Quoting
from “As You Like It” by the great playwright
William Shakespeare: “All the world’s
a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”
For two weeks this April, this stage will be set
in Singapore where the best films around the world
come together in the 20th International Singapore
Film Festival.
Showcasing a diverse range of over 300 films from
40 countries, expect to be enthralled by the wonders
of world cinema – right here in Singapore....
If
you didn’t already know that coffee is big
business, then Nick and Mark Francis’s documentary
should hammer that fact in. “Black Gold”
could have quite easily become another impassioned
and reckless rail against globalisation but you
get the sense that the brothers kept their eyes
on the numbers, and directed from their head and
not their hearts. Therein lies the film’s
main problem – facts are boring. It’s
neither harrowing nor heartfelt. The documentary
is bluntly informative of the disparate levels in
income of the Ethiopian farmers and the corporations
that buy the beans from them on the cheap, and it’s
quite competent in enlightening consumers of the
buried cost of a $5 latte. And on that level, it
succeeds. Somewhat admirably, they lionise the Ethiopian
people, both the underpaid farmers and the ones
who refuse to partake in the hopeless work. But
you can also observe that the Francis brothers were
hoping for something more from their primary subject,
Tadesse Meskela, a high-level representative from
the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union. The
directors do place him on a pedestal for most of
the film, even to the extent of including an embarrassingly
effusive interview from Meskela’s wife as
the man proudly looks on.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
3 out of 5
Metal:
A Headbanger’s Journey
A
documentary that wears its heart on its sleeves
is often a documentary that keeps its eyes on the
prize. And just days after viewing the disappointingly
cursory “American Hardcore”, “Metal:
A Headbanger’s Journey” throws down
a challenge in its first scenes when a frazzled
youth with a microphone makes sure to add that “punk…does
not belong in this world”. Canadian metalhead
cum anthropologist, Sam Dunn heads off on a personal
odyssey to the United States, Germany, the UK and
Norway to interview metal’s luminaries and
academics with two purposes in mind – to find
out why metal has been so maligned and to gauge
the obsession it inspires throughout its legion.
Dunn angles a new perspective on its self-aware,
perceptible fanbase and bands by personalising his
journey in a formalised, but never didactic way,
of approaching his subjects and interviewees as
kindred spirits. He features erudite interviews
with the subculture’s leading and most influential
personalities and accomplishes his first goal by
juxtaposing their reasoned, informed views on metal
with the irrational fear that advocacy groups have
waged battles over. But in one of the film’s
most harrowing interview sequences, he also concedes
that there are some bands that take the transgressive
state of their cults of personality too far. Dunn’s
academic background allows him certain legitimacy
and the documentary does try to counter the stigma
of a pedagogic structure by employing some innovative
and accessible use of the documentary within a documentary
footage, accentuating Dunn’s individual venture
into his lifelong fascination.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
4 out of 5
His
Big White Self
Nick
Broomfield has an uncanny ability to unlock his
subject’s thoughts with key sequences of visual
observations that without context might seem unremarkable.
The maverick director follows up “The Leader,
His Driver and the Driver’s Wife” with
“His Big White Self”, a sequel of sorts
that catches up with the titular trio of his career
defining 1991 documentary that started off as an
exploration of apartheid reign in South Africa that
developed into a ghastly portrayal of a Nazi propaganda
progeny (The Leader, Eugene Terre’Blanche)
who rose swiftly and bloodily to power, and the
lives of two close followers in JP (his driver)
and Anita (his driver’s wife). 15 years later
and the portraits change somewhat, with the trio
now broken up. But the creepiness of the country’s
still prevalent white power ideology and the willingness
to martyr one’s self for that belief remains.
The only closure Broomfield gets from his rollicking
by the intimidating Terre’Blanche all those
years ago, is by tearing a page from Michael Moore’s
“Bowling for Columbine” playbook and
conniving his way back into the Leader’s household.
