Jay's Movie Blog

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

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

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

1968 Tunnel Rats

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

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

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

Chaiya (Muay Thai Chaiya)

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Geunom Moksori (Voice of a Murderer)

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

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

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

Faet (Alone)

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Pig Hunt

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

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

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

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

(1) comments

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

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

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

Kod (Handle Me With Care)

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

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie

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

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

La Bête du Lac

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

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

Le Tueur (The Killer)

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Special Magnum (Strange Shadows in an Empty Room)

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

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

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

(1) comments

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

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

C+ jing taam (The Detective)

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Dark Floors

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

The Echo

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Babysitter Wanted

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kwong saan mei yan (An Empress and the Warriors

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Hwaryeohan hyooga (May 18

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

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

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

Dong Mau anh Hung (The Rebel

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

From Within

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

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

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

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

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

Uri Dongne (Our Town)

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

The End

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Stuck

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Red

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robo Rock

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

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

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

Riaru Onigokko (Chasing World)

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Trailer Park of Terror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Objective

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.


Tenten (Adrift In Tokyo)

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

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

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


Goongnyeo (Shadows in the Palace)

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.


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

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

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

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

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

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

Beautiful Sunday (Byootipul Seondei)

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

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.


Gidam (Epitaph)

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.


Kuro-Obi (Black Belt)

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

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

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

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

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

Ji Jie Hao (Assembly)

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Idiots and Angels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Dias (Before The Fall)

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

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

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

Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes)

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

Man jeuk (Sparrow)

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

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

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

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

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

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

Full review at EFC.

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

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

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

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

Vikaren (The Substitute)

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

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

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

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

Full review at eFilmCritic.

Punchlady

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

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

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

Negatibu happi chenso ejji (Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What We Do Is Secret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sad Vacation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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