There are just way too many Korean thrillers that I don't follow even though I'm taking notes, or at least that's how it seemed halfway through the day. Beautiful Sunday and Epitaph were both more than a bit overstuffed, relying on multiple twists that some folks in the lobby afterward were trying to puzzle out. Wide Awake was the same way, and I wonder if this is just the way it is in Korea right now, or whether I just happen to be seeing the wrong movies. I seem a lot more likely to get lost during Korean movies than any others, it seems, and I wonder why that is.
Ah, well. The Japanese half of the day was solid enough to make up for that. As I say in the full review on EFC/HBS, I had kind of been wary of Accuracy of Death (and why does it have that title in the subtitles and listings when it says "Sweet Rain" in plain English on the title screen). I don't have much interest in the "death is beautiful" meme, so both the description in the New York Asian Film Festival guide and Fantasia's turned me off; it just turned out to be so ubiquitous that I couldn't avoid it without deliberately avoiding it. Turns out that was a good thing, and Black Belt wound up being a solid, no-messing-around karate movie.
Today's plan: The Objective, Adrift In Tokyo, Shadows in the Palace and X-Cross. I suppose I could do a midnight, but Bad Biology looks like too much for me and Shamo would leave a gap in my schedule tomorrow where I really don't need one. If you're here, I can recommend Accuracy of Death, Assembly, Black Belt, and A Colt Is My Passport.
Beautiful Sunday (Byootipul Seondei)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
Beautiful Sunday doesn't quite accomplish magic, but it's got one of the basic principles down pat. In fact, it might be a little too good with its misdirection, as a good chunk of what's going on is, in the final analysis, not really that important, just a smokescreen of complication to obscure the really clever bit.
We start with Detective Kang (Park Yong-woo); one of the Seoul PD's most aggressive cops, he tears through a major drug deal to take down the kingpin, Song-tae. Then, immediately afterward, he sells 90% of the product to another drug dealer. 200g goes on the report rather than 2kg, and as much as Song-tae is livid at someone stealing from him, he keeps quiet to avoid more jail time. As soon as he gets out of jail, though, he and his second-in-command Yoo Chun-yon are gunning for Kang, who has other problems: His ill-gotten gains are being spent on his comatose wife's medical bills, and there's a serial rapist on the loose that Kang's captain really wants put away.
Meanwhile, we're also introduced to Min-woo (Nam Goog-min); his attraction to pretty Su-yeon (Min Jee-hye) quickly becomes an obsession. One night he goes up to introduce himself, she freaks out, and he grabs her, initially to calm her down, but once he's already got his hands on her, he takes the next step. That's bad enough, but when he later sees her working in a bookstore, he approaches her; she doesn't recognize him and they start dating.
It's almost inevitable that the two stories will cross (sure, sometimes they don't in movies like this, but that's rare and unsatisfying). Truth be told, waiting to see how this happens is the thing that drives most of the movie, and filmmaker Jin Kwang-kyo plays his cards pretty close to the vest on that one. Kang's story has a lot of characters and things going on, but ultimately doesn't amount to that much. Min-woo's, by contrast, is very minimalist, as we get uncomfortable waiting for Su-yeon to grasp just who she's falling in love with. Despite all the action in Kang's part of the movie, it's Min-woo's that's actually more engrossing most of the time; a ticking time bomb hidden behind happiness is more interesting than one in the middle of people who regard each other as enemies anyway.
Full review at EFC.
Gidam (Epitaph)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
Epitaph is one of the busiest horror films I've seen lately, starting in 1979 before flashing back to 1942, offering up ghosts and serial killers and obsessions that may or may not be connected in ways other than happening in close proximity to each other. It's good and proper for each character in a film to have his or her own story, but it doesn't quite work here; the three stories could each have been their own film. The end result is that none of the threads are really satisfying.
Still, brothers Jung Beom-sik and Jung Sik will likely be something once they start giving their stories a little more room to breathe. They're already pretty good at creepy atmosphere, setting up interesting situations, and knowing just when and how to hit the audience with the jump moment.
As with Beautiful Sunday, the audience was coming out of Epitaph trying to figure out what it was all about. Too bad; they could have been coming out gushing.
Suwito Rein: Sinigami No Seido (Accuracy of Death, aka Sweet Rain)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
Those who have lost a loved one suddenly may take issue with this film's premise - that a Grim Reaper has allowed it because that person has fulfilled their life's purpose. Still, it might be some small comfort to believe that the Reaper who made that judgment is someone akin to Takeshi Kaneshiro' Chiba.
Grim Reapers, we're told at the start, do not actually kill people, and they're not involved with cases where death is a result of age or disease. They spend a few days examining someone's life and then decide "proceed" or "suspend" depending on what they've seen. We follow Chiba in three cases over the years. In 1985, he meets Kazue Fujiki (Manami Konishi), a call center employee who has lost everybody she has loved and now has a stalker calling customer service and asking for her specifically. In the present day, he judges a yakuza (Ken Mitsuishi) who is at odds with his fellow gangsters over using children to push drugs and also keeps a watchful eye on would-be younger brother Akutso (Takuya Ishida). Finally, in 2028, an old hairdresser (Sumiko "Junko" Fuji) pegs him for a Grim Reaper and has an odd favor to ask of him before she goes.
Supposedly, the movie would not have been made without Takeshi Kaneshiro's participation (original novelist Kotaro Isaka was reticent about a film version), and it is a wonderful piece of casting. Kaneshiro is handsome, yes, and brings a wonderful guilelessness to Chiba. What very easily could be groan-worthy moments as Chiba fails to understand figures of speech are instead full of innocent charm. He is anything but cold as he goes about his job, playing his immortal being not as jaded but instead as interested in everything around him. Just watching Chiba listen to music is a little delight.
Full review at EFC.
Kuro-Obi (Black Belt)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Most martial-arts films make some noise, at least, about there being more to their practices than just violence, although most wind up seeming a bit hypocritical on some level. Black Belt (or Kuro-Obi) is no different, really, although it seems to take its pacifist teacher's beliefs more to heart than most. Yes, it will ultimately come down to fighting, but at least those that want to avoid combat seem sincere about it.
Three black belt karate masters are learning from their sensei (Shinya Owada) in 1932 when the military police come to the Shibihara dojo, looking to take possession of it for more useful purposes. Choei (Yuji Suzuki) is injured immediately, cut by a ceremonial sword. Taikan (Tatsuya Naka) attacks, disobeying sensei Eiken Shibihara's edict to only use karate to block attacks, not to thrust and kick, which leads to a series of challenges with the captain. Giryu (Akihito Yagi) is brought into the challenges, obeying the sensei's wishes, and the captain feels dishonor is brought upon him when Giryu will not finish him off. This doesn't run them off for very long, though, and soon Army commander Hidesha Goda is conscripting the masters. Giryu faces the consequences of his mercy, while Taikan becomes fond of the status afforded him and becomes corrupted. The dying master has given Choei the responsibility of choosing who will next wear the ancient belt (the "kuro-obi" of the title) and be considered the true master.
This is not a movie of great subtlety or moral gray areas. The opening duel with Captain Tanahara lets us know with crystal clarity who will be the good student and who will be the bad one, and the film quickly bears that out: Taikan is soon working for Goda, deciding he likes women and fights to the death, while Giryu joins with a poor but kind farming family. Commander Goda himself lacks only a moustache to twirl; he plans to not only have Taikan train his troops in hand-to-hand combat, but to use the dojos Taikan takes over as brothels, stocked with girls who have been all but kidnapped. He tends to laugh maniacally, too. In contrast, the farmers that take in Giryu are as good as he is bad: There's a spunky young boy, a beautiful daughter, and an elderly father who does, admittedly, have a weakness for gambling (at rigged tables! it's a front for swindling old men to force them to sell their daughters!).
Full review at EFC.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Fantasia 2008, Day Seven: Assembly, Idiots and Angels, and The Most Beautiful Night in the World
It started out rainy yesterday, but I was able to knock five work hours off the 24 I said I'd work to bring the vacation time used down to an even two weeks (plus the Fourth of July, which still counts as a holiday even if you're in Canada at the time). By the end, I had even figured out a relatively comfortable set-up for working in the apartment. It's not actually a bad place, but it's old enough that there aren't many outlets - so there is basically one place you can put the DSL modem and have it reach both the phone jack and some electricity. That would drive me absolutely nuts if I were staying there on a more permanent basis.
Still, I was able to keep half an eye on the Sox game until I hit the nearby steakhouse, where the feed was actually playing on the TVs, just in time for the offensive explosion. Steak, baked potato, and the Red Sox crushing the opposition to gain ground on the Rays. That's a nice afternoon even before leading into a good evening at the movies. Although scheduling a 160-minute movie for 10pm (even before Idiots and Angels started late) is just mean. Took a Diet Pepsi Max to get through it (man, you pay for the extra caffeine and not having your teeth feel coated with corn syrup [or, in Canada, "glucose-fructose"] with a nasty aftertaste), and that sort of wrecked my plans to get to sleep early.
Today's plan: Beautiful Sunday, Epitaph, Accuracy of Death and Black Belt. Sparrow is recommended at the QC.
Ji Jie Hao (Assembly)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
One probably wouldn't name a war movie "Retreat!", although that's what the assembly call of the film's title means - fall back and regroup. There is, after all, a time for soldiers to be fierce and a time when doing so just means walking through a meat grinder.
Captain Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu) knows this. A captain in Communist China's army, the film opens in 1948 with him warning the Nationalist forces that they're surrounded and it's better for them to surrender than die fighting. He knows the position isn't quite so one-sided, so he sends Lieutenant Jiao (Fan Liao) out for some more recon. They get pulled into battle anyway, and by the time it's over, he's lost a great many troops, including the unit's political officer. And though his old friend Colonel Liu (Jun Hu) claims his next assignment is not a punishment, it certainly seems like one: He and his 46 men are to defend a coal mine - and the only new personnel he's given is former prisoner Wang Jincun (Yuan Wenkang) to serve as the political officer (Liu says he doesn't need one, but Gu's men are nearly all illiterate, and having someone to write home for them would be a boon). The bugle call to assembly is supposed to come within a day, but while waiting, it's a bloodbath. Afterward, to add insult to injury, Gu awakens in a POW hospital - he had taken an enemy uniform for warmth - unable to convince his captors of his actual identity. He stays in the army, though, assigned as an enlisted man to Zhao "Flapjack" Er Dou (Deng Chao), hoping to learn the fate of his men.
There are men for whom the military becomes their family, and Gu is one of those from the start of the movie. Interestingly, we see him follow the reverse of the usual soldier's story arc: As the movie starts, he is the father figure, encouraging to his men and desperate to protect them even in death, adopting Jincun and making a man out of him. After the battle, we see him as a somewhat awkward recruit, not initially well-suited for the artillery unit he's been assigned to, taken under someone else's wing. He's still the grizzled veteran in Zhao's unit, though an NCO rather than an officer. For other characters, this may seem an affront to pride, but Gu seems content at his new place in the world. It's the only one he really knows, and while he still clearly feels immense loyalty to his troops, there is perhaps a bit of relief in no longer feeling the burden of command.
Full review at EFC.
Idiots and Angels
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Animated Auteur Visions)
Bill Plympton is an institution by now; he puts out a new animated short every year or so, a new feature every few years, all with a distinctive style and sense of humor. He's also one of the people who has figured out a way to support himself on his work without giving up much of his freedom, and managed to integrate new digital tools into his arsenal without wholesale compromise of his signature style.
His latest, Idiots and Angels, is pretty good; a dialogue-free story of a loathsome man who grows angel wings and maybe becomes a better person because of it. There's plenty of fun cartooning in it, and the story's pretty good. If you like Bill Plympton, you'll probably like this quite a bit.
Full review at EFC.
Sekai de Ichiban Utsukushii Your (The Most Beautiful Night in the World)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I'm not quite sure whether Diasuke Tengan's new movie overreaches in its grasping for profundity or whether I just don't quite love what it comes up with. It's a charming fantasy, with plenty of fun characters and a whimsical story. The visuals are snazzy, too, without being overly aggressive.
It's pretty long, though, and ends on something of a dubious note. In a way, it becomes like the last act of Fight Club, only with sex as the means of anarchy instead of violence, and I don't know if I necessarily bought into it as a good idea. Provocative, sure, but making much in the way of sense?
Full review at EFC.
Still, I was able to keep half an eye on the Sox game until I hit the nearby steakhouse, where the feed was actually playing on the TVs, just in time for the offensive explosion. Steak, baked potato, and the Red Sox crushing the opposition to gain ground on the Rays. That's a nice afternoon even before leading into a good evening at the movies. Although scheduling a 160-minute movie for 10pm (even before Idiots and Angels started late) is just mean. Took a Diet Pepsi Max to get through it (man, you pay for the extra caffeine and not having your teeth feel coated with corn syrup [or, in Canada, "glucose-fructose"] with a nasty aftertaste), and that sort of wrecked my plans to get to sleep early.
Today's plan: Beautiful Sunday, Epitaph, Accuracy of Death and Black Belt. Sparrow is recommended at the QC.
Ji Jie Hao (Assembly)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
One probably wouldn't name a war movie "Retreat!", although that's what the assembly call of the film's title means - fall back and regroup. There is, after all, a time for soldiers to be fierce and a time when doing so just means walking through a meat grinder.
Captain Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu) knows this. A captain in Communist China's army, the film opens in 1948 with him warning the Nationalist forces that they're surrounded and it's better for them to surrender than die fighting. He knows the position isn't quite so one-sided, so he sends Lieutenant Jiao (Fan Liao) out for some more recon. They get pulled into battle anyway, and by the time it's over, he's lost a great many troops, including the unit's political officer. And though his old friend Colonel Liu (Jun Hu) claims his next assignment is not a punishment, it certainly seems like one: He and his 46 men are to defend a coal mine - and the only new personnel he's given is former prisoner Wang Jincun (Yuan Wenkang) to serve as the political officer (Liu says he doesn't need one, but Gu's men are nearly all illiterate, and having someone to write home for them would be a boon). The bugle call to assembly is supposed to come within a day, but while waiting, it's a bloodbath. Afterward, to add insult to injury, Gu awakens in a POW hospital - he had taken an enemy uniform for warmth - unable to convince his captors of his actual identity. He stays in the army, though, assigned as an enlisted man to Zhao "Flapjack" Er Dou (Deng Chao), hoping to learn the fate of his men.
There are men for whom the military becomes their family, and Gu is one of those from the start of the movie. Interestingly, we see him follow the reverse of the usual soldier's story arc: As the movie starts, he is the father figure, encouraging to his men and desperate to protect them even in death, adopting Jincun and making a man out of him. After the battle, we see him as a somewhat awkward recruit, not initially well-suited for the artillery unit he's been assigned to, taken under someone else's wing. He's still the grizzled veteran in Zhao's unit, though an NCO rather than an officer. For other characters, this may seem an affront to pride, but Gu seems content at his new place in the world. It's the only one he really knows, and while he still clearly feels immense loyalty to his troops, there is perhaps a bit of relief in no longer feeling the burden of command.
Full review at EFC.
Idiots and Angels
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Animated Auteur Visions)
Bill Plympton is an institution by now; he puts out a new animated short every year or so, a new feature every few years, all with a distinctive style and sense of humor. He's also one of the people who has figured out a way to support himself on his work without giving up much of his freedom, and managed to integrate new digital tools into his arsenal without wholesale compromise of his signature style.
His latest, Idiots and Angels, is pretty good; a dialogue-free story of a loathsome man who grows angel wings and maybe becomes a better person because of it. There's plenty of fun cartooning in it, and the story's pretty good. If you like Bill Plympton, you'll probably like this quite a bit.
Full review at EFC.
Sekai de Ichiban Utsukushii Your (The Most Beautiful Night in the World)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I'm not quite sure whether Diasuke Tengan's new movie overreaches in its grasping for profundity or whether I just don't quite love what it comes up with. It's a charming fantasy, with plenty of fun characters and a whimsical story. The visuals are snazzy, too, without being overly aggressive.
It's pretty long, though, and ends on something of a dubious note. In a way, it becomes like the last act of Fight Club, only with sex as the means of anarchy instead of violence, and I don't know if I necessarily bought into it as a good idea. Provocative, sure, but making much in the way of sense?
Full review at EFC.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Fantasia 2008, Day Six: Wide Awake and Mad Detective
So I did the "Zappin Party" for the first time last night. That's one of the "only-at-Fantasia" things, with lots of goofy shorts and parody trailers, mostly locally-made but with some more professional bits and featuring familiar faces from the audience. It's also split pretty evenly between English and French, with a whole ton of French-language introduction. Very Montreal, that.
