar with the original manga may find the idea of a spin-off movie featuring the character unlikely, but the premise does work for the movie series, even if some of the execution is lacking.

(Spoilers for the Death Note movies follow, as you may expect)

Full review at EFC.

Wicked Lake

* ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Here's what you need to know about the quality of this film: They were giving away posters at the door, and a number of them were left in the theater, because who wants to have a reminder of this turd hanging around, even if it's free?

Just bad exploitation all around, full of bad acting without an idea in its plastic-looking head. There's got to be better ways to get one's fill of boobs and blood.

Chanbara Beauty (Onechanbara)

* * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Apparently, no matter what continent they come from, video game movies suck. Not that I've been stuck seeing many, but Chanbara Beauty feels like it would be typical - random zombie attacks, ridiculous costume designs (I don't care how badass someone is as a fighter, when you're living in a world defined by a nasty fluid-borne pathogen and your weapon of choice is a sword, exposed skin is not a good idea), powers that don't hold up to logic, etc., etc.

Even more than expected, Chanbara Beauty is unsatisfying and cheap-looking, although I'll grant that it might be a fun game.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Bloody Radical: Unconventional American Horror)

There is a lot of crap in the "slasher" subgenre, enough so that a person can be reasonably forgiven for giving the entire thing a pass because the occasional gem is not worth the vast mountains of poorly made movies that camouflage it. The occasional gem like Mandy Lane argues against that position, so of course it's stayed hidden for two years.

Mandy Lane (Amber Heard) really blossomed the summer before her junior year, and as it starts, really doesn't seem comfortable with all the new attention, and still tends to hang out with her far less popular friend Emmet (Michael Welch). At a pool party, jocky host Dylan (Adam Powell) constantly hits on Mandy and harasses Emmet, and after both have had a little too much to drink, Emmet goads Dylan into something foolish and shocking. Jump forward nine months, and Mandy and Emmet are no longer friends. She's still the good girl among the people she hangs out with - cheerleaders Chloe (Whitney Able) and Marlin (Melissa Price), rich kid Red (Aaron Himelstein), and athletes Bird (Adiwn Hodge) and Jake (Luke Grimes). They're going to spend the weekend at Red's family's ranch, with only hand Garth (Anson Mount) to supervise. Mandy still does tend to attract unwanted attention, though...

It may not seem like writer Jacob Forman has done anything particularly special here at first glance. He seems to have a better handle on how teenagers actually act than many others - the characters aren't self-referential constructs like in the Scream movies or lazy stereotypes - but that's not completely unusual. What he does is to rebuild the genre from the ground up, letting us see the killer's face much earlier than is typical and giving us some idea of his or her motives, although there are still a few complications to make the end more interesting. This doesn't seem like much, but for so long it seems as though there have just been a couple basic paths these movies could go down (bloody whodunit and gimmick killer, or some combination of the two) that playing up the characters rather than the mechanics seems downright revolutionary.

Full review at EFC, along with two others.

Shamo (Gwan Gaai)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I'm going to guess that Shamo was a fairly long manga series; like a lot of anime based on such series, the movie feels cut to the bone, with jumps in the story made in order to get to all the flashy scenes, and characters there because they were in the book but not given very much to do. It works better than usual in this one, in part because we're supposed to think of the protagonist as at least partly a dangerous maniac who can't be reasoned with; the randomness works in its favor.

Visually, it's also a treat, as director Soi Cheang sets it in a garish hightened reality that gives a certain amount of glitz to it trashy settings. The fight scenes are pretty bone-crunching affairs as well.

Labels: action, crap, Fantasia, fantasy, Hong Kong, horror, Japan, thriller, USA

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Fantasia 2008, Day Nine: The Objective, Adrift In Tokyo, Shadows in the Palace and X-Cross

A pretty successful day, all told: The Objective was a fairly crushing disappointment, true - I really did love Blair Witch and had high hopes for the premise of Daniel Myrick's first theatrical feature since - but Adrift in Tokyo was a very nice palate cleanser. Then I crossed the street to see a very good murder mystery and the sort of absolute insanity that Japan does better than anyone else. I know there's no chance of X-Cross getting much in the way of an American release, and that's too bad - the movie is flat-out fun, without anything close to a dull or slow moment.

Today's plan: L: Change the World, Wicked Lake, Chanbara Beauty, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, and Shamo. Maybe The Butcher or Tokyo Gore Police if I think I can swing a sixth movie at midnight.

The Objective

* * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

There are roughly a dozen good movies you could make with the hook stated at the beginning of The Objective. The trouble, unfortunately, is that most of them would require more money than Daniel Myrick apparently had to work with. Sure, he's been part of a gigantic hit on a budget before, but The Blair Witch Project was small by design; this needed to be bigger.

That hook? That on September 14, 2001, CIA satellite imagery picked up a hot spot in the mountains of Afghanistan - heat and radiation similar to the detonation of a small atomic device. They send Ben Keynes (Jonas Ball) to the area to investigate; he hooks up with a special forces team led by Matthew Anderson's Wally, telling them that they are looking for a cleric - who is, in fact, a good source of intel. What he doesn't tell them is that the CIA thinks that this could be a much bigger deal than a mere atomic bomb.

Given the apparent budget Myrick and the other filmmakers had to work with, creating something of the scale Keynes describes probably isn't going to happen - you're not going to get the teaser where something explodes in the desert, or cuts to a situation room in Washington, where a potential atomic or paranormal threat just days after 9/11 if given the constant attention it deserves. Instead, there's a small team that doesn't get any chance at all to show they're elite troops, walking around a featureless desert. Most of the good stuff is being saved for the finale minutes.

Full review at EFC.


Tenten (Adrift In Tokyo)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

I love movies shot like Adrift In Tokyo, on real city streets that give a feeling of being real and unique to that neighborhood but aren't necessarily the places tourists take pictures or filmmakers generally stage scenes. It's fun to play tourist that way, and when the unexpected happens - as it often does in Satoshi Miki's film - it seems both more surprising and more authentic, because those scenes seldom look staged to start.

There's also a great performance in here by Miura Tomokazu, who transforms a big, imposing beast into a guy we really like by the end of the film. Co-star Jo Odagiri is good, too, but it's Tomokazu that really grabs the attention of the audience as the film goes on.


Goongnyeo (Shadows in the Palace)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Ah, murder. It's been around since time immemorial, among the rich and the poor, whenever someone stood to gain from having another person not be around. The modern police force which methodically investigates these crimes is a relatively modern invention, although detective fiction tells us that no matter what the time and place, there's an amateur sleuth ahead of her time. Even in the maid's quarters of a Chosun Dynasty king.

A body is discovered: Wol-ryung (Seo Yeong-hie), a personal maid to the king's concubine, is found hanged in her quarters. The court nurse, Choi Chun-ryun (Park Jin-hie), starts the autopsy, and finds that this was no suicide - the lack of brusing on the neck says she was dead beforehand. Aside from that, the girl was lactating, clearly showing that she had broken the oath of celibacy taken by the entire staff. The head maid, Kam-cheol (Kim Sung-ryeong), tells Chun-ryun to report it as a suicide, since the consequences of a murder would be terrible for everyone: Masters' and servants' behavior reflects on each other, and royal concubine Hee-bin (Yun Se-ah) is battling the queen mother to have her child recognized as the royal heir, and implicating the household could weaken her position. Chun-ryun isn't about to let the matter go, especially once she's gained Hee-bin's tacit approval for the investigation. But who will tell her what she needs to know? Queen's maid Jung-ryul (Jeon Hye-jin), who found the body? Bullied mute Ok-jin (Lim Jeong-eun), the dead girl's roommate? What of Lee Hyung-ik (Kim Nam-jin), the king's nephew, who has taken Wol-ryung's medical records? Or the hints that there may be a supernatural explanation?

There's no type of story quite so engrossing as a good murder mystery, although no genre is more unforgiving when it fails. The audience knows early on to pay careful attention to details, since anything could be a clue, so any weakness in story, performance, direction, and even continuity will be thrown into sharper relief. Director Kim-Mee Jeung and her co-writer Choi Seok-Hwan create a film that holds up to such scrutiny; though it may not be a classically solvable mystery per se, the details all fit together perfectly and each scene seems to contain at least one bit of information that not only helps the viewer create a more complete picture but whets the appetite for what is going to come next.

