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Mood:
Very good
Outlook:
Opportunistic |
| Listening
to: Club 8
Last TV watched: Carnivale
Last film watched:"Kill Bill"
Last book read:"Roman Warfare"
Last magazine read:New Scientist
Last comic read: Marvel Boy
Currently playing: Call of Duty:
Dawnville Demo
I want to see: The Return of the
King
Forums I visit:
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Up
one level
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Picture Will Smith |
WILD
CARD - a mostly by the numbers detective
procedural thriller from Korea. Watching Wild Card
one could easily squint a bit and imagine any number
of Hollywood stars in the same roles reset in an American
city. That said, this story of a squad of detectives
chasing after a gang of thugs who are murdering their
way through Seoul during the 90s is enjoyable formula.
It has cops running endlessly after thieves. It has
the intersquad conflicts. It has the sweet romance on
the side. It has the veteran cop - younger reckless
cop pairing. For Korean flavour it has a healthy amount
of casual police brutality. Every other scene has suspects
being punched, tweaked, slapped or coerced into coughing
up information. Despite this, Wild Card is
funny entertainment in the same vein as a Will Smith
vehicle if Will Smith were ever to go to Korea, stake
out karaoke joints, eat bulgogi and use tae kwon do
to subdue punks. The people who made this have made
a traditional Hollywood cop film in every respect (with
a slight nod to Fritz Lang's "M" in a subplot
that has the local 'good guy' pickpockets joining the
search for the brutal murderers). |
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Recovering...
I sipped enough tea and hot cider to
get me through at least one movie yesterday. I did see
Wild Card (review tomorrow) and so got at least
90 minutes of entertainment in an otherwise sleepy-sicky
day. Later last night I downed a cup of Neo-citran and
went to sleep early. Today, I plan to see the Iranian-Jewish
love story Abjad and a second Iranian film
Deep Breath.
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Career making performance |
A
BIG GIRL LIKE YOU (Une grande fille comme toi)
- A cautionary story about how an empetuous young girl
from the country learns how the toils of life are necessary.
A Big Girl Like You is mostly like Truffaut
light but is buoyed by the tremendous performance of
lead actress. Mercedes Cecchetto debuts as a teenage
girl in a vocational school for cuisine. She's mouthy
and petulent, pissing off her teachers and her parents.
Not only just chafing with the drudgery of serving in
the school restaurant, she is going out of her mind
with work in general. After a final tantrum gets her
expelled from school, she somehow convinces her parents
to send her to Paris where she hopes to pursue a career
as "either a model or a photographer", unmindful
of the odds against her. Once in Paris, she seems instantly
thrown into the adult world with its pitfalls and risks,
where every shortcut to success becomes a dangerous
complication. The story itself feels like a modern version
of a Truffaut coming of age film and not as meaningful
by half. The real revelation is in the tremendous performance
of Cecchetto who manages to make such an unlikable brat
of a heroine into someone you might be willing to root
for. The redemption is predictable but watching Cecchetto
makes it worth staying to the end.
POWER
TRIP - An energetic and bittersweet documentary
about what happened when an American power company
took over the dilapidated distribution and generation
system of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Director
Paul Devlin has fashioned an amusing story of the
several years AES Corporation tried to modernize the
power system in Tblisi, battling attitudes of Soviet-era
entitlement, violent dissatisfaction of the Georgian
public and outright theft from corrupt authorities
and their elites. Like all good stories Power
Trip has a host of interesting characters, the
most interesting of whom is the hippyish manager Piers
Lewis, a 'citizen of the world' who is one of the
few AES executives who bothers to learn Georgian and
looks to have gone native. Through Devlin's lens,
Georgia is shown to be a robust, rich culture somewhat
befuddled by the sudden descent into capitalism and
still struggling to free itself from the robber-class
represented by President Edvard Sheverdanze (former
foreign minister of Mikhail Gorbachev). Although tackling
serious issues (the severe unemployment, thuggish
politics and urban despair of the people), Power
Trip is funny, especially in the fish out of
water experiences of the foreign workers which leads
to a surreal episode where the CEO of AES tries to
explain to a crowd of angry customers why one of the
mottos of the corporation is "to have fun".
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Theatre sickness
Today I am so sick as to become
nonfunctional. I am debating going out to the last showing
of the Korean cop thriller "Wild Card" but don't know
if the antihistamines in my system will remove all pleasure
from the experience. I've noticed for some reason that
all colours seem a bit drab to me right now. I most
probably got this from the many other people wheezing
away at VIFF screenings.
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Bang bang Miike
twists the Yakuza movie once again |
GOZU
- Quickly becoming a film festival favourite, Japanese
bad boy director Takashi Miike's contribution is another
weird and wonderful package designed to shock and throw
you into fits of laughter. As with almost all of his
films, Gozu is markedly uneven, evoking little more
than a shrug for long stretches, and then suddenly picking
you out of your chair with a zinger that has you talking
all the rest of the way home.
