Reviews
Ong-Bak (2003)
OK fight film
The story in Ong-Bak is nothing new, but that's not to be expected in this genre. If you're a fan of fight movies you've seen this many times before. A treasure is stolen from a simple village, and a young man has to go to the city and fight a lot of bad guys to bring it back. It's not innovation of the format that matters most in these movies, but how the individual scenes are performed. It's a bit like watching sports, people go out on the same field & play the same kind of game week after week but when it's good there's some individual variation & brilliance that make it worthwhile.
Ong-Bak starts out surprisingly slow, but when the action really picks up after some 30 minutes it's pretty good stuff. The first chase scene is one of the best I've ever seen. Tony Jaa is perfect as the hero. He's incredibly athletic & makes some awesome explosive moves in the fight scenes. And not least important, he doesn't engage in any dramatic over-acting, he's just a basic, simple tough guy. Kind of like Clint Eastwood in the beautiful spaghetti westerns. There's also a nice touch of humor that produces some good laughs. So if you like this genre I don't think you'll be disappointed with Ong-Bak.
Boksuneun naui geot (2002)
Grim facts told with dark humor
If you've ever been poor & if you ever had to work by a dirty machine for minimum wages just to be able to stay alive, you'll appreciate that director Chan-wook Park knows something about the pure desperation such conditions can bring about. And if you've ever lost somebody that you truly loved more than yourself, the most emotional scene in this film will probably make you cry.
'Sympathy For Mr Vengeance' deals with some very strong issues & grim facts. Chan-wook not only shows some real insight to these things, he also understands that he must use some artistic touch so the story doesn't develop as something that's just completely depressing from start to end. So a big part of this movie is told with a dark sense of humor & a twist of surrealism. I like this approach & I think there are some very good things both to enjoy and to contemplate in this work.
The plot revolves around a young man who tries to find a way to help his sister get a kidney she needs for a vital transplant. Since his economic resources are small he resorts to desperate measures which starts a devastating chain of assault & retaliation. Within the basic story there's exposition of some big subjects: the impossibility of true justice, the fact that what human rights you have mostly depend on where you happen to be born, and the sad truth that many of us value money more than human life.
As I said I like that Chan-wook applies a twisted touch to the story, but I also think that he goes a little overboard with these elements. Through the first half I felt like there was only a handful of scenes that was somewhat ordinary, and this both alienated me a bit from the characters & made some parts less believable. For instance, I certainly hope that it's not Korean reality that ordinary people take part in forensic autopsies. . . Then in the second half the movie becomes much more melancholy & straight forward, and people with a weak stomach should be prepared for some brutal violence. This left me with the impression that the first & second half of the movie was somewhat disjointed. I think the film would've felt more cohesive & convincing if the slightly twisted & the more somber parts had been more evenly dispersed throughout the story.
But all in all, Chan-wook Park still manage to tell an original & difficult story in a way that is much more impressive than depressive. That's worth 7/10 in my ratings. And he definitely made me feel very fortunate that I live in a country that values human life enough to ensure that everybody has the right to advanced medical care, regardless of the patient's bank account.
Hulk (2003)
The incredible Freud?
I think that 'Hulk' suffers from the same problem as some other recent sci-fi films, like 'The Core'. Instead of accepting that these kind of stories is all about fantasy & giving the audience a fun thrill ride, they try like maniacs to anchor them in reality & waste half the time on excessive talking & presenting "plausible" scientific explanations. Anybody with knowledge about this genre knows that such mumbo jumbo never makes the audience connect more, it totally works against its purpose. So it's a mystery to me that movie makers who are able to spend millions of dollars on their productions continually fail to understand basic facts about good screen writing.
In 'Hulk' the back story is presented very quick in the beginning, which I thought was good, but unfortunately this does not lead into a fun & fast paced action movie. Instead it almost comes to a full stop for about 40 minutes that is filled with romantic nonsense & lots of psychobabble. And when the action finally starts to unfold the development is still very slow, and it's only in the last half hour this really feels like a movie about the incredible Hulk. So once again we see that Freud, real world science & comic book characters don't mix well. Sorry Ang Lee, watch 'Blade II' & better luck next time.
Les invasions barbares (2003)
Simple & impressive about life & death
'Les Invasions Barbares' is a simple film about a man who is dying from cancer, and in his final days he and his family & friends reflect upon their lives.
