You probably don't want me on your movie trivia team; as much as I've watched a lot of movies and retained a fair amount of them, it's not exactly organized well in my head. Someone will ask me a question and I'll go to IMDB because they've got a whole team of professionals building indices for that stuff. Same goes for baseball, music, etc; I feel like I say "heck if I know" a lot more often than most people prone (or expected) to know stuff.
Despite that, I will often watch a remake of something I saw some years ago and think "huh, I've heard that joke before" and have it dawn on me that I had seen a whole lot more than that. It's kind of an odd hazard of going to genre fests and then seeing various film industries grow to the point where you can localize things rather than just import them, even across relatively short distances (physical and cultural) as Hong Kong and South Korea. It's kind of interesting to me that this didn't happen at any point during Too Cool to Kill; I was genuinely surprised to see that this was my second time through. Sure, it's been 12+ years, but my review from the time has me really, really liking The Magic Hour, and a number of scenes in Too Cool to Kill are just so clever that I figure they would ring a bell.
Maybe that's a sign that Xing Wenxiong did an unusually good job of reworking the concept into a new movie. I wish I could find out, but The Magic Hour is frustratingly unavailable; although I was kind of surprised to see that Japanese Blu-ray included English subtitles when it was released. Of course, it was listed as a "special edition" and as such probably retailed for $180 or so, significantly more than Well Go will charge for this one.
Zhe ge sha shou bu tai leng jing (Too Cool to Kill)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 February 2022 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, DCP)
I'm not sure what it means that, upon seeing Too Cool to Kill was a remake of a Japanese film in the closing credits, I went searching it out for comparison's sake and discovered that I had, in fact, seen and liked it twelve years ago. Revisiting that review, it certainly looks like writer/director Xing Wenxiong has remixed Koki Mitani's original enough to make the new version worth seeing, and an apparent hit during the recent Lunar New Year holidays.
It opens with master assassin Karl (Ai Lun) attempting to kill gangster Harvey (Chen Minghao), but slipping up and ending up in a local hospital. Harvey, meanwhile, has other concerns, like how Milan (Ma Li), the actress in a movie he is financing, does not return his affection, and the last movie he financed with her and her director brother Miller (Huang Cailun) didn't make back its budget. She ad-libs their way out of cement shoes by saying she knows Karl, he's a fan, but winds up with just one day to produce him. To buy enough time to get on a cargo ship out of the country, Milan and Miller convince Wei Chenggong (Wei Xiang), a take-ruining extra, to pose as Karl - but also tell him that he's taking part in an improvised movie. It should get Wei killed, but his unpredictable choices lead to Harvey inviting "Karl" to join the gang, though second-in-command Jimmy (Zhou Dayong) is far from enthused about the new guy.
Too Cool to Kill isn't quite a one-joke movie, but it milks its unlikely premise so well that it is a long time before it even comes close to running out of steam. Director Xing finds a smart balance between how Wei is fearless as an actor while Harvey is already terrified of Karl that sort of counter-balances how Wei's crashing through a snake pit should have him dead within minutes, and the way Ma Li plays cool movie-star poise against Huang Cailun's panicky control freak of a brother keeps things just steady enough that the rest doesn't fall over. The result is a movie that's self-assured enough to resist the temptation to change things up when that might be the easy way to hammer something home, like when Wei decides Karl should break the fourth wall. The easy thing to do might be to cut between how Wei sees this and how Harvey does, but Xing instead keeps both points of view in the same frame.
Indeed, it's something close to pure screwball, quick with its gags and able to hammer at one so that the repetition is funny and implausible but not quite to the breaking point. Part of the reason this works is that Xing et al get the audience into a spot where its heightened take on everything feels right, starting right from the setting . From the first shot, it's clearly insular apart from the rest of the world - a circle with 270 degrees of seashore and trees behind the other 90, with all the main buildings on a ring road rather than something that might lead out of town. "Lying Town", as the place is named, looks more like a European seaside community than a Chinese one (down to the English-language signage), and where The Magic Hour specifically states that it takes place in a picturesque town that is often used as a movie set, Lying Town could be a studio creation where the hotel rooms are functional. Everybody here is acting in a way; some just don't know how many layers deep their performance is.
From a speech he gives to the crew that's shown as part of the end credits, the film is also meta in that star Wei Xiang has been a supporting actor, often in very minor roles, until this film, so he apparently knows the desire to grab this opportunity to move up. He's got a tendency to play his part like a scene-stealer without quite hamming it up except when the character is doing that, and on top of having great comic timing, it also makes the audience feel like he's this guy who kind of doesn't belong in the middle of the story. As Malin and Miller, Ma Li and Huang Cailun feel like they're the movie's stars, and they drive the story, but wind up providing solid support, landing their own gags and keeping things moving. Chen Minghao and Zhou Dayong both manage some impressive exasperation.
As with its predecessor, Too Cool to Kill made me laugh a lot more than I was expecting, especially after a trailer that suggested the movie would be incoherent desperation, or maybe made up of jokes that don't translate from Mandarin. Instead, it's a comedy that works whether one has seen (or remembers) the original or not.
Full review at eFilmCritic
Showing posts with label remake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label remake. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
Monday, March 08, 2021
Johnnie To/Chow Yun-fat/Sylvia Chang: Eighth Happiness; All About Ah-Long; The Fun, the Luck & the Tycoon; and Office
I don't know whether The Fun, the Luck & the Tycoon was released on Hong Kong Blu-ray with an eye on the then-forthcoming release of Coming 2 America, or if Panorama was just grabbing what had decent elements from their catalog and getting some Johnnie To or Chow Yun-Fat material out. That's why I bought it, not seeing that it was a remake until later, at which point I was, as you might imagine, like "whaaaaaaat?" Combine that with wanting to see what my 3D copy of Office looked like and a couple other Chow/To collaborations. I thought all involved Sylvia Chang, but that's not the case; Eighth Happiness gives Chow other leading ladies. I was kind of surprised to see that all three of the earlier movies had the same kid actor, Huang Kun-Hsuen, who improved pretty quickly for All About Ah-Long and The Fun, the Luck & the Tycoon after being kind of rough in Eight Happiness. He got good enough that I'm a bit surprised to see him kind of vanish into obscurity in both Hong Kong and Taiwan when he became an adult, and I kind of wonder what his story is. Not that I'm going to go looking, because I feel that for every "went to college, found other interests" there are half a dozen "destroyed by substance abuse" stories.
Anyway! I'm buying a bunch of these with familiar names like To & Chow and kind of wishing I could justify more, because the late-1980s stuff here is kind of a blast. I've watched some previous batches of thirty-plus-year-old Hong Kong stuff where the take-away was that they were just cranking stuff out like crazy and didn't necessarily have the time to make it great, but if you look how much some of these people were working back then, you can also see a studio system that knows what its audience likes and gives it to them without getting too fancy. To and Chow (and Chang and Huang) did the first three of these movies along with many others over the course of a couple of years, and while they're not glossy, they're assured and capable at what they're aiming for.
I'm glad that publishers in Hong Kong are working through their 80/90s catalog, putting English subtitles on them so that they are easy for those of us in North America to import and watch, and pricing them at around $20 a pop. I love you, Hong Kong movie industry, for not being Japan (who seemingly doesn't want to make it easy for Americans to discover and love your films) or Korea (better but still making it harder than it has to be). I wonder to what extent it is so much easier to get cheap, English-subtitled Blu-rays from Hong Kong than the other Asian Region A countries because studios and viewers can look over their shoulder and see China ready to cut off decades of film history if they go all-streaming. If you like movies in HK, you're probably going to buy yourself some physical media just in case some CCP-backed company owns the most popular local streaming service next year, or so I imagine.
It's funny that when I first saw Office five years ago, it was unexpected to me that the first time I saw Johnnie To and Chow Yun-Fat working together, it seemed like something out of their wheelhouses. A little more time to dig into their work and it's pretty clear that they can do everything and the stuff that made it over here in the nineties and twenty-first century doesn't always show that. On the other hand, watching Office right after the other three was whiplash, stylistically. It's sometimes easy to overlook just how quickly digital tools from shooting to editing to distribution have allowed more places to aspire to the sort of slickness that only Hollywood (with its large and relatively affluent native audience) managed for decades, whether local indies or places like Hong Kong and China. There are still some folks in Hong Kong cranking out two or three movies that make a little money a year (you go, Herman Yau), but a potential audience of a billion people with more spending money than they used to have - and theaters to spend it - means that China, including those in Hong Kong with an eye on Mainland success, can do this sort of elaborate movie now, and folks like To have adapted to that new reality well, with a lot of room to experiment compared to the need to just get the movie from script to print in a couple of months.
Bat sing bou hei (Eighth Happiness)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Eighth Happiness starts with a gag that may just be too tacky to make the cut in an American comedy today, if anyone were still making broad 90-minute farces, but which is executed beautifully and works because there are pros involved who know how to handle its insanity. Screwball requires both meticulous timing and commitment to total anarchy, and this movie has a fair bit of both.
It follows the three brothers of the family Fang. Chien-Sheng (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau) wound up raising his younger siblings, and now hosts a morning cooking show on Hong Kong TV aimed at housewives. Chien-Lang (Chow Yun-Fat) is a would-be actor who has probably only kept girlfriend "Do-Do" Hung (Carol "Do-Do" Cheng Yu-Ling) so long because the flight attendant is often out of town and won't see his attempt to bed a woman from each of Hong Kong's districts. Chien-Hui (Raymond Wong Pak-Ming) is a shy artist looking to become a cartoonist. Over the course of a night, a number of misdialed and mis-connected telephone calls will connect them with potential dream girls: Chien-Hui believes he overhears a suicide attempt but winds up bursting in on Ying-Ying (Fennie Yuen Kit-Ying) instead; Chien-Lang gets a lead on shopgirl "Beautiful" (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung), as horny and reckless as he is; and Chien-Sheng starts a feud with Wu Fen-Fang (Petrina Fung Bo-Bo), not that he knows her name when he meets the Chinese Opera singer at the pastry shop the next morning before she is the guest on his show.
Those who mostly know Chow Yun-Fat from his work with John Woo and other bullet-filled action spectacles will likely drop their jaws at his character here, who despite the womanizing never seems less than flamboyantly gay even before you get to the posters of shirtless men in his bedroom, although his explanation is that at some point in his youth his brothers dressed him in girls' clothing and "now I'm campy!" It's a downright weird but never less than energetic performance, and the movie is at its most manic when he and Cherie Chung are competing to see who can top what the other is up to. It's a movie so full of broad, strange performances that Jacky Cheung's Chien-Sheng seems just as off in his grounded responsibility, while co-writer Raymond Wong and Fennie Yuen Kit-Ying almost fall into the background as a couple of nice kids you'd like to see wind up together even if they do get some of the movie's funniest scenes.
That includes the opener, which starts with Ying-Ying getting (sort of) flashed by a guy short enough that she initially thinks he's a kid and ends with her mother's martial-arts class running at Chien-Hui with swords. Director Johnnie To would spend much of the 1990s building a body of crime and action work that ranks among the greats, and he applies the same skills to the various slapstick set pieces here. They are over-the-top and the result of ridiculous misunderstandings, but To is great at keeping things hidden so that the audience isn't necessarily looking down on those jumping to the wrong conclusions, and even when some in the cast may not have perfect comic timing, he does. This isn't a fancy movie at all - it kind of looks cheap at times - but it's surprisingly rare that a comic beat gets missed.
(It doesn't hurt that the Hong Kong studio system meant that when you want to bash some cars together or have people stumbling to evade a madwoman with a sword for a joke, you can call the folks who built the action for the likes of John Woo and Ringo Lam in for a couple days' work).
To and a mostly game cast are still having to work overtime to get the most out of a messy script that feels like the result of people pitching gags and then having a hard time tying it together into an actual story. It doesn't help that, thirty years later, the telephone-related stuff seems like it comes from an even earlier century and some of the characterizations are questionable, but there's a number of moments where one might be more invested in the brothers getting their comeuppance rather than working their way out of a situation and others where a gag just doesn't work and the bits that build on it can't either. Farce needn't be deep, but this one gets very random at times.
The bits that don't work aren't nearly as frequent or intense as those that do, thankfully, and though Eighth Happiness is a ridiculous, dated trifle, it's the sort that makes one think that the world could use more trifles. 90 minutes of making an audience laugh with no strings attached can be a lot of fun.
Also at eFilmCritic
Ah Long dik goo si (All About Ah-Long)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
All About Ah-Long is one of only two movies where Chow Yun-Fat has a story credit, and it's maybe not coincidentally some of his best work as an actor, winning him his third Hong Kong Film Award and holding up well thirty-odd years later. He's far from the only reason to see it, but the movie is in his orbit and he makes that a good place to be.
His Ah-Long used to be a top motorcycle racer - old friend and coach "Dragon" Ng (Ng Man-Tat) thinks he could still be better than a lot of the kids he's training despite the three screws in his leg - but now works construction to provide a stable, if not fancy, life for son Porky (Huang Kun-Hsuen). Dragon thinks of Porky when an advertising agency contacts him looking for a charismatic kid who can do some BMX riding for a campaign, and the executive in charge, Sylvia Poon Por-Por (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia), is taken with Porky immediately. It turns out that the three adults know each other from before Por left for America ten years ago - just long enough for her to be the mother Ah-Long told Porky was dead, although if that's the case, why is she so surprised to see Ah-Long has a son?
It's a situation that seems peculiar at first but which the film explains without a whole lot of fuss, using just enough in the way of flashbacks to establish just what sort of rebellious messes the pair were in the late 1970s. Screenwriters Ng Man-Fai & Philip Cheng Chung-Tai and director Johnnie To Kei-Fung do a neat job of referencing the sins of the past just enough for there to be some irony to what Ah-Long will do to assure a better life for his son without making him too self-aware of how he'd be doing something similar to what Por's mother did. There's also an impressive sort of restraint in how this never becomes a romance in the way Porky clearly wants it to. The kid may have a fairy tale of long-separated parents coming back together in his head, but the filmmakers let the adults be smart enough to realize that even though they've matured, they're in many ways even more star-crossed than they were ten years earlier, even if a lot of the attraction is still there.
The cast does nimble work with that, with Chow playing the shaggy working-class Ah-Long as a little more mature but not particularly refined, a fuzzy line between the often-callous young man we see in the past and the ex-con dad of the present. There are some "son's best friend and in many ways still a big kid himself" vibes to Ah-Long, but Chow and the filmmakers get that Ah-Long in many ways being the means there's an occasional meanness to him. Sylvia Chang makes an impressive complement to him; Por's well-collected professionalism never seems like a put-on but it's still easy to connect her with the more volatile version in the past, and she does a nice job of allowing the euphoria of discovering Porky exist side-by-side with the knowledge that this situation will not be easy going forward (she also has a story credit here and unlike Chow would do a great deal as a writer and director in addition to acting). There's a joke in the film about how Porky doesn't really look like either parent, but it's worth it to have Huang Kun-Hsuen in the part. A busy child actor in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he's good at making Porky a reflection of Ah-Long with a hint of Por while never being precious or broad as kid actors often can be (heck, as he himself was in Eighth Happiness a year earlier), despite the fact that his big emotions aren't ever hidden. Ng Man-Tat is solid character-actor bonus.
