Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a trinity of reviews of three of the big Asian films currently making the film festival rounds including THE DUELIST, Chanwook Park's SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE and Miike's totally fucking trippy looking THE GREAT YOKAI WAR. I'm dying to see all of them, even if Doc Holliday didn't like LADY VENGEANCE... I refuse to believe a Park film can fail. Enjoy the reviews!
It’s crazy that I’ve never sent any reviews to my fav movie site since I do the Toronto film fest every year and have managed to be at ground zero for all sorts of coolness like Kung-Fu Hustle, Zatoichi, Ong-Bak, Ichi The Killer, Waking Life and Versus. Based on what’s already been posted on this site from TIFF ‘05 screenings I seem to be the only one who was seriously disappointed with Sympathy For Lady Vengeance but I’d really like to hear some more takes on it. If you post these call me Doc Holliday. Here's the reviews:
THE DUELIST
(Feel the power of PMS!)
Directed by Lee Myung-se The Duelist is a martial arts period piece that feels like South Korea’s answer to House Of Flying Daggers. The movie stars the beautiful Ha Jiwon as Namsoon, a fearlessly bitchy and unintentionally cute undercover police officer hot on the trail of a counterfeit ring that threatens to unravel the entire Korean economy. Namsoon is a relentlessly devoted cop, she dresses in ridiculous disguises, throws punchy temper tantrums when provoked and stares down every man who gets in her way (literally). But as we soon discover she’s also a tender young girl who can be swooned and turned into a gawking emotional mess when her feelings are toyed with. Namsoon seems trapped in a permanent state of severe pre-menstrual syndrome and that makes her a lot more entertaining than most action heroines I can think of. Counterpoint to her craziness is her partner Ahn, a man old enough to be her father but barely able to keep her on a leash and only slightly more mature than she is. Ahn struggles to keep up with Namsoon, occasionally forced into the father/older-brother role when it’s obvious she needs a good talking to. Together they’re a priceless on-screen duo, neither one can be called the brains of the operation but what they lack in brains they make up for in blind persistence. Namsoon and Ahn follow their counterfeit case all the way back to the Minister Of Defence and uncover a possible coup d’ tat brewing behind the scenes of Korea’s government. What promises to be a sticky political situation becomes even more tangled with the appearance of the Minister’s henchman, a mysterious swordsman named Sad-Eyes who taunts Namsoon and engages her in a series of beautifully staged duels that quickly become a strange form of courtship for the two fighters. The highlight of the entire film is their second encounter in a darkened alleyway under a full moon. This lively and gorgeous action sequence has them sparring in and out of shadows with a mix of slow-motion and lighting fast blades glinting in the moonlight, the choreography and visuals are striking. What starts off as a quirky, engaging adventure yarn turns far more serious and poetic in it’s second half becoming much closer in tone to the recent string of Chinese historical epics like Crouching Tiger, Hero and Flying Daggers. The Duelist certainly doesn’t have the budget or gloss of those films but it wears it’s heart on it’s sleeve just the same and packs a lot spirit in it’s lively heroine. I think I would’ve preferred the film to maintain it’s off-beat sense of humour all the way through and not go totally ‘Flying Daggers’-serious in the second half but that’s cuz I loved the two leads so much and wanted to see more of their bizarre chemistry rather than get another dose of the artsy martial arts poetry that we’ve already gotten plenty of these past few years.
SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE
(Sequel to Mr. Vengeance and Old Boy and directed by
Park Chan-wook. This is my 90% spoiler free review)
Imagine OldBoy without any intensity or momentum and that’s what you get with Sympathy For Lady Vengeance. That may sound a little unfair but the two films have so many plot points in common that it’s damn near impossible to tell you what’s wrong with this flick without making a side-by-side comparison to it’s predecessor. Here’s the set-up: Beautiful Geum-ja is released from a women’s prison after serving her full-sentence of 13 years for a horrible crime she confessed to but didn’t actually commit. Out of jail and back on the streets Geum-ja immediately begins her plan for bloody revenge against the one responsible for her unjust imprisonment. Sounds juicy. It ain’t. Instead the film takes forever to explain itself with a kaleidoscope narrative style that jumps back and forth through time which only serves to over-complicate a relatively simple story. Geum-ja gets out of jail, then we see her first few encounters in jail, then we watch her land a job out of jail, then we’re treated to the media blitz that occurred just before her incarceration, then we get a series of vignettes explaining how she gained friends behind bars by eliminating the local prison bully. I have nothing against a narrative that constantly jumps back and forth through time to explain all it’s details (Out Of Sight is one of my all-time favs) but in this case a normal linear story structure would have gone a long way towards building some sort of a connection between the film’s stoic heroine and the rest of us sitting in the audience. Instead we’re stuck playing catch-up every few minutes, trying to piece together a simple story that’s being told to us in a needlessly jumbled way. Audience connection is what this film is seriously lacking. In OldBoy, we never knew anything more than our hero. We had the same burning questions that he did, found ourselves confused and disoriented by the same circumstances, we