Tag Archives: foreign films

Seoul Station

Standing outside Seoul’s central subway station, two young men are having a nice liberal chat. “I think there should be universal welfare,” one says to the other. As if on cue, an old homeless man who is covered in blood comes staggering by. Concerned, one of the two men run to check on him but is quickly recoils from the smell. “I thought he was bleeding but he was just homeless,” he tells his friend.

So begins Seoul station, the first Korean animated zombie movie that I’ve ever seen. Though I was unsure of what to expect at first, it became immediately clear that this hilarious yet disturbing picture would have a lot more to say than the average episode of The Walking Dead. Because acclaimed director Sang-ho Yeon’s version of the zombie apocalypse seems to start with those who rely on the Seoul Station subway tunnels as a place to sleep, no one really seems to care at first and the infection is allowed to spread quickly. Unlike most zombie movies I’ve seen, we see the fall of civilization entirely through the eyes of pimps, prostitutes, and the homeless.

There aren’t many Zombie Kills of the Week in Seoul Station but the animation alone- surreal enough to be unique but realistic enough to keep it grounded when it counts- makes it stand out. As much as it has to say about the struggles of Seoul’s marginalized, this is not a movie without it’s guilty pleasures. There are enough close calls, creatively claustrophobic suspense, and hilariously over-the-top voice acting to work as a fun popcorn movie. It’s only unsettling once you let it sink in.

Assassination Classroom: Graduation

20 Replies

001 As you may remember, I had a great time last weekend watching a thoroughly ridiculous manga adaptation. Assassination Classroom: Graduation starts off from an even sillier place, as it features a superpowered yellow smiley faced squid who teaches assassination techniques to middle schoolers so they can kill him. I was 100% ready to love this movie, but instead suffered a big letdown.

sfs Which is not to say Assassination Classroom: Graduation is a bad movie. I mean, it’s not really a GOOD movie by any measure, but my post-screening research shows that it adheres quite closely to the source material (incidentally, this is a sequel to last year’s Assassination Classroom with each movie covering about half of the original manga’s story) and was a big box office hit in Japan. But this movie had no intention at any time of embracing the complete ridiculousness of its concept or the yellow squidlike teacher. Instead, Assassination Classroom: Graduation plays it almost completely straight, delivering life lesson after life lesson as the middle school class grows up and learns the ways of the assassin from a big yellow squid. How you can play that concept straight at all, I don’t even know.

The film’s straightforward approach seemed to satisfy the two white girls ahead of us who were eating a bagful of Japanese candy including green-wrapper Kit-Kats (green tea flavour?!?), but I wasn’t there to see an earnest coming of age story. And I certainly wasn’t there to see half an hour of the movie devoted to a love story between the squid and a lab technician. I was there to see an off-the-wall action movie and Assassination Classroom: Graduation is not that. Colour me disappointed.

bxzX8w6 So back to those green tea Kit Kats. Apparently Kit Kats are a huge deal in Japan because the name sounds like “kitto katsu”, which means “you will surely win”. That nice sentiment has given rise to a whole host of ridiculous Kit Kat varieties being eaten up by the Japanese (and also at least two white Canadians), including Shinshu Apple, Edamame Soybean, Purple Sweet Potato, Hot Japanese Chili, and Wasabi, among others. Lots and lots of others.

That Kit Kat madness is a perfect example of what I was expecting from Assassination Classroom: Graduation, but did not get. Learning about this Kit Kat craze is a decent consolation though, and it only happened because I went to see this movie. Obviously, the lesson is that Japan never fails to provide wackiness but you can’t always predict just where that wackiness will come from at any given time. And maybe that’s part of the fun!

Psycho Raman

10 Replies

I can probably count on one hand the number of Indian films I’ve seen. And I KNOW I can raman 2 count on one finger the number of Indian films I’ve seen that were about serial killers. Which brings me to the appropriately titled Psycho Raman.

