Month: September 2013

LFM Reviews A Touch of Sin @ The New York Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. It is hard to imagine Jia Zhangke releasing a wuxia martial arts epic. Despite the hat-tips to King Hu (who directed A Touch of Zen), it would be more accurate to describe his latest film as a meditation on violence, offering a challenging glimpse into the heart of a lawless contemporary China. American partisans on either side of the gun control debate could find themselves squirming at its morally ambiguous portrayal of a lone shooter, as well. Of course, Jia has never displayed a compulsive need to make things easy. Nonetheless, A Touch of Sin may yet prove to be one of his most accessible films when it screens as a main slate selection of the 51st New York Film Festival.

Right from the opening sequence, viewers will know they are in a different sort of Jia Zhangke film—one with a body count. The mystery motorcyclist will reappear later. Instead we will follow Dahai, a disillusioned labor leader, who returns home to stir up trouble for the corrupt village party boss and the new fat cat factory owner greasing his wheels. Instead, it is Dahai who is beaten and humiliated. Eventually, the mockery he endures pushes Dahai to the edge.

Without question, Sin’s first arc is its most unnerving. Much like Rafi Pitts’ criminally under-appreciated The Hunter, Sin openly invites viewers to condone or at least mitigate a shocking act of violence. Yet, the consistently contrarian Jia further complicates our emotional response by implying that some of Dahai’s rage might be tragically misplaced. It is keenly disturbing filmmaking, perfectly served Wu Jiang’s tightly wound performance.

Jia then shifts his attention to Zhou San, the sociopathic wanderer who started the film with a bang. He has returned to Chongqing, but his family is not too sure how they feel about seeing him again. Zhou’s story holds considerable potential, given the sense of danger that follows the drifter wherever he goes, but it is not nearly as well developed as those that immediately precede and follow it.

The presence of Zhao Tao, Jia’s longtime muse and now wife, promises and duly delivers a return to form. Zhao’s Zheng Xiaoyu is the receptionist at a half-sleazy sauna in Hubei, carrying on a long distance affair with Zhang Youliang, a factory manager in Guangzhou. Unfortunately, the family of the betrayed wife discovers their furtive relationship, sending goons to rough up Zheng. It will not be the only incident of injustice she witnesses first hand. When an abusive sauna client tries to force himself on her, she finally responds in much the same manner as Dahai.

For the concluding segment, Jia shifts to Guangdong, where a rootless migrant worker takes a series of jobs, including assembly line work in Zhang’s factory. However, it is Xiaohui’s experiences in the local luxury hotel-brothel that will be his emotional undoing. Luo Lanshan and Li Meng are quite engaging, developing some touching chemistry together as Xiaohui and the young working girl he courts. However, their storyline feels rather rushed (something you would never expect in Jia’s films), hustled to its untimely conclusion before all the necessary psychological bases have been touched.

Granted, A Touch of Sin is uneven, but it is a major cinematic statement, spanning class and geography. Without question, it is Jiang Wu and Zhao Tao who administer the arsenic with their fearless, visceral performances. In fact, with her work in Sin, one can make the case Zhao is the definitive and defining actress of our day and age. Don’t even counter with Streep. Unlike her Rich Little impersonations that consistently pull you out of the movie, Zhao always draws viewers into her films and characters. She is beautiful, but chameleon-like, playing parts that are emblematic of globalism (as in The World) and Chinese social alienation (a la 24 City). Yet, she is also achingly moving in a straight forward chamber drama like Jia’s short Cry Me a River.

It is hard to miss the implications of Sin. Jia unequivocally takes the Chinese state bureaucracy and their corporate cronies to task for their pervasive corruption. He also casts a disapproving eye on the burgeoning sex industry. For all its trenchant criticism, Sin is arguably somewhat encouraging—simply because Jia was able to complete it as he intended. Given his perpetually half pregnant state as a former independent filmmaker partially and uneasily incorporated into the state system, one always wonders if he will still be allowed to make his films according to his aesthetic and ethical principles. A Touch of Sin might be something of a stylistic departure, but it is very definitely a Jia Zhangke film, which is happy news indeed.