It's been a rainy morning here and looks likely to be a rainy afternoon, so I'm going to put in some time for my day job today and not burn all my vacation time for the year away. I wish I'd gone through with contacting the sister company to see if I could use their office space, though. Later on, the plan is Assembly, Idiots and Angels, and The Most Beautiful Night in the World. if you're in town, I can recommend Peur(s) du Noir, Sukiyaki Western Django, and Mad Detective; although with the latter playing at Cinematheque Quebecoise, I don't know whether the subtitles will be English or French.
Ri-teon (Wide Awake)
* * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Most of the time when I see media folks at pre-screenings or festivals with a notebook out, furiously scribbling notes as the movie plays, I tend to think it's unnecessary, and they're missing out on actually seeing the film. About a half-hour or so into Wide Awake, though, I was rummaging through my backpack for a notepad and a pen; otherwise, there was no way I was going to have this plot and these characters straight later.
We start in 1982 - well, we start with a bit of text describing "anesthetic awareness", a rare condition where the anesthetic given to a surgical patient doesn't take and he remains awake during the procedure but unable to make this known because the muscle relaxant has done its job. Anyway, 1982, 9-year-old Na Sang-u is having heart surgery, and he feels all of it. His doctor, Ryu Jan-hwan, does not believe his account. Jump forward twenty-five years, and Jan-hwan's son Jae-u (Kim Myeong-min) is also a surgeon. He's recently lost a patient, and the bereaved husband, Lee Myeong-suk (Kim Roe-ha), is bucking for a restraining order, constantly calling Jae-a and his girlfriend Seo Hui-jin (Kim Yoo-mi). At the hospital, a Jae-u proposes have psychiatrist O Chi-hun (Kim Tae-woo) use "hypnotic anesthetia" on a patient resistant to the conventional kind, which irritates Jae-u's anesthesiologist best friend Jang Saek-ho (Jeong Yoo-seok) no end. Meanwhile, Gang Uk-hwan (Yoo Joon-sang) has just returned to Korea after having lived in Los Angeles for the last several years, claiming to be Ryu's old friend but also seeming pretty unstable. Oh, and someone has been killing doctors from Ryu Jan-hawn's old hospital - the ones that involved in that psychologically scarring surgery on Na Sang-u.
Got that? Lucky you! Some of that comes as flashes of newspaper headlines that go by too quickly to actually read (especially if you don't read Korean and are thus dealing with white-on-white subtitles). There's also flashbacks to Na Sang-u being a creepy, psychotic little kid that come at seemingly random intervals and a flash-forward that does not create the dread or surprise it hopes to. Characters take forever to come to the simplest explanation, and there are enough false endings that the audience gets to wonder both why the movie hasn't ended yet and to ponder whether they would have preferred the ridiculously obvious or the obviously ridiculous ending.
Full review at EFC.
Sun Taam (Mad Detective)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I want a Mad Detective series; if not as films, then as TV, books, or some other medium. I don't know if that's exactly an unreasonable request; when you come up with a crime-solving character as original as Bun Chan-kwai coupled with a performance as entertaining as Lau Ching-wan's, you don't just stop at one killer thwarted.
Bun, you see, is nuts. When we meet him, he is solving a murder by getting inside it, repeatedly stabbing a pig carcass to simulate the murder and then having newly arrived Inspector Ho (Andy On) pack him in a suitcase and throw it down to flights of stairs. After that, he cuts off his own ear and presents it to his retiring chief as a present, just before the title "Mad Detective" appears on the screen. Five years later, as one might imagine, he is off the force, hallucinating his wife May (Kelly Lin) and claiming his crime-solving acumen comes from being able to see suspects' "gwai". He's thoroughly insane, but Ho comes to him with a case he's been unable to crack: Eighteen months ago, Detective Wong Kwok-chu disappeared chasing a suspect, with his gun since being used in a series of robberies. Bun immediately focuses on Wong's partner, Ko Chi-Wai (Gordon Lam), but Chi-wai presents him with almost too much to work with - seven "gwai".
(Note that the English subtitles translate "gwai" as "inner personality", although it apparently literally means "ghost" or "demon". Based on how they are used in the movie, maybe "inner demon" would have been best.)
Full review at EFC.
It's been a rainy morning here and looks likely to be a rainy afternoon, so I'm going to put in some time for my day job today and not burn all my vacation time for the year away. I wish I'd gone through with contacting the sister company to see if I could use their office space, though. Later on, the plan is Assembly, Idiots and Angels, and The Most Beautiful Night in the World. if you're in town, I can recommend Peur(s) du Noir, Sukiyaki Western Django, and Mad Detective; although with the latter playing at Cinematheque Quebecoise, I don't know whether the subtitles will be English or French.
Ri-teon (Wide Awake)
* * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Most of the time when I see media folks at pre-screenings or festivals with a notebook out, furiously scribbling notes as the movie plays, I tend to think it's unnecessary, and they're missing out on actually seeing the film. About a half-hour or so into Wide Awake, though, I was rummaging through my backpack for a notepad and a pen; otherwise, there was no way I was going to have this plot and these characters straight later.
We start in 1982 - well, we start with a bit of text describing "anesthetic awareness", a rare condition where the anesthetic given to a surgical patient doesn't take and he remains awake during the procedure but unable to make this known because the muscle relaxant has done its job. Anyway, 1982, 9-year-old Na Sang-u is having heart surgery, and he feels all of it. His doctor, Ryu Jan-hwan, does not believe his account. Jump forward twenty-five years, and Jan-hwan's son Jae-u (Kim Myeong-min) is also a surgeon. He's recently lost a patient, and the bereaved husband, Lee Myeong-suk (Kim Roe-ha), is bucking for a restraining order, constantly calling Jae-a and his girlfriend Seo Hui-jin (Kim Yoo-mi). At the hospital, a Jae-u proposes have psychiatrist O Chi-hun (Kim Tae-woo) use "hypnotic anesthetia" on a patient resistant to the conventional kind, which irritates Jae-u's anesthesiologist best friend Jang Saek-ho (Jeong Yoo-seok) no end. Meanwhile, Gang Uk-hwan (Yoo Joon-sang) has just returned to Korea after having lived in Los Angeles for the last several years, claiming to be Ryu's old friend but also seeming pretty unstable. Oh, and someone has been killing doctors from Ryu Jan-hawn's old hospital - the ones that involved in that psychologically scarring surgery on Na Sang-u.
Got that? Lucky you! Some of that comes as flashes of newspaper headlines that go by too quickly to actually read (especially if you don't read Korean and are thus dealing with white-on-white subtitles). There's also flashbacks to Na Sang-u being a creepy, psychotic little kid that come at seemingly random intervals and a flash-forward that does not create the dread or surprise it hopes to. Characters take forever to come to the simplest explanation, and there are enough false endings that the audience gets to wonder both why the movie hasn't ended yet and to ponder whether they would have preferred the ridiculously obvious or the obviously ridiculous ending.
Full review at EFC.
Sun Taam (Mad Detective)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I want a Mad Detective series; if not as films, then as TV, books, or some other medium. I don't know if that's exactly an unreasonable request; when you come up with a crime-solving character as original as Bun Chan-kwai coupled with a performance as entertaining as Lau Ching-wan's, you don't just stop at one killer thwarted.
Bun, you see, is nuts. When we meet him, he is solving a murder by getting inside it, repeatedly stabbing a pig carcass to simulate the murder and then having newly arrived Inspector Ho (Andy On) pack him in a suitcase and throw it down to flights of stairs. After that, he cuts off his own ear and presents it to his retiring chief as a present, just before the title "Mad Detective" appears on the screen. Five years later, as one might imagine, he is off the force, hallucinating his wife May (Kelly Lin) and claiming his crime-solving acumen comes from being able to see suspects' "gwai". He's thoroughly insane, but Ho comes to him with a case he's been unable to crack: Eighteen months ago, Detective Wong Kwok-chu disappeared chasing a suspect, with his gun since being used in a series of robberies. Bun immediately focuses on Wong's partner, Ko Chi-Wai (Gordon Lam), but Chi-wai presents him with almost too much to work with - seven "gwai".
(Note that the English subtitles translate "gwai" as "inner personality", although it apparently literally means "ghost" or "demon". Based on how they are used in the movie, maybe "inner demon" would have been best.)
Full review at EFC.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Fantasia 2008, Day Five: Before the Fall, Timecrimes, Sparrow, Peur(s) de Noir
Another longer morning than I hoped, especially considering it's much more likely to be hot and/or thunderstorming in the afternoon. I'm thinking that I might head down to the riverfront today, seeing what's at the archeological museum, climbing the clock tower, maybe catching up on some reviews while sitting on the riverbank. Yeah, I doubt that last one too.
Today's plans may wind up being relatively short, movie-wise: Probably just Wide Awake and Mad Detective; maybe "DJ XL5's Helzapoppin' Zappin' Party". Second Skin didn't tempt me at IFFB and it doesn't really tempt me here, and I don't know about the Zappin' Party, though it's a Fantasia tradition which I've yet to catch.
If you're in town, I heartily recommend Let the Right One In, and I'm opting for Wide Awake over Triangle by the slimmest of margins: I'd really like to see the Lam/Hark/To movie in its entirety, as I dozed through the middle segment at IFFB, but I'm pretty sure I'll get the likely US video release anyway.
3 Dias (Before The Fall)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
No full review for this one, since I must have nodded off at some point while watching it - a character disappearing without you remembering how is a pretty sure sign of that. Don't read that as a knock against the movie, though - it's all about me having a decent-sized lunch and then walking around in the heat afterward; I knew going in that I was kind of wiped out.
I'm not sure the fantastical premise of this movie is really necessary - at it's core, it's about a family trying to survive the escape of a serial killer that they were instrumental in putting away. The apocalyptic background explains his escape and creates an extra level of tension, although the movie already has that in abundance. That makes Before the Fall a thriller about dying on one's own terms rather than surviving, which is certainly an interesting variation.
Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
There's an argument to be made that a time travel story that makes one's head hurt a bit is probably a pretty good one; it generally means some thought has been put into how everything fits together. Timecrimes comes close to being a great time travel story because it's got the potential to make one's head hurt, but executes so well that it never comes to that.
Its unconventional hero is Hector (Karra Elejalde), something of a middle-aged schlub who just moved into a new house with his wife Clara (Candela Fernandez). As Clara goes out to get food for supper, Hector spots a pretty girl (Barbara Goenaga) taking her top off through his binoculars. He probably shouldn't go to investigate, as he winds up attacked by a bandaged man when he finds her unconscious. He climbs a fence to escape, winding up in a nearby laboratory where a grad student (Nacho Vigalondo) offers him a spot to hide, but when he gets out of the chamber, it's an hour... earlier?
Certain things which subsequently happen - or which, from another point of view, have already happened - are probably fairly obvious the the seasoned sci-fi fan. There is still satisfaction in watching them play out, though; filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo has built himself a clever clockwork mechanism of a script - and, yes, he has pulled M. Night Shamalayan's trick of inserting himself into the movie in the role that makes him the architect of the problem and allows him to explain it directly to the audience. Half the fun is figuring out how the pieces will fit together, especially since things will hit different people at different rates.
Full review at EFC.
Man jeuk (Sparrow)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Johnnie To's Sparrow begins with a small delight of a scene: Simon Yam sewing a button back onto his coat. The score could come from a classic musical, and from Yam's body language, the audience almost expects him to jump up and burst into song and dance. What a movie it would have been if he had, rather than being frequently tied down by plot!
That plot has Yam's Kei playing one of a team of four pickpockets; they're often good enough that they can extract the money out of a person's wallet and return it. Kei's hobby is photography, and one day he snaps some pictures of a beautiful woman (Kelly Lin). This woman, Chung Chun Lei, is the unhappy mistress of Boss Fu (Lo Hoi-Pang), and she also has encounters with the other members of the team. Fu's men are not pleased with that, and rough them up, which is part of why Kei is more than a little hesitant when Chun Lei asks for their help in retrieving her passport - which Fu keeps in a locked safe with the key always on his person.
Sparrow is often far more whimsical than what people think of as the typical Johnnie To movie, although that's due in part to the fact that his gangster movies get exported with far more regularity than his forays into other genres. There are times when it does seem like he is trying to make something like a musical or a dance picture, as the pickpockets wordlessly show off their precision work to the wonderful score by Fred Avril and Xavier Jamaux. The sequence at the end, in the rain with umbrellas, is a thing of true beauty.
Full review at EFC.
Peur(s) du Noir (Fear(s) of the Dark)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Animated Auteur Visions)
Horror and animation are natural fits for anthology films - horror because too much familiarity with a story can leave the audience unafraid by the end, animation because it can allow for amazingly different styles to be showcased. Peur(s) du Noir goes to an international group of print cartoonists for its stories, and while it's kind of a mixed bag, there certainly are some gems in this black-and-white packages.
We start out with French cartoonist Blutch, who gives us a series of episodes spread throughout the film of an aristocrat leading a group of wolves around only to have them slip their leads, one by one, with ghastly results. The artwork is very nice, looking like charcoal pencils come to life, and the attacks of the wolves remain shocking and brutal all the way to the end. The bits are rife with symbolism - the wolves' master starts out appalled by the first attack but is gleefully loosing them on innocent victims later on. The end is pretty much the expected one, and might have felt like a fizzle if not for it's viciousness.
Next up is American Charles Burns, whose art style is recognizable even from only seeing the cover to Black Hole. He gives us a tale of Eric, who as a boy was fascinated by insects and other creepy crawly things. One day he finds a peculiarly intelligent-seeming specimin that escapes its jar hidden under his bed. Years later, at college, the introverted young man meets a beautiful young woman, but she changes after getting some sort of weird cut while sleeping on that same bed with him. Burns and company create a creepy scenario, but the animation is kind of hit and miss - the very obviously computer-generated recreation of Burns's style works great for insects, but is kind of unnerving in a bad way with people.
Full review at EFC.
Today's plans may wind up being relatively short, movie-wise: Probably just Wide Awake and Mad Detective; maybe "DJ XL5's Helzapoppin' Zappin' Party". Second Skin didn't tempt me at IFFB and it doesn't really tempt me here, and I don't know about the Zappin' Party, though it's a Fantasia tradition which I've yet to catch.
If you're in town, I heartily recommend Let the Right One In, and I'm opting for Wide Awake over Triangle by the slimmest of margins: I'd really like to see the Lam/Hark/To movie in its entirety, as I dozed through the middle segment at IFFB, but I'm pretty sure I'll get the likely US video release anyway.
3 Dias (Before The Fall)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
No full review for this one, since I must have nodded off at some point while watching it - a character disappearing without you remembering how is a pretty sure sign of that. Don't read that as a knock against the movie, though - it's all about me having a decent-sized lunch and then walking around in the heat afterward; I knew going in that I was kind of wiped out.
I'm not sure the fantastical premise of this movie is really necessary - at it's core, it's about a family trying to survive the escape of a serial killer that they were instrumental in putting away. The apocalyptic background explains his escape and creates an extra level of tension, although the movie already has that in abundance. That makes Before the Fall a thriller about dying on one's own terms rather than surviving, which is certainly an interesting variation.
Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
There's an argument to be made that a time travel story that makes one's head hurt a bit is probably a pretty good one; it generally means some thought has been put into how everything fits together. Timecrimes comes close to being a great time travel story because it's got the potential to make one's head hurt, but executes so well that it never comes to that.
Its unconventional hero is Hector (Karra Elejalde), something of a middle-aged schlub who just moved into a new house with his wife Clara (Candela Fernandez). As Clara goes out to get food for supper, Hector spots a pretty girl (Barbara Goenaga) taking her top off through his binoculars. He probably shouldn't go to investigate, as he winds up attacked by a bandaged man when he finds her unconscious. He climbs a fence to escape, winding up in a nearby laboratory where a grad student (Nacho Vigalondo) offers him a spot to hide, but when he gets out of the chamber, it's an hour... earlier?
Certain things which subsequently happen - or which, from another point of view, have already happened - are probably fairly obvious the the seasoned sci-fi fan. There is still satisfaction in watching them play out, though; filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo has built himself a clever clockwork mechanism of a script - and, yes, he has pulled M. Night Shamalayan's trick of inserting himself into the movie in the role that makes him the architect of the problem and allows him to explain it directly to the audience. Half the fun is figuring out how the pieces will fit together, especially since things will hit different people at different rates.
Full review at EFC.
Man jeuk (Sparrow)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Johnnie To's Sparrow begins with a small delight of a scene: Simon Yam sewing a button back onto his coat. The score could come from a classic musical, and from Yam's body language, the audience almost expects him to jump up and burst into song and dance. What a movie it would have been if he had, rather than being frequently tied down by plot!
