You do not often get fourth chances to see a movie at a festival like Fantasia, but I got really lucky here - my first chance to see My Broken Mariko was opening night, and I probably would have caught it then if they hadn't opened the primary Opening Night. Its matinee encore was part of a bunch of staggered showtimes that overlapped both Baby Assassins and A Fish Tale (kind of uncool scheduling for folks who like the Japanese entries), so I said, ah, rats. It was, however, apparently received very well, and a press screening was announced for the morning of the 23rd and another screening for the 30th. Since the press screening would be at 9am, I opted for this one. It's not quite a record of time between first and final screening at this festival, but it's unusual and fortunate, because I liked it a lot.
And, for what it's worth, the folks who cut the trailer for the festival grabbed what is maybe it's most eye-widening moment from the movie, which is not always the case, and which also manages to be the moment from the trailer one is most likely to sit up and point like "that, right there!" during the movie. See if you can spot it.
After that, we had the funny case where I found myself looking at the schedule several times during the festival, kind of up in the air as to whether I wanted to see Hong Kong comedy Chili Laugh Story or One for the Road before looking the latter up and having my eyes open because it was from the director of Bad Genius - information I would forget by the time I was looking up "what should I do Sunday?" the next time.
Then came Confession, and you can tell the way the college-aged audience around the festival regularly turns over because of how the person introducing the film pointed out that it co-starred Kim Yun-jin from Lost to a wave of "uh, okay, I think I may have heard of that". I remember another thriller she starred in, either during a Lost hiatus or soon after the series ended where not only did she boost attendance, but the distributor was clearly hoping she'd help it open well in North America, spelling her name out in English, given name first, even if everyone else was listed in Korean.
Amusingly, where both Confession and Dobaaraa were concerned…
SPOILERS!
I basically got fooled twice in a row by mysteries that had true identities right out in plain sight. It made me wonder whether the way that it often seems there are maybe a half-dozen common family names in South Korea means you don't have to play cute with that sort of thing because people won't necessarily assume two people with the same family name are related. As to the Indian movie, I've got no idea whether that was a nickname Hindi-speaking people would have figured out belonged to someone or not.
!SRELIOPS
(Looks them up on IMDB)
Wow - both of those moves are remakes of films by Spanish filmmaker Oriol Paulo - Contratiempo for Confession and Durante la tormenta for Dobaaraa - so maybe it's no wonder they both pull the same sort of trick. He has, I believe, written and directed four features which have spawned at least seven or eight local versions between them, and that's brought down by the fact that one hasn't even been released in Spain yet. That's kind of crazy.
After that, Seire, because its second screening would have overlapped a different Korean thriller I wanted to see on closing night and, besides, I figured Quentin Dupieux's Incredible But True would play Boston. It has, of course, for one night at the French Film Festival when I was stuck logged in to work.
Next up: The last Monday of the fest, with The Protector, Convenience Story, and the super-fun Alienoid
My Broken Mariko (Mai burôkun Mariko)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
My Broken Mariko is a solid, sympathetic story about a woman trying to come to terms with her best freind's suicide, and that's a harder target to hit than one might expect. It's a thing that could be too earnestly somber or too casual, but filmmaker Yuki Tanada instead comes from a place that could be horrifying but instead has a shred of optimism: Mariko may have been doomed from the start, but that doesn't make her friend's attempts to help, before or after Mariko's death, without value.
Tomoyo Shiino (Mei Nagano) hears about it on the news, reported as something between "what's wrong with the youth these days" and advice to avoid the area on your commute home. She immediately pulls out her phone and starts texting, hoping against hope that it's not her 26-year-old Mariko Ikegawa (Nao Honda), but getting no response. The coroner released the body to her father (Toshinori Omi) without even a proper funeral, and this stiffens her back, because Mariko's father abused and molested her. Maybe she originally only intends to say good-bye, but once she talks her way past Mariko's stepmother Kyoko (Yo Yoshida), Tomoyo grabs her friend's ashes and escapes through the window. She and Mariko had talked of visiting Hawaii in the past, but Tomoyo can't afford that, so she instead decides on another place they had been drawn by, Cape Marigaoka, which is still a long-enough ride from Tokyo for Tomyo to get herself into some trouble along the way.
The film is structured as a road trip, not wasting much time getting Tomoyo to that window before kicking things off and in earnest and putting her on just enough of a trek to have room for flashbacks but not so much as to feel completely lost in one time or another. It also handles the trope of the conversions with an imagined dead friend as well as it can be handled - it feels a bit like a cliche that never happens in real life but is good on film, yes, but then again, Mariko is there in most of those scenes, isn't she?
All of that works in large part because of its great central performance; Tomoyo is sharp and funny selling everyday bits of absurdity like how gross her backup shoes are (she left her good pair at the Ikegawas') but not self-centered, with both Tanada and star Mei Nagano able to show Tomoyo as grappling with her own doubts about her own worth as well, but maybe holding it in because Mariko has always been so much more desperate. When she is eventually paired with a guy (Masataka Kubota), there's chemistry but it's not sexual or romantic. Neither she nor the filmmakers ever lose track of what's foremost in her mind here, although it's impressive to see her own issues poke their way out of that determined shell over the course of the film until it's unmistakably clear that she's not just not alright on Mariko's behalf.
The heartbreaking thing, of course, is how she just couldn't do enough for her best friend even though she tried so hard, always there for Mariko even though there were clearly challenges in her own life and times she probably had to sacrifice because Mariko would talk about killing herself if Tomoyo ever got a boyfriend (but entered unhealthy relationships of her own). The young actresses do a terrific job of feeling like they could grow up into the characters Nagano and Nao Honda start playing as teenagers, establishing a bond that easily persists past the point when Honda leans into how Mariko can be a difficult friend to handle.
Tomoyo mourns over the course of this trip, and doesn't necessarily come to any pat answers, and certainly doesn't find the greater world changed much as a result. But that's the nature of losing people in this way, and the film brings the audience through how feelings of responsibility and guilt can overwhelm. It shows viewers the despair involved, but doesn't force the audience to surrender to it.
(And in a minor "just amuses me" thing, Shiino improvises a haiku! Like the only thing they taught us about Japanese culture when I was a kid, but I think it's the first time I've seen it come up in 25 years of watching Japanese movies.)
One for the Road
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
One for the Road Co-writer/director Nattawut "Baz" Poonpiriya is likely best known for Bad Genius, a deliciously clever mash-up of a movie, and while this film is something else entirely, it has some of the same sorts of surprises. I raised my eyebrows thinking "that scene took a turn" at one point midway through this, and by the end I had to admire how they played that, because the back half of the film spends a whole lot of time inverting itself, and I couldn't say they hadn't warned me.
As it opens, "Boss" (Thanapob Leeratanakajorn) is living the good life in New York City, operating a tony-looking bar with specialty drinks, many of which he gives away, and bedding a number of the pretty young things who stop in. One night, he gets a surprise call from Bangkok, his friend Aood (Ice Natara) telling him that he is dying of cancer and he needs Boss's help in settling some things. Their bond is enough that Boss flies out there, only to find out that he needs someone to drive him to return some things to his ex-girlfriends: Alice (Ploi Horwang), the dancer who brought Aood back to Thailand from New York; Noona (Chutimon Cheungcharoensuking), an actress shooting a film in Samut Songkram; and Roong (Siraphan Wattanajinda), a now-married photographer who asks that they arrive while her husband is out of town. And while they're on the road, they may as well head to Boss's hometown, to see his sister Tak (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) and Poum, Tak's husband's son. And maybe someone else.
It's a nifty flick on the way to its later upheaval, an almost cozy art-house road trip with classic (English-language) pop on mixtapes, courtesy of Aood's late father, a disc jockey fond of American music. There are some feel-good moments, some moments which undermine the whole idea of this being a feel-good movie, and some surprises. In a way, the director seems to be doing a sort of refresh on the indie crowd-pleaser in the way Bad Genius mashed together high school and heist pictures, almost funnier because Wong Kar-Wai is producing and you can see when the film is dipping into his particular sort of romanticism, before they spring a different sort of clockwork trap from Genius. It's seldom a comedy sending up its genre conventions - it is a frequently funny movie, and even an outrageous one, but one which doesn't undermine itself by winking at the audience too hard.
Along the way, the film offers up a nifty cast who prove impressively believable as they jump between different points of their lives, aided by makeup and wardrobe, certainly, but generally doing well to show that they've matured some in the gaps that the filmmakers leave but maybe have not become fully-realized adults yet. That's especially true of Ploi Horwang, Chutimon Cheungcharoensuking, and Siraphan Wattanajinda, who show up in relatively narrow windows but play well off Ice Natara's Aood, playing the inevitable breakups and sometimes less-than-fond reunions in a way that lets them remain sympathetic while leaving Aood as more complex, enough that the audience is ready for some of the less likable choices he makes. Natara does impressive work in never quite squandering the default sympathy someone dying of the same cancer that killed his father is given. I'm sure Poonpiriya, editor Chonlasit Upanigkit, and the rest of the team, but Natara gives them good raw material.
At a certain point, Poonpiriya cheekily has the cassette in the car's tape deck flip from A-for-Aood to B-for-Boss, and while that doesn't entirely put the film in Thanapob Leeratanakajorn's hands, it's a major shift, and Leeratanakajorn does quickly make a case for why the film has placed him at the center alongside Narata, with this final stop covering more of Boss's life and finding plenty of material that makes the playboy persona of present-day Boss more understandable even if there's a lot that denies him any sort of sympathy. Violette Wautier shows up for the last act as Prim, Boss's first love, and immediately becomes the film's MVP, selling a romance that begins with him as a teenager and her as a bartender and only gets a little more eyebrow-raising from there; she gets handed some of the clunkier bits of the suddenly more melodramatic dialogue and manages to make it work. She and Leeratanakajorn make for an interesting pairing in that Boss & Prim always seem very much drawn to each other but perfectly capable of self-destruction even a few years later when the expected difference in maturity isn't that vast. It's a fascinating mess and as in unravels, one can see how the bits with Aood's exes are, while important on their own, also a warm-up to trying to make this mess right.
On top of that, it's really delightfully put together, beautifully and occasionally whimsically shot with some knowingly over-sincere selections on the soundtrack. It's an interesting blend of Wong's cool romanticism and Poonpiriya's itchier impulses that are always ready to get the audience on their toes and knock things over, especially if there's a good joke to be had when the audience is expecting wistfulness. The last-act shift is handled a lot better than expected, not just for getting overheated, but for how it's a long flashback detour, but it sure pays off.
One for the Road isn't quite Bad Genius, but it's definitely what the folks who made that movie do when let loose on film-festival-ready indie dramas.
Jabaek (Confession)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
I'm not sure that either the locked-room mystery or the more twisty thriller elements of Confession are exactly the best of their type, or that the film necessarily does a good a job as it could at playing like it's going to be one when in fact it's the other as the filmmakers would like, but it plays fair enough to give thrills both when the audience gets surprised or when they get there ahead of the movie.
Yoo Min-Ho (So Ji-Sub) has just been released on bail because there were apparently some irregularities in the murder case against him, despite it being virtually impossible that anyone else could have killed co-worker and lover Kim Se-Hee ("Nana" Im Jin-Ah). As he holes up in a snowy country cabin, some new evidence has come to light, and since his primary attorney cannot make the trip, another one, Yang Shin-Ae (Kim Yunjin) is dispatched. It turns out there Min-ho and Se-Hee may have been the last people to see college student Han Sun-Jae before he disappeared, with father Young-Seok (Choi Kwang-Il) has been seeking an explanation obsessively for the past year. He'd have motive and possibly means to kill Se-Hee, but it's obviously a risky defense strategy - Shin-Ae can't be surprised in court, and Min-Ho almost certainly has something to hide.
As mysteries go, Confession is tightly focused, sometimes to its apparent detriment - when a married man is accused of murdering his lover, one expects his wife to be something more of a factor, but Min-ho's barely registers long enough to be given a name. Similarly, the IT company where Min-Ho is an executive has an exceptionally capable fixer on retainer, good enough at his job that the audience won't go wrong presuming that certain lines of enquiry are such dead ends that it's not worth following up and loyal enough for that not to become a factor. Writer-director Yoon Jong-seok (adapting Spanish film Invisible Guest) for the most part handles hand-waving that material away adroitly, and that's fine; what he will inevitably wind up concentrating on is fine-grained enough that one wants it to matter, rather than zooming out and saying it has all been red herrings.
And the details do matter, with Yoon and the rest jumping into a flashback and then cutting it short by having Shin-Ae point out that, actually, she lied about something to see if Min-Ho would integrate that lie into his story, and then starting it again. It's the sort of thing that must have been fun for the actors, running through various different permutations of the same story, trying to make each feel both like the real deal but also playing up what the various unreliable narrators say. The filmmakers put it together in fine form, not establishing A so convincingly that the audience will automatically reject B. It fits together like clockwork, even if it maybe runs out a bit at the end. K-pop star Nana is particularly impressive here, tweaking her performance to reflect just how much blame Min-Ho and Shin-Ae want to place on her at a given moment but never making her quite a malleable cipher. Choi Kwang-Il does something similar as Han Young-Seok, whose on-screen swings from friendly mechanic looking to help out someone stranded to scheming seeker of vengeance reflect both the natural reaction to his loss and the stories being told.
