Michael Wells VS The NYAFF Round Three! Big Bang Love! Dynamite Warrior!

How the actual movie went over, I’ll find out when I go back this evening. For now, I guess I should mention some movies I actually *did* watch over the past few days.

No penises actually appear in “Big Bang Love: Juvenile A” (Japan, 2006), although plenty of wet, glistening young male flesh is lovingly examined by the camera in Takashi Miike’s dazzling, experimental, prison-set gay love story/murder mystery. Probably few readers of this site need to be told of Miike’s position as Japan’s most famous, most prolific and maybe most talented purveyor of “extreme” pulp marked by transgressive violence and sex. But here the filmmaker is feeling more ambitious (or pretentious, depending on your taste). “Big Bang Love” features relatively little blood and ookiness. It does have a fragmented chronology, a quasi-poetic, vaguely Beckettian script, and sets that straddle the minimalist and the expressionist, made up in large degree of darkness pierced by glowing shafts of light.

This turn in an avant garde direction is far more successful than Miike’s previous, nearly unbearable attempt, “Izo,” from a couple of years back. The film is a fevered waking dream of gorgeous and sensual images: An iridescent blue butterfly flapping between prison bars. Crumbling Mayan pyramids (not a typo) towering over the prison in the midst of a red, Martian-looking desert. The cobalt blue wall of an interrogation room, with a large window in it that one assumes has glass until an actor steps casually through it. A beam of white light from a hole in the wall painlessly piercing a prisoner’s torso – which only later begins bleeding from the same spot.

It all gives a vague impression of meaning something, although I’m not sure it does. I feel like any attempt to unpack “symbols” would simply dissipate the voluptuous and surprisingly moving power of the pictures, the sounds and the boyishly beautiful faces and bodies. Despite the latter, this isn’t especially a movie concerned with homosexuality or romance or sex, and wouldn’t be anyone’s choice of a feature to celebrate Pride Week (which it happens to be this week). The themes contained within what is, under the trappings, a simple story, seem pretty typical of prison tales: transgression and forgiveness; the arbitrariness of power; the formation of relationships and community under extreme circumstances; the construction of masculinity. The style and the substance are one – how “Big Bang Love” feels is what it means. I’m positive some Miike fans consider this a self-conscious sellout to snobbish film festival critic standards, an attempt at art house cred. But it’s been a long time since this guy fit into any comfortable categories, and he fits into them less and less all the time. Some people will probably never stop debating whether he’s a hack or an auteur, while meanwhile he goes along his merry way, doing as he pleases, unconcerned by the question.

The perfect chaser was Chalerm Wongpim’s “Dynamite Warrior” (Thailand, 2006), whose pleasures are perfectly easy to describe. This is balls-to-the-wall, throw-in-everything-ya-got action-comedy-fantasy silliness, lavishly executed and with enormous spirit and sincerity. To me and others I spoke to afterwards, it feels wonderfully like the nearly lost Hong Kong cinema of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, with its blend of martial arts (wired and unwired), supernatural lore, sweet romance, goofball comedy and heartfelt melodrama, all whipped together with hurricane speed and damn-the-torpedoes eagerness to please. And yes, there are actual torpedoes – or at least wooden rockets, fired and occasionally ridden, surfboard-style, by the title character, a hunky, purehearted bandit ("Born to Fight” star Dan Chupong) who raids 19th century Thailand’s buffalo herders while searching for the mystery man who killed his parents years before.

Amid the duelling wizards, animal-spirit-possessed fighters, bone-breaking muay thai boxing battles, and spells cast with virgin’s menstrual blood, special mention has to go to supporting actor Leo Putt. Nothing in the movie is more eyepopping than his hilarious performance as the villainous young nobleman Lord Waeng, a harelipped, giggling dandy with a blinding wardrobe, gravity-defying duck’s-ass hairdo and speech impediment, who gives the impression he’s still getting back at the world for all those times he got shoved in his school locker.

The audience were roaring with laughter, clapping and cheering, and practically bouncing up and down in their seats. Even if the fest had ended with “Dynamite Warrior,” I and they could have walked away perfectly satisfied and happy. Fortunately, it didn’t. More to come, maybe even about the penis gun.

By Michael Wells.