I finally met up with Scott Weinberg and William Goss, a couple of fellow writers for eFilmCritic, who are here to cover the festival for Cinematical/Horror Squad and FEARnet this week. I finally met them for the first time in Austin back in March, after having internet-known Scott for years, and they're pretty cool folks. They're up here until Sunday and will likely be posting regularly, although, let's face it - that's only a a side note to the coverage going on here. You won't even find out what I had to eat on those pages!
Gogo Chilship (Go Go 70's)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
What does a classic rock & roll movie need? A new sound. Rebellion against authority. Strife within the band. A girl. Clubs. Maybe a writer. And, of course, music that rocks, even if a generation has passed since the film's events. Go Go 70's delivers right down the list, to a greater or lesser extent, telling the story of a band, and a country, that needed to rock.
The time: 1969. The place, Kyungsang Province, right on the border between the Koreas. In a bar catering to American GIs, Im Sang-kyu (Cho Seung-woo) unenthusiastically fronts a country & western trio. After the gig, he and the band head across town to check out another show, where Man-sik (Cha Seung-wu) is demonstrating that he has neither the voice nor command of English to sing James Brown. Things get wild, both trios end up on stage, and as they bond over their love of "black music" afterward, they opt to join forces as "The Devils". They're soon headed to Seoul for a battle of the bands, with Mimi (Shin Min-a), who may be as fond of the music as she is of Sang-kyu, in tow. It's not a great time to be trying something new: Martial law is being declared, and Sang-kyu is a draft dodger. Still, some ingenuity on the part of writer/promoter Lee Byung-wuk (Lee Sung-min) gets them a regular gig, and a little sex appeal injected by Mimi creates a go-go sensation! But once you reach the top, the fall is inevitable.
Go Go 70's is an affectionate look back at The Devils. Other filmmakers may have chosen to play up any sort of rift between Sang-kyu and Man-sik, delved deeper into the relationship between Sang-kyu and Mimi, or taken a broader look at what it calls the first generation of Koran rock & roll (there are hints of a rivalry with another band, The Phoenixes); writer/director Choi Ho does not. There's a very brief bit of conflict in the middle, as Sang-kyu is upset that between the others' side gigs and the popularity of the "go-go" style, they haven't written much new music and have drifted from their soul roots, but the story goes off in another direction fairly quickly.
Full review at EFC.
"Die Schneider Krankheit" ("The Schneider Disease")
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival; screened with Mutants)
An extremely high-concept short from Spain, purpouting to be about a zombie-like plague that infected a small town near the German border fifty years ago, presented as an old German educational film. Kind of clever, but it certainly makes its conceit convoluted, too much so for it ever to be either very scary or very funny.
Mutants
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Zombie movies, even more than other types of horror movies, are kind of like Westerns. The specific background of how the characters got to where they start doesn't matter; the science or taxonomy of the monsters is secondary. The important part is that, like the western, you have people who have the ideals of a rational world, one with laws, ethics, and protection, trying to handle a world without them. David Morlet's Mutants doesn't break a lot of new ground in the field, but what it does come up with is worth seeing.
It opens with an ambulance screaming down a country road. Marco (Francis Renaud) is driving. Sonia (Hélène de Fougerolles), an EMT, is trying to treat a patient in the back; the is starting starting to turn into one of the mindless cannibals that has plunged the nation into chaos since summer. Perez (Marie-Sohna Conde), a hard-bitten soldier, is ready to cut their losses; she's also trying to raise NOAH, the government health/emergency management organization, on the radio. Stopping for gas, they come across a man who may have turned or may simply be autistic. More cannibals are heard. Guns come out. By the time they arrive at a large, abandoned building in the forest, their numbers have already been reduced, Marco has been bitten, although Sonia has reason to think that they have a chance if they can hold out long enough for the army to pick them up. Unfortunately, the first person to answer their radio call, Frank (Nicolas Briançon), isn't from the government.
There is clearly a great deal of 28 Days Later in the DNA of Mutants, although it makes some interesting contributions to the genre. The most interesting is how it adopts a somewhat realistic approach to how the virus affects the victims: In most zombie/ghoul/biohorror movies, it's close to instantaneous after an initial incubation period; Morlet has it attack Marco gradually, tormenting him, chipping away at his mental state, ebbing and strengthening almost randomly. It's in some ways even more horrifying than the physical attacks, because it gets at our sense of self. If Sonia is unable to stop the process, there won't be a single moment when Marco dies and his body becomes a zombie; just a gray area where you can't say exactly which he is.
Full review at EFC.
DJ XL5's Razzle Dazzle Zappin' Party
N/A (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
The pros didn't stick around for the Zappin' Party, although I didn't really give them a hard sell. It is something you want to do at least once as part of the Fantasia Experience, to get an idea of just how much this thing is a community as well as a festival - though, to be fair, I didn't partake until last year (my fourth), the first time I had the block free.
It is, objectively, mostly not very good, filled with a ton of inside jokes and deliberately chincy parodies. There are a few nuggets of god worth sifting for:
* "Starlight" - a funny CGI piece about the how the hole in the ozone layer is affecting Antartica's penguins.
* "Jazz with a General Problem" and "Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee" - enjoyable stop-motion toy animation, and you could probably sell many nostalgic nerds like me a transforming General Lee.
* "Deathspiel" - Zombie curling.
* "Momma" - the rare piece of straight horror in among the parodies, a chilling mood piece about two children worried that their mother will wake up.
... plus, I also finally realized that festival president Pierre Corbeil and DJ XL5 are the same person. Unless my meager french screwed that up last night and I'm a fool now rather than a fool before.
My plan for today was Slam-Bang, Gushing Prayer, and Hells; Lesbian Vampire Slayers (5pm, Hall) was recommended, but I'm apparently falling further and further behind.
Friday's plan looks like GS Wonderland (if I can finish work early), Instant Swamp, "Outer Limits of Animation", Les Lascars, The Chaser (or maybe the other screening of GS Wonderland, if work doesn't co-operate), and Arcanum.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Fantasia Daily for 14 July 2009: Yatterman, Tokyo Onlypic 2008, and The Clone Returns Home
Another day running late, but I would just like to point out: The rain only came down on the 14th during the time when I was neither in the office nor seeing a movie.
Yattaman (Yatterman)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Years ago, when it first came out, and before everyone I knew who would even consider watching a foreign film knew what it was, I would tell people that Takashi Miike's Audition was a sweet romantic comedy, which, well, it is not (although you could make an enjoyable one if you started from the same premise). I bring this up mainly so that you understand what I mean when I saw that Miike's Yatterman is nothing but wholesome family entertainment - maybe a little on the bland side for adults.
Yatterman 1 & 2 are toymaker Gan Takada (Sho Sakurai) and his girlfriend, electronics whiz Ai Kaminari. As the film opens, they ("ably" assisted by their robots Botty and Yatterwoof) are fighting off the weekly attack of Lady Doronjo (Kyoko Fukada) and her henchmen Tanzra (Kendo Kobayashi) and Boyacky (Katsuhisa Namase), intent as ever on getting the four segments of the Skull Stone for their "God of Thieves", Skullobey. In the midst of the rubble from the battle, that Yatter-crew finds Shoko Kaieda (Anri Okamoto), daughter of the archaeologist (Sadao Abe) who knows where the other skull fragments are to be found. Gan thinks she's kind of cute.
At first, I thought that the opening scene's bright Day-Glo color scheme, mangled language, and over-the top action was just going to be the hook, and then things might quiet back down to something close to normal, but no... The entire movie, minus one oddly conventional daydream sequence, is like that, as thoroughly dedicated to its cartoon aesthetic as the live-action Speed Racer. Indeed, even never having seen an episode of the original 1970s series, I can probably tell you some of its quirks, just from the stuff that gets repeated - the rickety bicycle built for three, for instance - or the way the movie's structure could essentially be two or three episodes grafted together.
Full review at EFC.
Tokyo OnlyPic 2008
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
Anthology films like Tokyo OnlyPic should probably not be graded on how good they are as a whole, but more on how good the best segments are, and how man segments should be in that group. On those grounds, Tokyo OnlyPic 2008 is an unqualified hit - the opening ceremony alone had my crying from laughter, and there are a number of other bits nearly as funny. Some don't work quite as well, but you'll get your money's worth from the good ones.
The premise is simple - the Tokyo OnlyPic ("Only Pictures") games are going on at roughly the same time as the Beijing Olympics, although these games contain some rather more esoteric events - like the "Hellmaraton", "Samurai Call", and "1000-character SMS". Many of them are presented as animation of various styles, some as live action, others as a mix, and in between, studio hosts Junichi Mogi and Shoko Nakagawa (genuine D-list celebrities!) introduce and analyze events from the studio.
Even the live-action segments are cartoons at heart, filled with painful slapstick, national stereotypes, and outlandish, silly events. Which isn't a bad thing - these are often excellent little cartoons. Main director Riichiro Mashima's opening ceremonies look like a video game into which some real people have occasionally been inserted for close-ups, but contains more laughs per second than anything else I've seen in a long, long time. It starts with the introduction of pigeons as the mascots for the games, continues with a final relay of the OnlyPic flame that will make the participants glad that there's a pool in the middle of the arena, and continues with a magnificent giant Buddha statue that for some reason shoots death rays from its eyes, and an introduction of the various teams that plays on their national reputations along with good slapstick. It's a mini-masterpiece of steady but escalating chaos, pushing each gag just a little further until it's a complete and utter madhouse.
Full review at EFC.
Kuron wa Kokyo wo Mezasu (The Clone Returns Home)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
I don't think this was a "boring movie nap", although I'll probably request a screener just to make sure. It is, however, a pretty boring movie, one that takes its science-fiction concept and then does very little of interest with it. It touches on the ethics of cloning and memory transfer without really digging into them, ponders a metaphysical question or two without coming to many interesting conclusions. It's been compared to Tartakovsky, which is fitting, but not necessarily complimentary.
It is, however, beautiful - cinematographer Hideho Urata shoots it marvelously. Mitsuhiro Oikawa gives a fine performance as the astronaut who is cloned after dying in an accident in orbit. I can see where the praise comes from, but I tend to prefer a more active story to this sort of meditation.
My plan for today is Go Go 70s, Mutants, and either "DJ XL5's Razzle Dazzle Zappin' Party" or Slam-Bang. Thursday's plan is likely Slam-Bang (if I don't see it tonight), The Warlords or Gushing Prayer, and Hells
Yattaman (Yatterman)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Years ago, when it first came out, and before everyone I knew who would even consider watching a foreign film knew what it was, I would tell people that Takashi Miike's Audition was a sweet romantic comedy, which, well, it is not (although you could make an enjoyable one if you started from the same premise). I bring this up mainly so that you understand what I mean when I saw that Miike's Yatterman is nothing but wholesome family entertainment - maybe a little on the bland side for adults.
Yatterman 1 & 2 are toymaker Gan Takada (Sho Sakurai) and his girlfriend, electronics whiz Ai Kaminari. As the film opens, they ("ably" assisted by their robots Botty and Yatterwoof) are fighting off the weekly attack of Lady Doronjo (Kyoko Fukada) and her henchmen Tanzra (Kendo Kobayashi) and Boyacky (Katsuhisa Namase), intent as ever on getting the four segments of the Skull Stone for their "God of Thieves", Skullobey. In the midst of the rubble from the battle, that Yatter-crew finds Shoko Kaieda (Anri Okamoto), daughter of the archaeologist (Sadao Abe) who knows where the other skull fragments are to be found. Gan thinks she's kind of cute.
At first, I thought that the opening scene's bright Day-Glo color scheme, mangled language, and over-the top action was just going to be the hook, and then things might quiet back down to something close to normal, but no... The entire movie, minus one oddly conventional daydream sequence, is like that, as thoroughly dedicated to its cartoon aesthetic as the live-action Speed Racer. Indeed, even never having seen an episode of the original 1970s series, I can probably tell you some of its quirks, just from the stuff that gets repeated - the rickety bicycle built for three, for instance - or the way the movie's structure could essentially be two or three episodes grafted together.
Full review at EFC.
Tokyo OnlyPic 2008
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
Anthology films like Tokyo OnlyPic should probably not be graded on how good they are as a whole, but more on how good the best segments are, and how man segments should be in that group. On those grounds, Tokyo OnlyPic 2008 is an unqualified hit - the opening ceremony alone had my crying from laughter, and there are a number of other bits nearly as funny. Some don't work quite as well, but you'll get your money's worth from the good ones.
The premise is simple - the Tokyo OnlyPic ("Only Pictures") games are going on at roughly the same time as the Beijing Olympics, although these games contain some rather more esoteric events - like the "Hellmaraton", "Samurai Call", and "1000-character SMS". Many of them are presented as animation of various styles, some as live action, others as a mix, and in between, studio hosts Junichi Mogi and Shoko Nakagawa (genuine D-list celebrities!) introduce and analyze events from the studio.
Even the live-action segments are cartoons at heart, filled with painful slapstick, national stereotypes, and outlandish, silly events. Which isn't a bad thing - these are often excellent little cartoons. Main director Riichiro Mashima's opening ceremonies look like a video game into which some real people have occasionally been inserted for close-ups, but contains more laughs per second than anything else I've seen in a long, long time. It starts with the introduction of pigeons as the mascots for the games, continues with a final relay of the OnlyPic flame that will make the participants glad that there's a pool in the middle of the arena, and continues with a magnificent giant Buddha statue that for some reason shoots death rays from its eyes, and an introduction of the various teams that plays on their national reputations along with good slapstick. It's a mini-masterpiece of steady but escalating chaos, pushing each gag just a little further until it's a complete and utter madhouse.
Full review at EFC.
Kuron wa Kokyo wo Mezasu (The Clone Returns Home)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
I don't think this was a "boring movie nap", although I'll probably request a screener just to make sure. It is, however, a pretty boring movie, one that takes its science-fiction concept and then does very little of interest with it. It touches on the ethics of cloning and memory transfer without really digging into them, ponders a metaphysical question or two without coming to many interesting conclusions. It's been compared to Tartakovsky, which is fitting, but not necessarily complimentary.
It is, however, beautiful - cinematographer Hideho Urata shoots it marvelously. Mitsuhiro Oikawa gives a fine performance as the astronaut who is cloned after dying in an accident in orbit. I can see where the praise comes from, but I tend to prefer a more active story to this sort of meditation.
My plan for today is Go Go 70s, Mutants, and either "DJ XL5's Razzle Dazzle Zappin' Party" or Slam-Bang. Thursday's plan is likely Slam-Bang (if I don't see it tonight), The Warlords or Gushing Prayer, and Hells
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Fantasia Daily for 13 July 2009: Legendary Assassin, Book of Blood, and Stoic
The first day of working out of my employers' sister company in Montreal went pretty well - I stayed until about four o'clock, don't believe I disturbed anybody too much, and through a combination of finally finishing something I've been working on for weeks and grabbing a couple of unusually straightforward assignments out of the work queue, I have probably set an unreasonable standard for how much work I can get done when I am actually in the office.
And now, for some fun facts about getting around Montreal without a car: Unlike most American cities, those dotted lines for when the road goes underground do, in fact, indicate places that pedestrians can go. I know this now because it enabled me to take a straight line to work on Tuesday that I didn't manage on a hot, sweaty Monday. Also, if you're taking the Metro from a spot on the green line between Lionel-Groulx and Berri-UQAM to a spot on the orange line between the two stations (or vice versa), it doesn't matter which direction you initially go. Heck, when getting from the office (Place des Armes) to the festival (Guy-Concordia), either way is seven stops with one transfer.
Long Nga (Legendary Assassin)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
It seems like everybody's been talking about Wu Jing being the next big action star for a few years, but it hasn't directly translated into lead roles - for crying out loud, he was "Assassin #1" in The Mummy 3 last year! Why that is when Jackie Chan and Jet Li aren't what they used to be and Donnie Yen can't be in everything, I don't know, but he's apparently decided that if getting behind the camera is what it takes to get front-and-center, that's what he'll do - and it's not a bad choice.
