Tired: "Oh, man, it's taken me almost the whole year to review everything from Fantasia; I'm a terrible critic who won't be credentialed next year because it takes me forever!"
Wired: "F--- yeah, look at me stretching that content out even though everything has been canceled! Glad I have some reserves! Hahahahaha!"
I jest a bit, and some of these reviews at this point are kind of rough - I am leaning a lot on what I wrote on my Letterboxd page and notes that I'm finding hard to read (I need to check if eye doctors are open yet, because I probably need reading glasses), so this is the one where the reviews really become ruminations on their themes and how that has stuck with me nearly eleven months later In some cases, I've had to skip a bit - I looked at what I had for Hard-Core and just couldn't add much to it.
Anyway, I'm done relying just on notes, but have some Blu-rays and streaming to hit so that I can catch up and be fresh. And, hey, taking forever means that I can end this post by noting that you can actually pre-order House of Hummingbird now, which was not on the horizon at all when I saw it last year!
Beol-sae (House of Hummingbird)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2019 in Auditorium des Diplomes de la SGWU (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
The very last detail I noticed during the screening of House of Hummingbird - indeed, the very last detail there is to notice - is that the copyright is assigned directly to writer/director/producer Kim Bora, rather to a production company or some group of investors, and I wonder if it meant she started out with more resources at her disposal than the film's young heroine or if it's just that much more important to claim the story as hers. It doesn't matter, really - the film is good either way - but it's the sort of small detail that can stick with you at the end of a movie about a girl who is often overlooked.
That girl is Eunhee (Park Ji-Hu), fourteen years old and unable to get into her family's apartment because her mother is napping or out or otherwise just not answering the door, to the point where Eunhee eventually wonders if she's in the right place, as these low-income units do tend to run together. There are five in there, including older sister Suhee (Park Soo-Yeon), who is always in trouble, and brother Daehoon, a year older but getting all of their parents' attention and support as he studies for his high-school entry exams. Eunhee isn't a great student - she'd rather hang around with boyfriend Jiwan and bestie Jisuk - but new teacher Kim Young-Ji (Kim Sae-Byuk) sees something in her notebook doodles. Even with that new interest being shown in her (and that of a new classmate), Eunhee doesn't quite think of herself enough to raise much of an alarm when a persistent sore throat doesn't go away.
It's a testimony to just how good young actress Park Ji-hu is - and how carefully filmmaker Kim Bora has inserted potentially upbeat moments - that House of Hummingbird doesn't just become a parade of misery, confirmation that adolescence is nothing but cruel torment. Eunhee is a middle-school heroine that the audience can get behind even as her troubles get piled high, and Park makes it clear that she needs someone behind her, always showing the hesitation and frustration of someone who knows she is not thought of as much and is only just figuring out that she is undervalued. Park puts the same sort of intelligent passion into the scenes where she's worried and empathetic as when she's frustrated and envious as Eunhee eventually figures out how to demand attention because she deserves it and not just because she feels slighted.
She's never alone in her troubles, which helps quite a bit; it's clear from the start that her mother and best friend know where she's coming from, even if they often seem powerless to help each other break away for more than a few minutes at a time. It's part of being a girl in that time and place, and while the very first scene captures how close a kid can be to boiling over in this situation, the movie as a whole trends toward Eunhee getting more able to handle herself, even if it's sometimes a sort of youthful not knowing any better. The cast around her does good work in carving out individual personalities while also representing all of the various things that a girl like Eunhee is up against, despite making sure that they are never actually bigger than her.
Part of that is that director Kim never sets things up so that Eunhee has one clear problem that she has to solve. The bulk of the film is relatively small moments, even when the room is crowded enough for Eunhee to fade to the back of a classroom or family gathering, and Kim shows an ability to hold those moments for a while, focusing on how Eunhee is reacting to them, and switch them up so that neither she nor the audience is completely overwhelmed. There are at least two major challenges as the film moves into its later stages, but neither Eunhee's diagnosis or the calamitous real-life event that Kim works into the script are things that an eighth-grade girl can exactly conquer through her own efforts, but getting through which can solidify and strengthen her.
Adolescence is tough but survivable, and House of Hummingbird nails that vibe well.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Shooting the Mafia
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP)
This is an intriguing but odd documentary, in that it seems like it could be more focused or detailed or illustrative, but instead the filmmakers just let their subject take them where she would, and if that wasn't where they expected, so be it. It helps to have the sort of subject who is willing to take you places in that case, although sometimes that means being ready for them to just not be interested in certain parts of the story.
Which isn't necessarily the case with Letizia Battaglia of Palermo, born in 1935, sent to a convent school by a controlling father, married at 16, and had three daughters, with the Mafia a part of the background noise, as was typical on the island of Sicily. She was 40 years old before walking into L'Ora to look for a job and winding up a photographer. She quickly became known for having a great eye, and also for not flinching in how she depicted organized crime (she photographed her first murder scene on her third day on the job). She would eventually enter politics with the Green Party, and her work would be seen as a crucial part of an unprecedented crackdown.
Some documentaries have a subject and some have a star, and there's no doubt that Battaglia fits in the latter category, she's famous, well-respected, and colorful and knows it. She's able to casually take charge of the film and bring out the respect and deference of those who talk about her, seldom seeming like she's bragging or ostentatiously self-deprecating. She doesn't seem to be bullying director Kim Longinotto or dictating what can or cannot be included in an obvious way; she just sits squarely at the center, telling stories she knows so well that they are somewhat hypnotic, so that the rest of the film has to work a bit harder.
As a result, the fact that Battalagia became a photographer and that she saw people connect to these pictures is the story, rather than the how of it. The film never seems to have as much of Letizia Battalagia's photography as it seems like it really "should", compared to others along similar lines. Longinotto seldom stops to comment on Battalagia's work as art and/or journalism, or call attention to a certain image being hers and what it represents as such. There are also noticeable gaps likely based upon what she was interested in talking about, and that means they have to work around it. For instance, there's not much about her time in politics, or when she wasn't active in either politics or photography, so she takes a step back during the big Mafia trials, letting those major events play out without her. It sometimes makes her feel like a convenient way to look at Sicily in general, rather than her, but it's always an odd thing when the main character is missing from the climax.
That doesn't leave a gap, because she is interesting enough to carry through, even if she never fits the confines of a conventional documentary easily. The people in her life talk about her with great affection, including a sometimes eyebrow-raising parade of younger photographers she took as lovers. Because she didn't pick up a camera until the age of 40, there's relatively little documentation of her early life, leading the filmmakers to fill in the gaps with film clips, which helps elevate her to a larger-than-life figure, confusing the heightened reality of the movie's techniques with the often dramatic life she would lead. It's intriguing and informative, but also shows you can't avoid myth-making.
Which is fine; a movie like this is about telling a big story lived by a big personality. What's left out, or given surprisingly little time, is unusual, but that doesn't make the rest any less interesting.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Lake Michigan Monster
* * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Fantasia Underground, digital)
Deliberate camp is awful most of the time, which is a fair description of Lake Michigan Monster, a tough slog for as long as the joke is looking at it and laughing at how low-rent it feels, but kind of fun once it finds itself more in the realm of the weird. Despite it only being 78 minutes long, it seems to take forever to make that jump, and I can't say that I found it worth the investment.
It is a story told by Captain Seafield (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), who hires a motley crew of specialists on his quest to kill the monster of the title, which he holds responsible for the death of his family. It is, in fact, motlier than most, as most seem fairly dangerously unstable. Of course, Seafield may be the kookiest of them, as he's not really a captain of anything - truth be told, he doesn't know the first thing about the sea (or, for that matter, large freshwater lakes), and quite honestly his experience is more field than sea.
When initially considering this movie, I couldn't help but think back to One Cut of the Dead, which was similarly painful for at least a third of its running time before suddenly switching gears in order to break out a last act that more than made up for the weak start, but the trick there was to really make use of absolutely everything that had been planted beforehand, retroactively making the early grind funnier. The bits that are awkwardly sprinkled into this movie's first half are obvious, and surrounded by things that aren't ever going to be more than "hey, isn't this dumb?" So it looks cheap and hammy, never really building to anything, and isn't going to be more. It's not only obvious but it slows down for stretches, trying to separate things that don't go together but not making great use of that time.
Fortunately, the filmmakers find various ways to dispense of its less necessary characters (as people making movies with "monster" in the title tend to do), and eventually just pares itself down to one man on a mission and between the no longer screwing around milking the same set of jokes on the one hand and a commitment to throwing a bunch of effects creative enough to not need every computational cycle a whole server farm can give on the other, the last stretch of the movie becomes a whole lot more fun. It's full of action, the randomness suddenly feels like its pushing in fun new directions, and Captain Seafield actually seems to give a damn about what's going on rather than just making the occasional arch-but-stupid remark.
It's still pretty dumb and campy by the end, but at least by that point it's asking is viewers to laugh at what it does well rather than what it's deliberately doing poorly, and that's a massive improvement. Creativity counts for a lot when you working on a shoestring, often much more than just letting the audience in on the joke.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Nochnoy Bog (Night God)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
As fusions of post-apocalyptic devastation and bureaucratic intransigence go, Night God is certainly arresting to look at and utterly committed to a level few films manage. It's also a reminder that, for however much truth there may be in this sort of vision of the future, it can be monotonous and ineffective once a viewer realizes that the cynicism is relatively unshakable. At a certain point, you don't add much by saying everything is a mess in the way that it has always been a mess and always will be, and how many ways can you say that?.
