Hey folks, Harry here in Sitges. Sorry I haven't been writing with updates about the unfuckingbelievable film festival here in Catalunya. I mean this festival is simply the best film festival in the world for film film geeks. The programmers have the absolute best taste I've seen from a festival ever. Just ungodly good. Tonight I saw Alex De La Iglesia's 800 BALAS (aka 800 BULLETS) and personally this is my favorite film I've seen this year thus far. I'll be writing on the airplane back, and in the weeks following in Austin. So much to cover. However, the official AICN correspondents at Sitges have finally arrived with reports. We'll call this wonder-pair... Smitty and the lovely Susan Dickenson. This wild pair from The Alamo have been a dynamic duo here. Smitty with his wondrous crooning voice and Susan Dickenson with her astonishing surviving skills. I'm dying to see SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE! Here ya go...
SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE
Review by Susan Dickenson:
The title is often of those obscure, kind of silly sounding names that Asian movies are often victim to, but after seeing the movie, the title is perfect.
The story serves up heaping helpings of revenge, counter-revenge and ever-escalating counter-counter revenge, which gets progressively more agonizingly un-satisfactory and helplessly hopeless as the victims fall. You indeed have nothing but head-clutching sympathy for both parties as they wound each other almost in spite of themselves out of blind driven grief.
The main character is a young deaf-mute man, who's beloved sister has kidney disease and will die without a transplant. Laid off of work and not a blood type match himself, he has only enough money to either buy the organ or to pay the surgeon, and after a hideous con by black market organ dealers, he soon has money for neither. The desperate man makes a desperate plan to save his sister, but in doing so accidentally starts a chain of events that begins the awful revenge-cycle.
Note by Smitty:
Big thumbs up on Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. I am
getting more and more impressed with the film output
from Korea. This film was a TOTAL package, a
fantastic movie. It's a depressing storyline, to say
the least, but it's peppered with enough comedy bits
to keep your spirits up and not leave you totally
devastated. The photography is gorgeous; every shot,
every scene is wonderfully designed. And for the
Gore-hounds, it's a revenge movie that doesn't skimp
on the Caro Syrup and cringe-factor. Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance was directed by Park Chan-Wook, who
previously directed the smash hit (in Korea) Joint
Security Area. Somebody please start getting these
films into American Cinemas!!!
DEMON LOVER
review by Susan Dickenson
This was the first film of the morning, and much earlier than I was equal to. So take this review with the understanding that less than full brainpower was engaged.
Basically, I simply could not completely follow what was happening.
The corporate intrigue surrounding a multi-million dollar deal for distribution of Japanese 3-D animated porn involves power plays and subtle political machinations that moves slowly enough that my attention slipped just before crucial momentous events, which I subsequently couldn't understand. The relationships and loyalties between the characters also shifts continually accroding to who has the upper hand in the corporate negotiations. This too, was done in so subtle a way (in keeping with the secretive and poker-faced nature of the characters) that I was often confused about who was doing what to whom and why.
All this is not the fault of the filmmakers, but there is no ignoring that there is only small percentage of the population who is willing or able to give the required effort of concentration into following the complexities of the plot. This is not a marketable film.
comments by Smitty
OK, I have to add my two cents on Demonlover. I really dug this movie. For one, it's Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep) and that alone will get some people salivating. Oliver Assayas used to be a film critic for the snooty Cahiers du Cinema, but because of his love of Asian cinema, kung fu and exploitation, ended up severing all ties with the magazine and the power brokers of French Cinema. The Goddard-worshippers hate him, the fans love him. Assayas is hard to classify. His films (Demonlover included) are gorgeously shot, every bit as artistic as the finest in French cinema, but he's not afraid to dig around in the gutter for some low-end subject material, and the gutter is where I like to hang out.
It's true, the pacing is a bit slow, but it builds to
a great climax and the storyline is fascinating.
Information is revealed to you in little morsels:
snippets of conversation, bedroom talk,
phone-conversations and secret meetings. In the end,
everything is pieced together quite nicely. This
could be the subject a somewhat dry wall-street
thriller, but when Assayas uses the tradable commodity
of pubic-hairless 3-D animated Japanese porn and
underground fetish internet torture sites, it adds
just the right mix of creepiness and juicy
exploitation that makes this film rise above to
another level entirely. I agree with Karrie that it's
not really a marketable film, it'll get released in
the states, but come and go quickly. Check it out
though, you'll be discussing it for a while.
NARC
review by Susan Dickenson
This is a solid, well acted, well executed tough-cop action flick, and I was not excited about it at all. I've seen this type of movie so many times that it becomes like an episode of Scooby Doo. What seemingly innocent bystander will be unmasked as the villain and end up cursing "those meddling kids" this week?