I think that writer / director Denys Arcand manage to do something pretty impressive here through very small means. After the first 15-20 minutes of this movie I thought it was close to crap. I didn't like the pace, the way it looked or any of the characters. But as the story slowly moves forward, Arcand proves that he & his actors have the ability to change my mind completely. Simply by using intelligence, humor & compassion they turn the characters into human beings that I can recognize and relate to, and they show us that "people are people". Deep down we're not very different from each other, no matter where or when we live and die. And at the end I was left with the reinforced notion that even though we try very hard to fill our lives through various activities & distractions like work, sex, art, drugs, politics, religion ... when the final days are upon us there's only one thing that really matters, the relationship we have with our family and (if we're lucky) a handful of close friends.
My impression is that this is very much a movie for grownups. I don't think I could've appreciated it when I was in my teens or 20's. But if you're young today you could make a note to watch this when you reach something between 35-40. Maybe like me you'll get something good out of it.
Narc (2002)
OK film about work on mean streets
'Narc' is plain & simple a gritty crime thriller that is well done. I've never been to Detroit, but the film's atmosphere of wintertime streets reminded me a lot of the Swedish working class town where I grew up and it felt very realistic.
The story is about a couple of cops who are trying to investigate the murder of a colleague that worked undercover among drug dealers. As they work the case they uncover secrets both about each other and the victim. It's a dark depiction of the people fighting everyday in the criminal underworld where the lines between right and wrong become inevitably blurred.
There are no standard Hollywood tricks such as comic relief, clever one-liners, or amazing stunts & effects, but if you'd rather watch a rough movie about people dealing with some grim facts you shouldn't be disappointed. The acting is good & Ray Liotta is great, as he always is when he gets some decent material to work with.
Ying xiong (2002)
As good as it gets
I have nothing bad to say about 'Hero'. It's the kind of movie that reaches a level that hordes of other movie makers only can dream about achieving. Every single scene is stunningly beautiful. Music, costumes, cinematography & acting is great & the whole experience is as close to perfection as anything human can get.
The basic story is pretty simple. It's set in China around 2000 years ago & tells the legend of some incredible sword fighters who are involved in a plot to kill a warrior king. Still the story evolves in an ingenious way (reminiscent of another Asian masterpiece: Akira Kurosawa's 'Rashomon' from 1950), so we are guaranteed unpredictable development & spectacular fight scenes well beyond the standard Hollywood formula. But more than this, I conceive the film as a dazzling tribute to the amazing power of human imagination and the glorious beauty that we are able to produce through various works of art, whether it's music, calligraphy, sword fighting or movie-making. 'Hero' feels like a celebration of the depth of the human senses & everything that is colorful in this world. It's fascinating to see how director Zhang Yimou manage to merge great action & profound poetry without ever being boring or overly pretentious. I love this movie and rate it 10/10.
Cidade de Deus (2002)
Simple life in a horrible world
I finally got around to watching this much praised movie, and I can certainly understand why so many people have found it fascinating. It is very well done in a technical aspect, and it's easy to be seduced by the way it looks and the constant flow of action scenes, not very different from the efficiency of some glossy & clever commercial. It also shows a way of life and a part of the world that is not very well known to many outsiders, thereby invoking some sense of illumination. Unfortunately, looking beyond the interesting setting & the glossy surface there's not a lot to be found.
In 'Cidade de Deus' we follow some dirt poor kids who live as brutal gangsters in a shanty town part of the Brazilian city Rio de Janeiro. The kids need money, so they steal, they deal in drugs and they kill. This is the basic plot for the movie. And then what, you may ask? Well, then there's
sadly, pretty much nothing more. What we get here is just a grim world contained within itself, where people perform a lot of horrible acts without really wondering why or thinking about any options or consequences. Now somebody could argue that this is actually the way that many people handle such savage situations, and so this movie is just portraying them in a realistic way. But even then, a filmmaker telling a dramatic story has many opportunities to put things into a broader context and he/she can make the choice to give the audience a more multi-layered view without embellishing anything. If you've seen something like the excellent TV mini-series 'The Corner' you know what I'm talking about.