Wu plays Bo, who has just arrived on one of Hong Kong's outlying islands to collect the head of Timothy "Chairman" Ma (Keu Zhan-wen), which he has done without a lot of trouble. The hitch is that a typhoon has shut the ferries down, just after they've disgorged a couple other gangsters, Jellyfish ("Tenky" Tin Kai-man) and Fat Wing (Lam Suet) and their crew, looking for Ma at the request behest of his wife (Noriko Aoyama), who is running the business while Ma hides out. Oh, and that nice girl Bo caught falling out of a tree after chasing her cat? Hiu Wor (Celina Jade) is a cop - who immediately gets in more trouble trying to arrest three large bank robbers.
Legendary Assassin is a star vehicle for Wu Jing, I believe the first for a guy generally brought in as a challenging screen opponent for bigger names, and he does have a nice, understated charisma in this film. He doesn't have a lot of dialog - there seem to be hints in the subtitles that Bo is not as adept in Cantonese as in Mandarin - but he's got expressive eyes and does a nice job of communicating physically even when he's not fighting. Being the mysterious, quiet man in this movie probably helps him, actually, letting him underplay the comedy that everyone else plays broadly.
Full review at EFC.
"Hold Your Fire"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
This short (playing in front of "Book of Blood") features a lot of grotesque imagery of the ravages of an east-asian war (could be WWII, could be Vietnam), and one genuinely heart-stopping moment, but the storytelling is a bit iffy - if it's supposed to be making a point, I'm not sure what it is. Also, it's an odd combination of live-action and CGI where even the actual performers look a bit unreal, throwing the whole thing into the so-called uncanny valley.
Book of Blood
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
When the DVD & Blu-ray for The Midnight Meat Train came out, I was honestly kind of surprised to see nearly every review approaching it in terms of it being Clive Barker's story, rather than Ryuhei Kitamura's first American feature. That makes sense, of course - Barker has been a big name in horror for decades, while Kitamura is not particularly well-known in the English-speaking world. That I went to the screening last year jazzed to see what Kitamura did with Hollywood money and actors doesn't mean that the rest of the world felt the same way.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I went to Book of Blood without much attachment to the material, even though it's taken from the same anthology that The Midnight Meat Train was. I didn't like it nearly as much as Kitamura's movie, either - for far too long, it feels like a generic haunted house movie, shot in an unpleasant green pallette that doesn't do much to add to the atmosphere, and acted rather flatly. I've seen this, including the relatively standard-issue twists before. The difference, of course, comes in the ending - Barker has grand and horrible nightmares, and the filmmakers do a fine job of visualizing them. It's almost worth slogging through the rest, including what seems like an awkward method of tying two stories together, to see the oft-repeated phrase about the dead having roads pictured.
I won't be hitting Dread tonight; Barker's style of horror isn't really my cup of tea when I have other options. I do have to admire him for having big ideas.
"Ice Cream Sunday"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
"Ice Cream Sunday" is a skillfully, creepily made take on the mind of a pedophile, spending much of its time on a simple, unashamed confession, interspersed with footage of young kids made more disturbingly intimate by being shot on 8mm, like a home movie. Then, of course, it goes and brings the church in, and gets weird, and goes on for a while. It's still disturbing as can be, but maybe loses something in its garishness.
Stoic
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
You know, if Uwe Boll keeps directing movies as watchable as Tunnel Rats and Stoic, he may lose the "worst director ever" tag. Stoic is not a great movie, but it's certainly watchable enough, though it's also plain to see that it could have been even better in the hands of a really good director.
It opens with Mitch Palmer (Shaun Sipos), a prison inmate, found hanged in his cell. An unseen investigator questions his three cellmates: Tearful Harry (Edward Furlong), defiant Peter (Sam Levinson), and icy Jack (Steffen Mennekes). As each tells their story - either truthfully or in lies - a narrative starts to emerge, starting with Mitch trying to back out of a poker bet and continually escalating as the other inmates begin bullying him to put him in his place.
The credits for this movie on the IMDB have some odd but noteworthy omissions: There's no writer listed, although the closing titles start with "Directed, Written, and Produced by Uwe Boll". Supposedly much of the movie was improvised, so it's understandable that the screenplay credits would be a bit vague. If that's the case, though, it might be nice to know who the editor was, as the film does wind up being fairly well put-together on that count. It's not flashy, but given that improvisation often provides a mountain of footage that can be hard to make into a single narrative, it's very solid.
Full review at EFC.
If you're in town today, you've probably already started seeing movies by the time this gets posted. I'm doing Yatterman, Tokyo OnlyPic 2008, and The Clone Returns Home. I'd recommend Power Kids, Stoic, and Dead Snow to various extents, but they've already played.
For Wednesday, my plan is Go Go 70s, Mutants, and either "DJ XL5's Razzle Dazzle Zappin' Party" or Slam-Bang.
And now, for some fun facts about getting around Montreal without a car: Unlike most American cities, those dotted lines for when the road goes underground do, in fact, indicate places that pedestrians can go. I know this now because it enabled me to take a straight line to work on Tuesday that I didn't manage on a hot, sweaty Monday. Also, if you're taking the Metro from a spot on the green line between Lionel-Groulx and Berri-UQAM to a spot on the orange line between the two stations (or vice versa), it doesn't matter which direction you initially go. Heck, when getting from the office (Place des Armes) to the festival (Guy-Concordia), either way is seven stops with one transfer.
Long Nga (Legendary Assassin)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
It seems like everybody's been talking about Wu Jing being the next big action star for a few years, but it hasn't directly translated into lead roles - for crying out loud, he was "Assassin #1" in The Mummy 3 last year! Why that is when Jackie Chan and Jet Li aren't what they used to be and Donnie Yen can't be in everything, I don't know, but he's apparently decided that if getting behind the camera is what it takes to get front-and-center, that's what he'll do - and it's not a bad choice.
Wu plays Bo, who has just arrived on one of Hong Kong's outlying islands to collect the head of Timothy "Chairman" Ma (Keu Zhan-wen), which he has done without a lot of trouble. The hitch is that a typhoon has shut the ferries down, just after they've disgorged a couple other gangsters, Jellyfish ("Tenky" Tin Kai-man) and Fat Wing (Lam Suet) and their crew, looking for Ma at the request behest of his wife (Noriko Aoyama), who is running the business while Ma hides out. Oh, and that nice girl Bo caught falling out of a tree after chasing her cat? Hiu Wor (Celina Jade) is a cop - who immediately gets in more trouble trying to arrest three large bank robbers.
Legendary Assassin is a star vehicle for Wu Jing, I believe the first for a guy generally brought in as a challenging screen opponent for bigger names, and he does have a nice, understated charisma in this film. He doesn't have a lot of dialog - there seem to be hints in the subtitles that Bo is not as adept in Cantonese as in Mandarin - but he's got expressive eyes and does a nice job of communicating physically even when he's not fighting. Being the mysterious, quiet man in this movie probably helps him, actually, letting him underplay the comedy that everyone else plays broadly.
Full review at EFC.
"Hold Your Fire"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
This short (playing in front of "Book of Blood") features a lot of grotesque imagery of the ravages of an east-asian war (could be WWII, could be Vietnam), and one genuinely heart-stopping moment, but the storytelling is a bit iffy - if it's supposed to be making a point, I'm not sure what it is. Also, it's an odd combination of live-action and CGI where even the actual performers look a bit unreal, throwing the whole thing into the so-called uncanny valley.
Book of Blood
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
When the DVD & Blu-ray for The Midnight Meat Train came out, I was honestly kind of surprised to see nearly every review approaching it in terms of it being Clive Barker's story, rather than Ryuhei Kitamura's first American feature. That makes sense, of course - Barker has been a big name in horror for decades, while Kitamura is not particularly well-known in the English-speaking world. That I went to the screening last year jazzed to see what Kitamura did with Hollywood money and actors doesn't mean that the rest of the world felt the same way.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I went to Book of Blood without much attachment to the material, even though it's taken from the same anthology that The Midnight Meat Train was. I didn't like it nearly as much as Kitamura's movie, either - for far too long, it feels like a generic haunted house movie, shot in an unpleasant green pallette that doesn't do much to add to the atmosphere, and acted rather flatly. I've seen this, including the relatively standard-issue twists before. The difference, of course, comes in the ending - Barker has grand and horrible nightmares, and the filmmakers do a fine job of visualizing them. It's almost worth slogging through the rest, including what seems like an awkward method of tying two stories together, to see the oft-repeated phrase about the dead having roads pictured.
I won't be hitting Dread tonight; Barker's style of horror isn't really my cup of tea when I have other options. I do have to admire him for having big ideas.
"Ice Cream Sunday"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
"Ice Cream Sunday" is a skillfully, creepily made take on the mind of a pedophile, spending much of its time on a simple, unashamed confession, interspersed with footage of young kids made more disturbingly intimate by being shot on 8mm, like a home movie. Then, of course, it goes and brings the church in, and gets weird, and goes on for a while. It's still disturbing as can be, but maybe loses something in its garishness.
Stoic
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
You know, if Uwe Boll keeps directing movies as watchable as Tunnel Rats and Stoic, he may lose the "worst director ever" tag. Stoic is not a great movie, but it's certainly watchable enough, though it's also plain to see that it could have been even better in the hands of a really good director.
It opens with Mitch Palmer (Shaun Sipos), a prison inmate, found hanged in his cell. An unseen investigator questions his three cellmates: Tearful Harry (Edward Furlong), defiant Peter (Sam Levinson), and icy Jack (Steffen Mennekes). As each tells their story - either truthfully or in lies - a narrative starts to emerge, starting with Mitch trying to back out of a poker bet and continually escalating as the other inmates begin bullying him to put him in his place.
The credits for this movie on the IMDB have some odd but noteworthy omissions: There's no writer listed, although the closing titles start with "Directed, Written, and Produced by Uwe Boll". Supposedly much of the movie was improvised, so it's understandable that the screenplay credits would be a bit vague. If that's the case, though, it might be nice to know who the editor was, as the film does wind up being fairly well put-together on that count. It's not flashy, but given that improvisation often provides a mountain of footage that can be hard to make into a single narrative, it's very solid.
Full review at EFC.
If you're in town today, you've probably already started seeing movies by the time this gets posted. I'm doing Yatterman, Tokyo OnlyPic 2008, and The Clone Returns Home. I'd recommend Power Kids, Stoic, and Dead Snow to various extents, but they've already played.
For Wednesday, my plan is Go Go 70s, Mutants, and either "DJ XL5's Razzle Dazzle Zappin' Party" or Slam-Bang.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Fantasia Daily for 12 July 2009: Thirst, Power Kids, Lalapipo, Evil Spirit: Viy, and Spare
Not a whole lot to say about yesterday: It was my first real morning-to-late night day of seeing movies here, and as much as folks don't believe it, that takes a bit out of you, engaging the same part of your brain for close to twelve hours straight. I met a nice lady from Anchor Bay Canada, gearing up for the evenings screening of Grace, during Thirst, and actually had a little more time than I expected to wander around looking for food after Lalapipo: Both the Fantasia program and NYAFF had it listed as around two hours, when it's actually right around the ninety-minute mark.
And I lost my program sometime between then and Evil Spirit: Viy, which is annoying as heck. A couple years ago, they actually had piles of programs out for the taking so long as you didn't want the DVD-o-trailers; this year I'm going to have to drop $5 to get another. But, someone will get the gift of a disc full of incomprehensible movie previews, as my copy of that is already sitting back at the apartment.
Bakjwi (Thirst)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I wish I could take credit for this line, but it was the lady in the next seat over who turned to me after the Fantasia screening of Thirst and said "isn't it cool to see a vampire movie that's not all gothy?"
Believe it or not, it is. It means Park Chan-wook is doing the sort of movie he's good at: The sort where, even when horrible things happen, there may be something funny about it, and not in an ironic, self-conscious way. The sort where things happen in bright light and full color. And the sort where, instead of moping over the tragic ironies of their lives, the characters go out and do stuff - sometimes noble, sometimes horrible, but always interesting.
Friar Hyan Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) is a good man; he ministers to the ill at a Seoul hospital, and counsels heartbroken nurses against suicide. Wanting to do more, he volunteers to test an experimental vaccine for Emmanuel Virus (EV), a nasty flesh-eating disease. The experiment is a tragic failure, as he's the only one of 500 to survive. But it's not the miracle it appears to be - he was somehow transfused with vampire blood. The vampirism holds the EV in check, along with having the usual side effects. And it's not just his appetite for blood that he's having trouble holding back - he's feeling a strong drive to do things that a Catholic priest, especially, shouldn't be doing.
Enter Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin). The onetime foster sister, now wife, of Sang-hyun's childhood friend Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun) is immensely dissatisfied with her life, running around the neighborhood barefoot at night just for a moment's escape. She's immediately attracted to the newly-virile priest, who should beware - an unhappy wife can be just as dangerous as a hungry vampire.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
5 Huajai Hero (Power Kids)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I can't recommend Power Kids to families, and it's not just because it is an amazing example of how what is apparently considered to be enjoyable family entertainment in one culture (say, Thailand) comes off as mind-bogglingly inappropriate in another (say, the U.S.). It's because, with the exception of the fight choreography, everything about the movie is cloying and amateurish.
The movie gives off its "really, this is for kids?" vibe even before the credits start, with refugees getting machine-gunned in the jungle. The scene still shifts to a more peaceful spot in Bangkok, where muay thai master Lek (Arunya Pawilai) looks after four kids - his niece Catt (Sasisa Jindamanee), nephews Wuth (Nantawooti Boonrapsap) and little Wun, and son of a friend Pong (Paytaai Wongkamlao). Sadly, Wun has a heart condition, and the need for a transplant is pushed up when some bullies chase him away from a remote control car race that their friend Jib (Nawarat Techarathanaprasert) is participating in. The good news: A donor heart has been found! The bad news: It needs to be transplanted within four hours and is currently located in a hospital that has been taken over by terrorists led by a cruel leader (Johnny Nguyen) and an uncertain young girl (Pimchanok Leuwisetpaiboon).
Yes, you are reading this right - the second half of this movie involves four junior-high-schoolers sneaking into a hospital filled with terrorists holding machine guns to retrieve a donor heart. Sure, they've got some muay thai skills, but this is still kids getting shot at even before you get to behavior you might not want your kids imitating, like smashing fluorescent lights on people and flying through panes of glass face first (and unless they spent a lot more on CGI than I imagine, there's really not much chance Boonrapsap is being doubled for there). Heck, just the "fun" scene meant to show us the kids' skills early on might be a little alarming for parents: I'm not sure I like the idea of kids whose elbows are at groin level learning to do Tony Jaa stuff anyway, let alone giving them the idea of strapping lengths of pipe to their arms and legs!
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Lalapipo
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Tetsuya Nakashima wrote this, and it's not hard to see his fingerprints on it - Lalapipo has all the jumping around, bright colors, crisscrossing plots and outright absurdity that Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko featured, but director Masayuki Miyano doesn't quite seem to have the magic touch with it that Nakashima himself does. There's charm to his movie, but it's only enough to just get the audience curious about the characters, not fall in love with them like I did with the films Nakashima directed himself.
Also, and it may just be the digital projection used, but the film looks kind of cheap in places. Shots out one character's window at a busy Tokyo intersection just get overpowered by yellow, and while it may be a stylistic choice, it makes the movie hard to look at. A little grottiness is expected given how much of the film revolves around characters in low-rent porn-oriented professions, but even the fantasy sequences look kind of half-hearted.
Evil Spirit: Viy
Seen 12 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
Hey, check it out... My first boring movie nap of the festival!
To be fair, I scarfed a bunch of pizza right before the movie started, so there was food-coma action going on too, but this really is the sort of navel-gazing orouborus of a movie that needs to be a lot more clever, or scary, or witty, to really be worth the effort. There are moments when it seems to be doing something neat, especially in the first third, but not enough to really suck me in.
