Asian Imports: My Daughter Is a Zombie and The Lychee Road

Back from Montreal, back on this nonsense:

Both are apparently leaving Boston after Thursday (and those are early/late shows), though The Lychee Road had a pretty good three-week run; I was kind of worried I might have to find a window while in Montreal, where it was playing at the Forum. They're being displaced by another big Chinese movie (Dead to Rights) and some others from elsewhere in Asia - the Shin Godzilla rerelease and War 2 & Coolie from India.

It always amuses me that, when I get back from Fantasia, there are a couple of films that would have been right at home there which I kind of have to scramble to see, but it's mostly because those movies have a higher churn rate than a lot of multiplex material all year round.


My Daughter Is a Zombie

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 August 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #8 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

As far as I can tell, My Daughter Is a Zombie has no connection to My Neighbor Zombie, one of my favorite movies in the genre that also happens to come from South Korea, but I like it for one of the same reasons I liked the other: The filmmakers steadfastly refuse to approve of solving a health-care crisis with guns, which even the most well-intentioned folks in other zombie movies find hard to resist.

The film opens with Lee Jeong-hwan (Jo Jung-suk), a former zookeeper and large animal trainer, returning to his family home in the quaint village of Eunbag-Ri to greet his daughter Su-ah (Choi Yu-ri) - who, we are soon shown and informed, is likely South Korea's last zombie. Like most 15-year-old girls, she found her father kind of cringey and annoying, even if she did share his love of dance, but got bitten while they fled Seoul during the zombie outbreak. She had turned by the time they got to Eunbag-Ri, but neither her father, grandmother Kim Bam-soon (Lee Jung-eun), nor Jeong-hwan's old friend Cho Dong-bae (Yoon Kyung-ho) had it in them to put her down. What they soon discovered was that apparently infectees like Su-ah respond to reminders of their old lives, so they do all they can to help Su-ah resist her new feral instincts. Not eager to help, on the other hand, is Shin Yeon-hwa (Cho Yeo-jeong), Jeong-hwan's first love, the local schoolteacher, and, after having to put down her own finacé, the region's top zombie-hunter.

I don't know how many Webtoon-derived movies I've seen, but this feels like the most Webtoon-derived a movie can be. There's an episodic structure that seems built to never really end but also never leave you completely hanging if it were to stop, a cat that is just expressive enough to need to be CGI. That isn't a dig, necessarily, but it kind of feels 90% premise, 10% plot, committed to the idea of this but kind of content to meander and not worrying about filling in some gaps. It's all right by that, though; the filmmakers capture how comics designed for infinite scroll have a sort of soothing rhythm even when the events are tense, and translate transitions and style to live action well. I'm reasonably sure the caricaturist at an amusement park is the original artist, which would be cute.

It's got a pleasant enough cast playing characters you're seldom sorry to see on screen, too: The adults are affable and funny while still tending to carry a little bit of the tension that naturally comes with hiding Su-ah, with Cho Jung-seok tending to look more committed as the movie goes on and more backstory is revealed, while Lee Jung-eun gives depth to the alcoholic granny that would typically be a comic character and Cho Yeo-jeong sees how a potential threat can be funny. I like Choi Yu-ri's Su-ah enough to wish we saw most of her as just a regular kid, although I kind of suspect that the pantomime she does as a zombie is kind of difficult to pull off well. The script says the word "zombie" throughout but doesn't treat Romero rules as necessarily definitive (indeed, the entire idea is arguably that they're made to force people to act cruelly rather than question cruelty). The filmmakers are pretty good at balancing cute absurdity and danger.

Maybe not enough; there's a lot that seems really ill-advised beyond what we might be willing to forgive, and less soul searching afterward than seems warranted. The story maps just well enough onto caring for, say, a child with cognitive issues that the places where it doesn't feel a bit uncomfortable (I wonder how it would hit if the girl's father was "teaching" instead of "training" her). And, boy, it wants to have all the endings, both introducing a new threat and including a gigantic "oh, by the way" bit.R />
Is it a bit odd for a zombie movie to ultimately be described as "pleasant"? Maybe, and there are certainly times when it doesn't seem to be the best of ideas, but it's not a bad idea to take this approach every once in a while.


Chang'an De Li Zhi (The Lychee Road)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 August 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #9 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The trick of a movie like The Lychee Road, I think, is figuring out how to maintain the odd spirit of the start, where you've got room to be kind of goofy setting things up and making jokes that are either anachronistic or about how certain things haven't changed to make the Tang Dynasty relatable to a moder audience, into the finale, when the stakes are immediate, the story is maybe catching up to recorded history, and there's a lesson you want to teach. Da Peng is better at the modern and chaotic than period adventure and dreams, so this movie slides out of his wheelhouse as that goes on.

He plays Li Shande, who came to the capital at 24 with the desire to be a dedicated public servant, and twenty-odd years later "Old Li" is well-liked by his co-workers in the Department of Imperial Granaries but still a broke ninth-level administrator (he's much better at math than politics), taking out an expensive loan to buy a home on the very outskirts for his sharp-tempered wife A-tong (Zhuang Dafei) and young daughter (Yang Huanyu). But it gets worse: The Emperor has decreed that fresh lychees from Lingnan will be served at his wife's birthday celebration on June 1st, 117 days away, but lychees spoil in three or four days, far faster than any route between the cities. Scheming Eunuch Du Shaoling (Zhang Ruoyun) advises the head of the Granaries, Liu Shuling (Wang Xun), to find a sap to appoint as Lychee envoy and take the fall, along with the expected death sentence for failing the Emperor. That'd be Old Li. It takes him 30 days to reach Lingnan and would likely take just as long to return. Ambitious merchant Su Liang (Bai "White-K" Ke), a second son looking to escape his brother's shadow, offers to buy the pass that will let Li bypass tolls and customs to live out the next three months in comfort, but after meeting Su and Zheng Yuting (Yang Mi), the young owner of the local orchards, he begins to think there may be a way to pull it off.

Longtime fans of co-writer/director/star Dong "Da Peng" Chengpeng, whose movies have fairly reliably opened in North America on top of being big hits in China, should feel at home in the first section; Li is more nerd than hustler, but he's both pretty funny and a guy audiences can relate to amid the slapstick chaos and broad comedy, a lot of it along the lines of "folks in Tang Dynasty Chang'an had to pay mortgages and deal with monstrous bosses too!", and even in this sort of period piece, it's the sort of comedy Da Peng is good at, both as a filmmaker and an actor. There's delights in the middle, too, as Li sets out to handle a mission where he's been set up to fail by using the scientific method and experimenting with logistics, along with making friends with the people he'll need to help rather than ring to trick them. It's a neat balance of problem-solving and not getting too far into the weeds, and sort of feels like a bridge between the light satire of the first act and a finale which needs to be believable in Tang Dynasty terms. There's lots of chuckling about pigeons being Imperial email and wondering if stickers were really a thing in that time.

Even before the finale throws a bunch of epilogues one's way, though, the shift to something more melodramatic feels a bit off, especially if one thinks Li Shinde would be more conscious of where his new plan was heading. The scheming suddenly seems too immediate compared to the rest of the movie, and too abstract. Sure, the truth of the matter is that Li's fate is largely in the hands of nobles and bureaucrats who barely regard him as human while he's in the room with them, and not even that once he leaves, but even with the occasional cuts back to Chang'an, it's hard to get invested in the scheming over who will lose face if Li succeeds (and is willing to kill over it) versus those who think they can derive advantage when the sort of logistics problems Li has to solve on the fly are what has been driving interest so far. There's also a speech which seems a little too intent on reflecting good socialist values, maybe to counter how Su Liang and Zheng Yuting aren't portrayed in a bad light for being businesspeople seeking advantages, but we've all got folks who need to hear it, whether we're in China or the United States.

It is, at least, an extremely watchable cast that Da Peng surrounds himself with: Zhuang Dafei gets introduced as something of a harpy who mostly slaps people, but by the end one can see a marriage that works. White-K and Yang Mi lubricate the center of the movie in different ways and always feel like they've got a life outside this particular story. When you need to raise the stakes in the end, you can do a lot worse than bringing in Andy Lau Tak-wah as an imperial advisor who seems malevolent even when being helpful.

I'm not sure it necessarily adds up to a crowd pleaser, though it's done fairly well in its native land and stuck around here longer than usual. There are bits throughout the movie to enjoy, at least, even if it as a whole never gets the heights of the filmmaker's best, zaniest work.

Harbin

Today in "hey, I wonder how various movies are doing in various theaters", Harbin opened on screen 6 at Causeway Street, which I think is the second-largest - it's located directly underneath the main screen in the part of the theater where one floor echoes the other, and my eyebrows went up when I saw it there, because it's a Korean film and while there were no big Hollywood releases this week, there were a bunch on Christmas, so - did they expect big things from Harbin? Did A Complete Unknown, Babygirl, or Nosferatu really just tank so hard at Causeway Street that this seemed a better use of the large screen? Does Harbin in particular have good buzz? Does the guy who programs Boston AMCs like Korean films and want the big war/spy movie on the biggest screen he can grab.

I dunno. This stuff's a mystery to me. But, hey, if you're gonna see it and have A-List, you've got three days to see it big.


