Dour, desperate, and painful to watch in some parts, Till My Heartaches End is Star Cinema's Halloween offering to Kimeralds: a 2-hour humorless drama about a relationship going through the motions of a breakup. And I loved it.
Film imitates the gossip headlines that have infested the grapevine for months, and if one were to read between the sobs during the movie's press conference, then this is the goodbye, the long last look of a couple that most of us watched grow up on national TV.
Jose Javier Reyes's bare, if sometimes lazy, direction fits the lifeless narrative. It's as if he is hesitant to tell the story of a man who wants more out of life and a woman who is content to stay quietly still. Kim Chiu's Agnes is fragile and neurotic; her slight frame trembles with every troubled tic, while Gerald Anderson is every bit the dashing lead whose looks equal his ambition. I sometimes wince at their sweetness in the various teleserye that they have starred in, but there's none of that here. Till My Heartaches End is a quiet, slow dissection. The excruciating repetition of arguments makes the impending crumble gloomier. Sadder. And as a fan of status quos, I felt for Agnes. (I'll understand if you un-Friend me from your Facebook.) The non-commercial end to such a commercial couple's movie could possibly be Star Cinema's bravest move this year.
There's no fast-forward button to a relationship whether it's beginning or ending. And Till My Heartaches End wallows in the uncertainty that keeps us up at night. Excuse me while I sob in the corner. 3/5
My parents met on a train in the 1960s. After accidentally taking what he thought was a vacant seat, he chatted up mom and offered her boiled eggs, which made mom giggle. He was a soldier on vacation; she was a young social worker who had just moved to Manila. It's a story I got tired of hearing when I was a child. It's a story I long to hear now as a man in his mid-30s trying to make life work.
Impossible lovers transformed by what is possible, there's really nothing more comforting than that. Bangkok Traffic [Love] Story (Rod fai fah...Ma ha na ter) or BTS exploits the formula of mismatched characters finding love with charming agility, hastily moving from one hilarious encounter to another until Li, who sells solar cells, and Loong, a BTS Skytrain engineer who mostly works at night, end up in a planetarium where it is day and night at the same time.
Promoted to celebrate the BTS's 10th anniversary, the film is obsessed with motion: forward, sideways, backward, falling. And wouldn't it be great if we bump into someone to navigate the twists and turns with? Much like being on a train, the scenery changes fast; love and loneliness are fleeting emotions squished between holidays and stations. Oftentimes, the film feels like several stand-alone episodes strung together without much consideration of narrative coherence but I was having too much fun to mind the style.
I remember a friend, Luis Katigbak, once writing about how music transforms into something else when you're listening to it and traveling at the same time. There really is something about trains, about MRTs, MTRs or BTSs, that make you feel more alive than usual, more hopeful than you're allowed to.
My parents met on a train in the 1960s and I've often tried to recreate that moment in my head. Bangkok Traffic [Love] Story is a laid-back, honest, fun ride. It's a breezy commute. It's a possibility I wouldn't mind hopping on. 3/5
Love is that queasy feeling in the stomach that only seems to be cured by alcohol: wine, soju and beer shaken and stirred until the queasiness turns to desperate sex. Judging from the trailer, "Hello My Love" was marketed as a light drama about a woman attempting to win her ex-fiancee back from his gay lover. It does aim for the silly but the result is quite upsetting.
Kim Ho-Jeong (Jo An) dishes advice to lovelorn callers in her radio program with heightened optimism, at times proclaiming that ether in the atmosphere allows lovers to communicate their affections across continents. Her fiancee Yoo Won-Jae (Min Seok) arrives from Paris with another man (Dennis Trillo look-alike Ryoo Sang-Wook, wa-pak!) and it doesn't take too long before she discovers the pair sweet dancing to La Mer. Ho-Jeong blackmails Won-Jae into dating her for a month after which he will decide who to be with.
The rest is difficult to watch.
"Hello My Love" is accidentally stirring. Ho-Jeong watching her ex running home in the rain, running home to be with another, running not walking, is a quick, quiet moment that firmly puts their recent past in the distant past. The film's clumsy comic timing only makes the entire affair more uncomfortable, her pleas more embarrassing. Out of respect for Ho-Jeong and Won-Jae's history, and a little out of pity for her shattered world, the trio agree to a (vague) threesome, the queasiness turning to quiet terror in my part.
In contrast to the other queer cinema releases from South Korea, including the sexually-charged "Frozen Flower" and the violently romantic "No Regrets," "Hello My Love" plays the safest. There's a trendy sheen (fashion, wine) on the surface, with not much emotional center, ending where the middle of the film should have been. The motivations and dissections are left in the dark and all we are left with is a dull, throbbing heartache. ***
If I haven't been updating my twitter or if you've noticed that I've been letting some crops wither over at Farmville, it is because I've been busy with work---which is a great cover-up for late night catching-up with the TV drama You're Beautiful, a surreal brew of Shakespearean set-ups, Korean idol culture, and catchy K-pop.
A boy band boy-bonding with a Twelfth Night twist, and if that wasn't enough, how about we throw in a bit of Sound of Music as well. You're Beautiful makes suspension of disbelief unbelievably difficult: pixie-ish Park Shin Hye is Go Mi Nyu, a novice (soon-to-be nun) who has to stand in for her twin brother Mi Nam for a slot in a popular boyband A.N.JELL. Mi Nam causes quite a stir at the boys' dormitory, which results in strange attractions, a bleeding forehead and some spitting action, all for laughs of course, and that's just two episodes in. But its the strangeness of overlapping styles that reel you in. Like I've mentioned again and again, the appetite to please is palpable. The hunger to do more than what is expected more so, that the final product becomes impossible to define.