Seu-pe-eo (Spare)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I kind of wish I could get away from work to hit the second screening of this; I saw the whole thing but was still kind of worn out. It is a ton of fun, though, with comments from the peanut gallery built into the soundtrack, plenty of good fighting, and a laid-back atmosphere about dealing with gamblers and gangsters that wouldn't feel out of place in a Guy Ritchie film.
It's a slight-but-fun buddy movie where the eventual buddies don't speak the same language, and really looks like it gets a lot of action out of a shoestring budget.
Well, this is going up too late to say much about recommendations for the day. I might just give Evil Spirit: Viy another try (7pm, de Seve), since the alternative is Clive Barker and "Book of Blood" is a title that promises a little more than I want in a horror movie, to be honest; those looking for something goofy and fun might dig The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (10pm, Hall). Tuesday offers another chance to sample the insanity that is Power Kids (3pm, de Seve), and I may have another review for Tuesday up in time.
Today's plan: Legendary Assassin, Book of Blood, Stoic
And I lost my program sometime between then and Evil Spirit: Viy, which is annoying as heck. A couple years ago, they actually had piles of programs out for the taking so long as you didn't want the DVD-o-trailers; this year I'm going to have to drop $5 to get another. But, someone will get the gift of a disc full of incomprehensible movie previews, as my copy of that is already sitting back at the apartment.
Bakjwi (Thirst)
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I wish I could take credit for this line, but it was the lady in the next seat over who turned to me after the Fantasia screening of Thirst and said "isn't it cool to see a vampire movie that's not all gothy?"
Believe it or not, it is. It means Park Chan-wook is doing the sort of movie he's good at: The sort where, even when horrible things happen, there may be something funny about it, and not in an ironic, self-conscious way. The sort where things happen in bright light and full color. And the sort where, instead of moping over the tragic ironies of their lives, the characters go out and do stuff - sometimes noble, sometimes horrible, but always interesting.
Friar Hyan Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) is a good man; he ministers to the ill at a Seoul hospital, and counsels heartbroken nurses against suicide. Wanting to do more, he volunteers to test an experimental vaccine for Emmanuel Virus (EV), a nasty flesh-eating disease. The experiment is a tragic failure, as he's the only one of 500 to survive. But it's not the miracle it appears to be - he was somehow transfused with vampire blood. The vampirism holds the EV in check, along with having the usual side effects. And it's not just his appetite for blood that he's having trouble holding back - he's feeling a strong drive to do things that a Catholic priest, especially, shouldn't be doing.
Enter Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin). The onetime foster sister, now wife, of Sang-hyun's childhood friend Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun) is immensely dissatisfied with her life, running around the neighborhood barefoot at night just for a moment's escape. She's immediately attracted to the newly-virile priest, who should beware - an unhappy wife can be just as dangerous as a hungry vampire.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
5 Huajai Hero (Power Kids)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I can't recommend Power Kids to families, and it's not just because it is an amazing example of how what is apparently considered to be enjoyable family entertainment in one culture (say, Thailand) comes off as mind-bogglingly inappropriate in another (say, the U.S.). It's because, with the exception of the fight choreography, everything about the movie is cloying and amateurish.
The movie gives off its "really, this is for kids?" vibe even before the credits start, with refugees getting machine-gunned in the jungle. The scene still shifts to a more peaceful spot in Bangkok, where muay thai master Lek (Arunya Pawilai) looks after four kids - his niece Catt (Sasisa Jindamanee), nephews Wuth (Nantawooti Boonrapsap) and little Wun, and son of a friend Pong (Paytaai Wongkamlao). Sadly, Wun has a heart condition, and the need for a transplant is pushed up when some bullies chase him away from a remote control car race that their friend Jib (Nawarat Techarathanaprasert) is participating in. The good news: A donor heart has been found! The bad news: It needs to be transplanted within four hours and is currently located in a hospital that has been taken over by terrorists led by a cruel leader (Johnny Nguyen) and an uncertain young girl (Pimchanok Leuwisetpaiboon).
Yes, you are reading this right - the second half of this movie involves four junior-high-schoolers sneaking into a hospital filled with terrorists holding machine guns to retrieve a donor heart. Sure, they've got some muay thai skills, but this is still kids getting shot at even before you get to behavior you might not want your kids imitating, like smashing fluorescent lights on people and flying through panes of glass face first (and unless they spent a lot more on CGI than I imagine, there's really not much chance Boonrapsap is being doubled for there). Heck, just the "fun" scene meant to show us the kids' skills early on might be a little alarming for parents: I'm not sure I like the idea of kids whose elbows are at groin level learning to do Tony Jaa stuff anyway, let alone giving them the idea of strapping lengths of pipe to their arms and legs!
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Lalapipo
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Tetsuya Nakashima wrote this, and it's not hard to see his fingerprints on it - Lalapipo has all the jumping around, bright colors, crisscrossing plots and outright absurdity that Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko featured, but director Masayuki Miyano doesn't quite seem to have the magic touch with it that Nakashima himself does. There's charm to his movie, but it's only enough to just get the audience curious about the characters, not fall in love with them like I did with the films Nakashima directed himself.
Also, and it may just be the digital projection used, but the film looks kind of cheap in places. Shots out one character's window at a busy Tokyo intersection just get overpowered by yellow, and while it may be a stylistic choice, it makes the movie hard to look at. A little grottiness is expected given how much of the film revolves around characters in low-rent porn-oriented professions, but even the fantasy sequences look kind of half-hearted.
Evil Spirit: Viy
Seen 12 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
Hey, check it out... My first boring movie nap of the festival!
To be fair, I scarfed a bunch of pizza right before the movie started, so there was food-coma action going on too, but this really is the sort of navel-gazing orouborus of a movie that needs to be a lot more clever, or scary, or witty, to really be worth the effort. There are moments when it seems to be doing something neat, especially in the first third, but not enough to really suck me in.
Seu-pe-eo (Spare)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 12 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
I kind of wish I could get away from work to hit the second screening of this; I saw the whole thing but was still kind of worn out. It is a ton of fun, though, with comments from the peanut gallery built into the soundtrack, plenty of good fighting, and a laid-back atmosphere about dealing with gamblers and gangsters that wouldn't feel out of place in a Guy Ritchie film.
It's a slight-but-fun buddy movie where the eventual buddies don't speak the same language, and really looks like it gets a lot of action out of a shoestring budget.
Well, this is going up too late to say much about recommendations for the day. I might just give Evil Spirit: Viy another try (7pm, de Seve), since the alternative is Clive Barker and "Book of Blood" is a title that promises a little more than I want in a horror movie, to be honest; those looking for something goofy and fun might dig The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (10pm, Hall). Tuesday offers another chance to sample the insanity that is Power Kids (3pm, de Seve), and I may have another review for Tuesday up in time.
Today's plan: Legendary Assassin, Book of Blood, Stoic
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Fantasia Daily for 11 July 2009: Queens of Langkasuka, Infestation, Love Exposure, and Sweet Karma
I've mentioned this many times, but seeing a lot of films at a festival is a recipe for eating like crap. I had a pretty nice burger at Dundee's on Friday night, but yesterday I got a late enough start that "brunch" was a small popcorn and a Diet Pepsi (I asked for a Diet Pepsi Max, which is just "Pepsi Max" south of the border, but the room was loud). I wasn't really hungry two movies later, but knew Love Exposure was going to be four hours, so I grabbed a slice of pizza and a Crush Cream Soda. I might have grabbed another on the way home, but I figured that would just kept me up.
Today, I'm starting with Tropical Hawaii. Strawberries, bananas, crepes (or a waffle), and fruit juice sounds like just what I need.
Puen Yai Job Salad (Queens of Langkasuka)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Buckle your swashes, folks, we're sailing for Thailand, circa the early 17th century. There, we can expect to find enough action, adventure, melodrama, and magic for an entire trilogy. It'll pop your eyes and maybe race your heart if it doesn't wear you out.
In 1593, we are told, a genius Dutch weaponeer was ambushed at sea while attempting to deliver two Great Cannons to Queen Haiju (Jarunee Suksawas), the strong but fair monarch of Langkasuka. His Chinese apprentice, Lim Kium (Jakrit Pnaichpatikam), washes up in a village of sea gypsies, where his inventions catch the eye of an orphan named Pari. Pari is brave, but angry, leading to Master White Ray (Sorapong Chatree) refusing to teach him the art of Du Lum sea sorcery. Ten years later, Lim is still three, and Pari (Ananda Everingham), now a man, joins him on missions against Black Raven (Winai Kraibutr), a pirate harassing the sea people. Black Raven has teamed with rebel prince Rawai (Ake Oree), whose attempt to assassinate Haiju was barely thwarted by Royal Guard Jarang ("Dan" Chupon Chanprung). Langkasuka needs allies, and if that means engaging combat-minded Princess Ungu (Anna Rees) to the Prince of Pahay, so be it.
Then, in the second act...
Queens of Langkasuka is sprawling, with the sea magic of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy augmented by some palace intrigue, a dash of Star Wars thrown in, and a bunch of muay thai fighting and soapy melodrama to perk up anyone who was feeling bored. And did I mention the ninja pirates? Or that the sunken Great Cannons are guarded by jellyfish stationed there by a Du Lum master, as they can command marine life? Director Nonzee Nimibutr and writer Win Lyovarin pack two or three movies' worth of madness into this film's 133 minutes, and they keep it up right to the end, jamming flashbacks and explanations of the philosophy behind Du Lum in until the film threatens to collapse under the weight. That never quite happens, although the movie could use a little breathing time at the end - all those subplots and relationships merit a little wrapping up, as opposed to what seems like a rush to get us out of the theater. No need to go all Return of the King on us, but throw us some sort of bone!
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Infestation
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
You know how most monster movies start out in the country or suburbs with the nasty stuff reaching the city something to be avoided at all costs? Infestation starts after that's happened. After giving us a few minutes to meet Chris Marquette's Cooper, there's a piercing noise, and the next thing Cooper knows, he's emerging from some sort of cocoon, but everyone else in the Bangor, ME, area seems to be wrapped up tight.
Cooper unwraps his boss, Maureen (Deborah Geffner), who insists on seeing to nearby daughter Sarah (Brooke Nevin). Soon Sarah has gone and unwrapped a few more, including oversexed weathergirl Cindy (Kinsey Packard), father Albert (Wesley Thompson) and his deaf son Hugo (E. Quincy Sloan), Leechee (Linda Park), Roger (Bru Miller), and some more. They find the cocoons were made by giant bugs, and while they're blind, they are intensely attracted to sound. Cooper suggest that they make for his father's house in nearby Berwick - Ethan (Ray Wise) is ex-military and has a well-stocked fallout shelter) - although everyone wants to check in on their families, and some want to follow the insects back to the tower of smoke where one of their party has been taken.
Though writer/director Kyle Rankin is likely best known for Project Greenlight and The Battle of Shaker Heights, he and collaborator Efram Potelle were making oddball shorts and features both before and after that. This time, the credits have Rankin writing and directing solo while Potelle serves in a number of technical roles - producer, second unit director, effects supervisor - and it seems like a good division of labor. Rankin stages the action well, and creates some nice moments for the actors to work with.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Ai No Mukidashi (Love Exposure)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
It's hard to talk about Love Exposure without starting with the length: It is nearly four intermission-free hours long; host Mitch Davis gave the audience a five-minute warning to hit the head before the movie started while also pumping it up as one of the most amazing films he's ever seen. And no lying, it is mind-blowing at times, an amazing mix of transgression, sweet romance, naughty slapstick, and out-there plotting. If you can carve out four hours for a movie sometime, it's absolutely worth seeing.
It's also not perfect. It's got more great movie in it than many other films, but somewhere in the third and fourth hours, when one set of characters is working in porn and another is in the Zero Church, it gets a little tedious. Not in a "good lord, I've been sitting here forever" way, but I felt a little disappointed in how director Sion Sono started directing the plot; the last act was nowhere near as exhilarating as what came before, and one character sort of stopped being crazy in what was an interesting, consistent way, but just bonkers in the way the story required at the moment.
There's a lot of great stuff in here, though, and it's so singular a work that I wouldn't dream of saying what Sono should or could have done differently.
Sweet Karma
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
Not a bad little revenge thriller in any way, shape, or form. I wouldn't say that this movie rises above the exploitation inherent in its genre, but director Andrew Hunt is keenly aware of it and uses it like a precision tool, manipulating matters so that we feel grimy and unclean in a low-rent strip club and yet still powerfully drawn to Shera Bechard's title character, even when she's pointedly using her sexuality as a weapon.
Ms. Bechard, by the way, could be something if she sticks with acting. She is ridiculously attractive (I wish I had brought the camera last night, because she dominated the dress she was wearing), and did a great job of being expressive and communicating in a wordless role. If she can deliver a line as well as a look, she can do more than catch the eye.
And that's Saturday. If you're in town, Love Exposure is playing again at the de Seve theater at noon. Grace is playing the Hall at 7:20pm, and it has grown on me since I reviewed it at IFFB. My plan for the day is Thirst (for real this time), Power Kids, Lalapipo, Evil Spirit: Viy (or, if Lalapipo starts late, take some time for dinner), and then Spare.
Today, I'm starting with Tropical Hawaii. Strawberries, bananas, crepes (or a waffle), and fruit juice sounds like just what I need.
Puen Yai Job Salad (Queens of Langkasuka)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
Buckle your swashes, folks, we're sailing for Thailand, circa the early 17th century. There, we can expect to find enough action, adventure, melodrama, and magic for an entire trilogy. It'll pop your eyes and maybe race your heart if it doesn't wear you out.
In 1593, we are told, a genius Dutch weaponeer was ambushed at sea while attempting to deliver two Great Cannons to Queen Haiju (Jarunee Suksawas), the strong but fair monarch of Langkasuka. His Chinese apprentice, Lim Kium (Jakrit Pnaichpatikam), washes up in a village of sea gypsies, where his inventions catch the eye of an orphan named Pari. Pari is brave, but angry, leading to Master White Ray (Sorapong Chatree) refusing to teach him the art of Du Lum sea sorcery. Ten years later, Lim is still three, and Pari (Ananda Everingham), now a man, joins him on missions against Black Raven (Winai Kraibutr), a pirate harassing the sea people. Black Raven has teamed with rebel prince Rawai (Ake Oree), whose attempt to assassinate Haiju was barely thwarted by Royal Guard Jarang ("Dan" Chupon Chanprung). Langkasuka needs allies, and if that means engaging combat-minded Princess Ungu (Anna Rees) to the Prince of Pahay, so be it.
Then, in the second act...
Queens of Langkasuka is sprawling, with the sea magic of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy augmented by some palace intrigue, a dash of Star Wars thrown in, and a bunch of muay thai fighting and soapy melodrama to perk up anyone who was feeling bored. And did I mention the ninja pirates? Or that the sunken Great Cannons are guarded by jellyfish stationed there by a Du Lum master, as they can command marine life? Director Nonzee Nimibutr and writer Win Lyovarin pack two or three movies' worth of madness into this film's 133 minutes, and they keep it up right to the end, jamming flashbacks and explanations of the philosophy behind Du Lum in until the film threatens to collapse under the weight. That never quite happens, although the movie could use a little breathing time at the end - all those subplots and relationships merit a little wrapping up, as opposed to what seems like a rush to get us out of the theater. No need to go all Return of the King on us, but throw us some sort of bone!
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Infestation
* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
You know how most monster movies start out in the country or suburbs with the nasty stuff reaching the city something to be avoided at all costs? Infestation starts after that's happened. After giving us a few minutes to meet Chris Marquette's Cooper, there's a piercing noise, and the next thing Cooper knows, he's emerging from some sort of cocoon, but everyone else in the Bangor, ME, area seems to be wrapped up tight.
