-
NYAFF 2023: A TOUR GUIDE
The 22nd annual New York Asian Film Festival takes place between July 14 and July 30. For more information, click here.
I did, in my own way, actually feel like something of a tourist myself while watching Kwak Eun-mi’s thoughtful, wary drama A Tour Guide. It’s a story suffused with geopolitical nuance and ethnographic complexities that, as an American, I could only ever play at a full understanding. So it’s to this movie’s credit that despite having difficulty being able to grasp all the dynamics at play, I was thoroughly involved and occasionally moved by the emotional throughline and the strong performances.
The film starts in 2015, as North Korean defector Han-Young (Lee Sul) begins her training for the job of tour guide to Chinese tourists in South Korea; her time as a refugee in China has garnered her some fluency in the language, and her plainly stated ambition is to make a lot of money.
For an outsider such as myself, there was an almost anthropological interest in these early moments, which do a good job of delineating the rules and customs of the business, full of minor details that both paint in the edges of the world and give us insight into the character of Han-Young. Whether furtively taping torn up notes in the bathroom or chugging a beer with all the gusto of a fraternity pledge, there’s an aloofness and a certain quietude in Sul’s performance that makes her sense of displacement and loneliness all too palpable.
Han-Young’s first experience as a tour guide is a vaguely mortifying one, with her arriving late, failing to captivate the audience with her patter and getting stuck babysitting the kid of one of the tourists as they go to look around on their own, dead-ending in a failed attempt to get anyone to buy anything from the shop at the end of the tour (it turns out tour guides under this program work mainly off commission on products sold). But on the advice of her friend and fellow national Jung-mi (Oh Gyeong-hwa), she buttons down to really get a handle on the wants and needs of her potential “customers”; cue endearing montage of her googling ‘what do Chinese people like?’ and ‘what do South Koreans eat’.
And so I had just naturally assumed the movie would be a kind of look at the ins and outs of this specialized tour guide industry, tracing her gradual acclimation and rise up the ranks.
But as it turns out, the film has much larger ambitions in mind.
Han Young’s story unfolds over several years, which gives us a broad overview of her life and career amidst the ups and downs of an ever changing political landscape. When we first skip ahead in time to 2016, the outbreak of MERS has slowed tourism down significantly, and Han Young struggles to make ends meet. This gives her more time to brush up on her Chinese (she’s fluent, but perhaps not quite as fluent as she makes herself out to be), explore her general surroundings and try and track down and reconnect with her brother In-hyeok (Jeon Bong-seok), who defected some time before Han Young, but who has since gone off the grid. A visit from Li Xiao (Park Se-hyun), In-hyeok’s girlfriend with dreams of coming to South Korea herself and living with the siblings in one big happy makeshift family, causes complications that threaten Han Young’s ever more precarious lifestyle. And there are more problems to come.
I would be lying if I said I understood every last detail of the things that happened over the course of the film; I had to look up MERS, and a later reference to THAAD sent me right back to Google. But while this aspect or that might have been mildly confusing for me in the moment, the thread underpinning every last moment was never anything less than clear: this is a portrait of isolation, and how the arbitrary notion of borders and their unforeseen, uncontrollable consequences can breed regret and disillusionment like a virus. Han-Young starts out hopeful and optimistic about making a new life for herself, but over the course of several years, finds herself ground down and feeling displaced, with no home to return to. One by one her fellow refugees peel off for more hospitable pastures, leaving almost no one she can turn to except her personal protection officer Tae-gu (Park Jun-hyuk), who is responsible for her safety and assimilation. He is handsome and kind, but frequently little more than a voice over the phone asking her if everything is okay. And, as Jung-mi points out, in a situation as politically heated as the one these nations find themselves in, the differences between protection and surveillance can be marginal at best.
In order to get by Han-Young makes compromises, and then mistakes, but at a certain point is really does feel like the system is set up for her to fail. It’s not in any way meant as an insult to say that by the time the film approaches its conclusion, it’s not so much coming in for a landing as it is deflating; by the time she’s weighed her prospects and comes to an important decision about her future, there’s just a sense of both exhaustion and relief, and there’s something admirably about the final cut to black; almost a return of the determination she showed at the start, but with a newfound steeliness forged in her experiences, both the good and the bad.
And I think that’s the moment I ought to close out on: the good and the bad. I suspect I’ve made this film sound like a bit of a slog with a distinctly downward spiral, and it’s anything but that. Certainly it pulls no punches about the complications and disappointments of life after defection. But it never makes its points at the expense of the moments of joy and human connection that tend to exist in even the toughest of situations. Life isn’t easy for any of the characters here, but they soldier on regardless, learning from their defeats and taking pleasure in the fleeting moments of escapism or beauty. It’s a glancing look at full, complicated lives, and there will always be virtue in films that seek to capture such things. Especially when they’re as skillfully made as this.
-
Disney’s HAUNTED MANSION is Grim, and will Leave you Grinning with its Ghostly Humor!
Haunted Mansion has Disney once again adapting the beloved dark ride to the silver screen nearly two decades after the previous endeavor, which featured Eddie Murphy who was fresh off the box office career killer that was The Adventures of Pluto Nash. While that Haunted Mansion wasn’t completely terrible (well… maybe it was), it failed its namesake by focusing more on its star and his on screen family’s hijinks rather than the Mansion and its rich mythology, which has its own very dedicated sect of Disney fandom, myself included. When a new film was announced, from Justin Simien, the director of Dear White People and Bad Hair, with a script from Katie Dippold the writer of Heat and in particular the 2016 Ghostbusters I was curious to see if that pair could crack the ride this time around.