Full review at EFC.


XX (Eksu Kurosu) : Makyo Densetsu (X-Cross)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

How much of a blast is X-Cross? At one point, noting character names for future reference, I put "Reika - insane lolita wields giant scissors" down in my notebook - and she's basically a side note to the film's main action-packed storyline!

We hit the ground running, as Shiyori (Nao Matsushita) finds a ringing cell phone in a closet of the hot-spring resort she's staying at, and hears something along the lines of "run! quickly! they'll cut off your leg!" when she answers it. In no time flat, she's strung up in front of a crowd as someone gets set to swing a big axe. Then it's flashback time, as we see Shiyori and her friend Aiko (Ami Suzuki) arriving at this very secluded hot spring, with Shiyori looking to get away after a break-up. Once we're caught up, it's something close to non-stop action as the voice on the phone tells us that the village's residents are descendants of a cult who folklore says would cut off their wives' legs to keep them from leaving - but who is this voice, and can he (or anyone) be trusted? And just what is up with that nutjob with the giant scissors (Shoko Nakagawa), anyway?

X-Cross is a film that implores you to just sit back and enjoy the ride, but it happily doesn't count on the audience taking things for granted. It's pure B-movie fun, yes, packed with pretty girls, ugly redneck cultists, blood, sharp and ridiculous weapons, and crazy costumes, but it's also got a story that, while simple, keeps the audience guessing. And not just in terms of having random stuff happen, but actually letting you enjoy figure things out and match them up: Everything fits together, and the back and forth jumping in time and location gives the audience several "ah-ha!" moments as they see how pieces fit together.

Full review at EFC.

Labels: action, comedy, drama, Fantasia, horror, Japan, Korea, mystery, thriller, USA

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There are just way too many Korean thrillers that I don't follow even though I'm taking notes, or at least that's how it seemed halfway through the day. Beautiful Sunday and Epitaph were both more than a bit overstuffed, relying on multiple twists that some folks in the lobby afterward were trying to puzzle out. Wide Awake was the same way, and I wonder if this is just the way it is in Korea right now, or whether I just happen to be seeing the wrong movies. I seem a lot more likely to get lost during Korean movies than any others, it seems, and I wonder why that is.

Ah, well. The Japanese half of the day was solid enough to make up for that. As I say in the full review on EFC/HBS, I had kind of been wary of Accuracy of Death (and why does it have that title in the subtitles and listings when it says "Sweet Rain" in plain English on the title screen). I don't have much interest in the "death is beautiful" meme, so both the description in the New York Asian Film Festival guide and Fantasia's turned me off; it just turned out to be so ubiquitous that I couldn't avoid it without deliberately avoiding it. Turns out that was a good thing, and Black Belt wound up being a solid, no-messing-around karate movie.

Today's plan: The Objective, Adrift In Tokyo, Shadows in the Palace and X-Cross. I suppose I could do a midnight, but Bad Biology looks like too much for me and Shamo would leave a gap in my schedule tomorrow where I really don't need one. If you're here, I can recommend Accuracy of Death, Assembly, Black Belt, and A Colt Is My Passport.

Beautiful Sunday (Byootipul Seondei)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Beautiful Sunday doesn't quite accomplish magic, but it's got one of the basic principles down pat. In fact, it might be a little too good with its misdirection, as a good chunk of what's going on is, in the final analysis, not really that important, just a smokescreen of complication to obscure the really clever bit.

We start with Detective Kang (Park Yong-woo); one of the Seoul PD's most aggressive cops, he tears through a major drug deal to take down the kingpin, Song-tae. Then, immediately afterward, he sells 90% of the product to another drug dealer. 200g goes on the report rather than 2kg, and as much as Song-tae is livid at someone stealing from him, he keeps quiet to avoid more jail time. As soon as he gets out of jail, though, he and his second-in-command Yoo Chun-yon are gunning for Kang, who has other problems: His ill-gotten gains are being spent on his comatose wife's medical bills, and there's a serial rapist on the loose that Kang's captain really wants put away.

Meanwhile, we're also introduced to Min-woo (Nam Goog-min); his attraction to pretty Su-yeon (Min Jee-hye) quickly becomes an obsession. One night he goes up to introduce himself, she freaks out, and he grabs her, initially to calm her down, but once he's already got his hands on her, he takes the next step. That's bad enough, but when he later sees her working in a bookstore, he approaches her; she doesn't recognize him and they start dating.

It's almost inevitable that the two stories will cross (sure, sometimes they don't in movies like this, but that's rare and unsatisfying). Truth be told, waiting to see how this happens is the thing that drives most of the movie, and filmmaker Jin Kwang-kyo plays his cards pretty close to the vest on that one. Kang's story has a lot of characters and things going on, but ultimately doesn't amount to that much. Min-woo's, by contrast, is very minimalist, as we get uncomfortable waiting for Su-yeon to grasp just who she's falling in love with. Despite all the action in Kang's part of the movie, it's Min-woo's that's actually more engrossing most of the time; a ticking time bomb hidden behind happiness is more interesting than one in the middle of people who regard each other as enemies anyway.

Full review at EFC.


Gidam (Epitaph)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Epitaph is one of the busiest horror films I've seen lately, starting in 1979 before flashing back to 1942, offering up ghosts and serial killers and obsessions that may or may not be connected in ways other than happening in close proximity to each other. It's good and proper for each character in a film to have his or her own story, but it doesn't quite work here; the three stories could each have been their own film. The end result is that none of the threads are really satisfying.

Still, brothers Jung Beom-sik and Jung Sik will likely be something once they start giving their stories a little more room to breathe. They're already pretty good at creepy atmosphere, setting up interesting situations, and knowing just when and how to hit the audience with the jump moment.

As with Beautiful Sunday, the audience was coming out of Epitaph trying to figure out what it was all about. Too bad; they could have been coming out gushing.


Suwito Rein: Sinigami No Seido (Accuracy of Death, aka Sweet Rain)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

Those who have lost a loved one suddenly may take issue with this film's premise - that a Grim Reaper has allowed it because that person has fulfilled their life's purpose. Still, it might be some small comfort to believe that the Reaper who made that judgment is someone akin to Takeshi Kaneshiro' Chiba.

Grim Reapers, we're told at the start, do not actually kill people, and they're not involved with cases where death is a result of age or disease. They spend a few days examining someone's life and then decide "proceed" or "suspend" depending on what they've seen. We follow Chiba in three cases over the years. In 1985, he meets Kazue Fujiki (Manami Konishi), a call center employee who has lost everybody she has loved and now has a stalker calling customer service and asking for her specifically. In the present day, he judges a yakuza (Ken Mitsuishi) who is at odds with his fellow gangsters over using children to push drugs and also keeps a watchful eye on would-be younger brother Akutso (Takuya Ishida). Finally, in 2028, an old hairdresser (Sumiko "Junko" Fuji) pegs him for a Grim Reaper and has an odd favor to ask of him before she goes.

Supposedly, the movie would not have been made without Takeshi Kaneshiro's participation (original novelist Kotaro Isaka was reticent about a film version), and it is a wonderful piece of casting. Kaneshiro is handsome, yes, and brings a wonderful guilelessness to Chiba. What very easily could be groan-worthy moments as Chiba fails to understand figures of speech are instead full of innocent charm. He is anything but cold as he goes about his job, playing his immortal being not as jaded but instead as interested in everything around him. Just watching Chiba listen to music is a little delight.

Full review at EFC.


Kuro-Obi (Black Belt)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Most martial-arts films make some noise, at least, about there being more to their practices than just violence, although most wind up seeming a bit hypocritical on some level. Black Belt (or Kuro-Obi) is no different, really, although it seems to take its pacifist teacher's beliefs more to heart than most. Yes, it will ultimately come down to fighting, but at least those that want to avoid combat seem sincere about it.