Cooper unwraps his boss, Maureen (Deborah Geffner), who insists on seeing to nearby daughter Sarah (Brooke Nevin). Soon Sarah has gone and unwrapped a few more, including oversexed weathergirl Cindy (Kinsey Packard), father Albert (Wesley Thompson) and his deaf son Hugo (E. Quincy Sloan), Leechee (Linda Park), Roger (Bru Miller), and some more. They find the cocoons were made by giant bugs, and while they're blind, they are intensely attracted to sound. Cooper suggest that they make for his father's house in nearby Berwick - Ethan (Ray Wise) is ex-military and has a well-stocked fallout shelter) - although everyone wants to check in on their families, and some want to follow the insects back to the tower of smoke where one of their party has been taken.
Though writer/director Kyle Rankin is likely best known for Project Greenlight and The Battle of Shaker Heights, he and collaborator Efram Potelle were making oddball shorts and features both before and after that. This time, the credits have Rankin writing and directing solo while Potelle serves in a number of technical roles - producer, second unit director, effects supervisor - and it seems like a good division of labor. Rankin stages the action well, and creates some nice moments for the actors to work with.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Ai No Mukidashi (Love Exposure)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
It's hard to talk about Love Exposure without starting with the length: It is nearly four intermission-free hours long; host Mitch Davis gave the audience a five-minute warning to hit the head before the movie started while also pumping it up as one of the most amazing films he's ever seen. And no lying, it is mind-blowing at times, an amazing mix of transgression, sweet romance, naughty slapstick, and out-there plotting. If you can carve out four hours for a movie sometime, it's absolutely worth seeing.
It's also not perfect. It's got more great movie in it than many other films, but somewhere in the third and fourth hours, when one set of characters is working in porn and another is in the Zero Church, it gets a little tedious. Not in a "good lord, I've been sitting here forever" way, but I felt a little disappointed in how director Sion Sono started directing the plot; the last act was nowhere near as exhilarating as what came before, and one character sort of stopped being crazy in what was an interesting, consistent way, but just bonkers in the way the story required at the moment.
There's a lot of great stuff in here, though, and it's so singular a work that I wouldn't dream of saying what Sono should or could have done differently.
Sweet Karma
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre de Seve (Fantasia Festival)
Not a bad little revenge thriller in any way, shape, or form. I wouldn't say that this movie rises above the exploitation inherent in its genre, but director Andrew Hunt is keenly aware of it and uses it like a precision tool, manipulating matters so that we feel grimy and unclean in a low-rent strip club and yet still powerfully drawn to Shera Bechard's title character, even when she's pointedly using her sexuality as a weapon.
Ms. Bechard, by the way, could be something if she sticks with acting. She is ridiculously attractive (I wish I had brought the camera last night, because she dominated the dress she was wearing), and did a great job of being expressive and communicating in a wordless role. If she can deliver a line as well as a look, she can do more than catch the eye.
And that's Saturday. If you're in town, Love Exposure is playing again at the de Seve theater at noon. Grace is playing the Hall at 7:20pm, and it has grown on me since I reviewed it at IFFB. My plan for the day is Thirst (for real this time), Power Kids, Lalapipo, Evil Spirit: Viy (or, if Lalapipo starts late, take some time for dinner), and then Spare.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Fantasia Daily for 10 July 2009: Must Love Death, The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, and Lesbian Vampire Killers
As I was walking through town yesterday, trying to find an ATM machine that would give me my lodging money with few hassles, I noticed a big hole in the ground where I think Ben's used to be. I guess it's about time for that - it's been a zombie storefront for my last couple Fantasias, standing empty but still covered in its old signage, but I guess I'd been holding out hope that someone would buy it and re-open it as basically the same thing: A place where you can get great smoked meat sandwiches and cherry cokes from countermen in snazzy white uniforms and red bow ties. Smoked meat is supposed to be a local thing, but walking down Maisonneuve and Ste. Catherine, I see a lot of pizza and kebab places, but not much with that particular specialty.
(And, yes, I put in six or so hours of work around that errand. I never said they'd be consecutive!)
Today's probably the last day of getting reviews for everything done, and that only because my schedule doesn't include much I haven't seen or can fit in before 2pm. I look forward to falling further and further behind!
Must Love Death
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Flirting with Chaos)
I liked Must Love Death well enough, but even though I'm the target audience - someone reasonably fond of both its genres and likely to laugh at the in-jokes besides - I had the same reaction that I figure a lot of people will: I wanted one or the other. In my case, I would have been happy to get the romantic comedy without the torture scenes, and I can see people wanting the opposite. Both? I'm not sure.
The comedy has Norman (Sami Loris), a heartbroken and suicidal studio musician, meeting waitress Jenny (Manon Kahle) after she hits him with her car. That doesn't seriously wound him, although the fact that she already has a boyfriend - Foxx C. Bigelow (Philipp Raffery), star of the sci-fi show her uncle produces (and who is set to record a single) - may. The horror comes from Norman driving to rural New jersey, where he thinks he's part of a suicide pact, not knowing that Sean (Jeff Burrell) and Gary (Peter Farkas) have an internet TV show called "Torture or No Torture" and are looking to upgrade from furry animals.
Writer/director Andreas Schaap actually does an impressive job of running Norman's two storylines alongside each other. The ways it could go wrong are myriad: A strictly chronological approach might mean a jarring shift in tone halfway, but it would also be really easy for cutting back and forth to render one thread a foregone conclusion. Or maybe the movie could get over-cute trying to keep the audience guessing. None of htis winds up happening; Schaap keeps a good balance between the two halves, even managing to plant an item in thread A that will pay off in thread B without it seeming too obvious.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge)
I sympathize with the Boone County D.A. who, in the opening reel of The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, asks why the White family should get so much attention. There's a boy in the county from humble circumstances who just got accepted to MIT, so why not follow him with a camera? After all, Jesco White has already been the subject of one documentary (1991's PBS production Dancing Outlaw) and there's also a fictionalized version of his life playing this festival, White Lightnin'. Why continue to focus on the family that is responsible for so much of the area's crime?
I don't have a good answer for that. I can say, truthfully, that this sort of spectacle is kind of fascinating to watch for those of us who have the kind of lives that allow us to travel to film festivals and only have fleeting contact with it outside of theaters. It does remind us that groups we might dismiss as freaks are human beings with all the desires and complexities that entails, even if we want no part of them. Most of us certainly wouldn't want to do what director Julien Nitzberg did, follow them for a year to see how they tick.
The answer may be "like time bombs", although most of the explosions happen off-camera. Susan "Kirk" White tells us how she stabbed her boyfriend Dennis, which is a lucky break for him because she was trying to slit his throat, while her hyperactive pre-teen son from a different relationship, Tyler, screeches about how he'll do the same if he ever sees Dennis again and flips the camera the birds to say how he really feels about him. Her cousin Mousie is just getting out of jail, and is on the hunt for her husband Charlie, who, during her four year incarceration, cheated on her with Kirk and is now shacked up with his pregnant girlfriend. Just going into jail is another cousin, Sue Bob White's son Brandon, who a few months earlier went on a rampage that ended in a man's gruesome injuries and a three-week standoff with police. We hear these stories in the Whites' own matter-of-fact words, and though we don't actually see any violent crime, the clan is also matter-of-fact about their drug use, reeling off their drugs of choice, partaking on camera, and describing their activities as dealers without much apparent worry that the footage will be used as evidence against them.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
"The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
It's a one joke movie - a faux trailer for a movie about a man being chased by a demonic killer who intends to do him in with a spoon - but in those ten minutes, writer/director Richard Gale hits a lot of good jokes. During the Q&A, he mentioned that, although he wouldn't make the complete nine hour cut referred to in the movie, a DVD release might contain a "feature" version that lasted an hour... Which should be torture enough!
Lesbian Vampire Killers
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
As you might expect, the title came first with Lesbian Vampire Killers. Unlike a lot of high-concept movies, it delivers on that title, both literally - there are vampires, they are lesbians, and our heroes are going to have to put them down - and by being as much tacky fun as that title implies.
The history is laid down in a prologue: Hundreds of years ago, vampire queen Carmilla (Silvia Colloca) terrorized a village, and as she and the local baron fought to the death, she laid down a curse that all the village's women would become lesbian vampires on their eighteenth birthday. Flash forward to the present. Jimmy (Hathew Horne) has just been dumped by his girlfriend Judy (Lucy Gaskell), again, and his best mate Fletch (James Corden) has just been fired from his job as a children's clown. They opt to go hiking in this village for a holiday. Fletch doesn't think much of the idea until he sees a vanload of hot German tourists - Lotte (MyAnna Buring), Trudi (Ashley Mulheron), Anke (Louise Dylan), and Eva (Vera Filatova). Of course, they doesn't know about the curse. The local vicar (Paul McGann) does, and it's rather important to him that something be done about it, as his daughter Rebecca (Emer Kenny) has her 18th birthday tomorrow. But all hope may not be lost - he believes Jimmy may be the prophesied last descendant of the baron, able to put an end to the curse once and for all!
Lesbian Vampire Slayers is gleefully exploitative - the ladies are all beautiful and busty, and becoming vampires often seems to also change their clothing to something even wispier and more revealing. Kind of unfair for the ladies in the audience, as Corden and Horne aren't exactly equivalent slices of beefcake, although Paul McGann's vicar compensates with a rugged masculinity. There's plenty of vampire attacks and vampire-slaying, as well, although not a whole lot of the red stuff; dead vampires tend to explode into sticky white foam. Read anything you want into that.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Today's plan: Queens of Langkasuka, Infestation (I remember the director from before Project Greenlight, when they were making and screening movies in Portland, ME), Love Exposure, and Sweet Karma. If you're here, I can still recommend Dream (de Seve, 2:50pm) and Ip Man (de Seve, 7:00pm), and Dead Snow (Hall, 11:45pm) isn't bad for what it is.
(And, yes, I put in six or so hours of work around that errand. I never said they'd be consecutive!)
Today's probably the last day of getting reviews for everything done, and that only because my schedule doesn't include much I haven't seen or can fit in before 2pm. I look forward to falling further and further behind!
Must Love Death
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Flirting with Chaos)
I liked Must Love Death well enough, but even though I'm the target audience - someone reasonably fond of both its genres and likely to laugh at the in-jokes besides - I had the same reaction that I figure a lot of people will: I wanted one or the other. In my case, I would have been happy to get the romantic comedy without the torture scenes, and I can see people wanting the opposite. Both? I'm not sure.
The comedy has Norman (Sami Loris), a heartbroken and suicidal studio musician, meeting waitress Jenny (Manon Kahle) after she hits him with her car. That doesn't seriously wound him, although the fact that she already has a boyfriend - Foxx C. Bigelow (Philipp Raffery), star of the sci-fi show her uncle produces (and who is set to record a single) - may. The horror comes from Norman driving to rural New jersey, where he thinks he's part of a suicide pact, not knowing that Sean (Jeff Burrell) and Gary (Peter Farkas) have an internet TV show called "Torture or No Torture" and are looking to upgrade from furry animals.
Writer/director Andreas Schaap actually does an impressive job of running Norman's two storylines alongside each other. The ways it could go wrong are myriad: A strictly chronological approach might mean a jarring shift in tone halfway, but it would also be really easy for cutting back and forth to render one thread a foregone conclusion. Or maybe the movie could get over-cute trying to keep the audience guessing. None of htis winds up happening; Schaap keeps a good balance between the two halves, even managing to plant an item in thread A that will pay off in thread B without it seeming too obvious.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia
* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre J.A. de Seve (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge)
I sympathize with the Boone County D.A. who, in the opening reel of The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, asks why the White family should get so much attention. There's a boy in the county from humble circumstances who just got accepted to MIT, so why not follow him with a camera? After all, Jesco White has already been the subject of one documentary (1991's PBS production Dancing Outlaw) and there's also a fictionalized version of his life playing this festival, White Lightnin'. Why continue to focus on the family that is responsible for so much of the area's crime?
I don't have a good answer for that. I can say, truthfully, that this sort of spectacle is kind of fascinating to watch for those of us who have the kind of lives that allow us to travel to film festivals and only have fleeting contact with it outside of theaters. It does remind us that groups we might dismiss as freaks are human beings with all the desires and complexities that entails, even if we want no part of them. Most of us certainly wouldn't want to do what director Julien Nitzberg did, follow them for a year to see how they tick.
The answer may be "like time bombs", although most of the explosions happen off-camera. Susan "Kirk" White tells us how she stabbed her boyfriend Dennis, which is a lucky break for him because she was trying to slit his throat, while her hyperactive pre-teen son from a different relationship, Tyler, screeches about how he'll do the same if he ever sees Dennis again and flips the camera the birds to say how he really feels about him. Her cousin Mousie is just getting out of jail, and is on the hunt for her husband Charlie, who, during her four year incarceration, cheated on her with Kirk and is now shacked up with his pregnant girlfriend. Just going into jail is another cousin, Sue Bob White's son Brandon, who a few months earlier went on a rampage that ended in a man's gruesome injuries and a three-week standoff with police. We hear these stories in the Whites' own matter-of-fact words, and though we don't actually see any violent crime, the clan is also matter-of-fact about their drug use, reeling off their drugs of choice, partaking on camera, and describing their activities as dealers without much apparent worry that the footage will be used as evidence against them.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
"The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
It's a one joke movie - a faux trailer for a movie about a man being chased by a demonic killer who intends to do him in with a spoon - but in those ten minutes, writer/director Richard Gale hits a lot of good jokes. During the Q&A, he mentioned that, although he wouldn't make the complete nine hour cut referred to in the movie, a DVD release might contain a "feature" version that lasted an hour... Which should be torture enough!
Lesbian Vampire Killers
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival)
As you might expect, the title came first with Lesbian Vampire Killers. Unlike a lot of high-concept movies, it delivers on that title, both literally - there are vampires, they are lesbians, and our heroes are going to have to put them down - and by being as much tacky fun as that title implies.
The history is laid down in a prologue: Hundreds of years ago, vampire queen Carmilla (Silvia Colloca) terrorized a village, and as she and the local baron fought to the death, she laid down a curse that all the village's women would become lesbian vampires on their eighteenth birthday. Flash forward to the present. Jimmy (Hathew Horne) has just been dumped by his girlfriend Judy (Lucy Gaskell), again, and his best mate Fletch (James Corden) has just been fired from his job as a children's clown. They opt to go hiking in this village for a holiday. Fletch doesn't think much of the idea until he sees a vanload of hot German tourists - Lotte (MyAnna Buring), Trudi (Ashley Mulheron), Anke (Louise Dylan), and Eva (Vera Filatova). Of course, they doesn't know about the curse. The local vicar (Paul McGann) does, and it's rather important to him that something be done about it, as his daughter Rebecca (Emer Kenny) has her 18th birthday tomorrow. But all hope may not be lost - he believes Jimmy may be the prophesied last descendant of the baron, able to put an end to the curse once and for all!
Lesbian Vampire Slayers is gleefully exploitative - the ladies are all beautiful and busty, and becoming vampires often seems to also change their clothing to something even wispier and more revealing. Kind of unfair for the ladies in the audience, as Corden and Horne aren't exactly equivalent slices of beefcake, although Paul McGann's vicar compensates with a rugged masculinity. There's plenty of vampire attacks and vampire-slaying, as well, although not a whole lot of the red stuff; dead vampires tend to explode into sticky white foam. Read anything you want into that.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Today's plan: Queens of Langkasuka, Infestation (I remember the director from before Project Greenlight, when they were making and screening movies in Portland, ME), Love Exposure, and Sweet Karma. If you're here, I can still recommend Dream (de Seve, 2:50pm) and Ip Man (de Seve, 7:00pm), and Dead Snow (Hall, 11:45pm) isn't bad for what it is.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Fantasia Daily for 9 July 2009: Ip Man
You know what's annoying? When you get set to uncork a nice rant about everything that went wrong on a particularly annoying day, and it all comes back to stuff that is basically your own doing. The clothes in the dryer that are still damp when they go in the suitcase? My own fault. Arriving for the 7:45am bus at 7:48? My own fault. Spending an hour trying to find a way to get the money for my sublet out of my checking account because the landlord (reasonably) doesn't feel right taking a personal check from the US? Should have hammered this out earlier. About the only thing I can lay on the world at large is that the 10am bus didn't arrive in Montreal until something like quarter of seven (scheduled for 5:30pm).
