Full disclosure: I felt a little off yesterday. The late night after the I Spit on Your Grave Q&A, generally less-than-excellent fast food one eats when dedicated to seeing as much of a film festival as possible, et al, got to me, making it hard to work for money or for film, and perhaps fittingly for Fantasia, I was a bit of a zombie. A decent meal and switching from Pepsi to Pepsi Max had me in decent shape from 7pm or so, but I was pretty worn down for Crows Zero 2.
There were a pair of fairly entertaining Q&As later in the evening, as the directors of At World's End and The Revenant came to town. Tomas Villum Jensen's session was in some ways less question-and-answer than monologue, as he could hold forth on subjects and go on great digressions. For instance, much of At World's End was shot in Australia, so he had stories both of hiring stunt people and other behind-the-scenes folk who worked on Star Wars and The Matrix (so even though At World's End is a big project for Denmark...) and how it is not a good place to be if, like Jensen, you do not like non-domesticated animals.
Crows Zero 2 (Kurozu Zero II)
N/A (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
I was tired and full of food during this one, so I drifted in and out, which is a bummer, as it was the only screening of the only Takashi Miike film playing during the festival. The man is slowing down, huh?
What I saw was well-done, although I was already a bit behind in not having seen any of the other Crows stories; the Crows Zero series is evidently a prequel to the stories of these characters as adults, detailing their high-school years. Which, apparently, were more or less non-stop fighting, a constant contest between rival gangs/schools. Some threads in the movie seemed to clearly be more connective tissue than anything, picking up on plots from the first Crows Zero and perhaps setting up for the original Crows manga and film, where I presume these characters are yakuza of some sort.
So, on the one hand, a whole lot of tough-guy posturing, which isn't really my thing, but Miike and his talented young cast do very well by it. There's a lot of characters to keep track of, but they've got personalities rather than just quirks or fighting styles. And Miike handles the fight scenes with enormous skill, whether it's individuals or huge mobs.
For me, though, this mostly came across as a brawl film, though I'm certain it's actually more.
(Also - is one of the characters supposed to look like Michael Jackson, or is it just me?)
Ved Verdens Ende (At World's End)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
At World's End is a lot of things - comedy, action/adventure, fantasy - but underneath all that, there's an unlikely romance going on that keeps the movie grounded and basically upbeat, no matter how crazy on one hand and mean on the other it gets.
A bit of a surprise, maybe, considering that its description tells the audience about a flower in the middle of the jungle that may confer eternal life, according to its 129-year-old guardian. And it does work as an adventure movie, a Danish version of Romancing the Stone. The action is effective, the comedy is occasionally dark but almost always effective, and together they do a fine job of drawing the characters from one mad situation to another.
The cast is also really fantastic. Fans of short-lived TV series will probably be amused to see Niklaj Coster-Waldau playing another long-lived character (for the record, I always liked it when his accent came through a little on New Amsterdam). Niklaj Lie Kaas is a hilariously unlikely hero, playing Adrian as fussy and odd, but also a hilarious victim of circumstance. The real standout is Brigitte Hjort as Beate, the secretary who comes across as an unusually capable and likable ditz - she tromps through the jungle in a ridiculous dress, says overly-truthful and shallow things, but is also pointedly not stupid. She's a tremendous joy to watch, and with the accent-free English she displays at a few points, her native country is going to have a hard time holding on to her.
Full review at EFC.
The Revenant
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
The Revenant is nearly two hours, long for a splatter-comedy, and if I could come up with a good suggestion for trimming it, I would probably offer it. The trouble is, the scenes which could probably survive a little tightening-up - the ones that are mostly David Anders and Chris Wylde talking - actually have a really nice rhythm to them. If the movie was mostly that, it would be a real low-budget delight.
The trouble I found was that writer/director Kerry Prior seems to have had a bunch of ideas, and was determined to use them all, whether or not they drew the film out too long, gave it an uneven tone, or ultimately just didn't make sense. It also loses something as the number of characters contracts, and the violence becomes out-of-character slapstick. It doesn't quite feel like flailing around, but does feel like the movie was an aggregation of little bits that worked individually, and fit together from piece to piece, eventually wandering far from its main strengths.
Also worth noting: I may wind up not coming back to give this a full review, since I think it's bad form to do that with works in progress, and while the movie seemed pretty locked, Prior made the occasional comment in his Q&A about how certain cut scenes may wind up back in. I wonder if this might be part of negotiations with distributors.
Full review at EFC.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Fantasia Daily for 11 July 2010: Alien vs Ninja, Technotise: Edit & I, A Frozen Flower, I Spit on Your Grave (2010)
Yep, this is about where I hit the wall trying to (1) see a bunch of movies, (2) write reviews of them to earn my media pass, and (3) put time in at my job which pays me the money necessary to travel to Montreal, sublet an apartment, and grab food between movies. I apologize, and will try and catch up with an all-capsule rundown of Monday; I will, of course, try to catch up after the end of the festival.
The big deal on Sunday was the world premiere of I Spit on Your Grave, 2010 version, which proved to be eventful not only for it being a pretty good movie (I didn't see a bad one all day), but for the the Q&A, which started off with a fan of the original saying the new version was BS, which led to him getting yelled down by many audience members who had stayed for the Q&A, him getting agitated and responding, calls for security to escort him from the room. Kudos on Mitch Davis for waving them off, and Meir Zarchi (director of the original Day of the Woman and producer of the remake) respectfully disagreeing and defusing the situation with a hug.
As much as Fantasia's audience is (justifiably) famous for its enthusiasm, I have to say, the gang-up there wasn't really cool. Yes, it's a bit rude, but the man was passionate about his feelings about the two movies, and one seldom gets an opportunity to get a direct conversation about that. The folks who would later preference their comments with how rude the first person had been to great applause seemed a bit hypocritical to me, jeering one person for giving an honest and negative opinion, but applauding others.
(In a second bit of "irony, what's that?", one of the producers actually said, when asking people to tell their friends to support the movie's October 2010 release, that it's a chance to support something different when Hollywood keeps pumping out adaptations and remakes. I get that this is a risky project, but, uh...)
Alien vs Ninja
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
There are some projects that one would figure cause movie studio lawyers to start twitching as soon as they are announced, but it seems that they have been slow to smite lately. If Fox ever gets around to crushing the likes of Alien vs Ninja, I hope they go easy on the Sushi Typhoon guys. It's not like anything about the movie indicates access to much cash, and the last act, at least, is demented sentai fun, which is more than can be said of the last few official Alien (vs Predator) films.
The title's pretty self-explanatory: An Iga clan raiding party - Yamata (Masanori Mimoto), Jinnai (Shuuji Kashiwabara), and Nezumi (Donpei Tsuchihira) - are returning from a missing when they see a fire in the sky. They're sent to investigate it with another party - including what is apparently the only girl in the clan, Rin (Mika Hijii), and a bunch of guys who mostly aren't going to live long enough to merit names - and find the expected: There is a boy whose entire village has been slaughtered, and a drooling seven-foot armor-plated killing machine. Since Yamata isn't exactly the type to back down from a fight, it's on.
AvN, as they even call it in the opening titles, is an entry in a series of low-budget action/gore movies created in large part for the export market, but even by those standards, it initially looks kind of half-baked. The CGI often crosses the line from "best we could afford" to "mock me, please". The palace Yamata and company are leaving as the film opens appears to be located next to a modern paved road, despite the film taking place in an earlier era. And no matter how many times Nezumi comments about being a senior/veteran/old, it doesn't make me believe Donpei Tsuchihira is anything but a guy in his mid-twenties with an anachronistic blond dye job - couldn't they at least shell out for a real middle-aged guy? All too often, the movie looks like it's nothing more than cheap and unambitious.
Full review at EFC
Technotise: Edit & I (Technotise - Edit i ja)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010: Subversive Serbia)
Early on in Technotise: Edit & I, the Edit of the title offhandedly mentions that one of her pet robots is named "Otomo", a reference that is apt for all that it is obvious: Like the famed Japanese director, Aleksa Gajic has adapted his own science fiction comic series into an animated film, and done so in a way that not only avoids Otomo's worse excesses, but also brings to mind another recent animator out of Japan, Makoto Shinkai, in that he has made a movie that belies its very small crew.
The year is 2074, the place is Belgrade, and student Edit (voice of Sanda Knezevic) is making another stab at passing her final exam in psychology. Though she's not qualified to practice, a research firm takes her on as an intern to baby-sit Abel (voice of Igor Bugarski), a mathematical savant who has been autistic ever since making a breakthrough about the nature of the universe. Things soon get very strange, though - just looking at Abel's work has an unexpectedly strong effect on her, and when she has a black-market chip implanted in her nervous system to help with memory retention, she has strange side effects - hallucinations, erratic behavior, and anemia that leads her to take an unusually high amount of iron supplements. By the time she starts to figure out what's going on with her, the company's head of security, Sergey (voice of Srdjan Miletic) is after her, and her group of friends - mainly boyfriend Bojan (voice of Nikola Djuricko) and best friend Broni (voice of Marija Karan) - may not be up to the challenge of facing down an international biotech company.
Gajic is Serbian, and the bulk of his work has been with French publishers (though the original Technotise story was first published in Serbia), and Technotise: Edit & I absolutely feels like a European sci-fi graphic album come to life: Plenty of detail but also a style that values cartooning over life-like visual realism, grand-scale concepts and action, and a good dollop of sex and comedy in even the most bloody or serious tales. The film lacks a bit of the sometimes quite crowded visual detail found in many bandes dessinées, but the look and tone is right on.
Full review at EFC
Ssang-hwa-jeom (A Frozen Flower)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
How things change; before King and the Clown, I don't think you ever saw gay characters in Korean cinema, and the casting of Thirst wound up being controversial and leading to relative unknown Kim Ok-bin landing the female lead because more established actresses wouldn't get near the nudity and sex the part demanded. Both of those seem to be relative non-issues for A Frozen Flower, which puts a Goryeo king and one of his guards in the same bed with no doubt what's going on, and has a few eyebrow-raising scenes involving the queen, as well.
It's a pretty good movie, sexy and suspenseful, beautifully realized. My only real issue with it was that it may have been a little too funny at times: The scenes where Hong Lim (Jo In-seong) is trying to impregnate the Queen (Song Ji-hyo) while the King (Ju Jin-mo) is in the next room, with literally paper-thin walls between them, got a lot of laughs, and I'm not quite sure how appropriate a response that was. It could have been played as uncomforable-tense, as opposed to uncomfortable-funny.
One thing that I would like to praise that may get overlooked amidst the sex and the intrique is how great the action in this movie is. Director Yu Ha only has two or three big action moments, but they are explosive - the first from how unexpected it is, and the one at the end for the sheer fury demonstrated, and how each swing of the sword and bit of destruction seems to have meaning. It's an exclamation point on the story, and a fitting one.
Full review at EFC.
I Spit on Your Grave
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
I can't comment on the original version of this movie (Day of the Woman), as I haven't seen it, but if this new version is toned down, as many horror remakes tend to be, I really don't want to see the original. This one is rough and brutal, to the point where Anchor Bay feels that it can't be cut down to an R rating for its planned October theatrical release, and they're probably right about that.
About half of the movie is quite excellenly made, if unpleasant. After some time setting the stage that takes a while to get going, the rape scene is absolutely horrific, as it should be. It's not fun to watch, but it feels right; the sort of monsters who could do this sort of things are probably just like what we see. The cast, as a whole, is excellent.
And then the last act... Well, it's just four or five brutal murders in a row, and while they're well-executed and satisfying on a certain level, I do think that this section could be improved. Sarah Butler is very good as the avenging victim, but especially in the last two instances, especially, the movie becomes a bit of a grotesque cartoon. The most truly unnerving scenes in this section are the ones where Butler's Jenny visits the innocent family of one of her rapists; it's the one that gets us to wonder just what's left of her mind and what she's capable of.
Full review at EFC.
The big deal on Sunday was the world premiere of I Spit on Your Grave, 2010 version, which proved to be eventful not only for it being a pretty good movie (I didn't see a bad one all day), but for the the Q&A, which started off with a fan of the original saying the new version was BS, which led to him getting yelled down by many audience members who had stayed for the Q&A, him getting agitated and responding, calls for security to escort him from the room. Kudos on Mitch Davis for waving them off, and Meir Zarchi (director of the original Day of the Woman and producer of the remake) respectfully disagreeing and defusing the situation with a hug.
As much as Fantasia's audience is (justifiably) famous for its enthusiasm, I have to say, the gang-up there wasn't really cool. Yes, it's a bit rude, but the man was passionate about his feelings about the two movies, and one seldom gets an opportunity to get a direct conversation about that. The folks who would later preference their comments with how rude the first person had been to great applause seemed a bit hypocritical to me, jeering one person for giving an honest and negative opinion, but applauding others.
(In a second bit of "irony, what's that?", one of the producers actually said, when asking people to tell their friends to support the movie's October 2010 release, that it's a chance to support something different when Hollywood keeps pumping out adaptations and remakes. I get that this is a risky project, but, uh...)
Alien vs Ninja
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
There are some projects that one would figure cause movie studio lawyers to start twitching as soon as they are announced, but it seems that they have been slow to smite lately. If Fox ever gets around to crushing the likes of Alien vs Ninja, I hope they go easy on the Sushi Typhoon guys. It's not like anything about the movie indicates access to much cash, and the last act, at least, is demented sentai fun, which is more than can be said of the last few official Alien (vs Predator) films.
The title's pretty self-explanatory: An Iga clan raiding party - Yamata (Masanori Mimoto), Jinnai (Shuuji Kashiwabara), and Nezumi (Donpei Tsuchihira) - are returning from a missing when they see a fire in the sky. They're sent to investigate it with another party - including what is apparently the only girl in the clan, Rin (Mika Hijii), and a bunch of guys who mostly aren't going to live long enough to merit names - and find the expected: There is a boy whose entire village has been slaughtered, and a drooling seven-foot armor-plated killing machine. Since Yamata isn't exactly the type to back down from a fight, it's on.
AvN, as they even call it in the opening titles, is an entry in a series of low-budget action/gore movies created in large part for the export market, but even by those standards, it initially looks kind of half-baked. The CGI often crosses the line from "best we could afford" to "mock me, please". The palace Yamata and company are leaving as the film opens appears to be located next to a modern paved road, despite the film taking place in an earlier era. And no matter how many times Nezumi comments about being a senior/veteran/old, it doesn't make me believe Donpei Tsuchihira is anything but a guy in his mid-twenties with an anachronistic blond dye job - couldn't they at least shell out for a real middle-aged guy? All too often, the movie looks like it's nothing more than cheap and unambitious.
Full review at EFC
Technotise: Edit & I (Technotise - Edit i ja)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010: Subversive Serbia)
Early on in Technotise: Edit & I, the Edit of the title offhandedly mentions that one of her pet robots is named "Otomo", a reference that is apt for all that it is obvious: Like the famed Japanese director, Aleksa Gajic has adapted his own science fiction comic series into an animated film, and done so in a way that not only avoids Otomo's worse excesses, but also brings to mind another recent animator out of Japan, Makoto Shinkai, in that he has made a movie that belies its very small crew.