Sometime in the future, a man (Bajmurat Zhumanov) returns to his home village after the fall of civilization, wife and daughter Aliya (Aliya Yerzhanova) in tow, only to be treated as an outsider, held at gunpoint, and forced to produce proof that he belongs there. After all, one would not want to be caught outside, when otherworldly entities take control of the area.
Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov creates an art-house apocalypse, one which offers up a world without sunlight but has familiar sorts of authoritarian types in charge of the town our narrator returns to, still asking for forms and proof of identity even if they must be hand-written. An absurd situation develops involving live explosives and a TV game show, but it just redirects things back to the bureaucracy, and the stonewalling before anybody attempts to solve it is perfunctory, at least for an outsider; perhaps there are elements of satire that play out more entertainingly in his native land. It's perhaps fitting that this sort of entrenched administration doesn't really change, but it comes across as a sort of default position, and it as such doesn't demand a particular character to complement it or get ground down. Star Bajmurat Zhumanov turns in a performance that's just a little less generic than the scenario, half befuddled everyman and half not used to putting up with this, and does well by it.
The film has its greatest spark of life when the daughter who had been silent through much of the film finally has words for her father about how he and his generation's obedience and timidity wrecked the world, but the filmmakers don't really seem to have any desire to run with that in any interesting direction - indeed, they see nothing but Icarus in that sort of attitude. It's kind of a bummer, not just for the fatalism, but because Aliya Zainalova has been doing good work in the corners throughout the movie and her complete frustration with the idiocy of all this is easily the film's most relatable moment
It's a striking vision of this at least. It's the sort of world that exists easily on a soundstage, and the details of it can be hypnotic, from the snow that sparkles as it falls through a hole in seemingly every roof to the daughter's yellow jacket, which seems to change shade as more or less light is cast in a scene. It's very deliberately paced, with the getting from one thing to another often a bit of a dark slog, but the islands of insanity and style are perhaps all the sharper for that.
The film is fully committed to its pessimistic metaphors, probably to a fault, but it's impossible to miss the thought and craft used to place them on-screen. For all that there is undoubtedly truth in what Yerzhanov is upt to, the film could really use a few more moments when the characters do something concrete, even if it's futile, rather than just talk about how thinking is resistance. It's a fair poke at present circumstances, but not one that leads anywhere.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Koko-di Koko-da
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
I spent a little time talking about what one could do with time loops when discussing another film that played this same festival, The Incredible Shrinking Wknd, and watching Koko-di koko-da (the last syllable of which is pronounced "day") in such close succession was a fascinating example of how the same seemingly limited device could be used to different ends. This one, in particular, is impressive for how it manages to remain harrowing even when the viewer can reasonably expect what they see to be erased.
It opens with a small family - father Tobias (Leif Edlund), mother Elin (Ylva Gallon), and daughter Maja (Katarina Jakobson) - on a camping outing to celebrate Maja's 8th birthday. It's a fun outing, with Maja's face made up like a bunny, until something makes Elin violently ill while they're on the road far from a hospital. It looks like it's going to be fine, but then things take a turn. Three years pass before they take another camping trip, which seems ill-advised even without the characters straight out of nasty folklore that keep turning up.
The bulk of that happens within the first ten minutes or so, and while most who see it will likely come in with a little more idea of what's going on than someone building a full day's festival schedule without being too picky about it, it's still built to pull the rug out from the audience early enough that talking about the work of the cast may be seen as SPOILERS. The small core cast is reliably terrific, sketching out a good baseline so that the devastated versions of the characters that we see for the rest of the film exist in sharp relief. Lief Edlund is especially good, creating different flavors of desperation as his anxiety from the potential collapse of his family is pushed into heightened territory. It's a fine match for Ylva Gallon, who spends the back half of the movie making sure that the audience sees that Elin is a raw nerve with no idea how to direct what she's feeling. They get all the room they need to demonstrate this, with the rest of the cast creating memorable adversaries that never detract from the stars.
As they shouldn't; this is not a film about that sort of monster. Instead, Johannes Nyholm has made a film that plunges into the despair of grief on multiple fronts, and the combination of the contrast with "before", the Groundhog Day-style time loop that traps you in a fearful place, and the perversion of something mostly-unrelated into something you can no longer abide is something that rings true even as it also feels like too much. In some ways, even the things that don't quite fit feel like they have meaning by highlighting the contradiction: Even as time resets, for example, the seasons change, so that this is both a place where the family feels stuck and one where the repetition does not mean they can escape quickly from any perspective. The movie can be a grim sit, and for some the repeated violence is going to be too extreme even as a representation of traumatic emotions. (End of spoilers)
It is, by the end, clear where the film is going, but it certainly can seem like overkill as things become gruesome. And then, at other times, it doesn't seem like too much, and there's this weird ethereal beauty to the horror it represents, an exquisite pain or a fleeting glimpse of something better. The extended shadow-puppet sequences, for instance, are dark as can be but also feel like people struggling and healing. There's humanity to the film's monsters, if not too much, and something sad but real about the characters trying to readjust to something normal. For all that this movie can occasionally be too much, it doesn't leap straight over being effective on its way there.
The sense of being unable to escape from a terrible moment or feeling makes this sort of story a potent metaphor but also a trap, because the situation calls for audiences to examine their situation without it becoming a puzzle. It's a line Nyholm walks extremely well, even as he creates a film that is eerie on top of being scary. It's the rare film to have a foot in both the festival's arthouse and horror sections, fitting just as well in each.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Les Particules
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 July 2019 in Salle J.A. DeSève (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
I suspect that there are bits of Blaise Harrison's coming-of-age film that I don't quite catch; aside from my having been such a lame asexual teen that I have trouble connecting with these movies as an adult to begin with, both the specific details of their environment and the fantastic events they encounter seem like they're saying something just out of my reach. That may be a good thing - there's a certain arrogance in thinking that the experience of youth is universal or easily mapped between generations and locations, even if there often is something to recognize.despite that.
In this one, I wonder a bit what the film taking place on a border might mean to its European audiences, as the characters live in the town that is home to the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which straddles both France and Switzerland: Does going to an apparent international school with both French and Swiss students make a kid more likely to feel like they don't fit in? It seems like it would, at least relative to other stories of European youth, but it's not something I was able to pick up as playing out here. What does having this thing which brings people from around the world in (and under) your backyard mean when it's not something you can really grasp?
Of course, all of that goes hand-in-hand with the strange effects Pierre-André "P.A." Jasson (Thomas Daloz) sees playing out around him, presumably from some experiment being conducted at the LHC. He's the sort of kid that often gets lost in the background in high school, taking an early bus because transit doesn't get to his part of town quite as often as it should, hanging out with folks like scruffy Mérou (Salvatore Ferro) and trying to get the attention Léa (Emma Josserand), though winding up spending more time with the ailing Roshine (Néa Lüders). It's all very ordinary until Mérou vanishes during a camping trip, something which could be foul play, him lighting out for somewhere else, or maybe something to do with the destruction of the building blocks of reality underneath their feet.
That unfathomable science which appears to have strange manifestations aboveground becomes a potent metaphor, something beyond P.A.'s teenage aimlessness that he can't yet grasp, something distorting reality itself. It's often on the periphery, and it would probably take another viewing and some mulling over to see how far Harrison is going with this - the final shot suggests things coming together and smashing into more basic pieces, which may be how young people feel these days, placed in situations out of their control to see what happens, although it doesn't necessarily fit the rest of the film. Maybe it's something simpler, like understanding the world is founded on unknowable mysteries but that moving ahead means trying to solve what you can anyway.
It's a tough thing to embody, but I like the way star Thomas Daloz manages it. P.A. is not an especially active, charismatic character, but Daloz and the filmmakers give him worth to go along with his doubt, a good heart even as confusion often results in pettiness. He plays well off Salvatore Ferro as a similar best friend - it's a character that would often be pushed to be flagrantly eccentric rather than just off and dealing with things his own way - and Néa Lüders winds up quite charming as the girl who starts off as his second choice but proves quite winning. They integrate well into the world Harrison gives them, not playing into stock teen tropes but showing a surprising charm when they threaten to become disaffected bores.
And, perhaps, that's a bit of what Harrison (who has made a pair of documentary shorts following someone from teenager to manhood) and co-writer Mariette Désert (who collaborated on another look at disaffected French youth in Jessica Forever) are trying to get at: The next generation will always be dealing with a world full of advanced but banal science and seemingly inexplicable mysticism for which their parents who did not experience it can't prepare them, and not knowing is part of the challenge. It's definitely a film that I'd like to see at a better hour, and not just the fifth show in a very long day.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Showing posts with label true-crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label true-crime. Show all posts
Saturday, June 06, 2020
Tuesday, October 03, 2017
China/Hong Kong double feature: Never Say Die & Chasing the Dragon
I swear I saw a clip of Andy Lau doing a cameo in the preview for Sky Hunter, and, man, did that make it seem like he banked a whole lot of work before his January injury. Part of that is that The Great Wall hit the US a couple of months after China, but even without counting that one, Shockwave, The Adventurers, and Chasing the Dragon all came out in 2017 while Lau has been recuperating. I don't think it's actually him in Sky Hunter, but, still, the man was busy enough that folks might not know he was gone.