Oddly enough, knowing this doesn't make me feel any less mad at the world in general. Crankiness was increased by how, around eight-thirty or so, I had that bizarrely unbalanced feeling where I needed both to have a drink of water and hit the restroom. It also felt like everyone in the city was blowing their toxic tobacco cloud in my face. In my defense, it is utterly unreasonable that the ATMs and ticket dispensers in the Metro are apparently the only places in Montreal where my debit card fails to work.
The upshot is that this wiped out any chance of seeing the opening movie, Takashi Miike's Yatterman. There's a second showing, but it means I'll have to rearrange my work schedule (doing some telecommuting so that I don't blow all my vacation time in one wad) to end earlier on Tuesday.
On the plus side, the day ended with roughly an hour of Donnie Yen kicking asses with forty-five minutes of other stuff interspersed. That is quite a fine way to end the day, so long as you're not the one on the other end of it.
Ip Man
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Hong Kong Cinema 100 Years)
Ip Man is a bit of a throwback, and I mean that as a compliment. It's easy to watch it and get the feel of an old Shaw Brothers movie, or Jet Li's Once Upon a Time in China series. It's prettier than the former and more modern than the latter, but like both, it consistently delivers the fantastic action. This is only to be expected, with one of Hong Kong's greatest current action stars (Donnie Yen), playing a legend (Ip Man had Bruce Lee as a disciple) with a fantastic team of action filmmakers putting it together.
As the movie opens in 1935, Ip Man (Yen) lives something like a life of leisure, occupying a fine house in martial arts-crazy Fo Shan, but not having any particular work. He lends his businessman friend Zhou Qingquan (Simon Yam) some money to open a cotton mill, but even though he is a master of Wing Chun, he doesn't have students. However, that doesn't prevent Jin Shan-zhoe (Fan Siu-wong) from challenging him when he comes to town looking to establish himself as the top master. Jin won't be the only challenger Ip must face; three years later, after the Japanese have invaded, the occupying General, Miura (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi), is a great martial arts enthusiast and challenges all of Fo Shan's martial arts masters. Ip Man is uninterested, at least until one of his friends is beaten to death.
Ip Man follows the basic structure of a Shaw Brothers movie - comedic opening, invaders who occupy the hero's small town, plenty of time for formal practicing and dueling in addition to action where the participants realy mean it. Director Wilson Yip and writer Edmond Wong execute it about as well as possible, giving us a chance to get to know not just Master Ip, but his family and his entire town, investing us in the place much better than just having the occupying Japanese be generically cruel. It also, more so than many martial arts films, gives us a chance to consider the various fighting styles. Wing Chun is, early on, denigrated for being invented by a woman, and there is something feminine about it; we can see the lack of macho posturing, as well as the grace and economy of movement compared to the other fighters' wushu and karate.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Today's plan: Full-ish day of work, then an evening triple-feature of Must Love Death, Thirst (new Park Chan-wook!!!!!), and Lesbian Vampire Killers. If you're in town, Ip Man is showing again at 4:35pm in the Hall theater, and I can recommend Kim Ki-duk's flawed but interesting Dream at 7:15 in J.A. de Seve, as well as the completely and gloriously insane House at 11:45pm in de Seve.
Oddly enough, knowing this doesn't make me feel any less mad at the world in general. Crankiness was increased by how, around eight-thirty or so, I had that bizarrely unbalanced feeling where I needed both to have a drink of water and hit the restroom. It also felt like everyone in the city was blowing their toxic tobacco cloud in my face. In my defense, it is utterly unreasonable that the ATMs and ticket dispensers in the Metro are apparently the only places in Montreal where my debit card fails to work.
The upshot is that this wiped out any chance of seeing the opening movie, Takashi Miike's Yatterman. There's a second showing, but it means I'll have to rearrange my work schedule (doing some telecommuting so that I don't blow all my vacation time in one wad) to end earlier on Tuesday.
On the plus side, the day ended with roughly an hour of Donnie Yen kicking asses with forty-five minutes of other stuff interspersed. That is quite a fine way to end the day, so long as you're not the one on the other end of it.
Ip Man
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 July 2009 at Concordia Theatre Hall (Fantasia Festival: Hong Kong Cinema 100 Years)
Ip Man is a bit of a throwback, and I mean that as a compliment. It's easy to watch it and get the feel of an old Shaw Brothers movie, or Jet Li's Once Upon a Time in China series. It's prettier than the former and more modern than the latter, but like both, it consistently delivers the fantastic action. This is only to be expected, with one of Hong Kong's greatest current action stars (Donnie Yen), playing a legend (Ip Man had Bruce Lee as a disciple) with a fantastic team of action filmmakers putting it together.
As the movie opens in 1935, Ip Man (Yen) lives something like a life of leisure, occupying a fine house in martial arts-crazy Fo Shan, but not having any particular work. He lends his businessman friend Zhou Qingquan (Simon Yam) some money to open a cotton mill, but even though he is a master of Wing Chun, he doesn't have students. However, that doesn't prevent Jin Shan-zhoe (Fan Siu-wong) from challenging him when he comes to town looking to establish himself as the top master. Jin won't be the only challenger Ip must face; three years later, after the Japanese have invaded, the occupying General, Miura (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi), is a great martial arts enthusiast and challenges all of Fo Shan's martial arts masters. Ip Man is uninterested, at least until one of his friends is beaten to death.
Ip Man follows the basic structure of a Shaw Brothers movie - comedic opening, invaders who occupy the hero's small town, plenty of time for formal practicing and dueling in addition to action where the participants realy mean it. Director Wilson Yip and writer Edmond Wong execute it about as well as possible, giving us a chance to get to know not just Master Ip, but his family and his entire town, investing us in the place much better than just having the occupying Japanese be generically cruel. It also, more so than many martial arts films, gives us a chance to consider the various fighting styles. Wing Chun is, early on, denigrated for being invented by a woman, and there is something feminine about it; we can see the lack of macho posturing, as well as the grace and economy of movement compared to the other fighters' wushu and karate.
Full review at eFilmCritic.
Today's plan: Full-ish day of work, then an evening triple-feature of Must Love Death, Thirst (new Park Chan-wook!!!!!), and Lesbian Vampire Killers. If you're in town, Ip Man is showing again at 4:35pm in the Hall theater, and I can recommend Kim Ki-duk's flawed but interesting Dream at 7:15 in J.A. de Seve, as well as the completely and gloriously insane House at 11:45pm in de Seve.
Monday, July 06, 2009
This Week In Tickets: 29 June 2009 to 5 July 2009
Another week filled with long days at work, followed by taking the bus somewhere on the weekend. The long days at work were the sort of thing that was frustrating at the time but amusing in retrospect: It was something that could have been done with an automated process, but that would have overwritten some code on the first bit I looked at. So I do it manually, only to find it was only that first bit which would have been affected. You want to scream during this and immediately afterwards, but it is kind of funny.
So, quiet week- work late, come home, watch game, repeat. Saturday was spent up in Maine with the family, which generally means doting on the cutest 2¾-year-old in the world, who I think was even more excited about having a picnic than watching the fireworks on the Fourth.
This week, unless things go horribly wrong, will feature no single movie tickets but a couple of ballgames and an early post as I head up to Montreal for Fantasia. I've been crazy disorganized this year, so all sorts of things from vacation time to media credentials to bus tickets could still fall through, but I've committed to subletting a place, so I'd better head up Thursday to make sure that gets done.
As frenzied as it seems to be, I really can't wait. Fantasia always contains a bunch of interesting movies, which seems like a perfect antidote to a summer that, post-Up, has been relentlessly uninteresting. This week's new releases made an attempt to bring some excitement, but only got halfway there.
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2009 at the AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run, digital 3-D)
To be fair to Ice Age 3, it's not a bad movie at all. It's more Ice Age, and while the folks who have taken up Chris Wedge's baton at Blue Sky don't seem to be quite so amazing as the guys following John Lasseter at Pixar (or as solid as Wedge himself), they don't do the material or characters any harm. They continue to deliver the goods, and they do a nice job of adding new characters without taking much away from the core group.
This movie's fun new additions are a trio of baby T. Rexes - the valley in which they live is apparently a thin layer of ice away from a volcanically-heated cavern where they're still around - who fixate on Sid, and a weasel named Buck. Simon Pegg voices Buck, and if there's anyone in Hollywood (a) having more fun and (b) doing a better job sharing it with audiences than Simon Pegg, I'm not aware. He gets the fun, motormouth role, and gives it equal parts "crazy hermit" and "casual superhero". The only problem with him is that when you consider that, when added to the three characters carried over from The Meltdown, some of the original characters are crowded out. The script probably could have been written to give his lines to Denis Leary's Diego, who disappears for good-sized chunks of the movie, but Pegg is too much fun for that to be a big complaint.
Both Diego and Buck get a lot to do in the movie's fun finale, though, where the 3-D really kicks into gear and there are enough dinosaurs flying, running, stomping, fighting, etc., to make me really want Amblin to pull the Jurassic Park franchise out of mothballs and do something in the 3-D format. Heck, even Scrat gets involved in the big action/adventure stuff, although for the most part his appearances wooing/competing for an acorn with a gril whatever-he-is are the same Chuck Jones-inspired bits as usual.
Public Enemies
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2009 at the Regal Fenway #12 (first-run)
So... How do you take Michael Mann, Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, and a manhunt for one of the twentieth century's most famous and charismatic outlaws and make it boring? It shouldn't be possible, should it? And yet that's exactly what this movie does. Maybe "boring" is too harsh, but moments of excitement and intrigue are few and far between.
Part of the problem, I think, is that it has two very over-hyped stars at the top. Because, let's be honest - Depp's a good actor, but he hasn't done anything really interesting since Finding Neverland five years ago; it's been a lot of Jack Sparrow (an act that got more and more tired after he mentioned he modeled Jack on Keith Richards in an interview and then felt the need to play to that afterward) and getting funny haircuts for Tim Burton. Christian Bale is also a good actor, but he's at his best with someone equally interesting to play off. He's only got one scene with Depp here, and even if it actually happened, it comes off as a contrived excuse to get his Melvin Purvis and Depp's John Dillinger in the same room.
Mann stages a couple pretty darn good action scenes - both big shootouts and what feel like meticulously recreations of Dillinger's robberies - but he and his co-writers forget to make the movie about anything. It's just a list of things that happened, rather than a story that demonstrates why Dillinger captured the imagination or how Purvis's combination of scientific investigation techniques and ruthless application of violence brought him down. Marion Cotillard is good, but kind of wasted as Dillinger's girlfriend; as much as I liked the character, she just hangs around until very late in the movie, when Cotillard gets to do some acting but doesn't really have her character affect the story.
So, quiet week- work late, come home, watch game, repeat. Saturday was spent up in Maine with the family, which generally means doting on the cutest 2¾-year-old in the world, who I think was even more excited about having a picnic than watching the fireworks on the Fourth.
This week, unless things go horribly wrong, will feature no single movie tickets but a couple of ballgames and an early post as I head up to Montreal for Fantasia. I've been crazy disorganized this year, so all sorts of things from vacation time to media credentials to bus tickets could still fall through, but I've committed to subletting a place, so I'd better head up Thursday to make sure that gets done.
As frenzied as it seems to be, I really can't wait. Fantasia always contains a bunch of interesting movies, which seems like a perfect antidote to a summer that, post-Up, has been relentlessly uninteresting. This week's new releases made an attempt to bring some excitement, but only got halfway there.
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2009 at the AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run, digital 3-D)
To be fair to Ice Age 3, it's not a bad movie at all. It's more Ice Age, and while the folks who have taken up Chris Wedge's baton at Blue Sky don't seem to be quite so amazing as the guys following John Lasseter at Pixar (or as solid as Wedge himself), they don't do the material or characters any harm. They continue to deliver the goods, and they do a nice job of adding new characters without taking much away from the core group.
This movie's fun new additions are a trio of baby T. Rexes - the valley in which they live is apparently a thin layer of ice away from a volcanically-heated cavern where they're still around - who fixate on Sid, and a weasel named Buck. Simon Pegg voices Buck, and if there's anyone in Hollywood (a) having more fun and (b) doing a better job sharing it with audiences than Simon Pegg, I'm not aware. He gets the fun, motormouth role, and gives it equal parts "crazy hermit" and "casual superhero". The only problem with him is that when you consider that, when added to the three characters carried over from The Meltdown, some of the original characters are crowded out. The script probably could have been written to give his lines to Denis Leary's Diego, who disappears for good-sized chunks of the movie, but Pegg is too much fun for that to be a big complaint.
Both Diego and Buck get a lot to do in the movie's fun finale, though, where the 3-D really kicks into gear and there are enough dinosaurs flying, running, stomping, fighting, etc., to make me really want Amblin to pull the Jurassic Park franchise out of mothballs and do something in the 3-D format. Heck, even Scrat gets involved in the big action/adventure stuff, although for the most part his appearances wooing/competing for an acorn with a gril whatever-he-is are the same Chuck Jones-inspired bits as usual.
Public Enemies
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 July 2009 at the Regal Fenway #12 (first-run)
So... How do you take Michael Mann, Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, and a manhunt for one of the twentieth century's most famous and charismatic outlaws and make it boring? It shouldn't be possible, should it? And yet that's exactly what this movie does. Maybe "boring" is too harsh, but moments of excitement and intrigue are few and far between.
Part of the problem, I think, is that it has two very over-hyped stars at the top. Because, let's be honest - Depp's a good actor, but he hasn't done anything really interesting since Finding Neverland five years ago; it's been a lot of Jack Sparrow (an act that got more and more tired after he mentioned he modeled Jack on Keith Richards in an interview and then felt the need to play to that afterward) and getting funny haircuts for Tim Burton. Christian Bale is also a good actor, but he's at his best with someone equally interesting to play off. He's only got one scene with Depp here, and even if it actually happened, it comes off as a contrived excuse to get his Melvin Purvis and Depp's John Dillinger in the same room.
Mann stages a couple pretty darn good action scenes - both big shootouts and what feel like meticulously recreations of Dillinger's robberies - but he and his co-writers forget to make the movie about anything. It's just a list of things that happened, rather than a story that demonstrates why Dillinger captured the imagination or how Purvis's combination of scientific investigation techniques and ruthless application of violence brought him down. Marion Cotillard is good, but kind of wasted as Dillinger's girlfriend; as much as I liked the character, she just hangs around until very late in the movie, when Cotillard gets to do some acting but doesn't really have her character affect the story.
Monday, June 29, 2009
This Week In Tickets: 22 June 2009 to 28 June 2009
It's a pretty good thing that Landmark and Kendall Square have been getting a steady stream of interesting-looking movies this summer, because the major studios have not been holding up their end of the bargain at the multiplex. The only June release that's gotten me in a theater is The Hangover, and I wasn't terribly impressed. It looks to get a little better this weekend, but I don't know if I'll be missing that much going to Montreal.
Sunday was spent back up in Maine, at the funeral for my father's wife's father, a nice old guy who I saw a couple times a year, when I went up for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I'll miss him a bit.
This upcoming week could be kind of crazy if I let it get that way. I'd really like to see The Hurt Locker at the HFA preview on Thursday, since it opens in the Boston area the day after my planned trip to Montreal, I missed it at SXSW, and though it looks like a big, exciting action movie, there hasn't been a successful Iraq War movie yet. I'm looking at going back up to Maine on Saturday for a Fourth of July cookout, although who knows what the weather will be like. After that, I am awful tempted to head back into NYC for the closing night of the New York Asian Film Festival, as most of its features don't look like they'll be repeated at Fantasia from the email I got today (which has me shocked, quite frankly - given that they had Shusuke Kaneko and Sion Sono as guests in the last couple of years, I figured Pride and Be Sure to Share would be shoo-ins).
