Immediately following Gozu, it was time to head over to the Uptown for Purple Butterfly, Lou Ye’s sweeping historical epic of a Chinese resistance movement during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai during WW2. In many ways playing like a slightly muddled Wong Kar-Wai film, Purple Butterfly stars Zhang Ziyi as a young Chinese girl in love with the son of a Japanese official.

She gets drawn into the resistance movement after her lover is called back to Japan and her brother—an anti-Japan activist—is blown up by a Japanese radical in the street in front of their home.  Things are further complicated when Ziyi’s lover returns as second-in-command of the Japanese intelligence service in Shanghai.

Lou Ye aims to create an epic story where the character’s romantic entanglements mirror the political situation and he comes very close to succeeding.  But he’s ultimately undone by an overly convoluted script and an over-reliance on the Ziyi story arc, neglecting the more pivotal and emotionally involving role of Szeto (Liu Ye).  A young man whose fiancé was killed in the crossfire of a Japanese/Resistance gunfight, Szeto is mistaken for a Resistance operative and is subsequently played by both sides.

Apparently, the version we saw was already a re-edit of the version that played at Cannes and the film could stand to be edited further to tighten things up and clarify the basic story arcs.  There are some unnecessary twists and characters that serve only to distract from the central story. That’s too bad, because in terms of both acting and cinematography, Purple Butterfly is a fairly stunning piece of work.

Written by Chris Brown.

Another Midnight Madness screening, Save The Green Planet was my third film of the day and I was worried that I may have trouble making it through.  No such problem.  With Save The Green Planet, first-time director Jun-Hwan Jeong has attempted one of those cross-genre films—in this case, there are ample elements of science fiction, comedy, and horror with traces of kung fu and serious psychological drama—that have eaten up many a more accomplished filmmaker.  Hudson Hawk, anyone?  And while Jeong’s opus tanked at the Korean box office, due to a misguided attempt to bill it as a romantic comedy, the film itself is an awful lot of fun.

Ha-Kyun Shin stars as Byeong-Gu, a troubled young man who is convinced that aliens from Andromeda are taking over the earth.  He’s so sure of this that he kidnaps a local businessman that he believes to be the alien’s leader, planning to torture him with exfoliating sponges and anti-insect bite lotion until he reveals the alien’s entire plot.  Is our hero a disturbed young man suffering some sort of mental illness?  Absolutely… but he might also be right.

The genius of the film lies in Jeong’s ability to turn the mood on a dime, taking us from outrageous comedy, to some truly disturbing torture sequences as Byeong-Gu descends deeper and deeper into his paranoia, to serious psychological drama, to brilliant parodies of both the hard-boiled cop and sci-fi genres—the 2001 homage is truly hysterical—and back again without ever once disrupting the overall flow of the film.  It works because Jeong has written his characters so well that they’re able to encompass a wide range of moods and behaviors perfectly naturally, and his actors all turn in top notch performances.

Anyone who follows Asian film will tell you that Korea has become one of the brightest lights in the region, and Jeong’s debut is a prime example of why.  There’s a willingness to experiment, to break the rules, and such a high level of technical expertise that you can be sure the film looks mighty fine all the while.  From cinematography to soundtrack—the killer punked out version of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” that opens the film is one of the best things I’ve heard in ages—to effects to performances, everything is pitch perfect.  Save The Green Planet is a classic cult film.

Written by Chris Brown.

Director Toshiaki Toyoda is a master of the bait and switch.  He has an uncanny ability to lull you into believing you’re going one way while all the while he’s actually leading you somewhere else, an ability that he uses to full effect in his latest film.  The story of 9 Souls begins with Michiru, a troubled youth most likely suffering from some sort of mental illness and whose world is a dark, bleak and hopeless place.

Michiru kills his own father and is sent to prison where he must share a crowded cell with nine other convicts.  Shortly after one of their cellmates—a forger who often bragged about having a large amount of money stashed in a student time capsule at Mt. Fuji Elementary School—is dragged off to solitary confinement, the remaining nine make a break for it and, of course, hit the road in search of the hidden money.

