Jay's Movie Blog

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

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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

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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

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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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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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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'll probably write more about this one when I get home and the BD is waiting for me. This is a movie created for home video, and probably is best judged seen that way.

Rate it at eFilmCritic.

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.

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.

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

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At some point in any festival, unless you're made of sterner stuff than I, you're probably going to hit the wall. There's just a point where the running between theaters (whether in the same building or in three neighboring cities), waiting in line, going through the rigamarole of getting a full house crammed into the room, and sitting through movies which demand a bit more than the usual matinee fare becomes tiring, and you maybe can't write an honest review because there's a very good chance that you napped through fifteen or twenty minutes.

For Triangle, I'm placing the blame solidly on my decision to go home, eat something marginally closer to a balanced meal than Cherry Coke and Twizzlers, and watch the Red Sox postgame show in the time between the Q&A for Turn the River in Somerville and the start of Triangle in Brookline. I must have fooled my body into thinking I was done for the day, when, no, there was still an hour and a half of Hong Kong action to go. For Severed Ways (where I don't think I missed much important), there's still being tired from not getting home until two-thirty-ish, rushing to Somerville, and winding up in a seat so far toward the front that you have to lean back to see the picture, way closer than digital projection was meant to be seen.

I spent the next couple hours really wishing I had waited a bit and gone to see the jump-rope movie instead. People need to be warned about this turd. (Note that the review for Severed Ways contains coarser language than usual - not my usual, but it's the best words for the job.)

Speaking of projection, I must confess that by the time Triangle showed, I was starting to get a little cranky about the first "F" in "IFFB" being kind of inaccurate; I think the opening night showing of Transsiberian was the only thing I saw on actual film rather than digital video up to that point. It kind of surprised me when Triangle wound up not being digital. Apparently the American movies with people in attendence couldn't get a print shipped, but the one from Hong Kong could. It just doesn't figure.

Tie Saam Gok (Triangle)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2008 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston After Dark)

I hope to get a chance to see Triangle again sometime soon, because the idea behind it is a lot of fun - getting three big-name action-adventure directors to make one film, handing the reins off to each other, allowing them to change styles to do what they do best... Well, that sounds like a lot of fun, and from the way the credits are arranged, it looks like each director had his own writers, too, and I know that's a lot of fun.

The story starts out as looking like a crime movie, as three down on their luck men are recruited for what initially looks like a robbery but either becomes a treasure hunt or was one all along (my subtitle comprehension does kind of go to heck after midnight). There's complications, of course, with one of the trio's wife having an affair with a corrupt cop who appears to be in on everything.

As it turns out, I think I missed the entire middle segment. I saw most of the set-up which led to the robbery, which is good, gritty crime; it could have been either Ringo Lam or Johnnie To. Then I missed the middle act, picking up for the end, which is much more a caper bit, as the getaway cars break down outside the city, the wife starts acting weird (she may just have one heck of a concussion), and there's a bunch of identical-looking bags, one containing rare coins, one smuggled guns, the other someone's dinner that keep getting mixed up. I'm pretty sure this leg is directed by Tsui Hark, if only because he's the one I most associate with being funny.

Taken on its own, that last act is a lot of goofy fun, but it might not play so well put together with two other acts that I assume are being played more or less straight. Hopefully I'll get a chance to find out soon; Magnolia's "Magnet" label seems to be putting it out sometime later this year.

Of course, they're also listed as distributor for...

Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2008 at the Somerville Theater #5 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

Believe it or not, Severed Ways was one of the movies I was initially fairly excited about when the IFFB announced their roster of films. How many Viking movies do you get at the typical independent film festival, after all, and the fact that it wasn't banished to the "After Dark" segment of the program held out hope that it might be pretty good. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a miserable enough experience that I would have happily traded Vikings for the documentary about competitive jump-roping next door if I could have.