Bonnie and Clyde
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (American Independents)
I often feel like there's something wrong with me in that I don't get bowled over by things like Bonnie and Clyde. I like it well enough, for sure, and was kind of tickled to see Genes Hackman and Wilder in relatively early roles. I can sort of see how it was a big deal, and recognize the quality of the work (though maybe not so much if I saw it in context).
It just doesn't speak to me, though. As much as I love crime, and will tear through Hard Case Crime paperbacks on my way to and from work, I have a hard time with movies that romanticize criminals. I just have a hard time get into Bonnie & Clyde as a romance, and the crime itself is often kind of random background. I do love the tension between Bonnie, Clyde, Buck, and Blanche, though; that holds up well even as the sidetracks seem unnecessary and the violence is no longer shocking.
Sunday was spent back up in Maine, at the funeral for my father's wife's father, a nice old guy who I saw a couple times a year, when I went up for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I'll miss him a bit.
This upcoming week could be kind of crazy if I let it get that way. I'd really like to see The Hurt Locker at the HFA preview on Thursday, since it opens in the Boston area the day after my planned trip to Montreal, I missed it at SXSW, and though it looks like a big, exciting action movie, there hasn't been a successful Iraq War movie yet. I'm looking at going back up to Maine on Saturday for a Fourth of July cookout, although who knows what the weather will be like. After that, I am awful tempted to head back into NYC for the closing night of the New York Asian Film Festival, as most of its features don't look like they'll be repeated at Fantasia from the email I got today (which has me shocked, quite frankly - given that they had Shusuke Kaneko and Sion Sono as guests in the last couple of years, I figured Pride and Be Sure to Share would be shoo-ins).
Bonnie and Clyde
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (American Independents)
I often feel like there's something wrong with me in that I don't get bowled over by things like Bonnie and Clyde. I like it well enough, for sure, and was kind of tickled to see Genes Hackman and Wilder in relatively early roles. I can sort of see how it was a big deal, and recognize the quality of the work (though maybe not so much if I saw it in context).
It just doesn't speak to me, though. As much as I love crime, and will tear through Hard Case Crime paperbacks on my way to and from work, I have a hard time with movies that romanticize criminals. I just have a hard time get into Bonnie & Clyde as a romance, and the crime itself is often kind of random background. I do love the tension between Bonnie, Clyde, Buck, and Blanche, though; that holds up well even as the sidetracks seem unnecessary and the violence is no longer shocking.
NYAFF One day, six films (part two)
Even under the best situations, I tend to eat terribly when attending a film festival, but this was especially annoying. I knew, going in, that I wasn't going to sample much of what NYC has to offer the palate. I knew the day wasn't going to start well - some crud from McDonald's in South Station because I feared how long I might have to wait at Cosi for something closer to cooked to order, and then a popcorn at the theater during the first or second movie. Organic popcorn, of course, since this is a NYC art-house that charges $12.50/ticket even for not-fest programs, although I don't know that that makes it substantially better or worse than the alternative.
I'd pegged the hour and fifteen minutes between the end of The Longest Nite and K-20 for supper, and I hadn't even set the bar that high - I wanted to hit Peanut Butter & Company, just to say I did, and because I do really like peanut butter. However, the Q&A for the movie went on for almost an hour. And while a bunch of it was quite interesting, I was hungry and finding myself less and less fascinated by Wai Ka-fai's TVB work in the 90s. But, blocked in. By the time it was over, there was no time left between movies, so I got some Reese's Pieces. I probably could have grabbed a slice of pizza or something somewhere, but the candy left me full. Still should have gotten another soda for When the Full Moon Rises, though, so that the caffeine, need to hit the restroom, and repetitive action of taking a sip would help me keep going through movie number six.
As I mentioned back on Monday, that last one made me wonder if what makes for a good midnight movie versus a good midnight selection for a festival. It's okay for the former to be a kind of slow, silly, and, honestly, kind of cappy (whether through ineptitude or design); when you go to a midnight movie, you generally do it with a group, you've probably gotten a late start on the day, or been doing other things. The sixth movie of a festival is a different experience; the movie-watching part of your brain is worn out, the seats have become too comfortable, and it's just very difficult to stay alert. That's not even counting how you've probably had a day of seeing how "good" and "fun" have a big overlap, and trying to get real enjoyment out of bad filmmaking is just not going to be that effective.
Granted, I am not the biggest fan of manufactured cult/nostalgia filmmaking in the first place, and I don't get enough sleep under the best conditions, let alone when I'm trying to blitz a festival, but I really think there's something to this - good midnight movies don't necessarily make good festival midnights.
Um Fa (The Longest Nite)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2009 at the IFC Center #1 (New York Asian Film Festival)
The vast majority of the time, a movie that gets taken away from its writer-director and extensively reworked by the studio is going to be a mess, and The Longest Nite isn't exactly the movie that bucks that trend. Of course, most of the time the studio has to fit more than five scenes into their new vision. And the fixers are seldom people on the same level as Wai Ka-fai and Johnnie To.
The film opens with a chunk of exposition about the Triad situation in Macau - Mr. Hung is the more established boss, and he's been locked in conflict with Mr. K for some time. Mr. Lung feels this situation is bad for business, so he's coming into town to make them work together. There's a contract out on Mr. Hung, presumably from Mr. K, and a number of hitmen have converged on the island to execute it. This includes Tony (Lau Ching-wan), although he doesn't seem to be actively doing much aside from getting between Mr. K's son Mark (Mark Cheng) and Maggie (Maggie Siu), a waitress at one of the clubs. He's still drawing the attention of Sam (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a corrupt cop on Mr. Lung's payroll.
If one looks too closely at the parts of the story that involve Triad hierarchy and who's paying who to do what, The Longest Nite's plot becomes a tangle to rival The Big Sleep, where the director and screenwriter famously had to phone Raymond Chandler to find out which character killed another (and got an ambiguous answer!). Like The Big Sleep, fortunately, the details of such things really don't matter so much. The plot is just there to give Tony a reason to skulk around Macao and Sam to chase after him, with various action stops along the way.
And, given that the film has Lau Ching-wan and Tony Leung Chiu-wai in the leads, it's generally going to be a lot of fun to watch. Both portray their characters as smart, capable people and worthy adversaries for one another. Lau does a great job of making Tony a guy who can vanish into a crowd but is also clearly the smartest guy in the room. He deadpans his way through a great many scenes, and at other times gives the blank face that says anything else would give it all away - but he's smirking on the inside. Leung's Sam doesn't display any of that sort of restraint, and he frequently plows scenes like a bull in a china shop. He's a burst of sometimes cocky, sometimes frustrated energy, gleefully sadistic, but never giving the impression that he's so out of control that he should be written off.
We'll never know what Patrick Yau's film would have looked like, but it seems fairly likely that To and Wai did not tone it down too much when they took over. An early scene has Sam enthusiastically smashing the fingers of a potential assassin to be sure he doesn't try anything - and then coming back to do it a little more, just in case. There's a naked, headless corpse in play, and Maggie is introduced vomiting on a customer for no particular reason. The over-the-top stuff doesn't take over the movie, but there's enough so that no particular incident makes the audience wonder what that was doing in this movie. The action direction in general is what we've come to expect from Johnnie To - not flashy, but you won't find many wrong steps. The action is also pretty good, especially when there are cars crashing into each other in a way that would make fans of 1970s vehicular mayhem smile.
The one exception to that is the climactic fight scene. In a Q&A afterward, Wai Ka-fai freely admitted that by the time it was shot, the budget was stretched and the film was running short (even with this sequence extended, the film clocks in at less than 85 minutes). It's got one quality bit of mayhem, but is otherwise an example of things not to do: The filmmakers deliberately make it difficult to tell the two characters from one another, and in fact shoot it in such a way that I wasn't sure whether or not Tony Leung Chiu-wai was ever on set, or just looped dialogue for his stunt double.
That winds up being a minor blot on what is otherwise a fine bit of Hong Kong crime. Not bad considering the rocky road it had to the screen. Unfortunately, it has also had a rough time getting on video; even ten years later, a rare festival screening like this is one of the only ways to see it.
Also at HBS.
K-20: Kaijin niju menso den (K-20: Legend of the Mask)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2009 at the IFC Center #1 (New York Asian Film Festival)
Even if 2009 weren't one of the most disappointing summer movie seasons in recent memory, I'd still wish that more foreign popcorn films got released here. I know subtitles can be a tough sell for movies aimed at a broad audience and dubbing can make even a great movie look terrible, but there's got to be some way to put a fun-for-the-whole-family adventure movie like K-20 in front of audiences that could appreciate its constant invention.
The invention starts from the first minute, when we hear a radio broadcast dated 8 December 1941, announcing... That Japan has signed a peace treaty with the United States and United Kingdom. Imperial Japan never falls, and as we open in 1949, there's a rigid class system still in place in the city of Teito. Master criminal K-20 (Kaijin Niju Menso Den, "The Fiend with Twenty Faces") tweaks the upper class, who devour coverage of Kogoro Akechi (Toru Nakamura), the police inspector assigned to catch K-20. A mysterious man hires poor circus acrobat Heikichi Endo (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to photograph Akechi's engagement to Countess Yoko Hashiba (Takako Matsu), but that results in Endo being mistaken for K-20 and arrested. It becomes clear that the real K-20 has framed him, but why?
The world of K-20 can be called retro-futuristic, steampunk, or any number of other things. It's a world where police zeppelins serve as carriers for tiny whirlybird helicopters, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison shared a Nobel Prize, Tesla's ideas for wireless transmission of energy may be turned into a weapon, and Heikichi's friend Genji "the Gadget" (Jun Kunimura) can build amazing things out of scraps. It's a world out of the serials, akin to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, although not quite so mannered in its attempts to evoke a "futuristic forties" feel. The visual effects are maybe not quite so impressive as they might be in a similarly-conceived American picture, but they've got a consistent quality, and do their duty of impressing without overwhelming.
Populating this world with a group of enjoyable characters helps quite a bit. Takeshi Kaneshiro makes for a fun accidental swashbuckler; I'm not sure what kind of actual martial arts skills he has, but he and his stunt doubles sell the acrobatics while also providing plenty of amusing slapstick as he trains to master K-20's skills so that he can confront the man who framed him as an equal. He combines matinee idol looks with Jackie Chan charm. Takoko Matsu is a great leading lady for him; sure, we're telegraphed everything we need to know about Yoko in her first scene (asking a maid if an arranged marriage is really all a woman can look forward to), but she throws herself into that role with gusto, whether gleefully ripping her expensive wedding dress apart, acting spectacularly ignorant of the lower classes' living conditions, or being an excited accomplice later. She's as charming here as she was in The Hidden Blade, and her giddiness often spreads to the audience. Toru Nakamura does a nice job of making Akechi just a bit insufferable, but not foolish or worthy of disdain.
The rest of the cast is good, too: Young Yuki Imai avoids excessive mugging as Heikichi's "kid brother" Shinsuke, and Kanata Hongo hits the right notes as Akechi's young assistant Yoshio. Jun Kunimura has a good Q vibe going as Genji, and plays nicely off Reiko Takashima as his wife. Writer/director Shimako Soto works the cast's chemistry well, keeping things light between them. She doesn't have them wink at the audience, but right up until Big Confrontation time, the general feeling is of fun, rather than high tension.
That's not to say K-20 is not exciting. It's got a number of big action set pieces, including a highly creative escape, a couple clever break-ins, and a final showdown that is well worth the price of admission. The movie seems pitched for a family audience, and Sato keeps things pretty kid-friendly, keeping things at a manageable pace with most of the action being fairly bloodless even as it's clearly laid-out. Even though there are plenty of effects, she never lets them overwhelm the characters. Naoki Sato contributes a booming, John Williams-esque score which adds to the excitement.
That score makes me wonder if the production companies are looking for Western success (among other things - the print screened also had many of the main titles in English). Even if they don't pull off the unlikely feat of cracking that market, we'll hopefully get a sequel or two to import. After all, K-20 certainly beats a lot of the home-grown blockbusters.
Also at HBS
I'd pegged the hour and fifteen minutes between the end of The Longest Nite and K-20 for supper, and I hadn't even set the bar that high - I wanted to hit Peanut Butter & Company, just to say I did, and because I do really like peanut butter. However, the Q&A for the movie went on for almost an hour. And while a bunch of it was quite interesting, I was hungry and finding myself less and less fascinated by Wai Ka-fai's TVB work in the 90s. But, blocked in. By the time it was over, there was no time left between movies, so I got some Reese's Pieces. I probably could have grabbed a slice of pizza or something somewhere, but the candy left me full. Still should have gotten another soda for When the Full Moon Rises, though, so that the caffeine, need to hit the restroom, and repetitive action of taking a sip would help me keep going through movie number six.
As I mentioned back on Monday, that last one made me wonder if what makes for a good midnight movie versus a good midnight selection for a festival. It's okay for the former to be a kind of slow, silly, and, honestly, kind of cappy (whether through ineptitude or design); when you go to a midnight movie, you generally do it with a group, you've probably gotten a late start on the day, or been doing other things. The sixth movie of a festival is a different experience; the movie-watching part of your brain is worn out, the seats have become too comfortable, and it's just very difficult to stay alert. That's not even counting how you've probably had a day of seeing how "good" and "fun" have a big overlap, and trying to get real enjoyment out of bad filmmaking is just not going to be that effective.
Granted, I am not the biggest fan of manufactured cult/nostalgia filmmaking in the first place, and I don't get enough sleep under the best conditions, let alone when I'm trying to blitz a festival, but I really think there's something to this - good midnight movies don't necessarily make good festival midnights.
Um Fa (The Longest Nite)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2009 at the IFC Center #1 (New York Asian Film Festival)
The vast majority of the time, a movie that gets taken away from its writer-director and extensively reworked by the studio is going to be a mess, and The Longest Nite isn't exactly the movie that bucks that trend. Of course, most of the time the studio has to fit more than five scenes into their new vision. And the fixers are seldom people on the same level as Wai Ka-fai and Johnnie To.
The film opens with a chunk of exposition about the Triad situation in Macau - Mr. Hung is the more established boss, and he's been locked in conflict with Mr. K for some time. Mr. Lung feels this situation is bad for business, so he's coming into town to make them work together. There's a contract out on Mr. Hung, presumably from Mr. K, and a number of hitmen have converged on the island to execute it. This includes Tony (Lau Ching-wan), although he doesn't seem to be actively doing much aside from getting between Mr. K's son Mark (Mark Cheng) and Maggie (Maggie Siu), a waitress at one of the clubs. He's still drawing the attention of Sam (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a corrupt cop on Mr. Lung's payroll.
If one looks too closely at the parts of the story that involve Triad hierarchy and who's paying who to do what, The Longest Nite's plot becomes a tangle to rival The Big Sleep, where the director and screenwriter famously had to phone Raymond Chandler to find out which character killed another (and got an ambiguous answer!). Like The Big Sleep, fortunately, the details of such things really don't matter so much. The plot is just there to give Tony a reason to skulk around Macao and Sam to chase after him, with various action stops along the way.
And, given that the film has Lau Ching-wan and Tony Leung Chiu-wai in the leads, it's generally going to be a lot of fun to watch. Both portray their characters as smart, capable people and worthy adversaries for one another. Lau does a great job of making Tony a guy who can vanish into a crowd but is also clearly the smartest guy in the room. He deadpans his way through a great many scenes, and at other times gives the blank face that says anything else would give it all away - but he's smirking on the inside. Leung's Sam doesn't display any of that sort of restraint, and he frequently plows scenes like a bull in a china shop. He's a burst of sometimes cocky, sometimes frustrated energy, gleefully sadistic, but never giving the impression that he's so out of control that he should be written off.