That plot has Yam's Kei playing one of a team of four pickpockets; they're often good enough that they can extract the money out of a person's wallet and return it. Kei's hobby is photography, and one day he snaps some pictures of a beautiful woman (Kelly Lin). This woman, Chung Chun Lei, is the unhappy mistress of Boss Fu (Lo Hoi-Pang), and she also has encounters with the other members of the team. Fu's men are not pleased with that, and rough them up, which is part of why Kei is more than a little hesitant when Chun Lei asks for their help in retrieving her passport - which Fu keeps in a locked safe with the key always on his person.
Sparrow is often far more whimsical than what people think of as the typical Johnnie To movie, although that's due in part to the fact that his gangster movies get exported with far more regularity than his forays into other genres. There are times when it does seem like he is trying to make something like a musical or a dance picture, as the pickpockets wordlessly show off their precision work to the wonderful score by Fred Avril and Xavier Jamaux. The sequence at the end, in the rain with umbrellas, is a thing of true beauty.
Full review at EFC.
Peur(s) du Noir (Fear(s) of the Dark)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Animated Auteur Visions)
Horror and animation are natural fits for anthology films - horror because too much familiarity with a story can leave the audience unafraid by the end, animation because it can allow for amazingly different styles to be showcased. Peur(s) du Noir goes to an international group of print cartoonists for its stories, and while it's kind of a mixed bag, there certainly are some gems in this black-and-white packages.
We start out with French cartoonist Blutch, who gives us a series of episodes spread throughout the film of an aristocrat leading a group of wolves around only to have them slip their leads, one by one, with ghastly results. The artwork is very nice, looking like charcoal pencils come to life, and the attacks of the wolves remain shocking and brutal all the way to the end. The bits are rife with symbolism - the wolves' master starts out appalled by the first attack but is gleefully loosing them on innocent victims later on. The end is pretty much the expected one, and might have felt like a fizzle if not for it's viciousness.
Next up is American Charles Burns, whose art style is recognizable even from only seeing the cover to Black Hole. He gives us a tale of Eric, who as a boy was fascinated by insects and other creepy crawly things. One day he finds a peculiarly intelligent-seeming specimin that escapes its jar hidden under his bed. Years later, at college, the introverted young man meets a beautiful young woman, but she changes after getting some sort of weird cut while sleeping on that same bed with him. Burns and company create a creepy scenario, but the animation is kind of hit and miss - the very obviously computer-generated recreation of Burns's style works great for insects, but is kind of unnerving in a bad way with people.
Full review at EFC.
Monday, July 07, 2008
Fantasia 2008, Day Four: The Substitute, Punch Lady, Negative Happy Chain Saw Edge, Let the Right One In, What We Do Is Secret
Ugh, I've had it sitting around here trying to finish a second review and install someone else's DSL modem. I'm gonna go find some food and a guidebook to replace the one I forgot to bring with me last week and get outside before heading back inside a screening room.
Today's plan: Before the Fall, Timecrimes (I've got a screener at home, but I'm told it's a great audience movie. I'll have to ask for a screener for Paradise Murdered), Sparrow, and then either Peur(s) de Noir or Beautiful Sunday (the former finishes first, the latter starts first, and both have uncontested 3pm screenings later in the week)
If you're in town, I can recommend The Substitute.
Vikaren (The Substitute)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
That The Substitute is making the festival rounds rather than getting some sort of general release is kind of amusing. The film's cast and plot makes it obvious that its primary audience is pre-teen kids, but how many people have been to a film festival that packs the tweens in? And then there's the film itself, edited in a way that may give adults fits, and apparently catching an R rating in the U.S. so that it's kept away from its main audience. Is this a case of the Danes thinking kids can handle more than Americans do, or something even more bizarre?
The story is pretty straightforward - a silver globe from a planet that knows only war lands in a Scandinavian chicken farm, possessing the farmer's wife. They had been watching an TV interview of Jesper (Ulrich Thomsen), a writer whose latest book proclaims love as the most powerful force in the universe. Sadly, Jesper's wife has perished in an automobile accident, and son Carl (Jonas Wandschneider) is having a very difficult time getting over that. On the same day Carl's class gets a new student, it also gets a long-term substitute teacher - Ulla Harms (Parpika Steen), the farmer's wife. She's strange and often cruel, but will the parents believe their kids' assertions that she's some kind of monster or alien? Of course not!
That this movie is rated R in America is patently absurd (the MPAA supplies "language" as the reason, but I don't recall anything worse than a "hell" or two in the subtitles, although I did note that some Danish words sounded kind of like f-bombs once or twice); it's almost as though filmmaker Ole Bornedal's previous thrillers (including the Danish and American versions of Nightwatch) are being held against it. There is some action and maybe more tension the The Substitute than might be found in an American live-action kid's adventure film, but nothing to be worried about.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Punchlady
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
There have been plenty of movies that were probably pitched as "battered wife fights back!" (The exclamation point is important) Punchlady is the first I know of, though, that could have been "battered wife fights back... in the ring!"
I don't want to be patronizing by claiming that this movie is insulting or dangerous, but I have to admit that I was a little uncomfortable with the relatively light touch used for this fantasy. It opens with a downright brutal depiction of domestic violence, but then sells it out a bit with its bizarre revenge-fantasy premise (Ha-eun winds up challenging her kickboxing-champion husband to a televised match, with their divorce settlement on the line) and a middle section that is almost the stuff of romantic comedy.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Negatibu happi chenso ejji (Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
This is the second film I saw on this day that made me wonder about the audience at Fantasia and festivals generally. This is very much a film made with teenagers in mind, but how many teens come to film festivals of any sort? At least Fantasia draws a good crowd of college kids, so they're not too far from the target audience, but there were still a bunch of people like me there, folks looking to hoot at the magical girl taking on the chainsaw-wielding giant.
It's cute enough, though, and does work as a tale of teenagers trying to grapple with loss. I wouldn't really try to sell it as an action movie, but I did think it was pretty cute.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
A couple years ago, Frostbite got a little hype as the first vampire movie to come out of Sweden. It was a wild teen comedy, perhaps not quite what people expected from the nation that produced the likes of Bergman, and not something that particularly stays with you. Let the Right One In hits closer to that mark, playing as moody and morose as well as bloody. It's quite frankly brilliant.
The time is the early 1980s, the place is a suburb outside of Stockholm. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a small 12-year-old, pale almost to the point of being an albino, and he's picked on all the time. He plays with a knife which he clearly fantasizes about putting into his tormentors, and is fascinated by a series of crimes happening in the area. A pair of new neighbors has just moved in - Hakan (Per Ragnar), whom we see kill a teenager, preparing to drain his blood before a dog scares him off, and Eli (Lina Leandersson), a girl about Oskar's age ("twelve, more or less") who is rather odd: She only shows up in the apartment complex's courtyard at night, doesn't go to school, and isn't familiar with certain figures of speech and other everyday accouterments of a kid's life. She tells him they're not going to be friends, but soon they've got nobody closer.
Though there is apparently an English-language remake planned even before this film is released in its native Sweden, I find it hard to imagine this film transplanted to another milieu. Director Tomas Alfredson fills the frame with heavy snows, dark skies, and dread, lingering on establishing shots and giving the audience a real sense of place. Everybody but the children seems weathered, and even they seem to be hardening quickly. It's a natural place for a vampire to be found.
Full review at eFilmCritic; be advised that it's almost impossible to go further without spoiling a few great early surprises.
What We Do Is Secret
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I had a good case of Film Festival Fifth Film Fatigue going by the time What We Do Is Secret started at 10pm, which was not a good way to approach a musical biopic of a band I've never heard of.
And, quite frankly, I won't be heartbroken if I never hear of them again. I'm not a particular fan of punk, and the stuff we hear from The Germs in this movie doesn't make me particularly interested in yet another tale of musicians who do drugs and act like jackasses. It's been done, and despite how much we're told Darby Crash was brilliant, I just don't see enough here to make watching this stuff worthwhile.
That said, I can't help but be impressed with the effort Rodger Grossman put into his film. The period details are, I'm told, spot on, and he combines faux-documentary and narrative scenes pretty well. He gets good, entertaining performances out of his cast. And I don't know that it's necessarily a fault that he's assumed that his film's audience would be as much of a fan of Darby Crash and the Germs as he was - that was something like 95% of the audience at the screening I saw, and they sure seemed to enjoy it.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Today's plan: Before the Fall, Timecrimes (I've got a screener at home, but I'm told it's a great audience movie. I'll have to ask for a screener for Paradise Murdered), Sparrow, and then either Peur(s) de Noir or Beautiful Sunday (the former finishes first, the latter starts first, and both have uncontested 3pm screenings later in the week)
If you're in town, I can recommend The Substitute.
Vikaren (The Substitute)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
That The Substitute is making the festival rounds rather than getting some sort of general release is kind of amusing. The film's cast and plot makes it obvious that its primary audience is pre-teen kids, but how many people have been to a film festival that packs the tweens in? And then there's the film itself, edited in a way that may give adults fits, and apparently catching an R rating in the U.S. so that it's kept away from its main audience. Is this a case of the Danes thinking kids can handle more than Americans do, or something even more bizarre?
The story is pretty straightforward - a silver globe from a planet that knows only war lands in a Scandinavian chicken farm, possessing the farmer's wife. They had been watching an TV interview of Jesper (Ulrich Thomsen), a writer whose latest book proclaims love as the most powerful force in the universe. Sadly, Jesper's wife has perished in an automobile accident, and son Carl (Jonas Wandschneider) is having a very difficult time getting over that. On the same day Carl's class gets a new student, it also gets a long-term substitute teacher - Ulla Harms (Parpika Steen), the farmer's wife. She's strange and often cruel, but will the parents believe their kids' assertions that she's some kind of monster or alien? Of course not!
That this movie is rated R in America is patently absurd (the MPAA supplies "language" as the reason, but I don't recall anything worse than a "hell" or two in the subtitles, although I did note that some Danish words sounded kind of like f-bombs once or twice); it's almost as though filmmaker Ole Bornedal's previous thrillers (including the Danish and American versions of Nightwatch) are being held against it. There is some action and maybe more tension the The Substitute than might be found in an American live-action kid's adventure film, but nothing to be worried about.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Punchlady
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
There have been plenty of movies that were probably pitched as "battered wife fights back!" (The exclamation point is important) Punchlady is the first I know of, though, that could have been "battered wife fights back... in the ring!"
I don't want to be patronizing by claiming that this movie is insulting or dangerous, but I have to admit that I was a little uncomfortable with the relatively light touch used for this fantasy. It opens with a downright brutal depiction of domestic violence, but then sells it out a bit with its bizarre revenge-fantasy premise (Ha-eun winds up challenging her kickboxing-champion husband to a televised match, with their divorce settlement on the line) and a middle section that is almost the stuff of romantic comedy.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Negatibu happi chenso ejji (Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
This is the second film I saw on this day that made me wonder about the audience at Fantasia and festivals generally. This is very much a film made with teenagers in mind, but how many teens come to film festivals of any sort? At least Fantasia draws a good crowd of college kids, so they're not too far from the target audience, but there were still a bunch of people like me there, folks looking to hoot at the magical girl taking on the chainsaw-wielding giant.
It's cute enough, though, and does work as a tale of teenagers trying to grapple with loss. I wouldn't really try to sell it as an action movie, but I did think it was pretty cute.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
A couple years ago, Frostbite got a little hype as the first vampire movie to come out of Sweden. It was a wild teen comedy, perhaps not quite what people expected from the nation that produced the likes of Bergman, and not something that particularly stays with you. Let the Right One In hits closer to that mark, playing as moody and morose as well as bloody. It's quite frankly brilliant.
The time is the early 1980s, the place is a suburb outside of Stockholm. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is a small 12-year-old, pale almost to the point of being an albino, and he's picked on all the time. He plays with a knife which he clearly fantasizes about putting into his tormentors, and is fascinated by a series of crimes happening in the area. A pair of new neighbors has just moved in - Hakan (Per Ragnar), whom we see kill a teenager, preparing to drain his blood before a dog scares him off, and Eli (Lina Leandersson), a girl about Oskar's age ("twelve, more or less") who is rather odd: She only shows up in the apartment complex's courtyard at night, doesn't go to school, and isn't familiar with certain figures of speech and other everyday accouterments of a kid's life. She tells him they're not going to be friends, but soon they've got nobody closer.
Though there is apparently an English-language remake planned even before this film is released in its native Sweden, I find it hard to imagine this film transplanted to another milieu. Director Tomas Alfredson fills the frame with heavy snows, dark skies, and dread, lingering on establishing shots and giving the audience a real sense of place. Everybody but the children seems weathered, and even they seem to be hardening quickly. It's a natural place for a vampire to be found.
Full review at eFilmCritic; be advised that it's almost impossible to go further without spoiling a few great early surprises.
What We Do Is Secret
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I had a good case of Film Festival Fifth Film Fatigue going by the time What We Do Is Secret started at 10pm, which was not a good way to approach a musical biopic of a band I've never heard of.
And, quite frankly, I won't be heartbroken if I never hear of them again. I'm not a particular fan of punk, and the stuff we hear from The Germs in this movie doesn't make me particularly interested in yet another tale of musicians who do drugs and act like jackasses. It's been done, and despite how much we're told Darby Crash was brilliant, I just don't see enough here to make watching this stuff worthwhile.
That said, I can't help but be impressed with the effort Rodger Grossman put into his film. The period details are, I'm told, spot on, and he combines faux-documentary and narrative scenes pretty well. He gets good, entertaining performances out of his cast. And I don't know that it's necessarily a fault that he's assumed that his film's audience would be as much of a fan of Darby Crash and the Germs as he was - that was something like 95% of the audience at the screening I saw, and they sure seemed to enjoy it.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Fantasia 2008, Day Three: Batman, Two Tales to Keep You Awake, the 36th Chamber, Le Grand Chef, and Jack Brooks
I bumped into Kurt Halfyard from Twitch today, and I was impressed that he recognized me from last year because, despite his protestations that he's bad with names and faces, I'm worse. No way I would have picked him out if I'd been sitting behind him rather than vice versa. Our paths crossed for the afternoon shows at the Hall theater; we were both pretty darn pleased to see a new-ish film by Alex de la Iglesia and agreed that this guy doesn't get nearly the exposure he should. His films are a thorough joy to watch, but his earlier work especially seems to be pretty much unavailable in Region 1, while his completed English-language thriller doesn't even seem to be on a North American release schedule at all (and with the collapse of Tartan, Ferpect Crime seems to be on its way into limbo as well).
The double feature from the Spanish TV-movie series Films to Keep You Awake was the highlight of the day film-wise for me (I'd certainly buy a ticket for de la Iglesia's entry, at least), although being three rows from the front while Gordon Liu took questions and did a little impromptu martial arts demonstration was also a bunch of fun.
Today's plan: The Substitute, Punch Lady, either Negative Happy Chain Saw Edge or The Pye-Dog (the first starts about a minute before my previous film gets out, so I'll have to sprint once the credits start and see if it's still letting in), Let the Right One In, and then either Who's That Knocking at My Door? or What We Do Is Secret, depending on my mood.
If you're in town, I can recommend Genius Party and [REC].
Batman: Gotham Knight
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
The idea behind Gotham Knight certainly seems sound enough - have a nice lineup of Japanese animators and American writers (who have worked on well-liked runs of the comics and the much-loved animated TV series) team up for tales that link the two entries in the most recent cinematic series. They've even got Kevin Conroy of the animated series back doing his voice. With that line-up, this seems like it should be a slam-dunk.
And yet, though there is much to admire about Gotham Knight, it doesn't quite add up to what it should. Sure, the structure is nice, with episodes that combine to form a single narrative, and I think this is a nifty way to get Batman characters into the movie series that couldn't be used well in a feature (Killer Croc, Deadshot, Crispus Allen). For all the style, though, Gotham Knight still sometimes looks and sounds cheap, and the jumping between animation styles, effective within "Have I Got a Story For You", is disconcerting over the course of the movie: Alfred looks completely different in the two segments he appears in, and Bruce Wayne goes from very well-built to pretty-boy slender. That might have worked in a strict anthology, but the episodes are supposed to be connected here.
I may write more about this one in the fall, when the BD will likely be available cheaper as part of a Batman box set. This is a movie created for home video, and probably is best judged seen that way.
Películas para no dormir: La habitación del niño (Films to Keep You Awake: The Baby's Room)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Alex de la Iglesia is a reasonable omission from the Masters of Horror series; it skewed North American and this Spanish director has spread his work across multiple genres. Fortunately, a similar series in Spain did include him, and Films to Keep You Awake produced things closer to feature-length with (I'm told) better production values. de la Iglesia's entry, at least, is a winner.
