Back a couple months ago, I wondered if Lu Yang's Brotherhood of Blades movies were so big and great that he got carte blanche to do whatever he wanted with A Writer's Odyssey, because it sure felt like the sort of thing where producers were almost afraid to say "no" to whatever he asked for, and it turned out to be a relatively easy thing to find out, since Well Go has the rights for both and put discs out. I went with the import on the second, though, because why not encourage Panorama and other Hong Kong distributors to go the 4K route whenever possible? It's a nice-looking disc, although it's kind of funny: This is one of those movies with a lot of black costumes with detailed embossing that even a good Blu-ray can mess up, so it benefits from the format, but it also highlights just that scheme can feel simultaneously slick and boring.
I don't know how well these two did at the box office, beyond the first apparently being enough of a hit to get the second a budget upgrade, but you can sort of see why some folks might see Lu Yang as the next big thing or ready to break out, both domestically and internationally - as much as I've seen Shaw Brothers-style period action given more contemporary coats of paint over the past couple of decades, Lu and co-writer Chen Shu bring in some international genre sensibilities without making the movies seem less Chinese.
One thing that's interesting is that in doing this, he seems to be pushing what the censors will allow a bit; Shen's a far more corrupt hero than these movies often present, even when taking place in the past when you can at least use the excuse that the Ming Dynasty was corrupt. It's interesting, though, that the second movie explicitly references free speech and censorship as something tyrants do. Not that that sort of hypocrisy is unusual, but it's interesting that it's a theme that Lu would return to in Odyssey, that artists can be literally dangerous to authorities.
Interesting enough to keep an eye on, at least.
Xiu chun dao (Brotherhood of Blades)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-Ray)
A Shaw Brothers-style story told in thoroughly modern fashion, Brotherhood of Blades isn't the most intricate thriller of the most astounding kung fu, but it's an entertaining middle ground for those who enjoy the genre a bit of martial-arts action but can't get into the rhythms or cultural specifics of those movies. Filmmaker Lu Yang delivers some solid wuxia action, even if one is not inclined to learn terms like "wuxia".
As it opens in 1627, Emperor Chongzhen (Ye Xiangming) has recently ascended to the throne, and his first action is to send the Imperial Assassins after Wei Zhongxian (King Shih-Chieh), whose "Eunuch's Clique" had effective control of the court under Chongzhen's predecessor. After the team of Lu Jianxing (Wang Qianyuan), Shen Lian (Chang Chen), and Jin Yichuan (Ethan Li Dong-Xue) successfully eliminates one crony, they are sent after Wei himself, in part because, as secret police leader Han Kuang (Zhao Lixin) points out, they are too low in status to have been a target for corruption. But, of course, everyone in the capital has an agenda that the rich and influential Wei and those who oppose him can influence, including the assassins - Lu is angling for a promotion, Shen would like to buy the freedom of courtesan Zhou Miaotong (Cecilia Liu Shishi), and Jin is being blackmailed by Ding Xiu (Zhou Yiwei) about his criminal past - while all the scheming going on above them is certain to render them loose ends to be eliminated.
The script by Lu and co-writer Chen Shu is maybe not entirely efficient - looked at as a whole, it certainly has a fair amount of elements that the movie doesn't exactly need - but it's impressively well-balanced. The main trio, by and large, are all able to have their own things going on without one completely taking center stage at the expense of the others, the conspiracy has enough going on to be interesting without pushing the heroes off to the side, and the spots where things circle back around to link up don't feel cheap. As director, he keeps all of that moving at a comfortable clip and makes the climax satisfying, although it could maybe do without the one last action sequence, a classic "let's take the last fight away from the rest of the movie's context" deal.
That said, it's a pretty good fight, and by and large action director Sang Lin does nice work as he works with Lu to stage the action. With the assassins established early on as an elite force and not much room in the story for other characters beyond Wei's bodyguard (Zhu Dan) to be especially great at martial arts, they mostly go for "throw a small army at these three guys" and it by and large works; everyone seems to be able to handle a sword well enough to keep it moving and it keeps dogpiling to a minimum. Lu uses hails of arrows the way a more modern movie might use automatic weapons fire, but still has fun giving characters different weapons and seeing how they match up against each other.
He and his cast also hit on the right sort of gritty amorality to make the film feel hit differently from a Hong Kong period action movie (often about legends) or the typical Mainland one (where the characters often map to specific modern types and approved attitudes). Chang Chen, in particular, feels comfortable letting the audience see Shen Lian as a piece of work, seemingly more comfortable as an assassin than the soldier or cop he and the crew are also expected to be, with some cruelty in his introduction and later aloofness. Li Dong-Xue and Wang Qianyuan have a little of that too, but Jin gets to play romantic while Lu is frustrated by the everyday corruption necessary to get ahead. King Shih-Chieh is clearly having a ball as Wei, a villain with nothing left to lose as the walls close in, while Zhao Lixin, Nie Yuan, Zhou Yiwei, and others create an enjoyable snake pit.
There's a dirty cops versus grandly corrupt officials vibe to it, and that turns out to be a good way into this material, probably even more so if the typical Chinese palace/temple intrigue leaves one cold or confused. It may not have the best twists or the best swordplay, but it does everything it attempts wee enough to make for an entertaining couple hours.
Also at eFilmCritic
Xiu chun dao II: xiu luo zhan chang (Brotherhood of Blades II: The Infernal Battlefield)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 4K Blu-Ray)
What's a filmmaker to do when a movie leaves the bulk of its characters dead at the end but performs well enough that the studio wants a sequel? They can try surrounding any survivors with new characters and see how that works, or do a prequel, or what's been increasingly popular in Hong Kong lately and just say the movie with a number after it is the same filmmakers and actors getting together to do the same sort of movie again, all valid ways of giving the audience more of that thing they enjoyed. For his follow-up to Brotherhood of Blades, filmmaker Lu Yang seems to be doing all three, and it makes for a more muddled, less invigorating take on the genre than its predecessor, even if there's still some fun to be had.
It opens in 1619 as Han soldier Shen Lian (Chang Chen) crawls out from under the corpses of those slain at one of the many battles at Sarhu, soon rescuing some of his comrades about to be executed by the Manchus. One of them, Lu Wenzhao (Zhang Yi) looks at the carnage and despairs of finding another way to live. Eight years later, Lu is a commander of the palace guards and Shen a captain, the sort that's not quite corrupt enough to get ahead in the same way as Lieutenant Ling Yunkai (Jiang Wu), a nephew of the powerful eunuch lord Wei Zhongxian (King Shih-Chieh). Given a bonus that doesn't sit well, he spends it on some work being sold by a local monk on behalf of talented artist Bei Zhai, only to be sent to arrest the artist (now considered seditious) with Ling. When he's shocked to see that the only person at Bei's house is the girl (Yang Mi) who offered him an umbrella to keep the painting dry, he causes the whole thing to go sideways, and soon he is being partnered with shrewd detective Pei Lun (Lei Jiayin) to investigate the case on the one hand and blackmailed by swordswoman Master Ding (Xin Zhilei) to burn the Guards' archives. Is he a pawn in the plans of Wei, whose influence will likely wane with a new Emperor, or the prince (Yuan Wen-Kang) who nevertheless fears Wei's power?
One might be forgiven for not being sure that this is the same Shen Lian, given that this movie would seem to rewrite his backstory and features none of the other characters with whom he formed a tight-knit unit in the other film, and it sometimes seems that Chang Chen isn't quite sure what to do with what Lu and returning co-writer Chen Shu have given him. He gives Shen the same sort of weighted-down body language as before but never really figures out how to make it work with the broad streak of idealism that the story necessitates. He's a lot more interesting playing off Lei Jiayin than Yang Mi; Lei plays Pei Lun as a smart detective who enjoys seeing people squirm, while Yang Mi seldom gets to let the same sort of strong idealism guide her performance, mostly playing the vertex of a love triangle where she's never actually seen with her original partner.
The plot's a messier situation Shen faced in the first movie, although never quite so immediate, with so much happening above his pay grade while he's basically forced to be a better survivor than the schemers realize. Shen's closer to an honest cop in a dirty department than a dirty cop with some scruples here, and even with all the double-crosses and massive conspiracies going on (including a moment or two where the filmmakers do a surprisingly good job of making the trope of a character remembering something he saw on TV earlier in the film work in Eighteenth Century China), they still run out of twists fairly early, with the good guys on the run for long enough to draw things out until the big fight.
And if that finale with a rope bridge rickety enough that the horses want no part of it and a bunch of people with swords doesn't exactly go full Temple of Doom, it is nevertheless a bloody good time. The budget seems to be a bit higher this time around (the title cards certainly show more companies contributing to it!), and while some goes to things that are only superficially more impressive - the leather costumes manage to get blacker and slicker - Lu and action director Sang Lin often seem to have a little more room to work this time around. There are more close-in confrontations that let Chang Chen and Xin Zhilei, among others, confront each other without a lot of cutting or getting lost in hordes - although when there is a horde, the filmmakers do a nice job of highlighting the sensation of sort of force about to crush you, even if you're as good at fighting as Shen.
Brotherhood of Blades 2 has the same basic formula as the first, half sword wuxia and half cops & corruption, but where that film seemed to have the right half of each, this one brings a little more of the genres' weaknesses along. It's still an interesting mix of influences, especially if you decide not to worry about how it fits with its predecessor.
Also at eFilmCritic
Showing posts with label wuxia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wuxia. Show all posts
Monday, July 26, 2021
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
IFFBoston 2019.19: Shadow
Yes, I'm doing the "number posts like IFFBoston was still going on when one of its selections hits theaters" bit before I've even started full reviews of its movies. I'm slow this year, and this is one I passed on there because it would have overlapped two slots for movies that might not get the theatrical release that this was all-but-guaranteed to get.
Although not quite - Well Go has had it sitting on a shelf since its National Day release in China, one of a couple where they figured that getting it in front of a broad audience rather than the immigrants, students, and expats would pay off - and then they pushed it another week when they picked up Savage and figured that a lot of markets, Boston included, couldn't handle quite that much Chinese cinema, especially with Avengers still devouring screens.
The funny thing is, all that delay meant that pre-orders for the 4K disc at DDD House (my go-to source for Hong Kong Blu-rays, which are Region A, almost always include English subtitles, and often include stuff not available in North America at all even beyond Chinese movies) had to be in before its US theatrical release, which seems crazy to me. There was an outside chance that I'd be able to tweet out a photo of my ticket and the disc that arrived while I was seeing the movie, although that didn't happen. What did happen was that pre-orders went up for an American 4K release of this movie, as of this writing available for pre-order on Amazon for something like half of what I paid (especially if you figure Prime shipping versus international).