We'll never know what Patrick Yau's film would have looked like, but it seems fairly likely that To and Wai did not tone it down too much when they took over. An early scene has Sam enthusiastically smashing the fingers of a potential assassin to be sure he doesn't try anything - and then coming back to do it a little more, just in case. There's a naked, headless corpse in play, and Maggie is introduced vomiting on a customer for no particular reason. The over-the-top stuff doesn't take over the movie, but there's enough so that no particular incident makes the audience wonder what that was doing in this movie. The action direction in general is what we've come to expect from Johnnie To - not flashy, but you won't find many wrong steps. The action is also pretty good, especially when there are cars crashing into each other in a way that would make fans of 1970s vehicular mayhem smile.
The one exception to that is the climactic fight scene. In a Q&A afterward, Wai Ka-fai freely admitted that by the time it was shot, the budget was stretched and the film was running short (even with this sequence extended, the film clocks in at less than 85 minutes). It's got one quality bit of mayhem, but is otherwise an example of things not to do: The filmmakers deliberately make it difficult to tell the two characters from one another, and in fact shoot it in such a way that I wasn't sure whether or not Tony Leung Chiu-wai was ever on set, or just looped dialogue for his stunt double.
That winds up being a minor blot on what is otherwise a fine bit of Hong Kong crime. Not bad considering the rocky road it had to the screen. Unfortunately, it has also had a rough time getting on video; even ten years later, a rare festival screening like this is one of the only ways to see it.
Also at HBS.
K-20: Kaijin niju menso den (K-20: Legend of the Mask)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 June 2009 at the IFC Center #1 (New York Asian Film Festival)
Even if 2009 weren't one of the most disappointing summer movie seasons in recent memory, I'd still wish that more foreign popcorn films got released here. I know subtitles can be a tough sell for movies aimed at a broad audience and dubbing can make even a great movie look terrible, but there's got to be some way to put a fun-for-the-whole-family adventure movie like K-20 in front of audiences that could appreciate its constant invention.
The invention starts from the first minute, when we hear a radio broadcast dated 8 December 1941, announcing... That Japan has signed a peace treaty with the United States and United Kingdom. Imperial Japan never falls, and as we open in 1949, there's a rigid class system still in place in the city of Teito. Master criminal K-20 (Kaijin Niju Menso Den, "The Fiend with Twenty Faces") tweaks the upper class, who devour coverage of Kogoro Akechi (Toru Nakamura), the police inspector assigned to catch K-20. A mysterious man hires poor circus acrobat Heikichi Endo (Takeshi Kaneshiro) to photograph Akechi's engagement to Countess Yoko Hashiba (Takako Matsu), but that results in Endo being mistaken for K-20 and arrested. It becomes clear that the real K-20 has framed him, but why?
The world of K-20 can be called retro-futuristic, steampunk, or any number of other things. It's a world where police zeppelins serve as carriers for tiny whirlybird helicopters, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison shared a Nobel Prize, Tesla's ideas for wireless transmission of energy may be turned into a weapon, and Heikichi's friend Genji "the Gadget" (Jun Kunimura) can build amazing things out of scraps. It's a world out of the serials, akin to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, although not quite so mannered in its attempts to evoke a "futuristic forties" feel. The visual effects are maybe not quite so impressive as they might be in a similarly-conceived American picture, but they've got a consistent quality, and do their duty of impressing without overwhelming.
Populating this world with a group of enjoyable characters helps quite a bit. Takeshi Kaneshiro makes for a fun accidental swashbuckler; I'm not sure what kind of actual martial arts skills he has, but he and his stunt doubles sell the acrobatics while also providing plenty of amusing slapstick as he trains to master K-20's skills so that he can confront the man who framed him as an equal. He combines matinee idol looks with Jackie Chan charm. Takoko Matsu is a great leading lady for him; sure, we're telegraphed everything we need to know about Yoko in her first scene (asking a maid if an arranged marriage is really all a woman can look forward to), but she throws herself into that role with gusto, whether gleefully ripping her expensive wedding dress apart, acting spectacularly ignorant of the lower classes' living conditions, or being an excited accomplice later. She's as charming here as she was in The Hidden Blade, and her giddiness often spreads to the audience. Toru Nakamura does a nice job of making Akechi just a bit insufferable, but not foolish or worthy of disdain.
The rest of the cast is good, too: Young Yuki Imai avoids excessive mugging as Heikichi's "kid brother" Shinsuke, and Kanata Hongo hits the right notes as Akechi's young assistant Yoshio. Jun Kunimura has a good Q vibe going as Genji, and plays nicely off Reiko Takashima as his wife. Writer/director Shimako Soto works the cast's chemistry well, keeping things light between them. She doesn't have them wink at the audience, but right up until Big Confrontation time, the general feeling is of fun, rather than high tension.
That's not to say K-20 is not exciting. It's got a number of big action set pieces, including a highly creative escape, a couple clever break-ins, and a final showdown that is well worth the price of admission. The movie seems pitched for a family audience, and Sato keeps things pretty kid-friendly, keeping things at a manageable pace with most of the action being fairly bloodless even as it's clearly laid-out. Even though there are plenty of effects, she never lets them overwhelm the characters. Naoki Sato contributes a booming, John Williams-esque score which adds to the excitement.
That score makes me wonder if the production companies are looking for Western success (among other things - the print screened also had many of the main titles in English). Even if they don't pull off the unlikely feat of cracking that market, we'll hopefully get a sequel or two to import. After all, K-20 certainly beats a lot of the home-grown blockbusters.
Also at HBS
Thursday, June 25, 2009
$9.99
I may have to start looking for some of Etgar Keret's books; not only are his stories generally short enough that several can be sucked down in one gulp on the bus ride to work, but I dig his sense of humor, at least in the movies made from his work. I quite liked Wristcutters: A Love Story, and the stuff pulled together to form $9.99 is pretty entertaining.
(Also, this confirms that if there's a hell, I'm likely going there for how eating disorder jokes often get a laugh out of me. $9.99 has a good one.)
One thing that really confuses me is the way that several things I've read about this bring up the frontal male nudity in it. Sure, you don't necessarily see that often in the movies - an animated film especially - but, honestly, if that is what gives you the heebie-jeebies in that scene, you are creeped out by the wrong things.
$9.99
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 June 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #2 (preview)
Movies made up of a group of intersecting stories often get downright peculiar. After all, one of the basic ideas is that the people passing in and out of our lives that we think of as background lead an existence just as complicated as we do. Maybe our lives are not quite as odd as those of the characters in $9.99, since living in an animated world allows things to get very strange, but it's not as far off as it may seem.
Start with the Peck family. Father Jim (voice of Anthony LaPaglia) normally frets about his underachieving kids, but an encounter with a homeless man (voice of Geoffrey Rush) carrying a gun leaves him shaken. Younger son Dave (Samuel Johnson) is unemployed in his mid-twenties, and still lives with his father, spending the day cooking (apparently no restaurants are hiring); he's just ordered a book from a catalog that will supposedly tell him the meaning of life. His older brother Lenny (voice of Samuel Johnson) works as a repossessor, and while he's moving a neighbor's things out, he meets someone moving in - Tanita (voice of Leeanna Walsman), a model who likes her men smooth. There's also Zack (voice of Jamie Katsamatsas), a kid who wants a toy soccer player but instead receives a piggy bank; Albert (voice of Barry Otto), a lonely old man who has been visited by a most disreputable angel; and Ron (voice of Joel Edgerton), whose girlfriend Michelle (voice of Claudia Karvan) has just left him and who seems to be imagining three lilliputian roommates even more immature than he is.
These characters mostly live in the same apartment building, and briefly encounter each other as neighbors do. Before appearing on screen, they were the cast of various short stories by Etgar Keret, who collaborated on the screenplay with director Tatia Rosenthal (and, in an amusing in-joke, is the author listed on the cover of the book that tells the meaning of life). Not having read them, I don't know whether these stories originally shared characters, but Keret and Rosenthal have left them reasonably discrete for the film: Some tie together, but for the most part, each contains its own beginning, middle, and end, with all five or six packed into a compact 78 minutes.
Rosenthal's animation style does take a little getting used to. The film is primarily stop-motion with the occasional computer assist - mostly for water, and presumably compositing and wire removal - and the character models often look well-used. Rosenthal will hold a tight close-up for long enough that the audience can see that the paint has peeled, the "skin" often seems stretched tight over an unyielding material, and when characters speak, the lips seem to be animated independent of the rest of the face. It's a style that, when seen in a two-minute preview, looks bad, but to which the audience can quickly acclimate. That's made much easier by the way that every other movement in the film looks extraordinarily natural; I can't remember another stop-motion picture where the people walked and gestured so much like actual people.
This style and execution is probably no accident; it simultaneously makes things seem grounded in the real world without the impossible being too jarring. Keret, Rosenthal, and their voice cast do an impressive job of getting us to believe in these characters as real people, especially since the characters are split between the world-weary (the angel, Jim) and optimistic (Zack, Dave), and how Albert manages to combine them both. Some of the characters are a little underused; I'd have liked to see more of Michelle, or the magician whose property is being repossessed.
The film's sense of humor is sneaky: It's generally warm and almost quaint, and then the filmmakers will hit the audience with something that stings, including a great one at a pivotal moment. It's not a movie that generally goes for big laughs, but one that certainly has the audience laughing all the way through. It's often laughs of quasi-familiarity, - the audience may not be able to empathize with the exact situation, but often enough they'll certainly understand the feeling exactly.
In truth, for all the style and some of the situations are unusual, $9.99 isn't nearly as weird as its oddest bits. It's quirky and comfortable at the same time.
Also at HBS.
(Also, this confirms that if there's a hell, I'm likely going there for how eating disorder jokes often get a laugh out of me. $9.99 has a good one.)
One thing that really confuses me is the way that several things I've read about this bring up the frontal male nudity in it. Sure, you don't necessarily see that often in the movies - an animated film especially - but, honestly, if that is what gives you the heebie-jeebies in that scene, you are creeped out by the wrong things.
$9.99
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 June 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #2 (preview)
Movies made up of a group of intersecting stories often get downright peculiar. After all, one of the basic ideas is that the people passing in and out of our lives that we think of as background lead an existence just as complicated as we do. Maybe our lives are not quite as odd as those of the characters in $9.99, since living in an animated world allows things to get very strange, but it's not as far off as it may seem.
Start with the Peck family. Father Jim (voice of Anthony LaPaglia) normally frets about his underachieving kids, but an encounter with a homeless man (voice of Geoffrey Rush) carrying a gun leaves him shaken. Younger son Dave (Samuel Johnson) is unemployed in his mid-twenties, and still lives with his father, spending the day cooking (apparently no restaurants are hiring); he's just ordered a book from a catalog that will supposedly tell him the meaning of life. His older brother Lenny (voice of Samuel Johnson) works as a repossessor, and while he's moving a neighbor's things out, he meets someone moving in - Tanita (voice of Leeanna Walsman), a model who likes her men smooth. There's also Zack (voice of Jamie Katsamatsas), a kid who wants a toy soccer player but instead receives a piggy bank; Albert (voice of Barry Otto), a lonely old man who has been visited by a most disreputable angel; and Ron (voice of Joel Edgerton), whose girlfriend Michelle (voice of Claudia Karvan) has just left him and who seems to be imagining three lilliputian roommates even more immature than he is.
These characters mostly live in the same apartment building, and briefly encounter each other as neighbors do. Before appearing on screen, they were the cast of various short stories by Etgar Keret, who collaborated on the screenplay with director Tatia Rosenthal (and, in an amusing in-joke, is the author listed on the cover of the book that tells the meaning of life). Not having read them, I don't know whether these stories originally shared characters, but Keret and Rosenthal have left them reasonably discrete for the film: Some tie together, but for the most part, each contains its own beginning, middle, and end, with all five or six packed into a compact 78 minutes.
Rosenthal's animation style does take a little getting used to. The film is primarily stop-motion with the occasional computer assist - mostly for water, and presumably compositing and wire removal - and the character models often look well-used. Rosenthal will hold a tight close-up for long enough that the audience can see that the paint has peeled, the "skin" often seems stretched tight over an unyielding material, and when characters speak, the lips seem to be animated independent of the rest of the face. It's a style that, when seen in a two-minute preview, looks bad, but to which the audience can quickly acclimate. That's made much easier by the way that every other movement in the film looks extraordinarily natural; I can't remember another stop-motion picture where the people walked and gestured so much like actual people.
This style and execution is probably no accident; it simultaneously makes things seem grounded in the real world without the impossible being too jarring. Keret, Rosenthal, and their voice cast do an impressive job of getting us to believe in these characters as real people, especially since the characters are split between the world-weary (the angel, Jim) and optimistic (Zack, Dave), and how Albert manages to combine them both. Some of the characters are a little underused; I'd have liked to see more of Michelle, or the magician whose property is being repossessed.
The film's sense of humor is sneaky: It's generally warm and almost quaint, and then the filmmakers will hit the audience with something that stings, including a great one at a pivotal moment. It's not a movie that generally goes for big laughs, but one that certainly has the audience laughing all the way through. It's often laughs of quasi-familiarity, - the audience may not be able to empathize with the exact situation, but often enough they'll certainly understand the feeling exactly.
In truth, for all the style and some of the situations are unusual, $9.99 isn't nearly as weird as its oddest bits. It's quirky and comfortable at the same time.
Also at HBS.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Departures
One thing about Departures that amused me, but maybe doesn't necessarily belong in the review proper: I'd picked up, at some point, that Kentucky Fried Chicken had done such a highly effective marketing job in post-war Japan that KFC and strawberry shortcake had become a Christmas tradition there. I'd never actually seen it referenced, though, so I practically burst out laughing at a scene in the middle of the movie where some of the main characters are meeting up on Christmas and enthusiastically wolfing down a bowl of fried chicken wings. (Though the cake next to it did not look like strawberry shortcake - indeed, the continuity was a bit off, because in some scenes there was a salad there!) Enthusiastically wolfing them down, slurping the greasy stuff right off the bone. Kind of horrifying, really- you could use the sound of that scene to foley a highly disturbing vampire movie.
Stuff like this is why I don't get too grumpy over the weird, stereotypical pair of Japanese guys in the "Kentucky Grilled Chicken" commercials - based on that bit of history and stunts like this, Japan and the Colonel have a relationship that us westerners can't really understand.
Okuribito (Departures)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 June 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)
Departures feels like the sort of film that wins the Academy Award for best foreign language feature. It's a good movie, just Japan-specific enough that the voters can feel like they're awarding another culture, but accessible and mainstream enough that film snobs can argue that it's another example of Oscar ignoring true excellence in favor of pretty-good-ness. And maybe it is. Nothing wrong with pretty good, and Departures is a pretty good pretty good film.
Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is a pretty good cellist, for that matter, though not so good that he can count on getting another job when the orchestra he plays in is dissolved. He and wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) move back to the house his mother left them, and he answers an ad for an "NK Agent". It's not the travel agency he assumes it to be - "NK" stands for nokan, or "encoffiinment" - but boss Ikuei Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki) pays well. He can't quite bring himself to tell Mika exactly what his new job entails, of course.
Which leads to one of the movie's two main themes, the way we as modern people distance ourselves from death as a part of life. We are told how Daigo's job used to be done by the family, then by undertakers, who now subcontract it out to businesses like theirs. So we see how the people who do this job are treated as outcasts, even though it is an important ritual. The other is how Daigo finds a new father figure in his boss, filling a hole that was left in his life since his father abandoned him and his mother when Daigo was six. There's obviously going to be some connection between these two threads, but to writer Kundo Koyama's great credit, there are multiple ways that they could connect, especially once we see that Daigo's father inspired him to take up the cello, and that he does have a natural talent for his new job.
