Day: September 29, 2015

LFM Reviews Saving Mr. Wu

By Joe Bendel. Why should Wu Ruofu replay the worst experience of his life when he can get Andy Lau to do it for him? Instead, he takes on the part of the police chief scrambling to rescue the kidnapped actor. It might sound slightly meta but the drama is as gritty as it gets in Ding Sheng’s Saving Mr. Wu, which opens this Friday in New York.

Although Wu (scrupulously referred to as “Mr. Wu” throughout the film, in Dragnet-Naked City-style) is a Mainland actor primarily known for television, he is reinvented here as a Hong Kong leading man movie star and former Cantopop idol, to capitalize on the Lau persona. However, the basic arc is reasonably faithful to the actual incident. While coming out of a Beijing karaoke club where he had been celebrating with a producer, Wu is kidnapped by a gang impersonating police officers. Frankly, Wu is never really fooled by them. After all, he has played plenty of cops in action movies. However, Zhang Hua and his accomplices have superior numbers and arms.

Clearly, Zhang is not as smart as he thinks he is, because Xing Feng and his boss, Captain Cao Gang (portrayed by the steely-looking Wu himself) manage to capture him. Unfortunately, they have not discovered his hideout and they suspect Zhang left orders to kill Wu by a certain time. Thus Saving unfolds in a split narrative, as the kidnapping drama catches up with the cat-and-mouse game playing out in the interrogation room.

Normally this sort of flashing-back and flashing-forward structure is just asking for trouble, but Ding maintains such tight control over the temporal shifts, they actually help build suspense. It also facilitates the ironic juxtaposition of Mr. Wu wrapped in chains and the apprehended Zhang ensconced in an iron maiden-ish contraption that looks like it would give Amnesty International a cow if it were used in any other country besides China.

From "Saving Mr. Wu."

When you watch Lau in Saving, you realize he is not one of the world’s biggest movie stars for nothing. This is a subtle, slow-burning performance that sneaks up and coldcocks you. Watching him protect Xiao Dou, a fellow kidnapping victim who was in the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time becomes seriously poignant. Conversely, Wang Qingyuan is massively creepy as the cruel and erratic Zhang. With him, every twitch screams trouble.

Frankly, as Gang, the real Wu is so hardnosed and grizzled, it seems strange that he has not made more films—or that anyone would want to try their luck kidnapping him. As an extra added bonus, Lam Suet appears as Wu’s trusted army buddy Mr. Su, playing it totally straight, but still showing the dynamic presence that enlivened so many Johnnie To films.

Saving is a tight, tense ripped-from-the-headlines thriller that gets shockingly mature and emotional in its climatic moments. Ding’s Police Story: Lockdown is far better than its reputation suggests (honest, it is), but this film should take him to the next level—and pretty much keep Lau at the top. Gripping and unusually satisfying, Saving Mr. Wu is highly recommended for all fans of procedurals when it opens this Friday (10/2) in New York, at the AMC Empire.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on September 29th, 2015 at 9:18pm.

LFM Reviews Mr. Zhang Believes @ The 2015 Vancouver International Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. In telling his story, “Anti-Rightist” Campaign survivor Zhang Xianchi fittingly quotes Georg Büchner’s famous line from Danton’s Death: “Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children.” Further passages from the German play would also resonate with Zhang’s oral history, such as: “The sin is in our thoughts” and “Your words smell of corpses.” The dramatic references would be appropriate, considering the expressionistic theatricality of Qiu Jiongjiong’s boldly experimental hybrid-documentary Mr. Zhang Believes, which screens during the 2015 Vancouver International Film Festival.

Qiu will indeed talk to Zhang and his remaining “Rightist”-denounced colleagues, but even these sequences have a bit of visual kick to them. However, must of the film dramatizes his story in highly stylized stage sets and sound stages, much like an old school Maoist propaganda pageant or a Brecht production before that. This is itself is a rather bold strategy, using the Party’s own techniques to criticize it. Yet, there is no shortage of substance underpinning the style.

Zhang spent years in Maoist-era work camps, but most of the film is devoted to explaining how he got there. Although Zhang’s father was a low level KMT official, he had once been a Communist and it is he who first radicalizes his son out of some misplaced nostalgia that he probably regretted. Still, it is because of his demonstrable record of revolutionary subversion and blinding zeal that Zhang is initially accepted into the PLA.