Anyway, after a couple of weeks of quiet on the Chinese movies playing America front, things got pretty busy with both Never Say Die and Chasing the Dragon playing Boston Common, and what looked like an even bigger weekend on tap before Feng Shaofeng's Youth was pulled from the release schedule in China (and, incidentally, the U.S.). It was going to be my third choice for Chinese movies anyway - it's got that propaganda look even if part of the reason it was delayed was that it presents history in too sad a light during a time period where the the PRC wants a lot of patriotism on display.
Looks like another busy weekend coming up, with Sky Hunter and City of Rock, with the second looking particularly interesting - it sure as heck looks like a Mainland-Chinese comedy with prominent gay characters, which I don't think I've seen yet, but it also looks like a trailer that's been cut deceptively (it really looks like a sentence that ends with "coming out" in the trailer was cut off there). It could wind up something else, but it's at least curious.
Aside from that, I was maybe a little extra disappointed with Never Say Die because, in addition to trying to catch a lot of Chinese films in general and having really enjoyed Goodbye Mr. Loser, I've got a particular fondness for gender-bender stories like this - aside from the fun slapstick possibilities, I kind of love the potential to tell the story about how someone who has had everything that he considers a basic part of his identity taken from him redefines himself/herself. I could, honestly, probably write at least a crappy first draft of an anthology film around the subject given a week or two (but probably shouldn't).
I wonder, though, if we're not rapidly passing the point where it's a viable thing to do well for a mainstream audience -at least, as something other than the theme of "some time as a woman makes you a better man". That's been the theme of most of these movies, because it's kind of universal and promises a return to the natural order at the end, but it kind of has them running on rails. Still, the very fact that the audience might be able to accept something other than gay panic jokes and having the whole film be about how to turn back now also means that they might be more conscious of how it's basically a movie about someone being assigned the wrong sex and why should they accept it any more if it happened because of a lightning-strike body swap than it happening at birth?
Doesn't have much to do with Never Say Die, which just outright avoids a lot of things, but there's a kind of funny irony to the idea that just as many possibilities as are added from loosening up might be closed by wising up.
Xiu Xiu De Tie Quan (Never Say Die)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 September 2017 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)
Mahua, the comedy troupe behind Never Say Die, is not terribly well known outside of China - you'll forgive me if I mess up names because it is frustratingly difficult to find an English-language site that matches actors to characters - but they're a funny group whose last movie (Goodbye Mr. Loser) may have made me laugh more than any other comedy from Mainland China. Their follow-up is only that funny in fits and starts, but it's got enough hilarious moments to recommend, especially since it seldom truly flops.
It opens with MMA fighter Edison (Allen Ai Lun) telling his opponent's manager that he's decided not to throw the fight unless she doubles his payoff, only to find out from his manager Dong (Song Yang) that he's overweight for a weigh-in for a real fight. One of the reporters, Ma Xiao (Mary Ma Li), has some tough questions about what happened in a match three years ago, and it looks like he might go after her except that her fiance, "Fighting King" Wu Liang (Tian Yu), steps in. He actually does chase after her when she accidentally reveals herself after recording Eidson and Dong making plans to throw a fight, and that's when they fall into the swimming pool and lightening strikes and, the next morning, they wake up not just in the hospital, but in each other's bodies.
As gender-bending body-swap comedies go, Never Say Die probably has to be graded on a scale that involves taking Chinese censorship into account; for all that the group goes for big, broad jokes throughout, they're only really racy for one short stretch toward the beginning, and though months pass with Eidson and Xiao swapped, it never seems like either something that weighs on them or a status quo they come to accept as permanent. It's probably worth a little examination that while Xiao learns to be a fighter and carry herself in a more masculine way in Edison's body, there's not really a complementary storyline where Edison finds some value in femininity; his story is basically stubbornness.
That's fine, though - though the traditional theme of this sort of movie is "some time as a woman might make you a better man", there's a sort of gleeful comedic recklessness in Xiao deciding that the reason the universe decided to switch their bodies was so that she'd have the opportunity to beat the crap out of her unfaithful boyfriend. The filmmakers (working from their own stage play) do a pretty fair job of setting up plenty of good connections between the four main characters and then playing out goofy situations, seldom worrying about going through them too quickly and generally stopping short of beating something into the ground. From an early scene where Edison and Xiao try to reverse things with really poorly considered use of tasers, they're able to use the body-swap as a means to let everybody in on knockabout slapstick, and there's just enough winking at the genre tropes being played with that Dong crying "to the mountaintop" to get Xiao/Edison some martial arts training is funny even before that starts a whole new round of physical comedy.
It's a set-up that gives Allen Ai, in particular, a lot of funny stuff to do, from being ready to fly off the handle as Edison to exaggerated femininity as Xiao, and a lot of material that is amusing no matter who the character he's playing is. Mary Ma Li certainly seems to be having a blast in her early scenes as Edison but, as mentioned, doesn't have nearly as strong a part as the film goes on; she and Ai do have a pretty nice chemistry that goes from warfare to friendship as the film goes on. Song Yang and Shen Tang get amusing secondary characters to play, and Tian Yu does nice work as Wu Liang, who has to be both a comic foil and a straight-out villain at various points.
Chinese comedies tend to be pretty hit-and-miss for me, both because they can only go so far in some areas and because some of the jokes are going to be pop-culture gags that I'm not going to get because only so much of the referenced material makes it near my eyeballs (there were a couple of bits that got the Mandarin-speaking crowd roaring that went over my head in the loud, obvious manner of a fighter-jet flyover). Even with that being the case, I got three or four belly-laughs out of "Never Say Die" and enjoyed most of it, despite all the spots I wished they'd pushed harder.
(Apparently-dead link to the original review on EFC)
Chui Lung (Chasing the Dragon)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 September 2017 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)
A large part of the buzz I saw on Chasing the Dragon was that it featured Donnie Yen in a role that was more "acting" than "action", but even though we know he's playing a character called "Crippled Ho", rest assured, he does a fair amount of punching and kicking in the first act. The rest of the film has a similar sort of stated ambition that ultimately delivers more conventional results, but given that the expected result is a Hong Kong crime movie with plenty of fistfighting and gunplay, that's not a bad fallback.
It starts in 1960, when Ng Sai Ho (Yen) is an illegal immigrant from Chaozhou living in a Hong Kong flophouse with a bunch of buddies whom he tells not to go to their construction job that night, because that pays $2 while helping fill out the crowd and maybe getting into a brawl as a couple of triad bosses face off pays $30. The trouble is, this showdown takes place outside the birthday party for Tong Ngan (Kent Tong Chun-yip), a rising star in the HKPD, and the British head of the riot police, Ernest Hunter (Bryan Larkin), is kind of looking for an excuse to beat up some Chinese after having a potential fight broken up by Inspector Lee Rock (Andy Lau Tin-lok). Rock is ambitious enough to develop into a rival - he's managed to climb socially by getting engaged to the daughter of a rich man - smart enough to see how much money there is to be made by streamlining and centralizing the corruption in the HKPD. The scrappy Ho, he sees, could be a useful ally - although both are perceptive enough to see that their partnership will inevitably be uneasy.
Seeing Andy Lau actually awake and engaged in a movie is well worth seeing Donnie Yen spending that same film in a goofy wig and a mustache that seems to take ten years to really fill in. Lau has had about a half-dozen movies make their way to release this year (impressive, considering he's spent much of it recovering from a broken back), but he's seemed to be running on autopilot in the likes of Shock Wave and The Adventurers; I'd been starting to forget why Lau is such a superstar in China. His Inspector Lee never really becomes a truly fascinating character, but there's something delightful about watching a face made for comedic affability demonstrate low cunning, or smile just a little too tightly and widely to communicate how he really despises Ngan. It's just the right sort of dubious decency over thoroughgoing amorality.
Lau's performance as the nominal hero of the piece allows Donnie Yen go a little bigger as Ho, going from simple man of the people to godfather and playing up the more operatic notes that implies. He's not quite actor enough to give Ho the gravitas that would make for a truly epic story, but he's able to pump a certain ferocity into a scene when it's needed. As one might expect from the character's full name, he's only got a couple of fight scenes, but it's neat to watch him go from reluctant to fierce, and then harness the impotence he feels after being crippled. Lau and Yen make a strong enough pair to keep a true-crime story that's more history lesson than thriller moving.
Part of that is that it looks great, spending most of its time in the seedy sections of a Hong Kong that was not yet a skyscraper-filled, neon-lit world city and dressing everybody up in garish 1960s/1970s fashions. The writing & directing team of Wong Jing teams and Jason Kwan (who also serves cinematographer), who between them have a terrific collective eye and come up with some fantastic visuals without being overly flashy for more than a second or two. It is, nevertheless, a movie packed full of visually impressive pieces: Take a big action scene in the Kowloon walled city; on it's own, the sort of fine shootout piece that one almost forgets that Hong Kong does better than anyone else, with great attention to geography, ruthless playing for high stakes, impressive work keeping track of three or four factions. Then Kwan lights the couple minutes of it with fireworks, creating a surreal glow on the faces of the characters for several minutes, a quiet way of showing that this moment is a fulcrum point without the characters underlining it with words, and a way to smoothly transition into a brief but pointed dream sequence that shows just how things will have changed when Ho wakes up from surgery. It's surprisingly deft management of tone, with Wong and Kwan knowing how and when to switch between the violence of an operatic mob picture and a fun genre programmer.
