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Reviews of Pattaya Heat, The Tenants, Granny Prostitutes, and The Guest

The 23rd annual New York Asian Film Festival takes place between July 12 and July 28. For more information, please click here.

PATTAYA HEAT

The alternate title to Pattaya Heat is ‘All Men Are Brothers’, the irony of which will be immediately evident within the first minute or so of screentime. An ensemble crime thriller with a pleasingly amoral nature, the film stands as a reminder that sometimes entertainment can be a simple as watching bad things happen to bad people.

Like The Time of Huan Nan in pacing if not in temperament, Yang Shupeng wastes no time in introducing our cast of rogues and laying out the field of play.

Mr. Simon is the axis the film revolves around. Introduced beating someone half to death in full view of dozens of horrifed pedestrians, Simon bristles under the thumb of his ailing father, desperate to take full control of the family business. In the meantime, he plots a gold heist that draws in a web of assorted allies and enemies, each with their own agenda, and none of them quite managing to achieve role model status.

To give you an idea of the general bar of empathy being asked of us here, our narrator is a burnt out cop who agrees to join a gold heist in order to get the money to pay for his daughters’ medical treatments. The movie then, very offhandedly, reveals that he needs this score because he lost the original payment while gambling.

Not heroic enough for you? Well, perhaps you’d prefer Thod as your audience identification figure; an assassin who goes to jail for an infamous tennis court massacre, gets released and immediately starts secretly selling drugs out of his brothers’ pizza shop.

There’s a lot going on here, fortune telling and infidelity and a movie screening that improbably becomes key to the heist… but it all ends in the only way it can, with a bunch of dead bodies,

Fair to say then that he film has, for lack of a better point of reference, serious Tarantinoesque vibes. Or to be more specific, not Tarantino vibes, but vibes not unlike the many, many terrible ripoffs that bubbled up in his wake. Which sounds, on the face of it, like an insult. But if they were done with this level of skill, it wouldn’t have been nearly the albatross it’s come to be regarded as.

There is both a fleetness and a distinct lack of modesty that makes one appreciate the restraint on display. One of the worst things the movies that Pattaya Heat cribs from (and a trait that even Tarantino himself doesn’t always avoid) is the sense of smugness; many of these movies felt very impressed with themselves, often with little cause. And whatever your overall opinion, Pattaya Heat does not read as a film that is breaks a sweat trying to convince you how cool and clever its characters and its twists and turns are. It’s a movie in the great noir tradition: first we meet the losers, then we watch them lose.

The sense of professionalism extends to the cast, all of whom understand the assignment and act accordingly. Special shout out to Ananda Everingham as prime baddie Simon, who adds much appreciated notes of flamboyant goofball chic to his would-be smooth operator; and Manita Chob Chuen, who lends her stock henchperson role a truly impressive sense of menace. She didn’t have to go this hard, but she did, and the film is all the better for it.

In the end, Pattaya Heat is a mean, cynical film with an appreciable moral vacuum at its blackened heart. There are no “good” characters here, and the only one who comes close makes a decidedly premature exit. So all is as it should be, really.

THE TENANTS

The Tenants is off-putting in the best possible way. The festival write-up invoked David Lynch, and I suppose that’s fair, but in a sense the comparison is actually selling the uniqueness and the weirdness short. This is a Korean science fiction film that somehow finds itself somewhere in the improbable Venn Diagram between Kurt Vonnegut, Harold Pinter and Hideo Nakata.

Mileage may vary, but if you can get on this films’ very particular gonzo wavelength, there’s a not insignificant deal of ominous delight to be had.

Yoon Eun-kyungs’ film unspools with the locked-in, drilled down efficiency of a short story best read after dark, and, accordingly, traffics in the sort of ideas that feel like they would land much better in a short film adaptation than a full length movie. But the premise carries on apace, somehow creeping along at exactly the right speed to keep us consistently curious and engaged, if not occasionally bewildered.

But, you know… in the best possible way.

Our hero, Shin-Dong (Kim Dae-geon), makes his living as a corporate drone for the Happy Meat corporation in a particularly crummy future version of Seoul, typing numbers in a computer that means nothing to him, or quite possibly to anyone. And when he’s done at work, he goes home to his cramped apartment and does… very little. He seems almost entirely checked out, a solitary man with little in the way of hobbies or dreams. It’s an aimless life, but at least it’s also colorless (and I’m not just referring to the gorgeous and wholly apropos black and white cinematography).

That all changes with a call from his landlord, credited as Mr. Bastard, and played by… a ten-year old. Mr Bastard seeks to raise the rent and kick Shin-Dong out. His only friend, the cynical Mr. Dork, advises him to sublet his apartment under Wolwose, a sort of renters’ rights program to undercut greedy landlords. This is how Shin-Dong comes into contact with the titular tenants, a married couple who seem entirely too strange to be real.