You're Beautiful is also pays homage to South Korea's idol culture while lovingly poking fun at the rabid fan base (which I'm a part of) and controlling recording labels. Casting FT Island's Lee Hongki and C.N.Blue's Jung Yonghwa as members of the fictional idol group gives the performances the authenticity it needs. Hongki and Yonghwa, though physically fitting the idol mold, also debunk the myth that manufactured groups are without talent---musicality as instinct rather than adornment on full display in their respective groups' albums. After School's UEE is also game, hamming up the bitchy with flair.
But the best thing about this drama is the music. K-Pop has been a little boring since the vocoder trend started; turned out I was looking at the wrong place. A.N.JELL churns out good power pop, catchy and undeniably soaring. Jang Geunsuk's vocals are strong and tender at the edges, Hongki's contribution to the OST shows off quite powerful pipes, and the band version with boy-girl harmonies is just, uhm, angelic.
Park Jin-Young or JYP is to be blamed for the inescapable "Nobody" by the Wonder Girls, and 2PM's brooding pop hit, "Again & Again." Actually it was Felice Tusi, a fellow contributor to allmusicjunkies.com, who brought my attention to JYP's secret to writing a string of hits.
Repetition.
Nobody, nobody but you. Again and again and again and again. Like a broken record that's record-breaking. If it weren't for the catchy hooks, it wouldn't be different from frustrated begging for belief. For loyalty.
Yee Chin-Yen's Blue Gate Crossing is brimming with questions repeated over and over by Zhang Shihao, a teenage boy (Wilson Chen/Chen Bo-Lin), but the answers are never kind. Confusion in love has never been this gorgeously realized, with all its awkward and clumsy interrogation. If I could, I would, question and question again and again. What is
childish comes across as frantic desperation. So what does it mean? What does it mean? What does it mean?
There's rhythm in the words. There is dance in the gestures. Zhang Shihao wants to keep in beat with Ming Kerou (Kwai Lunmei) whether it's dancing, stomping on a note, or arguing. In his head, it's about timing. Moving as one to be one. Ming Kerou, on the other hand, wants to keep in step with someone else.
The film is busy with silence. The side glances and long last looks fill the space of a sparse script, but the silence is never languid. It oftentimes feels like Yee Chin-Yen is writing the perfect pop song. There's a hummable beat to Blue Gates Crossing's pacing, fluidly going through the motions of love and heartbreak. There is a pop hook to the words, which stick and stay with you. There is that butterfly-in-the-stomach warmth, that lingering last note as Ming Kerou watches Zhang Shihao's back, that killer lyric as the strings soar: I can't see myself, but I can always see you.
Nobody, nobody but you. *****
The Region 3 DVD has several extras including a Making-Of, Wilson Chen's trip to Hong Kong to promote the movie and interviews with the cast and director. No english subtitles on all the extras though.
The middle child of the most ambitious film trilogy in recent years---there's no use arguing with me on this one---moves so briskly that oftentimes I felt the need to come up for air, but I loved every stubbornly dense moment of it.
No, I haven't finished the manga because, for this one, I wanted to experience the head rush and the nitpicking of puzzle pieces. (If LOST is your thing and haven't given up on the parallel time-line mindfuck, then you'll have a hoot with this one.)
It's years after the New Year's Eve attack of 2000, and it's the kids' turn to figure out how to strike back against Friend and his creepily smiling followers. Time lines and lives intersect, what Donkey saw in the science lab is revealed, and a messiah rises from the dead. Reviews keep mentioning how the uninitiated will find it difficult to wade through layers of subplots and time jumps. I'm not filing this under For Manga Readers Only and won't stereotype a fantastic plot as convoluted or impossible to follow.
Some parts, I admit, are just too unbelievable. But the Pope's speech aside, 20th Century Boys is similar in texture, in whiffs of melancholia, to Stephen King's novel IT. There's something about the journey from childhood to adulthood that bites with bittersweet pangs. Contrasts become warm and fuzzy memories, and along with the memories come the longing. I began to wonder whatever happened to the kids I used to spend afternoons with playing until my knees were bruised and bleeding. Are they doing well and living comfortably? Have they turned into monsters? Fighters? And where is that kid now, the six year-old Thor who told stories to his friends everyday but now barely has time to write down his own thoughts? ****
The sequel curse plagues Phobia 2 (ห้าแพร่ง/Ha Prang), not so much in direction as it does in composition, in the gaping silence between screams. A shame really because this is more surefooted than the original, driven by the horrors of road accidents and lurking mysteries that seduce and terrorize.
Seductive, that dark charm that lures us in, 4bia had plenty of. From the longing to connect in Ngao/Loneliness to the deliciously creepy miss en scene of a corpse in an empty plane in Teaw Bin 244/Flight 244, 4bia tickled and chewed on our imagination. Phobia 2, in keeping with the theme maybe, lost the ability to seduce with frights that drive by in a flash, as opposed to building up the creepy. Novice seems to be the most balanced in storytelling, with a weighty reveal that jolts. That last bit in the woods was difficult to watch---I knew how painful it would get but I couldn't help but watch it. This push and pull of terror and curiosity, though not as overwhelming as Loneliness, saves Novice from its "fantastic" end, (Geek Hint: Terry Brook's Sword of Shannara).
Ward has an interesting premise but falls short of actual surprise, with nothing much more to offer if you've seen the trailer.