Through the course of their journey we get to know Michiru’s cell mates—the diminutive doctor imprisoned for assisting suicide, the man who killed his own son, the biker, the bomber, a pimp, a pornographer, and a gambling cheat—and begin to get a feel for the odd dynamics that keep this group together.  The group finds the time capsule in relatively short order, but where this would be the end of most road movies, we quickly realize that it is only the beginning of Toyoda’s odyssey.  What was set up as the group’s goal was nothing but a device to keep us paying attention while he let us get to know his group of characters.

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My one real disappointment of the festival, Goodbye Dragon Inn is also the only film that I got up early and stood in the rush line to get into.  What a waste of time.  Ostensibly a reflection on the declining state of Chinese cinema, Goodbye Dragon Inn is set in an old moviehouse screening King Hu’s classic Dragon Inn on the final night before it closes forever.  The film follows the employees and patrons of the filmhouse throughout the course of the screening, but mostly this is a film with lots of pretty shots of nothing happening.  Seriously.

The film’s concept and plot have enough substance to create a fairly compelling short film but rather than—oh, I don’t know—finishing the script, director Ming-Liang Tsai instead stretches the running time into a full feature length by simply lengthening every shot.  A lot.

Oh look!  The ticket lady is walking down the hall. Still walking.  Still walking.  Still… no, now she’s turned the corner.  Oh look!  Now the hall’s empty but I can still hear her footsteps echoing from around the corner!  Better sit here and keep staring at this empty hall until I can’t hear those footsteps anymore.

Sequence after sequence plays out pretty much exactly like this.  It’s maddening because there are actually some good characters scattered throughout.  But Tsai never really seems to do anything with them, and he makes the bizarre choice to not introduce the only characters who provoke a genuine emotional response—an elderly pair of gentlemen who turn out to be the original stars of King Hu’s film coming back to revisit their past glory—until the closing minutes.

Gee Tsai, maybe it’s not all of Chinese cinema that’s having this problem.  Maybe it’s just that nobody comes to see your films because they’re dead boring.  Just a thought.

Written by Chris Brown.

I have mixed feelings about Japanese shock director Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi The Killer).  On the one hand, he is undoubtedly an incredibly creative man, capable of shooting stunning film and telling perfectly crafted stories when he reins in some of his baser instincts.  The man’s vision of the world is absolutely, 100% unique.  You could never confuse a Miike film for anything else.

On the other hand, several of Miike’s film cross the line into misogyny and you often get the sense that he’s painted himself into a corner by building a name as a shock director.  He now has to keep upping the ante to maintain the interest of his fans, and his films often degenerate into sloppy, messy affairs that don’t seem to have much point other than cramming as much bizarre and unsettling imagery onto the screen as possible.

I wasn’t planning on seeing Gozu, one of Miike’s latest films (he releases 3 or 4 in any given year), but when it turned out that Gozu was the last film I was working on my last volunteer shift of the festival and they needed somebody to sit in the theater to watch out for video pirates, I quickly volunteered my services.  I was rewarded with a prime seat right next to the film’s local representative who could be seen shaking his head and muttering “This is so messed up…” at several points throughout the screening.

Gozu is billed as a yakuza horror film, and though it certainly involves a good number of yakuza, it is absolutely not a horror film.  There is no attempt made to scare the audience here and the local distributor would do well to rethink their marketing.  Heh… who am I kidding?  This thing’s never going to get out there on any scale where marketing’s going to matter.

Gozu is a thoroughly bizarre, Jungian excursion that would make David Lynch blush at the straightforwardness of his own films.  Trained yakuza attack Chihuahuas, wildly lactating innkeepers, conflicted loyalties, a disappearing corpse, sexual repression, a strange cow headed figure, a yakuza boss who can only get an erection if he has a soup ladle inserted into his anus, and a graphic adult human birth scene—that would be an adult human giving birth to another adult human—that puts Udo Kier’s birth scene at the end of The Kingdom to shame all figure prominently.