While the film is more an ensemble chamber piece, our thruway is LaKeith Stanfield’s Ben Matthias, who was once an astrophysicist and now drunkenly conducts ghost tours in New Orleans, even though he doesn’t believe in ghosts. Ben is soon recruited by “Father” Kent (Owen Wilson) to investigate the Mansion, because he once invented a camera that can photograph the “spirit particle”, theoretically what ghosts SHOULD be made of. The only problem is, he’s never been able to find a real ghost to prove his camera actually works. When Ben arrives at the mansion he meets along with a host of ghosts, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson), a desperate mother and her eccentric son (Chase Dillon) who are looking to rid their house of the mischievous spirits so they can open a bed and breakfast. From there the layers of the story are simply pulled away as we discover one Hatbox Ghost in particular is to blame for keeping the ghosts in the mansion, hoping to collect 1000 souls.
First and foremost the film adapts the rich and morose mythology of the mansion, finely turning it and adapting it for the silver screen. Fans of the ride will definitely be pleased at how Justin Simien infuses the story with a litany of ride specific easter eggs and call backs, while not getting lost in the weeds of nostalgia as these things tend to do. The story here overall works rather well at tapping all the stories and haunted ephemera of the ride that it encapsulates and coherently bringing them together, while adding an original and rather charming subtext about grief and loss. I mean this after all is a film about ghosts and death, and thankfully those questions are not lost on Justin Simien or Katie Dippold, who use that angle to give the film its dark beating heart as we discover how that plays into the Hatbox Ghost’s ghastly MO.
As a horror guy, I was really surprised at just how hard they went with the scares, I mean take away the comedic ensemble of you’d have a much bleaker film. That’s something the 2003 version also lacked, and its at its core of the Mansion’s story is horror one, which always used its exaggerated gallows humor to offset the darker subject matter making it somewhat family friendly. I think they hit that mix of tones just right here. While the film no doubt has the scares, thanks to its ensemble and it definitely has the laughs. Accompanying LaKeith and Dawson’s rather delightfully engaging performances are Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Jamie Lee Curtis and Danny DeVito who do a great job at flexing their comedic chops and playing off one another injecting some great character moments into this camber piece ghost story. It’s that human dynamic under spiritual duress, and the comedy it inspires that really made this take on the story work for me.
Haunted Mansion will probably go down as one of my biggest surprises this summer. It got so much right with its approach, really capturing the dark ride vibe while still turning in a story that was as family friendly as you could get given the circumstances. While some hardcore fans may complain, as they tend to do, that it’s not the Guillermo del Toro version Disney once flirted with. If you ask me that film was already made and it was called Crimson Peak and it’s great, get over it, but it’s not a Disney film. That comes with that compromise of vision and tone you get when you make that Faustian pact with the Mouse. It’s how you can maneuver within that, which shows a director’s true strengths and I think Justin Simien has accomplished just that with a take that definitely deals out that Disney MO with its broad comedy strokes offsetting some surprisingly the dark and emotional story beats. So definitely check this out, because there’s always room for one more at the Haunted Mansion.
-
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM Embraces the Lunacy of its Legacy
Ever since their creation, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has remained one of the oddest cultural phenomenons in popular culture. They started as an underground, independent comic by Kevin Eastaman and Peter Laird, but quickly grew in popularity due to the Fred Wolf produced cartoon series and associated toy line. For the past forty years, the Ninja Turtles have been reimagined and reconsidered in almost every imaginable medium, from comics to TV shows and movies, to videogames and a cult classic tabletop roleplaying game, and of course countless toys upon toys.
The latest iteration comes from producer Seth Rogen and director Jeff Rowe, the cumbersomely named Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. The benefit that Rogen and Rowe have is those forty years of iterations and re-imaginings, which range from straight-faced action melodrama to tongue-in-cheek shenanigans. It gives them a wide range of inspiration to draw from. Luckily, they have the vision to pull from most of it without undermining any one aspect. They don’t shy away from the absurdism of the very premise, but also play it mostly straight. This approach provided what may be seen as the definitive vision for the long-running franchise, paying respects to its origins but also paving a way for a birth future. It also has created the best Ninja Turtles film to date.
As with all Ninja Turtle reboot, some specifics have to be set into place. Our titular heroes started as normal turtles who were exposed to a mysterious mutagen which they refer to as “ooze”. Thankfully so was Splinter (voiced brilliantly by Jackie Chan,) a lonely and cautious New York City rat who takes on the role of being their father. Due to his own anxiety and fear of humanity, Splinter teaches the turtles martial arts, and emphasizes the need for them to stay out of sight from humans. Inevitably though, they long for connection, and the closest option is normal human existence. Namely, they want to go to high school, or the romanticized version of high school they know from John Hughes movies.
Luckily for the turtles, they meet normal human teen April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri) who is an aspiring youth journalist. They see her support as the bridge to normal teenagerdom and a possibility for public fame, while she sees them as the scoop to make her name. Together they investigate the mysterious criminal kingpin Superfly (Ice Cube). To their shock however, her turns out to be an actual giant fly, another mutant like the turtles who has his own plans on how to deal with an indifferent human world.