And the only closure that we get to the hauntingly
glazed over Anita of yesteryear is her transformed
credo of believing integration is now the way forward,
all subtly hitting home in the final scenes.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
4 out of 5
Aachi
& Ssipak
For
what it’s worth, “Aachi & Ssipak”
represents a stylistic and technical milestone for
Korean animation. Now, even if it might not be good
or enjoyable, it does manage to drop jaws in the
sequences that do work. Quite obviously inspired
by the glut of web animation on the Internet, the
film twines absurdity, political lampoons and sexuality
into an incoherent mess that’s just much too
energetic and maniacal to take your eyes off. In
his simplest form, it’s about a ragtag crew
of criminal elements caught in the middle of a war
between the city’s Big Sister government and
a terrorist group called the Diaper Gang. The prize,
ultimately, being the proliferation of an addictive
candy delivered in phallic-like packaging called
a Juicy Bar. In an animation so concerned with faecal
matter and the anus, there’s not much subtext
to be gleaned from its fascination with derrieres
other than its producer’s willingly gleeful
lapses into iniquity
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
3 out of 5
Suburban
Mayhem
Paul
Goldman and Alice Bell’s mockumentary “Suburban
Mayhem” starts off with some measure of interest
in its subjects’ state of arrested development,
but manages to fracture its focus into different
pieces before it’s through. The Aussie production
does allude to its working class suburb’s
enfant terrible syndrome, channeling the seminal
“Romper Stomper” well enough by juggling
murder, delinquency and a hefty pacing of sex, drugs
and roll ‘n’ roll. However, setting
the stage just doesn’t cut it when the noxious
characters woefully expose its wafer-thin plotting.
Goldman’s self-satisfied intentions are made
clear enough and tacky dinner-table transgressions
aside; the film’s black comedy routine is
merely discernable at best but it’s just not
particularly biting or droll. Katrina (Emily Barclay),
its patricidal, chain-smoking femme fatale shoulders
the film’s best scenes despite the young character’s
tendency to regress into a badge for its director
to smugly flash about as the latest and loudest
provocateur of Australia’s idyllic suburbia
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
3 out of 5
Candy
Apparently
drug addiction is a bad thing. But it’s especially
disastrous if it concerns two good-looking people
in love. If its smack-in-the-head simplicity is
just mind-bogglingly obvious, then “Candy”
might just be a film made for its triumvirate of
prominent Australian actors more than its audience.
As such, its spurious cautionary tale is a rather
lightweight affair, propped up with heavyweight
performances by Abbie Cornish in the titular role
and Heath Ledger, playing Candy’s doped up
paramour, Dan. Far from approaching the borders
of distasteful effectiveness, the fiendishly charming
Geoffrey Rush rounds off the performers’ vanity
project as a father figure consort to the couple
and their romanticised spiral into unrelenting sequences
of degradation. The three-act structure is ominously,
and quite presumptuously baptised with grandiose
titles of Heaven, Earth and Hell. Nowhere approaching
the gravitas that its intertitles signify, the only
indication that it affords is the script’s
predilection for presenting dubious and superficial
melodrama that rides on the coattails of its performances.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
2½ out of 5
Ten
Canoes
Australia’s
2007 Oscar entry is a wry gem of a film that translates
our contemporary values schema into a morality play
set a thousand years ago in an indigenous tribe
settlement somewhere near the Arafura Swamp in Australia’s
Northern Territory. Iconic Aborigine actor David
Gulpilil (of “Walkabout” and “The
Last Wave” fame) eloquently and drolly orates
the film’s triple narrative of native Australian
lore that concerns itself with coveting, revenge,
sorcery and even a dash of penis envy. Remarkable
in its scope and mesmerising in its photography,
director Rolf de Heer’s idiosyncratic fascination
with the interaction of human nature against nature
is condensed into a simple but effective lesson
of history repeating itself. Possibly venturing
to rail against critics of the noble savagery belonging
to the Aborigines, “Ten Canoes” allow
us the positive enlightenment that comes from observing
a different and alien culture operate on levels
familiar to us.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
4 out of 5
Like
A Virgin
A
pleasingly pudgy transgendered teen becomes a wrestling
wunderkind in order to secure the hefty prize money
for his sex change operation in the directorial
debut of acclaimed scriptwriters, Lee Hae-yeong
and Lee Hae-jun. It’s no wonder then, that
added tender loving care was given to its colourful
cadre of carefully drawn characters that elevates
it from being just another brave little film that’s
centred around an ideal. Besides having the benefit
of seminating from proven pedigree, “Like
A Virgin” manages that rare distinction of
actually being quite amusing despite succumbing
to that very Korean Achilles' heel of parental melodrama.
