tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23973012227159967672024-03-19T09:24:47.899+00:00You Know, I Learned Something TodayIanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.comBlogger57125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-14985913344057963772017-10-25T16:35:00.000+01:002019-10-27T11:05:37.088+00:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM| <strong>BLADE RUNNER 2049</strong> | VENUE | <strong>CINEWORLD LEICESTER SQ., LONDON</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Notes on Denis Villeneuve’s <i>Blade Runner 2049</i> (2017)</strong></span></span>
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Don’t read if you intend to see the film.<br />
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1. The postmodern city. If the future of the first <i>Blade Runner</i> can be described as romantic, or erotic (by virtue of the fact that an advertiser’s eye is practically eroticizing everything and everyone), then <i>Blade Runner 2049</i>’s future seems more rigid (architecturally) and draconian (socially) and to be honest (despite evidence of reproduction and cohabitation) a little bit sexless. The cityscape (the Los Angeles of 2049) is truly vast, the outlying provinces grimly logically repetitive (which isn’t a criticism), but I didn’t ‘see’ a visual or stylistic continuity between this and the original film. The neon advertising notwithstanding, there’s little to gaze upon, no material culture/architecture to fetishize, much like the unremarkable interior of Stelline Laboratories which is a featureless arena, a playground for perceiving digital apparitions; or for that matter, the Wallace Corporation which despite being the most reminiscent of the Tyrell complex in terms of its lighting style just looks big and dark and empty against the ancient Mayan or Aztec temple influences that Ridley was aiming for . . . I was wowed by two memorable images: first, the reveal of the ghostly Tyrell buildings, now darkened and featureless in the shadow of Wallace Corp. which looms above it; and second, by the cut to Gosling’s K as he takes his first steps into the brilliant orange dust bowl that is the Las Vegas ‘desert’. But the one image offers merely angular lines and abstract imperious forms, while the other is notable for quite literally its emptiness. What does this architecture, the city geography, say about power relations and social class in 2049?<br />
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2. I wasn’t quite there with the drama of K’s death. I mean, I shed a tear because . . . it’s Ryan Gosling, and Gosling is bae, and it’s ‘Tears in Rain’ on the soundtrack, and his character has done something truly honorable (for a character we also love). But story-wise, it felt a little empty: he’s a Nexus 9 and comes to believe that he’s the son of Rachael and Deckard, only he isn’t, and he finds out that he isn’t; he loses Joi who is his holographic girlfriend, but later, in an encounter with an advertisement for the Joi brand, he realizes that her affection, devotion and yearning were all an illusion (‘EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO HEAR’); so to redeem himself, and to avoid civil war between Wallace and the last surviving replicants, he fakes Deckard’s death, then unites him with his daughter. And this merits a ‘tears in rain’ end-sequence? <br />
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3. I think the K and Joi love scene, which results from his meeting with Mariette, a pleasure model replicant who consents to a body meld, was extraordinary. The detail of them holding hands, of Joi leaning in to kiss him before her ‘real’ self (Mariette) does the same, reminded me of a similar scene in Spike Jonze’s <i>Her</i>.<br />
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4. Is Deckard a replicant in <i>BR 2049</i>? Unless I missed something, or it was too subtle for me, Villeneuve leaves this fairly open, right? Ultimately, we’re not sure if ‘the miracle’ moment at the heart of the film (the birth of Rachael and Deckard’s child) is miraculous because Deckard is a human and Rachael a replicant (which I think Villeneuve likes as an idea), or they are both replicants and the birth of their child marks an evolutionary leap for Tyrell’s last ‘batch’ of experimental replicants . . . Also, the question: why has Deckard aged? We know from <i>Blade Runner</i> that the Nexus 6 don’t age. Is Deckard Nexus 5 (an early attempt at creating lifelike replicants that <i>do </i>age)? Or a Nexus 7? I think we’re told in this film that Rachael is Nexus 7. So if he’s also Nexus 7 (a tantalizing prospect, since the number is omitted in the <i>BR 2049</i> opening crawl; did I miss for what reason?), this has implications for the original <i>Blade Runner</i>: was he superior, rather than inferior, in design and engineering terms to Roy Batty? (I think the fact that Deckard’s body routinely fails him and breaks down throughout <i>Blade Runner</i> suggests he’s the beaten-up Oldsmobile to Roy Batty’s premium EV. But maybe this is actually the point: his body fails because he is more human. The more lifelike Nexus 7 isn’t designed to be a slave like Batty, but rather a sentient being with human frailties and whose capacity to build friendships with others and to fall in love (which we see in the Nexus 6 replicants) is rewarded with a longer lifespan.) So moving on, how do the Nexus 8 replicants tie into Nexus development history? If Rachael was an experiment in terms of replicant reproduction, was Deckard also an experiment? Together, do Rachael and Deckard bridge the gap between Nexus 6 and 8? (There was also a nice little moment when K asks if Deckard’s dog is real and comes the reply: ‘Why don’t you ask it?’)
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5. I felt the death of Joshi was one of the film’s weaker moments: the prosaic framing of the two (her and Luv) from outside the office window as Joshi’s body slips backwards; the sense that we are repeating the confrontation between Batty and Tyrell in his chambers, it didn’t really work for me. To the point that I felt sorry for Robin Wright, who had so little to do on such a large-scale and important American film (I think she was even limited to the same three sets: the morgue at Police HQ, her office and K’s apartment). Wright is such a formidable actress and screen presence, I wanted more of her character. But well.<br />
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6. Lastly, and this is a difficult one, the romantic connection between Deckard and Rachael in <i>BR 2049</i>. I wasn’t convinced and that’s possibly because the film is reliant on Harrison to convey their very private (and unknowable) personal history. I would think (or like to believe) that Deckard loves Rachael deeply and that his entire existence, the quality of his morale and so forth, hinges on the vitality of his memories, those cherished moments he shared with her. (As Presley intones, ‘Oh let our love survive, or dry the tears from your eyes, let’s don’t let a good thing die’.) Yet, Deckard is still a survivor, he is still fighting (he boobytraps the casino, he keeps a companion, he surrounds himself with pre-blackout American luxuries and the perks of commerce), which feels inconsistent. I think I wanted something different, a different cadence. I know that if I were in that position, dependent on fragments of memories of my one serious lover, someone who was at the forefront of my thinking each and everyday for years, I’d be defeated inside without her. The shock of loss fades certainly, but the pain, the despair that accompanies loss becomes worse with each passing year, it pushes and pushes until you tire of existing . . . Perhaps this best describes K’s fate then, instead of Deckard’s? K seems to be the defeated one at the end of this, fatigued by discrimination and bigotry, dehumanized by his maker and endlessly frustrated by a capitalist system that turns desire, love and comfort into cheap commodities. And in that sense, it’s poignant that Sinatra plays on the soundtrack not for Deckard and Rachael, but for K and Joi. ‘All summer long we sang a song and then we strolled that golden sand, two sweethearts and the summer wind’ . . . ‘Then softer than a piper man, one day it called to you, I lost you, I lost you to the summer wind’.