Time and again, Zhang witnesses Party hypocrisy during his military service, but he resolutely clings to his illusions. However, it becomes even harder to kid himself when he and his new wife Hu Jun and their families struggle to survive due to their “class enemy” heritage. Unfortunately, all their remaining self-delusions will be crushed during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Using Zhang’s testimony, Qiu clearly establishes the deceptive nature of the “Thousand Flowers” Campaign, inviting criticism from progressive true believers like Zhang and Hu Jun, so that it could subsequently label them “Rightists” and purge them accordingly. Of course, that only left sycophants and psychopaths in positions of power, exactly as the Party wanted. Yet, Zhang slyly observes his most enthusiastic tormentors had even worse done unto them during the Cultural Revolution. Cue Danton.

Mr. Zhang Believes defies just about every manifestation of authority imaginable, including the political, ideological, and aesthetic. However, it is not experimental for the sake of experimentalism. As an accomplished painter, Qiu has a strong sense of composition. With cinematographer Peng Fan he creates some staggering black-and-white imagery. Frankly, there is not a thrown-away second of the film. Each frame is artfully arranged and suitable for framing, even though they often depict great tragedy.

From "Mr. Zhang Believes."

There are also real performances unfolding on-screen. Jimmy Zhang plays Zhang Xianchi as a guileless but credible everyman, often too studious for his own good, while Ma Xiao’ou is acutely haunting as the ill-fated Hu Jun. Arguably though, one of Qiu’s most effective decisions is his use of Zhang’s young adoring sister Ba Mei (whom he and Hu Jun temporarily adopt for his mother’s sake) as the innocent witness. Engagingly played by Cai Yifan, she metaphorically serves as the Shakespearean character who survives to tell the tale.

Mr. Zhang Believes is an avant-garde film in many respects, but it packs more emotional punch than most shamelessly manipulative melodramas. Somehow Qiu pulls it off. He draws viewers in and Zhang’s testimony lays them out. Indeed, the irony and finality of his closing words are simply devastating. It is a rare example of a documentary (liberally defined) that is truly a work of art. Very highly recommended for anyone interested in Twentieth Century Chinese history, Mr. Zhang Believes screens this Wednesday (9/30) and next Monday (10/5) as part of this year’s VIFF.

LFM GRADE: A+

Posted on September 29th, 2015 at 9:18pm.

LFM Reviews The Creeping Garden

By Joe Bendel. Whatever you do, do not call slime mold fungi. That was yesterday’s classification. Mostly they are mycetozoan amoebozoa, but they definitely have a fungus-like look. However, they exhibit an unclassifiable collective intelligence that would scare the bejesus out of Dr. Nils Hellstrom. Slime mold finally gets its well-deserved close-up in Tim Grabham & Jasper Sharp’s The Creeping Garden, which opens this Wednesday at Film Forum.

Although slime mold has never attracted as much attention from nature lovers and scientists as birds or pretty much every other species of animal, it still manages to attract a small but hardy group of “admirers.” Grabham & Sharp will knock about the woods with one such citizen naturalist, ogling the oozing patches they find on dead logs. They will also retreat into the lab, where legitimate scientists study slime molds’ ability to navigate mazes and detour around poisoned spots. We even meet science-inspired artists who use the branching patterns of slime molds in their work.

In addition to marveling at its slow but steady creepiness, Grabham & Sharp also celebrate the time-lapse photography that made their film possible. They even pay tribute to Percy Smith, the British pioneer of time-lapse microscopic technology in a cool tangent. Frankly, his 1931 slime mold documentary Magic Mixies still holds up pretty well, at least from what we see of it.

Smith may have gotten there first, but Grabham & Sharp are not exactly traveling down a well-worn path. Perhaps realizing audiences might need some selling on slime mold, they evoke the trippy 1970s vibe of The Hellstrom Chronicle and the eccentric docs based on Future Shock and Chariots of the Gods without overplaying their hand. They also include archival footage of John Chancellor reporting the discovery of a mysterious batch of slime mold in Texas, on what must have been the slowest news night in recorded human history. Yet, the film still feels slightly padded, especially during a gimmicky human-slime mold social behavior experiment that goes on too long.

Still, you have to admire a film with this much confidence in viewers’ intelligence. It almost sounds like the product of a dare, but Grabham & Sharp prove you can make a compelling film about slime mold. Grabham and co-cinematographers Ben Ellsworth and Clare Richards capture some incredible scenes of slime mold growth and development—it is all pretty gross at times, but mesmerizing. Recommended for your inner nose-picking bratty kid fascinated by creepy-crawling things, The Creeping Garden opens this Wednesday (9/30) in New York at Film Forum.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on September 29th, 2015 at 9:17pm.