Doing a small marathon of four movies To, Chow, Chang, and Huang made together (in one combination or other), it was striking what a different feel this had from Eighth Happiness and The Fun, the Luck & the Tycoon. Between those garish farces, To and cinematographer Horace Wong Wing-Hang give this one a grainier, less colorful style that often evokes home movies without seeming drained, always in close enough to see emotions but never zoomed in so much that one loses the context of Ah-Long's world. Without scenes of him doing so, one can see that Ah-Long has tidied up his apartment to look better for Por, and the scene when Porky first goes to Por's hotel for breakfast drives home that he clearly couldn't imagine places like that existing in Hong Kong.
It's good enough to make it's finale something of a head-scratcher: Ah-Long enters a big motorcycle race in Macau after getting a haircut so that he looks a little more like the Chow that's a big movie star than the down-on-his-luck ex-con he's often vanished into. It's so oddly disconnected from the rest of the movie that one wonders if the producers demanded a big set piece that could be used in ads or if there's a thread of Ah-Long returning to racing and developing some sort of antagonism with one of the other riders that got cut. To handles the action well, of course, right up until the operatic end, but it feels tacked on from another movie with the same cast.
I'd see that movie, even if it's something of an odd match with this one, forcing a resolution that the film otherwise wasn't headed toward. With or without that last part, All About Ah-Long is still an impressive bit of work from some of Hong Kong's best.
Also at eFilmCritic
Gat seng gung ziu (The Fun, the Luck & the Tycoon)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
I ordered the Blu-ray of The Fun, the Luck & the Tycoon from Hong Kong on the strength of the cast (Chow Yun-Fat and Sylvia Chang!) and director (Johnnie To!) doing what looked like a fun light comedy, and then found myself kind of gobsmacked to look it up and see it described as a remake of Coming to America, as if I should just know about things I like intersecting like that. The combination is a lot to live up to, but it manages to be zany fun even if a lot of people in it are coasting.
Tycoon La Bo-Sun (Chow Yun-Fat) is the scion of one of the richest families in Hong Kong, and though something of a spoiled brat, not a bad person at all. His mother and aunt have long planned to marry him and cousin Cindy Chan (Nina Li Chi) to make sure that all the money stays in the family, but Bo has no interest in that. Having borrowed his butler's jacket, he wanders into a charity function where he is mistaken for one of the caterers and plays along. Impressed with the female half of the sibling team running the catering, he answers the help-wanted sign at East East Wonton incognito, happy for the lousy pay and dormitory housing with hard-drinking 12-year-old Rocky Ma (Huang Kun-Hsuen) and four other immigrants with musical dreams if it means he gets to know Hung Leung-Yuk (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia) better. She's already got a boyfriend, Jimmy Hsu (Lawrence Cheng Tan-Shui), who has a Canadian passport as well as enough money to impress Yuk's brother Hung East (Ha Yue), while the butler (Wong San) is trying to keep Bo out of trouble while coaxing him to come back.
Director Johnnie To Kei-Fung and screenwriter Hoi Dik open the movie with a great little bit of physical comedy, brings a little more with Cindy's arrival, and has progressed all the way up to an actual pie fight (well, cake fight) before Bo has actually arrived at East East Wonton. To and company seem to be having a great time making the film as a live action cartoon, and while the "Production Design" credit To is given alongside the one for directing appears to mean something a bit different in Hong Kong than it does in Hollywood, the team has had a ball building both Bo-Sun's lives as colorful fantasies with plenty of silly bits in the corners.
It's not exactly a set-up built to have Bo do much soul-searching about how much he has versus others or discover that he's not good enough at anything practical to be worth Yuk's interest, so it's probably good that Chow doesn't play Bo as too deep a character. Instead, he's more or less Bugs Bunny, floating above situations with a silly grin because he knows he can't actually conceive of being in real trouble, at least until the last minute when he realizes Yuk may not in fact be that impressed. There are bits of Eddie Murphy in the performance as Chow laughs at his own jokes and the chaos around him, with Chow also playing a second role, although it's far from an imitation (it's kind of odd that Murphy was apparently well-enough known in Hong Kong for the dialogue to name-drop him twice in a remake of his movies, even if fame isn't necessarily fandom).
There's an enjoyable group around him, even if Sylvia Chang gets stuck in nice-girl territory as Yuk. Which isn't to say Nina Li Chi's Cindy is more appealing; she's just ridiculous in a way that's much easier to build jokes off of. Huang Kun-Hsuen gets the most entertainingly goofy role as Rocky, selling the heck out of this half-pint with an abrasive adult's soul, while Wong San's earnestly devoted butler may be half the reason why the audience cheers for Bo more than finding him obnoxious, because that loyalty had to come from somewhere. That Bo's singing co-workers are played by Beyond, apparently one of the hottest groups in Hong Kong at the time, is a pop-culture joke that probably worked a little better at the time but which doesn't thud here.
Thirty years can make a lot of comedies that a studio churned out to make sure the theaters they owned had something new every month with whatever was hot at the time into weird curiosities, and this movie is no different; I'd probably never have paid it any attention if later films hadn't made Chow Yun-Fat and Johnnie To into favorites and it might have stayed on the shelf longer if Coming 2 America hadn't made it momentarily a bit more relevant. It is, nevertheless, still fairly enjoyable: Everybody involved seems to be having a good time while still being the sort of pros who know how to make studio product into quality entertainment.
Also at eFilmCritic
Hua li shang ban zu (Office '15)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-ray)
I'd been planning on giving this one a rewatch for a while before the prompt came up; the 3D disc I ordered from Hong Kong has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years and as such things grew less common, my original belief that this would be neat but not transformative had become "it's a whole different movie this way". My original instinct on that turned out to be correct - the 3D version lets you add "shooting in 3D" to the list of things Johnnie To is good at (which includes roughly everything that has to do with making movies), but it's not exactly a revelation. I'm still kicking myself for not finding an excuse to go to New York when the 3D version was playing at the Metrograph, though.
Otherwise, it's still a pretty great movie. One oddity was that the DLP file I saw at Boston Common five years ago was likely in Mandarin/Putonghua, the "official" language of the movie, but the disc from HK only included Cantonese soundtracks, despite usually including both, and I wondered if the subtitling was slightly different, because it seemed slightly sharper and more satiric than I remembered the movie as being, although that may just be five more years of finding more to dislike about the systems it skewers. To a certain extent, I think both director Johnnie To and writers Sylvia Chang & Wai Ka-Fai found themselves stretching to include a bit too much in the film, especially if Chang's original play was more a star vehicle centered around her veteran executive. What seems like a story about corporate capitalism inevitably chewing up, corrupting, and discarding those who don't work their way to the absolute top becomes a bit of a cautionary tale for the two youngest characters whose souls may still be salvageable by the end.
One thing did click better this time, in that while I was kind of disappointed that Chow Yun-Fat was the only person who didn't get to sing in the movie, I see there's a certain logic behind it now. Characters in musicals have songs so that their feelings can be amplified, and Chow's Ho Chung-Ping is just too calculating for that, just not motivated enough by strong emotions to have a song. He's not even petty, jealous, or vindictive, still finding Winnie and Lee Xiang good enough at what they do to want to keep them around even if a more emotional person wouldn't want to. In that way, he's kind of the embodiment of the corporation as a legal person, just thoroughly amoral and focused on the goal of making money even when not actively corrupt.
Original eFilmCritic review from 2015
(Some of those prices are about twice what I paid at DDD House, and has Office seriously not gotten a physical release in the US until now - and that only on DVD?)
Anyway! I'm buying a bunch of these with familiar names like To & Chow and kind of wishing I could justify more, because the late-1980s stuff here is kind of a blast. I've watched some previous batches of thirty-plus-year-old Hong Kong stuff where the take-away was that they were just cranking stuff out like crazy and didn't necessarily have the time to make it great, but if you look how much some of these people were working back then, you can also see a studio system that knows what its audience likes and gives it to them without getting too fancy. To and Chow (and Chang and Huang) did the first three of these movies along with many others over the course of a couple of years, and while they're not glossy, they're assured and capable at what they're aiming for.
I'm glad that publishers in Hong Kong are working through their 80/90s catalog, putting English subtitles on them so that they are easy for those of us in North America to import and watch, and pricing them at around $20 a pop. I love you, Hong Kong movie industry, for not being Japan (who seemingly doesn't want to make it easy for Americans to discover and love your films) or Korea (better but still making it harder than it has to be). I wonder to what extent it is so much easier to get cheap, English-subtitled Blu-rays from Hong Kong than the other Asian Region A countries because studios and viewers can look over their shoulder and see China ready to cut off decades of film history if they go all-streaming. If you like movies in HK, you're probably going to buy yourself some physical media just in case some CCP-backed company owns the most popular local streaming service next year, or so I imagine.
It's funny that when I first saw Office five years ago, it was unexpected to me that the first time I saw Johnnie To and Chow Yun-Fat working together, it seemed like something out of their wheelhouses. A little more time to dig into their work and it's pretty clear that they can do everything and the stuff that made it over here in the nineties and twenty-first century doesn't always show that. On the other hand, watching Office right after the other three was whiplash, stylistically. It's sometimes easy to overlook just how quickly digital tools from shooting to editing to distribution have allowed more places to aspire to the sort of slickness that only Hollywood (with its large and relatively affluent native audience) managed for decades, whether local indies or places like Hong Kong and China. There are still some folks in Hong Kong cranking out two or three movies that make a little money a year (you go, Herman Yau), but a potential audience of a billion people with more spending money than they used to have - and theaters to spend it - means that China, including those in Hong Kong with an eye on Mainland success, can do this sort of elaborate movie now, and folks like To have adapted to that new reality well, with a lot of room to experiment compared to the need to just get the movie from script to print in a couple of months.
Bat sing bou hei (Eighth Happiness)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Eighth Happiness starts with a gag that may just be too tacky to make the cut in an American comedy today, if anyone were still making broad 90-minute farces, but which is executed beautifully and works because there are pros involved who know how to handle its insanity. Screwball requires both meticulous timing and commitment to total anarchy, and this movie has a fair bit of both.
It follows the three brothers of the family Fang. Chien-Sheng (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau) wound up raising his younger siblings, and now hosts a morning cooking show on Hong Kong TV aimed at housewives. Chien-Lang (Chow Yun-Fat) is a would-be actor who has probably only kept girlfriend "Do-Do" Hung (Carol "Do-Do" Cheng Yu-Ling) so long because the flight attendant is often out of town and won't see his attempt to bed a woman from each of Hong Kong's districts. Chien-Hui (Raymond Wong Pak-Ming) is a shy artist looking to become a cartoonist. Over the course of a night, a number of misdialed and mis-connected telephone calls will connect them with potential dream girls: Chien-Hui believes he overhears a suicide attempt but winds up bursting in on Ying-Ying (Fennie Yuen Kit-Ying) instead; Chien-Lang gets a lead on shopgirl "Beautiful" (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung), as horny and reckless as he is; and Chien-Sheng starts a feud with Wu Fen-Fang (Petrina Fung Bo-Bo), not that he knows her name when he meets the Chinese Opera singer at the pastry shop the next morning before she is the guest on his show.
Those who mostly know Chow Yun-Fat from his work with John Woo and other bullet-filled action spectacles will likely drop their jaws at his character here, who despite the womanizing never seems less than flamboyantly gay even before you get to the posters of shirtless men in his bedroom, although his explanation is that at some point in his youth his brothers dressed him in girls' clothing and "now I'm campy!" It's a downright weird but never less than energetic performance, and the movie is at its most manic when he and Cherie Chung are competing to see who can top what the other is up to. It's a movie so full of broad, strange performances that Jacky Cheung's Chien-Sheng seems just as off in his grounded responsibility, while co-writer Raymond Wong and Fennie Yuen Kit-Ying almost fall into the background as a couple of nice kids you'd like to see wind up together even if they do get some of the movie's funniest scenes.
That includes the opener, which starts with Ying-Ying getting (sort of) flashed by a guy short enough that she initially thinks he's a kid and ends with her mother's martial-arts class running at Chien-Hui with swords. Director Johnnie To would spend much of the 1990s building a body of crime and action work that ranks among the greats, and he applies the same skills to the various slapstick set pieces here. They are over-the-top and the result of ridiculous misunderstandings, but To is great at keeping things hidden so that the audience isn't necessarily looking down on those jumping to the wrong conclusions, and even when some in the cast may not have perfect comic timing, he does. This isn't a fancy movie at all - it kind of looks cheap at times - but it's surprisingly rare that a comic beat gets missed.
(It doesn't hurt that the Hong Kong studio system meant that when you want to bash some cars together or have people stumbling to evade a madwoman with a sword for a joke, you can call the folks who built the action for the likes of John Woo and Ringo Lam in for a couple days' work).
To and a mostly game cast are still having to work overtime to get the most out of a messy script that feels like the result of people pitching gags and then having a hard time tying it together into an actual story. It doesn't help that, thirty years later, the telephone-related stuff seems like it comes from an even earlier century and some of the characterizations are questionable, but there's a number of moments where one might be more invested in the brothers getting their comeuppance rather than working their way out of a situation and others where a gag just doesn't work and the bits that build on it can't either. Farce needn't be deep, but this one gets very random at times.
The bits that don't work aren't nearly as frequent or intense as those that do, thankfully, and though Eighth Happiness is a ridiculous, dated trifle, it's the sort that makes one think that the world could use more trifles. 90 minutes of making an audience laugh with no strings attached can be a lot of fun.
Also at eFilmCritic
Ah Long dik goo si (All About Ah-Long)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 March 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
All About Ah-Long is one of only two movies where Chow Yun-Fat has a story credit, and it's maybe not coincidentally some of his best work as an actor, winning him his third Hong Kong Film Award and holding up well thirty-odd years later. He's far from the only reason to see it, but the movie is in his orbit and he makes that a good place to be.
His Ah-Long used to be a top motorcycle racer - old friend and coach "Dragon" Ng (Ng Man-Tat) thinks he could still be better than a lot of the kids he's training despite the three screws in his leg - but now works construction to provide a stable, if not fancy, life for son Porky (Huang Kun-Hsuen). Dragon thinks of Porky when an advertising agency contacts him looking for a charismatic kid who can do some BMX riding for a campaign, and the executive in charge, Sylvia Poon Por-Por (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia), is taken with Porky immediately. It turns out that the three adults know each other from before Por left for America ten years ago - just long enough for her to be the mother Ah-Long told Porky was dead, although if that's the case, why is she so surprised to see Ah-Long has a son?