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">25 October, 2017</span><br />
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-19100497091511471842017-03-22T00:10:00.001+00:002019-10-27T11:06:09.126+00:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">EVENT | <strong>BLADE RUNNER DAY</strong> | VENUE | <strong>BFI SOUTHBANK CENTRE, LONDON</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Looking back at: ‘<i>Blade Runner</i> Day’<br /> The BFI, London (21 March 2009)</strong></span></span>
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In mid-October 2008, the BFI promoted its ongoing 75th birthday celebrations by announcing the winner of its nationwide <em>Visions for the Future</em> poll. Industry leaders, film and TV professionals, and BFI members had chosen <em>Blade Runner</em>, Ridley Scott’s seminal science-fiction film released in 1982, as the one film they wished to share with future generations. In addition to generating huge buzz around the institute’s <em>Visions for the Future</em> screenings from January 2009 (the films included <em>Quadrophenia</em>, <em>The Godfather</em>, <em>Stalker</em> and <em>Pulp Fiction</em>), the poll rounded off the BFI’s year-long birthday with a themed day of activities dedicated to the winner. <em>Blade Runner Day</em> took place on March 21 2009 and brought together a number of high-profile guests: author Paul M. Sammon, producer Michael Deeley, actor Rutger Hauer and director Ridley Scott. Following an onstage Q&A, Scott was presented with the BFI Fellowship, marking his contribution to British film and television culture, by director Stephen Frears. What follows is a brief overview of the day and some highlights of the best interviews.<br />
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The morning began with a screening of <em>On the Edge of Blade Runner</em> (UK, 2000), Andrew Abbott’s 52-minute documentary produced for Channel 4TV and written by film critic Mark Kermode. Shot seven years before Charles de Lauzirika’s <em>Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner</em> (2007) for Warner Home Video, Abbott’s film begins with the Philip K. Dick novel <em>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</em> (1968) and combines archival recording, special effects test reel footage and newly commissioned interview (circa-2000) to reprise the story of <em>Blade Runner’s</em> genesis, its production, reception and legacy. Like de Lauzirika’s film, <em>On the Edge</em> benefits from the testimony of key players: screenwriter Hampton Fancher recalls reeling from disagreements with Ridley before the hiring of co-writer David Peoples (“Ridley never said ‘if you don’t do what I want you to do then we’ll get somebody else to do it’; [he] was shy and manipulative”); executive producer Bud Yorkin reflects on Ridley’s style and his need for reshoots (“I think he was indulgent”); while Ridley himself recalls his strained relationship with certain crew members, including its executive producers (“On the film I became a screamer, I got really angry”). The film adds to the <em>Blade Runner</em> narrative with testimony from sources left out of the <em>Dangerous Days</em> history: science-fiction author Brian Aldiss describes Dick’s amphetamine use (“Dick was writing about what was happening to him and the drug culture of California with a little twist of lemon”); actors William Sanderson and Joe Turkel praise Ridley’s artistic sensibilities and his vision of twentieth-century urbanism; and actor M Emmett Walsh recalls tensions onset due to Ridley’s perfectionism and the pressures brought to bear by executive producers Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio. Unlike de Lauzirika’s film, <em>On the Edge</em> provides no interviews with Harrison Ford — placing the documentary in the context of its time, before Ford embraced his promotional role as an advocate for the 2007 Warner Home Video release — but includes descriptions from Ridley and production executive Katherine Haber addressing the actor’s unease during production.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 180%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>It’s a shame that producer Michael Deeley’s comments on the <em>Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner</em> documentary are so diplomatic because, going on his anecdotal evidence at the BFI, Bud Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio were the villains of the <em>Blade Runner</em> production story</strong></span></span><br />
<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih-S7EZXLkQ-Ob0wKkj7LuiOFdx7QCY-AbbiCm8zdXWRA1D9QTR_VczPiWxBaMoOVArYNwXmB1xXORwKqsPF6zpEAvGUyLgTx53ZNdt5SueI8caEqBLy0gCNWzqVM1d8x5V58uGLxGHgmt/s1600/Thin-spacer.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /> </div>
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Following the screening, <em>Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner</em> (1997) author Paul M Sammon discussed <em>Blade Runner</em> onstage with Oscar-winning producer Michael Deeley and academic Will Brooker (ed. <em>The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science-Fiction Classic</em>). The amiable tone was set with questions about Yorkin and Perenchio, the film’s completion bond guarantors. Citing <em>On the Edge</em>, Sammon asked Deeley for his response to Yorkin’s onscreen claim that, having gone $5.5 million over budget, the <em>Blade Runner</em> production was at that point effectively “taking money out of his childrens’ pockets”. According to Deeley, “all that anger and bitterness was caused by greed”, “one knew that they were strictly amateur in this respect, especially Perenchio”, and on the matter of the film’s financial arrangement: “at the end of twenty years, the Ladd Company [which owned domestic distribution rights] and Run Run Shaw’s [foreign territories] rights were passed to Yorkin and Perenchio, so they now have everything. Curious to say that neither Ridley nor I have ever been paid a profit on the picture”. Indeed, almost every reference to Yorkin and Perenchio was critical: Sammon condemned Yorkin and Perenchio’s behaviour, referred to the “group” [Tandem Productions, run by Yorkin, Perenchio and Norman Lear] as “obstructionist” throughout production, and emphasised Deeley’s point that Tandem “wound up owning the film, [with] all the ancillary rights” — yet they simply “didn’t give a damn”. </div>
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Noting that times have changed, with the release of the <em>Blade Runner: The Final Cut (5-disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition)</em> DVD two years ago, Sammon praised the work of Warner Home Video (which hired him as consultant and commissioned new materials to promote the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary); Deeley’s evaluation of the 1980s market for theatrical distribution reinforced the notion that a platform release could have benefited the film throughout awards season; Brooker, detailing how the film became a classic text for film scholarship in the early 1990s, discussed the subtle changes in the theatrical, Director’s Cut and Final Cut versions which help shape our understanding of the film across platforms (cinematic, literary, digital); and in Sammon’s personal reflections on Philip K Dick, he argued that drugs, rather than being a conduit to another reality as described by Scott Bukatman (1997), were energy boosters to sustain his productivity (“it was prosaic, he just needed the cash”). Sammon often followed up on Deeley’s statements and audience questions with his own interpretations. On the subject of the theatrical version’s original voice-over narration, Deeley's account did not identify the author responsible (only that he was “one of Yorkin’s friends”); Sammon identified the man as the late Roland Kibbee, a television writer then in his sixties, and recounted a story told to him by Ford about the (third and final) recording of the film’s narration: “Here was a man in a hobby suit, the cigarette ash falling all over the keyboard. Ford said, ‘Hello, I’m Harrison Ford’ and [Kibbee] said ‘Shut up and let me write your narration!’ [Ford] said right then, ‘I knew this was going to be a hard slog’”.
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Similarly, when recounting the production’s well documented ‘Yes Guvnor My Ass!’ T-Shirt incident, Sammon noted that it was Chief Makeup Artist Marvin Westmore who in Deeley’s amiable version of events “should have known better” than to leave a British newspaper (Deeley and Haber confirm <em>The Guardian</em>) where it could be found by the rest of the unionised American crew. On one unresolved matter, Sammon questioned Deeley about an alternate titles sequence — included in the Workprint section of the 2007 <em>Final Cut Collector’s Edition</em> — featuring single droplets of rain, or tears, gliding through frame. According to Deeley, Yorkin had already stepped in at this point to take over production and had arranged for the graphic to be shot without consulting either Deeley or Ridley. Finally, both Deeley and Sammon confirmed that writer William S Burroughs, who adapted Alan E Nourse’s cyberpunk novel <em>The Bladerunner</em> (1974) into a “half-assed” film treatment called <em>Blade Runner (a movie)</em> (“done to satisfy a contract” and published as a novella in 1979), was paid a $5,000 fee in exchange for rights to the highly desirable title.<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV-EbrxZ3TdjeuT6bnPpz8rqtFZBu4hui0f757jRyAoTyInWn5zYBd_EN_lSkXkorRtUDIKhO5wtaHGrNBKkfxCEq8EPBpnJkb2iObAdZSISxoR7beBWofz52SA8SfR6uk2Tu1v9MiUpma/s1600/Blade-Runner-Day-01.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Author Paul M Sammon interviews Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty) for <i>Blade Runner Day</i> at the BFI Southbank (March, 2009)</span></span><br />
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One guest who was bound to attract attention was Dutch actor Rutger Hauer. Where Harrison Ford was less involved in the film’s traditional publicity campaign in the 1980s (though he did participate in on-set interviews), Hauer enjoyed the one-on-one interview, roundtable and press junket process, and has continued to support the film’s publicity efforts, including through multiple charity events, to the present day. Joining Sammon onstage, after a special theatrical screening of Ridley’s <em>The Final Cut</em>, Hauer lightened the tone of the event considerably with his implacable LA charm and star quality. The actor reinforced the notion that he conceived, with Ridley, Roy Batty’s “tears in rain” monologue (which may be accurate, but David Peoples provides conflicting testimony in the <em>Dangerous Days</em> documentary); expressed his delight that the film’s performance in ancillary markets sustains its popularity for global audiences (“the film has been underground for twenty-five years pretty much”); and was critical of the distributor’s approach to marketing the film theatrically in 2007: “They were releasing the film thinking they were hot, they were going to make a shitload of money, and I thought ‘I think they might be right, <em>if</em> they release it <em>right this time</em>’. Guess what? The closer you got to the [release] date, you saw the [distributor] support shrink ... I thought: ‘Amazing, isn’t this amazing. They’re doing it <em>again</em>. And I like it’”. Hauer’s answer to an audience question concerning the textual significance of his character’s body tattoos was equally amusing. Downplaying any explicit meaning that Ridley may have attributed to its design, Hauer described it as another unknowable “layer,” something we look at and wonder “what the hell is that now?” Since the accuracy of Hauer’s memory was probably in question here, Sammon tried to give his explanation for the tattoos based on interviews he had conducted personally with Ridley — but Hauer, with a glint in his eye and behaving like the olympian prankster and sneak, stopped Sammon twice during his explanation (with a cheeky wave of his water bottle that amused the crowd) in order to tell us “I don’t know the answer ... but I’m curious if Ridley answers that question”. For a short time, Hauer and Sammon signed autographs and posed for photographs at the BFI Shop with waves of enthusiasts. <br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1rz7DTdgrLJRVgSu97W7RdCkQlZXTm-eHMC6R4uTM13YqIQY19neSowpBP9H5AHGwqsTcXsW6o77kdxM3lRg9v3M2HhOuIgCguk2Rv2bRZrVzDKs-XWfdAhEGBe0Ss-gzLiocL2g5g_YU/s1600/Blade-Runner-Day-02.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty) hooks up with fans, signing autographs for <i>Blade Runner Day</i> at the BFI Southbank (March, 2009)</span></span><br />
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The highlight of the day came shortly afterwards with the arrival of Ridley Scott. In a preemptory move however, Ridley’s office had block-booked 2/3 of the auditorium for his private guests, few of whom actually showed (and news of which unfortunately unsettled a few in the crowd who hadn’t been able to book online as a result). His onstage interview spanned from the earliest days of his career as a trainee graphic artist in Hartlepool to his latest work on the $200 million blockbuster <em>Robin Hood</em> for Universal Pictures. Reflecting on the strengths of <em>Alien</em> (1979), he said that “the priority of the director is to cast well” and in describing his approach to the chestburster scene he repeated the oft-told elements of his version of the story: it was to be a one-take action, John Hurt’s (Kane) artificial chest was packed with high-pressure pumps loaded with blood and offal, and actress Veronica Cartwright (Lambert) slipped backwards in the carnage. Ridley also alluded to the difficulties he experienced onset with the <em>Blade Runner</em> crew — Special Photographic Effects Supervisor Douglas Trumbull cites one such example in relation to the lighting effects in the Tyrell building — and took aim at those who criticised his autocratic style: “[If] everyone and their mother gets in the kitchen [then] there’s too many chefs. The director is the chef, whether you like it or not, that’s the job and if you don’t like it don’t work on the movie. So I was always thought to be a little tough because [of that]. <em>I don’t want advice</em>, I’ll fall on my own sword thank you very much”.