Most of the action is in the cabin, though, with the general snowy weather setting up a sense of isolation (though Yoon quietly establishes some specific geography for when it might be needed) and it being just the right combination of a rich person's retreat and having rustic elements; it's never a bad thing for the camera in an otherwise talky movie to be able to linger over Chekhov's Chainsaw for a moment One generally can't go too far wrong doing something like putting actors as good as So Ji-Sub and Kim Yunjin in a room and letting them go, especially when they're playing a sort of variation on how these scenes are usually about getting the upper hand;they're trying not to do so in quite so obvious a way.
I'm not sure this entirely translates into a great mystery or a nifty acting exercise, but it generally works out well enough that one should be able to enjoy it either way. With enough clues dropped in plain sight early enough and the story and cast of characters lean enough that one can sort of guess where holes will be filled, it has to, and at the very least, Yoon and his cast never drop the ball.
Dobaaraa
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
A funny thing about movies that mess with time is that while a new angle tends to feel exciting, it can aso quickly become shorthand for a lot of less-inspired movies, even when they may not necessarily deserve it. It's probably not entirely fair to tag Dobaaraa as falling into the "movies like Frequency" category, even if that's how it starts out - it certainly becomes its own mess, if a somewhat interesting one.
In 1996, sci-fi-loving kid Anay (Aarian Sawant) witnesses his neighbor (Saswata Chatterjee) apparently killing his wife, but when he tries to report it to the police in the middle of a monsoon, he is hit by a bus. Twenty-five years later, nurse Antara Awasthi (Taapsee Pannu), her husband Vikas (Rahul Bhatt), and daughter Avanti (Myra Rajpul) move into Anay's house and hear the story from her friend Abhisheik (Sukant Goel), who was Anay's best friend back then. Finding Anay's old television and VHS camera, they hook it up and, with a similar storm raging, somehow Antara is able to make contact with Anay, warning him about the danger he's in. She saves his life, but when she awakens the next morning, everything has changed - she's living in a different apartment, working at the same hospital but apparently a neurosurgeon rather than a nurse, and she never married Vikas. That means Avanti was never born, something Antara wants desperately to fix. But how? Her story sounds insane, and even the detective called in to handle the woman who seems to have suddenly gone insane (Puvail Gulati) seems to be humoring her as he says he believes her.
Amusingly, this was the second film of the festival in a row where I wound up thinking "ugh, it was sitting right there in front of me! " and I kind of think that makes me unobservant rather than making the filmmakers clever. Heck, it was right there in the exact same way! In my defense, the revelation of this thing kept ust out of direct view hits in a manner that is weird and uncomfortable rather than as a shocking reversal or a piece that satisfactorily makes other pieces click together, technically solving the mystery but overshadowing it at the same time. It's not entirely surprising that the movie winds up messy - where Frequency used its plot device as a way to amplify an existing connection that can exist across time, Dobaaraa has these three or four pockets of characters who don't start out with strong connections, and playing what has happened to Anay in the intervening 25 years as a mystery keeps writer Nihit Bhave (adapting a Spanish film by Oriol Paulo) and director Anurag Kashyap keeping most of what might resonate with the audience back until the end.
For those not kicking themselves or terribly inclined to worry about how it all fits together until the revelations, it makes for an enjoyable enough time twisting mystery, although one that can frequently become very frustrating: It's pretty clear early on that there's no clear way to save both kids without some sort of plot device mumbo jumbo that amounts to crossing one's fingers and hoping the never-specified rules are what one wants them to be, and that feels like something that should weigh on the characters more. Similarly, there are a lot of moments where it sure feels like the characters should be smarter than this - Antara in particular is carefully established as smart and empathetic early on, but huge chunks of the film seem to rely on her not putting two and two together or suddenly deciding that it equals five after ten minutes or so of her acting like she knows it's four. That's on top of how, for a movie that is all about playing with time, the timeframe always feels off, with no urgency for how the duration of the storm in both time periods should represent a ticking clock, rather than something brought up when it's convenient.
None of that is exactly fatal, in large part because Taapsee Pannu makes Antara appealing despite all that; she's not exactly subtle about how she's confused about this whole new-timeline thing and not exactly interested if it has erased her daughter, but she does a nice job of picking up the whole idea that she's got some unfulfilled potential and pride despite the ways in which her life in both has very messy parts. (She has apparently been in a lot of movies that looked interesting but maybe not worth risking the local theater running them unsubtitled over the past few years; maybe I'll go anyway next time.) It's kind of a shame that the filmmakers don't exactly give her a good on-screen partner; there looks to be something possible with Sukant Goel's Abhisheik in the original timeline, but he's sidelined in the new one, and for as much as the filmmakers seemingly want something to spark between her and Paviail Gulati's Inspector Anand, it just never happens.
Pannu's appeal and a commitment to the sort of time-twisty plotting that makes one's head spin just enough means that the film never fully collapses. It also never takes off, and there's a lot of time for the audience to feel like what they're seeing could and should be better for what it has to work with.
Seire
* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, digital)
Seire is the sort of horror movie that intrigues a foreigner such as myself but also maybe makes one wish for a tiny bit more cultural context, just to see how deeply embedded certain superstitions and traditions are - although, now that I think of it, maybe there's an interesting question to be examined here about what becomes a tradition and what becomes a superstition. That's not really this movie's thing, but it's maybe lurking just around the corner.
Being a new parent is stressful in the best of cases, and salesman Woo-jin (Seo Hyun-woo) not only doesn't seem to have been granted any parental leave, but wife Hae-mi (Shim Eun-woo) is as superstitious about observing seire, a set of rules meant to protect a newborn baby during the first three weeks of its life. It seems to be a bit unusual - Hae-mi's sister Hae-jin (Ko Eun-min), living next door and also pregnant, does not seem terribly concerned and is kind of annoyed at being considered an "outsider" during this period, although her husband Seong-tak (Ki Woo-kyum) mostly sees this as an eccentricity. Add to this the news that his college friend Se-yeong (Ryu Abel) has recently died, and things get more tense - Hae-mi doesn't want their son I-su exposed to any vibes that Woo-jin may back from the funeral. Also, Se-yeong was not just a "friend", but a longtime lover, and the fact that she has a twin, Ye-yeong, that Woo-jin never knew existed has him thrown even more.
Writer/director Park Kang does not explicitly state that Woo-jin left Se-yeong because he got Hae-mi pregnant, and that was a big factor in her downward spiral - or if he does, I missed it - but that would line a lot of offhand comments up and place what's going on in somewhat sharper relief: It is no longer just about Woo-jin being overwhelmed and Hae-mi seeming to go out of her way to make everything just a little harder, but how there is something toxic in the air, things pulling Woo-jin to the life he must leave behind and thus threatening the new life he is responsible for. It's sort of symbolically messy, but Woo-jin is meeting what seems like the reincarnation of his lover at her funeral, and how can that not be a mixed message?
And Ye-yeong does at times seem to be more than a twin, at least to Woo-jin, sometimes seeming to channel or even be possessed by her sister. Woo-jin is pretty clearly an unreliable narrator from the start, though, briefly seeming to see Se-yeong rather than Hae-mi, and whenever things threaten to get overtly supernatural, Park will throw in a reminder that Woo-jin may be imagining it, but that certainly doesn't make it any better, as it does mean he'll be putting his kid in danger. Park builds his biggest scare moments around things that are particular and relatable - nightmarish hospital visits, funerals, trying to raise a baby in a tight, cluttered apartment. The horror comes not from how a comfortable life can be disrupted, but from how close getting by can be to a nightmare, and how maybe something like Hae-mi's superstitions about seire come from that: It's a burden, but maybe every little bit helps, so why begrudge her that?
Seo Hyun-woo sits in the center as Woo-jin, and it's a nifty performance that I suspect will look even better on a second viewing. There's a big, clear base of "put-upon new dad" there, easily sympathetic, but scratch it and you can see that some of the exhaustion is disguised laziness or dismissal, just a little frustration under the frustration. There's no chemistry between him and Shim Eun-woo's Hae-mi, although it's often more indifference than hostility. Ryu Abel (aka Ryu Sun-young) is interesting as Ye-yeong; the audience never actually meets Se-yeong but still feels like her sister is intriguingly different; she also gives the audience a proper sense of how losing a twin is even more disorienting than losing other family while also hinting at a complex relationship between them. Park seems to have left a lot up to the audience's interpretation but given the cast specific backstories which they run with.
I'm curious how this plays for a lot of people - aside from not knowing just how common or central seire is to mainstream Koreans, I suspect it hits those who have had children differently as well. Even if those experiences are unknown, though, the film is impressively unnerving as the things one may not really believe in can still get under one's skin when things get stressful.
Showing posts with label Thailand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thailand. Show all posts
Thursday, September 01, 2022
Monday, November 08, 2021
Maybe Not Directly Related But...: Cloudy Mountain and The Rescue '21
I don't know to what extent Cloudy Mountain was inspired by the Thai cave rescue of 2018; maybe not at all, but when you see these two a week apart, figure how long a narrative feature with this amount of effects takes to produce, and note that there were Chinese forces helping in Thailand that were only fleetingly mentioned in coverage, and note that Cloudy Mountain does have a former elite soldier trying to lead folks trapped in a cave to safety (among a lot of other stuff).
That character is a railway soldier, not capitalized in the subtitles although it kind of feels that way, especially after seeing a trailer before the movie for another actually named "Railway Soldiers", making me wonder if this is a thing that China is pushing particularly hard right now, certainly another odd "multiple movies about the same thing coming out at once" situation. One sort of odd thing was how Cloudy Mountain had an over-the-credits epilogue about the heroism of railway soldiers and how they pulled China together and their successors are doing the same thing with high-speed rail, including notes about how many of these people died during the construction. On the one hand, did the filmmakers feel like they didn't have quite enough propaganda to pass the censorship board, especially since there was a subplot about management unreasonably expecting this massive engineering done on time no matter what which would absolutely be about greedy businessmen rather than government if the film were made in the West. Even taking that into account, "hundreds of people died" is a weird flex; if communism is all about the workers, doesn't that include worker safety?
That sort of thing makes The Rescue a nice contrast; its filmmakers studiously avoid almost every opportunity for hero worship in order to just tell the story. I suspect that it helps that they've done enough mountaineering documentaries (including ones where co-director Jimmy Chin is a subject) to be realistic about how these folks are wired, and that "daring" and "heroic" aren't the same, to the point where they in some cases are very careful how it's presented. They repeat how the plan to use general anesthetic is desperate several times, to the point where you can feel them hammering on the nail but… Well, I guess we're back to safety here, right? Film especially can fall victim to the human desire to see something have a clever, easily-digested solution, but Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi understand danger well enough to say, no, we're not doing that.
In a way, that focus on safety makes it an interesting contrast with their last picture, Free Solo, where they notably shot the climbing sequence of the title from something like a kilometer away so that their subject wouldn't feel the pressure of the cameras on him. Thinking about how they must have shot the reenactment scenes in The Rescue, it must have been the opposite: Cameras packed into incredibly tight spaces, trying to get good footage of something just a couple feet away, probably a whole bunch of people the audience can't see just off-screen just in case something turned dangerous.
Anyway, both of these have left local theaters but are not yet available on streaming, although if you go looking you can get a Chinese patriotic adventure named "The Rescue" on Prime Video, which, well, isn't the same thing, but is kind of in the same neighborhood. They are both pretty darn good if you enjoy watching people faced with a dangerous crisis and immediately pulling together to work the problem, which is incredibly cathartic after the past year or two.
Feng Bao (Cloudy Mountain)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 October 2021 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)
China's National Day generally brings a spate of patriotic behemoths to the box office, star-studded flag-waving blockbusters like this year's The Battle at Lake Changjin and My Country, My Parents. Cloudy Mountain as a movie is kind of the opening act for that - a somewhat lower budget and less star power, maybe not pushing so hard, but trying to be the same sort of crowd-pleaser. It's a solidly and sometimes surprisingly successful sort of minor disaster movie, not likely to make best-of lists but managing to deliver what it promises.
Yudang Mountain is the landmark in question, located in southwestern China near the town of Yunjiang; a 20-year project to build a tunnel for high-speed rail nearing completion. Conscientious director of blasting Hong Yizhou (Zhu Yilong) and scientist Ding Yajun (Chen Shu), also his girlfriend, are still performing a full brace of tests because the terrain is made of unpredictable karst, and what looked like a simple operation can suddenly turn dangerous. He's also making a bit of effort to avoid his demanding father Yunbing (Huang Zhi-Zhong), a former railway soldier, even going off to check some sensors while Yajun picks him up. That's when everything literally starts to come apart, with cave-ins, sinkholes, and rockslides, and project manager Lu Xiaojin (Jiao Junyan) trying to aid rescue workers while assuring her superiors that the tunnel is not in any danger.
Director Jun Li and co-writer Song Sha don't particularly break new ground here, but there's a lot to be said for hitting the ground running and serving up the good stuff. The visual effects in this movie may not be quite top-tier, but they're plenty effective, and they don't spend much time making the audience wait for the action. Jun and his crew shoot energetically with China's many large-screen and 3D theaters in mind, swooping through the air when the action is in the mountains and building boxes with the occasional terrifying drop or chimney while crawling through caves. They follow the typical disaster movie template from initial warning to major event to needing to rescue the trapped while also planning a large-scale mission to prevent something worse, with family issues and bureaucratic interference along the way. The cast appears to be people who Chinese audiences would find familiar faces from television, with Zhu Yilong and Chen Shu an appealing young couple while Huang Zhi-Zhong and Jiao Junyan certainly feel like folks who have played lots of demanding fathers and stern-but-honest middle managers.
