Is this film ever going to see the theatrical light of day in Australia or will it join the increasing list of films heading straight to Video Ezy shelves without much publicity behind them?
Saturday, March 14, 2009
What Just Happened to "What Just Happened"?
Barry Levinson's What Just Happened screened at Cannes08 and Sundance08, earned average reviews and to the best of my knowledge is yet to see a DVD or theatrical release in Australia. Walking along Moady Road in Hong Kong I visited the "Cheapy" DVD store and found dozens of DVDs and VCDs of the film for sale - official HK region discs and not knock-offs.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Human-rights themed shorts on Youtube by Apichatpong, Jia Zhangke and others...
Over on YouTube there's a collection of UN short films available by Apichatpong (Mobile Men), Jia Zhang-ke (Black Breakfast) and a bunch of other directors.
Slight hitch for Jia's short: the video has been uploaded in 4:3 aspect ratio to the 16:9 frame so it does appear 'squeezed'. Best bet is to use a downloader program to convert it to QuickTime or something and watch it in normal ratio. Link to Black Breakfast below. Other videos are linked on that page.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTpX3LTXgbE&feature=related
Madonna: The Material Girl from Brisbane's Queen Street Mall
The Superficial is covering Madonna's entrance at a Kabbalah function and by the looks of it her new army of stylists are the girls who hang outside the Hungry Jacks in the Queen Street mall in Brisbane. Either that or she just bought shares in Hot Topic.
http://thesuperficial.com/2009/03/madonna_youre_50.php
Favourite Shorts of IFFR2009
Fall
Director: Visri Vichit-Vadakan
Thailand
5 minutes
Striking b/w experimental short loaded with sexual energy. A young woman and man meet in an American city. What follows is a quick, erotic runthrough of their relationship.
Suicidal Variations
Directors: Kim Gok and Kim Sun
South Korea
15 minutes
Typical cine-insanity from the brothers Kim. With what would surely need a pre-credits warning for epileptics, a young woman knocks the head off a mysterious intruder and then attempts suicide. A hyper-intense blast of flashing imagery and raucous sound follows.
The Presentation Theme
Director: Jim Trainor
USA
14 minutes
Very disturbing crudely-rendered animation of a Peruvian traveller who meets a blood-sucking priestess.
Myth Labs
Director: Martha Colburn
USA
8 minutes
A wild, animated ride through the introduction and impact of meth labs into America.
Coagulate
Director: Mihai Grecu
France
7 minutes
A visually striking exploration of man, liquid and physical space with imagery impossible to erase from the memory.
Six Apartments
Director: Reynold Reynolds
Germany
12 minutes
Formally bold tour of six apartments, their creepy occupants and the germs, filth and disease which surround us all. Firmly focussed on the earth’s dwindling resources and geopolitical instability.
Origin of the Species
Director: Ben Rivers
UK
15 minutes
Fascinating new short from former Tiger winner Ben Rivers which continues his interest in Darwin. A haunting portrait of a man who lives isolated in a forest.
Man and Gravity
Director: Jakrawal Nilthamrong
Thailand
10 minutes
Amazing new short from Jakrawal where a countryside worker rides along on his motorbike constantly defying the laws of gravity with his excessive load.
Viva Taiwan Moooooovie
Director: Zero Chou
Taiwan
12 minutes
A terrific homage to Taiwan’s film history and a downright entertaining piece in its own right. Zero Chou re-introduces the gangster into Taiwanese movie culture…
Next Floor
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Canada
12 minutes
Greenaway-ish, visually staggering short about man’s excessive consumption. A party of aristocrats continues to eat all manner of flesh, crashing through the floors of an abandoned building as they grow heavier.
Brises
Director: Enrique Ramirez
Chile/France
13 minutes
One amazing shot through downtown Chile as the ghosts of past repression hover just outside the frame. Incredible.
Purgatorio
Director: Lav Diaz
Philippines
16 minutes
From the king of lengthy running times comes a grungy, poetic short with strongly political overtones.
10,000 Copyrighted Images
Director: Richard Wright
UK
7 minutes
As the title suggests, a furious montage of 10000 copyrighted images.
Director: Visri Vichit-Vadakan
Thailand
5 minutes
Striking b/w experimental short loaded with sexual energy. A young woman and man meet in an American city. What follows is a quick, erotic runthrough of their relationship.
Suicidal Variations
Directors: Kim Gok and Kim Sun
South Korea
15 minutes
Typical cine-insanity from the brothers Kim. With what would surely need a pre-credits warning for epileptics, a young woman knocks the head off a mysterious intruder and then attempts suicide. A hyper-intense blast of flashing imagery and raucous sound follows.
The Presentation Theme
Director: Jim Trainor
USA
14 minutes
Very disturbing crudely-rendered animation of a Peruvian traveller who meets a blood-sucking priestess.
Myth Labs
Director: Martha Colburn
USA
8 minutes
A wild, animated ride through the introduction and impact of meth labs into America.
Coagulate
Director: Mihai Grecu
France
7 minutes
A visually striking exploration of man, liquid and physical space with imagery impossible to erase from the memory.
Six Apartments
Director: Reynold Reynolds
Germany
12 minutes
Formally bold tour of six apartments, their creepy occupants and the germs, filth and disease which surround us all. Firmly focussed on the earth’s dwindling resources and geopolitical instability.
Origin of the Species
Director: Ben Rivers
UK
15 minutes
Fascinating new short from former Tiger winner Ben Rivers which continues his interest in Darwin. A haunting portrait of a man who lives isolated in a forest.
Man and Gravity
Director: Jakrawal Nilthamrong
Thailand
10 minutes
Amazing new short from Jakrawal where a countryside worker rides along on his motorbike constantly defying the laws of gravity with his excessive load.
Viva Taiwan Moooooovie
Director: Zero Chou
Taiwan
12 minutes
A terrific homage to Taiwan’s film history and a downright entertaining piece in its own right. Zero Chou re-introduces the gangster into Taiwanese movie culture…
Next Floor
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Canada
12 minutes
Greenaway-ish, visually staggering short about man’s excessive consumption. A party of aristocrats continues to eat all manner of flesh, crashing through the floors of an abandoned building as they grow heavier.
Brises
Director: Enrique Ramirez
Chile/France
13 minutes
One amazing shot through downtown Chile as the ghosts of past repression hover just outside the frame. Incredible.
Purgatorio
Director: Lav Diaz
Philippines
16 minutes
From the king of lengthy running times comes a grungy, poetic short with strongly political overtones.
10,000 Copyrighted Images
Director: Richard Wright
UK
7 minutes
As the title suggests, a furious montage of 10000 copyrighted images.
The Ferrari Dino Girl (IFFR2009)
Veteran Czech director Jan Nemec once again uses vintage footage of the Soviet invasion of Prague (formerly used in Oratorio For Prague) in his quietly brilliant autobiographical documentary The Ferrari Dino Girl. Tracing Nemec’s shooting of the 1968 footage and its subsequent smuggling out of the country, Ferrari Dino Girl not only boasts a stunning, uninterrupted sequence of the original footage but also frequently amusing reconstructions of how it came about. This forms the final part of an autobiographical trilogy Nemec began with Late Night Talks With Mother and continued with Landscape of My Heart.
Here Karel Roden stars as Nemec, armed with a camera as Soviet forces push into Prague. He subsequently shoots footage which opposes the Soviet line that their forces are being welcomed into Prague with open arms.Given Russia’s recent muscular foreign policy and increasing aggression in the region, Nemec’s archival footage resonates strongly in today’s geopolitical climate.
The title refers to a female travelling companion Nemec met while smuggling the footage from Prague into Vienna. She was a beautiful Czech ‘Brigitte Bardot’ which led Nemec to label her the Ferrari Dino Girl.
A natural fit for documentary sidebars but also could sync with films-on-filmmaking section.
Here Karel Roden stars as Nemec, armed with a camera as Soviet forces push into Prague. He subsequently shoots footage which opposes the Soviet line that their forces are being welcomed into Prague with open arms.Given Russia’s recent muscular foreign policy and increasing aggression in the region, Nemec’s archival footage resonates strongly in today’s geopolitical climate.
The title refers to a female travelling companion Nemec met while smuggling the footage from Prague into Vienna. She was a beautiful Czech ‘Brigitte Bardot’ which led Nemec to label her the Ferrari Dino Girl.
A natural fit for documentary sidebars but also could sync with films-on-filmmaking section.
Telstar (Nick Moran)
A natural inclusion in music-themed sidebars, Brit actor Nick Moran’s helming debut Telstar is an amusing, energetic and informative biopic on 50s/60s record producer Joe Meek who wrote the eponymous mega-hit and pioneered numerous developments in pop-music SFX. Although the film adheres to a familiar rise-and-fall trajectory, Meek’s story is such a wild ride that audiences will no doubt get swept up in the rush of retro-details, rocking soundtrack and Con O’Neil’s terrific central performance.