Three black belt karate masters are learning from their sensei (Shinya Owada) in 1932 when the military police come to the Shibihara dojo, looking to take possession of it for more useful purposes. Choei (Yuji Suzuki) is injured immediately, cut by a ceremonial sword. Taikan (Tatsuya Naka) attacks, disobeying sensei Eiken Shibihara's edict to only use karate to block attacks, not to thrust and kick, which leads to a series of challenges with the captain. Giryu (Akihito Yagi) is brought into the challenges, obeying the sensei's wishes, and the captain feels dishonor is brought upon him when Giryu will not finish him off. This doesn't run them off for very long, though, and soon Army commander Hidesha Goda is conscripting the masters. Giryu faces the consequences of his mercy, while Taikan becomes fond of the status afforded him and becomes corrupted. The dying master has given Choei the responsibility of choosing who will next wear the ancient belt (the "kuro-obi" of the title) and be considered the true master.

This is not a movie of great subtlety or moral gray areas. The opening duel with Captain Tanahara lets us know with crystal clarity who will be the good student and who will be the bad one, and the film quickly bears that out: Taikan is soon working for Goda, deciding he likes women and fights to the death, while Giryu joins with a poor but kind farming family. Commander Goda himself lacks only a moustache to twirl; he plans to not only have Taikan train his troops in hand-to-hand combat, but to use the dojos Taikan takes over as brothels, stocked with girls who have been all but kidnapped. He tends to laugh maniacally, too. In contrast, the farmers that take in Giryu are as good as he is bad: There's a spunky young boy, a beautiful daughter, and an elderly father who does, admittedly, have a weakness for gambling (at rigged tables! it's a front for swindling old men to force them to sell their daughters!).

Full review at EFC.

Labels: action, comedy, crime, drama, Fantasia, fantasy, Japan, Korea, martial-arts, thriller

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It started out rainy yesterday, but I was able to knock five work hours off the 24 I said I'd work to bring the vacation time used down to an even two weeks (plus the Fourth of July, which still counts as a holiday even if you're in Canada at the time). By the end, I had even figured out a relatively comfortable set-up for working in the apartment. It's not actually a bad place, but it's old enough that there aren't many outlets - so there is basically one place you can put the DSL modem and have it reach both the phone jack and some electricity. That would drive me absolutely nuts if I were staying there on a more permanent basis.

Still, I was able to keep half an eye on the Sox game until I hit the nearby steakhouse, where the feed was actually playing on the TVs, just in time for the offensive explosion. Steak, baked potato, and the Red Sox crushing the opposition to gain ground on the Rays. That's a nice afternoon even before leading into a good evening at the movies. Although scheduling a 160-minute movie for 10pm (even before Idiots and Angels started late) is just mean. Took a Diet Pepsi Max to get through it (man, you pay for the extra caffeine and not having your teeth feel coated with corn syrup [or, in Canada, "glucose-fructose"] with a nasty aftertaste), and that sort of wrecked my plans to get to sleep early.

Today's plan: Beautiful Sunday, Epitaph, Accuracy of Death and Black Belt. Sparrow is recommended at the QC.

Ji Jie Hao (Assembly)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

One probably wouldn't name a war movie "Retreat!", although that's what the assembly call of the film's title means - fall back and regroup. There is, after all, a time for soldiers to be fierce and a time when doing so just means walking through a meat grinder.

Captain Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu) knows this. A captain in Communist China's army, the film opens in 1948 with him warning the Nationalist forces that they're surrounded and it's better for them to surrender than die fighting. He knows the position isn't quite so one-sided, so he sends Lieutenant Jiao (Fan Liao) out for some more recon. They get pulled into battle anyway, and by the time it's over, he's lost a great many troops, including the unit's political officer. And though his old friend Colonel Liu (Jun Hu) claims his next assignment is not a punishment, it certainly seems like one: He and his 46 men are to defend a coal mine - and the only new personnel he's given is former prisoner Wang Jincun (Yuan Wenkang) to serve as the political officer (Liu says he doesn't need one, but Gu's men are nearly all illiterate, and having someone to write home for them would be a boon). The bugle call to assembly is supposed to come within a day, but while waiting, it's a bloodbath. Afterward, to add insult to injury, Gu awakens in a POW hospital - he had taken an enemy uniform for warmth - unable to convince his captors of his actual identity. He stays in the army, though, assigned as an enlisted man to Zhao "Flapjack" Er Dou (Deng Chao), hoping to learn the fate of his men.

There are men for whom the military becomes their family, and Gu is one of those from the start of the movie. Interestingly, we see him follow the reverse of the usual soldier's story arc: As the movie starts, he is the father figure, encouraging to his men and desperate to protect them even in death, adopting Jincun and making a man out of him. After the battle, we see him as a somewhat awkward recruit, not initially well-suited for the artillery unit he's been assigned to, taken under someone else's wing. He's still the grizzled veteran in Zhao's unit, though an NCO rather than an officer. For other characters, this may seem an affront to pride, but Gu seems content at his new place in the world. It's the only one he really knows, and while he still clearly feels immense loyalty to his troops, there is perhaps a bit of relief in no longer feeling the burden of command.

Full review at EFC.

Idiots and Angels

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Animated Auteur Visions)

Bill Plympton is an institution by now; he puts out a new animated short every year or so, a new feature every few years, all with a distinctive style and sense of humor. He's also one of the people who has figured out a way to support himself on his work without giving up much of his freedom, and managed to integrate new digital tools into his arsenal without wholesale compromise of his signature style.

His latest, Idiots and Angels, is pretty good; a dialogue-free story of a loathsome man who grows angel wings and maybe becomes a better person because of it. There's plenty of fun cartooning in it, and the story's pretty good. If you like Bill Plympton, you'll probably like this quite a bit.

Full review at EFC.

Sekai de Ichiban Utsukushii Your (The Most Beautiful Night in the World)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I'm not quite sure whether Diasuke Tengan's new movie overreaches in its grasping for profundity or whether I just don't quite love what it comes up with. It's a charming fantasy, with plenty of fun characters and a whimsical story. The visuals are snazzy, too, without being overly aggressive.

It's pretty long, though, and ends on something of a dubious note. In a way, it becomes like the last act of Fight Club, only with sex as the means of anarchy instead of violence, and I don't know if I necessarily bought into it as a good idea. Provocative, sure, but making much in the way of sense?

Full review at EFC.

Labels: action, animation, China, comedy, drama, Fantasia, fantasy, independent, Japan, USA, war

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So I did the "Zappin Party" for the first time last night. That's one of the "only-at-Fantasia" things, with lots of goofy shorts and parody trailers, mostly locally-made but with some more professional bits and featuring familiar faces from the audience. It's also split pretty evenly between English and French, with a whole ton of French-language introduction. Very Montreal, that.

It's been a rainy morning here and looks likely to be a rainy afternoon, so I'm going to put in some time for my day job today and not burn all my vacation time for the year away. I wish I'd gone through with contacting the sister company to see if I could use their office space, though. Later on, the plan is Assembly, Idiots and Angels, and The Most Beautiful Night in the World. if you're in town, I can recommend Peur(s) du Noir, Sukiyaki Western Django, and Mad Detective; although with the latter playing at Cinematheque Quebecoise, I don't know whether the subtitles will be English or French.

Ri-teon (Wide Awake)

* * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Most of the time when I see media folks at pre-screenings or festivals with a notebook out, furiously scribbling notes as the movie plays, I tend to think it's unnecessary, and they're missing out on actually seeing the film. About a half-hour or so into Wide Awake, though, I was rummaging through my backpack for a notepad and a pen; otherwise, there was no way I was going to have this plot and these characters straight later.

We start in 1982 - well, we start with a bit of text describing "anesthetic awareness", a rare condition where the anesthetic given to a surgical patient doesn't take and he remains awake during the procedure but unable to make this known because the muscle relaxant has done its job. Anyway, 1982, 9-year-old Na Sang-u is having heart surgery, and he feels all of it. His doctor, Ryu Jan-hwan, does not believe his account. Jump forward twenty-five years, and Jan-hwan's son Jae-u (Kim Myeong-min) is also a surgeon. He's recently lost a patient, and the bereaved husband, Lee Myeong-suk (Kim Roe-ha), is bucking for a restraining order, constantly calling Jae-a and his girlfriend Seo Hui-jin (Kim Yoo-mi). At the hospital, a Jae-u proposes have psychiatrist O Chi-hun (Kim Tae-woo) use "hypnotic anesthetia" on a patient resistant to the conventional kind, which irritates Jae-u's anesthesiologist best friend Jang Saek-ho (Jeong Yoo-seok) no end. Meanwhile, Gang Uk-hwan (Yoo Joon-sang) has just returned to Korea after having lived in Los Angeles for the last several years, claiming to be Ryu's old friend but also seeming pretty unstable. Oh, and someone has been killing doctors from Ryu Jan-hawn's old hospital - the ones that involved in that psychologically scarring surgery on Na Sang-u.