'Cidade de Deus' makes no attempt to explain why these kids don't have any other opportunities than a life of violent crime, so there's no real critique of the society that produces this horrible condition. Without even a glimpse of the reasons for this, you cannot give any real insight into the desperation that drives the characters to behave in the gruesome ways that they do. Instead it comes across as something that's inevitable and almost natural. Like wild animals eating each other, not because they're forced to by special circumstances that could be changed, but simply because it is their instinct. As we all know this will seldom apply to human beings since our existence is much more complex. Any such complexity is totally missing here. In addition there's not much effort made to show the devastating effects that drugs & brutality has on the human soul. Most of the times when something really awful happens in the story, like children becoming killers or getting killed, it's rapidly followed by some non-emotional scene with some cool music and flashy editing. There's no grieving for the victims, the movie is over 2 hours long & the director spends about 30 seconds of that time showing family members shattered by this unnecessary loss of life, which means there's no depiction of the deep sorrow & hopelessness that extreme poverty & violence creates. We get little or no reflection, just one gun-blasting action followed by another & then another. A lot of stuff for eyes & ears, less for hearts & brains.
So 'Cidade de Deus' is a film that looks very good. But for me to agree with IMDb placing it among the top 20 ever made (we're talking higher than 'Citizen Kane', 'Apocalypse Now' & 'The Seventh Seal'), the director's ability to convey the depth of human beings should at least be equal to his flair for technical tricks & brilliance. This is truly far from the case here. I rate it 5/10 for the cinematography & editing and for showing a small piece of a harsh reality without blinders, but for me it felt more like an ordinary action movie than an epic masterpiece.
Jisatsu sâkuru (2001)
Not like anything else
I really like 'Suicide Club'. This is a movie that manage to be sometimes scary, and from start to end pretty unpredictable & nerve wrecking. This is not achieved through the basic horror/ thriller formula but rather by using this format in a very personal and original way. Instead of using some crazy person or a monster as a killer with a defined purpose, director Sion Sono puts his characters (and us as viewers) face to face with death more as it actually is: something we all carry with us, but nobody can understand and nobody can escape. So as the story begins, the police that try to investigate the sudden occurrence of mass youth suicide can't rely on previous experiences. How do you stop violent death when the killer actually is inside the mind of the victims? And if you don't know how or why this happens, can you even protect yourself? This is in many ways a much more fascinating & disturbing concept than the extremely over-exploited serial killer running around with a knife/gun/axe or whatever.
In conjunction with the suspense there's some quite poetic parts which touches on the everlasting question: if you can't find a reason behind death, can you really find any reason to live? In this hi-tech, constant mass communication world maybe a lot of us are spending our time trying to escape from such profound questions by engaging in mindless distractions & superficial relations, never contemplating that these actions might be just as empty & worthless as a non-existence. One notion that the movie conveys is that since death is the only inescapable thing inside all of us, we won't find the true core of life anywhere else. We have to search deep within ourselves.
I rate 'Suicide Club' 8/10. For me it was both entertaining & thought provoking.
Gin gwai (2002)
Exit night - Enter light
In 'The Eye' a young woman who has been blind for many years since the age of two, goes through surgery and get her eyesight back. But this blessing comes with a curse, and she starts to see some scary things beyond the ordinary world.
This type of story gives a filmmaker some good material to work with. You get the chance to make a grownup meet the world just like a child, which can make it easier for the audience to believe & accept some extraordinary things. 'The Eye' make some good use of these opportunities. There are scenes that work with strong emotion and/or suspense, and it delivers some insight to the bitter-sweet fact that if you want the good things in life you also have to deal with some really bad stuff.
On the weaker side I think the pace of the film is a little too slow, there could've been more work on the characters, and the story recycle a lot of things from other scary movies. There's big similarities to parts of stronger creations such as 'Ringu' & 'The Sixth Sense', and of course a touch of a bunch more cheesy films like 'The Hand' & 'Body Parts'. This doesn't have to be just a bad thing if you can put a strong personal twist to it, but for me the recycling in 'The Eye' mostly made me think that some of the previous films used those elements in a much better & more original way.
All in all I guess that 'The Eye' is an OK effort that could be enjoyable, especially if you're easily scared & very afraid of ghosts. I rate it 5/10. Not very bad, not very good.
Equilibrium (2002)
Oh, those very dangerous paintings
I'm a huge sci-fi fan, so I tend to be more forgiving to shortcomings in movies made within this genre compared to many others. But 'Equilibrium' had such major flaws that I couldn't even let it slide as OK entertainment. There are a lot of small things here & there through the film that I find hard to accept, but I won't bother with them because the overwhelming problem is the basic premise that the whole story relies on.