After a prelude with kids playing hide and seek, we meet Juan (Javier Gutierrez) and Sonia (Leonor Watling), a young couple with a seven month-old baby and a much older house that they've just moved into. Juan's busybody sister Teresa (Eulalia Ramon) and her smug husband Marcos (Ramon Barea) stop by, incidentally dropping off some hand-me-downs. Most are useless, but they set up the baby monitor, only to hear strange sounds coming from it. They install a security system and upgrade to a new monitor that includes a camera, but that just shows Juan somebody in the baby's room. Sonia doesn't see it, and an increasingly paranoid Juan is referred to paranormal expert Domingo (Sancho Garcia) by his boss (Antonio Dechent).
While de la Iglesia has dabbled in many genres, he and writing partner Jorge Guerricaechevarria have always been most at home with black comedy, and some of the best moments in The Baby's Room are also among the funniest. Early on, they defuse any thoughts about what a cliché-ridden situation the young couple perhaps having their first marital problems might be, and nearly everybody has a great line or three. The scene where Juan first sees something on the baby monitor and goes to investigate is a small masterpiece of comic timing, one of those sequences where everyone in the audience laughs twice - once when they realize where the scene is going (and it doesn't hit them all at the same time), and once when it finally gets there.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Películas para no dormir: Para entrar a vivir (Films to Keep You Awake: To Let)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
To Let was shown at the Fantasia Festival as part of a double bill with another movie from the "Films to Keep You Awake" series, Alex de la Iglesia's The Baby's Room, and it shares a number of characteristics - a young couple starting a family, and a creepy new home. It puts a decidedly different spin on the material, though, playing up the bloody action as opposed to the black comedy.
This film's young couple are Mario (Adira Collado) and Clara (Marcarena Gomez). They're in a bit of a bind, since they've sold their old place before finding a new one, so even though Clara's not feeling well - morning sickness combined with the end of a 36-hour shift as a nurse - she agrees to see the apartment Mario has made an appointment to see, although she gets to play bad cop. They almost just turn right around upon finally finding it - it's in an ugly old building in a crummy-looking area with weird-looking mannequins strewn all over the place, but the realtor (Nuria Gonzalez) insists that the area is being redeveloped, with a school and a green zone and shops, and it's fully furnished and all the renovation is on them. Carla still doesn't like it, especially the way the woman is talking like they've already taken the place, but takes a moment to lie down when she's feeling dizzy. That's when Mario finds the pair of old sneakers he threw away last week, and she sees a photo of them already placed on the bedside table... Just where did Mario find the listing for this place, anyway?
Co-writer/director Jaume Balaguero was one of the directors of [REC], and like that sensation, To Let doesn't let up once the chaos begins in earnest. This is a pretty straightforward escape movie, with protagonists in a weakened state trying to outrun and outwit an adversary that knows the solidly-built territory much better than they do and has a few nasty tricks up its sleeve. Balaguero and his co-writer Alberto Marini do a nice job setting everything up, playing on what a weird and uncomfortable process looking for a new place to live is and finding a nifty way to sidestep the "how does this last more than five minutes if the heroine has a cell phone" question.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Pi li shi jie (Disciples of the 36th Chamber)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Shaw Brothers action films a lot, but they were definitely a factory. Take Disciples of the 36th Chamber, part of a series of Shaolin martial arts stories. I happened to see the first in the series, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, as part of a Shaw Brothers retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive about a month ago. It was a ton of fun, but you can't help but notice this second sequel follows the same template - rebellious kid who looks way too old to still be in school gets into trouble, is sent to the Shaolin temple to learn discipline, excels in his classes, but rebels in order to fight the oppressive Manchus. This time around, Gordon Liu's San-te is the monk instructing the rebellious student, Hsiao Ho's Fong Sai-yuk.
So you get a lot of training exercises, and more comedy as Sai-yuk is kind of an obnoxious brat. The spiritual and political aspects of Shaolin kung fu are less prominent here, and the action, while well-choreographed, lacks a certain amount of tension because so much of it is just training exercises. Stylistically, Shaw Brothers movies are so similar that it's surprising this one comes from 1985; it could be from any time in the twenty years before. That's why it's almost surprising how good the big battle at the end is, as director Lau Kar Leung (aka Liu Chia-lang) throws everything but the kitchen sink into a wedding trap. One of the things the Shaw Brothers did better than anyone else is battles with scale; there are moments in the end where long shots of the big battle fill the screen, and there are dozens of people fighting.
The restoration work is very good, and having Gordon Liu on-hand to introduce the movie and take questions afterward was a major treat. Disciples probably won't wind up on my list of favorite martial arts movies, but if the Shaw Brothers studio was a factory, they did at least tend to crank out quality work.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Le Grand Chef
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, From Manga to Screen)
At a festival like Fantasia, it's important to seek out movies like Le Grand Chef even if they don't turn out to be among the best in the festival - a steady diet of zombies, serial killers, ghosts and the like can leave a person feeling incredibly burned out by the time it's over. A mostly light-hearted movie about rival cooks can be just what one needs to cleanse the palate, if you'll excuse the metaphor.
Five years ago, Sung-chan (Kim Kang-woo) was poised to ascend to the top of the cooking world, but a terrible and nearly fatal blowfish incident led to Oh Bong-joo (Lim Won-hie) being selected as the head chef at Korea's most prestigious restaurant and culinary school instead. Now, Sung-chan is happily working as a farmer and greengrocer, looking after his increasingly senile grandfather, when an old friend shows up. The knife of the last Master Chef to Korea's last king has been found in Japan, and a nationwide contest has been announced to find which chef deserves to be its new owner. The man wants Sung-chan to enter, but he has no interest in doing so, even if he has left pretty VJ Kim Jin-su (Lee Ha-na) around to pester him until he does. He's resolute about not wanting to be in that sort of high-pressure environment again - at least, until Bong-joo shows up to offer him the position as the head of his kitchen if he stays out.
There's a lot to like about Le Grand Chef. Fans of the food movie will enjoy watching Sung-chan and Jin-su prepare a variety of Korean dishes far more appetizing than what they may remember from Oldboy. Director Jeon Yun-su keeps everything moving at a brisk pace, and he and screenwriter Shin Dong-ik embrace the episodic nature of the original comics (occasionally even using the sort of split screens Ang Lee used for Hulk) without making the resulting film seem choppy or overstuffed. There's a fun cast of characters, and even the ones that could have been one-note villains or clowns are something more interesting.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer has been getting a lot of love from genre fans, in part because it shows them a lot of love: It casts Robert Englund, it's fairly funny in the self-deprecating way that this group of fans accpets, and the cast and crew make a big point of how they did almost all the effects work with practical effects rather than CGI. It's the kind of movie that makes me idly wonder what the reception would be like if, prior to festival screenings like this, they told the audience that they were just making this sort of horror movie because it's cheap and has a built-in audience, and that they'd used computers to make something that looked just like puppets or men in suits. Just as an experiment.
It's fun, don't get me wrong, but I had the same sort of reaction to it I had to Behind the Mask a couple years ago: It's fun, and actually pretty well-made, but I didn't grow up on that sort of movie, and thus find myself loving it less than those who did.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
The double feature from the Spanish TV-movie series Films to Keep You Awake was the highlight of the day film-wise for me (I'd certainly buy a ticket for de la Iglesia's entry, at least), although being three rows from the front while Gordon Liu took questions and did a little impromptu martial arts demonstration was also a bunch of fun.
Today's plan: The Substitute, Punch Lady, either Negative Happy Chain Saw Edge or The Pye-Dog (the first starts about a minute before my previous film gets out, so I'll have to sprint once the credits start and see if it's still letting in), Let the Right One In, and then either Who's That Knocking at My Door? or What We Do Is Secret, depending on my mood.
If you're in town, I can recommend Genius Party and [REC].
Batman: Gotham Knight
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
The idea behind Gotham Knight certainly seems sound enough - have a nice lineup of Japanese animators and American writers (who have worked on well-liked runs of the comics and the much-loved animated TV series) team up for tales that link the two entries in the most recent cinematic series. They've even got Kevin Conroy of the animated series back doing his voice. With that line-up, this seems like it should be a slam-dunk.
And yet, though there is much to admire about Gotham Knight, it doesn't quite add up to what it should. Sure, the structure is nice, with episodes that combine to form a single narrative, and I think this is a nifty way to get Batman characters into the movie series that couldn't be used well in a feature (Killer Croc, Deadshot, Crispus Allen). For all the style, though, Gotham Knight still sometimes looks and sounds cheap, and the jumping between animation styles, effective within "Have I Got a Story For You", is disconcerting over the course of the movie: Alfred looks completely different in the two segments he appears in, and Bruce Wayne goes from very well-built to pretty-boy slender. That might have worked in a strict anthology, but the episodes are supposed to be connected here.
I may write more about this one in the fall, when the BD will likely be available cheaper as part of a Batman box set. This is a movie created for home video, and probably is best judged seen that way.
Películas para no dormir: La habitación del niño (Films to Keep You Awake: The Baby's Room)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Alex de la Iglesia is a reasonable omission from the Masters of Horror series; it skewed North American and this Spanish director has spread his work across multiple genres. Fortunately, a similar series in Spain did include him, and Films to Keep You Awake produced things closer to feature-length with (I'm told) better production values. de la Iglesia's entry, at least, is a winner.
After a prelude with kids playing hide and seek, we meet Juan (Javier Gutierrez) and Sonia (Leonor Watling), a young couple with a seven month-old baby and a much older house that they've just moved into. Juan's busybody sister Teresa (Eulalia Ramon) and her smug husband Marcos (Ramon Barea) stop by, incidentally dropping off some hand-me-downs. Most are useless, but they set up the baby monitor, only to hear strange sounds coming from it. They install a security system and upgrade to a new monitor that includes a camera, but that just shows Juan somebody in the baby's room. Sonia doesn't see it, and an increasingly paranoid Juan is referred to paranormal expert Domingo (Sancho Garcia) by his boss (Antonio Dechent).
While de la Iglesia has dabbled in many genres, he and writing partner Jorge Guerricaechevarria have always been most at home with black comedy, and some of the best moments in The Baby's Room are also among the funniest. Early on, they defuse any thoughts about what a cliché-ridden situation the young couple perhaps having their first marital problems might be, and nearly everybody has a great line or three. The scene where Juan first sees something on the baby monitor and goes to investigate is a small masterpiece of comic timing, one of those sequences where everyone in the audience laughs twice - once when they realize where the scene is going (and it doesn't hit them all at the same time), and once when it finally gets there.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Películas para no dormir: Para entrar a vivir (Films to Keep You Awake: To Let)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
To Let was shown at the Fantasia Festival as part of a double bill with another movie from the "Films to Keep You Awake" series, Alex de la Iglesia's The Baby's Room, and it shares a number of characteristics - a young couple starting a family, and a creepy new home. It puts a decidedly different spin on the material, though, playing up the bloody action as opposed to the black comedy.
This film's young couple are Mario (Adira Collado) and Clara (Marcarena Gomez). They're in a bit of a bind, since they've sold their old place before finding a new one, so even though Clara's not feeling well - morning sickness combined with the end of a 36-hour shift as a nurse - she agrees to see the apartment Mario has made an appointment to see, although she gets to play bad cop. They almost just turn right around upon finally finding it - it's in an ugly old building in a crummy-looking area with weird-looking mannequins strewn all over the place, but the realtor (Nuria Gonzalez) insists that the area is being redeveloped, with a school and a green zone and shops, and it's fully furnished and all the renovation is on them. Carla still doesn't like it, especially the way the woman is talking like they've already taken the place, but takes a moment to lie down when she's feeling dizzy. That's when Mario finds the pair of old sneakers he threw away last week, and she sees a photo of them already placed on the bedside table... Just where did Mario find the listing for this place, anyway?
Co-writer/director Jaume Balaguero was one of the directors of [REC], and like that sensation, To Let doesn't let up once the chaos begins in earnest. This is a pretty straightforward escape movie, with protagonists in a weakened state trying to outrun and outwit an adversary that knows the solidly-built territory much better than they do and has a few nasty tricks up its sleeve. Balaguero and his co-writer Alberto Marini do a nice job setting everything up, playing on what a weird and uncomfortable process looking for a new place to live is and finding a nifty way to sidestep the "how does this last more than five minutes if the heroine has a cell phone" question.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Pi li shi jie (Disciples of the 36th Chamber)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Shaw Brothers action films a lot, but they were definitely a factory. Take Disciples of the 36th Chamber, part of a series of Shaolin martial arts stories. I happened to see the first in the series, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, as part of a Shaw Brothers retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive about a month ago. It was a ton of fun, but you can't help but notice this second sequel follows the same template - rebellious kid who looks way too old to still be in school gets into trouble, is sent to the Shaolin temple to learn discipline, excels in his classes, but rebels in order to fight the oppressive Manchus. This time around, Gordon Liu's San-te is the monk instructing the rebellious student, Hsiao Ho's Fong Sai-yuk.
So you get a lot of training exercises, and more comedy as Sai-yuk is kind of an obnoxious brat. The spiritual and political aspects of Shaolin kung fu are less prominent here, and the action, while well-choreographed, lacks a certain amount of tension because so much of it is just training exercises. Stylistically, Shaw Brothers movies are so similar that it's surprising this one comes from 1985; it could be from any time in the twenty years before. That's why it's almost surprising how good the big battle at the end is, as director Lau Kar Leung (aka Liu Chia-lang) throws everything but the kitchen sink into a wedding trap. One of the things the Shaw Brothers did better than anyone else is battles with scale; there are moments in the end where long shots of the big battle fill the screen, and there are dozens of people fighting.
The restoration work is very good, and having Gordon Liu on-hand to introduce the movie and take questions afterward was a major treat. Disciples probably won't wind up on my list of favorite martial arts movies, but if the Shaw Brothers studio was a factory, they did at least tend to crank out quality work.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Le Grand Chef
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, From Manga to Screen)
At a festival like Fantasia, it's important to seek out movies like Le Grand Chef even if they don't turn out to be among the best in the festival - a steady diet of zombies, serial killers, ghosts and the like can leave a person feeling incredibly burned out by the time it's over. A mostly light-hearted movie about rival cooks can be just what one needs to cleanse the palate, if you'll excuse the metaphor.
Five years ago, Sung-chan (Kim Kang-woo) was poised to ascend to the top of the cooking world, but a terrible and nearly fatal blowfish incident led to Oh Bong-joo (Lim Won-hie) being selected as the head chef at Korea's most prestigious restaurant and culinary school instead. Now, Sung-chan is happily working as a farmer and greengrocer, looking after his increasingly senile grandfather, when an old friend shows up. The knife of the last Master Chef to Korea's last king has been found in Japan, and a nationwide contest has been announced to find which chef deserves to be its new owner. The man wants Sung-chan to enter, but he has no interest in doing so, even if he has left pretty VJ Kim Jin-su (Lee Ha-na) around to pester him until he does. He's resolute about not wanting to be in that sort of high-pressure environment again - at least, until Bong-joo shows up to offer him the position as the head of his kitchen if he stays out.
There's a lot to like about Le Grand Chef. Fans of the food movie will enjoy watching Sung-chan and Jin-su prepare a variety of Korean dishes far more appetizing than what they may remember from Oldboy. Director Jeon Yun-su keeps everything moving at a brisk pace, and he and screenwriter Shin Dong-ik embrace the episodic nature of the original comics (occasionally even using the sort of split screens Ang Lee used for Hulk) without making the resulting film seem choppy or overstuffed. There's a fun cast of characters, and even the ones that could have been one-note villains or clowns are something more interesting.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer has been getting a lot of love from genre fans, in part because it shows them a lot of love: It casts Robert Englund, it's fairly funny in the self-deprecating way that this group of fans accpets, and the cast and crew make a big point of how they did almost all the effects work with practical effects rather than CGI. It's the kind of movie that makes me idly wonder what the reception would be like if, prior to festival screenings like this, they told the audience that they were just making this sort of horror movie because it's cheap and has a built-in audience, and that they'd used computers to make something that looked just like puppets or men in suits. Just as an experiment.
It's fun, don't get me wrong, but I had the same sort of reaction to it I had to Behind the Mask a couple years ago: It's fun, and actually pretty well-made, but I didn't grow up on that sort of movie, and thus find myself loving it less than those who did.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Fantasia 2008, Day Two: La Antena, A Love, Genius Party, [REC]
Yesterday was "adventures in subtitles" day, at least in the afternoon - La Antena made them part of the story. A Love had titling so brutal as to apparently cancel today's encore, and Genius Part made me hate looking away from the imagery. I took a little time beforehand to find myself some wi-fi (which, because it's located in the office next to this apartment, I am still using. I promise I'll stop once the DSL modem arrives), find some of the necessities you would take for granted in a hotel at the pharmacy, and the like. I kind of can't wait until Monday, when I'll finally have time to get out and about into the city. Movie gluttony is nice, but I'd hate to spend all my July time off inside darkened theaters.
