I’m really not even sure what this festival is, but I love it when people write in to us from their local film scenes around the world. Check this out:
Last year at Cinemanila, one of the best things I saw there was a Thai movie called Beautiful Boxer, a true story of a kickboxer who was a ferocious fighter, who wore make up, who sometimes kissed his opponents to distract them and who eventually had a sex-change operation to become a woman.
Walking on the Wild Side
This year, Cinemanila starts November 3 to 15. I saw three movies on my first day, Nov. 5. The first one is from China, called Walking on the Wild Side, directed by Han Jie. It's hard to tell if it was shot in video and transferred to film, because some shots had that weird pixilated look that one spots in video. The film looks like it was shot with a budget of $300, so I'm inclined to think it's video. Three friends go on a road trip because they beat somebody up and they had to flee.
The fascination here is these three people are a result of China's socialist political system mixed with a free-market economy. I saw that people hardly changed clothes in China. I couldn't tell if that was a budget limitation, or a part of the storyline, or people couldn't afford clothes, or people hated bathing because it always looked cold. The characters also do a lot of thievery and from the way other characters reacted, thievery looks very, very commonplace in that part of China.
It's another "disenfranchised youth go on a road trip" movie, which has been done before by many countries (Breathless comes into mind). I like the movie because it's a side of China I haven't seen, but I can't say the movie does anything really outstanding. One thing I notice, the three leads strut and pose against a lot of cliffs, against some (what should be) stunning but badly shot landscapes.
In fact, I get the impression China is a very beautiful country slowly being ruined by the people living there. Hillsides are infected by low-cost housing, mountainsides ripped by mining, humans are equated to cockroaches feasting on a slowly degenerating countryside. They aren't showing that poverty is everywhere. They're showing that there's plenty of hardworking people, plenty of progress, plenty of opportunity, and all that is really raping the look of everything.
It's an interesting point. However, I thought the road trip story and the three youths on the run brings the whole movie down because it's such a tired idea. I think the idea of what the Chinese are doing to China is pretty interesting all by itself.
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Well, there's been a lot of love from this website poured on this movie already so I'll just add my dollop of syrup. The movie certainly didn't disappoint. It doesn't try to outdo the violence of Oldboy, but it does expand on the theme of revenge. I'm still trying to figure out why Koreans seem to have this unique flavor of sadistic and masochistic violence tinged with morbid humor. It's very distinct from the Japanese (probably the closest culture in comparison) and quite unlike violence from any other country on earth. Describing it is like trying to describe the difference between beef and pork.
Even harder to define is why I like Park Chan Wook's work so much. I think it's not just the violence. He really does love his characters, even the villains. He treats them brutally, yes, and this brutality is a mark of how much affection he has for them. It's not just an S&M thing. Maybe it's similar to the Native American's idea of torturing one's enemy so he can "make brave". All the performances are wonderful, but I want to single out Choi-min Sik's performance as both funny, sad and monstrous. I was repulsed by him at the same time sympathetic of his predicament.
Exiled
My first Johnny To movie! Comparing John Woo to Johnny To is like comparing warm apple pie to a stick of dynamite. In the first 15 minutes, four killers arrive at an apartment, looking for a man named Wo. The woman in the house denies there's anyone by that name there. So they bide their time until…a delivery van arrives. A man gets down, sees all four killers and…he goes in the house. What else can he do? Toss grass blades at them? They have guns, he's unarmed. As he goes up the stairs, two of the killers follow him upstairs, into his apartment, and what happens next will knock you on your butt if you weren't already sitting.
I remember one of the reasons why Martin Scorsese did The Departed is because Scorsese did Taxi Driver in the seventies and Hong Kong adapted his style to great success and apparently he's decided to return the compliment. Scorsese is a ballsy filmmaker, but he just doesn't have a Hong Kong filmmaker's sense of the near ridiculous. It's not humor. It's not snappy one-liners. It's setting up situations that are so incredible it's almost, but not quite, silly, and playing fast and loose with the situation.
The entire movie is one overwrought, giddy opera of macho honor and gunplay that stretches logic to the brink of the ridiculous and nails it there. If there's a movie it resembles, it's the Wild Bunch, though Exiled is probably not as epic. And compared to the Wild Bunch, Exiled's ending, though shot in slow motion, happens only in the time it takes to toss a can up into the air.
After Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and Exiled, I had a very strong, throbbing headache, which I EARNED!