On top of that, while the film may not be nearly as "serious" as the initial buzz may have made it sound, it develops a few interesting subtexts, especially in terms of how the Hong Kong people of the time act as residents of a colony. Lau's Rock seems ambitious and sophisticated, but his deference to the British sometimes seems to go beyond what is strictly good politics, and while Yen's Crippled Ho is a local thug, he's arguably got a grander, less-subservient vision. It's something which simmers underneath as the nature of the criminal inevitably brings them into conflict, though maybe not enough to make Chasing the Dragon more than a nicely-mounted period crime movie; Wong and Kwan will often move from interesting material to whatever happened next without quite connecting them thematically, and the sudden introduction of ICAC (the colony's anti-corruption task force) makes for a somewhat anticlimactic ending.
True crime stories (or even exaggerated ones that have to exist within a historical record) can't help but be vulnerable to that; real life isn't obligated to follow a satisfying story arc. That said, it's still a bit of a return to form for Wong Jing and Andy Lau, an impressive directorial debut for Jason Kwan, and a movie that can hold some interest even when it drifts from either the criminal history or bloody action that a particular viewer came for.
(Apparently-dead link to the original review on EFC)
Anyway, after a couple of weeks of quiet on the Chinese movies playing America front, things got pretty busy with both Never Say Die and Chasing the Dragon playing Boston Common, and what looked like an even bigger weekend on tap before Feng Shaofeng's Youth was pulled from the release schedule in China (and, incidentally, the U.S.). It was going to be my third choice for Chinese movies anyway - it's got that propaganda look even if part of the reason it was delayed was that it presents history in too sad a light during a time period where the the PRC wants a lot of patriotism on display.
Looks like another busy weekend coming up, with Sky Hunter and City of Rock, with the second looking particularly interesting - it sure as heck looks like a Mainland-Chinese comedy with prominent gay characters, which I don't think I've seen yet, but it also looks like a trailer that's been cut deceptively (it really looks like a sentence that ends with "coming out" in the trailer was cut off there). It could wind up something else, but it's at least curious.
Aside from that, I was maybe a little extra disappointed with Never Say Die because, in addition to trying to catch a lot of Chinese films in general and having really enjoyed Goodbye Mr. Loser, I've got a particular fondness for gender-bender stories like this - aside from the fun slapstick possibilities, I kind of love the potential to tell the story about how someone who has had everything that he considers a basic part of his identity taken from him redefines himself/herself. I could, honestly, probably write at least a crappy first draft of an anthology film around the subject given a week or two (but probably shouldn't).
I wonder, though, if we're not rapidly passing the point where it's a viable thing to do well for a mainstream audience -at least, as something other than the theme of "some time as a woman makes you a better man". That's been the theme of most of these movies, because it's kind of universal and promises a return to the natural order at the end, but it kind of has them running on rails. Still, the very fact that the audience might be able to accept something other than gay panic jokes and having the whole film be about how to turn back now also means that they might be more conscious of how it's basically a movie about someone being assigned the wrong sex and why should they accept it any more if it happened because of a lightning-strike body swap than it happening at birth?
Doesn't have much to do with Never Say Die, which just outright avoids a lot of things, but there's a kind of funny irony to the idea that just as many possibilities as are added from loosening up might be closed by wising up.
Xiu Xiu De Tie Quan (Never Say Die)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 September 2017 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)
Mahua, the comedy troupe behind Never Say Die, is not terribly well known outside of China - you'll forgive me if I mess up names because it is frustratingly difficult to find an English-language site that matches actors to characters - but they're a funny group whose last movie (Goodbye Mr. Loser) may have made me laugh more than any other comedy from Mainland China. Their follow-up is only that funny in fits and starts, but it's got enough hilarious moments to recommend, especially since it seldom truly flops.
It opens with MMA fighter Edison (Allen Ai Lun) telling his opponent's manager that he's decided not to throw the fight unless she doubles his payoff, only to find out from his manager Dong (Song Yang) that he's overweight for a weigh-in for a real fight. One of the reporters, Ma Xiao (Mary Ma Li), has some tough questions about what happened in a match three years ago, and it looks like he might go after her except that her fiance, "Fighting King" Wu Liang (Tian Yu), steps in. He actually does chase after her when she accidentally reveals herself after recording Eidson and Dong making plans to throw a fight, and that's when they fall into the swimming pool and lightening strikes and, the next morning, they wake up not just in the hospital, but in each other's bodies.
As gender-bending body-swap comedies go, Never Say Die probably has to be graded on a scale that involves taking Chinese censorship into account; for all that the group goes for big, broad jokes throughout, they're only really racy for one short stretch toward the beginning, and though months pass with Eidson and Xiao swapped, it never seems like either something that weighs on them or a status quo they come to accept as permanent. It's probably worth a little examination that while Xiao learns to be a fighter and carry herself in a more masculine way in Edison's body, there's not really a complementary storyline where Edison finds some value in femininity; his story is basically stubbornness.
That's fine, though - though the traditional theme of this sort of movie is "some time as a woman might make you a better man", there's a sort of gleeful comedic recklessness in Xiao deciding that the reason the universe decided to switch their bodies was so that she'd have the opportunity to beat the crap out of her unfaithful boyfriend. The filmmakers (working from their own stage play) do a pretty fair job of setting up plenty of good connections between the four main characters and then playing out goofy situations, seldom worrying about going through them too quickly and generally stopping short of beating something into the ground. From an early scene where Edison and Xiao try to reverse things with really poorly considered use of tasers, they're able to use the body-swap as a means to let everybody in on knockabout slapstick, and there's just enough winking at the genre tropes being played with that Dong crying "to the mountaintop" to get Xiao/Edison some martial arts training is funny even before that starts a whole new round of physical comedy.
It's a set-up that gives Allen Ai, in particular, a lot of funny stuff to do, from being ready to fly off the handle as Edison to exaggerated femininity as Xiao, and a lot of material that is amusing no matter who the character he's playing is. Mary Ma Li certainly seems to be having a blast in her early scenes as Edison but, as mentioned, doesn't have nearly as strong a part as the film goes on; she and Ai do have a pretty nice chemistry that goes from warfare to friendship as the film goes on. Song Yang and Shen Tang get amusing secondary characters to play, and Tian Yu does nice work as Wu Liang, who has to be both a comic foil and a straight-out villain at various points.
Chinese comedies tend to be pretty hit-and-miss for me, both because they can only go so far in some areas and because some of the jokes are going to be pop-culture gags that I'm not going to get because only so much of the referenced material makes it near my eyeballs (there were a couple of bits that got the Mandarin-speaking crowd roaring that went over my head in the loud, obvious manner of a fighter-jet flyover). Even with that being the case, I got three or four belly-laughs out of "Never Say Die" and enjoyed most of it, despite all the spots I wished they'd pushed harder.
(Apparently-dead link to the original review on EFC)
Chui Lung (Chasing the Dragon)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 September 2017 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)
A large part of the buzz I saw on Chasing the Dragon was that it featured Donnie Yen in a role that was more "acting" than "action", but even though we know he's playing a character called "Crippled Ho", rest assured, he does a fair amount of punching and kicking in the first act. The rest of the film has a similar sort of stated ambition that ultimately delivers more conventional results, but given that the expected result is a Hong Kong crime movie with plenty of fistfighting and gunplay, that's not a bad fallback.
It starts in 1960, when Ng Sai Ho (Yen) is an illegal immigrant from Chaozhou living in a Hong Kong flophouse with a bunch of buddies whom he tells not to go to their construction job that night, because that pays $2 while helping fill out the crowd and maybe getting into a brawl as a couple of triad bosses face off pays $30. The trouble is, this showdown takes place outside the birthday party for Tong Ngan (Kent Tong Chun-yip), a rising star in the HKPD, and the British head of the riot police, Ernest Hunter (Bryan Larkin), is kind of looking for an excuse to beat up some Chinese after having a potential fight broken up by Inspector Lee Rock (Andy Lau Tin-lok). Rock is ambitious enough to develop into a rival - he's managed to climb socially by getting engaged to the daughter of a rich man - smart enough to see how much money there is to be made by streamlining and centralizing the corruption in the HKPD. The scrappy Ho, he sees, could be a useful ally - although both are perceptive enough to see that their partnership will inevitably be uneasy.
Seeing Andy Lau actually awake and engaged in a movie is well worth seeing Donnie Yen spending that same film in a goofy wig and a mustache that seems to take ten years to really fill in. Lau has had about a half-dozen movies make their way to release this year (impressive, considering he's spent much of it recovering from a broken back), but he's seemed to be running on autopilot in the likes of Shock Wave and The Adventurers; I'd been starting to forget why Lau is such a superstar in China. His Inspector Lee never really becomes a truly fascinating character, but there's something delightful about watching a face made for comedic affability demonstrate low cunning, or smile just a little too tightly and widely to communicate how he really despises Ngan. It's just the right sort of dubious decency over thoroughgoing amorality.