To expose yourself to foreign cinema can be a bit of a culture shock at first. I remember when I first started watching European movies I was thrown off at first by the storytelling, pacing, and acting that felt strikingly different from what I’d become accustomed to watching American movies. So with Psycho Raman, I braced myself for a style of filmmaking that would be completely new to me.

I was quite looking forward to seeing what this new (to me) voice could bring to the tired serial killer genre, and- bad news first-, was a little disappointed how much director Anurag Kastyap’s film reminded me of so many American crime films that I’ve seen. The magnetic Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Ramanna, a poor man in Mumbai with a taste for killing people with his giant metal pipe. Before he can escape from the scene of his first crime, he witnesses a drug-addicted cop (Vicky Kaushal) stealing from his victim and committing a murder of his own. Raman immediately sees a kindred spirit with this crooked cop and sets out on a two-year mission to help him embrace the killer inside him.

raman 3 The symbiotic relationship between cop and killer is nothing new and I feel like I’ve seen every version there is of the “You complete me” speech but Kastyap shows us enough memorable images and packs enough suspense into Psycho Raman’s best scenes that his film is well worth watching. Mumbai is a compelling setting for this familiar story and, as the Fantasia Film Festival website notes, shows a side of India that most of us aren’t used to seeing.

Raman, as played by Siddiqui, clearly has a very screws loose but- like all of our favourite movie psychos- is actually quite insightful. He’s a fun character and Kastyap enjoys filming him walking in slow motion to the beat of a pop song so much that it’s easy to get the sense that he seems him as the hero of this gruesome story. It almost feels like the start of a Raman franchise.

Kastyap enjoys his serial killer so much that he often neglects the equally if not more raman 4 important character of Raghavan, the cop with a dark side. The film is divided into ten chapters and way too many of them don’t feature Raghavan at all. Not that I’m complaining. Kaushal doesn’t bring anything new to the drug addict or the angry cop and his scenes are often tedious. Still, the battle over this man’s soul is the whole point and Kastyap needed to put in a little more time developing this character.

A better film would have been about 20 minutes shorter and used that time more effectively. Still, though Kastyap always cuts away before the violence becomes gory, he doesn’t pull his punches. Psycho Ramanh is a dark and uncompromising movie and you may find its villain/anti-hero tough to shake.

Terra Formars

9 Replies

MV5BN2JmNjVhNmEtMGZhYy00NjEyLTk2ODgtOGRjYzczNzkyZTk1XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjA2OTcwNzE@._V1_ There will always be a place in my heart reserved for ridiculous movies. Ones that know they are dumb and just go for it anyway. Terra Formars is one of those movies. It is everything that you’d expect from a Japanese sci-fi battle between giant humanoid cockroaches and criminals with bug powers who are being paid to destroy the roaches so that humans can live on Mars.

Jay tells me that this is a very tame and straightforward addition to director Takashi Miike’s body of work. I would have found that hard to believe but for the clip of his work that was played before our screening, in connection with Miike being awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Fantasia Film Festival, and the descriptions offered during the presentation by the festival’s organizers. All five that spoke clearly love Miike’s work and a more ringing endorsement could not have been given, though with a clear disclaimer that his most extreme work is not going to be enjoyed by many.

001 Personal taste aside, Miike would be deserving of the lifetime achievement award based on productivity alone, as he has somehow screened 30 films at Fantasia during the festival’s 20 years of existence!

Though Terra Formars may be tame and straightforward for Miike, it is a deliciously over-the-top action romp that proudly pays tribute to its manga roots. The roaches look very cartoony on screen but that seems intentional given how closely they match the source material. Just as cartoony are the hybrid human-bug heroes, who to my delight received voice-over intros describing each of their powers. The heroes look incredible in their bug forms, and the glee with which they rip apart the roaches (and vice versa) is contagious.