The year is 2074, the place is Belgrade, and student Edit (voice of Sanda Knezevic) is making another stab at passing her final exam in psychology. Though she's not qualified to practice, a research firm takes her on as an intern to baby-sit Abel (voice of Igor Bugarski), a mathematical savant who has been autistic ever since making a breakthrough about the nature of the universe. Things soon get very strange, though - just looking at Abel's work has an unexpectedly strong effect on her, and when she has a black-market chip implanted in her nervous system to help with memory retention, she has strange side effects - hallucinations, erratic behavior, and anemia that leads her to take an unusually high amount of iron supplements. By the time she starts to figure out what's going on with her, the company's head of security, Sergey (voice of Srdjan Miletic) is after her, and her group of friends - mainly boyfriend Bojan (voice of Nikola Djuricko) and best friend Broni (voice of Marija Karan) - may not be up to the challenge of facing down an international biotech company.
Gajic is Serbian, and the bulk of his work has been with French publishers (though the original Technotise story was first published in Serbia), and Technotise: Edit & I absolutely feels like a European sci-fi graphic album come to life: Plenty of detail but also a style that values cartooning over life-like visual realism, grand-scale concepts and action, and a good dollop of sex and comedy in even the most bloody or serious tales. The film lacks a bit of the sometimes quite crowded visual detail found in many bandes dessinées, but the look and tone is right on.
Full review at EFC
Ssang-hwa-jeom (A Frozen Flower)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
How things change; before King and the Clown, I don't think you ever saw gay characters in Korean cinema, and the casting of Thirst wound up being controversial and leading to relative unknown Kim Ok-bin landing the female lead because more established actresses wouldn't get near the nudity and sex the part demanded. Both of those seem to be relative non-issues for A Frozen Flower, which puts a Goryeo king and one of his guards in the same bed with no doubt what's going on, and has a few eyebrow-raising scenes involving the queen, as well.
It's a pretty good movie, sexy and suspenseful, beautifully realized. My only real issue with it was that it may have been a little too funny at times: The scenes where Hong Lim (Jo In-seong) is trying to impregnate the Queen (Song Ji-hyo) while the King (Ju Jin-mo) is in the next room, with literally paper-thin walls between them, got a lot of laughs, and I'm not quite sure how appropriate a response that was. It could have been played as uncomforable-tense, as opposed to uncomfortable-funny.
One thing that I would like to praise that may get overlooked amidst the sex and the intrique is how great the action in this movie is. Director Yu Ha only has two or three big action moments, but they are explosive - the first from how unexpected it is, and the one at the end for the sheer fury demonstrated, and how each swing of the sword and bit of destruction seems to have meaning. It's an exclamation point on the story, and a fitting one.
Full review at EFC.
I Spit on Your Grave
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
I can't comment on the original version of this movie (Day of the Woman), as I haven't seen it, but if this new version is toned down, as many horror remakes tend to be, I really don't want to see the original. This one is rough and brutal, to the point where Anchor Bay feels that it can't be cut down to an R rating for its planned October theatrical release, and they're probably right about that.
About half of the movie is quite excellenly made, if unpleasant. After some time setting the stage that takes a while to get going, the rape scene is absolutely horrific, as it should be. It's not fun to watch, but it feels right; the sort of monsters who could do this sort of things are probably just like what we see. The cast, as a whole, is excellent.
And then the last act... Well, it's just four or five brutal murders in a row, and while they're well-executed and satisfying on a certain level, I do think that this section could be improved. Sarah Butler is very good as the avenging victim, but especially in the last two instances, especially, the movie becomes a bit of a grotesque cartoon. The most truly unnerving scenes in this section are the ones where Butler's Jenny visits the innocent family of one of her rapists; it's the one that gets us to wonder just what's left of her mind and what she's capable of.
Full review at EFC.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Fantasia Daily for 10 July 2010: Mandrill, First Squad, Evil 2, Gallants, The Message, Mutant GirlsSquad
Top three things I forgot to bring with me to Montreal despite knowing that I was going to need them:
3. Shampoo
2. Business cards
1. More than one change of underpants.
... So, as you can imagine, Saturday morning was spent figuring out where the nearest Target-like store was and attending to #3 and #1. I actually tried looking at places in "The Underground City" between Peel and Guy, but I would have spent way too much finding enough to get me very far into a three-week vacation where I don't have much time for laundry. The Zeller's at Atwater it was.
After that, it was off to a full day of movies. I was hoping to run into a cool publicist from Anchor Bay Canada at First Squad; we met at the Thirst screening last year and she sent me an email saying she'd be around but maybe not at the start of the movie. I didn't see her after, which at least prevented a bit of awkwardness, as I wasn't that impressed. (I also was trying to make good time to Evil: In The Time of Heroes. Hopefully we'll meet up before I Spit On Your Grave tonight.
Some cool guests later in the evening, and since I'm running late, I'll just let the pictures tell the story:
Translator, Bruce Leung, and Clement Cheng before Gallants
Programmer King-Wei Chu presents Bruce Leung with a kung fu star award following Gallants
Director Yoshihiro Nishimura and producer Yoshinori Chiba before Mutant Girls Squad
Nishimura and a NYAFF programmer whose name I didn't catch after Mutant Girls Squad
Chiba rejoins the Q&A dressed as a ninja and swipes Nishimura's loincloth
So, we made a nice full circle where underwear is concerned tonight, which, let me tell you, is the sort of film festival coverage you just can not plan!
Mandrill
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
It is, perhaps, possible to tell just how well-done a parody is by how long it's able to convince you that it's the real thing. Mandrill presents an exceptionally straight face, to the extent that it can come across as simply adopting a style even after it's done some pretty crazy things, and not just because the action is for real.
Mandrill (Marko Zaror) is the number one hitman in Chile, although he seems to limit his targets to gangsters. He has finally landed his dream target, having been asked to eliminate the man who murdered his parents when he was a boy - "The Cyclops" - but the only person who knows where the man is located is his daughter Dominique (Celine Reymond). So it's time to break out the seduction playbook, although Dominique may prove to be a tough nut to crack, even without considering the bodyguards.
The "thanks" section of the credits makes it clear that James Bond was a major influence on Mandrill; not only is Ian Fleming listed, but so are all six actors to play the character in the United Artists/Eon film series. The tone of the film is certainly early Bond, with Zaror giving off the same sort of vibe as Connery, a tough guy stuffed into a good suit, but brimming with enough self-confidence to make him mostly irresistible to the ladies, and able to shrug off the dangerous madness of his life. Writer/director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza locates the line between loving homage and out outright parody and hugs it, occasionally making a quick hop to the other side just long enough for the audience to see him over there but brief enough for it to play as black comedy rather than spoofery.
Full review at EFC
Fâsuto sukuwaddo (First Squad: The Moment of Truth)
* * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
First Squad seems like it would be a great idea: A secret occult battlefield between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, cleverly working in real historical details, told via animation done by one of the world's best production houses, Studio 4°C. Unfortunately, it seems as though nearly every time the writers had to make a decision about how to tell the story, they made the wrong one.
They at least picked a good story to start with - the German Ahnenerbe (an occult branch of the SS) intends to resurrect Baron Von Wolff (voice of Sergei Aisman) who attempted to conquer Russia in the 13th century, only to perish when the battle was fought on a frozen lake, which swallowed his army whole. To counter this army of ghosts, General Below of the 6th Division has Nadaya Ruslanova (voice of Elena Chebaturkina), a teenage psychic who has, unfortunately, lost her memory - and most of the rest of First Squad, so she must train to retrieve them from the other side.
There's the basis for a pretty good movie here, and Studio 4°C certainly holds up their end of the bargain; the animation is gorgeous. Nobody else outside of Disney does such a good job of augmenting cel-based visuals with CGI (they do some great POV camera shots, a killer with traditional animation), and they really hit the sweet spot between historical accuracy, somewhat exaggerated character design, and imaginative visuals. Director Yoshiharu Ashino and his team in Japan do just about all that can be asked of them.
Full review at EFC
To kako - Stin epohi ton iroon (Evil - In the Time of Heroes)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
There is, I suppose, the possibility that Evil - In the Time of Heroes makes a certain amount of sense if you have seen the first film (the Evil from Greece in 2006). I have my doubts, but I suppose I must be open to the possibility. It's not that In the Time of Heroes needs a great deal of background - fast zombie outbreaks are fast zombie outbreaks - but it would be nice to know if the characters really should be taking some of what we see for granted.
The basics are simple - a few days ago, there was a zombie outbreak of some sort in Athens, and a group of four people survived the first movie together: Family man Meletis (Meletis Georgiadis), his friend Marina (Pepi Moschovakou), young Jenny (Mary Tsoni), and soldier Lt. Vakirtzis (Andreas Kontopoulos). They lost at least one of their group, Argyris (Argiris Thanasoulas) on the way. They meet up with some new folks - Olga (Eftyhia Yakoumi), a Major in the army, Vicky (Ioanna Pappa), who had been stuck at the top of a Ferris Wheel during the initial outbreak, and Johnny (Thanos Tokakis), who helps them deal with a sniper that had them pinned down and brings them to a house where they can hide out. Jenny has been shot, though, so they need to find some medical supplies. Among the things that they don't know is that this has happened before, in the time of the great Greek city-states, and a strange messenger (Billy Zane) is coming with something for the reincarnation of the hero who drove the plague back the first time.
In the Time of Heroes is a strange mashup of tones; it jumps back in forth in time between the present and ancient times, and throws a lot of comedy into the both sections. Not just comic relief, either; there are times when it seems like the film intends to be a comedy first. Writer/director Yorgos Noussias is sometimes very haphazard in connecting the jokes with the tragic moments, to the point where the audience can find themselves scratching their heads, wondering just what sort of movie Noussias was trying to make. The characters also have an odd sort of ambivalence to the superhuman elements that show up.
Full review at EFC
Da Lui Toi (Gallants)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
According to the director, Gallants took about ten years to get financing, so one has to wonder - if it had been made then, would it have been giving late-career tributes to different old-school actors, or would Bruce Leung, Chen Kuan-tai, and Teddy Robin have just been playing slightly younger characters? It's a what-if we don't have to ponder, since they're the ones front and center in this movie, and it's lucky to have them.
We start, however, with Wong You-nam as a loser named Cheung. A screw-up at the real estate company he works for, he's been sent to a small village to help buy out tenants for a condo development. Naturally, this means working for Mang (Jin Auyeung), who still hates him from grade school. One of the tenants is a tea shop that used to be a martial arts club, still being run by two of its old students. Tiger ("Bruce" Leung Siu-lung) and Dragon (Chen Kuan-tai) are nearly sixty, but they keep faith with their old teacher, Master Law (Teddy Robin Kwan), who has been in a coma for thirty years after suffering an aneurysm during an epic duel. Cheung finds himself throwing in with the underdogs when Mang's attempts to have goons steal Law's favorable lease results in the master waking and thinking Cheung is both of his pupils - though Kwai (Jia Xiao-chen), the pretty girl helping out around the shop, is another incentive.
Gallants is the sort of comedy that jumps from bit to bit in the best possible way; directors Clement Cheng Sze-Kit and Derek Kwok Chi-kin (along with writer Frankie Tam) have a real knack for setting up funny situations, milking some good gags from them, and discretely casting them aside when they threaten to get too serious or worn-out. For instance, it's great to have a martial-arts tournament to inspire wacky training montages, but does anyone really want to see Cheung, Tiger, or Dragon suffer the inevitable humiliating beatdown that goes with it? Not really, so the script goes elsewhere, in a direction that's maybe not a laugh riot either, but has some earned sentiment that's not trite.
Full review at EFC
Feng Sheng (The Message)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
I can't really give The Message much of a review; as happened last night, I sort of hit the wall around 10pm and had I'm-awake-did-I-miss-anything moments all through the film. It's a gorgeous-looking piece, although it's the type of period film that maybe relies a little much on the effects to pretty things up. And a lot of times I think I would find myself really into a movie like this; the story is a World War II espionage thriller structured like a cozy mystery, all things I like.
But few cozy mysteries have this much torture. Not drawing things out to keep the audience on edge, literal "I will extract this information from you using all the methods of inflicting pain I can" torture. And that's a pretty unpleasant way to spend a couple of hours. It ennobles the heroes, sure, letting the audience see how they suffered, but it's not a lot of fun to watch.
Sentô shôjo: Chi no tekkamen densetsu (Mutant Girls Squad)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
So, aside from the insanity that surrounded the screening - see above - how is Mutant Girls Squad? Pretty good. That is, "pretty good" in terms of being a Sushi Typhoon sort of movie; it's cheap, tacky, ten different kinds of dumb, and its English credits give one the sinking feeling that it's the sort of movie manufactured almost entirely for export to the West (I think that's actually a huge part of Sushi Typhoon's business model), but it's one where the pure fun of it overrides how dumb it can be. Yes, Tak Sakaguchi, Noboru Iguchi, and Yoshihiro Nishimura are making this to sell to North Americans who love crazy Japanese movies, but it's not cynical on their part; they genuinely love this stuff.
And, while it's not exactly polished, it's fairly well-made. Yumi Sugimoto is a likable lead and a capable enough star, Sakaguchi does some good work choreographing the action, and Nishimura's monster and gore designs are creative and bizarre. I suspect that at least half of the Sushi Typhoon movies will be crud, but this is one of the good ones.
Full review at EFC.
3. Shampoo
2. Business cards
1. More than one change of underpants.
... So, as you can imagine, Saturday morning was spent figuring out where the nearest Target-like store was and attending to #3 and #1. I actually tried looking at places in "The Underground City" between Peel and Guy, but I would have spent way too much finding enough to get me very far into a three-week vacation where I don't have much time for laundry. The Zeller's at Atwater it was.
After that, it was off to a full day of movies. I was hoping to run into a cool publicist from Anchor Bay Canada at First Squad; we met at the Thirst screening last year and she sent me an email saying she'd be around but maybe not at the start of the movie. I didn't see her after, which at least prevented a bit of awkwardness, as I wasn't that impressed. (I also was trying to make good time to Evil: In The Time of Heroes. Hopefully we'll meet up before I Spit On Your Grave tonight.
Some cool guests later in the evening, and since I'm running late, I'll just let the pictures tell the story:
Translator, Bruce Leung, and Clement Cheng before Gallants
Programmer King-Wei Chu presents Bruce Leung with a kung fu star award following Gallants
Director Yoshihiro Nishimura and producer Yoshinori Chiba before Mutant Girls Squad
Nishimura and a NYAFF programmer whose name I didn't catch after Mutant Girls Squad
Chiba rejoins the Q&A dressed as a ninja and swipes Nishimura's loincloth
So, we made a nice full circle where underwear is concerned tonight, which, let me tell you, is the sort of film festival coverage you just can not plan!
Mandrill
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
It is, perhaps, possible to tell just how well-done a parody is by how long it's able to convince you that it's the real thing. Mandrill presents an exceptionally straight face, to the extent that it can come across as simply adopting a style even after it's done some pretty crazy things, and not just because the action is for real.