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This response, though persuasive, was characteristic of Ridley’s account. He repeatedly identified his authority as a visual stylist, placing great emphasis on his early career as a media entrepreneur (his scholarship at the Royal Academy of Art; his role in television as set designer; the founding of RSA in 1968 where he shot 2,700 commercials, averaging two per week; this all before before <em>The Duellists</em> in 1977). And in his statements about actors he was both partisan and defensive: citing the five films on which he has partnered with actor Russell Crowe (<em>Gladiator</em>, <em>A Good Year</em>, <em>American Gangster</em> and <em>Body of Lies</em>; their current project <em>Robin Hood</em> marks the fifth collaboration), Ridley asserted the New Zealand star’s superiority as “probably the best actor in the world today”.
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I haven’t been so excited by a director’s Q&A before. Twice in interview the houselights were brought down and clips were screened: the chestburster scene from <i>Alien</i>, in which Kane succumbs to his dreadful fate as carrier of a living organism that must literally eat its way out from within; and the rousing ten minute-long Germania battle sequence which opens the historical epic <em>Gladiator</em> (2000). There followed some light discussion, with Scott reflecting on the changing nature of the industry: for him, the second half of the 1970s was the heyday of Modern Horror which he linked to the release of <i>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</i> (1974). This discussion did not thrill me quite as much as the experience of spectatorship — we were in the company of one of the most important directors of the New Hollywood whose name still carries enormous symbolic weight in commercial cinema and modern advertising. Like my fellow filmgoers, I’ve seen these clips hundreds of times in my life: the subtle concern in a look shared between the science officer Ash (Ian Holm) and Kane at the dinner table; the gruesome beauty of the alien as it emerges slowly, insidiously, from a gaping red cavity now in the latter’s chest; and in <i>Gladiator</i> the images of archers readying their arrows, an entire hillside in flame as fire pots strike every tree, every pitiful soldier. I was more interested in Scott’s response to his own images; and I admit to being fascinated with this very idea, the author onstage viewing iconic moments from his past work in real time with his audience. I was thrilled to be present. </div>
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<i>Images: by me.</i>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">23 March, 2009</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Producer Michael Deeley signing autographs for <i>Blade Runner Day</i> at the BFI Southbank (March, 2009)</span></span><br />
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-78245495180827552512014-10-16T18:41:00.002+01:002018-09-08T20:14:44.747+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">EVENT | <strong>HANS ZIMMER REVEALED</strong> | VENUE | <strong>HAMMERSMITH APOLLO</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>‘Hans Zimmer Revealed’<br /> Live at the Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith (10 October performance)</strong></span></span></div>
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The eightieth birthday of the legendary Hollywood film composer John Williams in 2012 gave several major symphony orchestras in this country, among them the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), license to programme special concerts dedicated to his music. The big theme pieces of his repertoire — <i>Star Wars</i>, <i>Jurassic Park</i>, <i>The Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> and <i>E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial</i> — in mood bright, lively and romantic compositions, guaranteed high audience turnouts for both the RPO (<i>John Williams: 80th birthday tribute to the world’s leading film composer</i>, Royal Albert Hall 2012, 2014) and LSO (<i>Music for the big screen: the best of John Williams</i>, Barbican Hall 2012) events; and indeed these works have formed internationally the backbone of the many other Williams sets performed live in recent years — cf. concerts in Chicago (2008), Cleveland (2012), Massachusetts (2012), San Pedro (2012), Hong Kong (2012) and Deauville (2012). Meanwhile, the BBC Concert Orchestra and LSO recently developed successful programmes showcasing the work of Danny Elfman (<i>Danny Elfman’s music from the films of Tim Burton</i>, Royal Albert Hall 2013) and Patrick Doyle (<i>LSO on film: celebrating the music of Patrick Doyle</i>, Barbican Hall 2013), with the former — a world premiere here, which included personal contributions from Elfman as well as actress Helena Bonham Carter — returning in December, this time with the London Concert Orchestra. However, these high-profile events warranted, disappointingly, only brief guest appearances from their star composers — the few exceptions being the performance live of Clint Mansell with his band for an audience at a far smaller venue (<i>Clint Mansell film music from the Grammy and Golden Globe-nominated British composer</i>, Barbican Hall 2014) and the debut of David Arnold (<i>David Arnold: live in concert</i>, Royal Festival Hall 2014).<br />
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<i>Hans Zimmer Revealed</i> (Hammersmith Apollo, 10-11 October 2014) promotes change in this sort of commercial programming. Though structurally the programming conformed to traditional models (a repertoire of familiar music cues written for middle-budget films and commercial blockbusters, each given their own introduction by an announcer), the event was tailored to attract a larger number of attendees by altering performance location, presentation and musical style. Promoter Harvey Goldsmith’s foreword in the concert programme leans heavily on this distinction: “There are a number of touring concerts with orchestras playing film music with the movie projected … Tonight, Hans will be presenting <i>his music, his way</i>” (my emphasis).
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Thus rather than having a concert host present works in an ‘appropriate’ fashion (Tommy Pearson’s slightly awkward commentary for the <i>John Williams: 80th birthday tribute</i> in 2012 is a typical example), here Zimmer introduced the pieces himself, combining personal anecdotes about his early professional work (director Barry Levinson doorstepped Zimmer at his London-based studio Lillie Yard one evening to discuss his forthcoming production <i>Rain Man</i>) with stories about the modern entertainment industry (Zimmer approached singer/musician Lisa Gerrard to collaborate on <i>Gladiator</i>, but was turned down initially because the artist had just completed work on another Russell Crowe film, <i>The Insider</i>). In an interesting artistic shift which also enhanced the individuality of the event, Zimmer assumed a confessional tone (in a seemingly spontaneous outpouring similar to the popular dramatic monologues of Bruce Springsteen) in the middle of one set. The voice was still that of Zimmer the artist, Zimmer the composer, but the intimate tone of his to-audience storytelling reflected the sensitivity and importance of his subject (the death of film star Heath Ledger in 2008; the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado during a screening of <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i> in 2012 – “this is not just a career, it’s a life, it’s the life we live together and we become this family”).<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">South-African singer Lebo M. joins composer Hans Zimmer onstage for a rendition of <i>The Lion King</i> (1994)</span></span></div>
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Another factor to consider in this non-traditional approach is the incorporation (and promotion) of so many soloists from Zimmer’s studio Remote Control Productions. This, broadly speaking, is not an unorthodox practice. Additional ensembles play vital roles in traditional programming, and the appearances of guest soloists will necessitate at least two major solo cues to justify their artistic fees. (For example, violinist Carmine Lauri performing ‘Remembrances,’ ‘Jewish Town’ and ‘Main Theme’ from <i>Schindler’s List</i> (1993) for the LSO’s <i>Music for the big screen: the best of John Williams</i>.) The difference with Zimmer and director Peter Asher’s approach is that, wonderfully, they required their soloists to be active performers, and indeed some of the most appealing music cues were choreographed to highlight their endless contributions, as each made a grand display of a violin, guitar or cello. Of the many artists highlighted by Zimmer, five were absolutely unforgettable: <br />
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• Ann Marie Simpson-Calhoun, who was a contributing writer on <i>Sherlock Holmes</i> (2009) and its sequel <i>A Game of Shadows</i> (2011), in addition to her role as featured violin soloist on other Zimmer-recordings for <i>Man of Steel</i> (2013), <i>12 Years a Slave</i> (2013) and <i>The Lone Ranger</i> (2013); <br />
• Aleksey Igudesman who was, likewise, a featured violinist on <i>Sherlock Holmes</i>, with recording credits on non-Zimmer films, such as <i>The Road to El Dorado</i> (2000) and <i>Spanglish </i>(2004); <br />
• Richard Harvey, whose relationship with Zimmer (in his capacity as woodwinds musician) extends back to <i>The Lion King</i> (1994) and includes recordings for <i>Kingdom of Heaven</i> (2005), <i>The Da Vinci Code</i> (2006) and <i>Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa</i> (2008); <br />
• Czarina Russell, who began work for Zimmer as score co-ordinator on <i>Pirates of the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Chest</i> (2006) and is credited as a studio manager on over fifty other feature films; she was most recently the female vocalist on Zimmer’s <i>The Amazing Spider-Man 2</i> (2014);<br />