That glee carries over to the movie as a whole, and is the main reason that I was thoroughly charmed by Terra Formars from start to finish. It’s such a fun and bizarre adventure, you won’t care that much of it makes no sense at all. Highly recommended for anyone whose guilty pleasures include cheesy sci-fi monster movies.

Jonathan

14 Replies

This German film by writer-director Piotr Lewandowski is beautifully shot with lush cinematography; you won’t believe it’s his first feature.

The theme is surprisingly mature as well. Jonathan (Jannis Niewöhner) is stuck at home working on the farm and caring for his dying father (Andre Hennicke). The relationship is jonathan-film strained. There are whiffs of resentment. Luckily Jonathan has his father’s beautiful young nurse (Julia Koschitz) to distract him, but as the film lurches shakily through its middle third, Jonathan realizes that time is running out for his father and if the family secrets are to be unlocked, it’s now or never.

This movie is slow, sometimes maddeningly so. And the men in question are fairly reticent, so there’s a lot of sun-dappled quiet reflection, and a few close-up shots of bugs for good measure. The visual richness can contrast nicely against the jagged and raw emotions. These are the best of times and worst of times for young Jonathan. He’s discovering himself while losing his father. His sexual energy burns up his grief. The camera lingers on his angular body. This is the sexiest movie about terminal cancer you’re ever likely to see.

Secrets are poisonous, and they leave a large wake of destruction. Cancer is perhaps not the most devastating thing to happen to Jonathan’s family. And despite him being the titular character, this story is not Jonathan’s alone. He and his father both have truths to tell – if only they can find the words, and the courage.

One Floor Below

15 Replies

This summer, I wrote a little about my appreciation for some harmless eavesdropping. Not in a creepy way. But if you’re having a conversation while I’m in earshot, I’m listening in. For instance, just a moment ago, I overheard one colleague saying to another “I brought soup for supper tonight but will go out to get some salad so I can get my vegetables too. Not that salad is vegetables”.

The comments from some of our readers could not have been more validating. Who would have thought that so many bloggers loved to watch out of the corner of their eye as strangers live their lives? I’ve never felt better about not minding my own business.

The response I got was a little surprising. It seems to contradict my favorite Morgan Freeman speech of all time, where he tells Brad Pitt “In any major city, minding your own business is a science”. This line from Se7en, despite being delivered with the conviction of a great actor in his prime, may seem a little strange given our obsession with office gossip and the private lives of celebrities. Of course, this isn’t what Freeman was talking about. What if the person you’re watching happens to need your help? Suddenly, it can be quite tempting to play the “Hey, this is none of my business” card.

So it goes with Patrascu in One Floor Below, a Romanian thriller from director Radu Muntean. Climbing the stairs to his apartment, Patrascu can’t help overhearing, especially since he stops for a moment to listen in, a scandalous argument between two lovers in an apartment one floor below. From the sounds of it, the heated discussion quickly escalates into a case of domestic violence, at which point the middle-aged husband and father decides “Hey, this is none of my business” and moves on. The next day, he learns that the young woman one floor below has been murdered.

Why introduce my review with three paragraphs of questionably relevant references to eavesdropping, salad, and Morgan Freeman? Well, I had to talk about SOMETHING! What do you say about a movie where nothing much happens? However thought-provoking Patrascu’s moral dilemma, Muntean makes his point in one or two short scenes, leaving very little to talk about for the rest of the movie. The ambitious director struggles to find drama in a murder case where the main character makes no effort either to investigate or find justice (in fact, he lies to the police to avoid getting involved).

Muntean asks some good questions and makes some unsettling observations in One Floor Below but there aren’t enough of them- and not nearly enough plot- to fill 93 minutes. I admire the restraint with which he tells a story that could have so easily given in to melodrama. I couldn’t help feeling like I really should be liking this movie. But it really couldn’t hold my attention. And this coming from a guy who is captivated by two colleagues talking about soup.

