All good things must come to an end, unfortunately, and after a fantastic time at the Udine Far East Film Festival the lady-friend and I have made our way back home to Toronto. Let me say this: if you’re at all a fan of Asian film then this is a trip you have to plan on making at some point. The theatre is fantastic, the hospitality stellar, the line up strong year after year and the film makers and talent are exceptionally accessible. Adrift In Tokyo director Miki Satoshi was the happiest man in the place and well nigh ubiquitous, appearing at screening after screening and party after party with a constant smile on his face. The lady-friend and I first came across Pang Ho-Cheung lying on the grass out front of the theatre catching some sun and ran into him continuously thereafter as he bounced from screening to screening. Filipino director Erik Matti and Indonesia’s Joko Anwar battled it out for nicest man in the room - the lady-friend gave the edge to Anwar after he opened a few doors for her - and the whole experience was just stellar. Darcy Paquet of KoreanFilm.org fame, incidentally, could easily be our own Kurt Halfyard’s long lost brother. They look alike, the mannerisms and speaking voices are the same ... it would be kind of creepy if they weren’t such swell people ...
In some ways Your Friends, the latest film from pink film director turned arthouse favorite Ryuichi Hiroki, represents a major change for the director. After all it includes none of the sexual content or domestic violence that have attracted attention to his work for years. In the most important ways, however, Your Friends is Hiroki through and through. Though they’ve used sex as a primary metaphor for years he stopped being defined and limited by that long ago, the key element to Hiroki’s work being their resounding emotional intimacy and that factor is in full effect here. The story of a young woman, crippled in childhood, and the small handful of relationships that have defined her life the film is populated dominantly with young, non-professional actors playing out its simple yet emotionally potent story in a series of long, unadorned shots tat paces the emphasis purely on performance rather than style or flash.
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The Korean adaptation of a famous Japanese novel, word is that The Black House plays a little bit fast and loose with its source material. It’s a situation that might upset fans of the original work but as someone coming to the film fresh, The Black House is one hell of a fun ride, an impressive work from a young director that starts off as an above-average psycho-thriller before taking a hard turn into slasher territory. Yes, it’s finally something different in the world of Asian horror with no hair ghosts to be found, in their place just one compellingly heartless killer with a great big knife.
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Let me be clear right from the beginning. The Body is not a good film. It’s big and messy and hugely over reliant on CGI, showing all signs of a young director being a bad match to the script, director Paween Purijitpanya playing all the subtleties of a script by 13 Beloved director Chookiat Sakwirakul – one of Thailand’s brightest young talents – with the grace of a construction worker wielding a jackhammer. It’s big and noisy, saddled with mediocre performances and largely deficient when it comes to character work. That said, when it hits a sequence that works it REALLY works and there are more than enough of those moments to make the film a very compelling failure, a solidly entertaining ride that brings a little something new to the hair-ghost genre.
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One of the most anticipated Korean genre films in recent days, R-Point director Kong Su-Chang’s sophomore effort is blessed with a strong premise – soldiers manning an isolated guard post along the Korean DMZ infected with a strange virus that triggers random violence – but much like its predecessor it ultimately disappoints.
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[Though the Udine Far East Film Festival continues for a couple more days today will be my final day here and so I am taking the opportunity to pull earlier reviews for films I will be missing up from the archive to give a taste of what’s going on. Up first, Johnnie To and Wai Ka Fai’s Mad Detective.]
And the hot streak continues for Johnnie To. While the latest from the prolific action auteur lacks the blistering intensity of the Election films and the extreme high style of Exiled it reunites him with a pair of favored collaborators - screenwriter and co-director Wai Ka Fai and star Lau Ching Wan - and the result is an entertaining, surprising piece of work anchored by a powerhouse performance from Lau.
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[Another review pulled forward from the archive to coincide with the film’s screening at this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival, this one my review of Takashi Miike’s Crows 0, originall reviewed when it screened at the American Film Market.]
As the final credits rolled up the screen at the end of Takashi Miike’s Crows 0 Fantasia programming honcho Mitch Davis, clearly riding an adrenaline high from what we’d just witnessed, turned to me and commented that this was arguably the most commercially minded film that Takashi Miike has ever done. Obviously, yes, this is true on at least one very important level - the film having just opened in the number one spot at the Japanese box office - but on another it is still very much a Takashi Miike film though and through.
Put Ichi the Killer, Audition, Gozu and the like out of your mind for a moment and think instead about the fistful of films Miike has done about growing up young and poor in Osaka, films he has repeatedly said are his most personal and the most important to him among his extensive filmography, particularly the Young Thugs pictures. Placed in that context it is immediately obvious why Miike was offered the chance to adapt this popular and hugely successful manga, just as it’s immediately obvious why he jumped at the chance: Crows 0 is essentially a third Young Thugs film, albeit it one played out on a larger scale and with higher production values than earlier efforts. The end result? You’ll come for the fights, but you’ll stay for the characters. Brash, playfully violent, full of an over riding love of life, and absolutely filled with little character flourishes that bring the world to life Crows 0 is an effective, engaging, touching and hugely entertaining reminder that Miike has plenty of substance to back up his style and that the man has absolutely never gotten the respect he deserves for his ability to work with young actors.