Gozu starts with one of these zingers. At a meeting
for a Yakuza crew, the second-in-command gangster
Ozaki becomes unhinged, imagining that a little lap
dog is a 'yakuza attack dog'. He disposes of it in
hilarious fashion to the shock of the others. Determining
that Ozaki is best taken to 'the Yakuza dump' (i.e.
killed) in Nagoya, the boss assigns the job to the
youngest member, Minami. But along the way the young
Yakuza has his doubts due to earlier allegiances but
manages to kill Ozaki by accident. Or did he? Arriving
in Nagoya, Minami leaves the body in his car but,
on returning, finds the body gone.
This begins a bit of a Ulysses tale as the young
gangster searches high and low for the missing man
in a journey that gets weirder and weirder. Along
the way he'll stay at a hotel where the hostess is
always lactating; he'll receive help from another
Yakuza group who are based in a junkyard and he'll
meet a creature with the head of a cow (a minotaur?).
People in the audience will be going "what the
fuck?" every few minutes.
If the movie was just the weird stuff that goes on
in Nagoya Gozu would be an odd, odd movie. But Miike
leaves the brauvura moment to the end. All I can say
about it is that it has an outrageous physical stunt
that goes on and on. Whatever you can say about Miike,
he knows how to push an audience to its limits. Recommended
if you can hold on until the last ten minutes.
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Expect to see lots
of things explode |
THE
RESURRECTION OF THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL
- This Korean science fiction actioner was presented
as one which wasn't given a chance to meet western
audiences halfway. Apparently the first time it was
released its subtitles were so bad that there wasn't
a clear idea what the plot was. Actually, that may
have been half the problem. This extremely choppy
film is just a poor construct and stop me if this
story sounds familiar. A disconsolate youth seeks
to break into the high stakes world of professional
computer gaming (don't laugh, in Korea this is actually
the case) but finds out the game he signed up for
is more reality than fantasy. The game he's signed
up for involves each competitor trying to prevent
a little match girl (yes, the one from the children's
story) from being raped by anyone else or strangely
from saving herself by selling butane lighters to
get money. The object is to get her to fall in love
with you before she freezes and/or starves to death.
Anyway, this is an excuse for a lot of gunfights,
car and bike chases, kicking and exploding. There's
some VR BS, unfettered visual effects and no real
point. The only clever bit is that characters are
introduced using RPG-style graphics.
SAVE
THE GREEN PLANET - This bizarre Korean
film seeks and for the most part succeeds in entertaining
people from opposite genres though keeping a certain
manic tenor throughout. It's like a Juenet et Caro
film, with lots of gore. A corrupt businessman (are
there any other kinds in Korean film?) is kidnapped
by an insane man and his slightly corpulent girlfriend,
both of whom seem convinced that the businessman is
an alien from Andromeda. Taking him back to a remote
province, the two begin a program of torture to get
the 'alien' to reveal his plans for the human race.
It turns out that the businessman is the son of a
police chief, leading to a Silence of the Lambs investigation.
I don't know how funny it was supposed to be but it
was a bomb in South Korea (hence, ripe for North American
festivals?). It could be because it's just not that
funny. I'm not one to refuse a laugh just because
there is a leg about to be cut off on film but most
of the humour is physical. With that being the case,
Save the Green Planet became a bit tiring and trashy.
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THE
FOG OF WAR: ELEVEN LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF ROBERT S.
McNAMARA - If there are confirmed stars
of the Vancouver International Film Festival director
Errol Morris is one of them. From The Thin Blue
Line to A Brief History of Time, Morris
has a confirmed reputation as a master documentarian
that draws lineups around the block; with this year
no different.
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The grandfatherly
McNamara |
The Fog of War comes at a time when people
around the world are airing their doubts about military
decisions made by leadership. In the U.S. secretary
of defense Donald Rumsfeld's bluster and unvarying
hardline provides much of the spine for America's
two wars since the inaugaration of President Bush.
His counterpart during the Vietnam War and the near
hot war of the Cuban Missile Crisis was someone even
more derided by the anti-war movement, Robert S. McNamara.
In The Fog of War, Errol Morris turns his
famous interrotron system (a camera and mirror device
that projects his face over the lens of his camera
so that the subject speaks naturally into the lens)
on a still vibrant McNamara in his 70s who turns out
to be a thoughtful and deeply introspective subject.
The 'eleven lessons' of the title speak to McNamara's
willingness to derive something useful from his experiences
and actions during those times. What results is something
all leaders may want to approach nearing the end of
their thoughtul days, a chance to revisit, debrief
and possibly even second guess. Errol Morris' decidedly
light touch is probably not hard hitting enough for
those who lived through and opposed McNamara's actions.
What Morris has done is give McNamara a chance to
sit back and approach regret. But McNamara is not
regretful, rather, the one large lesson most will
glean from the filtered results of 20 hours of interviewing
is that leaders, even the leadership of the most powerful
nation on the earth, do not have the best information
available and act as capricious, tentative, bold,
and conflicted human beings.
As a presentation, Errol Morris' now famous subtle
camera moves on the subject's face give the audience
time to ponder the subject's face. McNamara's now
grandfatherly figure is contrasted with his boy-wonder
image during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
Morris will sometimes linger on McNamara's face long
after he has finished an answer. In this film Morris
uses less of the special effects and recreation that
he has been criticized for in the past; devices which
are now standard tools in documentaries.
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