Boy & The World

8 Replies

1026025-watch-gkids-unveils-us-trailer-boy-and-world This movie looks different, feels different, sounds different. Actually, I’d heard it was a silent film, and that’s not quite true. There’s a smattering of dialogue, unsubtitled, but that didn’t bother me. The images and the score are so evocative they’ve already buried under your skin, and you know what’s going on even if you can’t decipher the words. I probably shouldn’t admit this next bit, but upon looking it up, I see that the language is actually just a made up one – backwards Portuguese, apparently – so Boy_and_the_World_2.0.0 that may reassure you while making me look stupid. Incidentally, I don’t speak Portuguese forwards either.

Long story short, the film’s about a young boy searching for his father who has gone to the city in search of work, but the combination of sweet and simple imagery coupled with jaunty music and depth of imagination makes for a pretty powerful message. We see the world through the eyes of a child, and it’s as fanciful as you’d think, but it’s also reflective. I think the larger statement being made is a cautionary tale. At one point the boy seems to have found 960 his father, only to find many identical men exiting an office building. Has his father become a clone? Has the city stolen his soul? Is there simply no difference between men who don’t make things with their own hands?I’m not sure of the exact sentiment the Brazilian film makers were hoping to convey, but that’s kind of the beauty of the thing. In its quiet, it allows the viewer to be making judgments for herself, and my reading of it was obviously pretty damning.

This film actually made its debut right here at the Ottawa International Animation Festival where it received special honours “Because it was full of some of the most beautiful menino_mundo_01_wide-31e6e3590ce09f3e938c01ad238ba8e1298eac2f-s900-c85 images we’ve ever seen” and I think that’s putting it mildly. It’s some of the most innovative work I’ve seen in a while, despite the fact that the main character is basically a stick man, truly thrilling to watch and absorb. There we go, that’s what I’ve been getting to this whole time: it’s a movie that you don’t just watch. You experience it. The visuals feel quite personal and they take you back to your own childhood while thrilling you and keeping you guessing. All the drawings were hand-made by the Director, Alê Abreu, and I just love how he makes this very basic character come to life against a geometric, swirling, abstract background. It’s moving. This is an image-heavy post, and I think you can tell it’s for good reason. Yes, I could talk about this all day but honestly, this is one you’ll have to see for yourself, if only you feel up to risking the nontraditional style.

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window and Disappeared

13 Replies

I read this book many moons ago and didn’t particularly like it. Sean’s 92 year old Grandma read it too and she didn’t like it either, because the book made fun of former presidents, and she’d “lived through all that.” Though if you can’t make fun of anything that happened during her nearly 93 years, it’s reduced me to cracking plague jokes and doing neanderthal bits.

I wasn’t overly excited about seeking this out when it became a movie, but out of respect for its Oscar-nominated makeup job, I decided to give it a go.

It literally is about an old man named Allan who, on his 100th birthday, avoids his nursing home many-candled cake by climbing out a window. He doesn’t exactly disappear though – at least, not to us. We follow him out the window and on to an incredible series of events, 08HUNDRED-facebookJumbo including a suitcase full of drug money and a homicidal elephant, which is still secondary to the other trip he takes, the one down memory lane.

It turns out Allan has led a pretty incredible life, in part because his love of blowing shit up, and in part because he’s routinely been in the right place at the right time.

It stars Robert Gustafsson, a well-known comedian and actor in Sweden, who just happened to be less than half a century old when he shot this film. This presented a real challenge to the team who did the makeup and prosthetics as we see Allan not just as a 93419247-7904-4753-a65b-67018a827987 centenarian, but through many decades of his life thanks to a series of flashbacks.

Whether or not you like this film will depend a lot on your tolerance for absurdist humour. There are high-jinks upon high-jinks here, and they add up to a sweet film with some chuckles that obviously has some appeal, but the movie, like the book, left me feeling like it should have been so much more.