Today's going to be an inside day, though - Batman: Gotham Knight (though I'll have the blu-ray waiting for me when I get home), Tales to Keep You Awake (Spanish horror Grindhouse with Alex de la Iglesia contributing a film), Disciples of the 36th Chamber (with Gordon Liu in person!), Le Grand Chef (Korean, not French), Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer (looks like good dumb fun), and Robo Rock (giant robots and rock & roll? Yes, please!).
La Antena (The Ariel)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
La Antena opens with hands superimposed on a typewriter keyboard while a piano plays, and introduces us to its "City Without a Voice"by displaying it as the pages of a pop-up book. That's a fanciful start to a fanciful movie, one that enjoys its storytelling and which always has another nifty image up its sleeve to tease the imagination.
Years ago, we're told, the inhabitants of this city lost the ability to speak, but they soldiered on. Now, though, the city is dominated by Mr. TV, who not only owns the local television station but the main food company (TV Foods!) as well. The most popular program features a mysterious woman known as "The Voice" who still retains the power of speech. Living in this world is a TV repairman (Alejandro Urdapilleta) and his daughter Ana (Sol Moreno). One day, a letter from Mr. TV is delivered to Ana's mother's house that was meant for the Voice (the classic case of 166 Eclipse Street becoming 169 Eclipse Street because of a loose screw) that the eyes for the Voice's blind son are ready if she's ready to do her part. Ana doesn't know what this means, but decides to make friends the the boy anyway. Coincidentally, her father has stumbled across part of it - and it's sinister. He needs the help of his ex-wife (Valeria Bertuccelli) to escape pursuit, especially when Mr. TV and his cohort Dr. Y decide to kill the son, since another person with a voice could ruin their plans.
As befits a story about an entire city without a voice, filmmaker Esteban Sapir films La Antena in the style of a silent movie. The images are black and white, shot on 16mm film; the style alternates between the dream-like and early twentieth century - though an early twentieth century city where everybody speaks Spanish but much of the iconography is Soviet (an apt choice, as the film often feels like one of those Soviet sci-fi silents). Much like in genuine silents, the score incorporates sound effects, and The Voice's costume incorporates a hood that casts such a deep shadow as to seem empty, making her speech seem oddly disconnected in the same way.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Sarang (A Love)
N/A (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
I really can't review this one honestly; though it was listed as being 35mm in the program, it appears that the print could not arrive on time and the HD version shown had some of the most brutal English subtitles I have ever witnessed in a theater, including that film Garo and Clinton showed at the Coolidge where the very title was misspelled. A few people left; the rest of us muddled through, occasionally laughing at what the (I presume) electronic translation had wrought. Apparently one character's name translates as "beautiful bead" and another's as "turnip". Or "turnip" is some sort of odd Korean insult. I can't say for sure.
Unfortunately, the bad subtitles didn't add much camp appeal to what seemed like a pretty basic movie. In-ho gets in fights, but falls for beautiful Mi-ju as a kid. They meet up later, grow close, and his rescuing her from a gang leaves him in jail and her in some sort of witness relocation program, but they somehow meet again when he enters the service of a better breed of mobster who just happens to have her for a mistress. Torment ensues.
Gangster romances are a tricky thing; either it's tough to get a really good love story through all the testosterone or it could just take place anywhere but for the random violence. It can be done - one of my favorite examples is another Korean film, A Bittersweet Life, but based on what I was able to piece together from the subtitles, A Love isn't nearly at that film's level.
Genius Party
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Animated Auteur Visions)
"Genius Party" is probably the most hubristic/critic-baiting title I've seen since a Chinese film by the name of "Dazzling" a few years back; it just begs for a "but who crashed?" sort of response. If anybody can use that title and get away with it, though, it's the people at Studio 4°C, who have created some of the most visually stunning animated films to come out of Japan in recent years. This anthology has seven segments, and there's something brilliant in all of them.
First up, we have the opening by Atsuko Fukushima; it's a zippy piece set to music with magical flowers, phoenix birds, and smiling spherical creatures that pop up out of the ground and tap into some sort of cosmic force. It sets the tone for the film with constant motion which combines the look of traditional hand-drawn animation with flying cameras that tend to be a real hassle without computer assistance. The music and effects animation enhance it to get the audience excited for what comes next.
Things actually might peak in the second segment, "Shanghai Dragon" by Shoji Kawamori, especially for those that love the sci-fi action that people usually think of when Japanese animation is brought up. It starts out as a cute story of a (literally) snot-nosed five-year-old by the name of Gonglong who loves to draw and Meihua, the girl who stands up for him. Kawamori is most famous for anime with a bunch of mecha action, and he doesn't disappoint, as an incredible bit of future technology falls from the sky, chased by future cyborgs who want to protect it and AIs who want to destroy it (and humanity). Gonglong, naturally, finds it, and what follows is grand over-the-top action which both spoofs and embraces the clichés of the genre while putting a nifty new spin on it, as traditional anime style combines with a child's drawings.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
[REC]
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Playback in Black)
Sometimes it's good to believe the hype. One of the perils of going to festivals is that I know I'm going to be writing reviews of the movies I see, and I jump the gun trying to analyze the film while it's still going, even though you can't properly do that without having it in its entirety. Throw in that [REC] has been receiving a ton of praise, and it's perhaps not surprising that I spent a good chunk of the movie wondering what the big deal was. So my jumping out of the seat by the end was somewhat contaminated by "aaaah, that's it!".
[REC] opens with Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) introducing herself as the host of a news/reality program called "while you were asleep". For this week's episode, she's going to tag along and document the Barcelona Fire Department. Most of what they do isn't actually fighting fires; it's handling broken water mains, animal rescue, and the like. Tonight's first call has them going to a small apartment building where screams have come from the apartment of an old lady who lives alone with her cats; when they get there, they find a dead girl on the floor. The woman is practically feral, actually biting one of the police officers who joined the firemen. Before they can get him to an ambulance, though, the find there are government people sealing off the building, not giving any information to the panicked residents, and the bitten cop's partner is expected to take control despite not knowing any more than anyone else.
The Blair Witch project wasn't the first "horror verité" film, but it is the one that triggered the ones of varying quality since. [REC] makes the gimmick work better than most; even if Angela initially seems more "on-air personality" than reporter, it makes a certain amount of sense for her and cameraman Pablo (cinematographer Pablo Rosso) to keep shooting once the crazy stuff starts happening, and the enclosed building is tight enough quarters that just dropping the camera and running wouldn't help that much. More so than with many films of this type, the filmmakers make the "found footage" conceit really make sense.
Full review at eFilmCritic, along with one other review.
Today's going to be an inside day, though - Batman: Gotham Knight (though I'll have the blu-ray waiting for me when I get home), Tales to Keep You Awake (Spanish horror Grindhouse with Alex de la Iglesia contributing a film), Disciples of the 36th Chamber (with Gordon Liu in person!), Le Grand Chef (Korean, not French), Jack Brooks, Monster Slayer (looks like good dumb fun), and Robo Rock (giant robots and rock & roll? Yes, please!).
La Antena (The Ariel)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
La Antena opens with hands superimposed on a typewriter keyboard while a piano plays, and introduces us to its "City Without a Voice"by displaying it as the pages of a pop-up book. That's a fanciful start to a fanciful movie, one that enjoys its storytelling and which always has another nifty image up its sleeve to tease the imagination.
Years ago, we're told, the inhabitants of this city lost the ability to speak, but they soldiered on. Now, though, the city is dominated by Mr. TV, who not only owns the local television station but the main food company (TV Foods!) as well. The most popular program features a mysterious woman known as "The Voice" who still retains the power of speech. Living in this world is a TV repairman (Alejandro Urdapilleta) and his daughter Ana (Sol Moreno). One day, a letter from Mr. TV is delivered to Ana's mother's house that was meant for the Voice (the classic case of 166 Eclipse Street becoming 169 Eclipse Street because of a loose screw) that the eyes for the Voice's blind son are ready if she's ready to do her part. Ana doesn't know what this means, but decides to make friends the the boy anyway. Coincidentally, her father has stumbled across part of it - and it's sinister. He needs the help of his ex-wife (Valeria Bertuccelli) to escape pursuit, especially when Mr. TV and his cohort Dr. Y decide to kill the son, since another person with a voice could ruin their plans.
As befits a story about an entire city without a voice, filmmaker Esteban Sapir films La Antena in the style of a silent movie. The images are black and white, shot on 16mm film; the style alternates between the dream-like and early twentieth century - though an early twentieth century city where everybody speaks Spanish but much of the iconography is Soviet (an apt choice, as the film often feels like one of those Soviet sci-fi silents). Much like in genuine silents, the score incorporates sound effects, and The Voice's costume incorporates a hood that casts such a deep shadow as to seem empty, making her speech seem oddly disconnected in the same way.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Sarang (A Love)
N/A (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
I really can't review this one honestly; though it was listed as being 35mm in the program, it appears that the print could not arrive on time and the HD version shown had some of the most brutal English subtitles I have ever witnessed in a theater, including that film Garo and Clinton showed at the Coolidge where the very title was misspelled. A few people left; the rest of us muddled through, occasionally laughing at what the (I presume) electronic translation had wrought. Apparently one character's name translates as "beautiful bead" and another's as "turnip". Or "turnip" is some sort of odd Korean insult. I can't say for sure.
Unfortunately, the bad subtitles didn't add much camp appeal to what seemed like a pretty basic movie. In-ho gets in fights, but falls for beautiful Mi-ju as a kid. They meet up later, grow close, and his rescuing her from a gang leaves him in jail and her in some sort of witness relocation program, but they somehow meet again when he enters the service of a better breed of mobster who just happens to have her for a mistress. Torment ensues.
Gangster romances are a tricky thing; either it's tough to get a really good love story through all the testosterone or it could just take place anywhere but for the random violence. It can be done - one of my favorite examples is another Korean film, A Bittersweet Life, but based on what I was able to piece together from the subtitles, A Love isn't nearly at that film's level.
Genius Party
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Animated Auteur Visions)
"Genius Party" is probably the most hubristic/critic-baiting title I've seen since a Chinese film by the name of "Dazzling" a few years back; it just begs for a "but who crashed?" sort of response. If anybody can use that title and get away with it, though, it's the people at Studio 4°C, who have created some of the most visually stunning animated films to come out of Japan in recent years. This anthology has seven segments, and there's something brilliant in all of them.
First up, we have the opening by Atsuko Fukushima; it's a zippy piece set to music with magical flowers, phoenix birds, and smiling spherical creatures that pop up out of the ground and tap into some sort of cosmic force. It sets the tone for the film with constant motion which combines the look of traditional hand-drawn animation with flying cameras that tend to be a real hassle without computer assistance. The music and effects animation enhance it to get the audience excited for what comes next.
Things actually might peak in the second segment, "Shanghai Dragon" by Shoji Kawamori, especially for those that love the sci-fi action that people usually think of when Japanese animation is brought up. It starts out as a cute story of a (literally) snot-nosed five-year-old by the name of Gonglong who loves to draw and Meihua, the girl who stands up for him. Kawamori is most famous for anime with a bunch of mecha action, and he doesn't disappoint, as an incredible bit of future technology falls from the sky, chased by future cyborgs who want to protect it and AIs who want to destroy it (and humanity). Gonglong, naturally, finds it, and what follows is grand over-the-top action which both spoofs and embraces the clichés of the genre while putting a nifty new spin on it, as traditional anime style combines with a child's drawings.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
[REC]
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival, Playback in Black)
Sometimes it's good to believe the hype. One of the perils of going to festivals is that I know I'm going to be writing reviews of the movies I see, and I jump the gun trying to analyze the film while it's still going, even though you can't properly do that without having it in its entirety. Throw in that [REC] has been receiving a ton of praise, and it's perhaps not surprising that I spent a good chunk of the movie wondering what the big deal was. So my jumping out of the seat by the end was somewhat contaminated by "aaaah, that's it!".
[REC] opens with Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) introducing herself as the host of a news/reality program called "while you were asleep". For this week's episode, she's going to tag along and document the Barcelona Fire Department. Most of what they do isn't actually fighting fires; it's handling broken water mains, animal rescue, and the like. Tonight's first call has them going to a small apartment building where screams have come from the apartment of an old lady who lives alone with her cats; when they get there, they find a dead girl on the floor. The woman is practically feral, actually biting one of the police officers who joined the firemen. Before they can get him to an ambulance, though, the find there are government people sealing off the building, not giving any information to the panicked residents, and the bitten cop's partner is expected to take control despite not knowing any more than anyone else.
The Blair Witch project wasn't the first "horror verité" film, but it is the one that triggered the ones of varying quality since. [REC] makes the gimmick work better than most; even if Angela initially seems more "on-air personality" than reporter, it makes a certain amount of sense for her and cameraman Pablo (cinematographer Pablo Rosso) to keep shooting once the crazy stuff starts happening, and the enclosed building is tight enough quarters that just dropping the camera and running wouldn't help that much. More so than with many films of this type, the filmmakers make the "found footage" conceit really make sense.
Full review at eFilmCritic, along with one other review.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Fantasia 2008, Day One: Sukiyaki Western Django
Got into Montreal at about three yesterday, then took about an hour to get to the apartment because neither the ATM nor the metro ticket machine at the Berri-UQAM station wanted to recognize my debit card. That got resolved quickly enough, though, and I had no trouble getting my media credentials after unpacking.
(Probably noteworthy only to me, because I don't do the film critic thing for a living: I've gotten more from them each year. When I first came in '05, it was ten free tickets; '06 got me a media pass; '07 got me a pass and a program; this year there's a totebag and a lanyard added to the package. Yes, I'm easily impressed)
As I write this, I'm not sure where I'll wind up posting it; I had little luck with the Wi-fi at the Subway where I got supper last night. Of course, maybe if I'd brought my laptop rather than my phone, that would have been different.
Today's plan: La Antena, A Love, Genius Party, [rec], and maybe the "Celluloid Experiments 2008" program if I'm not totally wiped out by features come midnight.
Sukiyaki Western Django
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival Opening Night)
As much as I love Takashi Miike for being an outrageous filmmaker who does unpredictable things, I sometimes wonder if that can be a double-edged sword. Sukiyaki Western Django is unabashedly a gimmick movie; if you've heard about it at all it's probably for all the crazy things that Miike and company do. The thing you might not expect is that there's a darn near great spaghetti western not far underneath the craziness. Yes, it's easy to love this movie as camp, and I wouldn't trade any of the insanity away, but it's easy to overlook the fact that this movie would be pretty cool without the swordplay, schizophrenic sheriff, or that weird baby-in-a-flower image.
Gimmick number one is Quentin Tarantino, who appears in the movie's opener as a gunslinger who tells the tale to a group that passes by while he's preparing his sukiyaki. There was a town, Donourra (located either in Japan or Nevada) that was besieged by two rival gangs, the red-clad Heike and white-wearing Ganji, just like in England's War of the Roses. Both had heard there was treasure to be found, but their fighting has emptied the town out of almost all its original inhabitants. They stayed locked in this stalemate until a lone, nameless gunslinger (Hidesaki Ito) came to town, offering his considerable services to whoever paid the best. Cowardly Heike leader Kiyomori (Koichi Sato) and charismatic Ganji boss Yoshitsune (Yusuke Iseya) both make offers, warning him not to "play Yojimbo". Local barkeep Ruriko (Kaori Momoi) seems to be hoping for just that, though - Kiyomori killed her son Akira (Shun Oguri) and Yoshitsune is keeping Akira's beautiful widow Shizuka (Yoshino Kimura) as his woman, and their son hasn't spoken since.
Gimmick number two is that, though the entire cast other than Tarantino is Japanese, they're all speaking English, often not all that well. While some members of the cast seem to have a fairly decent command of the language - Iseya and Kimura could probably work in Hollywood if they wanted to - others, well, are pretty clearly reading their lines phonetically and place the emphasis in all the wrong places. Miike plays into this for camp value - it's less fluent Sato's Kiyomori that starts reciting Shakespeare and insisting on being called "Henry", for instance, and at one point even Tarantino starts imitating his visitors' cadence. The audience got a kick out of it, though I'm curious how well it plays without a large audience or whether most of the film's original Japanese audience realized there was a joke going on.
Read the rest at eFilmCritic.
(Probably noteworthy only to me, because I don't do the film critic thing for a living: I've gotten more from them each year. When I first came in '05, it was ten free tickets; '06 got me a media pass; '07 got me a pass and a program; this year there's a totebag and a lanyard added to the package. Yes, I'm easily impressed)
As I write this, I'm not sure where I'll wind up posting it; I had little luck with the Wi-fi at the Subway where I got supper last night. Of course, maybe if I'd brought my laptop rather than my phone, that would have been different.
