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Shion Sono‘s Strange Circus (Kimy√¥ na s√¢kasu) is scheduled to be screened at the 2006 Fantasia Festival in Montr√©al on Thursday July 13th at 9:45 p.m.. The screening is to be hosted by Sono.
Strange Circus had its world première at the 10th Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) on October 9th of last year, and its North American première at the 15th Philadelphia Film Festival (PFF) on April 2nd of this year. TLA Releasing (TLA Entertainment Group Inc.) has acquired the North American theatrical and home entertainment distribution rights for it.
The screenplay for Strange Circus was written by Sono. The movie stars Masumi Miyazaki, Issei Ishida, Rie Kuwana, Mai Takahashi, Fujiko, Tomorowo Taguchi, and Hiroshi Ôguchi.
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What follows is an expanded version of my review of Toshiaki Toyoda’s Hanging Garden updated to include a look at the film’s recent Japanese DVD release.
On first blush the news that Toshiaki Toyoda’s The Hanging Garden, the follow up to the much loved 9 Souls, would be a family drama felt like a huge departure for the director. And in many senses it is. The setting and shooting style are dramatically different from everything he has done before and his regular stable of actors is entirely absent. But, looked at another way it feels like a natural, even inevitable, extension of his previous work.
Think of it like this: Pornostar revolves around an absolute loner lashing out at society. Blue Spring is still youth only, but it revolves around a gang of high schoolers, a sort of implicit surrogate family and the dynamics within that group. 9 Souls takes that explicit surrogate relationship and makes it explicit, forging a strong bond between the father who killed his son and the son who killed his father, while also - for the first time in Toyoda’s work - introducing several strong threads revolving around the character’s actual families. All signs point in this direction and by the time you reach the end enough of Toyoda’s recurrent themes - latent mental illness and sudden bursts of fantasy - have again reared their heads that it’s quite clear who you’re dealing with.
DVD Details
Now, on to the disc itself. As already mentioned it boasts an excellent English translation of the film, one that flows easily and captures the individual quirks of each of the characters, a very important feature in a film as character driven as this. Whoever was responsible for translating this from Japanese to English deserves full marks. The transfer itself is anamorphic and in the correct ratio. The standard edition of the film is bare of features, including only the film’s theatrical trailer though it does give 2.0 and 5.1 audio options. While there is some softness to the image my hunch is that this is more a deliberate choice in film stock than it is a flaw in the transfer. The look of this is quite similar to the Japanese DVD release of Tony Takitani, a film that some criticized for being soft when the graininess was a deliberate choice of the director, and though I can’t confirm it - not having seen the film projected - this has the same consistency of feel and a lack of any obvious transfer problems making it seem likely that Toyoda shot this on a similar stock to that used in Takitani making the softness a stylistic decision of the director and not a flaw with the DVD. Also included with this release are a pair of postcards. A very strong release for a very strong film.
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In many ways it seems fair to say that Mum Jokmok is the Thai equivalent to Robin Williams. Those who know him in North America likely do so purely thanks to his role as Dirty Balls (or George, in the tamed down Besson translation) in Ong Bak but the man is a massively popular entertainer in his homeland. Originally a stand up comic Jokmok has carved out an amazingly successful television and film career with a comic persona that involves the frantic expenditure of a great deal of energy, largely by speaking faster and louder than anyone around him. Now, Thai humor doesn’t translate particularly well so Jokmok’s many film appearances come off as largely one note – a very loud note - affairs on these shores so imagine the surprise when he turned up starring in the delicate, magical-realist romance Midnight My Love and – stop the press! – it turns out that when you rein this guy in he’s actually a very good actor.
I’m quite certain that all those pretty pictures in Olivier Smolders Nuit Noir must mean something but as for what that might be, I have no clue whatsoever ...
A dark, surreal film that taps into the creepier side of the subconscious Nuit Noir is gorgeously photographed with a virtually non-stop barrage of beautiful, unsettling imagery, but is so thoroughly inscrutable on first viewing - my guess is this will take at least three to really begin to unpack - that it makes for difficult viewing.
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Full disclosure time: I’ve known Danielson’s Dan Smith for many years now. Though we see each other so seldom these days that calling him a friend feels like over selling the relationship he is certainly more than an acquaintance and the summer we lived in close quarters looms large in this film, that being the summer Dan signed his first record deal and met the woman who is now his wife. So ... objectivity? Forget about it. Not even a remote possibility.