Perhaps Love
This is a mainland China movie musical, a love triangle between an actor (Takeshi Kaneshiro), an actress (incredibly striking Zhou Xun) and their director (Jacky Cheung). For some reason I think of the relationship between Zhang Yimou and Gong Li and I wonder if this isn't based on their story. The female lead is very pretty, I thought she was good. The male lead who plays an actor and former lover is good-looking and brooding and the director who is the third angle of the triangle looks a bit like a young Jackie Chan. It's a cross between Truffaut's Night and Day and Moulin Rouge but not as good as either.
I think the problem here is I don't really like Chinese songs. I don't mind songs that aren't in English. I think Filipinos write terrific melodies and if you bother learn Filipino, the lyrics are pretty good too. I don't understand French or Japanese, but I like their melodies and somehow the language lends itself well to song.
But Chinese, the oldest language of the three major Oriental cultures in Asia (Japanese, Chinese and Korean) sounds awful to me when put to song. I went to a Chinese School and I'm familiar with the conventions of Chinese Pop Singing and frankly I never liked it, so maybe I'm a little biased against the movie already. Plus, their singing style has to grow on you. They don't usually do it that way anymore, but traditional Chinese song would like their women to sing in as tinny a voice as possible and they love to make it waver. It grates the nerves like a fire alarm or nails on a chalkboard.
Even without the music against it, I didn't find the movie that remarkable. The story is lurid and the plot a bit over the top, the directing by Peter Chan (he produced Three Extremes) is undistinguished. Maybe since this is a romantic musical it is already a bit ridiculous, and the cure for being slightly ridiculous (to paraphrase something Hannibal Lecter said in Hannibal) is to go way overboard in the silly, like Moulin Rouge. As it is, the musical seems half-hearted and it only flies a little in some minor bits.
Vera Drake
I've seen British director Mike Leigh's Naked and it was like a splash of freezing water. From there, Vera Drake is only my second Mike Leigh, which is pretty criminal of me, I know. It starts very quietly, accumulating details that in the end is all used for devastating effect. Everyone is quite good, none of the performances are flashy or hysterical. I wouldn't call the movie flashy or hysterical either but it is very, very intense, especially when it finishes. I think it clearly takes sides in the issues, but it does seem to give the other side a chance. What Vera Drake does seems right, yet she's putting lives of people she helps at risk. The true test of the movie's effectiveness is I love the movie, I've given thought about the issues the movie presents (and I still am) and yet I totally disagree with its moral stance.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring
Korea's Kim Ki-Duk succeeded in making me yelp in The Isle, cringe in Address Unknown and he startled me yet again when I saw how different 9-Iron was compared to his previous work. The transitional movie I missed was this one, his first "Buddhist" movie. If fellow countryman Park Chan Wook can be characterized as a baroque and lurid filmmaker who frequently resorts to narrative trickery, fancy camera moves and digital enhancements, Ki-Duk is a simpler storyteller. I like to believe both directions (simplicity and fancy trickery) can be a real bitch to practice.
The story is about a boy (Seo Jae-kyeong) who grows up under a monk's (Oh Young-soo) care, grows up (and becomes Kim Young-min), falls in love, leaves, comes back to the monk and later inherits the monk's robes (now played by the director). That's the story, yet it encompasses a man's entire life, it's economically told and yet it's quite compelling.
Part of the reason is Ki-Duk is unafraid of letting the movie go silent. Minutes pass and he's telling a story without words and he's a master in leading the audience to where he wants to go without explaining through narration or dialogue. Another part is this movie looks absolutely gorgeous. It has all four seasons in one location and yet he can frame the same object (a doorway to the lake, for instance) over and over again and our eyes just doesn't get tired of seeing it. And lastly, I don't think he makes jokes, but he does have a sense of the absurd. There are plenty of laughs in this movie, but these people are just going about their daily lives. It's just the director picks the moment to observe and picks what order to show it that brings out the incongruous in the normal, everyday things his characters do. He isn't playing for laughs, however, he does have a very, very dry wit.
Book of the Dead
This movie admittedly had me twiddling my thumbs. It's a Japanese film directed by Kihachiro Kawamoto about a princess who falls in love with a ghost. I think I missed an entire level of context here, so I didn't get involved with the princess's problem and I didn't care about the conclusion. I've watched anime with this effect on me, when characters act and I simply don't understand their motivation, when the story is buried under subtext and cryptic dialogue, I struggle and what little I understand didn't seem worth the effort. I remember I've seen extremely dull work (Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice comes into mind) and yet I left impressed by how brilliant it was. The Japanese, however, has this whole genre of storytelling that just simply doesn't work for me. I dismiss things like this as a problem in the cultural divide and I don't know if I'll ever "get it" in my lifetime.
