I can't believe I didn't get a chance to go on the river yesterday; the place I went needed four to load a boat, and there were never more than three of us at the time I was there. Ah well, it was a nice day to sit in the sun and get started on writing a review (but not finishing it; this is the point in the week where my writing slows to a crawl). The exhibit on prehistoric Japan at the archeological museum was very cool.
Quality took an upturn at about nine last night - Square Jaw Theater was unmemorable aside from the kickass "Green Hornet" short, and God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand was bloody godawful. Brutality against kids and it looked amateurish. Wilderness was a blast, though, and the director did a good Q&A afterwards, and Meatball Machine was a fun, cheap gross-out flick with aspirations to be more.
Today's plan: Hopefully get a call from the press office about screeners - by the time they sent me an email, I was away from the laptop. That'll teach me to include a phone number next time. Then it's a day at the main hall for 3 Mighty Men, All-Out Nine: Field of Nightmares, a dinner break because I'll be hungry and not interested in Hell, then back for Shinobi, The Gravedancers and (depending on how wiped out I am) The Glamorous life of Sachiko Hamai
God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand (Kami no hidarite akuma no migite)
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Director Shusuke Kaneko opens the film by dedicating it to his late mentor, Hiroyuki Nasu, which seems like a very poor way to respect the dead. Kaneko took the film over after Nasu's death, and whether you feel that Nasu would have done a better job with the film or that it's so flawed at a basic level that his dying before he could shoot it rather than after was a kindness, he probably deserves better than having his name tied to this miserable bit of nastiness.
Six year-old Sou Yamabe (Tsubasa Kobayashi) has terrible nightmares involving grisly murders, a recurring one being where he's a little girl who can't walk. He confides in his teenage sister Izumi (Asuka Shibuya), who witnesses one come to horrible life, leaving Sou missing a lot of blood and in the hospital. Then it starts for her, as Sou appears in her dreams to cryptically guide her to another town, where Yoshiko Tani (Ai Maeda) is searching for a lost friend. Meanwhile, bedridden little Momo (Momoko Shimizu) eagerly awaits the new storybooks her father (Tomorowo Taguchi) gives her. They're grimmer than Grimm, always seeming to end with a troublemaking teenage girl being brutally murdered. Hmmm.
When a movie more or less opens with a sharp object emerging from inside a sad little first-grader to leave him all but dead in a pool of his own blood, it's almost guaranteed to make a strong first impression. For me, it was disgust, followed by the crushing realization that horror films try to top themselves, and we were only ten minutes in. What's going to be worse than this?
Read the rest at HBS.
Wilderness
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Wilderness has a cast just primed for whittling. We're introduced to seven youthful offenders in the opening segment; it's not long after they're sent to an abandoned island for an exercise in teamwork that three women join them. Don't expect the island's population to stay in double digits for long, though - and don't expect the culling to be anything less than nasty.
The lads are doing the outward bound thing because one of them, Davie, slit his throat in response to the constant bullying he and Lindsay (Ben McKay) received, mostly at the hands of skinhead Steve (Stephen Wight) and his mate Lewis (Luke Neal), though the others in their bunkroom - Blue (Adam Deacon), Jethro (Richie Campbell), and newcomer Callum (rumored to have killed a fellow inmate at a previous facility) - haven't exactly done much to stop it. The island their guard Jed (Sean Pertwee) takes them to is former Army property now given over to the prison system. They're supposed to have it to themselves, but Louise (Alex Reid) and her two charges, Jo (Karly Greene) and Marcy (Lenora Crichlow), are there "building character" as well. And none of them know who (or what) else they're sharing the island with.
The revelation of the island's other inhabitant(s) comes earlier than it might, but it's late and important enough to be a surprise worth preserving. Part of the answer is "dogs", big German Shepards numerous and vicious enough to be described as a pack. Your garden-variety German Shepard is as imposing a marauder as any number of made-up predators, and these are not simple wild dogs. Even if they were, that would be quite enough; the lads are all city boys and quite un-used to dogs being such an actively hostile (and out of their control) part of the environment.
Read the rest at HBS.
Meatball Machine
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
It's the old, old, story. Boy meets girl after admiring her from afar. Girl is attacked by an alien parasite which makes her a gladiatorial cyborg. Boy loses girl. Boy meets other girl and her mad scientist father, boy is attacked by alien parasite but retains mind. Boy and girl fight to the death. How many times do we need to see the same ideas recycled before Hollywood and Tokyo come up with something new?
All kidding aside, Meatball Machine is the second take on the material; filmmaker Jun'ichi Yamamoto made a 1999 short with the same name and concept. For the feature version, he's teamed with two notable names in Japan's recent popcorn movie boom: Writer Jun'ya Kato worked on the screenplay for Death Trance ; co-director Yudai Yamaguchi directed Battlefield Baseball and the Cromartie High School live-action movie and also worked on Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus and Alive. Their work has on occasion been uneven, but just as often impressive; with Meatball Machine, they appear to be having fun making the best low-budget gore movie that they can.
The premise of the film posits aliens among us on Earth, here not for conquest but combat with each other, winner eating the loser. This causes problems for us not just because of the damage their techno-organic weapons do, but because these slug like things wield them by bonding to a human being, taking over their nervous systems and converting them into "necroborgs" (think Star Trek's Borg with bulkier armor and arms that can shape-shift into a variety of weapons). After one such fight, blue-collar worker Yoji (Issei Takahashi) finds a seemingly-inert pod that looks like a giant metal beetle and stows it in his closet for later tinkering while he nurses his crush on Sachiko (Aoba Kawai), the prettiest girl working at the day-care center next door. His first date with her has a bad end, though. Two, actually - first he gets squeamish about the scars and burns she exhibits from an abusive childhood, and the pod decides she would make an good host.
Read the rest at HBS
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Friday, July 14, 2006
Fantasia '06, Day 8: Necromancer and Frostbite
Didn't wind up doing much of anything yesterday - brunch at Eggspectation, a quick walk to the chalet of Mount Royal, then Necromancer, which was probably not a good choice after the mountain had tuckered me out. Give it credit for being a lot more subtle/nuanced than many Thai films I've seen - the jumping back in forth in time hurt my head a little, but at least it's making a stab at complexity.
After that, I thought about supper, but really wasn't hungry. I poked into 1.000.000 Comics to try and fill a few holes (especially that 2000 AD #1478 that is an annoying hole in my recent reading), got a couple issues of Darkman out of the dollar bin, and then headed to the sculpture garden at the CCA to rest and write up the review of Exodus (it, along with the one for Die You Zombie Bastards!, are now up here). Then it was to Hall for Frostbite, a pretty nifty Swedish vampire action-horror-comedy. I admit, I was initially kind of disappointed to hear they'd gone the comedy route, since the polar night can make for a real grinder of a vampire movie if done right, but I figure 30 Days of Night will eventually get made, and in the meantime Frostbite is a whole ton of fun.
Today's plan: Archeological museum - last year's exhibit on Rome has been replaced by one on Japan, and the Canadian exhibits will be more fun now that I don't feel the need to look at every minute coin and chamber pot - and maybe hit the jet boats again, then back to the festival for Square Jaw Theater, God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand, Wilderness, and Meatball Machine.
Necromancer (Jom kha mung wej)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
My previous (limited) experience with Thai horror films, I admit, led me to paint the country's output in the genre with a broad brush - straightforward, bloody affairs that conform to the standard horror-movie template and lean heavily on sudden flashes of light and loud noises on the soundtrack to do their job. That's the trouble with forming an opinion from a small sample size of what is, evidently, a large population (horror films are very popular in Thailand). Certainly, some must be a bit more ambitious, as Necromancer is.
The story, which cuts back and forth in time, involves two detectives who, in their attempts to apprehend necromancer criminals, attempt to make use of those corrupting magics themselves. As the film starts, "Itti" (Chatchai Plengpanich) has already turned to the dark side, and is being held in a special prison cell designed to contain magic users. Of course, he escapes, seeking vengeance on his former partners. "Santi" (Akara Amarttayakul) is skeptical, but soon becomes obsessed with capturing Itti, though even the people in Itti's sights are saying to let him go - the price of trying to catch him is too steep.
The system of magic used in Necromancer comes straight from Thai superstition, where words written on amulets are meant to give their wearer power and good fortune. The next logical step is to tattoo one's spells on one's skin - after all, it's impossible to be cut off from one's powers if they're a part of you, right? Unless, of course, that other fellow happens to know a spell to do just that. Indeed, part of what sets Necromancer apart from many horror films, especially western ones, is not just the specific logic of its fantastic elements, but that it does, in fact, have a sort of system it sticks to. There's a logic to how the film approaches necromancy that allows it to almost believably be set in our real world.
Read the rest at HBS.
Frostbite (Frostbiten)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
On its own, Frostbite is an entertaining if imperfect film. Stand back a little, though, and it becomes the horror genre in microcosm - it starts out with a simple story to scare its audience, but eventually decides that's not enough, and reworks the concept to try and fit it into a modern world. By the time it's over, much of what made the initial concept actually frightening is being played as black comedy. It's good black comedy, but you can't help but think that something has been lost from when vampires were scary.
The film opens during World War II, as a lost Swedish volunteer unit of the German army, looking for shelter from the cold. What they find are mutilated corpses and a small coffin whose occupant wants out. Plenty of misguided Swedish blood gets spilled. Now, sixty years later, we meet Annika (Petra Nielsen) and Saga (Grete Havnesköld), a divorced doctor and her teenage daughter heading north to a small city in Norrbotten where Annika has taken a job in the hospital. She's excited about working with Professor Gerhard Beckert (Carl-Åke Eriksson), a genetic researcher who puts a stake through the heart of a body brought into the morgue when no-one's looking, and is giving experimental medication to a coma patient. Meanwhile, the kids at Saga's new school have invited her to a party thrown by John (Nilas Grönberg). Saga's new friend Vega (Emma T. Åberg) is in charge of getting the E, which she thinks she's getting from Sebastian (Jonas Karlström), a resident at the hospital. What she thinks is ecstasy is actually the pills Beckert is giving the coma patient, and if she saw the side effects they're giving Sebastian...
The program described Frostbite as the first vampire film to come out of Sweden, or at least the first with any kind of money behind it. You'd think a country that extends far enough north to experience "polar night" - periods up to a month long when the sun stays below the horizon - would be a haven for vampires, and a concept horror filmmakers would have seized upon much more recently. And while this unbroken darkness makes for an unusual visual on occasion - like kids hanging around the school's front entrance before the first bell despite it looking like the middle of the night - the film does almost nothing with it, story-wise. It's something of a disappointment, since the polar night thing is what Sweden's got that would let them make a vampire movie that's uniquely theirs.
Read the rest at HBS.
After that, I thought about supper, but really wasn't hungry. I poked into 1.000.000 Comics to try and fill a few holes (especially that 2000 AD #1478 that is an annoying hole in my recent reading), got a couple issues of Darkman out of the dollar bin, and then headed to the sculpture garden at the CCA to rest and write up the review of Exodus (it, along with the one for Die You Zombie Bastards!, are now up here). Then it was to Hall for Frostbite, a pretty nifty Swedish vampire action-horror-comedy. I admit, I was initially kind of disappointed to hear they'd gone the comedy route, since the polar night can make for a real grinder of a vampire movie if done right, but I figure 30 Days of Night will eventually get made, and in the meantime Frostbite is a whole ton of fun.
Today's plan: Archeological museum - last year's exhibit on Rome has been replaced by one on Japan, and the Canadian exhibits will be more fun now that I don't feel the need to look at every minute coin and chamber pot - and maybe hit the jet boats again, then back to the festival for Square Jaw Theater, God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand, Wilderness, and Meatball Machine.
Necromancer (Jom kha mung wej)* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
My previous (limited) experience with Thai horror films, I admit, led me to paint the country's output in the genre with a broad brush - straightforward, bloody affairs that conform to the standard horror-movie template and lean heavily on sudden flashes of light and loud noises on the soundtrack to do their job. That's the trouble with forming an opinion from a small sample size of what is, evidently, a large population (horror films are very popular in Thailand). Certainly, some must be a bit more ambitious, as Necromancer is.
The story, which cuts back and forth in time, involves two detectives who, in their attempts to apprehend necromancer criminals, attempt to make use of those corrupting magics themselves. As the film starts, "Itti" (Chatchai Plengpanich) has already turned to the dark side, and is being held in a special prison cell designed to contain magic users. Of course, he escapes, seeking vengeance on his former partners. "Santi" (Akara Amarttayakul) is skeptical, but soon becomes obsessed with capturing Itti, though even the people in Itti's sights are saying to let him go - the price of trying to catch him is too steep.
The system of magic used in Necromancer comes straight from Thai superstition, where words written on amulets are meant to give their wearer power and good fortune. The next logical step is to tattoo one's spells on one's skin - after all, it's impossible to be cut off from one's powers if they're a part of you, right? Unless, of course, that other fellow happens to know a spell to do just that. Indeed, part of what sets Necromancer apart from many horror films, especially western ones, is not just the specific logic of its fantastic elements, but that it does, in fact, have a sort of system it sticks to. There's a logic to how the film approaches necromancy that allows it to almost believably be set in our real world.
Read the rest at HBS.
Frostbite (Frostbiten)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
On its own, Frostbite is an entertaining if imperfect film. Stand back a little, though, and it becomes the horror genre in microcosm - it starts out with a simple story to scare its audience, but eventually decides that's not enough, and reworks the concept to try and fit it into a modern world. By the time it's over, much of what made the initial concept actually frightening is being played as black comedy. It's good black comedy, but you can't help but think that something has been lost from when vampires were scary.
The film opens during World War II, as a lost Swedish volunteer unit of the German army, looking for shelter from the cold. What they find are mutilated corpses and a small coffin whose occupant wants out. Plenty of misguided Swedish blood gets spilled. Now, sixty years later, we meet Annika (Petra Nielsen) and Saga (Grete Havnesköld), a divorced doctor and her teenage daughter heading north to a small city in Norrbotten where Annika has taken a job in the hospital. She's excited about working with Professor Gerhard Beckert (Carl-Åke Eriksson), a genetic researcher who puts a stake through the heart of a body brought into the morgue when no-one's looking, and is giving experimental medication to a coma patient. Meanwhile, the kids at Saga's new school have invited her to a party thrown by John (Nilas Grönberg). Saga's new friend Vega (Emma T. Åberg) is in charge of getting the E, which she thinks she's getting from Sebastian (Jonas Karlström), a resident at the hospital. What she thinks is ecstasy is actually the pills Beckert is giving the coma patient, and if she saw the side effects they're giving Sebastian...
The program described Frostbite as the first vampire film to come out of Sweden, or at least the first with any kind of money behind it. You'd think a country that extends far enough north to experience "polar night" - periods up to a month long when the sun stays below the horizon - would be a haven for vampires, and a concept horror filmmakers would have seized upon much more recently. And while this unbroken darkness makes for an unusual visual on occasion - like kids hanging around the school's front entrance before the first bell despite it looking like the middle of the night - the film does almost nothing with it, story-wise. It's something of a disappointment, since the polar night thing is what Sweden's got that would let them make a vampire movie that's uniquely theirs.
Read the rest at HBS.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Fantasia '06, Day 7: Zombies & more
The review of Azumi 2 is up.
A sign of a good vacation is when you have to buy a new pair of shorts because you packed assuming that there'd be a day or two of rain, and the weather is being extremely co-operative.
Spent yesterday poking through the Underground City a bit, which is neat, although not quite so neat as the travel guides make it sound. Had lunch/dinner at Les 3 Brasseurs, and now need to figure out how to make a flamm, which is like a pizza only without tomato sauce and on a thin, crepe-like crust. It's yummy.
The movies were pretty darn good - Tokyo Zombie featured Tadanobu Asano with a goofy afro, which is worth the price of admission on its own, and SARS Wars was another zombie comedy which just shows how mercurial the Thai censors can be - they get all worried about showing a nipple, but the amount of blood and guts and off-color humor is truly astonishing. Blood Rain could use a little tightening up, as it was the screening where I felt the most drained, but it's a nifty period crime piece regardless. Ils hasn't even opened in its native France yet, but should be a big hit - it's a tight, taut suspense picture.
Today's plan: La Musée Juste pour Rire sounds like fun, along with the Black Watch Highlanders museum and the Cinerobotechnique. Should be light on the movies - just Necromancer and Frostbite; I've seen A Chinese Tall Story and Behind the Mask and have little interest in either White of the Eye or Strange Circus.
Tokyo Zombie (Tokyo Zonbi)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
In addition to being very funny, Tokyo Zombie is educational. I learned that it is possible for an illegal garbage dump in Tokyo to grow so large that it becomes a veritable mountain. I learned that if zombies ever attack, jujitsu is probably the most effective means of self-defense. If there's too many for the jujitsu to work on, try to be swarmed by older zombies, for reasons that become clear toward the end. I was reminded that kids listen to everything their parents say. And, of course, there is a lesson in the true value of friendship.