Clad in a suit that makes him look to all the world like a man out of time, and topped by a hat that has to be seen to be believed, the husband projects as almost aggressive blandness, to the point where it becomes unnerving. He pleasantly and softly cajoles his way into living in Shin-Dong’s bathroom, and things only get more absurd from there.

While he’s not in nearly as much of the film as you might expect from the title, Heo Dong-won makes an indeilble impression in a guided missile of a performance that hits the exact right tone to keep the audience off-kilter. It would be very easy to overplay the oddness, or the menace, or the artificial chumminess, but Dong-won keeps itentirely controlled and completely opaque. His hat gives off

To say too much about The Tenants would be to spoil an experience that is better felt than described. Mileage may vary on the ending, which both does and doesn’t feel like a cheat. But the ride to get there is singular, and well worth checking out for fans of the offbeat.

GRANNY PROSTITUTES

The New York Asian Film Festival is not like other festivals. They do things a little differently. And so, when a film called Granny Prostitutes is put on the schedule, such a thing comes with certain expectations.

What I expected, I did not get, and I did get, I did not like.

Joel C. Lamangan’s attempt at cinema concerns the efforts of senior citizen/sex worker Bella to keep the house willed to her by her late lover against the attempts of his son Mauro to take ownership, a task complicated by her inabilty to find the legal documents proving it’s hers. But each of her fellow titular prostitutes has their own drama to contend with; the pious Dalena attempts to maintain contact with her granddaughter against the wishes of her embittered daughter. The eldest, Corazon, seems to be going senile, endlessly obsessed with her lost love Ernesto and convcined he’s going to come back to her soon. Boy crazy Luningning must contend with the complications of having a much younger lover. And Miriam… well, her story starts with her accidentally bleeding all over a customer, and doesn’t get any happier from there.

The best word for the tonal shifts in the movie would be misguided… which is not an unfair assessment of the film overall, when you get right down to it. But it’s important here to be clear on why. The NYAFF has a ludicrously high batting average, so for them to get it this wrong requires at least a little exploration.

First of all, let us be clear: if you’re not ready for whiplash tonal changes in Asian cinema, you’ve hitched your pony to the wrong post. But the mix of broad laughs and tearful melodrama never even comes close to working. There is a world in which a sorrowful funeral can be followed by a broad slapstick scene where our heroines chase a heckling enemy out of their house with a knife and it could work… but that would require an emotional investment in the characters, and either a delicately modulated approach to the humor or an all-out, no holds barred level of No Fucks Given. And the movie never really manages to find an actual comedic gear; in the year of our lord 2000 and 24, just having a bunch of septugenereans say “pussy” a lot is simply not good enough.

Look, I’m no stranger to offensive humor, and I’m certainly no prude… hell, one of my first and most cherished NYAFF memories is watching a screening of Tokyo Tribe, a film that is essentially a two hour treatise on penis envy. And let’s just say most critics had a significantly less generous reading of what to me was the funniest aspect of last years Bad Education. But getting comedy right is as much a matter of execution as it is of content, if not more so. And Lamangan botches the job about as thoroughly as I could possibly imagine.

And I did come into this with high hopes; they’re old and they’re prostitutes! Whaddaya need, a roadmap?!? But it was just off from the jump. Aside from the immediate and insistently terrible musical score by Von De Guzman, the relentless and thuddingly inelegant expositional dialogue of the first ten minutes, delievered terribly (nearly the entire cast give fairly awful performances, though I’m hard pressed to imagine anyone being able to make something out of Dennis C. Evangelista’s hacky, horrible script), and those breakneck shifts in tone from crude to maudlin to faux inspirational, the sinking feeling set in early and only occasionally did the film ever rise to the level of adequate.

I could very easily do a laundry list of every little thing that bugged me about the film, all the ways in which it just completely shit the bed, from Jim Pebanco, nearly unwatchable as the offensive gay stereotype of a straw villain, to the absolutely idiotic moment where Bela steals an officers’ gun and points it at him and Dalena’s daughter with no consequences whatsoever, to the screaminglt flase empowerment monologues that are both unearned and underthought, to the fact that there is not one but THREE different characters with terminal illnesses… but there’s really only one thing I want to talk about. One thing that made me furious above all others.

I want to talk about the Dalena plotline.

Spoilers ahead, for those that don’t wish to know.

Dalena, as previously mentioned, has a plotline about her attempts to stay in the life of her granddaughter and to earn the forgiveness of her daughter.

Why, you may be wondering, does Dalena’s daughter hate her so much?

Well, let me tell you.

Dalena’s daughter hates her mother because her mother pimped her out when she was a child.

And the film treats the daughter like she’s the evil one.