Again, it's nothing against the movie. It's well paced, tense, brutal, has good character development, etc. etc. If it's the first cop-taking-the-law-into-his-own-hands movie that you've ever seen, it will blow you away. It's just that it's far from the first that I've seen. In my opinion, American filmmakers working in this genre need to freshen up their act. Asian filmmakers have far and away outstripped the US in this type of film, and have for so long now that catching up just isn't enough. We're looking for someone to turn cop-action on its head and make it breathe again.
Comment by Smitty
mega-dittos.
IRREVERSIBLE
review by Smitty
The first screening of Irreversible, the controversial new film by French experimental filmmaker Gaspar Noe, was prefaced by a 15 minute defence of the work by the festival programmer AND a quickly-escorted-out-the-door rabid group of women's rights protesters trying to shout down the director.
As I said, irreversible is a controversial film, but the controversy really hinges on just two scenes. Albeit they are LOOOOOONG, protracted scenes, one of which is so brutally horrifying that it nearly made Anthony Timpson, programmer of the Incredible Film Festival in New Zealand, vomit in his lap. If you knew the body of work he has absorbed in his life, this one fact would be enough to have half the country lining up for tickets and the other half running for shelter. This aforementioned scene, mind you, is NOT the brutal ten minute anal rape and beating sequence, one of the most graphic rape scenes I have ever seen, and that includes some pretty out-there films from Japan, a country with a thriving industry built on the subject.
That said, it was a pretty cool film. The protestors are out of their gourds, and like nearly all circumstances like this, they ought to watch the god-damn movie first before condemning it. It's not a film made for rape-fetishists to pleasure themselves, it's a thought-provoking film that doesn't shy away from the ghastly imagery of a ghastly subject. As long as they don't shoot the director, however, protesters are marketing gold and the best thing that can happen to a film. Keep on shouting about the brutality, time has proven that you can't buy better advertising than loony activists provide for free.
The story uses the Memento device, last scene first, then work your way back to the beginning from there. It's not as clever as Memento, where the discovery of past events ties to the memory disorder of the protagonist. In Irreversible, its more of a gimmick, but it still works well. The story arc with this particular plotline probably works better in reverse.
Also, if you are epileptic or prone to
motion-sickness, either bring your tongue extractor or
stay the hell away. The flashing lights and
roller-coaster camera work in Irreversible make Blair
Witch and the original Exorcist trailer seem like the
rock of Gibraltar. The intro sequence (climaxing in
the aforementioned vomit-inducer), a long kinetic shot
tracking the wake of destruction of a violent,
coked-up Frenchman plowing through an intense,
underground gay leather bar called.... THE RECTUM (If
I were into the underground, leather scene, I'd go to
no other bar but THE RECTUM). If you see it with only
Spanish subtitles like I did, just remember
"maricon"=homosexual and culo=rectum. That will get
you through this first sequence, no problem.
Apparently, this film has US distribution. Expect an
uproar, but check it out, it's a brutal, but well-done
film.
DEAD OR ALIVE: FINAL (PART 3)
I'm pissed off about this one. It's crap. Highlights were a couple of decent action scenes, some very cool vintage kung fu sequences that he either doctored up or shot from scratch, and a few inspired Miike wacky background details. The problem is that these account for only about 5 minutes of an 88 minute mediocrity. On paper, the story sounds great. A queeny homosexual mayor is forcing the city to take birth (and mind) control drugs to stabilize the society and promote homosexuality. A rag-tag bunch of breeders and a super-powered kung fu android hatch a plan to take him down. A mutant winged penis-headed robot also figures into the mix. Sounds good, right? Wrong. Sucks. I should mention that I'm a BIG Takashi Miike fan and try to program everything of his that I can at the theater. I won't be touching this one. I love the idea that Miike can crank out a dozen films a year and end up with some two-week-shooting-schedule gems like Visitor Q. He should have spent another couple of weeks on this one though. On top of the fact that the video to film transfer was one of the worst I've seen since BOARDINGHOUSE. It looked like it was shot on VHS in EP speed. The picture quality was constantly taking me out of the movie. Bad news.
I don't know. Maybe I set the bar a little high for this. Of everything in the nearly 500 film program it was probably the title I was most anticipating and it's my least favorite of all films seen so far. Watch Dead or Alive part1 again and leave part 3 on the shelf.
Comment by Susan Dickenson:
I fell asleep through the middle of Dead or Alive 3. Boring, lame, stupid, crap. Even the bits that Tim says were mildly redeeming were just gimmicky ideas stuck for no reason. And I had a horrible unsettling feeling before I fell asleep when one of the characters (inexplicably) spoke in perfect American english. He was an incredibly bad actor, and everyone else, who were speaking either Japanese or Chinese seemed fine to me. Got me wondering if one of the reasons that Asian cinema works so well so consistently is maybe because I can't tell if there is rancid acting going on. I really hope not.
