Hey folks, Harry here... Ya know... if I had that lame Time Traveling Fax Machine from the impending Richard Donner / Michael Crichton disaster TIMELINE... and was being completely selfish - instead of serving mankind by getting rid of a future mass murdering dictator in... oh, say 1928 Germany... I'd time-fax my carcass to last night's screening of ONG BAK MUAY THAI WARRIOR... cuz I'm going to be absolute bat shit frustrated insane crazy till I see it! Here's Anton Sirius, who saw more coolness yesterday than a human should.. Good thing he is made of star stuff...

Day Three

If anything, Copernicus gave you the soft sell on Ong-Bak. That screening was just heaven -- I've seen a lot of rapturous responses to films (heck, I've even seen an industry audience go apeshit over Crouching Tiger, when normally those things are quiet as a mausoleum) but I have never seen anything like the audience last night. The film simply connects, like a knee to the throat. It's pure rapture.

One more interview added -- Alexandre Aja, the director of the French horror flick Haute Tension. (Funny, I know an Aja, but she's named after the Steely Dan album. Which is not to be confused with Asia, Dario's daughter... oh never mind, I'm tired and rambling).

Oh, one more thing -- I don't have the review finished yet, but in the name of all that is holy and/or unholy DO NOT SEE THE COOLER, the William H. Macy Vegas flick. If you have a ticket, sell it or trade it or, I dunno, eat it, just don't use it! You'll thank me later.

Zatoichi (2003, directed by Takeshi Kitano)

If you've read my reviews in previous years you know it's a given that I was going to love this movie. Kitano's body of work as a director is as consistently brilliant as any director alive today - Dolls, Sonatine, Kikujiro, Hana-bi, Kids Return... heck, even Brother, probably the least of his movies, merely rocks.

But Zatoichi is a great movie even if you're not a devotee of the 'Beat' Takeshi. What Kitano has done is essentially take his usual yakuza film template - the blood-soaked battle scenes, the quiet interludes at a sanctuary, etc. - and married it to the Japanese legend of Zatoichi, the blind swordsman and masseur. With, umm, a big dance number at the end, kind of a Return of the Jedi-ish celebration of victory thing, only cooler and Ewok-less - I mean, I had no idea that tap-dancing had been invented in feudal Japan. I fully expect Kitano to try his hand at a musical next, even though I suspect he couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.

The plot is fairly basic - Zatoichi stumbles into a town run by a gang of brutes and ends up befriending and helping the oppressed villagers. Tadanobu Asano (the Japanese model/actor who's also in Bright Future, the Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, and made such an impression in Ichi the Killer - as the masochistic baddie - that Eli Roth, the director of Cabin Fever, dressed up like Asano's Ichi the Killer character for his own damn movie premiere) also stars as Gennosuke, the ronin who is forced to work as a bodyguard for the gang's boss, and who will have the inevitable showdown with Zatoichi.

The elements that Kitano brings to this retelling of the story are what elevate it, though. The score, for instance - Keiichi Suzuki, who did the music for Uzumaki, crafts a score that doesn't just complement the action on-screen, it actually merges with it at times. The fight scenes are brief and brutal, with spurts of blood flying willy-nilly. And Kitano's usual unique sense of humor is on full display - the idiot neighbor boy who wants to be a samurai, and the "training session", are worth the price of admission on their own.

Zatoichi is simply brilliant. Beginning to end, dazzling and surprising and brilliant. Go see it already!

Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran (2003, directed by Francois Dupeyron)

A sweet and saucy coming-of-age film, Monsieur Ibrahim is also perhaps the most daring political film I've seen in a while, even though it remains resolutely non-political.

Let me explain. Set in the Paris of Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, the film tells the story of Moses, a teenage boy who lives with stern and ineffectual father and has no dream bigger than losing his virginity to one of the hookers that work the corners just outside his window. Responsible for all the shopping and cooking, Moses gradually strikes up a friendship with the old gent who owns the shop across the street, played by Omar Sharif. When his father loses his job, leaves Moses to look for work and eventually throws himself under a train, it is the shopkeeper (his name is in the title, but I don't believe it's ever used in the film) who takes the boy into his heart and helps his grow up.

Moses (or Momo, as Ibrahim calls him) is Jewish; Ibrahim, of course, is Muslim, albeit of the Sufi sect. The film does not once make a big deal out of this.

In a film filled with quiet pleasures it was that fact which hit home the hardest after the credits rolled. I wouldn't have thought it was possible at this point to make a film about the relationship between a Jew and a Muslim without also making it about the relationship between Judaism and Islam, yet director Dupeyron not only manages it, he and his cast invest so much life into the film that you don't even notice what's missing. Moses and Ibrahim aren't symbols or metaphors (despite their names), they are people in their own right, making their way through the world.

A marvelous little gem of a movie, and Sharif's finest performance since... umm, Top Secret? It's been a while anyway.