Even with its odd imperfections here and there, A Touch of Sin packs a whopper of a punch. Highly recommended for China watchers and fans of social issue cinema, Sin screens this Saturday (9/28) at Alice Tully Hall and the following Wednesday (10/2) at the Beale, as part of this year’s NYFF, with a regular theatrical opening to follow next Friday (10/4) at the IFC Center.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on September 23rd, 2013 at 4:53pm.

LFM Reviews On the Job

By Joe Bendel. One of Metro Manila’s most politically-connected prisons has one heck of a work-release program. Periodically, they send out two convicts to execute a gangland-style hit, and after a spot of shopping both are safely back inside before anyone is the wiser. However, a botched assignment and a troublesome cop will create headaches for the elites pulling the strings in Erik Matti’s On the Job, which opens this Friday in New York.

Evidently, murder for hire beats making license plates. Ever since Mario “Tatang” Maghari went to prison, he has provided for his family better than ever before. He only sees them occasionally, showing up “on leave” from his vaguely defined work out-of-town. His daughter is starting to get suspicious, but says nothing. After all, her father has paid her law school tuition.

While each job is strictly business for Maghari, his new partner, Daniel Benitez, appreciates their intensity, like a form of extreme sports. Frankly, Maghari has misgivings about Benitez, but with his parole approaching he must groom a successor. He genuinely likes the kid, but he constantly reminds Benitez that nobody can afford sentimentality in their world. When Benitez finally takes the lead on a job, it turns out disastrously. It was not entirely his fault, but he and Maghari still have to make it right quickly. To do so, they will tangle with Francis Coronel, Jr., an ambitious cop, whose career track has been greased by his congressman father-in-law.

When Maghari and Benitez go after their hospitalized target, OTJ deliberately echoes John Woo’s Hard Boiled, but where the Hong Kong crime epic was slick and operatic, Matti’s film is gritty and pure street. It is a massive action spectacle, but rendered on a scrupulously human scale. Every blow hurts like it ought to, because no one is superhuman.

From "On the Job."

Yet, Matti is just getting started. He and co-screenwriter Michiko Yamamoto paint a scathing portrait of a legal justice system rife with corruption. They are working on a large scale canvas, where complicated family history and political alliances will profoundly impact all the players. While the themes of loyalty and betrayal will be familiar to mob movie junkies, Matti gives them a fresh spin. The distinctive sense of place also sets OTJ well apart from the field. Viewers will practically smell the B.O. during the scenes set in the sweltering but bizarrely informal prison.

A radical departure from Matti’s clinically cold erotic drama Rigodon (which screened at this year’s NYAFF), OTJ seamlessly combines genre thrills with a naturalistic aesthetic, but Joel Torre is the lynchpin holding it all together. Not just a hard-nosed action figure (although he is certainly that), Torre fully expresses the acute pain of Maghari’s tragic failings, born of his violent circumstances. The entire ensemble is completely convincing, but OTJ is truly his show.

Fully engaging on both the macro and micro levels, OTJ is one of the year’s best hitman-cop dramas. Driven by the talents of Matti and Torre, it is a serious social critique that never skimps on the adrenaline. Highly recommended, On the Job opens this Friday (9/27) in New York at the AMC Empire and in San Francisco at the Metreon.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on September 23rd, 2013 at 4:50pm.

LFM Reviews Let Me Out

By Joe Bendel. In an era when technology allows Jafar Panahi to be about as prolific as Woody Allen, would-be filmmakers are running out of excuses. After years of snarking from the sidelines, senior year film student Kang Mu-young is suddenly put on the filmmaking spot. Bedlam will ensue as he tries to shoot his zombie melodrama in Kim Chang-Lae and Jae Soh’s Let Me Out, which screens in select cities this Wednesday, via Tugg.