Harbin

* * ½ (out of four)

Seen 3 January 2025 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming; where to watch when it is

Harbin is the second movie I've seen recently where I was really glad the theater had laser projection, because a bulb being pushed past its useful life would have absolutely destroyed the many scenes where Korean freedom fighters gather in rather dimly lit rooms. Looks nice, but very well could have been a disaster.

(Not sure what the other one is, just that I had the thought. Could have been The Fire Inside or Day of the FIght. Of course, it would be hilarious if it was the 35mm print of Nosferatu and I was just thinking of good projection in general.)

Japan annexed Korea in the first years of the Twentieth Century, and soon there was a Korean Independence Army fighting for their freedom, though often from across the border in Russia. As the film opens in 1909, their last operation was a disaster: After surviving a battle where they were outnumbered, General Ahn Jung-deun (Hyun Bin) was loath to execute Japanese soldiers in cold blood as his comrade Lee Chang-sup (Lee Dong-wook) wished to do, leading to a later massacre. Ashamed of failing his people, he proposes a plan to assassinate outgoing Japanese Resident General Ito Hirobumi (Lily Franky) while he is making the case for the annexation. It's a plan that could fall apart in a number of ways - the Japanese are notoriously good at turning captured soldiers into moles - and the investigation is being led by Lt. General Tatsuo Mori (Park Hoon), whose vendetta against Ahn springs as much from not being allowed to commit ritual suicide as from all the Japanese soldiers Ahn's men killed.

"Looks nice, but could have been a disaster" goes for much of the movie, which springs from a notable incident but can only embellish it so much to stretch it into a thriller with tension and a story arc. The film is a short-for-South Korea 108 minutes, but even that includes a fair chunk devoted to an exceptionally bloody flashback to that first battle. Despite how Korean movies are often given plenty of room to breathe, co-writer/director Woo Min-ho doesn't do much to flesh out the ensemble cast or dig into its villains. There's a lot to be said for narrative efficiency, but this isn't necessarily that; Woo moves from event to event without a lot of fuss, but that mostly means he meanders quickly rather than packing multiple layers into every scene. I presume this incident is well-enough known in Korea that much of the home audience knows how it ends, so there's not even a lot of inherent suspense.

It goes through the motions all right, though, and sometimes does more. The opening of a man crossing a river that has frozen, thawed, and regrown enough times to create a series of crisscrossing lines is just the first of a number of striking shots, and the studio splurged on location shooting in Mongolia and Latvia (presumably doubling for Vladivostok) to keep pieces looking nice, although the film will likely revert to dark scenes with people in dark clothing soon enough. The filmmakers also sprang for Japanese star Masaya Nakagawa (aka "Lily Franky") as Hirobumi, giving the role gravitas even as he highlights how, as a politician, he is rather detached from the people dying amid all this fighting. Hyun Bin, Lee Dong-wook, and Park Hoon are all solid as the principals.

The filmmakers are sometimes shockingly up front with the violence, especially in the crucial battle that comes near the start of the film; it often becomes a brawl in the mud as soldiers run out of ammunition and resort to knives, with blood flowing from one slit throat like a waterfall and another Korean fighter stabbing a Japanese soldier so much as to decapitate him. Somewhere in all this, there could be an interesting movie about the various sorts of violence that exist in wartime: Ahn and Mori both feel the need to perform self-harm out of shame; Hirobumi talks about how annexing Korea is a mistake because the Korean people will be more difficult to handle than inbred royalty and scheming scholars while Ahn seems to grasp that war crimes are not just soul-destroying but bad tactics; the volunteer corps that the Koreans are fielding may have more "spirit" than Japan's professional military, but maybe the reason they have to worry so much about spies is because people who are soldiers out of inflamed patriotism rather than being committed to it as a way of life are going to be looking for a way their life can get back to normal. It's all there, I suppose - nothing in the film really contradicts these ideas and it's what I'm thinking about after the movie - but the film never really seems to stop and think about them itself. It's too focused on drawing up plans where the audience doesn't get the thrill of seeing them executed, or ferreting out spies from among candidates who are essentially identical.

More than anything, it's a black-and-gray movie that never finds a great storytelling hook beyond "this was an early, important event in Korea's fight for independence", and it could really use that. Instead, it's serviceable and not bad on an otherwise slow weekend, and I'll bet the patriotic bits play a lot better back home in South Korea.

Seoul Under Siege: 12.12: The Day and Concrete Utopia

As mentioned in This Week's Next Week post, this was an unusually busy week for Asian cinema here in Boston, with six films from three SE Asian countries actually playing in AMC multiplexes in the city proper, plus the Indian films. It's partly a function of studios releasing a whole ton of nothing between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I also kind of wonder if AMC is sort of poking around these two theaters roughly a mile apart and seeing what distinguishes their audiences. The results of this weekend's experiment suggests that there's more interest in Korean films at Causeway Street than Boston Common - not-bad turnout for something with no advertising on Friday night versus pretty much just me on Saturday afternoon - but that could also have something to do with 12.12: The Day being a current release - and massive hit - in South Korea while Concrete Utopia opened in its home territory back in August, so students could have seen it then and had months to pirate.

(Meanwhile, Boston Common got a trailer and standee for Noryang: Deadly Sea but Causeway street didn't, for all that means!)

Anyway, it's an interesting sort of split double feature that makes one wonder how the true-life events in 12.12 influenced Utopia, in that they both feature would-be dictators who don't exactly seem to start with that as their goal but get pretty far despite kind of being lunkheads. As Americans, we've always favored the conniving, opportunistic genius (who may secretly be behind it all), and it's been frustrating - galling, even - to see that often, these guys are not so bright. South Korea, though, has lived with some of these guys, and it strikes me that if you look at their cinema, there's a pretty big clear pattern of cynicism about their autocrats, from royals to future post-apocalyptic warlords. I've probably known this since The President's Last Bang, a movie I love enough that I initially approached 12.12 as a sequel, at least subconsciously.


Looks like one more day of Concrete Utopia (Wednesday 20 December), but 12.12: The Day is booked straight into January, in part because nobody releases anything the week after Christmas.


Seoul-ui bom (12.12: The Day)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 December 2023 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)

It's a curious sensation to watch a film, get keyed up at the thrills (or, in the case of Full River Red, slapstick escalation), and then realize from the captions at the end that the film's local audience probably knew exactly where it was heading from the start: You are not, necessarily, enjoying the same movie that the filmmakers made, although given than 12.12: The Day and Full River Red were two of the biggest hits of the year in South Korean and China, they clearly don't need to rely on an unknown outcome. Which is a long way of saying that while I enjoyed 12.12 as a suspenseful military thriller, it clearly also works if your knowledge of 20th Century Korean history extends beyond the broad strokes.

For those lacking even the broad strokes, President Park Chung-hee was assassinated on 26 October 1979, ending 17 corrupt years in office. Heading up the investigation is Chun Doo-gwang (Hwang Jung-min), a pugnacious general who was also the leader of the Hanahoe secret society within the Korean military. In an attempt to counter Chun's influence, Army Chief of Staff Jeong Sang-ho (Lee Sung-min) appoints a reluctant general Lee Tae-sin (Jung Woo-sung) as head of the Capital Garrison Command, responsible for defending Seoul itself, and plans to diminish Hanahoe's influence by assigning Chun and ihs compatriots to backwaters as the investigation winds down. In response, Chun sends troops to arrest Jeong, who was present at the assassination, on trumped-up charges; without new President Choi Han-gyoo (Jung Dong-hwan) authorizing them, Lee recognizes this as a power grab, and mobilizes the forces not controlled by Hanahoe to arrest Chun.

A bit of Wikipedia diving indicates that "Lee Tae-sin" is a composite character primarily based upon General Jang Tae-wan, although most of the rest appear to be the actual figures involved. Director Kim Seong-su and his co-writers likely streamline the history in other ways; look away from the subtitles for a moment and you might miss that the coup was timed to interfere with announcements planned for the next day, for instance. Indeed, there are moments where the sheer pettiness of it all may take one aback - is Kim suggesting that General Chun is putting all this into action, with a large portion of the army backing him, as a tantrum brought on by being sidelined? Well, perhaps not explicitly, but as with Ridley Scott's Napoleon, there's certainly an intent to home in on how these "strongmen" often seem to arise less through brilliance than being in the right place at the right time, with the sort of amorality that lets them put troops in harm's way and not worry much about losses.

Actor Hwang Jung-min takes the idea that Chun is a small man with a loud voice and runs with it, spending much of the movie practically screaming at people trying to rein him in, manifesting a chip on his shoulder where Tae-sin and others who attended college rather than passing through the military academy are concerned, or almost ready to scratch his skin off while meeting with the President, as if unable to believe that this frail-looking civilian has the power to tell him no. It's initially easy to read this as stupidity, but as insecure as this picture of Chun might be, he's not that; he may be a blunt object, but he's one canny enough to know where smashing through norms can be a superpower. It's what makes Jung Dong-hwan's General Lee an interesting counterpoint; he's measured and reluctant, and there's a delight to how he can't entirely hide his distaste for Chun and his gang of thugs, with a bit of hubris to how he underestimates the Hananoe group. Jung doesn't play to the balcony quite so much as Hwang does, but his performance is pointed and quietly charismatic in a way that lets one cast Lee as the protagonist and Chun as the scenery-chewing villain.