It gets a little messy when the disasters aren't front and center, in large part because the filmmakers don't really seem to have an idea of how to come to a climax; lots of moments of transition and resolution happen offscreen, denying the audience moments of satisfaction (whether schmaltzy or stoic) and a clean pivot to the next stage. Along those lines, there's a weird bit where the thinly-sketched folks that the Hongs are trying to rescue just hang back while they go through their family dreams and the audience can't help but notice the implication that they're not as important, and it's not the only time that happens. The actual finale has a hard time juggling the impulses for heroic self-sacrifice and unlikely victories. It often feels like the producers hired folks who are good with the effects and worried less about the rest.
And, of course, the film eventually starts aggressively checking off the "what the film board wants Chinese films to be" boxes; one can't help but notice that the inspiring speech includes "westerners do that, but we do this" when there aren't any non-Chinese people in the movie. And yet, the drive to "reflect socialist values" also winds up being one of the film's strengths: There is something bizarrely soothing about this frenetic movie - just watching people reflexively and competently pull together and help out when faced with an unexpected crisis feels ridiculously good.
Cloudy Mountain is rough in a lot of places, but it's a capable big spectacle that was probably a lot of fun in Imax/3D/D-box, though it doesn't get that sort of release in North America. For two hours of bad stuff happening and good people getting stuff done, though, it's pretty satisfying.
Also at eFilmCritic
The Rescue '21
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2021 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #4 (first-run, digital)
As I mentioned in the recent review of a fictional film, there is very little more satisfying than watching very competent people just get down to doing good with their skills, and that's what The Rescue is in more or less undiluted form. The audience knows the story of how a boy's soccer team was rescued from a cave in Thailand, at least during the film's initial release three years after the event, so the filmmakers just get down to fleshing it out with detail without getting overly technical.
If you're reading this review or seeing the film later, the Tham Luang cave rescue was quite a big deal in mid-2018 - a dozen members of a local soccer team and their coach failed to come home on 23 June, but their bikes were found outside a cave that they often spent time exploring, one which floods every summer but usually not for another month. The government responds quickly, but a local British expatriate who has spent time in the caves quickly recognizes that traversing the now-underwater passages requires the specialized skills of recreational cave divers like Britain's John Volanthen and Richard Stanton (who, coincidentally, has just met a nurse from the area) - although discovering that the team is somehow still alive after a week raises the question of how you get them through over a mile of a dark, twisting underground river: It takes two or three hours to traverse and even the Thai Navy SEALs tended to panic over a much shorter distance.
Even if this hadn't been worldwide news relatively recently, the title of the film probably tips most viewers off as to how it ends, and savvy viewers aren't going to be too far off when they guess what happened to the one retired naval officer who is brought up by name but not part of the interviews. Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin seem well-aware that this film may have audiences coming at it from different places over time, and as such make sure that they pay careful attention to both telling the story and explaining the story, using clear graphics to show the scope of the situation and laying out what is going on as things progress, never presuming what the audience knows or wants to know at a certain point.
As a result, it's an impressively humble movie. The filmmakers are careful to not push awe at the rescuers too much, wither in the form of a build-up or humblebrag, though there's still the same sense that these folks are wired differently, and not always for the better, that the filmmakers bring to their mountaineering docs; it's just somewhat muted to reflect how their own accomplishments and what they might sacrifice for them are not the main issues here. There's attention paid to more mundane logistics, such as the folks who are doing less immediately-dangerous boots-on-the-ground civil engineering to make sure that rain doesn't raise the underground river and flood the caves even more. Perhaps more notably, there's willingness to step back from emotional storylines that aren't crucial to the job at hand. One of the divers has just met a woman who might give him a personal connection to the area? That's nice, and an interesting detail but Chin and Vasarhelyi are not going to get anywhere near making a movie where a dozen Thai kids potentially dying primarily plays as a way for a middle-class English guy to achieve some personal growth. Similarly, while they acknowledge that there is mythology around this place and a monk present tied to that, it's not what the movie is about, even if one might be tempted to make that a thematic centerpiece.
They also don't see reenactment as a chance to dazzle as some might. On-the-scene documentary footage was relatively limited and often more useful for showing how challenging the circumstances were (even with handlamps, you can't see much at all), so they have to recreate for clarity, but try to call attention to themselves as little as possible, either in terms of being flashy or overly faithful to first-person perspective. By the time the credits mention that many scenes are recreated on-site with the original divers, a viewer will think that, yes, they kind of had to be, but it feels both immediate enough and enough like a regular movie that those in the audience will be thinking more about what they're seeing than how they're able to see it.
Whoever eventually makes a feature version of this story probably won't be quite so humble; they'll want personality-clashing drama, views into the rescuers inner lives. It's fine to make that movie; those things are all part of the story. The route these filmmakers take, on the other hand, makes for great, plain-spoken communication, and audiences so often need that much more than conventional dramatics given extra weight by being based on a true story.
Also at eFilmCritic
That character is a railway soldier, not capitalized in the subtitles although it kind of feels that way, especially after seeing a trailer before the movie for another actually named "Railway Soldiers", making me wonder if this is a thing that China is pushing particularly hard right now, certainly another odd "multiple movies about the same thing coming out at once" situation. One sort of odd thing was how Cloudy Mountain had an over-the-credits epilogue about the heroism of railway soldiers and how they pulled China together and their successors are doing the same thing with high-speed rail, including notes about how many of these people died during the construction. On the one hand, did the filmmakers feel like they didn't have quite enough propaganda to pass the censorship board, especially since there was a subplot about management unreasonably expecting this massive engineering done on time no matter what which would absolutely be about greedy businessmen rather than government if the film were made in the West. Even taking that into account, "hundreds of people died" is a weird flex; if communism is all about the workers, doesn't that include worker safety?
That sort of thing makes The Rescue a nice contrast; its filmmakers studiously avoid almost every opportunity for hero worship in order to just tell the story. I suspect that it helps that they've done enough mountaineering documentaries (including ones where co-director Jimmy Chin is a subject) to be realistic about how these folks are wired, and that "daring" and "heroic" aren't the same, to the point where they in some cases are very careful how it's presented. They repeat how the plan to use general anesthetic is desperate several times, to the point where you can feel them hammering on the nail but… Well, I guess we're back to safety here, right? Film especially can fall victim to the human desire to see something have a clever, easily-digested solution, but Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi understand danger well enough to say, no, we're not doing that.
In a way, that focus on safety makes it an interesting contrast with their last picture, Free Solo, where they notably shot the climbing sequence of the title from something like a kilometer away so that their subject wouldn't feel the pressure of the cameras on him. Thinking about how they must have shot the reenactment scenes in The Rescue, it must have been the opposite: Cameras packed into incredibly tight spaces, trying to get good footage of something just a couple feet away, probably a whole bunch of people the audience can't see just off-screen just in case something turned dangerous.
Anyway, both of these have left local theaters but are not yet available on streaming, although if you go looking you can get a Chinese patriotic adventure named "The Rescue" on Prime Video, which, well, isn't the same thing, but is kind of in the same neighborhood. They are both pretty darn good if you enjoy watching people faced with a dangerous crisis and immediately pulling together to work the problem, which is incredibly cathartic after the past year or two.
Feng Bao (Cloudy Mountain)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 October 2021 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)
China's National Day generally brings a spate of patriotic behemoths to the box office, star-studded flag-waving blockbusters like this year's The Battle at Lake Changjin and My Country, My Parents. Cloudy Mountain as a movie is kind of the opening act for that - a somewhat lower budget and less star power, maybe not pushing so hard, but trying to be the same sort of crowd-pleaser. It's a solidly and sometimes surprisingly successful sort of minor disaster movie, not likely to make best-of lists but managing to deliver what it promises.
Yudang Mountain is the landmark in question, located in southwestern China near the town of Yunjiang; a 20-year project to build a tunnel for high-speed rail nearing completion. Conscientious director of blasting Hong Yizhou (Zhu Yilong) and scientist Ding Yajun (Chen Shu), also his girlfriend, are still performing a full brace of tests because the terrain is made of unpredictable karst, and what looked like a simple operation can suddenly turn dangerous. He's also making a bit of effort to avoid his demanding father Yunbing (Huang Zhi-Zhong), a former railway soldier, even going off to check some sensors while Yajun picks him up. That's when everything literally starts to come apart, with cave-ins, sinkholes, and rockslides, and project manager Lu Xiaojin (Jiao Junyan) trying to aid rescue workers while assuring her superiors that the tunnel is not in any danger.
Director Jun Li and co-writer Song Sha don't particularly break new ground here, but there's a lot to be said for hitting the ground running and serving up the good stuff. The visual effects in this movie may not be quite top-tier, but they're plenty effective, and they don't spend much time making the audience wait for the action. Jun and his crew shoot energetically with China's many large-screen and 3D theaters in mind, swooping through the air when the action is in the mountains and building boxes with the occasional terrifying drop or chimney while crawling through caves. They follow the typical disaster movie template from initial warning to major event to needing to rescue the trapped while also planning a large-scale mission to prevent something worse, with family issues and bureaucratic interference along the way. The cast appears to be people who Chinese audiences would find familiar faces from television, with Zhu Yilong and Chen Shu an appealing young couple while Huang Zhi-Zhong and Jiao Junyan certainly feel like folks who have played lots of demanding fathers and stern-but-honest middle managers.
It gets a little messy when the disasters aren't front and center, in large part because the filmmakers don't really seem to have an idea of how to come to a climax; lots of moments of transition and resolution happen offscreen, denying the audience moments of satisfaction (whether schmaltzy or stoic) and a clean pivot to the next stage. Along those lines, there's a weird bit where the thinly-sketched folks that the Hongs are trying to rescue just hang back while they go through their family dreams and the audience can't help but notice the implication that they're not as important, and it's not the only time that happens. The actual finale has a hard time juggling the impulses for heroic self-sacrifice and unlikely victories. It often feels like the producers hired folks who are good with the effects and worried less about the rest.
And, of course, the film eventually starts aggressively checking off the "what the film board wants Chinese films to be" boxes; one can't help but notice that the inspiring speech includes "westerners do that, but we do this" when there aren't any non-Chinese people in the movie. And yet, the drive to "reflect socialist values" also winds up being one of the film's strengths: There is something bizarrely soothing about this frenetic movie - just watching people reflexively and competently pull together and help out when faced with an unexpected crisis feels ridiculously good.
Cloudy Mountain is rough in a lot of places, but it's a capable big spectacle that was probably a lot of fun in Imax/3D/D-box, though it doesn't get that sort of release in North America. For two hours of bad stuff happening and good people getting stuff done, though, it's pretty satisfying.
Also at eFilmCritic
The Rescue '21
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2021 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #4 (first-run, digital)
As I mentioned in the recent review of a fictional film, there is very little more satisfying than watching very competent people just get down to doing good with their skills, and that's what The Rescue is in more or less undiluted form. The audience knows the story of how a boy's soccer team was rescued from a cave in Thailand, at least during the film's initial release three years after the event, so the filmmakers just get down to fleshing it out with detail without getting overly technical.
If you're reading this review or seeing the film later, the Tham Luang cave rescue was quite a big deal in mid-2018 - a dozen members of a local soccer team and their coach failed to come home on 23 June, but their bikes were found outside a cave that they often spent time exploring, one which floods every summer but usually not for another month. The government responds quickly, but a local British expatriate who has spent time in the caves quickly recognizes that traversing the now-underwater passages requires the specialized skills of recreational cave divers like Britain's John Volanthen and Richard Stanton (who, coincidentally, has just met a nurse from the area) - although discovering that the team is somehow still alive after a week raises the question of how you get them through over a mile of a dark, twisting underground river: It takes two or three hours to traverse and even the Thai Navy SEALs tended to panic over a much shorter distance.
Even if this hadn't been worldwide news relatively recently, the title of the film probably tips most viewers off as to how it ends, and savvy viewers aren't going to be too far off when they guess what happened to the one retired naval officer who is brought up by name but not part of the interviews. Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin seem well-aware that this film may have audiences coming at it from different places over time, and as such make sure that they pay careful attention to both telling the story and explaining the story, using clear graphics to show the scope of the situation and laying out what is going on as things progress, never presuming what the audience knows or wants to know at a certain point.
As a result, it's an impressively humble movie. The filmmakers are careful to not push awe at the rescuers too much, wither in the form of a build-up or humblebrag, though there's still the same sense that these folks are wired differently, and not always for the better, that the filmmakers bring to their mountaineering docs; it's just somewhat muted to reflect how their own accomplishments and what they might sacrifice for them are not the main issues here. There's attention paid to more mundane logistics, such as the folks who are doing less immediately-dangerous boots-on-the-ground civil engineering to make sure that rain doesn't raise the underground river and flood the caves even more. Perhaps more notably, there's willingness to step back from emotional storylines that aren't crucial to the job at hand. One of the divers has just met a woman who might give him a personal connection to the area? That's nice, and an interesting detail but Chin and Vasarhelyi are not going to get anywhere near making a movie where a dozen Thai kids potentially dying primarily plays as a way for a middle-class English guy to achieve some personal growth. Similarly, while they acknowledge that there is mythology around this place and a monk present tied to that, it's not what the movie is about, even if one might be tempted to make that a thematic centerpiece.
They also don't see reenactment as a chance to dazzle as some might. On-the-scene documentary footage was relatively limited and often more useful for showing how challenging the circumstances were (even with handlamps, you can't see much at all), so they have to recreate for clarity, but try to call attention to themselves as little as possible, either in terms of being flashy or overly faithful to first-person perspective. By the time the credits mention that many scenes are recreated on-site with the original divers, a viewer will think that, yes, they kind of had to be, but it feels both immediate enough and enough like a regular movie that those in the audience will be thinking more about what they're seeing than how they're able to see it.