Backpackers. Now, I'm a Songyos Sugmakanan fan and this man can do wonders with characterization, and can twist emotions as well as plots, but Backpackers is just…okay. He doesn't really add much to the zombie genre and the camera work is 28 Days Later familiar.
Salvage doesn't make much sense; the retribution was a little too much for just being a bitch. The scares are as obvious as the danger music, and I felt that the lead didn't really deliver. This could've been a great acting piece, but the lack of connection, of escalating desperation has made this difficult to get into.
In the End, I gather from the other reviews I've read, has become this installment's favorite segment. It is quite clever, and the four guys from 4bia's In the Middle, are still delivering the funnies. Marsha Wattanapanich is totally game playing herself---but not really her self---but the end feels forced, just so it could fit into the theme.
In the end, Phobia 2 does feel like driving past a car crash. Curiosity turns to fear. Fear turns to pity. And then you move to wherever you were headed to, driving away and forgetting. **
Tin Shui Wai. The City of Sadness. Towering housing projects rising like deadly spikes have replaced old fish ponds in the 1990s. And along with the Hong Kong workers that relocated to the city for the promise of jobs that never materialized due to poor city planning, come the continuing reports of unemployment, suicides, and gang wars among others.
The Way We Are, in contrast to whatever you may have read about Tin Shui Wai, is devastatingly boring.
The film revolves around the quiet, robotic lives of Mrs. Cheung (Bau Hei-Jing) and her teenage son Ka-On (Juno Leung). Ann Hui's steady eye sharply captures the daily routine of the mother as she works in the supermarket unpacking, weighing and packing durian fruits, then coming home to cook dinner and read the newspaper afterwards. The daily grind, routine upon routine, but without melodrama or even a hint of manipulated emotion. Since Mrs. Cheung only knows work (she has been working since 12 years old), there is no hatred over their status, which I was expecting.
At its heart, The Way We Are defies expectations by being involving in its objective simplicity. When Mrs. Cheung meets a new neighbor, an old lady who cooks, waits for the day to become night, then cooks again, the kindness Mrs. Cheung shows evolves from politeness to concern as their lives fall into a syncopated working-class rhythm.
There's an overwhelming feeling that something will go wrong but nothing ever does, and not in the way you expect it. Ka-On, who seems at the start to be lazy and useless, is simply just a good kid. Now, he's about to drug deal, no, he's about to bash some Christian kid's face in, hmm, maybe later. And the one dramatic high point, the one where the screaming and sobbing should be exploding, was dealt with humming subtlety: two friends on a bus silently weeping.
Hui once in awhile cuts the narrative to pictures of old Hong Kong. The way they were, with just a hint of nostalgia. People in Tin Shui Wai don't have the luxury of reminiscing, by choice it seems like it. It's just the way they are.
I've been so used to watching Johnnie To films shot in Hong Kong that the experience of watching The Way We Are was both unsettling and refreshing. The documentary-drama is naked of pretensions and surefooted in its narrative. I keep going back to that Juliana Hatfield lyric which perfectly captures the film's afterglow: Nothing's good and nothing's bad. Everything's just kind of sad. ****
It's oh so quiet and oh so still. Director Daisuke Tengan continues to explore the eloquence of silence and the depth of gestures in "Waiting in the Dark" (Kurai Tokoro De Machiawase). Tengan, who penned the disquieting "Audition," knows all too well the weight of deliberate---okay, slow---storytelling and this mostly silent film is heavy with intriguing pauses.
Structured in three chapters, Michiru, Akihiro, Michiru and Akihiro, it explores the lives of a blind girl and outcast immigrant Akihiro and how their loneliness converge after the young man is suspected of murder and secretly hides in Michiru's house. Michiru first thinks it is her dead father haunting the house until she begins counting the loaves of bread. Understated is an understatement when Tengan lets even the simplest chore quietly unfurl but the sudden attack of memories---parallel point of views that complete a picture---make the silence necessary.
The situations are oftentimes questionable (Can she not smell him? And yeah, the guy is cute but a stranger invading your home is still a creepy idea) but it is undeniably fascinating to watch both tiptoe around each other's narrative until their pasts overlap. Wilson Chen (Chen Bo-lin) and Rena Tanaka (brooding, luminous) are eyecandies with a solid center, and admittedly, a huge part of my enjoyment of the film is appropriated to their simmering chemistry in this almost love story. ***
The HK version of the DVD costs only HK$35. No extra features.
Four independent movements, varying in mood, tempo, and secrets. It's a bittersweet symphony this life, so sings Richard Ashcroft, but bittersweet is too romantic. Knee-busting loneliness on a cellular level symphony, and because the family in Tokyo Sonata is painfully ordinary, it's impossible not too see how snugly the shoe fits. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa conducts with deliberate stillness; the same silent, steady style which made Kairo equally horrifying and heartbreaking. When the father practically loses everything in one day, and when each family member begin to stumble toward hope, or the mere idea of it, it becomes an exhilarating race. To the starting line. ***** (The Region 3 DVD has decent subtitles but is sorely lacking in extras.)