Audiences are thrown right away into the chaos of Meek’s legendary townhouse recording studio as writer Geoff Goddard arrives to collaborate with Meek as both men bond over music and a shared interest in the supernatural. Thanks to superb production design, zippy editing and Peter Wignall’s sharp eye for capturing the anarchy of the Holloway Road studio, Telstar immediately grabs audience attention and provides a truly immersive tour of this locale which will feature heavily throughout and signify Meek’s unhinged personality.
From there the film takes in Meek’s achievements – most notably his smash-hit Telstar – while listing his struggles with sexual identity, terrible business sense, psychotic outbursts and increasing paranoia.
Aside from O’Neil (who reprises the same role he played in the theatrical version), all cast members acquit themselves admirably and further add to the film’s sense of period-authenticity. Kevin Spacey is tops as Meek’s business partner, an ex-major with all the business acumen his partner lacks. Elsewhere Tom Burke gets under the nervous skin of Goddard effectively and JJ Feild’s turn as pop-star Heinz is near-perfect.
Audiences are thrown right away into the chaos of Meek’s legendary townhouse recording studio as writer Geoff Goddard arrives to collaborate with Meek as both men bond over music and a shared interest in the supernatural. Thanks to superb production design, zippy editing and Peter Wignall’s sharp eye for capturing the anarchy of the Holloway Road studio, Telstar immediately grabs audience attention and provides a truly immersive tour of this locale which will feature heavily throughout and signify Meek’s unhinged personality.
From there the film takes in Meek’s achievements – most notably his smash-hit Telstar – while listing his struggles with sexual identity, terrible business sense, psychotic outbursts and increasing paranoia.
Aside from O’Neil (who reprises the same role he played in the theatrical version), all cast members acquit themselves admirably and further add to the film’s sense of period-authenticity. Kevin Spacey is tops as Meek’s business partner, an ex-major with all the business acumen his partner lacks. Elsewhere Tom Burke gets under the nervous skin of Goddard effectively and JJ Feild’s turn as pop-star Heinz is near-perfect.
The Strength of Water (IFFR2009)
Proving New Zealand is capable of producing dull, Sommersault-esque cinema-to-nowhere like their next-door neighbours, The Strength of Water represents yet another tired addition to the family-in-mourning sub-genre that’s high on mood and low on characterisations and narrative development. Unsurprisingly the film was developed in collaboration with Sundance and frequently resembles a New Zealand version of some of that fest’s most hackneyed indie-with-a-capital-I inclusions.
Sketching the emotional impact a young girl’s death has on her Maori family and their relations with the wider community, Water kills off its most striking sparkiest screen presence early to focus in on the strained (and cliched) tensions between siblings, lovers and parents left to deal with their grief. Bogumil Godfrejow’s crisp lensing demonstrates a good feel for the surrounding, moody locales and the majority of the cast acquit themselves just fine. Perhaps inclusion in an indigenous sidebar beckons but this truly by-the-numbers drama is hardly likely to turn heads.
Sketching the emotional impact a young girl’s death has on her Maori family and their relations with the wider community, Water kills off its most striking sparkiest screen presence early to focus in on the strained (and cliched) tensions between siblings, lovers and parents left to deal with their grief. Bogumil Godfrejow’s crisp lensing demonstrates a good feel for the surrounding, moody locales and the majority of the cast acquit themselves just fine. Perhaps inclusion in an indigenous sidebar beckons but this truly by-the-numbers drama is hardly likely to turn heads.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Agrarian Utopia (Uruphong Raksasad)
After a series of brilliant shorts and the feature Stories From the North (which is, in essence, a series of more shorts) which all dealt with man, nature and village culture, Uruphong returns with the hypnotising documentary-fiction hybrid Agrarian Utopia which is once again set amidst Northern Thailand’s rural areas. In an increasingly wired-up culture addicted to YouTube, Blackberries, iPhones and Facebook, it almost seems like interplanetary travel to visit a community completely divorced from modern technology: Uruphong’s utopian setting sees men farming rice paddies with the most bare-basic of tools as the seasons drift by.
But as the men labour, the stars flash past and the rains come, we’re reminded of the earthly pleasures which still remain outside of ever-expanding cityscapes and suburban districts, quietly compelling and utterly entrancing in Uruphong’s distinctive style. In one euphoric, visually astonishing moment children skip through the mud in slow-motion; in another, the night’s sky dazzles with stars. What all this amounts to is (1) a graceful plea to recognise mother nature before we all disappear under rising sea levels and choke from air-pollution, (2) an invaluable social-document of a rapidly dying culture and (3) the best sign of ‘09 that Thailand’s film culture is alive and kicking.
But as the men labour, the stars flash past and the rains come, we’re reminded of the earthly pleasures which still remain outside of ever-expanding cityscapes and suburban districts, quietly compelling and utterly entrancing in Uruphong’s distinctive style. In one euphoric, visually astonishing moment children skip through the mud in slow-motion; in another, the night’s sky dazzles with stars. What all this amounts to is (1) a graceful plea to recognise mother nature before we all disappear under rising sea levels and choke from air-pollution, (2) an invaluable social-document of a rapidly dying culture and (3) the best sign of ‘09 that Thailand’s film culture is alive and kicking.
Hong Kong Movie Posters: Twinkle
A few years ago I found this company on the Internet called Twinkle who sell Hong Kong movie posters and other collectibles. I was curious so I visited their "shop" which was little more than a crammed office which they somehow managed to cram all their stock into - if you see it you'll agree it's a feat of major engineering, physics and Tetris-like geometric skill. It was rather difficult to find on Connaught Road West but the staff were friendly and I spent a good hour there going through their stock.
Anyway, it does somewhat amaze me that they're still in business but I'm glad they're around and hawking posters, postcards and other promotional materials.
I bought a Kill Bill Vol. 1 theatrical poster from them and it smelled of cigarette smoke so it seemed like the real-deal.
http://www.twinkle.com.hk/
Address: Rm.303, Chung Ying Building, 20 Connaught Road West, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong.
Anyway, it does somewhat amaze me that they're still in business but I'm glad they're around and hawking posters, postcards and other promotional materials.
I bought a Kill Bill Vol. 1 theatrical poster from them and it smelled of cigarette smoke so it seemed like the real-deal.
http://www.twinkle.com.hk/
Address: Rm.303, Chung Ying Building, 20 Connaught Road West, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong.
HKIFF
The Hong Kong International Film Festival is almost ready to kick into gear and there's plenty of titles to satisfy even the most hardcore cinephile.
Films I'm excited to see one day or have already seen and can recommend (films already seen will be repped with a *):
Night and Fog (Ann Hui) - A companion piece to last year's The Way We Were.
Yang Yang (Cheng Yu-chieh) - Latest from the director of Do Over, a Taiwanese network narrative drama I thoroughly enjoyed. Features hot new star Sandrine Pinna (last seen in Miao Miao).
24 City (Jia Zhangke)*
Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar-wai)*
JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri)* - Not quite the masterpiece some are claiming but still compelling viewing and Van Damme proves he shouldn't be relegated to F-grade action-flick hell just yet.
The Good, The Bad, The Weird (Kim Jee-woon)*
Religulous (Larry Charles)*
Genova (Michael Winterbottom)
Perfect Life (Emily Tang)*
Er Dong (Yang Jin)*
Naked of Defenses (Ichii Masahide)*
Before The Flood 2 (Yan Yu)
Survival Song (Yu Guangyi)*
Mental (Soda Kazuhiro)
Confucius (Fei Mu)
35 Shots of Rhum (Claire Denis)
Four Nights With Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski)*
Achilles and the Tortoise (Kitano Takeshi)*
Of Time and The City (Terence Davies)*
Fusa (Ichikawa Kon)
Cry Me A River (Jia Zhangke)*
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
Under The Tree (Garin Nugroho)
Love Exposure (Sion Sono)*
Still Walking (Kore-eda Hirokazu)*
True Women For Sale (Herman Yau)
Crazy Racer (Ning Hao)
Jalainur (Zhao Ye)
Knitting (Yin Lichuan)
No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti (Leon Dai)
Revanche (Gotz Spielmann)*
Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain)*
Birdsong (Albert Serra)*
Waiting For Sancho (Mark Peranson)*
Night of an Era (Sheng Zhimen)
Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley)*
Routine Holiday (Li Hongqi)*
Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly (Edwin)*
All Around Us (Hashiguchi Ryosuke)*
Land of Scarecrows (Roh Gyeong-tae)
Agrarian Utopia (Uruphong Raksasad)*
Pharoah's Wife (Ernst Lubitsch)
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)*
The festival runs from the 22nd March to the 13th April.
Films I'm excited to see one day or have already seen and can recommend (films already seen will be repped with a *):
Night and Fog (Ann Hui) - A companion piece to last year's The Way We Were.