Lau's performance as the nominal hero of the piece allows Donnie Yen go a little bigger as Ho, going from simple man of the people to godfather and playing up the more operatic notes that implies. He's not quite actor enough to give Ho the gravitas that would make for a truly epic story, but he's able to pump a certain ferocity into a scene when it's needed. As one might expect from the character's full name, he's only got a couple of fight scenes, but it's neat to watch him go from reluctant to fierce, and then harness the impotence he feels after being crippled. Lau and Yen make a strong enough pair to keep a true-crime story that's more history lesson than thriller moving.
Part of that is that it looks great, spending most of its time in the seedy sections of a Hong Kong that was not yet a skyscraper-filled, neon-lit world city and dressing everybody up in garish 1960s/1970s fashions. The writing & directing team of Wong Jing teams and Jason Kwan (who also serves cinematographer), who between them have a terrific collective eye and come up with some fantastic visuals without being overly flashy for more than a second or two. It is, nevertheless, a movie packed full of visually impressive pieces: Take a big action scene in the Kowloon walled city; on it's own, the sort of fine shootout piece that one almost forgets that Hong Kong does better than anyone else, with great attention to geography, ruthless playing for high stakes, impressive work keeping track of three or four factions. Then Kwan lights the couple minutes of it with fireworks, creating a surreal glow on the faces of the characters for several minutes, a quiet way of showing that this moment is a fulcrum point without the characters underlining it with words, and a way to smoothly transition into a brief but pointed dream sequence that shows just how things will have changed when Ho wakes up from surgery. It's surprisingly deft management of tone, with Wong and Kwan knowing how and when to switch between the violence of an operatic mob picture and a fun genre programmer.
On top of that, while the film may not be nearly as "serious" as the initial buzz may have made it sound, it develops a few interesting subtexts, especially in terms of how the Hong Kong people of the time act as residents of a colony. Lau's Rock seems ambitious and sophisticated, but his deference to the British sometimes seems to go beyond what is strictly good politics, and while Yen's Crippled Ho is a local thug, he's arguably got a grander, less-subservient vision. It's something which simmers underneath as the nature of the criminal inevitably brings them into conflict, though maybe not enough to make Chasing the Dragon more than a nicely-mounted period crime movie; Wong and Kwan will often move from interesting material to whatever happened next without quite connecting them thematically, and the sudden introduction of ICAC (the colony's anti-corruption task force) makes for a somewhat anticlimactic ending.
True crime stories (or even exaggerated ones that have to exist within a historical record) can't help but be vulnerable to that; real life isn't obligated to follow a satisfying story arc. That said, it's still a bit of a return to form for Wong Jing and Andy Lau, an impressive directorial debut for Jason Kwan, and a movie that can hold some interest even when it drifts from either the criminal history or bloody action that a particular viewer came for.
(Apparently-dead link to the original review on EFC)
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
Plans A & B: Legend and Krampus
The plan on Saturday was to catch Krampus at the Regal in Fenway on Saturday and then Chi-Raq at AMC on Sunday - making plans around MoviePass's restrictions can lead to stuff like that - but that got messed up when the former sold out before I could purchase tickets, even though there was a good fifteen, twenty minutes before the showtime and the lobby didn't exactly look full when I was there. I'm kind of getting concerned about their seat upgrades - it's been going on for about three months now, and they're only up to eight screens in use, and I wonder just how much capacity they've sacrificed for reserved seating in big, comfy recliners, and how much the price will go up to make up the difference.
Still, I'd been planning to get to Legend anyway, and it's a lot of fun, enough that even when I started recognizing the same frustration I had with Black Mass and, indeed, most gangster movies - they tend to be a list of memorable incidents rather than an actual story - it's at least got Tom Hardy being memorable, which counts for a lot. Krampus has a bit of a similar issue, in that like a lot of horror movies it's sort of an assembly of decent ideas for scares that doesn't quite come together - but it's also got a cast that I really liked more than I was expecting. It's kind of rare for a horror movie to really seem to want the audience to like it's characters - it seems far more common to come up with ways that their passing won't be mourned - so the realization that I was rapidly growing fond of even the cousins built to be obnoxious was kind of exciting.
So, neither one is perfect, but both have something worth recommending. That's a pretty good weekend at the movies.
Legend
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 December 2015 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)
One of my favorite ways to mess around during awards season and make the point that determining the winners is not nearly so important as shining a light on noteworthy achievements is finding a way to suggest nominating folks with dual rules in a film twice. I am extremely tempted to do that with Legend, because just one Tom Hardy is probably twice as much roguish charm as most gangster movies can muster, and doubling up on that presents the potential for something spectacular. It's also something that the rest of the film can't compete with, a problem since this isn't one of those performance-capture things where Hardy can play every role.
He can play Reginald and Ronald Kray, though. Gangsters in London's East End in the 1960s, they form sharp contrasts - Reggie is brilliant, tactical, and enjoys hobnobbing with the celebrities who come to his club & casino to get close to danger; Ron is a mentally-unstable thug who really enjoys the parts of being a gangster that involve violence. They're not natural rivals - when the younger sister of Reggie's driver catches his eye, Ron isn't envious; he likes the lads, after all. Still, this Frances Shea (Emily Browning) is more interested in the glamorous surface of the club business than the linked crime, Ron is none too fond of the fellow handling their books (David Thewlis), nor the idea of working for the American mob. Oh, and then there's the Scotland Yard detective (Christopher Eccleston) who's been trying to put them away for years.
Though writer/director Brian Helgeland is American, this being based on a true story explains a lot about Guy Ritchie and the other folks making offbeat British gangster movies - with these guys as a model, it's no wonder those fims are darkly comic and frequently show a flair for the absurd, as there seems to be a great deal of that too the Krays, especially compared to the businesslike Americans who show up. There's no shortage of bizarre and larger-than-life anecdotes to build a movie around, and Helgeland does a fine job of connecting each to the next, from the first scenes of Reggie trading the trail that Scotland Yard has put on him to Ron's later excesses. It's breezy as real-life gangster stories go, admittedly glossing over the day-to-day violence to keep things entertaining.
Full review on EFC.
Krampus
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 December 2015 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)
There's another horror movie featuring the titular dark shadow of Santa Claus out this holiday season (A Christmas Horror Story), and it's perhaps telling that neither group of filmmakers saw this monster as carrying a whole movie. In A Christmas Horror Story, he's basically one selection in an anthology; here he's more or less a final boss for the heroes to face after everything else. It's a smart choice; Krampus may be a nasty piece of work, but it's the lead-up to him that makes this particular movie a whole lot of fun.
As things begin, it's already a rough holiday season for the Engel family; father Tom (Adam Scott) is overworked, and his wife Sarah (Toni Collette) is frustrated with that and busting her hump making preparations for festivities that she knows will not be appreciated by her sister Linda (Allison Tolman) and her husband Howard (David Koechner), not to mention their uncouth children. These cousins coming over has teenage daughter Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen) wanting time away from her family even more, and even son Max (Emjay Anthony), who loves Christmas as much as his German grandmother/"Omi" (Krista Stadler), is getting into fights at the holiday pageant. The fact that his heart is in the right place may be what proves dangerous in this case, as his torn-up letter to Santa drifts into sinister hands and a strange blizzard strikes their neighborhood.
The film opens with scenes of Black Friday-esque madness at a shopping mall, ironically accompanied by classic mellow Christmas music, but even then there is the sense that the knives are not out and sharpened to the extent that they perhaps could be; these images are familiar and director Michael Dougherty stages them with an eye toward getting a laugh, but from the very start, he's attacking the film from the angle that Christmas is worth saving, and that there is something good in all the frustrations that go along with it. Maybe he and his co-writers shouldn't; maybe it would be a sharper story if Max's dedication seemed hopelessly native and he had to really fight everything to being back the spirit of Christmas (or, with this being a horror movie, ultimately lose it himself). Just looking at the themes in play, this seems like it would be the smart move.
Full review on EFC.
Still, I'd been planning to get to Legend anyway, and it's a lot of fun, enough that even when I started recognizing the same frustration I had with Black Mass and, indeed, most gangster movies - they tend to be a list of memorable incidents rather than an actual story - it's at least got Tom Hardy being memorable, which counts for a lot. Krampus has a bit of a similar issue, in that like a lot of horror movies it's sort of an assembly of decent ideas for scares that doesn't quite come together - but it's also got a cast that I really liked more than I was expecting. It's kind of rare for a horror movie to really seem to want the audience to like it's characters - it seems far more common to come up with ways that their passing won't be mourned - so the realization that I was rapidly growing fond of even the cousins built to be obnoxious was kind of exciting.
So, neither one is perfect, but both have something worth recommending. That's a pretty good weekend at the movies.
Legend
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 December 2015 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)
One of my favorite ways to mess around during awards season and make the point that determining the winners is not nearly so important as shining a light on noteworthy achievements is finding a way to suggest nominating folks with dual rules in a film twice. I am extremely tempted to do that with Legend, because just one Tom Hardy is probably twice as much roguish charm as most gangster movies can muster, and doubling up on that presents the potential for something spectacular. It's also something that the rest of the film can't compete with, a problem since this isn't one of those performance-capture things where Hardy can play every role.