The text at the beginning sounds enticing - it sets up the backstory from the Vinland Sagas, telling us of a group of Norsemen who by 1007 AD had made a settlement in what is now Canada sending a further expedition south, only to be beset by "Skraelings" (the Abenaki) and driven back home. Two scouts, Orn (Tony Stone) and Volnard (Fiore Tedesco) were left behind and must survive off the land while they try to make their way back north, with hundreds of miles of wilderness, natives, and Christian missionaries between them and their goal.

I wonder if I might have enjoyed this movie a little more had it appeared at the Underground Film Festival rather than the Independent Film Festival. It would seem to fit there better; Severed Ways is very much a backyard film, which Tony Stone shot in Vermont and at Viking ruins in Newfoundland. Stone does practically everything, writing, directing, producing, and editing as well as starring in the picture. Costumes and props do look like they were made in his basement - probably more true to life than something from an elaborate Hollywood production, but still feeling like stuff they cobbled together out of what was lying around. It also feels a little underpopulated, as homemade movies tend to be.

Still, seeing it in a context where I'm more inclined to be generous would not have made it a good movie. Even discounting the question of what those Catholic missionaries are doing in the New World something like five hundred years too early, Stone makes a lot of decisions that maybe seemed to make sense at the time but don't quite work. The heavy metal soundtrack is a good idea, but actually showing Orn headbanging is weird. The actors speak in Greenlandic, apparently the closest thing going to ancient Norse, but it sounds stilted, and the subtitles are in idiomatic twenty-first century English ("we're toast if we stay here!"), further breaking the spell. The overblown chapter titles don't help, either - the small act of mayhem that follows the proclamation of "Conquest" is laughable.

A lot of that can be overcome, but Stone loses his audience pretty decisively early on. There are certain on-screen images you have to earn, and actual shit coming out of your ass is one of them. There was a palpable wave of revulsion that went through the audience at that, and smaller ones when Orn/Stone killed and dressed chickens and fish on-screen, and as much as you can try to defend that by saying it has documentary value, it just feels gratuitous, and no matter how much merit the rest of the film might have, there's no getting over that the audience just doesn't want any part of it any more.

That sort of thing throws the rest of the movie's faults into greater relief. Severed Ways runs nearly two hours but it's generally a slow, introspective 110 minutes, and the audience feels trapped by a performer who mistakenly thinks that every minute detail of his character's actions is just that fascinating. Stone isn't a good enough actor to pull it off, though, and the way he cavorts on screen makes the film seem like a sustained act of egotism. Which is too bad, because there is material for an interesting film here - the idea of being lost that far from home is powerful, as is Volnard's spiritual growth from encountering the Christian monks.

Maybe Stone is a guy to watch, even if his ambition greatly outstrips his resources and skill right now. Someday after working with and learning from the right people, he could become a decent filmmaker. In the meantime, though, I can't think of any good reason for someone to actually watch this movie.

Also on EFC.

Labels: action, crap, drama, history, Hong Kong, IFFB, independent, Independent Film Festival of Boston, indiefilmcafe, USA

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One last gasp before starting the IFFB stuff (and then a likely massive catch-up post).

It saddens me a little that HBS/EFC had no reviews for CJ7, even though I didn't love the film; I can't be the only guy there who thinks a new Stephen Chow film is a big deal, can I? Of course, I suspect it didn't get far out of the big cities anyway (it's already long gone from Boston), so maybe not as many people had the opportunity to review it, or did it for some other paying gig.

At least The Forbidden Kingdom opened well, because it's a fun action-adventure that I'd happily use to introduce folks to Jackie Chan and Jet Li if I knew someone age-appropriate. I did feel like a bit of a dummy when I read some of the other reviews, of course - was I the only person who didn't immediately twig to some of the casting (he said, trying to avoid spoilers, even though every other review he's seen lays it right out without worrying about it)?

Horton Hears a Who!

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2008 at Regal Fenway #10 (first-run)

So, it turns out adapting Dr. Seuss well is possible, although like any adaptation, you wind up with something much different in feel from the source material. The story's still there, but part of the appeal of Seuss is stopping to examine some crazy detail he put in, or getting caught up in the cadence of his rhymes. You can't quite do that with movies; they run at a set pace that doesn't allow the audience to explore until home video, and the running time of a feature means that more words have to be put in, until the rhymes are nearly swallowed.