Yang Yang (Cheng Yu-chieh) - Latest from the director of Do Over, a Taiwanese network narrative drama I thoroughly enjoyed. Features hot new star Sandrine Pinna (last seen in Miao Miao).
24 City (Jia Zhangke)*
Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar-wai)*
JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri)* - Not quite the masterpiece some are claiming but still compelling viewing and Van Damme proves he shouldn't be relegated to F-grade action-flick hell just yet.
The Good, The Bad, The Weird (Kim Jee-woon)*
Religulous (Larry Charles)*
Genova (Michael Winterbottom)
Perfect Life (Emily Tang)*
Er Dong (Yang Jin)*
Naked of Defenses (Ichii Masahide)*
Before The Flood 2 (Yan Yu)
Survival Song (Yu Guangyi)*
Mental (Soda Kazuhiro)
Confucius (Fei Mu)
35 Shots of Rhum (Claire Denis)
Four Nights With Anna (Jerzy Skolimowski)*
Achilles and the Tortoise (Kitano Takeshi)*
Of Time and The City (Terence Davies)*
Fusa (Ichikawa Kon)
Cry Me A River (Jia Zhangke)*
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin)
Under The Tree (Garin Nugroho)
Love Exposure (Sion Sono)*
Still Walking (Kore-eda Hirokazu)*
True Women For Sale (Herman Yau)
Crazy Racer (Ning Hao)
Jalainur (Zhao Ye)
Knitting (Yin Lichuan)
No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti (Leon Dai)
Revanche (Gotz Spielmann)*
Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain)*
Birdsong (Albert Serra)*
Waiting For Sancho (Mark Peranson)*
Night of an Era (Sheng Zhimen)
Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley)*
Routine Holiday (Li Hongqi)*
Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly (Edwin)*
All Around Us (Hashiguchi Ryosuke)*
Land of Scarecrows (Roh Gyeong-tae)
Agrarian Utopia (Uruphong Raksasad)*
Pharoah's Wife (Ernst Lubitsch)
Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)*
The festival runs from the 22nd March to the 13th April.
HKIFF Asian Digital Competition 2009
I've only seen three of the Asian Digital Competition titles but will look forward to seeing the others in the distant future. Programme includes Emily Tang's sublime Perfect Life (winner of the VIFF Dragons & Tigers Award), Ichii Masahide's Naked of Defenses (also an inclusion at VIFF), Yang Jin's Er Dong (which also screened at IFFR2009 and Pusan08), Phillip Young's Glamorous Youth, James Lee's Call If You Need Me, Sherad Anthony Sanchez's Imburnal, Sherman Ong's Flooding in the Time of Drought and Noh Young-seok's Daytime Drinking.
Apichatpong's PHANTOMS OF NABUA online
http://www.animateprojects.org/home
Follow the appropriate links to Apichatpong's glorious new short film which features as part of the Primitive project. Is it just me or does anyone else fancy a game of flaming soccer?
Follow the appropriate links to Apichatpong's glorious new short film which features as part of the Primitive project. Is it just me or does anyone else fancy a game of flaming soccer?
Asian DVDs
Ning Hao's Crazy Racer is getting a mainland DVD release in two versions (both don't have English subtitles): the 'special edition' features behind-the-scenes featurettes and the standard trailer-and-text tidbits...Numerous versions of Taiwanese box-office smash Cape No. 7 are bouncing around but the Rolls Royce director's cut package (maybe predictably) can be found in Taiwan: stamps, stationery, an address plate, poster, mock love letters and English subtitles...Speaking of best-packages, Kim Jee-woon's superb "kimchi western" The Good, The Bad, The Weird is being released in Korea in a 3-disc set with the Korean theatrical cut and International version included. A pirate disc (with decent English subtitles) has been bouncing around since December '08 but now's the time to part with the dollars and spring for the geniuine copy (haven't heard any news on the Blu-Ray)...John Woo's intermittently jaw-dropping epic Red Cliff II is getting a Hong Kong DVD release. In Australia a combined theatrical version is promised sometime before June...Chen Kaige's Forever Enthralled is out on DVD in China and Hong Kong. Haven't watched it yet but the wife saw it and was only occasionally enthralled...the global financial meltdown isn't going to send the price of Japanese discs plummeting but if you can afford to indulge, three English-subtitled essentials would be Kore-eda's Still Walking, Hashiguchi's All Around Us and Kitano's Achilles and the Tortoise. I'm not a huge fan of the Kitano but it's probably worth owning all the same. Still Walking comes with a nice water-colour poster in the slipcase...speaking of Japanese discs Detroit Metal City is getting deluxe treatment and comes with some Kubrick figures...I'm not sure whether Xie Jin's recent death will prompt some enterprising soul to collect some of his best on DVD but when I was in Beijing I found a copy of Woman Basketball Player No. 5 with passable English subtitles...
Notes on Wang Xiaoshuai
It’s about one degree Celsius, a typically chilly Beijing winter morning, as I nervously wander through the grounds of a sports-club complex, late for an interview with Wang Xiaoshuai. The estate is dwarfed by ageing high-rises and the sky is a bleak shade of grey, the kind of environment usually reserved for British social-realist films. There are no signs of life and all the buildings share the same locked-and-barred visage. Most of the signage is written in Chinese characters and the ‘gardens’ are covered in a thin layer of ice. My friend, accompanying me as a translator, leads us down one path only to meet an ominous carpark. We’re late as it is and we’re both terrified that our eventual reception will be chillier than the locale.
We put a call through to Wang’s assistant and we finally enter a building, ride the sardine-can elevator and knock on a door which looks like it should be on the front of a bank-vault. Wang’s assistant ushers us in, hands us some tiny plastic bags to slip over our shoes and seats us on a plush leather sofa. Wang’s office is inviting but orderly and there’s no sign of the filmmaker. After a few minutes of small talk with his assistant, Wang shuffles in, greets us, lights up a cigarette and sits down to talk.
Wang’s career stretches right back to the early nineties when he established himself as a key figure of China’s Sixth Generation filmmakers after graduating from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy. His landmark debut The Days, starring renowned painter Liu Xiao-dong, transplanted a Euro-minimalist formal approach onto an extremely intimate love-story: the result remains a haunting tribute to the lovers and intellectuals of the twentysomething generation struggling in the shadows of Tiananmen. The film travelled to numerous festivals and attracted the (unfortunate) attention of the mainland’s film bureau who placed Wang on their blacklist: this ban led him to direct Frozen under the pseudonym ‘Wu Ming’ (literally translated as “no name”) as he submitted another project through the official channels. Individual struggle in the face of society’s pressures seems to be a broader constant flowing through Wang’s work but more acutely, he seems fixated on how Chinese society’s constant transformations scar compact ‘family’ units – families, in the traditional formation or in makeshift unions like the Nightclub singer and her two male kidnappers in So Close to Paradise or the commune of performance artists in Frozen. After a reworked title and numerous edits, 1997’s So Close to Paradise located elements of the hard-boiled gangster noir within a tale of rural migrants struggling to make ends meet in the big smoke. 2001’s Beijing Bicycle, which brought Wang acclaim at Berlin with the Grand Jury Prize and the Best Actor award, continued Wang’s focus on the pressures and pitfalls facing the working youth by charting the devastating consequences of a stolen bike on two teenage boys. Bicycle obtained levels of dramatic tension well exceeding its heritage, namely De Sica’s film, and provided a terrific snapshot of Beijing’s contemporary youth culture: unsurprisingly it’s probably Wang’s most well known film in the West.
The spectre of American migration which hung over Wang’s debut resurfaced in Drifters and the two films share somewhat of a continuity with their downtrodden protagonists and long-take formal execution. But whereas The Days ended with departures, Drifters opened with arrivals; a young man returns to his home town after a stint in the States to face reassimilation into his family which includes a baby son living with the mother’s relatives. Shanghai Dreams explored the growing pains of a teenage girl coping with political exile during the Cultural Revolution and the film picked up the Jury Prize at Cannes 2005. From these brief descriptions you’ll probably notice a few themes cropping up which seems to make Wang’s latest Left, Right a natural progression in the career of a filmmaker so intensely focused on familial dynamics and individual struggle.
On his film IN LOVE WE TRUST
A while ago, I watched a few television shows with the kind of stories where a mother is looking for her ex-husband and the program is there to help the search as well as the audiences at home. There was another one about sisters who were apart for more than two decades; there were a few stories like that. When we were gossipping about these stories later, it attracted my attention and interests. In China, of course, it’s a happy celebration for a family to have a baby, but it isn’t easy to bring up a child, there will be a series of troubles along the way. In such a difficult situation, imagine a broken family and ex-partners having to conceive a child together. Two separate families reuniting for the purpose of having a new baby, try imagining the trouble which would arise from such a situation. This story is quite suitable for a film premise and quite suitable for the feeling that I want my films to have at the moment.