He can play Reginald and Ronald Kray, though. Gangsters in London's East End in the 1960s, they form sharp contrasts - Reggie is brilliant, tactical, and enjoys hobnobbing with the celebrities who come to his club & casino to get close to danger; Ron is a mentally-unstable thug who really enjoys the parts of being a gangster that involve violence. They're not natural rivals - when the younger sister of Reggie's driver catches his eye, Ron isn't envious; he likes the lads, after all. Still, this Frances Shea (Emily Browning) is more interested in the glamorous surface of the club business than the linked crime, Ron is none too fond of the fellow handling their books (David Thewlis), nor the idea of working for the American mob. Oh, and then there's the Scotland Yard detective (Christopher Eccleston) who's been trying to put them away for years.
Though writer/director Brian Helgeland is American, this being based on a true story explains a lot about Guy Ritchie and the other folks making offbeat British gangster movies - with these guys as a model, it's no wonder those fims are darkly comic and frequently show a flair for the absurd, as there seems to be a great deal of that too the Krays, especially compared to the businesslike Americans who show up. There's no shortage of bizarre and larger-than-life anecdotes to build a movie around, and Helgeland does a fine job of connecting each to the next, from the first scenes of Reggie trading the trail that Scotland Yard has put on him to Ron's later excesses. It's breezy as real-life gangster stories go, admittedly glossing over the day-to-day violence to keep things entertaining.
Full review on EFC.
Krampus
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 December 2015 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)
There's another horror movie featuring the titular dark shadow of Santa Claus out this holiday season (A Christmas Horror Story), and it's perhaps telling that neither group of filmmakers saw this monster as carrying a whole movie. In A Christmas Horror Story, he's basically one selection in an anthology; here he's more or less a final boss for the heroes to face after everything else. It's a smart choice; Krampus may be a nasty piece of work, but it's the lead-up to him that makes this particular movie a whole lot of fun.
As things begin, it's already a rough holiday season for the Engel family; father Tom (Adam Scott) is overworked, and his wife Sarah (Toni Collette) is frustrated with that and busting her hump making preparations for festivities that she knows will not be appreciated by her sister Linda (Allison Tolman) and her husband Howard (David Koechner), not to mention their uncouth children. These cousins coming over has teenage daughter Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen) wanting time away from her family even more, and even son Max (Emjay Anthony), who loves Christmas as much as his German grandmother/"Omi" (Krista Stadler), is getting into fights at the holiday pageant. The fact that his heart is in the right place may be what proves dangerous in this case, as his torn-up letter to Santa drifts into sinister hands and a strange blizzard strikes their neighborhood.
The film opens with scenes of Black Friday-esque madness at a shopping mall, ironically accompanied by classic mellow Christmas music, but even then there is the sense that the knives are not out and sharpened to the extent that they perhaps could be; these images are familiar and director Michael Dougherty stages them with an eye toward getting a laugh, but from the very start, he's attacking the film from the angle that Christmas is worth saving, and that there is something good in all the frustrations that go along with it. Maybe he and his co-writers shouldn't; maybe it would be a sharper story if Max's dedication seemed hopelessly native and he had to really fight everything to being back the spirit of Christmas (or, with this being a horror movie, ultimately lose it himself). Just looking at the themes in play, this seems like it would be the smart move.
Full review on EFC.
Saturday, October 03, 2015
Saving Mr. Wu
After writing up a review of Lost in Hong Kong last week, I noticed a few tweets saying that the lack of reporting on its box office was a sign of how the movie business and those reporting on it were being blinded by certain prejudices, and it took a little digging to find that its success in China was huge - $100M for a comedy in September, which is more or less unheard of anywhere, with success at that order of magnitude generally only being found by Hollywood pictures in America. One thing noted by many of those articles, though, was that it might not have a long run as the sole juggernaut at the top of the charts because of some things arriving the next week, like Saving Mr. Wu.
If the turnout in China mirrors that in Boston, then it's not a huge threat; the crowd was decent, but not the "holy crap, this is selling theaters out like a massive Hollywood hit" of the previous week. Still, it's starting to feel weird copying the reviews of these movies to a mailing list about independent film; they may fit that group's definition of small releases, but they're big mainstream hits in a country with three times America's population.
I initially mentioned a certain inside joke within the review, but wound up removing that because I wasn't entirely sure it was as clever as I thought it might be and because speculating might give something away, though I can still do it here while warning of...
SPOILERS!
At one point, Zhang Hua says that they originally thought they had kidnapped Andy Lau. Not only is Lau playing Mr. Wu, but I believe the Mr. Wu in question is playing the cop - in the subtitles, Wu's given name is scrupulously avoided, although another review I read points out that the actor abducted in 2004 was one Wu Ruofu, who is listed in the cast as one of the cops. Interesting that Wu didn't play himself, although in some ways I can't blame him - why put yourself through multiple takes of replicating the worst day of your life?
Or it could just be someone with a very similar name. If it is him, though, I wonder if that's something the Chinese audience might have found too cute, best appreciated when recognized after-the-fact. Heck of a resource for Lau to have on the same set if it is, though.
!SRELIOPS
All in all, pretty good, and it's always nice to see the thrillers and action/adventure movies start to make it over here as fast as the romantic comedies and youth dramas are.
Jie jiu wu xian sheng (Saving Mr.Wu)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2015 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)
It's often said, by those longing for a past golden age, that the movies were better decades ago when filmmakers had to deal with restrictions, whether imposed by the industry or communities - from pressure, the argument goes, diamonds are formed. There's some merit to this line of thinking, but watching it being applied in China can be a bit disheartening, as the Hong Kong filmmakers with a great legacy of gritty, uncompromising crime stories must deal with a government edict that Crime Does Not Pay to get access to that billion-person mainland audience. If Saving Mr. Wu weren't based upon actual events, it would probably be frustrating to watch, because it often seems to be built around dealing with a foregone conclusion as much as telling the story in the most exciting way possible.
Mr. Wu (Andy Lau), in this case, is an actor from Hong Kong in Beijing to sign a contract to appear in a new movie. He's exiting a club when a man flashing a badge tells him that his car was involved in a hit-and-run, and would he please come down to the station to clear it up? Things get a little rough, and it's soon clear that this guy is no cop. Some days later, this Zhang Hua (Wang Qianyuan) is in a police station, restrained as investigators Xing (Liu Ye) and Cao (Wu Ruofu) interrogate him. They note that Hua is watching the clock, meaning his confederates probably have orders to kill Wu and another hostage, Xiao Dou (Cai Lu), if he has not contacted them by a certain time.
There are a number of reasons why writer/director Ding Sheng (an up-and-comer known for some of Jackie Chan's more notable recent films) might decide to present his story in non-linear fashion; for one thing, it keeps both Wu and the detectives in the film as constant presences, rather than having Xing and Cao push him to the background later on. Hua's capture by the police being inevitable, just part of the rules of the genre as far as Chinese cinema is concerned, probably figures into it at some level, though - if the audience knows something is going to happen, do it quick, so that the audience can spend some time wondering how things got from A to B and hopefully having the suspense from both tracks add up when one finally catches up with the other. Ding does okay by that, although what gets said in the interrogation room does make the road to it a bit less exciting on occasion, though the uncertainty about how things are lining up does give the finale a bit more pop.
Of course, the Chinese audience more in tune with their entertainment business and the stories that go with it will get the benefit of one of the more impressively self-referential jokes a film like this can have, as Hua tells one of the cops that they thought they'd grabbed Andy Lau at first. Nobody should have any complaints about the job Andy Lau does with the part. In his hands, Wu is an approachable celebrity rather than the egotist he might be in other movies; he can talk about rich-person issues like doing business in both Hong Kong and China without seeming disconnected. Lau spends most of the movie balancing this guy's natural terror with a brain that's constantly working - he is an army veteran who works at making a good impression as an actor, after all, so he's going to try and use those qualities to try and find a way out of this situation - but does some of his best work as things come to a head, showing a ton of raw emotion without many words.
For as great and well-known as Lau is, Wang Qianyuan may be the actual star of the show, though, if only for being the guy who is a constant as the film jumps back and forth in time early on. Zhang Hua is a monster, likely as dangerous to his fellow crooks as he is to his victims, and Wang builds the guy up as utterly amoral without actually having to act that way in an overt fashion. His weathered face and ready response to whatever happens marks him as working-class but too independent to take orders from anyone else, and while there's a bit of a sneer to how he speaks with anybody who might consider themselves above him, it's free enough from mustache-twirling that the casual way he carries a grenade or tosses guns around gives a little jolt each time - he's smart and meticulous enough that the moments where clearly doesn't give a damn are shocking.
With those two anchoring a very capable cast, Ding builds a pretty capable crime story. Saving Mr. Wu is procedural as opposed to being built around its action scenes - although those are very nicely executed when the time comes - instead focusing on people picking up on details, maybe playing out how things may go in their heads, and how simple uncompromising process is generally the most effective, even if it's not best in certain ways. Though subject to mainland constraints, it still retains a bit of Hong Kong flavor - Ding makes neither the kidnappers nor the cops appear slick or glamorous - even Wu's circle seems to have more rough edges than movie stars and their retinue often do - although I do wonder if Ding has slipped a bit of subversive ideas in there: The completely immobilizing chair where Zhang Hua is chained for much of his interrogation is a memorable image, welded together in a way that seems both crude and standard, the sort of overkill usually used for the Hannibal Lecter types as opposed to something in every interview room. And, could this have happened at all if the police weren't expected to be bullying and violent?