Today's plan: La Antena, A Love, Genius Party, [rec], and maybe the "Celluloid Experiments 2008" program if I'm not totally wiped out by features come midnight.
Sukiyaki Western Django
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2008 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival Opening Night)
As much as I love Takashi Miike for being an outrageous filmmaker who does unpredictable things, I sometimes wonder if that can be a double-edged sword. Sukiyaki Western Django is unabashedly a gimmick movie; if you've heard about it at all it's probably for all the crazy things that Miike and company do. The thing you might not expect is that there's a darn near great spaghetti western not far underneath the craziness. Yes, it's easy to love this movie as camp, and I wouldn't trade any of the insanity away, but it's easy to overlook the fact that this movie would be pretty cool without the swordplay, schizophrenic sheriff, or that weird baby-in-a-flower image.
Gimmick number one is Quentin Tarantino, who appears in the movie's opener as a gunslinger who tells the tale to a group that passes by while he's preparing his sukiyaki. There was a town, Donourra (located either in Japan or Nevada) that was besieged by two rival gangs, the red-clad Heike and white-wearing Ganji, just like in England's War of the Roses. Both had heard there was treasure to be found, but their fighting has emptied the town out of almost all its original inhabitants. They stayed locked in this stalemate until a lone, nameless gunslinger (Hidesaki Ito) came to town, offering his considerable services to whoever paid the best. Cowardly Heike leader Kiyomori (Koichi Sato) and charismatic Ganji boss Yoshitsune (Yusuke Iseya) both make offers, warning him not to "play Yojimbo". Local barkeep Ruriko (Kaori Momoi) seems to be hoping for just that, though - Kiyomori killed her son Akira (Shun Oguri) and Yoshitsune is keeping Akira's beautiful widow Shizuka (Yoshino Kimura) as his woman, and their son hasn't spoken since.
Gimmick number two is that, though the entire cast other than Tarantino is Japanese, they're all speaking English, often not all that well. While some members of the cast seem to have a fairly decent command of the language - Iseya and Kimura could probably work in Hollywood if they wanted to - others, well, are pretty clearly reading their lines phonetically and place the emphasis in all the wrong places. Miike plays into this for camp value - it's less fluent Sato's Kiyomori that starts reciting Shakespeare and insisting on being called "Henry", for instance, and at one point even Tarantino starts imitating his visitors' cadence. The audience got a kick out of it, though I'm curious how well it plays without a large audience or whether most of the film's original Japanese audience realized there was a joke going on.
Read the rest at eFilmCritic.
New York Asian Film Festival: Sad Vacation
I didn't really attend the New York Asian Film Festival; I'd decided I wanted to see November before it ended its run, decided it might be a good idea to use the day-trip to see a game in Yankee Stadium before they knocked that down, bought tickets for those and the bus ride, and then found out that NYAFF started that weekend. So, much like Fantasia, I spent the next two weeks refreshing Subway Cinema's homepage to find out what was playing that weekend. I briefly considered the idea of booking a hotel room so I could take in some stuff on Sunday, since the bus ticket back to Boston that I'd booked had only cost a dollar, but that turned out to be too rich for my blood.
Sad Vacation wound up fitting pretty snugly in between a Yankees loss and a pretty darn good play. David Mamet can really work wonders with the f-bomb, especially when he's got Nathan Lane and Dylan Baker to work with. Yankee Stadium didn't impress me that much; it really felt sterile, making me really appreciate how good we have things in Boston with Fenway Park. Also, Yankees fans are a pretty passive lot. Maybe it would have been different if I'd seen a Yankees win or a game with a rival team rather than a bland interleague tilt with the Reds, but once the people in the bleachers were done calling the players' names, audience participation was pretty much all prompted by the jumbotron, which itself was pretty embarrassing at times: Noise between every pitch, crowing about "The Power of the 'Stache" after Giambi gets a single with two outs in a game the Yankees are losing by four... Oh, and the place started clearing out in the seventh inning.
Honestly, Yankees fans, I expected better. I thought you were like us, intense east coast baseball lovers. Poor show, New York.
On the other hand, I found the IFC Center a pretty nice place to see a movie. I think I was the second-to-last person in, so I wound up in the front row, but I've got to say - that seat is the most comfortable I've had in a movie theater not located in a furniture store.
Maybe next year I'll take in a little more of the NYAFF; the only really difficult part is that it overlaps Fantasia. Speaking of which, I'm writing this on the bus for Montreal, where I'll be covering the whole festival for eFilmCritic/Hollywood Bitch-slap. I think I've plotted out an attack that will have me seeing 80-odd films in two and a half weeks. That's worth being out of the country for Independence Day, I guess.
So, if you're going to be in Montreal, say hi. I'll be the guy with the media pass and the Red Sox t-shirt, pretty much no matter what the day. I really need to buy a t-shirt at some spot other than the Red Sox souvenir store one of these days.
Sad Vacation
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2008 at the IFC Center #2 (New York Asian Film Festival)
I don't know if Japan has the old saying that you can choose your friends but not your family, though that idea is at the heart of Sad Vacation. That doesn't mean that people won't try, though, with decidedly mixed results.
Take Kenji Shiraishi (Tadanobu Asano) and Yuri Matsumura (Kaori Tsuji). The opening text informs us they witnessed Yuri's older brother (Kenji's best friend) kill a man and then turn the gun on himself. Yuri couldn't handle it, and is institutionalized in a state of denial; Kenji looks after her between what have usually been minor criminal jobs. In the latest, though, he's helping smuggle Chinese immigrants into the country, looking after a child when his father dies in transit. Sensing it wouldn't be wise to stick around - there are sickos out there for whom untraceable kids are a valuable commodity - Kenji opts for more honest work, as a designated driver. Two of his fares have a big effect on him: He and bar hostess Saeko Shiina (Yuka Itaya) are quickly smitten with each other, and while small trucking company owner Shigeo Mamiya (Ken Mistuishi) isn't significant himself, Kenji is sure that his wife Chiyoko (Eri Ishida) is the mother who abandoned him and his father when he was a child.
Writer/director Shinji Aoyama packs quite a bit into this film, to the point where it could easily become too much: If the studio had mandated he cut the film down to under two hours, for instance, he probably could have jettisoned the whole subplot with Aoi Miyazaki as Kozue Tamura, an eighteen-year-old girl who takes a job with Mamiya's trucking company after leaving home, especially the man who comes from her hometown to find her. The trucking company is populated by hard-luck cases with potentially interesting backstories, and one of the story lines stops relatively early even though its last scene would often be the impetus for everything that happens afterward.
Of course, that's part of the point of the greater story: Even though we've seen Kenji decide to look after Yuri and to boy A-chun, there is an emotional dead spot in him that he inherited from his mother, either from her genes or her absence. The grim events of Sad Vacation's later reels are the result of a relationship that explodes into dysfunction almost as soon as it re-establishes itself . Aoyama has Mamiya say that Kenji underestimates "the force of [Chiyoko's] mercy", and it's hard to say whether Chiyoko is truly merciful or manipulative in a remarkably far-reaching and vicious way. Both may be true; the drive to create and protect a family has led to a great deal of kindness and cruelty.
Tadanobu Asano is a ubiquitous figure in Asian cinema that makes its way to the west, and not just because he's prolific and works with popular directors. He translates well to other languages because he tends toward roles without a lot of complicated dialog, and silence needs no subtitles. Kenji's not quite so quiet as some of his other roles, but he's still a guy whose eyes often say more than his words. He's also got the ability to charm the audience even when he's mixed up in questionable activities.
Eri Ishida is a much colder presence; she's middle-aged and hardly playing a glamorous character, but there's a hint of femme fatale to her scenes with Asano. Not in a creepy, incestuous way, just that this is a woman who knows how to get what she wants from men, and her son is in no way immune. The rest of the cast is good, too - Kengo Kora is young and angry as Chiyoko's second son; Ken Mitsuishi is all too good-hearted as his father. Yuka Itaya is pleasant as Saeko, and Aoi Miyazaki is always interesting as Kozue.
I didn't learn until afterward that both Kozue and Kenji had appeared before; Miyazaki played Kozue in Aoyama's previous film, Eureka, the events of which are referenced here, while Asano played Kenji in a short film. Aoyama mines those films for flashbacks, but they are in no way necessary to enjoy this one. He does a fine job keeping things moving, even if it does mean occasionally giving certain subplots the short shrift - and as much as Kozue's story, for instance, may seem removable compared to other bits, I don't think I'd want the movie to go without it; Kozue offers a nice counterbalance to Kenji. I like how he has everybody spend the entire movie involved in moving things in one capacity or another (human trafficking, delivering cargo and bringing people home) only to mostly get caught in quagmires.
And the end is quietly devastating, final in many ways while making it painfully clear that family is something that can never truly be escaped. All in all, quite the excellent piece of work.
Also at eFilmCritic.
Sad Vacation wound up fitting pretty snugly in between a Yankees loss and a pretty darn good play. David Mamet can really work wonders with the f-bomb, especially when he's got Nathan Lane and Dylan Baker to work with. Yankee Stadium didn't impress me that much; it really felt sterile, making me really appreciate how good we have things in Boston with Fenway Park. Also, Yankees fans are a pretty passive lot. Maybe it would have been different if I'd seen a Yankees win or a game with a rival team rather than a bland interleague tilt with the Reds, but once the people in the bleachers were done calling the players' names, audience participation was pretty much all prompted by the jumbotron, which itself was pretty embarrassing at times: Noise between every pitch, crowing about "The Power of the 'Stache" after Giambi gets a single with two outs in a game the Yankees are losing by four... Oh, and the place started clearing out in the seventh inning.
Honestly, Yankees fans, I expected better. I thought you were like us, intense east coast baseball lovers. Poor show, New York.
On the other hand, I found the IFC Center a pretty nice place to see a movie. I think I was the second-to-last person in, so I wound up in the front row, but I've got to say - that seat is the most comfortable I've had in a movie theater not located in a furniture store.
Maybe next year I'll take in a little more of the NYAFF; the only really difficult part is that it overlaps Fantasia. Speaking of which, I'm writing this on the bus for Montreal, where I'll be covering the whole festival for eFilmCritic/Hollywood Bitch-slap. I think I've plotted out an attack that will have me seeing 80-odd films in two and a half weeks. That's worth being out of the country for Independence Day, I guess.
So, if you're going to be in Montreal, say hi. I'll be the guy with the media pass and the Red Sox t-shirt, pretty much no matter what the day. I really need to buy a t-shirt at some spot other than the Red Sox souvenir store one of these days.
Sad Vacation
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2008 at the IFC Center #2 (New York Asian Film Festival)
I don't know if Japan has the old saying that you can choose your friends but not your family, though that idea is at the heart of Sad Vacation. That doesn't mean that people won't try, though, with decidedly mixed results.
Take Kenji Shiraishi (Tadanobu Asano) and Yuri Matsumura (Kaori Tsuji). The opening text informs us they witnessed Yuri's older brother (Kenji's best friend) kill a man and then turn the gun on himself. Yuri couldn't handle it, and is institutionalized in a state of denial; Kenji looks after her between what have usually been minor criminal jobs. In the latest, though, he's helping smuggle Chinese immigrants into the country, looking after a child when his father dies in transit. Sensing it wouldn't be wise to stick around - there are sickos out there for whom untraceable kids are a valuable commodity - Kenji opts for more honest work, as a designated driver. Two of his fares have a big effect on him: He and bar hostess Saeko Shiina (Yuka Itaya) are quickly smitten with each other, and while small trucking company owner Shigeo Mamiya (Ken Mistuishi) isn't significant himself, Kenji is sure that his wife Chiyoko (Eri Ishida) is the mother who abandoned him and his father when he was a child.
Writer/director Shinji Aoyama packs quite a bit into this film, to the point where it could easily become too much: If the studio had mandated he cut the film down to under two hours, for instance, he probably could have jettisoned the whole subplot with Aoi Miyazaki as Kozue Tamura, an eighteen-year-old girl who takes a job with Mamiya's trucking company after leaving home, especially the man who comes from her hometown to find her. The trucking company is populated by hard-luck cases with potentially interesting backstories, and one of the story lines stops relatively early even though its last scene would often be the impetus for everything that happens afterward.
Of course, that's part of the point of the greater story: Even though we've seen Kenji decide to look after Yuri and to boy A-chun, there is an emotional dead spot in him that he inherited from his mother, either from her genes or her absence. The grim events of Sad Vacation's later reels are the result of a relationship that explodes into dysfunction almost as soon as it re-establishes itself . Aoyama has Mamiya say that Kenji underestimates "the force of [Chiyoko's] mercy", and it's hard to say whether Chiyoko is truly merciful or manipulative in a remarkably far-reaching and vicious way. Both may be true; the drive to create and protect a family has led to a great deal of kindness and cruelty.
Tadanobu Asano is a ubiquitous figure in Asian cinema that makes its way to the west, and not just because he's prolific and works with popular directors. He translates well to other languages because he tends toward roles without a lot of complicated dialog, and silence needs no subtitles. Kenji's not quite so quiet as some of his other roles, but he's still a guy whose eyes often say more than his words. He's also got the ability to charm the audience even when he's mixed up in questionable activities.
Eri Ishida is a much colder presence; she's middle-aged and hardly playing a glamorous character, but there's a hint of femme fatale to her scenes with Asano. Not in a creepy, incestuous way, just that this is a woman who knows how to get what she wants from men, and her son is in no way immune. The rest of the cast is good, too - Kengo Kora is young and angry as Chiyoko's second son; Ken Mitsuishi is all too good-hearted as his father. Yuka Itaya is pleasant as Saeko, and Aoi Miyazaki is always interesting as Kozue.
I didn't learn until afterward that both Kozue and Kenji had appeared before; Miyazaki played Kozue in Aoyama's previous film, Eureka, the events of which are referenced here, while Asano played Kenji in a short film. Aoyama mines those films for flashbacks, but they are in no way necessary to enjoy this one. He does a fine job keeping things moving, even if it does mean occasionally giving certain subplots the short shrift - and as much as Kozue's story, for instance, may seem removable compared to other bits, I don't think I'd want the movie to go without it; Kozue offers a nice counterbalance to Kenji. I like how he has everybody spend the entire movie involved in moving things in one capacity or another (human trafficking, delivering cargo and bringing people home) only to mostly get caught in quagmires.
And the end is quietly devastating, final in many ways while making it painfully clear that family is something that can never truly be escaped. All in all, quite the excellent piece of work.
Also at eFilmCritic.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Nikkatsu Akushon! from The Warped Ones to The Machine Girl
This was one of the series I was most looking forward to on the spring Brattle calendar, but as luck would have it, the week it ran happened to overlap with one where I'd managed to buy tickets to two Red Sox games. Fortunately, The Warped Ones was used as a Sunday Eye-Opener, and that's one that conflicted with a game, but there were several others that I just couldn't get to, the "NOT AVAILABLE ON VIDEO" part of their write-ups cruelly taunting me from the schedule.
It's a crying shame that they're not, because these Nikkatsu films (and the contemporaneous fare that filled out the schedule) are a lot of fun. There's also something very uniquely Japanese about them, in part because of their international feel. As much as Japan has always been a land with strong traditions, one of those is a willingness to make foreign innovations their own. The tag on this series (and the book I bought to accompany it) was "No Borders, No Limits", and there's plenty of Hollywood and Europe in their DNA: Some play as great noirs, some recall the French New Wave. It was exciting to discover, especially once you get a look at just how many movies Nikkatsu released during their peak; the half-dozen or so that have been touring the world just barely scratch the surface.
The studio crashed hard after its peak; according to the book it spent the late seventies and eighties making "romantic porno", which isn't quite so bad as it sounds; it's pretty soft-core and not so hidden away as it might be in the U.S. There were more reorganizations after that, and I was surprised and pleased to see their logo on the back of The Machine Girl when it arrived the other day.
The Warped Ones (Kyonetsu no Kisetsu, aka Season of Heat)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action! / Sunday Eye opener)
Part of the fun of watching The Warped Ones is the joy of discovery - it may not quite be a classic, but it's a very good movie, and one you might not know existed - although Nikkatsu Studio's youth-oriented films of the 1960s were incredibly popular in Japan at the time of their release, they lapsed into relative obscurity until recently. And even among the Nikkatsu catalog, The Warped Ones is a standout tale of youth gone wild.
Respectable people may say that it's that damn western music that gets it started: Jazz-loving pickpocket Akira (Tamio Kawaji) is caught and arrested in his favorite bar and sent to jail, where he meets Masaru (Eiji Go). When they're released, they hook up with Akira's prostitute friend Fumiko (Noriko Matsumoto), steal a car and engage in their various brands of petty crime necessary to pay their rent and bar bills. On a spree, they come across the reporter who turned Akira in (Hiroyuki Nagato) and his fiancée Yuki (Yuko Chishiro). He gets beat up; she gets raped.