There is a lot more world building in Mutant Mayhem, but none of it is overcrowded or feels bloated. Rather it all flows together and creates a massive world that is great table setting for a new take on the world of the mutants. The brilliant move that Rowe and Rogen fall upon that sets their vision aside is leaning into the teenaged aspect of the TMNT formula. By using actual teenagers as the voice actors for the four star turtles, and giving them space to improvise and riff off of each other in real time, it gives the atmosphere of the story a lighter, breezier mood. It also taps into the playful anxiety that is at the center of the turtles’ story. The characters all reflect their knowable versions (Leonardo the teacher’s pet leader, Raphael the rageaholic, Donatello the tech geek and Mikey the goofball), but somehow feel more genuine than ever before because they are given the space to breatheThe other inspired choice the film makes is tapping into TMNT’s history as an underground comic, specifically in an exaggerated, borderline grotesque art style and production design that feels like the sketches in the margins of a notebook. This gives the film a punk rock, street level aesthetic that taps into the roots of the franchise but also feels like a fresh, untapped direction. In a clever twist, the most unsettling artwork is dedicated to the human characters in the film, with strange asymmetrical features and leering eyes. There is a joy in the oddity of it all that is infectious.
There are other parts that all add up to a holistic whole that is a thrilling new take on an evergreen playset. The Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score melds perfectly with a needle-drop wonderland of classic 90s hip-hop tracks. The humor is sharp and winning, as are the flashy fighting sequences. In total it creates an exciting cinematic experience that celebrates the anarchic core of one of pop culture’s strangest stories, and the end result is thrilling and singular: an adventure that is in a single breathe refreshing and nostalgic.
-
NYAFF 2023: EVERYPHONE, EVERYWHERE
The 22nd annual New York Asian Film Festival takes place between July 14 and July 30. For more information, click here.
It’s kind of weird, isn’t it, that movies are so bad with tech stuff?
The list of movies that are embarrassingly unable to grapple with the way the modern world has embraced things like smartphones and social media is… well, almost all of them so far.
And sure, we’ve all heard the complaints about how cell phones have absolutely ruined horror movies and thrillers, and sure, obviously it’s difficult to make the new international pastimes of sliding into DMs and watching cat videos visually appealing from a cinematic standpoint (Look, respect for keeping costs down, but come on, guys…. Screenlife ain’t it). But if your goal as a filmmaker is to try and tell stories about modern life and how it is lived, none of these things are ignorable. So simply put, sooner or later someone is just going to have to sit down and figure this shit out.
So one of the highest compliments I can pay to Everyphone Everywhere is that it’s one of the only movies I’ve ever seen that gets it right. In terms of stakes, in terms of how these technologies bifurcate our lives, in terms of the petty and not so pretty inconveniences they face.
It understands the assignment, and approaches the problems of making this type of film with a playful eye and a proper sense of human-sized scale. And a lot of mentions of WhatsApp.
The film actually had me from its very opening moment, a monologue from one of our main protagonists, Chung Chit (Endy Chow). A graphic designer, he stares down the camera as he sits on a balcony and gives what feels like a very rehearsed speech about his clever entrepreneurial spirit. His backdrop is the city with a brilliant blue sky, an tableau so perfect it almost seems like he’s been photoshopped into a postcard. But, in the first of the gleeful little nudges director Amos Why employs so deftly, first the sky behind him desaturates as he talks, and then his monologue is interrupted by a text from his wife, reminding him that he’s about to be late for the ferry. He grabs the “camera”, which turns out to be his phone, and rushes off. It’s an impish opening salvo in a film that is going to lean very heavy on such clever touches.
Chung Chit is just one of our three protagonists, all of whom are having their own problems. Raymond (Peter Chan), a recently promoted real estate mogul, discovers his phone was hacked while on on his way to visit a woman named Ana (Rosa Maria Velasco). Once he gets confirmation that he’s locked out of his WhatsApp account, he must go about replacing his phone and letting everybody in his contacts list know what happened. He even makes a pit stop to see his boss, as he seems especially concerned about the potential for blackmail.
Ana, meanwhile, has her suspicions confirmed that her husband has been unfaithful, and is forced to confront some aspects of her life that she’d really rather not examine too closely.
We even spend some brief time with the hacker himself (Henick Chau), as he tries to arrange a paid date with a girl over the app, with negotiations breaking down fairly quickly in a very amusing back and forth. In fact, it is in this scene that the visual wit really makes its presence felt, as Why implements a particular bit of scene staging that has definitely been used in trying to visualize text conversations in movies, but with a clever new twist it’s shocking that no one ever tried out before. We’ve seen the bit where people who are texting each other in different locations appear in the same room, as if having a normal in-person conversation. But to my knowledge, no one has ever gone the further step of having the character appear not as themselves, but at they perceive the other to look: to the hacker, the girl resembles a gorgeous model, and to the girl, the hacker resembles a stereotypical chubby, bespectacled nerd, far from the lanky, floppy haired kid he is in real life.
This is a gambit that Why doesn’t go to particularly often in the film, but when he does it always lands, an imaginative and effective way of visually representing the seemingly insurmountable gap between the digital space and actual reality
But of all the extended cast, it’s Chit who has the least dramatic and yet somehow best subplot in the entire film: in his rush to get out the door in the opening scene, he left his phone at home and now must figure out how to get to his appointment without the actual directions.
Readers, this is the most relatable subplot in the history of cinema.
Chit’s comical quest, trying to borrow phones from strangers, or using the internet on a display phone at a wireless store to try and get into his account only to realize he doesn’t remember his password because it’s autofilled on his phone… this, more than any other movie I can think of, really understands the minor inconveniences of modern technology that wind up feeling major because we’ve given so much of our lives over to this stuff.
It’s probably not a surprise to realize that all these things are connected, and in truth some of the weaker parts of the film are the contrivances of some of the connections. But even complaining about that seems churlish, somehow; the movie is so full of charm and playfulness that I was more than willing to forgive it for any minor missteps (and they were mostly minor). Even as the end credits rolled, the cast revealed more playful notes that I had missed, including a cameo by a world famous director that made me do a double take when I read it.
