Hey folks, Harry here... Mark was good enough to send me this report he got from Garo of his coverage from Toronto. The key film here is MEMORIES OF MURDER! Garo claims this film is better than SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE, which was my pick as the best film of 2002. I am now hunting for this movie... if you find it on DVD - let me know... MUST SEE NOW! Here ya go...
Howdy,
I enjoyed reporting on the Seattle International Film Festival and feel a bit left out this time around. But here's a report on three screenings at TIFF by Kung Fu Cinema's reporter in the field, Garo. You can also find exclusive pics of directors Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Vincenzo Natali here:
Best,
Mark Pollard
Day One: September 4th
I’m in Boston waiting to board my plane to Toronto for (in my opinion) the best film festival in the world, The Toronto International Film Festival. I’ve been going to the fest since 1997 and love going. Once on the plane they give out these SARS questioners you are supposed fill out. The problem is, I just had a chest cold about two weeks ago, you know the kind that has you coughing up green stuff every hour or so. I still have remnants of the cold lingering in my chest which manifests itself as a persistent cough. One of the questions on the SARS questionnaire is, "Do you have a cough?" Now here is my dilemma, do I circle "yes" and risk being quarantined for the entire festival or just out and out lie and circle, "no"? My answer was to lie because I know I don’t have SARS, but if I do it’s now Toronto’s problem and not mine.
Once off the plane and ready to contaminate the entire city, I head to the hotel to drop off my luggage. Once the luggage is gone I head to the film festival’s Ticket Office to pick up my tickets. At the box office I run into Midnight Madness programmer and good friend, Colin Geddes. We exchange phone numbers and vow to get together later. I then look through my tickets and damn, I didn’t get three tickets for films I wanted. The three films are The Tesseract by Oxide Pang (one half of the directing team behind the Hong Kong horror hit The Eye), Coffee & Cigarettes by Jim Jarmusch, and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead by Mike Hodges. I’ll now have to use the Rush line to get tickets and I hate Rushing for tickets. For those not in the know, the Rush line is where people stand and 5 minutes before the movie starts, if there are seats still available, they’ll sell you tickets for the show. You’ll know if I get into these films if you see reviews for them.
Some of the films I’m looking forward to this year are Beat Takeshi’s Zatoichi, Ong-Bak, School Of Rock, End Of The Century: The Story Of The Ramones, Save The Green Planet, Undead, and Vincent Gallo’s (whose Buffalo ’66 is one of the best films ever made!) The Brown Bunny. Hopefully these movies will live up to my expectations and I’ll find some hidden gems in my other selections.
Day Two: September 5th
Memory Of Murder
One of the best things at the fest is going to a movie you know little about and have no expectations for and being blown away by what you see. This movie blew me away. Based on a real life case of a serial killer/rapist (the first ever in Korea) who raped and killed women between the years of 1986 and 1991, this Korean film mixes very dark humor with tragedy that recalls another Korean film, Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance. In my opinion this movie is even better than that movie as the characters are more fleshed out than in Vengeance. This is not a movie for everyone and you’ll either laugh at the scene where the cops brutally beat a retarded suspect into confessing to the crime (yes, the scene is played for laughs so stop looking at me like I’m some kind of monster) or you’ll walk out of the theater in disgust. All the performances are top notch and director Bong Joon-ho handles the macabre to the hilarious expertly. This is one movie you need to hunt down and see and I have a great feeling that this might just be the best movie I see at the whole fest.
Last Life In The Universe
I’ve seen one of director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s previous films, the black comedy 6ixtynin9, and let’s just say I wasn’t impressed. I skipped his film last year, A Transistor Love Story, but decided to see his new film anyway. This film stars Tadanobu Asano (who has been in such films as the mind-numbling awful Gojoe, Takeshi Miike’s overrated Ichi The Killer and many many others) as a Japanese man who has OCD and is obsessed with committing suicide while living in Bangkok. When he accidentally kills a Yakuza gang member on the same night he watches a bar girl he had a crush on get killed by a car, he goes to stay with the bar girls sister and romance starts to blossom. But then Takeshi Miike shows up as Yakuza from Japan and you just know more blood is gonna get spilled. This movie is defiantly better than 6ixtynin9 but you just get the feeling that if you took out all the Yakuza stuff, the movie would fit perfectly on the Lifetime network. The movie does look nice thanks to cinematographer Christopher Doyle.
Cypher
I haven’t seen Cube but I’ve heard it’s great. Someday I will see it. This is Vincenzo Natali’s second film after Cube and it’s a fun entertaining popcorn movie that you will probably never be seen since Miramax owns the rights to it and they are not into releasing good movies anymore. In fact, Miramax has been sitting on this film for over a year and has no plans to release it anytime soon. But don’t worry, the moment the next horrible Halloween sequel is ready they’ll put it into a three thousand theaters while they use the negative of this movie and countless other good films (Shaolin Soccer anybody?) as door stops. Well, enough of the evil empire that is Miramax, let’s get back to the film shall we. Jeremy Northam stars as a guy who is an under cover agent for a corporation called Digicorp, he goes to conventions and tapes the lectures. But then he meets Rita (Lucy Liu) and who he’s working for and exactly who he is becomes fuzzier and fuzzier. Cypher is a twisty thriller that kept me guessing till the end but my friend next to me says he figured it out about half way through so I guess that makes me stupid. So if you’re stupid like me, Cyper is the movie for you.