• and Nick Glennie-Smith, a long-time collaborator and prolific composer/conductor, who has worked on almost all of Zimmer’s soundtracks, from <i>The Rock</i> (1996, composer) and <i>Crimson Tide</i> (1995, additional music), through <i>Gladiator </i>(2000, additional music) and <i>Hannibal </i>(2001, additional music), to <i>Man of Steel</i> (2013, conductor) and <i>Transformers – Age of Extinction</i> (2014, conductor).</blockquote>
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Much of the focus here went on the two violinists Simpson and Igudesman (unsurprisingly, given Simpson’s proven flair for performance and Igudesman’s ‘other’ career as one half of the comedy duo Igudesman & Joo) — their ‘scene’-stealing moments, as each artist played across and spurred on the other (often taking centre-stage in order to do so), bolstered the rousing, celebratory mood of Zimmer’s major anthems. In addition, one of the most refreshing aspects of <i>Hans Zimmer Revealed</i> was its technical production. The lighting design (produced by industry expert Marc Brickman) was characterised by striking colours, selective blackouts (which threw controlled sections of the stage into darkness) and intense strobe lighting — techniques befitting of a modern rock concert as opposed to the traditional theatrical lighting of a Barbican or Albert Hall event. <br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Composer Hans Zimmer and soloist Ann Marie Simpson-Calhoun performing 'Discombobulate' from <i>Sherlock Holmes</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>For me personally, the highpoints of past events have involved old familiar friends: music cues that have been with us for years (if not for most of our lifetime, via different formats and media), which when performed for us live have us positively levitating in our seats, the entire piece singing within us</strong></span></span><br />
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The evening began with a selection of music cues which successfully established Zimmer, his band, the orchestra and then chorus in a sleek introduction: a lively ensemble piece (‘Driving’) from <i>Driving Miss Daisy</i> (1989) featuring Zimmer on piano; the upbeat deliberately untidy Holmes theme (‘Discombobulate’) from <i>Sherlock Holmes</i> (with Zimmer on banjo); a strings-based fast-tempo piece (‘Zoosters Breakout’) from <i>Madagascar </i>(2005) that unveiled the full symphony just beyond the band; and an impressive display of the Crouch End Festival Chorus for the towering <i>Crimson Tide</i> (1995) piece ‘Roll Tide’. This segued into the flamboyant midsection of Act One: an extended rendition of the main theme (‘160 BPM’) from <i>Angels and Demons</i> (2009) with drum solo by percussionist Satnam Ramgotra; a suite of themes from <i>Gladiator </i>featuring mezzo-soprano Miriam Blennerhassett (‘The Wheat’, ‘The Battle’, ‘Honour Him’, ‘Now We Are Free’); and the slow-building anthem ‘Chevaliers de Sangreal’ from <i>The Da Vinci Code</i> (2006). The ensemble was perhaps at its best in a special rendition of ‘Circle of Life’ from <i>The Lion King</i>, which brought together Czarina Russell (as vocalist) with the wonderful South-African singer Lebo M (Lebohang Morake). In the final piece before the intermission, Zimmer highlighted Tristan Schulze on the cello for a turbulent, at times bittersweet, set from the <i>Pirates of the Caribbean</i> sequels <i>Dead Man’s Chest</i> (‘Jack Sparrow’) and <i>At World’s End</i> (‘Up Is Down’).<br />
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For Act Two, ostensibly the freer session of the evening allowing for some experimentation, Zimmer took care to include more of his guest musicians and Remote Control Productions artists in the frame. Opening the first set: the always delightful ‘You Are So Cool’ from <i>True Romance</i> (1993), foregrounding percussionists Frank Ricotti and Gary Kettle; an otherworldly piece from <i>Rain Man</i> (1988) in which synthesisers and steel drums mix with pan pipes; and a show-piece (again) for Russell in the form of <i>Green Card</i> (1990), a grandiose work which embellished the melodies and oriental tones of the original cue ‘Instinct’. The midsection combined two show-off set pieces: ‘What Are You Going To Do When You Are Not Saving The World?’ from <i>Man Of Steel</i>, and ‘Journey To The Line’ from <i>The Thin Red Line</i> (1998). In the final set, violinist Igudesman delivered a simultaneously impressive and hair-raising performance as the schizophrenic voice of ‘My Enemy’ from this year’s <i>The Amazing Spider-Man 2</i> (on the subsequent evening of the 11th, Pharrell Williams performed his Oscar-nominated ‘Happy’ from <i>Despicable Me 2</i> (2013), and relieved Igudesman as vocalist on ‘My Enemy’); and lastly, Zimmer’s rampaging <i>Dark Knight</i> suite included <i>The Dark Knight</i>’s (2008) ‘Why So Serious?’, which drew melodies briefly from ‘Like A Dog Chasing Cars’ and ‘Introduce A Little Anarchy’, and from <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i> (2012) the music cue ‘Gotham’s Reckoning’, in which Zimmer himself led the memorable chanting effect (an aspect of the soundtrack much publicised prior to release) — this successfully brought the ensemble to a point where they could introduce ‘Aurora’, Zimmer’s “heartfelt tribute to the victims and families” of the Colorado shootings noted above (and see, ‘Hans Zimmer composes song for Aurora shooting victims’, <i>Hollywood Reporter</i>, Tina Daunt, 2012). An encore then turned us to the project for which Zimmer is perhaps most revered and sadly reviled: <i>Inception</i> (2010). The suite combined ‘Dream Is Collapsing’, the energetic ‘Mombasa’ and the comparatively subtle ‘Time.’<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Hans Zimmer receives a standing ovation at the close of his concert, <i>Hans Zimmer Revealed</i></span></span></div>
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A kind of non-traditional film concert then — combining modern compositions with ‘new’ renditions of mid-1990s classic scores — <i>Hans Zimmer Revealed</i> delivered on at least two fronts: it showcased the talents of Remote Control artists, particularly Ann Marie Simpson-Calhoun and Aleksey Igudesman, giving them ample space to thrill and entertain audiences with their dynamic performances; secondly, it gave Zimmer a forum to present his own compositions in a knockabout way that sits, if not arrogantly, then uneasily alongside the other conservative programmes of film music still lined up for the remainder of the year. The musical selection, though broadly predictable, was also very well received. For me personally, the highpoints of past events have involved old familiar friends: music cues that have been with us for years (if not for most of our lifetime, via different formats and media), which when performed for us live in a room of thousands or a few hundred have us positively levitating in our seats, the entire piece singing within us. With <i>Hans Zimmer Revealed</i> I felt very much a reversal of this tendency, the cues which I consider to be ‘old friends’ passing me by, leaving little or no impression: <i>Gladiator </i>failed, perhaps unsurprisingly, to match the sheer strength and stomp of the Philharmonia Film Orchestra’s performance of <i>Gladiator Live</i> earlier this year (Royal Albert Hall, 2014), which <i>did </i>itself feature a star appearance by an impeccable Lisa Gerrard; similarly, ‘Journey to the Line’ from <i>The Thin Red Line</i>, for some a standout piece that evening, failed to move me as once it certainly did in my teens, its repetitive nature and simplicity a bit underwhelming to me now. Suffice to say, the more pulse-racing, bass-pounding tunes which Zimmer assembled for his recent collaborations with Christopher Nolan, and to an extent Gore Verbinski, electrified the crowd and impressed the most. <i>Dark Knight</i> I enjoyed immensely, as well as cues I hadn’t previously heard, such as <i>Green Card</i> and <i>Madagascar</i>; and with both Richard Harvey and Lebo M onstage together, you can imagine how utterly uplifting the ensemble’s rendition of <i>The Lion King</i> turned out to be. The sense of fun that was persistent throughout this performance, for me returned again in ‘What Are You Going To Do When You Are Not Saving The World?’, the slow-build crescendo from <i>Man Of Steel</i> — and so much took me by surprise with this piece: the emphatic violin work of Simpson particularly (but Igudesman also) sits with me still as a lasting image, the wild drum rhythm of Ramgotra, the slick guitar riff played by Johnny Marr (who has worked with Zimmer on the soundtracks for <i>Inception </i>and <i>The Amazing Spider-Man 2</i>), and Zimmer himself at the keyboard. And though ‘My Enemy’ erupted with a force and mania that coloured pretty much everything that followed it (some soundtrack fans have complained that it had no place in the repertoire at all), it nonetheless served a purpose in reflecting the tastes of Zimmer as a programmer of unconventional music (Goldsmith: “his music, his way”).
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I confess to loving the sheer volume of sound here — this was the one performance in over a dozen now that I’ve attended in which causing myself actual hearing loss might well have been on the cards throughout the course of the evening! Add to this an impressive line-up of soloists and some very well rehearsed set-pieces, and Zimmer’s ambitious debut (“his first public concert”) registers more strongly than any film concert that has preceded it. Many people have reservations about Zimmer’s material, the influence he has on the contemporary Hollywood film industry (which is seen as disproportionate compared to other star composers), and the impact of his methodology on the conventions of classical film scoring — I, for one, entered the Hammersmith Apollo expecting to be beaten over the head, and left believing I’d experienced something quite phenomenal.