45 Years

35 Replies

When I first got married, I used to fantasize about a 40th wedding anniversary. As one character in 45 Years puts it, a good marriage is “so full of history”. I couldn’t wait to start living forty or more years of history with the woman I was marrying and to one day hopefully celebrate how we beat the odds and stood the test of time. We lasted a little more than four years.

I knew that marriage would be hard. Literally everyone I knew who had ever walked down an aisle warned me of this and I really did think I understood what they meant. But nothing could prepare me for the seemingly impossible choices and challenges that awaited me. If I, as keen and committed as I was, couldn’t last 5 years, what does it take to make it to 45? I’ve often thought about the kinds of compromises the couples that last would have to make, the things they’d need to talk about, and the things they’d need to avoid talking about.

45 Years looks at what happens when a happily married couple are faced with one of those subjects that they got along just fine without talking about just one week before their 45th anniversary party. Five years before he married Kate, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) lost his girlfriend in a tragic hiking accident. Fifty years later, he gets a letter telling him that her body has been found.

Initially, Kate (Charlotte Rampling) can’t understand why Geoff is so preoccupied with this development. Once she realizes how much he wants to talk about his memories of her, she tries her best to be supportive and starts to ask questions about her husband’s former lover. Although she seems genuinely curious at first, she starts to regret her questions when his answers make it more and more clear that her husband’s previous relationship may have been more serious than she’d been led to believe.

Kate’s jealousy of a woman that died fifty years ago is fascinating. She always knew that Geoff’s last relationship didn’t so much end as was cut tragically short but she seemed to always avoid asking herself the hard questions. Would he have married her had she lived? How often does he think of the life he could have had with her?

What makes a good marriage? 45 years seems to suggest it’s as full of little white lies as it is of history and explores whether a seemingly strong partnership can withstand being shaken up by a little truth. Of course, these are polite old British people in a British movie so the distance that begins to develop between husband and wife may not express itself explosively enough for some audiences. This is a restrained film with restrained performances where the drama comes as much from what is NOT said as from the dialogue itself. Luckily, Courtenay and Rampling are masters of subtlety. Oscar-nominee Rampling in particular is captivating both with the brave face she puts on and the unshakeable doubt that she occasionally shows us. She gives a performance that is way too honest and low-key to ever win her an Oscar. But she gets my vote.

Son of Saul

12 Replies

A few days ago, I wrote about my experience with the movie Mustang, Turkey’s submission for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. I was a little disconcerted by the hearty laughter from the audience at our local Bytowne cinema at the battle of wits between a little girl and her mean (and probably violent) uncle. Even though the film’s director takes a hopeful and sometimes humorous approach to some tough material, I was way too nervous for this girl to laugh. I was reminded that night how differently two people can experience the same film.

Competing with Mustang for the Oscar is a film that even the Bytowne crowd can’t (and didn’t) find funny. Son of Saul is set in a Concentration Camp but is unlike any Holocaust movie I’ve ever seen.

There’s so much going on around Saul as he navigates his way through the camp in search of a rabbi who can help him give his son a proper Jewish burial. But we rarely see any of it. First-time feature director Laszlo Nemes used the Academy aspect ratio of 1.375:1, which I’d be lying if I claimed to understand exactly what it means but I gather that it produces an unusually narrow field of vision. The camera is usually either right in his face or right over his shoulder so we can see the camp only from his point of view. We have only the off-camera cries of anguish to remind us of the atrocities in the background. Through the eyes of Saul, there are no Oskar Schindlers, no Roberto Benignis to pretend for us that this is all a game.

This is some bleak material that is expertly shot by Nemes. With a technical prowess that occasionally reminded me of Alfonso Cuarón, I would have expected Son of Saul to move me more than it did. Mustang, for example, may not have the same flawless attention to detail but still managed to elicit an emotional response from me that I just couldn’t seem to manage with son of Saul. I was more impressed with the filmmaking than I was captivated by the story.