On his student years at the Beijing Film Academy
Beijing Film Academy was the only comparatively professional academy relating to films in those years [the eighties]. There were a few academies of music and art; however, there was only one film academy. The most important thing was that it provided an environment which allowed students to see many films that we otherwise could not have seen. Watching films is actually a process of studying film: therefore, this environment was very essential. Nowadays, the advantage doesn’t exist anymore, films are available on the market once they are released. It was different in those years hence it was an advantageous environment that the academy could offer to students. In addition, it was relatively difficult to make a film then, a film would cost one to two million RMB. No one would believe in you or invest if you had not been trained in the academy. In other words, it was necessary to have a qualification to make a film. This, once again, doesn’t apply anymore. Nowadays, a group of young people can shoot a film using a digital camera as long as they have passion and a story they want to tell. These are the functions of the academy.
Influences
In the beginning, it was Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini; and then Ozu Yasujiro’s films which I saw at university; Yang and Hou’s films that were brought in by Tony Rayns, they all influenced us. The influence became orientalised, it went from the west to the east. Hiroshima Mon Amour made by Alain Resnais looked like a film made by a person from the east rather than France.
Being Blacklisted
I was confused and lost at that time, I could not work out my way. I thought in a very simple way, and I believed that I was not wrong. Instead I felt proud of myself because I did not spend one cent that was from the government to make the film. I thought I understood completely that our country was a very poor country which had no money. Yet it still needed films. So I made a film without financial assistance from the government which responded to Chairman Mao’s call of “paddling one’s own canoe and being self-dependent”. It was a bit naïve. It is a lot freer now, and the rules have changed. But I kept thinking I didn’t do anything wrong, it wasn’t anything illegal. Sometimes, a very simple idea can be your spiritual support for a very long time.
We put a call through to Wang’s assistant and we finally enter a building, ride the sardine-can elevator and knock on a door which looks like it should be on the front of a bank-vault. Wang’s assistant ushers us in, hands us some tiny plastic bags to slip over our shoes and seats us on a plush leather sofa. Wang’s office is inviting but orderly and there’s no sign of the filmmaker. After a few minutes of small talk with his assistant, Wang shuffles in, greets us, lights up a cigarette and sits down to talk.
Wang’s career stretches right back to the early nineties when he established himself as a key figure of China’s Sixth Generation filmmakers after graduating from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy. His landmark debut The Days, starring renowned painter Liu Xiao-dong, transplanted a Euro-minimalist formal approach onto an extremely intimate love-story: the result remains a haunting tribute to the lovers and intellectuals of the twentysomething generation struggling in the shadows of Tiananmen. The film travelled to numerous festivals and attracted the (unfortunate) attention of the mainland’s film bureau who placed Wang on their blacklist: this ban led him to direct Frozen under the pseudonym ‘Wu Ming’ (literally translated as “no name”) as he submitted another project through the official channels. Individual struggle in the face of society’s pressures seems to be a broader constant flowing through Wang’s work but more acutely, he seems fixated on how Chinese society’s constant transformations scar compact ‘family’ units – families, in the traditional formation or in makeshift unions like the Nightclub singer and her two male kidnappers in So Close to Paradise or the commune of performance artists in Frozen. After a reworked title and numerous edits, 1997’s So Close to Paradise located elements of the hard-boiled gangster noir within a tale of rural migrants struggling to make ends meet in the big smoke. 2001’s Beijing Bicycle, which brought Wang acclaim at Berlin with the Grand Jury Prize and the Best Actor award, continued Wang’s focus on the pressures and pitfalls facing the working youth by charting the devastating consequences of a stolen bike on two teenage boys. Bicycle obtained levels of dramatic tension well exceeding its heritage, namely De Sica’s film, and provided a terrific snapshot of Beijing’s contemporary youth culture: unsurprisingly it’s probably Wang’s most well known film in the West.
The spectre of American migration which hung over Wang’s debut resurfaced in Drifters and the two films share somewhat of a continuity with their downtrodden protagonists and long-take formal execution. But whereas The Days ended with departures, Drifters opened with arrivals; a young man returns to his home town after a stint in the States to face reassimilation into his family which includes a baby son living with the mother’s relatives. Shanghai Dreams explored the growing pains of a teenage girl coping with political exile during the Cultural Revolution and the film picked up the Jury Prize at Cannes 2005. From these brief descriptions you’ll probably notice a few themes cropping up which seems to make Wang’s latest Left, Right a natural progression in the career of a filmmaker so intensely focused on familial dynamics and individual struggle.
On his film IN LOVE WE TRUST
A while ago, I watched a few television shows with the kind of stories where a mother is looking for her ex-husband and the program is there to help the search as well as the audiences at home. There was another one about sisters who were apart for more than two decades; there were a few stories like that. When we were gossipping about these stories later, it attracted my attention and interests. In China, of course, it’s a happy celebration for a family to have a baby, but it isn’t easy to bring up a child, there will be a series of troubles along the way. In such a difficult situation, imagine a broken family and ex-partners having to conceive a child together. Two separate families reuniting for the purpose of having a new baby, try imagining the trouble which would arise from such a situation. This story is quite suitable for a film premise and quite suitable for the feeling that I want my films to have at the moment.
On his student years at the Beijing Film Academy
Beijing Film Academy was the only comparatively professional academy relating to films in those years [the eighties]. There were a few academies of music and art; however, there was only one film academy. The most important thing was that it provided an environment which allowed students to see many films that we otherwise could not have seen. Watching films is actually a process of studying film: therefore, this environment was very essential. Nowadays, the advantage doesn’t exist anymore, films are available on the market once they are released. It was different in those years hence it was an advantageous environment that the academy could offer to students. In addition, it was relatively difficult to make a film then, a film would cost one to two million RMB. No one would believe in you or invest if you had not been trained in the academy. In other words, it was necessary to have a qualification to make a film. This, once again, doesn’t apply anymore. Nowadays, a group of young people can shoot a film using a digital camera as long as they have passion and a story they want to tell. These are the functions of the academy.
Influences
In the beginning, it was Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini; and then Ozu Yasujiro’s films which I saw at university; Yang and Hou’s films that were brought in by Tony Rayns, they all influenced us. The influence became orientalised, it went from the west to the east. Hiroshima Mon Amour made by Alain Resnais looked like a film made by a person from the east rather than France.
Being Blacklisted
I was confused and lost at that time, I could not work out my way. I thought in a very simple way, and I believed that I was not wrong. Instead I felt proud of myself because I did not spend one cent that was from the government to make the film. I thought I understood completely that our country was a very poor country which had no money. Yet it still needed films. So I made a film without financial assistance from the government which responded to Chairman Mao’s call of “paddling one’s own canoe and being self-dependent”. It was a bit naïve. It is a lot freer now, and the rules have changed. But I kept thinking I didn’t do anything wrong, it wasn’t anything illegal. Sometimes, a very simple idea can be your spiritual support for a very long time.
Interview with Bong Joon-ho
Bong Joon-ho has quickly established himself as a world-class filmmaker in just three features and a handful of shorts; his latest, the monster-movie trapped in a family drama (or should that be the other way around?) The Host has been captivating audiences worldwide with its smart take on the genre, its spot-on political currency and breathtaking special effects. After making a splash at the 2006 Cannes Director’s Fortnight, the film broke box-office records in its native Korea (one figure floated was that one in four Koreans had seen the film). Bong spoke to FILMINK through a translator from the set of Kim Jee-woon’s (A Bittersweet Life) latest film, The Good, The Bad and the Weird (starring The Host’s Song Kang-ho) where he was visiting friends in between promoting The Host and working on his new film, a ‘small drama about a Korean mother’ with the working title Mother (and after that there’s a mega-scale sci-fi film executive produced by Oldboy director Park Chan-wook).
“The first idea was to make a movie about the Han River, I knew that the monster would be born out of this river which is very dear to all Koreans, especially people living in Seoul,” Bong says about how he preconceived the film, “I didn’t have this idea of creating a family drama to start with but I knew that I had to make a very different movie from ordinary Hollywood monster genre movies, I didn’t want to have any superheroes or scientists in my movie so the ‘family’ idea came in at a later stage.”
While The Host may seem like a slight departure from a director who debuted with the intelligent comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite and followed it with the harrowing thriller Memories of Murder what connects this ostensibly fun genre-flick is his firm affinity for society’s working class everyman(and woman). “In terms of genre, “Memories of Murder” was a thriller and “The Host”, you can call it a monster movie, but if you look down deep inside I don’t think I’ve changed my approach that much and there are some common themes between them. In all three of my movies, the stories I like to tell are basically about powerless people, they don’t get any protection or blessings from the system, and life still has to go on. They have to live, they have to survive. In “The Host” I showed the whole unfairness [of the system] and the monster summarised all of this. In “Barking Dogs Never Bite” I used that comic situation where the little puppy was involved and in “Memories of Murder” I used the serial-murder cases. Through all these abnormal episodes I was trying to show how distorted and how tough ordinary people’s lives can be,” Bong remarks quickly after I ask him about the thematic linkages between his features.