Kind of outsmarted myself there, but the important part is that it's on the big screen right now and looks amazing, so you should see it, but if you can't, it will look as amazing as it can at home.
Ying (Shadow)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 May 2019 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)
Zhang Yimou's Shadow is probably the most visually striking wuxia film since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so striking that when it gets off to a bit of a halting start, one might be tempted to consider that an acceptable trade-off for just being able to look at the thing for a couple hours. That it would quickly becomes more was not guaranteed, but it does, offering up palace intrigue an spurts of action that make it one of the best films that the genre has produced in recent years.
It opens in a time of tension between the Wei and Yang kingdoms; though technically allied, Yang occupies Jing City, traditionally Wei territory. The Wei king (Ryan Zheng Kai) accepts this, not wishing to endanger the peace, but his Commander (Deng Chao) has just foolishly proposed to duel with Yang (Hu Jun), which could lead to war. It seems like an absurd mistake for this seasoned and respected general to make, but there is a secret few outside "Madam" (Sun Li), the Commander's wife, know: The Commander has a double, trained since childhood to stand in for him, but since he was wounded in his last battle this shadow (Deng) has been posing as the Commander full time. The king attempts to counter this situation by arranging a marriage between Yang's son Ping (Leo Wu Lei) and his sister (Guan Xiaotong), but despite all the wheels turning within wheels, a showdown between master swordsman Yang and the Commander's less-accomplished doppelganger.
Zhang and co-writer Li Wei sometimes waver a bit in how to communicate this - some bits of the backstory are dropped as text in the beginning, and some is initially left for the audience to figure out before someone spells it out just to make sure - but the imagery is built to make sure that what's going on-screen has one's attention. Costumes, props, and settings are all blacks, whites, grays, and silvers, and considering the pallor of many character, there are times when one might initially think that the whole film was shot in black-and-white. The flesh tones betray that it wasn't, and that's jarring for a second, but there's apparent purpose to it - you can tell which characters are creatures of the palace and which spend time in the outside world by their pallor or lack thereof. When other colors start showing up in the palette, it's to clear purpose - red blood to boldface the violence, and a bit of gold to dazzle and distract, as much a signal to the audience that there is subterfuge going on as something to genuinely draw the eye.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Although not quite - Well Go has had it sitting on a shelf since its National Day release in China, one of a couple where they figured that getting it in front of a broad audience rather than the immigrants, students, and expats would pay off - and then they pushed it another week when they picked up Savage and figured that a lot of markets, Boston included, couldn't handle quite that much Chinese cinema, especially with Avengers still devouring screens.
The funny thing is, all that delay meant that pre-orders for the 4K disc at DDD House (my go-to source for Hong Kong Blu-rays, which are Region A, almost always include English subtitles, and often include stuff not available in North America at all even beyond Chinese movies) had to be in before its US theatrical release, which seems crazy to me. There was an outside chance that I'd be able to tweet out a photo of my ticket and the disc that arrived while I was seeing the movie, although that didn't happen. What did happen was that pre-orders went up for an American 4K release of this movie, as of this writing available for pre-order on Amazon for something like half of what I paid (especially if you figure Prime shipping versus international).
Kind of outsmarted myself there, but the important part is that it's on the big screen right now and looks amazing, so you should see it, but if you can't, it will look as amazing as it can at home.
Ying (Shadow)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 May 2019 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, DCP)
Zhang Yimou's Shadow is probably the most visually striking wuxia film since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so striking that when it gets off to a bit of a halting start, one might be tempted to consider that an acceptable trade-off for just being able to look at the thing for a couple hours. That it would quickly becomes more was not guaranteed, but it does, offering up palace intrigue an spurts of action that make it one of the best films that the genre has produced in recent years.
It opens in a time of tension between the Wei and Yang kingdoms; though technically allied, Yang occupies Jing City, traditionally Wei territory. The Wei king (Ryan Zheng Kai) accepts this, not wishing to endanger the peace, but his Commander (Deng Chao) has just foolishly proposed to duel with Yang (Hu Jun), which could lead to war. It seems like an absurd mistake for this seasoned and respected general to make, but there is a secret few outside "Madam" (Sun Li), the Commander's wife, know: The Commander has a double, trained since childhood to stand in for him, but since he was wounded in his last battle this shadow (Deng) has been posing as the Commander full time. The king attempts to counter this situation by arranging a marriage between Yang's son Ping (Leo Wu Lei) and his sister (Guan Xiaotong), but despite all the wheels turning within wheels, a showdown between master swordsman Yang and the Commander's less-accomplished doppelganger.
Zhang and co-writer Li Wei sometimes waver a bit in how to communicate this - some bits of the backstory are dropped as text in the beginning, and some is initially left for the audience to figure out before someone spells it out just to make sure - but the imagery is built to make sure that what's going on-screen has one's attention. Costumes, props, and settings are all blacks, whites, grays, and silvers, and considering the pallor of many character, there are times when one might initially think that the whole film was shot in black-and-white. The flesh tones betray that it wasn't, and that's jarring for a second, but there's apparent purpose to it - you can tell which characters are creatures of the palace and which spend time in the outside world by their pallor or lack thereof. When other colors start showing up in the palette, it's to clear purpose - red blood to boldface the violence, and a bit of gold to dazzle and distract, as much a signal to the audience that there is subterfuge going on as something to genuinely draw the eye.
Full review on EFilmCritic
Monday, December 18, 2017
The Thousand Faces of Dunjia
There was Christmas shopping to do this weekend, so it seems like I'll only have time to see one of the two Chinese movies coming out this weekend before the crush of things coming out over the next seven days, and even though Dunjia isn't great, I still kind of feel like it's the right choice - it is, at least, kind of weird and unpredictable, which is certainly not the vibe I got from the Youth previews.
I must admit, though, that seeing what turned out to be a big effects-driven movie so soon after seeing Star Wars: The Last Jedi cannot help but lead to disappointment. Maybe someday I'll give it another chance, especially if that sequel promised toward the end ever comes out.
Qi men dun jia (The Thousand Faces of Dunjia)
* * (out of four)
Seen on 16 December 2017 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)
It's unfair to judge a movie based on how well it lives up to its previews, especially in a case like The Thousand Faces of Dunjia where the North American distributor is trying to sell the film to an audience that likely doesn't necessarily consider Da Peng, Ni Ni, Zhou Dongyu, and Aarif Lee an all-star cast and has a new Star Wars movie opening the same weekend to scratch their big special-effects itch. It's understandable that they don't show the big CGI creatures in that case, but it sure feels like a heck of a bait-and-switch when they show up in medieval China.
To give writer Tsui Hark and director Yuen Woo-ping their due, the introduction of the first alien is a lot of fun, as the giant three-eyed goldfish leads Constable Dao Yicheng (Aarif Rahman Lee) on a rooftop chase across Kaifeng City, with his paths crossing with Metal Dragonfly (Ni Ni), Third Sister of the secretive Wuyin Clan, the top-secret group that hunts down aliens causing trouble on Earth. A meteor crash nearby has caused alien activity to spike, which is why First Brother (Wu Bai) is seeking a powerful weapon in Luoyang and Second Brother Zhuge Chin (Da Peng) is seeking a prophesied new leader - though what he finds is "Circle" (Zhou Dongyu), a timid, amnesiac girl locked up in a mental hospital. Neither she nor Dao seems like they'll be nearly enough when what looks like a flying hairball emerges from the meteor to free a monster secretly kept in chains beneath the city.
Though Tsui Hark is probably best known in the United States for directing the first three Once Upon a Time in China films with Jet Li and a couple of mid-1990s Jean-Claude Van Damme flicks, he's spent a good chunk of his career trying to make the biggest special-effects extravaganzas possible on a Hong Kong budget, so a bunch of CGI monsters in a movie he wrote and produced isn't completely unexpected, even if director Yuen Woo-ping has mostly used digital effects to remove the wires from his anti-gravity martial arts choreography. The ones their effects team comes up with here are genuinely odd ducks indeed, well on the "fake" side of the uncanny valley, always lit just a bit too evenly, and with mouths that don't really move enough for how much dialogue they're given (though maybe that's a Mandarin/Cantonese thing), but enjoyably weird in their design. Though done with CGI rather than make-up and puppetry, there's something to them that evokes the gonzo creatures and zombies that Yoshihiro Nishimura creates for his low-budget monster films; as much as these things are never really fooling anybody, they're at least memorable enough to open a discussion on whether audiences should perhaps give rough digital effects the same leeway they give to rough practical ones.
Full review at EFC
I must admit, though, that seeing what turned out to be a big effects-driven movie so soon after seeing Star Wars: The Last Jedi cannot help but lead to disappointment. Maybe someday I'll give it another chance, especially if that sequel promised toward the end ever comes out.
Qi men dun jia (The Thousand Faces of Dunjia)
* * (out of four)
Seen on 16 December 2017 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, DCP)
It's unfair to judge a movie based on how well it lives up to its previews, especially in a case like The Thousand Faces of Dunjia where the North American distributor is trying to sell the film to an audience that likely doesn't necessarily consider Da Peng, Ni Ni, Zhou Dongyu, and Aarif Lee an all-star cast and has a new Star Wars movie opening the same weekend to scratch their big special-effects itch. It's understandable that they don't show the big CGI creatures in that case, but it sure feels like a heck of a bait-and-switch when they show up in medieval China.
To give writer Tsui Hark and director Yuen Woo-ping their due, the introduction of the first alien is a lot of fun, as the giant three-eyed goldfish leads Constable Dao Yicheng (Aarif Rahman Lee) on a rooftop chase across Kaifeng City, with his paths crossing with Metal Dragonfly (Ni Ni), Third Sister of the secretive Wuyin Clan, the top-secret group that hunts down aliens causing trouble on Earth. A meteor crash nearby has caused alien activity to spike, which is why First Brother (Wu Bai) is seeking a powerful weapon in Luoyang and Second Brother Zhuge Chin (Da Peng) is seeking a prophesied new leader - though what he finds is "Circle" (Zhou Dongyu), a timid, amnesiac girl locked up in a mental hospital. Neither she nor Dao seems like they'll be nearly enough when what looks like a flying hairball emerges from the meteor to free a monster secretly kept in chains beneath the city.
