Category: Culture

If you were in the mood to get a taste of some cool Asian movies, there are two film festivals coming up in New York and San Francisco. New York has the New York Korean Festival, running from August 13th to the 22nd. I haven’t seen any of those movies, but I do hear good things about Memories of Murder. The Uninvited also got good reviews at FantAsia.

Meanwhile, over in San Francisco on the same dates, the Four Star is running the 8th annual Asian Film Festival. Note in particular Battlefield Baseball and Azumi. Hm, and not one but two Shaw Brothers flicks: One-Armed Swordsman and Lady General Hua Mulan. Old school 60s swordplay movies, both of them. Plus they’ll be showing both Ju-on and Ju-on 2.

Go do the right thing, and don’t forget that seeing movies at the Four Star will help them stay in business.

Wow, that was a lot of movies I just saw there. I’m still a little dazed. But while the cinematic extravaganza is fresh, I will provide a nifty capsule guide to everything I saw.

First, though, some notes. The samurai movie “I badly want to see, but which I did not catch the name of, so all I know is that there’s a young woman who apparently trains to be a samurai when her… brother? is killed…” is Azumi by Ryuhei Kitamura, who also directed Versus. This makes me want to see it all the more.

Enter… Zombie King! is in fact in the IMDB under the title Zombie Beach Party. I’ve submitted a change to the title, since as far as I can tell it wasn’t actually released as Zombie Beach Party, and will contentedly allow the smart people at IMDB to determine whether or not I’m right.

And now, the movies. I’m stealing my grading system from Chris; as he says, it’s too hard to rank these, so everything’s either great, OK, or not worthwhile. Great movies I want to own. OK movies I liked but don’t want to own. Not worthwhile movies suck; if any filmmakers are reading this, please don’t make any of those.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

Cutie Honey, live action anime which is so cute my eyeballs exploded. But they did so cutely.

Enter… Zombie King!, a movie about wrestling and zombies and rock and roll music. If I hadn’t already written part of a game about wrestling and zombies, this would have made me want to write a game about wrestling and zombies.

Executioners From Shaolin, a Shaw Brothers movie about revenge and kung fu and stuff. Big inspiration for Tarantino.

Into The Mirror, a Korean cop movie pretending to be a slasher flick. Superb use of mirrors. Creepy.

One Missed Call, Takashi Miike’s exceedingly disturbing entry into the Japanese postmillenial horror genre. Also a pointed critique of the Japanese obsession with cellphones and reality television, but mostly I remember the disturbing bits.

One Night Stands

The Bodyguard, a Thai comedy action flick which probably wouldn’t have made this category except I’m soft-hearted for romance.

Deadly Outlaw Rekka, a Takashi Miike yakuza story told in swift brutal bites.

Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace was basically a high-grade fan film with some funny bits; I’ll cut it some slack for being a workprint, and also for a very funny gag about the obligatory training sequence.

Red Vs. Blue, funny machinima with an excellent sense of how best to use the tools available to the filmmaker.

Robot Stories, a great anthology science fiction film that’s about people rather than ideas.

Toolbox Murders, awfully good Tobe Hooper slasher movie. Whoever wrote this has a very good understanding of LA occult history; if I bought more horror DVDs I’d want to own this one.

My Eyes, My Eyes

Hillside Strangler, a self-indulgent exploitation flick pretending to be an art movie.

Malice@Doll, a self-indulgent CGI anime flick pretending to have a point.

Saving Private Tootsie, which deserves better than to be relegated to this category but which — looking back — just didn’t work for me. I am not the appropriate audience.

It’s probably not the case that all Thai movies are deliriously loopy; my sample size of three is far too small. However, The Bodyguard is deliriously loopy. It’s like a goofy 80s Hong Kong cop movie, except much more so.

I wanted to see this one because it stars Petchtai Wongkamlao, aka Mum Jokmok, who was in the incredibly cool Ong Bak. Phanom Yeerum, the lead from Ong Bak, has a cameo appearance as well. Alas, his cameo is the only serious martial arts moment in the movie — the Riverdance sequence later on doesn’t really count — and The Bodyguard is emphatically more of a comedy than an action movie. Think Chris Rock, but without Jackie Chan around to provide butt-kicking.