Judged on what it is, though, Horton Hears a Who! is a fun movie. Blue Sky captures the look of the storybooks without being quite so enslaved by it as the live action films have been. Jim Carrey and Steve Carrell both give lively vocal performances, and the story touches on the idea of faith and how we handle things we cannot explain without being too heavy-handed about it. That's pretty impressive.

Cheung Gong 7 hou (CJ7)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2008 at Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run)

CJ7 was a mammoth hit in Chinese theaters, but didn't produce much of a blip in the U.S. There's just no place for it; parents don't bring their kids to movies with subtitles and the ever-shrinking audience for foreign films would rebel if it was shown dubbed. They won't make it a sleeper hit because they don't see kids' movies. So it slips through the cracks, which is unfortunate - so many kids' movies are terrible that it doesn't make sense to dismiss a good one just because people are speaking Chinese.

Dicky (Xu Jiao) is the poorest boy at his private school; the film opens with him trying to sew his sneakers back together. As so often happens, he's not just picked on by the other kids but treated like crap by most of his teachers. His construction-worker father Ti (Stephen Chow) spends every dime they have on the school, so they live in a hovel near the dump. One night, while searching that dump for a pair of sneakers for Dicky, Ti stumbles across something that came from a crashed alien spaceship. He doesn't realize it, but the toy he gives Dicky is an impossibly cute alien with strange powers ("CJ7", since the rich kid boasts of having a "CJ1" robotic dog).

Chow writes and directs as well as acting, and like his other recent films (Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle), he's using a lot of digital effects. They don't look look completely real, but they're not supposed to. Chow has always been a performer who has tended toward broad physical comedy, so it's not surprising that not only is CJ7 full of rounded surfaces and hyper-cute design, but Chow engages in a lot of Loony Tunes-style slapstick with it. CJ7 is highly malleable, pulls tools out of nowhere, and when he gets kind of beat up, cartoony springs poke through the surface. The story's got large chunks of E.T. in it, but a lot of the stuff with the creature/robot is closer to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.

Even when CJ7 is not on screen, the vibe is something of a live-action cartoon. One bizarre scene toward the beginning has Dicky and Ti competing over who can squash more cockroaches in their kitchen (between this, Ratatouille, and Enchanted, I'm wondering where the meme about vermin being family movie fodder came from). There are students at Dicky's school who shake the ground when they lumber into the scene, and his math teacher Mr. Cao (Lee Shing-Cheung) is a thoroughly hissy snob, who stops just short of pulling out a pair of tongs when circumstances force him to handle something that Dicky has touched. On the opposite side of the fence is the almost impossibly beautiful and friendly Miss Yuen (Kitty Zhang Yugi), who brings the requisite innocent sex appeal to the film.

Then there's Xu Jiao, who delivers some pricelessly funny reaction shots. She's not subtle, and in a lot of movies she'd be dismissed as a child actor trying to skate by on being cute. It works here, I think, though someone would need to have just slightly less tolerant of kids mugging for the camera for it not to. And, yes, those pronouns are right; Stephen Chow's son is played by a girl. This isn't unprecedented (it happens in animation all the time), and the audience will likely hardly notice it; it's just an odd choice.

Chow himself takes a back seat to Xu, playing Ti as generally a good dad without being anything close to saccharine. Folks expecting a lot of him may be disappointed. His work behind the scenes is pretty good for most of the film, but it does seem to come apart a bit in the end - after an hour or so of fun, CGI-enhanced slapstick, the movie decides to get serious and be heartwarming, and that leaves the ending kind of a downer on the one hand and kind of random on the other.

Kids might not mind that, though, and that is who CJ7 was made for. The question is, just how many English-speaking kids are likely to see this movie, even if it is a lot better than much of the stuff being sent their way?

Also on HBS.