Koyama and director Yojiro Takita do a nice job of building a pleasant atmosphere. The film opens with a bit of a flash-forward, so that our first impression of this job is respectful, though not so absolutely somber that we can't see a bit of humor in the odd circumstances. There's great affection between and for even the minor characters, although it's generally not something that the filmmakers go out of their way to demonstrate, but what any observer would pick up from meeting these people. A storyline about the elderly mother of one of Daigo's childhood friends who operates a public bathhouse more or less on her own is peppered with charming bits.
I particularly enjoyed the way Diago's and Mika's marriage is portrayed; though the story does lean on the familiar gimmick of the husband not being fully honest with his wife more than one might like, it feels different here than it does in movies from Tokyo Sonata to Shall We Dance? and further back. Daigo and Mika aren't a couple hamstrung by the dictates of tradition, but a modern young couple who joke and treat each other as equals, more or less. Masahiro Motoki does a nice job of showing Daigo maturing, and I like how Ryoko Hirosue is able to make Mika into someone we like pretty instantly, even when she displays flaws that match Daigo's in scale, if not form. I haven't liked an on-screen married couple more recently.
Tsutomu Yamazaki also hits just the right note; he pulls off making Sasaki funny without ever making him a punchline. He's got the bearing of a man with a wealth of experience whom age has slowed some without "old man" being the first thing that comes to mind when he appears. Kimiko Yo is nice as his assistant, and all the mourning families are interesting to watch for their different reactions.
Departures is a little rough in spots; after the initial flash-forward, the bits where Daigo is finding out where he's working and learning the trade are played rather broadly, sometimes to the point of Motoki mugging to the camera. The comedy is toned down a little bit after that, and things run as smoothly as the story will allow. I do like a lot of the little details - the notches on the floor where Daigo practiced his cello as a child, for instance - and the way Takita shows the passage of time in a way that's not jarring.
It's nicely off-kilter, though not enough to put people off. The frequently silly opening act hurts the film a little, but the film does a nice rebound into something that isn't quite brilliant, but certainly heartfelt and satisfying.
Also at HBS.
Stuff like this is why I don't get too grumpy over the weird, stereotypical pair of Japanese guys in the "Kentucky Grilled Chicken" commercials - based on that bit of history and stunts like this, Japan and the Colonel have a relationship that us westerners can't really understand.
Okuribito (Departures)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 June 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)
Departures feels like the sort of film that wins the Academy Award for best foreign language feature. It's a good movie, just Japan-specific enough that the voters can feel like they're awarding another culture, but accessible and mainstream enough that film snobs can argue that it's another example of Oscar ignoring true excellence in favor of pretty-good-ness. And maybe it is. Nothing wrong with pretty good, and Departures is a pretty good pretty good film.
Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is a pretty good cellist, for that matter, though not so good that he can count on getting another job when the orchestra he plays in is dissolved. He and wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) move back to the house his mother left them, and he answers an ad for an "NK Agent". It's not the travel agency he assumes it to be - "NK" stands for nokan, or "encoffiinment" - but boss Ikuei Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki) pays well. He can't quite bring himself to tell Mika exactly what his new job entails, of course.
Which leads to one of the movie's two main themes, the way we as modern people distance ourselves from death as a part of life. We are told how Daigo's job used to be done by the family, then by undertakers, who now subcontract it out to businesses like theirs. So we see how the people who do this job are treated as outcasts, even though it is an important ritual. The other is how Daigo finds a new father figure in his boss, filling a hole that was left in his life since his father abandoned him and his mother when Daigo was six. There's obviously going to be some connection between these two threads, but to writer Kundo Koyama's great credit, there are multiple ways that they could connect, especially once we see that Daigo's father inspired him to take up the cello, and that he does have a natural talent for his new job.
Koyama and director Yojiro Takita do a nice job of building a pleasant atmosphere. The film opens with a bit of a flash-forward, so that our first impression of this job is respectful, though not so absolutely somber that we can't see a bit of humor in the odd circumstances. There's great affection between and for even the minor characters, although it's generally not something that the filmmakers go out of their way to demonstrate, but what any observer would pick up from meeting these people. A storyline about the elderly mother of one of Daigo's childhood friends who operates a public bathhouse more or less on her own is peppered with charming bits.
I particularly enjoyed the way Diago's and Mika's marriage is portrayed; though the story does lean on the familiar gimmick of the husband not being fully honest with his wife more than one might like, it feels different here than it does in movies from Tokyo Sonata to Shall We Dance? and further back. Daigo and Mika aren't a couple hamstrung by the dictates of tradition, but a modern young couple who joke and treat each other as equals, more or less. Masahiro Motoki does a nice job of showing Daigo maturing, and I like how Ryoko Hirosue is able to make Mika into someone we like pretty instantly, even when she displays flaws that match Daigo's in scale, if not form. I haven't liked an on-screen married couple more recently.
Tsutomu Yamazaki also hits just the right note; he pulls off making Sasaki funny without ever making him a punchline. He's got the bearing of a man with a wealth of experience whom age has slowed some without "old man" being the first thing that comes to mind when he appears. Kimiko Yo is nice as his assistant, and all the mourning families are interesting to watch for their different reactions.
Departures is a little rough in spots; after the initial flash-forward, the bits where Daigo is finding out where he's working and learning the trade are played rather broadly, sometimes to the point of Motoki mugging to the camera. The comedy is toned down a little bit after that, and things run as smoothly as the story will allow. I do like a lot of the little details - the notches on the floor where Daigo practiced his cello as a child, for instance - and the way Takita shows the passage of time in a way that's not jarring.
It's nicely off-kilter, though not enough to put people off. The frequently silly opening act hurts the film a little, but the film does a nice rebound into something that isn't quite brilliant, but certainly heartfelt and satisfying.
Also at HBS.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Last International Playboy (aka Frost)
I didn't connect this movie's co-star Lucy Gordon to the story a month ago about a promising young actress who committed suicide a month ago until I checked her IMDB entry toward the end of the process of writing the review. I guess it seems kind of creepy, now, considering that there are threads in this movie about characters potentially harming themselves and a mother who had killed herself. I wonder if this was something the releasing company worked for, since promoting a movie about self-destruction would inevitably bring questions about the cast member who hanged herself.
It almost certainly must have thrown the brakes on, because the company (Black Note Films, I believe) seems to have been advertising it relatively aggressively. I've seen ads for it on the sides of buses for months, which struck me as fairly strange because independent films from small companies don't tend to get that sort of exposure, and the bus ads were eye catching, making good use of their horizontal orientation. The poster and cardboard standees that showed up at Kendall Square as the movie came out is another good one, looking more like the cover to a glossy hardcover book than a movie poster; it's stylish.
The movie itself is a mess, though - boring characters, indifferent performances, a soundtrack that seems to consist entirely of bands that will likely stay undiscovered. The credits seem to indicate reshoots - both because there's a copyright date of 2009 despite the film having played festivals last year and because there's a section marked "Re-Shoot" - and I wonder whether they improved the film or maybe softened it up.
Speaking of the end credits, they looked very hasty and cheap (perhaps indicating they were redone), and had some of the oddest footage playing under them. I'm not complaining, mind you - we are talking about a topless, slow-motion pillow fight - but that seems like a really odd choice for the end of a movie where a large chunk of the characters are women urging the main character to be a better man, and the generic model types mostly disappear in the second half.
The Last International Playboy
* * (out of four)
Seen 2 June 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)
The Last International Playboy was known as Frost during its time on the festival circuit, and I wholeheartedly support the name change, both because the longer title is a lot more interesting and because it downplays the fact that the filmmakers actually named a main character "Jack Frost". This was likely done by the marketing department - even though the title appears in the film, it's not interesting there; it sounds just as generic as everything else.
The title character (Jason Behr) is Jack Frost; he's the thirty-ish remnant of a wealthy family who wrote a well-received novel seven years ago and hasn't done much since. He's still carrying a torch for his editor, Carolina (Monet Mazur), who has been his best friend since they were kids; that's awkward because she's just told him that she's marrying Russell (Rob Bogue) in six months. Of course, it's not like that torch has prevented him from seeing other women; he's able to round up a bunch of cutely-named blonde models when his friend Scotch (Mike Landry) asks, so that he can better look the part for a writer doing an article on "the last international playboy". The writer, Kate Hardwick (Lucy Gordon), winds up more interested in Frost, and she's not alone: Beautiful trainwreck Ozzy (Krysten Ritter) insists he's going to marry her, and 11-year-old Sophie (India Ennenga) latches onto him because he's always around their apartment building when her parents are working.
There is not a single character in this movie that you have not seen before, likely in a more interesting variation. Jack is wealthy but still basically a decent guy, Scotch is kind of a loser (is there any doubt that he was the boorish legacy member of his fraternity in college?), Carolina is nice but impatient, Ozzy is loud, Sophie has a precocious understanding of adult psychology. Their issues aren't particularly timely or ingeniously creative. They don't even talk in an interesting way, either in terms of unlikely wit or musical vulgarity (Ozzy and Scotch try, but it's just kind of sad). Even songs that flat out tell the audience what to think are a step up from the plainness on display; this movie is about as whitebread as dramas about the idle rich get, and that is pretty darn vapid.
Part of the trouble may be casting Jason Behr in the title role. He still looks like he should be playing teenagers, even with the permanent five o'clock shadow he's been sporting since at least Dragon Wars and claims he's getting too old for this. To be fair, there's not a whole lot he can do; the screenplay seems to be very careful to make sure that we like Jack from the start. He's too nice and obviously good-intentioned, even though there really should be something creepy about how he hangs around with an 11-year-old (non-related) girl and won't accept reality when it comes to his ex. And somewhere between Behr and co-writer/director Steve Clark, the audience is getting pounded on the head with his drinking - look, he's on the same path as Ozzy, just not as fast!
Speaking of Ozzy, I'd like to see Krysten Ritter in a larger role sometime. She's specialized in parts like Ozzy - unconventionally pretty (for the movies, at least), overeager girls who don't fit in with the more practiced beauties around them - and initially, this doesn't look like one of her best: As wooden as much of the cast is, she's overdoing it, though I appreciated the energy. She shows us that there's more to her during a "girls getting ready to go out" montage, though, and darn if she didn't actually make me feel something later on, when no-one else was managing it. India Ennenga does actually come close, though her character is too obviously the tiny adult to Frost's overgrown teenager; Mike Landry's got a character who is supposed to be a loser, and he does that well enough that it's kind of hard to look past the boorishness. Neither Monet Mazur or Lucy Gordon really sparks with Behr, though, and it feels like one of them really should have.
To give credit where credit's due, Clark seems to be OK until it comes time to have people speak - wordless scenes are generally fairly nice, but the dialog is almost aggressively banal, and he doesn't seem to be able to coax a good delivery from his actors. He also gives us no hook into this privileged world, just seeming to assume that wealthy people in exclusive circles are interesting, especially if they're writers. He also saddles the film with a very soft conclusion. I can get not wanting to be overdramatic, but give us something!
It's not to be, unfortunately. Maybe that title change wasn't such a great idea after all; it holds out hope that the audience will get something juicy when if fact it's all too low-key.
Also at HBS.
It almost certainly must have thrown the brakes on, because the company (Black Note Films, I believe) seems to have been advertising it relatively aggressively. I've seen ads for it on the sides of buses for months, which struck me as fairly strange because independent films from small companies don't tend to get that sort of exposure, and the bus ads were eye catching, making good use of their horizontal orientation. The poster and cardboard standees that showed up at Kendall Square as the movie came out is another good one, looking more like the cover to a glossy hardcover book than a movie poster; it's stylish.
The movie itself is a mess, though - boring characters, indifferent performances, a soundtrack that seems to consist entirely of bands that will likely stay undiscovered. The credits seem to indicate reshoots - both because there's a copyright date of 2009 despite the film having played festivals last year and because there's a section marked "Re-Shoot" - and I wonder whether they improved the film or maybe softened it up.
Speaking of the end credits, they looked very hasty and cheap (perhaps indicating they were redone), and had some of the oddest footage playing under them. I'm not complaining, mind you - we are talking about a topless, slow-motion pillow fight - but that seems like a really odd choice for the end of a movie where a large chunk of the characters are women urging the main character to be a better man, and the generic model types mostly disappear in the second half.
The Last International Playboy
* * (out of four)
Seen 2 June 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #7 (first-run)
The Last International Playboy was known as Frost during its time on the festival circuit, and I wholeheartedly support the name change, both because the longer title is a lot more interesting and because it downplays the fact that the filmmakers actually named a main character "Jack Frost". This was likely done by the marketing department - even though the title appears in the film, it's not interesting there; it sounds just as generic as everything else.
The title character (Jason Behr) is Jack Frost; he's the thirty-ish remnant of a wealthy family who wrote a well-received novel seven years ago and hasn't done much since. He's still carrying a torch for his editor, Carolina (Monet Mazur), who has been his best friend since they were kids; that's awkward because she's just told him that she's marrying Russell (Rob Bogue) in six months. Of course, it's not like that torch has prevented him from seeing other women; he's able to round up a bunch of cutely-named blonde models when his friend Scotch (Mike Landry) asks, so that he can better look the part for a writer doing an article on "the last international playboy". The writer, Kate Hardwick (Lucy Gordon), winds up more interested in Frost, and she's not alone: Beautiful trainwreck Ozzy (Krysten Ritter) insists he's going to marry her, and 11-year-old Sophie (India Ennenga) latches onto him because he's always around their apartment building when her parents are working.
There is not a single character in this movie that you have not seen before, likely in a more interesting variation. Jack is wealthy but still basically a decent guy, Scotch is kind of a loser (is there any doubt that he was the boorish legacy member of his fraternity in college?), Carolina is nice but impatient, Ozzy is loud, Sophie has a precocious understanding of adult psychology. Their issues aren't particularly timely or ingeniously creative. They don't even talk in an interesting way, either in terms of unlikely wit or musical vulgarity (Ozzy and Scotch try, but it's just kind of sad). Even songs that flat out tell the audience what to think are a step up from the plainness on display; this movie is about as whitebread as dramas about the idle rich get, and that is pretty darn vapid.
Part of the trouble may be casting Jason Behr in the title role. He still looks like he should be playing teenagers, even with the permanent five o'clock shadow he's been sporting since at least Dragon Wars and claims he's getting too old for this. To be fair, there's not a whole lot he can do; the screenplay seems to be very careful to make sure that we like Jack from the start. He's too nice and obviously good-intentioned, even though there really should be something creepy about how he hangs around with an 11-year-old (non-related) girl and won't accept reality when it comes to his ex. And somewhere between Behr and co-writer/director Steve Clark, the audience is getting pounded on the head with his drinking - look, he's on the same path as Ozzy, just not as fast!
Speaking of Ozzy, I'd like to see Krysten Ritter in a larger role sometime. She's specialized in parts like Ozzy - unconventionally pretty (for the movies, at least), overeager girls who don't fit in with the more practiced beauties around them - and initially, this doesn't look like one of her best: As wooden as much of the cast is, she's overdoing it, though I appreciated the energy. She shows us that there's more to her during a "girls getting ready to go out" montage, though, and darn if she didn't actually make me feel something later on, when no-one else was managing it. India Ennenga does actually come close, though her character is too obviously the tiny adult to Frost's overgrown teenager; Mike Landry's got a character who is supposed to be a loser, and he does that well enough that it's kind of hard to look past the boorishness. Neither Monet Mazur or Lucy Gordon really sparks with Behr, though, and it feels like one of them really should have.
To give credit where credit's due, Clark seems to be OK until it comes time to have people speak - wordless scenes are generally fairly nice, but the dialog is almost aggressively banal, and he doesn't seem to be able to coax a good delivery from his actors. He also gives us no hook into this privileged world, just seeming to assume that wealthy people in exclusive circles are interesting, especially if they're writers. He also saddles the film with a very soft conclusion. I can get not wanting to be overdramatic, but give us something!
It's not to be, unfortunately. Maybe that title change wasn't such a great idea after all; it holds out hope that the audience will get something juicy when if fact it's all too low-key.
Also at HBS.
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