Feel good done right: convincingly silly, irrationally musical, with a relaxed awesomeness at the end. Swing Girls follows the Water Boys formula but the segment with the mushrooms and the wild boar makes the former the better comedy. Or maybe I just have a soft spot for big band swing. The film does bring back the (mam)moths in the stomach when music was just discovered. It's not a point in time; it's layers (emotions, excitement) that expand and melt into each other. The more you learned, the more you craved, the more you held on. The Region 3 DVD has a Making Of which showed how the girls, through blistered lips and tears, learned each of their instruments. It just made me love the film more. ****
Thanks to The Tioseco-Bohinc Film Series, which "picks up where Alexis Tioseco left off with his Fully Booked Screenings," we are once again given the rare opportunity to see and experience independent movies that Alexis believed showcased the best of Filipino film-making. Thanks too (with waving flags and fireworks) to TBFS curators Dodo Dayao, Oggs Cruz and Richard Bolisay for carrying on with the program and all the (selfless) hard work that went and will go into it. The least we can do is to attend the FREE screenings every second Sunday of the month. A full theater means this will go on. Forever. Or until independent cinema is shown in theaters to a full house. Or, forever.
Ray Gibraltar's When Timawa Meets Delgado is unconventionally nosy and furiously questioning as it investigates the boom of the nursing or health care profession in the Philippines. We are all too familiar with the whys (to escape poverty, to earn dollars) but it's the roundabout way of Gibraltar's narrative that slowly reveals the heart, the funnies, the pain of having a dream.
Following the film is a bit of a challenge at first; there are too many things going on, the quality (of the film) and point of views jump with an impatient itch. The movie itself is a patchwork of audio-visual presentations, documentaries, random footage and performance art.
This is where you stand back and tell yourself to relax. And trust the filmmaker.
In the Q & A that followed last Sunday's screening, Gibraltar humbly admitted that he put the film together as if he were cooking, instinctively. But there is obviously order in his madness.
When Timawa Meets Delgado are fragments of confessions that by the film's end reflects our own curious and desperate nature, with a healthy pinch of humor. It is everything (political, experimental, slice of life) and one thing (Delgado and Timawa's journey). It is jumping in on an ongoing dialogue. It is oftentimes how we think in our noisy worlds. And it is the uncomfortable silence when the noise dies down and the question that we tried to drown out is demanding an answer. *****
Soju, the Korean rice wine, and SuJu, or Super Junior, the largest boy band in the world, is a deadly combination. Attack on the Pin-Up Boys, produced mainly for Super Junior fans, which stars 12 of the 13 members, is a convincing comedy and a surprisingly energetic satire on fame. I was preparing myself for some mindless fun, hence the soju to make the experience more giddy. While the movie does deliver within (quite low) expectations---loads of slapstick, anime-quirky effects, and the SuJu boys in all their charming glory---it also goes beyond a fluff piece, dissecting both popularity and fandom.
Ugly truths so ugly it has to be funny.
When shit hits the face.
The movie begins with a series of attacks on popular pretty boys who get hit by shit on the face. Not for queasy stomachs, I tell you. At first, students are appalled. Until the victims become celebrities and three popular students from Neulparan High School---judo jock Kangin, dancer Heechul and school president Siwon (yes, their names remain unchanged)---race to get hit by shit. The Super Junior boys aren't exactly playing themselves but the meta-poking does add to the playful criticism of Korea's (or anywhere else's) idol culture. Kibum, the boy detective, ponders about the incidents and the reaction of the masses. Did the ordinary kids feel better that pretty boys or flower boys were being attacked in such a degrading manner? Was it general boredom with their own ordinary lives that made them react with such frenzy?
"When grown-ups say we have potential it only makes us more nervous."
It's also interesting to note that Super Junior is not your typical idol group. The boys that make up SuJu is a cross section of the male population: from the jock to the effeminate, from the scrawny to the overweight. Extraordinary circumstances (and hard work) have made them stars in their own right; Attack on the Pin-Up Boys also shows an insecure boy band while celebrating their differences. Kyuhyun and Ryeowook standout for their comedic timing, while the rest of the members all deliver a very natural performance.
The film doesn't aim to make a statement and it ends thoughtfully, with the desire of those who criticize fame to be famous.
Attack on the Pin-Up Boys is hilarious and super strange. The panda judo member, the Jedi school president and the cartoonish special effects all say that the movie is not to be taken seriously. But it's hard to ignore the undercurrent ugliness of it all.
Here's the prerequisite song and dance at the end, synchronized-dancing crazy Wonder Boy:
Can a film really be faulted for aiming to be beautiful?
Hello Schoolgirl (순정만화) is often blindingly so. The soft afternoon flares, the careful attention to fixing a flickering light bulb, the aerosol snow that melts a heart one floor down and later fills a lonely room; luminously lit and lilting moments that distract from the inelegant motions of lovers with significant age disparity.
Yeon-woo (Yoo Ji-tae) is a polite, 30-year old civil servant who falls for 17-year old high school student Soo-yeung (Lee Yeon-hee). Soo-yeung finds the doting, older man adorable and eventually yearns to take their relationship to a higher level. Over dinner, she blurts out that she never wants to grow up because all the adults in her life have turned into crouching cowards.
Director Ryu Jeong-ha approaches the film as an adult, creating beauty of out self-control, and yes, cowardice.
Yoo Ji-tae's Yeon-woo is what most of us have become in our thirties: complacent, easily pleased with kindness, and comfortable with his place in the society. Pleasures are enjoyed in moderation; love happens when it happens, and if it is from a distance, then so be it. There is no grand unraveling of the character. A joyfully quite ride on a bicycle, driven by Yoo Ji-tae's knack for simmering characterization, becomes the glorious race to the sunset. It's not much, but when was the last time you deliberately made time to look around around and like where you are? (Thank you, The Sundays.)
Exactly.