Got that? Lucky you! Some of that comes as flashes of newspaper headlines that go by too quickly to actually read (especially if you don't read Korean and are thus dealing with white-on-white subtitles). There's also flashbacks to Na Sang-u being a creepy, psychotic little kid that come at seemingly random intervals and a flash-forward that does not create the dread or surprise it hopes to. Characters take forever to come to the simplest explanation, and there are enough false endings that the audience gets to wonder both why the movie hasn't ended yet and to ponder whether they would have preferred the ridiculously obvious or the obviously ridiculous ending.

Full review at EFC.

Sun Taam (Mad Detective)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I want a Mad Detective series; if not as films, then as TV, books, or some other medium. I don't know if that's exactly an unreasonable request; when you come up with a crime-solving character as original as Bun Chan-kwai coupled with a performance as entertaining as Lau Ching-wan's, you don't just stop at one killer thwarted.

Bun, you see, is nuts. When we meet him, he is solving a murder by getting inside it, repeatedly stabbing a pig carcass to simulate the murder and then having newly arrived Inspector Ho (Andy On) pack him in a suitcase and throw it down to flights of stairs. After that, he cuts off his own ear and presents it to his retiring chief as a present, just before the title "Mad Detective" appears on the screen. Five years later, as one might imagine, he is off the force, hallucinating his wife May (Kelly Lin) and claiming his crime-solving acumen comes from being able to see suspects' "gwai". He's thoroughly insane, but Ho comes to him with a case he's been unable to crack: Eighteen months ago, Detective Wong Kwok-chu disappeared chasing a suspect, with his gun since being used in a series of robberies. Bun immediately focuses on Wong's partner, Ko Chi-Wai (Gordon Lam), but Chi-wai presents him with almost too much to work with - seven "gwai".

(Note that the English subtitles translate "gwai" as "inner personality", although it apparently literally means "ghost" or "demon". Based on how they are used in the movie, maybe "inner demon" would have been best.)

Full review at EFC.

Labels: Fantasia, Hong Kong, Korea, mystery, thriller

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Another longer morning than I hoped, especially considering it's much more likely to be hot and/or thunderstorming in the afternoon. I'm thinking that I might head down to the riverfront today, seeing what's at the archeological museum, climbing the clock tower, maybe catching up on some reviews while sitting on the riverbank. Yeah, I doubt that last one too.

Today's plans may wind up being relatively short, movie-wise: Probably just Wide Awake and Mad Detective; maybe "DJ XL5's Helzapoppin' Zappin' Party". Second Skin didn't tempt me at IFFB and it doesn't really tempt me here, and I don't know about the Zappin' Party, though it's a Fantasia tradition which I've yet to catch.

If you're in town, I heartily recommend Let the Right One In, and I'm opting for Wide Awake over Triangle by the slimmest of margins: I'd really like to see the Lam/Hark/To movie in its entirety, as I dozed through the middle segment at IFFB, but I'm pretty sure I'll get the likely US video release anyway.

3 Dias (Before The Fall)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

No full review for this one, since I must have nodded off at some point while watching it - a character disappearing without you remembering how is a pretty sure sign of that. Don't read that as a knock against the movie, though - it's all about me having a decent-sized lunch and then walking around in the heat afterward; I knew going in that I was kind of wiped out.

I'm not sure the fantastical premise of this movie is really necessary - at it's core, it's about a family trying to survive the escape of a serial killer that they were instrumental in putting away. The apocalyptic background explains his escape and creates an extra level of tension, although the movie already has that in abundance. That makes Before the Fall a thriller about dying on one's own terms rather than surviving, which is certainly an interesting variation.

Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

There's an argument to be made that a time travel story that makes one's head hurt a bit is probably a pretty good one; it generally means some thought has been put into how everything fits together. Timecrimes comes close to being a great time travel story because it's got the potential to make one's head hurt, but executes so well that it never comes to that.

Its unconventional hero is Hector (Karra Elejalde), something of a middle-aged schlub who just moved into a new house with his wife Clara (Candela Fernandez). As Clara goes out to get food for supper, Hector spots a pretty girl (Barbara Goenaga) taking her top off through his binoculars. He probably shouldn't go to investigate, as he winds up attacked by a bandaged man when he finds her unconscious. He climbs a fence to escape, winding up in a nearby laboratory where a grad student (Nacho Vigalondo) offers him a spot to hide, but when he gets out of the chamber, it's an hour... earlier?

Certain things which subsequently happen - or which, from another point of view, have already happened - are probably fairly obvious the the seasoned sci-fi fan. There is still satisfaction in watching them play out, though; filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo has built himself a clever clockwork mechanism of a script - and, yes, he has pulled M. Night Shamalayan's trick of inserting himself into the movie in the role that makes him the architect of the problem and allows him to explain it directly to the audience. Half the fun is figuring out how the pieces will fit together, especially since things will hit different people at different rates.

Full review at EFC.

Man jeuk (Sparrow)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Johnnie To's Sparrow begins with a small delight of a scene: Simon Yam sewing a button back onto his coat. The score could come from a classic musical, and from Yam's body language, the audience almost expects him to jump up and burst into song and dance. What a movie it would have been if he had, rather than being frequently tied down by plot!

That plot has Yam's Kei playing one of a team of four pickpockets; they're often good enough that they can extract the money out of a person's wallet and return it. Kei's hobby is photography, and one day he snaps some pictures of a beautiful woman (Kelly Lin). This woman, Chung Chun Lei, is the unhappy mistress of Boss Fu (Lo Hoi-Pang), and she also has encounters with the other members of the team. Fu's men are not pleased with that, and rough them up, which is part of why Kei is more than a little hesitant when Chun Lei asks for their help in retrieving her passport - which Fu keeps in a locked safe with the key always on his person.

Sparrow is often far more whimsical than what people think of as the typical Johnnie To movie, although that's due in part to the fact that his gangster movies get exported with far more regularity than his forays into other genres. There are times when it does seem like he is trying to make something like a musical or a dance picture, as the pickpockets wordlessly show off their precision work to the wonderful score by Fred Avril and Xavier Jamaux. The sequence at the end, in the rain with umbrellas, is a thing of true beauty.

Full review at EFC.

Peur(s) du Noir (Fear(s) of the Dark)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Animated Auteur Visions)

Horror and animation are natural fits for anthology films - horror because too much familiarity with a story can leave the audience unafraid by the end, animation because it can allow for amazingly different styles to be showcased. Peur(s) du Noir goes to an international group of print cartoonists for its stories, and while it's kind of a mixed bag, there certainly are some gems in this black-and-white packages.

We start out with French cartoonist Blutch, who gives us a series of episodes spread throughout the film of an aristocrat leading a group of wolves around only to have them slip their leads, one by one, with ghastly results. The artwork is very nice, looking like charcoal pencils come to life, and the attacks of the wolves remain shocking and brutal all the way to the end. The bits are rife with symbolism - the wolves' master starts out appalled by the first attack but is gleefully loosing them on innocent victims later on. The end is pretty much the expected one, and might have felt like a fizzle if not for it's viciousness.

Next up is American Charles Burns, whose art style is recognizable even from only seeing the cover to Black Hole. He gives us a tale of Eric, who as a boy was fascinated by insects and other creepy crawly things. One day he finds a peculiarly intelligent-seeming specimin that escapes its jar hidden under his bed. Years later, at college, the introverted young man meets a beautiful young woman, but she changes after getting some sort of weird cut while sleeping on that same bed with him. Burns and company create a creepy scenario, but the animation is kind of hit and miss - the very obviously computer-generated recreation of Burns's style works great for insects, but is kind of unnerving in a bad way with people.

Full review at EFC.

Labels: action, animation, comedy, drama, France, Hong Kong, horror, sci-fi, Spain

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Ugh, I've had it sitting around here trying to finish a second review and install someone else's DSL modem. I'm gonna go find some food and a guidebook to replace the one I forgot to bring with me last week and get outside before heading back inside a screening room.