It may be a mistake to read too much into it; this just may have been the way things happened, with Ding Sheng and company telling the story faithfully, and anything a viewer finds under the surface likely being something he or she brought to the film.rather than what Ding put there. Even if that is the case, Saving Mr. Wu has a very nice surface, and may even prove more suspenseful outside of China where the incident that inspired it is not so well-known.
(Formerly at EFC)
If the turnout in China mirrors that in Boston, then it's not a huge threat; the crowd was decent, but not the "holy crap, this is selling theaters out like a massive Hollywood hit" of the previous week. Still, it's starting to feel weird copying the reviews of these movies to a mailing list about independent film; they may fit that group's definition of small releases, but they're big mainstream hits in a country with three times America's population.
I initially mentioned a certain inside joke within the review, but wound up removing that because I wasn't entirely sure it was as clever as I thought it might be and because speculating might give something away, though I can still do it here while warning of...
SPOILERS!
At one point, Zhang Hua says that they originally thought they had kidnapped Andy Lau. Not only is Lau playing Mr. Wu, but I believe the Mr. Wu in question is playing the cop - in the subtitles, Wu's given name is scrupulously avoided, although another review I read points out that the actor abducted in 2004 was one Wu Ruofu, who is listed in the cast as one of the cops. Interesting that Wu didn't play himself, although in some ways I can't blame him - why put yourself through multiple takes of replicating the worst day of your life?
Or it could just be someone with a very similar name. If it is him, though, I wonder if that's something the Chinese audience might have found too cute, best appreciated when recognized after-the-fact. Heck of a resource for Lau to have on the same set if it is, though.
!SRELIOPS
All in all, pretty good, and it's always nice to see the thrillers and action/adventure movies start to make it over here as fast as the romantic comedies and youth dramas are.
Jie jiu wu xian sheng (Saving Mr.Wu)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2015 in AMC Boston Common #19 (first-run, DCP)
It's often said, by those longing for a past golden age, that the movies were better decades ago when filmmakers had to deal with restrictions, whether imposed by the industry or communities - from pressure, the argument goes, diamonds are formed. There's some merit to this line of thinking, but watching it being applied in China can be a bit disheartening, as the Hong Kong filmmakers with a great legacy of gritty, uncompromising crime stories must deal with a government edict that Crime Does Not Pay to get access to that billion-person mainland audience. If Saving Mr. Wu weren't based upon actual events, it would probably be frustrating to watch, because it often seems to be built around dealing with a foregone conclusion as much as telling the story in the most exciting way possible.
Mr. Wu (Andy Lau), in this case, is an actor from Hong Kong in Beijing to sign a contract to appear in a new movie. He's exiting a club when a man flashing a badge tells him that his car was involved in a hit-and-run, and would he please come down to the station to clear it up? Things get a little rough, and it's soon clear that this guy is no cop. Some days later, this Zhang Hua (Wang Qianyuan) is in a police station, restrained as investigators Xing (Liu Ye) and Cao (Wu Ruofu) interrogate him. They note that Hua is watching the clock, meaning his confederates probably have orders to kill Wu and another hostage, Xiao Dou (Cai Lu), if he has not contacted them by a certain time.
There are a number of reasons why writer/director Ding Sheng (an up-and-comer known for some of Jackie Chan's more notable recent films) might decide to present his story in non-linear fashion; for one thing, it keeps both Wu and the detectives in the film as constant presences, rather than having Xing and Cao push him to the background later on. Hua's capture by the police being inevitable, just part of the rules of the genre as far as Chinese cinema is concerned, probably figures into it at some level, though - if the audience knows something is going to happen, do it quick, so that the audience can spend some time wondering how things got from A to B and hopefully having the suspense from both tracks add up when one finally catches up with the other. Ding does okay by that, although what gets said in the interrogation room does make the road to it a bit less exciting on occasion, though the uncertainty about how things are lining up does give the finale a bit more pop.
Of course, the Chinese audience more in tune with their entertainment business and the stories that go with it will get the benefit of one of the more impressively self-referential jokes a film like this can have, as Hua tells one of the cops that they thought they'd grabbed Andy Lau at first. Nobody should have any complaints about the job Andy Lau does with the part. In his hands, Wu is an approachable celebrity rather than the egotist he might be in other movies; he can talk about rich-person issues like doing business in both Hong Kong and China without seeming disconnected. Lau spends most of the movie balancing this guy's natural terror with a brain that's constantly working - he is an army veteran who works at making a good impression as an actor, after all, so he's going to try and use those qualities to try and find a way out of this situation - but does some of his best work as things come to a head, showing a ton of raw emotion without many words.
For as great and well-known as Lau is, Wang Qianyuan may be the actual star of the show, though, if only for being the guy who is a constant as the film jumps back and forth in time early on. Zhang Hua is a monster, likely as dangerous to his fellow crooks as he is to his victims, and Wang builds the guy up as utterly amoral without actually having to act that way in an overt fashion. His weathered face and ready response to whatever happens marks him as working-class but too independent to take orders from anyone else, and while there's a bit of a sneer to how he speaks with anybody who might consider themselves above him, it's free enough from mustache-twirling that the casual way he carries a grenade or tosses guns around gives a little jolt each time - he's smart and meticulous enough that the moments where clearly doesn't give a damn are shocking.
With those two anchoring a very capable cast, Ding builds a pretty capable crime story. Saving Mr. Wu is procedural as opposed to being built around its action scenes - although those are very nicely executed when the time comes - instead focusing on people picking up on details, maybe playing out how things may go in their heads, and how simple uncompromising process is generally the most effective, even if it's not best in certain ways. Though subject to mainland constraints, it still retains a bit of Hong Kong flavor - Ding makes neither the kidnappers nor the cops appear slick or glamorous - even Wu's circle seems to have more rough edges than movie stars and their retinue often do - although I do wonder if Ding has slipped a bit of subversive ideas in there: The completely immobilizing chair where Zhang Hua is chained for much of his interrogation is a memorable image, welded together in a way that seems both crude and standard, the sort of overkill usually used for the Hannibal Lecter types as opposed to something in every interview room. And, could this have happened at all if the police weren't expected to be bullying and violent?
It may be a mistake to read too much into it; this just may have been the way things happened, with Ding Sheng and company telling the story faithfully, and anything a viewer finds under the surface likely being something he or she brought to the film.rather than what Ding put there. Even if that is the case, Saving Mr. Wu has a very nice surface, and may even prove more suspenseful outside of China where the incident that inspired it is not so well-known.
(Formerly at EFC)
Monday, July 21, 2008
Fantasia 2008, Day Eighteen: 1968 Tunnel Rats, Muay Thai Chaiya, Voice of a Murderer, Alone, and Pig Hunt
Today's my last day in Montreal - I leave on the 8am bus tomorrow - and it has been a blast. My only regret is that between trying to get two or three reviews up a day and doing some work for the day job, I wound up not getting to go out and about nearly as much as I would have liked. I'm not sure what the "right" way to do a festival is - I kind of feel obligated to see as many movies as I can and spread the word on them if they're going to give me a media pass, but I have spent way too much time in this apartment typing on a computer.
Ah, well. I've got the place rented through next month, so I'll probably take an unclaimed weekend and just see the city with no obligations at some point.
Today's plan: The Moss, Going by the Book, Dance of the Dead, and probably Tokyo Gore Police, though I might decide I want to end the fest on Dance of the Dead and make sure I get enough sleep to wake up early tomorrow. If you're in town, Alone and La Tueur are good today and The Midnight Meat Train is good tomorrow.
1968 Tunnel Rats
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
So, has this whole "Uwe Boll is quite possibly the worst filmmaker ever!" been an elaborate hoax? I haven't seen any of his videogame-derived movies, which are apparenty unbearably awful, but Tunnel Rats is a pretty solid piece of work. It has a little trouble getting started - the scenes in the camp where we try to get to know a dozen or so characters in very little time wiht not-always-fitting music aren't great - but once it gets down into the tunnels, it's a pretty tense bit of work.
Of course, it seems to still be a bit of a work in progress, as there was just a black placeholder screen for the end credits, so perhaps there's time for him to screw it up yet.
Chaiya (Muay Thai Chaiya)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I'm not generally a fan of boxing films; even so-called classics of the genre leave me cold. Because, let's face it - boxing is about violence and fighting as an end unto itself, and while it's one thing to engage in it for physical fitness or self defense, it's hardly surprising when boxers wind up entangled in crime and thuggery. At that point, it's a question of how compelling the filmmakers make the details and how much style they bring to the story. While Chaiya doesn't stand out too much on the first front, it is exceptional on the second.
We start with three friends in rural Thailand, training under the tutelage of a master at his camp. Samor (Sonthaya Chitmanee), our narrator, suffers from an early leg injury, and misses his chance to perform in the ring himself, and so winds up supporting the other two. Pao (Thawatchai Phanpakdee), is the son of coach Thew (Samart Payakarun) and brother of a champion, and is considered to have the most potential, although he is somewhat timid, being in their shadow. Piak (Akara Amarttayakul), is more aggressive, both as a fighter and in life, as he woos pretty nurse Sriprai (Phreeta Kongpetch) before Pao can make his move. After a time, the four make their way to Bangkok so that Pao and Piak can try to break in as professional boxers. Though Piak has more early success, a false accusation soon has him reduced to underground cage matches - and soon doing "favors" for the man who runs them.