A bit Holden Caulfield-ish, Kang loves to call out directors for being phonies. However, after a rather tactless Q&A session, Yang Ik-june (the indie director playing himself) turns the tables on the student, offering $5,000 in start up money for Kang’s senior film. Hurriedly, Kang dusts off his old discarded zombie screenplay (titled Let Me Out, probably because the characters are constantly banging on locked doors) and assembles a cast and crew who are not already attached to other projects.

Yang’s producer buddy Yong-woon recruits a motley but workable group, including Hong Sang-soo’s camera loader for their director of photography. The casting of Sun-hye, a third rate starlet enrolled in their film school, opens the door for some sponsorship opportunities—mainly from liquor and cigarette companies. This will definitely be a boozy set. Ah-young, a vastly more talented fellow classmate, also agrees to be the female co-lead. She is actually good in her part, even though she lacks confidence in both her abilities and Kang’s script.

Like the zombies it crudely portrays, the film-within-the-film takes hit after hit, but refuses to die. Cast and crew members will quit, equipment will break, and they will be evicted from their locations, but the film lumbers along erratically, just the same. Co-directors (and Seoul Institute of the Arts faculty members) Kim and Soh maintain a manic energy level, but they never lose sight of the human element. Despite all of Kang’s humbling frustrations, LMO remains a big, earnest valentine to scrappy DIY filmmaking.

From "Let Me Out."

Kwon Hyun-sang, the son of Cannes award winning director Im Kwon-taek, clearly relates to the wannabe Tarantino, nicely portraying his long deferred maturation process. K-pop and Korean TV star Park Hee-von provides an appealingly down-to-earth foil as Ah-young, while Jessica Choi relishes creating chaos as Sun-hye, the hot mess.

This is indeed the sort of film that will recharge your cineaste batteries. There are scores of in-jokes and cinema references, but that is all frosting on the cake. At its core, LMO is really all about a young filmmaker getting his act and his film together. It is a story a wide spectrum of viewers should be able to relate to, but it will have special resonance for fans of zombie movies, like the one Kang is trying to complete. Surprisingly heartfelt at times, Let Me Out is highly recommended for fans of Korean cinema and cult movies. It screens this Wednesday (9/25) in New York (at the AMC Loews Kips Bay), as well as San Francisco, Dallas, and Atlanta, but since these are Tugg shows, you had better book now to be sure you will have a ticket and the screenings will go forward.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on September 23rd, 2013 at 4:47pm.

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Finding Movie Inspiration in NASA’s Real Science: The Case Study of Europa Report

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. Hollywood is in the midst of a science-fiction boom, yet few of its sci-fi movies are based on real science. That’s a shame, because the scientific discoveries emerging from NASA these days are as exciting as any Hollywood blockbuster. Whether it’s the stunning images from the Mars Curiosity rover, or the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes’ observations of a dazzling array of exoplanets, or the announcement that Voyager 1 has become the first human-made object to leave the solar system, NASA is daily generating storylines that provoke the imagination and expand our horizons.

What makes these developments intriguing for adaptation into sci-fi movies is that they are real. At a time when audiences are increasingly jaded by computer special effects, there’s something fresh and engaging about a sci-fi movie that might actually have some basis in reality. Isn’t it time that we see more sci-fi films that explore the real mysteries of the universe all around us?

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NASA deep-space imaging.

As a case study for a sci-fi movie inspired by NASA science, I recommend that people take a look at Sebastian Cordero’s Europa Report. With a cast that includes Sharlto Copley, Anamaria Marinca, and Michael Nyqvist, Europa Report is currently playing in select theaters and on VOD, and will be available on iTunes starting October 8th. The movie is one of the few sci-fi films in recent years to offer a realistic depiction of a manned mission to outer space – in this case, to search for life on Jupiter’s moon Europa.

I chatted with NASA- JPL astrobiologist Steve Vance, one of the science advisors on Europa Report, at the film’s LA Film Festival premiere. Vance expressed to me his enthusiasm about the movie:

“I’m just thrilled that I got to be part of something that is bringing Europa more into the public eye. I’m really excited about how this movie captures the passion of exploration and also the science.”