It will, of course, be the result of the conflict that ultimately decide whom history will cast in those roles, and Kim stages them very well indeed, no small thing considering that both sides are ROK soldiers and thus can't be easily color-coded. Though he's not entirely immune to some gimmicks - he and the effects crew occasionally augment maps of battle plans with digital overlays that occasionally make them look like anachronistic flat-panel screens, even if it's clear the characters can't see them - he and his crew know how to suggest the to suck people in: He creates the sense of things happening in real time without stating it, for instance, and gives the proper sort of recurring momentary attention to things which obvious effect events (how will the United States and North Korea react to all this troop movement) without overcomplicating the action. The combat is well-staged, with Kim pulling the neat trick of making the action clear to the audience but necessarily blurry to forces who don't have the sort of real-time communications and telemetry that exists in the twenty-first century. The moments where things rest on individual action amid all the automatic weapons fire seem especially precarious.

It does all exhaust the audience at certain points, when the sheer number of senior officers to keep track of starts to pile up and the battle starts to turn but still needs to be played out. As with Napoleon, this film is often committed enough to the theme of these generals being thuggish that it's hard to see how they could inspire loyalty. Even with that, 12.12 is an often-electrifying snapshot of its events, even for those who know how it all ends.


Concrete Utopia (Konkeuriteu yutopia)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 December 2023 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)

Hey, have you heard the one about the small community of post-apocalyptic survivors who scavenge the ruins, turn on outsiders, and eventually display humanity's worst traits as the situation gets tighter? Oh, you have? Well, of course you have - it's a classic! The folks who made Concrete Utopia have, too, and they retell it well enough, although I suspect that Concrete Utopia lost a bit of what makes this version special somewhere in the adaptation to cinema.

Mere moments into the film, a massive earthquake strikes Seoul, practically leveling the city during an especially cold winter, although one apartment block - Hwang Gung Apartments - remains upright. Up on the eighth floor, civil servant Min-Seong (Park Seo-Joon) and wife Myeong-hwa (Park Bo-young), a nurse, figure they have supplies for a week, but still take in a woman and her son when nobody else would answer the door. Min-seong also rushes into a burning apartment to fight the fire alongside Kim Yeong-tak (Lee Byung-hun), who is taking care of his ailing mother (Kang Ae-shim) on the ninth floor. As help fails to materialize, the residents start to organize, with Yeong-tak as "Building Delegate", although another resident, Keung-ae (Kim Sung-young), does most of the organization. Eventually, the residents vote to expel outsiders, while Yeong-tak leads expeditions to forage for supplies. It's a precarious situation, and that's before the arrival of Moon Hye-woon (Park Ji-hu), a teenage resident who had been away from home when the disaster struck.

The credits describe this as adapting the second volume of a webtoon, which simultaneously could explain a lot and seems deeply confusing: There's an opening segment about how renting rather than purchasing apartments makes society unstable (but in terms of people being social-climbing strivers rather than potentially having their life collapse under them), suggesting that maybe other volumes had a different focus, but also that the series must have taken a heck of a turn after the first volume. It's structurally weird in other places, with two flashbacks to the earthquake that are jarring because the opening implies it happened at night, and also because the one featuring one character has much less obvious effect on their actions than the one featuring another; it's also odd that Myeong-hwa doesn't have one despite being just as central a character as Min-seong and Yeong-tak.

Those flashbacks to before the earthquake are also kind of odd-feeling, visually, less like a contrast to the present than bits of some other movie spliced in. The filmmakers have a bit of trouble finding the right tone in a few other places; such as when a turn to more obvious satire briefly interests (a classic South Korean genre-jump), but then the film settles back into the gray and morose. All of the disaster movie stuff feels a bit familiar, like nobody came up with really novel scenarios but just did the standards. It's ably-executed enough, at least, selling the on-the-ground reality well enough that one never spends a lot of time asking what's happening, say, five kilometers away from Hwang Gung Apartments or if there's a functioning government anywhere. The irony-to-principle balance in the finale is way off.

By coincidence - they were released three months apart in Korea - Concrete Utopia is an interesting pairing with the other Korean film hitting North America this weekend (12.12: The Day) in that both of them feature men taking power seemingly not so much cunning as being well-placed and amoral, with Lee Byung-hun toning down the movie star charisma to make Yeong-tak look kind of woozy, like he's stumbled into this situation with PTSD and a possible concussion but those don't dull everything that is problematic about him. Park Bo-young's Meong-hwa is the opposite side of the spectrum, practical but believably rising to the various challenges to her basic decency; the actress doesn't have many flashy scenes until the end, but she always gives the impression that she's considering things before acting. Park Seo-joon, meanwhile, has to play his nominal protagonist as weaker, and it's uncomfortably easy to recognize oneself in his good intentions that can nevertheless be swayed. There's a nice cast around them, too, especially Park Ji-hu whose late entry feels like it can change the game just through attitude as opposed to what Hye-woon means for the plot, although the situation is fraught enough that there's not a whole lot for the rest to do, just different shades of being weighed down.

It's never quite boring, and it's often good enough that one can easily imagine a movie where the whole thing is as good as its best part. Despite that, Concrete Utopia never quite that movie, playing much closer to standard genre fare despite aiming for importance.

The French Blockbusters of Christophe Gans: The Brotherhood of the Wolf and Beauty and the Beast '14

I've probably shared these anecdotes on this blog before, but they fit:

Back in 2001, the Boston Film Festival was a thoroughly different beast than it is now - it had different ownership, commandeered multiple screens in the Loews Copley Place (now a Saks Fifth Avenue), running a lot of things that played TIFF a few days earlier, and for the most part, things would sit on a screen for roughly a day - two evening shows, three matinees the next day. You could see everything. Anyway, 9/11 happened right in the middle of the festival, so there was some disruption to the festival, as you might imagine. My first film of the day was Sam the Man, a comedy starring Fisher Stevens (who I was kind of surprised didn't have the accent from Short Circuit) directed by Gary Winick (I thinkI'd liked his The Tic Code). However, the prints were in the wrong place, so when me and another handful of people sat down for that movie, we instead were served up Brotherhood, and if I hadn't been planning to see that next, holy crap! They eventually seated us in the right theaters and restarted the movies, but yes, that made Sam the Man feel even less impressive.

I would spend the next four months or so before its January release. If you want to dig, you can probably find reviews at either Ain't It Cool (I filed dispatches from Boston Film Festival one year under the name "Paul Revere", as one did then) or Home Theater Forum, but, well, there's better uses for your time and mine than finding them.

Flash forward a dozen years, and I'm in Paris, using some vacation time that won't roll over just before Christmas, spending some evenings watching English-language movies that may or not get released in the United States, and one of the trailers I get is for a version of La Belle & La Bete directed by Gans, and my eyes go wide like saucers, because, unimpressed as I'd been with Silent Hill, this looks amazing even if I'm only sort of half-comprehending the French-language dialogue. I'm not sure quite how much the Disney live-action remake is rumored versus set at this point, or if I knew Gans was doing this, but I figured it had to be getting an American release, right? Folks know Gans, they know Léa Seydoux and Vincent Cassel, it looks amazing, etc., etc.

It doesn't, at least not in Boston - apparently there was a very limited release in late 2016, two and a half years after it played France, and then it hit video the next year, when the Disney remake arrived. I ordered a copy, naturally, but the same thing happened as with most discs I order - it wound up on a shelf, sticking out slightly to remind me I hadn't seen it, and remaining there because most nights I go see something in the theater or watch baseball or am trying to catch up on something else. This week, I figured to watch something from my "seen before, new discs" piles, and hit on Brotherhood, and somehow came up with the idea of watching Beauty and the Beast as a pairing. This, it turns out, is a pretty good idea, since all the scenes of Vincent Cassel hunting a beast in flashback tie it even more closely to Brotherhood.

And it's fun! Maybe not quite the movie it could have been, but it's an enjoyable family movie (although one with a French level of ambient sexiness), and kind of fascinating in how Gans and company are taking a fairly well-known fairy tale and seeming to do as much as they can to distinguish themselves from the Disney version without doing the "we've got a horror guy directing this, let's make it twisted!" thing. Considering how Disney would soon be doubling down on every decision they made in the early 1990, and how that owes a clear debt to the Jean Cocteau version, seeing this now has everything a bit more exciting and unexpected.

Back in 2017, I kicked around the idea of getting my nieces the Cocteau & Gans versions and saying "hey, every other relative is going to get them the Disney versions, this is what I'm for". Chickened out, though. They've kind of aged out of that now, although I'm still tempted.

Between 2013 and now, though, there have been no new films from Gans; if the Silent Hill sequel shows up next year as expected, it will be ten years between new movies, which really seems like a lot. I'm not plugged into what's going on in French film to know if maybe he's got a reputation as a bad guy. Sure, that doesn't always seem like it would be a particular problem in France. I also don't know what the exact box-office calculus is in France; I could sort of see a situation where Brotherhood and Beauty are very expensive movies, relative to the local norms, but not exactly hits. Meanwhile, Silent Hill wasn't a hit either - it did well enough to spawn a cheaper sequel - so he's not making a leap in the USA.