Here we are told that after world war 3 there is a totalitarian government which have so much intelligence & technology that they're able to produce a drug that can turn every citizen into a human robot by completely suppressing all their feelings. This government also have so much power that they can convince the vast majority of ordinary people to take this monster drug every day, because the removal of human feelings is supposed to prevent another devastating war. (Yes, we must immediately forget - just as the movie's government & people obviously did - that rather than emotional, the reasons for war are infinitely much more likely to be purely practical; like the need for natural resources, food & land). To make sure the above policy is enforced the rulers have lots of heavily armed men that are ready to track & kill anybody who won't take the drug.
But then we also learn that even though the government possess all this amazing intelligence, technology and power, they are not able to suppress a resistance movement whose major interests when staying off the drug seem to be the urge to read poetry and look at pictures of girls and flowers? I'm sorry, I just can't buy into all that. Actually I couldn't do anything but laugh when the first action scene showed a group of tough rugged men with big guns ruthlessly kill and be killed for the right to ... watch old oil paintings! C'mon people, that's not deep, it's just stupid.
George Orwell wrote the classic book '1984' about totalitarian states, and he knew more about this subject way back in the 1940's than 'Equilibrium' writer/director Kurt Wimmer does today. In Orwell's book the state doesn't try to keep the big majority of the people under total control, because everybody with reasonable intelligence understand that this is impossible. Instead the state give some advantages to smaller groups who in exchange help them, and these collaborators are then kept under extreme surveillance and threatened with horrible punishment if they become disobedient, because the collaborators are the ones that really make or break the men in power. In 'Equilibrium', maybe you are willing to look past the impossibility that somebody could invent a single drug that totally suppressed all of the strong emotions we humans have. But why then would a totalitarian power waste their resources on the even more impossible task of forcing every single person to take this drug every single day? Not to mention the hopeless effort of trying to destroy every single work of art ever produced on the planet, because unlike some things that the government gladly will allow - you know, really trivial stuff like raising children & shooting people who don't follow orders - old paintings & poetry are obviously way more likely to arouse those Dangerous Feelings, right?
A totalitarian state with superior brains & power wouldn't bother trying to keep track of every single person in the world. They would rather deal with the masses mainly through media propaganda, and use the amazing drug to keep a group close to the leaders under total control. That would not only be possible but very plausible since it is every dictator's dream to have an army of human robots that would carry out his orders totally without emotion. Such a force would be enough to ensure that ordinary people couldn't go against the leader's will. Like colonel Kurtz says in 'Apocalypse Now': "If I had divisions of men who could kill without feeling, our troubles here would be over very quickly".
I rate 'Equilibrium' 3/10 because everything in it didn't suck completely. On the plus side I'll say that I think the cinematography & design looks pretty good, and I think that Christian Bale does some good work in the scenes where he's starting to change from a robot to a feeling human. But for me these minor positives weigh like a feather against the heavy problems within the script. There really should have been much more work done on the story long before Mr. Bale stood in front of the camera.
Koroshiya 1 (2001)
3 simple questions before watching
If you're a teenager looking for cheap thrills, or a way to test how much (fake) violence you can stand to watch, 'Ichi the killer' may do the trick. But if you're just a little bit older and have gathered some deeper real life experience, this film will not be able to shock or scare you, simply because it has no true emotion and absolutely no connection with reality. The one feeling you're most likely to get from it is plain and simple disgust. So, since you only live once, there are some questions you can ask yourself before you decide to give precious time away to director Takashi Miike and his crew:
* 1) Do I want to watch several lengthy scenes of ridiculously exaggerated sadistic torture that is produced only with the intention to shock or disgust me? * 2) Do I want to see repeated scenes where men with the apparent intelligence of a rabid caveman brutally beat, rape and mutilate women? * 3) Do I want to spend 2 hours watching a bunch of grown-ups behave like one dimensional cartoon characters performing random acts of fantasy violence, barely held together by a story that has roughly the same depth and meaning as the testimonials on some TV shopping network?
If your answer to the above is yes, then 'Ichi' will provide for your desire. But if your answer is no, then trust me, you're better off watching a few minutes of world news for shock value and then you can spend the rest of your evening doing something more rewarding.
I rate 'Ichi' 3/10 because hollow as it is, there are quite a few other creations that easily manage to go one or two steps further down the spiral. Sad but true.