This documentary contains some fascinating material on the failed Anthony Weiner 2013 mayoral run in New York, though I was not overly impressed with the way, at least in the early going, the filmmakers put their thumb on the scale in order to create the impression that the Weiner campaign had overwhelming momentum prior to the scandal breaking. Continue reading
Alan Lo’s first film, Zombiology: Enjoy Yourself Tonight (Hong Kong 2017), starring Carrie Ng (Naked Killer), Alex Man (Rouge), Michael Ning (Port of Call), and Louis Cheung (Ip Man 3), opened July 18 as part of the 16th New York Asian Film Festival. The film revolves around a pair of immature men who find themselves confronted with a genuine zombie outbreak. I had a chance to speak with Lo and Ng, in NYC to present the film, about the genesis of the film, flying guillotines, and the merits of Western zombies vs. Chinese hopping vampires.
CSB: What was the basis for the story?
Alan Lo: My first introduction to zombies was through a video game called Resident Evil. That interested me in zombies. And I actually made an earlier film called Zombie Guillotines. But the two films are not directly related. Zombiology is based on a novel, but the thing is that it is not really based on the novel. Continue reading
Sick of serious Miike? 13 Assassins and Hara-kiri Miike? Yearning for the older, wackier V-cinema Miike? Look no further than The Mole Song: Hong Kong Capriccio (a belated sequel to 2013’s The Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji). This film is a totally ridiculous live action yakuza cartoon from start to finish, featuring such over-the-top flourishes as a flying squirrel themed-villain, plane crashes over Hong Kong, and a toilet plunger fight. Worried you don’t remember what happened in the first film? No problem, our hero exposits prior events while hanging naked from a cage of yakuza suspended from a helicopter. Continue reading
So, so, so dumb but so, so, so fun. Fabricated City starts off with our lead, disaffected loner Kwon Ju (Ji Chang-wook) going into battle in a multi-player war game with his team of random internet gaming geeks, performing crazy Matrix-style stunts and showing why he is the best. What’s nuts is that the movie gets even more unrealistic when it transitions to the real world, to the point where I spent the entire film expecting a last-minute twist revealing that Kwon Ju was still playing a game. Continue reading
More an erotic fable than a proper narrative, Suffering of Ninko puts a Japanese spin on the popular mythological concepts of the succubus and the incubus. Ninko is a Buddhist monk, fixated on his own asceticism. Unfortunately, his very presence drives women (and some men) into an absolute frenzy and he finds himself pursued by lustful devotees despite his increasingly frantic efforts to withdraw from the world. After teetering on the edge of sanity, he eventually meets his counterpart in a female mountain spirit, who possesses the same powers of attraction and uses them to destroy men. Continue reading
The festival program describes Split as a mash-up of Rain Man and Kingpin, and that’s exactly right. The problem is that there is way too much Rain Man, and way too little Kingpin. It’s a bowling dramedy, but weighted heavily on the drama side, and the hackneyed Rain Man premise can’t sell the drama effectively. I really disliked this movie for about the first hour and a half. It’s well crafted on a technical level and well performed, but shameless and manipulative in the service of an obnoxious, dated plot. And then, somehow, in the last half an hour, Split became SO shameless and SO manipulative that I kind of circled back around into enjoying it as an massively overripe piece of cheese. I still don’t much like it, but at least it left me with a good, albeit pungent, taste in my mouth. Continue reading
Kfc starts out with the opposite of the Fargo disclaimer – a emphatic reassurance that the film’s events are purely fictional. Whether that’s a reaction against Fargo or just an attempt not to get sued, I don’t know, because Kfc will turn you off not just the titular chicken franchise, but food in general. This grotty little Vietnamese indie constantly assaults its audience with graphic, repellent imagery and a wet, visceral soundtrack that is somehow even more nauseating than the film’s visuals. Yet the film is strangely absorbing, and I found myself lost in its puzzle box structure. Continue reading
Extraordinary Mission is exactly the kind of movie that Hong Kong as always excelled at – a twisty undercover cop thriller that frequently breaks out into no-holds-barred action scenes. Very much in the spirit of its direct cinematic forebears like Infernal Affairs, Hard Boiled and City on Fire, Extraordinary Mission exists very much in that HK world where undercover cops are constantly having to escape their own while proving to vicious crime lords just how cold they are. Except, this isn’t a Hong Kong film at all, it’s another example of China drinking Hong Kong’s milkshake. Continue reading
Bad Genius makes me feel like the Thai film industry just leveled up. I’ve watched a lot of Thai movies. There’s a ton of great action even beyond the filmography of Tony Jaa (stuff like Dynamite Warriors and Power Kids), plenty of creepy or gross-out horror, and an interesting art house undercurrent with movies like Tears of the Black Tiger and, of course, the works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. But by and large, when it comes to mainstream fare, Thai cinema has never reached the level that South Korea or even China routinely demonstrates these days. Bad Genius could change all that – it’s the first time I’ve thought Thailand could really hold its own with Hollywood. Continue reading
I really enjoyed Saving Sally, the passion project of director Avid Liongoren and screenwriter Charlene Sawit. The film is bursting with creativity, the leads are sweet and likable, and the film has a lovely “Blues Clues meets Liquid Television” aesthetic with a charming blend of live action and animation. So it kind of kills me to harsh Saving Sally’s buzz, but I have some major issues with the wish fulfillment elements of the plot (kind of like I thoroughly enjoy The Incredibles, but the more I think about the underlying philosophy, the more unhappy I get). Continue reading
