Category: 4. Joe Bendel

By Joe Bendel. Kim Jun-shik could have been an Olympic champion marathoner, but the milestones defining his life involve involuntary military service. Impressed into the Imperial Japanese, Soviet, and National Socialist armies, Kim’s journey ultimately brought him to Omaha Beach on D-Day. It is an epic story (rather loosely based historical fact), told with appropriate grit and grandeur in Kang Je-kyu’s My Way (trailer above), which opens this Friday in New York.

Kim could always run fast, and from a young age his fate will be intertwined with that of Tatsuo Hasegawa. The grandson of a high-ranking Japanese officer, Hasegawa quickly becomes Kim’s primary competition on the track. Not surprisingly, the Japanese authorities put the fix in for Hasegawa at the Olympic trials, precipitating a full scale riot among outraged Korean spectators. Forced into the Japanese military as punishment, Kim eventually finds himself serving under Hasegawa, a harsh martinet in the tradition of his grandfather.

Needless to say, the campaign in Mongolia does not go well. Leading his men into a crushing defeat, Hasegawa is captured, along with Kim and several fellow Korean conscripts. Conditions in the Soviet labor camp are unbearably brutal, except for Kim’s friend Jong-dae, who becomes the Communist enforcer amongst the prisoners. Not unexpectedly, he reserves the harshest mistreatment for the Japanese, particularly Hasegawa, which troubles Kim despite their checkered history. When the war temporarily turns against the Soviets, the prisoners are given a grimly illegal choice: summary execution or service on the Eastern Front. Both are essentially death sentences.

Somehow surviving the ensuing carnage, Kim and Hasegawa head west, ready to declare themselves Japanese POWs when they encounter the Germans. Ironically, the conditions of service under the Nazis appear relatively mild compared to their stints with the Soviets and militarist Japanese, at least for a while. However, there are eerie (if unsubtle) parallels between all three militaries that clearly demonstrate the underlying similarities of oppressive regimes.

Like a cross between Saving Private Ryan and Chariots of Fire, My Way is a sprawling chronicle of sport, combat, and statist regimes that employs its flashback structure quite adroitly. There are a number of spectacularly rendered large scale battle scenes (in which it definitely helps to be swift of foot), but the film still packs a real emotional punch, particularly when depicting Kim’s brief relationship with Shirai, a captured Chinese sniper out to avenge her family.

One of the world’s most beautiful women, Fan Bingbing is absolutely heartbreaking as Shirai. Yet, it is Jang Dong-gun and Joe Odagiri who really carry the weight of the picture, as Kim and Hasegawa, respectively. They convincingly portray the two soldiers’ evolution from bitter enemies to stateless brothers-in-arms. On paper, much of their narrative would sound forced, but they make it work on-screen every step of the way.

Audiences should look past the oddly nondescript title, because it is hard to imagine there will be a better war film this year than My Way. Considerably superior to The Front Line, it is a cinematic saga worthy of the 70mm Cinemascope era. Highly recommended, it opens this Friday (4/20) in New York at the AMC Empire, the Beekman Theatre, and the Village East.

Posted on April 16th, 2012 at 3:09pm.

By Joe Bendel. The Communists loved their paperwork and with good reason. It was one of their most effective tools for controlling people. Yet, Vacek’s mother seems to have a talent for it, navigating the red tape required for immigration while writing four scores of undeliverable missives to his defector father in Václav Kadrnka’s Eighty Letters, which appropriately screens at Bohemia National Hall as part Disappearing Act IV, the annual showcase of films unjustly overlooked after their well received festival runs, co-presented by the Czech Center.

Alarmed to find himself home alone one morning, Vanek catches up with his mother at the tram stop, essentially forcing her to take him with her on her mysterious errands. They do not talk much during the day, but they are not visiting places conducive to conversation. Confused and a bit withdrawn, Vanek whiles away the time in series doctor’s waiting rooms and government lobbies. It is not until we hear his mother’s voiceover composing another letter to his father that we appreciate how close she is to completing the deliberately arduous application process. Of course, that begs the question: then what?