Though Tsui Hark is probably best known in the United States for directing the first three Once Upon a Time in China films with Jet Li and a couple of mid-1990s Jean-Claude Van Damme flicks, he's spent a good chunk of his career trying to make the biggest special-effects extravaganzas possible on a Hong Kong budget, so a bunch of CGI monsters in a movie he wrote and produced isn't completely unexpected, even if director Yuen Woo-ping has mostly used digital effects to remove the wires from his anti-gravity martial arts choreography. The ones their effects team comes up with here are genuinely odd ducks indeed, well on the "fake" side of the uncanny valley, always lit just a bit too evenly, and with mouths that don't really move enough for how much dialogue they're given (though maybe that's a Mandarin/Cantonese thing), but enjoyably weird in their design. Though done with CGI rather than make-up and puppetry, there's something to them that evokes the gonzo creatures and zombies that Yoshihiro Nishimura creates for his low-budget monster films; as much as these things are never really fooling anybody, they're at least memorable enough to open a discussion on whether audiences should perhaps give rough digital effects the same leeway they give to rough practical ones.
Full review at EFC
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
December Movies from China: The Sword Master and The Wasted Times
Farewell, The Wasted Times trailer. I may have made a lot of jokes about you over the past year or so, but as ubiquitous trailers go, you were all right. You at least always looked intriguing, which is more than can be said about the Assassin's Creed preview that frequently played right next to you.
It winds up saying something interesting about ambition to see these two a week apart and write about them the same day - Sword Master isn’t exactly small-time - there’s clearly been some money spent on it, and the filmmakers are clearly trying to consciously evoke the same sort of artificiality that set-bound Shaw Brothers films had - but it’s a familiar narrative told in a fairly familiar way. The Wasted Times went for self-deprecating irony, jumped back and forth in time, and used its big budget in sometimes off-putting ways, and ultimately was found wanting. I suspect that a lot of this can be put at the feet of severe cuts; the IMDB lists the “original cut” as 210 minutes long compared to the 125-minute version that played theaters, and while I suspect that original cut was never what was actually going to play theaters, that’s a good chunk of movie taken out of it. It left an unusually solid skeleton - most movies cut that severely wind up incomprehensible - but no heart.
I’d actually be kind of intrigued to see a longer version of The Wasted Times; when the movie focuses on Tadanobu Asano’s Japanese immigrant, for instance, there’s clearly something fascinating going on (and I have a hard time believing Zhang Ziyi signed on just for what we wound up seeing). On the other hand, I’ll definitely check out Death Duel sometime, just to see where Derek Yee, writer/director, decided to do things differently than a movie in which he starred.
San shao ye de jian (2016) (Sword Master)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 December 2016 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)
A good chunk of what makes Sword Master such a fun throwback to the Hong Kong wuxia movies of earlier decades is that filmmakers Derek Yee and Tsui Hark remember that people used to do them all the time. WIth the Hong Kong film industry shrunken, respectable folks like Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou making movies meant to elevate the genre, and visual effects offering an alternate sort of spectacle, it can sometimes seem like the art of a good martial-arts programmer is gone. That Yee manages to capture what seems to have once been commonplace (through an admittedly nostalgic lens) thus becomes rather remarkable.
Not that these guys opt to go without modern luxuries in making this film - it opens with a slick swordfight on an icy bridge as assassin Yen Shih-san (Peter Ho Yun-tung) cuts through another warrior on his way to confront Hsieh Shao-feng, the Third Master at Supreme Sword Manor, and claim his place as the greatest swordsman in the martial world. It’s a matter of principle for him, as he refuses the money of Hsieh’s spurned lover Mu-yung Chu-ti (Jiang Yiyan) to do it as a job. But when he arrives at the manor, he finds that he has missed his chance for a fight to the death. Meanwhile, in Bitter Sea Town, a nameless vagrant (Kenny Lin Geng-xin) has a night at the Blue Moon House brothel that he can’t pay for, winding up having to work it off , often finding himself landing in the middle of the antics of “Princess” Hsiao Li (Jiang Meng-ji), simultaneously one of the klutzier and more scheming girls there.
Once upon a time, director and co-writer Derek Yee Tung-sing starred in another adaptation of the source novel (1977’s Shaw Brothers production Death Duel), and it would certainly be a fun exercise to watch them back to back. As much as Sword Master often feels like a legitimate successor to the classic martial arts movies, it also fits in very well with the recent films of producer and co-writer Tsui Hark, who genuinely loves special effects and 3D; Hark is a “throw stuff at the audience” guy. Yee maintains a fluid camera that, even in the 2D version playing most American theaters, is clearly looking to present depth and a spatial arena for the fighters to play in, often filling the screen with bright colors and elaborate costuming and production values.
Full review on EFC.
Luomandike xiaowang shi (The Wasted Times)
* * (out of four)
Seen 17 December 2016 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)
Even if it hadn’t played in basically unaltered form in front of every Chinese movie released in North America for about a year and a half, the preview for Cheng Er’s The Wasted Times would have been a perfect parody of Chinese art-house movies, or at least their trailers: Beautifully composed images cut together to suggest mystery and mood rather than a specific story, a meticulously recreated historical setting, self-referential meta-commentary, and a conscious effort to include the only two English-language lines in the film, despite one being an ethnic slur. Whether intended ironically or not, those two minutes were kind of perfect in a way that the actual two-hour film can’t match.
The film opens with text describing a Japanese man who assimilated to life in occupied Shanghai completely, coming across as more “Shanghainese” than some of the natives. That description fits Watabe (Tadanobu Asano) to a T; though he runs a sushi restaurant, he dresses in Chinese clothing, speaks the local dialect, is married to a Chinese woman, has two Chinese children, and professes more loyalty to his adopted city than his native land. He’s good friends with his brother-in-law Mister Lu (Ge You), himself the sort of gangster who sees his job as making sure that everything moves smoothly in the community as much as making money for himself. Part of that, historically, has been getting the boss’s new, younger, wife (Zhang Ziyi) a role in an upcoming movie, even if that displaces more talented actress Xiao Wu (Yuan Quan). But while 1937’s Battle of Shanghai is still some months in the future, Japan’s desire to have Lu and his partners front a Japanese bank presents a test for everyone.
Much of that action takes place in the first segment or two of a film that jumps around in time, with the English subtitles, at least, taking the curious route of mentioning the proximity of the action to events in the Sino-Japanese War even though Cheng seldom shows those landmarks directly. The Wasted Times covers roughly thirteen years or so in total, though it jumps back and forth, and the fractured narrative hurts it: The climactic moment comes early, and the switching time period and perspective is seldom done in a way that creates a particularly intriguing contrast, and dramatically taking a character off the board for an equally dramatic later return means little if they’re present in an intervening sequence set years earlier. Cheng’s decisions on what to include often seem haphazard, built around the necessity of getting the whole plot in but leaving out emotional moments and in one case sticking around a time and place barely long enough for the subtitled establishing shot.
Full review on EFC.
It winds up saying something interesting about ambition to see these two a week apart and write about them the same day - Sword Master isn’t exactly small-time - there’s clearly been some money spent on it, and the filmmakers are clearly trying to consciously evoke the same sort of artificiality that set-bound Shaw Brothers films had - but it’s a familiar narrative told in a fairly familiar way. The Wasted Times went for self-deprecating irony, jumped back and forth in time, and used its big budget in sometimes off-putting ways, and ultimately was found wanting. I suspect that a lot of this can be put at the feet of severe cuts; the IMDB lists the “original cut” as 210 minutes long compared to the 125-minute version that played theaters, and while I suspect that original cut was never what was actually going to play theaters, that’s a good chunk of movie taken out of it. It left an unusually solid skeleton - most movies cut that severely wind up incomprehensible - but no heart.
I’d actually be kind of intrigued to see a longer version of The Wasted Times; when the movie focuses on Tadanobu Asano’s Japanese immigrant, for instance, there’s clearly something fascinating going on (and I have a hard time believing Zhang Ziyi signed on just for what we wound up seeing). On the other hand, I’ll definitely check out Death Duel sometime, just to see where Derek Yee, writer/director, decided to do things differently than a movie in which he starred.
San shao ye de jian (2016) (Sword Master)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 December 2016 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)
A good chunk of what makes Sword Master such a fun throwback to the Hong Kong wuxia movies of earlier decades is that filmmakers Derek Yee and Tsui Hark remember that people used to do them all the time. WIth the Hong Kong film industry shrunken, respectable folks like Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou making movies meant to elevate the genre, and visual effects offering an alternate sort of spectacle, it can sometimes seem like the art of a good martial-arts programmer is gone. That Yee manages to capture what seems to have once been commonplace (through an admittedly nostalgic lens) thus becomes rather remarkable.
Not that these guys opt to go without modern luxuries in making this film - it opens with a slick swordfight on an icy bridge as assassin Yen Shih-san (Peter Ho Yun-tung) cuts through another warrior on his way to confront Hsieh Shao-feng, the Third Master at Supreme Sword Manor, and claim his place as the greatest swordsman in the martial world. It’s a matter of principle for him, as he refuses the money of Hsieh’s spurned lover Mu-yung Chu-ti (Jiang Yiyan) to do it as a job. But when he arrives at the manor, he finds that he has missed his chance for a fight to the death. Meanwhile, in Bitter Sea Town, a nameless vagrant (Kenny Lin Geng-xin) has a night at the Blue Moon House brothel that he can’t pay for, winding up having to work it off , often finding himself landing in the middle of the antics of “Princess” Hsiao Li (Jiang Meng-ji), simultaneously one of the klutzier and more scheming girls there.
Once upon a time, director and co-writer Derek Yee Tung-sing starred in another adaptation of the source novel (1977’s Shaw Brothers production Death Duel), and it would certainly be a fun exercise to watch them back to back. As much as Sword Master often feels like a legitimate successor to the classic martial arts movies, it also fits in very well with the recent films of producer and co-writer Tsui Hark, who genuinely loves special effects and 3D; Hark is a “throw stuff at the audience” guy. Yee maintains a fluid camera that, even in the 2D version playing most American theaters, is clearly looking to present depth and a spatial arena for the fighters to play in, often filling the screen with bright colors and elaborate costuming and production values.
Full review on EFC.
Luomandike xiaowang shi (The Wasted Times)
* * (out of four)
Seen 17 December 2016 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, DCP)
Even if it hadn’t played in basically unaltered form in front of every Chinese movie released in North America for about a year and a half, the preview for Cheng Er’s The Wasted Times would have been a perfect parody of Chinese art-house movies, or at least their trailers: Beautifully composed images cut together to suggest mystery and mood rather than a specific story, a meticulously recreated historical setting, self-referential meta-commentary, and a conscious effort to include the only two English-language lines in the film, despite one being an ethnic slur. Whether intended ironically or not, those two minutes were kind of perfect in a way that the actual two-hour film can’t match.