The pleasures of Everyphone Everywhere, in their own way, are relatively simple. But they are also smart and meaningful. Few films could get away with an emotional climax based around messages on a set of 25-year old Nokias… few films would ever think to try. For all its dramatic ambitions, it finds its highest purchase in a cascade of tiny, familiar moments, and that’s a feat well worth recognizing.
-
Criterion Review: AFTER HOURS (1985) [4K-UHD]
![Criterion Review: AFTER HOURS (1985) [4K-UHD]](https://i0.wp.com/cinapse.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Screenshot-2023-07-29-at-12.57.55-PM.png?resize=1140%2C641&ssl=1)
Surrender, Dorothy!
NOTE: All screencaps are from the disc(s) in question with no editing applied, but may have compression or resizing inherent to file formats and WordPress’ image system.
After the powers that be failed to raise funding for his biblical epic The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese teamed up with actor-producer Griffin Dunne and producer Amy Robinson and jumped headfirst into After Hours. It’s a film whose protagonist reflects the powerlessness that Scorsese felt during this fruitless gap between films fresh from The King of Comedy, with his biggest passions snatched away without rhyme or reason. Here, adrift and bored office worker Paul Hackett (Dunne) embarks on a whim of an adventure pursuing the elusive Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) to her apartment in the East Village–where love and plaster-of-Paris bagel paperweights may lie in wait. However, a fatal conclusion to the date strands Paul in the surreal underworld of lower Manhattan–where his every move to try and get home is increasingly foiled by bizarre characters and recurring plot strands that seem to prove that Paul is in a Kafkaesque hell of his own design.
What truly sets After Hours apart in Scorsese’s filmography is how much the film is defined by its whimsically grim sense of humor. Scorsese and screenwriter Joseph Minion perfectly capture the random delirium of Paul’s late-night misadventures, as if each zig-zag in the plot seemed wholly ripped from the emotional pivots of one’s worst nightmares. There’s such a perverse thrill in watching just where Paul’s misery takes him: the slightest of decisions can have life-or-death consequences for this hapless being over the span of mere seconds, let alone minutes or hours. The storyline magically feels both heavily plotted and entirely improvised, diverting into unexpected tangents for much of its refreshingly brief runtime before doubling back on some of its most insane plot points when we–and Paul–least expect it. That, and there’s gasp-inducing cameos by everyone from Cheech and Chong as mistaken burglars to Catherine O’Hara wielding a Mister Softee truck, lending the film a fitting Wizard of Oz-esque quality. While everything from The King of Comedy to Mean Streets to The Wolf of Wall Street injects a key levity amidst their drama After Hours is very much a comedy–albeit injected with equal parts paranoid thriller and surreal horror film.
Plunging headfirst into the chaos of Paul’s night proves to be as cathartic as it is comical. By the point Paul nearly avoids being subjected to trial-by-mohawk at an S&M club or avoids a growing mob of East Villagers convinced he’s the serial burglar they’ve been targeting for weeks–it’s clear that all Paul and his audience can do is surrender to the whims of the world that they’ve been resisting the entirety of the film. Much of After Hours’ production was spent deliberating just how the film should end; many of the film’s creatives and even fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Terry Gilliam chimed with their own surreal ideas on how to cap off Paul’s adventures. It’s fitting that Scorsese’s longtime idol and editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s husband Michael Powell devised that the film should end right where it began–at Paul’s soulless job–giving Scorsese’s outlandish nightmare a deviously ouroboros-like quality. The truth, after all, is that the nightmares of After Hours never really end; like the best of nightmares, Paul’s journey is never explained, never resolved, and never-ending.
A long-awaited Criterion release of an American auteur’s most sought-after cult classics, After Hours returns to shelves to thrill and provoke a new generation of audiences.
Video/Audio
Criterion presents After Hours in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, with a Dolby Vision HDR presentation on the UHD and a 1080p transfer of the same restoration on the accompanying Blu-ray. The restoration is sourced from the film’s 35mm original camera negative, with director Martin Scorsese’s personal 35mm print used as a color reference, and final picture and sound approved by editor Thelma Schoonmaker. The monaural soundtrack was additionally restored from the film’s original magnetic audio track. SDH subtitles are provided solely for the feature film.
After Hours’ deliciously nightmarish qualities are vividly realized in this new restoration, rife with deep, blocking-free shadows, harsh streetlights and interior spotlights, with the occasional flame. The minute grime of Michael Ballhaus’ cinematography and Jeffrey Townsend’s production design only builds as the terror continues, contrasting well with the superficial sheen of Paul’s pristine apartment at the film’s beginning. Sequences in the labyrinthine Soho streets as well as in the climactic Club Berlin are standouts visually, in addition to the lonely homely glow of the bar that Tom and waitress Juliework at, lit by hanging lamps and the radiance of an isolated jukebox.
Criterion has proved to be quite adept at getting as much range out of a monaural track as possible, and After Hours is no exception. It’s a film that relies just as much on the diegetic noise of ringing phones, footsteps, and the clatter of other ephemera as it does on Howard Shore’s ticking, paranoid score. Both elements are effectively utilized in this presentation, each working in tandem to heighten the already surreal world Paul descends into over the course of the film.
Special Features
Like other Criterion 4K releases, all special features are presented on the accompanying Blu-ray Disc. However, the audio commentary is available on both the Blu-ray and the 4K UHD discs.