“The reason I focus on powerless people is because when you are really that powerless and you have a lot of suffering in your day to day life, there are a lot of issues and stories involved and it gives me true human drama. If you’re rich and well educated and you don’t have any problems there’s no drama, but when there’s suffering there’s all kinds of complicated issues involving family, finances, society, whatever, there are strong emotions involved. I can explore whether people in these sorts of dire situations can break out of it, create some sort of breakthrough or give into it and completely ruin themselves; it gives me good storylines and a lot to talk about. It throws you these huge questions about what are we, what is society and what can it do to us, these ultimate questions. It gives me a lot to think about and talk about, that’s why I choose powerless people.”
Spielberg’s Jaws has been mentioned as key influence on The Host and after asking the director whether there were any other films or filmmakers which inspired him the response was surprising but slightly logical given The Host’s mix of studio-spectacle and dark drama. “A lot of people say The Host is a family drama and it’s about the family dynamics and what happens within a family when certain incidents happen. I got inspired by M. Night Shyamalan’s movie Signs. Although it’s about extra-terrestrial beings, it’s more to do with how the family reacted to that, what happens within the family, between family members. Imamura Shohei is one of my favourite directors, he would quite often make movies about the powerless, the poorest, the very bottom of the society. I was always quite interested in his movies so he inspired me as well.”
As the interview comes to a close I can’t help but enquire whether the film has been seen over the border given North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is a mad cinephile (he’s directed a few films and has even written a film-theory book!) and Bong gives a chuckle, “It’s hard to say because North Korea is such a closed society so I have no idea whether Kim Jong-il has seen my movie or not…he could have probably brought in the pirate version from China.”
“The first idea was to make a movie about the Han River, I knew that the monster would be born out of this river which is very dear to all Koreans, especially people living in Seoul,” Bong says about how he preconceived the film, “I didn’t have this idea of creating a family drama to start with but I knew that I had to make a very different movie from ordinary Hollywood monster genre movies, I didn’t want to have any superheroes or scientists in my movie so the ‘family’ idea came in at a later stage.”
While The Host may seem like a slight departure from a director who debuted with the intelligent comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite and followed it with the harrowing thriller Memories of Murder what connects this ostensibly fun genre-flick is his firm affinity for society’s working class everyman(and woman). “In terms of genre, “Memories of Murder” was a thriller and “The Host”, you can call it a monster movie, but if you look down deep inside I don’t think I’ve changed my approach that much and there are some common themes between them. In all three of my movies, the stories I like to tell are basically about powerless people, they don’t get any protection or blessings from the system, and life still has to go on. They have to live, they have to survive. In “The Host” I showed the whole unfairness [of the system] and the monster summarised all of this. In “Barking Dogs Never Bite” I used that comic situation where the little puppy was involved and in “Memories of Murder” I used the serial-murder cases. Through all these abnormal episodes I was trying to show how distorted and how tough ordinary people’s lives can be,” Bong remarks quickly after I ask him about the thematic linkages between his features.
“The reason I focus on powerless people is because when you are really that powerless and you have a lot of suffering in your day to day life, there are a lot of issues and stories involved and it gives me true human drama. If you’re rich and well educated and you don’t have any problems there’s no drama, but when there’s suffering there’s all kinds of complicated issues involving family, finances, society, whatever, there are strong emotions involved. I can explore whether people in these sorts of dire situations can break out of it, create some sort of breakthrough or give into it and completely ruin themselves; it gives me good storylines and a lot to talk about. It throws you these huge questions about what are we, what is society and what can it do to us, these ultimate questions. It gives me a lot to think about and talk about, that’s why I choose powerless people.”
Spielberg’s Jaws has been mentioned as key influence on The Host and after asking the director whether there were any other films or filmmakers which inspired him the response was surprising but slightly logical given The Host’s mix of studio-spectacle and dark drama. “A lot of people say The Host is a family drama and it’s about the family dynamics and what happens within a family when certain incidents happen. I got inspired by M. Night Shyamalan’s movie Signs. Although it’s about extra-terrestrial beings, it’s more to do with how the family reacted to that, what happens within the family, between family members. Imamura Shohei is one of my favourite directors, he would quite often make movies about the powerless, the poorest, the very bottom of the society. I was always quite interested in his movies so he inspired me as well.”
As the interview comes to a close I can’t help but enquire whether the film has been seen over the border given North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is a mad cinephile (he’s directed a few films and has even written a film-theory book!) and Bong gives a chuckle, “It’s hard to say because North Korea is such a closed society so I have no idea whether Kim Jong-il has seen my movie or not…he could have probably brought in the pirate version from China.”
Ocean Flame
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Liu Fendou, director of the stylish black comedy Green Hat, but he’s finally returned with Ocean Flame, a genre-blending tale of amour fou set in Hong Kong’s underworld. Based on a Wang Shuo novel, the film focuses on the sadomasochistic relationship between the thuggish pimp Wang Yao (an intimidating Liao Fan) and sexy barmaid Lichuan (a startlingly assured performance from newcomer Monica Mok).
The pair embark on a brutal, fiercely passionate relationship but Wang soon gets Lichuan to start sleeping with married men so he can blackmail them. Like the title suggests the film explores the binaries inherent in their volatile relationship as the pair’s union slowly tears itself apart thanks to Wang’s violent, tyrannical behaviour and his need to constantly assert his sexual dominance over his partner.
Part gangster melodrama, part frighteningly intense love-story and part lyrical artfilm, Ocean Flame is a poignant love/hate letter to doomed-relationships and the explosive individuals who enter the fray.
The uncut DVD is finally out in Hong Kong. Predictably, the Chinese version is censored so opt for the more expensive HK disc. C'mon, the film's no masterpiece but certainly worth watching...
The pair embark on a brutal, fiercely passionate relationship but Wang soon gets Lichuan to start sleeping with married men so he can blackmail them. Like the title suggests the film explores the binaries inherent in their volatile relationship as the pair’s union slowly tears itself apart thanks to Wang’s violent, tyrannical behaviour and his need to constantly assert his sexual dominance over his partner.
Part gangster melodrama, part frighteningly intense love-story and part lyrical artfilm, Ocean Flame is a poignant love/hate letter to doomed-relationships and the explosive individuals who enter the fray.
The uncut DVD is finally out in Hong Kong. Predictably, the Chinese version is censored so opt for the more expensive HK disc. C'mon, the film's no masterpiece but certainly worth watching...
Hong Kong International Film Festival 2008 Wrap-up
Perhaps the one familiar concept that lingered with me throughout this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) was uttered in Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema, a documentary on the infamous cinematic man of mystery directed by Variety chief film critic Todd McCarthy. Rissient framed cinema and cinema-going as a kind of ‘warfare’ and the more films I sat through, some pleasantly and others torturously, it made sense that in some ways this is all a grand battle to find and champion the good over the bad and to desperately fight the ticking clock that threatens to rob us of all that rich cinematic history and foreign terrains still to explore. This point is not new but it did feel good to have it reiterated forcefully and I kept it close to my heart together with Rissient’s declaration, “It’s not enough to like a film, you have to like it for the right reasons.” So what better battle ground then for the hardcore cinephile and casual moviegoer to enter onto than the HKIFF, one of Asia’s key film festivals, and separate the trash from the treasures and go head-to-head with fellow fest-goers over whatever new titles caused debate?
The festival is getting big, make no mistakes about it, and with an Asian Film Awards (AFA) ceremony, a marketplace (the Filmart) and an attached film-financing forum (the HAF) all coinciding at the same time there’s little doubting that the HKIFF is trying to reposition itself as a counterforce to Pusan’s dominance in the region. I’ll move beyond the glitz, the biz and the glamour (although I couldn’t resist sneaking a peek at the red-carpet photos of the AFA) and stick to what matters: the films. The festival has, in part, earned a ‘cinephile’ tag thanks to a long-held tradition of terrific sidebar programmes which have drawn attention to the masters (recently: Ozu, Visconti and Michael Snow), maverick Asian auteurs and establishment actors, experimental work or rarely seen gems of Chinese/Hong Kong cinema. This year fest-goers were treated to retrospectives on Edward Yang, Zhu Shilin and Ingmar Bergman; a collection of films directed, acted or produced by Hong Kong actor Eric Tsang; directorial focuses on Japanese young-gun Ishii Yuya and controversial maverick Wakamatsu Koji, not to mention American indie pioneers Charles Burnett and Gus Van Sant; a sprinkling of Maya Deren shorts; and regional focuses on Israel, Taiwan and Czechoslovakia. Combined with the usual programme strands highlighting, in particular the latest from mainland China, Hong Kong and Asian digital work, it’s little wonder that the festival runs close to three weeks!