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<i>Images: by me.</i>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">16 October, 2014</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-39746141549760461302013-12-01T19:59:00.006+00:002023-01-18T16:08:27.398+00:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;"><strong>EVENT </strong>THE YEAR OF THE 12 DIRECTORS<strong> VENUE</strong> APOLLO PICCADILLY</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>The Korean Cultural Center UK<br />‘The Year of the 12 Directors’ series: Park Kwang-su<br />(April 2012)</strong></span></span></div>
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Park Kwang-su, the former deputy director of the Busan International Film Festival — now fifty-seven years old, and a Dean in the National University of Arts’ Department of Filmmaking — is one of the most important filmmakers to ever be invited to the Korean movie scene in London. His earliest films were instrumental in charging mainstream cinema with a sense of political purpose and ideological critique at a time when the creative industries were still under heavy scrutiny from the state. <i>Chilsu and Mansu</i> (<i>Chil-su hwa Man-su</i>, 1988), Park’s debut feature raised questions about political reform under two of Korea’s major dictatorships; <i>A Single Spark</i> (<i>Aleumda-un cheongnyeon Jeon Tae-il</i>, 1995), released three years after the election of the South’s first civilian president, brought Park wider attention in the mainstream for dramatising the self-immolation of Jeon Tae-il, a workers’ rights activist who fought for social transformation and better working conditions in the seventies, and who is probably still a household name given that national boycotts concerning labour matters still persist. His other films — <i>Black Republic</i> (<i>Guedeuldo ulicheoleom</i>, 1990), <i>Berlin Report</i> (<i>Beleulin lipoteu</i>, 1991), <i>To the Starry Island</i> (<i>Geu seom-e gago sipda</i>, 1993) and <i>The Uprising</i> (<i>I Jaesu-ui nan</i>, 1998) — continued in a similar vein, underscoring the impact of state-sanctioned violence on student protestors and isolating aspects of the nation’s history to critique its forward momentum. Park regards the socio-political scene with the same analytical eye today, but he is taking on other assignments, other films: <i>Meet Mr. Daddy</i> (<i>Shiny Day</i> and <i>Nunbushin Nal-ae</i>, 2007), which played here this evening in the third event of ‘The Year Of The 12 Directors’ series.<br />
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At the post-film Q & A, Park was a paragon of decency, answering in a soft-spoken manner that settled everyone; from time to time he joked with the interpreter about adding something more in her notebook after saying his piece and their friendly interaction lightened the tone. At the meet-and-greet session later, he regarded the whole act of autographing and posing with fans for photographs as both an amusement and mystery, as if not quite believing that for each and every person here at least one film of his had left its mark. Our host, Dr. Mark Morris, a heavyweight in East Asian film studies and lecturer at Cambridge, explained that Park’s films matched political criticism with artistic integrity, and that no other Korean filmmaker, besides perhaps Im Kwon-taek, had been more influential in steering the course and development of the Korean New Wave.<br />
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“Censorship was a very serious issue in the beginning, and I was careful with my films. If we had rubbish on the street in one scene then it would be edited out, or I would otherwise have to substitute scenes in order to get a film distributed.” These cuts would have been imposed by the Public Performance Ethics Committee (PPEC), a government board which screened each and every film produced by a company expecting a licensed commercial release and reviewing it carefully in its pre- and post-production phases to make sure everything was acceptable for the state; when Park submitted his second feature film, <i>Black Republic</i>, in 1990 the PPEC deleted a flashback sequence on the grounds that it depicted, and in all likelihood would have “encouraged,” antigovernment activity. “Nowadays in Korea,” he continued, “it’s hardly an issue anymore, but back then I had to release <i>Chilsu and Mansu</i> on the opening day of the Olympics ceremony, when no one was really paying attention, just to get it shown.”<br />
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This was a critical period in South Korean history and <i>Chilsu and Mansu</i> a vital product of that time. The Summer Olympics of 1988 was a huge propaganda event, intended exclusively for party political purposes. With President Chun Doo-hwan at the helm throughout most of the eighties any form of legitimate opposition or political protest against the military regime was forbidden and violently repressed. Television, film, radio and print were tightly controlled and used to plug the red scare message with news of impending doom coming from the North. But when Chun went down in 1987, the disputed 17 December election went to his hand-picked successor Roh Tae-woo. The Olympics went ahead as Chun had planned but according to David Black and Shona Bezanson “the combination of widespread internal dissent” and massive international scrutiny at this time “had a signal effect on the pace and peacefulness” of the transition towards democracy. A paper for the John Hopkins University which considered the legacy of the Seoul Olympics said that, on the subject of activism, the Chun government had successfully “constrained radical action” by giving the public (“students and the middle class”) a stake in the Olympic preparations. A more comprehensive study by James Larson and Park Heung-soo found that although the Summer Olympics could not be separated from the Chun government in the mass consciousness, the ideological message nevertheless filtered through, via President Roh, that the eyes of the world were watching and a concerted effort should be made to “work for the Olympics out of national pride.”<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbPoSxmL03PKGN73GjSGxD99OgvcYtQkRpkZGp-I1KPVrF_Te5sJKTbrPDwgB8GPjmqU9SEnrjG9syR3xTajSI-LRY9P0KVdSD6aiM0CHrQ8kU9ZhVJbak39EbbGMKycu-xt3LaWw3XuUP/s1600/Chilsu-and-Mansu.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Screaming at the bastards of Seoul: billboard painters Man-su (Ahn Sung-ki) and Chil-su (Park Joon-hoon) in Park Kwang-su’s <em>Chilsu and Mansu </em>(1988)</span></span></div>
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It was in this context that Park’s screen version of <i>Chil-su hwa Man-su</i>, which was deeply aligned with the play directed by Kim Sok-man for the Yonu Theatre Company in 1986, became so valuable. The film and play were almost seen as failures by radicals deeply committed to the removal of military influence from all aspects of Korean public life — they pushed, instead, for hard art, plays and films that could beat the crackdown and disseminate their message more widely. But above ground, both Kim’s play and Park’s screen version expressed criticism of the major regimes in unprecedented ways, thus earning a definite place in the history of the cultural movement. Eugène Van Erven, in his 1988 discussion of resistance theatre, explains the political significance of the play, but above all he points to the value of improving the aesthetics of the theatre movement and migrating “underground” ideas to nervous popular audiences. Park Kwang-su successfully brought some of these ideas to the cinematic mainstream and to this day he is remembered for it.<br />
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Looking back he says that he was simply writing and filming honestly about the basic issues of the day. “Every night I would go home, work on the script, then come back and devise the next scene. The first half of the film was very haphazard and I just told the actors to say whatever so we could get it done. But in the second half we had to make do . . . [In retrospect] I think that part of the film is quite weak.”<br />
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<tr valign="top"><td><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHFMlqF32ySBOyw752Q2kCmpOxzpIYUJMLjOvC7hw1l832s7P4Gt4jZhbCZviV6aRJJqmu22POIdXAE7OEdT8qXhNLE2OKQE6O8GbIpzRuQRinb1PGH7c3UKcubqWiAbERpNsgUn0-WsCo/s1600/Black-Republic.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Kim Gi-young (Moon Sung-keun) and Young-sook (Shim Hye-jin) in <i>Black Republic</i> (1990)</span></span><br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_9VNgd5-A7Qcq0ozPMm9J5lJmDdSvkUWCSMaRwr0sevkYYNX5RKKiBWXqGYDhRIX7yled8jmo3SfNiv-7YHH2txOMH1qmn7XUZk9lh7Thk_zYj8HZqswRhp0WlhBX_OdppxMHnoEthcGz/s1600/Meet-Mr-Daddy.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Ha Sun-young (Ye Ji-won) with daughter Joon (Seo Sin-ae) in <i>Meet Mr. Daddy</i> (2007)</span></span><br />
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On this matter, Park includes the film’s most iconic scene: two downtrodden sign-painters, having completed a giant billboard in the city featuring a tanned blonde in a bikini, suffer a meltdown and release their pent-up frustrations on the general public below. “In the 1980s, it was illegal for foreign men and women to be models in Korea. Of course, for the last scene in <i>Chilsu and Mansu</i> we had to use an advertisement with a foreign female model on it. Well, the police came and ordered us to pull it down immediately. So I rushed to shoot coverage of all the scenes with the billboard in shot, and then later filmed everything in the other direction.”<br />
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A few in the audience wondered if the director was on sabbatical from filmmaking to prioritise study. To this, Park said that his hands were tied until the summer break. “In the past I focussed a lot on the pure arts and theatre, which spoke to a minority audience of educated people. I moved into film in order to communicate with a larger, more-everyday audience, but it transpired that the intellectual viewers picked up on my films again, partially due to my methodology. So the driving question for me remains: how best to communicate with the audience? Back then few people were making serious political films, but today many directors are tackling these issues, anyone can do it . . . It’s time for me to think about what kind of film <i>I</i> should make, and my desire is to communicate with a more popular audience. That’s not to say that I will avoid making films with social and political issues in the future — but hopefully I can produce something that will satisfy that driving question.”</div>
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<i>This article was originally published by New Korean Cinema.</i>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">9 April, 2012</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-63883668846599656252013-06-15T10:55:00.000+01:002018-09-05T17:36:33.425+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 85%;"><strong>INTERVIEW</strong> DIRECTOR<strong> KIM HAN-MIN</strong></span></div>
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<b>Part I</b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Interview with Kim Han-min, director of <em>War of the Arrows</em>: <br />“It’s technically very difficult getting a tiger into a film.”</strong></span></span></div>
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“It was the one military practice, the one token of martial skill, which ever held its own among a people who for thousands of years have preferred silks, pictures, poems and music, the stately crane in the paddy fields and the knarled [sic] pine on the mountainside.”</blockquote>
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—Historian J. L. Boots on Korean archery, from <i>Korean Weapons and Armour<br />
Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society</i>, December 1934</blockquote>
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Having made it through to the semi-finals of the national championships, successful young target shooter Park Nam-joo is ready to blow her chances in a playoff against Olympic Gold medallist Yun Ok-hee. She can see the counter on the red timing clock ticking over fast, but her breathing is all wrong, and the only thing that concerns her now is holding position to regain her rhythm. But she buckles and breaks stance. No mistaking that reaction. At full draw again, arrow tethered and ready for release, the counter hits zero and she’s left staring in disbelief at the target . . . “She failed!” croak the announcers; and then a blizzard of criticisms pinpointing her rotten sense of timing in shootoffs. The tournament’s over for Park Nam-joo. Returning to her family, tear-stricken and breathing heavily, she presents her runners-up medal to a photograph of her missing thirteen year-old niece, a bright young thing who within minutes of Nam-joo’s defeat had been whisked off by a shambling mutant fish-beast from the Han river and presumably drowned <i>en route</i> to the banks lining the far side. Sobbing, pained, exhausted, the Park family unite behind Nam-joo in filial piety. “It’s bronze,” her brother says to the photograph, wiping aside his tears. “Bronze!” And then the weeping grandfather: “Your aunt brought you a . . .” his voice breaking, bone in his throat, “. . . a <i>bronze</i> medal.” Then follow hysterics and misery like you have never seen. <br />
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If it is widely known that archery is practically Korea’s national sport, it is also known that Korean coaches try not to do anything halfway . . . Passing on to your missing thirteen year-old niece the news that her bright and talented aunt Nam-joo has returned from the national championships a bronze medallist is about as pale and meaningless a piece of information as telling your ancestors there is a new Barbara Streisand album in the works. And if the reality is indeed very different, then many in the West can be forgiven for assuming that a bronze in Korean archery is someone’s idea of a bad joke. One reason why this sequence from Bong Joon-ho’s <i>The Host</i> (<i>Goemul</i>, 2006) is so cutting is that it embraces precisely this heritage and uses it to frame the Park family’s inadequacies. This opening line from a <i>New York Times</i> article about the Beijing Summer Olympics of 2008 gets right to the heart of it: “The South Korean women started Sunday by smashing the world record and then got what they really came to the Olympics to get, what they always come to get: the archery team gold.” <br />
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What they always come to get.