On top of that, it's extremely hard to get a movie made, especially if you've got the sort of ambitions Gans has. He's been attached to various things - something called The Adventurer with Mark Dacascos, a movie based on the Fatal Frame games - and it's worth noting that Silent Hill is the only movie where he's worked from someone else's screenplay. If he's not taking work-for-hire, it's probably not hard to spend years developing something only to see it not pan out, several times. He would have been a great get for Marvel when they were doing canny buy-low moves to hire really talented people who hadn't quite hit it big or hadn't had a hit in a while, but that's not really their MO anymore, and who knows if Gans would be up for it?

So, here's hoping that Return to Silent Hill is good and he gets a chance to do something big again - these are fun movies, and for all that Gans wouldn't be the only one-hit wonder of this sort in cinema, it still seems very strange that someone could make this sort of international splash and then only make two other movies over the next 20+ years without much in the way of overt controversy.


Le pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 December 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Brotherhood of the Wolf is a bit flabbier than the non-stop thrills I remember from first viewing, and not just because some scenes have been added for the "director's cut" on the 4K disc (those, oddly, all feel necessary): There's a fair amount of not getting anywhere in the first hour which, coupled with the authentic casual racism of the 18th-Century aristocracy, awkwardly countered, can make one wince. Did this really knock me flat when I first saw it, just because I'd never seen that sort of French genre film before (because anything in French hitting theaters in Worcester, MA or Portland, ME was art-house stuff)?

Yes, it did, and still kind of does, because the things that make it awesome and cringe-worthy are more or less the same things: Christophe Gans approaches this movie like he hit some sort of lottery in terms of being able to make it and goes all-in as if he knows he might never get a chance to do this sort of grand pulp adventure again: It's got horror, martial-arts, heaving bodices, conspiracies, and more, a slick presentation of cheerily disreputable pulp material that never winks at the camera like Gans wants to make sure the audience is in on a joke - he is earnestly enthusiastic, whether punctuating a conversation by exploding pumpkins with various weapons or cross-fading from Monica Bellucci's breasts to a snowy mountain range. It's a Hammer movie being made by someone in the Raimi/Woo mold, but who is also very much French, bringing a different flavor of cool cynicism and sexual energy to the story.

It can be a little much, especially for an American for whom the conflict with royal and papal power seems like a lot of noise in the background, like there are more factions and conspirators than the movie really needs to make the action explode out of simmering conflict. When it does, though, Gans and his cast throw themselves into it, especially once Samuel Le Bihan's Fronsac has the whole thing spread out before him and ready to rampage. The filmmakers hit a nice balance between using the Beast sparingly and revealing it, keeping the story somewhat mythic - though I do wonder just how much FX work has been reword for the director's cut, as the Beast seems much more digital than I remember.

It's fortunate that Gans did put it all in this movie, because he really hasn't had much chance to do something similar. This may no longer be the surprise it was when it came out, but it's still a darn entertaining monster movie.


La belle et la bête '14 (Beauty and the Beast)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 December 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Christophe Gans's take on Beauty and the Beast is very much the take on this classic story that one might expect from the maker of Brotherhood of the Wolf, generally more for better than worse. It's great-looking, exciting, and makes a conscious effort to do things differently than other versions of the fairy tale, whether that means returning to the source or envisioning something new; it's also got enough going on that the simple beauty of the story can occasionally get buried.

Take the beginning, where we learn that Belle (Léa Seydoux) is the youngest of six children, and that her father (André Dussollier) was a wealthy shipping magnate brought to ruin when his three ships sink on the same voyage - well, by "ruined", forced to move from the city to their country estate, which suits Belle fine. An attempt to revive his business has the father fleeing town after a run-in with Perducas (Eduardo Noriega), whom gambling-addicted oldest son Maxime (Nicolas Gob) owes a great deal of money, winding up at a mysterious castle which presents him with a chest of treasure, but when he takes a rose for Belle, he angers the estate's beastly resident (Vincent Cassel), who gives him a day to make his farewells before being killed, lest the beast kill the whole family. Belle chooses to return in his place, and could be the key to breaking the curse upon the manor and its master.

That's a lot of story for a tale that is at its heart so simple that almost anybody can articulate its events and themes Belle's family is so large that I'm not sure if one brother got either a name or signature personality trait, and there's a whole thing about Perducas's lover Astrid (Myriam Charleins) having some sort of mystic abilities that kind of gets batted around in the finale but seems like an big thing to ultimately have so little impact. There is also a lot of work put into delivering flashbacks to Belle about how the Prince became the Beast, and some of that effort would likely have been put into looking at how he and Belle draw closer together, maybe differentiating Belle from his first great love (Yvonne Catterfeld).

When Gans gets down to business and focuses on the title characters, it's terrific. Vincent Cassel is at his cocky, roguish best in the flashbacks, making his younger prince a font of passion and charisma but possessed of enough selfishness that it is no surprise that he will need to be taught a terrible lesson. It's a nifty balance of him deserving this but still being redeemable, and while one might feel Cassel is under too much makeup as the Beast, there's perhaps some logic to it: He has, by this point, more or less been consumed by the worst aspects of masculinity, and Cassel doesn't hold back on the Beast being a monster until Belle can see him as otherwise.

The best thing in the film, though, is Léa Seydoux as a Belle who is at no point a naïve ingenue: She knows full well how apt her name is and is going to make the Beast work for her affection. Seydoux's Belle is playful and kind, but also sure enough of herself that she can bristle at the idea of being a replacement for anybody, whether it be her mother or the princess, and without getting into too-modern language, she presents a sharp contrast in her body language and attitude between when she's given a sexy dress to wear so that the Beast can look at her during dinner and when she's chosen something beautiful herself.

That last dress is a rose that envelops her, maybe impractical but certainly a great visual considering how important the flowers have been throughout the film. If there are times Gans and his crew are perhaps visibly trying too hard to avoid the choices of other adaptations, particularly Disney's animated classic, he's still got the eye for a striking image that often elevated Brotherhood (as well as carrying over a disdain for hunters who kill gratuitously) and horror-movie instincts that let him make the castle and its grounds scarier than one might expect from a family film, though there are times when the magical isolation enhances the fairy-tale quality as well. There's plenty of visual invention on display, and he's able to make the inevitable gut-punch at the end of the flashbacks work even though everyone in the audience knows where it must be leading.

Inevitably, Gans's version of this tale exists in the shadow of two masterpieces (the Disney and Cocteau versions), and for all that the filmmaker is not timid, one does occasionally wonder if he occasionally worked a little too hard at doing something different and so didn't give the actual romance of the title characters as much attention as he could have - as with Brotherhood, he might have figured this was his one shot at a family blockbuster and poured everything into it. Even with that, it's an impressive production that manages to feel modern but not anachronistic, and an interesting contrast to other takes on the story.

Weird Weekend Part II: Chang An, Road to Boston, and Limbo

I spent the last few days chuckling to myself at Boston Common booking Chang An, because even for Chinese movies, a nearly-three-hour animated feature about two Tang dynasty poets seemed, well, kind of niche. Then, on Saturday night, I looked to reserve a seat for the next afternoon's show and pretty much the whole upper section was sold out. Chinatown, at least, was down for this, with a fair number of kids who didn't seem to get particularly squirmy. Go figure; I would have figured this was as hard a sell as you'd find this weekend, even to the local Chinese audience, but this is just more confirmation that I am not a Chinese-American person with a family that may want to learn more about the culture and thus have no idea what will be appealing to that group.

Next up after that was Road to Boston, which did not have nearly the same crowd, which surprised me a little bit, although I'd be curious to see how it would do closer to Patriot's Day, when the marathon is foremost in people's minds, as opposed to "as far from mid-April as the calendar will let you get". But, then, I suppose last weekend was a good time for it to come out in South Korea; it didn't have a million tickets sold like Dr. Cheon, but 870,000 in two weeks seems pretty good for a Korean film.

Most of the audience behind me was Korean-American, I think, and there were a lot of us staying through the end credits, with at least one camera flash as people presumably spotted their names and friends' names in the Korean text. Nobody local, I don't think, because the parts of the film meant to be set in Boston were actually shot in Melbourne. I'd be annoyed, but I seem to recall a lot of parts of that area that could pass for mid-Twentieth-Century New England, maybe part of why I enjoyed my trip there so much a few years back. They seem to have gotten a lot of the marathon details right, at least from what I've absorbed from 50 years living in New England.

(I like to sit up front, so I was unable to see the whole theater giving a knowing nod at a scene where the coaches look at the young running dashing up to a mountaintop shrine and say "boy, look at that kid go up that hill." "Yep, really good at going up hills, that one." "I hear there's a sort of heartbreaking story as to why…")

After that, dinner break, and over to the Somerville for its last show of Limbo, and I feel kind of weirdly guilty about waiting around after being so excited to see it not just playing the area but a theater that doesn't really book a lot of Asian films. I see they've got a Canto-Pop show scheduled for the main stage in late November, so I'm half-wondering if there may be more Cantonese-speaking Chinese-Americans in Somerville than there are in Chinatown, going by how well Mainland films are often attended compared to Hong Kong ones. Not that this was an "I'm the only guy in the theater who needs subtitles" situation; it might just be that the Somerville Theatre attracts a good crowd for people who like this sort of dark crime movie. Or it was a theater rental to get its VOD/UHD release a little extra notice and nothing to do with the local audience at all.