Eighty is a film that refuses to look the audience in the eyes, which might be understandably off-putting for some viewers. Indeed, we watch most of Kadrnka’s pseudo-autobiographical story from sidewalk level, but there is a reason for that. The last time I was in Prague I asked my Czech friends why everyone identified me as an American before I ever spoke a word of awful Czech. My nondescript wardrobe was hardly a giveaway. They said it was because of the way I held my head up when I walked. Seeing this film helps explain that answer.

Unfolding from Vanek’s POV, Eighty is a quiet film with quite a bit of running through the streets of Prague. It could almost be considered The Red Balloon’s Kafkaesque cousin. Unfortunately, Zuzana Lapcikova and Martin Pavlus are strangely cold screen presences. However, they certainly look and feel convincing as mother and son.

Kadrnka masterfully sets the mood and frames his shots. Despite the emotional aloofness of the cast, it is an interesting film to watch purely for its craftsmanship. It is certainly worth a look, particularly this Sunday (4/15) when it screens free at BNH as Disappearing Act IV continues in New York. It is also a great opportunity to catch up with Jaak Kilmi and Kiur Aarma’s wonderfully sly and illuminating documentary Disco and Atomic War (see here and here), which also screens for free on Sunday, right before Eighty Letters.

Posted on April 13th, 2012 at 2:29pm.

By Joe Bendel. They say one should write about what you know. Hong Sang-soo knows about film school, or at least his characters do. Their lives and films freely blur and overlap in his sort of but not really braided-story film, Oki’s Movie, which opens this Monday at the Maysles Cinema as something of a ringer in their Documentary in Bloom film series.

Oki’s Movie is actually four short films featuring the same cast of characters or characters based on them. When we first meet Jingu in A Day for Incantation, he is a young film school instructor with a handful of less than enthusiastically received short films to his record. After psyching himself up to face a new day, he gets far too drunk at a faculty lunch, offending the department chairman, Professor Song, before leaving for a disastrous screening of one of his shorts. As King of Kisses opens, it would appear Incantation is Jingu’s thesis project, which Professor Song praises effusively. In fact, Jingu seems to be one of his favorites, but the student is more interested in wooing Oki, oblivious to her clearly implied relationship with Song.

In the sketchiest segment, After the Snowstorm, Song questions his academic career when only Oki and Jingu brave a snowstorm for his class. For their efforts, he entertains their meaning-of-life questions, answering with canned profundities. However, Oki’s Movie rebounds with the concluding title segment, in which Oki compares and contrasts two trips she took to Acha Mountain, first with Song and then with Jingu. Demonstrating a fascination with repeated cycles, Oki’s Movie, the sub-film, nicely leads into Hong’s The Day He Arrives, which as luck would have it opens next Friday in New York.

Instinctively, viewers will want to impose a sequential order on Oki’s Movie, presumably beginning with the characters in their present day, followed by three successive flashbacks. However, Hong deliberately problematizes such linearity by consciously presenting the opening and closing segments as films-within-films (emphasized with their separate but identical credit sequences), with Oki apparently appearing as an actress in Jingu’s A Day for Incantation.

Despite his narrative puzzle-making, Hong is often compared to Woody Allen and it is easy to see why throughout drily witty Oki’s Movie. While his three major characters all rather self-centered and neurotic, he never judges them too harshly. Indeed, there are even moments of biting self-awareness, particularly from Oki, but also to a lesser extent from Song, rendered as an almost tragic figure in Oki’s short. By American standards, it is also a bit politically incorrect, deriving gleeful humor from the outrageous things said as a result of inebriation. While Hong never moralizes, he certainly shows the repercussions of over-indulgence.

Indeed, Hong is a master at depicting incidents of social awkwardness and the human foibles that magnify them. Lee Sun-kyun is quite the convincing blindered sad sack, but manages to keep Jingu relatively grounded. In contrast, Jung Yumi is a consistently intelligent and intriguing screen presence as Oki, the reluctant femme fatale.

In a sense, Hong represents the road too often not taken by postmodernists. Like his thematically related short Lost in the Mountains and his forthcoming The Day He Arrives, Oki is light and droll rather than dour and didactic. Even with its eccentric structure, it is a highly accessible film suitable for viewers who usually confine their international cinema patronage to relationship comedies in the French tradition. Solidly entertaining, Oki’s Movie is definitely worth a trip uptown when it screens Monday (4/16) through Sunday (4/22) at the Maysles Cinema.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on April 13th, 2012 at 2:26pm.