The film opens with text describing a Japanese man who assimilated to life in occupied Shanghai completely, coming across as more “Shanghainese” than some of the natives. That description fits Watabe (Tadanobu Asano) to a T; though he runs a sushi restaurant, he dresses in Chinese clothing, speaks the local dialect, is married to a Chinese woman, has two Chinese children, and professes more loyalty to his adopted city than his native land. He’s good friends with his brother-in-law Mister Lu (Ge You), himself the sort of gangster who sees his job as making sure that everything moves smoothly in the community as much as making money for himself. Part of that, historically, has been getting the boss’s new, younger, wife (Zhang Ziyi) a role in an upcoming movie, even if that displaces more talented actress Xiao Wu (Yuan Quan). But while 1937’s Battle of Shanghai is still some months in the future, Japan’s desire to have Lu and his partners front a Japanese bank presents a test for everyone.
Much of that action takes place in the first segment or two of a film that jumps around in time, with the English subtitles, at least, taking the curious route of mentioning the proximity of the action to events in the Sino-Japanese War even though Cheng seldom shows those landmarks directly. The Wasted Times covers roughly thirteen years or so in total, though it jumps back and forth, and the fractured narrative hurts it: The climactic moment comes early, and the switching time period and perspective is seldom done in a way that creates a particularly intriguing contrast, and dramatically taking a character off the board for an equally dramatic later return means little if they’re present in an intervening sequence set years earlier. Cheng’s decisions on what to include often seem haphazard, built around the necessity of getting the whole plot in but leaving out emotional moments and in one case sticking around a time and place barely long enough for the subtitled establishing shot.
Full review on EFC.
Monday, July 20, 2015
The Fantasia Daily 2015.06 (19 July 2015): The Arti: The Adventure Begins, Possessed, The Case of Hana & Alice, and Observance
Fun day yesterday - arriving at Hall just in time for the Chinese wuxia puppet movie, I was surprised to find that it was playing in 3D! I must admit, I sometimes feel a little odd when I read movie Twitter or internet or dead trees, because it sometimes seems nobody else actually enjoys 3D; it's all about gimmicks and added expense and reduced light, never about the coolness of it as an optical illusion or how some guys use it really well. Anyway, they handed me the fancy 3D glasses and I was a little more stoked for what was already going to be a unique experience. Not disappointed, either; like Teana: 10000 Years Later the day before, China does not screw around with 3D, throwing stuff into the audience's lap and doing everything the filmmakers can to create space.
It wound up being an all-animation afternoon in Hall, with the exception of a live-action short before The Case of Hana & Alice, though with distinctly different styles - puppets from Taiwan, stop-motion from Spain, mostly-conventional from Japan. Fun, especially since it seldom lines up that way.
After that, there was a rare spot on the Fantasia schedule where I had seen the movies playing on both screens at other festivals - (T)ERROR at IFFBoston and We Are Still Here at BUFF, which means I had the chance to actually sit down and eat without missing anything! Take those moments when you can get them, festival-goers; they can be rare! Naturally, it started to rain as soon as I stepped outside the theaters, so I only got as far as Dundee's on Crescent Street before ducking in and deciding this would do. Not bad ribs for that sort of place, at least.
After that, I spent some time writing and then headed across the street to de Seve for Observance. Short line for a world premiere; a lot of the other media guys were across the street for I Am Thor, all but guaranteed to be the bigger, crazier event.
Fortunately, the rest of the audience will have a chance to catch it on Wednesday afternoon, and I think most of the folks above - writer/director Joseph Sims-Dennett and cast members Lindsay Farris, Stephanie King, and Tom O'Sullivan - will probably still be hanging around; you likely don't fly here from Australia for just one day. It's worth checking out, especially if the ambiguous half-in-the-mind thriller is your sort of thing.
They give good Q&A, too, good enough that writing the review is tough for someone who mostly wants to talk about what he actually got from the film rather than the discussion afterwards which others might not necessarily be privy to. It was full of "crazy shoot" stories - they shot it in roughly 11 seventeen-hour days, and if that doesn't sound extreme enough to you, it was during that week in 2012 when Australia was setting all sorts of crazy temperature records - 46 Celsius at one point (about 115 degrees Farenheit), which I recall reading was brutal enough that weather forecasters were adding new colors to the map.
One thing I found interesting and odd was when someone asked them about the characters speaking with North American accents rather than Australia, they didn't really hem and haw much about indie movies selling better that way, but instead Sims-Dennett talked about how it made the film less specific in terms of setting, and I wonder if that's a bit of confirmation bias on his part: Being from there, he sees the location as obviously Sydney, but I don't know that anybody not from the city would, especially as close-in as it was shot. Then again, Australia is such a relatively small place in terms of population and history that there's maybe not a lot of room to drop a conspiracy into it. On the other hand, star Lindsay Farris mentioned that the Australian accent can be fairly harsh, and not necessarily the most nuanced tool for an actor. Which seems like a really weird thing to say about your own manner of speaking, honestly, almost defeatist.
As an aside: They got the accents and the money right, but didn't disguise the power outlets on the walls. Oh, and Americans seldom buy milk in that sort of round plastic bottle. But, then, I suppose those mismatches just increased the ambiguity of location.
So, that was yesterday. Today I'll be hitting the International Sci-Fi Short Film Showcase, Børning, and then flipping a coin between Gangnam Blues and A Christmas Horror Story. Oh, and trying to find out from my Airbnb host just where the heck the laundry is in this 25-story building
Qi Ren Mi Ma: Gu Luo Bu Zhi Mi (The Arti: The Adventure Begins)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP with XPand 3D)
To say one doesn't see many movies like The Arti may understate the case; there is one family in Taiwan not only carrying on a tradition of glove puppetry but using it to make fantastic adventure films like this. Enhanced with impressive visual effects, the end result is an incredible treat which only comes around once in a while, especially if you like this sort of steampunk martial-arts adventure anyway.
ARTI-C is a wooden robot built some sixteen years before the main action and powered by a mysterious core called "The Origin"; after frightened people killed its creator while chasing him from his home, his children have been wanderers. Older brother Mo tends to the automaton and searches for more information about The Origin, though his sister Tong spends much of her time fighting. Their next stop is the Kingdom of Lou-lan along the Silk Road, though there are perils: Sandworms are attacking villages along the river, and Prince Angelo has invited Mo and ARTI-C to participate in a martial-arts tournament as a way to earn his assistance in retrieving more of The Origin from the mysterious Lop people.
There's a fair amount of digital work used in creating The Arti, although the making-of bits shown over the final credits may surprise in terms of there not being as much as one might think; the guys at PiLi Puppetry have built some sets of impressive scale and appear to have built the puppets ingeniously enough that there's not even that much need for wire removal. The craftsmanship all around is detailed, especially in the costumes, although it seldom extends to articulated mouths. In many cases, that would give the characters a sort of dehumanizing formality - compare how much the Muppets are built around their mouths relative to Japanese puppetry with the same sort of complex, multi-layered costumes seen here - although that is far from the case with this movie.
Full review on EFC.
Pos Eso (Possessed)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
There are some spoofs that cast such a broad net for their targets that they maybe slip out of the category of parody altogether, and then there are things like Possessed, which is clearly one-third The Exorcist, one-third The Omen, and one-third everything else. Lucky for those watching it, that "everything else" includes a lot of funny, funny stuff, and the whole thing gets a lot crazier when sculpted out of clay.
It starts with a priest with the unlikely name of Lenin (voice of Josema Yuste) retrieving a holy artifact from a booby-trapped crypt, and don't think his staunchly communist mother isn't disappointed with his career choices on top of feeling neglected. Elsewhere in Spain, we're introduced to Trini (voice of Anabel Alonso), a world-famous flamenco dancer who has retired to take care of her son Damian after the death of her bullfighter husband Georgio - though her manager Manolo (voice of Alex Angulo) would really like her to get back to work. Of course, to say Damian is the sort of kid who causes trouble is a bit of an understatement, and the Bishop (voice of Santiago Segura) is far too corrupt to have the faith necessary to conduct an actual exorcism.
Basic building blocks for a demonic possession movie, only this one is a riot. Director Samuel Ortà Martà (credited as "Sam") has a fondness for slapstick which is in terrible taste, but presents it in bright primary colors that make its gross-out bits far more the stuff of cartoons than horror movies. Sam and co-writer Ruben Ontiveros also have a good sense of where their movie's line between a bit of awfulness that is horrifyingly funny off-screen but just cruel as a visual, making for a movie where anything goes but where the jokes all find their level.
Full review on EFC.
"La Pepperette"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
You've got to like seeing shorts like "La Pepperette" before a film at a festival - five minutes or less, but establishes a dynamic between its characters quickly and packs a few really funny moments in there before hitting the audience with a punchline. This is a short movie that does not mess around, even if it does have a relaxed feel.
That starts behind the camera, where co-writer/director/producer/cinematographer/editor Jerome Hof and co-writer/producer/casting director Joëlle Agathe build a movie that is very efficient - there's not a wasted moment in it, and Hof knows when a cut is funnier than watching something play out. In front of the camera, Jean-Carl Boucher and Pier-Luc Funk play off each other very well as eponymous characters Carl and Pierre-Luc, one a nervous would-be convenience store robber and the other an enthusiastic getaway driver. They're both playing characters who aren't necessarily thinking things through but aren't bumbling, coming across as more sympathetic than you might expect without making the short cutesy.
Anyway, I hope they keep making good, quick movies even if they move up to longer lengths. This one got in and out and is all the more enjoyable for it.
Hana to Alice Satsujin Jiken (The Case of Hana and Alice)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, HD)
Eleven years ago, Shunji Iwai made Hana & Alice, a well-received movie about two high-school best friends smitten with the same boy, praised in large part for the performances by Anne Suzuki and Yu Aoi as the title characters. Now, he's decided to to tell the story of how these two girls met ten years later despite the actresses having aged a decade in the meantime, and rather than recast, he's made his first animated film. It's a charmer.