The Forbidden Kingdom

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 April 2008 at AMC Boston Common #18 (sneak preview)

I don't know if an attempt to measure such things objectively would actually find that the audience with which I saw The Forbidden Kingdom enjoyed the obligatory scene where martial arts masters Jet Li and Jackie Chan pummel student Michael Angarano in the name of training more than they usually would. You'll forgive us if we took a certain amount of sadistic joy in it, though - after all, no-one came to the movie to see him, and it's fun to see the movie acknowledge that.

Angarano plays Jason Tripitikas, a South Boston teen who loves his chop sockey movies. A group of bullies forces him to help rob the shop where he gets his import DVDs, and after the owner is shot, he winds up in possession of a golden staff that fans of the genre and those who watched the prologue will recognize as belonging to the Monkey King. It somehow pulls him back in time to ancient China, where he's told the story of how the Jade Warlord (Collin Chou) tricked the Monkey King, freezing him as a statue until his staff is returned. That job's too big for James, but he does meet up with drunken master Lu Yan (Chan), revenge-seeking orphan Sparrow (Liu Yifei), and a mysterious monk (Jet Li). Together, they attempt to reach the Warlord's fortress atop Five Elements Mountain, though he has sent white-haired Wolf-Witch assassin Ni Chan (Li Bingbing) after them.

It is easy to mock The Forbidden Kingdom for casting Jet Li and Jackie Chan in the same movie and having them technically be supporting characters to the American kid. There's probably a line of less-than-ideal compromises that have to be made to get to that point - it takes Hollywood money to make it happen, Hollywood money means Hollywood producers, and Hollywood producers means it has to make money in America, so shoot it in English with a central American character so that the previews don't look too foreign. It's forgivable, though, in part because the movie did, in fact, get made, and in part because John Fusco's script wears its love for these movies on its sleeve. He makes Jason an annoying name-dropping fanboy, but he drops good names. Fusco tailors his script to his cast, giving Jet Li chances to do both quick hand-to-hand combat and wire-fu, while Jackie Chan gets to reference what is likely his most beloved work (the Drunken Master movies) and do his "using whatever is near at hand" shtick. Heck, we got a "Journey to the West" movie when I'm certain that at one point, some American studio exec said "what's all this 'Monkey King' stuff; can't they just be rival cops?"

That's not saying it's a great script; it's frequently sort of awkward, and the Boston scenes feel a little rote. There are great huge information dumps, although I do like the way Fusco and director Rob Minkoff quietly toss the basis for a clever plot twist into the middle of a long-winded retelling of the Monkey King myth. That one bit of misdirection makes up for a story that seems to be cobbled together from several sources. It's worth noting that despite the presence of a time-traveling American teenager, this is probably the sanest Journey to the West movie I've seen; be relieved or disappointed as you will.

Enough about the script, though - Jackie Chan and Jet Li fight! How cool is that? Pretty darn cool, actually. I must admit to being a little worried during Chan's early scenes; combine Lu Yan's bulky hair and more shots from behind than usual, and he could have been doubled as he was in bits of Rush Hour 3. The Chan-Li centerpiece dispels those fears, though; they're both in good form, and Minkoff makes sure the audience gets a good look at them in action. Fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping keeps things going at an exciting pace and does a good job of blending their styles - Chan's drunken boxing is a fun contrast to Li's more violent fighting. The two are clearly having a blast, and that's conveyed to the audience. There are probably a couple places this sequence could have stopped, but the movie lingers on it; after all, this is what the audience came for.

The pair acquit themselves well enough when they're not fighting as well. Chan seems more comfortable being funny in English than in many of his other movies; Jet Li does a nice job of making his character seem human as well as being a testy man of mystery, as well as being surprisingly funny in other scenes. Anganaro sometimes does perform his role a little too well - he's sort of fan that collects and catalogs, but hasn't yet moved beyond that superficial level, and that's kind of annoying. Liu Yifei is a bit tough to get a handle on, since Sparrow is given an odd way of speaking, referring to herself in the third person in a sort of disengaged manner. I wish Li Bingbing had the chance to do more of the heavy lifting as the villain; as much as Collin Chou hams it up a bit, he never seems as ferocious as she does.