Mandrill (Marko Zaror) is the number one hitman in Chile, although he seems to limit his targets to gangsters. He has finally landed his dream target, having been asked to eliminate the man who murdered his parents when he was a boy - "The Cyclops" - but the only person who knows where the man is located is his daughter Dominique (Celine Reymond). So it's time to break out the seduction playbook, although Dominique may prove to be a tough nut to crack, even without considering the bodyguards.
The "thanks" section of the credits makes it clear that James Bond was a major influence on Mandrill; not only is Ian Fleming listed, but so are all six actors to play the character in the United Artists/Eon film series. The tone of the film is certainly early Bond, with Zaror giving off the same sort of vibe as Connery, a tough guy stuffed into a good suit, but brimming with enough self-confidence to make him mostly irresistible to the ladies, and able to shrug off the dangerous madness of his life. Writer/director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza locates the line between loving homage and out outright parody and hugs it, occasionally making a quick hop to the other side just long enough for the audience to see him over there but brief enough for it to play as black comedy rather than spoofery.
Full review at EFC
Fâsuto sukuwaddo (First Squad: The Moment of Truth)
* * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
First Squad seems like it would be a great idea: A secret occult battlefield between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, cleverly working in real historical details, told via animation done by one of the world's best production houses, Studio 4°C. Unfortunately, it seems as though nearly every time the writers had to make a decision about how to tell the story, they made the wrong one.
They at least picked a good story to start with - the German Ahnenerbe (an occult branch of the SS) intends to resurrect Baron Von Wolff (voice of Sergei Aisman) who attempted to conquer Russia in the 13th century, only to perish when the battle was fought on a frozen lake, which swallowed his army whole. To counter this army of ghosts, General Below of the 6th Division has Nadaya Ruslanova (voice of Elena Chebaturkina), a teenage psychic who has, unfortunately, lost her memory - and most of the rest of First Squad, so she must train to retrieve them from the other side.
There's the basis for a pretty good movie here, and Studio 4°C certainly holds up their end of the bargain; the animation is gorgeous. Nobody else outside of Disney does such a good job of augmenting cel-based visuals with CGI (they do some great POV camera shots, a killer with traditional animation), and they really hit the sweet spot between historical accuracy, somewhat exaggerated character design, and imaginative visuals. Director Yoshiharu Ashino and his team in Japan do just about all that can be asked of them.
Full review at EFC
To kako - Stin epohi ton iroon (Evil - In the Time of Heroes)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
There is, I suppose, the possibility that Evil - In the Time of Heroes makes a certain amount of sense if you have seen the first film (the Evil from Greece in 2006). I have my doubts, but I suppose I must be open to the possibility. It's not that In the Time of Heroes needs a great deal of background - fast zombie outbreaks are fast zombie outbreaks - but it would be nice to know if the characters really should be taking some of what we see for granted.
The basics are simple - a few days ago, there was a zombie outbreak of some sort in Athens, and a group of four people survived the first movie together: Family man Meletis (Meletis Georgiadis), his friend Marina (Pepi Moschovakou), young Jenny (Mary Tsoni), and soldier Lt. Vakirtzis (Andreas Kontopoulos). They lost at least one of their group, Argyris (Argiris Thanasoulas) on the way. They meet up with some new folks - Olga (Eftyhia Yakoumi), a Major in the army, Vicky (Ioanna Pappa), who had been stuck at the top of a Ferris Wheel during the initial outbreak, and Johnny (Thanos Tokakis), who helps them deal with a sniper that had them pinned down and brings them to a house where they can hide out. Jenny has been shot, though, so they need to find some medical supplies. Among the things that they don't know is that this has happened before, in the time of the great Greek city-states, and a strange messenger (Billy Zane) is coming with something for the reincarnation of the hero who drove the plague back the first time.
In the Time of Heroes is a strange mashup of tones; it jumps back in forth in time between the present and ancient times, and throws a lot of comedy into the both sections. Not just comic relief, either; there are times when it seems like the film intends to be a comedy first. Writer/director Yorgos Noussias is sometimes very haphazard in connecting the jokes with the tragic moments, to the point where the audience can find themselves scratching their heads, wondering just what sort of movie Noussias was trying to make. The characters also have an odd sort of ambivalence to the superhuman elements that show up.
Full review at EFC
Da Lui Toi (Gallants)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
According to the director, Gallants took about ten years to get financing, so one has to wonder - if it had been made then, would it have been giving late-career tributes to different old-school actors, or would Bruce Leung, Chen Kuan-tai, and Teddy Robin have just been playing slightly younger characters? It's a what-if we don't have to ponder, since they're the ones front and center in this movie, and it's lucky to have them.
We start, however, with Wong You-nam as a loser named Cheung. A screw-up at the real estate company he works for, he's been sent to a small village to help buy out tenants for a condo development. Naturally, this means working for Mang (Jin Auyeung), who still hates him from grade school. One of the tenants is a tea shop that used to be a martial arts club, still being run by two of its old students. Tiger ("Bruce" Leung Siu-lung) and Dragon (Chen Kuan-tai) are nearly sixty, but they keep faith with their old teacher, Master Law (Teddy Robin Kwan), who has been in a coma for thirty years after suffering an aneurysm during an epic duel. Cheung finds himself throwing in with the underdogs when Mang's attempts to have goons steal Law's favorable lease results in the master waking and thinking Cheung is both of his pupils - though Kwai (Jia Xiao-chen), the pretty girl helping out around the shop, is another incentive.
Gallants is the sort of comedy that jumps from bit to bit in the best possible way; directors Clement Cheng Sze-Kit and Derek Kwok Chi-kin (along with writer Frankie Tam) have a real knack for setting up funny situations, milking some good gags from them, and discretely casting them aside when they threaten to get too serious or worn-out. For instance, it's great to have a martial-arts tournament to inspire wacky training montages, but does anyone really want to see Cheung, Tiger, or Dragon suffer the inevitable humiliating beatdown that goes with it? Not really, so the script goes elsewhere, in a direction that's maybe not a laugh riot either, but has some earned sentiment that's not trite.
Full review at EFC
Feng Sheng (The Message)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
I can't really give The Message much of a review; as happened last night, I sort of hit the wall around 10pm and had I'm-awake-did-I-miss-anything moments all through the film. It's a gorgeous-looking piece, although it's the type of period film that maybe relies a little much on the effects to pretty things up. And a lot of times I think I would find myself really into a movie like this; the story is a World War II espionage thriller structured like a cozy mystery, all things I like.
But few cozy mysteries have this much torture. Not drawing things out to keep the audience on edge, literal "I will extract this information from you using all the methods of inflicting pain I can" torture. And that's a pretty unpleasant way to spend a couple of hours. It ennobles the heroes, sure, letting the audience see how they suffered, but it's not a lot of fun to watch.
Sentô shôjo: Chi no tekkamen densetsu (Mutant Girls Squad)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
So, aside from the insanity that surrounded the screening - see above - how is Mutant Girls Squad? Pretty good. That is, "pretty good" in terms of being a Sushi Typhoon sort of movie; it's cheap, tacky, ten different kinds of dumb, and its English credits give one the sinking feeling that it's the sort of movie manufactured almost entirely for export to the West (I think that's actually a huge part of Sushi Typhoon's business model), but it's one where the pure fun of it overrides how dumb it can be. Yes, Tak Sakaguchi, Noboru Iguchi, and Yoshihiro Nishimura are making this to sell to North Americans who love crazy Japanese movies, but it's not cynical on their part; they genuinely love this stuff.
And, while it's not exactly polished, it's fairly well-made. Yumi Sugimoto is a likable lead and a capable enough star, Sakaguchi does some good work choreographing the action, and Nishimura's monster and gore designs are creative and bizarre. I suspect that at least half of the Sushi Typhoon movies will be crud, but this is one of the good ones.
Full review at EFC.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Fantasia Daily for 9 July 2010: Phobia 2, Secret Reunion, The Clash, Rubber
Ah, working from the road! At least the new offices in Montreal are nearby and nice; I actually got there early because I wasn't quite sure how far it was. Then I spent the whole day dealing with an unexpected side effect of the code that seemed so clever last week. At least I know what the problem was.
Then it was back down the road for a pretty good run of movies, hanging out with a few cool Canadian internet film writers, and my first film of the festival that had a star in attendance, the surprise darling of Cannes, "Robert" from Rubber:
Sadly, what both the host and the guest had to say was en français, and my understanding of the language isn't even what it was in high school. It sounds like Robert has a bit of an ego, though maybe he's earned it, as his first film was hilarious.
Haa Phrang (Phobia 2)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
The first Phobia (called "4bia" in festival programs) was a sort of sampler, offering up four short horror stories from four different directors, also tending toward different types of horror. The follow-up anthology brings the number of stories and directors up to five, and while the variety isn't quite what it was in the previous one, this group of Thai filmmakers still finds ways to make the audience jump.
In the first short, "Novice", Paween Purijitpanya gives us Pey, a surly teenager who has just been deposited in a remote Buddhist temple by his mother after a tragic accident. It's the start of the ritual of the hungry ghosts, and woe befalls the poor kid who disturbs the food left out for the spirits. Purijitpanya takes a basic horror story and executes it near-perfectly. The effects guys come up with a good monster, and the filmmakers hold it back enough to make its appearances jump-worthy while still cranking up the tension between. It builds to the ending it must have, but a good one.
In one of the more direct connections between shorts, Visute Poolvoralaks's "Ward" focuses on the kid Pey was with, Tee Arthit, who winds up in the hospital with casts on both his legs. Supposedly, his hospital room is effectively private, with an empty bed to one side and a brain-dead patient on the other - but the brain-dead patient has visitors, and when they leave, seems much more active than he should be. "Ward" is a pretty straightforward series of jump moments, set up and knocked down.
Full review at EFC
Uigyeongje (Secret Reunion)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
Secret Reunion starts out like a spy movie, the sort they don't set in the present day anymore because the Cold War has ended everywhere but Korea and Cuba (although from the recent news about a busted Russian spy ring in New York, you wouldn't know it). It evolves strangely, though, becoming a sort of unique take on the buddy picture, much like Jang Hun's debut, Rough Cut, looking conventional but much more clever.
At the turn of the millennium, a group of three North Korean agents led by the brutal "Shadow" (Jeon Gook-hwan) made an assassination attempt on a defected cousin of Kim Jong-il. The South Korean National Intelligence Service had turned one, Son Tae-soon (Yun Hee-seok), so Agent Lee Han-kyu (Song Kang-ho) and his team are able to get to the scene. It's a bloodbath, and Han-kyu is fired in the wake of the debacle. The other spy, Song Ji-woon (Kang Dong-won) is disavowed, cut off from his pregnant wife in the north. Six years pass, and Han-kyu is now working as a sort of very low-rent private detective, retrieving foreign-born brides who walk out on their husbands. Relying on his pair of idiot assistants gets him poised for a beating on a construction site, when the fight is broken up by the foreman - Ji-woon, living incognito under the the name Park Ki-joon. The recognize each other immediately, though don't show it, and soon Han-kyu has recruited Ji-woon to work for him. Each thinks the other's low circumstances is a cover, and that learning what is really going on will get them rewarded by their old masters.
The opening sequence of Secret Reunion is as good as this sort of spy movie stuff gets, fusing slick tradecraft with over-the-top action in a way that manages to evoke both the realistic and fantasy modes of spy cinema, set Shadow up as a villain to be reckoned with, and establishes Ji-woon as a decent man without painting him as disloyal. Jang is so assured in this tense, violent territory that it's a bit of a surprise when the movie goes in a different direction.
Full review at EFC
Bay Rong (The Clash)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
It's probably unfair to compare this to The Rebel, the previous action movie to co-star Johnny Nguyen and Tranh Van Ngo, but it's inevitable - the two leads are back, and Nguyen once again writes and produces. This looks to be made on a much smaller budget, and is contemporary as opposed to being a period piece. Unfortunately, it just isn't at the same level; the action scenes are fewer and farther between, and the melodramatic story doesn't quite work.
Still, when the action scenes come, they are great fun to watch. Nguyen is a top-notch screen fighter, and Ngo isn't so bad herself, and their high-leverage style of mixed martial arts is shot in a way that there's no doubt that the actors and stuntmen are taking hits and doing some incredibly athletic action. Nguyen has come up with a good basic story, but aside from the action, there are precious few moments when the movie is really fun to watch; it could use a little more levity or character types beyond grim hardcases.
Full review at EFC.
Rubber
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010: Camera Lucida)
Ah, curse the need to spend a little bit of time this morning seeing to certain essentials, as it leaves me without the time to write a full review of Rubber, the early leader in the contest for the most deranged, bizarre - and funny movie of the festival. The concept is screwy enough - a discarded tire comes to life, starts rolling, and kills whatever comes into its path with the power of its mind. On top of that, though, writer/director Quentin Dupieux presents it in a way that smashes at the fourth wall, presenting it as not quite a film-within-a-film, but having an audience all the same, one which interacts with the story in strange ways.
And yet, it all works. The crazy digressions, the deadpan comedy, the constant pointing out that this actually doesn't make a lick of sense. It's got a winning cast that all hit just the right note, and special effects that are handmade but not obviously cheesy. It may at times be a hard, weird movie to describe, but it's also a perfect midnight movie experience.
Full review at EFC.
Then it was back down the road for a pretty good run of movies, hanging out with a few cool Canadian internet film writers, and my first film of the festival that had a star in attendance, the surprise darling of Cannes, "Robert" from Rubber:
Sadly, what both the host and the guest had to say was en français, and my understanding of the language isn't even what it was in high school. It sounds like Robert has a bit of an ego, though maybe he's earned it, as his first film was hilarious.
Haa Phrang (Phobia 2)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
The first Phobia (called "4bia" in festival programs) was a sort of sampler, offering up four short horror stories from four different directors, also tending toward different types of horror. The follow-up anthology brings the number of stories and directors up to five, and while the variety isn't quite what it was in the previous one, this group of Thai filmmakers still finds ways to make the audience jump.
In the first short, "Novice", Paween Purijitpanya gives us Pey, a surly teenager who has just been deposited in a remote Buddhist temple by his mother after a tragic accident. It's the start of the ritual of the hungry ghosts, and woe befalls the poor kid who disturbs the food left out for the spirits. Purijitpanya takes a basic horror story and executes it near-perfectly. The effects guys come up with a good monster, and the filmmakers hold it back enough to make its appearances jump-worthy while still cranking up the tension between. It builds to the ending it must have, but a good one.
In one of the more direct connections between shorts, Visute Poolvoralaks's "Ward" focuses on the kid Pey was with, Tee Arthit, who winds up in the hospital with casts on both his legs. Supposedly, his hospital room is effectively private, with an empty bed to one side and a brain-dead patient on the other - but the brain-dead patient has visitors, and when they leave, seems much more active than he should be. "Ward" is a pretty straightforward series of jump moments, set up and knocked down.