It's a situation that seems peculiar at first but which the film explains without a whole lot of fuss, using just enough in the way of flashbacks to establish just what sort of rebellious messes the pair were in the late 1970s. Screenwriters Ng Man-Fai & Philip Cheng Chung-Tai and director Johnnie To Kei-Fung do a neat job of referencing the sins of the past just enough for there to be some irony to what Ah-Long will do to assure a better life for his son without making him too self-aware of how he'd be doing something similar to what Por's mother did. There's also an impressive sort of restraint in how this never becomes a romance in the way Porky clearly wants it to. The kid may have a fairy tale of long-separated parents coming back together in his head, but the filmmakers let the adults be smart enough to realize that even though they've matured, they're in many ways even more star-crossed than they were ten years earlier, even if a lot of the attraction is still there.
The cast does nimble work with that, with Chow playing the shaggy working-class Ah-Long as a little more mature but not particularly refined, a fuzzy line between the often-callous young man we see in the past and the ex-con dad of the present. There are some "son's best friend and in many ways still a big kid himself" vibes to Ah-Long, but Chow and the filmmakers get that Ah-Long in many ways being the means there's an occasional meanness to him. Sylvia Chang makes an impressive complement to him; Por's well-collected professionalism never seems like a put-on but it's still easy to connect her with the more volatile version in the past, and she does a nice job of allowing the euphoria of discovering Porky exist side-by-side with the knowledge that this situation will not be easy going forward (she also has a story credit here and unlike Chow would do a great deal as a writer and director in addition to acting). There's a joke in the film about how Porky doesn't really look like either parent, but it's worth it to have Huang Kun-Hsuen in the part. A busy child actor in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he's good at making Porky a reflection of Ah-Long with a hint of Por while never being precious or broad as kid actors often can be (heck, as he himself was in Eighth Happiness a year earlier), despite the fact that his big emotions aren't ever hidden. Ng Man-Tat is solid character-actor bonus.
Doing a small marathon of four movies To, Chow, Chang, and Huang made together (in one combination or other), it was striking what a different feel this had from Eighth Happiness and The Fun, the Luck & the Tycoon. Between those garish farces, To and cinematographer Horace Wong Wing-Hang give this one a grainier, less colorful style that often evokes home movies without seeming drained, always in close enough to see emotions but never zoomed in so much that one loses the context of Ah-Long's world. Without scenes of him doing so, one can see that Ah-Long has tidied up his apartment to look better for Por, and the scene when Porky first goes to Por's hotel for breakfast drives home that he clearly couldn't imagine places like that existing in Hong Kong.
It's good enough to make it's finale something of a head-scratcher: Ah-Long enters a big motorcycle race in Macau after getting a haircut so that he looks a little more like the Chow that's a big movie star than the down-on-his-luck ex-con he's often vanished into. It's so oddly disconnected from the rest of the movie that one wonders if the producers demanded a big set piece that could be used in ads or if there's a thread of Ah-Long returning to racing and developing some sort of antagonism with one of the other riders that got cut. To handles the action well, of course, right up until the operatic end, but it feels tacked on from another movie with the same cast.
I'd see that movie, even if it's something of an odd match with this one, forcing a resolution that the film otherwise wasn't headed toward. With or without that last part, All About Ah-Long is still an impressive bit of work from some of Hong Kong's best.
Also at eFilmCritic
Gat seng gung ziu (The Fun, the Luck & the Tycoon)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
I ordered the Blu-ray of The Fun, the Luck & the Tycoon from Hong Kong on the strength of the cast (Chow Yun-Fat and Sylvia Chang!) and director (Johnnie To!) doing what looked like a fun light comedy, and then found myself kind of gobsmacked to look it up and see it described as a remake of Coming to America, as if I should just know about things I like intersecting like that. The combination is a lot to live up to, but it manages to be zany fun even if a lot of people in it are coasting.
Tycoon La Bo-Sun (Chow Yun-Fat) is the scion of one of the richest families in Hong Kong, and though something of a spoiled brat, not a bad person at all. His mother and aunt have long planned to marry him and cousin Cindy Chan (Nina Li Chi) to make sure that all the money stays in the family, but Bo has no interest in that. Having borrowed his butler's jacket, he wanders into a charity function where he is mistaken for one of the caterers and plays along. Impressed with the female half of the sibling team running the catering, he answers the help-wanted sign at East East Wonton incognito, happy for the lousy pay and dormitory housing with hard-drinking 12-year-old Rocky Ma (Huang Kun-Hsuen) and four other immigrants with musical dreams if it means he gets to know Hung Leung-Yuk (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia) better. She's already got a boyfriend, Jimmy Hsu (Lawrence Cheng Tan-Shui), who has a Canadian passport as well as enough money to impress Yuk's brother Hung East (Ha Yue), while the butler (Wong San) is trying to keep Bo out of trouble while coaxing him to come back.
Director Johnnie To Kei-Fung and screenwriter Hoi Dik open the movie with a great little bit of physical comedy, brings a little more with Cindy's arrival, and has progressed all the way up to an actual pie fight (well, cake fight) before Bo has actually arrived at East East Wonton. To and company seem to be having a great time making the film as a live action cartoon, and while the "Production Design" credit To is given alongside the one for directing appears to mean something a bit different in Hong Kong than it does in Hollywood, the team has had a ball building both Bo-Sun's lives as colorful fantasies with plenty of silly bits in the corners.
It's not exactly a set-up built to have Bo do much soul-searching about how much he has versus others or discover that he's not good enough at anything practical to be worth Yuk's interest, so it's probably good that Chow doesn't play Bo as too deep a character. Instead, he's more or less Bugs Bunny, floating above situations with a silly grin because he knows he can't actually conceive of being in real trouble, at least until the last minute when he realizes Yuk may not in fact be that impressed. There are bits of Eddie Murphy in the performance as Chow laughs at his own jokes and the chaos around him, with Chow also playing a second role, although it's far from an imitation (it's kind of odd that Murphy was apparently well-enough known in Hong Kong for the dialogue to name-drop him twice in a remake of his movies, even if fame isn't necessarily fandom).
There's an enjoyable group around him, even if Sylvia Chang gets stuck in nice-girl territory as Yuk. Which isn't to say Nina Li Chi's Cindy is more appealing; she's just ridiculous in a way that's much easier to build jokes off of. Huang Kun-Hsuen gets the most entertainingly goofy role as Rocky, selling the heck out of this half-pint with an abrasive adult's soul, while Wong San's earnestly devoted butler may be half the reason why the audience cheers for Bo more than finding him obnoxious, because that loyalty had to come from somewhere. That Bo's singing co-workers are played by Beyond, apparently one of the hottest groups in Hong Kong at the time, is a pop-culture joke that probably worked a little better at the time but which doesn't thud here.
Thirty years can make a lot of comedies that a studio churned out to make sure the theaters they owned had something new every month with whatever was hot at the time into weird curiosities, and this movie is no different; I'd probably never have paid it any attention if later films hadn't made Chow Yun-Fat and Johnnie To into favorites and it might have stayed on the shelf longer if Coming 2 America hadn't made it momentarily a bit more relevant. It is, nevertheless, still fairly enjoyable: Everybody involved seems to be having a good time while still being the sort of pros who know how to make studio product into quality entertainment.
Also at eFilmCritic
Hua li shang ban zu (Office '15)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 March 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-ray)
I'd been planning on giving this one a rewatch for a while before the prompt came up; the 3D disc I ordered from Hong Kong has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years and as such things grew less common, my original belief that this would be neat but not transformative had become "it's a whole different movie this way". My original instinct on that turned out to be correct - the 3D version lets you add "shooting in 3D" to the list of things Johnnie To is good at (which includes roughly everything that has to do with making movies), but it's not exactly a revelation. I'm still kicking myself for not finding an excuse to go to New York when the 3D version was playing at the Metrograph, though.
Otherwise, it's still a pretty great movie. One oddity was that the DLP file I saw at Boston Common five years ago was likely in Mandarin/Putonghua, the "official" language of the movie, but the disc from HK only included Cantonese soundtracks, despite usually including both, and I wondered if the subtitling was slightly different, because it seemed slightly sharper and more satiric than I remembered the movie as being, although that may just be five more years of finding more to dislike about the systems it skewers. To a certain extent, I think both director Johnnie To and writers Sylvia Chang & Wai Ka-Fai found themselves stretching to include a bit too much in the film, especially if Chang's original play was more a star vehicle centered around her veteran executive. What seems like a story about corporate capitalism inevitably chewing up, corrupting, and discarding those who don't work their way to the absolute top becomes a bit of a cautionary tale for the two youngest characters whose souls may still be salvageable by the end.
One thing did click better this time, in that while I was kind of disappointed that Chow Yun-Fat was the only person who didn't get to sing in the movie, I see there's a certain logic behind it now. Characters in musicals have songs so that their feelings can be amplified, and Chow's Ho Chung-Ping is just too calculating for that, just not motivated enough by strong emotions to have a song. He's not even petty, jealous, or vindictive, still finding Winnie and Lee Xiang good enough at what they do to want to keep them around even if a more emotional person wouldn't want to. In that way, he's kind of the embodiment of the corporation as a legal person, just thoroughly amoral and focused on the goal of making money even when not actively corrupt.
Original eFilmCritic review from 2015
(Some of those prices are about twice what I paid at DDD House, and has Office seriously not gotten a physical release in the US until now - and that only on DVD?)
Saturday, May 16, 2020
Free Country
Even if it's a $10 rental rather than a $5 ticket, I must admit, I kind of like having the whole weekend to see one of the German-language films that Goethe-Institut brings to the Coolidge rather than trying to get there at 11am on Sunday. The crowd would have been nice, but if the Red Line isn't running between Alewife and Harvard, it's just not happening. This may only be running on the Coolidge's site through Sunday (17 May 2020) evening, but if you're reading this Saturday night or Sunday morning, you can still catch it at its "proper" time!
I am, I must admit, a bit surprised that I didn't recognize the movie as it started, because usually with this sort of mystery thriller that gets remade across borders, I will have the moment where it starts to seem awfully familiar and then like a rewatch. I suspect that this didn't happen here because it's not really the twist or the mechanics that drives either Marshland or Free Country, but the setting of a place that has gone from dictatorship to democracy but doesn't necessarily trust it. It's a nifty dynamic that I wish Free Country exploited a little better, although, as I say in the review, maybe it does, if you're German. So often we see remakes that are either just franchising or otherwise banking on viewers not wanting subtitles, but if they're finely calibrating it to play for a given region, I find that fascinating and useful even if it tends to push me out rather than give me a chance to examine those differences.
Freies Land (Free Country)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Goethe-Instiut German Film/Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)
It's been a while since I saw Marshland ("La Isla Minima"), the Spanish film remade here, though I didn't recognize the connection as I watched the new version. It does, however, make sense in retrospect: Free Country plays like a story mapped and adapted to a similar situation, and does that well enough to work as a thriller but is perhaps not as incisive as the filmmakers intended it to be.
It takes place in 1992, soon after the reunification of Germany which has left the East in turmoil; it's no surprise teenage sisters Patricia and Nadine Kraft talked of leaving the town of Löwitz and going to Berlin. Their disappearance still must be investigated, with Patrick Stein (Trystan Pütter), recently reassigned from Hamburg in the West, and Markus Bach (Felix Kramer), from Görlach in the East, assigned to the case. They start by talking with parents Henner (Marius Marx) and Katharina (Nora van Waldstätten), and classmates including Nicole Liederbach (Alva Schäfer), who appears to be dating the "Handsome Charlie" (Ludwig Simon) that the older sister had been seeing. A so-called psychic provides one clue, but the investigation expands when new information comes to light.
Murder, after all, was the sort of crime committed in decadent capitalist countries, and swept under the rug in places like East Germany. Ideally, this would be the heart of the movie, with the squeaky-clean Stein having to deal with everybody in the area associating the police with the Stasi while Bach struggles with decreased authority, or directly confronting how the fall of communism and reunification has not necessarily made things better in places like Löwitz but instead given them capitalists who want to decrease their already-low wages while hiring Poles from over the border. To the extent that this is a factor, though, it seems to be one where a viewer might have to be a German of a certain age to see the nuances of it. Other than the most clearly-described instances, this tends to fade quickly into mismatched-cop territory, with a side of "city cop in a small town" - a clash of styles, but in the most familiar, generic manner.
With that the case, there's not a whole lot of room to make this more than a conventional "buried crime in the boonies" movie, and while the cast is good, it's an odd situation where trying to give them more to work with (some of it taken directly from Marshland) tends to highlight the thinness of the characters. Trystan Pütter and Felix Kramer are a good contrast as mismatched detectives, with Kramer seemingly more willing to dig into how these archetypes work better when played big, but the film too often sends them off in different directions rather than having them play off each other, and the little side-stories they get for character development feel a bit like busy-work. Most of the other characters floating around are fairly straightforward, although there's something interesting in Marc Limpach as the "journalist" who dreamed of being a reporter in a free country and now finds himself a crime-scene ghoul, even if he only rarely gets to lean into it. Some of the best work probably comes from Nora von Waldstätten as the girls' youthful mother - cowed somewhat by her husband but not timid and guilty that the desire for something more that she passed onto her girls may have gotten them killed. She tags along with Stein for little particular reason beyond having more of her in the movie at one point, and one wonders what this film might have been like had it focused on these two and how post-Cold War Germany was not what they'd hoped for.
The film is nicely put together in general, pushing through its somewhat workman-like police procedural methodically without ever getting bogged down or just doing it by the number, getting good, uneasy moments out of abandoned places while also using the spread-out nature of the area, much tied together through waterways rather than roads, to give the town character and make it feel like things can be just out of sight. Director Christian Alvart serves as his own cinematographer, and it probably helps the imagery to be a little more piercing than it might otherwise have been, serving up meticulously clean and tidy images of a hollow town.
It's quite possible that Free Country is a better remake than I can see because I am not the target audience - if Alvart and co-writer Siegfried Kammi took the original film and calibrated it precisely in such a way that it resonates with a German audience but not necessarily with an outsider like myself, then that's arguably exactly what they're supposed to do. It's still a decent thriller, even if I suspect that Marshland is the better version.