Harlene Bautista plays the role as a one-note hateful shrew, and I would say it’s a relief when she disappears from the film, but the nature of her disappearance is maybe the worst part of all: against Dalena’s warnings, she abandons her sick child to go live with her (unseen) American boyfriend, whom the film goes out of its way to mention is black. Her fate is revealed in a brief exchage near the end wherein we find out that she has left her lover, who turned out to be abusive, and is having such a hard time living in America as an undocumented immigrant that she’s no longer seems quite as angry about what Dalena did to her. Dalena sees this as a positive step towards her dreams of an eventual reconciliation.

Look… in one form or another I’ve been writing about movies for over a decade now. There is no novelty, no joy, and precious little value in writing negatively about movies at this point. But I found this entire subplot absolutely repellant. It took the film from merely a failed comedy to a movie that actively pissed me off. A movie that already wasn’t working tips into what feels like unironic, unvarnished racism; there was absolutely no reason for this character who doesn’t actually appear in the film to be identified by their race. And if this was part of the comedy, I’d get it; transgressive, ironic racism isn’t necessaerily my thing, I think it’s old hat at this point, but it’s still fair game if you want to go there. But this is the dramatic part; it’s the part we’re meant to take seriously. And that, to me, is either a woefully ignorant creative choice or an actively racist one. I find myself displeased with either possibility.

Added to the general homophobia that the very existence of Mauro and Pebanco’s mincing, embarrassing performance represents, and I simply cannot see how this movie, of all possible options, made the cut. This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen at NYAFF, and it isn’t even remotely a contest.

I don’t have it in me to go 100% negative, so here’s the one nice thing I’ll give them: Joni McNab and Carlo San Juan are mildly diverting as a young couple who get tangled up with Luningning, and the film briefly teases a throuple situation that felt kind of progressive and interesting.

But actually, they kind of fuck that up in the end, too.

Ah hell, guys. I tried. I really did.

…You know what, let’s try and end this entry on a more positive note, shall we…?

THE GUEST

When it comes to genre, there really is beauty in simplicity. The Guest knows this, and proceeds accordingly. A simple and highly effective game of cat and mouse that sets up its pins and knocks them down with glorious bloody minded efficiency,

The opening credits, a symphony of surveillance, seems to be setting up a paranoid thriller of some kind, like a Korean Enemy of the State or some such. But happily, writer/director Yeon Je-gwang has smaller fish in mind, if no less ambitious in its own way. We are very quickly introduced to Min-Cheol (Lee Ju-seung) and Young-gyu (Han Min), a pair of losers working at an isolated motel for their boss Deuk-Chan. He’s listed as  ASSHOLE in Young-gyu’s phone, and more than earns the label in a remarkably short amount of screentime.

The hotel, as it turns out, is not so much the kind where one goes to sleep, as the kind where one goes to do everything else… up to and including unwittingly being recorded by hidden cameras in every room, which Deuk-Chan sells on the black market.  

For Young-gyu and Min-Cheol, both deep in debt and working it off one sex tape at a time, it’s a living… though Min-Cheol is clearly wrestling with an increasingly uneasy conscience (you can tell he’s our audience identification figure because he only took out a loan from Deuk-Chan to pay his sick mothers hospital bills). And then, one night, a guest checks in carrying an unconscious woman over his shoulder. What happens in his room is the sort of thing that could completely clear the duo’s debt… if only they’re able to survive long enough to sell it. Which does not seem likely.

There’s not much more to The Guest than that, and there really doesn’t need to be; while those opening credits seem to be pointing towards some kind of commentary on modern privacy, at heart that’s really just a MacGuffin, the necessary impetus that sets the chase into motion. What’s clearly more important to Je-gwang is crafting a minimalist, old fashioned suspense-thriller. And so he has.

Along with his director of photography Han Sangkil and Editing Supervisor Shin Munkyung, Je-gwang shows a deft sense of geography and effectively uses the spaces in their setting to build out tension that never feel like a series of set pieces strung together, but like a rolling ball of cause and effect chaos. The general lack of dialogue once things get rolling helps as well. This is a film comfortable with letting its visuals sell the terror.

And holding it all together is Jeong Soo-kyo as our nameless psycho, with the coldest, deadest gaze I’ve seen in quite some time. Soo-kyo’s character is interesting because while his actions for most of the movie stem from a sense of self-preservation, his initial action is basically inexplicable. He’s not some sadistic mastermind, taking glee in his violence, he’s just a void with an axe. It’s chilling.

Usually around this point, I say something like ‘they just don’t make films like this anymore’, but that’s not true; people are trying to make films exactly like this all the time. It’s just that they just rarely manage to pull it off this well.

…And with that, all is right with the world. That’s it for now, tune in next time for monsters, thieves and a quantum of underage drinking.