The movie takes place over the course of years during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and as a result feels a bit like a mauy thai version of Boogie Nights. The cinematography takes on a retro feel as well, with lots of grain and the occasional split screen during montage sequences to have Pao's and Piak's paths run literally in parallel. Director Kongkiat Khomsiri and his editors do a very nice job with those sequences, which are both filled with muay thai action and pretty good storytelling. Having this sort of narrative sweep does mean that he has to fit a lot of information into the film's two hours, and that's often accomplished by literally stopping the film and giving the audience names and vital statistics on new figures entering the friends' world.
Full review at EFC.
Geunom Moksori (Voice of a Murderer)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
That title threatens to give the game away, but then again, the outcome won't exactly be in doubt for the film's target audience - the 1991 kidnapping of Lee Hyong-ho is one of Korea's most famous true-crime stories. That's worth remembering when one sits down to watch this movie: For us, this looks like a thriller, but it is perhaps best appreciated as a character study of two parents trapped in their worst nightmare. There's a great scene that sums up the entire movie, as the parents rush to a cable car that slowly makes its way to the top of a tower, watching the kidnapper take their car and ransom while they helplessly wait to reach the top and hope they will find their son there.
Seen that way, it's a pretty strong movie; Sol Kyung-gu's breakdown in the final scene is a thing of terrible beauty.
Faet (Alone)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
When I saw the original Thai version of Shutter at Fantasia a few years back, I told friends that the only way it seemed Thai horror could get less subtle would be to have the ushers actually throwing cats at the audience. That turns out to be an unfair stereotype, but the makers of that movie are back and looking to get the audience to jump again. They manage it, too, throwing in a story that's actually fairly clever besides.
When we first meet elegant Pim (Masha Wattanapanich) and scruffy Wee (Vittaya Wasukraipaisan), they are living in Soeul, South Korea, and seem happy enough - they have friends, a dog, and live comfortably. Bad news comes from their native Thailand when they find out that Pim's mother (Ratchanoo Bunchootwong) has just had a stroke. They fly back to be at her side, but returning home dredges up a lot of bad memories for Pim. She was born a conjoined twin, and her sister Ploy did not survive the separation that she insisted upon. Now, Ploy appears to be appearing in every mirror and any other place she can. Wee and his psychiatrist friend Donai try to convince Pim that it's all in her head... but is it?
Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom made a pretty decent horror movie in Shutter, and though the story here is different, they spend much of the movie keeping to the same template: Introduce the situation, punctuate the film with lots of flashes of a dead girl accompanied by loud crashes in the score, and flesh out the characters' backstory in flashback, including how the twins' first meetings with Wee when they were hospitalized teenagers (Wee for complications from diabetes) set in motion both Pim's desire to separate and Ploy's increasingly hostile nature. (The latter is nice; a haunting makes more sense if the ghost was ornery even before death) The first half of Alone is an unapologetic jump movie, but Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom are really, really good at making the audience jump.
Full review at EFC.
Pig Hunt
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Bloody Radical: Unconventional American Horror)
Perhaps the funniest moment during last night's screening of Pig Hunt was the director and executive producer trying to push it as an allegory for America today and the war in Iraq. Sure, they make good connections, and I don't doubt that was in their mind. Of course, with their next breath they try to claim they were being subtle about their politics, but I don't know if a hunting cabin full of newspaper clippings with "LIES!" scribbled on them qualifies as subtle.
In the end, it's a decent monster movie featuring a giant pig and all the bloody violence they could cram into it. Not bad at all, and it will do you all right if you're looking for some monster-fighting hillbilly action.
Ah, well. I've got the place rented through next month, so I'll probably take an unclaimed weekend and just see the city with no obligations at some point.
Today's plan: The Moss, Going by the Book, Dance of the Dead, and probably Tokyo Gore Police, though I might decide I want to end the fest on Dance of the Dead and make sure I get enough sleep to wake up early tomorrow. If you're in town, Alone and La Tueur are good today and The Midnight Meat Train is good tomorrow.
1968 Tunnel Rats
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
So, has this whole "Uwe Boll is quite possibly the worst filmmaker ever!" been an elaborate hoax? I haven't seen any of his videogame-derived movies, which are apparenty unbearably awful, but Tunnel Rats is a pretty solid piece of work. It has a little trouble getting started - the scenes in the camp where we try to get to know a dozen or so characters in very little time wiht not-always-fitting music aren't great - but once it gets down into the tunnels, it's a pretty tense bit of work.
Of course, it seems to still be a bit of a work in progress, as there was just a black placeholder screen for the end credits, so perhaps there's time for him to screw it up yet.
Chaiya (Muay Thai Chaiya)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I'm not generally a fan of boxing films; even so-called classics of the genre leave me cold. Because, let's face it - boxing is about violence and fighting as an end unto itself, and while it's one thing to engage in it for physical fitness or self defense, it's hardly surprising when boxers wind up entangled in crime and thuggery. At that point, it's a question of how compelling the filmmakers make the details and how much style they bring to the story. While Chaiya doesn't stand out too much on the first front, it is exceptional on the second.
We start with three friends in rural Thailand, training under the tutelage of a master at his camp. Samor (Sonthaya Chitmanee), our narrator, suffers from an early leg injury, and misses his chance to perform in the ring himself, and so winds up supporting the other two. Pao (Thawatchai Phanpakdee), is the son of coach Thew (Samart Payakarun) and brother of a champion, and is considered to have the most potential, although he is somewhat timid, being in their shadow. Piak (Akara Amarttayakul), is more aggressive, both as a fighter and in life, as he woos pretty nurse Sriprai (Phreeta Kongpetch) before Pao can make his move. After a time, the four make their way to Bangkok so that Pao and Piak can try to break in as professional boxers. Though Piak has more early success, a false accusation soon has him reduced to underground cage matches - and soon doing "favors" for the man who runs them.
The movie takes place over the course of years during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and as a result feels a bit like a mauy thai version of Boogie Nights. The cinematography takes on a retro feel as well, with lots of grain and the occasional split screen during montage sequences to have Pao's and Piak's paths run literally in parallel. Director Kongkiat Khomsiri and his editors do a very nice job with those sequences, which are both filled with muay thai action and pretty good storytelling. Having this sort of narrative sweep does mean that he has to fit a lot of information into the film's two hours, and that's often accomplished by literally stopping the film and giving the audience names and vital statistics on new figures entering the friends' world.
Full review at EFC.
Geunom Moksori (Voice of a Murderer)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
That title threatens to give the game away, but then again, the outcome won't exactly be in doubt for the film's target audience - the 1991 kidnapping of Lee Hyong-ho is one of Korea's most famous true-crime stories. That's worth remembering when one sits down to watch this movie: For us, this looks like a thriller, but it is perhaps best appreciated as a character study of two parents trapped in their worst nightmare. There's a great scene that sums up the entire movie, as the parents rush to a cable car that slowly makes its way to the top of a tower, watching the kidnapper take their car and ransom while they helplessly wait to reach the top and hope they will find their son there.
Seen that way, it's a pretty strong movie; Sol Kyung-gu's breakdown in the final scene is a thing of terrible beauty.
Faet (Alone)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
When I saw the original Thai version of Shutter at Fantasia a few years back, I told friends that the only way it seemed Thai horror could get less subtle would be to have the ushers actually throwing cats at the audience. That turns out to be an unfair stereotype, but the makers of that movie are back and looking to get the audience to jump again. They manage it, too, throwing in a story that's actually fairly clever besides.
When we first meet elegant Pim (Masha Wattanapanich) and scruffy Wee (Vittaya Wasukraipaisan), they are living in Soeul, South Korea, and seem happy enough - they have friends, a dog, and live comfortably. Bad news comes from their native Thailand when they find out that Pim's mother (Ratchanoo Bunchootwong) has just had a stroke. They fly back to be at her side, but returning home dredges up a lot of bad memories for Pim. She was born a conjoined twin, and her sister Ploy did not survive the separation that she insisted upon. Now, Ploy appears to be appearing in every mirror and any other place she can. Wee and his psychiatrist friend Donai try to convince Pim that it's all in her head... but is it?
Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom made a pretty decent horror movie in Shutter, and though the story here is different, they spend much of the movie keeping to the same template: Introduce the situation, punctuate the film with lots of flashes of a dead girl accompanied by loud crashes in the score, and flesh out the characters' backstory in flashback, including how the twins' first meetings with Wee when they were hospitalized teenagers (Wee for complications from diabetes) set in motion both Pim's desire to separate and Ploy's increasingly hostile nature. (The latter is nice; a haunting makes more sense if the ghost was ornery even before death) The first half of Alone is an unapologetic jump movie, but Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom are really, really good at making the audience jump.
Full review at EFC.
Pig Hunt
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Bloody Radical: Unconventional American Horror)
Perhaps the funniest moment during last night's screening of Pig Hunt was the director and executive producer trying to push it as an allegory for America today and the war in Iraq. Sure, they make good connections, and I don't doubt that was in their mind. Of course, with their next breath they try to claim they were being subtle about their politics, but I don't know if a hunting cabin full of newspaper clippings with "LIES!" scribbled on them qualifies as subtle.
In the end, it's a decent monster movie featuring a giant pig and all the bloody violence they could cram into it. Not bad at all, and it will do you all right if you're looking for some monster-fighting hillbilly action.
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