But mostly, the movie is just silly. Near the base of "Black Fuji", an illegal dumping ground where trash, chemical waste, and inconvenient corpses are disposed of, is a small fire extinguisher factory where Fujio (Tadanobu Asano) and Mitsuo (Sho Aikawa) practice jujitsu when they should be working. While disposing of the body of a manager who discovered their goofing off - these things happen - they witness the bodies buried within Black Fuji coming back to life (all the microbes and toxic waste must have mutated or something) and decide to high-tail it north to Russia, where they'll practice their jujitsu and maybe come back when their fighting skills are so good they can defeat the entire zombie population. They pick up Yoko (Erika Okuda) when they stop to raid a convenience store for supplies, but don't actually get out of Tokyo before the zombie hordes drive them off a bridge. Flash forward five years, and the rich have cordoned off a section of the city and send slaves to battle zombies in the arena as the Romans once sent Christians against lions. They don't like watching Fujio, though - with his jujitsu, the zombies are finished off too fast!
As you might imagine, Tokyo Zombie more closely resembles Shaun of the Dead than Dawn of the Dead. Where Shaun was a romantic comedy at its heart, Tokyo Zombie is basically a buddy movie. Fujio and Mitsuo are a pair of genial slackers who would be quite content if life consisted of noting more than hanging out together and practicing their moves, and in a way, the dead rising gives them an excuse to do so. They bicker, of course - Mitsuo is middle aged and cranky while Fujio is about as smart as a gifted rock - but it's friendly bickering; Yoko will supply the acrimony.
Read the rest at HBS.
SARS Wars (Khun krabii hiiroh)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
SARS was a major health scare a couple years ago, but the panic seems to have died down a little, to be replaced by worry over avian influenza. This seems unreasonable to me; as much as I'm sure bird flu is to be taken seriously even if you are not a bird, does it have the potential to kick off a full-scale zombie epidemic the way SARS apparently does? I doubt it.
Of course, when the film starts, the zombies aren't the problem - a gang of thugs has kidnapped Liu (Phintusuda Tunphairao), the teenage daughter of a rich Bangkok man. He attempts to hire Master Thep (Suthep Po-ngam) to rescue her, but he's getting a little long in the tooth for such action. He does have an apprentice, Khun Krabii (Suppakorn Kitsuwan), who has studied hard but is not terribly experienced or street-smart, but will have to do. Meanwhile, a single SARS-infected cockroach from an infected village in Africa has somehow made its way to the Thai airport, where it bites a disembarking foreigner (Andrew Biggs), who by the time he turns is in the same building where Liu is busily not waiting for rescue. Soon, a party on the first floor is filled with zombies, prompting Health Minister Ratsuda (Naowarat Yuktanan) to seal it off to keep Thailand "virus-free", although virologist Dr. Diana (Lene Christensen) thinks her experimental treatment offers a better option than killing everyone inside. Of course, she doesn't know about the giant mutated zombie snake.
This is a classic zombie set-up - heroes with access to weapons trapped in an enclosed space with the military as much a threat as the walking dead. However, director Taweewat Wantha isn't just looking to make a zombie movie; he's making a spoof film, too, with occasional shots at Star Wars, The Matrix, and others. He spends some time breaking the fourth wall, too, with comments about the movie's budget and what the censors will and won't allow. They movie is not really a parody of zombie movies; most of the time the zombie action plays straight, if over-the-top. Anything else, though, is fair game, and while the jokes are sometimes pretty obvious and broad. SARS Wars winks at the audience "yeah, we know this is silly and well-worn, but we like it, and we know you like it, so here it is at double strength".
Read the rest at HBS.
Blood Rain (Hyeol-ui Nu)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
"CSI: Joseon Dynasty Korea"
Blood Rain has a name fit for horror and the blood to match, and while supernatural thrills are certainly one direction the story could have gone, the film is actually a mystery. It's a heck of a nifty one, too, with an atmospheric setting, an intriguing sleuth, and a conspiracy that is going to be a devil to crack.
In the early part of the 19th Century, the isolated island of Donghwa is relatively prosperous thanks in large part to its paper mill, which produces paper of unusually high quality. Mainland Korea lets them remain more or less autonomous so long as they send regular tribute. This year, disaster strikes, as the ship carrying the paper bursts into flames while most of the crew is ashore. To investigate, the government sends Lee Weon-gyu (Cha Seung-won). He quickly demonstrates his crime-solving expertise on a more recent crime, but as soon as he starts investigating, townspeople start turning up dead. The more superstitious folks on the island lay the blame on the ghost of the mill's founder, who (along with his family) was executed several years ago for his alleged Catholicism. This is of more than passing interest to Weon-gyu, as his father was involved in that prosecution.
Blood Rain resembles a pulp novel, if they'd had them in Korea's Joseon dynasty. The detective is stoic, the world view is cynical, and the murders are frequent and quite bloody. The mystery is, I think, solvable once you've got all the evidence (I don't recall any information withheld from the audience that Weon-gyu wsa privy to), but that's not the whole point. Like any good pulp yarn, the investigated incident is only half the story; the other half is the crime that daily life can be: The mill's owners are wealthy, but the workers are poor; the vast majority of the authority figures look down on the people so that even the ones who genuinely want to help; everybody has a shameful secret. The main difference is that Weon-gyu is less hard-boiled than many pulp protagonists.
Read the rest at HBS.
Ils (Them)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Ils is basic "there's someone or something in the house that means us harm" material. Filmmakers David Moreau and Xavier Palud don't dress it up with a lot of unnecessary frills; they just spend the film's short running time figuring out how to best put the screws to the characters and audience until it's time to roll the end credits.
After a tense opening where a mother and her annoyed teenage daughter encounter something creepy on the side of the road when their car breaks down, the film introduces Clementine (Olivia Bonamy) and Lucas (Michael Cohen), a French couple living in Bucharest, Rumania. Clementine teaches French in a local high school, while Lucas fights writer's block. Clementine passes the empty car on her way home, but doesn't think much of it. They have a nice dinner, and go to bed, only to wake up at about three in the morning by a noise inside their house. There's someone else there, cutting the power, and they always seem to be just around the corner when Clementine or Michael enters a new room.
Rumania is a nice place to set this kind of thriller. Bucharest isn't particularly close to the Transylvania region, but Eastern Europe is full of old, spooky corners. You don't need to bring the supernatural in to create a sense of danger, though; there's monsters of more recent vintage who left the country economically devastated until very recently. While Bucharest proper is fairly safe, the outlying area where the couple's house is located doesn't look nearly so prosperous; there might be folks desperate enough to go after the folks from Western Europe.
Read the rest at HBS.
A sign of a good vacation is when you have to buy a new pair of shorts because you packed assuming that there'd be a day or two of rain, and the weather is being extremely co-operative.
Spent yesterday poking through the Underground City a bit, which is neat, although not quite so neat as the travel guides make it sound. Had lunch/dinner at Les 3 Brasseurs, and now need to figure out how to make a flamm, which is like a pizza only without tomato sauce and on a thin, crepe-like crust. It's yummy.
The movies were pretty darn good - Tokyo Zombie featured Tadanobu Asano with a goofy afro, which is worth the price of admission on its own, and SARS Wars was another zombie comedy which just shows how mercurial the Thai censors can be - they get all worried about showing a nipple, but the amount of blood and guts and off-color humor is truly astonishing. Blood Rain could use a little tightening up, as it was the screening where I felt the most drained, but it's a nifty period crime piece regardless. Ils hasn't even opened in its native France yet, but should be a big hit - it's a tight, taut suspense picture.
Today's plan: La Musée Juste pour Rire sounds like fun, along with the Black Watch Highlanders museum and the Cinerobotechnique. Should be light on the movies - just Necromancer and Frostbite; I've seen A Chinese Tall Story and Behind the Mask and have little interest in either White of the Eye or Strange Circus.
Tokyo Zombie (Tokyo Zonbi)* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
In addition to being very funny, Tokyo Zombie is educational. I learned that it is possible for an illegal garbage dump in Tokyo to grow so large that it becomes a veritable mountain. I learned that if zombies ever attack, jujitsu is probably the most effective means of self-defense. If there's too many for the jujitsu to work on, try to be swarmed by older zombies, for reasons that become clear toward the end. I was reminded that kids listen to everything their parents say. And, of course, there is a lesson in the true value of friendship.
But mostly, the movie is just silly. Near the base of "Black Fuji", an illegal dumping ground where trash, chemical waste, and inconvenient corpses are disposed of, is a small fire extinguisher factory where Fujio (Tadanobu Asano) and Mitsuo (Sho Aikawa) practice jujitsu when they should be working. While disposing of the body of a manager who discovered their goofing off - these things happen - they witness the bodies buried within Black Fuji coming back to life (all the microbes and toxic waste must have mutated or something) and decide to high-tail it north to Russia, where they'll practice their jujitsu and maybe come back when their fighting skills are so good they can defeat the entire zombie population. They pick up Yoko (Erika Okuda) when they stop to raid a convenience store for supplies, but don't actually get out of Tokyo before the zombie hordes drive them off a bridge. Flash forward five years, and the rich have cordoned off a section of the city and send slaves to battle zombies in the arena as the Romans once sent Christians against lions. They don't like watching Fujio, though - with his jujitsu, the zombies are finished off too fast!
As you might imagine, Tokyo Zombie more closely resembles Shaun of the Dead than Dawn of the Dead. Where Shaun was a romantic comedy at its heart, Tokyo Zombie is basically a buddy movie. Fujio and Mitsuo are a pair of genial slackers who would be quite content if life consisted of noting more than hanging out together and practicing their moves, and in a way, the dead rising gives them an excuse to do so. They bicker, of course - Mitsuo is middle aged and cranky while Fujio is about as smart as a gifted rock - but it's friendly bickering; Yoko will supply the acrimony.
Read the rest at HBS.
SARS Wars (Khun krabii hiiroh)* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
SARS was a major health scare a couple years ago, but the panic seems to have died down a little, to be replaced by worry over avian influenza. This seems unreasonable to me; as much as I'm sure bird flu is to be taken seriously even if you are not a bird, does it have the potential to kick off a full-scale zombie epidemic the way SARS apparently does? I doubt it.
Of course, when the film starts, the zombies aren't the problem - a gang of thugs has kidnapped Liu (Phintusuda Tunphairao), the teenage daughter of a rich Bangkok man. He attempts to hire Master Thep (Suthep Po-ngam) to rescue her, but he's getting a little long in the tooth for such action. He does have an apprentice, Khun Krabii (Suppakorn Kitsuwan), who has studied hard but is not terribly experienced or street-smart, but will have to do. Meanwhile, a single SARS-infected cockroach from an infected village in Africa has somehow made its way to the Thai airport, where it bites a disembarking foreigner (Andrew Biggs), who by the time he turns is in the same building where Liu is busily not waiting for rescue. Soon, a party on the first floor is filled with zombies, prompting Health Minister Ratsuda (Naowarat Yuktanan) to seal it off to keep Thailand "virus-free", although virologist Dr. Diana (Lene Christensen) thinks her experimental treatment offers a better option than killing everyone inside. Of course, she doesn't know about the giant mutated zombie snake.
This is a classic zombie set-up - heroes with access to weapons trapped in an enclosed space with the military as much a threat as the walking dead. However, director Taweewat Wantha isn't just looking to make a zombie movie; he's making a spoof film, too, with occasional shots at Star Wars, The Matrix, and others. He spends some time breaking the fourth wall, too, with comments about the movie's budget and what the censors will and won't allow. They movie is not really a parody of zombie movies; most of the time the zombie action plays straight, if over-the-top. Anything else, though, is fair game, and while the jokes are sometimes pretty obvious and broad. SARS Wars winks at the audience "yeah, we know this is silly and well-worn, but we like it, and we know you like it, so here it is at double strength".
Read the rest at HBS.
Blood Rain (Hyeol-ui Nu)* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
"CSI: Joseon Dynasty Korea"
Blood Rain has a name fit for horror and the blood to match, and while supernatural thrills are certainly one direction the story could have gone, the film is actually a mystery. It's a heck of a nifty one, too, with an atmospheric setting, an intriguing sleuth, and a conspiracy that is going to be a devil to crack.
In the early part of the 19th Century, the isolated island of Donghwa is relatively prosperous thanks in large part to its paper mill, which produces paper of unusually high quality. Mainland Korea lets them remain more or less autonomous so long as they send regular tribute. This year, disaster strikes, as the ship carrying the paper bursts into flames while most of the crew is ashore. To investigate, the government sends Lee Weon-gyu (Cha Seung-won). He quickly demonstrates his crime-solving expertise on a more recent crime, but as soon as he starts investigating, townspeople start turning up dead. The more superstitious folks on the island lay the blame on the ghost of the mill's founder, who (along with his family) was executed several years ago for his alleged Catholicism. This is of more than passing interest to Weon-gyu, as his father was involved in that prosecution.
Blood Rain resembles a pulp novel, if they'd had them in Korea's Joseon dynasty. The detective is stoic, the world view is cynical, and the murders are frequent and quite bloody. The mystery is, I think, solvable once you've got all the evidence (I don't recall any information withheld from the audience that Weon-gyu wsa privy to), but that's not the whole point. Like any good pulp yarn, the investigated incident is only half the story; the other half is the crime that daily life can be: The mill's owners are wealthy, but the workers are poor; the vast majority of the authority figures look down on the people so that even the ones who genuinely want to help; everybody has a shameful secret. The main difference is that Weon-gyu is less hard-boiled than many pulp protagonists.
Read the rest at HBS.
Ils (Them)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Ils is basic "there's someone or something in the house that means us harm" material. Filmmakers David Moreau and Xavier Palud don't dress it up with a lot of unnecessary frills; they just spend the film's short running time figuring out how to best put the screws to the characters and audience until it's time to roll the end credits.
After a tense opening where a mother and her annoyed teenage daughter encounter something creepy on the side of the road when their car breaks down, the film introduces Clementine (Olivia Bonamy) and Lucas (Michael Cohen), a French couple living in Bucharest, Rumania. Clementine teaches French in a local high school, while Lucas fights writer's block. Clementine passes the empty car on her way home, but doesn't think much of it. They have a nice dinner, and go to bed, only to wake up at about three in the morning by a noise inside their house. There's someone else there, cutting the power, and they always seem to be just around the corner when Clementine or Michael enters a new room.
Rumania is a nice place to set this kind of thriller. Bucharest isn't particularly close to the Transylvania region, but Eastern Europe is full of old, spooky corners. You don't need to bring the supernatural in to create a sense of danger, though; there's monsters of more recent vintage who left the country economically devastated until very recently. While Bucharest proper is fairly safe, the outlying area where the couple's house is located doesn't look nearly so prosperous; there might be folks desperate enough to go after the folks from Western Europe.
Read the rest at HBS.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Fantasia '06, Day 6: Good start, so-so finish.
Wow... Nothing I saw yesterday repeats today, so just capsules to fill in later (and I have been filling some in; the post about Sunday now includes/links to a new Funky Forest review. So this'll be a short one. At least for now.
Spent the first few hours of the afternoon up on Mont Royal, which is a pleasant enough activity - you get to sweat off that big Cocktail Hawaii breakfast, but aren't terribly hot because a lot of the paths up are in shaded areas. Weird how that works out. There's a nifty little artificial lake up there with paddleboats available. All two-seaters, though. There are days I wish I had a girlfriend not because I feel particularly lonely but because the things that were designed for couples look like fun. How's that for selfish?
I would have liked to sit up there a little longer and rest and write - I know that there is plenty of park space in Boston or Cambridge where I can just drop flat on my back and zone out, but I don't take advantage of it - but moviegoing called. Azumi 2 and Black Kiss (aka Syncronicity) were both very good in different ways, and I'll enjoy writing more about them. Bad Blood is the type of subtle horror-as-reflection-of-family-issues movie that has to be better than it is to really get my affection, and Art of Fighting wound up striking me as ugly despite all of its dark comedy.
Today's plan: Maybe do some shopping, since I've spent too much of the morning on writing the Funky Forest review (my plans for the week were heavily influenced by the assumption of more rain than there's been), followed by Tokyo Zombie, SARS Wars, Blood Rain and Ils
Azumi 2: Death or Love
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Wouldn't it be a kick if Shusuke Kaneko shot Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monster All Out Attack at the same time Ryuhei Kitamura made the original Azumi, and then Kaneko wound up making Azumi 2 at the same time Kitamura made Final Wars? The times don't add up, but the reversal is fun to ponder. Fans can debate which director served which series the best, but all four permutations have wound up working pretty well.
As you may remember from the first film (and for those who don't, it's recapped), Azumi was one of ten orphan teenagers raised from early childhood to be assassins, with the intent of snuffing out ambitious warlords and preserving the peace. Then, on the eve of their first mission, they were paired up and ordered to kill their partners to prove their resolve; Azumi was paired with Nachi, her first love. Now, of the original ten, only Azumi (Aya Ueto) and Nagara (Yuma Ishigaki) remain to take down the last warlord, Masayuki Sanada (Mikijiro Hira), in his heavily-guarded mountain fortress. Well, they're not quite alone - they make contact with the priest who sponsored their training, Tenkai (Shigeru Koyama), picking up a perky new sidekick, Kosue (Chiaki Kuriyama) to act as their guide. They also meat a Robin Hood-style bandit, Ginkaku (Shun Oguri) who could be twins with Nachi.
Kaneko is probably best known for his work in the kaiju genre, where his 1990s Gamera trilogy and his entry into the Godzilla series gained raves for not only being action-packed city-flatteners, but for the genuine sense of danger present - those buildings the monsters crushed were pointedly occupied. Here, he's clearly working with a smaller budget than Kitamura had for the first film, but he's able to make up for it by focusing more on Azumi's emotional burden. The kids were naïve and their minds were programmed but good before; now that they've been out in the world a little, they're starting to realize that they've done horrible things, to the extent that Azumi and Nagara are OK that attempting to kill Nagara is likely a suicide mission, not just because they're good, brainwashed little soldiers, but because they're not keen on living with that much blood on their hands.
