Month: May 2015

By Joe Bendel. At various times, the public sale of alcohol was illegal throughout what was then Bombay State. Of course, for the mobbed-up nightclub managed by Johnny Balraj, Prohibition was good for business. The new vocalist is not bad either, but their inevitable romance gets caught up in an underworld power struggle in Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet, which opened Friday in New York.

Balraj and his sworn-brother Chimman grew up on the streets together, but it is Balraj who has the necessary crazy to go far in gangtserism. Even when he starts fronting the swanky Bombay Velvet club in the early 1960s, he still blows off steam fighting in underground steel cage matches. Technically, it is Balraj’s business, but it is really part of the newspaper mogul and syndicate boss Kaizad Khambata’s vast empire. Still, Balraj has a free hand to hire talent like Rose Noronha. She makes quite the impression on him. Unfortunately, she is a plant sent to seduce Balraj by Jimmy Mistry, the ambitious editor of a rival Communist newspaper.

It works. Balraj falls for Noronha hard, but as her star rises, it becomes mutual. Of course, when undesirable elements from her past try to assert themselves, it leads to friction. Frankly, Balraj does not think much of either Khambata or Mistry, but he stays in business with his ostensive boss in hopes of getting a piece of the action. In this case, the pie getting sliced up is the massive real estate fortune to be made from the anticipated development of Bombay/Mumbai’s Nariman Point business district.

In a way, Velvet echoes the infighting gangsters and politicians of Yoo Ha’s real estate-driven Gangnam Blues, but at times viewers can see the not so subtle influence of De Palma’s Scarface. Probably the only thing separating the wildly erratic Belraj from Tony Montana is a small mountain of cocaine. He has the Tommy Gun.

Regardless, Velvet is clearly Kashyap’s most commercial film to date. He is no stranger to underworld intrigue having helmed the gritty epic Gangs of Wasseypur, but he really cranks up the glossy flashiness this time around. Yet, since the film is largely set in a jazz club, he can have his cake and eat too, by confining the ample musical numbers to the Velvet stage. In fact, they work rather well. Amit Trivedi’s tunes, sounding like Bollywood show-stoppers as arranged by Nelson Riddle, should definitely get heads nodding.

Ranbir Kapoor makes Balraj’s unstable lunacy strangely charismatic. You would never want to be anywhere near such a person, but he is consistently fun to watch. Likewise, Karan Johar shamelessly chews on the scenery as the flamboyantly snide and villainous Khambata. Manish Choudhary is also terrifically sleazy as the greedy Red Mistry. Oddly enough given his prominence, Kay Kay Menon gets somewhat shortchanged on screen time, even though his honest Inspector Kulkarni is a potentially intriguing character.

For fans of Wasseypur, it is important to note there is no shortage of dead bodies in Velvet. It has a high polished sheen, and some appealing big band vocals, but it is really about getting down to business. An impressively mounted decade-spanning period production, Bombay Velvet is recommended for fans of the gangster genre and high-end Bollywood while it plays in New York, at the AMC Empire.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on May 18th, 2015 at 10:03pm.

By Joe Bendel. For the residents of a provincial Henan village, the local mountain is like their East River. It is a handy place to dump a body. Nobody asks too many questions when a newly charred corpse pops up, perhaps because everyone is complicit in something during the course of Xin Yukun’s A Coffin in the Mountain, which screens at the 2015 Seattle International Film Festival.

Xiao Weiguo is an oddity—a village chief who never sought to profit from his position. His semi-estranged son Xiao Zongyao finds that hopelessly old-fashioned. His visit home has been awkward, as usual. However, he is looking forward to an assignation with his on-again-off-again girlfriend, at least until she drops the pregnancy bomb. To make matters worse, local lowlife Bai Hu overhears their conversation. When he threatens to inform Xiao’s father, things get a little rough. At least they were already on the mountain, so they will not have to travel far to dump the body.

Meanwhile, Li Qin tries to convince her lover, Wang Baoshan to kill her abusive degenerate of a husband, Chen Zili. Apparently somebody did the deed, but probably not the self-centered Wang. Regardless, Li Qin is not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Of course, nothing is as obvious as it first appears as Xin’s braided stories overlap, intersect, and refer back.

Coffin looks like a depressing Chinese indie, but it is really a wickedly droll, blackly comic noir in the tradition of the early Cohen Brothers. By now, the nonlinear narrative gimmick has been done to death and usually done poorly, but Xin and co-screenwriter Feng Yuanliang make it look fresh and insidiously clever. It is a pleasure to watch Xin smoothly fit his pieces together. Yet, the film is so matter-of-factly understated, it often takes a beat or two for the audience to realize they have had the rug pulled out from under them again.

Although there are no big names to speak, the entire cast is dynamite, particularly Sun Li as Li Qin, the working class Chinese equivalent of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. However, as Xiao Weiguo, Huo Weiman steals the film outright in the third act with his slow burning intensity and quickly escalating frustration. As he pulls his hair out in exasperation, we just have to shake our heads in appreciation for Xin’s twisty and twisted gamesmanship.

This is a terrific film that consistently confounds expectations right from the start. It should herald the discovery a refreshingly original filmmaker and at least half a dozen new talents in front of the camera. Very highly recommended, The Coffin in the Mountain screens this Saturday (5/16), Monday (5/18), and Thursday (5/21) at this year’s SIFF.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on May 14, 2015 at 4:54pm.

By Joe Bendel. Leave it to JCVD to give an urban legend a Taken twist. Deacon, a hardboiled kidnapping & recovery specialist will wake up in an icy Manila bathtub sans one kidney. However, he has a very particular set of skills, skills that he has acquired over a very long career that will help him track down that kidney, because it was already spoken for. Deacon was supposed to donate it to his ailing niece and he is not about to disappoint in Ernie Barbarash’s Pound of Flesh, which opens this Friday in select theaters.