Kind of crazy to see it as a bookend on the day with Chang An, though - just the most noir-ish, scuzzy Hong Kong film possible after starting the day with a smoothed-out, moralistic CGI feature.


Chang'an san wan li (Chang An)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2023 in AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run, DCP)

There was a recent flap where certain American politicians grumbled about what soldiers shouldn't be doing which included mocking the idea of military people writing poetry, while this film may still have been kicking around theaters on the other side of the world before arriving in North America along with the mid-autumn festival hits; it celebrates a rich history or Chinese warrior-poets going back centuries in an epic-sized animated feature at least partially meant for children. It doesn't really do a whole lot to make the idea particularly interesting, unfortunately; it's the sort of history lesson that compacts a lot of big, messy facts about a turbulent period into a polished, easily-swallowed capsule.

It opens during the reign of Emperor Daizong, with aged regional governor Gao Shi (voice of Wu Junquan) facing an uphill battle trying to hold Fort Yushang from the forces of the An Lushan rebellion. Forced to fall back, he soon finds himself visited by a military inspector, Cheng Jianjun (voice of Lu Lifeng); surprisingly, Cheng's questions do not concern Gao's recent failures in battle, but poet Li Taibai - "Li Bai" for short - who was one of few to side with the rebels. Despite a second attack being imminent, Gao settles in to describe their entire intersecting histories to Cheng, going back 40 years: That's when Gao (voiced in flashback by Tang Tianxiang), a skilled spear-fighter from a heroic but impoverished house, mets Bai (voice of Ling Zhenhe), whose material comfort can net him no official status, coming as it does from mercantile sources. They become fast friends, although their lives only occasionally intersect, as Gao is by nature a military man and Li a libertine, but both become renowned poets even as the prosperous Tang Dynasty is beset by attacks and rebellions.

One should not necessarily expect too much of a film like Chang An (whose title refers to China's capital and seat of culture at the time, a place where both poets strive to belong); if it's a historical movie, it's grade-school history, where the aim is to use exciting battle action and impressive visuals to help cement what happened in what order. Why all this is going on is handwaved away to a certain extent; Gao is a loyal subject looking to match his grandfather's service, and is witness to various noteworthy incidents and people, but not particularly connected to the causes and effects of those events, beyond noting ambition and opposition to the stability provided by the Emperor. Indeed, as the flashbacks catch up to Old Gao, the film does not have Gao and Li debate how they have found themselves on opposite side, but shows Li being lectured by the boy who runs Gao's errands; he has learned his lesson well and is passing his exams.

Perhaps more frustrating, though, is that for a film that often links Gao and Li as poets and attaches great importance to the art, it seemingly has very little to say about poetry. It seldom if ever shows Gao or Li doing the work of composing a poem, never discussing how finding the right word and meter or cutting what isn't essential heightens the impact of what often comes off, as subtitled, as simply stating what the poet has seen (though English subtitles are likely the worst way to encounter the poetry of a tonal language like Middle Chinese); the craft and work of it is almost wholly absent. Indeed, the filmmakers note but somewhat avoid facets of this which could make Gao's journey as a poet more interesting: He's portrayed as having both a stutter and dyslexia, but is apparently able to simply grow out of them, and there's a pointed section early on where Gao, Li, and some of Li's friends, notably swordswoman Pei Shi'er (voice of Li ShiMeng) talk about talent and the privilege to hone or display it, but this is something that is raised as a concert but not much explored. Like battles, poetry is apparently just something that happens, without a lot of curiosity as to how and why.

(And, yes, there is something worth noting about this conversation happening in a movie that flashes the approval of the nation's film board at the start, along with the later lines that it is regrettable that various pets have fallen out of favor and find themselves starving, as if that is just some neutral rule of the world. There's also a conversation to be had about how this is the story of two men who are never shown to marry for love and whose first and last encounters involve ditching their shirts and wrestling, although it may be about how the filmmakers got that in rather than how they don't go any farther.)

It may not have much to say about the craft of poetry, but its filmmaking craft is fairly impressive. The natural and man-made environments are both impressively rendered, and the studios do a nice job of depicting how Chang'An or a landmark like the Yellow Crane Tower can seem grand and aspirational to the likes of Gao and Lee without overdoing the gleaming precious metals or extreme detail (though people are often rendered in a way that lands between whimsical hand-drawn caricature and stiff photorealism, more often blandly than grotesquely). Whether historically accurate or not, I like the way rooms full of "poetry boards" evoke bulletin boards more than galleries or libraries; it evokes modern social media in how missives are mixed and interacting, or how a poem's popularity can spread without the author knowing, like a post going viral. The grand action is well staged, possibly by the same visual effects houses that render flights of arrows for live-action epics, and the martial arts seems to use good reference or motion capture to evoke the same sort of thrill as an old-fashioned Shaw Brothers sword-versus-spear fight.

And, for a grandly-sized movie - at 168 minutes, I can't immediately recall a longer mainstream animated feature meant to be seen in one intermission-free sitting - it moves pretty well. There's maybe one joke about sticking to the point, but this did nice work of communicating the size of Gao's life without making the audience, kids included, particularly fidgety. It does roughly what I imagine it was set out to do - introduce a general audience, mostly young and Chinese, to a number of noteworthy figures - in capable fashion, even if the length belies that it's not much more ambitious than that.


1947 Boston (Road to Boston)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2023 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)

I'm curious how many North American cities Road to Boston opened in other than Boston itself; it's the sort of rousing sports movie that comes out often enough that you don't necessarily have to import more. After all, it's the sort that is pretty clearly less about sports than pride, but it's a fine example of the genre, one which knows how to let that drive the movie but let the characters, and ultimately the competition, be what the audience connects with.

In 1936, Son Kee-chung (Ha Jung-woo) won the gold medal for the marathon at the Berlin Olympics, but because Korea was occupied by Japan at the time, it was under the name "Son Kitei", and he was forced to leave track & field by the government for covering the Japanese flag with his laurel. Ten years later, Japan has been liberated (though still a "refugee country" under a United States military government), and his old teammate Nam Sung-yong (Bae Sung-woo), now a coach, wants to bring a team to the 1948 London Olympics, but there's a catch: Korea technically has no Olympic history, so will need to qualify in some other international event, such as the 1947 Boston Marathon. It's easier said than done: Government support is conditional on the disillusioned Son coaching, and the best potential recruit, Suh Yun-bok (Im Si-wan), is dirt-poor with an ailing mother, so feels running is frivolous. And that's before getting to the issues of raising the money to send the team to America, which includes a large deposit and the need for a local guarantor (Kim Sang-ho) to prevent such events from bringing in a flood of refugees, even if this trio are insistent that they want to represent Korea rather than become Americans.

This marathon is described as Korea's first chance to prove itself on the world stage as an independent nation, and for much of the film, director Kang Je-kyu and his co-writers are as focused on the moment as the competition: The "Republic of Korea", they note, is technically a new country, which makes it cash-poor but which doesn't mean it doesn't have history, and the filmmakers are wise to point out the burden that places on these athletes and the public at large: Son has never been able to properly take pride in his accomplishment, Suh may be too constrained by his present circumstances to become what Son should have been, and everybody knows that asking a bunch of poor people for money to compete in a marathon is tacky at best. Indeed, one of the things that's fascinating about the film, and which can seem like a plotting weakness at first, is that both filmmakers and characters seem to recognize that what they're getting at is something instinctual and only rational in hindsight, so instead of having a big speech about why a community, even a poor one, needs to support this kind of project, but sort of maneuver things into a position where people know they instinctively need this and that nobody else will make it happen but them. You talk up the benefits after they're revealed.

That works, in large part, because Ha Jung-woo's Son is not the sort of national hero who seems natural fit for the position, although Ha's crusty screen presence is fit for the job: Son's always got a chip on his shoulder, and Ha hits the line between where it's helpful and a problem, embodying how being that great at one thing kind of ripples through every other piece of your personality. Im Si-wan's Yun-bok is angrier, and he does a nifty thing where one maybe doesn't initially recognize he's laying it on a bit thick because he does, in fact, like running so much that he has to work at suppressing it. It thus falls on Bae Sung-woo to be the glue of the movie as Nam; he's got an easy way of bantering with Ha to sell the idea that these two are old friends and shows the sort of enthusiasm for the sport that otherwise might need to be unearthed. Kim Sang-ho is useful comic relief in the last act so that it's not entirely isolating, fish-out-of-water material.

(There are some highly entertaining Boston accents, although this may be the rare time that the "they talk like JFK there, right?" gambit works!)

The race almost functions as an encore, after the issues leading up to it are resolved - Suh and Nam actually doing well kind of feels like a bonus - but it's a heck of an encore. Kang has had the characters talk about running and shown the degree to which a half-marathon can reduce a person to nothing but full-body pain so that the audience has some idea of what to expect but still has plenty to discover, and while he filmed little or nothing in Massachusetts, they put together something that feels like this particular marathon, taking the story they were given and wringing everything he could out of it. The race, as sports often does, winds up distilling just who Son, Suh, and Nam are to their essences, and the cast and crew know that this is what the audience wants to see just as much as how well Suh does.