Knock-out masterpieces arrived in the form of Wang Bing’s He Fengming, Hong Sang-soo’s Night and Day, Diao Yinan’s Night Train, Jose Luis Guerin’s In The City of Sylvia, Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Ploy, Wakamatsu Koji’s United Red Army and a handful of others and I hope I did in fact like them for the right reasons. Hong’s latest once again preoccupies itself with the romantic/lustful tribulations of a male artist – this time an award-winning painter – but there’s a number of key departures from his previous work which marks this as an entirely refreshing development in the career of one of contemporary world cinema’s greats. Shot on HD and set mainly in Paris, Night and Day takes on a diary-like narrative form replacing the internal mirroring plot devices of old and there’s plenty of insights about Korean masculinity when divorced from the motherland. Diao Yinan’s Night Train boasts some of the most elegantly refined and precisely composed imagery of recent Chinese cinema and thankfully it has an emotionally gripping story to match the formal beauty: a female bailiff looks for love in the rural provinces when she’s not executing prisoners and she soon falls for a man directly related to one of her deceased detainees. Striking stuff and my pick for the festival’s best film.
Pen-ek Ratanaruang has returned to Thailand (after a brief journey into Hong Kong waters with Invisible Waves) for Ploy and his latest screened as part of the festival’s “Auteurs” programme alongside films by Hong, Guy Maddin and Roy Andersson. Pen-ek is one of Thailand’s most successful mainstream filmmakers and his previous films Last Life in the Universe, Monrak Transistor and 6ixtynin9 have all showcased his strong abilities as a striking visualist (he also works for the premiere advertising agency The Film Factory which may in some ways explain this) and a perfect conjurer of moody atmospherics. Ploy centres around a thirtysomething couple who have just jetted in to Bangkok from the States for a funeral, clearly suffering from a festering case of the ‘Seven Year Itch’. They check into a swank hotel but the husband decides to hit the lobby’s bar for a quick drink; once there, his eye catches a teenage girl who surely must be donning one of cinema’s great afros. He invites her back to his room (where his wife is asleep) which of course complicates his ailing marriage. Elsewhere a hotel maid checks into one of the vacant rooms and indulges in all kinds of sexual fantasies which may or may not be connected to our main couple’s woes. This terrific film is charged with a dreamy ambience which occasionally and smoothly parlays into immodest tension, when the wife (played by famous Thai soap actress Lalita Panyopas) decides to venture off on her own mission of infidelity, and certainly qualifies as his most sensual and visually impressive film to date.
Wang Bing had three films in the festival with a total running time of seventeen-and-a-half hours: one piece of video art Crude Oil, a documentary He Fengming and a short Brutality Factory (part of the State of the World omnibus). Wang can surely be labelled one of world cinema’s most important filmmakers and certainly one of the key artists from China’s current DV-cinema boom. Crude Oil explores the complete making of the precious liquid from a humanist and industrial perspective so the overall picture is clear as to what really goes into a drop of the stuff from back-breaking, monotonously repetitive labour to the mechanical whirrings of a bulky machine. There’s a precise reasoning behind Wang’s “cinema of total disclosure” and it imparts both socio-political and aesthetic pleasures for those willing to allow themselves to nestle into Crude Oil’s rhythms of the everyday. The other intriguing aspect of this slab of cinema is that perhaps non-deliberately Crude Oil almost resembles a horror film like The Thing except the monster lurking to ensnare these men in this horrible location is our rapacious consumption of oil. Wang keeps the camera inside a small workers cafeteria for the first few hours of the film and the tension mounts as to the harsh conditions outside. We see glimpses of the harsh night as a worker wanders off outside and comes back in to grab a smoke but when the camera finally turns its gaze to the tough terrain located outside, somewhere near the Gobi Desert, the effect is quite stunning and shocking. Later the film’s flickering final shot, a faintly lit moon threatening to disappear from sight, surely is a warning that we’re close to exhausting the good times with the earth’s finite resources. Again the real-world implications associated with this shot are far more scary than anything in Hostel or Saw.
Another kind of horror film, He Fengming, explores the anti-rightist period of China’s communist history when many innocent people were thrown into labour camps or worse for sometimes little more than writing an article which could have been misinterpreted by a Party cadre. Fengming is an elderly lady living in a modest apartment and the entire film consists of her meticulously mining her heart-breaking past for information on how her family was destroyed thanks to the anti-rightist campaign. Some might think that a film boasting just one old woman and one apartment would be tedious but the film is edge-of-your-seat stuff, and Fengming’s calm but emotional storytelling is vice-like gripping from start to end. Again Wang strips cinema down to its most essential to force you to focus on the only thing that’s important here: the storytelling and the decaying visage of a woman shattered by the gale-force winds of history. The short Brutality Factory mines similar territory, a look at the torture of a woman who won’t squeal on her allegedly anti-communist partner, with shocking effect.
The festival’s Midnight Heat selection offered up an assortment of genre flicks with mixed results. Taking its cue from the ten commandments, The Ten includes an impressive cast of familiar A minus/B plus actors (Winona Ryder, Paul Rudd, Liev Schreiber, Jessica Alba, Gretchen Mol, Famke Janssen and Adam Brody) but comes to little more than a series of underdeveloped comedy sketches which would be far more appropriate in a sophomore college revue. Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django (just confirmed for this year’s festival!) finds the prolific Japanese shock-meister turn to the Italian oaters of the sixties for inspiration bringing Quentin Tarantino with him for the ride (there’s global consensus Quentin that you need to stay behind the camera from now on, m’kay?). Equal parts Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, it’s wildly stylish with plenty of violence and the opening even pays homage to the Querelle-ish visuals of Miike’s 2006 effort Big Bang Love. It would be safe to say that Australian audiences can expect all prints to be subtitled in English because the barely-there phonetic English soundtrack is likely to cause severe confusion. The French schlock horror flick Inside could have been more appropriately titled, There Will Be Blood…Lots of It! and would have fully delivered on that moniker. This outrageously bold film is a relentless, pummelling exercise in pain and uses its slither of a premise (a pregnant woman is stalked by a mysterious woman who wants her baby) to extract some jaw-dropping moments of violence. When Inside kicks into gear it operates like only the best late-night genre flicks do, unleashing set-piece after set-piece of stabbing, cutting, fighting, burning, etc and drenching the screen in crimson rivers of blood. Given Knocked Up and Juno’s strong veneration for motherhood, the perversity and deranged shenanigans of Inside seems like the perfect antidote to the feel-good charm on display in those familial daydreams. One thing’s for sure though: Inside should carry a warning, like rollercoasters, that pregnant women should stay well away.
The Asian DV Competition prize went to Takahashi Izumi’s What The Heart Craves, a moderately successful look at a small group of youngish urbanites and the delicate social network that unravels after a simple magic trick. Much more dynamic and formally assured however was Ishii Yuya’s Of Monster Mode which finely oscillated between lyrical tenderness and unhinged insanity, one minute opting for laughs and then the next turning deadly serious. Crossroads, pitched itself somewhere at the junction of Betelnut and 13 Princess Trees and felt at least 45 minutes too long and overly familiar. Sweet Food City is not entirely successful but alerts a filmmaker ready to graduate to far more fascinating things in the future if he keeps a similar level of formal experimentation intact. Woo Ming-jin’s breezy Days of the Turquoise Sky is another Malaysian film to arrive with young people in its sights but is so gloriously wrapped in its easy-going charm that it’s near impossible not to warm to.
A quick round-up of bravos: Brian De Palma’s Redacted is by far the best thing he’s done in ages and leaves little doubt that the Coalition of the Willing are stuck in a terribly immoral, hopelessly futile quagmire. Redacted’s attempt to check the pulse of the YouTube age feels a little clunky but De Palma seems effortlessly in control of his politicising and need to throw in jolting thrills, a mix which has rarely worked for him in the past (I’d also give it credit purely for the fact that it successfully takes the piss out of the earnest European doco genre). Aditya Assarat’s Wonderful Town (confirmed for this year’s programme) is, in short, wonderful; another major alert signal that Thailand is breeding a great crop of talented indie filmmakers, some of which you may just see soon in the upcoming focus on Thai cinema. Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World is a visual stunner and a subtle alarm-bell that the world needs to have re-calibrated its resource-gluttony yesterday. Touring the Antarctica, Herzog finds kindred spirits who are willing to pit (or align) themselves to harsh, uncompromising natural environments but Herzog seems less convinced about man’s future to co-exist with the earth (hence the pun of the title). The real beauty of the film comes from deep beneath the icy ceilings when the camera lurks to the bottom of the ocean and finds all kinds of weird and wonderful worlds co-habiting with our own.