Read the rest at HBS.
Black Kiss (Shinkuronishiti or Syncronicity)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
It's almost assuring to see that other film industries can occasionally do the things that drive us crazy in America. Consider the case of this pitch-black serial killer movie from Japan that played film festivals under the name of "Synchronicity" back in late 2004 (and that name still figures prominently into the design of the opening credits), but didn't get a theatrical release until 2006, when its name had become "Black Kiss". It's a great, grimy movie, but it must drive a filmmaker crazy to have his work just sit unseen for over a year.
The film opens with a man and a beautiful young woman on a date, and to every outward appearance, it's a "getting ahead in business" date; she's a model trying to upgrade her status to "actress". They flirt, they drink, they check into the "Hotel Bat's". He runs out to get a drink, and when he comes back, he's knocked out, tied up, and... Well, it's gross.
Flash back a week and meet Asuka Hoshino (Reika Hashimoto), a young model who just moved to Tokyo and is living out of her duffel bag. A fellow model introduces her to Kasumi (Kaori Kawamura), who used to be in that business but is now working retail, and whose roommate just moved out. Kasumi is initially hostile, but lets the sugary-sweet younger girl move in. Kasumi is mysterious and unstable; she'll be friendly one minute and then get a phone call that has her screaming, followed abruptly by "I'm going out". It's after one of those calls that Asuka looks out the window and sees the grisly murder from the opener. The police are called, including one (Shunsuke Matsuoka) who has a history with Kasumi; he's told to consult with a retired detective (Masao Takayama) who worked on bizarre cases with the FBI in America, who is a little odd himself.
Read the rest at HBS.
Bad Blood (Coisa Ruim)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
There's nothing particularly wrong with either story Portugal's Coisa Ruim ("Bad Blood" in English). There's material for an interesting family drama, and there's decent material for a ghost story, and a connection between the two. It doesn't come together, though - the supernatural is a constant distraction from the more conventional story, but it's not big enough to really make for a notable horror story.
As the film opens, the Monteiro family is preparing to move from their home in Lisbon to the country house that father Xavier (Adriano Luz) has recently inherited from a great-uncle. No other member of his family is nearly as enthused, though his wife Helena (Manuela Couto) supports him in front of their three children - young single mother Sofia (Sara Carinhas), elementary-schooler Ricardo (João Santos), and Rui (José Afonso Pimentel), a college student who is the most overtly hostile. What they don't initially realize is just how superstitious the local residents are - Father Vicente (José Pinto) regularly performs exorcisms, and they soon make the acquaintance of a self-described medium, along with the young new parish priest, Father Cruz (João Pedro Vaz). There's something creepy about their new home, and it soon begins encroaching on their already contentious relationships.
I probably annoy my theater-major brother by describing a lot of productions he acts in as "yelling plays", by which I mean stories about families who seem to spend so much time shouting at each other that it's hard to spot the actual affection they must feel. They're gritty, real actors' showpieces that the audience can usually relate to and they bore the hell out of me. Coisa Ruim is a yelling play put on film with a ghost story grafted onto the edges which serves as much as an excuse to enter into intellectual reason-versus-faith debates as to actually intrigue us. It's a terribly frustrating way to tell a ghost story, for as much as I agree that it is important for a tale of the supernatural to be populated by complex, interesting characters, focusing too much on characterization takes away from what is unique about the film. I've seen men of faith and men of science challenge each other (with the end result almost always annoying me because the existence of ghosts or other paranormal activities tends to give the men of faith the last word), and it's seldom as interesting as the writers seem to think it is. And I've got no trouble with yelling plays per se, but when you stick them into a ghost story, the presence of some extraordinary element highlights just how petty the arguments are.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Art of Fighting (Ssaum-ui gisul)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
It's an old, old story - kid gets picked on, finds a mentor who can teach him how to defend himself, and later stands up for himself. Maybe, just maybe, the mentor learns a little bit about himself and becomes less of a recluse as a result. The audience can stand up and cheer, safe in the knowledge that things are going to get better.
It's a pleasant enough fantasy, but not one with a lot of connection to reality. In real life, standing up to a bully often means that they escalate, either bringing in their friends or attacking those close to the target who can't easily defend themselves. There's no ring where things can be settled in a neutral, controlled environment. And a mentor who can teach you how to really fight in a manner that is effective, rather than just aesthetically pleasing, is generally someone you're better off not dealing with.
Such are the problems for Song Byung-tae (Lee Hyun-kyoon). His father recently had him transfered to a vocation school from an academically-oriented high school, reasoning that if Byung-tae isn't college-bound, he should learn a trade. Byung-tae has always been a target of bigger kids, but the worst apples at his new school are a quantum leap over what he's had to deal with before, and things just get worse when the bullies find out his father is a police officer. He spends most of his after-school time hiding out in a local study center until he encounters Oh Man-su (Baek Yun-shik), a disheveled middle-aged guy who doesn't look like much but makes a couple thugs regret trying to mug him. Byung-tae tries to get Oh to teach him how to fight, but the man refuses, on the grounds that violence isn't the answer to his problems. He eventually relents when he sees that violence certainly looks like a better answer than pacifism. But what Oh has to teach Byung-tae isn't specific techniques - it's being willing to fight dirty, to make sure that a guy who goes down stays down, and generally how to meet the bullies on their own terms.
Read the rest at HBS.
Spent the first few hours of the afternoon up on Mont Royal, which is a pleasant enough activity - you get to sweat off that big Cocktail Hawaii breakfast, but aren't terribly hot because a lot of the paths up are in shaded areas. Weird how that works out. There's a nifty little artificial lake up there with paddleboats available. All two-seaters, though. There are days I wish I had a girlfriend not because I feel particularly lonely but because the things that were designed for couples look like fun. How's that for selfish?
I would have liked to sit up there a little longer and rest and write - I know that there is plenty of park space in Boston or Cambridge where I can just drop flat on my back and zone out, but I don't take advantage of it - but moviegoing called. Azumi 2 and Black Kiss (aka Syncronicity) were both very good in different ways, and I'll enjoy writing more about them. Bad Blood is the type of subtle horror-as-reflection-of-family-issues movie that has to be better than it is to really get my affection, and Art of Fighting wound up striking me as ugly despite all of its dark comedy.
Today's plan: Maybe do some shopping, since I've spent too much of the morning on writing the Funky Forest review (my plans for the week were heavily influenced by the assumption of more rain than there's been), followed by Tokyo Zombie, SARS Wars, Blood Rain and Ils
Azumi 2: Death or Love* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Wouldn't it be a kick if Shusuke Kaneko shot Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monster All Out Attack at the same time Ryuhei Kitamura made the original Azumi, and then Kaneko wound up making Azumi 2 at the same time Kitamura made Final Wars? The times don't add up, but the reversal is fun to ponder. Fans can debate which director served which series the best, but all four permutations have wound up working pretty well.
As you may remember from the first film (and for those who don't, it's recapped), Azumi was one of ten orphan teenagers raised from early childhood to be assassins, with the intent of snuffing out ambitious warlords and preserving the peace. Then, on the eve of their first mission, they were paired up and ordered to kill their partners to prove their resolve; Azumi was paired with Nachi, her first love. Now, of the original ten, only Azumi (Aya Ueto) and Nagara (Yuma Ishigaki) remain to take down the last warlord, Masayuki Sanada (Mikijiro Hira), in his heavily-guarded mountain fortress. Well, they're not quite alone - they make contact with the priest who sponsored their training, Tenkai (Shigeru Koyama), picking up a perky new sidekick, Kosue (Chiaki Kuriyama) to act as their guide. They also meat a Robin Hood-style bandit, Ginkaku (Shun Oguri) who could be twins with Nachi.
Kaneko is probably best known for his work in the kaiju genre, where his 1990s Gamera trilogy and his entry into the Godzilla series gained raves for not only being action-packed city-flatteners, but for the genuine sense of danger present - those buildings the monsters crushed were pointedly occupied. Here, he's clearly working with a smaller budget than Kitamura had for the first film, but he's able to make up for it by focusing more on Azumi's emotional burden. The kids were naïve and their minds were programmed but good before; now that they've been out in the world a little, they're starting to realize that they've done horrible things, to the extent that Azumi and Nagara are OK that attempting to kill Nagara is likely a suicide mission, not just because they're good, brainwashed little soldiers, but because they're not keen on living with that much blood on their hands.
Read the rest at HBS.
Black Kiss (Shinkuronishiti or Syncronicity)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
It's almost assuring to see that other film industries can occasionally do the things that drive us crazy in America. Consider the case of this pitch-black serial killer movie from Japan that played film festivals under the name of "Synchronicity" back in late 2004 (and that name still figures prominently into the design of the opening credits), but didn't get a theatrical release until 2006, when its name had become "Black Kiss". It's a great, grimy movie, but it must drive a filmmaker crazy to have his work just sit unseen for over a year.
The film opens with a man and a beautiful young woman on a date, and to every outward appearance, it's a "getting ahead in business" date; she's a model trying to upgrade her status to "actress". They flirt, they drink, they check into the "Hotel Bat's". He runs out to get a drink, and when he comes back, he's knocked out, tied up, and... Well, it's gross.
Flash back a week and meet Asuka Hoshino (Reika Hashimoto), a young model who just moved to Tokyo and is living out of her duffel bag. A fellow model introduces her to Kasumi (Kaori Kawamura), who used to be in that business but is now working retail, and whose roommate just moved out. Kasumi is initially hostile, but lets the sugary-sweet younger girl move in. Kasumi is mysterious and unstable; she'll be friendly one minute and then get a phone call that has her screaming, followed abruptly by "I'm going out". It's after one of those calls that Asuka looks out the window and sees the grisly murder from the opener. The police are called, including one (Shunsuke Matsuoka) who has a history with Kasumi; he's told to consult with a retired detective (Masao Takayama) who worked on bizarre cases with the FBI in America, who is a little odd himself.
Read the rest at HBS.
Bad Blood (Coisa Ruim)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
There's nothing particularly wrong with either story Portugal's Coisa Ruim ("Bad Blood" in English). There's material for an interesting family drama, and there's decent material for a ghost story, and a connection between the two. It doesn't come together, though - the supernatural is a constant distraction from the more conventional story, but it's not big enough to really make for a notable horror story.
As the film opens, the Monteiro family is preparing to move from their home in Lisbon to the country house that father Xavier (Adriano Luz) has recently inherited from a great-uncle. No other member of his family is nearly as enthused, though his wife Helena (Manuela Couto) supports him in front of their three children - young single mother Sofia (Sara Carinhas), elementary-schooler Ricardo (João Santos), and Rui (José Afonso Pimentel), a college student who is the most overtly hostile. What they don't initially realize is just how superstitious the local residents are - Father Vicente (José Pinto) regularly performs exorcisms, and they soon make the acquaintance of a self-described medium, along with the young new parish priest, Father Cruz (João Pedro Vaz). There's something creepy about their new home, and it soon begins encroaching on their already contentious relationships.
I probably annoy my theater-major brother by describing a lot of productions he acts in as "yelling plays", by which I mean stories about families who seem to spend so much time shouting at each other that it's hard to spot the actual affection they must feel. They're gritty, real actors' showpieces that the audience can usually relate to and they bore the hell out of me. Coisa Ruim is a yelling play put on film with a ghost story grafted onto the edges which serves as much as an excuse to enter into intellectual reason-versus-faith debates as to actually intrigue us. It's a terribly frustrating way to tell a ghost story, for as much as I agree that it is important for a tale of the supernatural to be populated by complex, interesting characters, focusing too much on characterization takes away from what is unique about the film. I've seen men of faith and men of science challenge each other (with the end result almost always annoying me because the existence of ghosts or other paranormal activities tends to give the men of faith the last word), and it's seldom as interesting as the writers seem to think it is. And I've got no trouble with yelling plays per se, but when you stick them into a ghost story, the presence of some extraordinary element highlights just how petty the arguments are.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Art of Fighting (Ssaum-ui gisul)* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
It's an old, old story - kid gets picked on, finds a mentor who can teach him how to defend himself, and later stands up for himself. Maybe, just maybe, the mentor learns a little bit about himself and becomes less of a recluse as a result. The audience can stand up and cheer, safe in the knowledge that things are going to get better.
It's a pleasant enough fantasy, but not one with a lot of connection to reality. In real life, standing up to a bully often means that they escalate, either bringing in their friends or attacking those close to the target who can't easily defend themselves. There's no ring where things can be settled in a neutral, controlled environment. And a mentor who can teach you how to really fight in a manner that is effective, rather than just aesthetically pleasing, is generally someone you're better off not dealing with.
Such are the problems for Song Byung-tae (Lee Hyun-kyoon). His father recently had him transfered to a vocation school from an academically-oriented high school, reasoning that if Byung-tae isn't college-bound, he should learn a trade. Byung-tae has always been a target of bigger kids, but the worst apples at his new school are a quantum leap over what he's had to deal with before, and things just get worse when the bullies find out his father is a police officer. He spends most of his after-school time hiding out in a local study center until he encounters Oh Man-su (Baek Yun-shik), a disheveled middle-aged guy who doesn't look like much but makes a couple thugs regret trying to mug him. Byung-tae tries to get Oh to teach him how to fight, but the man refuses, on the grounds that violence isn't the answer to his problems. He eventually relents when he sees that violence certainly looks like a better answer than pacifism. But what Oh has to teach Byung-tae isn't specific techniques - it's being willing to fight dirty, to make sure that a guy who goes down stays down, and generally how to meet the bullies on their own terms.
Read the rest at HBS.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Fantasia '06, Day 5: Eh
Spent the day down in the Old Port area, trying to figure out how to get to the public garden exhibit before realizing that admission was being charged. Then I was looking to make a return trip to the Archeology Museum only to see it fermé lundi. Bug-ger. The little 45 minute boat ride around the old port was nice; it delivered a lot of the same information as the jet boating last year, but with much less getting wet. Then it was back to Concordia for a back-and-forth across the street evening, with only the middle movie at the Hall Theater.
I would have done something violent for a steak tip sub last night. I ordered a steak & cheese sandwich and found it piled up with stuff that wasn't steak or cheese. I admit to being a picky eater who will probably have bad things happen to him down the line for never developing a taste for his vegetables, but also, I'm just used to a steak and cheese sandwich being steak, cheese, and bread. You want a salad, you order a side salad, or ask for onions and stuff. I don't know whether it's a Canada thing, an America thing, a New England thing, or a "places I patronize because they don't use valuable roll space for things other than steak and cheese" thing, but either way, expectations weren't meeting with reality.
Not really exceptional movies yesterday. I'd worn myself down before getting to Lost in Wu Song, so I don't know if I really appreciated it while I was watching it - it is very funny, but also smarter than I realized at the time. Murder, Take One has an interesting premise in its live, reality-show coverage of a homicide investigation, but stretches that premise thin and its last act does in a silly an annoying direction. Tape Number 31 was Blair Witch Project-style stuff in rural China, with all Blair Witch's problems (and third-act effectiveness in spite of them). Lost in Wu Song repeats tonight; Murder, Take One Wednesday evening.
Today's plan: Mont Royal, perhaps, before Azumi 2, Black Kiss, Bad Blood, and The Art of Fighting
Lost in Wu Song (Wu Song Da Wo)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
We're getting closer to being able to make the film we imagine independently, but we're not there yet, not by a long shot, at least not in any consistent way. As nice as it is to read stories about guys who make a great animated film on their home PCs, or of a cast and crew working for nothing but a share in the finished film, we hear about them because those situations are unusual. Most of the time, getting a movie made is very difficult, especially for someone who lacks experience.
Like, say, Men De Song. Like many boys in China, he idolized folk hero Wu Song, who slew a tiger with his bare hands and took fatal revenge on those who killed his brother (said brother's wife and her lover). He intends to make the definitive film of this legend and then, his life's work complete, retire to become a Buddhist Monk. But he's having trouble casting the lead part - nobody in the massive open audition that starts the film had what he was looking for. The major investor wants to cast pop star Li, but he becomes set on Wang Dachuan, the muscular but dimwitted cousin of one of his minor investors. As the film goes on, De Song and Zhang (the major investor) will clash over that and every other aspect of the filmmaking process. He also has to deal with the advances of young actress Mei Li, who would play the treacherous Pan Dailan.
Read the rest at HBS.
Murder, Take One (Baksuchilttae Tteonara)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
The first reaction to Murder, Take One is to dismiss its premise as ridiculous, a strawman created expressly for satirical purposes. But in a world with Cops, CourtTV, Dick Wolf's Crime & Punishment, and the like, is Jang Jin's idea of real-time, all-access coverage of a murder investigation all that far-fetched? Aside from the impossibility of finding a jury that could try the case - perhaps not a stumbling block in Korea, and some American cops and D.A.s would take their chances - what's stopping it?
A woman is found in a hotel room, stabbed nine times, dead only a couple hours. A suspicious-looking man is picked up twenty minutes later, and it looks like an open-and-shut case for Prosecutor Choi Yeon-gi (Cha Seung-Won). Things won't be quite so simple, though - the suspect, Kim Young-hun, refuses to confess, and forensic evidence reveals the case more complicated than the multiple stab wounds would imply. To make matters worse, a television network has obtained special dispensation to follow a murder investigation from discovery to resolution, with a panel of experts in-studio, opinion polls, and no hope of keeping developments under wraps.