Tetsuko Arisugawa (voice of Yu Aoi) and her mother Kayo (voice of Shoko Aida) have just moved to a small town after Kayo's divorce, which not only means a new school for Tetsuko but a new nickname - taking her mother's surname rather than that of father Kenji Kuroyanagi means she'll be "Alice" rather than "Kuro" from now on. It's kind of a weird place - the shut-in girl in the overgrown house next door seems to be spying on her, and the other students are adamant she not sit in a certain seat because of a story about how "Judas" sat there and was murdered by one of his four wives. It's ridiculous for a middle-school student, but one of the other kids went into convulsions as if possessed when she sat there before. The curious Alice winds up investigating, and the trail leads in short order to her weird next-door neighbor, Hana Arai (voice of Anne Suzuki), who has her own reasons to find out what actually happened a year ago.
I've not seen the original Hana & Alice, but that's going to have to be remedied because I found myself tremendously fond of these characters. Alice, in particular, is a pip; she's introduced with the sort of red flags that could mark her as the surly new girl - embarrassed by her flirty mother, resigned to giving up ballet because money's tight and she's the practical one - but Yu Aoi gives her this great, spunky personality. She's naturally funny and though she takes no crap, it's not hard to see how she makes friends quickly enough. Hana stays in the background for the first half-hour or so of the movie, but once introduced, she's got a sardonic tone that matches Alice's. It's easy to see how the two will become friends even as they start off somewhat antagonistic, there's a natural banter to their first conversations and their tones match. In some ways, Anne Suzuki's got the harder part; Hana has to be dramatic in a way that's really worrisome when you think about it - going near-hikikomori like that isn't a good sign on top of the events that led there - but it also can't be hugely surprising when she's out and about and more than a bit likable and capable.
Full review on EFC.
Observance
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
Writer/director Joseph Sims-Dennett initially seems to start out with a private eye story with the background redacted before quickly evolving into something more sinister. It's an intense stakeout thriller, if one that leans more toward how this sort of activity messes with a detective's mind than what he learns.
Not that Parker (Lindsay Farris) is necessarily a licensed private detective; he may just be a guy who is in desperate need of money to pay his late son's outstanding hospital bills. Whatever the case may be, he's been offered to pay five figures to sit in an apartment across the street from that of a beautiful woman (Stephanie King), surveil it, and report what he has observed when an employer who demands complete anonymity calls. When the assignment drags on for days longer than expected without "Subject One" leaving her apartment, everything he learns seems to be a dead end, and her fiancé starts to seem dangerous... Well, he starts getting more than antsy.
For two buildings just about right next to each other, the two apartments in question certainly give the opposite impression: The woman's is cozy but nice, while Parker's squat bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the one I had to clean with a snow shovel when moving out, ankle-deep in scrap paper and with newspaper covering the walls and windows. It's a pit that obviously corresponds to Parker's shredded life, and then some, and manages to get more grotesque as the film goes along, with dead rats and a container of unknown black liquid. It also feels like a feedback loop - a place takes on the personality of the person staying there, whether actively or passively (when Parker doesn't use his spare time to clean the place), but also influences the outlook of the person in the space.
Full review on EFC.
It wound up being an all-animation afternoon in Hall, with the exception of a live-action short before The Case of Hana & Alice, though with distinctly different styles - puppets from Taiwan, stop-motion from Spain, mostly-conventional from Japan. Fun, especially since it seldom lines up that way.
After that, there was a rare spot on the Fantasia schedule where I had seen the movies playing on both screens at other festivals - (T)ERROR at IFFBoston and We Are Still Here at BUFF, which means I had the chance to actually sit down and eat without missing anything! Take those moments when you can get them, festival-goers; they can be rare! Naturally, it started to rain as soon as I stepped outside the theaters, so I only got as far as Dundee's on Crescent Street before ducking in and deciding this would do. Not bad ribs for that sort of place, at least.
After that, I spent some time writing and then headed across the street to de Seve for Observance. Short line for a world premiere; a lot of the other media guys were across the street for I Am Thor, all but guaranteed to be the bigger, crazier event.
Fortunately, the rest of the audience will have a chance to catch it on Wednesday afternoon, and I think most of the folks above - writer/director Joseph Sims-Dennett and cast members Lindsay Farris, Stephanie King, and Tom O'Sullivan - will probably still be hanging around; you likely don't fly here from Australia for just one day. It's worth checking out, especially if the ambiguous half-in-the-mind thriller is your sort of thing.
They give good Q&A, too, good enough that writing the review is tough for someone who mostly wants to talk about what he actually got from the film rather than the discussion afterwards which others might not necessarily be privy to. It was full of "crazy shoot" stories - they shot it in roughly 11 seventeen-hour days, and if that doesn't sound extreme enough to you, it was during that week in 2012 when Australia was setting all sorts of crazy temperature records - 46 Celsius at one point (about 115 degrees Farenheit), which I recall reading was brutal enough that weather forecasters were adding new colors to the map.
One thing I found interesting and odd was when someone asked them about the characters speaking with North American accents rather than Australia, they didn't really hem and haw much about indie movies selling better that way, but instead Sims-Dennett talked about how it made the film less specific in terms of setting, and I wonder if that's a bit of confirmation bias on his part: Being from there, he sees the location as obviously Sydney, but I don't know that anybody not from the city would, especially as close-in as it was shot. Then again, Australia is such a relatively small place in terms of population and history that there's maybe not a lot of room to drop a conspiracy into it. On the other hand, star Lindsay Farris mentioned that the Australian accent can be fairly harsh, and not necessarily the most nuanced tool for an actor. Which seems like a really weird thing to say about your own manner of speaking, honestly, almost defeatist.
As an aside: They got the accents and the money right, but didn't disguise the power outlets on the walls. Oh, and Americans seldom buy milk in that sort of round plastic bottle. But, then, I suppose those mismatches just increased the ambiguity of location.
So, that was yesterday. Today I'll be hitting the International Sci-Fi Short Film Showcase, Børning, and then flipping a coin between Gangnam Blues and A Christmas Horror Story. Oh, and trying to find out from my Airbnb host just where the heck the laundry is in this 25-story building
Qi Ren Mi Ma: Gu Luo Bu Zhi Mi (The Arti: The Adventure Begins)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, DCP with XPand 3D)
To say one doesn't see many movies like The Arti may understate the case; there is one family in Taiwan not only carrying on a tradition of glove puppetry but using it to make fantastic adventure films like this. Enhanced with impressive visual effects, the end result is an incredible treat which only comes around once in a while, especially if you like this sort of steampunk martial-arts adventure anyway.
ARTI-C is a wooden robot built some sixteen years before the main action and powered by a mysterious core called "The Origin"; after frightened people killed its creator while chasing him from his home, his children have been wanderers. Older brother Mo tends to the automaton and searches for more information about The Origin, though his sister Tong spends much of her time fighting. Their next stop is the Kingdom of Lou-lan along the Silk Road, though there are perils: Sandworms are attacking villages along the river, and Prince Angelo has invited Mo and ARTI-C to participate in a martial-arts tournament as a way to earn his assistance in retrieving more of The Origin from the mysterious Lop people.
There's a fair amount of digital work used in creating The Arti, although the making-of bits shown over the final credits may surprise in terms of there not being as much as one might think; the guys at PiLi Puppetry have built some sets of impressive scale and appear to have built the puppets ingeniously enough that there's not even that much need for wire removal. The craftsmanship all around is detailed, especially in the costumes, although it seldom extends to articulated mouths. In many cases, that would give the characters a sort of dehumanizing formality - compare how much the Muppets are built around their mouths relative to Japanese puppetry with the same sort of complex, multi-layered costumes seen here - although that is far from the case with this movie.
Full review on EFC.
Pos Eso (Possessed)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, DCP)
There are some spoofs that cast such a broad net for their targets that they maybe slip out of the category of parody altogether, and then there are things like Possessed, which is clearly one-third The Exorcist, one-third The Omen, and one-third everything else. Lucky for those watching it, that "everything else" includes a lot of funny, funny stuff, and the whole thing gets a lot crazier when sculpted out of clay.
It starts with a priest with the unlikely name of Lenin (voice of Josema Yuste) retrieving a holy artifact from a booby-trapped crypt, and don't think his staunchly communist mother isn't disappointed with his career choices on top of feeling neglected. Elsewhere in Spain, we're introduced to Trini (voice of Anabel Alonso), a world-famous flamenco dancer who has retired to take care of her son Damian after the death of her bullfighter husband Georgio - though her manager Manolo (voice of Alex Angulo) would really like her to get back to work. Of course, to say Damian is the sort of kid who causes trouble is a bit of an understatement, and the Bishop (voice of Santiago Segura) is far too corrupt to have the faith necessary to conduct an actual exorcism.
Basic building blocks for a demonic possession movie, only this one is a riot. Director Samuel Ortà Martà (credited as "Sam") has a fondness for slapstick which is in terrible taste, but presents it in bright primary colors that make its gross-out bits far more the stuff of cartoons than horror movies. Sam and co-writer Ruben Ontiveros also have a good sense of where their movie's line between a bit of awfulness that is horrifyingly funny off-screen but just cruel as a visual, making for a movie where anything goes but where the jokes all find their level.
Full review on EFC.
"La Pepperette"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival, digital)
You've got to like seeing shorts like "La Pepperette" before a film at a festival - five minutes or less, but establishes a dynamic between its characters quickly and packs a few really funny moments in there before hitting the audience with a punchline. This is a short movie that does not mess around, even if it does have a relaxed feel.
That starts behind the camera, where co-writer/director/producer/cinematographer/editor Jerome Hof and co-writer/producer/casting director Joëlle Agathe build a movie that is very efficient - there's not a wasted moment in it, and Hof knows when a cut is funnier than watching something play out. In front of the camera, Jean-Carl Boucher and Pier-Luc Funk play off each other very well as eponymous characters Carl and Pierre-Luc, one a nervous would-be convenience store robber and the other an enthusiastic getaway driver. They're both playing characters who aren't necessarily thinking things through but aren't bumbling, coming across as more sympathetic than you might expect without making the short cutesy.
Anyway, I hope they keep making good, quick movies even if they move up to longer lengths. This one got in and out and is all the more enjoyable for it.
Hana to Alice Satsujin Jiken (The Case of Hana and Alice)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2015 in Theatre Hall Concordia (Fantasia International Film Festival: AXIS, HD)
Eleven years ago, Shunji Iwai made Hana & Alice, a well-received movie about two high-school best friends smitten with the same boy, praised in large part for the performances by Anne Suzuki and Yu Aoi as the title characters. Now, he's decided to to tell the story of how these two girls met ten years later despite the actresses having aged a decade in the meantime, and rather than recast, he's made his first animated film. It's a charmer.