Whoever eventually makes a feature version of this story probably won't be quite so humble; they'll want personality-clashing drama, views into the rescuers inner lives. It's fine to make that movie; those things are all part of the story. The route these filmmakers take, on the other hand, makes for great, plain-spoken communication, and audiences so often need that much more than conventional dramatics given extra weight by being based on a true story.
Also at eFilmCritic
Thursday, October 28, 2021
Just Made It Fit: Days and Prisoners of the Ghostland
The Brattle's schedule came out before I booked my trip to Washington, DC, so I did, in fact, spend a fair amount of time hemming and hawing about whether or not I wanted to fly 450 miles to see baseball the same weekend that would likely be the only time that these two movies from singular filmmakers would be playing in the area, let alone at one of my favorite venues (over and above "is it wise to get in a metal tube for a couple hours, for any reason, in 2021?"). Eventually, I settled for tweaking the dates on the trip so that I would return on the second-to-last day of their run. DC-to-Boston is only a couple hours on a plane, and I scheduled it for a reasonable hour, so I wasn't even a little wiped out when I headed to Harvard Square.
Oddly enough, the Brattle's Covid capacity was kind of perfect for Days, because it's a movie you want to see in a theater - it's gorgeous and has a couple of moments when it's nice to hear/feel other people react - but maybe not a packed one where you're sensing another person's presence that close to you or even accidentally touching hands. Movies about isolation are odd things - they don't feel quite right in theaters but feel like an attack when you're at home - so it's oddly appropriate to have a little of it imposed upon you to watch this one.
(I do wonder how many storyboards were necessary for this movie, though. A couple dozen? Fifty? More, but half of them for one scene?)
After that, it was a little bit of hanging around for Prisoners after that and, I'm not going to lie, it's not great. I think part of it is that I can just never get into the sort of disconnected-but-taking-stuff-in mindset that a lot of weird movies seem to require; if I'm noticing the cool stuff, I'm also noticing the bits of the plot that don't work. Maybe it's never going in for alcohol or weed or something. I'll probably get a copy on disc anyway - Sono/Cage deserves a second look and you want to encourage crazy stuff on 4K - but it's a bit of a letdown.
Still, between this evening and the double feature a couple days earlier, I had a week of movies by Justin Chon, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Sion Sono, right before the start of Nightstream, which isn't a bad run at all.
Rizi (Days)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 October 2021 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)
As much as I've enjoyed the work of Tsai Ming-Liang in the past, I purchased my ticket for Days based on a gorgeous still that came across my Twitter feed a few months ago. I eventually got that image, and it was part of a shot that was impressive itself, so, hey, success. Nevertheless, there were times leading up to that scene when I wondered if the filmmaker was having a laugh at his audience's willingness to embrace nothing happening, afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes, but Tsai eventually earns that inaction.
It opens with a middle-aged man, Kang (Lee Kang-Sheng) staring out a window, watching it rain, and Tsai holds that shot, as he tends to do throughout the film; then takes a bit of a nap in his bath, Elsewhere in Bangkok, the younger Non (Anong Houngheuangsy) prepares dinner for himself, a process that involves starting two or three fires in clay mounds. They go about their relatively solitary business until they inevitably meet, with Non hired to give Kang a massage in a hotel room booked especially for the purpose.
The film opens with an on-screen advisory saying that the film is intentionally unsubtitled, which depending on one's mindset can seem almost taunting at first, not just doing something pretentious and unconventional, but drawing attention to it. The actual effect is the opposite; it lets Tsai keep the audience's focus on the "action" and imagery rather than the bottom quarter of the screen without having to force the already-taciturn characters to be unnaturally silent. They're not saying of consequence, and it comes across whether you speak Mandarin or not. It's counter-intuitive, but Tsai has been doing this sort of thing long enough to know what he's up to.
Not every bit of deliberate minimalism is so obviously effective; those who have seen some of Tsai's movies before will not be shocked that he lets his scenes breathe, to put it mildly, even and especially when not much is happening. It's not that Tsai doesn't make some good use of this - he and cinematographer Jhong Yuan Chang frame some beautiful shots, and the frequent rain on the soundtrack is enveloping but not oppressive. Scenes go on long enough that one can't help but study them and the two men at the center. Kang is sphinx-like, often still, not particularly active until he starts prepping his hotel room for the massage. Non isn't exactly fleshed out, but one can see him concentrating on immediate concerns, not quite easy-going but pulling back a little as he gets set to do his job. The massage itself is almost comic in its elongation - a lot of attention paid to one particular area - and it's hard not to think back to that opening disclaimer when Kang is suddenly not talking, really, but making expressive noises.
During and after all that, one does eventually get to a sort of understanding of how numbed and repressed Kang is, only able to feel anything with a lot of groundwork and effort, only to see that sensation drain away almost immediately, though some of the film's most gorgeous moments happen in that window, as the camera pulls out and the city seems alive and full of connected people, even if it doesn't last. There's art in how that realization presents itself after two hours of impatience, blooming and fading until Kang things are back to where they started.
Its time on the big screen came and went quickly, but I'm not sure I could have watched it with a remote control in my hand; it demands one's entire attention but also encourages one's mind to wander until a viewer finds the thing that interests them in a scene. It likely works best in a theater because of its isolation, although there is more than enough striking imagery to make it an interesting watch at home.
Also at eFilmCritic
Prisoners of the Ghostland
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 October 2021 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)
I don't know that there is ultimately more to Prisoners of the Ghostland than Sion Sono playing with cross-genre apocalyptic imagery and Sofia Boutella eventually reminding viewers that she moves better than just about anyone else on film. A more straightforward movie might not need more, but this one is so buried under messy world-building and thick accents that would have been comically but comprehensibly dubbed over in the 1980s crud it imitates that it's hard to enjoy the sheer weirdness on display.
It takes place in the sort of future where one can see Hero (Nicolas Cage) and Psycho (Nick Cassavetes) robbing a bank with the aesthetics of an Apple Store in one scene and then in the next see Hero caged up in the remains of a "Samurai Town" amusement park run by a local warlord - or "Governor" (Bill Moseley) - who offers him a deal: His foster daughter Bernice (Boutella) has gone off into the badlands, and Hero is the man to do it, outfitted with a special explosive costume that will blow off his arms if he tries to raise a hand to her, for example. Of course, rescuing her means overcoming his own demons, finding her amidst a village of cultists who believe complete nuclear annihilation will come if the town clock strikes the hour, and dealing with how she's retreated so far inward that she can't even speak, which is a problem because unless her voice resets it, the suit will blow Hero to smithereens rather than let him escape.
Director Sion Sono has been a mainstay for fans of Japanese cult cinema for decades now, in part because he has been so prolific that he would often have not just one movie at an annual genre festival, but two or even three (or that one would be a four-hour anything-can-happen thrill ride) and in part because he seemed to grow more energetic as he aged, setting a faster pace and filling his films more to bursting. This is his English-language debut, but his stamp is nevertheless all over the film: Even the silent or withdrawn characters have big personalities, he'll happily jump over anything that seems to be just marking time between the fun parts, and he'll give the viewer striking new sights regularly. He doesn't write the screenplay, and while at some points that hardly seems to matter - he's jumping from idea to idea and basically using it as a skeleton to play with images of the apocalypse and how they are used in film - at others one starts to wonder. The Ghostland is a jumble of genre archetypes, and mashing them together even if they don't quite fit is what these movies are often about, but his instincts don't always match the story by Aaron Hendry & Reza Sixo Safai. When a filmmaker as eccentric and talented as Sono creates something from the ground up, he knows how to skip to what feels like it should come next even if it leaves important information and events out, but he's seldom able to find that sort of rhythm here. It's the sort of chaos that highlights how little the whole thing seems to be fleshed out, rather than a pinball machine which rapidly redirects the audience but also has them wondering what the next bit of action will be.
The light shows he sets off are nevertheless often pretty good, of course. He and his crew build environments that always seem a bit more interesting than one might expect given that the basic idea has shown up a lot. There's just enough functioning neon in Samurai Town (and other decorations just beginning to show signs of wear) that the seemingly pre-apocalyptic bank is just within reach of making sense, for example, an outpost of the rich among those trying desperately to hang on. The mix of different forms of madness in the Ghostland never settles into one metaphor, but why should it? Some people facing the collapse of everything they know are going to worship false prophets, some are going to wrap themselves in a cocoon until they become mannequins, and others are going to try and turn back time. Sono and company aren't going to go particularly deep on any of these ideas, but the different forms of madness are both more and less overwhelming.
It also doesn't hurt that he's got Tak Sakaguchi and Sofia Boutella on-hand for when things start getting crazy. Tak is on-screen as the Governor's bodyguard with a troubled conscience, but he's doing just as much work behind the camera (under the name Toshiro Takuma) as Sono's action director. His signature quick movements and ability to handle a large crowd of extras are a good match for the director's fast pace and willingness to try anything. Boutella, as usual, makes great use of having entered show business as a dancer; whether being twisted and still in the way the average person without exceptional body control can't be early on or cutting through the action in the way few others can at the climax.
Nicolas Cage, meanwhile, is enthusiastic if not nearly so physically accomplished as those co-stars, and while many fans of his greatly enjoyed his relative restraint in Pig, even those who don't find his collaboration with Sono as a reason for giddiness would still be excited about his diving into a movie this crazy. The thing is, it seems as if Sono is as much a fan of Nicholas Cage as any other cult film nerd and more or less expects the magic to happen on its own, but Cage does actually need to be directed. This performance has moments of inspired madness but also plenty where Cage doesn't seem to know what variety of ham the scene needs. He's famous for his commitment to even the most out-there parts, but there's not a whole lot for him to commit to where Hero is concerned. There's no core for him to bring to the surface in garish fashion.
It's almost as if these two strong personalities were too deferential to the other when they needed to butt heads or have one clear vision. It's not enough to make Prisoners boring or not worth watching once - it's got too singular talents involved for that to happen - but if this is the only time that Sono and Cage work together, it will go down as one heck of a missed opportunity.
Also at eFilmCritic
Oddly enough, the Brattle's Covid capacity was kind of perfect for Days, because it's a movie you want to see in a theater - it's gorgeous and has a couple of moments when it's nice to hear/feel other people react - but maybe not a packed one where you're sensing another person's presence that close to you or even accidentally touching hands. Movies about isolation are odd things - they don't feel quite right in theaters but feel like an attack when you're at home - so it's oddly appropriate to have a little of it imposed upon you to watch this one.
(I do wonder how many storyboards were necessary for this movie, though. A couple dozen? Fifty? More, but half of them for one scene?)
After that, it was a little bit of hanging around for Prisoners after that and, I'm not going to lie, it's not great. I think part of it is that I can just never get into the sort of disconnected-but-taking-stuff-in mindset that a lot of weird movies seem to require; if I'm noticing the cool stuff, I'm also noticing the bits of the plot that don't work. Maybe it's never going in for alcohol or weed or something. I'll probably get a copy on disc anyway - Sono/Cage deserves a second look and you want to encourage crazy stuff on 4K - but it's a bit of a letdown.
Still, between this evening and the double feature a couple days earlier, I had a week of movies by Justin Chon, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Sion Sono, right before the start of Nightstream, which isn't a bad run at all.
Rizi (Days)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 October 2021 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)
As much as I've enjoyed the work of Tsai Ming-Liang in the past, I purchased my ticket for Days based on a gorgeous still that came across my Twitter feed a few months ago. I eventually got that image, and it was part of a shot that was impressive itself, so, hey, success. Nevertheless, there were times leading up to that scene when I wondered if the filmmaker was having a laugh at his audience's willingness to embrace nothing happening, afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes, but Tsai eventually earns that inaction.
It opens with a middle-aged man, Kang (Lee Kang-Sheng) staring out a window, watching it rain, and Tsai holds that shot, as he tends to do throughout the film; then takes a bit of a nap in his bath, Elsewhere in Bangkok, the younger Non (Anong Houngheuangsy) prepares dinner for himself, a process that involves starting two or three fires in clay mounds. They go about their relatively solitary business until they inevitably meet, with Non hired to give Kang a massage in a hotel room booked especially for the purpose.
The film opens with an on-screen advisory saying that the film is intentionally unsubtitled, which depending on one's mindset can seem almost taunting at first, not just doing something pretentious and unconventional, but drawing attention to it. The actual effect is the opposite; it lets Tsai keep the audience's focus on the "action" and imagery rather than the bottom quarter of the screen without having to force the already-taciturn characters to be unnaturally silent. They're not saying of consequence, and it comes across whether you speak Mandarin or not. It's counter-intuitive, but Tsai has been doing this sort of thing long enough to know what he's up to.
Not every bit of deliberate minimalism is so obviously effective; those who have seen some of Tsai's movies before will not be shocked that he lets his scenes breathe, to put it mildly, even and especially when not much is happening. It's not that Tsai doesn't make some good use of this - he and cinematographer Jhong Yuan Chang frame some beautiful shots, and the frequent rain on the soundtrack is enveloping but not oppressive. Scenes go on long enough that one can't help but study them and the two men at the center. Kang is sphinx-like, often still, not particularly active until he starts prepping his hotel room for the massage. Non isn't exactly fleshed out, but one can see him concentrating on immediate concerns, not quite easy-going but pulling back a little as he gets set to do his job. The massage itself is almost comic in its elongation - a lot of attention paid to one particular area - and it's hard not to think back to that opening disclaimer when Kang is suddenly not talking, really, but making expressive noises.