The other story switches the perspective: Yeon-woo's new colleague, Sook (Kang In), falls for a mysterious older woman, Kwon Ha-kyeong, who always carries an old film camera around. She enjoys the company of Sook, but she fears the coincidences that are too similar with her previous relationship. In contrast, this plot takes delight in the silliness that a youg man is willing to go through for courtship; the absence of pride in the name of love. Super Junior's Kang In (insert inaudible squeal) takes his popular backstage antics to film, making the rough, fumbling Sook frighteningly relatable.
I'm not familiar with the original webcomic by Kang Full, but Hello Schoolgirl is too beautiful for a controversial subject matter. Maybe that is the intention. The hand held cam show the underlying turmoil, but the surface has an untouchable sheen, celebrating the love, but burying the heartache.
The kicked-up dirt, the caked mud on my leather shoes, and my rag-tag group---the overweight bully, the bespectacled math genius, the giggly volleyball players, the quiet Catholic that was me when I was in grade school---conquered after-school boredom with trips to dark corridors and empty classrooms. If we were feeling more daring than usual, we would go to the garden behind a Gothic, metal church where it was said the school's priests were buried. One time, we did see a ghostly figure, a thin old man who had ashen-gray skin, walking aimlessly around the garden. My friends screamed and ran, stumbling on rocks and shrubs. I was rooted to the ground. Because he had seen me. I remember my knees felt like buckling but I stood firm as the old man walked toward me. When he was less than a few feet away, he called out to me, "Hijo! Have you seen my nail cutter?" I shook my head, and suddenly ran away. I never told my friends that the old man was an almost senile priest.
Dorm (Dek Hor/เด็กหอ)is magical and horrifying this way. Horror with wide-eyed wonder, the kind that is an adventure shared with friends. Director Songyos Sugmakanan is a fantastic storyteller and starts the film with boyhood nostalgia quite similar to his early work along with other directors, Fan Chan, and Japanese thriller 20th Century Boys. Chatree (Charlie Trairat, also the lead of Fan Chan) is plucked from everything familiar and is sent to a boarding school where he is bullied by a gang of students. Songyos cloaks the dormitory in a mossy palette, giving it a more sinister, swampy feel as strange things begin to happen at night.
The frights are simple but ingeniously executed, and often aims to be evocative of childhood fears. The trips to the bathroom with every shadow stretched like clawed hands, the howling dogs, the school disciplinarian we imagined to be the devil incarnate (played delicately tethering to insanity by Thai veteran actress Chintara Sukapatana), the lock that seems to click into place by itself, unearthed forgotten jitters. Songyos doesn't aspire for grand. He is after our memory, and once the connection has been established, disbelief goes into suspended animation. I was a boy again wandering around corridors.
Horror turns to horrifying heartbreak when Chatree befriends Vichien (Michael Sirachuch Chientaworn), another loner who turns out to be a ghost. The hints were pretty obvious but the reveal was still a surprise, a reveal that was so unexpected and so refreshingly original that I gasped at both the anticipated plot twist and the surprising loneliness it meant.
Many would argue that Dorm isn't really a horror flick. Technically, it is. Horror in fiction is a disturbance in the human experience by supernatural forces. As a film, it does not go for the usual out-for-vengeance ghost with creaking bones. Itmay not frighten but it does horrify---seeing a friend die and decay is horrifying. Alienation, guilt, being unloved, more so.
With Dorm, Songyos attacks an old, familiar genre with such brutal grace that it is at once too beautiful and too painful to watch.
Rating: 5
Dorm (Dek Hor/เด็กหอ) Directed by Songyos Sugmakanan (Fan Chan/Hormones) Starring Charlie Trairat (Fan Chan/Hormones), Michael Sirachuch Chientaworn (Hormones), Chintara Sukapatana
Betcha never imagined while musing about the motions of bodies that you would centuries later inspire a film about two silly girls who blindly embark on a journey to the other side of the(ir) world with only your theory (of objects falling in uniform acceleration independent of their masses) and a couple of rocks to put that theory into a test to guide them through life-changing decisions.
Consequently, there is a lot of falling in this movie. It begins with best friends Noon (Jarinporn Joonkiat) and Cherry (Chutima Theepanarth) bungee jumping off a bridge to seal their no-fear pact to set off for Europe; Noon hopes to get over a heartbreak, and the other wants to prove her school's decision to expel her wrong. The girls agree to tour and work across Europe indefinitely, and this is where the film takes a familiar turn, at least when it comes to Philippine cinema.
We actually have coined a name for illegal immigrants/workers: TNT or tago ng tago (literally, in English, err, hide and hide), which just goes to show how "ordinary" this has become to the Filipino experience. The similarities of practice---the girls working in restaurants, the running from migration officers, the street-smartness of saving up cash sometimes by cheating or in the movie's case, slipping through the subway turnstile---made me smile. And a little sad.
What makes this film different though is the light-heartedness, the teen-flickness of treatment. This is not some gritty drama about illegal immigrant workers; it's a winsome fairytale that sometimes gets a little too precious. In the Paris subway, Noon hears a dark, handsome stranger speaking in Thai and stalks him. It turns out that the guy, Pisit, played by Ray MacDonald with refreshingly relaxed (read: adult) cynicism, has been living in Paris for quite some time and is staying in a commune with other immigrants and artists. But it's all very wholesome, kiddies.
Joonkiati and MacDonald have a delightful chemistry (though I'm a little uncomfortable with age gap) and are responsible for one of the genuinely warm moments of the film: in a sea of a busy crowd, Noon and Pisit raise placards with questions, written in Thai, that read Raise your hands if you can read this, and my favorite Raise your hands if you miss home. A few passersby raise their hands shyly, some more enthusiatically, all very naturally that I have a feeling that the scene was not staged.