These are not nice people, Akira especially, but they are the sort of energetic, amoral outlaws that have captivated moviegoers as long as there have been movies. There is something perversely attractive about someone like Akira who lives almost entirely in the moment, giving little if any consideration to such matters as the future or morality. Kawaji plays Akira as something just short of feral, not so much mellowed by jazz as distracted by it. He invests the character with a ton of charisma without ever angling for sympathy or leaning on some backstory that justifies his actions.
Writer Nobuo Yamada and director Koreyoshi Kurahara operate in a similar fashion; this movie is all about immediacy. It runs a compact 75 minutes, but every one of them is packed, from the frantic opening credits onward. There's a sequence or two that might make a person to scratch his head or wonder aloud just what the heck is going on, but the upside is that when those moments come, they're lively and outrageous without being repulsive. The sharp black-and-white cinematography and jazzy score are very nice, too, and both sets and location shooting convey a bustling harbor town rather than the formal, placid environments that might be found in a more traditional Japanese film.
Yamada and Kurahara don't quite condone their wild child main character's behavior, but they do seem to think that there's a thing or two to be learned from it. Petty or impulsive crime is one thing; organized crime is something else. And as distasteful as the idea of a woman seeking out her rapist for any sort of solace or relationship is, it doesn't make Chishiro's Yuki look entirely weak or pathetic; yes, she's a victim who has wound up in Akira's power, but she is also trying to face what happened to her, which is far more than can be said for Nagato's Kashiwagi.
Of course, trying to take away any sort of lesson from The Warped Ones is probably a mistake. It's all about the thrill and feeling of acting for the present, right, wrong, good, or bad be damned.
Also at HBS.
A Colt Is My Passport (Koruto wa ore no pasupoto)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 April 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action!)
The getaway is often the trickiest part of any bit of criminal skulduggery. After all, heists and hits can be planned, but at a certain point, escapes will have to be improvised, and that's where crime pictures stop being just exercises in cinematic cool and start getting suspenseful.
Here, the crime that must be fled is meticulously constructed, but not exactly to the satisfaction of its instigators - the hitman (Jo Shishido) takes all the information about his target's habits an basically concludes that he has to do the deed in the location that is least convenient for his employers. So in addition to the law being after him, he and his sidekick (Jerry Fujio) wind up running from the combined might of two yakuza families. The hitman wants to lie low until he can figure something out, but there's a girl (Chitose Kobayashi) at the truck stop where they're hiding out that Fujio's character has taken a shine to...
A Colt is My Passport is a methodical thriller, the type that spends a lot of time showing just how one might accomplish this sort of assassination. We follow the characters onto rooftops, listen as they discuss the challenges inherent in one approach or another, and feel the tension that comes from knowing what the next step is but also knowing how many assumptions getting to that next step entails. We also get to share in the satisfaction that comes from things getting pulled off right, or that it's somewhat unfair when they aren't.
Not all the details are so exciting, though - the series of meetings and negotiations that result in both the yakuza families that took out the hit and the one whose head was assassinated pooling their resources to find and eliminate the assassin is rather dry. I suppose that those who enjoy mob films more than me will be far more interested, but those scenes really do seem to go on for a long time and pull the action away from the main characters.
Those characters are a fairly amiable bunch; Chitose Kobayashi, for instance, has quite a nice take on the waitress with bigger dreams than her town affords her. Jerry Fujio is quite likable as the younger member of the team who will occasionally make mistakes or hesitate. Shishido, on the other hand, despite his famously chipmunk-cheeked face, is all business. He's not cruel or an automaton, but he's a guy who pretty clearly knows his stuff. He will, of course, have reason to lash out in the end, and that's certainly something to see.
The finale is one of the most memorable scenes of the movie; director Takashi Nomura transplants a showdown out of a western to a modern Japanese beach, with cars, automatic weapons, explosives, and carefully laid traps. It's a crazy scene, straining belief a bit but meticulous enough in its construction for the audience to go along.
Most of the movie hits that balance - a lot of fun detail, but seldom at the expense of muffling the action or making the characters just generic cogs. Yes, it has a bit of a draggy section in the middle, but even that will probably be pretty enjoyable for people who like mob politics.
Also at HBS.
Black Rose Mansion (Kuro bara no yakata)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 April 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action! + 60s Japanese Cinema)
Black Rose Mansion is a pretty crazy film - it gives us a strange, previously abandoned house occupied by an exotic figure who seduces both a father and his estranged son. It gets even better; that character is played by a famous female impersonator of the time, and it's never quite clear whether the seductress is actually a man or just played by one.
So, yes, it's a full serving of weird, but it's also slick, atmospheric melodrama.
The Red Handkerchief (Akai Hankachi)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action!)
There are some that rank Red Handkerchief as the best film produced by Nikkatsu studios during its peak, and I certainly can't contradict them. It's the sort of thing that makes for surprisingly great movie: The outer form of a detective story surrounding a core of regret, deception, and love.
It opens with a couple of Yokohama detectives chasing a gangster through crowded back alleys. Makimi (Yujiro Ishihara) is the rising star, a college-educated youth on Japan's Olympic shooting team, and Ishizuka (Hideaki Nitani) his working-class partner. Their quarry is hit by a truck, and the only witness - an old man running a ramshackle food stand - won't say anything. Makimi becomes infatuated with the old man's factor-worker daughter (Ruriko Asaoka), but any chance of a future romance is snuffed out when Mikami guns her father down during an escape attempt.
Jump to four years later. The head of Yokohama's organized crime task force tracks Makimi down in an itinerant construction gang. Tsuchiya (Nobuo Kaneko) says he's always thought something stank about the whole situation, and he'd like Makimi to do some poking around - police forces don't like to investigate one of their own, after all. Makimi's not interested, at first, but when he hears that Ishizuka is now the wealthy owner of several local department stores, and is married to the daughter, well, that gets him curious.
You don't have to be a brilliant detective to figure out that Ishizuka is dirty, although gathering proof that would hold up in court is a different beast. Of course, discovering the hows that could connect Ishizuka to the local yakuza is probably less important to Makimi and the audience than figuring out the whys and whens. Was Makimi betrayed or did Ishizuka seize an opportunity? Did Ishizuka always have an eye on the girl, or is it like she says, that he helped her when she had nothing and Makimi had sent himself into exile?
This is the type of movie Nikkatsu called "mood action", a sort of soapy shoot-em-up. Ishihara and Asaoka were frequent co-stars in these pictures, and they're a good pairing. Ishihara was one of the studio's matinee idols, and though the script sometimes plays to that - Mikami carries a guitar with him and Ishihara sings the film's theme - but he gives the character more weight than that. Mikami is a guy who has had all his illusions shattered multiple times, and Ishihara makes him wary and weary, not really wanting to believe the worst of Ishizuka, with anger only gradually and tentatively entering his performance.
Asaoka also plays somewhat against type; usually cast in more glamorous roles, she comes across as sincere when playing the poor factory girl in the beginning, and somewhat adrift when we meet her again later as Ishizuka's wife. Nitani is good as Ishizuka; he switches places with Ishihara's Mikami in terms of class, and though he doesn't obviously carry an inferiority complex around with him, he does make it clear that jealousy could have been a motive back at the start. Kaneko was a busy character actor, and fits into the crusty old cop role with ease.
Director (and co-writer) Toshio Masuda handles his duties masterfully; he steers the setting between respectability and squalor with ease, piecing together a story about a man who seemingly has redemption forced upon him. The emotional stories peel back perfectly, so we as the audience feel like we're solving a mystery even though we basically all know the score.
A nifty trick, that. I can't say it makes Red Handkerchief Nikkatsu's best film of the period (after all, I've seen four or five out of hundreds), but I certainly hope the Nikkatsu Action! series currently touring the country's specialty theaters gets it an English-friendly DVD release, at least.
Also at HBS.
Velvet Hustler (Kurenai no nagareboshi) (aka Crimson Comet, Like a Shooting Star)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action!)
One of the recurrent devices in crime films is the big-city hood hiding out in a less glamorous place until the heat dies down. It goes back at least to We're No Angels, and recently turned up to good effect in In Bruges. Indeed, Velvet Hustler is itself a remake of a hit from the same studio and director, 1958's Red Quay, although by most accounts one with a very different tone.
That tone is insouciance, as laid-back hitman Goro (Tetsuya Watari) steals a snazzy American car and takes out his target, whistling all the while. As per the plan, he heads out of Tokyo for Kobe to await further instructions. A year later, he's still waiting, generally out on the docks with a gang of teenagers that have attached themselves to him. They steer American servicemen on leave to their preferred bar and brothel and get kickbacks. It's not Tokyo, but it could be worse. Speaking of which, another hitman (Jo Shishido) has shown up to eliminate a certain loose end, and a local detective (Tatsuya Fuji) is pretty sure Goro's a wanted man, but no need to stir up trouble, right? Then there's Keiko (Ruriko Asaoka), a brash young woman from Tokyo seeking her missing jewel dealer husband. Common sense tells Goro not to get involved, but, man, she's attractive...
Goro is the sort of hitman that comes across more as scoundrel than sociopath; though a capable killer, he never seems to be in any hurry to do it again. He's just aloof enough from the Kobe crowd to be cool without seeming like a jerk, and has enough good qualities between his good looks and understated loyalty to his friends to charm the audience. Watari is plenty likable in the role, combining Japanese reserve with western informality; he's sort of like Bogart in one of those roles where every word he deigns to speak (and every expression on his face) is either dry sarcasm or shameless flirting.
Ruriko Asaoka is the main object of that flirtation, receiving and returning it well. It's clear that she's not particularly bothered by the fact of her fiancé's disappearance, but the timing of it is inconvenient. Plus, going to Kobe and hiring someone like Goro to investigate is a keen way to be modern and independent. She sparks off Watari right away, but also convinces us that Goro has to win Keiko over.
She also gets to wear the most fab outfits. It is the swinging sixties, after all, and the filmmakers have a grand time decking Goro and Keiko out in the slickest finery, whether it be her miniskirts or the red sportscar he swipes in the opener. Goro's straw hat, with a hole in it so he can see anyone coming when the brim is down, is a little kitschy but clean enough to work. As much as a lot of the location shooting around Kobe is kind of nifty, and shows the kind of bustle a port city can have, director Toshio Masuda and company always make sure that when Goro and Keiko go into someplace that's supposed to be hip and happening, it's always trying a bit too hard or kind of shabby when you get past the bright colors. It's a pale imitation of Tokyo, and we understand why Goro wants to go back even though he has it pretty good in Kobe.
And for all Masuda does a great job creating a fun mood and inching up the tension when Goro finally can't quite juggle everything, there is the occasional sense that they are concentrating on atmosphere to the detriment of the rest of the film. The story's got a lot of moving parts that don't interact as much as one maybe might like, for instance. And after seeing Goro do his job effortlessly in the opener, it might have been nice to have him demonstrate his cool more through action than words or raised eyebrows. Although, to be fair, when the time for action does come, it's pretty good - as breezy as some of the movie is, people looking to kill each other is serious business, and the movie doesn't pretend that a life of crime is without consequences.
I'd be interested to see Red Quay - Masuda acknowledges the influence of Breathless on Velvet Hustler, and as much as that style is a big chunk of what makes this version enjoyable, I wonder what it was like before that style took over.
Also at HBS.
Three Outlaw Samurai (Sanbikin no samurai)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action! + 60s Japanese Cinema)
I first saw this movie in November 2005 and ended my review with a comment that it was, unfortunately, not on video. Two and a half years later, it's still not available in Region 1, and it's still a crying shame.
It does appear to have been released in Hong Kong, but I don't have a multi-region player. I should really get on that.
The Machine Girl (Kataude Mashin Garu)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 June 2008 in Jay's Living Room (upconverted DVD)
The Machine Girl surprised me a bit, given the companies involved. Nikkatsu Studios has of late been the subject of a traveling retrospective which emphasized its cool, jazzy sixties output, far removed from this kind of in-your-face fare. Media Blasters/Tokyo Shock, on the other hand, is an American company that specializes in bringing this material to the U.S., and appears to be releasing it here unusually soon after (or even before) Japan. In some ways, The Machine Girl seems cynically designed to appeal to American fans of Japanese extreme cinema, but despite feeling somewhat calculated, it's also a bunch of fun.
The Machine Girl is Ami Hyuga (Minase Yashiro); after seeing her in bloody action during the opening credits, we flash back to how she became a relentless avenger with a machine gun where her right arm should be: Already an athletic girl, she and her brother Yu (Ryosuke Kawamura) were shunned after their father committed suicide after being falsely accused of murdering their mother. Yu and a friend are bullied to death by Sho Kimura (Nobuhiro Nishimura) and his crew, and the police won't help her. Indeed, one of the kids who bullied Yu was the son of the investigating detective, who along with his wife are the first to maim Ami when she comes for help. Ami eventually gains the help of Miki (Asami), the mother of the other dead boy, who trains her while her mechanic husband builds their new weapons, like the machine gun which replaces her severed left forearm. Which they'll need, because Sho's father is a yakuza.
A ninja yakuza.
Whose wife thinks he's too soft.
The story is absolutely ridiculous, of course. And sloppy - the movie flashes back after the opening action scene, but never reaches a point where that scene would logically fit. The motivations in revenge fantasies are seldom complicated, just by their nature, but even by those standards, Ami seems awfully sanguine about how much blood she spills, and she's not alone: Pretty much the entire cast winds up revenge-obsessed killers, none of them seeming to ever stop for a second and think, wait, this is not how civilized people handle their problems. The rationale for considering Ami the movie's heroine is basically "they started it".
The production values are also pretty cheap at times. There are basically no extras. CGI shurikens look like the most expensive effects used, and some of the practical effects are just as ridiculous. I think there's a scene where a character looks less bloody after getting an arterial spray in the face because it's just plain water with food coloring. The Machine Girl is clearly a spoof or pastiche of crappy exploitation films, but that's a dangerous game - it's an ugly thing when a filmmaker aims for sub-par and misses the mark.
Writer/director Noboru Iguchi seems to be one of the rare guys who can pull it off, though. He appears to be a guy who loves his schlock, and never shies from it. The guy who made "Sukeban Boy" is not going to wink at the audience and comment on how silly this all is; he's delivering blood and guts, not irony. It's way over the top - just how does someone puke up their intestines after being stabbed in the head? - but Iguchi almost always hits the sweet spot, where we're grossed out or titillated rather than actually disturbed. Iguchi also doesn't allow the fact that he's making an homage to trash cinema to be an excuse for laziness. There's always some bit of extra craziness going on in the corners, and he gets fairly serviceable performances (both in terms of action and action) from a cast that is not packed with big-name talent.
Minase Yashiro, for instance, is doing her first film. She's not exactly polished, but she brings what the character needs - cuteness and charm in the flashbacks, a spine of steel throughout - so that we buy into and cheer on this girl taking out yakuza she has no business touching. Asami's got a little more experience, albeit in softcore, and while it's a stretch to believe she's old enough to have a fifteen year-old son, she and Yashiro play well off each other; amid all the violence, they're getting something they need from each other. They both look like they can fight a little, too. Nobuhiro Nishimura does well making his bully a spoiled brat, and the actors playing his parents are a stitch - the father (sorry, no English credit) is both put-upon and monstrous, and the mother (Hiroko Yashiki, I think) is a great work of homicidal shrewishness.
The Machine Girl panders to a certain audience, no question about it - a Japanese schoolgirl with a machine gun for an arm wreaking bloody vengeance against yakuza ninjas is first order pandering. Iguchi has the knack for making it fun rather than cynical (although thinking back to "Sukeban Boy", I'm surprised he didn't figure out a way to get more T&A into the film), hitting the target a heck of a lot better than most people making deliberate trash do.
Also at HBS, along with one other review.
It's a crying shame that they're not, because these Nikkatsu films (and the contemporaneous fare that filled out the schedule) are a lot of fun. There's also something very uniquely Japanese about them, in part because of their international feel. As much as Japan has always been a land with strong traditions, one of those is a willingness to make foreign innovations their own. The tag on this series (and the book I bought to accompany it) was "No Borders, No Limits", and there's plenty of Hollywood and Europe in their DNA: Some play as great noirs, some recall the French New Wave. It was exciting to discover, especially once you get a look at just how many movies Nikkatsu released during their peak; the half-dozen or so that have been touring the world just barely scratch the surface.
The studio crashed hard after its peak; according to the book it spent the late seventies and eighties making "romantic porno", which isn't quite so bad as it sounds; it's pretty soft-core and not so hidden away as it might be in the U.S. There were more reorganizations after that, and I was surprised and pleased to see their logo on the back of The Machine Girl when it arrived the other day.