Full review on EFilmCritic
I am, I must admit, a bit surprised that I didn't recognize the movie as it started, because usually with this sort of mystery thriller that gets remade across borders, I will have the moment where it starts to seem awfully familiar and then like a rewatch. I suspect that this didn't happen here because it's not really the twist or the mechanics that drives either Marshland or Free Country, but the setting of a place that has gone from dictatorship to democracy but doesn't necessarily trust it. It's a nifty dynamic that I wish Free Country exploited a little better, although, as I say in the review, maybe it does, if you're German. So often we see remakes that are either just franchising or otherwise banking on viewers not wanting subtitles, but if they're finely calibrating it to play for a given region, I find that fascinating and useful even if it tends to push me out rather than give me a chance to examine those differences.
Freies Land (Free Country)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 May 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Goethe-Instiut German Film/Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)
It's been a while since I saw Marshland ("La Isla Minima"), the Spanish film remade here, though I didn't recognize the connection as I watched the new version. It does, however, make sense in retrospect: Free Country plays like a story mapped and adapted to a similar situation, and does that well enough to work as a thriller but is perhaps not as incisive as the filmmakers intended it to be.
It takes place in 1992, soon after the reunification of Germany which has left the East in turmoil; it's no surprise teenage sisters Patricia and Nadine Kraft talked of leaving the town of Löwitz and going to Berlin. Their disappearance still must be investigated, with Patrick Stein (Trystan Pütter), recently reassigned from Hamburg in the West, and Markus Bach (Felix Kramer), from Görlach in the East, assigned to the case. They start by talking with parents Henner (Marius Marx) and Katharina (Nora van Waldstätten), and classmates including Nicole Liederbach (Alva Schäfer), who appears to be dating the "Handsome Charlie" (Ludwig Simon) that the older sister had been seeing. A so-called psychic provides one clue, but the investigation expands when new information comes to light.
Murder, after all, was the sort of crime committed in decadent capitalist countries, and swept under the rug in places like East Germany. Ideally, this would be the heart of the movie, with the squeaky-clean Stein having to deal with everybody in the area associating the police with the Stasi while Bach struggles with decreased authority, or directly confronting how the fall of communism and reunification has not necessarily made things better in places like Löwitz but instead given them capitalists who want to decrease their already-low wages while hiring Poles from over the border. To the extent that this is a factor, though, it seems to be one where a viewer might have to be a German of a certain age to see the nuances of it. Other than the most clearly-described instances, this tends to fade quickly into mismatched-cop territory, with a side of "city cop in a small town" - a clash of styles, but in the most familiar, generic manner.
With that the case, there's not a whole lot of room to make this more than a conventional "buried crime in the boonies" movie, and while the cast is good, it's an odd situation where trying to give them more to work with (some of it taken directly from Marshland) tends to highlight the thinness of the characters. Trystan Pütter and Felix Kramer are a good contrast as mismatched detectives, with Kramer seemingly more willing to dig into how these archetypes work better when played big, but the film too often sends them off in different directions rather than having them play off each other, and the little side-stories they get for character development feel a bit like busy-work. Most of the other characters floating around are fairly straightforward, although there's something interesting in Marc Limpach as the "journalist" who dreamed of being a reporter in a free country and now finds himself a crime-scene ghoul, even if he only rarely gets to lean into it. Some of the best work probably comes from Nora von Waldstätten as the girls' youthful mother - cowed somewhat by her husband but not timid and guilty that the desire for something more that she passed onto her girls may have gotten them killed. She tags along with Stein for little particular reason beyond having more of her in the movie at one point, and one wonders what this film might have been like had it focused on these two and how post-Cold War Germany was not what they'd hoped for.
The film is nicely put together in general, pushing through its somewhat workman-like police procedural methodically without ever getting bogged down or just doing it by the number, getting good, uneasy moments out of abandoned places while also using the spread-out nature of the area, much tied together through waterways rather than roads, to give the town character and make it feel like things can be just out of sight. Director Christian Alvart serves as his own cinematographer, and it probably helps the imagery to be a little more piercing than it might otherwise have been, serving up meticulously clean and tidy images of a hollow town.
It's quite possible that Free Country is a better remake than I can see because I am not the target audience - if Alvart and co-writer Siegfried Kammi took the original film and calibrated it precisely in such a way that it resonates with a German audience but not necessarily with an outsider like myself, then that's arguably exactly what they're supposed to do. It's still a decent thriller, even if I suspect that Marshland is the better version.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Kill Mobile
Well, give this movie a perverse sort of credit: By being not very good and changing things up in order to (presumably) make the Chinese censors happy, it threw a monkey wrench into my plans to self-plagiarize for my reviews of the various versions of Perfect Strangers, and I had to do more than a rewrite to talk about just how this film was weaker.
The kind of ironic thing is that, while this particular version was bowlderized to satisfy Chinese content standards, the easiest path to watching the original is a region A Blu-ray from… Hong Kong. A reminder that things are apparently different in the SAR, I guess, and how weird the situation with this movie is. Also maybe not ironic but odd is that this Chinese version has the same distributor as the Korean version (with Chinese subtitles) that just played North American in November.
Ah, well. Two weeks until the Mexican version hits.
Shoujikuang xiang (Kill Mobile)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2018 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, DCP)
Kill Mobile arrives in theaters roughly a month and a half after Intimate Strangers, the Korean remake of the Italian film Perfect Strangers, and about one month before the Mexican version, with at least half a dozen other adaptations of this highly-franchisble story either already completed and released or in production around the world. I suspect, when all of them are lined up next to each other, this Chinese version will be among the lesser entries; between censorship and general timidity, it lacks what made at least the Korean version a piercing black comedy.
Wen Bo (Tian Yu) and Dai Dai (Dai Lele) are hosting a nice little dinner party with some longtime friends: Married couple Wu Xioajiang (Qiao Shan) and his wife Li Nan (Huo Siyan), who are leaving their kids at home with Xiaojiang's mother; screenwriter Jia Di (Tong Dawei) and pretty young fiancee Bai Xuejiao (Xi Mengyao); and the currently single Han Xiao (Ma Li), who seemed alarmingly ready to skip the dinner and the rest of her life before getting a reminder on her mobile phone. Addiction to those devices comes up as a topic of conversation, and psychologist Dai Dai suggests an experiment - they leave their phones on the table so that everyone can see all the messages and notifications, and calls get answered on speaker.
It's easy to see why the makers of the original film hae been able to so successfully franchise it over the past year and a half; it opens up the "friendly gathering going right to hell because something throws the equilibrium off or someone unexpected shows up" to new possibilities that don't bog things down: A text message or call can pop up, wreak some havoc, and then not hang around, unnecessarily stealing the spotlight from the characters who we're going to spend some time with. And even if you've seen another version and know some of what's coming, the execution of the jokes is often pretty good.
The kind of ironic thing is that, while this particular version was bowlderized to satisfy Chinese content standards, the easiest path to watching the original is a region A Blu-ray from… Hong Kong. A reminder that things are apparently different in the SAR, I guess, and how weird the situation with this movie is. Also maybe not ironic but odd is that this Chinese version has the same distributor as the Korean version (with Chinese subtitles) that just played North American in November.
Ah, well. Two weeks until the Mexican version hits.
Shoujikuang xiang (Kill Mobile)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2018 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, DCP)
Kill Mobile arrives in theaters roughly a month and a half after Intimate Strangers, the Korean remake of the Italian film Perfect Strangers, and about one month before the Mexican version, with at least half a dozen other adaptations of this highly-franchisble story either already completed and released or in production around the world. I suspect, when all of them are lined up next to each other, this Chinese version will be among the lesser entries; between censorship and general timidity, it lacks what made at least the Korean version a piercing black comedy.
Wen Bo (Tian Yu) and Dai Dai (Dai Lele) are hosting a nice little dinner party with some longtime friends: Married couple Wu Xioajiang (Qiao Shan) and his wife Li Nan (Huo Siyan), who are leaving their kids at home with Xiaojiang's mother; screenwriter Jia Di (Tong Dawei) and pretty young fiancee Bai Xuejiao (Xi Mengyao); and the currently single Han Xiao (Ma Li), who seemed alarmingly ready to skip the dinner and the rest of her life before getting a reminder on her mobile phone. Addiction to those devices comes up as a topic of conversation, and psychologist Dai Dai suggests an experiment - they leave their phones on the table so that everyone can see all the messages and notifications, and calls get answered on speaker.
It's easy to see why the makers of the original film hae been able to so successfully franchise it over the past year and a half; it opens up the "friendly gathering going right to hell because something throws the equilibrium off or someone unexpected shows up" to new possibilities that don't bog things down: A text message or call can pop up, wreak some havoc, and then not hang around, unnecessarily stealing the spotlight from the characters who we're going to spend some time with. And even if you've seen another version and know some of what's coming, the execution of the jokes is often pretty good.
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Intimate Strangers
I've beat the drum about how foreign film distribution has changed a ton over the last decade a lot, but the path of this one is just genuinely weird in ways that kind of makes me dizzy. At first, I noted that this was the sort of film which a few years ago might have done well in the boutique houses, but instead of having a run in its home country, it gets snapped up immediately, and before it's been out in its native South Korea for much more than a week, it's playing American theaters courtesy of an Australian distributor that is also subtitling it in Chinese for its North American release. There's a lot to unpack there - would it eventually get broader play in the U.S. if it had had time to go through the old-school distributors, winding up with Sony Pictures Classics, Magnolia, or Samuel Goldwyn, and playing places that specialize in good-for-you foreign films rather than multiplexes that play Asian movies that have been rushed to play in front of expatriate/immigrant audiences before they can get it pirated? Or would it just have played in front of whiter audiences that way? Is this just an example of how the old system of foreign film distribution is breaking down?
Well, it's not just that, because the end credits reveal that this is a remake of a 2016 Italian film, which played Tribeca that year and got pretty good reviews internationally. You would think that Perfetti Sconoscuiuti ("Perfect Strangers") might have gotten U.S. distribution, although, given the speed of the old system, it's entirely possible that it could still be working its way through the pipeline, with the labels mentioned above trying to strike a bargain. Even more than the Korean remake, that seems like something the art-house guys would go for.
(Fun trivia: Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" seemed like an odd song to be a ringtone which becomes part of the soundtrack in the Korean movie, but it apparently traces back to the Italian one, and I wonder how it works there.)
So here's the thing - while I'm writing the review for this one, I get an email from a publicist stating that a Mexican version ("Perfectos Desconocidos") will be released by Lionsgate/Pantelion on January 11th. The Italian version is barely mentioned, as an afterthought at the end of the email, and although a part of me thinks that this is kind of insanely close for two versions of the same movie to come out in the U.S., part of me is also thinking that the overlap for these two movies is basically guys like me who are going to use the heck out of their AMC Stubs A-List even if they're the only person in the theater who needs the subtitles. Pantelion and Tangren may be releasing what is effectively the same movie two months apart, but they're targeting two different audiences.
But are we done? No! Those two remakes are apparently the sixth and seventh takes on this material - it has already been remade in Greece, Spain, Turkey, and France. The Mexican one, in fact, is opening there about a year after the Spanish one opened in its home country (heck, it played Mexico in December of 2017). And here's the kicker - at least a couple of these movies have a lot of talent behind them. The Spanish one is directed by Álex de la Iglesia and the French one by Fred Cavayé, and while I guess de la Iglesia doesn't have quite the fandom in North America that he used to and Cavayé is basically a guy who made one movie that got some attention here (Point Blank) even though Mea Culpa also made it over… It's not unreasonable to expect those versions to have gotten some North American attention. Heck, it turns out I was pretty impressed with The Fatal Encounter from the Korean director, so it's not like he's a no-one.
What to make of this? I honestly don't know. Maybe this is just a good idea for a movie that plays better when localized, and the Italian studio was smart enough to realize this and started to franchise it immediately, and in America that led to someone like The Weinstein Company getting both remake and distribution rights and deciding to sit on the original. It's happened before. Maybe that's what's happening now, and it's not just a matter of the pipeline from Europe to the United States being a dated anachronism while the one from Asia (minus Japan) is fast for the hits but invisible to those who have traditionally watched foreign films… But I think that may be more the case than not, and when the original Perfetti Sconoscuiuti and its more notable variations do arrive in the U.S., they'll just quietly be on VOD or some streaming service with zero fanfare. This doesn't seem ideal.
Ah, well. In unrelated but amusing news, the director of this movie, Lee Jae-kyu, has chosen a Western name ("J.Q.") that both tickles me and makes me feel very silly when I include both at once.
Wanbyeokhan Tain (Intimate Strangers)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 November 2018 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, DCP)
Intimate Strangers is in its second week atop the South Korean box office and I readily admit that it's hard to imagine a remake doing the same here (or a threemake, considering this is an adaptation of the Italian Perfect Strangers); it's the sort of relationship-oriented movie for adults that has a hard time finding a place these days. It's a pretty good one, though, and I can't fault it for using kind of a cheap trick to keep people talking afterward. It works, after all.
Doctors Seok-ho (Cho Jin-woong) and Ye-jin (Kim Ji-soo) - him in cosmetic surgery, her in psychiatry - have just moved into a fancy new place, and as such are having a housewarming party with the guys Seok-ho has been friends with since meeting in kindergarten 40 years ago and their partners: Cranky lawyer Tae-so (Yu Hae-jin) and his wife Soo-hyun (Yun Jung-ah), who has been engrossed in a poetry class of late; serial entrepreneur Joon-mo (Lee Seo-jin) and younger wife Se-kyung (Song Ha-yoon), whose family helped finance his new restaurant; and Young-bae (Yoon Kyung-ho), a genial fellow despite being recently divorced and out of work, whose girlfriend can't make it because she's sick. There was a fifth member of the group, but he recently got caught in an affair with a girl half his age, and when the guys comment that he was foolish to leave his phone unlocked, Ye-jin suggests a game - they leave their phones on the table so that everyone can see all the messages and notifications, and calls get answered on speakerphone.
Even if this wasn't a direct remake of another film, there's a long and storied history of friendly gatherings going right to hell because something throws the equilibrium off or someone unexpected shows up. Here, the "game" with the phones is certainly more than a bit artificial - it is the sort of thing that people might talk about but easily find an excuse to bow out of in real life - but it turns out to be a nifty way of maintaining focus: A text message or call can pop up, wreak some havoc, and then not hang around, unnecessarily stealing the spotlight from the characters whose everyday hypocrisy is supposed to be the focal point, or be awkwardly shuffled off-stage. There are certainly downsides to this sort of upper-middle-class melodrama only briefly stepping outside of its comfort zone, but it certainly allows a piece with a potentially unwieldy ensemble to do good work without getting pulled in other directions.
Full review at EFC.
Well, it's not just that, because the end credits reveal that this is a remake of a 2016 Italian film, which played Tribeca that year and got pretty good reviews internationally. You would think that Perfetti Sconoscuiuti ("Perfect Strangers") might have gotten U.S. distribution, although, given the speed of the old system, it's entirely possible that it could still be working its way through the pipeline, with the labels mentioned above trying to strike a bargain. Even more than the Korean remake, that seems like something the art-house guys would go for.