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8VAmT0p5R27WYYU1F9uSWJjjpMmF_6usBCbnu_QM7t9xEqTPa1OnVSMESuzXaDEEpOOZvc6Ih7Pgko4FrPuf74ktE2VFMJQO28IqQSBLyrdcc0MnXQn7-FHJiZnRa4Or7qBXGDF9icVLa/s1600/War-of-the-Arrows-02.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Park Hae-il, as master archer Nam-Yi, readies an arrow using a three finger under case grip in <i>War of the Arrows</i></span></span></div>
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There is no reason why I should have spent time after my interview with director Kim Han-min thinking of this scene specifically. Set in the middle of the seventeenth century, when Chosŏn Korea was invaded by the Manchu for the second time in ten years, Kim’s propulsive, whiz-bang historical/action drama <i>War of the Arrows</i> has nothing to do with the national championships or target shooting in modern Korea. It instead condenses a savage and traumatic historical event into a punchy and poignant return-of-the-hero tale. But in its last few moments our conversation switched to the broader subject of Korean archery as tradition, and it is precisely because there was not enough time to get seriously into the thing that I left with this perspective. <br />
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Kim has said he considers the bow and arrow to be the vital element of his film. It is a pitch I hear first hand in interview — “I wanted to make a historical drama which introduced and focused on the arrow and the bow” — and again later at the press screening where he fields questions from the audience. I had planned originally to de-emphasise this aspect of the film for our discussion, feeling that if <i>War of the Arrows</i> should be viewed as anything then it shouldn’t be as, primarily, a “bow and arrow movie” (especially in light of the marketing push). But then Kim observes, with some pride, that like thousands of other children in South Korea he was taught archery in his junior years (archery is taught at elementary school, high-school and college level by designated coaches who spend between three and six months running drills); that the sound of an arrow striking its target left an indelible impression on him — and with that he cuts right through the one-dimensional note of the marketing message and has my attention.
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This exciting contemporary form, he says, is directly rooted in a long and excellent tradition which extends back to Chosŏn Korea. His assertion that “the arrow and bow is one of the [few] iconic symbols that hasn’t been severed from history,” in fact, pinpoints the thinking behind, among others, Yun Ok-hee’s own public attempts to promote the historical legacy of Korean archery. Yun, whose F.I.T.A. world ranking has floated consistently between first and third place since 2006, argues that the achievements of Korean archers in Olympic and world championships is evidence of this legacy: “Our sensitive fingertips handed down from our ancestors and our spiritual strength and willingness to fight to the very end are our secrets.” Set in this context, then, Kim’s film might even be viewed as a tribute.<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkUBxEJTLu6iZuAX_g8FDkvtao_SlL9Lp6I4y7RpSFnwwq2whsocp6CB1IKe2zYWkx3sifw_17mvfAxYPRl4hrjLyt3tA38QajlrS5CGNkGTPZBXF7ml1lR_j-7v5hIzN9ckYvKnwhOgqy/s1600/Kim-Han-min-01.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Director Kim Han-min at the London Korean Cultural Centre (photo I London)</span></span></div>
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We’re holding the interview in the library corner of the Korean Cultural Centre at a time when the film’s total ticket sales are 450,000 shy of <i>Sunny</i> (<i>Sseoni</i>, 2011), the friendships-and-terminal-illness tale from writer-director Kang Hyung-chul which has mushroomed beyond anything we might have expected and currently holds the top spot for biggest domestic draw of the year. Within the month, <i>War of the Arrows</i> will pass the 7.4 million admissions mark, moving it safely out of the commercial blockbusters zone but still short of the sort of numbers racked up by the disaster phenomenon <i>Haeundae</i> (aka., <i>Tidal Wave</i>, 2009) and the 2008 sleeper comedy <i>Scandal Makers</i> (aka., <i>Speed Scandal, Gwasokseukaendeul</i>). But the train doesn’t stop there. At this point, Kim and his sales team are skilfully carving out an international platform for the film that will take it from London to the States, where it’s set to play in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Dallas; to Canada where it’s confirmed in Toronto and Vancouver; and then back here for the festival stint where it opens the London Korean Film Festival in November. <br />
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Which is nice for Kim, and good for K.O.F.I.C., the state-supported organisation responsible for promoting Korean films abroad and supplying the majority of us in the west with information . . . But all of this has an effect on the realities of interviewing. With <i>War of the Arrows</i> imagery everywhere and PR staff politely hustling, Kim has the confidence and edge of a man who has turned a full-bore, 100-day long, multi-million dollar production into possibly the year’s single biggest attraction at the Korean multiplex. “The amount of pressure was immense,” admits the director. “I started filming in February this year and had to finish on June 9 for an August 10 release date.” While principal photography is usually shorter for Korean films — obviously this part of the production process was very much influenced by the unique aesthetic and technical demands, as well as economic factors, of the historical film; by contrast, typical productions can be turned around in well under twelve weeks — there is no question at all that <i>War of the Arrows</i>’ post-production period was alarmingly short, even with the benefits of Korea’s growing post-production services and industry. “It was an incredibly short period of time, it required very clear and succinct communication with a lot of different people. I received help from specialist members of staff and liaised with the special effects departments very closely. The pressure was huge, but I was very lucky to have met such good crew members this year — sometimes they came up with better ideas than me so this made things easier!”
A <i>Korea Times</i> piece on <i>War of the Arrows</i>, published in August (‘<i>Arrows</i> aims for new horizons’), gives the impression that the film’s production budget was low; this is true of historical films produced in the globalised Hollywood system but not in the current Korean industry where lavish budgets on the scale of <i>I Saw the Devil</i> (<i>Angmareul Boatda</i>, 2010) are exceptionally rare. In 2010, the average production budget, excluding prints and advertising, was KW 1.42 billion (US$1.2 million); by contrast, Kim’s film, earmarked from the start as a big-budget historical production, cost KW 9 billion (US$8.5 million). I quote this information to Kim, primarily because it is worth getting confirmation on production budgets at every unusual opportunity but also because I want to test <i>The Korea Times</i>’ contention that a US$8-9 million budget should be restrictive at all in the current Korean film industry. Kim laughs. “There was nothing I couldn’t do with that money. If it was a bit more I could maybe have looked after the staff a bit better . . .” <br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJADwQU2AV8e1ClRmMkzWUckNQU_PUXIc5Doh-nmyTPAcL6_DDPLb50jUEHvJMmKhI0LOrGcnbGCi_UXAqQrzjivUyGARBelbBC6peL7Yp1cPyd64LHevuCATNiRwh9wSOGYv0cWr5OnSP/s1600/War-of-the-Arrows-04.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Moon Chae-won as Ja-in, sister to Na-mi, on the day of her wedding</span></span><br />
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Kim seems to prefer writing and directing his own projects. Though he has worked with other screenwriters — on his short-film debut <i>Sympathy</i> (<i>Yeonmin</i>, 1998) and then again on his second feature, the occasionally daffy blackmail thriller <i>Handphone</i> (<i>Haendeupon</i>, 2009), written by Kim Mi-hyun — his self-authored output has performed more respectably at the box office and garnered local festival awards. To date he has written and directed the short films <i>Sunflower Blues</i> (1999) and <i>Three Hungry Brothers</i> (<i>Galchiguidam</i>, 2003), his feature debut <i>Paradise Murdered</i>, aka. <i>Paradise</i> 1986 (<i>Geukrakdo Salinsageon</i>, 2007), which made the top best selling films list in the year of its release, and of course <i>War of the Arrows</i>. “My first priority and main job is directing. It is a bit unfortunate that I can’t find a like-minded writer, I just end up doing the job myself . . . Strangely, the films where I’ve had another writer onboard, like <i>Handphone</i>, were not the ones that were commercially successful. I’ve been mulling that point over recently, to see what that’s about.”