- Audio Commentary: A 2004 archival commentary featuring director Martin Scorsese, actor Griffin Dunne, producer Amy Robinson, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and Editor Thelma Schoonmaker, with select 2023 updates by Dunne and Robinson recorded by Criterion. Scorsese is open about how After Hours was realized as a placeholder film after his first attempt at Last Temptation of Christ fell through, but eventually grew into a way for Scorsese to return to his roots as a filmmaker. Ballhaus and Scorsese are also candid about the wild experimentation used for some of the film’s shots, notably the near-disastrous usage of bungee cord on a camera that was then dropped above Dunne’s head for a shot that would only last a few frames on-screen.
- Martin Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz: A new 20-minute interview between Scorsese and author/collaborator Lebowitz, featuring their mutual memories of growing up in New York in the 1980s and how those experiences informed the development and filming of After Hours–with lots of fun anecdotes involving the occasional trouble the crew would get in (or avoid) filming on Village streets after dark.
- Filming For Your Life – Making “After Hours:” An 18-minute 2004 archival featurette tracking the development, production, and release of the film, anchored by interviews by Scorsese, Dunne, Robinson, and Schoonmaker. Dunne in particular speaks to his experience as both producer and lead actor of the film, and interesting moments include side-by-side comparisons of the film’s shot list and their final edit in the film. A truly entertaining segment involved the many voices who tried to give After Hours a satisfying ending–only for the film’s savior to be none other than Scorsese’s idol and Schoonmaker’s husband, British director Michael Powell.
- The Look of “After Hours:” A newly-cut 18-minute featurette from Criterion featuring audio interviews with costume designer Rita Rack and production designer Jeffrey Townsend, where they discuss creating the seedy and layered world of After Hours amid film clips, production stills, call sheets, photo inspirations, and other myriad sources.
- Deleted Scenes: Seven deleted scenes totaling around 8 minutes. Picture quality is surprisingly good for cut film from the ‘80s–presented in SD with occasional marks of scratched emulsion or hair in the gate. Most of the scenes are brief extracts or extensions of extant scenes, but feature some of the film’s most memorable characters. Among the inclusions are a new intro to Catherine O’Hara’s Gail, John Heard’s Tom discussing a pivotal suicide note with Paul, another appearance by the beloved Dick Miller, and an incredibly-edited sequence of Paul attempting to stay the night at Tom’s apartment before triggering a strobe light.
- Trailer for After Hours’ theatrical release.
- Booklet featuring an essay by film critic Sheila O’Malley, which examines the wild and surreal underworld Scorsese conjures out of Lower East Side New York, in particular the repetitive and increasingly sinister usage of ordinary objects like clocks and light switches. Also discussed are the influences of fellow artists and directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Franz Kafka on Paul’s increasingly hellish journey of unprovoked misery.
After Hours is now available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray courtesy of The Criterion Collection.
-
FANTASIA 2023: Junta Yamaguchi’s RIVER is a Dreamy Whimsical Delight!
River is the triumphant return of director Junta Yamaguchi, whom most would remember from his previous time twisting sci-fi comedy Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. Here however, instead of a TV that allows those to see two minutes into the future, this time we have the staff and patrons at an inn in the picturesque and quiet Kibune, who are stuck in a two minute time loop. The strange part is while they are always forced to reset to their “initial position”, their consciousness do not. So like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day they are able to build on their experiences allowing those stuck in the loop to learn from each go round and attempt to solve the mystery of just what happened to get them stuck in the first place. The film uses this mystery and its plot device of the loop to tell a bright and whimsical tale about a cast of unlikely protagonists, who by being trapped are finally freed from the monotony of their day to day lives to live their life to the fullest 2 minutes at a time.
Our protagonist here is the charming Mikoto (Riko Fujitani), a server/maid at the inn who gets stuck in a moment of prayer to the Kibune River Gods about her troubled relationship. It’s through her we meet the other staff and eccentric clientele who are also stuck at the inn as she spends her first few loops still trying to do her job so sooth and serve the confused and befuddled customers. Like most Japanese films the extenuating circumstance here is used to break our characters out of their politeness, and let them experience this event authentically without the polite facade enforced by Japanese society. The two minute time limit definitely adds some comedic value, since one couple is eating and one man is in the shower when it started. So effectively they are just stuck endlessly eating and showering. Eventually they have to learn to immediately break, and to meet as a group as they try to solve the mystery.
The film is presented through a dream-like digital haze, coupled with a bright and sparse soundtrack which works more to accentuate the comedy and keep the mood upbeat, even though the film peeks in some dark areas here and there. That said, it’s very much a story of this ensemble of characters who all start the loop in the middle of a moment of uncertainty, whether that be a relationship or a choice. But thanks to the loop they are given the gift of time and experience to sift through that and explore their options to hopefully come out a better person. While Mikoto and her boyfriend take the lion share of the runtime, an eccentric writer Obata (Yoshimasa Kondô) on a time crunch to finish a serial novel consistently steals the show, pushing the scenario with his stress induced thoughts of death and destruction. It’s fun mix that is populated with a cast of actors who all do their best to make their moments shine.
Thankfully the film’s gimmick never gets in the way of the film’s message – that no matter how hectic life may be, you should always take time out for those precious to you. Even two minutes as we see here, can make a world of difference! It’s that cheerful and wholesome “can do!” attitude that Yamaguchi applies to his approach to his story and characters, who are then tasked to utilize their time in the loop to not only break the cycle, but better themselves. Of course there are a few bumps along the way, and the film has to cycle through the requisite emotional beats, since there’s understandably some fear and panic to be involved being stuck in a never ending loop. But eventually the film finds its stride becoming a shot of serotonin that’s a whimsical delight that is thoughtful as it is clever.