Read the rest at HBS.
Tape Number 31
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
I liked The Blair Witch Project quite a bit, even after the inevitable backlash. This film is cut from the same cloth, with a predominately Chinese crew shooting a documentary for the Discovery Channel about "wild men" in rural China, only to find themselves running afoul of the mysterious, never-fully-glimpsed creatures. It's got all the same faults as Blair Witch - stop filming yourselves, especially when you should be running! - but also the same sort of downright effective final act.
The film opens with a shot of a man turning a camera on, polishing it, and then jumping off a cliff while letting the camera run down. So, how'd he get there? We flash back several weeks, when a 22-year-old filmmaker by the name of Helen is recruiting a crew for a cryptozoology documentary about the so-called "wild men" of rural China. She recruits two cameramen, Dou Yan and Zachary (the sole member of the group who's not ethnically Chinese); two sound operators, Yin Jie and Liu Yuen Yuen, and an archaeologist, Dr. Xia. They leave Shanghai, interview people who claim to have encountered the wild men (and receive conflicting descriptions), and recruit a native guide, Zhou Li Jun. They climb to an isolated plateau, where they find strange symbols carved into trees, and, one morning, into the ground around their tents. Members of the crew want to leave, but Helen's convinced they need to stay to make the trip worthwhile.
It's a familiar template if you've seen The Blair Witch Project, which is both good and bad. There's really not a whole lot cooler than having something nifty and unexpected appear at the edge of the frame so that the alert viewer can seize onto it a second before the characters to, and that's an effect that often seems contrived in a conventional narrative film. The trouble is that in order for that moment to arrive unannounced, the film has to first establish a certain baseline. That process is what's really tricky, since logically the camera would only be turned on when the filmmakers have some sort of expectation of something interesting happening. Too often, the first chunk of this film is either things that are rather dull or just wouldn't seem likely to be taped.
Read the rest at HBS.
I would have done something violent for a steak tip sub last night. I ordered a steak & cheese sandwich and found it piled up with stuff that wasn't steak or cheese. I admit to being a picky eater who will probably have bad things happen to him down the line for never developing a taste for his vegetables, but also, I'm just used to a steak and cheese sandwich being steak, cheese, and bread. You want a salad, you order a side salad, or ask for onions and stuff. I don't know whether it's a Canada thing, an America thing, a New England thing, or a "places I patronize because they don't use valuable roll space for things other than steak and cheese" thing, but either way, expectations weren't meeting with reality.
Not really exceptional movies yesterday. I'd worn myself down before getting to Lost in Wu Song, so I don't know if I really appreciated it while I was watching it - it is very funny, but also smarter than I realized at the time. Murder, Take One has an interesting premise in its live, reality-show coverage of a homicide investigation, but stretches that premise thin and its last act does in a silly an annoying direction. Tape Number 31 was Blair Witch Project-style stuff in rural China, with all Blair Witch's problems (and third-act effectiveness in spite of them). Lost in Wu Song repeats tonight; Murder, Take One Wednesday evening.
Today's plan: Mont Royal, perhaps, before Azumi 2, Black Kiss, Bad Blood, and The Art of Fighting
Lost in Wu Song (Wu Song Da Wo)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
We're getting closer to being able to make the film we imagine independently, but we're not there yet, not by a long shot, at least not in any consistent way. As nice as it is to read stories about guys who make a great animated film on their home PCs, or of a cast and crew working for nothing but a share in the finished film, we hear about them because those situations are unusual. Most of the time, getting a movie made is very difficult, especially for someone who lacks experience.
Like, say, Men De Song. Like many boys in China, he idolized folk hero Wu Song, who slew a tiger with his bare hands and took fatal revenge on those who killed his brother (said brother's wife and her lover). He intends to make the definitive film of this legend and then, his life's work complete, retire to become a Buddhist Monk. But he's having trouble casting the lead part - nobody in the massive open audition that starts the film had what he was looking for. The major investor wants to cast pop star Li, but he becomes set on Wang Dachuan, the muscular but dimwitted cousin of one of his minor investors. As the film goes on, De Song and Zhang (the major investor) will clash over that and every other aspect of the filmmaking process. He also has to deal with the advances of young actress Mei Li, who would play the treacherous Pan Dailan.
Read the rest at HBS.
Murder, Take One (Baksuchilttae Tteonara)* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
The first reaction to Murder, Take One is to dismiss its premise as ridiculous, a strawman created expressly for satirical purposes. But in a world with Cops, CourtTV, Dick Wolf's Crime & Punishment, and the like, is Jang Jin's idea of real-time, all-access coverage of a murder investigation all that far-fetched? Aside from the impossibility of finding a jury that could try the case - perhaps not a stumbling block in Korea, and some American cops and D.A.s would take their chances - what's stopping it?
A woman is found in a hotel room, stabbed nine times, dead only a couple hours. A suspicious-looking man is picked up twenty minutes later, and it looks like an open-and-shut case for Prosecutor Choi Yeon-gi (Cha Seung-Won). Things won't be quite so simple, though - the suspect, Kim Young-hun, refuses to confess, and forensic evidence reveals the case more complicated than the multiple stab wounds would imply. To make matters worse, a television network has obtained special dispensation to follow a murder investigation from discovery to resolution, with a panel of experts in-studio, opinion polls, and no hope of keeping developments under wraps.
Read the rest at HBS.
Tape Number 31
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
I liked The Blair Witch Project quite a bit, even after the inevitable backlash. This film is cut from the same cloth, with a predominately Chinese crew shooting a documentary for the Discovery Channel about "wild men" in rural China, only to find themselves running afoul of the mysterious, never-fully-glimpsed creatures. It's got all the same faults as Blair Witch - stop filming yourselves, especially when you should be running! - but also the same sort of downright effective final act.
The film opens with a shot of a man turning a camera on, polishing it, and then jumping off a cliff while letting the camera run down. So, how'd he get there? We flash back several weeks, when a 22-year-old filmmaker by the name of Helen is recruiting a crew for a cryptozoology documentary about the so-called "wild men" of rural China. She recruits two cameramen, Dou Yan and Zachary (the sole member of the group who's not ethnically Chinese); two sound operators, Yin Jie and Liu Yuen Yuen, and an archaeologist, Dr. Xia. They leave Shanghai, interview people who claim to have encountered the wild men (and receive conflicting descriptions), and recruit a native guide, Zhou Li Jun. They climb to an isolated plateau, where they find strange symbols carved into trees, and, one morning, into the ground around their tents. Members of the crew want to leave, but Helen's convinced they need to stay to make the trip worthwhile.
It's a familiar template if you've seen The Blair Witch Project, which is both good and bad. There's really not a whole lot cooler than having something nifty and unexpected appear at the edge of the frame so that the alert viewer can seize onto it a second before the characters to, and that's an effect that often seems contrived in a conventional narrative film. The trouble is that in order for that moment to arrive unannounced, the film has to first establish a certain baseline. That process is what's really tricky, since logically the camera would only be turned on when the filmmakers have some sort of expectation of something interesting happening. Too often, the first chunk of this film is either things that are rather dull or just wouldn't seem likely to be taped.
Read the rest at HBS.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Fantasia '06, Day 4: Four on four
A couple longish films make for an actual break during the weekend. I opted to see My Scary Girl instead of the first screening of Azumi 2, and since Feed would have made it awful close with A Chinese Tall Story (and just looked nasty), I instead headed to St. Catherine's street to see if Future Shop had a cheap digital camera (left mine at home) and to visit Mr. Steer's, where you can get a pretty darn good burger and a heaping helping of fries. It's a bit less busy than Bartley's back home, but it's still a good burger. The combo special - a burger with both a pattie and a chicken breast - is pretty good, too.
I was kind of surprised to see a lot of folks rooting for Italy in the World Cup. You'd think Montreal would be full of French partisans, but that wasn't the case.
The movies were pretty good. It's frustrating to see that The Woods is probably going straight to video; director Lucky McKee was there for the screening and he didn't even really seem interested in talking about a theatrical release - the "corporate bullshit" has just worn him down to the point where all he wants is to have a copy on his shelf.
It was a pretty good day for crowd reaction, especially in the main hall. The crowd cheering "stage manager" Daniel Walther's removal of microphones and turning off of lights is a kick, and I always know I'm with my type of people when Bruce Campbell's name in the credits gets a big ovation. Funky Forest: The First Contact got lots of audience participation and applause throughout; it's that kind of string of randomness. And some of the folks around me seriously loved A Chinese Tall Story. A Chinese Tall Story and Funky Forest both repeat on Thursday, if you're up here. As mentioned, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon repeats today, and a review is up.
Today's plan: Something touristy, followed by Lost in Wu Song, Murder, Take One, and Tape No. 31
My Scary Girl (Dalkom Salbeolhan Yeon-in)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
It is, admittedly, uncool to identify too closely with Kim Dae-woo, the "me" in My Scary Girl (also known as "My Sweet Yet Brutal Girlfriend") - he's a thirty-year-old virgin who has never had a real girlfriend or even kissed a girl. But consider the alternative represented by the title character: She kills people, generally husbands and boyfriends.
Hwang Dae-woo (Park Yong-Woo) and Lee Mina (Choi Kang-hie) meet when she moves in to his building and he nearly throws out his back helping the mover with the refrigerator. He's been the type to make excuses for why he's not dating, but she seems different, and soon his friends are shoving him at her (literally). He gets uncomfortable when her ex-boyfriend shows up, but he soon disappears - and Mina starts shopping for a new kimchee refrigerator when her roommate Jang-mi (Jo Eun-ji) starts complaining about the corpse.
The film's main gag, of course, is that most of the time Dae-woo comes off as the weird one, completely ignorant of how to behave on a date, with his jokes and attempts to plan banter inevitably proving awkward and cringe-worthy. As smart as he is, he comes pretty close to making the wrong move at every point, while Mina is forgiving and, in general, sensible and practical. We wind up spending our time watching the film hoping Dae-woo can make things work out more because it would be a shame for him to lose a great girl like Mina over some sort of silly misunderstanding or by not going through the proper rituals. The idea that screwing up with her romantically might be a quick route to violent death is a sort of secondary consideration.
Read the rest at HBS.
A Chinese Tall Story (Ching din dai sing)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Dig deep into the archives here, and one of the first movie reviews you'll find will be for a piece of cheese called "Monkey War 2: New Pilgrims to the West". Neither the review nor the film is really worth looking at; I just bring it up as my first encounter with the Monkey King characters and one of my first encounters with Hong Kong cinema that wasn't art-house or standard martial arts action. I couldn't help but think of it while watching A Chinese Tall Story, if only because Jeff Lau's new film manages to trump that other movie in budget (by a long shot), craziness, and all-around fun.
Wukong, the Monkey King (Bo-lin Chen), doesn't isn't around for most of the film, as he and his imp companions are captured by an angry demon. He saves his master, the monk Tripitaka (Nicholas Tse), by strapping him to his magic staff and hurling him far, far away. Tripitaka is the second strange thing to fall out of the sky near the lizard imps that find him recently, after a strange coccoon. He eventually winds up paired with Mei-yan (Charlene Choi), an imp with an unsightly skin condition, on the run from attacking demons and looking for allies to rescue Wukong and the others. Their journey will take them to the heavens, and back, and the allies they'll encounter include Xiaoshan (Bingbing Fan), who was tucked away in the coccoon that the lizard imps had found. She's the princess of a technologically advanced group of humans who fled the earth for the stars before the Ice Age. On the way, Mei-yan and Tripitaka must learn to trust each other and Tripitaka must learn to fight, rather than simply try to subdue his enemies with kind words.
This group of characters has been the basis for movies and television many times - Jeff Lau himself made a couple Monkey King films with Stephen Chow ten or so years earlier - but probably never quite like this. Sure, despite having only watched that one old, cheap version, I can recognize a few elements: Wukong's magic staff, his servitude to the Tripitaka as penance for his crimes against the Celestial Court, the pig-imp sidekick, other imps wanting to eat the monk to gain his power are all present. I'm reasonably confident that the time traveling people in spaceships are new, though, and I doubt any earlier edition has had close to this kind of special effect budget.
The opening battle against a horde of demons that Tripitaka is tossed away from is massive enough for Stephen Sommers to feel a twinge of jealousy, and the film abounds with wire work, CGI characters, bright colors, and fanciful environments. The big final battle is absolutely crazy - demons, kaiju-sized plant monsters, kung fu, guys with machine guns, a massive spaceship control room, and what the magical staff transforms into dropped a few jaws in the audience. Lau's got a handle on what his effects crew are capable of, and what he asks of them is not [i]Star Wars[/i]-prequel perfection; he knows that the more stuff he puts on screen, the less likely it is to all integrate seemlessly. Many elements feel hollow and weightless. But each effects set piece has new sights that may be wholly different from the previous one, so if there are faults, they're not the same ones.
It reminded me of how, when I was a kid, I might have had a couple Transformers, Star Wars toys, and army men, so when playing with them I'd come up with a story that had them all together. Here, sci-fi brushes against animal spirits and monsters, and the staff becomes the same sort of cartoon character that the carpet was in Aladdin. Every new scene brings a surprise, which almost becomes disbelief by the end. And if you're still able to be floored after spaceships have held off a demon horde in ancient China, the film is doing something right. The only hitch I really found is that the last sequence in the Celestial Court is really kind of brutal compared to what had gone before; this is a movie where people say "oh, sugar!" (at least in the subtitles), and the nasty treatment the hero and heroine get is really not what I'm used to in a family movie. There's slapsticky violence involving knives earlier, but this feels different, there's no tongue in cheek.
I like the cast: Nicholas Tse opens the movie with a goofy, innocent charm as the ivory tower monk who really thinks he can solve all problems just by talking and getting people to see each others' point of view. He's kind of pulled through the movie, but handles each new crazy situation with aplomb. Charlene Choi is full of energy and enthusiasm, putting enough childlike glee into her role that kids won't get turned off by the buck-toothed, spotty face the make-up people put on her I'd like to see another movie with more of Bo-lin Chen's Monkey King, although maybe his cockiness is best enjoyed in small doses. Bingbing Fan gives a quirky quality to Xiaoshan that keeps her from being a serious romantic rival to Mei-yan, but that's OK. More knowledgable fans of Hong Kong cinema will likely spot a number of familiar spaces; I just noticed Gordon Liu as the King of Heaven.
There's an equal amount of talent behind the camera. Lau is a guy who hasn't really broken through in the West, either by effort or having his films picked up by a major studio (he was a producer on Kung Fu Hustle, wrote So Close, and worked with Wong Kar-Wai early in the careers), but he does a pretty darn good job here, keeping things moving while also giving us enough time to get to know and like the characters. He's got a pretty nice staff behind the camera, too, with beautiful production design and nice effects work making the film a colorful joy to look at. He gets a soundtrack from Joe Hisaishi, best known for scoring Hayao Miyazaki's animated films. Frequent collaborator Cory Yuen stages the action scenes.
This probably won't get much of a U.S. release; it just doesn't look as polished as domestic family adventure movies, so it's probably kind of a hard sell to parents. That's a pity; give this a good dub job and kids would probably eat this up with a spoon.
Funky Forest: The First Contact (Naisu no mori)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Man, every time I think I've got a handle on Japanese pop culture, they throw something like this at me.
This review is sort of useless. I can say, hey, you should watch Funky Forest: The First Contact, because it's funny and weird. But if I do that, and I do it really well, you'll probably have little option other than importing the DVD when it comes out, and I can totally see this being nothing but strange if it's not seen in a theater full of crazed people laughing, doing some audience participation, being just as confused as you but along for the ride. Unless you know someone who programs theaters and can talk him into a midnight show, you really just aren't going to get the experience we did in Montreal.
Which is cool. There's no particular reason (other than economical) why something must be built to work just as well as a shared theatrical experience and a solitary televised one. Of course, I may be full of crap here, just because this is how I first encountered it. After all, the first thought that went into my head about what this movie was like was not co-director Katsuhito Ishii's previous feature, The Taste of Tea, or another recent Japanese film that jumped between a series of bizarre intersecting stories, Survive Style 5+, but Monty Python's Flying Circus, and they did okay delivering surreal comedy into the living room.
Although Monty Python doesn't really describe Funky Forest, either. This movie is a two-and-a-half hour set of sketches, some recurring, some not but containing characters who show up in other contexts, and others apparently just being totally strange one-offs. We start with a pair of goofy-looking bickering stage comics, and we'll return to them often, though only for a few seconds at a time. Then there's little Hachiko (Maya Banno from The Taste of Tea), who daydreams about being in a weird spacescape when she should be doing her homework. We'll meet the "Unlucky With Women Brothers", featuring the ubiquitous Tadanobu Asano as "Guitar Brother", while another brother encounters the "Babbling Hot Springs Vixens". There's "Notti & Takefumi", a young girl kind-of-sort-of dating the guy who had been her English teacher two years before, who relate weird, musical dreams to each other. Then there's a "Home Room!!!!!!!" full of weird high school students (and Hachiko, and some grown men...). And just when you've figured out that, the movie hits you with a guy in a yellow costume with a long, tail-like thing coming out of his groin and a probe he needs a pretty schoolgirl to stick in her navel. Then there's a series of grotesque little creatures inhabiting the school.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Woods
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
I'll admit it; I've been waiting for The Woods because a favorite actor has a supporting role. I'd recognized director Lucky McKee's skill at building atmosphere and creeping out the audience in May, but it was just too much for me; there just didn't seem to be any particular reason to get to the end of that movie. Here, he's working from a script by another writer, and I think it helps make for a more mainstream, but still creepy, work of horror.