Sansa (2003, directed by Siegfried)

I should've known better than to see something from a director with only one name.

Sansa is a film that is remarkably similar to, yet infinitely worse than, Monsieur Ibrahim. Like that film, Sansa is about a young man with an eye for the ladies, who forms a bond with an older man who shares his love of beauty. Both films start in Paris, and involve a lot of travel. Actually, that's about it for the similarities, but that's also about it for Sansa.

First off, directors should need a license to use hand-held cameras. Sansa is nauseating to look at, two hours of pointless 'immediacy' that seems to have been necessary only because the budget got blown on airplane tickets. This isn't the artificial realism of a Dogme95 film; this is simply crap.

The look of the film is nothing compared to what passes for a plot though. The main character, a street hustler and artist of somewhat debatable intelligence, wanders around the world looking for chicks. (And when I say wanders I mean it literally -- at one point it appears as though he walks from St. Petersburg to Tokyo via Chechnya and India.) Despite visiting cities on four continents though he only even seems to run into the same six people, most notably Mr. Click, a famous conductor and violinist who serves as an older role model for Sansa's lifestyle. He also finds Ayako Fujitani when he gets to Tokyo, but sadly Gamera does not show up to turn him into Sansa frites.

Two hours of shakily-shot chases, flirtations and ridiculously coincidental encounters, broken up occasionally by ten minute sequences of just shots of faces. That's the whole damn film.

One name directors. Pah. Never again, dammit!

Ong-Bak Muay Thai Warrior (2003, directed by Prachya Pinkaew)

Holy sweet Jesus fuck!

Ong-Bak Muay Thai Warrior kicks the living shit out of every martial arts movie made in the last ten years. Every. Single. One. This thing makes Iron Monkey look like god-damned Gymkata. Fuck! A coherent review is impossible right now. I'll try, but it's probably just going to devolve into "And then he... with the... and then the guy... holy shit! With his legs on fucking fire!!!"

Plot-wise the film is essentially a Buddhist version of Drunken Master II -- a thug (played by the Thai Adrian Zmed) steals the head of his home village's Buddha, and local orphan boy Ting sets off to Bangkok to retrieve it. Ting, having been trained at the temple in Muay Thai fighting (and given the strict admonition never to use it, of course, it being fucking ass-brutalizingly lethal and all), proceeds to beat the holy living sweet merciful fuck out of a local boss and his gang, the toughs at the illegal street fighting joint run by Zmed's boss, Zmed, the rest of the boss' hoods, and the hand-picked Burmese boxer who is Zmed's boss' enforcer in the climactic fight that just annihilates the fuck out of any other climactic fight scene in any other martial arts movie ever. I'm not kidding. To me the gold standard for climactic fights scenes was the aforementioned Drunken Master II. After the hellacious way Ting and the Burmese boxer fuck each other up over the course of this fight DM II looks nearly quaint in comparison. Burning coals and industrial alcohol suddenly don't quite measure up when multiple adrenaline injections directly below the heart and skull-fracturing elbows come into play.

Speaking of obsolescence, I hope Jet Li has made some wise investments. Panom Yeerum, the 25-year-old weapon of mass destruction who stars in Ong-Bak Muay Thai Warrior, is the new Bruce Lee.

Let me say that again, in case you thought I was off my head or exaggerating or something you know the one, all the legends have it. Christ-all-fucking-mighty! That sequence in the club where Ting wipes the floor with the hand-picked champs, finishing off with the punk-wannabe bad-ass who even makes the ring announcer recoil in fear and horror when he steps up... or the blow that finally takes out Zmed... this guy has it. HE HAS IT.

I can't overlook the direction here either. Prachya Pinkaew does a great job keeping the action flowing while highlighting Yeerum's jaw-dropping moves and just generally rocks that shit hard. This guy has a future too, and Luc Besson (who snatched up the distribution rights for this baby at Cannes) made a very wise investment in establishing a working relationship with Pinkaew early in his career.

Ong-Bak Muay Thai Warrior is quite possibly the best film that has ever been shown at Toronto's Midnight Madness. The only thing that could possibly be in the ballpark is Dead-Alive back in '92. Sure, the plot's thin and some of the secondary performances weak, but this isn't fucking Mamet. I made this prediction last night, and I stand by it -- slap Yeerum's dreamboat mug on a poster and keep the ad campaign simple, building it around his fighting style and teasing folks with just how fucking much ass gets kicked in the film, and Ong-Bak could do Blair Witch numbers. This puppy might need a little word of mouth, but a nine digit domestic box office is within reach here.

You have to see this film. This is the must-see film of the year. Every card-carrying geek who's ever plunked down their coin for a piece of dung like the Tuxedo just to catch those few moments of Jackie genius that he still doles out now and then; every one of us who stops flipping the remote when a Green Hornet rerun is on; every one of us who's ever come out of a film sparring with your buddies -- this is the one you have to see.

Anton Sirius...