During and after all that, one does eventually get to a sort of understanding of how numbed and repressed Kang is, only able to feel anything with a lot of groundwork and effort, only to see that sensation drain away almost immediately, though some of the film's most gorgeous moments happen in that window, as the camera pulls out and the city seems alive and full of connected people, even if it doesn't last. There's art in how that realization presents itself after two hours of impatience, blooming and fading until Kang things are back to where they started.
Its time on the big screen came and went quickly, but I'm not sure I could have watched it with a remote control in my hand; it demands one's entire attention but also encourages one's mind to wander until a viewer finds the thing that interests them in a scene. It likely works best in a theater because of its isolation, although there is more than enough striking imagery to make it an interesting watch at home.
Also at eFilmCritic
Prisoners of the Ghostland
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 October 2021 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run, DCP)
I don't know that there is ultimately more to Prisoners of the Ghostland than Sion Sono playing with cross-genre apocalyptic imagery and Sofia Boutella eventually reminding viewers that she moves better than just about anyone else on film. A more straightforward movie might not need more, but this one is so buried under messy world-building and thick accents that would have been comically but comprehensibly dubbed over in the 1980s crud it imitates that it's hard to enjoy the sheer weirdness on display.
It takes place in the sort of future where one can see Hero (Nicolas Cage) and Psycho (Nick Cassavetes) robbing a bank with the aesthetics of an Apple Store in one scene and then in the next see Hero caged up in the remains of a "Samurai Town" amusement park run by a local warlord - or "Governor" (Bill Moseley) - who offers him a deal: His foster daughter Bernice (Boutella) has gone off into the badlands, and Hero is the man to do it, outfitted with a special explosive costume that will blow off his arms if he tries to raise a hand to her, for example. Of course, rescuing her means overcoming his own demons, finding her amidst a village of cultists who believe complete nuclear annihilation will come if the town clock strikes the hour, and dealing with how she's retreated so far inward that she can't even speak, which is a problem because unless her voice resets it, the suit will blow Hero to smithereens rather than let him escape.
Director Sion Sono has been a mainstay for fans of Japanese cult cinema for decades now, in part because he has been so prolific that he would often have not just one movie at an annual genre festival, but two or even three (or that one would be a four-hour anything-can-happen thrill ride) and in part because he seemed to grow more energetic as he aged, setting a faster pace and filling his films more to bursting. This is his English-language debut, but his stamp is nevertheless all over the film: Even the silent or withdrawn characters have big personalities, he'll happily jump over anything that seems to be just marking time between the fun parts, and he'll give the viewer striking new sights regularly. He doesn't write the screenplay, and while at some points that hardly seems to matter - he's jumping from idea to idea and basically using it as a skeleton to play with images of the apocalypse and how they are used in film - at others one starts to wonder. The Ghostland is a jumble of genre archetypes, and mashing them together even if they don't quite fit is what these movies are often about, but his instincts don't always match the story by Aaron Hendry & Reza Sixo Safai. When a filmmaker as eccentric and talented as Sono creates something from the ground up, he knows how to skip to what feels like it should come next even if it leaves important information and events out, but he's seldom able to find that sort of rhythm here. It's the sort of chaos that highlights how little the whole thing seems to be fleshed out, rather than a pinball machine which rapidly redirects the audience but also has them wondering what the next bit of action will be.
The light shows he sets off are nevertheless often pretty good, of course. He and his crew build environments that always seem a bit more interesting than one might expect given that the basic idea has shown up a lot. There's just enough functioning neon in Samurai Town (and other decorations just beginning to show signs of wear) that the seemingly pre-apocalyptic bank is just within reach of making sense, for example, an outpost of the rich among those trying desperately to hang on. The mix of different forms of madness in the Ghostland never settles into one metaphor, but why should it? Some people facing the collapse of everything they know are going to worship false prophets, some are going to wrap themselves in a cocoon until they become mannequins, and others are going to try and turn back time. Sono and company aren't going to go particularly deep on any of these ideas, but the different forms of madness are both more and less overwhelming.
It also doesn't hurt that he's got Tak Sakaguchi and Sofia Boutella on-hand for when things start getting crazy. Tak is on-screen as the Governor's bodyguard with a troubled conscience, but he's doing just as much work behind the camera (under the name Toshiro Takuma) as Sono's action director. His signature quick movements and ability to handle a large crowd of extras are a good match for the director's fast pace and willingness to try anything. Boutella, as usual, makes great use of having entered show business as a dancer; whether being twisted and still in the way the average person without exceptional body control can't be early on or cutting through the action in the way few others can at the climax.
Nicolas Cage, meanwhile, is enthusiastic if not nearly so physically accomplished as those co-stars, and while many fans of his greatly enjoyed his relative restraint in Pig, even those who don't find his collaboration with Sono as a reason for giddiness would still be excited about his diving into a movie this crazy. The thing is, it seems as if Sono is as much a fan of Nicholas Cage as any other cult film nerd and more or less expects the magic to happen on its own, but Cage does actually need to be directed. This performance has moments of inspired madness but also plenty where Cage doesn't seem to know what variety of ham the scene needs. He's famous for his commitment to even the most out-there parts, but there's not a whole lot for him to commit to where Hero is concerned. There's no core for him to bring to the surface in garish fashion.
It's almost as if these two strong personalities were too deferential to the other when they needed to butt heads or have one clear vision. It's not enough to make Prisoners boring or not worth watching once - it's got too singular talents involved for that to happen - but if this is the only time that Sono and Cage work together, it will go down as one heck of a missed opportunity.
Also at eFilmCritic
Sunday, January 03, 2021
Krasue: Inhuman Kiss
Anyway, I'm curious about how often the people who do have Netflix have had this recommended to them, especially those who like horror. It's a genuinely weird movie - like I say below, it's a period coming-of-age romantic horror movie from Thailand - with a cast of young Thai actors, and I don't know what the Netflix algorithm grabs onto in order to get people who don't already know Oabnithi Wiwattanawarang (who has the most IMDB credits of anyone in the cast) to it. It's a pretty terrific little movie, but I have no idea how recommendation engines would find a path to it; for all that it's a lot of things different people like, it's only 25% any of them, after all.
And would people have known to go looking for it? From what I can tell, it was released in Thailand in March 2019, picked up by Netflix in May 2019, and made its way onto the service a month and change later, meaning it never hits NYAFF, Fantasia, Fantastic Fest, etc., where enthusiastic people like me might talk it up before it has another blip in October/November as Thailand's Oscar submission. As much as I doubt this was ever going to be any sort of theatrical hit, or sold gangbusters on Blu-ray, I don't notice any of my friends on Letterboxd having seen it and only one wanting to (which isn't necessarily a great proxy for awareness as I don't do watchlists myself), and some of them really, really like horror. It's a big-deal movie in its homeland that just becomes bulk for Netflix, so they can say they put so many "Netflix Originals" online over the course of a month. Shudder might have given it more individual attention, but then the potential audience is smaller.
(Truth be told, I'm kind of bummed I didn't get a Mitch Davis introduction for this at Fantasia. If he liked it, that would have been a treat!)
It's a huge shame, and I kind of wonder what other weird and delightful movies are falling out of view because a big service like Netflix or Prime scoops them up and figures it's not worth the manpower to both figure out what's worth promoting beyond the obvious audience and actually doing it, especially when it doesn't really matter to them whether you watch this or a few episodes of The Office.
Sang krasue (Krasue: Inhuman Kiss aka Inhuman Kiss)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
They say not to judge a book by it's cover, but take a second to look at the "cover" of Krasue: Inhuman Kiss - whether it's a poster, the slipcase for a DVD or Blu-ray, or the header image on a streaming service - and if that floating-head image doesn't get your attention, well, I'm not sure how. The point is, that image makes one heck of a promise, and amazingly enough, it delivers more. It is a period coming-of-age romantic horror ride the likes of which doesn't come around too often.
When they were kids, Jerd, Ting, Noi, and Sai went out in the woods playing hide and seek near a house said to hold a dead woman's spirit, with Sai reassuring Noi but coming upon something strange herself. Years later, they're teenagers, with Ting (Darina Boonchu) a young mother, Sai (Phantira Pipityakorn) assisting at the local health center despite the doctors having been called to the fighting in Bangkok, and Jerd (Sapol Assawamunkong) nursing a crush on her. He's a catch - handsome and from a rich family - but Sai still pines for Noi (Oabnithi Wiwattanawarang), whose family moved to Bangkok some years ago, but has returned just ahead of Tat (Surasak Wongthai), who describes himself as a krasue hunter. Krasue are said to be monster women whose heads detach from their body and spits into wells, with a woman who drinks from the same well becoming one herself and a man who does feeling incredible until the krasue eats his guts. But that doesn't sound like Sai at all.
Does that seem like giving a little too much away? It's not - Sai is obviously going to be at the center of things from the opening flashback - but even if it was, there is a lot to come. Director Sitisiri Mongkolsiri and screenwriter Chookiat Sakveerakul have moments that could serve as climaxes at roughly every quarter-mark, expanding and twisting the story in ways that feel natural while also meaning that the actual finale is full of things that are completely insane. It's a neat trick that they get there fairly, and are able to keep things moving at the right sort of pace that they can take a moment to regroup without things going completely back to normal, with some things happening mostly off-screen but the ways that it does appear getting things across.
It works in large part because so much of the movie is emotionally grounded in things the audience understands even if, as an outsider, the setting is not immediately recognizable as the mid-1940s because where the filmmakers can, they seem to skew modern in things like wardrobe, hairstyles, and dialogue (at least, to the extent I can tell from the English subtitles on a Blu-ray produced for the Hong Kong market). There's something very natural about how these young people play off each other, rather than overheated, with the filmmakers seldom holding anything back or making them larger-than-life for melodramatic purposes. Noi is probably not going to find a way out of the situation with science, but it never seems futile or unreasonable (and the fact that it's presented like a teenager's science experiment helps). The filmmakers are smart about how the idea of a teenager as more than a kid but less than an adult wasn't really an accepted thing until after this movie's setting even if they were always like that, leading to the characters fumbling about earnestly and the couple years Ting has on her school-age friends being appropriately life-changing.
Not that this movie is actually subtle - the young cast is good, but their performance is seldom particularly layered, with Surasak Wongthai going even bigger as Tat. The film isn't as heavily reliant on jump scares as Thai horror can be, but composer Chatchai Pongprapaphan isn't shy about putting a big crash in the score when they come or pushing the tension hard at other points There's a nice pastoral look to it, not taking the path of a suffocating jungle but understanding how secrets can quickly be buried in this place, with a lot of room for mystery to be uncovered even as the area is modernizing. And while the visual effects are not quite so polished as they might be if this movie came from the United States or China, they use what they've got to good advantage: Make-up effects feel like they could come from either fairy tales or monster movies, elemental if not entirely real-looking, and the CGI used to illustrate the krasue is horrific, ethereal, and a little silly all at once, enough to let a viewer feel the characters' disbelief at the situations they find themselves in.
It makes Krasue: Inhuman Kiss (currently a Netflix exclusive with the first word removed from the title in most of the world) an exceptionally odd movie, a crazy bit of folkloric horror that became Thailand's Oscar submission, though not a nominee. That it somehow manages to be a jaw-dropping genre film and a smartly observed coming-of-age story is a minor miracle - as out-there as advertised but honest enough to make a viewer believe in its madness.
Also at eFilmCritic
Monday, December 23, 2019
Sheep Without a Shepherd
I'm not sure exactly how much of a surprise hit Sheep Without a Shepherd is in China - the end credits had Imax and Dolby Atmos logos, and I doubt that films are prepared for premium theaters there just as a matter of course. Yes, there are enough of those screens being built for a high enough population that you may want one or two coming out every weekend, but this film seems so relatively small-scale and non-blockbuster-ish - and, heck, skeptical enough about the police to incur the censor board's resistance even if it is Thai police rather than Chinese - that I wouldn't necessarily expect it to open wide in China.
And yet, there it is, at the top of the box office charts, well ahead of The Rise of Skywalker (the first Star Wars film to get a day-and-date release in China) and apparently Only Cloud Knows and Ip Man 4, which are getting fairly sizable American releases. Meanwhile, its release here seems like a genuine afterthought, basically given two screenings a day rather than four - well, three, but one is at 9am or so and, guys, I can tell you from experience that nobody goes to the early-riser screenings they put on for other movies just because they can pack a house with blockbuster fans - and a lot of those were marked "Sold Out" on Friday and Saturday. That's the sort of "sold out" that means "we're going to run Star Wars on another screen", though, so AMC was probably just thinking of this as maybe something that could sell a few tickets on the margins. I'm not sure how much the good turnout at the 7:10 show on Sunday is a weekend's worth of tickets compacted into one show or what would have happened anyway, but I'm gathering that some folks in Chinatown were genuinely excited to see that thing that was doing well back in China.
One thing that made me smile more than the "this character likes movies a lot" stuff usually does came when it was time to show the actual movies Weijie was watching, and the police groaned at the fact that he had apparently watched 860 of them while waiting around at work in the past year; it's just the right sort of "that's insane but props to him" feel. Plus, at least one of the movies referenced as specifically being useful in cracking his head is a pretty nifty choice - sure, Se7en is a masterpiece (and I'm amused by the movie nerd that put the "7" in the subtitles even when some other things seemed kind of dicey), but Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt is an inspired choice, considering how much of this movie also hangs on someone five or six years old selling her performance. Korean film Montage is the one it openly admits to cribbing a lot from, and while I haven't seen that, it sounds familiar enough that after hearing the description I'm kind of surprised that I haven't seen it at Fantasia or NYAFF or something. Kind of why I stuck a link over there to the right, to remind me to give it a look.