Finally a shout-out to Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema, a revealing portrait of someone who discovered, promoted and championed great cinema with a passion and zeal that successfully elevated emerging talents firmly onto the world stage. If most of us are film-loving foot-soldiers then Pierre Rissient surely must be the Commander-in-Chief, an aggressive, passionate, intelligent and ruthless man whose love of cinema knows no bounds. At one point Sydney Pollack describes him as, “an animal that clamps onto your leg” and elsewhere we learn of Rissient’s bully-boy tactics as a PR man who would corner critics and force them to accept a film’s brilliance. Rissient’s name is unlikely to register with most people but after watching Man of Cinema you’ll understand just how important he’s been in uncovering and championing some of contemporary cinema’s major figures. Admittedly the documentary tips into hagiography intermittently but considering that Rissient is a man who thoroughly deserves the sort of championing he’s done on the behalf of others for most of his life, I’m willing to let that pass and get swept up in the salutes. What a list of salutes they are too: Clint Eastwood, Claude Chabrol, Rolf de Heer, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Quentin Tarantino, Olivier Assayas, Jane Campion, Abbas Kiarostami, Edward Yang, John Boorman, James Toback, Charles Burnett and on and on. Our very own David Stratton joins the chorus with a funny anecdote about Rissient’s one night stand with a certain mega-watt starlet and the freakish Svengalism Rissient possessed in predicting The Piano’s Cannes top-prize win and the date which it would screen at the festival. My favourite yarn of the film though goes to the story about Rissient and Fritz Lang going to see Deep Throat and the famed German director’s restless eagerness to see the titular act.
In an age of nonchalance (who can blame us considering the dreck clogging the arteries of local cineplexes?), Sahara-desert-dry academicism or solipsistic blogging Man of Cinema takes us back to a completely different age when film-love was quite a different ball game. But considering the festival screened marvellous new work by Diao Yinan, Wang Bing, Ishii Yuya, Aditya Assarat, Edwin, Ho Yuhang and Hong Sang-soo to name but a few I would argue that the future is still bright and worth continuing the good fight for.
The festival is getting big, make no mistakes about it, and with an Asian Film Awards (AFA) ceremony, a marketplace (the Filmart) and an attached film-financing forum (the HAF) all coinciding at the same time there’s little doubting that the HKIFF is trying to reposition itself as a counterforce to Pusan’s dominance in the region. I’ll move beyond the glitz, the biz and the glamour (although I couldn’t resist sneaking a peek at the red-carpet photos of the AFA) and stick to what matters: the films. The festival has, in part, earned a ‘cinephile’ tag thanks to a long-held tradition of terrific sidebar programmes which have drawn attention to the masters (recently: Ozu, Visconti and Michael Snow), maverick Asian auteurs and establishment actors, experimental work or rarely seen gems of Chinese/Hong Kong cinema. This year fest-goers were treated to retrospectives on Edward Yang, Zhu Shilin and Ingmar Bergman; a collection of films directed, acted or produced by Hong Kong actor Eric Tsang; directorial focuses on Japanese young-gun Ishii Yuya and controversial maverick Wakamatsu Koji, not to mention American indie pioneers Charles Burnett and Gus Van Sant; a sprinkling of Maya Deren shorts; and regional focuses on Israel, Taiwan and Czechoslovakia. Combined with the usual programme strands highlighting, in particular the latest from mainland China, Hong Kong and Asian digital work, it’s little wonder that the festival runs close to three weeks!
Knock-out masterpieces arrived in the form of Wang Bing’s He Fengming, Hong Sang-soo’s Night and Day, Diao Yinan’s Night Train, Jose Luis Guerin’s In The City of Sylvia, Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Ploy, Wakamatsu Koji’s United Red Army and a handful of others and I hope I did in fact like them for the right reasons. Hong’s latest once again preoccupies itself with the romantic/lustful tribulations of a male artist – this time an award-winning painter – but there’s a number of key departures from his previous work which marks this as an entirely refreshing development in the career of one of contemporary world cinema’s greats. Shot on HD and set mainly in Paris, Night and Day takes on a diary-like narrative form replacing the internal mirroring plot devices of old and there’s plenty of insights about Korean masculinity when divorced from the motherland. Diao Yinan’s Night Train boasts some of the most elegantly refined and precisely composed imagery of recent Chinese cinema and thankfully it has an emotionally gripping story to match the formal beauty: a female bailiff looks for love in the rural provinces when she’s not executing prisoners and she soon falls for a man directly related to one of her deceased detainees. Striking stuff and my pick for the festival’s best film.
Pen-ek Ratanaruang has returned to Thailand (after a brief journey into Hong Kong waters with Invisible Waves) for Ploy and his latest screened as part of the festival’s “Auteurs” programme alongside films by Hong, Guy Maddin and Roy Andersson. Pen-ek is one of Thailand’s most successful mainstream filmmakers and his previous films Last Life in the Universe, Monrak Transistor and 6ixtynin9 have all showcased his strong abilities as a striking visualist (he also works for the premiere advertising agency The Film Factory which may in some ways explain this) and a perfect conjurer of moody atmospherics. Ploy centres around a thirtysomething couple who have just jetted in to Bangkok from the States for a funeral, clearly suffering from a festering case of the ‘Seven Year Itch’. They check into a swank hotel but the husband decides to hit the lobby’s bar for a quick drink; once there, his eye catches a teenage girl who surely must be donning one of cinema’s great afros. He invites her back to his room (where his wife is asleep) which of course complicates his ailing marriage. Elsewhere a hotel maid checks into one of the vacant rooms and indulges in all kinds of sexual fantasies which may or may not be connected to our main couple’s woes. This terrific film is charged with a dreamy ambience which occasionally and smoothly parlays into immodest tension, when the wife (played by famous Thai soap actress Lalita Panyopas) decides to venture off on her own mission of infidelity, and certainly qualifies as his most sensual and visually impressive film to date.
Wang Bing had three films in the festival with a total running time of seventeen-and-a-half hours: one piece of video art Crude Oil, a documentary He Fengming and a short Brutality Factory (part of the State of the World omnibus). Wang can surely be labelled one of world cinema’s most important filmmakers and certainly one of the key artists from China’s current DV-cinema boom. Crude Oil explores the complete making of the precious liquid from a humanist and industrial perspective so the overall picture is clear as to what really goes into a drop of the stuff from back-breaking, monotonously repetitive labour to the mechanical whirrings of a bulky machine. There’s a precise reasoning behind Wang’s “cinema of total disclosure” and it imparts both socio-political and aesthetic pleasures for those willing to allow themselves to nestle into Crude Oil’s rhythms of the everyday. The other intriguing aspect of this slab of cinema is that perhaps non-deliberately Crude Oil almost resembles a horror film like The Thing except the monster lurking to ensnare these men in this horrible location is our rapacious consumption of oil. Wang keeps the camera inside a small workers cafeteria for the first few hours of the film and the tension mounts as to the harsh conditions outside. We see glimpses of the harsh night as a worker wanders off outside and comes back in to grab a smoke but when the camera finally turns its gaze to the tough terrain located outside, somewhere near the Gobi Desert, the effect is quite stunning and shocking. Later the film’s flickering final shot, a faintly lit moon threatening to disappear from sight, surely is a warning that we’re close to exhausting the good times with the earth’s finite resources. Again the real-world implications associated with this shot are far more scary than anything in Hostel or Saw.
Another kind of horror film, He Fengming, explores the anti-rightist period of China’s communist history when many innocent people were thrown into labour camps or worse for sometimes little more than writing an article which could have been misinterpreted by a Party cadre. Fengming is an elderly lady living in a modest apartment and the entire film consists of her meticulously mining her heart-breaking past for information on how her family was destroyed thanks to the anti-rightist campaign. Some might think that a film boasting just one old woman and one apartment would be tedious but the film is edge-of-your-seat stuff, and Fengming’s calm but emotional storytelling is vice-like gripping from start to end. Again Wang strips cinema down to its most essential to force you to focus on the only thing that’s important here: the storytelling and the decaying visage of a woman shattered by the gale-force winds of history. The short Brutality Factory mines similar territory, a look at the torture of a woman who won’t squeal on her allegedly anti-communist partner, with shocking effect.