I'm glad The Forbidden Kingdom turned out to be as good - and as much fun - as it is. Aside from not knowing whether we'll ever get to see Chan and Li work together again (it took a bunch of North American money to make it happen and Chan's not getting any younger), I want it to remind audiences how much fun this style of movie is. Last year gave us the depressing one-two punch of Rush Hour 3 and War; hopefully this signals a return to martial arts stars actually putting on a great show on the big screen.

On HBS along with five other reviews.

Son of Rambow

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2008 at the Brattle Theatre (sneak preview/Sunday Eye Opener)

Son of Rambow knows kids. You can tell from the opening credits, where a twelve-year-old boy runs through the neighborhood, only stopping long enough to cause mischief, or when the little sister of the other main character simply can't stand still even though her jumping around might distract from the two people talking. The movie shares its young cast's surplus of energy, and even though it's got adult wisdom to it, the end result's never a lecture.

The kid running across town after sneaking a VHS camera into a cinema to record First Blood is Lee Carter (Will Poulter), a brat who lives in the back of a nursing home with his brother Lawrence while their mother spends her time in Spain with her new husband. He soon meets his polar opposite in Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) when both are sent into the hallway during school - Lee for being a disruption, Will because his family's strict religion means he's not allowed to even watch the documentary being shown in geography class. Will already loves to draw, and when he winds up accidentally watching the Stallone movie while hiding from Lee's brother, it's like nothing he's imagined before. Soon the pair are shooting their own sequel together, even though that means hiding the project from Lawrence (Ed Westwick) and Lee's mother Mary (Jessica Stevenson). Meanwhile, the arrival of a group of French exchange students, particularly ultra-cool Didier (Jules Sitruk), is blowing other kids' minds the same way the movie blew Will's.

Among other things, Son of Rambow is a love letter to the movies, making them as much as watching them. We see Will stunned and amazed by his first movie-watching experience, transported into another world where a scarecrow can come alive and be the villain in the movie they're going to make. He's already been making flipbooks, and soon he's drawing scenes in his Bible that evolve into storyboards. Will and Lee are about as far from cool as kids can be, but once the word gets out about what they're doing, Didier and his crew suddenly want to hang out with them, because what's as cool as making a movie? Of course, once Didier joins up, it doesn't take much to read the next scenes as a riff on going from small independent films to big studio works, with more people on the set than you can handle and demanding stars taking charge.

Writer/director Garth Jennings doesn't spend so much time talking about movies that he shirks his duty to make a good one, though. This is basically a coming-of-age buddy flick at heart. Will and Lee are a fine pair of opposites: Lee is a pint-sized thief and con man, Will's a sheltered kid who dives in head-first because he's never had this sort of outlet for his creativity before. They make a good team, whether Lee is taking advantage of Will in a Tom Sawyer manner or just busting out laughing at some of the screwy stuff that Will does. Their misadventures are honestly funny, with a perfect level of whimsy. Jennings is also very good at presenting physical comedy and genuine peril differently, which becomes a factor toward the end of the movie. I love things like the repeated sound of cheering when Lee is kicked out of his classroom, and how it lightens up a potentially heavy moment toward the end.

The most important thing Jennings and his producing partner Nick Goldsmith do, though, is get great performances out of Milner and Poulter. The movie would likely disintegrate completely if we ever stopped believing they were genuine early-eighties kids. One false note, whether it be a script that was too self-aware or a young actor who can't just relax and play on-screen and the movie would be a goner, just adults who couldn't get the kids quite right. Happily, that never happens. Will Poulter is especially terrific; he makes Lee the sort of kid that would drive the adults who had to deal with him absolutely insane but shows the audience he's not really a bad kid (there aren't any really bad kids in this movie's world). Bill Milner finds just the right notes to hit for Will; he's as much a regular kid as his unusual environment will allow. He never plays Will as stupid, or even ignorant - he's just uninformed.

The movie belongs to Milner and Poulter, but the rest of the cast is good. Jules Sitruk is pretty darn hilarious embodying everything about the eighties which has become embarrassing twenty years later. Jessica Stevenson is just right as Will's mother; there's a whole other movie about how she and Neil Dudgeon's fellow sect member Joshua implied whenever they're both on screen, although Jennings keeps it implied, so as not to distract from the kids or make the film too harsh or easy a condemnation of the characters' beliefs.