-
FANTASIA 2023: A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE Bestows Context and Clarity onto the STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL
Fandom docs are a dime a dozen these days, and it really takes something really special to break out from the pack. Jeremy Coon and Steve Kozak managed to do just that with A Disturbance in the Force, their deep dive into one of the most infamous pieces of mainstream “lost” media The Star Wars Holiday Special, which just screened at Fantasia. The variety special made in an era pre-internet and home video, was meant to bridge the gap between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and sell the toys that were finally hitting shelves in time for Christmas. The special only aired only once on November 17th, 1978 and seemingly vanished, that is until the internet made it readily available on nearly any streaming service it could be posted. With Star Wars now a constant in the pop culture zeitgeist, Disturbance does a great job at not only giving context to the failed experiment, but also showing how a litany of factors might have contributed to it being as terrible as it is.
Presented to those who tuned in that fateful night as “a sequel – of sorts, to Star Wars” (TV Guide), the filmmakers dig deep, providing interviews with nearly everyone who had some kind of influence over the production to uncover just what happened, and help it make sense to audiences today. For those that have never gazed into the abyss that is the Star Wars: Holiday Special it follows Chewbacca and Han Solo as they attempt to return the Wookiee to his home world of Kashyyyk for Life Day, which is essentially Wookiee Christmas. What made this completely insane by today’s standards is the ENTIRE cast of the original film returned for this TV special, that featured not only such strange casting choices as Beatrice Arthur, Art Carney and Jefferson Starship, but it also featured the first on screen appearance of a bounty hunter named Boba Fett.
While the easy route would have been to simply skewer the special for cheap laughs. Disturbance instead takes the high road doing a fantastic job at first giving the viewer a foundational knowledge of 70s musical variety shows and the power players behind them. It does this so we can properly appreciate the variety show as a genre of its own and how they played into the different family demographics. From there the film begins to chronicle the troubled production with the Special’s writers and director(s) who are quick to point out Lucas had much more of a creative hand in it than he would have liked us to believe. While the filmmakers slowly build to the airing of the special, the interviews with cast and crew are strategically interspersed with a pop culture peanut gallery of celebrity Star Wars fans to color how this is perceived by fans today.
My only gripe would be that the doc is primarily forced to lean on archival interviews with the core cast and crew (Hamill, Ford, Fisher, Mayhew and Davids) for their reflections. Thankfully there’s been enough journalists to bring it up over the years much to their visible dismay, that the filmmakers were able to cull what feels like a balanced perspective from the cast and even Lucas himself. It’s that balance that the filmmakers hit perfectly as they build to the show’s premiere and ultimately the lackluster product. Part of what makes this so fascinating is just how in an age where Star Wars is such a controlled and canonized thing, that they could make Bea Arthur the manager of the cantina or base an entire musical segment around Wookiee VR porn.
Overall the trajectory of the narrative was surprisingly engaging and informative with the filmmakers doing an excellent job at making the audience laugh, while satisfying the superfans like myself with their constant search for answers. While A Disturbance In The Force FEELS like something that would be on Disney+ the fact that its narrative leads to the conclusion that Lucas might himself have ultimately been responsible for this train wreck, may be a bit too honest for Lucasfilm right now. That being said, A Disturbance In The Force is a comprehensive and hilarious document that’s a must see for all Star Wars fans – those have seen The Holiday Special and those who have tried to sit through it.
-
AFIRE: On Climate Change and Self-Absorption
(L to R): Schubert, Beer, Uibel and Trebs in Afire. Filmmaker Christian Petzold (Phoenix, Barbara) re-teams with actress Paula Beer from 2020’s Undine in his latest drama, Afire. As in the mermaid tale, the German director infuses his new work – on its face, a story about a grumpy writer on a retreat with his friend, underneath, a haunting allegory about climate change and humanity’s refusal to adequately address it – with a certain magic.
Author Leon (Thomas Schubert, King of Stonks) accompanies his friend Felix (Langston Uibel, Unorthodox) to a secluded cottage built by Felix’s dad. Leon’s hopes for a quiet retreat are interrupted by another occupant of the house, Nadja (Beer). Easygoing Felix and friendly Nadja encourage Leon to take a breather from his work, but he scorns them both. (Honestly, Leon is such a snobby asshole, I couldn’t understand why a sweet soul like Felix would be friends with him in the first place.)
Leon is our antihero, a man who prefers to observe instead of doing something. He creeps on Nadja and reads her journal, an obsession with her beginning to grow. He rudely interrogates dinner guest Devid (Enno Trebs, The White Ribbon) in one cringeworthy scene. His self-absorption knows no bounds.
There’s a point in the film where I began to wonder if Nadja wears the same red dress all the time to illustrate how Leon doesn’t truly see her. He is infatuated with the woman he assumes her to be, making little effort to get to know the person she is. Leon is hesitant to acknowledge or encourage Felix’s talent; it seems he barely knows this friend at all. In Leon’s mind, everything is about him. He is literally the main character in his own story, even in situations where he should play (and be) supporting.
Paula Beer in Afire. During their stay, forest fires edge ever closer to their area. The tenants assume they’re okay because of the winds from the nearby sea. Fire is a magical, yet destructive element here; there’s a beauty and a horror to the fire imagery shown. The ashes blowing into the guest’s yard are a symbol of impending doom.
While not as comedic as another European climate change feature, Woman at War, Afire is similar in its subtle message delivery to film-goers. What could be yet another feature film about a white male who thinks too much of himself instead delves hidden depths in the hands of this writer and director. Will we be like Leon and remain stuck in our own minds, ignoring the lives of those around us? With Afire, Petzold challenges the viewer to observe and take action.