The film is as saccharine as it sounds and mostly gets by with charm and giggling but director Nithiwat Tharatorn has an incandescent eye for capturing the overwhelming grandness and melancholy of Europe's old cities and architecture. His camerawork is also fascinating. His hand held shots has fierce immediacy that gets you into the heat of the panic, especially that bit in the subway where the camera follows the girls running from the police, shaky and stumbling, then blinding daylight. It left me breathless. And it's a sign that Thanatorn can make a great movie if he really puts his mind, and camera, to it.
So, dear, dear Galileo, your theory turned out to be simplified metaphor on the gravity of consequences that was barely carried through until the end of the film but you will be glad to hear that, from the sighs and gleeful laughter that filled the cinema, you're now quite popular with the kids and I'm quite certain that we'll be seeing girls all across Bangkok invoking your guidance and dropping stones off bridges.
In motion, T.
Rating: 3/5
Dear Galileo (Nee Tam Galileo/หนีตามกาลิเลโอ) Directed by Nithiwat Tharatorn (Fan Chan, Seasons Change) Starring Pom Chutima Theepanarth (Hormones), Toey Jarinporn Joonkiat, Ray MacDonald (Fun Bar Karaoke)
Creepy can be gorgeously dense. The house that traps adults and the forest that stands guard are thick with swamp-green shadows and murmuring. Hansel and Gretel (헨젤과 그레텔) is a visual feast of horrors and sweets; details, details, details make your eyes dart from one corner of the room to the other. Toys, gems, cupcakes, storybooks, that robot-printed couch that I would like to have, silhouettes on walls, and bunnies, lots and lots of bunnies. (And what's with all the carrots, what do they need such good eyesight for anyway? It must be bunnies!---Thank you Joss Whedon, and Anya, for now making me forever suspicious of rabbits.) The candied claustrophobia swells halfway into the movie when director Lim Pil-Seong shows us grandly the chasm that separates fantasy and reality.
Creepy can be cute. Very cute. Jin Ji-Hee is a precocious child actress who can go from nice to scary to weepy in a snap, but it is her voice that sends the tingle down my spine. Low and grainy, it is an otherworldly, underworldly sound. Hansel and Gretel plays at opposites with utter delight. The malicious eyes above the gap-toothed grin, the children toying with the adults, it reverses the roles in the grim fairytale. Three children who never age lure adults into their house and "audition" them to be their parents. Eun-soo (Cheon Jeong-myeong) crashes his car while arguing with his pregnant girlfriend over the phone. When he regains consciousness, he sees a girl in a red riding hood who leads him to her house where he can rest for the night. Eun-soo meets the other two children and the parents who seem shaken up. The following morning, Eun-soo sets for home but discovers that he couldn't get out of the forest's veiny grasp. The parents disappear. A new couple arrives.
Creepy can be unnerving. The film takes a chilling turn with the arrival of a religious fanatic who is too touchy with girls. The bad kind of touchy. The roles are once again reversed; morals shatter whatever was fantastical and macabre. Lim Pil-Seong inserts the back story of the children as the movie reaches its climax. The exposition runs a little longer than it should, taking some much needed tension away from the final act. The flashback was also quite difficult to watch---I had to look away a couple of times because, even if I quite like watching torture porn, I couldn't stomach watching a man beat a child lifeless.
Hansel and Gretel starts strong and keeps you enthralled until the resolution awkwardly rolls out, which I found a little too...X-men meets Fables. Yes, the mutants and the Vertigo comic, with the telekinesis and the power of the written word. Still, it's a movie that's easy to get lost in. Beguiling, rich like icing, and cruel like the real world.
Rating: 3.5
Hansel and Gretel (Hen-jel-gwa Geu-re-tel) Directed by Lim Pil-Seong (Antarctic Journal) Starring Cheon Jeong-myeong (The Aggressives), Eun Won-jae (Natural City), Sim Eun-kyung (Living Death), Jin Ji-hee (Cello), Park Hee-son (Love Talk)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is stubbornly un-Hollywood. It is talky, quite presumptuous (characters, new ones and vaguely familiar ones, walk in and out without much less of an introduction), and the CGI, except for the wonder-filled action sequence at the opening, is mostly used for tone. TONE.
Coming from the mildly amusing but numbingly dull CGasm of Transformers 2, the new Potter film is like a breath of fresh air, but a chilling one at that. Director David Yates' palate remains saturated casting a more dream-like quality---a filmy hazyness, which usually means your eyes are glassy from smoking pot or you're straddling between waking and sleep---a nod to Alfonso Cuaron's atmospheric Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. There is always something sinister lurking behind the fog that envelopes the scenery, making the relationships more precious than they are.
And relationships is what the Half-Blood Prince is all about.
SPOILERISH NOW.
Harry and Dumbledore's have been handed the Luke Skywalker-Obi Wan Kenobi fate, albeit with quiet tenderness: Dumbledore lays a protective hand over Harry's chest, asking him to step back and hide during the movie's finale; Harry laying a hand over Dumbledore's still chest.
Under the stormy skies of Hogwarts, Ron, Hermione, Harry and Ginny go through the motions of their own stormy, passive-aggressive teenage love affairs. Yates reminds us that even with the impending gloom-and-doomyness, we are still watching kids who yearn and are quite desperate for some normalcy: love, popularity, a good laugh. I did not find the flirtation and the awkward confessions trivial at all; the darkness of the film only heightened every lovelorn sigh.