The festival’s Midnight Heat selection offered up an assortment of genre flicks with mixed results. Taking its cue from the ten commandments, The Ten includes an impressive cast of familiar A minus/B plus actors (Winona Ryder, Paul Rudd, Liev Schreiber, Jessica Alba, Gretchen Mol, Famke Janssen and Adam Brody) but comes to little more than a series of underdeveloped comedy sketches which would be far more appropriate in a sophomore college revue. Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django (just confirmed for this year’s festival!) finds the prolific Japanese shock-meister turn to the Italian oaters of the sixties for inspiration bringing Quentin Tarantino with him for the ride (there’s global consensus Quentin that you need to stay behind the camera from now on, m’kay?). Equal parts Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, it’s wildly stylish with plenty of violence and the opening even pays homage to the Querelle-ish visuals of Miike’s 2006 effort Big Bang Love. It would be safe to say that Australian audiences can expect all prints to be subtitled in English because the barely-there phonetic English soundtrack is likely to cause severe confusion. The French schlock horror flick Inside could have been more appropriately titled, There Will Be Blood…Lots of It! and would have fully delivered on that moniker. This outrageously bold film is a relentless, pummelling exercise in pain and uses its slither of a premise (a pregnant woman is stalked by a mysterious woman who wants her baby) to extract some jaw-dropping moments of violence. When Inside kicks into gear it operates like only the best late-night genre flicks do, unleashing set-piece after set-piece of stabbing, cutting, fighting, burning, etc and drenching the screen in crimson rivers of blood. Given Knocked Up and Juno’s strong veneration for motherhood, the perversity and deranged shenanigans of Inside seems like the perfect antidote to the feel-good charm on display in those familial daydreams. One thing’s for sure though: Inside should carry a warning, like rollercoasters, that pregnant women should stay well away.
The Asian DV Competition prize went to Takahashi Izumi’s What The Heart Craves, a moderately successful look at a small group of youngish urbanites and the delicate social network that unravels after a simple magic trick. Much more dynamic and formally assured however was Ishii Yuya’s Of Monster Mode which finely oscillated between lyrical tenderness and unhinged insanity, one minute opting for laughs and then the next turning deadly serious. Crossroads, pitched itself somewhere at the junction of Betelnut and 13 Princess Trees and felt at least 45 minutes too long and overly familiar. Sweet Food City is not entirely successful but alerts a filmmaker ready to graduate to far more fascinating things in the future if he keeps a similar level of formal experimentation intact. Woo Ming-jin’s breezy Days of the Turquoise Sky is another Malaysian film to arrive with young people in its sights but is so gloriously wrapped in its easy-going charm that it’s near impossible not to warm to.
A quick round-up of bravos: Brian De Palma’s Redacted is by far the best thing he’s done in ages and leaves little doubt that the Coalition of the Willing are stuck in a terribly immoral, hopelessly futile quagmire. Redacted’s attempt to check the pulse of the YouTube age feels a little clunky but De Palma seems effortlessly in control of his politicising and need to throw in jolting thrills, a mix which has rarely worked for him in the past (I’d also give it credit purely for the fact that it successfully takes the piss out of the earnest European doco genre). Aditya Assarat’s Wonderful Town (confirmed for this year’s programme) is, in short, wonderful; another major alert signal that Thailand is breeding a great crop of talented indie filmmakers, some of which you may just see soon in the upcoming focus on Thai cinema. Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World is a visual stunner and a subtle alarm-bell that the world needs to have re-calibrated its resource-gluttony yesterday. Touring the Antarctica, Herzog finds kindred spirits who are willing to pit (or align) themselves to harsh, uncompromising natural environments but Herzog seems less convinced about man’s future to co-exist with the earth (hence the pun of the title). The real beauty of the film comes from deep beneath the icy ceilings when the camera lurks to the bottom of the ocean and finds all kinds of weird and wonderful worlds co-habiting with our own.
Finally a shout-out to Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema, a revealing portrait of someone who discovered, promoted and championed great cinema with a passion and zeal that successfully elevated emerging talents firmly onto the world stage. If most of us are film-loving foot-soldiers then Pierre Rissient surely must be the Commander-in-Chief, an aggressive, passionate, intelligent and ruthless man whose love of cinema knows no bounds. At one point Sydney Pollack describes him as, “an animal that clamps onto your leg” and elsewhere we learn of Rissient’s bully-boy tactics as a PR man who would corner critics and force them to accept a film’s brilliance. Rissient’s name is unlikely to register with most people but after watching Man of Cinema you’ll understand just how important he’s been in uncovering and championing some of contemporary cinema’s major figures. Admittedly the documentary tips into hagiography intermittently but considering that Rissient is a man who thoroughly deserves the sort of championing he’s done on the behalf of others for most of his life, I’m willing to let that pass and get swept up in the salutes. What a list of salutes they are too: Clint Eastwood, Claude Chabrol, Rolf de Heer, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Quentin Tarantino, Olivier Assayas, Jane Campion, Abbas Kiarostami, Edward Yang, John Boorman, James Toback, Charles Burnett and on and on. Our very own David Stratton joins the chorus with a funny anecdote about Rissient’s one night stand with a certain mega-watt starlet and the freakish Svengalism Rissient possessed in predicting The Piano’s Cannes top-prize win and the date which it would screen at the festival. My favourite yarn of the film though goes to the story about Rissient and Fritz Lang going to see Deep Throat and the famed German director’s restless eagerness to see the titular act.
In an age of nonchalance (who can blame us considering the dreck clogging the arteries of local cineplexes?), Sahara-desert-dry academicism or solipsistic blogging Man of Cinema takes us back to a completely different age when film-love was quite a different ball game. But considering the festival screened marvellous new work by Diao Yinan, Wang Bing, Ishii Yuya, Aditya Assarat, Edwin, Ho Yuhang and Hong Sang-soo to name but a few I would argue that the future is still bright and worth continuing the good fight for.
Variety Asia Online RIP...Aniston turns 40 too
Fuck you Wall Street, dodgy lenders and the US housing bubble. You've claimed a victim I actually care about in the form of Variety Asia Online. Grady Hendrix's blog was pretty much the only thing getting me through the day (I'm exaggerating slightly but still...).
Jennifer Aniston turns 40 next week which makes me feel really, really old. It feels like one minute Chumbawamba are topping the charts, the next Jennifer Aniston is 40 and kids in the street are saying to me 'get outta the way, asian grampa'.
Jennifer Aniston turns 40 next week which makes me feel really, really old. It feels like one minute Chumbawamba are topping the charts, the next Jennifer Aniston is 40 and kids in the street are saying to me 'get outta the way, asian grampa'.
A Late Best of 2008
FEATURES - No order
Night and Day
Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
Birdsong
The Juche Idea
All Around Us
Perfect Life
Good Cats
The Good, The Bad, The Weird
Dog in Cheonggyecheon
24 City
United Red Army
Mock Up on Mu
Waiting For Sancho
Serbis
Crude Oil
Still Walking
Survival Song
Let The Right One In
Waltz With Bashir
Gomorra
SHORTS - No Order
The Face
I Love Lakers
The Substance of Earth
Hulahoop Soundings
A Trip To The Wound
Soul of the Ultimate Nation
A Voyage of a Foreteller
The Planet
The Monk
Brutality Factory
Petals
Cry Me A River
Roy Tai Phrae
Night and Day
Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
Birdsong
The Juche Idea
All Around Us
Perfect Life
Good Cats
The Good, The Bad, The Weird
Dog in Cheonggyecheon
24 City
United Red Army
Mock Up on Mu
Waiting For Sancho
Serbis
Crude Oil
Still Walking
Survival Song
Let The Right One In
Waltz With Bashir
Gomorra
SHORTS - No Order
The Face
I Love Lakers
The Substance of Earth
Hulahoop Soundings
A Trip To The Wound
Soul of the Ultimate Nation
A Voyage of a Foreteller
The Planet
The Monk
Brutality Factory
Petals
Cry Me A River
Roy Tai Phrae
Film Piracy is wrong...and Natalie Blair is gonna tell you why!
AFACT (Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) has struck a devastating blow against Chinese DVD pirates by enlisting the help of global entertainment ambassadors Sam Clark and Natalie Blair (from TV's "Neighbours") to speak out against piracy.
I'm being a little unfair. Clark and Blair are actually speaking to Australian schoolkids about why downloading TV and films illegally is wrong. Who is out there illegally supplying download networks with episodes of "Neighbours"? Anyway, I'm sure this will convince the kids to be good and spend their money on legit copies.
AFACT has also detailed the traits of your average pirate and contrary to popular belief they are not wooden-legged and accompanied by a parrot; they are evil males, aged 16 - 24.
They've also announced "Ninety percent of pirated initial releases come from camcording in movie theatres," a figure which I'm highly skeptical about.
I guess its better for business to propagate an image of evil asians lurking in movie theatres with DV cameras than respectable AMPAS members...
I'm being a little unfair. Clark and Blair are actually speaking to Australian schoolkids about why downloading TV and films illegally is wrong. Who is out there illegally supplying download networks with episodes of "Neighbours"? Anyway, I'm sure this will convince the kids to be good and spend their money on legit copies.
AFACT has also detailed the traits of your average pirate and contrary to popular belief they are not wooden-legged and accompanied by a parrot; they are evil males, aged 16 - 24.
They've also announced "Ninety percent of pirated initial releases come from camcording in movie theatres," a figure which I'm highly skeptical about.
I guess its better for business to propagate an image of evil asians lurking in movie theatres with DV cameras than respectable AMPAS members...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