Afire opens this weekend at AFS Cinema in Austin.
-
NYAFF 2023: KITTY THE KILLER
The 22nd annual New York Asian Film Festival takes places between July 14 and July 30. For more information, click here.
There was a moment, right at the very beginning of Kitty The Killer, that was almost intriguing in its Off-The-Rack nature. A man we don’t know yet gets a phone call warning him that a man named Wong (Pat Chatburirak) has procured something called the Black Box and is selling it to the Japanese, which is a betrayal of The Agency. The man, who we learn is called Grey Fox (Tao Somchai Khemklad), calls Wong for a bit of predator-prey banter and director Lee Thongkham lets the whole thing basically plays itself out in roughly two or three minutes of decidedly ‘been there, done that’ screentime.
And with that, I got a tiny interior frisson of cautious optimism.
Because that’s the not-so-dirty, not entirely secret dirty little secret behind the action genre: plot is really more of a necessary evil than anything; in a sense, it can actually be the thing that gets in the way of what we came there to see. Indeed, one of the nicest things about the action as a genre is that it’s a genre that allows for a hell of a lot of leeway.
If comedy doesn’t make you laugh, it is functionally worthless. If horror movies don’t give you at least some kind of visceral kick, they’re beneath contempt. If science fiction fails to bring a certain amount of spectacle or invention to the table,
When you get right down to it, action is the only genre that can get by on style and/or attitude alone.
So where for most films, such unoriginality could be ruinous, an action film is this upfront with its exposition, and so Book Basic in its details, the possibility exists that the filmmakers see the story details as the hindrance they so often are, and instead of wasting our time pretending that it’s actually important or innovative, put their energies towards getting all that stuff out of the way in as quick and efficient a manner as possible as to better concentrate on the most important thing for audiences: the cathartic mayhem of dudes getting the shit kicked out of them.
Ultimately, the film will turn out to be a bit… plottier in its plotting and rather weirder around the edges, but hey… that can work, too.
Grey Fox sends his number one killer Dina (Ploypailin Thangprapaporn) to take out Wong and retrieve the Black Box. After a stylish showdown, Dina retrieves the box, but Wong manages to escape. He goes to the lovely, purple haired Ms. Violet (Janie Ratipan Panpinij, labeled as “coordinator under The Agency” in a chyron, always a helpful touch for audience and note taking film critic alike), insisting that something be done, lest the Japanese wing of The Agency be force to go to way with the Malaysian wing. Violet sends her number one killer, Nina The Faceless (who, spoiler alert, actually has a face, and a cool mask to cover it) to take out Grey Fox and get the box back. As you do.
There is another showdown, a bloody daylight back alley brawl, wherein Dina arrives to save her guardian but can’t quite hack it, and it seems like the course is set: Dina will go on a roaring rampage of retribution, taking on the entire Agency to attain justice for the loss of Grey Fox.
But that’s when things go… in a decidedly different direction.
In an absolute left field turn in terms of tone, we are introduced to Charlie (Denkhun Ngamnet), an ambitious young executive whose narration about hard work and self-improvement do little to paper over the fact he is a total bumbler and an absolute goof.
Just as we’re wondering why we’re following this yutz around, Charlie stumbles right into Gray Fox, who is temporarily less dead than you’d expect from previous events. He tasks Charlie with rescuing Dina from The Agency and, to ensure compliance, puts a hit out on Charlie’s family if he refuses.
Pretty good motivation, all things considered.
The movie twists and turns from there, but eventually settles into something of a brain damaged cross between Wanted, Kick-Ass and John Wick, which I mean as a compliment. Charlie agrees to become the new Grey Fox and undergoes rigorous training at the hands of the all-female Kitty Killer Squad.
Now, I can’t tell if it’s an intentional joke that he’s undergoing the exact sort of ‘tear you down and build you back up again’.sort of program that we’ve come to know and love from every assassin movie ever in order to become… the guy who sends them on missions. But it amused me either way.
(SIDENOTE: There are flashbacks to the origins of the members of the Kitty Killer squad, and they make use of a trend in these types of movies where as part of their conditioning, the trainees are forced to kill an adorable animal they’ve been taking care of, in order to prove they can be ruthless. I very much appreciate this, because it;s like the opposite of William Goldmans’ advice: Now we kill the cat!)
Kitty The Killer goes heavy on the mythology and the comic book style world building, only instead of a Keanu Reeves or a James McAvoy, we have more of a Thai Kevin Hart. And it’s a shift that takes a bit of time to adjust to; the first act is hardly serious business, but it’s operating in more of a winking, smart-assed sort of way. But when Ngamnet comes in with his flailing limbs and maniacal laughter (seriously, if they’re hiring a new Joker, he’s at least earned an audition), things start trending more than a little slapstick-y.
Luckily, as these things go it’s actually a good comic performance. Anybody who’s seen their share of Thai action movies knows that tonal mismatches can be pare for the course, graphic violence mixing with comedy so broad that even Hong Kong movies would ask them to take it down a notch. But Ngamnet tempers his performance so, while it can get very silly at times, never does so at the expense of the dramatic beats. In fact, arguably his loosey goosey charm keeps you from asking a lot of questions about The Agency’s hiring policies, because it’s probably best we don’t linger on the implications of an organization that exclusively recruits underage female assassins that all dress like schoolgirls.
Plus, for what its worth he’s the only person with an insane action hero body who actually acknowledges that he has an insane action hero body; his preening, posing, and inability to stop feeling his own pecs during his shirtless scenes is a bit that, for me at least, never got old.