followed his emotional state with each twist and turn of the plot, slowly building up tension until the climax causes everything to boil over with shock and heartbreak and we’re right there with him ever step of the way. It’s perfect. There is none of that tight narrative focus in Lady Vengeance. Our heroine has no mystery to unravel, we’re just kinda watching her from a distance trying to figure out what she’s up to while receiving little bits of her back-story when the director feels we need some more info. Her master plan for revenge turns out to be fairly twisted but still a disappointment. Her obstacles are minimal; two henchmen try to kill her, they fail almost immediately. No suspense, no tension, very little drama has been built up by the time we enter the third act. Speaking of which Park barely introduces the villain and gives us only the most vague explanation of what motivates him. The third act (the ‘vengeance’ part) could be the only notable part of the film but since the first two acts failed to build up any momentum, the final moments of vengeance (and the 15 minute wandering aftermath) fell flat with me. Or maybe it’s because the misdeeds of the villain are revealed to the audience only minutes before he’s actually killed off? See what I mean by a lack of build up? The dissatisfaction of revenge may very well be a theme that Park wanted to explore but this film is way too meandering to make that type of statement clearly. Without giving away too much of the finale there is a definite parent/child theme which is touched on at various points but never fully realized. Perhaps if the entire film were built out of the events in the third act there could be some interesting issues explored but as it stands Lady Vengeance wastes too much time on scenes that go nowhere and doesn’t spend enough time on the tough questions it could potentially raise about justice and reprisal. As an art-house film (which feels like what Park was going for) it doesn’t satisfy thematically. As a revenge film it’s mostly bloodless with almost no action. There’s an occasional dark joke that prompts a good laugh (group photo!) but I was mostly left cold and uninvolved and dammit, I really wanna love twisted stuff like this.
THE GREAT YOKAI WAR
(I like to call it ‘Sympathy For The Sock Puppet’)
A cow gives birth to a calf with a talking human head that warns of impending destruction... and then the movie gets weird. Directed by Takashi Miike as a ‘horror film for children’ or something to that effect this is a fun, silly WTF?! movie loaded with bad Japanese CGI that blends elements of Spirited Away with Miike’s unique brand of weirdness and parody. A little background for the Gaijin readers: The Yokai are mischievous spirits from Japanese folklore that represent every object, place or feeling that you can imagine (the spirit of a river, the spirit of winter, the spirit of an umbrella, etc... you get the idea) and apparently these spirits can only be seen by young children or intoxicated adults. Admittedly an odd plot-point but I didn’t make it up. The movie takes place in modern day Japan as Tadashi a young boy from a rural village is lured into the creepy surrounding forest in a frantic search for his elderly grandfather. Tadashi falls into the realm of the Yokai who desperately need his leadership (because he’s apparently ‘the chosen one’) to defeat a villainous mastermind who threatens their very existence. And so begins an endless parade of sheer weirdness that occasionally stops for the sake of either family-film style sentimentality or something far more inappropriate. Tadashi and his motley crew of brave Yokai set forth to battle an army of demon-robots lead by none other than sexy little Chiaki Kuriyama (Go-Go!) in a slinky skin-tight outfit and brandishing a deadly whip. Rather than try and summarize the ending of this film, which I still don’t understand lemme just give you a quick little highlight reel: The special effects range from glossy CGI to lots of actors in full body make-up (most of the Yokai spirits) to some sort of fuzzy forest critter who is obviously just a sock-puppet. That definitely runs the gamut. And did I mention that the sock-puppet is one of the main characters? Did I mention that Go-Go actually beats the bloody shit out of that sock-puppet in one of those great Miike-esque scenes of “I’m really not sure if I should be laughing or disturbed right now but I’m laughing anyway” emotional paradox? Speaking of the main characters, there’s also a perpetually wet chick who’s always getting the inside of her thighs felt up by young boys. And a scary half-man half-turtle thing who really comes off as a lot more threatening than he should be. There’s also a Yokai spirit who’s just some dude that cleans beans, which leads to ‘the bean song’, which I would really appreciate an MP3 of if anyone out there can lead me to it. And then there’s a moment that I’ve lost sleep trying to figure out. It goes a little something like this: Go-Go is running down an empty corridor, suddenly she stops, looks around, and then for no reason pulls off all her clothes, looks around again, and then pulls them back on and continues running like nothing happened. Which is a scene that would’ve been a lot better if it weren’t shot from her shoulders up. I’m not Asian but I grew up on anime & manga and still managed to be throughly weirded out by this experience. So is it a good movie? YES... I think.
If you post these rambling reviews I’ll follow it up with my take on the other screenings I was lucky enough to attend like Guy Ritchie’s REVOLVER, Tsui Hark’s SEVEN SWORDS, Wilson Yip’s SPL, Shane Black’s KISS KISS BANG BANG, and the neo-noir A LITTLE TRIP TO HEAVEN starring Forest Whitaker and Julia Stiles. Many thanx to Happychild and her lubby dubby boyfriend for getting me into more screenings than I should’ve gotten into this year.
From your good friend
Doc Holliday