Tetsuko Arisugawa (voice of Yu Aoi) and her mother Kayo (voice of Shoko Aida) have just moved to a small town after Kayo's divorce, which not only means a new school for Tetsuko but a new nickname - taking her mother's surname rather than that of father Kenji Kuroyanagi means she'll be "Alice" rather than "Kuro" from now on. It's kind of a weird place - the shut-in girl in the overgrown house next door seems to be spying on her, and the other students are adamant she not sit in a certain seat because of a story about how "Judas" sat there and was murdered by one of his four wives. It's ridiculous for a middle-school student, but one of the other kids went into convulsions as if possessed when she sat there before. The curious Alice winds up investigating, and the trail leads in short order to her weird next-door neighbor, Hana Arai (voice of Anne Suzuki), who has her own reasons to find out what actually happened a year ago.
I've not seen the original Hana & Alice, but that's going to have to be remedied because I found myself tremendously fond of these characters. Alice, in particular, is a pip; she's introduced with the sort of red flags that could mark her as the surly new girl - embarrassed by her flirty mother, resigned to giving up ballet because money's tight and she's the practical one - but Yu Aoi gives her this great, spunky personality. She's naturally funny and though she takes no crap, it's not hard to see how she makes friends quickly enough. Hana stays in the background for the first half-hour or so of the movie, but once introduced, she's got a sardonic tone that matches Alice's. It's easy to see how the two will become friends even as they start off somewhat antagonistic, there's a natural banter to their first conversations and their tones match. In some ways, Anne Suzuki's got the harder part; Hana has to be dramatic in a way that's really worrisome when you think about it - going near-hikikomori like that isn't a good sign on top of the events that led there - but it also can't be hugely surprising when she's out and about and more than a bit likable and capable.
Full review on EFC.
Observance
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2015 in the J.A. de Seve Cinema (Fantasia International Film Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)
Writer/director Joseph Sims-Dennett initially seems to start out with a private eye story with the background redacted before quickly evolving into something more sinister. It's an intense stakeout thriller, if one that leans more toward how this sort of activity messes with a detective's mind than what he learns.
Not that Parker (Lindsay Farris) is necessarily a licensed private detective; he may just be a guy who is in desperate need of money to pay his late son's outstanding hospital bills. Whatever the case may be, he's been offered to pay five figures to sit in an apartment across the street from that of a beautiful woman (Stephanie King), surveil it, and report what he has observed when an employer who demands complete anonymity calls. When the assignment drags on for days longer than expected without "Subject One" leaving her apartment, everything he learns seems to be a dead end, and her fiancé starts to seem dangerous... Well, he starts getting more than antsy.
For two buildings just about right next to each other, the two apartments in question certainly give the opposite impression: The woman's is cozy but nice, while Parker's squat bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the one I had to clean with a snow shovel when moving out, ankle-deep in scrap paper and with newspaper covering the walls and windows. It's a pit that obviously corresponds to Parker's shredded life, and then some, and manages to get more grotesque as the film goes along, with dead rats and a container of unknown black liquid. It also feels like a feedback loop - a place takes on the personality of the person staying there, whether actively or passively (when Parker doesn't use his spare time to clean the place), but also influences the outlook of the person in the space.
Full review on EFC.
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Films at the Gate (and Brattle): Fearless Hyena, Come Drink with Me, and The Boxer's Omen
Have I mentioned before that I love Films at the Gate? I do, unreservedly. I missed Saturday's screening, but I think it was raining that day anyway.
I don't know if the lanterns are there year-round, or if that was part of the decoration, but it's a nifty look. I didn't get any pictures of the opening presentations, alas, which is a shame because while I didn't make it for the lion dancing, there was some nifty things. Including an videotaped greeting from Donnie Yen, who stopped by an ACDC event early this year. But did Iceman open in the Boston area the next week? No. It did not. This continuing to happen boggles my mind.
I was also glad to see that Come Drink with Me was one of the selections; I think it was the only one from the Harvard Film Archive's King Hu series from last year that I missed, and while the Blu-ray (or even DVD) wasn't exactly up to the level's of the HFA's 35mm prints, it's still a pretty great movie.
Speaking of great 35mm prints, I got to the second leg of the Brattle's "Reel Weird Brattle" program this week; all of the movies are on 35mm from the American Genre Film Archive, and if they all look as nice as this one, it's a pretty good reason to stay up late. They'll be handing out pins with each one, and I'd say "collect them all", but it's a bit late for that (hey, I can't either; I'm missing at least two by being out of town). I think this is the only Chinese one, but if they're all this nuts...
Xiao quan guai zhao (The Fearless Hyena)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 September 2014 in Chinatown Park on the Greenway (Films at the Gate, video)
The Fearless Hyena is noteworthy in large part because it is Jackie Chan's first credited movie as writer and director as well as star, and given that "screenplay by Jackie Chan" never exactly became something that drew people to movies, it's not surprising that the story is fairly perfunctory. On the other hand, Chan's greatest skill as a director - getting out of the way of his own fight choreography - is visible from the start.
In this one, he plays Shing Lung, a lazy young man who would rather gamble that practice the kung fu of his grandfather Peng-fei (James Tien Jun), especially since said grandfather has said not to use it in public. He doesn't quite think he's doing that by running a scam with Ti Cha (Lee Kwan), head of a bogus kung fu school. Still, it attracts the attention of both Yen Chuen-wong (Yen Shi-kwan), the warlord determined to eradicate all practitioners of this style, and beggar "Unicorn" (Chan Wai-lau), secretly a master himself.
There are a lot of movies with the basic template of The Fearless Hyena - establish the villain, establish the student, make it personal, train under an unyielding master, and then build up a big fight for the finale. A lot of kung fu movies from the 1970s look like this - not studio-bound like Shaw Brothers films, but often taking place in big empty spaces, or likely-reused town sets - and have the same rhythms. Jackie Chan being in charge means that this is done with slapstick bits, even when things take the inevitably more serious turn.
Full review at EFC
Da zui xia (Come Drink with Me)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 September 2014 in Chinatown Park on the Greenway (Films at the Gate, video)
Cheng Pei-pei was cast in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because Ang Lee remembered her fondly from the films she made as a young woman, with several articles specifically mentioning this one, also a signature film of King Hu. It would be Hu's last for Shaw Brothers before moving to Taiwan, regarded as both a pivotal moment in the wuxia genre and a great film in its own right. It is not an undeserved reputation.
It starts out with a caravan being ambushed, with government official Zhang Buqing (Wong Chung) taken prisoner by rebels including "Smiling Tiger" Tsu Kan (Lee Wan-chung). In response the their demands, his father sends his other child, the Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei), to negotiate his release - that is to say, rescue him. She takes up residence in the local inn, although the other non-bandit guest - "Drunken Cat" Fan Tai-pei (Yueh Hua) - may prove ally or hindrance.
Hu made a number of films set in inns - most notably, Dragon Inn - and sometimes entirely constrained to them, although Come Drink with Me is rather open. It still has some of the moments that Hu (and others) would return to off and on, generally playing more as straight-up action with relatively little intrigue, including not making a big deal out of folks initially thinking Golden Swallow is a man. In some ways, Hu is doing what the greats often do in influential movies, presenting things with a casual confidence that later imitators don't quite have.
Full review at EFC
Mo (The Boxer's Omen)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Reel Weird Brattle, 35mm)
The Boxer's Omen seems like two extremely different movies made into one, much as one character is... No, that metaphor is not quite right, and I am not going to spoil one of the more jaw-dropping moments of complete insanity that this movie offers up, even though that would likely still leave several dozen for the viewer to discover. It is a downright strange movie wrapped in something conventional and almost unrelated, a fine midnight movie if there ever was one.
The boxer is Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei), who challenges Thai kickboxer Bu Bo (Bolo Yeung Sze) after the latter's dirty and illegal moves seriously injure Chan's brother. That will be in three months, which is good: Both before and after coming to Thailand to issue the challenge, Chan Hung has had visions which lead him to a Buddhist temple where the monks tell him that their abbot was his twin in a former life, which means that he must become a monk and fight the black magician who cast a killing spell on the abbot for slaying the magician's student...
To say this makes no sense is more than a bit unfair; there is actually a pretty simple "you killed someone close to me and I shall have retribution!" logic going on with all the back and forth, so all the motivations are easy enough to buy into. As to all the reincarnation, transformation, and the evil wizard who seems to be hanging out in the same room as his arch-nemesis... Hey, I don't know that much about Buddhism; this could make at least as much sense as the exorcisms in western horror movies! In all seriousness, On Szeto's screenplay seems to run on completely arbitrary rules, seeming less the result of one or two writers than something handed off between four or five each instructed to the nuttiest thing he or she could come up with. Somehow, he and director Kuei Chih-hung make this flow better than it has any right to.
Full review at EFC
I don't know if the lanterns are there year-round, or if that was part of the decoration, but it's a nifty look. I didn't get any pictures of the opening presentations, alas, which is a shame because while I didn't make it for the lion dancing, there was some nifty things. Including an videotaped greeting from Donnie Yen, who stopped by an ACDC event early this year. But did Iceman open in the Boston area the next week? No. It did not. This continuing to happen boggles my mind.
I was also glad to see that Come Drink with Me was one of the selections; I think it was the only one from the Harvard Film Archive's King Hu series from last year that I missed, and while the Blu-ray (or even DVD) wasn't exactly up to the level's of the HFA's 35mm prints, it's still a pretty great movie.
Speaking of great 35mm prints, I got to the second leg of the Brattle's "Reel Weird Brattle" program this week; all of the movies are on 35mm from the American Genre Film Archive, and if they all look as nice as this one, it's a pretty good reason to stay up late. They'll be handing out pins with each one, and I'd say "collect them all", but it's a bit late for that (hey, I can't either; I'm missing at least two by being out of town). I think this is the only Chinese one, but if they're all this nuts...
Xiao quan guai zhao (The Fearless Hyena)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 September 2014 in Chinatown Park on the Greenway (Films at the Gate, video)
The Fearless Hyena is noteworthy in large part because it is Jackie Chan's first credited movie as writer and director as well as star, and given that "screenplay by Jackie Chan" never exactly became something that drew people to movies, it's not surprising that the story is fairly perfunctory. On the other hand, Chan's greatest skill as a director - getting out of the way of his own fight choreography - is visible from the start.