The year is 1965, and Heather Fasulo (Agnes Bruckner) is being sent to an exclusive girls' school after a few instances of acting out, including setting a fire in the front yard which nearly destroyed an old oak tree. The headmistress, Ms. Traverse (Patricia Clarkson) informs her that since her father (Bruce Campbell) isn't quite so well-off financially as he appears, she will be tested for a scholarship, which she receives. The school is isolated by trees in every direction, so there's no relief from the usual girls' school issues - she sticks up for a picked on classmate, Marcy (Lauren Birkell), thus earning the enmity of blonde queen bee Samantha (Rachel Nichols). Another girl, Ann (Kathleen Mackey) has just returned from the hospital. As with any old institution, the school has accumulated creepy stories, but Heather is starting to get the impression that they're much more than just stories.
Aside from being McKee's follow-up to May, which certainly got people's attention when it appeared four years ago, The Woods has gained the stigma for being stuck in a studio vault which is unfair. Almost every film on MGM/UA and Columbia's schedule has had its schedule messed with by Sony's purchase of MGM, though few have suffered as badly as The Woods - it's been in the can for at least two years; and just compare Rachel Nichols in this film to her recent work - no way she can play a teenager any more, and she probably wasn't well known enough (from two separate TV series) to have third billing (first under the title) when this was originally planned for release. Bruckner seemed like an up-and-comer back when the film was expected to be released in August 2004; now her star has faded a little. It's the sort of film a studio has issues with, too - it's centered around teenage characters but is set forty years ago and has an R rating, so they spend a lot of time trying to make it more salable. According to McKee, the version screened is his preferred cut and will probably be the one to come out if and when the studio ever releases it.
Read the rest at HBS.
I was kind of surprised to see a lot of folks rooting for Italy in the World Cup. You'd think Montreal would be full of French partisans, but that wasn't the case.
The movies were pretty good. It's frustrating to see that The Woods is probably going straight to video; director Lucky McKee was there for the screening and he didn't even really seem interested in talking about a theatrical release - the "corporate bullshit" has just worn him down to the point where all he wants is to have a copy on his shelf.
It was a pretty good day for crowd reaction, especially in the main hall. The crowd cheering "stage manager" Daniel Walther's removal of microphones and turning off of lights is a kick, and I always know I'm with my type of people when Bruce Campbell's name in the credits gets a big ovation. Funky Forest: The First Contact got lots of audience participation and applause throughout; it's that kind of string of randomness. And some of the folks around me seriously loved A Chinese Tall Story. A Chinese Tall Story and Funky Forest both repeat on Thursday, if you're up here. As mentioned, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon repeats today, and a review is up.
Today's plan: Something touristy, followed by Lost in Wu Song, Murder, Take One, and Tape No. 31
My Scary Girl (Dalkom Salbeolhan Yeon-in)* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
It is, admittedly, uncool to identify too closely with Kim Dae-woo, the "me" in My Scary Girl (also known as "My Sweet Yet Brutal Girlfriend") - he's a thirty-year-old virgin who has never had a real girlfriend or even kissed a girl. But consider the alternative represented by the title character: She kills people, generally husbands and boyfriends.
Hwang Dae-woo (Park Yong-Woo) and Lee Mina (Choi Kang-hie) meet when she moves in to his building and he nearly throws out his back helping the mover with the refrigerator. He's been the type to make excuses for why he's not dating, but she seems different, and soon his friends are shoving him at her (literally). He gets uncomfortable when her ex-boyfriend shows up, but he soon disappears - and Mina starts shopping for a new kimchee refrigerator when her roommate Jang-mi (Jo Eun-ji) starts complaining about the corpse.
The film's main gag, of course, is that most of the time Dae-woo comes off as the weird one, completely ignorant of how to behave on a date, with his jokes and attempts to plan banter inevitably proving awkward and cringe-worthy. As smart as he is, he comes pretty close to making the wrong move at every point, while Mina is forgiving and, in general, sensible and practical. We wind up spending our time watching the film hoping Dae-woo can make things work out more because it would be a shame for him to lose a great girl like Mina over some sort of silly misunderstanding or by not going through the proper rituals. The idea that screwing up with her romantically might be a quick route to violent death is a sort of secondary consideration.
Read the rest at HBS.
A Chinese Tall Story (Ching din dai sing)* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Dig deep into the archives here, and one of the first movie reviews you'll find will be for a piece of cheese called "Monkey War 2: New Pilgrims to the West". Neither the review nor the film is really worth looking at; I just bring it up as my first encounter with the Monkey King characters and one of my first encounters with Hong Kong cinema that wasn't art-house or standard martial arts action. I couldn't help but think of it while watching A Chinese Tall Story, if only because Jeff Lau's new film manages to trump that other movie in budget (by a long shot), craziness, and all-around fun.
Wukong, the Monkey King (Bo-lin Chen), doesn't isn't around for most of the film, as he and his imp companions are captured by an angry demon. He saves his master, the monk Tripitaka (Nicholas Tse), by strapping him to his magic staff and hurling him far, far away. Tripitaka is the second strange thing to fall out of the sky near the lizard imps that find him recently, after a strange coccoon. He eventually winds up paired with Mei-yan (Charlene Choi), an imp with an unsightly skin condition, on the run from attacking demons and looking for allies to rescue Wukong and the others. Their journey will take them to the heavens, and back, and the allies they'll encounter include Xiaoshan (Bingbing Fan), who was tucked away in the coccoon that the lizard imps had found. She's the princess of a technologically advanced group of humans who fled the earth for the stars before the Ice Age. On the way, Mei-yan and Tripitaka must learn to trust each other and Tripitaka must learn to fight, rather than simply try to subdue his enemies with kind words.
This group of characters has been the basis for movies and television many times - Jeff Lau himself made a couple Monkey King films with Stephen Chow ten or so years earlier - but probably never quite like this. Sure, despite having only watched that one old, cheap version, I can recognize a few elements: Wukong's magic staff, his servitude to the Tripitaka as penance for his crimes against the Celestial Court, the pig-imp sidekick, other imps wanting to eat the monk to gain his power are all present. I'm reasonably confident that the time traveling people in spaceships are new, though, and I doubt any earlier edition has had close to this kind of special effect budget.
The opening battle against a horde of demons that Tripitaka is tossed away from is massive enough for Stephen Sommers to feel a twinge of jealousy, and the film abounds with wire work, CGI characters, bright colors, and fanciful environments. The big final battle is absolutely crazy - demons, kaiju-sized plant monsters, kung fu, guys with machine guns, a massive spaceship control room, and what the magical staff transforms into dropped a few jaws in the audience. Lau's got a handle on what his effects crew are capable of, and what he asks of them is not [i]Star Wars[/i]-prequel perfection; he knows that the more stuff he puts on screen, the less likely it is to all integrate seemlessly. Many elements feel hollow and weightless. But each effects set piece has new sights that may be wholly different from the previous one, so if there are faults, they're not the same ones.
It reminded me of how, when I was a kid, I might have had a couple Transformers, Star Wars toys, and army men, so when playing with them I'd come up with a story that had them all together. Here, sci-fi brushes against animal spirits and monsters, and the staff becomes the same sort of cartoon character that the carpet was in Aladdin. Every new scene brings a surprise, which almost becomes disbelief by the end. And if you're still able to be floored after spaceships have held off a demon horde in ancient China, the film is doing something right. The only hitch I really found is that the last sequence in the Celestial Court is really kind of brutal compared to what had gone before; this is a movie where people say "oh, sugar!" (at least in the subtitles), and the nasty treatment the hero and heroine get is really not what I'm used to in a family movie. There's slapsticky violence involving knives earlier, but this feels different, there's no tongue in cheek.
I like the cast: Nicholas Tse opens the movie with a goofy, innocent charm as the ivory tower monk who really thinks he can solve all problems just by talking and getting people to see each others' point of view. He's kind of pulled through the movie, but handles each new crazy situation with aplomb. Charlene Choi is full of energy and enthusiasm, putting enough childlike glee into her role that kids won't get turned off by the buck-toothed, spotty face the make-up people put on her I'd like to see another movie with more of Bo-lin Chen's Monkey King, although maybe his cockiness is best enjoyed in small doses. Bingbing Fan gives a quirky quality to Xiaoshan that keeps her from being a serious romantic rival to Mei-yan, but that's OK. More knowledgable fans of Hong Kong cinema will likely spot a number of familiar spaces; I just noticed Gordon Liu as the King of Heaven.
There's an equal amount of talent behind the camera. Lau is a guy who hasn't really broken through in the West, either by effort or having his films picked up by a major studio (he was a producer on Kung Fu Hustle, wrote So Close, and worked with Wong Kar-Wai early in the careers), but he does a pretty darn good job here, keeping things moving while also giving us enough time to get to know and like the characters. He's got a pretty nice staff behind the camera, too, with beautiful production design and nice effects work making the film a colorful joy to look at. He gets a soundtrack from Joe Hisaishi, best known for scoring Hayao Miyazaki's animated films. Frequent collaborator Cory Yuen stages the action scenes.
This probably won't get much of a U.S. release; it just doesn't look as polished as domestic family adventure movies, so it's probably kind of a hard sell to parents. That's a pity; give this a good dub job and kids would probably eat this up with a spoon.
Funky Forest: The First Contact (Naisu no mori)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Man, every time I think I've got a handle on Japanese pop culture, they throw something like this at me.
This review is sort of useless. I can say, hey, you should watch Funky Forest: The First Contact, because it's funny and weird. But if I do that, and I do it really well, you'll probably have little option other than importing the DVD when it comes out, and I can totally see this being nothing but strange if it's not seen in a theater full of crazed people laughing, doing some audience participation, being just as confused as you but along for the ride. Unless you know someone who programs theaters and can talk him into a midnight show, you really just aren't going to get the experience we did in Montreal.
Which is cool. There's no particular reason (other than economical) why something must be built to work just as well as a shared theatrical experience and a solitary televised one. Of course, I may be full of crap here, just because this is how I first encountered it. After all, the first thought that went into my head about what this movie was like was not co-director Katsuhito Ishii's previous feature, The Taste of Tea, or another recent Japanese film that jumped between a series of bizarre intersecting stories, Survive Style 5+, but Monty Python's Flying Circus, and they did okay delivering surreal comedy into the living room.
Although Monty Python doesn't really describe Funky Forest, either. This movie is a two-and-a-half hour set of sketches, some recurring, some not but containing characters who show up in other contexts, and others apparently just being totally strange one-offs. We start with a pair of goofy-looking bickering stage comics, and we'll return to them often, though only for a few seconds at a time. Then there's little Hachiko (Maya Banno from The Taste of Tea), who daydreams about being in a weird spacescape when she should be doing her homework. We'll meet the "Unlucky With Women Brothers", featuring the ubiquitous Tadanobu Asano as "Guitar Brother", while another brother encounters the "Babbling Hot Springs Vixens". There's "Notti & Takefumi", a young girl kind-of-sort-of dating the guy who had been her English teacher two years before, who relate weird, musical dreams to each other. Then there's a "Home Room!!!!!!!" full of weird high school students (and Hachiko, and some grown men...). And just when you've figured out that, the movie hits you with a guy in a yellow costume with a long, tail-like thing coming out of his groin and a probe he needs a pretty schoolgirl to stick in her navel. Then there's a series of grotesque little creatures inhabiting the school.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Woods
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
I'll admit it; I've been waiting for The Woods because a favorite actor has a supporting role. I'd recognized director Lucky McKee's skill at building atmosphere and creeping out the audience in May, but it was just too much for me; there just didn't seem to be any particular reason to get to the end of that movie. Here, he's working from a script by another writer, and I think it helps make for a more mainstream, but still creepy, work of horror.
The year is 1965, and Heather Fasulo (Agnes Bruckner) is being sent to an exclusive girls' school after a few instances of acting out, including setting a fire in the front yard which nearly destroyed an old oak tree. The headmistress, Ms. Traverse (Patricia Clarkson) informs her that since her father (Bruce Campbell) isn't quite so well-off financially as he appears, she will be tested for a scholarship, which she receives. The school is isolated by trees in every direction, so there's no relief from the usual girls' school issues - she sticks up for a picked on classmate, Marcy (Lauren Birkell), thus earning the enmity of blonde queen bee Samantha (Rachel Nichols). Another girl, Ann (Kathleen Mackey) has just returned from the hospital. As with any old institution, the school has accumulated creepy stories, but Heather is starting to get the impression that they're much more than just stories.
Aside from being McKee's follow-up to May, which certainly got people's attention when it appeared four years ago, The Woods has gained the stigma for being stuck in a studio vault which is unfair. Almost every film on MGM/UA and Columbia's schedule has had its schedule messed with by Sony's purchase of MGM, though few have suffered as badly as The Woods - it's been in the can for at least two years; and just compare Rachel Nichols in this film to her recent work - no way she can play a teenager any more, and she probably wasn't well known enough (from two separate TV series) to have third billing (first under the title) when this was originally planned for release. Bruckner seemed like an up-and-comer back when the film was expected to be released in August 2004; now her star has faded a little. It's the sort of film a studio has issues with, too - it's centered around teenage characters but is set forty years ago and has an R rating, so they spend a lot of time trying to make it more salable. According to McKee, the version screened is his preferred cut and will probably be the one to come out if and when the studio ever releases it.
Read the rest at HBS.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Fantasia '06, Day 3: 6 freakin' films
Not much to say about the day - started seeing movies at 12:30pm, knocked off at 2am. The highlight is Citizen Dog, which plays again today and tomorrow, and The Maid, which has another show this afternoon, is also pretty good.
Today's plan: My Scary Girl, A Chinese Tall Story, Funky Forest, and The Woods.
Monarch of the Moon
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Monarch of the Moon shoots fish in a barrel, parodying World War II-era superhero serials as if they didn't do that just fine themselves. It's easier to spoof what makes such films ridiculous today than to do what, say, Sky Captain or the Indiana Jones films did and recapture the elements that make them fun without resorting to mockery. Monarch of the Moon does better than most, in that it doesn't completely exhaust its joke in the first half hour.
Meet Cal Crawford (Blane Wheatley), the Yellow Jacket, an American who gained the ability to call forth a swarm of his namesake insects as the result of Nazi experiments. Not the world's coolest superpower, but you take what you can get. Now he and his team - office girl Susan (Monica Himmelheber), Colonel Slate (Will MacMillan), heavy-drinking pilot Randy (Kyle Kaplan), Professor Montgomery Wright (Phil Van Tee), and young Bear Scout Benny (Brent Moss) attempt to foil the Axis's most depraved plans. Currently, beautiful but deadly Japanese agent Dragonfly (Kimberly Page) is working with Nazi scientists and the technologically advanced Moon People to pave the way for a lunar invasion.
Read the rest at HBS.
Tales from the Enchanted Kingdom: Exodus
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
At its start, Exodus may set a new standard in sponsorship and product placement, but by the end, I'm not really inclined to hold that against it too much. If a vanity card, being mentioned in the film's full title ("Tales from...") and a prologue where the Enchanted Kingdom amusement park's Dumbledore-like mascot urges kids to turn off their cell phones and introduces the story means that they shell out the money for the completely different sort of fantasy that follows, then that's just how big-budget family adventure movies get made in the Philippines, and those of us in the rest of the world should just be amused that a place several thousand miles away is advertising at us.
Once the movie proper starts, we're introduced to Exodus, a mighty mercenary warrior hired by the last surviving enclave of humanity to defend them from Bangulbol and his "dark men" before they snuff our species out and literally cover the land in darkness. The leadership recognizes that this isn't much of a long term strategy, though, and sends Exodus to gather the last four Fire, Water, Earth, and Air Elementals (or is it five; is there still a Spirit Elemental left?) and take the fight to Bangulbol before it's too late.
The elements of the story should be fairly familiar - the dark lord who is actually a sort of fallen angel, the four basic elements of the world, the son sent away at birth to be spared a massacre becoming a hero. A jaded audience member can sit back and spot where a bit was taken from Lord of the Rings, a bit from the story of Moses, etc., and declare that nothing new or interesting is going on. And we may be right, from our perspective; the story gets a lot of their parts second-hand, and though they are parts that frequently speak to something basic or primal, they're also familiar. The same may not be true for a Filipino kid, though, and it's possible that no-one there has seen something quite this grand or polished be home-grown rather than imported.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Maid
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Every once in a while, a successful movie ruins things for everybody else. I won't say which other movie has a plot twist that is so famous that it makes a similar twist in The Maid seem a little uninspired, but you've probably guessed it, or will as soon as ghosts are mentioned. It'd be unfair to judge The Maid by that similarity, since it's got more going on after that revelation and the different context makes for an interesting story.