More calamitous than the love potion mix-up is Draco's internal conflict. Written as a bratty villain all through out the series, Draco finally went beyond playground bullying and faced the most difficult choice that anyone ever has to make in the Potter-verse. In the end, he couldn't muster the courage, or the malice, to kill Dumbledore. Snape, bound by the Unbreakable Vow made with Draco's mum, took Draco's place as murderer of Hogwarts' headmaster.
SPOILERISH NO MORE.
I read the book years ago and I remember it being quickly paced. Yates' deliberate pacing may turn-off some viewers who are used to blockbusterish hit-and-run storytelling but it does have its merits. Instead of the clunky and chunky expositions of the book, we get a series of well-plotted reveals that build up. The mood, if a little monotonous, is also consistent all through out and successfully digs its grimy claws into one's psyche. There's that Empire Strikes Back heaviness that is quite difficult to shake off, and the movie's coda shows no effort in clearing the skies.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban still is the best installment but Half-Blood Prince comes a close second, with love among the ruins as the greatest magic of them all.
"I want you to watch three movies a week with me. I pick them. It's the only education you're going to get."
After a series of conversations with friends on "the art" of watching movies, I come across The Film Club, a memoir by film critic and writer David Gilmour. He chronicles the three years he spent with his son, who dropped out of school, watching movies three times a week. Parenting and films make a combination that's too ideal, too sappy at least to a cynical eye---no, thankfully not a sequel to Tuesdays With Morrie---but David's candid prose shows it as it is, a father's love is awkward, and an awkward, second-guessing kind of love is more fascinating only because it is all too familiar. It's what great movies are about; it's why we stare at the ceiling on sleepless night. The father-son relationship that David draws at the beginning is naturally strange and detached, with nothing much in common, no actual emotional anchor, drifting rudderless. And then the movies arrive.
The film club begins with Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows. David explains, "I figured it was a good way to slide into European art films, which I knew were going to bore him until he learned how to watch them. It's like learning a variation on regular grammar." I loved the thought process that went behind every film he showed his son, Jesse.
If love is a mixtape, then David carefully prepared his with films; movies that became dialogues on morality and romance, cinematography that evoked buried regrets, acting tics that magnified the meaning of gestures, and plots that hinted at possible futures. Ranging from the thoughtful violence of Akira Kurosawa's Ran to the self-destructive fireworks of the documentary Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry, from the talky Annie Hall to the quiet musing of Chungking Express, Jesse was exposed to varying degrees of artistry and failures, of crucial movements in film history as well as guilty pleasures that resonated with sheer entertainment above vision or message.
The memoir's most urgent pleasure comes from David's contagious love for cinema and his critical eye that taught Jesse, and the readers of the memoir as well, how to deconstruct a scene or read meaning in frame compositions without sounding stiff (like I just did) and hifalutin. "Watch out for this scene," David usually goes and as fan of movies myself, I had to dig out dusty VHS tapes or DVDs so I could go along for the ride down Film 101. The writing is irresistible this way.
But at its heart, The Film Club is about a father who is learning to let go of his son, and a son finally realizing his place in the scheme of things turbulent and heartbreaking. The movies in between gave David and Jesse a common ground---a bubble, so to speak---where they could figure out what to do next together. The figuring out part turned out to be the best part in both their lives.
I could have finished the book in one sitting but this is the type to savor. And I assure you, you'll probably be popping Kurosawa's Ran or may be even Verhoeven's Showgirls in your player anytime soon.
Sweet, light, dusted with quirk and coated with candy cane colors, Antique is a gentle reminder that life is meant to be devoured, bitter chunks and all.
Director Min Gyoo-dong who directed one of the more intriguing Korean high school horror films Memento Mori---where a painful sexual awakening comes face to face with both social monster and vengeful ghost---continues his exploration of gender by adapting popular Japanese manga Antique Bakery by Fumi Yoshinaga.
Gone are the gothic and heavy with foreboding doom claustrophobia of Memento Mori. Antique, if anything, glows. It glows by contrast: trauma versus joy, sweet versus bitter, while delicious colors overlap and swirl to the riff of Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with a sinister undertone.
The movie opens with an awkward confession, Min Sun-Woo (Kim Jae-Wook) admits with much difficulty his liking for Kim Jin-Hyuk (Joo Ji-Hoon). Jin-Hyuk more than turns Sun-Woo down, he smashes a cake on Sun-Woo's face while yelling his disgust.
Years later, Jin-Hyuk puts up a patisserie called Antique and hires Sun-Woo to be his pastry chef. The rest of his staff, a retired boxing champ and Jin-Hyuk's childhood friend and bodyguard---are all bewildered why he opened Antique when cakes in particular make him vomit. For those who haven't read the manga or haven't seen the Japanese series, the reveal is a surprise, one that takes the movie to a darker place, which is still sprinkled with the fantastic: shadow hands that choke manifest a memory that was too traumatizing for Jin-Hyuk to remember.
After Jin-Hyuk rejected Sun-Woo in high school, Sun-Woo has become the opposite of his stuttering past: a Prada-snug love magnet that no man, gay or straight, could resist. Except, of course, for Jin-Hyuk.
Homosexuality is played with flirtatious sweetness all through out with a dash of magic. It's a refreshing approach with no hint of irony and wonderfully free of guilt or tragedy. Joo Ji-Hoon of Princess Hours sheds his refined affectation for the hot-tempered Jin-Hyuk. His comedic timing is ruggedly perfect; the consuming burden of pretending to be happy for his staff and his family never leaves his eyes. (Ji-Hoon was recently convicted of illegal drug use. He was given a suspended jail term and community service. More information about this here.) Kim Jae-Wook of Coffee Prince plays Sun-woo with refinement and grace, and delightfully counters Ji-Hoon's brusque, manly manners with subtle but tender gestures.