I can't say for sure that kids will love this movie; there weren't any at the screening I attended. The former kids there got a real kick out of it, though, and there's enough straightforward fun without talking down or over-reliance on nostalgia that there's no reason for them not to have a good time.

On HBS come 2 May, along with at least one other review.

Labels: action, animation, Brattle, comedy, Eye-Opener, family, Hong Kong, independent, UK, USA

(0) comments

Exiled was easily the best of the festival, even with The Signal playing. I was glad to see it used as the week's Eye Opener because of the Sox game on Monday - I'd be able to watch the end of the game off the DVR after The Vampire Lovers without staying up until 3am - but also because... Well, one of the reasons I like the Eye Opener is because it makes me watch movies I would probably not go out of my way to see and maybe learn something, but once in a while, it's nice to be the guy who can name a couple of Johnnie To movies, compare his style to John Woo's, and generally enjoy a well-choreographed gunfight while the people who love the Canadian independent films are in unfamiliar territory.

And, as much as there was a lot of talk about it being a male-bonding story and what it said about how this kind of man in this sort of hierarchical organization has a hard time making decisions for himself and the way China insists movies which show police corruption be set before the HK/Macao handover... They are really good gunfights. Action scenes in a lot of American movies can be so bad that many people might not realize how good what To does is, but compare what To does here with, say, Paul Greengrass in The Bourne Ultimatum or Michael Bay in Transformers; where To gives us a genuine thrill from showing what's going on, the guys doing the big American action films seem to be trying to hide that they're not as good at their jobs as To.

Anyway, Exiled opens next week (2 November 2008) at the Brattle and runs for a week. There's a good chance it's the best action

Exiled (Fong Juk)

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye Opener / Boston Fantastic Film Festival)

Johnnie To is one of Hong Kong's busiest directors; by the time you've finished one of his movies, it seems like he's already got another one out. They're generally pretty good, too, but Exiled is something special. It's one of the really great action flicks, the type that others all too often don't even aspire to be.

It starts with two pairs of men visiting an apartment in Macau, just before the handover to China. Blaze (Anthony Wong) and his partner Fat (Suet Lam), then Tai (Francis Ng) and his partner Cat (Roy Cheung) both ask for Wo; the woman who answer says she's never heard of him. They wait. Blaze has been sent to kill Wo; Tai has come to protect him. When Wo (Nick Cheung) does arrive, there's the expected shootout; what's maybe unexpected is that afterward, they put down their guns, help Wo and his wife Jin (Josie Ho) move in, and share a meal. Then they hash out a plan - they'll go to Jeff (Cheung Siu-fai), find one last job for Wo to do, and see that his family gets the money. Of course, "one last job" is movie talk for "things go terribly wrong".

Johnnie To has been making Hong Kong action movies for a long time, and was one of the biggest names to stay stay there when the likes of John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Corey Yuen opted to try their luck in Hollywood when the UK returned the territory to China. This film is a departure for him, not in terms of subject matter - he has made a ton of crime flicks - but style. To is one of those directors that generally doesn't call attention to himself with stylish flourishes but can certainly tell a story as well as anybody else. That invisibility goes out the window with Exiled, and not just because the gunfights have the the loving slow-motion shots and rain of shell casings one would expect from a John Woo movie. To is making something very close to a western here, and a spaghetti western at that. The world often seems empty aside from the bad men confronting each other, and setting the story in Macau rather than Hong Kong lets him take advantage of the Mediterranean architecture of the former Portuguese territory. To even permits himself to get meta for a second - in a moment when the band of outlaws is discussing an escape to Europe around a campfire, one pipes up that he "doesn't know English, but [he does] know Italian."