That context is Singapore, where Rosa Dimaano (Alessandra de Rossi) has arrived to begin working as a maid for the Teo family, who stage Chinese operas and care for their developmentally disabled son, Ah Soon (Benny Soh). She has arrived at the beginning of China's seventh lunar month, during which time many Chinese burn paper offerings to the spirits of their ancestors, leave food out for wandering spirits, or leave the front row of chairs open for ghosts at performances. This is all pretty weird for Rosa, an eighteen-year-old Filipino who had seldom left her village before coming to Singapore; she's Christian, herself, and doesn't know these customs. When she sweeps away some ashes in the sidewalk, Mrs. Teo (Huifang Hong) scolds her, saying it's bad luck. It certainly seems to be - after doing so, Rosa can see ghosts, including one that is uncomfortably close at hand. She's already a little on edge, since her brother needs money for a kidney transplant and the maid across the street freaks out at the sight of her. But it's only thirty days, after which the gates of hell close and she'll be bothered by ghosts no more, right? She can handle that.
Read the rest at HBS.
Citizen Dog (Mah Nakorn)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
From the very first frames of Citizen Dog, the audience should know they're in for something special. Commercial director Wisit Sasanatieng, cinematographer Rewat Prelert, and production designer Suras Kardeeroj make it clear early on that they're making a film of exceptional visual beauty, with the only question being whether or not it can keep up emotionally. Happily, it does, winding up as sweet as it is eccentric.
The film mainly follows Pod (Mahasamut Boonyaruk), whom the narrator describes as a simple country bumpkin come to Bangkok to make his fortune. Working at a sardine factory, he meets best friend Yod (Sawatwong Palakawong Na Autthaya) after each cuts off their index finger (in this film's world, though, this doesn't cause any bleeding and they easily reattach). Not wanting to go through that again, they quit their jobs, and it's at Pod's next job as a security guard that he meets Jin (Saengthong Gate-Uthong) and falls madly in love. Jin is pretty, but weird - she works as a maid and is obsessed not only with cleaning and keeping things orderly, but with the characters in serialized romance magazines an a mysterious book with an all white cover that fell from the sky when she was living in the country; deciphering its contents is her mission in life. She likes Pod, as he's the only person who talks to her (everyone else thinks she's crazy), but is far from head-over-heels for him.
Read the rest at HBS.
Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
So let's say slasher movies were real. Spree killers targeted high-school students and then apparently came back from the dead to do it again. And again. If this was a common theme in American life as opposed to just in American movies, I imagine somebody would try to study the phenomenon, even if it meant going to unsafe lengths to do it.
Meet Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals). This graduate student and aspiring documentary filmmaker has been contacted by Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel), who also has a dream - to be to Glen Echo, MD, what Jason Vorhees was to Crystal Lake, what Freddy Krueger was to Elm Street, what Michael Myers was to Haddonfield... You get the idea. It takes lots of preparation - choosing your "survivor girl", preparing the old scary house (nailing windows shut, ridding trees of limbs that can support a person's weight, sabotaging potential weapons), doing a lot of cardio (those kids are ten years younger than you and probably run track, and aren't trying to look slow), etc. As the anniversary of Leslie's supposed death approaches, though, Taylor starts getting cold feet. After all, this is standing back and watching while Leslie kills innocent people.
Read the rest at HBS.
Die You Zombie Bastards!
* * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Look at that title. Doesn't it promise excitement? It's phrased as a command, it's got a curse word in it, and it's so important that those zombie bastards die that not only does it have an exclamation point, but it omits a comma. Sure, the implication is that it'll be tongue-in-cheek, but it'll be exciting tongue-in-cheek, right? This should, one way or another, be a movie that gets the audience going.
It is not. It may, in fact, be the most boring movie ever to feature zombies, serial killing cannibals, robots, mad scientists, ninjas, vampires, and gratuitous nudity. One of the characters within the movie even makes the point that she's not scared, because after a while repetition makes something that had been scary little more than boring, and you can only get away with that sort of self-deprecating meta-comment if what you're doing is, in fact, not a crashing bore. That's trying to be sly with the audience, and only really works when it reveals something non-obvious, that the movie is actually more clever than it appears. Here, it just goes to show that the film really has nothing beyond a bunch of half-baked ideas that co-writer/director Caleb Emerson can't stitch together.
The first, and most enjoyable, idea is a group of hot blonde scientists talking about their findings on Hell Island while getting naked and skinny-dipping. Alas, soon they are captured by Dr. Nefarious (Geoff Mosher) and his insta-zombie ray, but three smart, sexy blondes aren't enough (well, after the zombification, they're not so smart and not really sexy unless you're into green, but you get the idea). He wants his ideal woman to share in the triumph of his global zombification plan, and he's decided that that's Violet (Pippi Zornoza), the flesh-eating serial-killer wife of flesh-eating serial-killer Red (Tim Gerstmar). She's just made him a superhero costume complete with a cape made of human flesh when she's taken (he's evidently always wanted to be a superhero), and he sets out on a quest to find her.
Read the rest at HBS.
Today's plan: My Scary Girl, A Chinese Tall Story, Funky Forest, and The Woods.
Monarch of the Moon
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Monarch of the Moon shoots fish in a barrel, parodying World War II-era superhero serials as if they didn't do that just fine themselves. It's easier to spoof what makes such films ridiculous today than to do what, say, Sky Captain or the Indiana Jones films did and recapture the elements that make them fun without resorting to mockery. Monarch of the Moon does better than most, in that it doesn't completely exhaust its joke in the first half hour.
Meet Cal Crawford (Blane Wheatley), the Yellow Jacket, an American who gained the ability to call forth a swarm of his namesake insects as the result of Nazi experiments. Not the world's coolest superpower, but you take what you can get. Now he and his team - office girl Susan (Monica Himmelheber), Colonel Slate (Will MacMillan), heavy-drinking pilot Randy (Kyle Kaplan), Professor Montgomery Wright (Phil Van Tee), and young Bear Scout Benny (Brent Moss) attempt to foil the Axis's most depraved plans. Currently, beautiful but deadly Japanese agent Dragonfly (Kimberly Page) is working with Nazi scientists and the technologically advanced Moon People to pave the way for a lunar invasion.
Read the rest at HBS.
Tales from the Enchanted Kingdom: Exodus
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
At its start, Exodus may set a new standard in sponsorship and product placement, but by the end, I'm not really inclined to hold that against it too much. If a vanity card, being mentioned in the film's full title ("Tales from...") and a prologue where the Enchanted Kingdom amusement park's Dumbledore-like mascot urges kids to turn off their cell phones and introduces the story means that they shell out the money for the completely different sort of fantasy that follows, then that's just how big-budget family adventure movies get made in the Philippines, and those of us in the rest of the world should just be amused that a place several thousand miles away is advertising at us.
Once the movie proper starts, we're introduced to Exodus, a mighty mercenary warrior hired by the last surviving enclave of humanity to defend them from Bangulbol and his "dark men" before they snuff our species out and literally cover the land in darkness. The leadership recognizes that this isn't much of a long term strategy, though, and sends Exodus to gather the last four Fire, Water, Earth, and Air Elementals (or is it five; is there still a Spirit Elemental left?) and take the fight to Bangulbol before it's too late.
The elements of the story should be fairly familiar - the dark lord who is actually a sort of fallen angel, the four basic elements of the world, the son sent away at birth to be spared a massacre becoming a hero. A jaded audience member can sit back and spot where a bit was taken from Lord of the Rings, a bit from the story of Moses, etc., and declare that nothing new or interesting is going on. And we may be right, from our perspective; the story gets a lot of their parts second-hand, and though they are parts that frequently speak to something basic or primal, they're also familiar. The same may not be true for a Filipino kid, though, and it's possible that no-one there has seen something quite this grand or polished be home-grown rather than imported.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Maid
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Every once in a while, a successful movie ruins things for everybody else. I won't say which other movie has a plot twist that is so famous that it makes a similar twist in The Maid seem a little uninspired, but you've probably guessed it, or will as soon as ghosts are mentioned. It'd be unfair to judge The Maid by that similarity, since it's got more going on after that revelation and the different context makes for an interesting story.
That context is Singapore, where Rosa Dimaano (Alessandra de Rossi) has arrived to begin working as a maid for the Teo family, who stage Chinese operas and care for their developmentally disabled son, Ah Soon (Benny Soh). She has arrived at the beginning of China's seventh lunar month, during which time many Chinese burn paper offerings to the spirits of their ancestors, leave food out for wandering spirits, or leave the front row of chairs open for ghosts at performances. This is all pretty weird for Rosa, an eighteen-year-old Filipino who had seldom left her village before coming to Singapore; she's Christian, herself, and doesn't know these customs. When she sweeps away some ashes in the sidewalk, Mrs. Teo (Huifang Hong) scolds her, saying it's bad luck. It certainly seems to be - after doing so, Rosa can see ghosts, including one that is uncomfortably close at hand. She's already a little on edge, since her brother needs money for a kidney transplant and the maid across the street freaks out at the sight of her. But it's only thirty days, after which the gates of hell close and she'll be bothered by ghosts no more, right? She can handle that.
Read the rest at HBS.
Citizen Dog (Mah Nakorn)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
From the very first frames of Citizen Dog, the audience should know they're in for something special. Commercial director Wisit Sasanatieng, cinematographer Rewat Prelert, and production designer Suras Kardeeroj make it clear early on that they're making a film of exceptional visual beauty, with the only question being whether or not it can keep up emotionally. Happily, it does, winding up as sweet as it is eccentric.
The film mainly follows Pod (Mahasamut Boonyaruk), whom the narrator describes as a simple country bumpkin come to Bangkok to make his fortune. Working at a sardine factory, he meets best friend Yod (Sawatwong Palakawong Na Autthaya) after each cuts off their index finger (in this film's world, though, this doesn't cause any bleeding and they easily reattach). Not wanting to go through that again, they quit their jobs, and it's at Pod's next job as a security guard that he meets Jin (Saengthong Gate-Uthong) and falls madly in love. Jin is pretty, but weird - she works as a maid and is obsessed not only with cleaning and keeping things orderly, but with the characters in serialized romance magazines an a mysterious book with an all white cover that fell from the sky when she was living in the country; deciphering its contents is her mission in life. She likes Pod, as he's the only person who talks to her (everyone else thinks she's crazy), but is far from head-over-heels for him.
Read the rest at HBS.
Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
So let's say slasher movies were real. Spree killers targeted high-school students and then apparently came back from the dead to do it again. And again. If this was a common theme in American life as opposed to just in American movies, I imagine somebody would try to study the phenomenon, even if it meant going to unsafe lengths to do it.
Meet Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals). This graduate student and aspiring documentary filmmaker has been contacted by Leslie Vernon (Nathan Baesel), who also has a dream - to be to Glen Echo, MD, what Jason Vorhees was to Crystal Lake, what Freddy Krueger was to Elm Street, what Michael Myers was to Haddonfield... You get the idea. It takes lots of preparation - choosing your "survivor girl", preparing the old scary house (nailing windows shut, ridding trees of limbs that can support a person's weight, sabotaging potential weapons), doing a lot of cardio (those kids are ten years younger than you and probably run track, and aren't trying to look slow), etc. As the anniversary of Leslie's supposed death approaches, though, Taylor starts getting cold feet. After all, this is standing back and watching while Leslie kills innocent people.
Read the rest at HBS.
Die You Zombie Bastards!
* * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Look at that title. Doesn't it promise excitement? It's phrased as a command, it's got a curse word in it, and it's so important that those zombie bastards die that not only does it have an exclamation point, but it omits a comma. Sure, the implication is that it'll be tongue-in-cheek, but it'll be exciting tongue-in-cheek, right? This should, one way or another, be a movie that gets the audience going.
It is not. It may, in fact, be the most boring movie ever to feature zombies, serial killing cannibals, robots, mad scientists, ninjas, vampires, and gratuitous nudity. One of the characters within the movie even makes the point that she's not scared, because after a while repetition makes something that had been scary little more than boring, and you can only get away with that sort of self-deprecating meta-comment if what you're doing is, in fact, not a crashing bore. That's trying to be sly with the audience, and only really works when it reveals something non-obvious, that the movie is actually more clever than it appears. Here, it just goes to show that the film really has nothing beyond a bunch of half-baked ideas that co-writer/director Caleb Emerson can't stitch together.
The first, and most enjoyable, idea is a group of hot blonde scientists talking about their findings on Hell Island while getting naked and skinny-dipping. Alas, soon they are captured by Dr. Nefarious (Geoff Mosher) and his insta-zombie ray, but three smart, sexy blondes aren't enough (well, after the zombification, they're not so smart and not really sexy unless you're into green, but you get the idea). He wants his ideal woman to share in the triumph of his global zombification plan, and he's decided that that's Violet (Pippi Zornoza), the flesh-eating serial-killer wife of flesh-eating serial-killer Red (Tim Gerstmar). She's just made him a superhero costume complete with a cape made of human flesh when she's taken (he's evidently always wanted to be a superhero), and he sets out on a quest to find her.
Read the rest at HBS.
Fantasia '06, Day 2: Dirty Ho, Princess Aurora, A Bittersweet Life
The greatness of a place like Cocktail Hawaii when you visit a city likke Montreal really cannot be overstated. Say you've been up past midnight watching movies and the quick bits of drifting off during the bus ride and Seven Swords didn't help make up for the four hours of sleep you got the previous night. You don't wake up until eight or nine, spend another hour and a half assuring the family via IM that you made it to Canada safely while trying to finish writing your first reviews, and then walk to Concordia. It's noon. But that's okay; you can still order a "Sacramento" - a thick waffle topped with a banana and a half, strawberries and Nutella chocolate syrup - and a big ol' fresh-squeezed OJ without an issue. It's a breakfast place that doesn't even open until nine (and also serves wraps and ice cream). I would be there every Saturday and Sunday if somplace like this opened in Cambridge.
Next up on the day was the CCA (Centre Canadian d'Architecture), a spiffy little museum in the same area. I'm sorry I missed it last year; the nifty "sculpture garden" is a nice place to sit and relax.
After which, it was time to hit the movies, grabbing a snack because the options were "popcorn for supper" and missing the last film of the night in order to grab something. I went with the latter, skipping Art of the Devil 2 for a hot roast beef sandwhich at Ben's at 12.30.
Six films on the line-up today: Monarch of the Moon, Exodus, The Maid, Citizen Dog, Behind the Mask, and either Die You Zombie Bastards! or She-Demons of the Black Sun. A tough choice, those midnights are.
Dirty Ho (Lan tou He)
* * * (out of four) (incomplete)
Seen 7 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Since this film was originally released in 1979, the title probably didn't have quite the same idiomatic meaning it does now. Said title was actually meant to cash in on the popularity of Dirty Harry. And it's not as if the original title, "Rotten-Headed Ho", would be much better.
The Ho of the title is Ho Chen (Yue Wong), a small-time crook who has a brief competition with a travelling merchant, Mr. Wang (Gordon Liu), for the attentions of a pair of girls at a brothel (it's one of those kung fu movie brothels where people don't seem to come for sex). Ho loses his gold, attempts to get it back, and finds his kung fu doesn't compare to that of Wang, who is secretly a martial arts master. Ho sustains a nasty head wound that must be treated every three days with medicine only Wang has, and Wang insists Ho act as his disciple. Ho doesn't immediately see that Wang is being dogged by assassins, and is hiding more than just a mastery of the martial arts.
If you've seen a 1970s Shaw Brothers movie, you've got some idea of what you're in for - intrigues involving rogue generals and princes, groups of fighters united by a common theme and unorthodox fighting styles, fights with the sound effects cranked up and a tendency to fight one at a time. And, of course, training scenes. You've got to have the eccentric master putting his impatient disciple through some kind of improvised workout using unconventional equipment - Mr. Miyagi learned everything he knew from these guys. It's tradition, darn it, and fun until it reaches the level of self-parody.
Part of the reason that this movie isn't laughable is the genuine chemistry between Gordon Liu and Yue Wong as Wang and Ho. There's nothing particularly subtle going on - Wang is trying to get Ho to be a better man (and says as much), and rather envies Ho's lack of obligations. Ho, of course, responds to the genuine respect versus goodwill he purchases at the brothel. Their complimentary personalities, Ho crass and pretty much illiterate, Wang intellectual and absorbed by his beloved antiques and wine tastings. Both have strong screen presences, doing a much better job of selling us these characters as having individual personalities rather than a defining quirk or characteristic better than most Shaw Brothers characters. This is, I think, in part because Dirty Ho is a buddy film, rather than one which focuses on a large number of martial artists in identical haircuts - Liu and Wong actually have room to act, as well as fight.
Besides, without Dirty Ho, we might never see a martial-arts wine tasting. That sequence, and the similarly staged visit to the antique shop that follows it are two of the film's most delightful surprises, subtle martial arts tangos that go on beneath tables or just out of Ho's sight as Gordon Liu quickly counters his opponents' attacks with small movements of the hand or foot, all the while continuing to exchange pleasantries with his attackers who respond in kind because they just want Wang dead, not noticed. Many films from this period use big, screen-filling moves that are announced by name; these zippy little scenes almost succeed in convincing the audience that there's something else going on.
Of course, the bigger fights are fun too. Some are kind of silly - like the one featuring a guy known as "the biter" - but most are fast and athletic. Director Chia-Liang Liu also handled the martial arts instruction, and though this is relatively early in his career, he's the same guy that would later choreograph Drunken Master II and keep him working today, as the fight choreographer for Tsui Hark's recent Seven Swords. Yue Wong has much of the heavy lifting in those scenes, but he's more than capable. Wong and Liu also work great as a unit, so that the later scenes where Ho and Wang fight of assassins as if having one mind between them are smooth as can be.