However, I cannot disagree that this is an extremely gorgeous movie. The entire story is told using stop-motion puppetry and though I had given up on the story and characters halfway, I stayed till the end because the images were simply too beautiful to miss.
Black
This is an Indian Bollywood remake of Arthur Penn's "The Miracle Worker", directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, and for the first half, I was missing that stark, black and white movie and I was thinking how it was much better than this one. Luckily, the second half talks about what if the girl grows up and decides to get an education. This was beyond what "Miracle Worker" showed and I actually grew to love the whole movie and forgive my dislike of the first half. This movie is full of fancy camera moves. It seems to be competing against Baz Luhrmann, Michael Bay and Tony Scott in winning an award for frenetic direction. When I complained about how half-hearted Perhaps Love (see above) was and how it needed to embrace its own ludicrous heart, I luckily saw this movie the next day and it was a perfect antidote. Everything is a dramatic moment, every scene is like the ending, the music swells and swoops if the blind and deaf girl trips and falls on her fanny.
Two more things. I saw Perhaps Love and the girl there was quite attractive. Here, the girl (Rani Mukherjee) is quite stunning (she wore dark contacts to cover her green eyes, my God). There is something about Indian actresses and their eyes that are like expressive liquid pools. I think she holds her own against her mentor (Amitabh Bachchan) who overacts perfectly like Topol (he also looks like Topol!) did as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.
Lastly, the cinematography is very beautiful. I like the way the shadows turn very black here, yet it's a colorful movie. I guess it fits the theme.
Princess Raccoon
Though it's a Japanese film, it stars Zhang Zhiyi and she's fast becoming overexposed. Here she's a princess of the deceptive raccoons which according to Japanese legend can change appearance (see Studio Ghibli's Pom Poko). The movie is directed (by Seijun Suzuki) like a studio-bound television show, and sometimes the characters clown and prance like they're acting in a Barney episode. However, I do like the songs better than what they sang in Perhaps Love. I like the Japanese idea of what is melody more than the Chinese, and I like the way Japanese sounds when sung. Otherwise, I'd just stick to Pom Poko.
Heremias Part I
The closing film of Cinemanila is from the Philippines. It is an extremely masochistic movie to watch mainly because it's nine hours long! It's black and white and shot in video. The story is about Heremias (Ronnie Lazaro) a vendor of woven baskets and other wood furniture. They live in covered oxcarts selling their wares to passersby. One day Heremias's oxcart is stolen and he spends seven hours looking for it.
Shades of Bicycle Thief? This epic is more than four times the length of de Sica's classic. The length isn't amazing. Lord of the Rings, if watched in one sitting, would be as long. 24, each season, would last literally 24 hours. However, those movies are full of incident and are pretty fast paced. They were also released in pieces and were edited and meant to be watch in installments.
Heremias is shot and edited to be seen in one damned sitting! Again, it's a very spare story, told simply, and in very, very long takes. The very first shot took fifteen minutes and it's a shot of the oxcart entering frame left and exiting frame right! There's this unbelievable shot (you don't know if you should applaud him for his audacity, strangle him for his indulgence or shoot yourself for your masochism) that's an HOUR long about four teenagers drunk and smoking pot and we don't even see them directly most of the time. We see their shadows on a wall or their outlines against car headlights.
Despite its length, I honestly wanted to attend any Question and Answer they might have had with the director, but since it ended 11 pm (after starting at 2pm!) no one felt like having a Q&A afterwards.
So with questions left unanswered, I wondered why the director did this. Why tell a story for nine hours, and why keep shots going on for so long? Why didn't director Lav Diaz chop up the movie into two hour pieces or make it for TV instead? And for God's sake, this is PART ONE? IS HE SERIOUS?! However, I did spend nine hours with the man, and after nine hours, though I was glad it was over, I did care about him. It's like getting to know someone. It takes time and Lav Diaz is totally serious about you getting to know his character and experiencing what his characters go through, sometimes in real time.
At least that's my take. People hearing about what I did might just shake their heads in pity. So who's stupider? A director taking nine hours to tell a story or the audience who paid money to sit and take the director's abuse and his refusal to cut a scene?
So in conclusion, aside from the more well known Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and Vera Drake, I would like to report that Exiled and Black are very good films, worth recommending that you'd try them.
Quentin Tarantado