Musical numbers, comedy, sexual tension, murder, and cakes, lots and lots of cakes. Antique can be faulted for juggling too many quirks and styles, but it is Min Gyu-dong's unexpected visual hiccups---women in the flour, a boxing ring covered with flowers, a fist fight with a shadow creature---that makes this film explosively sensual while propelling the mystery and plot. It's definitely tricky but Gyu-dong's instincts are spot on. In Park Chan-Wook's I'm a Cyborg but That's OK, the absurd, hallucinatory vignettes often distract from the storytelling and made the mundane more mundane; cool ideas that accidentally became the movie. Here, it is played to heighten the sensation, to make senses more tangible: Seduction in the women rolling in the powdery sugar, Fear in the drawer that sprung out of a child's chest.
Above the din of ecstatic imagination and your own grumbling stomach---have a slice of cake or ice cream within reach, it will come in handy---Antique's coda casually serves a palatable food for thought: Take the sweet with the bitter, the acidic, the spice but never forget the icing on top.
Rating: 5
ANTIQUE 서양골동양과자점 앤티크 Directed by Min Gyu-Dong Starring Joo Ji-Hoon, Kim Jae-Wook, Yoo Ah-In, Choi Ji-Ho
Visit Hancinema for more Antique goodness.Below is Love is by FT Island MV from Antique.
Because the status was not quo, Joss Whedon, in the middle of the WGA strike last year proved the studio yuppie scum wrong, that, no, money does not make a show brilliant, and that, yes, writers do. Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog could very well be the best single episode TV show that wasn't on TV. A 43-minute musical initially produced exclusively for Internet distribution, Joss Whedon self-produced, directed and composed the music with the help of brothers Zack and Jed Whedon and actress Maurissa Tancharoen.
With my freeze ray I will stop the world,
With my freeze ray I will find the time to find the words to
Tell you how how you make make me feel... - Dr. Horrible
Dr. Horrible, played with geek-buckling precision by Neil Patrick Harris, is a wannabe super villain who video blogs, replies to sent-in emails, and reveals his master plan to rule the world and win over laundromat girl of his dreams Penny (Felicia Day who played the potential and later on slayer Vi in Buffy the Vampire Slayer) through songs. When he receives a response to his application from the Evil League of Evil, he sets to motion his plan to steal the final ingredient to make his freeze ray work---a freeze ray that would freeze time and stop the pain so he could finally confess his love. Aww.
Much like everything else in the Whedonverse, things don't go according to plan. Horrible was successful in stealing the wonderflonium but he also accidentally introduced Captain Hammer (wonderfully hammy Nathan Fillon), his nemesis, the Superman to his Brainiac, to Penny.
The Buffy musical Once More, with Feeling, episode six of the gloomy sixth season is arguably the show's finest hour; I am obviously biased since I named this blog after Buffy's confessional number. A demon descends upon Sunnydale and binds the town and its inhabitants to a spell that made everyone sing and dance...to death. Best kept secrets were sung out loud, silly, oftentimes funny, and ultimately existential. Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a more typical musical with songs for soliloquy. The songs this time around are catchier (but shorter, damn!) and the counterpoint vocals of Harris and Day in the exceptional My Eyes---which chronicles a downfall and a falling for someone, helplessly getting smitten beside helplessly fulfilling an evil destiny---packs a contrasting emotional punch that celebrated musical-movies Dreamgirls, Rent or Chicago can only dream of, err, packing.
The musical format keeps things whimsical, a sonic bubble that seemingly contained the plot in comic booky fantasy fulfillment territory. But this is no doubt a Joss Whedon story and if there's one thing that he is a genius at it's the slap-in-the-face, punch-in-the-nose, kick-in-the-shin, drive-a-stake-through-the-heart ending; Whedon cruelly reveals his last card just when you feel the worst has happened.
The last 3 seconds of Dr. Horrible has rightfully earned a degree in Horribleness; a silence and a blank stare that continues to haunt me.
I cannot believe my eyes How the world’s filled with filth and lies but it’s plain to see evil inside of me is on the rise. - Dr. Horrible
Fate versus free will seems to be a constant in the Whedonverse. Buffy accepted hers (fate) even if it meant a short lifespan; Angel went against his monstrous nature (free will) but only because he rebelled against his vampire fate.
Dr. Horrible at the start was obviously not meant for supervillainy. He declined a grudge match with Johnny Snow because there were children at a park and his ultimate secret weapon's main purpose was to stop time for confession's sake. Even when he was one click away from killing Captain Hammer, he hesitated.
It was crazy random happenstance.
It seems like no matter what he did, Horrible was destined to join the Evil League of Evil. It was his fate to be a villain. Whedon's characters continue to be caught in situations that dictate their roles in the world. He seems to be saying that there is no real good or evil; it's the circumstances that make us, that ultimately define us.
Hero. Villain. Sidekick. Victim. We are everyone at one point in our lives. It's beyond our hands.
Rating: 5
Get Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Bloghere. The commentary is equally sing-alongy.
Dour, desperate, and painful to watch in some parts, Till My Heartaches End is Star Cinema's Halloween offering to Kimeralds: a 2-hour humorless drama about a relationship going through the motions of a breakup. And I loved it.