In this one, he plays Shing Lung, a lazy young man who would rather gamble that practice the kung fu of his grandfather Peng-fei (James Tien Jun), especially since said grandfather has said not to use it in public. He doesn't quite think he's doing that by running a scam with Ti Cha (Lee Kwan), head of a bogus kung fu school. Still, it attracts the attention of both Yen Chuen-wong (Yen Shi-kwan), the warlord determined to eradicate all practitioners of this style, and beggar "Unicorn" (Chan Wai-lau), secretly a master himself.
There are a lot of movies with the basic template of The Fearless Hyena - establish the villain, establish the student, make it personal, train under an unyielding master, and then build up a big fight for the finale. A lot of kung fu movies from the 1970s look like this - not studio-bound like Shaw Brothers films, but often taking place in big empty spaces, or likely-reused town sets - and have the same rhythms. Jackie Chan being in charge means that this is done with slapstick bits, even when things take the inevitably more serious turn.
Full review at EFC
Da zui xia (Come Drink with Me)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 September 2014 in Chinatown Park on the Greenway (Films at the Gate, video)
Cheng Pei-pei was cast in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because Ang Lee remembered her fondly from the films she made as a young woman, with several articles specifically mentioning this one, also a signature film of King Hu. It would be Hu's last for Shaw Brothers before moving to Taiwan, regarded as both a pivotal moment in the wuxia genre and a great film in its own right. It is not an undeserved reputation.
It starts out with a caravan being ambushed, with government official Zhang Buqing (Wong Chung) taken prisoner by rebels including "Smiling Tiger" Tsu Kan (Lee Wan-chung). In response the their demands, his father sends his other child, the Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei), to negotiate his release - that is to say, rescue him. She takes up residence in the local inn, although the other non-bandit guest - "Drunken Cat" Fan Tai-pei (Yueh Hua) - may prove ally or hindrance.
Hu made a number of films set in inns - most notably, Dragon Inn - and sometimes entirely constrained to them, although Come Drink with Me is rather open. It still has some of the moments that Hu (and others) would return to off and on, generally playing more as straight-up action with relatively little intrigue, including not making a big deal out of folks initially thinking Golden Swallow is a man. In some ways, Hu is doing what the greats often do in influential movies, presenting things with a casual confidence that later imitators don't quite have.
Full review at EFC
Mo (The Boxer's Omen)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2014 in the Brattle Theatre (Reel Weird Brattle, 35mm)
The Boxer's Omen seems like two extremely different movies made into one, much as one character is... No, that metaphor is not quite right, and I am not going to spoil one of the more jaw-dropping moments of complete insanity that this movie offers up, even though that would likely still leave several dozen for the viewer to discover. It is a downright strange movie wrapped in something conventional and almost unrelated, a fine midnight movie if there ever was one.
The boxer is Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei), who challenges Thai kickboxer Bu Bo (Bolo Yeung Sze) after the latter's dirty and illegal moves seriously injure Chan's brother. That will be in three months, which is good: Both before and after coming to Thailand to issue the challenge, Chan Hung has had visions which lead him to a Buddhist temple where the monks tell him that their abbot was his twin in a former life, which means that he must become a monk and fight the black magician who cast a killing spell on the abbot for slaying the magician's student...
To say this makes no sense is more than a bit unfair; there is actually a pretty simple "you killed someone close to me and I shall have retribution!" logic going on with all the back and forth, so all the motivations are easy enough to buy into. As to all the reincarnation, transformation, and the evil wizard who seems to be hanging out in the same room as his arch-nemesis... Hey, I don't know that much about Buddhism; this could make at least as much sense as the exorcisms in western horror movies! In all seriousness, On Szeto's screenplay seems to run on completely arbitrary rules, seeming less the result of one or two writers than something handed off between four or five each instructed to the nuttiest thing he or she could come up with. Somehow, he and director Kuei Chih-hung make this flow better than it has any right to.
Full review at EFC
Thursday, March 21, 2013
This Week In Tickets: 11 March 2013 - 17 March 2013
Chlotrudis Awards stuff dominating my movie-watching time, for good and ill.
Stubless: The three movies I saw to vote on Chlotrudis's Buried Treasure Award (Beauty Is Embarrassing on Monday, Alps on Tuesday, Sound of Noise on Thursday, all in my living room); and Ginger & Rosa (Sunday at 10am in Coolidge Corner #2).
I think this may be the first year of voting in the Chlotrudis Awards when I've actually seen enough of the movies in the Buried Treasure category to actually vote in the category. I still missed Breathing, but five out of six movies that are, by their nature, difficult to see is not bad, especially when you're the only movie lover in North America without Netflix.
I didn't have quite the busy weekend I initially intended. The two King Hu pictures on Friday night were a start, but were also a lot at the end of the work week. Saturday wound up being a bit of a spring cleaning day, and I didn't feel like I'd make the end of A Touch of Zen, let alone The ABCs of Death - especially with a 10am screening of Ginger & Rosa, which wound up being pretty good, on Sunday morning. After that I went for The Call, trying two theaters before I could get MoviePass to work, and then just barely had time to grab some groceries and a much-needed shower before it was time for "the Trudies".
As usual, it was an amusing enough evening, eventually serving as a wake for the Boston Phoenix, which abruptly ceased publication a few days earlier. It's long been a friend to the organization and film in general, and it's tough to imagine the Dig completely filling the void it leaves.
A lot of the people presenting the awards were from the Phoenix, or other local organizations, and maybe it was because that paper closing means that its critics are, temporarily, just enthusiasts like us, but the thing about the Chlotrudis Awards presentation that has struck me as weird ever since I started attending really stood out: Why don't we, as members, give out our own awards? On one level, it doesn't really matter - folks are only rarely there to pick them up - but as much as it's cool to have guests there validating us as being worthy of the critics' and programmers' and officials' respect, the usual set-up where Chlotrudis members stand on stage, introduce someone else, who reads off the nominees and announces the winner kind of feels like we're stepping aside or making sure that someone with authority speaks for us. I think it would actually be much cooler if the members were standing side-by-side with the guests, rather than ceding the stage.
The awards themselves were a pretty reasonable lot. For a small group like this, just getting seen give a movie a lg up, especially since that lets people discuss it on various forums and boost visibility. So I wasn't surprised that The Perks of Being a Wallflower wound up getting a lot of awards; it got a push. And I can't complain about stuff getting a push, as the movie I nominated for Buried Treasure, A Simple Life wound up winning, despite only one or two of us having seen it before the nominating meeting in January. It gave me a weirdly personal stake in the evening's festivities, which I'm sure the folks who nominated the other films up for consideration must have shared. When that got announced as the last and biggest prize of the night, well, what could I thing but "Suck it, losers!"
I kid, especially since a lot of people at the after-party seemed to be implying that they voted strategically - apparently they saw this having momentum and, having liked it pretty well, voted for it perhaps over their first choice; based upon the number of people who did that, it seemed like Sound of Noise could easily have won. That's why you vote your conscience, folks.
The reception afterward was OK, although I found myself having to leave to get some lobby air after a while - aside from the usual difficulties in being able to hear in a crowded room, it was one of those evenings where something just seemed to assault my sense of smell. In this case, it was cucumbers - normally inoffensive enough, but had me recoiling in full get that away! mode.
It was cool to actually hear people talking about reading and looking forward to what I wrote, though. As much as I write in part because it's the best way for me to organize my thoughts on something, I do like knowing people read it, and looking at the page views on this and eFilmCritic often has me wonder how many are people actually reading and how many are spiders or other robots doing little but cataloging the web. A couple of folks mentioned (one or two actually enthusiastically) reading my reviews and, no joke, that felt really great.
Stubless: The three movies I saw to vote on Chlotrudis's Buried Treasure Award (Beauty Is Embarrassing on Monday, Alps on Tuesday, Sound of Noise on Thursday, all in my living room); and Ginger & Rosa (Sunday at 10am in Coolidge Corner #2).
I think this may be the first year of voting in the Chlotrudis Awards when I've actually seen enough of the movies in the Buried Treasure category to actually vote in the category. I still missed Breathing, but five out of six movies that are, by their nature, difficult to see is not bad, especially when you're the only movie lover in North America without Netflix.
I didn't have quite the busy weekend I initially intended. The two King Hu pictures on Friday night were a start, but were also a lot at the end of the work week. Saturday wound up being a bit of a spring cleaning day, and I didn't feel like I'd make the end of A Touch of Zen, let alone The ABCs of Death - especially with a 10am screening of Ginger & Rosa, which wound up being pretty good, on Sunday morning. After that I went for The Call, trying two theaters before I could get MoviePass to work, and then just barely had time to grab some groceries and a much-needed shower before it was time for "the Trudies".
As usual, it was an amusing enough evening, eventually serving as a wake for the Boston Phoenix, which abruptly ceased publication a few days earlier. It's long been a friend to the organization and film in general, and it's tough to imagine the Dig completely filling the void it leaves.
A lot of the people presenting the awards were from the Phoenix, or other local organizations, and maybe it was because that paper closing means that its critics are, temporarily, just enthusiasts like us, but the thing about the Chlotrudis Awards presentation that has struck me as weird ever since I started attending really stood out: Why don't we, as members, give out our own awards? On one level, it doesn't really matter - folks are only rarely there to pick them up - but as much as it's cool to have guests there validating us as being worthy of the critics' and programmers' and officials' respect, the usual set-up where Chlotrudis members stand on stage, introduce someone else, who reads off the nominees and announces the winner kind of feels like we're stepping aside or making sure that someone with authority speaks for us. I think it would actually be much cooler if the members were standing side-by-side with the guests, rather than ceding the stage.
The awards themselves were a pretty reasonable lot. For a small group like this, just getting seen give a movie a lg up, especially since that lets people discuss it on various forums and boost visibility. So I wasn't surprised that The Perks of Being a Wallflower wound up getting a lot of awards; it got a push. And I can't complain about stuff getting a push, as the movie I nominated for Buried Treasure, A Simple Life wound up winning, despite only one or two of us having seen it before the nominating meeting in January. It gave me a weirdly personal stake in the evening's festivities, which I'm sure the folks who nominated the other films up for consideration must have shared. When that got announced as the last and biggest prize of the night, well, what could I thing but "Suck it, losers!"
I kid, especially since a lot of people at the after-party seemed to be implying that they voted strategically - apparently they saw this having momentum and, having liked it pretty well, voted for it perhaps over their first choice; based upon the number of people who did that, it seemed like Sound of Noise could easily have won. That's why you vote your conscience, folks.
The reception afterward was OK, although I found myself having to leave to get some lobby air after a while - aside from the usual difficulties in being able to hear in a crowded room, it was one of those evenings where something just seemed to assault my sense of smell. In this case, it was cucumbers - normally inoffensive enough, but had me recoiling in full get that away! mode.