(Fun trivia: Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" seemed like an odd song to be a ringtone which becomes part of the soundtrack in the Korean movie, but it apparently traces back to the Italian one, and I wonder how it works there.)
So here's the thing - while I'm writing the review for this one, I get an email from a publicist stating that a Mexican version ("Perfectos Desconocidos") will be released by Lionsgate/Pantelion on January 11th. The Italian version is barely mentioned, as an afterthought at the end of the email, and although a part of me thinks that this is kind of insanely close for two versions of the same movie to come out in the U.S., part of me is also thinking that the overlap for these two movies is basically guys like me who are going to use the heck out of their AMC Stubs A-List even if they're the only person in the theater who needs the subtitles. Pantelion and Tangren may be releasing what is effectively the same movie two months apart, but they're targeting two different audiences.
But are we done? No! Those two remakes are apparently the sixth and seventh takes on this material - it has already been remade in Greece, Spain, Turkey, and France. The Mexican one, in fact, is opening there about a year after the Spanish one opened in its home country (heck, it played Mexico in December of 2017). And here's the kicker - at least a couple of these movies have a lot of talent behind them. The Spanish one is directed by Álex de la Iglesia and the French one by Fred Cavayé, and while I guess de la Iglesia doesn't have quite the fandom in North America that he used to and Cavayé is basically a guy who made one movie that got some attention here (Point Blank) even though Mea Culpa also made it over… It's not unreasonable to expect those versions to have gotten some North American attention. Heck, it turns out I was pretty impressed with The Fatal Encounter from the Korean director, so it's not like he's a no-one.
What to make of this? I honestly don't know. Maybe this is just a good idea for a movie that plays better when localized, and the Italian studio was smart enough to realize this and started to franchise it immediately, and in America that led to someone like The Weinstein Company getting both remake and distribution rights and deciding to sit on the original. It's happened before. Maybe that's what's happening now, and it's not just a matter of the pipeline from Europe to the United States being a dated anachronism while the one from Asia (minus Japan) is fast for the hits but invisible to those who have traditionally watched foreign films… But I think that may be more the case than not, and when the original Perfetti Sconoscuiuti and its more notable variations do arrive in the U.S., they'll just quietly be on VOD or some streaming service with zero fanfare. This doesn't seem ideal.
Ah, well. In unrelated but amusing news, the director of this movie, Lee Jae-kyu, has chosen a Western name ("J.Q.") that both tickles me and makes me feel very silly when I include both at once.
Wanbyeokhan Tain (Intimate Strangers)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 November 2018 in AMC Boston Common #14 (first-run, DCP)
Intimate Strangers is in its second week atop the South Korean box office and I readily admit that it's hard to imagine a remake doing the same here (or a threemake, considering this is an adaptation of the Italian Perfect Strangers); it's the sort of relationship-oriented movie for adults that has a hard time finding a place these days. It's a pretty good one, though, and I can't fault it for using kind of a cheap trick to keep people talking afterward. It works, after all.
Doctors Seok-ho (Cho Jin-woong) and Ye-jin (Kim Ji-soo) - him in cosmetic surgery, her in psychiatry - have just moved into a fancy new place, and as such are having a housewarming party with the guys Seok-ho has been friends with since meeting in kindergarten 40 years ago and their partners: Cranky lawyer Tae-so (Yu Hae-jin) and his wife Soo-hyun (Yun Jung-ah), who has been engrossed in a poetry class of late; serial entrepreneur Joon-mo (Lee Seo-jin) and younger wife Se-kyung (Song Ha-yoon), whose family helped finance his new restaurant; and Young-bae (Yoon Kyung-ho), a genial fellow despite being recently divorced and out of work, whose girlfriend can't make it because she's sick. There was a fifth member of the group, but he recently got caught in an affair with a girl half his age, and when the guys comment that he was foolish to leave his phone unlocked, Ye-jin suggests a game - they leave their phones on the table so that everyone can see all the messages and notifications, and calls get answered on speakerphone.
Even if this wasn't a direct remake of another film, there's a long and storied history of friendly gatherings going right to hell because something throws the equilibrium off or someone unexpected shows up. Here, the "game" with the phones is certainly more than a bit artificial - it is the sort of thing that people might talk about but easily find an excuse to bow out of in real life - but it turns out to be a nifty way of maintaining focus: A text message or call can pop up, wreak some havoc, and then not hang around, unnecessarily stealing the spotlight from the characters whose everyday hypocrisy is supposed to be the focal point, or be awkwardly shuffled off-stage. There are certainly downsides to this sort of upper-middle-class melodrama only briefly stepping outside of its comfort zone, but it certainly allows a piece with a potentially unwieldy ensemble to do good work without getting pulled in other directions.
Full review at EFC.
Monday, July 23, 2018
Fantasia 2018.11: Fireworks, Loi Bao, Our House, The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion, and Parallel
The weekend is for starting out in Hall and ending up in DeSève, while the week goes the other way. Thus the expected big crowd for Fireworks (which I'm guessing either didn't play Canada/Quebec earlier in the month or folks just waited for it to play this room) and a fair-sized one for Lôi Báo, an okay superhero movie I believe was Vietnam's sole representation here. Kind of neat, although I was kind of struck by how little of what I usually associate with Vietnam is there visually - the nice-looking town where it takes place could be dropped just about anywhere in the world and not look out of place, which probably says as much about what the media has fed us all about Vietnam over the past decades (it's always going to still be the war in American films) as anything else.
After that, I opted not to go across the street for five hours of boxing drama, which meant Our House, a pretty fair remake of a previous Fantasia film, Phasma Ex Machina, reconfigured enough that I don't have to be afraid of just regurgitating my review for the previous one, although the fact that they are not just re-using the old script makes a bit of the plot device a bit of a head-scratcher (at one point, the characters are recording their experiments in wireless electricity on a phone that charges without wires). Pretty solid, though.
After that was South Korean thriller/superhero origin story The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion, where Cheval Noir Jury President Tim Matheson (left) came out to announce that lead actress Kim Da-mi won the prize for Best Actress, though the rest of the prizes won't be announced until next week. Not gonna lie - I didn't really see it through much of the movie, but the last act is kind of insane in every way, changing a lot of what one may think of the movie. Writer/director Park Hoon-jung plans it as an open-ended series, but doesn't have any solid sequel plans yet, pointing out that the ball is pretty much still in Warner Brothers' court.
That one started a bit late and ran a bit late, but I fortunately had a good buffer to get across the street for Parallel, though I wound up further back in the press line, meaning I wound up in the front row and thus got some weird angles on the photos:
Left to right, director Isaac Ezban, producer John Zaozirny, and writer Scott Blaszak. Ezban's previous films were done in Mexico, and he'd been looking for an American (or, in this case, American-produced but Canadian-shot) film that was still in his wheelhouse. Everybody seemed to connect really well for this one, even if it felt kind of frantic.
Today's plan: Weirdly, this Monday is one of the earliest starts, and as mentioned above, it's DeSève before Hall, with The Dark, I Am a Hero, Luz, The Witch in the Window, and then Inuyashiki for a double-dose of Shunsuke Sato manga adaptations (not the triple feature, although that was doable). The Ranger is highly recommended
Uchiage hanabi, shita kara miru ka? Yoko kara miru ka? (Fireworks)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
Go figure - a couple years ago, we were talking about whether Matoko Shinkai could be the new Miyazaki, and now Fireworks is being promoted in large part by how it's like a Shinkai movie and from a Your Name producer. Time sometimes marches on fast!
And while plenty charming, it's no Your Name. It's a cute, likable tale of young love and potential separation, but its fantasy isn't quite so sharp, and the relaxed pacing often feels like repetition and padding that doesn't reveal quite so much on second glance. The animation is often beautiful, although there's a bit of tension between the digital techniques and the more traditional aesthetics.
On the other hand, it gets a huge leg up for being the rare anime (or manga) about middle-schoolers that actually feels like the kids are 14 or 15 rather than older teens, at least to this guy who is well past those years. Even the pretty, smart girl in a movie mostly filled with boys gets to be very much messed up and uncertain, which is a bit of a change of pace and gives the movie a bit more of an impact.
Full review at EFC.
"Hooligans"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: Action!, digital)
I kind of love the combination of dry absurdity and violent slapstick on display here, from the formal planning of brawling if it were a semi-organized league to flashbacks to why, exactly, everybody wants to expel the captain's cousin. It's all perfectly deadpan with characters who work for the situation presented, funny exaggeration (reading glasses!), and action that doesn't feel overly choreographed but still works as really good storytelling.
Lôi Báo
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: Action!, DCP)
For a movie whose basic premise is goofy enough to include head transplants, this doesn't play as nearly the bit of madness it could have. Granted, you've got to scale expectations down a bit for Vietnam - the effects budget it's not going to be huge - but there's still a feeling of rather mild ambition here, of taking the superhero stuff in stride because you know the beats.
It's for some good action, though, with the stunt team and a couple of the actors showing some nice martial-arts chops and knife work when they get in close enough (guns are iffier). It's a fair amount of fun when it goes for the full pulp experience, not quite so great when trying to be a bit more sincere.
Full review at EFC.
Our House
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
(Very deliberately not going back to see what I wrote about Phasma Ex Machina because I already repeated myself with one remake this festival and I want to see if this happens every time)
A genre movie can get away with a certain amount of wheel-spinning if it sends one out excited, and Our House does a pretty good job there. It's got more than a few moments where you scratch your head, wondering if these guys have ever seen a movie about machines that amplify the spiritual world and a few others that basically say "you know how this goes" as they skip into familiar territory, but the last chunk of this movie is good jump-y fun.
It's got a nice primary cast, too, finding a good spot where one believes they're a family making a valiant effort to sponsor on after tragedy while still operating with a believable amount of friction. It's not necessarily an all-time horror movie cast, but they're good enough to watch for reasons behind seeing them get cut down.
Full review at EFC.
The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Well, okay, this is kind of an okay riff on genetically engineered superhumans, but I kind of feel like I've seen it all before, with the shadowy agencies and people in black suits and the hiding things we can kind of predict--
(Sudden extremely violent action scene)
Oh, that's right, this is a South Korean action movie--
(All hell breaks loose in final act)
Well, okay, that makes up for a lot. Like, yeah, that was kind of derivative and familiar, plot-wise, but South Korea does not do this sort of thing halfway, and the action and plot twists in the back stretch are big and nuts, with that nice performance by Kim Da-mi becoming something even more delightfully crazy.
Fine, bring on Part 2.
Full review at EFC.
"Space/Time Conundrum"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
This is going to sound kind of weird, but I suspect that I would have rated this short a wee bit higher if it was just the opening half, not because what comes after is bad, but because there's something really striking and conceptual about watching the look on actor Danny Bass's face on an emotional roller coaster as the lighting changes and a bunch of kind of nonsense-y bits of his heads-up display twinkle. It's utterly removed from context but the feel of it brings back 2001 and other similar movies in a strong, abstracted way, boiling them down to the elemental horror and wonder.
The back half kind of negates that, but thankfully has a good moment or two to rebuild it at the end; actress Shelby Brunn sells the heck out of a couple lines which imply a sad, strange past to this story. What writer/director Fernando Lopez does with his short is good enough that this doesn't quite deserve categorization as a recovery, but it does get it out of the realm of making fun of the characters.
Parallel
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Parallel sometimes feels like two or three high-concept sci-fi films sewn together, not always cleanly, and then accelerated with certain bits taken out to increase the suspense in the second half. It's kind of exhausting at times, to be honest, and it's kind of impressive that it doesn't become just frantic. It moves a little too fast to really get all the heft it wants to out of all of its storylines, but director Isaac Ezban can at least get the nuggets of what's interesting out, and the end has a great sort of take-no-prisoners ruthlessness, even if Ezban and writer Scott Blaszak can't resist "one last…" temptation.
It's got a nice cast, too, with the main group all giving the sort of performances where the audience is in good hands no matter how lead/supporting stuff eventually shakes out. It's also one of the better examples of a genre movie taking advantage of the whole internet/mobile start-up culture, and how it's one part absurdly cutthroat capitalism, one part busy hackers, and one part people not really knowing what comes next but certain that "disruption" is good. It's at the core of this movie as it is a lot, but Ezban & Blaszak seem to understand it better than a lot of folks do.
Full review at EFC.
After that, I opted not to go across the street for five hours of boxing drama, which meant Our House, a pretty fair remake of a previous Fantasia film, Phasma Ex Machina, reconfigured enough that I don't have to be afraid of just regurgitating my review for the previous one, although the fact that they are not just re-using the old script makes a bit of the plot device a bit of a head-scratcher (at one point, the characters are recording their experiments in wireless electricity on a phone that charges without wires). Pretty solid, though.
After that was South Korean thriller/superhero origin story The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion, where Cheval Noir Jury President Tim Matheson (left) came out to announce that lead actress Kim Da-mi won the prize for Best Actress, though the rest of the prizes won't be announced until next week. Not gonna lie - I didn't really see it through much of the movie, but the last act is kind of insane in every way, changing a lot of what one may think of the movie. Writer/director Park Hoon-jung plans it as an open-ended series, but doesn't have any solid sequel plans yet, pointing out that the ball is pretty much still in Warner Brothers' court.
That one started a bit late and ran a bit late, but I fortunately had a good buffer to get across the street for Parallel, though I wound up further back in the press line, meaning I wound up in the front row and thus got some weird angles on the photos:
Left to right, director Isaac Ezban, producer John Zaozirny, and writer Scott Blaszak. Ezban's previous films were done in Mexico, and he'd been looking for an American (or, in this case, American-produced but Canadian-shot) film that was still in his wheelhouse. Everybody seemed to connect really well for this one, even if it felt kind of frantic.
Today's plan: Weirdly, this Monday is one of the earliest starts, and as mentioned above, it's DeSève before Hall, with The Dark, I Am a Hero, Luz, The Witch in the Window, and then Inuyashiki for a double-dose of Shunsuke Sato manga adaptations (not the triple feature, although that was doable). The Ranger is highly recommended
Uchiage hanabi, shita kara miru ka? Yoko kara miru ka? (Fireworks)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
Go figure - a couple years ago, we were talking about whether Matoko Shinkai could be the new Miyazaki, and now Fireworks is being promoted in large part by how it's like a Shinkai movie and from a Your Name producer. Time sometimes marches on fast!
And while plenty charming, it's no Your Name. It's a cute, likable tale of young love and potential separation, but its fantasy isn't quite so sharp, and the relaxed pacing often feels like repetition and padding that doesn't reveal quite so much on second glance. The animation is often beautiful, although there's a bit of tension between the digital techniques and the more traditional aesthetics.