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuor-5KF_Vxz_bie6ZYZiOXciuRv-TojFvk-L-DnRButfz0AL4htp9YTMaeFJCUM_i0hpqR5M0JkUFeter6Qg52kNwEbp_GCS7oav8iThz4lHdPwQATNBoSZx6K0AI6Hq2X5QpsMAmNGKy/s1600/Paradise-Murdered.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Park Sol-mi as teacher Jang Gwi-nam — a role that earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the 2007 Blue Dragon Film Awards — in Kim Han-min’s debut feature <i>Paradise Murdered</i> (<i>Geukradko Salinsageon</i>, 2007)</span></span></div>
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXYw0VQASyapyKkuzcXiHwO2XlNIGzZVoACkrCI2j3r82aj8MP9o32cznrONcZAqZQVTuqxJZ7RwoKnechoh1o8umSPDGCXLKzzrJyyYyCOl0llLr1o_lF5yxIdb_WThpWaYTqwjzRbY7w/s1600/Handphone.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Jeong Yi-gyu (Park Yong-woo) pesters entertainment agency rep Oh Seung-min (Eom Tae-woong) in <i>Handphone</i> (<i>Haendeupon</i>, 2009)</span></span></div>
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<i>Paradise Murdered</i> and <i>Handphone</i> were received as “serious” thriller mysteries, attracting a more sophisticated audience than your typical adolescent, though on reflection both films surprise with their dark comic register. Consider one early sequence in <i>Paradise Murdered</i>. The surviving residents on Geukrak Island have all assembled in an empty schoolroom to discuss the recent murders of two locals and the unexplained disappearance of a third, Deok-su. <i>En passant</i>, Kim for no apparent reason inserts a gaggle of vignettes which would not look out of place in a Daffy Duck cartoon: an elasticised killer in wetsuit, white gloves and a snorkel tossing a bright red body-bag into the ocean; in the next, the same man seen from overhead, this time tunnelling out a six-foot burial plot for the tied-up, not-yet-dead corpse itching for freedom nearby; and the punchline has a pair of (apparently) conjoined rocks sprouting from the blue sea, a spiralling arrow pointing down towards them and the accompanying caption: “Deok-su’s ass.” Gamely overturning the dramatic pace and structure of the schoolroom scene in this manner, Kim flits schizophrenically between, on the one hand, suspenseful half-sinister debate and, on the other, the tempestuous exertions of an anonymous killer with all the wit and grace of a Chuck Jones villain. On the subject of <i>Paradise Murdered</i>, I ask about this scene and if, given that the entire film must bear his stamp as a writer-director, he feels that any of this madcap zaniness channels his personal idiosyncrasies. After hearing the translation, he belts out the sort of laugh which is probably heard at the far end of the building and maybe in reception too. Settling back with a broad, mischievous grin, he replies simply: “Most definitely yes.” But as he is prone to do on the publicity circuit he launches immediately into a direct question of his own, pointing to a scene in his new film — in which our dazed hero Nam-Yi (Park Hae-il), having engaged his prospective brother-in-law (Kim Mu-yeol) in a drunken, sprawling tavern fight, is compelled to yield, and then vomits all over his opponent’s face — and asking if it does roughly the same trick. <br />
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Moments earlier Kim asked another pointed question, this time about the different weapon systems used in his film by the Ch’ing and Chosŏn dynasty armies, and the subtle variations within these systems. He evidently enjoys asking the questions. More than being civil or reserved in interview, Kim seems genuinely interested in finding out what you have to say to him in this short, sharp time slot; not for nothing does he want to understand how well the film — its nationalist themes and archetypes — plays with an international audience: this is, lest we forget, the most well-publicised Korean blockbuster of the year. It’s an instinct which shines later at the festival press launch, where he implores a hundred journalists, embassy staff, hotel and theatre personnel, event organisers and excitable young film geeks to bring any film-specific questions right up to him in person once the grim, for being so formal, business of the onstage Q & A is over. To this end, he succeeds in charming the audience, speaking with a humility and confidence that engages us all, but I wonder how far any of this goes in serving his contention that <i>War of the Arrows</i> is “a deep and meaningful film.”
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">1 November, 2011</span></div>
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(cont’d)<br />
<a href="https://blazejowski.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/interview-director-kim-han-min-part-ii.html"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;">Part II</span></b></a></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-59985584637753146292013-06-15T10:49:00.001+01:002018-09-05T15:19:49.178+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;"><strong>INTERVIEW</strong> DIRECTOR<strong> KIM HAN-MIN</strong></span></div>
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<b>Part II</b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Interview with Kim Han-min, director of <em>War of the Arrows</em>:<br /> “It’s technically very difficult getting a tiger into a film”</strong></span></span><br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPvFbpBoCJX00VBat1bmBGGPe9wuCEgvj9nvx1NvSnUw3FGjrEYwf_AlYErYLaQ2hphyphenhyphen54pSKCT-4LGqmXVRuXaQ7KW2Hpxs1cf1Ayt8RTfr7-67o2fGtPZbX6oSMyVV_WsgDK_I4hFzsC/s1600/War-of-the-Arrows-03.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Park Hae-il as the master archer Nam-Yi in <i>War of the Arrows</i></span></span><br />
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Though little of this makes it into the final film, it is worth recalling the devastating impact of the Japanese invasions in the late sixteenth century. Intended to bring about the destabilisation of Ming China, this bitter war exposed the complacency of Chosŏn Korea, shocking the military leadership from its general malaise and arousing the ire of the elite classes (Confucianists and bureaucrats all) who demanded absolute immediate reform. Little changed, however, and the first Manchu invasion of 1627 exposed these weaknesses again. The second Manchu invasion of 1636-7 forced the Chosŏn state into a humiliating capitulation. It culminated finally in the establishment of tributary relations with the Ch’ing, thus ensuring Korean submission to China until remarkably well into the nineteenth century. Kim’s film draws on the almighty upheaval of this second invasion, and its interest, born of necessity, is in the spectacle not the story. In creating a resistance tale which turns on the promise of reunion between a brother (Nam-Yi) and sister (Ja-In, played by Moon Chae-won) separated by invasion, Kim shifts the narrative focus away from the Chosŏn state, its political structures and the collateral damage of war.<br />
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Despite this stripped-back, clipped-wing approach, his film touches on two key issues which make up for its curious love affair with the bow and arrow; both invite us to sympathise with its lead characters’ suffering on a personal as well as a political level. First, Ja-In and her fiancé are forced to make an impossible choice that damages irreparably their bond to the Korean nation-state. Second, the story of Nam-Yi, who is hell-bent on rescuing his sister from Prince Dorgon of the Ch’ing, negotiates the tension between ethnic difference and national identity. <br />
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Kim smiles when I broach the subject and he takes a moment. “Historically, Korea has frequently been invaded by the surrounding countries. At that point of suffering — where the people are oppressed and repressed — emerges a very determined spirit, a noble spirit. I wanted to create a simple story and drama, yet a powerful drama to convey this.” It is in this tension, this struggle between the oppressor and oppressed, the invader and prisoner-of-war, that <i>War of the Arrows</i> catches its most potent theme. The question that haunts Ja-In and other prisoners as they reach the Manchurian border — “Can we ever go back?” — reflects their deep-seated anxieties about the symbolic significance of crossing from one nation to the other. Here, border lines and identity are open questions. In one scene, as several hundred prisoners-of-war crawl along a hillside in the northern provinces, a high point-of-view shot shows the beauty of the wild and unprotected land they leave behind; treasures, as well as traditions, they are forced to abandon. In the film's closing stages the returning survivors, bloodied and exhausted, cross back into Korea not as heroes (who freed prisoners from servitude and almost certainly death), but as traitors, unprepared (and perhaps unfit) to die for their country. A coda claims there were no formal cases of repatriation.<br />
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Kim also stresses that many of his actors speak note-perfect Manchu, the official dynastic language, now endangered, of the Ch’ing which was seriously under threat as early as the eighteenth century. According to articles in <i>China Daily</i>, <i>The New York Times</i> and from <i>Reuters</i> a few dozen of the 10 million Manchu living in the north-eastern provinces and in Beijing today can speak the language fluently; Jin Yanshan, a delegate from Liaoning, explains it without any frills: “In my home village, the old people still use the odd word of Manchu, like for mother or father. That’s it. There is no environment for it.” Kim’s efforts to recover the language from the precious few primary schools and villages where it is still practised in north-east China lends some credibility to the claim that he is as much concerned with history and tradition as he is with arrows, gorge-jumping and Mexican stand-offs. Although little is made of the intercultural connection between Nam-Yi and his Manchurian arch rival, Jyu Shin-Ta (Ryoo Seung-yong), the merging of the two languages, Korean and Manchu, heightens the familial bond between the multilingual Nam-Yi and his sister (described as the “best archer in the Chosŏn dynasty” and “the beauty of the region” respectively in the English press book) with powerful reverberations. The film may verge towards generic convention here, but it draws attention to the demographic mixing of ethnic and social identities by expunging Nam-Yi and Ja-In’s “mysterious” mother from the narrative altogether. The subtext is as loud as the impact of one of Jyu Shin-Ta’s arrows.<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj43os3pUKRMxXZkkzcMvUjCxgbsvwzepio-aUKRvdhls6sEfySgqBjYLfyhN3ArXrFdLeAMpRzUrWYXfXd05N-g3Qh1fg5BuCN0hcRzBJKeiqzMFFrfKFRtLUMZuPfepSc0cP_4Aai1tj/s1600/Kim-Han-min-02.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Director Kim Han-min at the London Korean Cultural Centre (photo I London)</span></span></div>