Full review at EFC
Uigyeongje (Secret Reunion)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2010 in Theatre Hall (Fantasia 2010)
Secret Reunion starts out like a spy movie, the sort they don't set in the present day anymore because the Cold War has ended everywhere but Korea and Cuba (although from the recent news about a busted Russian spy ring in New York, you wouldn't know it). It evolves strangely, though, becoming a sort of unique take on the buddy picture, much like Jang Hun's debut, Rough Cut, looking conventional but much more clever.
At the turn of the millennium, a group of three North Korean agents led by the brutal "Shadow" (Jeon Gook-hwan) made an assassination attempt on a defected cousin of Kim Jong-il. The South Korean National Intelligence Service had turned one, Son Tae-soon (Yun Hee-seok), so Agent Lee Han-kyu (Song Kang-ho) and his team are able to get to the scene. It's a bloodbath, and Han-kyu is fired in the wake of the debacle. The other spy, Song Ji-woon (Kang Dong-won) is disavowed, cut off from his pregnant wife in the north. Six years pass, and Han-kyu is now working as a sort of very low-rent private detective, retrieving foreign-born brides who walk out on their husbands. Relying on his pair of idiot assistants gets him poised for a beating on a construction site, when the fight is broken up by the foreman - Ji-woon, living incognito under the the name Park Ki-joon. The recognize each other immediately, though don't show it, and soon Han-kyu has recruited Ji-woon to work for him. Each thinks the other's low circumstances is a cover, and that learning what is really going on will get them rewarded by their old masters.
The opening sequence of Secret Reunion is as good as this sort of spy movie stuff gets, fusing slick tradecraft with over-the-top action in a way that manages to evoke both the realistic and fantasy modes of spy cinema, set Shadow up as a villain to be reckoned with, and establishes Ji-woon as a decent man without painting him as disloyal. Jang is so assured in this tense, violent territory that it's a bit of a surprise when the movie goes in a different direction.
Full review at EFC
Bay Rong (The Clash)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
It's probably unfair to compare this to The Rebel, the previous action movie to co-star Johnny Nguyen and Tranh Van Ngo, but it's inevitable - the two leads are back, and Nguyen once again writes and produces. This looks to be made on a much smaller budget, and is contemporary as opposed to being a period piece. Unfortunately, it just isn't at the same level; the action scenes are fewer and farther between, and the melodramatic story doesn't quite work.
Still, when the action scenes come, they are great fun to watch. Nguyen is a top-notch screen fighter, and Ngo isn't so bad herself, and their high-leverage style of mixed martial arts is shot in a way that there's no doubt that the actors and stuntmen are taking hits and doing some incredibly athletic action. Nguyen has come up with a good basic story, but aside from the action, there are precious few moments when the movie is really fun to watch; it could use a little more levity or character types beyond grim hardcases.
Full review at EFC.
Rubber
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2010 in Salle de Seve (Fantasia 2010: Camera Lucida)
Ah, curse the need to spend a little bit of time this morning seeing to certain essentials, as it leaves me without the time to write a full review of Rubber, the early leader in the contest for the most deranged, bizarre - and funny movie of the festival. The concept is screwy enough - a discarded tire comes to life, starts rolling, and kills whatever comes into its path with the power of its mind. On top of that, though, writer/director Quentin Dupieux presents it in a way that smashes at the fourth wall, presenting it as not quite a film-within-a-film, but having an audience all the same, one which interacts with the story in strange ways.
And yet, it all works. The crazy digressions, the deadpan comedy, the constant pointing out that this actually doesn't make a lick of sense. It's got a winning cast that all hit just the right note, and special effects that are handmade but not obviously cheesy. It may at times be a hard, weird movie to describe, but it's also a perfect midnight movie experience.
Full review at EFC.
Friday, July 09, 2010
Fantasia Daily for 8 July 2010: Higanjima
The lesson of the first day, as always, is to get stuff done early.
If I get my lodging for Fantasia settled early, I'm not running around at the last minute trying to get a draft in Canadian funds on Friday, which will be ready in "one business day" (Tuesday, because of the holiday). If I stop into the bank before work on Tuesday or Wednesday (which also involves being smart and checking the bank's hours), rather than after, I don't get there after the bank closes its doors at four o'freakin'clock and have to get in there first thing yesterday, which means I catch the 7:45am bus instead of the 10:00am one. Aside from the $15 they charged me to change my ticket, I'll bet that the 7:45am bus didn't spend an hour in White River Junction, VT, waiting for either other buses with people trying to make a connection or a driver for the one I was on (on top of the usual 30 minute layover there), and seeing the schedule slip further between there and Burlington... Well, it allowed me to finish my book, I guess, but it put seeing two movies yesterday out of reach, and likely annoyed and inconvenienced the guy I'm subletting the condo from.
Ah, well, the end result is that I missed Sorcerer's Apprentice (which I was never getting into) or Mandrill, and Mandrill plays again on Saturday. All that displaces from the schedule for me is Evangelion 2.0, and as one of the (apparently rare) folks who didn't much like Evangelion 1.0, I can deal with that.
Well, that and I had no time to get any supper, or even Canadian currency so I could buy some candy at the concession stand. I'm making sure I put plenty of time between working in the Montreal office and getting to Phobia 2 this afternoon so that that doesn't happen again!
Higanjima
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2010 in Salle J.A. de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
It's tough not to get just a little excited during the opening sequence of Higanjima, because it makes a thoroughly enjoyable statement: That putting a stake through a vampire's heart is for people who aren't truly committed to getting the job done. No, if you truly want to be rid of a vampire, you do what Atsushi (Dai Watanabe) does after chasing a couple down: Back them against a wall and drive a battering ram into their face until their head explodes like... Well, a head that's just had a battering ram smashed into it. That's a badass opening, although it's also a set-up for the inverse ninja rule: Fighting two vampires turns out to be cooler than fighting an island full of vampires.
Before heading back to the island, though, we meet Akira (Hideo Ishiguro). He's Atsushi's younger and less-respected brother, and initially he and his friend Pon are just running from conventional high-school bullies. As he runs, we meet his other buddies: Chemistry whiz Nishiyama, archery-club member Yuki (Miori Takimoto), hefty Kato, and friendly delinquent Ken (Tomohisa Yuge). He's pulled aside by Rei (Asami Mizukawa), who tells him that Atsushi, missing for two years, is alive! Akira and his friends find out about the vampires when they follow her, and agree to come to her island - but does she mean to have them help Atsushi defeat master vampire Miyabi (Koji Yamamoto), or is she just helping him replenish the island's food supply?
I'm not sure how long the manga that Higanjima is based upon ran, but the movie bears some of the marks of being adapted from one that ran a while: It's simultaneously too big and too small, filled with more characters and backstory than it has a chance to really elaborate on, managing to cause a bit of fatigue while also seeming a bit shallow at points. You can tell which characters have giant targets on their backs by how much development they're given, and even the major characters' subplots are elaborated sketchily enough that something apparently mean to be important seems a bit like a non-sequitur in the end. Those long serials can also tolerate a little repetition over years; having two of Akira's friends get taken an need rescuing at different times sticks out in a movie just over two hours long.
Full review at EFC
If I get my lodging for Fantasia settled early, I'm not running around at the last minute trying to get a draft in Canadian funds on Friday, which will be ready in "one business day" (Tuesday, because of the holiday). If I stop into the bank before work on Tuesday or Wednesday (which also involves being smart and checking the bank's hours), rather than after, I don't get there after the bank closes its doors at four o'freakin'clock and have to get in there first thing yesterday, which means I catch the 7:45am bus instead of the 10:00am one. Aside from the $15 they charged me to change my ticket, I'll bet that the 7:45am bus didn't spend an hour in White River Junction, VT, waiting for either other buses with people trying to make a connection or a driver for the one I was on (on top of the usual 30 minute layover there), and seeing the schedule slip further between there and Burlington... Well, it allowed me to finish my book, I guess, but it put seeing two movies yesterday out of reach, and likely annoyed and inconvenienced the guy I'm subletting the condo from.
Ah, well, the end result is that I missed Sorcerer's Apprentice (which I was never getting into) or Mandrill, and Mandrill plays again on Saturday. All that displaces from the schedule for me is Evangelion 2.0, and as one of the (apparently rare) folks who didn't much like Evangelion 1.0, I can deal with that.
Well, that and I had no time to get any supper, or even Canadian currency so I could buy some candy at the concession stand. I'm making sure I put plenty of time between working in the Montreal office and getting to Phobia 2 this afternoon so that that doesn't happen again!
Higanjima
* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2010 in Salle J.A. de Seve (Fantasia 2010)
It's tough not to get just a little excited during the opening sequence of Higanjima, because it makes a thoroughly enjoyable statement: That putting a stake through a vampire's heart is for people who aren't truly committed to getting the job done. No, if you truly want to be rid of a vampire, you do what Atsushi (Dai Watanabe) does after chasing a couple down: Back them against a wall and drive a battering ram into their face until their head explodes like... Well, a head that's just had a battering ram smashed into it. That's a badass opening, although it's also a set-up for the inverse ninja rule: Fighting two vampires turns out to be cooler than fighting an island full of vampires.
Before heading back to the island, though, we meet Akira (Hideo Ishiguro). He's Atsushi's younger and less-respected brother, and initially he and his friend Pon are just running from conventional high-school bullies. As he runs, we meet his other buddies: Chemistry whiz Nishiyama, archery-club member Yuki (Miori Takimoto), hefty Kato, and friendly delinquent Ken (Tomohisa Yuge). He's pulled aside by Rei (Asami Mizukawa), who tells him that Atsushi, missing for two years, is alive! Akira and his friends find out about the vampires when they follow her, and agree to come to her island - but does she mean to have them help Atsushi defeat master vampire Miyabi (Koji Yamamoto), or is she just helping him replenish the island's food supply?
I'm not sure how long the manga that Higanjima is based upon ran, but the movie bears some of the marks of being adapted from one that ran a while: It's simultaneously too big and too small, filled with more characters and backstory than it has a chance to really elaborate on, managing to cause a bit of fatigue while also seeming a bit shallow at points. You can tell which characters have giant targets on their backs by how much development they're given, and even the major characters' subplots are elaborated sketchily enough that something apparently mean to be important seems a bit like a non-sequitur in the end. Those long serials can also tolerate a little repetition over years; having two of Akira's friends get taken an need rescuing at different times sticks out in a movie just over two hours long.
Full review at EFC
Thursday, July 08, 2010
Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston (and beyond) 9 July - 15 July
BOSTON
I've got no reason to complain about not being able to get to all this over the next seven days; I will, after all, be in Montreal, where it promises to be slightly less like an oven, seeing a bunch of movies that may not make it to local theaters at all, about twenty of them. Still, what's playing back home looks to be pretty decent:
NEW YORK
Racing Dreams opens at the IFC Center. It's a pretty good documentary, the best thing I saw at the Boston Film Festival last fall before bailing on it. I found out afterward that my friend Laurel did some behind the scenes work on it. Thus, it gets a few extra cool points and a little bit of a push from me. I'm sure that this could increase its box office by seven bucks or so.
FANTASIA
I'll try to be doing daily updates, but in case I don't, and you're curious about what I deem of interest (or, good heavens, want to meet up with the press-pass-wearing dork in the middle of the third row who speaks terrible French), here's the plan:
I've got no reason to complain about not being able to get to all this over the next seven days; I will, after all, be in Montreal, where it promises to be slightly less like an oven, seeing a bunch of movies that may not make it to local theaters at all, about twenty of them. Still, what's playing back home looks to be pretty decent:
- Yet another Independent Film Festival Boston 2010 alumnus opens at Kendall Square, Perrier's Bounty. It's a snazzy-looking Irish thriller with a great cast, and one I skipped at IFFBoston because I figured that the nifty Irish movie would play Boston a bit sooner than this. It's got the one-week warning on it, though, so I hope that I can prevail on you fine people to go see it so that maybe its run can get extended a couple times, when I'm back on the 29th, I'll have a day to see it.
(Seeing that it's only opening with two shows a day, I'm not holding my breath!)
I'm less worried about missing The Girl Who Played with Fire. It's also opening at the Boston Common AMC and in West Newton (and Coolidge Corner next week). Seeing how The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo managed to hang around the Kendall for three months, right up to its home video release (and still continues at the Arlington Capitol!), I suspect this one will last at least three weeks somewhere. Interestingly, West Newton also has Dragon Tattoo hanging around for one show a day, but it's at 8:30pm, so you can't do an in-order double feature. - Also opening at the Kendall and at the Coolidge is the 50th Anniversary re-release of Breathless; it's a one-week engagement at the Coolidge, and likely at the Kendall. If you want to see it, don't wait too long.
Midnights at the Coolidge, another "The End Is Nigh" flick, the original Mad Max. Well, the first film, at any rate; the Coolidge website doesn't mention whether it's the original Australian soundtrack or the one dubbed with American accents that Warner released alongside The Road Warrior.
Oh, and they're showing Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen Monday. I do believe that there's a sort of rule that you've not allowed to call yourself a movie lover if you're in town when this plays on the big screen and don't attend. - It's good to see that the acquisition by Starz hasn't changed Anchor Bay too much. They've apparently looked at their records, seen that they haven't extracted twenty bucks from each of Sam Raimi's fans in a couple of years, and decided to remedy that by putting The Evil Dead out on Blu-ray next month. Of course, that means new prints have to be struck, and one of them plays the Brattle over the weekend: 10pm Friday, Satruday, and Sunday; 8pm Monday.
Also at the Brattle this week: Inglorious Basterds, Friday through monday; a free double feature of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus at 11am Saturday morning, a preview of Winnebago Man on Tuesday, a panel discussion of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird (with a screening of the film) on Wednesday, and the annual Trailer Treats Party (with Trailer Smackdown Contest) on Thursday. That's a fun night, and just a good week's worth of stuff. - The Somerville Theatre continues their rock & roll movie series with Madonna: Truth or Dare on Monday and Tuesday, and Stop Making Sense on Wednesday and Thursday.
- Movie at the Arlington Regent Theatre! One I'd really like to see, for that matter - Waking Sleeping Beauty is a documentary about Walt Disney Feature Animation's renaissance in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and by all accounts an honest and not-always-complimentary one, despite being distributed by Disney.
- And, of course, the bigger studio movies open all over the place: Despicable Me is the animated 3-D movie of the week, and Predators looks to bring the action. It actually looks like a pretty good weekend, especially by Summer '10 standards. The trailers for Despicable Me look like pretty good cartooning, at least in the clips I've seen, although I imagine that having a third 3-D movie come out within a month's time is going to strain the capacity in a lot of areas. At Boston Common, it looks to be added to the line-up at the expense of The Last Airbender, which is probably a good thing for both, in that Airbender was apparently hastily and half-heartedly converted to 3-D in post-production.
I'm also hoping Predators sticks around until I make it back. I'm not a huge fan of the franchise, or even the first movie (despite it being Schwarzeneggar and McTiernan), but Nimrod Antal has made a couple better-than-expected movies in Vacancy and Armored, and I suspect that he can do something pretty darn impressive with the money Fox gave him and Robert Rodriguez.