The truest moments of pleasure primarily stems from
its protagonist, Oh Dong-gu’s (Ryu Deok-hwan)
absurd responses to his chauvinistic reality, and
his flights of fancy involving an attractive teacher.
For the most part, the film does approach society
without preconceptions allowing itself a fair bit
of leeway for fluff and fantasy. There’s a
sense that its secondary characters become too much
of a handful when there’s a discernable, almost
portentous shift in tone whenever Dong-gu’s
miserable louse of a father shows up, upsetting
the thoughtful equilibrium of its comedy that does
occasionally become reminiscent of Masayuki Suo’s
“Sumo Do, Sumo Don't”.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
3½ out of 5
Bloody
Tie
Cleaving
closely to the contours shaped by De Palma, Scorcese
and Mann, “Bloody Tie” operates on a
level rarely seen in Korean cinema. It transposes
old-school Western ideals to the sinful port city
of Busan and essentially becomes a hodgepodge of
the gritty American crime potboilers replete with
corruption in the ranks, perversely bankrupt codes
of honour and lots of drug-fuelled thrusts into
viciously muscular confrontations. Developing upon
the similar tropes of buddy movies such as “48
Hrs.” sans the forced male bonding, it pairs
up two reprobates at opposite ends of the law who
approach their line of work in the same, unconscionable
way. Conducting itself with a bit of frantic, icily
droll dick-swagger, the film still dares to stare
deeper into the abyss than its thematic peers. Tunnelling
under the shiny pastel surface of its pulsating
city lights, a darkly poetic significance filters
through the slithering hand-held camerawork, revealing
the tenebrous tongue shared between its agents.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
4 out of 5
Ad
Lib Night
What
“Ad Lib Night” accomplishes in its simplicity
is nothing short of exceptional. The delicate minimalism
employed in Lee Yoon-ki’s third feature is
tremendously absorbing and is just handled with
immense grace. The stealthily devastating isolation
of big city living is evoked by a mysterious doppelganger’s
acceptance to stand beside a dying man in proxy
of his runaway daughter. While its key sequences
involve the enchantingly doleful stranger, her identity
is the least important aspect of the film. This
gesture of good faith, which spans a single night
in the household, becomes a gentle and emotional
narrative that taps into the pulse of young adults,
scurrying to depart from their familial tethers
and seeking independence. It develops an intricate,
underlying tapestry of shame, guilt, responsibility
and maturation. Lee’s camera acts as a silent,
vacant observer. With great clarity and poignancy
the camera weaves in and out of conversations held
between the family members gathered around the deathbed.
The streamlined economy of his static camerawork
witnesses the different dynamics and insecurities
of the close extended family members through their
dialogue and (or lack of) physical expressions.
The mood remains plaintive and avoids the trappings
of a melodrama by dividing the focus onto the different
energies of each character dealing with the situation
at hand. The bittersweet melancholy resonating from
its final scenes ruminates on the bonds we take
for granted and the kinships we have lost.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
4½ out of 5
F*ck
There’s
really not much to glean from the film’s celebration
of its titular cussing. It’s neither cathartic
nor informative, but it does remind me of the thrill
I used to get from that once ubiquitous adolescent
prank (“See you next Tuesday”) when
it was pulled off to great effect. Under the guise
of a semi-serious dissertation of how and why the
world’s favourite expletive became as proverbial
and culturally offensive as it is, director Steve
Anderson fills most of its running time with obvious
allusions to its history and capping it off with
vainglorious interviews with the media’s foremost
douchebags like Bill Maher and Evan Seinfeld, among
other celebrities who use their screen time to cheekily
rail against conservatism and vaunting themselves
as trailblazers in the fight for their country’s
First Amendment. Obligatory conservative talking
heads aside, Anderson fails to establish himself
as an impartial mediator, often seeming intimidated
and impressed by his more illustrious interviewees.
