Father Geek here once again with a report from that film watching machine Albert Lanier. Yep, our Pacific Editor (Ms Moon Yun Choi) sent me another of Albert's HIFF columns, and he caught some wonderfully wacky wons for us this time around...
MIX OF POWERFUL, OFFBEAT FILMS CONVERGE AT HIFF
It must have been something in the water the programmers of the 2003 Hawaii International Film Festival drank because a few of the late night weekday entries at HIFF this year are truly bizarre. I am no spring chicken/uninitiated virgin type when it comes to seeing weird films... Then again, maybe it's something I drank...
Well, let us begin with a look at the first film I saw on Nov. 4, the Taiwanese drama ROBINSON'S CRUSOE directed by Cheng Sheng-Lin.
ROBINSON'S CRUSOE focuses on Robinson, the head of an urban Real Estate firm, who is working to earn a million dollars so that he can buy Crusoe Island which is located between Florida and the Caribbean. When he's not working, Robinson spends his time either in his four-star hotel room taking a bath or ruminating about life in general and his past during walks around Taipei with a couple of female real estate colleagues.
Crusoe Island certainly does represent a possible escape for Robinson. At times he seems close to realizing his goal--a land developer is willing to buy up urban properties owned by Robinson which help provide the moneys needed to buy his dream island—but Robinson is willfully stuck in inertia, deliberately unable to be decisive or assertive with the choices and options laid out in his life.
Indeed, Robinson is a man who prefers to float unemotionally through life. He has a girlfriend but that relationship (if indeed that is a good word for it) is emotionally immobile and inert. He has a friendthat advises him to get out of the real estate business because of the physical intimidation and corruption inherent in the business but Robinson merely listens politely. By the end of ROBINSON'S CRUSOE, the essential problem within the main character is not that he pined for some impossible dream or fantasy or that his goal perhaps wasn't the fit for his personality but that he dreamed in the first place, that he had this desire to begin with.
ROBINSON'S CRUSOE almost worked. Lead actor Leon Dai does an admirable job here of playing Robinson and Director Cheng Sheng Lin navigates the emotional and unemotional terrain here well at times. We can see Robinson's disconnection, the detachment from an appealing inner life demonstrated skillfully in ROBINSON'S CRUSOE.
However, the film's script (written by Cheng and Kuei-Mei Yang) offers only the disconnect not any connection. Crusoe Island serves as Robinson's only real passion, the only "socket" he can plug into emotionally and yet we don't get any sense of feeling or desire from this one real connection of Robinson's. Therefore, the film becomes an entirely passive exercise in futility. This is not a bad thing. I certainly like films about the futility of notions or goals but if the filmmakers fail to show at least the glimmer of real interest, the spark of hope, then a film like ROBINSON'S CRUSOE unfortunately falls by the wayside.
I treated myself by watching the crazy Swedish comedy KOPS. This riotous comic features takes place in a sleepy Swedish town where a handful of police officers have plenty of time on their hands because crime is nearly nonexistent.
Well...I should mention the cow that runs a bit loose in the town's square. I mean, you've got disorderly conduct and resisting arrest right there. In any event, these cops look forward to eating waffle dogs for lunch and playing hockey in front of the police station.
Then, stunning news. A female officer with the National Police visits the station and informs the peace officers that their station will soon be closed. The reason? There appears to be no crime in their district and budget considerations dictate shutting down their station as this would be financially advantageous. This news panics the tiny squad of cops composed of a husband and wife who nag each other over their flaws and faults, a single father and American-action film obsessed dreamer who seems like a slight parody of Tackleberry in the POLICE ACADEMY films. These cops decide to take action: they start a crime wave in order to get the police authorities to rescind the closure decision. This hilarious daisy chain of "crimes"culminates in a kidnapping incident which brings out an entire police SWAT team.
KOPS is a screwball comedy filled to the brim with hilarious scenes. This film was well attended during the screening I went to and the Honolulu audience was convulsed in laughter. They seemed to love this movie.
I liked KOPS too. This is a simplistically plotted comedy that is ably executed by its director, Josef Fares, as well as its cast. Fares co-wrote KOPS' script along with writers Mikael Hafstrom and Vasa and they manage to introduce the main characters simply and effectively and navigate them through th! e rest of the plot and the story without a lot of needless subplots and additional scenes that slow the film down. KOPS shoots from both barrels. It contains enough sight gags and verbal humor to feed the hunger of an audience starving for over the top humor.
The last film of the day for me was the really off kilter BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL from Japan which had its U.S. Premiere that night.
The opening images of BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL show teenage high school baseball players batting and getting thrown out at base. A batter smashes a pitch into the air. An outfielder runs and leaps up to catch the ball and he does. Just as grabs the baseball with his glove, the ball explodes. Chaos breaks out on the field. Players attack each other with sudden ferocity. A coach watching in the dugout is shocked, scared and appalled. ! Pretty soon, the field is littered with human debris-arms and other limbs, a human head impaled on a metal rod.
Welcome to a nightmare. Welcome to horror unleashed. Welcome to BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL.