Anyway, surprisingly nifty movie, and I've got no idea if it will still be around come Wednesday. Maybe not the usual Christmas Eve [Eve] viewing, but worth a look.
Wu Sha (Sheep Without a Shepherd)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 December 2019 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, DCP)
Sheep Without a Shepherd is the sort of thriller that elicits happily complicit snickers from the audience because they are extremely invested in someone getting away with murder. Well, maybe not quite murder, but you get the point. The filmmakers know exactly what's going to get the audience rooting against the police and manage to make it work even when what they are doing is pretty obvious.
It starts with a jailbreak that's actually a story being told by Li Weijie (Xiao Yang), a Chinese man living in the Thai village of Chanban who watches a lot of movies between calls at his network service business. He's a bit tight with money - he, wife Ayu (Tan Zhuo), and daughters Pingping (Audrey Hui) & An-An (Zhang Ziran), have a fair-sized house because a lot next to the cemetery is a bargain - but he relents when 16-year-old Pingping needs 6000 baht (about $200) for a special weekend camp for high achievers. It goes badly, and things get worse when a fellow attendee, Suchat (Beety) shows up with cell phone video to blackmail her into another "date" while Weijie is away on business in nearby Lua Pathom. Ayu interrupts and Pingping fights back, accidentally connecting with Suchat's skull rather than his phone. The next morning, Weijie must call on everything he's learned about avoiding arrest from watching movies to keep what they've done from being discovered, especially tricky because not only are Suchat's parents chief of police Laoorn (Joan Chen) and mayoral candidate Dutpon (Philip Keung Ho-Man), but Sangkun (Shih Ming-Shuai), a corrupt cop who has long had it in for Weijie, actually caught a glimpse of him getting into the victim's car the next morning.
Six screenwriters are credited with adapting the Malayalam-language film Drishyam (the sixth remake, following four in other parts of India and one in Sri Lanka), something which often seems like a recipe for turning a pointed story into mush, but that is not the case here. It's a really impressively constructed machine of a film which lays out where it's going but still makes the audience enjoy the process of getting there, turns dark comedy into something that really stings, and finds plenty of room to bring emotions to a boil even as it's being methodical. The writers and Malaysian director Sam Quah Boon-Lip are able to wear their influences on their sleeves and even find a way to use a mid-credits scene to wring something out of the Chinese "content guidelines" that the film had mostly been mostly able to skirt by being set in Thailand. Quah and company manage to walk an impressive tightrope between the different ways that crime is difficult in the movies and in real life, keeping the audience aware of it but never becoming a movie about movies.
Sometimes Xiao Yang veers a little too closely to self-aware as Li Weijie, taking charge perhaps a little too easily once he sees the situation, but he does a nifty job of handling how his irreverence in the early going becomes something between bravery and recklessness lafter on, but he's kind of self-aware of how you have to be foolish to try this. He's a fun guy to watch but Xiao always pitches it so that neither he nor Tan Zhuo and Audrey Hui look foolish, despite the fact that they are thoroughly believable as people who have just been through something horrible and can't quite shake it off. They're believably shaken in ways that movies seldom have room for such characters to be. The family is rounded out by young Zhang Xiran as An-An, who is somewhere in the five-to-seven range and is able to should much more than kids that age usually do in this sort of movie, whether as a character or actor.
They seem even more doomed because Joan Chen gives a downright ferocious performance as Laoorn (which is how her name is subtitled and pronounced, although it's "La Wen" in the credits and seemingly something else on her uniform's name tag). She's introduced as ruthlessly intelligent early on, and while she's seen as a moderating influence at home, she's relentless once Suchat disappears, and Chen dives into the role, happily taking mama-bear tenaciousness and cranking it up a notch, making Laoorn downright frightening but staying just on the right side of the line where the audience still sympathizes with this monster's motives. Philip Keung is in and out as her somewhat more refined partner and Beety gets the job done as her roofie-dropping son, but it's the actors playing the other cops who help her stand out: Jerry Huang Chih-Wei is a solid grounding force as the one who seems to be trying to just do the job right, while Shih Ming-Shuai's Sangkun goes from impressively nasty at the start to darkly comic as his well-known corruption means that nobody trusts him despite his actually being right later on.
That's a kind of nasty irony that one doesn't necessarily see that much of in thrillers - there's usually just the one kind of bad cop, and watching the two types stepping on each other's feet here is a lot of fun. It's a minor part, because Quah and company obviously don't want to distract too much from how this movie is about two parents who will trample over all sorts of boundaries in order to defend their children, even if it's arguably too late. That eventually gets underlined, but it's well after the filmmakers have given the audience the time to realize that this is the second time they've put two corpses in one coffin or punched up the finale by using Dutpon's political ambitions, previously just a way to illustrate Suchat's privileged position, as a way to escalate well beyond the basic scale of the story. It's a way to make the dangers of that sort of rot even more obvious and shocking without a lot of moral hand-wringing.
Quah and his team get a lot of the thriller basics right - as an example, getting rid of Suchat's car and phone is by-the-book but with each shot and cut executed perfectly - and it adds up to a much better thriller than I was expecting. It's going to get buried in the United States, hitting theaters at the same time as "Star Wars" and a couple of Chinese movies with much bigger names attached, but proving a big hit back in China. It's worth seeking out, though, because the sort of wicked smiles it often inspires can be hard to come by.
(Formerly at EFC)
Monday, April 01, 2019
Triple Threat
Getting a movie like Triple Threat into theaters for even one night is probably a victory for Well Go, because it's D2V as all get-out, although that's not necessarily the pure insult it used to be: Although I haven't dipped my toes in it much beyond what makes it to Fantasia, there's a growing appreciation for what the folks in this market are doing, shooting in Thailand or Eastern Europe, with a set of actors who are specializing in playing a certain type of tough guy and selling the heck out of their fight scenes (and directors who understand that their job is to make those sequences sing) rather than slumming it as a gig that pays the rent while their agent finds them work worthy of their talents. Stuff like this may not be great, transcendent art, but it's a bit better than B-movie "product" or "content" or dues-paying stepping stones.
On the other hand, you can't help but notice the disparity with stuff that's made for the big-screen experience when the distributor goes and attaches a trailer for Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy to the movie. The opening images of the preview are striking in a way that the aggressively generic environs of Triple Threat are not, and then the trailer gets slick and playful as Michelle Yeoh walks into a restaurant where Max Zhang's title character is working as a waiter and they play a bit, passing a drink back and forth across a table, redirecting it in small ways so it doesn't drop, spill, or stop moving. That's a movie that has a bit of room to be more than solid and satisfying. Sure, I was already inclined to like Master Z after Ip Man 3 and dropping Michelle Yeoh into a martial-arts movie these days is pretty much bringing in a ringer, but there's not really an equivalent moment in Triple Threat, either in terms of being truly creative with the stars' action chops or just having the characters grab you in a more-than-functional way. It kind of tries with Iko's Jaka burying his wife or Tony Jaa hamming it up while cooking a meal, but the spark isn't quite there.
Well, maybe it is in the scene where White's character is saying "bullshit, bullshit, oh, Donnie and Sammo" when browsing a street vendor's bootleg movies. That's kind of both a well-delivered line that shows some personality and kind of a statement of what's important here: It's looking to be the sort of action movie that White wouldn't call bullshit, and any other priority is a distant second. It maybe doesn't make it as a whole, but I can't say I regret watching the main six throw down at the end.
Triple Threat
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2019 in AMC Boston Common #17 (special presentation, DCP)
A direct-to-video all-star cast doesn't sound like a huge reason to go see a movie, but there's two kinds of direct-to-video people who: Actors who have lost their box-office draw but keep working in whatever job they can get (your Eric Roberts or Bruce Willis types), and action professionals like the stars of this movie. These guys can fight on screen and are hopefully just good enough where the scenes in between are not entirely laughable, or at least the producers can afford enough action to minimize that. Triple Threat has the action, and thankfully it's good and frequent enough to do the job.
It takes place in a fictional Southeast Asian country where the news is in English but the locals speak Thai, and a crime-ridden one at that, although Chinese heiress Xiao Xian (Celina Jade) has a plan to change that through investment and philanthropy. The mob in the form of of Siu Feng (Monica Mok Siu-kei) has a plan, starting with sending a team of mercenaries - including Devereaux (Michael Jai White), Joey (Michael Bisping), Mook (JeeJa Yanin), Payu (Tony Jaa), and Long Fei (Tiger Chen Hu) - to bust terrorist Collins (Scott Adkins) out of an MI6 black site, so he can lead a team to take Xian out. Seems like overkill, except that Payu and Jaka thought they were on a humanitarian mission, and at least one staffer, Jaka (Iko Uwais), has survived, and all three will have their paths cross with Xiao as she is under attack.
For a movie that is mostly a chase which stays close enough that people can regularly fight, this is needlessly complicated in some ways, and often just plain silly - is breaking Collins out really necessary, given that he doesn't exactly come off as some sort of superlative mastermind rather than just another merc? Leave him until later and you've got Devereaux as team leader and haven't preemptively made enemies of Payu, Jaka, and Long Fei. Sure, you can't know that in advance, and a martial-arts movie has got to set itself up with reasons for people to switch sides and fight each other, but there's a point where even the folks with no illusions about the action serving the story rather than vice versa might raise an eyebrow about how it doesn't quite fit, even before one starts to note that this place looks pretty nice for a supposedly poor, crime-infested hellhole, although people seem to take folks running through the streets firing automatic weapons in stride.
Full review on EFilmCritic
On the other hand, you can't help but notice the disparity with stuff that's made for the big-screen experience when the distributor goes and attaches a trailer for Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy to the movie. The opening images of the preview are striking in a way that the aggressively generic environs of Triple Threat are not, and then the trailer gets slick and playful as Michelle Yeoh walks into a restaurant where Max Zhang's title character is working as a waiter and they play a bit, passing a drink back and forth across a table, redirecting it in small ways so it doesn't drop, spill, or stop moving. That's a movie that has a bit of room to be more than solid and satisfying. Sure, I was already inclined to like Master Z after Ip Man 3 and dropping Michelle Yeoh into a martial-arts movie these days is pretty much bringing in a ringer, but there's not really an equivalent moment in Triple Threat, either in terms of being truly creative with the stars' action chops or just having the characters grab you in a more-than-functional way. It kind of tries with Iko's Jaka burying his wife or Tony Jaa hamming it up while cooking a meal, but the spark isn't quite there.
Well, maybe it is in the scene where White's character is saying "bullshit, bullshit, oh, Donnie and Sammo" when browsing a street vendor's bootleg movies. That's kind of both a well-delivered line that shows some personality and kind of a statement of what's important here: It's looking to be the sort of action movie that White wouldn't call bullshit, and any other priority is a distant second. It maybe doesn't make it as a whole, but I can't say I regret watching the main six throw down at the end.
Triple Threat
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2019 in AMC Boston Common #17 (special presentation, DCP)
A direct-to-video all-star cast doesn't sound like a huge reason to go see a movie, but there's two kinds of direct-to-video people who: Actors who have lost their box-office draw but keep working in whatever job they can get (your Eric Roberts or Bruce Willis types), and action professionals like the stars of this movie. These guys can fight on screen and are hopefully just good enough where the scenes in between are not entirely laughable, or at least the producers can afford enough action to minimize that. Triple Threat has the action, and thankfully it's good and frequent enough to do the job.
It takes place in a fictional Southeast Asian country where the news is in English but the locals speak Thai, and a crime-ridden one at that, although Chinese heiress Xiao Xian (Celina Jade) has a plan to change that through investment and philanthropy. The mob in the form of of Siu Feng (Monica Mok Siu-kei) has a plan, starting with sending a team of mercenaries - including Devereaux (Michael Jai White), Joey (Michael Bisping), Mook (JeeJa Yanin), Payu (Tony Jaa), and Long Fei (Tiger Chen Hu) - to bust terrorist Collins (Scott Adkins) out of an MI6 black site, so he can lead a team to take Xian out. Seems like overkill, except that Payu and Jaka thought they were on a humanitarian mission, and at least one staffer, Jaka (Iko Uwais), has survived, and all three will have their paths cross with Xiao as she is under attack.
For a movie that is mostly a chase which stays close enough that people can regularly fight, this is needlessly complicated in some ways, and often just plain silly - is breaking Collins out really necessary, given that he doesn't exactly come off as some sort of superlative mastermind rather than just another merc? Leave him until later and you've got Devereaux as team leader and haven't preemptively made enemies of Payu, Jaka, and Long Fei. Sure, you can't know that in advance, and a martial-arts movie has got to set itself up with reasons for people to switch sides and fight each other, but there's a point where even the folks with no illusions about the action serving the story rather than vice versa might raise an eyebrow about how it doesn't quite fit, even before one starts to note that this place looks pretty nice for a supposedly poor, crime-infested hellhole, although people seem to take folks running through the streets firing automatic weapons in stride.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Sunday, July 08, 2018
This Week in Tickets: 2 July 2018 - 8 July 2018
Would have seen more, but it is really difficult to convince myself I was in the mood for certain movies. I mean, Hereditary is a 127-minute horror movie, and it is difficult to get up for that.
On top of that, it was a week of trying to get ahead of stuff at work and not really finding myself leaving at a time that aligns with seeing a movie. Heck, I wound up staying a couple hours late on Thursday to make it easier to get to a 9pm show of Ant-Man and the Wasp so that I could fit it in around other things. It was pretty darn good, despite me being a dumbass jerk about getting the right 3D glasses. Also, according to Google Maps, it is often shorter for me to just walk home from Assembly Row than take transit, especially late at night, when the first bus is just late enough to make the transfer if Medford go awry.