The movie ends rather abruptly (another characteristic of the genre at the time), but what more does it need? They fight, we laugh, and that's how it should be. (Formerly at HBS/EFC)
Princess Aurora (Orora Gongju)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
The name suggests a fun family adventure, and within the world of the movie, there is a TV show called "Princess Aurora" that's popular with young children. What the film actually delivers, though, is the hunt for a serial killer whose motives initially baffle the police and the audience, even as we follow her closely.
This film is a "howgetum" rather than a whodunit; we see who the killer is right off. It's Jung Soon-jung (Eom Jeong-hwa), an attractive Porsche salesperson in her early thirties who just seems to flip out when confronted by a pretty young trophy wife hitting her seven-year-old step-daughter, escorting the girl out of the ladies' room before brutally stabbing the woman to death. It's then we meet the detectives called to the scene, Jung (Gweon Oh-jung) and Oh Sung-soo (Mun Seong-Geun). Oh intends to leave the force to become a Christian pastor. This case will speed his exit from the force, though, once he pieces enough together to figure out that Soon-jung is involved; a scene that jumps from him making a phone call to her ignoring one suggests that they have a past connection. He's the one who recognizes the significance of the "Princess Aurora" stickers left at each crime scene.
As a standard-issue cops hunting a serial killer movie, this has a number of fun elements. Most of Soon-jung's victims are callous enough that we think she may be killing them just because they rubbed her the wrong way, and some of her murders are creative in a nasty way: There's a certain perverse delight to seeing a vain, bitchy woman suffocated during her spa treatment. The characters at the police station would be well-suited to a continuing series: The bespectacled, devout Oh is a skilled and observant detective, who works well with his younger, scruffy-but-capable partner. The captain (Choi Jong-weon) is a fun supporting character.
The trouble is that once things come together, things don't step up to the next level. The same incident set both Soon-jung and Sung-soo on their respective and opposite paths, but once what's going on becomes clear, the characters get less interesting: Oh really should be more troubled by what he's seeing from Soon-jung, but he's got no outlet with which to communicate that. Similarly, Soon-jung develops a somewhat standard crazy serial-killer tic which we've seen countless times before, and though it pays off nicely in the film's last sequence, the part of the film that stretches from Oh telling his colleagues what he knows about Soon-jung and that last part is disappointing - we've seen this sort of stuff before, and the film just seems to be going through the motions.
This doesn't reflect poorly on the cast; the two principles are very good individually, enough that we'd kind of like to see them play off each other more. Mun Seong-Geun is particularly strong in the procedural scenes, inhabiting his character to make us believe in his day-to-day life, and putting across that he's probably trying to use his newfound religion to dodge the uglier aspects of his life. Eom Jeong-hwa is apparently best known for light romantic comedies, and if so, the way she plays against type here is double effective - she makes Soon-jung able to turn her charm on easily, but also completely sells her shocking brutality and rage; she goes from two kinds of hot to cold without a hitch, which is why we might like to see a little more intensity when just how nuts her character is is revealed; it's a little flat compared to the rest. Gweon Oh-jung sort of recedes to the background as the movie goes on; he's a steady presence, but it's not his story.
The film is directed by Bang Eun-jin, who also worked on the screenplay. Ms. Bang makes her feature directing debut, and does fairly well with it; she's got a good eye for the camera. The pacing could use a little bit of work, but she does a great job with her actors. I'd like a little more attention paid the the procedural details, since having Oh remain on the case after a certain point is kind of ridiculous, but the snappiness of the dialogue manages to penetrate the subtitles, and she gets good performances out of her entire cast.
It is a relatively unique premise - comparing it to American films, I can't really imagine Ashley Judd in the villain role - and the film shows promise. For the work of a first-time director, it's pretty solid work, even if there's enough good genre movies coming out of Korea that this doesn't quite stand out that far from the crowd. (Formerly at HBS/EFC)
A Bittersweet Life (Dalkomhan Insaeng)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
A Bittersweet Life is big, hard-boiled action just like John Woo used to make. Kim Ji-woon isn't necessarily the guy I'd expect to see make this sort of film, but he proves darn good at it, delivering a shot of high-testosterone adrenaline from start to finish.
Kim Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) is an enforcer for "President" Kang (Kim Young-Chul), and he's good at it: When called down to handle a situation in a restaurant's back room, the staff jumps at his glance and the hoods are quickly dispatched. It's a situation created by Kang's lieutenant, Mun-suk (Kim Roe-ha), who lacks Sun-woo's icy professionalism and is quickly falling out of favor with Kang, at least relative to Sun-woo. While away in Shanghai on business, Kang gives Sun-woo an extra job - watch his young girlfriend Hee-soo (Shin Min-a), make sure she's not cheating on him, and if she is, kill her and her lover. When the time comes, though, Sun-woo has a twinge of conscience, earning him Kang's wrath. It doesn't help that Sun-woo's cocky attitude has offended another underworld kingpin, "President" Baek (Hwang Jeong-min), who's sending his own killer to take Sun-woo out.
Some guys just have movie star written all over them, and Lee Byung-hun is one of them. He's a good-looking guy who fills out a suit nicely, of course, but he's got the knack for carrying himself with authority and when he bursts into action, delivering his punches and kicks with savage authority. He earns his character's tendency to be a prick by projecting that much more cool than everyone else on screen, and similarly can sell the amount of punishment his body takes while other characters go down. He's good when the veneer of cool is peeled back a little, too, whether it be feeling something when he's around Hee-soo, betrayed and beaten later in the movie, or aware that he might, just this once, be in a situation he can't escape. If he looks familiar to North American audiences, it's probably from a couple of Park Chan-wook pictures: He played the South Korean NCO who made friends with his enemies in JSA, and was the film director victimized in Park's segment of Three...Extremes, "Cut".
Here, though, he's working with Kim Ji-woon, whose previous film was the stylish horror picture A Tale of Two Sisters. He retains his knack for creating dazzling visuals, from the slick interior of the restaurant Kang and company use as a front to the sleazy mess where some lowlife arms dealers do their work. Check out the difference between where Sun-woo and Hee-soo live: The girl's home is cluttered with colorful objects, particularly lamps, whereas Sun-woo sleeps on a couch in a spartan apartment only illuminated by a single lamp whose simple push-button switch rests in his hand while he sleeps. He and cinematographer Kim Ji-yong always seem to have the right angle and distance during the action scenes - far enough back to give us a clear view of what's going on and close enough to rub our noses in the destructive violence. And the man bursting out of a shallow grave has been done before, but seldom this well. They also know how to flatter Ms. Shin, although she doesn't need a lot of help in that department.
Kim's script is a blast, filled with bloody action, memorable supporting characters, and philosophical monologues that don't outlast their welcome. It refrains from giving us an obvious and unlikely romance, so I'll forgive it if it maybe piles a little too much gangland intrigue on us without much explanation. It's also fiercely funny without undercutting the tension or resorting to lame one-liners: A scene where two characters have their guns disassembled when they realize that they really need their weapons in one piece before the other guy has his together got a chuckle even while kick-starting the pulse, and the line from one of the guys digging a second, deeper grave as he sees Sun-woo escape brought the house down. Kim keeps this movie going relentlessly forward, making its two hours pass in a breeze.
As good as Lee Byung-hun is, the rest of the cast hold their own with him. Shin Min-a is a young beauty who invests her character with such spontaneity and warmth that the audience easily believes that she throws these killers' priorities all out of whack. Kim Roe-ha is great contrast to the lead, making Mun-suk as talkative and flamboyant as Sun-woo is cold and reserved. Kim Young-chul and Hwang Jeong-min are both prideful types as mob bosses whose feud doesn't quite go away as the focus on stomping out Sun-woo, and Lee Gi-yeong has a nice supporting role as a killer who may be Sun-woo's equal, if only because he's not burdened with Sun-woo's arrogance.
Many bullets are shot and punches are thrown over the course of this movie, in a way that reminded me that I haven't really seen a flat-out action movie this good in a while. Kim Ji-woon and Lee Byung-hun are the best pairing of actor and director for this kind of film since John Woo and Chow Yun-fat, and definitely worth checking out.
(Formerly at EFC/HBS)
Next up on the day was the CCA (Centre Canadian d'Architecture), a spiffy little museum in the same area. I'm sorry I missed it last year; the nifty "sculpture garden" is a nice place to sit and relax.
After which, it was time to hit the movies, grabbing a snack because the options were "popcorn for supper" and missing the last film of the night in order to grab something. I went with the latter, skipping Art of the Devil 2 for a hot roast beef sandwhich at Ben's at 12.30.
Six films on the line-up today: Monarch of the Moon, Exodus, The Maid, Citizen Dog, Behind the Mask, and either Die You Zombie Bastards! or She-Demons of the Black Sun. A tough choice, those midnights are.
Dirty Ho (Lan tou He)
* * * (out of four) (incomplete)
Seen 7 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Since this film was originally released in 1979, the title probably didn't have quite the same idiomatic meaning it does now. Said title was actually meant to cash in on the popularity of Dirty Harry. And it's not as if the original title, "Rotten-Headed Ho", would be much better.
The Ho of the title is Ho Chen (Yue Wong), a small-time crook who has a brief competition with a travelling merchant, Mr. Wang (Gordon Liu), for the attentions of a pair of girls at a brothel (it's one of those kung fu movie brothels where people don't seem to come for sex). Ho loses his gold, attempts to get it back, and finds his kung fu doesn't compare to that of Wang, who is secretly a martial arts master. Ho sustains a nasty head wound that must be treated every three days with medicine only Wang has, and Wang insists Ho act as his disciple. Ho doesn't immediately see that Wang is being dogged by assassins, and is hiding more than just a mastery of the martial arts.
If you've seen a 1970s Shaw Brothers movie, you've got some idea of what you're in for - intrigues involving rogue generals and princes, groups of fighters united by a common theme and unorthodox fighting styles, fights with the sound effects cranked up and a tendency to fight one at a time. And, of course, training scenes. You've got to have the eccentric master putting his impatient disciple through some kind of improvised workout using unconventional equipment - Mr. Miyagi learned everything he knew from these guys. It's tradition, darn it, and fun until it reaches the level of self-parody.
Part of the reason that this movie isn't laughable is the genuine chemistry between Gordon Liu and Yue Wong as Wang and Ho. There's nothing particularly subtle going on - Wang is trying to get Ho to be a better man (and says as much), and rather envies Ho's lack of obligations. Ho, of course, responds to the genuine respect versus goodwill he purchases at the brothel. Their complimentary personalities, Ho crass and pretty much illiterate, Wang intellectual and absorbed by his beloved antiques and wine tastings. Both have strong screen presences, doing a much better job of selling us these characters as having individual personalities rather than a defining quirk or characteristic better than most Shaw Brothers characters. This is, I think, in part because Dirty Ho is a buddy film, rather than one which focuses on a large number of martial artists in identical haircuts - Liu and Wong actually have room to act, as well as fight.
Besides, without Dirty Ho, we might never see a martial-arts wine tasting. That sequence, and the similarly staged visit to the antique shop that follows it are two of the film's most delightful surprises, subtle martial arts tangos that go on beneath tables or just out of Ho's sight as Gordon Liu quickly counters his opponents' attacks with small movements of the hand or foot, all the while continuing to exchange pleasantries with his attackers who respond in kind because they just want Wang dead, not noticed. Many films from this period use big, screen-filling moves that are announced by name; these zippy little scenes almost succeed in convincing the audience that there's something else going on.
Of course, the bigger fights are fun too. Some are kind of silly - like the one featuring a guy known as "the biter" - but most are fast and athletic. Director Chia-Liang Liu also handled the martial arts instruction, and though this is relatively early in his career, he's the same guy that would later choreograph Drunken Master II and keep him working today, as the fight choreographer for Tsui Hark's recent Seven Swords. Yue Wong has much of the heavy lifting in those scenes, but he's more than capable. Wong and Liu also work great as a unit, so that the later scenes where Ho and Wang fight of assassins as if having one mind between them are smooth as can be.
The movie ends rather abruptly (another characteristic of the genre at the time), but what more does it need? They fight, we laugh, and that's how it should be. (Formerly at HBS/EFC)
Princess Aurora (Orora Gongju)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2006 at Salle J.A. de Sève (Fantasia Festival 2006)
The name suggests a fun family adventure, and within the world of the movie, there is a TV show called "Princess Aurora" that's popular with young children. What the film actually delivers, though, is the hunt for a serial killer whose motives initially baffle the police and the audience, even as we follow her closely.
This film is a "howgetum" rather than a whodunit; we see who the killer is right off. It's Jung Soon-jung (Eom Jeong-hwa), an attractive Porsche salesperson in her early thirties who just seems to flip out when confronted by a pretty young trophy wife hitting her seven-year-old step-daughter, escorting the girl out of the ladies' room before brutally stabbing the woman to death. It's then we meet the detectives called to the scene, Jung (Gweon Oh-jung) and Oh Sung-soo (Mun Seong-Geun). Oh intends to leave the force to become a Christian pastor. This case will speed his exit from the force, though, once he pieces enough together to figure out that Soon-jung is involved; a scene that jumps from him making a phone call to her ignoring one suggests that they have a past connection. He's the one who recognizes the significance of the "Princess Aurora" stickers left at each crime scene.
As a standard-issue cops hunting a serial killer movie, this has a number of fun elements. Most of Soon-jung's victims are callous enough that we think she may be killing them just because they rubbed her the wrong way, and some of her murders are creative in a nasty way: There's a certain perverse delight to seeing a vain, bitchy woman suffocated during her spa treatment. The characters at the police station would be well-suited to a continuing series: The bespectacled, devout Oh is a skilled and observant detective, who works well with his younger, scruffy-but-capable partner. The captain (Choi Jong-weon) is a fun supporting character.
The trouble is that once things come together, things don't step up to the next level. The same incident set both Soon-jung and Sung-soo on their respective and opposite paths, but once what's going on becomes clear, the characters get less interesting: Oh really should be more troubled by what he's seeing from Soon-jung, but he's got no outlet with which to communicate that. Similarly, Soon-jung develops a somewhat standard crazy serial-killer tic which we've seen countless times before, and though it pays off nicely in the film's last sequence, the part of the film that stretches from Oh telling his colleagues what he knows about Soon-jung and that last part is disappointing - we've seen this sort of stuff before, and the film just seems to be going through the motions.
This doesn't reflect poorly on the cast; the two principles are very good individually, enough that we'd kind of like to see them play off each other more. Mun Seong-Geun is particularly strong in the procedural scenes, inhabiting his character to make us believe in his day-to-day life, and putting across that he's probably trying to use his newfound religion to dodge the uglier aspects of his life. Eom Jeong-hwa is apparently best known for light romantic comedies, and if so, the way she plays against type here is double effective - she makes Soon-jung able to turn her charm on easily, but also completely sells her shocking brutality and rage; she goes from two kinds of hot to cold without a hitch, which is why we might like to see a little more intensity when just how nuts her character is is revealed; it's a little flat compared to the rest. Gweon Oh-jung sort of recedes to the background as the movie goes on; he's a steady presence, but it's not his story.
The film is directed by Bang Eun-jin, who also worked on the screenplay. Ms. Bang makes her feature directing debut, and does fairly well with it; she's got a good eye for the camera. The pacing could use a little bit of work, but she does a great job with her actors. I'd like a little more attention paid the the procedural details, since having Oh remain on the case after a certain point is kind of ridiculous, but the snappiness of the dialogue manages to penetrate the subtitles, and she gets good performances out of her entire cast.
It is a relatively unique premise - comparing it to American films, I can't really imagine Ashley Judd in the villain role - and the film shows promise. For the work of a first-time director, it's pretty solid work, even if there's enough good genre movies coming out of Korea that this doesn't quite stand out that far from the crowd. (Formerly at HBS/EFC)
A Bittersweet Life (Dalkomhan Insaeng)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
A Bittersweet Life is big, hard-boiled action just like John Woo used to make. Kim Ji-woon isn't necessarily the guy I'd expect to see make this sort of film, but he proves darn good at it, delivering a shot of high-testosterone adrenaline from start to finish.
Kim Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) is an enforcer for "President" Kang (Kim Young-Chul), and he's good at it: When called down to handle a situation in a restaurant's back room, the staff jumps at his glance and the hoods are quickly dispatched. It's a situation created by Kang's lieutenant, Mun-suk (Kim Roe-ha), who lacks Sun-woo's icy professionalism and is quickly falling out of favor with Kang, at least relative to Sun-woo. While away in Shanghai on business, Kang gives Sun-woo an extra job - watch his young girlfriend Hee-soo (Shin Min-a), make sure she's not cheating on him, and if she is, kill her and her lover. When the time comes, though, Sun-woo has a twinge of conscience, earning him Kang's wrath. It doesn't help that Sun-woo's cocky attitude has offended another underworld kingpin, "President" Baek (Hwang Jeong-min), who's sending his own killer to take Sun-woo out.
Some guys just have movie star written all over them, and Lee Byung-hun is one of them. He's a good-looking guy who fills out a suit nicely, of course, but he's got the knack for carrying himself with authority and when he bursts into action, delivering his punches and kicks with savage authority. He earns his character's tendency to be a prick by projecting that much more cool than everyone else on screen, and similarly can sell the amount of punishment his body takes while other characters go down. He's good when the veneer of cool is peeled back a little, too, whether it be feeling something when he's around Hee-soo, betrayed and beaten later in the movie, or aware that he might, just this once, be in a situation he can't escape. If he looks familiar to North American audiences, it's probably from a couple of Park Chan-wook pictures: He played the South Korean NCO who made friends with his enemies in JSA, and was the film director victimized in Park's segment of Three...Extremes, "Cut".