Europa has been the focus of much attention in recent years because it may harbor life in the liquid water ocean that is theorized to exist under its icy crust. Vance, who studies the interiors of icy moons like Europa and who is acting staff scientist on NASA’s Europa Project, told me that he and his colleagues are “pre-formulating a mission that we hope will fly to Europa to address the same kind of questions that were addressed in the movie.” The most pressing of these questions is whether life independently developed on another body within our solar system.

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Concept image of Europa.

Although Vance noted that a manned mission to Europa isn’t currently feasible, due to the difficulties of even sending a human as far as Mars, he explained that NASA is assessing plans to send a robotic spacecraft to Europa (see NASA artist’s concept above): “The mission we’re looking at right now is [that] we’ll do multiple flybys to orbit Jupiter, and do thirty or more flybys of Europa and completely map the surface.” (See this paper in the August issue of Astrobiology on future missions to Europa, co-authored by Vance).

And this brings me to a larger point: whether it’s robotic spacecraft taking photos of the surfaces of distant moons like Europa – or movies that draw on that imagery to dramatize outer-space exploration – visual representation plays a crucial role in bringing science to life.

For example, the photos taken by the Galileo space probe as it orbited Jupiter and its moons from 1995 to 2003 gave the public the most detailed images yet of mysterious Europa and its icy, cracked outer shell. These photos (see below) then inspired the filmmakers of Europa Report. In turn, NASA scientists like Vance hope that movies like Europa Report will inspire public support for future missions back to Europa. In short, art and science play a surprisingly reciprocal role today.

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NASA images of Europa.

Given how important photos and imagery have been to NASA, I was amazed to read in a recent NASA blog post that in the 1960s, NASA debated whether to even put cameras on board spacecraft. Fortunately, with the Mariner 4 mission that brought back the first close-up photos of Mars in 1965, the agency realized how crucial images were to advancing scientific knowledge and inspiring the public. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Finding Movie Inspiration in NASA’s Real Science: The Case Study of Europa Report

Shakespeare’s Henriad: LFM Reviews Hollow Crown on PBS

By Joe Bendel. The House of Plantagenet had a good run, but their dynasty would not last forever. You can blame Richard II. His fall and the rise of his Lancaster cousins provided ample inspiration for Shakespeare’s three king-four play cycle known as the Henriad. Executive producer Sam Mendes and three of Britain’s leading stage directors adapted the Richard and Henry plays for television as The Hollow Crown, which premieres on PBS this Friday as part of the current season of Great Performances.

Richard II begins with the title monarch on the throne, but that may soon change. Callous and erratic, Richard is a sad excuse for king. Nonetheless, the nobility has maintained their loyalty. Richard’s own actions will drive many lords into rebellion, starting with the precipitous banishment of Henry Bolingbroke. When the King confiscates the estate of his late uncle, Bolingbroke’s father, John of Gaunt, he pushes the Earl of Northumberland and his associates into rebellious conspiracy.

A bit of a slow starter, Richard II might be the weakest link of the Crown. However, it exceeds viewer expectations for one of the marquee Henriad highlights, when Patrick Stewart knocks John of Gaunt’s “This England” soliloquy out of the park. The stout Rory Kinnear and David Morrissey also bring an appropriately Shakespearean physicality to Bolingbroke and Northumberland, respectively. Unfortunately, Ben Whishaw’s sickly, petulant presence poorly serves the villainous Richard. Even more problematic is Richard II director Rupert Goold’s depiction of the deposed tyrant through Christ-like imagery.

Bolingbroke is now Henry IV, but he plays more of a supporting role in the two plays that bear his name: Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. The King has an heir to succeed him, but has little confidence in the free-spirited Prince Hal. The future Henry V would rather carouse with the disreputable Sir John Falstaff than worry about affairs of state.