I readily admit, I like this movie a little more because the idea that this thing that feels super-local actually wound up being tremendously important to people on the other side of the world tickles me, with the movie going a little further to flatter Boston besides. Mostly, though, it's just a well-made sports movie, the sort that reminds us just why we love these silly-seeming activities.


Zhi chi (Limbo)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2023 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)

You've got to fudge the dates a bit to say that this is a return to form for director Soi Cheang after a detour into Monkey King fantasy - he actually made SPL 2 between his first and second Monkey King movies, and some more mainstream action flicks just before that trilogy - but the point is nonetheless compelling: After that detour into family-friendly action, he's got a hell of a lot of darkness stored up, and Limbo shows that he's got a real talent for it.

As the film opens in 2017, the Hong Kong Police Department finds themselves investigating a serial killer, or at least they think that must be the case: So far, they've only found the left hands of two women. Though up-and-comer Will Ren (Mason C. Lee Sun) is technically in charge of the investigation, he'll be leaning on veteran detective Cham Lau (Gordon Lam Ka-Tung) and his knowledge of the city and its seamier sides, as the killer seems to be preying upon those whose disappearance won't be noticed. The second victim was recently released from prison, which is when he discovers that car thief Wong To (Cya Liu Yase) is also back on the streets, sending him into a near-murderous rage. But with relatively little to work on, Wong To may be their best path through the underworld to whoever is doing this.

Cya Liu's Wong To may set some sort of record for taking abuse in this movie, and it's more horrific in its way than the serial killer elements. Those are random and monstrous, but at least unambiguously treated as such. Wong To may be a criminal, but she's a thief, and that she caused a deadly accident horrifies her. For all that Cham and Ren are hunting down a serial killer, much of the tension comes from the question of whether her need to atone can outlast Cham's desire for revenge. Liu is terrific, establishing Wong's street smarts quickly and letting Cheang do a quick turnaround as her guilt drives her, and they get that street smarts also means knowing when you are well and truly screwed. Gordon Lam, meanwhile, pivots Cham from an eccentric detective who nevertheless seems reliable to a man whose anger lets him tap into a vein of cruelty.

They are reflections of the world that they live in, a Hong Kong that looks slick when you are pulled way back but which is nothing but grimy slums in close-up, photographed in a harsh black and white, high-contrast digital sharpness that denies the audience shadows to hide the worst of the setting or letting grain soften it. Even when the camera pulls back, hovering to follow a tricky route or just providing an overhead view, it's phenomenal work, gasp-worthy imagery to make this a truly striking bit of noir.

And a nihilistic one; there's barely any motive to its crimes - the suspects played by both Fish LIew and Hiroyuki Ikeuchi are often pathetic as opposed to any sorts of masterminds - with Cham looking for revenge with impunity while the seemingly upright Ren is still looking to cover up when it looks like he might slip. Wong To doesn't so much become a heroine as revert to fight-or-flight, her noble intentions and capability as a crook who can mostly avoid violence to repeating "I don't want to die" like a mantra.

It's a cruel chase, but certainly a memorable one. The film has actually made its way to general North American release after Cheang's follow-up, Mad Fate, which is also a visually striking tour of Hong Kong's underbelly on the trail of a serial killer. This is Soi Cheang's wheelhouse and a hell of a ride.

The Inventor

I feel like there were ticket-sale shenanigans going on for this movie but I can figure out why. Observe, if you will, what was blocked out as unavailable on Fandango shortly after I bought my ticket:

That "X" just behind the handicapped companion seats is me, though I'm normally in the last row of the front section. For some reason, that whole section, and the outer two seats on either side of the rear section was marked as sold, although, ahem:

… nobody in any of those spots. All four weekend shows had the same seats "sold".

I don't get why, though - does the streaming contract or the like get more lucrative if the movie gets a top-ten finish or makes more than a million at the box office, or some other metric, and the producers bought up all the seats most folks consider less desirable while still leaving plenty that folks would buy to try and hit that goal? That's my only guess. I suppose it's smarter than the Sound of Freedom folks who bought so many seats that people who legitimately wanted to see the movie couldn't (if they didn't know about where to get the pre-sold tickets), but, it's weird.


Aside from that, I was psyched to see it because I backed the Kickstarter for the animatic way back in 2020, which feels like something I should disclose in a review, although I only kicked in $10, which should get me a digital version of the movie at some point in the near-ish future, but didn't get me in the credits (that was a $100 perk), so it's not like I'm a producer who stands to make money on anybody seeing it. Truth be told, that's probably less than one typically spends on the hope that there's a good movie on the other end. Still, it's pretty cool to see something one contributed to on a big screen; I don't think that's happened for me aside from the Veronica Mars movie, and that was probably, at least in retrospect, more of a "this will probably happen anyway but let's get the money up from and see if that gets enough people feeling involved for a word-of-mouth campaign" situation than this.

Though I feel involved and am maybe trying to get this some word of mouth during it's one week of matinees in Boston. Hey, I'm not saying it's a bad thing, even if it's kind of cynical when a less independent production does it.


Also also: Even if it doesn't feature "Kickstarter Backer: Jason Seaver", this has one of the quirkier sets of end credits I can remember.


The Inventor

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 September 2023 in AMC Boston Common #5 (first-run, DCP)

The Inventor is not exactly the movie I imagined when I contributed to its Kickstarter several years ago, but what ever is? Even setting that aside, it's an odd duck, focusing on a period more than a story, built to be kid-friendly but featuring more grave-robbing than that may imply, but charming in its earnest educational intentions.

As it opens in 1516, Leonardo da Vinci (voice of Stephen Fry) is pursuing a number of different interests Rome, from art to optics to anatomy, with the Pope (voice of Matt Berry) less than enthused about the latter in particular, as da Vinci aims to find the seat of the soul. When he attempts to task Leonardo with creating weapons of war for a conflict with France, the artist instead counsels peace, and King Francis I (voice of Gauthier Battoue) is so taken with da Vinci's work that he becomes the Florentine's new patron . The King's sister, Princess Marguerite (voice of Daisy Ridley) is taken with Leonardo's idea for an "ideal city", but Francis is soon more focused on a grand exposition, featuring a powerful statue of himself, that will impress visiting monarchs Charles (voice of Max Baumgarten) and Henry (voice of Daniel Swan).

Visually, the film is quite a delight; it is primarily presented as stop-motion animation featuring smooth, clean designs, contrasted to the fiddly detail of Laika or the emphasized imperfection of Aardman; it does not exactly call to mind Leonardo's own work, which can frequently be seen as part of his thought balloons, but have an expressiveness to the characters and functionality to the environments that reflects him as both artist and engineer. The picture does deviate from stop-motion a bit more than expected, although the 2-D portion of the film is made in consultation with Tomm Moore and his Cartoon Saloon studio, and as such is charming in its own right. When the filmmakers have the chance to be clever and playful, they shine, such as how the Pope is presented as a giant who dominates a scene even when acting a fool, with spies who are literally shadows. Marguerite and her children work as a unit, occasionally shown in Fibonacci-inspired patterns.

It's something of a shame that the soundtrack does not often live up to the charming imagery. Stephen Fry makes a fine Leonardo, of course; his voice is full of intelligence, wonder, and wit, just hearing it almost automatically brings forth what one wants da Vinci to be, and it's almost unfair that Daisy Ridley, Marion Cotillard, and Gauthier Battoue can give fine performances as the French royal family but just aren't so obviously perfectly cast as Fry. The songs don't particularly do the intended job of amplifying their material, either; that they are meant to sound like something from 500 years ago rather than something anachronistic is an intriguing choice, but it means one sometimes has to strain for the lyrics and meaning rather than letting them carry one away; they often seem to be there because this sort of animated feature has songs, rather than because a song is the best, most powerful way to communicate the scene's idea.

There is an idea or two lurking in this film, with the delight of discovery and invention being foremost, but the film is perhaps at its most interesting when Leonardo explains to Marguerite that the world is divided between those who see, those who can be made to see, and those who cannot see, an unusual moment considering how he has mostly pressed on without a lot of reflection on the system around him, though he is quite aware of it. At times, this feels like it should naturally be the central idea animating the film, a bit of wisdom that the movie is not quite pointed enough in its critique of the powerful to fully embrace.

Which, I suppose, is probably a lot to expect of a mainly-charming little film that will likely be some kids' introduction to Da Vinci, if not so much something for the adult Animation Appreciator. It's cute and maybe a bit slight, but also a bit of a relief compared to how visibly hard many animated films work to astound.

Irish Movies in Ireland: The Wonder

Saturday was one of those days when I sort of struggled to remember how I navigated new cities without a smartphone, in part because that navigation was kind of imperfect: For whatever reason, my Galaxy was popping up notes that my location was approximate in the Maps app, and whatever combination of gyroscope and GPS is supposed to calculate which way I was pointing could be off by 90 or 120 degrees. This always seems to happen to me in a new city, and I can't guess why.