There is also a Grease sing-along playing AMC Boston Common. I would make some sort of snarky comment, but I haven't seen Grease, and for all I know, it's the best movie ever. I doubt this, and doubt that I'd enjoy a sing-along version of even, say, Disney's Beauty and the Beast (why, no, I haven't seen Rocky Horror Picutre Show, despite it playing Harvard Square every Saturday night).
NEW YORK
Racing Dreams opens at the IFC Center. It's a pretty good documentary, the best thing I saw at the Boston Film Festival last fall before bailing on it. I found out afterward that my friend Laurel did some behind the scenes work on it. Thus, it gets a few extra cool points and a little bit of a push from me. I'm sure that this could increase its box office by seven bucks or so.
FANTASIA
I'll try to be doing daily updates, but in case I don't, and you're curious about what I deem of interest (or, good heavens, want to meet up with the press-pass-wearing dork in the middle of the third row who speaks terrible French), here's the plan:
- Friday 9 July: Phobia 2 and Secret Reunion in Hall, then across the street for The Clash and Rubber in De Seve. Why? The first Phobia ("4bia") was pretty darn good, Secret Reunion matches the director of Rough Cut with the star of Thirst, Clash is from the makers of The Rebel, and Rubber looks demented. Plus, I'm not a huge fan of Herschell Gordon Lewis, so the tribute to him isn't a big deal to me.
- Saturday 10 July: Running back and forth across the street between Mandrill (DeSeve), First Squad (De Seve), Gallants (Hall), The Message (De Seve), and Mutant Girls Squad (Hall). Why? Well, I'll have seen many of the opposing films (Down Terrace, The Life and Death of a Porno Gang, and Ip Man 2), I want to see First Squad more than Evil: In the Time of Heroes (though Greece has yet to be stamped on my horror passport), and Mandrill more or less locks me into it.
- Sunday 11 July: Starting in Hall with Alien vs Ninja and Technotise: Edit & I, then we see whether I'm more in the mood for Irish horror in Outcast or Korean erotic drama in A Frozen Flower. After that, I'll see if I'm still up for the I Spit on Your Grave remake. Why? Technotise is one of the films I'm building my schedule around (Serbian animated sci-fi with a Eurocomics style), so everything else is working around that.
- Monday 12 July: After I get out of work, it's all Hall - Crows Zero 2, At World's End, and The Revenant. Why? Gotta see the festival's only Miike film, At World's End looks nifty, and I can see Golden Slumber later.
- Tuesday 13 July: Mai Mai Miracle in De Seve, then over to Hall for Le Grand Chef 2 and Tears for Sale. Why? I liked the first Le Grand Chef.
- Wednesday 14 July: Kuroneko in De Seve if I get out of work on time; Gintama andHeartless in Hall, and then likely Feast of the Assumption: The Otero Family Murders in De Seve. Why? Seen and loved Marwencol. Plus, the Zappin Party is a tough split between "awesome" and "not just too campy, but also in French" for me.
- Thursday 15 July: Possessed in De Seve, Merentau in Hall, either We Are What We Are or T.T. Syndrome, and then maybe Lemmy. Why? Because word on the Indonesian martial arts movie is that it's got spectacular action, I'm not yet sure whether I'm more down for Mexican cannibals or Serbian slashers, and despite having already seen Air Doll, Lemmy wasn't something I even considered seeing when it played at IFFBoston, just on a "I've never listened to Motorhead" basis.
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
This Week In Tickets: 28 June 2010 to 4 July 2010
A week where I don't see many movies and where TWIT will be going on a bit of a hiatus anyway (in favor of daily Fantasia updates) offers a good opportunity to break the previews into a separate post. So lets get right to the tickets!
It was a pretty nice couple of days to go to the ballpark; I had nice seats for each game, though from opposite ends of the field. Not to give the Sox any ideas, but it's absolutely crazy that bleachers cost something like half of what the boxes out in right field cost; it's a much better view, although one less likely to net you a home run or foul ball. The seat on Friday was also pretty sweet, and it even turned out that the walkway warning turned out to be more or less bogus - there was a fence in front of it, it was a three-seat row, and there was another exit on the other side. No-one climbing over me to get their dozen beers per game!
Both were wins, too - Tuesday's actually felt like a clobbering for a good chunk of it, although some terrible relief in the final two innings made it much closer. Friday's was one of those games which old-timers wax nostalgic about, where pitchers work quickly and the game finishes in just over two hours. Nicely paced, but it felt downright weird to hear Papelbon's music played right around 9pm, and when you pay that much for a ticket, you maybe expect a little more baseball!
Saturday was spent finding a shady spot and reading, and then Sunday was spent at a couple of 3-D movies. First up was Toy Story 3 with my brother and his finacée, a surprisingly cost-effective outing, actually, as we had two $8.50 ticket vouchers (cutting their tickets down to a mere $4 each from my $12.50) and $1 fourth-of-July specials for large popcorn and soda. It strikes me that AMC Boston Common may want to adjust the signage at the box office, which states that digital 3-D, not-really-IMAX, and 3-D not-really-IMAX add $5, $6, and $7, respectively, to the ticket price. Based on a $9.50 matinee ticket (both my friends living in Maine and my ten-years-younger self freaked out a bit reading that), that overstates the cost by a couple bucks.
Spoilers for Toy Story 3
Seeing it a second time, with folks I could talk about it afterward and on a different screen, didn't change my opinion of the movie that much; I still think it's pretty brilliant, although covering a lot of the same territory as Toy Story 2. Matt even leaned over to ask me if Kelsey Grammer was doing the voice of Lotso Huggin' Bear; I wish I'd remembered to ask him whether he was associating him that closely with Prospector Pete, or if he even remembered that bit of casting.
Morgan asked if there was anything to what she'd heard about the ending, to which I said, yes, there will be crying. She didn't believe it until it got close to the end, and everyone was holding hands, waiting for the end. Matt wound up giving the claw a bigger laugh than it maybe deserved, just from being so relieved. And then the scene in Bonnie's front yard made some very glad that they were wearing 3-D glasses, and the audience at large couldn't see their eyes.
I have to admit, though, as wonderful as that ending is... A part of me would have liked it to be sadder, in a way. I think I really would have liked it if Andy had taken Woody to college. I can see why they didn't go that route, but if the movies are looked at as metaphors for growing up, it's the logical next step: In Toy Story, Woody has to learn how to deal with the arrival of a younger sibling in Buzz; in Toy Story 2, he learns to handle peer pressure and being pulled in two different directions by family and new friends; Toy Story 3 could have been about leaving the home, forming one's own family even though still connected to the old one. And I think it is, although Jodi Benson's Barbie is the one that really gets that storyline in its purest form.
I don't imagine I would have had the heart to break that group up either, for what it's worth, and the toys' lives shouldn't necessarily be perfect metaphors for those of their owners, anyway. In a way, Woody does graduate to adulthood in this story, going from the older brother of the first two movies to a father figure by the end of this one, although it's not an easy journey, at times recalling what a complete prick the cowboy could be in the first.
On a more light-hearted note: I totally missed the Return of the Jedi reference Matt spotted more or less instantly (although I was all over the nods to The Great Escape, and kind of surprised they didn't have Jessie bouncing a ball against the wall at some point). Given that there's a pretty big Empire Strikes Back moment in Toy Story 2, I now must watch the first again to see if there's an obvious Star Wars reference.
Also, if you have little kids your considering bringing to this movie: The monkey will freak them the heck out. It's not scarring or anything, but be prepared!
/ Spoilers for Toy Story 3
After that, I killed a little time in the Aquarium and then the bookstore before heading back across the river to find a spot on the Cambridge side to watch the fireworks. They were, as usual, spectacular, but I wouldn't mind at all if WBZ got out of the fireworks-presentation business; aside from snickering at how the show was being presented in HD (not quite so impressive to those of us there in person; also, the presenting sponsor's slogan got on my nerves: I don't want an insurance company that's "as responsible as you are", but one that's a great deal more responsible - that's why I'm buying insurance!), it seemed like there were was more time spent on commercial breaks and inane banter between the hosts than actual music being played.
Still, it's always great to be in Boston on the 4th - two years ago, I was out of the country; last year, I was in Portland, and being with one's family is nice, but the Fourth of July is a prime "you guys should be coming here" holiday.
Sea Rex 3-D
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2010 at the New England Aquarium (first-run)
It's easy to forget, with all the IMAX-branded theaters sprouting up around the country, that most of the screens that people would consider "real" IMAX are in museums of various types, especially science museums and spots like the New England Aquarium, which is why a steady stream of educational but hopefully still awe-inspiring films are created in the large format. Sea Rex is the latest to show up at the Aquarium, and it's fine, if not quite so impressive as some of its cousins.
That's not even comparing it to the Hollywood event films occupying many giant screens; it comes up somewhat short even in comparison to Sea Monsters 3-D, another large-format featurette on the same subject that started making its way through the science-museum circuit just a few years ago. Sea Rex, like many IMAX documentaries, is pitched to elementary-school children visiting the museum or aquarium on a field trip, and it often feels like an institutional film blown up large: It has a framing sequence that is meant to be friendly, although it could come across as really freaky if looked at literally - is museum visitor Julie (Chloe Hollings) actually speaking to a hallucination or ghost or spirit of pioneering paleontologist George Cuvier (Richard Rider)? Scientists deliver lectures, rather than naturally demonstrating their work; animated sequences try to explain things with strained metaphors. It teaches well enough, but is just stilted enough that those older than young children may make fun.
The CGI budget is also just low enough to be a bit of an issue. Creatures are rendered competently, but it's also clear that the filmmakers don't exactly have the budget of a major production: There's a uniformity to the lighting and textures, and the movements are slightly mechanical; we don't always see the musculature under the skin working. It's a little more noticeable because it is composited on top of beautiful IMAX 3-D phototography.
Sea Rex is not a bad movie; it's a fairly enjoyable presentation of interesting information; if it's playing when you take your kids to the science museum or aquarium, it's worth a look. It's just not in the top tier of IMAX documentaries, the ones worth going out of one's way to see.
It was a pretty nice couple of days to go to the ballpark; I had nice seats for each game, though from opposite ends of the field. Not to give the Sox any ideas, but it's absolutely crazy that bleachers cost something like half of what the boxes out in right field cost; it's a much better view, although one less likely to net you a home run or foul ball. The seat on Friday was also pretty sweet, and it even turned out that the walkway warning turned out to be more or less bogus - there was a fence in front of it, it was a three-seat row, and there was another exit on the other side. No-one climbing over me to get their dozen beers per game!
Both were wins, too - Tuesday's actually felt like a clobbering for a good chunk of it, although some terrible relief in the final two innings made it much closer. Friday's was one of those games which old-timers wax nostalgic about, where pitchers work quickly and the game finishes in just over two hours. Nicely paced, but it felt downright weird to hear Papelbon's music played right around 9pm, and when you pay that much for a ticket, you maybe expect a little more baseball!
Saturday was spent finding a shady spot and reading, and then Sunday was spent at a couple of 3-D movies. First up was Toy Story 3 with my brother and his finacée, a surprisingly cost-effective outing, actually, as we had two $8.50 ticket vouchers (cutting their tickets down to a mere $4 each from my $12.50) and $1 fourth-of-July specials for large popcorn and soda. It strikes me that AMC Boston Common may want to adjust the signage at the box office, which states that digital 3-D, not-really-IMAX, and 3-D not-really-IMAX add $5, $6, and $7, respectively, to the ticket price. Based on a $9.50 matinee ticket (both my friends living in Maine and my ten-years-younger self freaked out a bit reading that), that overstates the cost by a couple bucks.
Spoilers for Toy Story 3
Seeing it a second time, with folks I could talk about it afterward and on a different screen, didn't change my opinion of the movie that much; I still think it's pretty brilliant, although covering a lot of the same territory as Toy Story 2. Matt even leaned over to ask me if Kelsey Grammer was doing the voice of Lotso Huggin' Bear; I wish I'd remembered to ask him whether he was associating him that closely with Prospector Pete, or if he even remembered that bit of casting.
Morgan asked if there was anything to what she'd heard about the ending, to which I said, yes, there will be crying. She didn't believe it until it got close to the end, and everyone was holding hands, waiting for the end. Matt wound up giving the claw a bigger laugh than it maybe deserved, just from being so relieved. And then the scene in Bonnie's front yard made some very glad that they were wearing 3-D glasses, and the audience at large couldn't see their eyes.
I have to admit, though, as wonderful as that ending is... A part of me would have liked it to be sadder, in a way. I think I really would have liked it if Andy had taken Woody to college. I can see why they didn't go that route, but if the movies are looked at as metaphors for growing up, it's the logical next step: In Toy Story, Woody has to learn how to deal with the arrival of a younger sibling in Buzz; in Toy Story 2, he learns to handle peer pressure and being pulled in two different directions by family and new friends; Toy Story 3 could have been about leaving the home, forming one's own family even though still connected to the old one. And I think it is, although Jodi Benson's Barbie is the one that really gets that storyline in its purest form.
I don't imagine I would have had the heart to break that group up either, for what it's worth, and the toys' lives shouldn't necessarily be perfect metaphors for those of their owners, anyway. In a way, Woody does graduate to adulthood in this story, going from the older brother of the first two movies to a father figure by the end of this one, although it's not an easy journey, at times recalling what a complete prick the cowboy could be in the first.
On a more light-hearted note: I totally missed the Return of the Jedi reference Matt spotted more or less instantly (although I was all over the nods to The Great Escape, and kind of surprised they didn't have Jessie bouncing a ball against the wall at some point). Given that there's a pretty big Empire Strikes Back moment in Toy Story 2, I now must watch the first again to see if there's an obvious Star Wars reference.
Also, if you have little kids your considering bringing to this movie: The monkey will freak them the heck out. It's not scarring or anything, but be prepared!
/ Spoilers for Toy Story 3
After that, I killed a little time in the Aquarium and then the bookstore before heading back across the river to find a spot on the Cambridge side to watch the fireworks. They were, as usual, spectacular, but I wouldn't mind at all if WBZ got out of the fireworks-presentation business; aside from snickering at how the show was being presented in HD (not quite so impressive to those of us there in person; also, the presenting sponsor's slogan got on my nerves: I don't want an insurance company that's "as responsible as you are", but one that's a great deal more responsible - that's why I'm buying insurance!), it seemed like there were was more time spent on commercial breaks and inane banter between the hosts than actual music being played.
Still, it's always great to be in Boston on the 4th - two years ago, I was out of the country; last year, I was in Portland, and being with one's family is nice, but the Fourth of July is a prime "you guys should be coming here" holiday.
Sea Rex 3-D
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 July 2010 at the New England Aquarium (first-run)
It's easy to forget, with all the IMAX-branded theaters sprouting up around the country, that most of the screens that people would consider "real" IMAX are in museums of various types, especially science museums and spots like the New England Aquarium, which is why a steady stream of educational but hopefully still awe-inspiring films are created in the large format. Sea Rex is the latest to show up at the Aquarium, and it's fine, if not quite so impressive as some of its cousins.