On the other hand, it gets a huge leg up for being the rare anime (or manga) about middle-schoolers that actually feels like the kids are 14 or 15 rather than older teens, at least to this guy who is well past those years. Even the pretty, smart girl in a movie mostly filled with boys gets to be very much messed up and uncertain, which is a bit of a change of pace and gives the movie a bit more of an impact.
Full review at EFC.
"Hooligans"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: Action!, digital)
I kind of love the combination of dry absurdity and violent slapstick on display here, from the formal planning of brawling if it were a semi-organized league to flashbacks to why, exactly, everybody wants to expel the captain's cousin. It's all perfectly deadpan with characters who work for the situation presented, funny exaggeration (reading glasses!), and action that doesn't feel overly choreographed but still works as really good storytelling.
Lôi Báo
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival: Action!, DCP)
For a movie whose basic premise is goofy enough to include head transplants, this doesn't play as nearly the bit of madness it could have. Granted, you've got to scale expectations down a bit for Vietnam - the effects budget it's not going to be huge - but there's still a feeling of rather mild ambition here, of taking the superhero stuff in stride because you know the beats.
It's for some good action, though, with the stunt team and a couple of the actors showing some nice martial-arts chops and knife work when they get in close enough (guns are iffier). It's a fair amount of fun when it goes for the full pulp experience, not quite so great when trying to be a bit more sincere.
Full review at EFC.
Our House
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
(Very deliberately not going back to see what I wrote about Phasma Ex Machina because I already repeated myself with one remake this festival and I want to see if this happens every time)
A genre movie can get away with a certain amount of wheel-spinning if it sends one out excited, and Our House does a pretty good job there. It's got more than a few moments where you scratch your head, wondering if these guys have ever seen a movie about machines that amplify the spiritual world and a few others that basically say "you know how this goes" as they skip into familiar territory, but the last chunk of this movie is good jump-y fun.
It's got a nice primary cast, too, finding a good spot where one believes they're a family making a valiant effort to sponsor on after tragedy while still operating with a believable amount of friction. It's not necessarily an all-time horror movie cast, but they're good enough to watch for reasons behind seeing them get cut down.
Full review at EFC.
The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Auditorium des Diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
Well, okay, this is kind of an okay riff on genetically engineered superhumans, but I kind of feel like I've seen it all before, with the shadowy agencies and people in black suits and the hiding things we can kind of predict--
(Sudden extremely violent action scene)
Oh, that's right, this is a South Korean action movie--
(All hell breaks loose in final act)
Well, okay, that makes up for a lot. Like, yeah, that was kind of derivative and familiar, plot-wise, but South Korea does not do this sort of thing halfway, and the action and plot twists in the back stretch are big and nuts, with that nice performance by Kim Da-mi becoming something even more delightfully crazy.
Fine, bring on Part 2.
Full review at EFC.
"Space/Time Conundrum"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
This is going to sound kind of weird, but I suspect that I would have rated this short a wee bit higher if it was just the opening half, not because what comes after is bad, but because there's something really striking and conceptual about watching the look on actor Danny Bass's face on an emotional roller coaster as the lighting changes and a bunch of kind of nonsense-y bits of his heads-up display twinkle. It's utterly removed from context but the feel of it brings back 2001 and other similar movies in a strong, abstracted way, boiling them down to the elemental horror and wonder.
The back half kind of negates that, but thankfully has a good moment or two to rebuild it at the end; actress Shelby Brunn sells the heck out of a couple lines which imply a sad, strange past to this story. What writer/director Fernando Lopez does with his short is good enough that this doesn't quite deserve categorization as a recovery, but it does get it out of the realm of making fun of the characters.
Parallel
* * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2018 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
Parallel sometimes feels like two or three high-concept sci-fi films sewn together, not always cleanly, and then accelerated with certain bits taken out to increase the suspense in the second half. It's kind of exhausting at times, to be honest, and it's kind of impressive that it doesn't become just frantic. It moves a little too fast to really get all the heft it wants to out of all of its storylines, but director Isaac Ezban can at least get the nuggets of what's interesting out, and the end has a great sort of take-no-prisoners ruthlessness, even if Ezban and writer Scott Blaszak can't resist "one last…" temptation.
It's got a nice cast, too, with the main group all giving the sort of performances where the audience is in good hands no matter how lead/supporting stuff eventually shakes out. It's also one of the better examples of a genre movie taking advantage of the whole internet/mobile start-up culture, and how it's one part absurdly cutthroat capitalism, one part busy hackers, and one part people not really knowing what comes next but certain that "disruption" is good. It's at the core of this movie as it is a lot, but Ezban & Blaszak seem to understand it better than a lot of folks do.
Full review at EFC.
Wednesday, August 06, 2014
The Fantasia Daily 2014.20: The Desert, Monsterz, Metalhead, Welcome to New York
The wind-down for Fantasia is kind of long this year - Tuesday was the official "closing night", with Welcome to New York the closing night film, but there's more on Wednesday and an extra day of encores on Thursday.
Kind of a bland day, though, with all of the movies inspiring less than a strong reaction from me. I kind of get the impression that the festival wasn't blown away by demand for Welcome to New York - I think the announcement in French before Metalhead was that you could go see WtNY on that ticket as well, which (needless to say) you don't do with a sold out show.
And then, man, the Q&A.
Abel Ferrara (r) delivered one of the most rambling Q&A sessions I've seen, refusing to answer the simple question of what attracted him to the subject and going off on tagents with almost every question, and festival co-director Mitch Davis (l) basically had to just sit back, enjoy the randomness, and let the man go, because I don't think you come see Ferrara for focus. He's an emotional guy who specializes in rawness in his films, and this is the persona you kind of have to expect. He's the sort of "from the gut" filmmaker that you'd expect to bristle when somebody mentions "process".
Still, this lasted from the end of the movie at around midnight until one-thirty or so, and while sometimes these Q&As aren't exactly informative, this one occasionally felt like the movie just happened free of anybody making a decision at all. I'm pretty sure that's not the case, although it would kind of explain why it rambled so much.
Also, there was one guy a few rows behind me who went to the "who are we to judge" well with Gerard Depardieu's DSK-inspired character and mentioned how his wife kept trying to put the blame on him rather than accepting culpability herself, and while I suppose there's some merit to the latter, I am really all kind of okay with judging someone who sees a maid come into his hotel room and decides that ejaculating on her face is a reasonable thing to do harshly. There's not exactly a lot of moral ambiguity to this character.
Anyway, final day #2 will be Preservation, the "Outer Limits of Animation" block, and probably Killers, although I might be tempted by The Fives if the animation ends early enough. Skipping Kundo: Age of the Rampart in the hopes that AMC will actually book it in Boston at the end of the month.
"Former Things"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival, HD)
"Former Things" is fifteen minutes of a man returning to his childhood home after some sort of outbreak, and it's all right. It's not sluggish or overwrought or hampered by bad effects or anything like that. It's a decent slice of post-apocalyptic melancholy that doesn't drag.
That's something, but I've got to admit - I'm kind of with the folks who were struggling to remember its name after the main feature. It's a decent bit of imagery, but not one with much staying power at all.
El Desierto (The Desert)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
There's a lot to like about Christoph Behl's post-apocalyptic love triangle, with Lautaro Delgado and William Prociuk playing what may be the last two men in the world and Victoria Almeida the last woman, a situation that is never going to go smoothly. The cast is terrific in their restrained performances, and a bit of clever structuring and editing in the last act makes the movie something close to heartbreaking at times. The flies are unnerving, both the ones buzzing around the house where they're holed up and tattooed on one character's skin.
The movie doesn't quite run out of steam, but it does bump up against its barriers on occasion. Behl and company don't seem to have the resources to depict a post-apocalyptic world outside of the house, and it often comes across as limited rather than claustrophobic. It's also the sort of movie where identifying any particular scene that needs to go or be tightened is difficult, but where the cumulative effect of not a whole lot happening starts to wear on the viewer. I felt a little more fidgety than I really should have coming out of it, even if I liked most of what it was doing.
Monsterz
* * (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
2011's Haunters was an excellent Korean movie that established a simple premise - two people with opposite superpowers (mind control and rapid healing) on a collision course - and delivered with entertaining action pieces, a likable cast of characters, and style to complement its straight-ahead drive. I figured it for a US remake, but Japan got there first, and sort of screwed it up.
It's got some nice details - giving a kid with immense psychic powers a copy of Akira to read may have been a bad idea - but it also does some completely unnecessary things, like grafting a greater mythology onto the story but not making that actually important, while also trying to give the characters too much nuance. There are odd jumps, action that seems nowhere near as crisp or logical as it was in the Korean film, and a tendency by horror director Hideo Nakata to equate killing a lot of people with excitement. It's a remake trying to add too much at the expense of what made the original terrific.
Málmhaus (Metalhead)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Metalhead doesn't exactly sneak up on an audience - it's clear from the start that writer/director Ragnar Bragason has some pretty good ideas for his story about grief and mourning, especially when he trains his camera on the parents of the title character, who still seem shell-shocked nine years after losing their son while daughter Hera watched. There's not always that much for Hera to actually do, but just enough for things to crank along.
The last act is something special, though, as Karl and Droplaug start to come out of their funks and Helga crashes in a way that finds her giving in to the standards of her small Icelandic community just as a group from Norway who like her music shows up. It's a surprisingly complex interaction that actually frees the movie up to be funny in a way that the previous hour of one lone headbanger in a quiet farming town might have been expected to be but wasn't.
I'm not sure that Metalhead will emerge as a particular favorite, but it's pretty good, and surprisingly ingratiating when you might expect screaming.
Full review on EFC
Welcome to New York
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Closing Night, HD)
That Welcome to New York is a long, rambling movie is not in and of itself a bad thing. There are times early on where it's a definite plus as the audience is kind of assaulted with the excesses of M. Deveraux (Gerard Depardieu), with a noteworthy contrast as he's arrested and booked.. There are later scenes with Jacqueline Bisset as his wife trying to fight the charges and save her reputation that go on and on, and while they're individually interesting, the cumulative effect is wearing.
Ultimately, I wonder what it's about. The movie is based closely enough on the Dominique Strauss-Khan case to have three screens worth of disclaimers at the front but pointedly fictionalized in a way that causes it to lose a bit of weight, it winds up with the Special Victims Unit episode resolved off-screen and no notable movement for either Deveraux or Simone, it winds up just a look at a man without a conscience who skates because he is rich and powerful, but doesn't seem to have much to say about the matter beyond the obvious while letting Depardieu and Bisset do their things.
Full review on EFC
Kind of a bland day, though, with all of the movies inspiring less than a strong reaction from me. I kind of get the impression that the festival wasn't blown away by demand for Welcome to New York - I think the announcement in French before Metalhead was that you could go see WtNY on that ticket as well, which (needless to say) you don't do with a sold out show.
And then, man, the Q&A.
Abel Ferrara (r) delivered one of the most rambling Q&A sessions I've seen, refusing to answer the simple question of what attracted him to the subject and going off on tagents with almost every question, and festival co-director Mitch Davis (l) basically had to just sit back, enjoy the randomness, and let the man go, because I don't think you come see Ferrara for focus. He's an emotional guy who specializes in rawness in his films, and this is the persona you kind of have to expect. He's the sort of "from the gut" filmmaker that you'd expect to bristle when somebody mentions "process".
Still, this lasted from the end of the movie at around midnight until one-thirty or so, and while sometimes these Q&As aren't exactly informative, this one occasionally felt like the movie just happened free of anybody making a decision at all. I'm pretty sure that's not the case, although it would kind of explain why it rambled so much.
Also, there was one guy a few rows behind me who went to the "who are we to judge" well with Gerard Depardieu's DSK-inspired character and mentioned how his wife kept trying to put the blame on him rather than accepting culpability herself, and while I suppose there's some merit to the latter, I am really all kind of okay with judging someone who sees a maid come into his hotel room and decides that ejaculating on her face is a reasonable thing to do harshly. There's not exactly a lot of moral ambiguity to this character.
Anyway, final day #2 will be Preservation, the "Outer Limits of Animation" block, and probably Killers, although I might be tempted by The Fives if the animation ends early enough. Skipping Kundo: Age of the Rampart in the hopes that AMC will actually book it in Boston at the end of the month.
"Former Things"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival, HD)
"Former Things" is fifteen minutes of a man returning to his childhood home after some sort of outbreak, and it's all right. It's not sluggish or overwrought or hampered by bad effects or anything like that. It's a decent slice of post-apocalyptic melancholy that doesn't drag.
That's something, but I've got to admit - I'm kind of with the folks who were struggling to remember its name after the main feature. It's a decent bit of imagery, but not one with much staying power at all.
El Desierto (The Desert)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
There's a lot to like about Christoph Behl's post-apocalyptic love triangle, with Lautaro Delgado and William Prociuk playing what may be the last two men in the world and Victoria Almeida the last woman, a situation that is never going to go smoothly. The cast is terrific in their restrained performances, and a bit of clever structuring and editing in the last act makes the movie something close to heartbreaking at times. The flies are unnerving, both the ones buzzing around the house where they're holed up and tattooed on one character's skin.
The movie doesn't quite run out of steam, but it does bump up against its barriers on occasion. Behl and company don't seem to have the resources to depict a post-apocalyptic world outside of the house, and it often comes across as limited rather than claustrophobic. It's also the sort of movie where identifying any particular scene that needs to go or be tightened is difficult, but where the cumulative effect of not a whole lot happening starts to wear on the viewer. I felt a little more fidgety than I really should have coming out of it, even if I liked most of what it was doing.
Monsterz
* * (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
2011's Haunters was an excellent Korean movie that established a simple premise - two people with opposite superpowers (mind control and rapid healing) on a collision course - and delivered with entertaining action pieces, a likable cast of characters, and style to complement its straight-ahead drive. I figured it for a US remake, but Japan got there first, and sort of screwed it up.
It's got some nice details - giving a kid with immense psychic powers a copy of Akira to read may have been a bad idea - but it also does some completely unnecessary things, like grafting a greater mythology onto the story but not making that actually important, while also trying to give the characters too much nuance. There are odd jumps, action that seems nowhere near as crisp or logical as it was in the Korean film, and a tendency by horror director Hideo Nakata to equate killing a lot of people with excitement. It's a remake trying to add too much at the expense of what made the original terrific.
Málmhaus (Metalhead)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Metalhead doesn't exactly sneak up on an audience - it's clear from the start that writer/director Ragnar Bragason has some pretty good ideas for his story about grief and mourning, especially when he trains his camera on the parents of the title character, who still seem shell-shocked nine years after losing their son while daughter Hera watched. There's not always that much for Hera to actually do, but just enough for things to crank along.