It all adds up to one empty, hollow shell of a documentary
that forgets to keep its finger on the pulse. Like
we give a flying f*ck.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
1½ out of 5
American
Hardcore
The
documentary contains all the cheeky references and
attitude of the American hardcore punk scene of
the early 1980s but none of the primitive, wild
man spirit of its greatest performers. Obnoxious
talking heads interspersed with a tandem of epileptic
audio-visual assaults induce more migraine than
actual biting barbs against the conservatism of
Reagan’s 80s. Paul Rachman's obtuse but energetic
approach to “American Hardcore” does
abrasively attribute the era’s barren politicking
as the genesis for punk. His beloved subculture
erroneously comes off as a social disillusionment
bordering on one massive circle jerk that has to
staunchly defy the recidivism of that old, tired
order belonging to its subjects’ parents in
order to be relevant. But instead of edifying its
esoteric appeal, it gives reason to punk philosophy’s
own vain aggressiveness and inadvertently lays out
the groundwork for to become just another anachronistic
casualty.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
2½ out of 5
Grbavica
Winning
the Golden Bear at the 2006 Berlin International
Film Festival, Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Zbanic
arrives with an emotional belter in her debut feature,
“Grbavica”. All the more relevant now
in its quietly disconcerting post-wartime musings,
the film packs all the wallop of a shotgun to the
gut with the revelations sowed from the secrets
held between a mother-daughter pairing of waitress,
Esma (Mirjana Karanovic) and her pubescent daughter
Sara (Luna Mijovic). Sara, a wartime baby, believes
her father to be a hero for the cause and a monetary
benefit that derives from that belief spurs her
inquisitive nature that begins to unsettle Esma.
Alluding to bankrupt masculine values in the region
among other things, the film’s raison d'etre
is to remind audiences of the echoes of war and
the numerous communal crises still facing its people.
“Grbavica” falters when it shows too
much leg and too little narrative flexibility when
leading up to its devastating conclusion, marvelously
acted upon by its leading ladies.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
3½ out of 5
We
Shall Overcome
Insisting
that Martin Luther King’s inspirational spirit
resides not just in American civil liberties but
inside the hearts and minds of people everywhere,
Danish helmer Niels Arden Oplev transplants this
belief to a 1969 Danish middle school. More specifically,
it works its way into the crusade of a young boy
named Frits (Janus Dissing Rathke) against his oppressively
rigid and churlishly abusive headmaster Svendsen
(Bent Mejding). Adapted from a true story, the performances
are executed with certain aplomb and a refreshing
command over its varied characters keeps it involving.
A battle of ideologies between a 13 year-old and
a demented disciplinarian gives way to inherent
humour but awkward shifts in mood disorients despite
keeping it shrewdly cynical in the same vein as
a “Dead Poets Society” more than a “Matilda”.
It treads a familiar path but a continued and precise
service to its young protagonist including a personal
subplot that rounds off Frits as a young boy becoming
a young man, manages to raise the film into a rousing
family film with its nose right on the money.
–
Justin Deimen
Rating:
3½ out of 5
After
the Wedding
Sweet
sorrow permeates through Susanne Bier’s Oscar
nominated “After the Wedding”, a quietly
testing film that tepidly breaks free from the shackles
of the Dogme manifestoes to deliver an incredibly
subtle celebration of family. Paternal pacification
is as good a reason as any to explore with overwhelming
and eloquent sentimentality when Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen)
is arm-twisted into returning to his native Denmark
to seek out funds for his orphanage’s young
charges in India. He meets with the seemingly magnanimous
Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard, filling the screen with his
sheer presence), a millionaire that invites him
to his daughter’s wedding and in the process
sets the wheels of redemption into motion. Bier’s
most prominent work thus far is also her most joyous
when she bravely evokes the goodness in her characters,
working the circumstances to peel away the layers
of tacit human desires and destructive pride. Blessed
with superlative performances across the board,
a particularly inspired turn by Mikkelsen serves
as Bier’s dramatic lynchpin for her film’s
gentle twists and turns. But even its sudsy plot
developments work well in Bier's kinetic and expertly
crafted dreamworld, which despite its otherworldly
state still manages to disclose the bare and conspicuous
design of mortality and compassion.