Friday, I went to Boston Common for Brother of the Year, a so-so comedy notable for being the first Thai movie I can remember having this sort of quick release in North America. I would not mind if some of their horror movies, action, and things like Bad Genius followed in its footsteps.
Then it was time for a trip to Maine to exchange presents for cake with a couple of nieces. Amusingly, a couple of people there were surprised that they made comic books for kids, which suggests that someone in that industry has messed up big-time. They also got Paddington and its sequel, Early Man, and Steamboat Bill, Jr., because someone needs to introduce kids to the great silent comedians.
That was also something that ran at the Somerville's "Silents, Please" series a couple of months ago, and this Sunday also featured the latest installment of that series, Docks of New York, an fair drama that was impressively mounted, as you might expect coming from the end of the silent age.
No more of these for another month, since I'll be in Montreal for the Fantasia International Film Festival, trying to post daily updates but almost certainly falling behind. I'll be trying to get something onto my Letterboxd account in as close to real-time as possible, though.
Docks of New York
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm)
This kind of goes on for a 76-minute movie, although I suspect that what plays as kind of circular and indecisive 90 years later felt more like a familiar pattern to a working-class audience in 1928. It's a thin, simple story that probably plays a little better if you already know the general rhythm.
Even if that's the case, it's still gorgeous; there's not a shot in the film that doesn't look like a great still from the period, and some of the moving images are just as incredible, complex, dynamic stuff - there's an amazing shot from a scene that seemed to settle into two characters chatting but becomes a stunning look at the busy bar they're in. And there's little denying that when von Sternberg wants to hit you in the gut, he's good at it, more so because, even when he's going to show a light at the end of the tunnel, he never makes it feel like crass manipulation.
Plus, there are a couple of really nifty performances from Betty Compson as a suicidal woman finding cautious hope in the man who rescued her and Olga Baclanova as a harder-edged woman seeing her sailor husband for the first time in three years and rather ambivalent about it. They're a darn sight more entertaining than George Bancroft and Clyde Cook as their opposite numbers - they handle their roles well enough, but aren't given quite the multifaceted characterization needed to drive the movie, though Bancroft finds an interesting gear later on that makes a lot more click into place.
On top of that, it was a week of trying to get ahead of stuff at work and not really finding myself leaving at a time that aligns with seeing a movie. Heck, I wound up staying a couple hours late on Thursday to make it easier to get to a 9pm show of Ant-Man and the Wasp so that I could fit it in around other things. It was pretty darn good, despite me being a dumbass jerk about getting the right 3D glasses. Also, according to Google Maps, it is often shorter for me to just walk home from Assembly Row than take transit, especially late at night, when the first bus is just late enough to make the transfer if Medford go awry.
Friday, I went to Boston Common for Brother of the Year, a so-so comedy notable for being the first Thai movie I can remember having this sort of quick release in North America. I would not mind if some of their horror movies, action, and things like Bad Genius followed in its footsteps.
Then it was time for a trip to Maine to exchange presents for cake with a couple of nieces. Amusingly, a couple of people there were surprised that they made comic books for kids, which suggests that someone in that industry has messed up big-time. They also got Paddington and its sequel, Early Man, and Steamboat Bill, Jr., because someone needs to introduce kids to the great silent comedians.
That was also something that ran at the Somerville's "Silents, Please" series a couple of months ago, and this Sunday also featured the latest installment of that series, Docks of New York, an fair drama that was impressively mounted, as you might expect coming from the end of the silent age.
No more of these for another month, since I'll be in Montreal for the Fantasia International Film Festival, trying to post daily updates but almost certainly falling behind. I'll be trying to get something onto my Letterboxd account in as close to real-time as possible, though.
Docks of New York
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm)
This kind of goes on for a 76-minute movie, although I suspect that what plays as kind of circular and indecisive 90 years later felt more like a familiar pattern to a working-class audience in 1928. It's a thin, simple story that probably plays a little better if you already know the general rhythm.
Even if that's the case, it's still gorgeous; there's not a shot in the film that doesn't look like a great still from the period, and some of the moving images are just as incredible, complex, dynamic stuff - there's an amazing shot from a scene that seemed to settle into two characters chatting but becomes a stunning look at the busy bar they're in. And there's little denying that when von Sternberg wants to hit you in the gut, he's good at it, more so because, even when he's going to show a light at the end of the tunnel, he never makes it feel like crass manipulation.
Plus, there are a couple of really nifty performances from Betty Compson as a suicidal woman finding cautious hope in the man who rescued her and Olga Baclanova as a harder-edged woman seeing her sailor husband for the first time in three years and rather ambivalent about it. They're a darn sight more entertaining than George Bancroft and Clyde Cook as their opposite numbers - they handle their roles well enough, but aren't given quite the multifaceted characterization needed to drive the movie, though Bancroft finds an interesting gear later on that makes a lot more click into place.
Saturday, July 07, 2018
Brother of the Year
What a peculiar release this is: a Thai film that played its native land back in May and appears to have been picked up by an Australian distributor (though it does not appear on their website) that also booked it in some North American theaters with Chinese subtitles. Based upon what I saw at the 6:50pm show on Friday, it's not a great strategy, as the audience was just me until three or four other people came in as previews were starting to run. Considering that this is the first Thai movie I've seen get this sort of quick release, I wonder if there's not a real audience for Thai movies or if it just takes a few of these things being released for word to get out that these movies occasionally play for the Thai community to come out.
It's a bit odd to see something so utterly mainstream from Thailand, though - most of what we get in the U.S. is art-house stuff from Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Wisit Sasanatieng (though his stuff hasn't made it across that Pacific much in the last decade and holy crap they both have parts in an anthology film this year), maybe some martial arts, and always looking great, with even the likes of Bad Genius having slick cinematography. Admittedly, it's a big example of how movies used to get filtered through festivals and art-house distributors so that most of us didn't necessarily get a chance to see what folks in other countries were actually watching.
I do kind of wonder how this particular movie winds up getting this distribution and booking, though - it's not Bad Genius in terms of quality, so I wonder if it's a matter of a couple of the cast members being pop stars. It's awfully innocuous otherwise, but I gather something has to be first. Hopefully it won't be the last.
Nong Pee Teerak (Brother of the Year)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2018 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DCP)
The back end of Brother of the Year introduces a ton of new background characters we haven't seen before as it moves from Bangkok to the countryside, and it's kind of strange that I often felt like I knew where they were coming from more than the main characters, who actually go and explain themselves early in the movie. That's not to say that the main cast is bad at all, but that they are not as well-served by the story as they deserve, and it makes for a movie that's good enough to watch but not quite up to its potential.
It first introduces the audience to Chut (Sunny Suwanmethanont), a Bangkok advertising executive in his mid-twenties who has been happily living a player's life while his younger sister Jane (Urassaya Sperbund) has been attending college in Japan for the past four years. When she returns to the house their mother (Anchuleeon Buagaew) arranged for them to share a bit early, they're immediately reminded why they drive each other insane: To Jane, Chut is a gross, irresponsible jerk who only acts like a big brother when it comes to intimidating her boyfriends; Chut sees Jane as an obnoxious know-it-all who can never do wrong and got him saddled with a terrible nickname back in school. So, naturally, she immediately gets a job at one of his company's clients and starts dating her co-worker and his contact Moji (Nichkhun), thus bringing their sibling rivalry into a new arena.
That's not a terrible situation, especially since director Vithaya Thongyuyong and his three co-writers are willing to let Jane be a little harsh at times, but there's almost always something about the situation that doesn't quite seem right: Every push to get Jane and Moji together feels a bit too heavy-handed, without nearly enough passion on display to make it work, while the first scene with Jane and Chut in the same conference room seems to jump to the siblings cruelly lashing out a little too quickly. Some of the most interesting moments come toward the end, when Jane is having misgivings about the path she's choosing, but the film hasn't done much to set up her comments about how living in Japan as a foreigner is stressful, for example. It's an utterly believable thing for her to be concerned about, but the film has only given the audience momentary glimpses that she would be.
Full review on EFC
It's a bit odd to see something so utterly mainstream from Thailand, though - most of what we get in the U.S. is art-house stuff from Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Wisit Sasanatieng (though his stuff hasn't made it across that Pacific much in the last decade and holy crap they both have parts in an anthology film this year), maybe some martial arts, and always looking great, with even the likes of Bad Genius having slick cinematography. Admittedly, it's a big example of how movies used to get filtered through festivals and art-house distributors so that most of us didn't necessarily get a chance to see what folks in other countries were actually watching.
I do kind of wonder how this particular movie winds up getting this distribution and booking, though - it's not Bad Genius in terms of quality, so I wonder if it's a matter of a couple of the cast members being pop stars. It's awfully innocuous otherwise, but I gather something has to be first. Hopefully it won't be the last.
Nong Pee Teerak (Brother of the Year)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2018 in AMC Boston Common #15 (first-run, DCP)
The back end of Brother of the Year introduces a ton of new background characters we haven't seen before as it moves from Bangkok to the countryside, and it's kind of strange that I often felt like I knew where they were coming from more than the main characters, who actually go and explain themselves early in the movie. That's not to say that the main cast is bad at all, but that they are not as well-served by the story as they deserve, and it makes for a movie that's good enough to watch but not quite up to its potential.
It first introduces the audience to Chut (Sunny Suwanmethanont), a Bangkok advertising executive in his mid-twenties who has been happily living a player's life while his younger sister Jane (Urassaya Sperbund) has been attending college in Japan for the past four years. When she returns to the house their mother (Anchuleeon Buagaew) arranged for them to share a bit early, they're immediately reminded why they drive each other insane: To Jane, Chut is a gross, irresponsible jerk who only acts like a big brother when it comes to intimidating her boyfriends; Chut sees Jane as an obnoxious know-it-all who can never do wrong and got him saddled with a terrible nickname back in school. So, naturally, she immediately gets a job at one of his company's clients and starts dating her co-worker and his contact Moji (Nichkhun), thus bringing their sibling rivalry into a new arena.
That's not a terrible situation, especially since director Vithaya Thongyuyong and his three co-writers are willing to let Jane be a little harsh at times, but there's almost always something about the situation that doesn't quite seem right: Every push to get Jane and Moji together feels a bit too heavy-handed, without nearly enough passion on display to make it work, while the first scene with Jane and Chut in the same conference room seems to jump to the siblings cruelly lashing out a little too quickly. Some of the most interesting moments come toward the end, when Jane is having misgivings about the path she's choosing, but the film hasn't done much to set up her comments about how living in Japan as a foreigner is stressful, for example. It's an utterly believable thing for her to be concerned about, but the film has only given the audience momentary glimpses that she would be.
Full review on EFC
Monday, July 24, 2017
Fantasia 2017.11: The H-Man, Broken Sword Hero, What a Wonderful Family! 2, and The Sheriff in Town
Lots of guests one day, nearly none the next - although, to be fair, I bailed on what was probably one of the centerpiece, guest-intensive things of the festival as I skipped King Cohen because I figured it would run into The Sheriff in Town. It turned out that I didn't really love that one - it's a clever idea and you can constantly see what it's going for, but only clicks about half the time - but I don't regret the choice that much; I'm weirdly incurious about the history of cult movies and people behind them, especially if they're of relatively recent vintage. So, sure, I would have loved if the presentation on Ishiro Honda that preceded The H-Man had been a little more focused and mapped out for the time it had, because I'm just as fascinated by the other material that goes with the story of Honda's life and work, but I'll happily give a seat at the Larry Cohen tribute to someone who is really excited about being in the room.
Today: Junk Head, The Laplace's Demon, Love and Other Cults, and The Mole Song: Hong Kong Capriccio. Most Beautiful Island is good enough that I'm tempted to see it again with the director in attendance, you all already know what Terminator 2 is although an early look at the 3D conversion/restoration might be neat, and Q: The Winged Serpent is a thoroughly bizarre thing on 35mm.
Bijo to ekitai ningen (The H-Man)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Ishiro Honda, 35mm)
Probably my only 35mm throwback at Fantasia this year, it's a bummer that the print was dubbed in a way that probably couldn't have sounded great in 1959, much less 2017 (if the idea of a sub is to make it easier to swallow, what was with the stereotypical accents except when Chikako is singing?). It is a bit of a minor work from the director of the original Gojira, but kind of fun as a genre mash-up in ways they didn't do as much at the time when the original genre films were thriving, a cops & criminals picture that suddenly takes a detour to a mysterious ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and then deals with gangsters and oozing monsters in equal measure.
Literally oozing; "H-Man" is a viscous radioactive liquid that may or may not have any memory of being human, and while it's weird and a little creepy, it's only immediately threatening once in a while. It's a good thing that everything about the rest of the movie, from the cops to the crooks to the psychedelic burlesque at a nightclub, is kind of neat and off-kilter, and probably more fun with a subtitled print.
Thong Dee Fun Khao (Broken Sword Hero)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Action, DCP)
What makes a great martial arts action movie? The obvious first part of the answer - "great martial arts action" - is right there in the question, but while fans will often accept other deficiencies if a film delivers that, they often want a little more than just the promise of another fight in between action scenes. Broken Sword Hero takes a stab at delivering that, but unless one is particularly invested in Thai fighting techniques and history, it's a bit of a mixed bag.