The last act is something special, though, as Karl and Droplaug start to come out of their funks and Helga crashes in a way that finds her giving in to the standards of her small Icelandic community just as a group from Norway who like her music shows up. It's a surprisingly complex interaction that actually frees the movie up to be funny in a way that the previous hour of one lone headbanger in a quiet farming town might have been expected to be but wasn't.
I'm not sure that Metalhead will emerge as a particular favorite, but it's pretty good, and surprisingly ingratiating when you might expect screaming.
Full review on EFC
Welcome to New York
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Closing Night, HD)
That Welcome to New York is a long, rambling movie is not in and of itself a bad thing. There are times early on where it's a definite plus as the audience is kind of assaulted with the excesses of M. Deveraux (Gerard Depardieu), with a noteworthy contrast as he's arrested and booked.. There are later scenes with Jacqueline Bisset as his wife trying to fight the charges and save her reputation that go on and on, and while they're individually interesting, the cumulative effect is wearing.
Ultimately, I wonder what it's about. The movie is based closely enough on the Dominique Strauss-Khan case to have three screens worth of disclaimers at the front but pointedly fictionalized in a way that causes it to lose a bit of weight, it winds up with the Special Victims Unit episode resolved off-screen and no notable movement for either Deveraux or Simone, it winds up just a look at a man without a conscience who skates because he is rich and powerful, but doesn't seem to have much to say about the matter beyond the obvious while letting Depardieu and Bisset do their things.
Full review on EFC
Thursday, July 31, 2014
The Fantasia Daily 2014.14: The One I Love, Slipstreams and Eclectic Sheep, Ju-on: The Beginning of the End, Four Corners
Made a quick stop at the press office to collect a screener before The One I Love, but I don't know if I'll actually have time to watch it (they have to be back on Friday). I kind of don't want to - unless this is really your job, why spend part of a festival leaned over your laptop watching DVDs? Maybe I'm better off just hoping that Doctor Proctor plays at Fantastic Fest, since I go to these things to see movies with an audience, not to just get my film count up.
Speaking of things you might not otherwise get to see with an audience, here are some of the filmmakers from the "Slipstreams and Eclectic Sheep" block:
Left to right, that is Elinor Svoboda, who made "Merus Breach"; Tim Sanger of "Redaction"; Josh Tanner, who brought "The Landing" from Australia; and Dave Paige, who directed "Atrium".
Good folks with good stories. Svoboda is a sound editor by trade, so it's no surprise that her movie focused heavily on that, although host Mitch Davis joked afterward that the projectionist had to ride the volume control like the truck driver riding the brake in Sorcerer to avoid blowing out the spiffy new sound system. Which makes a good segue to Sanger, who mentioned that he didn't watch sci-if while making "Redaction", but focused instead on 1970s cop films. Not so much by Frankenheimer, but a lot of Alan J. Pakula. Tanner, meanwhile, said that in order to shoot his story that was meant to be very much in the American Midwest in Australia, they wound up repurposing the sets built for Superman Returns, which makes me want to dig that out and see just how much it still looks like the Kent Farm.
And now, off to get the screener they didn't have on hand yesterday (Cold Steel Mountain) and check out The Creep Behind the Camera, The Fake, and When Animals Dream.
The One I Love
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Paradigm Shifters, DCP)
There are filmmakers that like to explain all the details of how their plot devices work, there are those who like to keep a little mystery, and then there are the makers of The One I Love, who seem extremely fuzzy on the whole concept. Fortunately, their concept if a good one, yielding plenty of laughs and maybe a little bit of thought, even if by the end the audience has no idea how it works.
It starts prosaically enough; Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Elizabeth Moss) are having trouble in their marriage and nothing seems to help. Finding very little he can do in the office, their therapist (Ted Danson) tells them he has something that might help - a nice little property they can use as a retreat. They get there and do find themselves reconnecting - but when they happen upon the first house, the experience becomes almost too good to be true.
I won't spoil what they find there, but the good news is that the characters don't take long to catch on, and can spend half the movie investigating what's happening, although from very different directions: Ethan wants to know what's going on and how it works, while Sophie is mostly looking to just get the experience. It's kind of interesting how that dynamic plays out - while on the one hand writer Justin Lader and director Charlie McDowell seem to give a little too much early credence to Sophie's complaints that Ethan wanting explanations ruins the experience, her diving right in after what are basically surface-level pleasures does not come across as particularly healthy, either. Or at least, not good for the marriage. The film doesn't exactly play out as an examination of the two mindsets and whether they're compatible - it kind of churns in the background - but it's something that can be projected onto it if that's how one is inclined to approach the story.
Full review at EFC
"Atrium"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
There was a definite them of idealized and controlled relationships to this block, even extending to the previous feature many of us saw (The One I Love). This one does a pretty nice job of it, from the early moment that wife Laura (Sara Jester) has a sharp response to her husband Travis (Sam Zuckerman) asking if she's not feeling well. It escalates in a quality slow build from there, eventually arriving at a climax that is not unexpected given the block that this short is showing it, but effective enough.
It works as well as it does, I suspect, because writer/director David Paige has an eye for figuring out which elements of an ostentatious apartment or other bits of design will make a setting that is basically contemporary into something that seems a little off-kilter. Add that to a very nice bit of work by Sara Jester and you've got a familiar sci-fi story well-presented.
"A Better Life"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
"A Better Life" has one of the niftier takes on its subject I've seen, one that I'd be interesting seeing fleshed out, if not quite to feature length, than maybe as a television episode: A man in a comatose or persistent vegetative state is given neural implants that will allow his wife to keep him active via remote control so that muscles don't atrophy and maybe the familiar surroundings and activity helps to break him out more than lying on a hospital bed. If The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits had a revival going on right now, it would be a great fit.
As it is, though, it's still pretty strong. The science-fictional idea is nifty, and the character-oriented side of Diane remembering how Bill could often be difficult while she simulates empty displays of affection is strong too. Aimee Klein sells this quite well indeed, and I rather liked the performance Hardy Koenig put in as the doctor performing this miracle. It's got a bit of an issue at the end, where the twist is pretty much the expected ending by now, but otherwise I liked it quite a bit.
"Redaction"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
Writer/director Tim Sanger mentioned having worked in a law office at one point during the Q&A for "Redaction", and it was pretty clear that he'd put a great deal of thought into how something like this would be part of an evolving legal system which sounds like a domestic abuse victim's worst nightmare. It would be no wonder that most people choose to have the incident removed from their minds, both for the obvious, visceral reasons and for the sheer lack of hassle.
It's another concept I'd like to see expanded to a couple times its length to perhaps play with the idea via parallel narratives or something. Jaimi Paige (as the victim) and Sarah Lilly (as a counselor who knows what she's going through) are pretty great in the one we get, though, displaying an excellent grasp of the way this future issue would play out for the individuals. I also like how Sanger decides to focus on their perspective just enough to make it clear that the husband (who does opt for redaction) and the police officer who caught the case are very much secondary concerns; it's the sort of idea where a filmmaker might be tempted to dive in head-first and examine all perspectives, even when they don't need it.
"Jiminy"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
Scoring Denis Lavant for a supporting part in your short film must feel pretty good. It probably helps when you've got a clever, witty script to present him with, and Arthur Molard's "Cricket" definitely has that. Though I wasn't quite sure whether the "crickets" implanted in people's necks were simply silicon chips or some bioengineered actual cricket (there are shots that imply the latter is the case), it doesn't matter. The idea of an implant that can constantly advise its recipient and allow some things to happen on automatic is a good one and Molard does good things with it.
Indeed, at twenty minutes, his short is a model of charming efficiency, hinting at interesting uses and interesting side-effects, while still leaving enough room for Benjamin Breniere's cricket technician to have an interesting story of discovering the benefits and perils of one's own agency. Breniere is pretty good in this, projecting a certain confidence bordering on unearned arrogance, and taking things in interesting directions when the script points him there. The rest of the cast is strong as well, while Molard and co-writer Teddy Jacquier come up with a steady stream of intriguing uses for their plot device, both in life and to move the plot along.
A neat bit of sci-fi, probably my favorite of the package.
"On/Off"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
Easily the most slickly-produced of the short films in the block, "On/Off" unfortunately does get buried beneath its impressive visual effects in a way that most movies only get accused of. Thierry Lorenzi has his visual effects guys build an impressive vision of a space station that needs repairs and some nifty other effects along the way, and for a moment it looks like they'll be used in service of something - there's impressive imagery visualizing things falling apart for lead character Meredith (Carole Brana) - but Lorenzi instead goes for a twist ending that is rather empty.
"Merus Breach"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
The most openly experimental short in the package, Elinor Svoboda's "Merus Breach" certainly leaves a strong impression with its almost painfully aggressive sound design that simulates what it's like to be a "sensitive" in a future where hyper/infrasonic waves inaudible to most of the population are used to fight pollution. It certainly gets the audience to empathize with these people, enough so that the revelation midway through is almost unnecessary.
It's otherwise quite well done. It drags a little, but it gets a lot of mileage out of good, simple design both visually and audibly. Stacey Iseman and Tyler Parr get the job done as the speechless leads. It's a kind of peculiarity that's not for everybody, but where you have to admire both the creativity and execution.
"Prospect"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
This short is of the "making good sci-fi with worn-out props" persuasion, but it's a pretty good one. I dig that the team looking for "orulaks" is a father and daughter, with good work from Tony Doupe and Callie Harlow respectively. Harlow especially is great, carrying a lot of the movie without dialogue just from how she carries herself. Though much of what we see is very practical indeed, the CGI used on occasion tends to be a nice boost. I'd have liked a firmer ending, but what filmmakers Christoper Caldwell and Zeek Earl come up with works.
What I like best is the genuine feeling of how alien and hostile this world is, even if it was shot in an American swamp. There's a palpable feeling that the planet will swallow them up if the bandits don't, and that's not easy to achieve. Most similar shorts have people seriously saying this, but it's got real impact here.
"The Trial"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
Brits Phil Arnold & Mark Player make a well-realized short here - it doesn't have the biggest effects budget of any that played the festival, but it's got nice future hooks. I can't fault Joseph Maudsley as the appropriately-panicked main character and especially liked Gary Sharkey as his lawyer. It's got a nifty idea that has good horror payoffs.
The movie doesn't quite seem to be about anything, though. There's potential in a story of an alternate trial where a psychic reads your mind, but I'm not sure what Arnold and Player are trying to do here - basic fear of the untested? A way this might be subverted? Fear of what else may come out when the "encephalic detectives" get their hands on you? They're all teased, but none ultimately get much use, leaving the end result kind of dry.
"The Landing"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
A very strong short from Australia, although set in Cold War America, that sets up an intriguingly tense premise and then upends it for something that turns out to be just as good. It's a nifty twist, especially as we see the full horror of it written on the face of Tom Usher playing a young boy who sees a spaceship crash into his backyard.
Either the script or Henry Nixon's performance as the boy's father could use a little bit of tightening - there's something a little exaggerated about him beyond how a kind might remember the situation - but on the whole, it's extremely well-done.
Ju-on: Owari no hajimari (Ju-on: The Beginning of the End)
* * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, HD)
How am I going to look upon the first couple of Ju-on films should I revisit them? As things I enjoyed in part because they were my introduction to Japanese horror or examples of how downright good a job Takashi Shimizu did? This sequel/remake/refresh is just not very good, and it's frustrating to try and figure out why.
After all, the cast is pretty decent. It doesn't look or feel cheap. I suspect that re-watching the Shimizu versions would pop up the same problems with the motive not having a sharp enough focus or the "kills" being king of silly. Maybe the idea is just tapped out, or maybe the attempt at fusing too many different types of horror story, even with the film's very specific narrative-hopping structure, just doesn't work.
Four Corners
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Pretty darn fine as gang movies go. I must admit to not having a particular affinity for this genre, and I kind of worry that being drawn to this one because it is set in South Africa rather than an American city doesn't speak well of me - I'm too willing to dismiss these stories as alien rather than close-to-home. Still, the environment that director Ian Gabriel and company visit in Four Corners is a large part of its appeal, showing gangs functioning like secret societies inside prison and a run-down but still somewhat sustaining township near Cape Town.
The core cast is very nice, too - Jezzriel Skei doesn't quite have to carry the movie as Richardo, a middle-schooler who just wants to play chess but is being pulled inexorably into the local "numbers gangs", but he's well up for it when it's on him, a darn fine starring role. Brendan Daniels is right up there as well as "Farakhan", a character audiences know just has to be Ricardo's father but isn't as detached in mind from the gangs as he'd like to think. There are plenty of others worth watching, and none of them feel too practiced; there's a steely authenticity to how everyone is inured to living on these violent streets but still alert.
There's a fair amount going on and a lot more characters besides, but Gabriel never has the plot become overwhelming. He gives us an eye into a different world with interesting people populating it.
Speaking of things you might not otherwise get to see with an audience, here are some of the filmmakers from the "Slipstreams and Eclectic Sheep" block:
Left to right, that is Elinor Svoboda, who made "Merus Breach"; Tim Sanger of "Redaction"; Josh Tanner, who brought "The Landing" from Australia; and Dave Paige, who directed "Atrium".
Good folks with good stories. Svoboda is a sound editor by trade, so it's no surprise that her movie focused heavily on that, although host Mitch Davis joked afterward that the projectionist had to ride the volume control like the truck driver riding the brake in Sorcerer to avoid blowing out the spiffy new sound system. Which makes a good segue to Sanger, who mentioned that he didn't watch sci-if while making "Redaction", but focused instead on 1970s cop films. Not so much by Frankenheimer, but a lot of Alan J. Pakula. Tanner, meanwhile, said that in order to shoot his story that was meant to be very much in the American Midwest in Australia, they wound up repurposing the sets built for Superman Returns, which makes me want to dig that out and see just how much it still looks like the Kent Farm.
And now, off to get the screener they didn't have on hand yesterday (Cold Steel Mountain) and check out The Creep Behind the Camera, The Fake, and When Animals Dream.
The One I Love
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival: Paradigm Shifters, DCP)
There are filmmakers that like to explain all the details of how their plot devices work, there are those who like to keep a little mystery, and then there are the makers of The One I Love, who seem extremely fuzzy on the whole concept. Fortunately, their concept if a good one, yielding plenty of laughs and maybe a little bit of thought, even if by the end the audience has no idea how it works.
It starts prosaically enough; Ethan (Mark Duplass) and Sophie (Elizabeth Moss) are having trouble in their marriage and nothing seems to help. Finding very little he can do in the office, their therapist (Ted Danson) tells them he has something that might help - a nice little property they can use as a retreat. They get there and do find themselves reconnecting - but when they happen upon the first house, the experience becomes almost too good to be true.