Quoting
from “As You Like It” by the great playwright
William Shakespeare: “All the world’s
a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”
For two weeks this April, this stage will be set
in Singapore where the best films around the world
come together in the 20th International Singapore
Film Festival.
If
you didn’t already know that coffee is big
business, then Nick and Mark Francis’s documentary
should hammer that fact in. “Black Gold”
could have quite easily become another impassioned
and reckless rail against globalisation but you
get the sense that the brothers kept their eyes
on the numbers, and directed from their head and
not their hearts. Therein lies the film’s
main problem – facts are boring. It’s
neither harrowing nor heartfelt. The documentary
is bluntly informative of the disparate levels in
income of the Ethiopian farmers and the corporations
that buy the beans from them on the cheap, and it’s
quite competent in enlightening consumers of the
buried cost of a $5 latte. And on that level, it
succeeds. Somewhat admirably, they lionise the Ethiopian
people, both the underpaid farmers and the ones
who refuse to partake in the hopeless work. But
you can also observe that the Francis brothers were
hoping for something more from their primary subject,
Tadesse Meskela, a high-level representative from
the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union. The
directors do place him on a pedestal for most of
the film, even to the extent of including an embarrassingly
effusive interview from Meskela’s wife as
the man proudly looks on.
A
documentary that wears its heart on its sleeves
is often a documentary that keeps its eyes on the
prize. And just days after viewing the disappointingly
cursory “American Hardcore”, “Metal:
A Headbanger’s Journey” throws down
a challenge in its first scenes when a frazzled
youth with a microphone makes sure to add that “punk…does
not belong in this world”. Canadian metalhead
cum anthropologist, Sam Dunn heads off on a personal
odyssey to the United States, Germany, the UK and
Norway to interview metal’s luminaries and
academics with two purposes in mind – to find
out why metal has been so maligned and to gauge
the obsession it inspires throughout its legion.
Dunn angles a new perspective on its self-aware,
perceptible fanbase and bands by personalising his
journey in a formalised, but never didactic way,
of approaching his subjects and interviewees as
kindred spirits. He features erudite interviews
with the subculture’s leading and most influential
personalities and accomplishes his first goal by
juxtaposing their reasoned, informed views on metal
with the irrational fear that advocacy groups have
waged battles over. But in one of the film’s
most harrowing interview sequences, he also concedes
that there are some bands that take the transgressive
state of their cults of personality too far. Dunn’s
academic background allows him certain legitimacy
and the documentary does try to counter the stigma
of a pedagogic structure by employing some innovative
and accessible use of the documentary within a documentary
footage, accentuating Dunn’s individual venture
into his lifelong fascination.
Nick
Broomfield has an uncanny ability to unlock his
subject’s thoughts with key sequences of visual
observations that without context might seem unremarkable.
The maverick director follows up “The Leader,
His Driver and the Driver’s Wife” with
“His Big White Self”, a sequel of sorts
that catches up with the titular trio of his career
defining 1991 documentary that started off as an
exploration of apartheid reign in South Africa that
developed into a ghastly portrayal of a Nazi propaganda
progeny (The Leader, Eugene Terre’Blanche)
who rose swiftly and bloodily to power, and the
lives of two close followers in JP (his driver)
and Anita (his driver’s wife). 15 years later
and the portraits change somewhat, with the trio
now broken up. But the creepiness of the country’s
still prevalent white power ideology and the willingness
to martyr one’s self for that belief remains.
The only closure Broomfield gets from his rollicking
by the intimidating Terre’Blanche all those
years ago, is by tearing a page from Michael Moore’s
“Bowling for Columbine” playbook and
conniving his way back into the Leader’s household.