Some of this is old ground for Miike (the excessive lactation pops up in a few of his films), but what separates this one is an absurd sense of humor that Miike has only really exhibited before with The Happiness Of The Katakuris. While he normally tends to get bogged down in attempts to shock and disturb, with Gozu Miike is working with a nod and a wink, acknowledging that he’s putting together something utterly bizarre and confounding and inviting the audience to simply sit back and enjoy the ride.

As far as narrative goes, Gozu is primarily the story of Minami, a low level yakuza gangster, and his immediate superior Ozaki to whom Minami is intensely loyal.  However, Ozaki has fallen out of favor with the gang.  The boss feels Ozaki is losing his grip on reality (see above comment regarding trained yakuza attack Chihuahuas) and orders Minami to take Ozaki out to a gang-run autowrecker and execute him.  Minami agonizes over what he’s going to do throughout the entire drive until he suddenly comes to a washed out bridge and slams on the brakes, sending Ozaki flying headfirst into the dashboard, breaking his neck and thus doing Minami’s job for him.

Visibly rattled, Minami stops at a roadside diner for a coffee, but while he’s inside, Ozaki’s body disappears.  The bulk of the film is then spent with Minami trying to track down Ozaki’s corpse, which increasingly appears to have been reanimated.  Eventually, he tracks down a young woman who claims to be Ozaki and who can recite, verbatim, entire conversations that only Minami and Ozaki knew as proof of her identity.

As has been the case with virtually every Miike film I have seen, I was very impressed with the caliber of the cinematography, editing, and performances. Very often this material is poorly shot on the cheap, with the filmmakers counting on the general oddity to distract the viewers from the poor quality, but not Miike.  In his case, he’s an obviously gifted filmmaker who has just chosen a very strange genre in which to express himself.

Written by Chris Brown.

At first glance, my first film of the festival and the only one of the three films I’d designated must-see that I actually got to see seems to violate my “Not if it’s going to be in mainstream theaters” rule.  But a.) I’m a Lars von Trier freak, and b.) this was the initial three hour cut of the film, and early reports are that it will be trimmed down to the two hour range before hitting the domestic circuit.  Plus, Nicole Kidman was there.  She’s really tall.

Lars von Trier is very much a love or hate type of director.  I have yet to meet anyone who has a middling opinion of the man and, honestly, everything that people on both sides of the argument have to say about him is true.  He’s frustratingly difficult, self-important, and melodramatic.  He’s also one of very few filmmakers who insists on resisting Hollywood filmmaking trends and on experimenting with the medium itself in an attempt to produce more “truthful” films.  His international influence as a founder of the Dogme 95 movement cannot be overestimated.  That said, Dogville‘s not going to convince anybody to change sides in this argument.  Those who already hate him will continue to do so, likewise those who swear by his work.

Like the rest of his Dogme compatriots, von Trier has only shot one true Dogme film, but he has continued experimenting with different techniques to achieve the immediacy that was Dogme’s primary aim.  With Dogville, von Trier moves his production onto a large soundstage which has a map of the town of Dogville painted on the floor.  There are some minor pieces of built set—a bell tower, the frame of an abandoned mine, etc—but the vast majority of the action occurs on an empty stage.

The primary consequence of this is that nothing can be shot in isolation—von Trier can’t work with just one actor in just one set—but rather the entire village is always populated and active.  The approach works remarkably well, and if nothing else, it’s good to see von Trier working with sound, lighting, and more technically-involved shots than he has on his past several projects.  The man is a phenomenally skilled technician and that is one aspect of his craft which he deliberately set aside during his Dogme experimentation.

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In case you didn’t figure out from my extended ramblings on Lars Von Trier and Dogville, I’m a bit of a fan of the current wave of Danish cinema and the Dogme movement.  Thus when I spotted a film written by Thomas Anders Jensen, who also wrote the scripts for Mifune and Open Hearts, and directed by Lone Sherfig, whose Italian For Beginners is the only female-directed Dogme film to date, I had to go.  Good thing.  Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself was probably my favorite film of the festival on all levels—script, acting, cinematography, everything was fantastic.