He's not just engaging in genre pastiche, either. Like To's other crime films that have made it over here, Exiled does a fine job of setting up its story and background quickly, emphasizing the humanity and relationships of its cast of gangster characters, without trying to get the audience to believe that these are admirable people or casting them as romantic outlaws - they're crooks, and though on one hand they're just guys with a nasty job, they also deserve what is coming to them (whether immediately like Wo or down the road). The action is top-notch, with at least four gunfights in the running for best of the year (and a fifth which isn't bad at all). Even if To had opted to shoot in his usual understated style, this would have been a top-tier action movie.

The closest thing to a misstep occurs somewhere around the middle; the aftermath of the second and third gunfights could very well mark the end of the movie, and for a while it's not obvious why the credits haven't rolled yet. What comes after solidifies the Western feel of the movie, as the survivors find themselves outside of the modern city - in the desert, even - with what had seemed like a throwaway comment earlier assuming more importance. Josie Ho's Jin also takes on a more prominent role. In some ways, it's this second half that makes Exiled especially interesting - there have been plenty of stories told about two teams with opposing goals but little personal animosity, but seldom do they spend as much time on the effects of the sacrifices generally reserved for the final act. The closeness of the handover is a constant undercurrent, and while it likely won't reverberate quite so directly for people outside Hong Kong and Macau, the uncertainty of what will change and what will stay the same with new people in charge will be familiar to many.

The film is well-acted, too. Though you might expect Nick Cheung to be the star as Wo, it's Anthony Wong who has the meatiest role. He, of course, has the biggest conflicting loyalties, ordered to kill a long-time friend, but rather than playing Blaze as obviously tortured, Wong makes him resigned: he's trying to be nice about it, and make it work out as well as it possibly can for everyone, but his boss just won't step aside and let things run smoothly. Nick Cheung is quite likable as Wo; he gives the impression of having known the score from the beginning. He gets us to believe that Wo has accepted the necessity of his own murder in order for his wife and newborn son to have a normal life, although he would still really like to live. Simon Yam has a delicious "guest star" role as the crime boss who wants Wo dead. Josie Ho makes Jin an intriguing character in her own right, while always seeming just nervous enough to remind us that these criminal types aren't normal, and that most people should be afraid of them. Everyone else fills their roles almost perfectly.

Johnnie To is one of the world's most reliable action storytellers, so Exiled being good is pretty much expected. This is a master at his peak, well worth a look even if your tastes don't normally lean toward the Asian action.

Also at HBS.

Labels: action, Boston Fantastic Film Festival, Boston Fantastic Film Festival 2007, Brattle, Hong Kong, indiefilmcafe, western

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All day at the movies yesterday, including the pretty decent Death Note double feature, hosted by Shusuke Kaneko, who strikes me as a pretty cool guy - low key and friendly, and seeing as it's his third or fourth time presenting something at Fantasia personally (he must have been too busy working on these movies to come last year), I imagine he just likes coming here, too, which is a nice perk if you can get it. I found the first movie to be very good, and I wish the second had been up to it. It wasn't bad, but I think it might have been more convoluted than necessary.

If you're in Montreal for the festival, I can recommend both Death Note films and wouldn't talk anyone out of The Fox Family. I'll be seeing Kiltro, Ultraman Mebius & Ultra Brothers, Mulberry Street and Memories of Matsuko. I didn't realize the last was from the director of Kamikaze Girls until a couple days ago, so it it jumped to the top of my radar pretty quickly.

Death Note (Desu Noto)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Concorida (Fantasia 2007)

It's almost pointless to write a review of Death Note alone; its Japanese release was similar to that of Kill Bill, with what is arguably one five-hour epic split in half and the two parts released several months apart. Still, as I write this particular paragraph during an intermission between the two parts, I will say that the first movie ends with one of the nemeses seeming to gain a huge advantage, and it has certainly left me stoked for The Last Name.