And the only closure that we get to the hauntingly
glazed over Anita of yesteryear is her transformed
credo of believing integration is now the way forward,
all subtly hitting home in the final scenes.
For
what it’s worth, “Aachi & Ssipak”
represents a stylistic and technical milestone for
Korean animation. Now, even if it might not be good
or enjoyable, it does manage to drop jaws in the
sequences that do work. Quite obviously inspired
by the glut of web animation on the Internet, the
film twines absurdity, political lampoons and sexuality
into an incoherent mess that’s just much too
energetic and maniacal to take your eyes off. In
his simplest form, it’s about a ragtag crew
of criminal elements caught in the middle of a war
between the city’s Big Sister government and
a terrorist group called the Diaper Gang. The prize,
ultimately, being the proliferation of an addictive
candy delivered in phallic-like packaging called
a Juicy Bar. In an animation so concerned with faecal
matter and the anus, there’s not much subtext
to be gleaned from its fascination with derrieres
other than its producer’s willingly gleeful
lapses into iniquity
Paul
Goldman and Alice Bell’s mockumentary “Suburban
Mayhem” starts off with some measure of interest
in its subjects’ state of arrested development,
but manages to fracture its focus into different
pieces before it’s through. The Aussie production
does allude to its working class suburb’s
enfant terrible syndrome, channeling the seminal
“Romper Stomper” well enough by juggling
murder, delinquency and a hefty pacing of sex, drugs
and roll ‘n’ roll. However, setting
the stage just doesn’t cut it when the noxious
characters woefully expose its wafer-thin plotting.
Goldman’s self-satisfied intentions are made
clear enough and tacky dinner-table transgressions
aside; the film’s black comedy routine is
merely discernable at best but it’s just not
particularly biting or droll. Katrina (Emily Barclay),
its patricidal, chain-smoking femme fatale shoulders
the film’s best scenes despite the young character’s
tendency to regress into a badge for its director
to smugly flash about as the latest and loudest
provocateur of Australia’s idyllic suburbia
Apparently
drug addiction is a bad thing. But it’s especially
disastrous if it concerns two good-looking people
in love. If its smack-in-the-head simplicity is
just mind-bogglingly obvious, then “Candy”
might just be a film made for its triumvirate of
prominent Australian actors more than its audience.
As such, its spurious cautionary tale is a rather
lightweight affair, propped up with heavyweight
performances by Abbie Cornish in the titular role
and Heath Ledger, playing Candy’s doped up
paramour, Dan. Far from approaching the borders
of distasteful effectiveness, the fiendishly charming
Geoffrey Rush rounds off the performers’ vanity
project as a father figure consort to the couple
and their romanticised spiral into unrelenting sequences
of degradation. The three-act structure is ominously,
and quite presumptuously baptised with grandiose
titles of Heaven, Earth and Hell. Nowhere approaching
the gravitas that its intertitles signify, the only
indication that it affords is the script’s
predilection for presenting dubious and superficial
melodrama that rides on the coattails of its performances.
Australia’s
2007 Oscar entry is a wry gem of a film that translates
our contemporary values schema into a morality play
set a thousand years ago in an indigenous tribe
settlement somewhere near the Arafura Swamp in Australia’s
Northern Territory. Iconic Aborigine actor David
Gulpilil (of “Walkabout” and “The
Last Wave” fame) eloquently and drolly orates
the film’s triple narrative of native Australian
lore that concerns itself with coveting, revenge,
sorcery and even a dash of penis envy. Remarkable
in its scope and mesmerising in its photography,
director Rolf de Heer’s idiosyncratic fascination
with the interaction of human nature against nature
is condensed into a simple but effective lesson
of history repeating itself. Possibly venturing
to rail against critics of the noble savagery belonging
to the Aborigines, “Ten Canoes” allow
us the positive enlightenment that comes from observing
a different and alien culture operate on levels
familiar to us.