Today's plan: Before the Fall, Timecrimes (I've got a screener at home, but I'm told it's a great audience movie. I'll have to ask for a screener for Paradise Murdered), Sparrow, and then either Peur(s) de Noir or Beautiful Sunday (the former finishes first, the latter starts first, and both have uncontested 3pm screenings later in the week)

If you're in town, I can recommend The Substitute.

Vikaren (The Substitute)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

That The Substitute is making the festival rounds rather than getting some sort of general release is kind of amusing. The film's cast and plot makes it obvious that its primary audience is pre-teen kids, but how many people have been to a film festival that packs the tweens in? And then there's the film itself, edited in a way that may give adults fits, and apparently catching an R rating in the U.S. so that it's kept away from its main audience. Is this a case of the Danes thinking kids can handle more than Americans do, or something even more bizarre?

The story is pretty straightforward - a silver globe from a planet that knows only war lands in a Scandinavian chicken farm, possessing the farmer's wife. They had been watching an TV interview of Jesper (Ulrich Thomsen), a writer whose latest book proclaims love as the most powerful force in the universe. Sadly, Jesper's wife has perished in an automobile accident, and son Carl (Jonas Wandschneider) is having a very difficult time getting over that. On the same day Carl's class gets a new student, it also gets a long-term substitute teacher - Ulla Harms (Parpika Steen), the farmer's wife. She's strange and often cruel, but will the parents believe their kids' assertions that she's some kind of monster or alien? Of course not!

That this movie is rated R in America is patently absurd (the MPAA supplies "language" as the reason, but I don't recall anything worse than a "hell" or two in the subtitles, although I did note that some Danish words sounded kind of like f-bombs once or twice); it's almost as though filmmaker Ole Bornedal's previous thrillers (including the Danish and American versions of Nightwatch) are being held against it. There is some action and maybe more tension the The Substitute than might be found in an American live-action kid's adventure film, but nothing to be worried about.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Punchlady

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

There have been plenty of movies that were probably pitched as "battered wife fights back!" (The exclamation point is important) Punchlady is the first I know of, though, that could have been "battered wife fights back... in the ring!"

I don't want to be patronizing by claiming that this movie is insulting or dangerous, but I have to admit that I was a little uncomfortable with the relatively light touch used for this fantasy. It opens with a downright brutal depiction of domestic violence, but then sells it out a bit with its bizarre revenge-fantasy premise (Ha-eun winds up challenging her kickboxing-champion husband to a televised match, with their divorce settlement on the line) and a middle section that is almost the stuff of romantic comedy.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Negatibu happi chenso ejji (Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

This is the second film I saw on this day that made me wonder about the audience at Fantasia and festivals generally. This is very much a film made with teenagers in mind, but how many teens come to film festivals of any sort? At least Fantasia draws a good crowd of college kids, so they're not too far from the target audience, but there were still a bunch of people like me there, folks looking to hoot at the magical girl taking on the chainsaw-wielding giant.

It's cute enough, though, and does work as a tale of teenagers trying to grapple with loss. I wouldn't really try to sell it as an action movie, but I did think it was pretty cute.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

A couple years ago, Frostbite got a little hype as the first vampire movie to come out of Sweden. It was a wild teen comedy, perhaps not quite what people expected from the nation that produced the likes of Bergman, and not something that particularly stays with you. Let the Right One In hits closer to that mark, playing as moody and morose as well as bloody. It's quite frankly brilliant.

The time is the early 1980s, the place is a suburb outside of Stockholm. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a small 12-year-old, pale almost to the point of being an albino, and he's picked on all the time. He plays with a knife which he clearly fantasizes about putting into his tormentors, and is fascinated by a series of crimes happening in the area. A pair of new neighbors has just moved in - Hakan (Per Ragnar), whom we see kill a teenager, preparing to drain his blood before a dog scares him off, and Eli (Lina Leandersson), a girl about Oskar's age ("twelve, more or less") who is rather odd: She only shows up in the apartment complex's courtyard at night, doesn't go to school, and isn't familiar with certain figures of speech and other everyday accouterments of a kid's life. She tells him they're not going to be friends, but soon they've got nobody closer.

Though there is apparently an English-language remake planned even before this film is released in its native Sweden, I find it hard to imagine this film transplanted to another milieu. Director Tomas Alfredson fills the frame with heavy snows, dark skies, and dread, lingering on establishing shots and giving the audience a real sense of place. Everybody but the children seems weathered, and even they seem to be hardening quickly. It's a natural place for a vampire to be found.

Full review at eFilmCritic; be advised that it's almost impossible to go further without spoiling a few great early surprises.

What We Do Is Secret

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

I had a good case of Film Festival Fifth Film Fatigue going by the time What We Do Is Secret started at 10pm, which was not a good way to approach a musical biopic of a band I've never heard of.

And, quite frankly, I won't be heartbroken if I never hear of them again. I'm not a particular fan of punk, and the stuff we hear from The Germs in this movie doesn't make me particularly interested in yet another tale of musicians who do drugs and act like jackasses. It's been done, and despite how much we're told Darby Crash was brilliant, I just don't see enough here to make watching this stuff worthwhile.

That said, I can't help but be impressed with the effort Rodger Grossman put into his film. The period details are, I'm told, spot on, and he combines faux-documentary and narrative scenes pretty well. He gets good, entertaining performances out of his cast. And I don't know that it's necessarily a fault that he's assumed that his film's audience would be as much of a fan of Darby Crash and the Germs as he was - that was something like 95% of the audience at the screening I saw, and they sure seemed to enjoy it.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Labels: action, biography, comedy, Denmark, drama, family, Japan, Korea, musical, sci-fi, Sweden, USA, vampires

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I bumped into Kurt Halfyard from Twitch today, and I was impressed that he recognized me from last year because, despite his protestations that he's bad with names and faces, I'm worse. No way I would have picked him out if I'd been sitting behind him rather than vice versa. Our paths crossed for the afternoon shows at the Hall theater; we were both pretty darn pleased to see a new-ish film by Alex de la Iglesia and agreed that this guy doesn't get nearly the exposure he should. His films are a thorough joy to watch, but his earlier work especially seems to be pretty much unavailable in Region 1, while his completed English-language thriller doesn't even seem to be on a North American release schedule at all (and with the collapse of Tartan, Ferpect Crime seems to be on its way into limbo as well).

The double feature from the Spanish TV-movie series Films to Keep You Awake was the highlight of the day film-wise for me (I'd certainly buy a ticket for de la Iglesia's entry, at least), although being three rows from the front while Gordon Liu took questions and did a little impromptu martial arts demonstration was also a bunch of fun.

Today's plan: The Substitute, Punch Lady, either Negative Happy Chain Saw Edge or The Pye-Dog (the first starts about a minute before my previous film gets out, so I'll have to sprint once the credits start and see if it's still letting in), Let the Right One In, and then either Who's That Knocking at My Door? or What We Do Is Secret, depending on my mood.

If you're in town, I can recommend Genius Party and [REC].

Batman: Gotham Knight

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

The idea behind Gotham Knight certainly seems sound enough - have a nice lineup of Japanese animators and American writers (who have worked on well-liked runs of the comics and the much-loved animated TV series) team up for tales that link the two entries in the most recent cinematic series. They've even got Kevin Conroy of the animated series back doing his voice. With that line-up, this seems like it should be a slam-dunk.

And yet, though there is much to admire about Gotham Knight, it doesn't quite add up to what it should. Sure, the structure is nice, with episodes that combine to form a single narrative, and I think this is a nifty way to get Batman characters into the movie series that couldn't be used well in a feature (Killer Croc, Deadshot, Crispus Allen). For all the style, though, Gotham Knight still sometimes looks and sounds cheap, and the jumping between animation styles, effective within "Have I Got a Story For You", is disconcerting over the course of the movie: Alfred looks completely different in the two segments he appears in, and Bruce Wayne goes from very well-built to pretty-boy slender. That might have worked in a strict anthology, but the episodes are supposed to be connected here.

I may write more about this one in the fall, when the BD will likely be available cheaper as part of a Batman box set. This is a movie created for home video, and probably is best judged seen that way.