The upshot is that while I was walking from the Georgian mansion-cum-tenament house at 14 Henrietta Street to the Irish National Museum of Art and Design, I got turned around a fair bit, so was zooming in and studying the map, and Google probably knows me well enough to highlight theaters at this point. So when I saw "Light House Cinema" and looked up to see this:

… I couldn't help but think, damn, that marquee game is on point! That is not the marquee, but an observation deck that was probably a smokestack for the power plant which has since been remodeled into a nightclub below at one point. Still, if Light House is a chain, they chose a heck of a location with that landmark across the street from this relatively modest location:

It's actually pretty nice inside, a bit less cramped and segmented than the IFI was, though with the same odd-to-me emphasis on a bar/café at which one can stop and talk before the film as opposed to place to get snacks for during. Probably more appropriate in this case, as I was seeing a movie about someone pointedly not eating, though I got some popcorn anyway.

As with the IFI, I'm kind of struck by how that entryway is a passage that sort of emphasizes how you're kind of going past the outer edge of the building, into a central area that might have been a courtyard before but is now windowless before you go down to the lower levels. Reasonable enough you don't necessarily want a whole lot of potential light pollution.

At any rate, I'm kind of glad I saw this on the Dublin trip as opposed to at the IFFBoston Fall Focus or its run at the Kendall afterward, if only because visiting places like 14 Henrietta and the like did a nice job of hammering the historical context of the movie home. There's "knowing of the Irish famine" and "having the desperation of it fresh in your mind", after all.

The next day would bring me to the Emigration Museum and the replica Jeannie Johnston; the former pointed out the extent to which the famine shrunk the country and the latter was actually used as a shooting location:

The guide pointed out, sort of amused, that the production repainted this half of the ship, as that was what would be on camera, and it would be another year before the trust would be able to paint the other to make it symmetric.

The Wonder

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 November 2022 in Light House Sheffield #3 (first-run, DCP)

The Wonder has an odd sort of framing device which initially made me think of how many people (myself included) initially thought TÀR was based on a real person, if only because they don't really make films about that sort of singular character unless they actually exist these days; was filmmaker Sebastián Lelio doing something similar but more deliberate, playing with the audience's assumptions about whether this really happened and what segments were necessarily speculative? As it turns out, probably not; by the time the film is over, it's got more interesting thoughts on how stories are told than just reassuring the audience they haven't been fooled.

After that, it sets the scene Rural Ireland, just past the midpoint of the Nineteenth Century. Nurse Elizabeth Wright (Florence Pugh), who had previously tended patients on the battlefields of the Crimea, has been hired for a most unusual job: Spend two weeks observing Anna O'Donnell (Kila Lord Cassidy), who has by all accounts not eaten since her fourteenth birthday, four months ago. She will alternate shifts with Sister Michael (Josie Walker), fittingly, as much of the town committee that hired her, including the local priest (Ciarán Hinds), seek evidence of a miracle, while the local doctor (Toby Jones) hopes for some sort of scientific discovery of how humans can perhaps draw sustenance from the ether. Lib is mostly practical, although she notes that Anna is bright and inquisitive, while her parents are sincere and non-exploitative. That said, Anna is not healthy, and what sort of nurse would allow her patient to starve to death, even if it is happening at an impossibly slow pace?

There is a casual mention of the Irish Potato Famine toward the start of the story, seemingly designed to make the audience discount the scale of the event (Ireland was a nation of 8 million at the start, with a million dying and another million emigrating during the famine, and the population still not recovered 170 years later), perhaps focusing on Lib's own demons. It makes sense; this is the sort of thing one tries not to speak of as opposed to moving forward, but it seeps in through cracks: It explains why Will Byrne (Tom Burke), the reporter sent by a London newspaper to cover the story, is no longer of this place even though he grew up there. As it becomes clear that Anna is choosing not to eat more than not needing to - and that her older brother is gone - the idea of survivor's guilt begins to take center stage, and not just for Anna. The men of God need to find meaning in this; the man of science needs to find a way for it to not happen again. Meanwhile, the full plates placed in front of Lib at the inn where she is staying begin to look downright vulgar as the film passes its midpoint. Co-writer/director Sebastián Lelio and company may not be able to evoke the actual hunger of the famine, but they can perhaps simulate remembering it, and knowing that it will leave its mark upon one forever.

It's such a raw and obvious scar that the audience may figure out what is happening before Lib does, but that serves to bring the film back to where it started and the idea of just what to do with what she's found. The truth, after all, is not going to support the narratives that Anna and the people in her orbit are committed to. Lib is practical, and more rigorous in her science than the doctor who sees her as more instrument than peer, but human minds are often too committed to the world being fair by their own lights, and if Lib is to save Anna, the solution must serve the narratives - including hers. The importance of this makes Niamh Algar's Kitty O'Donnell (Anna's aunt or cousin) an intriguing choice of narrator; despite being as close to things as anybody is, she's so peripheral as to be able to smash the fourth wall without it affecting the story. She pores over Will's stories with difficulty, as she is not quite so well-educated as him or Lib, but both within and outside the story, she's looking to supply context and help everyone - Lib, the viewer, herself - understand the whole situation, including where one can't really know, but has to fill in bits for oneself.

She's nevertheless off to the side for the most part, with Florence Pugh front and center, terrific as always. Lib is a mostly-functional addict, and the way that Pugh captures that not quite being segregated from her work as much as she'd like, especially as the film goes on and the stress of the assignment begins to wear on her. She establishes this aura of being wryly no-nonsense that stabilizes the film when she starts to lose control. It's reflected in Kila Lord Cassidy's Anna, a curious but not precocious kid who has this other layer to her experience even beyond the memory of the famine, and there's something blistering true about how she, in particular, needs a version of this story that makes sense.

That is, ultimately, what makes The Wonder fascinating beyond what's the main story - it's about how truth gets built, without ever being cynical about whether what actually happened is important.

Fantasia 2022.14: Happer's Comet, Hansan: Rising Dragon, and Inu-Oh

No guest at the shows I saw that day - just no way I was logging out of work on time for Topology of Sirens and I didn't get to The Diabetic (my story is that I was eating and lost track of time and in sticking to it) - so here's a photo of a spot a block away from where the festival takes place:

That Leonard Cohen mural pops even when you're looking down from Mount Royal, and the one mural above another feels like an abundance of riches to those of us from a city where there's not really much public art. Like, we got very excited about Elfland because a few eight-year-olds screwing around in a vacant lot was a lot for us. The MLK sculpture is going to just break Bostonians' brains.

I will say that Brit & Chips no longer being in that building made me sad, as it was my go-to if I had time between films for the past few years before the pandemic. I went to the original location by the Vieux-Porte after the festival was over, but it wasn't the same - mostly just beery breading, as opposed to the Orange Crush and sour cream & onion flavors I remember. I wound up hitting the fried chicken place instead, which is pretty good. Heck, it even had the Cotts Black Cherry soda that I didn't realize you could get without also buying a smoked-meat sandwich at Schwartz's.

(Shockingly low poutine and smoked-meat consumption this year - I think I had a poutine the day I arrived, and my stomach tightened up the next day, so I kind of avoided it afterward, and no smoked meat until I had some as part of a locally-inspired eggs benedict after the festival. No excuse there, other than the fancy/creative places for that seemed to have vanished from the Concordia area.)

Okay, that's probably enough of that. Another short-ish entry coming up, with Out in the Ring, Freaks Out, and the final DJ XL5 Zappin Party.


Happer's Comet

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, ProRes)

The thing about a festival structured like Fantasia is that if it's all you're not going to be doing anything else while there, you can build your schedule without knowing that much about what you're seeing, and wind up at a movie that's basically ambient noises, more or less by accident. Happer's Comet is the sort of film where it's no surprise that director Tyler Taormina was also the sound designer, and while that's an intriguing thing to watch at times, it's not even as linear or conventional as the filmmaker's previous film Ham on Rye.

It is, as such things go, not bad. Taomina spends much of the early going jumping between tiny vignettes at seeming random, showing folks mostly alone in their homes and cars and occasionally on the streets walking their dog or the like. Later on, a number of people come out to roller skate through empty streets at night, so even though there isn't any dialogue, things start to feel tied together, or at least have the potential to be. In the meantime, moving lights intersect with sound in interesting ways (lots of trains in this town), small noises take on heightened importance, and people look to fill time . Nobody seems to go out of their way to not talk, in large part because they are often on their own.

Taormina occasionally feints in the direction of a couple incidents colliding, and at other points the film is built in such a way that a savvy viewer wonders if one shot is meant to be a reaction to another, or if they're unrelated and they should wonder if the juxtaposition is a comment on the brain looking for connections in an isolated time: The film was shot when people were the most hunkered down because of covid, and plays as a snapshot of that moment in a way that a film with more of a plot likely can't. It was a period of inaction, stress, and isolation, and a movie that spurs its characters to accomplish tasks during that time is chronicling the exception rather than the rule.

Even though it's a piece of barely-narrative art, one can't help but watch it as a movie, and with the story so minimal, one's eyes go to how it's presented, and it's good-looking for what it is with a cast made up of Taormina's family, friends, and neighbors, but I don't know that the craft is that exciting. Done well, sure, and sustaining it for an hour is something, but not exactly engrossing - a well-sustained chain of not-bad moments that eventually feel like they should be leading to something a bit more climactic than they do.