Filmed in a conventional style (i.e. this is not a Dogme film) with a largely Scottish cast, the film tells the story of the terminally depressed Wilbur.  And yes, he does in fact want to kill himself.  Both of his parents have been stricken with cancer, he hates his job, and he lives alone, so what does he have worth living for?  After one of his suicide attempts, Wilbur is sent to live with his older brother Harbour in the large house/used bookshop that Harbour has just inherited from their recently deceased father.

Here the two brothers meet Alice, a poverty-stricken single mother who sells them the books she finds while working as a night cleaning nurse at the local hospital to support her young daughter.  Harbour falls in love with Alice and Alice, genuinely fond of Harbour and seeing a way out of her terrible life, agrees to marry him.  Things become far more complicated when Harbour is diagnosed with the same cancer that afflicted both of his parents and when Wilbur and Alice find themselves falling in love.

Now here’s the thing: it’s a comedy.  A very dry and black comedy, but a comedy nonetheless, and one that hits its mark both often and hard.  Scherfig manages a fairly similar balancing act to the one Alan Ball manages with “Six Feet Under”.  She finds humor in extremely unlikely situations and uses it to break the tension in what could otherwise be an unbearably oppressive film, while also managing to respect the seriousness of the situations her characters are in.

Jensen’s script is honed to near perfection and beautifully cast.  Jamie Sives and Adrien Rawlins play the brothers to perfection, no small feat considering the number of issues they both carry hidden away deep inside.  Sives in particular is stunning in his portrayal of Wilbur, somehow managing to remain deeply sympathetic to the audience despite the sometimes horrific things this script leads him to do.  Also strong are the criminally overlooked Shirley Henderson—best known either as Moaning Myrtle in the second Harry Potter film or as Spud’s girlfriend in Trainspotting, depending what part of the demographic you may be in—as Alice and Mads Mikkelsen who steals every scene he is in as the hospital’s drier-than-a-desert psychologist.  

One of the great strengths of this film, and something that sets it apart from anything coming out of North America, is Scherfig’s willingness to present a complex moral story without casting any judgment whatsoever.  She simply presents the story to the audience as something that happens and leaves it to them to sort out the morality of it all at the end.  Smart move as it gives the film a lingering emotional heft that would have been destroyed by any attempt at moralizing.

Written by Chris Brown.

Film festival Midnight Madness screenings are the absolute best place in the world to indulge in genre film mania.  There’s no experience quite like being packed into the grand old Uptown Theater (now sadly closed, this festival was it’s last hurrah) with 900 rabid fans screaming at all the right moments for whatever kung fu, horror, or other general strangeness the programmers have chosen to throw on screen.  I was out of town for Ong Bak and am still kicking myself for missing it, but Ju-On more than made up for it.

This Japanese ghost story is poised to become the next Ring.  It’s already created enough of a sensation in Asia that the sequel has already been completed and Sam Raimi is currently in Japan producing an English language remake with original director Takashi Shimizu at the helm.

This is very likely the most effective horror film I have ever seen.  Ever.  Told in an episodic fashion that lets the director throw in a good scare every ten minutes or so, Ju-On is a basic haunted house story.  A mother and her young son were murdered in their home—the mother’s corpse hidden in the attic, the son’s never found—and they now harbor a grudge against the living.  Simply put, if you come too close, the ghosts kill you.  Or drive you mad.  Then you yourself take on the curse and the circle widens.

The film’s structure is dead simple.  A single name appears on a black screen.  That person is going to die in the next film segment.  Person dies, next name appears.  Repeat.  No, there’s not a whole lot of plot—if you get too close you die, remember?  Not a lot of room for plot development, but Shimizu does such an incredible job of building up tension and then delivering the goods that nobody really cares about storyline anyway.  It’s all about getting to the next scare.

Perhaps what’s most impressive about this film is that all of the hallmarks of the American horror film—the gore, the shocking effects—are completely absent here.  Shimizu scares the pants off you using nothing more than sound and lighting effects, a killer sense of timing, and a little kid painted this odd pale purple color.

Written by Chris Brown.