Películas para no dormir: La habitación del niño (Films to Keep You Awake: The Baby's Room)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Alex de la Iglesia is a reasonable omission from the Masters of Horror series; it skewed North American and this Spanish director has spread his work across multiple genres. Fortunately, a similar series in Spain did include him, and Films to Keep You Awake produced things closer to feature-length with (I'm told) better production values. de la Iglesia's entry, at least, is a winner.

After a prelude with kids playing hide and seek, we meet Juan (Javier Gutierrez) and Sonia (Leonor Watling), a young couple with a seven month-old baby and a much older house that they've just moved into. Juan's busybody sister Teresa (Eulalia Ramon) and her smug husband Marcos (Ramon Barea) stop by, incidentally dropping off some hand-me-downs. Most are useless, but they set up the baby monitor, only to hear strange sounds coming from it. They install a security system and upgrade to a new monitor that includes a camera, but that just shows Juan somebody in the baby's room. Sonia doesn't see it, and an increasingly paranoid Juan is referred to paranormal expert Domingo (Sancho Garcia) by his boss (Antonio Dechent).

While de la Iglesia has dabbled in many genres, he and writing partner Jorge Guerricaechevarria have always been most at home with black comedy, and some of the best moments in The Baby's Room are also among the funniest. Early on, they defuse any thoughts about what a cliché-ridden situation the young couple perhaps having their first marital problems might be, and nearly everybody has a great line or three. The scene where Juan first sees something on the baby monitor and goes to investigate is a small masterpiece of comic timing, one of those sequences where everyone in the audience laughs twice - once when they realize where the scene is going (and it doesn't hit them all at the same time), and once when it finally gets there.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Películas para no dormir: Para entrar a vivir (Films to Keep You Awake: To Let)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

To Let was shown at the Fantasia Festival as part of a double bill with another movie from the "Films to Keep You Awake" series, Alex de la Iglesia's The Baby's Room, and it shares a number of characteristics - a young couple starting a family, and a creepy new home. It puts a decidedly different spin on the material, though, playing up the bloody action as opposed to the black comedy.

This film's young couple are Mario (Adira Collado) and Clara (Marcarena Gomez). They're in a bit of a bind, since they've sold their old place before finding a new one, so even though Clara's not feeling well - morning sickness combined with the end of a 36-hour shift as a nurse - she agrees to see the apartment Mario has made an appointment to see, although she gets to play bad cop. They almost just turn right around upon finally finding it - it's in an ugly old building in a crummy-looking area with weird-looking mannequins strewn all over the place, but the realtor (Nuria Gonzalez) insists that the area is being redeveloped, with a school and a green zone and shops, and it's fully furnished and all the renovation is on them. Carla still doesn't like it, especially the way the woman is talking like they've already taken the place, but takes a moment to lie down when she's feeling dizzy. That's when Mario finds the pair of old sneakers he threw away last week, and she sees a photo of them already placed on the bedside table... Just where did Mario find the listing for this place, anyway?

Co-writer/director Jaume Balaguero was one of the directors of [REC], and like that sensation, To Let doesn't let up once the chaos begins in earnest. This is a pretty straightforward escape movie, with protagonists in a weakened state trying to outrun and outwit an adversary that knows the solidly-built territory much better than they do and has a few nasty tricks up its sleeve. Balaguero and his co-writer Alberto Marini do a nice job setting everything up, playing on what a weird and uncomfortable process looking for a new place to live is and finding a nifty way to sidestep the "how does this last more than five minutes if the heroine has a cell phone" question.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Pi li shi jie (Disciples of the 36th Chamber)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Shaw Brothers action films a lot, but they were definitely a factory. Take Disciples of the 36th Chamber, part of a series of Shaolin martial arts stories. I happened to see the first in the series, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, as part of a Shaw Brothers retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive about a month ago. It was a ton of fun, but you can't help but notice this second sequel follows the same template - rebellious kid who looks way too old to still be in school gets into trouble, is sent to the Shaolin temple to learn discipline, excels in his classes, but rebels in order to fight the oppressive Manchus. This time around, Gordon Liu's San-te is the monk instructing the rebellious student, Hsiao Ho's Fong Sai-yuk.

So you get a lot of training exercises, and more comedy as Sai-yuk is kind of an obnoxious brat. The spiritual and political aspects of Shaolin kung fu are less prominent here, and the action, while well-choreographed, lacks a certain amount of tension because so much of it is just training exercises. Stylistically, Shaw Brothers movies are so similar that it's surprising this one comes from 1985; it could be from any time in the twenty years before. That's why it's almost surprising how good the big battle at the end is, as director Lau Kar Leung (aka Liu Chia-lang) throws everything but the kitchen sink into a wedding trap. One of the things the Shaw Brothers did better than anyone else is battles with scale; there are moments in the end where long shots of the big battle fill the screen, and there are dozens of people fighting.

The restoration work is very good, and having Gordon Liu on-hand to introduce the movie and take questions afterward was a major treat. Disciples probably won't wind up on my list of favorite martial arts movies, but if the Shaw Brothers studio was a factory, they did at least tend to crank out quality work.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Le Grand Chef

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, From Manga to Screen)

At a festival like Fantasia, it's important to seek out movies like Le Grand Chef even if they don't turn out to be among the best in the festival - a steady diet of zombies, serial killers, ghosts and the like can leave a person feeling incredibly burned out by the time it's over. A mostly light-hearted movie about rival cooks can be just what one needs to cleanse the palate, if you'll excuse the metaphor.

Five years ago, Sung-chan (Kim Kang-woo) was poised to ascend to the top of the cooking world, but a terrible and nearly fatal blowfish incident led to Oh Bong-joo (Lim Won-hie) being selected as the head chef at Korea's most prestigious restaurant and culinary school instead. Now, Sung-chan is happily working as a farmer and greengrocer, looking after his increasingly senile grandfather, when an old friend shows up. The knife of the last Master Chef to Korea's last king has been found in Japan, and a nationwide contest has been announced to find which chef deserves to be its new owner. The man wants Sung-chan to enter, but he has no interest in doing so, even if he has left pretty VJ Kim Jin-su (Lee Ha-na) around to pester him until he does. He's resolute about not wanting to be in that sort of high-pressure environment again - at least, until Bong-joo shows up to offer him the position as the head of his kitchen if he stays out.

There's a lot to like about Le Grand Chef. Fans of the food movie will enjoy watching Sung-chan and Jin-su prepare a variety of Korean dishes far more appetizing than what they may remember from Oldboy. Director Jeon Yun-su keeps everything moving at a brisk pace, and he and screenwriter Shin Dong-ik embrace the episodic nature of the original comics (occasionally even using the sort of split screens Ang Lee used for Hulk) without making the resulting film seem choppy or overstuffed. There's a fun cast of characters, and even the ones that could have been one-note villains or clowns are something more interesting.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)

Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer has been getting a lot of love from genre fans, in part because it shows them a lot of love: It casts Robert Englund, it's fairly funny in the self-deprecating way that this group of fans accpets, and the cast and crew make a big point of how they did almost all the effects work with practical effects rather than CGI. It's the kind of movie that makes me idly wonder what the reception would be like if, prior to festival screenings like this, they told the audience that they were just making this sort of horror movie because it's cheap and has a built-in audience, and that they'd used computers to make something that looked just like puppets or men in suits. Just as an experiment.

It's fun, don't get me wrong, but I had the same sort of reaction to it I had to Behind the Mask a couple years ago: It's fun, and actually pretty well-made, but I didn't grow up on that sort of movie, and thus find myself loving it less than those who did.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Labels: action, animation, Canada, comedy, Fantasia, Hong Kong, horror, Korea, Spain, superhero, thriller, USA

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Yesterday was "adventures in subtitles" day, at least in the afternoon - La Antena made them part of the story. A Love had titling so brutal as to apparently cancel today's encore, and Genius Part made me hate looking away from the imagery. I took a little time beforehand to find myself some wi-fi (which, because it's located in the office next to this apartment, I am still using. I promise I'll stop once the DSL modem arrives), find some of the necessities you would take for granted in a hotel at the pharmacy, and the like. I kind of can't wait until Monday, when I'll finally have time to get out and about into the city. Movie gluttony is nice, but I'd hate to spend all my July time off inside darkened theaters.