That sort of film leaves plenty of mental capacity free to wander, and maybe this one isn't quite so enrapturing that it can afford to do so in any case but a theater where one is afraid of disturbing others by leaving.

Hansan: Yongui Chulhyeon (Hansan: Rising Dragon)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

This prequel to The Admiral: Roaring Currents (why it's not titled "The Admiral: Rising Dragon", since folks do recall and enjoy that movie, I can't guess) follows roughly the same pattern as its predecessor: A lot of names thrown up on screen, intrigue in the Japanese camp and strife in the Korean, and a fair amount of killing time before its time for the big naval battle in the end. The good news is that Kim Han-min and his collaborators have not lost many steps in the interim, and pay off the audience's patience with a rousing finale.

The film opens in 1592, five years or so before Roaring Currents. The Japanese military led by Wakizaka Yasuharu (Byun Yo-han) is advancing across the peninsula, catching Josean units by surprise and driving the king back to the fort at Pyongyang, though their eyes are on the larger prize of China. Their best hope is Admiral Yi Sun-shin (Park Hae-il), a tactical genius with ships fearsome enough that they are seen as dragons by the more superstitious of his foes, although in examining a ship heavily damaged in battle, Wakizaka believes he has spotted a weakness that can be exploited. One of the highest-ranking generals, Won Gyu (Son Hyeon-ju) advises retreat and concentration on defense, which means that Yi must be subtle with his plan to lure Wakizaka's ships through various straits to the waters near Hansan Island, where his mentor Eo Yeong-dam (Ahn Sung-ki), who has extensive knowledge of the terrain, might just be able to spring a trap, if all goes right.

The general outline of the film is so similar to its predecessor that arguably the main difference is the casting and circumstances of the main character. Where Roaring Currents had Song Kang-ho as an older Yi Sun-shin who had been imprisoned for a previous failure and was eager to prove his worth (or at least to die at sea rather than in jail); Park Hae-il plays Admiral Yi here, and while the situation is undeniably dire, desire to do one's duty is only so exciting. Park portrays Yi as poker-faced, undoubtedly on top of things but never tipping his hand to either his colleagues or the audience, to the point where it can be difficult to tell if his victories are brilliance or being in good position to take advantage of things breaking right. He only has a right hand who can get him to open up on occasion, so there's not much chance to find a fascinating personality at the center of the strategy.

It makes the Japanese side of the movie more fun to watch, oddly enough - Byun Yo-han's Wakizaka is theoretically running a parallel story, maneuvering to get his peers and subordinates in position to back his play while outfoxing Yi, but backstabbing and treachery is more dynamic on-screen than quiet politicking. On top of that, Byun gets to give a showier performance, and as the film marches toward the endgame, there are spies and double-agents, and even if you haven't seen Roaring Currents since its initial release, it's likely that the origin stories of a couple characters from that movie will click regardless.

Still, the movie does eventually reach the battle to which it has title cards counting down throughout, a ploy to lure the Japanese navy into open waters where Yi's "crane wing formation" can work, and that's fun stuff, from the tense fog-shrouded start to the coup de grace that had been foreshadowed throughout the film. In between, there's heavily armored ships just smashing through each other, soldiers shooting arrows at each other from the decks of moving ships, and, of course, the best thing an action movie can have: Wooden ships with cannons blowing the living hell out of each other at close range. Though done with few or no practical work compared to the previous movie, it still looks great - knowing how to stage something is arguably more important than the exact methods used to achieve it these days.

Like Roaring Currents before it, Rising Dragon is a slow build, but the release is a heck of a blast. Filmmaker KimHan-min is apparently already hard at work on a third movie to round out the trilogy. If it's got set-up to match its naval action; it will really be something, but even if it follows the pattern of the first two films, the series will end with a bang.

Inu-Oh

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Seen 14 August 2022 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, DCP)

When people talk about the new generation of anime filmmakers who could be seen as the heirs to the likes of Miyazaki, Otomo, and Takahata - folks whose works and names could become known beyond that intense fans of the medium and associated genres - the name of Masaaki Yuasa doesn't come up nearly as often as Makoto Shinkai or Mamoru Hosoda, though it probably should. It's understandable, in a strange sort of way: Not only are his films idiosyncratic cartoons compared to the others' more restrained styles, perhaps why they haven't often been given the sort of multiplex presentations in North America, but he's been so mind-bogglingly productive - four features and three television series released in the past five years - that it's harder to present the new Yuasa as an event. The thing is, though, the features in that run have been phenomenal, and Inu-Oh might just be his masterpiece. If it's not (it does perhaps try to do too much), it's at least got enough of a supply of jaw-dropping creativity to start a conversation.

It starts with a street musician beginning a tale in present-day Tokyo, but is soon jumping back 600 years, to when Noh Theater was just beginning to define itself as an art form, two shoguns were vying to be recognized as the true claimant to the throne, and the lost Imperial Regalia (aka the Heike Treasure) were said to be the key. Young Tomona, whose family has been diving for treasure in the local waters for generations, may have located the sword, but its magical powers cause a disaster when it breaks the surface, killing his father and blinding him. Elsewhere, a child is born into a family of sarugaka dancers with seemingly every deformity possible, apparently linked to his father (voice of Kenjiro Tsuda) donning another piece of the Regalia. Years later, Tomona (voice of Mirai Moriyama) has joined the biwa priests, nomadic musicians who recount the legends of Heike while playing the biwa, though someone has been killing priests singing new songs. The deformed child (voice of Avu-chan) has become a surprisingly agile dancer, given the differing lengths of his arms and legs, and the mask that covers his face. They encounter each other by chance and soon realize they have a mutual ability to communicate with spirits and begin a partnership to help them find peace by having their tales told.

Doing that means breaking free of the carefully delineated orthodoxy of their art forms, and when they do that, everything changes, suddenly becoming a rock opera as Tomona serves as the hype man for Inu-Oh (the name the other has chosen, as Tomona becomes Tomoichi when accepted into the biwa troupe and Tomoari when striking out on his own). The soundtrack suddenly becomes electric rather than strictly traditional, and the performances become a fifteenth-century pastiche of a modern arena rock show. It's the sort of thing that many animated features play as a joke or with a wink, an anachronistic take on something familiar (it's more or less a foundational part of the DreamWorks formula), but Yuasa plays it straight - it might not have literally been rock & roll, but the effect was the same: It's something disreputable compared to what's played for the shogun, with a direct connection to the audience who find themselves getting up and dancing along while also in awe at the pair's showmanship. The songs themselves are bangers, which may be a surprise considering that the subject matter is the people who fell in a twelfth-century battle, but there's also a thrill to it as their personae evolve, with Tomoari taking on a more feminine/nonbinary appearance while freeing these spirits changes Inu-Oh physically, evolving him from a beast that sleeps and eats with the dogs to something far more conventional, although his face remains twisted and covered - but even then, in a sign of what Noh will become, he is wearing different masks for different performances and different images.

The film gives itself so much over to performance in the center that it crowds the rest of the film out - the serial killer from the start is given little more thought, for instance, until it gets explained and tied in with the larger story later on. There are subplots and interesting bits of characterization that feel like they could have had more time, from the differences of opinion within the biwa troupe about whether Tomoari's new songs and styles are horrifying or exciting, and the hint of treachery in the court of Shogun Ashikaga (voice of Tasuku Emoto) that seems like there's a whole lot more going on, although, arguably, that's just Yuasa and screenwriter Akiko Nogi remaining focused on Tomona and Inu-Oh. The same could be said for how the film finishes after their climactic concert for the shogun and his wife, that the film is properly focused on the story of their rise, but it feels like there is a whole film's worth of stuff to do afterwards, about censorship and how the powerful enforce orthodoxy in both history and the performing arts and selling out and, in the final moments, how stories come full circle and are retold. It's not this film's story, but the viewer can feel the importance of the topics even as the film zooms through them at absurd speed.

It's a justifiable choice, though, and not one which sours how tremendously exhilarating the previous hour and a half has been. Yuasa's animation has always been full of caricature and distortion - the Science Saru house style is much looser than that of many animation studios - and though that's the case here, and as such it's impressive to see how convincing the early iterations of Inu-Oh are, because they're anatomically ridiculous but still need to come off as somehow real, a different sort of exaggeration than the rest of the stylized characters. The dancing is amazing, smooth and fluid even when it's built around Inu-oh's impossible proportions while feeling natural but not rotoscoped when he's more properly humanoid. The stylized depictions of how Tomona perceives the world are clever and immediately recognizable as a way to depict blindness in a visual medium, but Yuasa and company are able to dip in and out of them easily rather than setting up something pointed; on the other side, Shogun Ashikaga often seems to be drawn in a slightly different style, closer to traditional Japanese fine art than the cartooning, a more interesting choice than simply portraying him as rigid. Perhaps the only place where the animation falls a bit is a flying first-person shot, the sort of thing that requires a lot of digital assistance and doesn't quite match the traditional-style visuals it's flying through.

That's about a minute out of a 95-minute movie, though, with the other 98% thrilling, creative, and impeccably executed, with a second viewing during its theatrical run confirming that it's not just festival excitement about seeing the latest from a favorite creator. Inu-Oh is a terrific film - like few others most audiences have seen, but also seeming like it couldn't be made any other way.