Hey folks, Harry here with Mr Tough Guy in Rotterdam with two more reviews from that wonderful festival. I'm dying to see FLYING FISH, the trailer was cool and well... a dutch kung fu flick sounds fascinating. As for COP FESTIVAL - hmmm, interesting. Well, here's our friend in Rotterdam with the scoop...
Hey Harry
Sent you something about Zatoichi yesterday, and now I’m back with something else from the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. Saw three movies today and I’d like to say something about the first and last.
The first thing I saw today was Cop Festival, not really a movie, but a collection of 10 minute long short movies. Shinozaki Makoto was there to give an introduction and to do a Q & A afterwards. We were quite lucky to see these shorts, as they’ve only been shown outside of Japan once before at the Vancouver film festival. The festival Director Simon Field saw them there and had this to say:” They’re terrible, we’ve got to have them.”
Shinozaki Makoto explained how they came into existence; a local theatre asked him for his movie Asakusa Kid, but he had already given it to another theatre instead he decided to ask his buddies for help and make a series of shorts. With a dead line of 2 months they started on Cop Festival. To tie the shorts together they decided they needed some rules, and unlike the Dogma rules which made sense they decided they needed stupid rules.
The rules were these:
1.the main protagonist had to be a cop
2.The short had to be 10 minutes and not a second longer
3.At least one stupid thing had to happen every minute The result is a series of insanely funny and popular shorts, which have spawned 3 more cop festivals. From those 4 series they made a selection, two shorts of each series for the IFFR.
The 8 shorts we saw were incredibly low budget, with terrible subtitles but they were all fantastic. My two favourites were Love Juice cop, and small elephant cop. Love juice cop is all about a female cop whose mission it is to have sex with criminals they can’t convict. As she reaches her climax she squirts her “love juice” over her victim, killing him. The entire audience was laughing out loud as we saw one of those criminals being sprayed by love juice, then seeing his face melt of and finally see his head roll of his shoulders. My other favourite small elephant cop is about a small 3 maybe 4 inch long fluffy blue elephant who’s a cop, and goes on to solve a homicide case. The entire thing was shot as stop motion, and looked really great considering that the rest of the cast were played by humans.
The chances of seeing these beauties on DVD somewhere along the line are small, but they are busy with Cop festival 5, and it’s already really successful so maybe just maybe there will be a big boxed set of DVD’s someday
FIGHTING FISH
The second movie I want to say something about is the Dutch martial arts movie Fighting Fish, which had its premiere today at the IFFR. While I didn’t see it at the actual premiere I did see it about 2 hours later at the second showing.
The basic story is simple, A-ken, a martial arts expert returns to Rotterdam for the funeral of his brother who’s a member of the Chinese gang in Rotterdam. A-ken is there with 2 goals, to return the ashes of his brother to his mother and to avenge his brother’s death. He goes on to investigate the murder and falls in love with a pretty blond Dutch girl along the way.
I went into this movie expecting the worst, but as it turned out it wasn’t as bad as I expected, the first half hour was actually quite good, it set up the story and had a decent fight scene, and it all seemed like a decent Hong Kong movie, especially since all the dialogue of the first half hour is basically all in Cantonese. But after the first half hour A-ken finally meets the Dutch girl, and it goes downhill from there. The Dutch and English dialogues that follow are extremely cheesy. While the rest of the movie isn’t terrible, it’s a shame they couldn’t maintain the quality of the first part. The plot itself was pretty simple and a bit predictable at times, but not bad especially considering it’s the first feature film they made. The fight scenes were pretty good, maybe a bit too long at times, but writer and star Kim Ho Kim did a pretty decent job on the choreography and while it could be improved at times, it wasn’t bad, I’ve certainly seen much worse. All in all it was a fun movie to see, and certainly better then I had expected for the first Dutch martial arts feature.
Mr Tough Guy