Today's going to be an inside day, though - Batman: Gotham Knight (though I'll have the blu-ray waiting for me when I get home), Tales to Keep You Awake (Spanish horror Grindhouse with Alex de la Iglesia contributing a film), Disciples of the 36th Chamber (with Gordon Liu in person!), Le Grand Chef (Korean, not French), Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer (looks like good dumb fun), and Robo Rock (giant robots and rock & roll? Yes, please!).

La Antena (The Ariel)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

La Antena opens with hands superimposed on a typewriter keyboard while a piano plays, and introduces us to its "City Without a Voice"by displaying it as the pages of a pop-up book. That's a fanciful start to a fanciful movie, one that enjoys its storytelling and which always has another nifty image up its sleeve to tease the imagination.

Years ago, we're told, the inhabitants of this city lost the ability to speak, but they soldiered on. Now, though, the city is dominated by Mr. TV, who not only owns the local television station but the main food company (TV Foods!) as well. The most popular program features a mysterious woman known as "The Voice" who still retains the power of speech. Living in this world is a TV repairman (Alejandro Urdapilleta) and his daughter Ana (Sol Moreno). One day, a letter from Mr. TV is delivered to Ana's mother's house that was meant for the Voice (the classic case of 166 Eclipse Street becoming 169 Eclipse Street because of a loose screw) that the eyes for the Voice's blind son are ready if she's ready to do her part. Ana doesn't know what this means, but decides to make friends the the boy anyway. Coincidentally, her father has stumbled across part of it - and it's sinister. He needs the help of his ex-wife (Valeria Bertuccelli) to escape pursuit, especially when Mr. TV and his cohort Dr. Y decide to kill the son, since another person with a voice could ruin their plans.

As befits a story about an entire city without a voice, filmmaker Esteban Sapir films La Antena in the style of a silent movie. The images are black and white, shot on 16mm film; the style alternates between the dream-like and early twentieth century - though an early twentieth century city where everybody speaks Spanish but much of the iconography is Soviet (an apt choice, as the film often feels like one of those Soviet sci-fi silents). Much like in genuine silents, the score incorporates sound effects, and The Voice's costume incorporates a hood that casts such a deep shadow as to seem empty, making her speech seem oddly disconnected in the same way.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Sarang (A Love)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)

I really can't review this one honestly; though it was listed as being 35mm in the program, it appears that the print could not arrive on time and the HD version shown had some of the most brutal English subtitles I have ever witnessed in a theater, including that film Garo and Clinton showed at the Coolidge where the very title was misspelled. A few people left; the rest of us muddled through, occasionally laughing at what the (I presume) electronic translation had wrought. Apparently one character's name translates as "beautiful bead" and another's as "turnip". Or "turnip" is some sort of odd Korean insult. I can't say for sure.

Unfortunately, the bad subtitles didn't add much camp appeal to what seemed like a pretty basic movie. In-ho gets in fights, but falls for beautiful Mi-ju as a kid. They meet up later, grow close, and his rescuing her from a gang leaves him in jail and her in some sort of witness relocation program, but they somehow meet again when he enters the service of a better breed of mobster who just happens to have her for a mistress. Torment ensues.

Gangster romances are a tricky thing; either it's tough to get a really good love story through all the testosterone or it could just take place anywhere but for the random violence. It can be done - one of my favorite examples is another Korean film, A Bittersweet Life, but based on what I was able to piece together from the subtitles, A Love isn't nearly at that film's level.

Genius Party

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Animated Auteur Visions)

"Genius Party" is probably the most hubristic/critic-baiting title I've seen since a Chinese film by the name of "Dazzling" a few years back; it just begs for a "but who crashed?" sort of response. If anybody can use that title and get away with it, though, it's the people at Studio 4°C, who have created some of the most visually stunning animated films to come out of Japan in recent years. This anthology has seven segments, and there's something brilliant in all of them.

First up, we have the opening by Atsuko Fukushima; it's a zippy piece set to music with magical flowers, phoenix birds, and smiling spherical creatures that pop up out of the ground and tap into some sort of cosmic force. It sets the tone for the film with constant motion which combines the look of traditional hand-drawn animation with flying cameras that tend to be a real hassle without computer assistance. The music and effects animation enhance it to get the audience excited for what comes next.

Things actually might peak in the second segment, "Shanghai Dragon" by Shoji Kawamori, especially for those that love the sci-fi action that people usually think of when Japanese animation is brought up. It starts out as a cute story of a (literally) snot-nosed five-year-old by the name of Gonglong who loves to draw and Meihua, the girl who stands up for him. Kawamori is most famous for anime with a bunch of mecha action, and he doesn't disappoint, as an incredible bit of future technology falls from the sky, chased by future cyborgs who want to protect it and AIs who want to destroy it (and humanity). Gonglong, naturally, finds it, and what follows is grand over-the-top action which both spoofs and embraces the clichés of the genre while putting a nifty new spin on it, as traditional anime style combines with a child's drawings.

Full review at eFilmCritic.

[REC]

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Playback in Black)

Sometimes it's good to believe the hype. One of the perils of going to festivals is that I know I'm going to be writing reviews of the movies I see, and I jump the gun trying to analyze the film while it's still going, even though you can't properly do that without having it in its entirety. Throw in that [REC] has been receiving a ton of praise, and it's perhaps not surprising that I spent a good chunk of the movie wondering what the big deal was. So my jumping out of the seat by the end was somewhat contaminated by "aaaah, that's it!".

[REC] opens with Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) introducing herself as the host of a news/reality program called "while you were asleep". For this week's episode, she's going to tag along and document the Barcelona Fire Department. Most of what they do isn't actually fighting fires; it's handling broken water mains, animal rescue, and the like. Tonight's first call has them going to a small apartment building where screams have come from the apartment of an old lady who lives alone with her cats; when they get there, they find a dead girl on the floor. The woman is practically feral, actually biting one of the police officers who joined the firemen. Before they can get him to an ambulance, though, the find there are government people sealing off the building, not giving any information to the panicked residents, and the bitten cop's partner is expected to take control despite not knowing any more than anyone else.

The Blair Witch project wasn't the first "horror verité" film, but it is the one that triggered the ones of varying quality since. [REC] makes the gimmick work better than most; even if Angela initially seems more "on-air personality" than reporter, it makes a certain amount of sense for her and cameraman Pablo (cinematographer Pablo Rosso) to keep shooting once the crazy stuff starts happening, and the enclosed building is tight enough quarters that just dropping the camera and running wouldn't help that much. More so than with many films of this type, the filmmakers make the "found footage" conceit really make sense.

Full review at eFilmCritic, along with one other review.

Labels: adventure, animation, Argentina, comedy, crime, fantasy, horror, Japan, Korea, romance, sci-fi, silent, Spain, zombies

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Got into Montreal at about three yesterday, then took about an hour to get to the apartment because neither the ATM nor the metro ticket machine at the Berri-UQAM station wanted to recognize my debit card. That got resolved quickly enough, though, and I had no trouble getting my media credentials after unpacking.

(Probably noteworthy only to me, because I don't do the film critic thing for a living: I've gotten more from them each year. When I first came in '05, it was ten free tickets; '06 got me a media pass; '07 got me a pass and a program; this year there's a totebag and a lanyard added to the package. Yes, I'm easily impressed)

As I write this, I'm not sure where I'll wind up posting it; I had little luck with the Wi-fi at the Subway where I got supper last night. Of course, maybe if I'd brought my laptop rather than my phone, that would have been different.

Today's plan: La Antena, A Love, Genius Party, [rec], and maybe the "Celluloid Experiments 2008" program if I'm not totally wiped out by features come midnight.

Sukiyaki Western Django

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival Opening Night)

As much as I love Takashi Miike for being an outrageous filmmaker who does unpredictable things, I sometimes wonder if that can be a double-edged sword. Sukiyaki Western Django is unabashedly a gimmick movie; if you've heard about it at all it's probably for all the crazy things that Miike and company do. The thing you might not expect is that there's a darn near great spaghetti western not far underneath the craziness. Yes, it's easy to love this movie as camp, and I wouldn't trade any of the insanity away, but it's easy to overlook the fact that this movie would be pretty cool without the swordplay, schizophrenic sheriff, or that weird baby-in-a-flower image.