That's not even comparing it to the Hollywood event films occupying many giant screens; it comes up somewhat short even in comparison to Sea Monsters 3-D, another large-format featurette on the same subject that started making its way through the science-museum circuit just a few years ago. Sea Rex, like many IMAX documentaries, is pitched to elementary-school children visiting the museum or aquarium on a field trip, and it often feels like an institutional film blown up large: It has a framing sequence that is meant to be friendly, although it could come across as really freaky if looked at literally - is museum visitor Julie (Chloe Hollings) actually speaking to a hallucination or ghost or spirit of pioneering paleontologist George Cuvier (Richard Rider)? Scientists deliver lectures, rather than naturally demonstrating their work; animated sequences try to explain things with strained metaphors. It teaches well enough, but is just stilted enough that those older than young children may make fun.
The CGI budget is also just low enough to be a bit of an issue. Creatures are rendered competently, but it's also clear that the filmmakers don't exactly have the budget of a major production: There's a uniformity to the lighting and textures, and the movements are slightly mechanical; we don't always see the musculature under the skin working. It's a little more noticeable because it is composited on top of beautiful IMAX 3-D phototography.
Sea Rex is not a bad movie; it's a fairly enjoyable presentation of interesting information; if it's playing when you take your kids to the science museum or aquarium, it's worth a look. It's just not in the top tier of IMAX documentaries, the ones worth going out of one's way to see.
Saturday, July 03, 2010
Last Week In Tickets: 21 June 2010 to 27 June 2010
This is me practicing chaining myself to the computer to not fall too far behind a self-imposed deadline before trying to make daily posts in Montreal:
Yikes, that's a lot of movies crammed into a short about of time. Good prep work for Fantasia, I guess, but as I mentioned in the SF-1970 blog entry, I was pooped the next day.
Now, quick reviews, because it is way too nice to sit here typing this stuff much longer:
Harry Brown
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 June 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square (first-run)
The positive here, obviously, is that you get to watch Michael Caine and to a lesser extent Emily Mortimer act. They're pretty darn terrific in this story of Brown (Caine), a pensioner driven to clean up his neighborhood after the murder of his best friend by the punks who hang out around their council flats. Naturally, he's pretty successful, since he was special forces in Northern Ireland before his wife of forty-odd years domesticated him. Mortimer plays the detective who sees that the common thread in the kids being executed is not a gang war.
I've long held to the principle of not messing with old men. Forget that you don't know their history, and he may have fought in a war or something. The simple fact of the matter is that they are the people that natural selection hasn't been able to do anything with yet, while the jury is still out on people half their age. Naturally, nobody else in the movie has come to that realization.
That's about the only lesson the movie has for us, though - as good as Caine is, we never really see a man whose soul is being eaten away by what he chooses to do, even though it's something he rejected explicitly. There's an icky, pro-vigilantism feel toward the end of the movie, along with a plot twist that adds to the violence but seems out of place in a film that, up until then, had been very straightforward.
Knight and Day
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 June 2010 at AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)
What a frustrating movie. On the one hand, director James Mangold gives it a fun, breezy tone, making it a spy movie that's light-hearted without ever quite dropping down to the level of parody. It's also a clever use of Tom Cruise, allowing his twin images of being a charismatic movie star and also being kind of nuts to work for the character. It's not transformational acting, but it's a good use of what movie stars bring to the table.
On the other hand, it seldom manages more than just "pretty decent" in terms of execution. There's a car chase in the first act that frustrated the heck out of me because it seemed inconsistent from one point to another (going from a crowded street to one where the characters have room to maneuver and back without any rhyme or reason), and neither the action nor the jokes ever makes the leap to become a moment that the audience will remember after the movie ends.
(As an aside, they establish Cameron Diaz's character early on as having the very non-girly business of restoring classic cars, and I'm kind of shocked that at no point did the action require her to fix a car. While that would be formulaic, it would also give her a bit more to do than scream like a madwoman.)
- That's annoying: The Brattle continues its tribute to Dennis Hopper, but the film that gave the series its name, The American Dreamer, is canceled. They make up for it with extra screenings of The Trip and The Glory Stompers (double features with Easy Rider, and shall inflict Super Mario Brothers on those who dare to come tonight at 9:30pm. Tuesday brings Mad Dog Morgan (though it is still marked "tentative"), and Wednesday at Thursday is a late-career, scenery-chewing double feature of Speed and Waterworld.
They take a break on Monday for P-star Rising, the latest in a bi-weekly documentary presentations. This one's about a girl rapper who starts out at nine years old. - The Coolidge and Kendall Square both open I Am Love, which I saw at IFFBoston and kind of hated, although many seem much more forgiving of its interminable and ridiculous second half than I.
The Coolidge also celebrates the holiday weekend with Independence Day a fitting and timely start to their "The End is Nigh" series of July midnights. The most interesting thing there this week (presuming you haven't already seen Winter's Bone, which you should), looks to be a Thursday night screening of Off and Running presented by both the Roxbury International and Boston Jewish Film Festivals with the documentary's subject Avery Klein-Cloud doing a Q&A afterward. Wish I could go. - The one-week warning at Kendall Square is for The Killer Inside Me, which in contrast to I Am Love, I seem to like while everybody else could go without. They also opened Love Ranch and Afghan war documentary Restrepo.
They're also making the somewhat surprising (to me) decision have a Lisbeth Salander-free week before opening The Girl Who Played With Fire on the 9th; I figured they might want to keep The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo around long enough for double features. (And, BTW, if anybody knows of a preview screening in Boston before Thursday, drop me a line; I'd like to see this before heading north for Fantasia, though if it has even half of the first's longevity, it'll still be there when I get back) - New mainstream openings are The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, which has probably gotten me a lot more hits on my review of Irish ghost story The Eclipse than the latter coming out on DVD on the 29th, and The Last Airbender, which has gotten vicious reviews. Not just negative, vicious, being as it is the intersection between half-assed price-gouging 3-D and another apparent disappointment from M. Night Shamalayan, whom critics just seem to not like personally. Myself, I quite liked everything he's done from The Sixth Sense to The Village, and don't think Lady in the Water and The Happening are quite so bad as their reputations, so I may check it out.
On flat 35mm film, if I do; that's what it was shot for, and reports indicate that it's not worth the $5 fee theaters are charging now.
Yikes, that's a lot of movies crammed into a short about of time. Good prep work for Fantasia, I guess, but as I mentioned in the SF-1970 blog entry, I was pooped the next day.
Now, quick reviews, because it is way too nice to sit here typing this stuff much longer:
Harry Brown
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 June 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square (first-run)
The positive here, obviously, is that you get to watch Michael Caine and to a lesser extent Emily Mortimer act. They're pretty darn terrific in this story of Brown (Caine), a pensioner driven to clean up his neighborhood after the murder of his best friend by the punks who hang out around their council flats. Naturally, he's pretty successful, since he was special forces in Northern Ireland before his wife of forty-odd years domesticated him. Mortimer plays the detective who sees that the common thread in the kids being executed is not a gang war.
I've long held to the principle of not messing with old men. Forget that you don't know their history, and he may have fought in a war or something. The simple fact of the matter is that they are the people that natural selection hasn't been able to do anything with yet, while the jury is still out on people half their age. Naturally, nobody else in the movie has come to that realization.
That's about the only lesson the movie has for us, though - as good as Caine is, we never really see a man whose soul is being eaten away by what he chooses to do, even though it's something he rejected explicitly. There's an icky, pro-vigilantism feel toward the end of the movie, along with a plot twist that adds to the violence but seems out of place in a film that, up until then, had been very straightforward.
Knight and Day
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 June 2010 at AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)
What a frustrating movie. On the one hand, director James Mangold gives it a fun, breezy tone, making it a spy movie that's light-hearted without ever quite dropping down to the level of parody. It's also a clever use of Tom Cruise, allowing his twin images of being a charismatic movie star and also being kind of nuts to work for the character. It's not transformational acting, but it's a good use of what movie stars bring to the table.
On the other hand, it seldom manages more than just "pretty decent" in terms of execution. There's a car chase in the first act that frustrated the heck out of me because it seemed inconsistent from one point to another (going from a crowded street to one where the characters have room to maneuver and back without any rhyme or reason), and neither the action nor the jokes ever makes the leap to become a moment that the audience will remember after the movie ends.
(As an aside, they establish Cameron Diaz's character early on as having the very non-girly business of restoring classic cars, and I'm kind of shocked that at no point did the action require her to fix a car. While that would be formulaic, it would also give her a bit more to do than scream like a madwoman.)
SF-1970
I won't say much about the Harvard Film Archive's SF-1970 series, because I didn't get to nearly as much of it as I'd like. Last week I had Red Sox tickets, my friend Justin was in town to hang out and play a gig with Girls, Guns, and Glory; this week I had plans to spend a day at NYAFF 2010, and the scant amount of sleep that night combined with a full day of work left me skeptical on my ability to stay awake through Quintet, so I stayed home and crashed.
The 1970s are an interesting decade for sci-fi; much like the rest of Hollywood was doing a lot of experimenting, the people making science fiction during that decade were telling stories with a more adult sensibility. Cronenberg's body horror started in that period, and films became more overtly satirical. And then, just as with the rest of the industry, George Lucas changed everything with Star Wars. I say "changed", while others would say "ruined"; after Star Wars, visual effects started pushing forward by leaps and bounds in a continuous cycle that hasn't stopped yet, but by popularizing fantasy, the studios started pitching it to a more mainstream audience. Filmmakers would become able create anything that they could imagine, but funding was only available for the most conventional fantasies, and the quirky 1970s-style sci-fi stories now looked cheap and tacky in comparison, at least at a superficial glance.
I don't necessarily think of the 1970s as a golden age, although it always gets a strong argument when the folks at the Boston Sci-Fi Marathon are hashing out what's playing this year and what should. I'm wary as a rule about putting golden ages in the past, and I like the visuals and world-building that the technology of today and tomorrow allows. A lot of neat stuff was made, though, and I regret that I didn't even get to see a quarter of what I hoped to during this program.
Death Race 2000
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 June 2010 at the Harvard Film Archive (SF-1970)
Death Race 2000 was remade a couple years ago, and the end result was slick, but bland, almost completely unmemorable (aside from a line you wouldn't expect to come out of Joan Allen's mouth). The 1975 original, on the other hand, is the exact opposite: Tacky, with production quality straddling the border between B- and C-grade, but so utterly loopy as to be unforgettable.
It is twenty-five years in the future, in the year two thousand. The "United Provinces of America" have a President for Life, who keeps the masses amused with a cross-country road race where the participants not only score points for making it to checkpoints quickly, but for any pedestrians they run down on the way. This year's five participants are wild girl Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), swastika-sporting Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins), classically-themed but dumb Nero the Hero (Martin Kove), would-be thirties gangster Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone), and the object of Joe's envy, the cybernetically enhanced and scarred Frankenstein (David Carradine). Of course, some in the land find this spectacle horrifying, and led by Thomasina Paine (Harriet Medin), they have arranged for one of their own, Annie Smith (Simone Griffeth), to be Frankenstein's navigator.
Death Race 2000 is a Roger Corman production, with all that implies. The budget is minuscule. It's filled with automotive mayhem, gratuitous nudity, guys looking for a fresh start - David Carradine had just walked off the set of Kung Fu - and people who would become a big deal later. Not just Sylvester Stallone (in one of his earliest roles), but cinematographer Tak Fujimoto would go on to a steady career shooting some pretty notable movies. You can't necessarily see the talent in a Roger Corman picture as you're watching it, but it's clear that he has always had the knack for putting enough quality people together that his movies are more entertaining than they should be.
And that's the way it is with Death Race 2000. Corman doesn't deserve all the credit/blame for this one - writers Charles Griffith and Robert Thorn give director Paul Bartel some legitimately demented material, and he executes it with panache. This is a movie whose main running joke is vehicular homicide, and the filmmakers make it work in a way that's genuinely funny. And while the satire may at times be ham-fisted (broad Nazi jokes? really?), it is executed with vicious relish, and sharp enough to still feel relevant thirty-five years later.
And the cast can sell it. David Carradine, for instance, is just what a picture like this needs, laid-back enough to flow with the insanity around him but still able to put unexpected nuance into his performance. Simone Griffeth brings more to Annie than just being easy on the eyes; there's enough intelligence to her character that their scenes together are dealings between equals worthy of our attention. Stallone, who would become the most famous later on, is fairly raw, but does show some of the charisma that would make him a major star in a few years. Like him,the rest of the cast does a pretty good job moving between broad stereotypes and intense, fearsome competitors.
They need to, because that's what makes Death Race 2000 work as well as it does: Bartel does an excellent job of maintaining the air of black comedy while often charging the film with legitimate suspense, giving us a stake in these characters even though most are monsters of one sort or another (heck, the notional heroes are pretty hard to like). And while the budget is low, what there is is put to good use, creating a future world that is surreal rather than detailed enough for the audience to find fault.
Just look at the cars and the people who drive them - Death Race 2000 is a live-action cartoon with nasty teeth, the sort that better filmmakers with more resources have great trouble doing well. It's got its flaws - spots where the low budget stops being charming and a bizarre coda - but for the most part, it's B-movie entertainment done unusually well.
(Dead link to) Full review at EFC.
Phase IV
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 June 2010 at the Harvard Film Archive (SF-1970)
Here's an interesting question: If Phase IV were not a curiosity for being the only feature-length film directed by someone deservedly renowned for other contributions to the industry (assume that Saul Bass used a pseudonym that nobody caught on to the next thirty-five years, so it was the exact same film), would anybody remember it today? I say yes; it stands on its own as a genuinely creepy bit of sci-fi horror.
There's been a blast of radiation from space. Its effects aren't obvious, but in the Arizona desert, the ants are acting peculiarly - different species are not fighting each other over territory, and their natural predators are disappearing. Dr. Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) thinks that they are evolving, and he gets his government employers to assign him a mathematician, James Lesko (Michael Murphy), to help decode what appears to be communication among the ants. His suspicions appear to be well-founded - the local ants have developed a much more powerful hive mind than they had before. And they're on the outside of Hubbs's research station, while the scientists and Kendra Eldridge (Lynne Frederick), a local girl whose farm home has been overrun, are trapped within.
Ants can be unnerving enough as it is - they are already more organized than many groups of people, they've got weird angular shapes, and we don't have enough of an instinctive grasp of the square-cube law to look at one carrying a stick many times its size and understand that such strength wouldn't scale up. Bass and writer Mayo Simon are therefore pretty clever in that they don't do a whole lot to exaggerate what these mutant ants are capable of. They don't grow enormous, or suddenly start talking in a language we can easily understand. Bass and Simon refuse to humanize them, which makes them a more implacable foe.
He also does well to bring in a specialist to shoot the ants, much the way other filmmakers would bring Bass in to create a slick set of opening titles. Ken Middleham, a specialist in shooting the very small for the likes of National Geographic, gets us right down at the ants' level, and those sequences are amazing: Excellent documentary footage integrated seamlessly into the narrative, manipulated in a way to advance the plot. The special effects by John Richardson are excellent as well, and its a tribute to both that it's hard to tell where one man's work stops and the other's starts.