Here, though, he's working with Kim Ji-woon, whose previous film was the stylish horror picture A Tale of Two Sisters. He retains his knack for creating dazzling visuals, from the slick interior of the restaurant Kang and company use as a front to the sleazy mess where some lowlife arms dealers do their work. Check out the difference between where Sun-woo and Hee-soo live: The girl's home is cluttered with colorful objects, particularly lamps, whereas Sun-woo sleeps on a couch in a spartan apartment only illuminated by a single lamp whose simple push-button switch rests in his hand while he sleeps. He and cinematographer Kim Ji-yong always seem to have the right angle and distance during the action scenes - far enough back to give us a clear view of what's going on and close enough to rub our noses in the destructive violence. And the man bursting out of a shallow grave has been done before, but seldom this well. They also know how to flatter Ms. Shin, although she doesn't need a lot of help in that department.
Kim's script is a blast, filled with bloody action, memorable supporting characters, and philosophical monologues that don't outlast their welcome. It refrains from giving us an obvious and unlikely romance, so I'll forgive it if it maybe piles a little too much gangland intrigue on us without much explanation. It's also fiercely funny without undercutting the tension or resorting to lame one-liners: A scene where two characters have their guns disassembled when they realize that they really need their weapons in one piece before the other guy has his together got a chuckle even while kick-starting the pulse, and the line from one of the guys digging a second, deeper grave as he sees Sun-woo escape brought the house down. Kim keeps this movie going relentlessly forward, making its two hours pass in a breeze.
As good as Lee Byung-hun is, the rest of the cast hold their own with him. Shin Min-a is a young beauty who invests her character with such spontaneity and warmth that the audience easily believes that she throws these killers' priorities all out of whack. Kim Roe-ha is great contrast to the lead, making Mun-suk as talkative and flamboyant as Sun-woo is cold and reserved. Kim Young-chul and Hwang Jeong-min are both prideful types as mob bosses whose feud doesn't quite go away as the focus on stomping out Sun-woo, and Lee Gi-yeong has a nice supporting role as a killer who may be Sun-woo's equal, if only because he's not burdened with Sun-woo's arrogance.
Many bullets are shot and punches are thrown over the course of this movie, in a way that reminded me that I haven't really seen a flat-out action movie this good in a while. Kim Ji-woon and Lee Byung-hun are the best pairing of actor and director for this kind of film since John Woo and Chow Yun-fat, and definitely worth checking out.
(Formerly at EFC/HBS)
Friday, July 07, 2006
Fantasia '06, Day 1: The Descent and Seven Swords
Well, in good news, I wasn't quite so worn out as I was last year, or at least I didn't think so. I think I walked my way into trouble - the hotel I'm staying at is about a mile or two from the screenings, and it's probably a good rule of thumb that if you pass more than two subway stations, you probably should have been taking the subway. The Descent was fantastic, but Seven Swords had me jerking my head forward as I realized I was drifting off. Not much of an indictment against the movie - hopefully I got the inevitable day where I overestimate my capabilities out of the way quickly.
The tentative plan for tonight is Dirty Ho and Princess Aurora in the J.A. de Sève theater, followed by A Bittersweet Life and Art of the Devil 2 in the main hall. The timing between the two is tight, though, so I may either knock off early and write the first two up or find some food and give Forest of the Dead a shot.
The Descent
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
The Descent doesn't mess around on its way to being the best action-horror movie to come down the pipe in a while. It tosses out a couple of nasty deaths early, gives us danger enough for two thrillers, never lets up, and never takes a break for arguments that can really wait until the characters have survived the next five seconds.
What you need to know: Six women - mostly from the U.K. - are using their vacation to explore a cave system that their American friend recently found in North Carolina. Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) lost her husband and daughter a year before; Beth (Alex Reid) is her best friend. Rebecca (Saskia Mulder) is a maternal-type English teacher taking the trip with her less-experienced sister Sam (MyAnna Buring), a med student. Organizing the trip is Juno (Natalie Mendoza), who hasn't told the group that the cave system is not the well-explored one she implied but in fact one that's not on any map, and Holly (Nora-Jane Noone), her daredevil protégé with an even more acute tendency to leap before she looks. So, things are bad enough when a cave-in seals off their entrance; when they realize that they may not be alone...
(Formerly at EFC)
Seven Swords (Chat Gim)
* * ¾ (out of four) (incomplete)
Seen 6 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Tsui Hark's new martial arts epic is beautiful and action-packed, but also exhausting. It likely doesn't help that I was already drained from the bus ride and the hike from the hotel and all that, but you know how people will hear a thick book is being adapted for film and say "this should really be a TV mini-series; a two-hour film won't do it justice"? Seven Swords will be the test of that; the same sets and (I think) much of the same crew to make a mini-series (Seven Swordsmen) which will have much more room to breathe than the 2.5-hour feature.
And, don't get me wrong, if I could see the feature version again without bumping something else off my festival to-do list, I'd be happy to do so. It's got a pretty nice cast, a lot of action, and it really looks like no expense was spared in the making. It also seems to have a big fight scene roughly every ten minutes, too many characters for me to keep track of while regularly conking out, and perhaps over-stylized action.
There's a couple TBA slots still left on the Fantasia schedule; maybe Seven Swords will get one of them, in which case I'll give a more useful report.
The tentative plan for tonight is Dirty Ho and Princess Aurora in the J.A. de Sève theater, followed by A Bittersweet Life and Art of the Devil 2 in the main hall. The timing between the two is tight, though, so I may either knock off early and write the first two up or find some food and give Forest of the Dead a shot.
The Descent
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
The Descent doesn't mess around on its way to being the best action-horror movie to come down the pipe in a while. It tosses out a couple of nasty deaths early, gives us danger enough for two thrillers, never lets up, and never takes a break for arguments that can really wait until the characters have survived the next five seconds.
What you need to know: Six women - mostly from the U.K. - are using their vacation to explore a cave system that their American friend recently found in North Carolina. Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) lost her husband and daughter a year before; Beth (Alex Reid) is her best friend. Rebecca (Saskia Mulder) is a maternal-type English teacher taking the trip with her less-experienced sister Sam (MyAnna Buring), a med student. Organizing the trip is Juno (Natalie Mendoza), who hasn't told the group that the cave system is not the well-explored one she implied but in fact one that's not on any map, and Holly (Nora-Jane Noone), her daredevil protégé with an even more acute tendency to leap before she looks. So, things are bad enough when a cave-in seals off their entrance; when they realize that they may not be alone...
Writer/director Neil Marshall was last seen with Dog Soldiers, and while it's unfortunate that he apparently can't crank out one or two good genre films a year, the three-year wait for his follow-up is well worth it. Dog Soldiers could occasionally get a little scattered, but The Descent is tightly focused in its tension, not giving more than a few moments' respite when things start to go downhill, but also showing a great deal of skill in how it constructs its story and gets us involved in the characters. We know that Sarah's going to be the one we're spending the most time with - she, after all, has the personal tragedy in the prologue - but we're introduced to the others without a lot of expository dialogue or obvious "Hello, my name is _______, and my personality trait is..." situations. The relationships between the characters are simple, but have the feel of history behind them; we know it's going to hurt when they're picked off.
It's interesting (and will probably be a cliché in this film's reviews) to note that the main characters are all women - only one man has a speaking part and he's gone about ten minutes in, but I don't think there's any kind of statement being made other than "let's not waste any time on sexual tension". It is pretty cool to see an action/adventure movie entirely populated by capable women that doesn't treat their attractiveness as one of their main assets in getting the job done. You put men in this movie, and at some point it's going to be a question of male/female dynamics, and while there's a good movie to be made like that, this one does just fine without. Plus, men wouldn't stand a chance of getting through some of the passages the ladies have to crawl through, so they'd be dead anyway.
That it's these specific women is something of a plus, too. Shauna Macdonald merits a comparison to Linda Hamilton in the Terminator movies; she starts out untested but cranks up the intensity to the point of being a force not to be messed with in the end. She's a nice contrast to Natalie Mendoza, whose good looks and ability to sell her character's athleticism and skill provide good camouflage for how irresponsible Juno is, even if she can handle herself when it's time to throw down. Alex Reid brings warmth to Beth without making her excessively touchy-feely, and Nora-Jane Noone gets some good snark in her part. Sasika Mulder and MyAnna Buring kind of wind up in the position where their being less involved in the main dynamic makes them look like cannon fodder, but they're pleasant enough.
All this would be for naught if The Descent wasn't good at making the audience jump or scream, which it is. Things go wrong at just the right moments, and Marshall uses his setting's natural ability to induce claustrophobia well, while also managing to open things up a little more when he needs room to fight. It's nice to see caves that look natural, rather than sixties-sci-fi-show deals with flat floors that just look like a darkened sound stage. He's not shy with the blood, either, getting his cast involved in some brutal fights and dealing out at least one nasty "that really should stay inside" injury. The editing's got occasional "just show us what's going on" moments, but sorts itself out nicely by the end.
(Note: I gather the version I saw was the American version, which cuts one bit from the end, but I kind of think adding another shock would have been a little much.)
Hopefully The Descent gets a better shot in American theaters than Dog Soldiers did; I think the latter maybe had a blip in rep places before heading to cable. It certainly deserves that shot, and to become a hit; it's darn good from start to finish.
Seven Swords (Chat Gim)* * ¾ (out of four) (incomplete)
Seen 6 July 2006 at Théâtre Hall Concordia (Fantasia Festival 2006)
Tsui Hark's new martial arts epic is beautiful and action-packed, but also exhausting. It likely doesn't help that I was already drained from the bus ride and the hike from the hotel and all that, but you know how people will hear a thick book is being adapted for film and say "this should really be a TV mini-series; a two-hour film won't do it justice"? Seven Swords will be the test of that; the same sets and (I think) much of the same crew to make a mini-series (Seven Swordsmen) which will have much more room to breathe than the 2.5-hour feature.
And, don't get me wrong, if I could see the feature version again without bumping something else off my festival to-do list, I'd be happy to do so. It's got a pretty nice cast, a lot of action, and it really looks like no expense was spared in the making. It also seems to have a big fight scene roughly every ten minutes, too many characters for me to keep track of while regularly conking out, and perhaps over-stylized action.
There's a couple TBA slots still left on the Fantasia schedule; maybe Seven Swords will get one of them, in which case I'll give a more useful report.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Recent first-run stuff: The Da Vinci Code, Lady Vengeance, Nacho Libre
Very briefly: In Montreal now, about to go pick up my press pass so that I can see The Descent and Seven Swords tonight. The hotel looks nicer than the one I stayed in last year, but there only seems to be one working outlet, which is hugely annoying.
The Da Vinci Code
* * (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2006 at AMC Boston Common #11 (First-run)
The trouble with The Da Vinci Code, at least as a movie, isn't that it advances a theory that could rub the religious the wrong way. After all, if a person's faith can't handle a hypothetical scenario in a work of fiction, then it's probably not doing them a lot of good. The problem is that said idea is all the movie has, and the process of finding it out isn't terribly exciting.
It opens with Dr. Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), an internationally renowned expert in the field of symbolic anthropology or something like that being called to a crime scene in the Louvre to help decode a set of cryptic markings found near a body. As he does so, though, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), a detective with the French equivalent of the FBI, informs him that he's not considered an expert, but a suspect. The murdered man was her grandfather, and she thinks the detective in charge, Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), is barking up the wrong tree, so she helps him escape and follow the clue to the real killer - Silas (Paul Bettany), an albino religious zealot. But who is he an agent for?
Read the rest at HBS.
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 June 2006 at Landmark Kendall Square #2 (First-run)
Though the English-language title of Park Chan-wook's most recent feature most explicitly references the first entry in his so-called "revenge trilogy", Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and it quotes an important line from that film, it's the parallels with Oldboy that may leap out the most vividly - the lengthy period of imprisonment, the elaborate plan, the pain of not knowing a lost child. Heck, when the time to inflict some pain comes, one character chooses the hammer as his weapon of choice. It's not quite as flashy as Oldboy, but that's to its benefit - there's nothing smirk-worthy in its ending to keep it from hitting like a ton of bricks.
Thirteen years ago, Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) didn't seem like the type to murder a six-year-old boy; indeed, one of her fellow prisoners would later say that she shined with the light of goodness. But she confessed, and was convicted. Inside, she earned the admiration of a Christian preacher (Kim Byeong-ok) for her devotion to God, a baker (Oh Dal-su) for her ability to make delicious pastries from substandard ingredients, and her fellow prisoners for taking unpleasant jobs like caring for an elderly North Korean spy. When she is released at the age of thirty-two, she takes a job at the baker's shop but turns her back on the church; she also tracks down the inmates released before her and presses them into service in her plan for revenge on Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik), the man she holds responsible for losing everything that matters to her.
Read the rest at HBS
Nacho Libre
* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2006 at AMC Fenway #13 (First-run)
Nacho Libre has no use for subtlety. It stars Jack Black and is produced by Nickelodeon Pictures, and neither Black nor Nick is especially noted for forgoing the obvious joke for something more sophisticated when the obvious thing can be observed to work. In other words, people will occasionally pass some gas in this movie, but if you can get over thinking you're too good for a fart joke, you'll probably laugh at it.
Ignacio, nicknamed "Nacho" (Jack Black), has lived his entire life in an orphanage - first as a child following the death of his parents, then as the most lowly and least respected friar on staff. For nearly as long, he has been a fan of luchadors, the masked wrestlers who are immensely popular in his part of Mexico. After a new nun, Sister Encarnarcion (Ana de la Reguera) comes to the rectory and stirs dormant emotions within him, he forms a tag-team with Esqueleto (Hector Jiminez), the skinny pauper who had previously stolen the orphans' day-old tortilla chips. Soon, though, even if the money for being jobbers is good, they begin to hunger for respect, which can only be gained by defeating Ramses (Cesar Gonzales), the country's most popular and most feared competitor.
Read the rest at HBS.
The Da Vinci Code
* * (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2006 at AMC Boston Common #11 (First-run)
The trouble with The Da Vinci Code, at least as a movie, isn't that it advances a theory that could rub the religious the wrong way. After all, if a person's faith can't handle a hypothetical scenario in a work of fiction, then it's probably not doing them a lot of good. The problem is that said idea is all the movie has, and the process of finding it out isn't terribly exciting.
It opens with Dr. Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), an internationally renowned expert in the field of symbolic anthropology or something like that being called to a crime scene in the Louvre to help decode a set of cryptic markings found near a body. As he does so, though, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), a detective with the French equivalent of the FBI, informs him that he's not considered an expert, but a suspect. The murdered man was her grandfather, and she thinks the detective in charge, Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), is barking up the wrong tree, so she helps him escape and follow the clue to the real killer - Silas (Paul Bettany), an albino religious zealot. But who is he an agent for?
Read the rest at HBS.
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi)* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 June 2006 at Landmark Kendall Square #2 (First-run)
Though the English-language title of Park Chan-wook's most recent feature most explicitly references the first entry in his so-called "revenge trilogy", Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and it quotes an important line from that film, it's the parallels with Oldboy that may leap out the most vividly - the lengthy period of imprisonment, the elaborate plan, the pain of not knowing a lost child. Heck, when the time to inflict some pain comes, one character chooses the hammer as his weapon of choice. It's not quite as flashy as Oldboy, but that's to its benefit - there's nothing smirk-worthy in its ending to keep it from hitting like a ton of bricks.
Thirteen years ago, Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) didn't seem like the type to murder a six-year-old boy; indeed, one of her fellow prisoners would later say that she shined with the light of goodness. But she confessed, and was convicted. Inside, she earned the admiration of a Christian preacher (Kim Byeong-ok) for her devotion to God, a baker (Oh Dal-su) for her ability to make delicious pastries from substandard ingredients, and her fellow prisoners for taking unpleasant jobs like caring for an elderly North Korean spy. When she is released at the age of thirty-two, she takes a job at the baker's shop but turns her back on the church; she also tracks down the inmates released before her and presses them into service in her plan for revenge on Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik), the man she holds responsible for losing everything that matters to her.
Read the rest at HBS
Nacho Libre
* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2006 at AMC Fenway #13 (First-run)
Nacho Libre has no use for subtlety. It stars Jack Black and is produced by Nickelodeon Pictures, and neither Black nor Nick is especially noted for forgoing the obvious joke for something more sophisticated when the obvious thing can be observed to work. In other words, people will occasionally pass some gas in this movie, but if you can get over thinking you're too good for a fart joke, you'll probably laugh at it.
Ignacio, nicknamed "Nacho" (Jack Black), has lived his entire life in an orphanage - first as a child following the death of his parents, then as the most lowly and least respected friar on staff. For nearly as long, he has been a fan of luchadors, the masked wrestlers who are immensely popular in his part of Mexico. After a new nun, Sister Encarnarcion (Ana de la Reguera) comes to the rectory and stirs dormant emotions within him, he forms a tag-team with Esqueleto (Hector Jiminez), the skinny pauper who had previously stolen the orphans' day-old tortilla chips. Soon, though, even if the money for being jobbers is good, they begin to hunger for respect, which can only be gained by defeating Ramses (Cesar Gonzales), the country's most popular and most feared competitor.
Read the rest at HBS.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