A
pleasingly pudgy transgendered teen becomes a wrestling
wunderkind in order to secure the hefty prize money
for his sex change operation in the directorial
debut of acclaimed scriptwriters, Lee Hae-yeong
and Lee Hae-jun. It’s no wonder then, that
added tender loving care was given to its colourful
cadre of carefully drawn characters that elevates
it from being just another brave little film that’s
centred around an ideal. Besides having the benefit
of seminating from proven pedigree, “Like
A Virgin” manages that rare distinction of
actually being quite amusing despite succumbing
to that very Korean Achilles' heel of parental melodrama.
The truest moments of pleasure primarily stems from
its protagonist, Oh Dong-gu’s (Ryu Deok-hwan)
absurd responses to his chauvinistic reality, and
his flights of fancy involving an attractive teacher.
For the most part, the film does approach society
without preconceptions allowing itself a fair bit
of leeway for fluff and fantasy. There’s a
sense that its secondary characters become too much
of a handful when there’s a discernable, almost
portentous shift in tone whenever Dong-gu’s
miserable louse of a father shows up, upsetting
the thoughtful equilibrium of its comedy that does
occasionally become reminiscent of Masayuki Suo’s
“Sumo Do, Sumo Don't”.
Cleaving
closely to the contours shaped by De Palma, Scorcese
and Mann, “Bloody Tie” operates on a
level rarely seen in Korean cinema. It transposes
old-school Western ideals to the sinful port city
of Busan and essentially becomes a hodgepodge of
the gritty American crime potboilers replete with
corruption in the ranks, perversely bankrupt codes
of honour and lots of drug-fuelled thrusts into
viciously muscular confrontations. Developing upon
the similar tropes of buddy movies such as “48
Hrs.” sans the forced male bonding, it pairs
up two reprobates at opposite ends of the law who
approach their line of work in the same, unconscionable
way. Conducting itself with a bit of frantic, icily
droll dick-swagger, the film still dares to stare
deeper into the abyss than its thematic peers. Tunnelling
under the shiny pastel surface of its pulsating
city lights, a darkly poetic significance filters
through the slithering hand-held camerawork, revealing
the tenebrous tongue shared between its agents.
What
“Ad Lib Night” accomplishes in its simplicity
is nothing short of exceptional. The delicate minimalism
employed in Lee Yoon-ki’s third feature is
tremendously absorbing and is just handled with
immense grace. The stealthily devastating isolation
of big city living is evoked by a mysterious doppelganger’s
acceptance to stand beside a dying man in proxy
of his runaway daughter. While its key sequences
involve the enchantingly doleful stranger, her identity
is the least important aspect of the film. This
gesture of good faith, which spans a single night
in the household, becomes a gentle and emotional
narrative that taps into the pulse of young adults,
scurrying to depart from their familial tethers
and seeking independence. It develops an intricate,
underlying tapestry of shame, guilt, responsibility
and maturation. Lee’s camera acts as a silent,
vacant observer. With great clarity and poignancy
the camera weaves in and out of conversations held
between the family members gathered around the deathbed.
The streamlined economy of his static camerawork
witnesses the different dynamics and insecurities
of the close extended family members through their
dialogue and (or lack of) physical expressions.
The mood remains plaintive and avoids the trappings
of a melodrama by dividing the focus onto the different
energies of each character dealing with the situation
at hand. The bittersweet melancholy resonating from
its final scenes ruminates on the bonds we take
for granted and the kinships we have lost.
There’s
really not much to glean from the film’s celebration
of its titular cussing. It’s neither cathartic
nor informative, but it does remind me of the thrill
I used to get from that once ubiquitous adolescent
prank (“See you next Tuesday”) when
it was pulled off to great effect. Under the guise
of a semi-serious dissertation of how and why the
world’s favourite expletive became as proverbial
and culturally offensive as it is, director Steve
Anderson fills most of its running time with obvious
allusions to its history and capping it off with
vainglorious interviews with the media’s foremost
douchebags like Bill Maher and Evan Seinfeld, among
other celebrities who use their screen time to cheekily
rail against conservatism and vaunting themselves
as trailblazers in the fight for their country’s
First Amendment. Obligatory conservative talking
heads aside, Anderson fails to establish himself
as an impartial mediator, often seeming intimidated
and impressed by his more illustrious interviewees.