I won't spoil what they find there, but the good news is that the characters don't take long to catch on, and can spend half the movie investigating what's happening, although from very different directions: Ethan wants to know what's going on and how it works, while Sophie is mostly looking to just get the experience. It's kind of interesting how that dynamic plays out - while on the one hand writer Justin Lader and director Charlie McDowell seem to give a little too much early credence to Sophie's complaints that Ethan wanting explanations ruins the experience, her diving right in after what are basically surface-level pleasures does not come across as particularly healthy, either. Or at least, not good for the marriage. The film doesn't exactly play out as an examination of the two mindsets and whether they're compatible - it kind of churns in the background - but it's something that can be projected onto it if that's how one is inclined to approach the story.
Full review at EFC
"Atrium"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
There was a definite them of idealized and controlled relationships to this block, even extending to the previous feature many of us saw (The One I Love). This one does a pretty nice job of it, from the early moment that wife Laura (Sara Jester) has a sharp response to her husband Travis (Sam Zuckerman) asking if she's not feeling well. It escalates in a quality slow build from there, eventually arriving at a climax that is not unexpected given the block that this short is showing it, but effective enough.
It works as well as it does, I suspect, because writer/director David Paige has an eye for figuring out which elements of an ostentatious apartment or other bits of design will make a setting that is basically contemporary into something that seems a little off-kilter. Add that to a very nice bit of work by Sara Jester and you've got a familiar sci-fi story well-presented.
"A Better Life"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
"A Better Life" has one of the niftier takes on its subject I've seen, one that I'd be interesting seeing fleshed out, if not quite to feature length, than maybe as a television episode: A man in a comatose or persistent vegetative state is given neural implants that will allow his wife to keep him active via remote control so that muscles don't atrophy and maybe the familiar surroundings and activity helps to break him out more than lying on a hospital bed. If The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits had a revival going on right now, it would be a great fit.
As it is, though, it's still pretty strong. The science-fictional idea is nifty, and the character-oriented side of Diane remembering how Bill could often be difficult while she simulates empty displays of affection is strong too. Aimee Klein sells this quite well indeed, and I rather liked the performance Hardy Koenig put in as the doctor performing this miracle. It's got a bit of an issue at the end, where the twist is pretty much the expected ending by now, but otherwise I liked it quite a bit.
"Redaction"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
Writer/director Tim Sanger mentioned having worked in a law office at one point during the Q&A for "Redaction", and it was pretty clear that he'd put a great deal of thought into how something like this would be part of an evolving legal system which sounds like a domestic abuse victim's worst nightmare. It would be no wonder that most people choose to have the incident removed from their minds, both for the obvious, visceral reasons and for the sheer lack of hassle.
It's another concept I'd like to see expanded to a couple times its length to perhaps play with the idea via parallel narratives or something. Jaimi Paige (as the victim) and Sarah Lilly (as a counselor who knows what she's going through) are pretty great in the one we get, though, displaying an excellent grasp of the way this future issue would play out for the individuals. I also like how Sanger decides to focus on their perspective just enough to make it clear that the husband (who does opt for redaction) and the police officer who caught the case are very much secondary concerns; it's the sort of idea where a filmmaker might be tempted to dive in head-first and examine all perspectives, even when they don't need it.
"Jiminy"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
Scoring Denis Lavant for a supporting part in your short film must feel pretty good. It probably helps when you've got a clever, witty script to present him with, and Arthur Molard's "Cricket" definitely has that. Though I wasn't quite sure whether the "crickets" implanted in people's necks were simply silicon chips or some bioengineered actual cricket (there are shots that imply the latter is the case), it doesn't matter. The idea of an implant that can constantly advise its recipient and allow some things to happen on automatic is a good one and Molard does good things with it.
Indeed, at twenty minutes, his short is a model of charming efficiency, hinting at interesting uses and interesting side-effects, while still leaving enough room for Benjamin Breniere's cricket technician to have an interesting story of discovering the benefits and perils of one's own agency. Breniere is pretty good in this, projecting a certain confidence bordering on unearned arrogance, and taking things in interesting directions when the script points him there. The rest of the cast is strong as well, while Molard and co-writer Teddy Jacquier come up with a steady stream of intriguing uses for their plot device, both in life and to move the plot along.
A neat bit of sci-fi, probably my favorite of the package.
"On/Off"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
Easily the most slickly-produced of the short films in the block, "On/Off" unfortunately does get buried beneath its impressive visual effects in a way that most movies only get accused of. Thierry Lorenzi has his visual effects guys build an impressive vision of a space station that needs repairs and some nifty other effects along the way, and for a moment it looks like they'll be used in service of something - there's impressive imagery visualizing things falling apart for lead character Meredith (Carole Brana) - but Lorenzi instead goes for a twist ending that is rather empty.
"Merus Breach"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
The most openly experimental short in the package, Elinor Svoboda's "Merus Breach" certainly leaves a strong impression with its almost painfully aggressive sound design that simulates what it's like to be a "sensitive" in a future where hyper/infrasonic waves inaudible to most of the population are used to fight pollution. It certainly gets the audience to empathize with these people, enough so that the revelation midway through is almost unnecessary.
It's otherwise quite well done. It drags a little, but it gets a lot of mileage out of good, simple design both visually and audibly. Stacey Iseman and Tyler Parr get the job done as the speechless leads. It's a kind of peculiarity that's not for everybody, but where you have to admire both the creativity and execution.
"Prospect"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
This short is of the "making good sci-fi with worn-out props" persuasion, but it's a pretty good one. I dig that the team looking for "orulaks" is a father and daughter, with good work from Tony Doupe and Callie Harlow respectively. Harlow especially is great, carrying a lot of the movie without dialogue just from how she carries herself. Though much of what we see is very practical indeed, the CGI used on occasion tends to be a nice boost. I'd have liked a firmer ending, but what filmmakers Christoper Caldwell and Zeek Earl come up with works.
What I like best is the genuine feeling of how alien and hostile this world is, even if it was shot in an American swamp. There's a palpable feeling that the planet will swallow them up if the bandits don't, and that's not easy to achieve. Most similar shorts have people seriously saying this, but it's got real impact here.
"The Trial"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
Brits Phil Arnold & Mark Player make a well-realized short here - it doesn't have the biggest effects budget of any that played the festival, but it's got nice future hooks. I can't fault Joseph Maudsley as the appropriately-panicked main character and especially liked Gary Sharkey as his lawyer. It's got a nifty idea that has good horror payoffs.
The movie doesn't quite seem to be about anything, though. There's potential in a story of an alternate trial where a psychic reads your mind, but I'm not sure what Arnold and Player are trying to do here - basic fear of the untested? A way this might be subverted? Fear of what else may come out when the "encephalic detectives" get their hands on you? They're all teased, but none ultimately get much use, leaving the end result kind of dry.
"The Landing"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Slipstreams And Electric Sheep, digital)
A very strong short from Australia, although set in Cold War America, that sets up an intriguingly tense premise and then upends it for something that turns out to be just as good. It's a nifty twist, especially as we see the full horror of it written on the face of Tom Usher playing a young boy who sees a spaceship crash into his backyard.
Either the script or Henry Nixon's performance as the boy's father could use a little bit of tightening - there's something a little exaggerated about him beyond how a kind might remember the situation - but on the whole, it's extremely well-done.
Ju-on: Owari no hajimari (Ju-on: The Beginning of the End)
* * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Théâtre Hall (Fantasia Festival, HD)
How am I going to look upon the first couple of Ju-on films should I revisit them? As things I enjoyed in part because they were my introduction to Japanese horror or examples of how downright good a job Takashi Shimizu did? This sequel/remake/refresh is just not very good, and it's frustrating to try and figure out why.
After all, the cast is pretty decent. It doesn't look or feel cheap. I suspect that re-watching the Shimizu versions would pop up the same problems with the motive not having a sharp enough focus or the "kills" being king of silly. Maybe the idea is just tapped out, or maybe the attempt at fusing too many different types of horror story, even with the film's very specific narrative-hopping structure, just doesn't work.
Four Corners
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2014 in Salle D.B. Clarke (Fantasia Festival, DCP)
Pretty darn fine as gang movies go. I must admit to not having a particular affinity for this genre, and I kind of worry that being drawn to this one because it is set in South Africa rather than an American city doesn't speak well of me - I'm too willing to dismiss these stories as alien rather than close-to-home. Still, the environment that director Ian Gabriel and company visit in Four Corners is a large part of its appeal, showing gangs functioning like secret societies inside prison and a run-down but still somewhat sustaining township near Cape Town.
The core cast is very nice, too - Jezzriel Skei doesn't quite have to carry the movie as Richardo, a middle-schooler who just wants to play chess but is being pulled inexorably into the local "numbers gangs", but he's well up for it when it's on him, a darn fine starring role. Brendan Daniels is right up there as well as "Farakhan", a character audiences know just has to be Ricardo's father but isn't as detached in mind from the gangs as he'd like to think. There are plenty of others worth watching, and none of them feel too practiced; there's a steely authenticity to how everyone is inured to living on these violent streets but still alert.
There's a fair amount going on and a lot more characters besides, but Gabriel never has the plot become overwhelming. He gives us an eye into a different world with interesting people populating it.
Thursday, May 01, 2014
Brick Mansions
Folks don't always believe me when I say that they should go see French genre movies because they don't mess around, but it's true. In fact, some of the best horror movies and mid-sized action movies you'll see come from there, and even some of the more entertaining English-language action movies of recent years came out of Luc Besson's factory.
It's a funny thing, though - the stereotype is so often that foreign films are less empty action and focus on characters more, and American remakes dumb things down, but Brick Mansions kind of messes up by going the opposite way. It's been a while (eight years) since I saw the original District 13, so maybe it's got something where Cyril Raffaelli's got some sort of personal enmity against Taha that must be dealt with, but I don't remember it. Besson jams that sort of subplot in for the American version, though, and what's up with that? Have we been so programmed to make things personal that either audiences find "Tremaine killed Damien's father, and he wants revenge!" to be a bigger deal than "neutron bomb might go off in the middle of Detroit!"?
That's weird, right? And it's part of why I like French genre movies: They may not necessarily go in for a whole lot of nuance, but they don't mess around with less important stuff the way American movies often do, with this being an obvious example.
Brick Mansions
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2014 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)
The first action-oriented previews for Brick Mansions made it look like David Belle was at the center of the movie with Paul Walker around to give Americans a familiar face; the later ones would focus more on Walker and his character's personal motivation to complete this mission and avenge his father. Now, while Walker was by all accounts a stand-up guy who built himself up into a decent-enough actor, this movie is a prime example of how that sort of obligatory storyline just gets in the way of the good stuff.
Belle plays Lino, a resident of a Detroit neighborhood so bad that the city has walled it off, stopped running schools and hospitals, and let the criminals run wild; he does his best to clean up the area by interrupting the drug trade, which leads to Brick Mansions's kingpin Tremaine Alexander (RZA) having his ex-girlfriend Lola (Catalina Denis) kidnapped. Walker, meanwhile, plays undercover cop Damien Collier (Paul Walker), currently working to bust George the Greek (Carlo Rota) as part of his obsession with busting Tremaine, who is responsible for the death of Damien's father. He's about to get his chance; a weapon of mass destruction has been stolen and brought into the neighborhood, and the mayor (Bruce Ramsay) has tasked Damien with finding it, using Lino as a local guide.
Brick Mansions is a remake of French film District 13, also written and produced by Luc Besson and starring David Belle. Belle doesn't return because he is fluent in English (he is overdubbed by an uncredited Vin Diesel), but because he is the inventor of parkour, or "free-running", an athletic discipline all about getting from point A to point B by going over, around, or through any obstacles without breaking pace. District 13 was all about finding ways to string parkour stunts together with just enough story to justify it, so if you're going to remake it, you might as well bring back Belle. Doing so pays off right away; the movie kicks off with a terrific chase scene that maybe isn't as jaw-dropping as the similar sequences from District 13 because parkour has become a staple of action films in general since then but is still a great few minutes of David Belle doing nifty David Belle things. Besson and director Camille Delamarre don't forget what the point of these movies is, and even a lot of action that isn't parkour per se is enjoyably acrobatic.
Full review at EFC
It's a funny thing, though - the stereotype is so often that foreign films are less empty action and focus on characters more, and American remakes dumb things down, but Brick Mansions kind of messes up by going the opposite way. It's been a while (eight years) since I saw the original District 13, so maybe it's got something where Cyril Raffaelli's got some sort of personal enmity against Taha that must be dealt with, but I don't remember it. Besson jams that sort of subplot in for the American version, though, and what's up with that? Have we been so programmed to make things personal that either audiences find "Tremaine killed Damien's father, and he wants revenge!" to be a bigger deal than "neutron bomb might go off in the middle of Detroit!"?
That's weird, right? And it's part of why I like French genre movies: They may not necessarily go in for a whole lot of nuance, but they don't mess around with less important stuff the way American movies often do, with this being an obvious example.
Brick Mansions
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2014 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, DCP)
The first action-oriented previews for Brick Mansions made it look like David Belle was at the center of the movie with Paul Walker around to give Americans a familiar face; the later ones would focus more on Walker and his character's personal motivation to complete this mission and avenge his father. Now, while Walker was by all accounts a stand-up guy who built himself up into a decent-enough actor, this movie is a prime example of how that sort of obligatory storyline just gets in the way of the good stuff.
Belle plays Lino, a resident of a Detroit neighborhood so bad that the city has walled it off, stopped running schools and hospitals, and let the criminals run wild; he does his best to clean up the area by interrupting the drug trade, which leads to Brick Mansions's kingpin Tremaine Alexander (RZA) having his ex-girlfriend Lola (Catalina Denis) kidnapped. Walker, meanwhile, plays undercover cop Damien Collier (Paul Walker), currently working to bust George the Greek (Carlo Rota) as part of his obsession with busting Tremaine, who is responsible for the death of Damien's father. He's about to get his chance; a weapon of mass destruction has been stolen and brought into the neighborhood, and the mayor (Bruce Ramsay) has tasked Damien with finding it, using Lino as a local guide.
Brick Mansions is a remake of French film District 13, also written and produced by Luc Besson and starring David Belle. Belle doesn't return because he is fluent in English (he is overdubbed by an uncredited Vin Diesel), but because he is the inventor of parkour, or "free-running", an athletic discipline all about getting from point A to point B by going over, around, or through any obstacles without breaking pace. District 13 was all about finding ways to string parkour stunts together with just enough story to justify it, so if you're going to remake it, you might as well bring back Belle. Doing so pays off right away; the movie kicks off with a terrific chase scene that maybe isn't as jaw-dropping as the similar sequences from District 13 because parkour has become a staple of action films in general since then but is still a great few minutes of David Belle doing nifty David Belle things. Besson and director Camille Delamarre don't forget what the point of these movies is, and even a lot of action that isn't parkour per se is enjoyably acrobatic.
Full review at EFC
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