Across Japan and around the world, criminals are dying on their feet, victims of heart attacks despite no medical reason for it to happen. One falls in the middle of a hostage situation, and that's when we find out that the deaths are caused by law student Light Yagami (Tatsuya Fujiwara) writing their names in a magical notebook - the "Death Note" of the title. It was given to him by death god Ryuk (a CGI creation only Light can see), and Light has vowed to use it to rid the world of evil. Popular sentiment is with Light (code-named "Kira" by the police and news media), although Light's girlfriend and fellow law student Shiori (Yu Kashii) doesn't share that opinion. Neither do the police, who have assigned a high-ranking detective (Takeshi Kaga) to the investigation, and are also consulting with a mysterious investigator known only as "L". Fearing (rightly) that Tokyo's MPD has a leak, he has also called on the American FBI, notably Ray Iwatari (Shigeki Hosokawa) and his fiancée, Naomi Misora (Asako Seto).

Death Note doesn't go in for moral ambiguity as much as complete amorality. Light seldom if ever discusses the idea of whether or not writing someone's name in the book is simply wrong, and it doesn't come up much in the debates we see among students and in flashes of newspaper clippings and text messages. The point is made several times that "Kira" is having a powerful deterrant effect, both by noting that violent crime statistics are down and a simple text message from an unknown teen saying "no-one bullies me any more". Ryuk flat-out says he's on neither Light's nor L's side, and more to the point, Light doesn't even blink when he first attempts to kill L, nor attempt to justify the action in terms of how many more lives he'd be able to save. Of course, L does something pretty lacking in conscience to fight back.

Full review at EFC.

Death Note: The Last Name (Desu Noto: The Last Name)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in Théatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia 2007)

Death Note: The Last Name came out hot on the heels of the first film (about four months later), and fulfills the promises made at Death Note's finale. It's got a more complex story than its predecessor, not always to its benefit, but it's far from being one of those sequels that undoes much of the goodwill of the first.

(If you haven't seen the first movie, don't read any farther: There will be spoilers.)

Full review at EFC.

Puritan

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)

The atmosphere is thick in Puritan, and sometimes it feels as if the film is constructed entirely out of atmosphere - you could get lost in the shadows, the strange lighting, the hints of the paranormal. Underneath it all is a classically-structured film noir, one which plays by the rules of that sort of film while at the same time injecting something supernatural without the two feeling in conflict.

Simon Puritan (Nick Moran) used to be a reporter, but has made his living by giving "psychic" readings in between migraines ever since his father died. Before one reading, a terribly burned man (Pete Hodge) tells him that his wife will be coming in for a reading soon, and gives him a little information about her dead sister. Simon, of course, will fall for the beautiful Ann Bridges (Georgina Rylance), but soon discovers that she is married to a wealthy and unscarred American self-help author (David Soul). The burned man shows up again, saying to stay away from, because she'll only bring trouble - but once someone like Ann has you...

Simon may not truly be able to contact the dead, but he hangs around in eerie places. The house in Whitechapel that he inherited from his father was once the property of Aleister Crowley, and there are stories of hauntings ever since he summoned the devil himself there one night. It was built , as were several nearby churches, but Nicholas Hawksmoore, said to be a pagan who imbued his buildings with dark magic. All of this is, of course, almost completely irrelevant to the main plot of the film, but they are interesting little facts and details on their own, the sort of thing that makes a person pay closer attention and maybe pick up on truly important bits of information.

Full review at EFC.

Isabella

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2007 in J.A. De Sève Théatre (Fantasia 2007)

It's easy to say what Isabella is about - a middle-aged man coming to terms with the daughter he never knew he had - although it's a little more difficult to nail down the specific plot, especially while it's playing. After a while it doesn't quite matter, though, since we're getting very nice work from Chapman To and Isabella Leong.

The film takes place against the background of Macau just before its handover to mainland China; as the occasional on-screen text informs us, the local police department has been rocked by a corruption scandal and is trying to put its house in order before the new bureaucracy does it for them. Shing (Chapman To) doesn't look like a particularly honest cop, so he's got enough on his plate when one of the teenage girls he has been hitting on tells him that he is her father, and needs his help to get into her apartment to rescue her dog. Yan (Isabella Leong) doesn't expect Shing to actually act like a father, but the orphaned girl inspires something in him beyond the usual apathy and scuzziness.

The title of the film refers to the name of Yan's dog, but one can be easily forgiven for believing the film is named