Gimmick number one is Quentin Tarantino, who appears in the movie's opener as a gunslinger who tells the tale to a group that passes by while he's preparing his sukiyaki. There was a town, Donourra (located either in Japan or Nevada) that was besieged by two rival gangs, the red-clad Heike and white-wearing Ganji, just like in England's War of the Roses. Both had heard there was treasure to be found, but their fighting has emptied the town out of almost all its original inhabitants. They stayed locked in this stalemate until a lone, nameless gunslinger (Hidesaki Ito) came to town, offering his considerable services to whoever paid the best. Cowardly Heike leader Kiyomori (Koichi Sato) and charismatic Ganji boss Yoshitsune (Yusuke Iseya) both make offers, warning him not to "play Yojimbo". Local barkeep Ruriko (Kaori Momoi) seems to be hoping for just that, though - Kiyomori killed her son Akira (Shun Oguri) and Yoshitsune is keeping Akira's beautiful widow Shizuka (Yoshino Kimura) as his woman, and their son hasn't spoken since.

Gimmick number two is that, though the entire cast other than Tarantino is Japanese, they're all speaking English, often not all that well. While some members of the cast seem to have a fairly decent command of the language - Iseya and Kimura could probably work in Hollywood if they wanted to - others, well, are pretty clearly reading their lines phonetically and place the emphasis in all the wrong places. Miike plays into this for camp value - it's less fluent Sato's Kiyomori that starts reciting Shakespeare and insisting on being called "Henry", for instance, and at one point even Tarantino starts imitating his visitors' cadence. The audience got a kick out of it, though I'm curious how well it plays without a large audience or whether most of the film's original Japanese audience realized there was a joke going on.

Read the rest at eFilmCritic.

Labels: action, comedy, Fantasia, Japan, samurai, western

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I didn't really attend the New York Asian Film Festival; I'd decided I wanted to see November before it ended its run, decided it might be a good idea to use the day-trip to see a game in Yankee Stadium before they knocked that down, bought tickets for those and the bus ride, and then found out that NYAFF started that weekend. So, much like Fantasia, I spent the next two weeks refreshing Subway Cinema's homepage to find out what was playing that weekend. I briefly considered the idea of booking a hotel room so I could take in some stuff on Sunday, since the bus ticket back to Boston that I'd booked had only cost a dollar, but that turned out to be too rich for my blood.

Sad Vacation wound up fitting pretty snugly in between a Yankees loss and a pretty darn good play. David Mamet can really work wonders with the f-bomb, especially when he's got Nathan Lane and Dylan Baker to work with. Yankee Stadium didn't impress me that much; it really felt sterile, making me really appreciate how good we have things in Boston with Fenway Park. Also, Yankees fans are a pretty passive lot. Maybe it would have been different if I'd seen a Yankees win or a game with a rival team rather than a bland interleague tilt with the Reds, but once the people in the bleachers were done calling the players' names, audience participation was pretty much all prompted by the jumbotron, which itself was pretty embarrassing at times: Noise between every pitch, crowing about "The Power of the 'Stache" after Giambi gets a single with two outs in a game the Yankees are losing by four... Oh, and the place started clearing out in the seventh inning.

Honestly, Yankees fans, I expected better. I thought you were like us, intense east coast baseball lovers. Poor show, New York.

On the other hand, I found the IFC Center a pretty nice place to see a movie. I think I was the second-to-last person in, so I wound up in the front row, but I've got to say - that seat is the most comfortable I've had in a movie theater not located in a furniture store.

Maybe next year I'll take in a little more of the NYAFF; the only really difficult part is that it overlaps Fantasia. Speaking of which, I'm writing this on the bus for Montreal, where I'll be covering the whole festival for eFilmCritic/Hollywood Bitch-slap. I think I've plotted out an attack that will have me seeing 80-odd films in two and a half weeks. That's worth being out of the country for Independence Day, I guess.

So, if you're going to be in Montreal, say hi. I'll be the guy with the media pass and the Red Sox t-shirt, pretty much no matter what the day. I really need to buy a t-shirt at some spot other than the Red Sox souvenir store one of these days.

Sad Vacation

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2008 at the IFC Center #2 (New York Asian Film Festival)

I don't know if Japan has the old saying that you can choose your friends but not your family, though that idea is at the heart of Sad Vacation. That doesn't mean that people won't try, though, with decidedly mixed results.

Take Kenji Shiraishi (Tadanobu Asano) and Yuri Matsumura (Kaori Tsuji). The opening text informs us they witnessed Yuri's older brother (Kenji's best friend) kill a man and then turn the gun on himself. Yuri couldn't handle it, and is institutionalized in a state of denial; Kenji looks after her between what have usually been minor criminal jobs. In the latest, though, he's helping smuggle Chinese immigrants into the country, looking after a child when his father dies in transit. Sensing it wouldn't be wise to stick around - there are sickos out there for whom untraceable kids are a valuable commodity - Kenji opts for more honest work, as a designated driver. Two of his fares have a big effect on him: He and bar hostess Saeko Shiina (Yuka Itaya) are quickly smitten with each other, and while small trucking company owner Shigeo Mamiya (Ken Mistuishi) isn't significant himself, Kenji is sure that his wife Chiyoko (Eri Ishida) is the mother who abandoned him and his father when he was a child.

Writer/director Shinji Aoyama packs quite a bit into this film, to the point where it could easily become too much: If the studio had mandated he cut the film down to under two hours, for instance, he probably could have jettisoned the whole subplot with Aoi Miyazaki as Kozue Tamura, an eighteen-year-old girl who takes a job with Mamiya's trucking company after leaving home, especially the man who comes from her hometown to find her. The trucking company is populated by hard-luck cases with potentially interesting backstories, and one of the story lines stops relatively early even though its last scene would often be the impetus for everything that happens afterward.

Of course, that's part of the point of the greater story: Even though we've seen Kenji decide to look after Yuri and to boy A-chun, there is an emotional dead spot in him that he inherited from his mother, either from her genes or her absence. The grim events of Sad Vacation's later reels are the result of a relationship that explodes into dysfunction almost as soon as it re-establishes itself . Aoyama has Mamiya say that Kenji underestimates "the force of [Chiyoko's] mercy", and it's hard to say whether Chiyoko is truly merciful or manipulative in a remarkably far-reaching and vicious way. Both may be true; the drive to create and protect a family has led to a great deal of kindness and cruelty.

Tadanobu Asano is a ubiquitous figure in Asian cinema that makes its way to the west, and not just because he's prolific and works with popular directors. He translates well to other languages because he tends toward roles without a lot of complicated dialog, and silence needs no subtitles. Kenji's not quite so quiet as some of his other roles, but he's still a guy whose eyes often say more than his words. He's also got the ability to charm the audience even when he's mixed up in questionable activities.

Eri Ishida is a much colder presence; she's middle-aged and hardly playing a glamorous character, but there's a hint of femme fatale to her scenes with Asano. Not in a creepy, incestuous way, just that this is a woman who knows how to get what she wants from men, and her son is in no way immune. The rest of the cast is good, too - Kengo Kora is young and angry as Chiyoko's second son; Ken Mitsuishi is all too good-hearted as his father. Yuka Itaya is pleasant as Saeko, and Aoi Miyazaki is always interesting as Kozue.

I didn't learn until afterward that both Kozue and Kenji had appeared before; Miyazaki played Kozue in Aoyama's previous film, Eureka, the events of which are referenced here, while Asano played Kenji in a short film. Aoyama mines those films for flashbacks, but they are in no way necessary to enjoy this one. He does a fine job keeping things moving, even if it does mean occasionally giving certain subplots the short shrift - and as much as Kozue's story, for instance, may seem removable compared to other bits, I don't think I'd want the movie to go without it; Kozue offers a nice counterbalance to Kenji. I like how he has everybody spend the entire movie involved in moving things in one capacity or another (human trafficking, delivering cargo and bringing people home) only to mostly get caught in quagmires.

And the end is quietly devastating, final in many ways while making it painfully clear that family is something that can never truly be escaped. All in all, quite the excellent piece of work.

Also at eFilmCritic.

Labels: drama, Japan, New York Asian Film Festival

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