As well as the filmmakers present the ants, the human characters might be problematic for some. Traditionally, this sort of movie has a group of ordinary people with whom the audience can easily identify (or at least a reporter whose job it is to translate the scientists' cryptic utterances into something we understand). Phase IV really doesn't have that. Davenport's Hubbs is close to the edge to start with, a sort of mad-scientist in waiting. Kendra spends most of the movie in a state of shock, which Lynne Frederick presents quite believably (though her accent tends to waver between English and American). Lesko is our narrator and the movie's hero, but even he can sometimes seem very detached. Especially in the beginning of the movie, he makes the sort of jokes scientists make, in that the rest of us aren't sure whether or not he's serious.
Put it all together, and it makes for a difficult movie that doesn't necessarily age well. If you're able to get sucked into its world, Phase IV is relentlessly creepy and quite suspenseful; the ants prove quite resourceful in ways that are all the more threatening because they don't have a human face that takes pride in its cleverness. Of course, that concept can sometimes seem close to absurdity, and what looked high-tech and futuristic in 1974 is, well, quaint in the twenty-first century.
For all that, Phase IV holds up, and not just as an interesting footnote. It's definitely a weird movie, but more weird in that it sends shivers up the spine rather than causes one to wonder what this otherwise well-regarded guy was thinking.
Full review at EFC.
The 1970s are an interesting decade for sci-fi; much like the rest of Hollywood was doing a lot of experimenting, the people making science fiction during that decade were telling stories with a more adult sensibility. Cronenberg's body horror started in that period, and films became more overtly satirical. And then, just as with the rest of the industry, George Lucas changed everything with Star Wars. I say "changed", while others would say "ruined"; after Star Wars, visual effects started pushing forward by leaps and bounds in a continuous cycle that hasn't stopped yet, but by popularizing fantasy, the studios started pitching it to a more mainstream audience. Filmmakers would become able create anything that they could imagine, but funding was only available for the most conventional fantasies, and the quirky 1970s-style sci-fi stories now looked cheap and tacky in comparison, at least at a superficial glance.
I don't necessarily think of the 1970s as a golden age, although it always gets a strong argument when the folks at the Boston Sci-Fi Marathon are hashing out what's playing this year and what should. I'm wary as a rule about putting golden ages in the past, and I like the visuals and world-building that the technology of today and tomorrow allows. A lot of neat stuff was made, though, and I regret that I didn't even get to see a quarter of what I hoped to during this program.
Death Race 2000
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 June 2010 at the Harvard Film Archive (SF-1970)
Death Race 2000 was remade a couple years ago, and the end result was slick, but bland, almost completely unmemorable (aside from a line you wouldn't expect to come out of Joan Allen's mouth). The 1975 original, on the other hand, is the exact opposite: Tacky, with production quality straddling the border between B- and C-grade, but so utterly loopy as to be unforgettable.
It is twenty-five years in the future, in the year two thousand. The "United Provinces of America" have a President for Life, who keeps the masses amused with a cross-country road race where the participants not only score points for making it to checkpoints quickly, but for any pedestrians they run down on the way. This year's five participants are wild girl Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), swastika-sporting Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins), classically-themed but dumb Nero the Hero (Martin Kove), would-be thirties gangster Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone), and the object of Joe's envy, the cybernetically enhanced and scarred Frankenstein (David Carradine). Of course, some in the land find this spectacle horrifying, and led by Thomasina Paine (Harriet Medin), they have arranged for one of their own, Annie Smith (Simone Griffeth), to be Frankenstein's navigator.
Death Race 2000 is a Roger Corman production, with all that implies. The budget is minuscule. It's filled with automotive mayhem, gratuitous nudity, guys looking for a fresh start - David Carradine had just walked off the set of Kung Fu - and people who would become a big deal later. Not just Sylvester Stallone (in one of his earliest roles), but cinematographer Tak Fujimoto would go on to a steady career shooting some pretty notable movies. You can't necessarily see the talent in a Roger Corman picture as you're watching it, but it's clear that he has always had the knack for putting enough quality people together that his movies are more entertaining than they should be.
And that's the way it is with Death Race 2000. Corman doesn't deserve all the credit/blame for this one - writers Charles Griffith and Robert Thorn give director Paul Bartel some legitimately demented material, and he executes it with panache. This is a movie whose main running joke is vehicular homicide, and the filmmakers make it work in a way that's genuinely funny. And while the satire may at times be ham-fisted (broad Nazi jokes? really?), it is executed with vicious relish, and sharp enough to still feel relevant thirty-five years later.
And the cast can sell it. David Carradine, for instance, is just what a picture like this needs, laid-back enough to flow with the insanity around him but still able to put unexpected nuance into his performance. Simone Griffeth brings more to Annie than just being easy on the eyes; there's enough intelligence to her character that their scenes together are dealings between equals worthy of our attention. Stallone, who would become the most famous later on, is fairly raw, but does show some of the charisma that would make him a major star in a few years. Like him,the rest of the cast does a pretty good job moving between broad stereotypes and intense, fearsome competitors.
They need to, because that's what makes Death Race 2000 work as well as it does: Bartel does an excellent job of maintaining the air of black comedy while often charging the film with legitimate suspense, giving us a stake in these characters even though most are monsters of one sort or another (heck, the notional heroes are pretty hard to like). And while the budget is low, what there is is put to good use, creating a future world that is surreal rather than detailed enough for the audience to find fault.
Just look at the cars and the people who drive them - Death Race 2000 is a live-action cartoon with nasty teeth, the sort that better filmmakers with more resources have great trouble doing well. It's got its flaws - spots where the low budget stops being charming and a bizarre coda - but for the most part, it's B-movie entertainment done unusually well.
(Dead link to) Full review at EFC.
Phase IV
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 June 2010 at the Harvard Film Archive (SF-1970)
Here's an interesting question: If Phase IV were not a curiosity for being the only feature-length film directed by someone deservedly renowned for other contributions to the industry (assume that Saul Bass used a pseudonym that nobody caught on to the next thirty-five years, so it was the exact same film), would anybody remember it today? I say yes; it stands on its own as a genuinely creepy bit of sci-fi horror.
There's been a blast of radiation from space. Its effects aren't obvious, but in the Arizona desert, the ants are acting peculiarly - different species are not fighting each other over territory, and their natural predators are disappearing. Dr. Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) thinks that they are evolving, and he gets his government employers to assign him a mathematician, James Lesko (Michael Murphy), to help decode what appears to be communication among the ants. His suspicions appear to be well-founded - the local ants have developed a much more powerful hive mind than they had before. And they're on the outside of Hubbs's research station, while the scientists and Kendra Eldridge (Lynne Frederick), a local girl whose farm home has been overrun, are trapped within.
Ants can be unnerving enough as it is - they are already more organized than many groups of people, they've got weird angular shapes, and we don't have enough of an instinctive grasp of the square-cube law to look at one carrying a stick many times its size and understand that such strength wouldn't scale up. Bass and writer Mayo Simon are therefore pretty clever in that they don't do a whole lot to exaggerate what these mutant ants are capable of. They don't grow enormous, or suddenly start talking in a language we can easily understand. Bass and Simon refuse to humanize them, which makes them a more implacable foe.
He also does well to bring in a specialist to shoot the ants, much the way other filmmakers would bring Bass in to create a slick set of opening titles. Ken Middleham, a specialist in shooting the very small for the likes of National Geographic, gets us right down at the ants' level, and those sequences are amazing: Excellent documentary footage integrated seamlessly into the narrative, manipulated in a way to advance the plot. The special effects by John Richardson are excellent as well, and its a tribute to both that it's hard to tell where one man's work stops and the other's starts.
As well as the filmmakers present the ants, the human characters might be problematic for some. Traditionally, this sort of movie has a group of ordinary people with whom the audience can easily identify (or at least a reporter whose job it is to translate the scientists' cryptic utterances into something we understand). Phase IV really doesn't have that. Davenport's Hubbs is close to the edge to start with, a sort of mad-scientist in waiting. Kendra spends most of the movie in a state of shock, which Lynne Frederick presents quite believably (though her accent tends to waver between English and American). Lesko is our narrator and the movie's hero, but even he can sometimes seem very detached. Especially in the beginning of the movie, he makes the sort of jokes scientists make, in that the rest of us aren't sure whether or not he's serious.
Put it all together, and it makes for a difficult movie that doesn't necessarily age well. If you're able to get sucked into its world, Phase IV is relentlessly creepy and quite suspenseful; the ants prove quite resourceful in ways that are all the more threatening because they don't have a human face that takes pride in its cleverness. Of course, that concept can sometimes seem close to absurdity, and what looked high-tech and futuristic in 1974 is, well, quaint in the twenty-first century.
For all that, Phase IV holds up, and not just as an interesting footnote. It's definitely a weird movie, but more weird in that it sends shivers up the spine rather than causes one to wonder what this otherwise well-regarded guy was thinking.
Full review at EFC.
Thursday, July 01, 2010
New York Asian Film Festival 2010: The Storm Warriors, Bodyguards and Assassins, Echoes of the Rainbow, and Ip Man 2
I had a bit of an aggravating start to Sunday - I had been smart and made plans a couple weeks in advance, getting a good price for the 6:30am Boston/NY trip on Megabus and reserving my tickets. I left plenty of time to find my way to Lincoln Center. I figured I was cutting things a little close when I got to Central Square in Cambridge at only five of six, but I figured that since there were plenty of other people there, a train must be coming soon.
"Soon" turned out to be twenty-five minutes. It made pretty good time getting to South Station - abut ten minutes - but it almost takes longer to get from the subway stop to the bus (up to the train station, across the tracks to the bus station, up two flights of stairs, and then to the far terminal for the discount buses to NYC). I tried to exchange my ticket for one on the 7:30, but they had just sold the last one. I could be put on standby, but I figured that if that didn't work out, there would be no way I was getting to New York by noon for The Storm Warriors. So I moved to the Fung Wah desk next door, dropped $15 for the 7am bus, and took that, grumbling that someone at the T owes me money.
It did at least set up a kind of an amusing situation in that the bus took me into Chinatown, but I would have to take the subway uptown a ways to spend the day watching Chinese movies. Not quite ironic, but amusing. Then I got myself kind of turned around getting from the 59th street D-train stop to the actual building, including a moment when I could see it but not see the way to reach it, prompting a Mainerly "you can't get there from here" to escape my lips.
I did make it, though. Spiffy building, nice stage and screen. They turn the air conditioning up pretty high, so I probably shouldn't have been wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but overall it was a nice way to spend an afternoon at the movies. I got pretty good seats, too, which meant I was right there for Simon Yam's entertaining introductions and Q&A's:
Honestly, Mr. Yam was a stitch; the movie he was genuinely excited about was Echoes of the Rainbow, and no wonder - he won a Best Actor award for it, and though he was in all four movies, that was the only one where he really had a substantial role. It made for some amusing moments, though, as his answers to the questions festival organizer Grady Hendrix would ask often seemed only tangentially related, swiftly switching over to a plea to the audience to come see Echoes when it played at 6pm. Not a whole lot did (or most of the group had gone to the Saturday show), but it meant that I was able to camp out in a good seat for Ip Man 2, which I watched with some of the crew that runs IFFBoston. I managed not to ask about why, in the dozen years I've been going to Boston area fests, nobody has managed to get Donnie Yen to come to town. There are a bunch of obvious explanations - he's a big star in Asia who works constantly (after a brief sojourn in L.A. that produced nothing but Highlander: Endgame and Blade II, he has done two or three movies a year this decade); the Boston event which would play his films (Films at the Gate) has zero money to do much in the way of guest relations; despite the fact that he spent a good chunk of his youth here, he may not have much affinity for the Boston area.
Unfortunately, the charge ran out on my phone sometime during Echoes - I suspect because I didn't properly quit the maps app after getting to the theater and the GPS drains like crazy. So no pictures of Sammo Hung.
After that... Supper at 11pm, falling asleep just about as soon as I got into the 1:30am bus, and arriving in Boston four hours or so later, just in time to get home and go to work. I think I'm just now back on a reasonable sleep schedule.
(So, no, I won't be doing the same thing this Sunday, no matter how badly I want to see Confessions despite it not being on Fantasia's schedule...)
The Storm Warriors (Fun Wan II)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)
My monthly pull at the comic shop is pretty international: North American, British, French, Korean, Japanese. No Chinese, though; not much of that has made it to America in translation. Which means I can't say for sure whether or not The Storm Warriors is the closest thing to a faithful translation to the screen, in story and style, that China's martial-arts comics have received. On the other hand, it is pretty much what you'd expect to come of giving Danny & Oxide Pang a bunch of money to make a martial-arts fantasy epic.
In true comic-book fashion, though, we open on a cliffhanger - invading villain Lord Godless (Simon Yam) has captured the legendary hero Nameless (Kenny Ho) and many of his men. A rescue operation is mounted, but Nameless is poisoned and weak; he sends three of his group - Cloud (Aaron Kwok), Wind (Ekin Cheng), and Chu Chu (Yan Tang) to call upon reclusive Lord Wicked (Wong Tak-bun) for help. Given that Godless's son Heart (Nicholas Tse) is rampaging across China, Wicked opts to use a short-cut, teaching Wind to tap into "the evil way" while Nameless transfers his remaining power to Cloud. Wicked opted to teach Wind because he displays more self-control, but his training is interrupted. As Godless and Heart approach the Dragon's Tomb, will Wind's self-control hold, or will Cloud have to stop his comrade?
At first glance, The Storm Warriors doesn't necessarily feel like the place where an uninitiated audience would feel comfortable jumping in; it's not just an adaptation of a story from a long-running comic book serial, but also a sequel to 1998's The Storm Riders (Kowk and Cheng return from the first film). It is, however, fairly easy to get into. Despite having a vast mythology to pull from, the story in Storm Warriors is fairly self-contained and easy to grasp. And as complicated as these mystical fighting universes can be - at least, based upon their Korean and Japanese cousins - the Pangs and their co-writers don't ask the audience to remember a lot of detail: If you can understand that Wind tapping into an evil force is going to have an effect on him - your basic "power corrupts" scenario - you're about 75% of the way there.
Full review at EFC.
Shi yue wei cheng (Bodyguards and Assassins)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)
Before Bodyguards and Assassins, the festival presented Development Hell, a documentary not about the making of this film, but of the collapse of multiple attempts to shoot it under multiple titles over decades. Unlike many cursed productions, this one made it to screens in impressive fashion, with an all-star cast and extraordinary production values, at least providing the filmmakers with a happy ending.