Actually, the next scene shows a well-dressed man at a desk waking up. This individual is the Principal of Seido High School and the Coach of its baseball team. It seems that the ghastly bloodbath and the carnage it created in the opening scenes were all just a dream. Or maybe not. Seido High has to face its next opponent Gedo High School which has a team composed of the undead. Gedo's team doesn't just demolish the competition. It literally kills them. Seido needs help. The principal sends one of his students off to recruit players for the team. This teenage patsy winds up in a mostly pastoral, mildly industrial! site where vicious groups of high school dropouts hangout.
Dropout and former sports star Jubeh pops up at this hangout. He clashes with some of the other toughies there. In one hilarious scene, he literally plays a game of "baseball" with a punk, essentially trying to avoid being hit by a bat with the object of "striking" out the batter. When the Principal heads out onto the field to take a look, he is convinced that he has found his secret weapon against the Zombies of Gedo High school. Jubeh refuses to play at first but of course, seeing what threat Gedo High poses and his own personal reasons cause him to change his mind.
BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL because this is a movie that must be seen to be disbelieved. This is a film that combines zombie horror, outright comedy, sports film tension, and musical sequences (that's right--characters break out in song and slide up to the camera and warble a tune ! or two) into an otherworldly film package. Credit must be given to Yudai Yamaguchi in this his directorial debut. Yamaguchi manages to really create weird but interesting images to look at and to help shape a bizarre world that fuses sports with murder and death. This is said to be based on a Manga comic and it certainly feels and sounds like one.
I have to say I liked BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL, this film is truly out there and I found it completely entertaining. Indeed, if George Romero did a zombie baseball musical comedy film for Troma films and set it in Japan, it might look like BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL.
SURPRISES OCCUR AMONG WEEKDAY FILMS AT HIFF
The 10 p.m. screening of the strange Japanese film BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL on Nov. 4 took me completely by surprise much to my delight. So did the next two days of the 2003 Hawaii International Film Festival in Honolulu. After a number of good films and more than a few mediocre to poor, I finally saw one of the best films of the festival the following night.
But first things firstwhich was Tracy Tragos' 56-minute documentary BE GOOD SMILE PRETTY which I saw that afternoon. The doc examines Tragos' father Donald Glenn Droz, a Naval Academy graduate who commanded a Patrol Boat while serving in the Vietnam War and who was killed during a Vietcong ambush.
Tragos who never got to know her father. Droz died when Tracy was just a baby and the two spent their only time together during an R&R trip in Hawaii. The filmmaker turns her camera on her long remarried mother, a corporate attorney, who still weeps copious tears over the long lost husband she continues to love deeply. Tragos also visits her paternal grandmother and her father's brother and cousin, college classmates at a reunion of her father’s class at Annapolis. One of them being Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts who was a ! friend and comrade of Droz in Vietnam and former naval personnel that Droz commanded and served with during the war.
The director looks at letters her father wrote to her mother, one of which contained the phrase from which the title of the film came from, and listened to recordings of phone calls between her father and her other. BE GOOD SMILE PRETTY is a genuinely cathartic film. The doc is touching but above all, it is enlightening about who Donald Droz was and this facet is the reason why the film works so well.
What Tragos does so well here is to construct an image and personality of her father. Donald Droz doesn't just seem like a cardboard profile of a nice, simple, hail-fellow well met but a guy who was a bit of a prankster, a thoughtful person, and an engaging man. Perhaps even someone you would like to meet if he were still alive. I appreciated Tragos decision to appear on-camera, to prod her mother to reopen old wounds, to talk with relatives and friends still shaken up over her father's death. It might have been easier to simply hover off-camera and keep her hurt and pain to herself but she chooses to share her emotions and to open herself up to an unseen audience.
BE GOOD SMILE PRETTY is the attempt by a daughter to get to know the father who was snatched away by the ravages of war. Tragos wisely honors who her father was as a man and respects his memory in such a thoughtful way that by the end of this film, an audience can get to know and respect Donald Glenn Droz.
By contrast I had a hard time liking or respecting the Chinese drama ALL TOMORROW PARTIES, a tired, stale picture that focuses on uninteresting personal relationships between a couple of characters while neglecting the semi-Orwellian social and p! olitical forces at play in the film.
Essentially, a religious sect named the Gui Dao rules over China and other parts of Asia. This sect seems to combine Hindu iconography with Maoist authoritarianism which has a pervasive hold on the socio-political, economic and of course, religious framework of China. Dissenters are usually rounded up and taken to Camp Prosperity, actually a prison surrounded by brick walls with turrets. Two such "dissenters" meet while serving time in the camp: Zhuai who was sent there along with his younger brother Mian and Xuelan who is forced to stay in the prison along with her young son.