Deacon has yet to meet his niece and he has been estranged from his brother George for years, but a man has to do what a man has to do. Unfortunately, that means Deacon is also pretty easy to set up. When he saves a damsel in distress, who happens to be just his type, it leads to a woozy night on the town and an ice bath. George, the devout Catholic is rather disappointed in his carelessness. Of course, Deacon is not about to take this lying down, even if has just gone under the knife. Reconnecting with Kung, a dodgy former comrade, Deacon pops some morphine and starts following the trail of the organ harvesting ring.

Maybe you think you have seen this all before, but keep in mind, in this case, Van Damme uses a Gideon Bible to beat the snot out of people. You can call that getting Biblical. However, it really isn’t objectionable, considering how seriously Pound handles issues stemming from George’s Catholicism.

Frankly, the combination of Van Damme and an unpretentious action-specialist like Barbarash inspires a great deal of confidence. As in Assassination Games and Falcon Rising, there are no over-the-top set piece spectacles in Pound. Instead, the film is all about Van Damme putting his foot in the bad guys’ behinds. Barbarash understands how to show off his stars’ skills, giving us full body shots and absolutely no shaky cams.

Indeed, Van Damme still does his thing in Pound. All his strengths and weaknesses remain what they always were, which is good or bad, depending on your perspective. He is deliberately playing a somewhat older cat, but he has not lost much in terms of physique and flexibility. Aki Aleong adds some extra veteran seasoning as the crafty old Kung. The Manila backdrops also helps give Pound a distinctive flair.

Sadly, Pound is dedicated to the memory of co-star Darren Shahlavi, probably best known as Twister in Ip Man 2. He also had massive skills and considerable presence. Pound showcases the former more than the latter, but as Drake the chief henchman, he is definitely a worthy opponent for Deacon. Shahlavi could have very easily broken out with genre fans, becoming something like the next Scott Adkins, so his early death and its mangled reporting in the media is especially tragic.

Despite off-screen misfortunes, this is just a fun film that happens to be better executed than cinema snobs will give it credit for. When Van Damme makes a film with Barbarash you can be assured of a certain level of quality control. If you want to see a dude with one kidney kicking an organ harvesting gang several shades of black-and-blue than Pound is your ticket. Recommended for Van Damme fans, Pound of Flesh releases on iTunes and in select markets this Friday (5/15), with a special Saturday (5/16) screening scheduled at the Arena Cinema in Los Angeles.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on May 14th, 2015 at 4:45pm.

By Joe Bendel. It was called Reconstruction, implying rebuilding and renewal, but there was still considerable violence during the years following the Civil War. The Rileys will learn this first hand. They are not Radical Republicans facing the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan. They will simply get caught up in an old school family feud. Unfortunately, the war made killing immeasurably easier in Kane Senes’s Echoes of War, which opens tomorrow in New York.

The war has been over for a while, but Uncle Wade is only now making his way home to Texas. He clearly saw considerable action and it changed him. The Riley family had their share of tragedy on the homefront as well. His sister Elizabeth passed away, leaving his devout brother-in-law Seamus Riley to raise their nearly grown daughter Abigail and teenage son Samuel.

The kids love their uncle, but Riley is far less embracing. They seem to have a history, but Uncle Wade has history with everyone. He soon discovers the formerly well-to-do McCluskey family has been raiding Riley’s traps with impugnity, barely leaving enough for the family to live on. The father is a turn-the-other-cheek fellow, who also remains mindful of the complicated relations between the respective families. In contrast, their thievery does not sit well with Uncle Wade, so he aims to fix it. Of course, this all complicates Abigail’s Capulet-and-Montague romance with the earnest but ineffectual Marcus McCluskey.

Eventually, Senes will get down to score-settling, but he is clearly more interested in exploring Uncle Wade’s post-traumatic stress and young McCluskey’s halting courtship of Abigail. Arguably, the chaotic in medias res opener is not the way to commence a moody film like Echoes. It is an impressively textured film, with a good eye for period detail and natural backdrops. However, the tragic inevitability of the narrative could also be uncharitably described as predictable. Just imagine the worst that could happen and it probably will.

Regardless, an awful lot of people will eventually see Echoes on VOD or cable, because Maika Monroe is about ten seconds away from being the next Jennifer Lawrence. (Honestly, has JLaw done anything as cool as It Follows?) She is quite good as Abigail Riley, but her character stays well within the conventional parameters for a daughter of the old west.

On the other hand, Ethan Embry is nearly unrecognizable, in every way, as the tortured Seamus Riley. His Old Time religion could have easily become the stuff of cliché and even mockery, but Embry uses it to bring out his humanity. It is a great performance, but also James Badge Dale proves he has the chops and presence to lead a film as the tightly wound Uncle Wade. As usual, William Forsythe does his thing as the overbearing McCluskey patriarch, but it is hard to see why Miss Abigail would entertain the advances of Rhys Wakefield’s lifeless junior McCluskey brother.

To its credit, Echoes is a handsome period production. At times, you can smell the honeysuckle and feel the hot dry Texas air. Senes helms with notable sensitivity, but the story of the shell-shocked veteran having trouble coming to grips with life after war started yielding declining marginal returns years ago. Recommended for western-Americana viewers looking for a streaming distraction, Echoes of War releases tomorrow (5/15) on iTunes and opens in New York at the AMC Loews Village 7.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on May 14th, 2015 at 4:44pm.