The Warped Ones (Kyonetsu no Kisetsu, aka Season of Heat)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 March 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action! / Sunday Eye opener)
Part of the fun of watching The Warped Ones is the joy of discovery - it may not quite be a classic, but it's a very good movie, and one you might not know existed - although Nikkatsu Studio's youth-oriented films of the 1960s were incredibly popular in Japan at the time of their release, they lapsed into relative obscurity until recently. And even among the Nikkatsu catalog, The Warped Ones is a standout tale of youth gone wild.
Respectable people may say that it's that damn western music that gets it started: Jazz-loving pickpocket Akira (Tamio Kawaji) is caught and arrested in his favorite bar and sent to jail, where he meets Masaru (Eiji Go). When they're released, they hook up with Akira's prostitute friend Fumiko (Noriko Matsumoto), steal a car and engage in their various brands of petty crime necessary to pay their rent and bar bills. On a spree, they come across the reporter who turned Akira in (Hiroyuki Nagato) and his fiancée Yuki (Yuko Chishiro). He gets beat up; she gets raped.
These are not nice people, Akira especially, but they are the sort of energetic, amoral outlaws that have captivated moviegoers as long as there have been movies. There is something perversely attractive about someone like Akira who lives almost entirely in the moment, giving little if any consideration to such matters as the future or morality. Kawaji plays Akira as something just short of feral, not so much mellowed by jazz as distracted by it. He invests the character with a ton of charisma without ever angling for sympathy or leaning on some backstory that justifies his actions.
Writer Nobuo Yamada and director Koreyoshi Kurahara operate in a similar fashion; this movie is all about immediacy. It runs a compact 75 minutes, but every one of them is packed, from the frantic opening credits onward. There's a sequence or two that might make a person to scratch his head or wonder aloud just what the heck is going on, but the upside is that when those moments come, they're lively and outrageous without being repulsive. The sharp black-and-white cinematography and jazzy score are very nice, too, and both sets and location shooting convey a bustling harbor town rather than the formal, placid environments that might be found in a more traditional Japanese film.
Yamada and Kurahara don't quite condone their wild child main character's behavior, but they do seem to think that there's a thing or two to be learned from it. Petty or impulsive crime is one thing; organized crime is something else. And as distasteful as the idea of a woman seeking out her rapist for any sort of solace or relationship is, it doesn't make Chishiro's Yuki look entirely weak or pathetic; yes, she's a victim who has wound up in Akira's power, but she is also trying to face what happened to her, which is far more than can be said for Nagato's Kashiwagi.
Of course, trying to take away any sort of lesson from The Warped Ones is probably a mistake. It's all about the thrill and feeling of acting for the present, right, wrong, good, or bad be damned.
Also at HBS.
A Colt Is My Passport (Koruto wa ore no pasupoto)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 April 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action!)
The getaway is often the trickiest part of any bit of criminal skulduggery. After all, heists and hits can be planned, but at a certain point, escapes will have to be improvised, and that's where crime pictures stop being just exercises in cinematic cool and start getting suspenseful.
Here, the crime that must be fled is meticulously constructed, but not exactly to the satisfaction of its instigators - the hitman (Jo Shishido) takes all the information about his target's habits an basically concludes that he has to do the deed in the location that is least convenient for his employers. So in addition to the law being after him, he and his sidekick (Jerry Fujio) wind up running from the combined might of two yakuza families. The hitman wants to lie low until he can figure something out, but there's a girl (Chitose Kobayashi) at the truck stop where they're hiding out that Fujio's character has taken a shine to...
A Colt is My Passport is a methodical thriller, the type that spends a lot of time showing just how one might accomplish this sort of assassination. We follow the characters onto rooftops, listen as they discuss the challenges inherent in one approach or another, and feel the tension that comes from knowing what the next step is but also knowing how many assumptions getting to that next step entails. We also get to share in the satisfaction that comes from things getting pulled off right, or that it's somewhat unfair when they aren't.
Not all the details are so exciting, though - the series of meetings and negotiations that result in both the yakuza families that took out the hit and the one whose head was assassinated pooling their resources to find and eliminate the assassin is rather dry. I suppose that those who enjoy mob films more than me will be far more interested, but those scenes really do seem to go on for a long time and pull the action away from the main characters.
Those characters are a fairly amiable bunch; Chitose Kobayashi, for instance, has quite a nice take on the waitress with bigger dreams than her town affords her. Jerry Fujio is quite likable as the younger member of the team who will occasionally make mistakes or hesitate. Shishido, on the other hand, despite his famously chipmunk-cheeked face, is all business. He's not cruel or an automaton, but he's a guy who pretty clearly knows his stuff. He will, of course, have reason to lash out in the end, and that's certainly something to see.
The finale is one of the most memorable scenes of the movie; director Takashi Nomura transplants a showdown out of a western to a modern Japanese beach, with cars, automatic weapons, explosives, and carefully laid traps. It's a crazy scene, straining belief a bit but meticulous enough in its construction for the audience to go along.
Most of the movie hits that balance - a lot of fun detail, but seldom at the expense of muffling the action or making the characters just generic cogs. Yes, it has a bit of a draggy section in the middle, but even that will probably be pretty enjoyable for people who like mob politics.
Also at HBS.
Black Rose Mansion (Kuro bara no yakata)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 April 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action! + 60s Japanese Cinema)
Black Rose Mansion is a pretty crazy film - it gives us a strange, previously abandoned house occupied by an exotic figure who seduces both a father and his estranged son. It gets even better; that character is played by a famous female impersonator of the time, and it's never quite clear whether the seductress is actually a man or just played by one.
So, yes, it's a full serving of weird, but it's also slick, atmospheric melodrama.
The Red Handkerchief (Akai Hankachi)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action!)
There are some that rank Red Handkerchief as the best film produced by Nikkatsu studios during its peak, and I certainly can't contradict them. It's the sort of thing that makes for surprisingly great movie: The outer form of a detective story surrounding a core of regret, deception, and love.
It opens with a couple of Yokohama detectives chasing a gangster through crowded back alleys. Makimi (Yujiro Ishihara) is the rising star, a college-educated youth on Japan's Olympic shooting team, and Ishizuka (Hideaki Nitani) his working-class partner. Their quarry is hit by a truck, and the only witness - an old man running a ramshackle food stand - won't say anything. Makimi becomes infatuated with the old man's factor-worker daughter (Ruriko Asaoka), but any chance of a future romance is snuffed out when Mikami guns her father down during an escape attempt.
Jump to four years later. The head of Yokohama's organized crime task force tracks Makimi down in an itinerant construction gang. Tsuchiya (Nobuo Kaneko) says he's always thought something stank about the whole situation, and he'd like Makimi to do some poking around - police forces don't like to investigate one of their own, after all. Makimi's not interested, at first, but when he hears that Ishizuka is now the wealthy owner of several local department stores, and is married to the daughter, well, that gets him curious.
You don't have to be a brilliant detective to figure out that Ishizuka is dirty, although gathering proof that would hold up in court is a different beast. Of course, discovering the hows that could connect Ishizuka to the local yakuza is probably less important to Makimi and the audience than figuring out the whys and whens. Was Makimi betrayed or did Ishizuka seize an opportunity? Did Ishizuka always have an eye on the girl, or is it like she says, that he helped her when she had nothing and Makimi had sent himself into exile?
This is the type of movie Nikkatsu called "mood action", a sort of soapy shoot-em-up. Ishihara and Asaoka were frequent co-stars in these pictures, and they're a good pairing. Ishihara was one of the studio's matinee idols, and though the script sometimes plays to that - Mikami carries a guitar with him and Ishihara sings the film's theme - but he gives the character more weight than that. Mikami is a guy who has had all his illusions shattered multiple times, and Ishihara makes him wary and weary, not really wanting to believe the worst of Ishizuka, with anger only gradually and tentatively entering his performance.
Asaoka also plays somewhat against type; usually cast in more glamorous roles, she comes across as sincere when playing the poor factory girl in the beginning, and somewhat adrift when we meet her again later as Ishizuka's wife. Nitani is good as Ishizuka; he switches places with Ishihara's Mikami in terms of class, and though he doesn't obviously carry an inferiority complex around with him, he does make it clear that jealousy could have been a motive back at the start. Kaneko was a busy character actor, and fits into the crusty old cop role with ease.
Director (and co-writer) Toshio Masuda handles his duties masterfully; he steers the setting between respectability and squalor with ease, piecing together a story about a man who seemingly has redemption forced upon him. The emotional stories peel back perfectly, so we as the audience feel like we're solving a mystery even though we basically all know the score.
A nifty trick, that. I can't say it makes Red Handkerchief Nikkatsu's best film of the period (after all, I've seen four or five out of hundreds), but I certainly hope the Nikkatsu Action! series currently touring the country's specialty theaters gets it an English-friendly DVD release, at least.
Also at HBS.
Velvet Hustler (Kurenai no nagareboshi) (aka Crimson Comet, Like a Shooting Star)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action!)
One of the recurrent devices in crime films is the big-city hood hiding out in a less glamorous place until the heat dies down. It goes back at least to We're No Angels, and recently turned up to good effect in In Bruges. Indeed, Velvet Hustler is itself a remake of a hit from the same studio and director, 1958's Red Quay, although by most accounts one with a very different tone.
That tone is insouciance, as laid-back hitman Goro (Tetsuya Watari) steals a snazzy American car and takes out his target, whistling all the while. As per the plan, he heads out of Tokyo for Kobe to await further instructions. A year later, he's still waiting, generally out on the docks with a gang of teenagers that have attached themselves to him. They steer American servicemen on leave to their preferred bar and brothel and get kickbacks. It's not Tokyo, but it could be worse. Speaking of which, another hitman (Jo Shishido) has shown up to eliminate a certain loose end, and a local detective (Tatsuya Fuji) is pretty sure Goro's a wanted man, but no need to stir up trouble, right? Then there's Keiko (Ruriko Asaoka), a brash young woman from Tokyo seeking her missing jewel dealer husband. Common sense tells Goro not to get involved, but, man, she's attractive...
Goro is the sort of hitman that comes across more as scoundrel than sociopath; though a capable killer, he never seems to be in any hurry to do it again. He's just aloof enough from the Kobe crowd to be cool without seeming like a jerk, and has enough good qualities between his good looks and understated loyalty to his friends to charm the audience. Watari is plenty likable in the role, combining Japanese reserve with western informality; he's sort of like Bogart in one of those roles where every word he deigns to speak (and every expression on his face) is either dry sarcasm or shameless flirting.
Ruriko Asaoka is the main object of that flirtation, receiving and returning it well. It's clear that she's not particularly bothered by the fact of her fiancé's disappearance, but the timing of it is inconvenient. Plus, going to Kobe and hiring someone like Goro to investigate is a keen way to be modern and independent. She sparks off Watari right away, but also convinces us that Goro has to win Keiko over.
She also gets to wear the most fab outfits. It is the swinging sixties, after all, and the filmmakers have a grand time decking Goro and Keiko out in the slickest finery, whether it be her miniskirts or the red sportscar he swipes in the opener. Goro's straw hat, with a hole in it so he can see anyone coming when the brim is down, is a little kitschy but clean enough to work. As much as a lot of the location shooting around Kobe is kind of nifty, and shows the kind of bustle a port city can have, director Toshio Masuda and company always make sure that when Goro and Keiko go into someplace that's supposed to be hip and happening, it's always trying a bit too hard or kind of shabby when you get past the bright colors. It's a pale imitation of Tokyo, and we understand why Goro wants to go back even though he has it pretty good in Kobe.
And for all Masuda does a great job creating a fun mood and inching up the tension when Goro finally can't quite juggle everything, there is the occasional sense that they are concentrating on atmosphere to the detriment of the rest of the film. The story's got a lot of moving parts that don't interact as much as one maybe might like, for instance. And after seeing Goro do his job effortlessly in the opener, it might have been nice to have him demonstrate his cool more through action than words or raised eyebrows. Although, to be fair, when the time for action does come, it's pretty good - as breezy as some of the movie is, people looking to kill each other is serious business, and the movie doesn't pretend that a life of crime is without consequences.
I'd be interested to see Red Quay - Masuda acknowledges the influence of Breathless on Velvet Hustler, and as much as that style is a big chunk of what makes this version enjoyable, I wonder what it was like before that style took over.
Also at HBS.
Three Outlaw Samurai (Sanbikin no samurai)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 April 2008 at the the Brattle Theatre (Nikkatsu Action! + 60s Japanese Cinema)
I first saw this movie in November 2005 and ended my review with a comment that it was, unfortunately, not on video. Two and a half years later, it's still not available in Region 1, and it's still a crying shame.
It does appear to have been released in Hong Kong, but I don't have a multi-region player. I should really get on that.
The Machine Girl (Kataude Mashin Garu)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 June 2008 in Jay's Living Room (upconverted DVD)
The Machine Girl surprised me a bit, given the companies involved. Nikkatsu Studios has of late been the subject of a traveling retrospective which emphasized its cool, jazzy sixties output, far removed from this kind of in-your-face fare. Media Blasters/Tokyo Shock, on the other hand, is an American company that specializes in bringing this material to the U.S., and appears to be releasing it here unusually soon after (or even before) Japan. In some ways, The Machine Girl seems cynically designed to appeal to American fans of Japanese extreme cinema, but despite feeling somewhat calculated, it's also a bunch of fun.
The Machine Girl is Ami Hyuga (Minase Yashiro); after seeing her in bloody action during the opening credits, we flash back to how she became a relentless avenger with a machine gun where her right arm should be: Already an athletic girl, she and her brother Yu (Ryosuke Kawamura) were shunned after their father committed suicide after being falsely accused of murdering their mother. Yu and a friend are bullied to death by Sho Kimura (Nobuhiro Nishimura) and his crew, and the police won't help her. Indeed, one of the kids who bullied Yu was the son of the investigating detective, who along with his wife are the first to maim Ami when she comes for help. Ami eventually gains the help of Miki (Asami), the mother of the other dead boy, who trains her while her mechanic husband builds their new weapons, like the machine gun which replaces her severed left forearm. Which they'll need, because Sho's father is a yakuza.
A ninja yakuza.
Whose wife thinks he's too soft.
The story is absolutely ridiculous, of course. And sloppy - the movie flashes back after the opening action scene, but never reaches a point where that scene would logically fit. The motivations in revenge fantasies are seldom complicated, just by their nature, but even by those standards, Ami seems awfully sanguine about how much blood she spills, and she's not alone: Pretty much the entire cast winds up revenge-obsessed killers, none of them seeming to ever stop for a second and think, wait, this is not how civilized people handle their problems. The rationale for considering Ami the movie's heroine is basically "they started it".
The production values are also pretty cheap at times. There are basically no extras. CGI shurikens look like the most expensive effects used, and some of the practical effects are just as ridiculous. I think there's a scene where a character looks less bloody after getting an arterial spray in the face because it's just plain water with food coloring. The Machine Girl is clearly a spoof or pastiche of crappy exploitation films, but that's a dangerous game - it's an ugly thing when a filmmaker aims for sub-par and misses the mark.
Writer/director Noboru Iguchi seems to be one of the rare guys who can pull it off, though. He appears to be a guy who loves his schlock, and never shies from it. The guy who made "Sukeban Boy" is not going to wink at the audience and comment on how silly this all is; he's delivering blood and guts, not irony. It's way over the top - just how does someone puke up their intestines after being stabbed in the head? - but Iguchi almost always hits the sweet spot, where we're grossed out or titillated rather than actually disturbed. Iguchi also doesn't allow the fact that he's making an homage to trash cinema to be an excuse for laziness. There's always some bit of extra craziness going on in the corners, and he gets fairly serviceable performances (both in terms of action and action) from a cast that is not packed with big-name talent.
Minase Yashiro, for instance, is doing her first film. She's not exactly polished, but she brings what the character needs - cuteness and charm in the flashbacks, a spine of steel throughout - so that we buy into and cheer on this girl taking out yakuza she has no business touching. Asami's got a little more experience, albeit in softcore, and while it's a stretch to believe she's old enough to have a fifteen year-old son, she and Yashiro play well off each other; amid all the violence, they're getting something they need from each other. They both look like they can fight a little, too. Nobuhiro Nishimura does well making his bully a spoiled brat, and the actors playing his parents are a stitch - the father (sorry, no English credit) is both put-upon and monstrous, and the mother (Hiroko Yashiki, I think) is a great work of homicidal shrewishness.
The Machine Girl panders to a certain audience, no question about it - a Japanese schoolgirl with a machine gun for an arm wreaking bloody vengeance against yakuza ninjas is first order pandering. Iguchi has the knack for making it fun rather than cynical (although thinking back to "Sukeban Boy", I'm surprised he didn't figure out a way to get more T&A into the film), hitting the target a heck of a lot better than most people making deliberate trash do.
Also at HBS, along with one other review.
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