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[Another review pulled forward from the archive to coincide with the film screening in Udine, this one Vietnamese martial arts flick The Rebel.]
Stories about stunt men writing, producing and starring in their own movies—movies directed by their own brothers, no less—do not exactly inspire confidence. What do muscle heads know about writing scripts? Telling stories? Making films? The fear is that you’ll end up with nothing but a pointless, thoughtless vanity project full of flexing biceps and little else and history tells us that those fears are not entirely unfounded. Thankfully Vietnamese-American martial artist Johnny Nguyen is far from typical and The Rebel—the writing-directing-starring project that inspired such a fresh appreciation of his native culture that he has returned to Vietnam to continue living and working there—is a quality piece of work that bears none of the weaknesses that would label it a vanity project.
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[Once again pulling forward an earlier review for a film that played here in Udine yesterday. Having the chance to see Our Town on the big screen only reinforced my opinions below ... this is one very good film ...]
If you sit down and think about it calmly and rationally, Jung Gil Young’s dueling serial killer thriller Our Town is a film that very likely shouldn’t work. The premise stretches believability and as the film progresses Young piles on emotional traumas and character connections by the boatload in the name of ramping up the tension and melodramatic catharsis. But it does work, and it works very well indeed, thanks to hugely charismatic and believable performances from the film’s three leads and stylish, energetic direction from Young that keeps you so caught up in this bizarre, twisted world that you happily forget that it operates on a set of rules and principals that you’d simply never find at play in reality. Can it be that between this film, The Chaser and Epitaph Korea is finally producing some legitimate young talent and showing signs of shaking off its extended slump? Damn straight.
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Coming as it does from the production arm of major Japanese broadcaster TBS it should probably not be quite so surprising that medical thriller The Glorious Team Batista plays like little more than an over blown television movie but somehow I expected more. Director Yoshihiro Nakamura is an accomplished veteran of the industry, after all, and one who has collaborated as a writer with Yoichi Sai and Hideo Nakata and his cast boasts a number of prominent names, prime among them Hiroshi Abe.
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Slightly uneven in tone, slightly baffling in the way it builds comedy out of realistic family violence, Yoshida Daihachi’s Funuke: Show Some Love You Losers boasts impressive performances and enough stylistic zing to mark Yoshida as a film maker to keep an eye on.
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Perhaps the highest compliment that can be paid to Feng Xiaogang’s The Assembly, a film built around Communist Chinese military campaigns of the forties and fifties, is that he has created a film that completely and utterly transcends politics. Technically astounding, with battle sequences orchestrated by the team behind Korean hit Taegukgi - sequences that match or beat anything ever put on screen by big budget Hollywood, Saving Private Ryan included – the heart of the film never gets lost in the spectacle, the soul of the piece anchored in an astounding central performance from Zhang Hanyou.
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What will audiences find In The Pool? A surprisingly confident feature debut from TV veteran Satoshi Miki – the subject of a retrospective here at the Udine Far East Film Festival – for one thing, a pleasingly loopy and borderline absurd slapstick comedy for another. Built around the skills of comedian Suzuki Matsuo who plays unhinged psychiatrist Dr. Irabu, more deranged by far than any of his patients, the film pokes fun at the always-in-control Japanese psyche while telling the stories of three loosely connected patients.
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[The Udine Far East Film Festival celebrates its tenth edition this year. The lady friend and I rolled in to town last night and while we missed yesterday’s screenings one of the late pictures was Muay Thai Chaiya, a film I’ve seen and greatly enjoyed previously, so I’m pulling my previous review forward here.]
Kongkiat Khomsiri’s debut as a solo director after being part of the gang behind ultra-gorey Art of the Devil 2 will strike many as familiar on more than one level. Drawing on the tried and true story of three poor friends from the country drawn to the big city by the promise of fame and fortune only to be forced apart by forces outside their control, Muay Thai Chaiya follows one of the most popular structures in Asian action films - one drawn on earlier this year in Alexi Tan’s Blood Brothers and prominent in kung fu and action films from the golden age onwards. Now, if Khmosiri has failed to do the story justice you could reasonably criticize the man for simply repeating what had come before but there’s a very good reason why this particular structure keeps coming back - in good hands it produces remarkable results and Khomsiri’s hands are sure enough and his story laced with just enough novel elements to keep things feeling fresh and vital throughout.
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Malaysian director Mamat Khalid will have two films premiering in Europe at this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival in Italy. They are the horror spoof Zombi Kg Pisang and noir thriller-comedy Kala Malam Bulan Mengambang. The director will be in attendance.
Check out the links for Udine’s Paolo Bretolin’s synopses for both films, plus my review of Kala Malam.