In 1906, the Qing Dynasty still ruled China. Would-be revolutionaries were routinely assassinated, and the man who would later become known as the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, lived in exile in Japan. But in October, he would come to Hong Kong ot meet with other revolutionaries, a golden opportunity for Mainland assassins. Empress Cixi sends her top general, Yan Xiao-guo (Jun Hu), to spearhead the attempt. Security is meant to be handled by former general Fang Tian (Simon Yam), but Yan strikes first, leaving matters in the hands of a ragtag group: Li Yu-tang (Wang Xueqi), a businessman who had been satisfied to merely donate money to the cause; Chen Xiao-bai (Tony Leung Ka-fai), who edits the newspaper Li owns and also tutors Li's son Chung-guang (Wang Bo-Chieh); A-si(Nicholas Tse), Li's rickshaw boy; "Master Liu" (Leon Lai), a once-proud man reduced to vagrancy; Fang Hong (Li Yuchun), General Fang's 16-year-old daughter; and "Stinky Tofu" (Mengke Bateer), a giant of a street vendor who was once a Shaolin monk. The English have told the police to stay back, but one corrupt cop, Sum Chang-yan (Donnie Yen) is spying for Yan, less for ideology than because he still carries a torch for Li's young wife (Fan Bingbing).
Bodyguards and Assassins is a lot of movie; it runs 139 minutes and in that time gives all of its characters time to define themselves to the audience. They don't necessarily grown and change very much over the course of the film - the bulk of the action takes place over a period of less than a week - but director Teddy Chan, the editors, and the four credited writers do an excellent job of balancing the various characters. We learn just enough about each to grow fond of or interested in each one, but we're not smothered in unnecessary soap that unduly distracts us from or delays the action we paid to see.
Full review at EFC.
Sui yuet san tau (Echoes of the Rainbow)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)
Many filmmakers produce a movie like Echoes of the Rainbow at some point in their careers. It's an autobiographical story set in the place and time of the writer/director's youth, and though I'm not sure whether it's actually better than most or just less familiar (I can go a long time before seeing another New York teenager grow up with the mafia on the periphery), I liked this one. It's a love letter to Alex Law's youth, but a clear-eyed and well-made one.
The Laws live above their shop at one end of a quiet Hong Kong street. Mr. Law (Simon Yam) makes the shoes; his wife (Sandra Ng Kwan Yue) sells them. They have two sons. The younger, "Big Ears" (Buzz Chung), is about seven or eight years old and our narrator; he's a troublemaker in school and likes to nick things out of it. Older brother Desmond (Lee Chi-ting) is an excellent student and athlete at a private English-language school. He's seeing a nice girl, Flora (Evelyn Choi). Money-wise, the Laws don't have much, but they have a roof over their heads. A typhoon threatens that, but it's what they discover afterward that shakes them more.
The street that the Laws live on in Echoes of the Rainbow is a real place; it was actually marked for preservation rather than demolition after the film's success at the box office. What we're seeing in the movie, of course, is a bit of a fairy-tale version of the place, but Law isn't hiding that; he occasionally edits in snippets of home movies that show it as much more crowded and somewhat dingier. It's actually a nice effect, acknowledging that we're seeing the story nostalgically, from the perspective of young Big Ears, but also showing that the reality does not actually contradict his experiences.
Full review at EFC.
Ip Man 2
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)
When I reviewed Ip Man last year, I was enthusiastic, comparing it to classic Shaw Brothers and Once Upon a Time in China. As I said then, that's pretty good company for a martial arts epic to be in, and Ip Man 2 doesn't stray far from it. Indeed, that turns out to be a bit of a weakness this time around; rather than being reminiscent of those great action films, Ip Man 2 feels more like an imitation of them.
The year is now 1950 (although none of the characters seem to have aged since the first movie, which took place in the mid-thirties). Wing chun master Ip Man (Donnie Yen) has left Fo Shan for Hong Kong, where an old friend allows him to use empty rooftop space for a martial arts school. Students are few and far between, though, until Wong Leung (Huang Xiaoming) shows up; impressed by master Ip, he soon brings his friends. The kids run afoul of the students of another master, Hung Jan Nam (Sammo Hung), who also runs the cartel of local martial arts clubs, demanding fees. And while Ip is trying to establish himself in Hong Kong, Hung is working on a deal to provide security and exhibit Chinese boxing alongside an exhibition by the Western champion, "The Twister" (Darren Shahlavi).
Let's start with the good: Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung fight, in a set-piece that Hung choreographs and directs. It's a situation meant to test Ip Man's skills, so kind of artificial, but fun to watch. Huang Xiaoming and the other younger actors in the movie are pretty decent as well. Hung, main director Wilson Yip, and company rely a little more heavily on wire work than the first movie did, especially during the centerpiece duel between Ip and Hung (and all of Hong Kong's other martial arts masters), but almost never to the point of people seeming to defy gravity. The fighting is fun to watch, and though the contrast in styles between Wing Chun and Hung Keut it not quite so obvious as in the first film, we are shown some of how it works - the lack of posturing, the simultaneous attack and defense. Toward the end of the movie, when the action moves from sparring to serious business, we're once again treated to Yen doing some amazingly quick, rapid-fire combinations.
Full review at EFC.
"Soon" turned out to be twenty-five minutes. It made pretty good time getting to South Station - abut ten minutes - but it almost takes longer to get from the subway stop to the bus (up to the train station, across the tracks to the bus station, up two flights of stairs, and then to the far terminal for the discount buses to NYC). I tried to exchange my ticket for one on the 7:30, but they had just sold the last one. I could be put on standby, but I figured that if that didn't work out, there would be no way I was getting to New York by noon for The Storm Warriors. So I moved to the Fung Wah desk next door, dropped $15 for the 7am bus, and took that, grumbling that someone at the T owes me money.
It did at least set up a kind of an amusing situation in that the bus took me into Chinatown, but I would have to take the subway uptown a ways to spend the day watching Chinese movies. Not quite ironic, but amusing. Then I got myself kind of turned around getting from the 59th street D-train stop to the actual building, including a moment when I could see it but not see the way to reach it, prompting a Mainerly "you can't get there from here" to escape my lips.
I did make it, though. Spiffy building, nice stage and screen. They turn the air conditioning up pretty high, so I probably shouldn't have been wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but overall it was a nice way to spend an afternoon at the movies. I got pretty good seats, too, which meant I was right there for Simon Yam's entertaining introductions and Q&A's:
Honestly, Mr. Yam was a stitch; the movie he was genuinely excited about was Echoes of the Rainbow, and no wonder - he won a Best Actor award for it, and though he was in all four movies, that was the only one where he really had a substantial role. It made for some amusing moments, though, as his answers to the questions festival organizer Grady Hendrix would ask often seemed only tangentially related, swiftly switching over to a plea to the audience to come see Echoes when it played at 6pm. Not a whole lot did (or most of the group had gone to the Saturday show), but it meant that I was able to camp out in a good seat for Ip Man 2, which I watched with some of the crew that runs IFFBoston. I managed not to ask about why, in the dozen years I've been going to Boston area fests, nobody has managed to get Donnie Yen to come to town. There are a bunch of obvious explanations - he's a big star in Asia who works constantly (after a brief sojourn in L.A. that produced nothing but Highlander: Endgame and Blade II, he has done two or three movies a year this decade); the Boston event which would play his films (Films at the Gate) has zero money to do much in the way of guest relations; despite the fact that he spent a good chunk of his youth here, he may not have much affinity for the Boston area.
Unfortunately, the charge ran out on my phone sometime during Echoes - I suspect because I didn't properly quit the maps app after getting to the theater and the GPS drains like crazy. So no pictures of Sammo Hung.
After that... Supper at 11pm, falling asleep just about as soon as I got into the 1:30am bus, and arriving in Boston four hours or so later, just in time to get home and go to work. I think I'm just now back on a reasonable sleep schedule.
(So, no, I won't be doing the same thing this Sunday, no matter how badly I want to see Confessions despite it not being on Fantasia's schedule...)
The Storm Warriors (Fun Wan II)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)
My monthly pull at the comic shop is pretty international: North American, British, French, Korean, Japanese. No Chinese, though; not much of that has made it to America in translation. Which means I can't say for sure whether or not The Storm Warriors is the closest thing to a faithful translation to the screen, in story and style, that China's martial-arts comics have received. On the other hand, it is pretty much what you'd expect to come of giving Danny & Oxide Pang a bunch of money to make a martial-arts fantasy epic.
In true comic-book fashion, though, we open on a cliffhanger - invading villain Lord Godless (Simon Yam) has captured the legendary hero Nameless (Kenny Ho) and many of his men. A rescue operation is mounted, but Nameless is poisoned and weak; he sends three of his group - Cloud (Aaron Kwok), Wind (Ekin Cheng), and Chu Chu (Yan Tang) to call upon reclusive Lord Wicked (Wong Tak-bun) for help. Given that Godless's son Heart (Nicholas Tse) is rampaging across China, Wicked opts to use a short-cut, teaching Wind to tap into "the evil way" while Nameless transfers his remaining power to Cloud. Wicked opted to teach Wind because he displays more self-control, but his training is interrupted. As Godless and Heart approach the Dragon's Tomb, will Wind's self-control hold, or will Cloud have to stop his comrade?
At first glance, The Storm Warriors doesn't necessarily feel like the place where an uninitiated audience would feel comfortable jumping in; it's not just an adaptation of a story from a long-running comic book serial, but also a sequel to 1998's The Storm Riders (Kowk and Cheng return from the first film). It is, however, fairly easy to get into. Despite having a vast mythology to pull from, the story in Storm Warriors is fairly self-contained and easy to grasp. And as complicated as these mystical fighting universes can be - at least, based upon their Korean and Japanese cousins - the Pangs and their co-writers don't ask the audience to remember a lot of detail: If you can understand that Wind tapping into an evil force is going to have an effect on him - your basic "power corrupts" scenario - you're about 75% of the way there.
Full review at EFC.
Shi yue wei cheng (Bodyguards and Assassins)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)
Before Bodyguards and Assassins, the festival presented Development Hell, a documentary not about the making of this film, but of the collapse of multiple attempts to shoot it under multiple titles over decades. Unlike many cursed productions, this one made it to screens in impressive fashion, with an all-star cast and extraordinary production values, at least providing the filmmakers with a happy ending.
In 1906, the Qing Dynasty still ruled China. Would-be revolutionaries were routinely assassinated, and the man who would later become known as the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, lived in exile in Japan. But in October, he would come to Hong Kong ot meet with other revolutionaries, a golden opportunity for Mainland assassins. Empress Cixi sends her top general, Yan Xiao-guo (Jun Hu), to spearhead the attempt. Security is meant to be handled by former general Fang Tian (Simon Yam), but Yan strikes first, leaving matters in the hands of a ragtag group: Li Yu-tang (Wang Xueqi), a businessman who had been satisfied to merely donate money to the cause; Chen Xiao-bai (Tony Leung Ka-fai), who edits the newspaper Li owns and also tutors Li's son Chung-guang (Wang Bo-Chieh); A-si(Nicholas Tse), Li's rickshaw boy; "Master Liu" (Leon Lai), a once-proud man reduced to vagrancy; Fang Hong (Li Yuchun), General Fang's 16-year-old daughter; and "Stinky Tofu" (Mengke Bateer), a giant of a street vendor who was once a Shaolin monk. The English have told the police to stay back, but one corrupt cop, Sum Chang-yan (Donnie Yen) is spying for Yan, less for ideology than because he still carries a torch for Li's young wife (Fan Bingbing).
Bodyguards and Assassins is a lot of movie; it runs 139 minutes and in that time gives all of its characters time to define themselves to the audience. They don't necessarily grown and change very much over the course of the film - the bulk of the action takes place over a period of less than a week - but director Teddy Chan, the editors, and the four credited writers do an excellent job of balancing the various characters. We learn just enough about each to grow fond of or interested in each one, but we're not smothered in unnecessary soap that unduly distracts us from or delays the action we paid to see.
Full review at EFC.
Sui yuet san tau (Echoes of the Rainbow)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)
Many filmmakers produce a movie like Echoes of the Rainbow at some point in their careers. It's an autobiographical story set in the place and time of the writer/director's youth, and though I'm not sure whether it's actually better than most or just less familiar (I can go a long time before seeing another New York teenager grow up with the mafia on the periphery), I liked this one. It's a love letter to Alex Law's youth, but a clear-eyed and well-made one.
The Laws live above their shop at one end of a quiet Hong Kong street. Mr. Law (Simon Yam) makes the shoes; his wife (Sandra Ng Kwan Yue) sells them. They have two sons. The younger, "Big Ears" (Buzz Chung), is about seven or eight years old and our narrator; he's a troublemaker in school and likes to nick things out of it. Older brother Desmond (Lee Chi-ting) is an excellent student and athlete at a private English-language school. He's seeing a nice girl, Flora (Evelyn Choi). Money-wise, the Laws don't have much, but they have a roof over their heads. A typhoon threatens that, but it's what they discover afterward that shakes them more.
The street that the Laws live on in Echoes of the Rainbow is a real place; it was actually marked for preservation rather than demolition after the film's success at the box office. What we're seeing in the movie, of course, is a bit of a fairy-tale version of the place, but Law isn't hiding that; he occasionally edits in snippets of home movies that show it as much more crowded and somewhat dingier. It's actually a nice effect, acknowledging that we're seeing the story nostalgically, from the perspective of young Big Ears, but also showing that the reality does not actually contradict his experiences.
Full review at EFC.
Ip Man 2
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2010 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (New York Asian Film Festival 2010)
When I reviewed Ip Man last year, I was enthusiastic, comparing it to classic Shaw Brothers and Once Upon a Time in China. As I said then, that's pretty good company for a martial arts epic to be in, and Ip Man 2 doesn't stray far from it. Indeed, that turns out to be a bit of a weakness this time around; rather than being reminiscent of those great action films, Ip Man 2 feels more like an imitation of them.
The year is now 1950 (although none of the characters seem to have aged since the first movie, which took place in the mid-thirties). Wing chun master Ip Man (Donnie Yen) has left Fo Shan for Hong Kong, where an old friend allows him to use empty rooftop space for a martial arts school. Students are few and far between, though, until Wong Leung (Huang Xiaoming) shows up; impressed by master Ip, he soon brings his friends. The kids run afoul of the students of another master, Hung Jan Nam (Sammo Hung), who also runs the cartel of local martial arts clubs, demanding fees. And while Ip is trying to establish himself in Hong Kong, Hung is working on a deal to provide security and exhibit Chinese boxing alongside an exhibition by the Western champion, "The Twister" (Darren Shahlavi).
Let's start with the good: Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung fight, in a set-piece that Hung choreographs and directs. It's a situation meant to test Ip Man's skills, so kind of artificial, but fun to watch. Huang Xiaoming and the other younger actors in the movie are pretty decent as well. Hung, main director Wilson Yip, and company rely a little more heavily on wire work than the first movie did, especially during the centerpiece duel between Ip and Hung (and all of Hong Kong's other martial arts masters), but almost never to the point of people seeming to defy gravity. The fighting is fun to watch, and though the contrast in styles between Wing Chun and Hung Keut it not quite so obvious as in the first film, we are shown some of how it works - the lack of posturing, the simultaneous attack and defense. Toward the end of the movie, when the action moves from sparring to serious business, we're once again treated to Yen doing some amazingly quick, rapid-fire combinations.
Full review at EFC.
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