The title spelling of J.L. Aronson’s film is an important tip as to what Aronson is up to with his film. Note going in that this is a ‘Family’ movie, and not a ‘Famile’ one, and that is an important distinction. This is not a film about Dan Smith the musician so much, not a film particularly concerned with the mechanics of the music industry and Smith’s place within it, but a film about Dan himself, his family, friends, and the beliefs that drive is art. So it is less a typical rock-doc than it is a family portrait, a film cobbled together with more family video than typical interview footage.
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Despite a successful international festival run that saw the film take home Best Film and Best Screenplay awards at Sitges - which means many smarter people than I disagree with me on this - I confess to finding Hard Candy thoroughly mediocre. Not bad enough to hate nor good enough to get excited over it’s just kind of there.
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Two days and nine films into the Philadelphia Film Festival it doesn’t seem to carry all that much weight to say that Pal Sletaune’s Next Door is by far the best film I have seen here.
Well how about this: it is very likely the best film I have seen all year and I would go as far as to say this is a landmark film in its particular genre, one of the very best films about sexual obsession, violence and paranoia ever made.
Next Door is an absolutely ferocious powerhouse of a film, grabbing firm hold from the opening scene and not slackening its grip until the potent final image has faded from the screen. Wow. Just wow. Equal parts Hitchcock and Lynch this is a dark, twisted, surreal trip into the depths of the human psyche.
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When we first caught wind of Indonesian blockbuster comedy Joni’s Promise some months back it came to us tagged as a Sabu style comedy. And while the basic plotline with it’s constantly running lead character does sound like the sort of thing Sabu would come up with it is far more straightforward than Japan’s unsung, soft spoken comic auteur’s work. In fact Joni’s Promise is a film that could very easily be translated into English and shot as a straight up American remake with no alterations required. And it would probably be a hit here, too.
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Yourgos Noussias’ Evil is one hundred percent a crowd film. I will confess to having seen this on DVD prior to the festival and - watching it at home, alone, on a mid sized television with the sound down to not annoy the naighbours - finding it rather underwhelming. But put it on the big screen with the volume pumped and an appreciative crowd and, for all it’s faults, it takes on an undeniable goofy, blood soaked charm.
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Did anyone see this coming? After acheiving significant international success with his family oriented animated feature My Beautiful Girl Mari - and he is currently at work on another animated feature, Cobby the Fox - Korea’s Lee Sung-Gang opted to make his sophomore feature a live action picture. And not just any live action picture, an experimental, supernaturally charged mystery loaded with explicit sexuality. Texture of Skin is a drastic change of pace for the director, one so dramtic that it could conceivably place his entire career at risk were he to fail. But Texture of Skin is far away from being a failure. It is a beautiful, complex, subtly nuanced film; one unlikely to rack up major box office but also one that clearly announces Lee as a significant talent in all facets of his work and one that should allow him to move in literally any direction, any sphere, he cares to for the rest of his career.
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The aimless youth film is well nigh a genre unto itself. There are stacks of these films released every year, and you know the type. There are the uplifting stories of kids hard done by who manage to somehow find hope and inspiration and rise above their circumstances and then there are the others that simply try to capture what life is like for a young person in a world that provides them with no hope. 7 Virgins falls squarely into the latter camp.
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If Gael Bernal were a white man he would be a massive star by now. He is an enormous talent with an impeccable eye for quality projects. His presence in a film is virtually enough on its own to guarantee a film’s quality. He is so strong that even when his films don’t entirely work they are, at the very least, fascinating failures. This is the case with The King.
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Julian Jarrold’s Kinky Boots is entirely predictable and emotionally manipulative. The first act is hugely flawed, failing to properly establish several key relationships and the nature of its lead character leaving lead actor Joel Edgerton looking lost and outclassed by his co-stars throughout the early going. It borrows the exact structure of virtually every working class UK comedy made since The Full Monty. But when it works - which is pretty much every scene involving Chiwetel Ejiofor - it really works, and it ends up being exactly what it wants to be: an effective mainstream crowd pleaser.
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Perhaps it is a function of the sheer number of awards Sara Johnsen’s Kissed By Winter has won internationally, the weight of expectations, but I was expecting more. Despite some solid performances and strong cinematography the script ultimately lets the film down, never fully living up to its own potential.
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Director Ryuichi Hiroki has a very particular genius. While many others can out do him in terms of camera work and technical chops there are few, if any, working in the world today who are more gifted at drawing shockingly intimate performances out of his stars. With It’s Only Talk Hiroki reteams with Shinobu Terajima, the star of his break out film Vibrator, to spectacular effect.
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