It all adds up to one empty, hollow shell of a documentary
that forgets to keep its finger on the pulse. Like
we give a flying f*ck.
The
documentary contains all the cheeky references and
attitude of the American hardcore punk scene of
the early 1980s but none of the primitive, wild
man spirit of its greatest performers. Obnoxious
talking heads interspersed with a tandem of epileptic
audio-visual assaults induce more migraine than
actual biting barbs against the conservatism of
Reagan’s 80s. Paul Rachman's obtuse but energetic
approach to “American Hardcore” does
abrasively attribute the era’s barren politicking
as the genesis for punk. His beloved subculture
erroneously comes off as a social disillusionment
bordering on one massive circle jerk that has to
staunchly defy the recidivism of that old, tired
order belonging to its subjects’ parents in
order to be relevant. But instead of edifying its
esoteric appeal, it gives reason to punk philosophy’s
own vain aggressiveness and inadvertently lays out
the groundwork for to become just another anachronistic
casualty. 
Winning
the Golden Bear at the 2006 Berlin International
Film Festival, Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Zbanic
arrives with an emotional belter in her debut feature,
“Grbavica”. All the more relevant now
in its quietly disconcerting post-wartime musings,
the film packs all the wallop of a shotgun to the
gut with the revelations sowed from the secrets
held between a mother-daughter pairing of waitress,
Esma (Mirjana Karanovic) and her pubescent daughter
Sara (Luna Mijovic). Sara, a wartime baby, believes
her father to be a hero for the cause and a monetary
benefit that derives from that belief spurs her
inquisitive nature that begins to unsettle Esma.
Alluding to bankrupt masculine values in the region
among other things, the film’s raison d'etre
is to remind audiences of the echoes of war and
the numerous communal crises still facing its people.
“Grbavica” falters when it shows too
much leg and too little narrative flexibility when
leading up to its devastating conclusion, marvelously
acted upon by its leading ladies.
Insisting
that Martin Luther King’s inspirational spirit
resides not just in American civil liberties but
inside the hearts and minds of people everywhere,
Danish helmer Niels Arden Oplev transplants this
belief to a 1969 Danish middle school. More specifically,
it works its way into the crusade of a young boy
named Frits (Janus Dissing Rathke) against his oppressively
rigid and churlishly abusive headmaster Svendsen
(Bent Mejding). Adapted from a true story, the performances
are executed with certain aplomb and a refreshing
command over its varied characters keeps it involving.
A battle of ideologies between a 13 year-old and
a demented disciplinarian gives way to inherent
humour but awkward shifts in mood disorients despite
keeping it shrewdly cynical in the same vein as
a “Dead Poets Society” more than a “Matilda”.
It treads a familiar path but a continued and precise
service to its young protagonist including a personal
subplot that rounds off Frits as a young boy becoming
a young man, manages to raise the film into a rousing
family film with its nose right on the money.
Sweet
sorrow permeates through Susanne Bier’s Oscar
nominated “After the Wedding”, a quietly
testing film that tepidly breaks free from the shackles
of the Dogme manifestoes to deliver an incredibly
subtle celebration of family. Paternal pacification
is as good a reason as any to explore with overwhelming
and eloquent sentimentality when Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen)
is arm-twisted into returning to his native Denmark
to seek out funds for his orphanage’s young
charges in India. He meets with the seemingly magnanimous
Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard, filling the screen with his
sheer presence), a millionaire that invites him
to his daughter’s wedding and in the process
sets the wheels of redemption into motion. Bier’s
most prominent work thus far is also her most joyous
when she bravely evokes the goodness in her characters,
working the circumstances to peel away the layers
of tacit human desires and destructive pride. Blessed
with superlative performances across the board,
a particularly inspired turn by Mikkelsen serves
as Bier’s dramatic lynchpin for her film’s
gentle twists and turns. But even its sudsy plot
developments work well in Bier's kinetic and expertly
crafted dreamworld, which despite its otherworldly
state still manages to disclose the bare and conspicuous
design of mortality and compassion. 