Succeeding Kinnear as Henry IV, Jeremy Irons gives one of his best performances in years, acutely conveying the burdens of guilt, command, and fatherhood. Likewise, Tom Hiddleston relishes the roguishness of Prince Hal, while also convincingly growing in stature once Henry V ascends the throne. As director of both parts of Henry IV, Richard Eyre makes amends for misfiring with The Other Man. He seems to love Falstaff even more than Welles did, but Simon Russell Beale looks so haggard and dissipated as the jolly fellow, viewers will fear he might keel over well before his character’s spirit is broken.

Renouncing his wild past, Henry V turns his attention towards France in the Henriad’s conclusion, which should particularly interest Francophiles because of the presence of Lambert Wilson as the King of France and Mélanie Thierry as his daughter, Princess Katherine. Hiddleston’s courtship scene with Thierry has considerable charm, but Henry V director Thea Sharrock strangely underplays the St. Crispin’s Day speech, perhaps hoping to avoid comparison with Branagh’s rendition.

Shot on some notably picturesque locations, Hollow Crown opens up Shakespeare quite cinematically. While there is a considerable editorial hand at work, the language is never dumbed down. It is a smart way to present the Bard on television, with discrete productions that still have the continuity of a mini-series. The all-star cast should be of particular interest to fans of Downton Abbey (due to the too-briefly seen Michelle Dockery and Iain Glen). It is a great looking period piece, buttressed by a number of fine performances. Recommended for patrons of classical theater and fans of British television, The Hollow begins tonight (9/20) and continues for the next three Fridays on most PBS outlets nationwide.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on September 20th, 2013 at 1:25pm.

Sam Rockwell Goes Hunting: LFM Reviews A Single Shot

By Joe Bendel. Call it a simple improvisation rather than a simple plan. Nobody thinks too far ahead or particularly deeply in this criminal morality tale. As a result, there is a mess of trouble for everyone in David M. Rosenthal’s roughly passable backcountry noir, A Single Shot, which opens today in New York.

John Moon is an unemployed loser, whose wife Jess has filed for a divorce. Aside from some occasional farm labor temp jobs, Moon mostly puts food on his table through hunting. While stalking his game one fateful morning, Moon inadvertently kills a young woman squatting in the woods. Attempting to cover-up the accidental shooting he discovers a large stash of cash.

Now Moon has enough money to retain Pitt, the town’s slimiest lawyer, and throw some look-I’m-not-a-deadbeat-money Jess’s way. Of course, this is not exactly the best way to maintain a low profile. Suddenly he is on Cro-Magnon drug dealer Waylon’s radar, in a bad way. Everyone else around him is also acting rather suspiciously, but Moon is not so quick on the up-take.

Shot has a number of moody and atmospheric scenes that work quite well, but the tension always dissipates rather than growing and compounding. Perhaps the greatest problem is its dubious premise. An experienced hunter would never fire off the reckless shot that ignites this film. Someone like Moon, who has been hunting longer than Rosenthal has been making movies, knows never to pull the trigger unless you are absolutely certain of what you have in your sites.

From "A Single Shot."

Still, Rockwell is convincingly slow-witted yet simultaneously slow-burningly intense as Moon. It is largely his work that will keep viewers invested in Shot, at least to some extent. William H. Macy is rather amusing as Pitt, but he might as well be credited as a “special guest star.” In contrast, the potentially interesting Jason Isaacs is completely wasted as Waylon, buried under a Wookie’s worth of greasy locks.

There are no big secrets or revelations in Shot, so despite some well executed bits of skullduggery, there is little suspense overall. Basically, it is a bad idea to come between a drug dealer and his illicit cash. Nor is it a winning strategy to pick a fight with an anti-social mountain man who lives and breathes hunting. As a result, everyone learns something in Shot, except the audience, who come in way ahead of everyone on-screen. Just sort of okay but not great, A Single Shot opens today (9/20) in New York at the AMC Empire.

LFM GRADE: C

Posted on September 20th, 2013 at 1:22pm.