I still kind of enjoyed it, particularly because of the romance subplot with Pumwaree Yodkamol (also in Ong Bak, and possibly the cutest tomboy beanpole on the planet) and Pipat Apiratthanakorn. Alas, the action was not crisp and the in-jokes mostly went over my head. I don’t regret seeing it but I wouldn’t recommend it.

And whoa, that’s all 14 movies. Next: the executive summary of the festival, and maybe some other bits and pieces and notes.

I figured Into The Mirror was going to be just another postmillenial Asian horror film. (How quickly we become jaded!) Turns out it’s a cop movie about the redemption of a man who got his partner killed and now labors as a security guard. His story just happens to take place in the context of a clever slasher movie with Asian horror elements to it.

The lead, Ji-tae Yu, was the antagonist in Oldboy, and while I didn’t like Oldboy that much, I remember thinking he was good. I’m coming perilously close to having enough of a handle on Korean cinema to go out hunting obscure DVDs. Gotta keep a handle on that tendency.

But back to the movie. It was exceedingly slick and well-done. All the Korean movies I’ve seen over the last year or so have had excellent production values. The horror gimmick in Into The Mirror is, of course, mirrors — the department store in which various awful things take place is full of them, and plenty of other reflective surfaces. The cinematography rocked the house; once the mirror theme was established, you couldn’t blink without getting creeped out.

The director made pretty top-notch use of the theme, too, all the way through to the truly disturbing ending. I think it was effective because, as we all know, mirrors are a little creepy, and they do feel like a window into another world. Into The Mirror nails that feeling in the same way as — bear with me, this is an odd comparison — Alice In Wonderland.

The other thing I found interesting is that, insofar as it uses horrific elements, it draws more on slasher movies than on recent Asian horror cinema. Sure, there’s a mystery and a spirit and a unifying theme, but… it doesn’t have the linear elements I associate with the Asian stuff, and it doesn’t have the predetermination aspects. C.f. Ringu and One Missed Call, in both of which you know you’re going to buy the farm.

Of course, the spirits and the tragic motivating intelligence behind it all are still there, so maybe my distinction is without merit. I’ll have to ponder on it.

We also got a new trailer before this one: Dark Water, the new-to-North-America movie from Hideo Nakata, who directed Ringu. It looked pretty good. Hm, and looks like he’s directing Ring 2 over here in America. Interesting.

The biggest obstacle in the path of machinima is the lack of expressiveness in 3D game engines. Of course, Malice@Doll’s characters were completely without expression, so maybe it’s not such a big barrier after all. Red Vs. Blue gets around the problem by using characters in powered armor. This works out just fine.

Burnie Burns, the director and creator, has enough of a handle on what he’s doing to pull off double-takes, both in the character animations and with the camera, which is more than I can say for some traditional directors. He’s got the chops to make machinima believable as cinema. He also knows how to protect his weaknesses: for example, shaky voice acting is fixed up by filtering everyone through radio static, which makes perfect sense in the powered armor context.

As a movie, Red Vs. Blue is ambitious. Much of the story is twenty-something gamer humor; the characters aren’t futuristic soldiers, they’re a bunch of geeks in powered armor behaving like you’d expect geeks in powered armor to behave. Albeit ones who’ve been through basic training. Burns goes for real emotion here and there, and sort of hits the target, but if this was a live action film it wouldn’t be worth more than a few chuckles.

Notwithstanding, it’s tremendously cool as a signpost and it succeeds on its own terms. It’s — ah. It’s not amateur, it’s proficient. It proves that the tools can do what they need to do in order to make a real movie. The remaining barrier is facial expressions, That’s a problem which game publishers want to solve, for many of the same reasons; it won’t surprise me if ten years from now machinima is as mainstream in the same way that print on demand publishing is mainstream today. Which is to say “marginally” but also “promising.”