LFM Reviews Mountains May Depart @ The 53rd New York Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Evidently, in Chinese discos around 1999, “Go West” was like “The Final Countdown” in Czech dance clubs. When they played it, everybody hit the dancefloor. However, when you heard the Pet Shop Boys’ cover, you knew it was 12:00 sharp, the start of a new day. It heralds the dawn of a new era, but not necessarily a better one in Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart, which screens as a Main Slate selection of the 53rd New York Film Festival.

Shen Tao and her friends are going to party like it is 1999, because it is. New Year is approaching, when she will once again sing Fenyang’s big celebratory song. Obviously, the school teacher is the village sweetheart, but the well-heeled wheeler-dealer Zhang Jinsheng and her dirt poor childhood chum Liangzi are particularly smitten. A traditional love triangle forms, but Shen is (perhaps willfully) unaware how dirty Zhang is willing to fight.

By most objective measures, she makes the wrong choice and deals with the consequences in the second act set during 2014. Divorced from Zhang, Shen lives a comfortable life as Fenyang’s leading patroness, but it is a lonely existence without her seven year old son Dollar, as his father insisted on naming him, which pretty much tells you what you need to know about Zhang. However, she gets a poignant reminder of what might have been when the long absent Liangzi returns to Fenyang with his family and a nasty case of black lung.

The 2014 arc concludes with Shen attempting to make some sort of peace with Dollar before he immigrates to Australia with Zhang and his trophy wife. Flashing forward to 2025, the eighteen year-old can hardly remember his mother. Zhang’s dodgy dealings have caught up with them, causing no end of embarrassment for the son. For obvious Freudian reasons, Dollar explores an ambiguously romantic relationship with his professor Mia, a Hong Kong immigrant (by way of Toronto) who happens to be about Shen’s age.

Both the 1999 and 2014 sections include documentary footage Jia shot before knowing they would have a place in Mountains, but not the 2025 segment, at least not as far as we know. Frankly, the opening scene of Jia’s muse and now wife Zhao Tao leading a “Go West” get-down is so infectious, it demanded a film be crafted around. Yet, following its sheer retro joy, the rest of the film down-shifts, maintaining an exquisitely bittersweet vibe.

To match his vintage footage, all of the 1999 scenes are in boxy Academy ratio (as per the state of digital cameras at the time) and feature vivid saturated colors (especially the crimson reds of Shen’s wardrobe). In accordance with technological advances and increased pollution, Jia cranks up the 2014 scenes to standard ratio and dilutes the colors, while the 2025 Australian sequences are shot in sterile looking widescreen. You can also notice the population density of the streets and the screen precipitously decline.

It is all rather fitting and clever as a commentary on the impact of technology on human relationships, but what really sticks with you is Jia’s characteristic use of pop songs, which has never been as poignant. In addition to The Pet Shop Boys, HK Cantopop superstar Sally Yeh’s love songs rouse all kinds of sentimental and nostalgic feelings, in the way only effective pop tunes can.

Zhao Tao is absolutely perfect for Shen Tao. She truly looks ageless and timeless, yet she can eerily convey so much through so such subtle expression. Probably nobody working in film today can hold an audience rapt with a silent close-up as long as she can. Your heart aches for her, but you have to respect Shen for accepting responsibility for her mistakes and carrying on with dignity.

From "Mountains May Depart."

Zhao brings more than enough presence for any film, but Mountains also has the revered Sylvia Chang, hot on the heels of Office after a five year absence from film. Few people have her combination of maturity and sensuality that is so aptly suited for Mia. Think of her as a potential HK Helen Mirren, in a few years’ time. There are no end of pitfalls to depicting May-Septemberish relationships, but she develops convincingly imperfect chemistry with Dong Zijian’s Dollar that makes it work in dramatic terms.

The more you think about Mountains, the more it gets into your head and your soul. It is the sort of film that might break you out in tears later in the night rather than while you are in the theater, which is rather considerate of it, really. It is also further proof that Zhao Tao is the finest screen actress of our generation, bar none. Very highly recommended, Mountains May Depart screens again tonight (9/29) at the Beale Theater, as part of this year’s NYFF.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on September 29th, 2015 at 12:36pm.