The film introduces the viewer to Thongdee (Buakaw Banchamek) as an adult running from a horde of pursuers, but quickly flashes back to him similarly on the run as a kid, when he's called "Joi" and bullied by the governor's sun Cherd. They're still enemies as adults, when Cherd (Nantawut Boonrubsub) and his uncle Panritdeja pursue Thongdee to a boxing camp. The pair's pursuit spurs Thongdee to move on, studying various martial arts at other camps, with young Boonkerd (Vannapoom Songsuparp) tagging along. They make a number of friends both in training and on the road, with Thongdee particularly taken by Ramyong (Sornsin Maneewan), who leaped from a caravan to defend her sisters from apparent Burmese invaders, and as a result attracting the attention of her uncle Rueang (Phutharit Prombandal), who has an important position in a different governor's staff.
The festival program hints that the star of this movie, Bukaw Banchamek, could be the next Tony Jaa, and he certainly seems to have the muay thai bona fides to pull that off; a four-time champion and solidly built dude (who also played professional soccer), there's little surprise when he jumps into a fray and starts trading effective-looking blows or just lays someone out quickly. He can certainly move and perform the athletic feats necessary. Charisma-wise, it's kind of hard to tell how he'll shape up given more acting roles, but he looks like he might make for a good "inexperienced guy befuddled by weird situation" sort of hero.
Unfortunately, he doesn't get a whole lot of chance to really play a character in this picture, because despite the plots that sort of develop around the edges, there is really nothing to this movie but boxing. Thongdee goes to one boxing camp, spars with the master's best student as an audition, trains, gets into a bigger fight, and then moves on to the next one. It's not even really a case that he seems obsessed with becoming known as the country's best fighter or the like, or that he's always in immediate danger of discovery; there's just no drive to get from one situation to another (Cherd sort of disappears as a factor at one point, and it's not like he's missed, but it's an example of how what's important aside from Thongdee learning to fight fluctuates semi-randomly in this movie). He accumulates a few sidekicks almost randomly, and though they're often pretty good ones - there's even a nice moment when a fighter kicked to the side for losing one fight joins the group and Thongdee recalls that happening to him without it having to make it into the dialog - the star isn't quite actor enough to make it feel like a makeshift family rather than other guys hanging around.
Full review on EFC.
Kazoku wa tsuraiyo 2 (What a Wonderful Family! 2)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)
Yoji Yamada is obviously not going to make as many What a Wonderful Family! movies as he did Tora-san entries; production moves slower these days even if I suspect that he is writing what he knows in terms of infusing these comedies with themes about the challenges of aging as well as the sillier bits of farce that push the plots forward. But I hope he keeps going; I've grown fond of the Hirata family and love the studio-era traditionalism found here.
This one follows up on the first, probably a year or two later, and for the most part everything is as Yamada left it - Shuzo Hirata (Isao Hashizume) and his wife Tomiko (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) did not wind up divorcing, but they do spend most of their time doing their own things. Eldest son Konosuke (Masahiko Nishimura), his wife Fumie (Yui Natsukawa), and their own sons Kenichi (Takanosuke Nakamura) and Nobusuke (Ayumu Marumaya) still live with them, but youngest son Shota (Satoshi Tsumabuki) has married Noriko Mamiya (Yu Aoi) and moved out. Fumie notes that Shuzo's car has a fresh dent or two on it, and suggests his daughter Shigeko (Tomoko Nakajima) talk to him about giving up his driver's license, but everyone is kind of afraid to confront him about that. Meanwhile, as Tomiko takes a trip to Scandinavia to see the Northern Lights, Shuzo and lady friend Kayo (Jun Fubuki) encounter one of his old high school classmates, Ginpei Maruta (Nenji Kobayashi), handsome and from a successful family back in the day but living alone and working a road crew at the age of 73 now.
Full review on EFC.
Boangwan (The Sheriff in Town)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)
Filmmaker Kim Hyung-joo has a pretty great concept for an action-comedy here, as the cop who breaks all the rules actually gets fired for a botched investigation but becomes something other than a P.I. who has crawled into the bottle, but you've got to be true to the references you make, and if you start out specifically name-checking Chow Yun-fat in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, that's the scale you should probably be working on. It's a fun story, but don't promise a riff on John Woo's best if what you've got is something closer to a 1980s TV spoof.
Five years ago, Detective Choi Dae-ho (Lee Sung-min) charged into a situation without waiting for back-up, hoping to get closer to meth kingpin "Popeye" by capturing his lieutenant Shin Il-sik (Jeong Man-sik), but instead his partner was stabbed, Il-sik got away, and the police only captured frightened mule Koo Jong-jin (Choi Jin-woong). That gets you fired, but five years later, Dae-ho isn't despondent; he's returned to Kijang, Busan, a pretty easy-going beach town where he's gone into business with brother-in-law Deok-man (Kim Sung-kyun) and become the unofficial sheriff. He and his "Voluntary Crime Prevention Group" are looking askance at the "Beach Town" development, and it only gets weirder that when it turns out to be funded by Jong-jin, who after serving two years struck it rich in the traditional medicine business and credits it all to the kindness Dae-ho showed the night he was arrested. But with meth showing up in Kijang just as Jong-jin shows up, Dae-ho can't help but be suspicious - or does he just want to see some real action again?
Even when this sort of crime story is played straight, the cop is frequently the least entertaining part of the movie, and while that's not entirely the case here, Lee Sung-min never quite clicks as Dae-ho the way that Choi Jin-woong does as Jong-jin. Choi's part is the rare comic performance that is funny foot just how level it is rather than how it shifts in tone and manages to maintain that over the course of a feature-length film, with Choi always finding the point where Jong-jin is hitting his exaggerated bonhomie in a way that is not normal but not really deadpan, and it's never not funny. This is, perhaps, because it is in large part a response to Lee getting increasingly frantic as Dae-ho, but Lee doesn't have as many gears as Choi does, so the build-up of Dae-ho's suspicions isn't quite the escalating tension it could be.
Full review on EFC.
Today: Junk Head, The Laplace's Demon, Love and Other Cults, and The Mole Song: Hong Kong Capriccio. Most Beautiful Island is good enough that I'm tempted to see it again with the director in attendance, you all already know what Terminator 2 is although an early look at the 3D conversion/restoration might be neat, and Q: The Winged Serpent is a thoroughly bizarre thing on 35mm.
Bijo to ekitai ningen (The H-Man)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2017 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Ishiro Honda, 35mm)
Probably my only 35mm throwback at Fantasia this year, it's a bummer that the print was dubbed in a way that probably couldn't have sounded great in 1959, much less 2017 (if the idea of a sub is to make it easier to swallow, what was with the stereotypical accents except when Chikako is singing?). It is a bit of a minor work from the director of the original Gojira, but kind of fun as a genre mash-up in ways they didn't do as much at the time when the original genre films were thriving, a cops & criminals picture that suddenly takes a detour to a mysterious ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and then deals with gangsters and oozing monsters in equal measure.
Literally oozing; "H-Man" is a viscous radioactive liquid that may or may not have any memory of being human, and while it's weird and a little creepy, it's only immediately threatening once in a while. It's a good thing that everything about the rest of the movie, from the cops to the crooks to the psychedelic burlesque at a nightclub, is kind of neat and off-kilter, and probably more fun with a subtitled print.
Thong Dee Fun Khao (Broken Sword Hero)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017: Action, DCP)
What makes a great martial arts action movie? The obvious first part of the answer - "great martial arts action" - is right there in the question, but while fans will often accept other deficiencies if a film delivers that, they often want a little more than just the promise of another fight in between action scenes. Broken Sword Hero takes a stab at delivering that, but unless one is particularly invested in Thai fighting techniques and history, it's a bit of a mixed bag.
The film introduces the viewer to Thongdee (Buakaw Banchamek) as an adult running from a horde of pursuers, but quickly flashes back to him similarly on the run as a kid, when he's called "Joi" and bullied by the governor's sun Cherd. They're still enemies as adults, when Cherd (Nantawut Boonrubsub) and his uncle Panritdeja pursue Thongdee to a boxing camp. The pair's pursuit spurs Thongdee to move on, studying various martial arts at other camps, with young Boonkerd (Vannapoom Songsuparp) tagging along. They make a number of friends both in training and on the road, with Thongdee particularly taken by Ramyong (Sornsin Maneewan), who leaped from a caravan to defend her sisters from apparent Burmese invaders, and as a result attracting the attention of her uncle Rueang (Phutharit Prombandal), who has an important position in a different governor's staff.
The festival program hints that the star of this movie, Bukaw Banchamek, could be the next Tony Jaa, and he certainly seems to have the muay thai bona fides to pull that off; a four-time champion and solidly built dude (who also played professional soccer), there's little surprise when he jumps into a fray and starts trading effective-looking blows or just lays someone out quickly. He can certainly move and perform the athletic feats necessary. Charisma-wise, it's kind of hard to tell how he'll shape up given more acting roles, but he looks like he might make for a good "inexperienced guy befuddled by weird situation" sort of hero.
Unfortunately, he doesn't get a whole lot of chance to really play a character in this picture, because despite the plots that sort of develop around the edges, there is really nothing to this movie but boxing. Thongdee goes to one boxing camp, spars with the master's best student as an audition, trains, gets into a bigger fight, and then moves on to the next one. It's not even really a case that he seems obsessed with becoming known as the country's best fighter or the like, or that he's always in immediate danger of discovery; there's just no drive to get from one situation to another (Cherd sort of disappears as a factor at one point, and it's not like he's missed, but it's an example of how what's important aside from Thongdee learning to fight fluctuates semi-randomly in this movie). He accumulates a few sidekicks almost randomly, and though they're often pretty good ones - there's even a nice moment when a fighter kicked to the side for losing one fight joins the group and Thongdee recalls that happening to him without it having to make it into the dialog - the star isn't quite actor enough to make it feel like a makeshift family rather than other guys hanging around.
Full review on EFC.
Kazoku wa tsuraiyo 2 (What a Wonderful Family! 2)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2017 in Théâtre D.B. Clarke (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)
Yoji Yamada is obviously not going to make as many What a Wonderful Family! movies as he did Tora-san entries; production moves slower these days even if I suspect that he is writing what he knows in terms of infusing these comedies with themes about the challenges of aging as well as the sillier bits of farce that push the plots forward. But I hope he keeps going; I've grown fond of the Hirata family and love the studio-era traditionalism found here.
This one follows up on the first, probably a year or two later, and for the most part everything is as Yamada left it - Shuzo Hirata (Isao Hashizume) and his wife Tomiko (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) did not wind up divorcing, but they do spend most of their time doing their own things. Eldest son Konosuke (Masahiko Nishimura), his wife Fumie (Yui Natsukawa), and their own sons Kenichi (Takanosuke Nakamura) and Nobusuke (Ayumu Marumaya) still live with them, but youngest son Shota (Satoshi Tsumabuki) has married Noriko Mamiya (Yu Aoi) and moved out. Fumie notes that Shuzo's car has a fresh dent or two on it, and suggests his daughter Shigeko (Tomoko Nakajima) talk to him about giving up his driver's license, but everyone is kind of afraid to confront him about that. Meanwhile, as Tomiko takes a trip to Scandinavia to see the Northern Lights, Shuzo and lady friend Kayo (Jun Fubuki) encounter one of his old high school classmates, Ginpei Maruta (Nenji Kobayashi), handsome and from a successful family back in the day but living alone and working a road crew at the age of 73 now.
Full review on EFC.
Boangwan (The Sheriff in Town)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2017 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU/Théâtre Hall (Fantasia International FIlm Festival 2017, DCP)
Filmmaker Kim Hyung-joo has a pretty great concept for an action-comedy here, as the cop who breaks all the rules actually gets fired for a botched investigation but becomes something other than a P.I. who has crawled into the bottle, but you've got to be true to the references you make, and if you start out specifically name-checking Chow Yun-fat in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, that's the scale you should probably be working on. It's a fun story, but don't promise a riff on John Woo's best if what you've got is something closer to a 1980s TV spoof.
Five years ago, Detective Choi Dae-ho (Lee Sung-min) charged into a situation without waiting for back-up, hoping to get closer to meth kingpin "Popeye" by capturing his lieutenant Shin Il-sik (Jeong Man-sik), but instead his partner was stabbed, Il-sik got away, and the police only captured frightened mule Koo Jong-jin (Choi Jin-woong). That gets you fired, but five years later, Dae-ho isn't despondent; he's returned to Kijang, Busan, a pretty easy-going beach town where he's gone into business with brother-in-law Deok-man (Kim Sung-kyun) and become the unofficial sheriff. He and his "Voluntary Crime Prevention Group" are looking askance at the "Beach Town" development, and it only gets weirder that when it turns out to be funded by Jong-jin, who after serving two years struck it rich in the traditional medicine business and credits it all to the kindness Dae-ho showed the night he was arrested. But with meth showing up in Kijang just as Jong-jin shows up, Dae-ho can't help but be suspicious - or does he just want to see some real action again?
Even when this sort of crime story is played straight, the cop is frequently the least entertaining part of the movie, and while that's not entirely the case here, Lee Sung-min never quite clicks as Dae-ho the way that Choi Jin-woong does as Jong-jin. Choi's part is the rare comic performance that is funny foot just how level it is rather than how it shifts in tone and manages to maintain that over the course of a feature-length film, with Choi always finding the point where Jong-jin is hitting his exaggerated bonhomie in a way that is not normal but not really deadpan, and it's never not funny. This is, perhaps, because it is in large part a response to Lee getting increasingly frantic as Dae-ho, but Lee doesn't have as many gears as Choi does, so the build-up of Dae-ho's suspicions isn't quite the escalating tension it could be.
Full review on EFC.
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