Suddenly, one day the prison administrators, guards and employ! ees open the gate and hightail it out of the camp. The prisoners gather together in courtyard and just stare at the open gate as if it were an optical illusion or unreal. The inmates finally do leave the asylum. The ex-prisoners walk out on the country roads leading from the prison, tasting freedom for the first time in months and maybe years. What to do now? The cult is being overthrown as Korean troops are moving into China to "liberate" its citizens. Zhuai and Zuelan and her child traipse around the largely deserted and desolate industrial districts of a nearby city. They locate a deserted apartment and set up house even though Xuelan is wary about living in the apartment.
ALL TOMORROW PARTIES fails because the characters are narrowly written and the filmmakers are far more interested in whether the romantic relationship of the main protagonists will survive or wither on the vine.
Director Lik Wai Yu (who also wrote the film's screenplay) does seem to make slightly salient points at times about the human reliance on authority, even illegitimate authority, in the face of government breakdown and regime changes. He even shows the cycle of domination and control constantly spins into motion. One dominant controlling entity is overthrown and replaced by another entity that, though more benign and less overpowering than the last still has to assert its superior position.
However, these points are obscured by the central relationship between Zhuai and Xuelan that I found neither intriguing nor stimulating. They drift through their lives unsure of themselves, each other and the decisions they eventually make. In short, ALL TOMORROW PARTIES is a cinematic killjoy.
The Japanese film GOZU, on the other hand, was a complete joy to behold.
Granted, it was a weird, grotesque, completely revolting film. However, GOZU is a brilliant piece of filmmaking that is definitely one of the best films shown at HIFF this year.
Directed by the hardest working filmmaker in the world Miike Takashi (this is what? His 25th film this year, I don't know), GOZU deals primarily with two Yakuza goons-Minami and Ozaki. Ozaki is the older of the two. During a trip to Nagoya, Ozaki tells the younger Minami that he is planning to bump off the head of their Yakuza family whom he considers an embarrassment. He wants to know if Minami will join this planned putsch. Minami feels obligated to support Ozaki because the older man previously saved his life and essentially pledges his support. However, in an ironic twist, Ozaki winds up dead in the! back seat of Minami's car. The Yakuza boss calls Minami on his cell phone: He wants Ozaki dead.
So, Minami's got a good news/bad news situation here. His boss wants Ozaki dead and the gangster is deadbut Minami can't get rid of Ozaki's body. Minami drives into the countryside into the city. He parks in a space in front of a restaurant and enters. Minami is greeted within the dining establishment by a bald man and two men in drag.
A couple of minutes later, Minami looks through the restaurant's front window to check on his car and is shocked to discover that Ozaki's body is gone. Thus begins the roller coaster ride of truly weird and disturbing occurrences and incidents in which the dream world often seems to fold into the real world like a mobius strip and in which the real world appears to be stranger than any dream world. I would absolutely love to reveal the strange flights of fancy this film takes but this is a movie that has to be seen. I can state with the utmost confidence that no review can do GOZU justice.
Takashi does a masterful job of directing GOZU. He takes Sakichi Sato's script and plunges headlong into its frothy brew of eerie plot points and unique characters. In GOZU, Takashi directs his actors and shoots his scenes with such surefootedness and utter confidence that as audience members, we are willing to take this offbeat ride with him. GOZU had its U.S. Premiere that night and was shown only once again on the last day of the festival.
By the way, if you any of you talkbackers or AICN faithful get a hold of GOZU on a VHS tape or an DVD and decide to watch it for the first time: DO NOT MISS THE CLIMAX OF THIS FILM. It will be worth it. Trust me.
Finally,! a few words about THE HUNTER AND THE HUNTED which also had its U.S. Premiere at this year fest. Directed by Izuru Narushima, THE HUNTER AND THE HUNTED largely focuses on two characters: a police detective that has returned to active duty after taking care of his child in the wake of his wife's death and a professional burglar who considers thievery his "vocation" and lifelong work.
Jin, the cop meets Neko, the burglar at a local park. Neko helps fix the wheel of Jin's daughter's bike after she takes a spill. Jin thanks Neko, realizes he may be a well-known criminal then identifies himself as a policeman. He would like Neko to follow him to the station. And so begins an unexpected and interesting relationship in which takes place over a period of years in which Neko acts as a sort of guide and teacher to Jin, teaching him how to be a sharper, more effective detective.
THE HUNTER AND THE HUNTED! is a surprisingly warm and funny film that takes the normal adversarial relationship between the peace officer and felon and takes it to different and sometimes slightly moving heights.
Narushima and the film's screenwriters Yoshiko Komatsu and Katsuhiko Manabe do a really fine job here at translating this story to the screen, ably sifting through the hurts and emotional residue of the past in both characters. However, most of the praise should to the film's leads Koji Yakusho and Emoto Akira as Jin and Neko. Their performances are spot on. The actors never take the easy way out by needlessly boosting the laid-back humor at the expense of some of the emotional layers continued within the lives of each character.
THE HUNTER AND THE HUNTED was actually the only film I saw on Thursday, November 6 (since I attended HIFF's Award ceremony that night) but the film turned out to be a nice change o! f pace and more importantly one of those small, unheralded films hat never get any press attention or hype but deliver the goods nonetheless.