At the end of the day there really isn’t that much in Kitty The Killer that die hard action fans haven’t seen before; it is a movie that was written by four writers, and it is a movie that definitely feels like it was written by four writers. But I continue to insist that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, and in this case, I don’t think it is. The fight choreography by Sumret Mueangputt is good but not spectacular, and there’s a welcome amount of gore (including a blink-and-you-miss-it decapitation, my second favorite kind of decapitation). And they even throw in the occasional animated shot during the fights, a stylistic choice which is always appreciated. A post-credit scene indicates they’re thinking franchise, and I’m not quite sure if there’s enough meat on the bone for all that. But as a singular experience, you could certainly do much, much worse.
Incidentally… absolute earworm of a theme song this film has, been stuck in my head for days. Seriously, I think I need to call one of those doctors that drills a hole in your brain…
-
NYAFF 2023: GEYLANG
The 22nd annual New York Asian Film Festival takes place between July 14 and July 30. For more information, click here.
Ohhh, boy, what a ruthlessly executed little rat trap of a movie this turned out to be!
In his sophomore feature Geylang, director Boi Kwong have put together that rarest of things, a modern noir that keeps its style, character, plot, and thrill in perfect balance. It Shorn of self-congratulation, self-indulgence, or ideas above its station, it knows exactly the vicious appeal at the heart of noir: it’s fun watching losers lose, but only when they choose to lose.
There has been a murderin Geylang, a small neighborhood in Singapore which is presumably nowhere near as festering and depraved as the movie makes it out to be. As one might expect, the how and why of what happened to the late, barely lamented streetwalker Zhang Xiao Ling is a mystery to only be uncovered in the fullness of time. But as one might also expect, is that none of the people we’re about to meet seem particularly invested in getting to the bottom of things; they’ve all got rather a lot going on.
Chief among them is Fatty (Mark Lee), a decidedly non-chunky pimp with the kind of embarrassing long, stringy hair that does more to explain his character than ten pages of backstory could ever do. When not running girls out of the Cherry Affairs Sex Shop, he lives with his dementia suffering dad (a scene stealing Woon Sang Tau) and racks up debts he can’t afford to repay. When a collector drops by unannounced to have a decidedly unfriendly discussion about it, things very quickly spiral out of control in a reassuringly predictable manner.
And then there’s Dr. Sun (Shane Mardjuki), a twitchy first time visitor to Cherry Affairs, who requests the services of one Shangri-La (Lin Ying Wei), an assignation that turns out to be something less than a match made in Heaven.
Lastly, there’s Celine (Sheila Sim), a woman who has appointed herself guardian of the streets; her Project Angel acta as a resource to help and protect sex workers. Good for the streets, but in the opinion of her ambitious politician partner Edwin (Eric Gwee Ying Kiat), bad optics. He’s running on a ‘clean up the city’ platform, and in his mind having a mate who associates with streetwalkers is undermining his messaging. But Celine has her own goals, and no intentions of just rolling over for anyone.
Those are our four main players, the pinballs that spend one long night bouncing off one another in increasingly twisted circumstances, and to say much more than that would be a disservice to the perfectly calibrated chaos engine that Kwong and his screenwriter Link Sng have set up here. With it’s chronologically skewed narrative drive, it’s the exact type of thriller that’s very easy to get painfully wrong. But the way information is revealed is peerless. The film bounces back in time to fill in the gaps and reveal hidden connections, just as these sorts of thrillers always do. But unlike most other attempts, which all too frequently spin their wheels trying to hold off explaining anything in an attempt to prolong the suspense, in Geylang you learn exactly what you need to know roughly ten seconds after you realize you didn’t know it, and they never linger in the past when there’s so much present to be dealt with.
It’s 100% forward momentum, and the sense of relentlessness is intoxicating.
So the structure is airtight, but without decent characters and performers, the film would still be nothing but an empty wind-up toy. And this is where the film reaches that next level; almost nobody here could be considered ‘good’ in the conventional sense, but as they say, “everyone has his reasons”, and so it is here. Sometimes those reasons are as simple as ‘greed’, but it’s hard times in Geylang, and the sense of desperation that everyone is laboring under makes for a series of all-too-understandable terrible decisions on the part of every last person here.
As the most outwardly unsympathetic character, Mark Lee probably gets the most screentime, and he infuses his character with a snarky wit and an an aura of scuzzball resourcefulness that makes you sympathize with him, even as he’s arguably the most faithless person in the whole roster.
Granted, his exasperated but still fairly loving relationship with his dad does serve to soften him. But only a little.
He’s matched blow-for-blow by both Sim and Wei as Celine and Shangri-La. At first, Celine seems like the most obviously principled, but this is the sort of film where it’s only a matter of time before the cracks start to show, and Sim really nails the transition from steely to anguished. And as a character who in many ways gets the worst of it, proves steely in an entirely different way; by the very virtue of her subplot, she has to spend most of her time at an 11, and she continually finds new ways to embody a cockroach-like survival instinct. Mardjuki as Sun has a bit less to do, but his twitchy, sweaty performance linger even when he’s off screen. Plus, there was a moment towards the end with his character, a flawlessly timed Frying Pan/Fire moment, that made me absolutely cackle with glee.
I mean, I actually cackled a lot at Geylang. Noir is pretty much my favorite genre, and when something is your favorite genre, you tend to grade on a curve. So it’s nice when that’s not even remotely necessary. If you have a black heart and love watching people land in shit and choosing to dig, I cannot recommend this one highly enough.