It was cool to actually hear people talking about reading and looking forward to what I wrote, though. As much as I write in part because it's the best way for me to organize my thoughts on something, I do like knowing people read it, and looking at the page views on this and eFilmCritic often has me wonder how many are people actually reading and how many are spiders or other robots doing little but cataloging the web. A couple of folks mentioned (one or two actually enthusiastically) reading my reviews and, no joke, that felt really great.
King Hu and the Art of Wuxia: Dragon Inn and All the King's Men
This is one of those series that makes me think that I really should have a membership at the Harvard Film Archive. They have them every once in a while, and it's always a very pleasant surprise - you pick up the schedule, knowing that what's coming is a fairly deep dig into the more obscure corners of world cinema and visits by avant-garde short filmmakers who merge documentary techniques with actually scratching the 16mm film - if you've got somewhat more mainstream tastes, it's often a case of picking and choosing. And then, every once in a while, they'll do two weeks of something that interests you.
I jest about the obscurity of what the HFA shows, because I'm glad there is a place where this sort of deep dive happens - if you want to go more mainstream, the Brattle is right down the road. Because, after all, a series of eight wuxia films from forty years ago, even if it is what gets me excited to come down there is probably not going to move the needle for a lot of others.
Kind of a shame. I'll let the HFA's program do the talking about why King Hu is exciting and important, because they know a whole heck of a lot more about the subject than I do, but I can at least vouch for the prints I saw last Friday night - they were pretty fantastic; the print of Dragon Inn was brand new (as is the A Touch of Zen print that ran last Saturday and this coming Saturday), and I believe they mentioned All the King's Men was from Hu's personal collection, managed by UCLA, as were some other prints. In short, these look really excellent, and I'm looking forward to seeing four more this weekend.
As an aside, reviewing these can be frustrating - IMDB doesn't have a lot of names filled in, the Asian movie databases tend to focus on more recent works, and doing a general web search yielded a lot of works that had the same name both in English and Mandarin (apparently there was a popular and completely Chinese TV show called "Tian xia di yi" a decade or so ago). I couldn't even find any other reviews to scour for names like I could with Dragon Inn. In the end, I was glad I took this picture between films:
... Because that was the best way to link at least a couple noteworthy characters with the actors who played them.
Long men kezhan (Dragon Inn)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (King Hu and the Art of Wuxia, 35mm)
1967's Dragon Inn (Long men kezhan in Mandarin, also known as "Dragon Gate Inn") is kind of a big deal. It's the first film that director King Hu did in Taiwan after leaving Shaw Brothers, in many ways jump-starting that country's film industry. It's been remade and referenced, and its DNA shows up in many movies beyond Hu's "inn films". And most importantly, it's a terrific wuxia film in it's own right.
Minister of Defense Wu Chien has just been executed, thanks in part to lies spread by eunuch Tsao Shao-chin (Bai Ying), who controls both the secretive Eastern Agency and Palace Guards. The Emperor has allowed Wu's family to live in exile, but Tsao figures this will just lead to revenge, and when the first attempt to assassinate them fails, he dispatches the agencies' top swordsmen, Pi Hsiao-tang (Miao Tien) and Mao Tsung-hsien (Han Ying-chieh) to Dragon Gate, when the Wus will cross into Mongolia. They commandeer the local inn, but others also arrive ahead of the Wus: Hsiao Shao-tzu (Shih Chun), a friend of innkeeper Wu Ning (Cho Kin) is first, and then travelers Mr. Chu (Hsieh Han) and Ms. Chu (Polly Shang-kuan) - and the more justice-minded new arrivals have considerable skills with the sword themselves.
That's a lot of information being dumped on the audience for a relatively simple story, especially for Westerners who don't know the sort of politics that went on in Ming Dynasty China, but King Hu lays things out quite clearly after the initial narration. Yes, there are a lot of characters running around and some things are not going to be obvious (Ms. Chu is dressed as a man and this apparently fools most of the characters), but there aren't as many betrayals and double-crosses as later entries in the genre would pile on as twists, and the sides line up as a pretty straightforward good-versus-evil fight rather than a load of competing factions.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Tian xia di yi (All the King's Men)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (King Hu and the Art of Wuxia, 35mm)
Palace intrigue in old China... A secret mission... A master thief. All the ingredients for a martial arts epic, except, well, no, that's not what this is at all. Period melodrama? Closer, but it's really more of a dry black comedy.
It's the 10th century BC, the emperor (Tien Feng) is not well, and the medicines he is receiving from con artist "Immortal Li" are in reality only making him worse. There is a man in a nearby kingdom, "Divine Physician" Chang Po-chao, whom it's said could cure his epilepsy, but the only way to bribe the head of the border guard is with a new work by painter Wei Yu-pi. He, meanwhile, wishes to be paid in jade, in fact with a specific piece, which requires a thief. But Ting Yu-yu, the best in the area, claims to be retired, though his daughter Li-ting (Cheng Pei-pei) seems enthusiastic. And for the sake of secrecy, the archivists originally sent to recruit Chang don't even know it's on behalf of the emperor!
There are other things going on as well, but All the King's Men ("Tian xia di yi" in Mandarin) is basically a slowly-rolling snowball of a comedy, picking up characters and entanglements until it's got enough momentum to crush anything in its path. It's not necessarily the type that announces itself as such, though; where a lot of movies of that ilk will pick up a broadly-played fool and a great deal of slapstick at some point, this one continues to work bureaucratic slight of hand almost right to the end. It's a comedy of manners that seldom goes for the really big laughs to punctuate its steady stream of little ones. It could probably use more outright farce, actually, but it's at least not so dialogue-dependent that those of us who don't speak the language are trying to squeeze the gags out of subtitles.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
I jest about the obscurity of what the HFA shows, because I'm glad there is a place where this sort of deep dive happens - if you want to go more mainstream, the Brattle is right down the road. Because, after all, a series of eight wuxia films from forty years ago, even if it is what gets me excited to come down there is probably not going to move the needle for a lot of others.
Kind of a shame. I'll let the HFA's program do the talking about why King Hu is exciting and important, because they know a whole heck of a lot more about the subject than I do, but I can at least vouch for the prints I saw last Friday night - they were pretty fantastic; the print of Dragon Inn was brand new (as is the A Touch of Zen print that ran last Saturday and this coming Saturday), and I believe they mentioned All the King's Men was from Hu's personal collection, managed by UCLA, as were some other prints. In short, these look really excellent, and I'm looking forward to seeing four more this weekend.
As an aside, reviewing these can be frustrating - IMDB doesn't have a lot of names filled in, the Asian movie databases tend to focus on more recent works, and doing a general web search yielded a lot of works that had the same name both in English and Mandarin (apparently there was a popular and completely Chinese TV show called "Tian xia di yi" a decade or so ago). I couldn't even find any other reviews to scour for names like I could with Dragon Inn. In the end, I was glad I took this picture between films:
... Because that was the best way to link at least a couple noteworthy characters with the actors who played them.
Long men kezhan (Dragon Inn)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (King Hu and the Art of Wuxia, 35mm)
1967's Dragon Inn (Long men kezhan in Mandarin, also known as "Dragon Gate Inn") is kind of a big deal. It's the first film that director King Hu did in Taiwan after leaving Shaw Brothers, in many ways jump-starting that country's film industry. It's been remade and referenced, and its DNA shows up in many movies beyond Hu's "inn films". And most importantly, it's a terrific wuxia film in it's own right.
Minister of Defense Wu Chien has just been executed, thanks in part to lies spread by eunuch Tsao Shao-chin (Bai Ying), who controls both the secretive Eastern Agency and Palace Guards. The Emperor has allowed Wu's family to live in exile, but Tsao figures this will just lead to revenge, and when the first attempt to assassinate them fails, he dispatches the agencies' top swordsmen, Pi Hsiao-tang (Miao Tien) and Mao Tsung-hsien (Han Ying-chieh) to Dragon Gate, when the Wus will cross into Mongolia. They commandeer the local inn, but others also arrive ahead of the Wus: Hsiao Shao-tzu (Shih Chun), a friend of innkeeper Wu Ning (Cho Kin) is first, and then travelers Mr. Chu (Hsieh Han) and Ms. Chu (Polly Shang-kuan) - and the more justice-minded new arrivals have considerable skills with the sword themselves.
That's a lot of information being dumped on the audience for a relatively simple story, especially for Westerners who don't know the sort of politics that went on in Ming Dynasty China, but King Hu lays things out quite clearly after the initial narration. Yes, there are a lot of characters running around and some things are not going to be obvious (Ms. Chu is dressed as a man and this apparently fools most of the characters), but there aren't as many betrayals and double-crosses as later entries in the genre would pile on as twists, and the sides line up as a pretty straightforward good-versus-evil fight rather than a load of competing factions.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
Tian xia di yi (All the King's Men)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2013 in the Harvard Film Archive (King Hu and the Art of Wuxia, 35mm)
Palace intrigue in old China... A secret mission... A master thief. All the ingredients for a martial arts epic, except, well, no, that's not what this is at all. Period melodrama? Closer, but it's really more of a dry black comedy.
It's the 10th century BC, the emperor (Tien Feng) is not well, and the medicines he is receiving from con artist "Immortal Li" are in reality only making him worse. There is a man in a nearby kingdom, "Divine Physician" Chang Po-chao, whom it's said could cure his epilepsy, but the only way to bribe the head of the border guard is with a new work by painter Wei Yu-pi. He, meanwhile, wishes to be paid in jade, in fact with a specific piece, which requires a thief. But Ting Yu-yu, the best in the area, claims to be retired, though his daughter Li-ting (Cheng Pei-pei) seems enthusiastic. And for the sake of secrecy, the archivists originally sent to recruit Chang don't even know it's on behalf of the emperor!
There are other things going on as well, but All the King's Men ("Tian xia di yi" in Mandarin) is basically a slowly-rolling snowball of a comedy, picking up characters and entanglements until it's got enough momentum to crush anything in its path. It's not necessarily the type that announces itself as such, though; where a lot of movies of that ilk will pick up a broadly-played fool and a great deal of slapstick at some point, this one continues to work bureaucratic slight of hand almost right to the end. It's a comedy of manners that seldom goes for the really big laughs to punctuate its steady stream of little ones. It could probably use more outright farce, actually, but it's at least not so dialogue-dependent that those of us who don't speak the language are trying to squeeze the gags out of subtitles.
Full review on eFilmCritic.
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