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But in fulfilling the demand to make plot, genre and characterisation more transparent for new audiences, Kim admits to taking a step back and reducing to a minimum the things that originally interested him: this includes of course some of the nuances of traditional ground archery. Adds Kim on this point: “Unfortunately it slowed the rhythm of the film, so this element, this focus, had to be more succinct and simplified.” In its theatrical form, these matters are subordinate to the key melodramatic thrust of the film which deepens our understanding of Nam-Yi as an outsider: the film emphasises the unavoidable fact that, as the descendant of a national traitor, Nam-Yi too is considered with suspicion and contempt; also emphasised is a sense of personal failure on Nam-Yi’s part — his mission to rescue Ja-In from the Manchurian Prince becomes a sort of hysterical antidote, as well as an opportunity to both honour the memory of his father and fulfil his duty as Ja-In’s protector. Though Kim speaks earnestly about turning in a schematic, well-paced melodrama (with far greater narrative redundancy than either of his previous features), his concern for stating this point the right way is revealing when set against his obvious enthusiasm for both the historical period (a huge cinematic subject in its own right) and for the tactics of short- and long-range archery. <br />
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On a technical level also, Kim has good reason to feel dissatisfied with a key digital effects sequence. As the elite Niru troop led by Jyu Shin-Ta pursue our hero up a rocky mountainside and into a box canyon with seemingly nowhere to go, a wild tiger repels their attack, tearing ruthlessly into their number and permitting Nam-Yi’s escape. Though it is regrettable that the digital effects team, working to a tight post-production schedule, produced such a hollow series of rendered images in the finished film, the apparently risk-averse Dasepo Club and DCG Plus (production and investment management companies respectively) voiced concerns early on in production about the entire sequence, and tried holding Kim back from shooting it altogether. “That was a very contentious issue,” he admits. “It was technically very difficult because the funding companies and investors were against it. But for me as the director, the thought of not having the tiger appearing in this picture, on the mountain top, was just ridiculous.” Indeed, the whole set-piece allows Kim to extend thematic connections of importance to his commentary on traditional virtue and morality. As elsewhere in East Asia, most obviously China, the tiger is a symbol of virtue and righteousness; in Korean folk belief specifically, the tiger has supernatural attributes connecting it to the Mountain Spirit; and in rituals, paintings and other art objects, it is portrayed as a mountain god, a sacred guardian, to which the oppressed, needy and diseased do turn. In the film, the scene’s sting-in-the-tail ending succeeds in unnerving Jyu Shin-Ta and the surviving men in his troop: the tiger’s attack on the Niro suggests that their ghoulish fate is just. So the scene is of importance not for its computer-generated, <i>Gladiator</i>-style spectacle, but because of what the tiger is shown doing. “Some of our national characteristics are strongly associated with the symbol of the tiger,” says Kim. “It’s an animal the Korean people have a lot of national respect for. So I was very persistent and stubborn about it, that’s why [this sequence] was included.”</div>
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqGPXoy6NvsZMdQmZLBmW0ctUGUgwtF6KVmcEDFOu9tot6Id9fGWuJ7FCJ25cAeeR1MYHEcORUzTWCFW3wLNP3qAgFlXgTT9zx61ejNLELIBU01TZuBDqORm0LGQ5whyD38-8cpX7ATJGN/s1600/War-of-the-Arrows-06.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Nam-Yi engages the Niru in a game of cat and mouse in <i>War of the Arrows</i></span></span><br />
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For a moment I observe the standee board to Kim’s left, a stylised publicity shot of the star, Park Hae-il, brandishing a bow and arrow which he aims in our direction. It reminds me of a delicately handled training sequence in which the self-taught Nam-Yi walks beyond the long-range target at which his sister had earlier been aiming to reveal, directly concealed behind it, the target at which he has actually been firing, festooned with dozens and dozens of practice arrows. Nam-Yi has quietly perfected the skill of bending arrows through the air around rocks, trees and, but of course, enemies. It is a <i>bone fide</i> crowd-pleaser, tricksy, sped-up and fun. “Don’t you think arrows are more interesting than guns and knives?” Kim asks, shortly before wrapping. They can be, I say: in the world of guns at least there is a tangible difference between the strategic sniper fire of a film like <i>Enemy at the Gates</i> (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 2001, USA/Ger./UK/Ire.) and the power-worshipping, meatheaded spectacle of a Stallone movie. Critics may suggest that <i>War of the Arrows</i> sits somewhere between the two in action terms, straddling the divide, but to its credit the film succeeds in creating a sense of entrapment that forces Nam-Yi to retaliate tactically; and at the height of the hero’s exhilarating revenge attacks on the Niro there’s no denying the thrill of watching a single CG-assisted arrow nailing an assailant cleanly behind his hostage . . . So this idea that Nam-Yi can bend an arrow through the air and take out someone in a single shot, is it possible? “I’m not going to tell you!” he says, and suddenly out comes that proud, freewheeling laugh again. “You will have to try it yourself.”
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<i>First place on the Honour Roll: director Kim Han-min. Warm thanks also to a jumble of people in the Korean Cultural Centre and the London Korean Film Festival Centre, including Paul Koren, and for her patience, Elizabeth from Margaret London. For doing her utmost to interpret my questions, big thanks and high praise to An Ji-yoon, resident translator at the LKFF. And thanking also Louise at Showbox for her help. This article was originally published by New Korean Cinema.</i>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">1 November, 2011</span></div>
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<a href="https://blazejowski.blogspot.com/2013/06/interview-director-kim-han-min-part-i.html"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;">Part I</span></b></a></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-35512253443643174992013-05-22T18:38:00.004+01:002023-01-16T11:08:12.125+00:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">EVENT<strong> LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2011 GUIDE/PREVIEW</strong> VENUE <strong>THE MAY FAIR HOTEL</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>London Korean Film Festival 2011 guide and preview:<br />news from Mayfair, first impressions, and a salute to curatorial ambition</strong></span></span><br />
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A warm September evening at the May Fair hotel. This is, apparently, a good place to stay if you need to know who and what is hip now in the fashion world, but more appropriately for us it is traditionally London W1’s luxury rest stop for overseas filmmakers in festival season. Around one hundred people have assembled for the press launch of the London Korean Film Festival 2011. Director Kim Han-min is in the green room, here to publicise his new film <i>War Of The Arrows</i> (hitherto <i>Arrow: The Ultimate Weapon</i>), which in addition to screening for us tonight is scheduled to open the festival formally in the first week of November; an image of its main protagonist, a sensational archer turned Chosun Dynasty-hero played by Park Hae-il, appears on standee boards everywhere. Our mediator is <i>Sight & Sound</i> magazine’s Roger Clarke and he’ll be chairing the Q&A session later on he says. But we are not quite ready for <i>Arrows</i>, which is our main business of the evening, so before Kim’s introduction and the warm hello which we always give Ambassador Choo Kyu Ho, whose seat in front of me I briefly stole earlier, the lights are dimmed for our first look at the 2011 festival trailer. A sort of cinephiliac montage and distillation of the playbill, it begins modestly then whips into a merry-go-round of arrows, round kicks, charging soldiers and a baton fight between schoolgirls which goes effortlessly awry (the bespectacled perpetrator having a bang-up time thwacking her friend on the head while all around them anti-government demonstrations kick off). On the evidence here, Kang Hyung-chul’s <i>Sunny</i> looks set to steal the show this November.<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY5EkTldWhLkcBCf8qwmolOU14levfkq4umIN6tGda3acz1ESsl7Ikhc2ClTNODfQNW4nGgcrCjS6DkVjRzUYe2EtOZU23op3b1QEF5TpGObiLq-pa1oznf87_coAi4JkiPm3u2Ryf1Tk2/s1600/Detective-K.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Han Ji-min as Han Gaek-joo / Lee Ah-yeong in Kim Seok-yoon’s <i>Detective K</i> (2011)</span></span><br />
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Consistently one of the most hospitable as well as representative showcases for any foreign cinema in the U.K., the L.K.F.F. (now in its sixth year) matches the current might of domestic genre cinema with offbeat projects more commonly associated with the arthouse. Familiarity with the festival isn’t necessary, but regulars will recognise the format: the big-screen opening gala, onstage Q & A session with prominent filmmakers, themed programmes presenting the latest film trends, the director retrospective, animation day, the continuation of the Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival, and the obligatorily high-profile closing gala. Such a formula has served the festival well for years, but in light of the ongoing work at the Barbican, traditionally the festival’s quieter docile home, its complexion has changed. In 2010 the festival began mining a new seam in central London, playing to the weird carnival excesses of Leicester Square on opening night, then invoking an older artistic heritage in the switch to the I.C.A. building located on the Mall. In particular the Apollo on Lower Regent Street — Piccadilly’s luxury digital cinema which uses new 4K CineAlta projection systems — galvanised the director’s retrospective and focused a multicoloured laserbeam on the whole show . . . And as many of us will this year be redirected into Haymarket for a round of new films, Korean cinema will once again be in the spotlight where I feel it belongs: far from the perimeter, digging the sounds and nightlife of a vibrant city. It was a good time to move the L.K.F.F. 2010-1 into the mouth of the West End.
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOKEbcg4M-Q9ht2C-qG7jDl9_Y0rwamoUToVRdFQ7uSVmzc3LOsdttW8nywzxfz3yAmZOLPCFNFADxGvVl4IfTr7B2WRRfeKbFHWnhfkqBQnojNvTtd3EDn6rxDznqY2WJiY-ETN4i6pjy/s1600/Sunny-2.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Go Soo-hee, Hong Jin-hee, Yoo Ho-jeong and Lee Yeon-kyeong in <i>Sunny</i> (2011) </span></span>
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7Q9eLDlkV_cAlZaP-tT2U4kyz2H54isOiVyWmkpkGOjeuPeFESl7lPKWXpRWVkvPrFN0fO32Ts00_WRTMA74vGvvG2kHe4Y77KzLZZ0txkMrIzFR6hW2qN_tO09HiavwG-vE9emdCi42p/s1600/Suicide-Forest.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Seong Dong-il and Ryoo Seung-beom in Jo Jin-mo’s <i>Suicide Forecast</i> (2011)</span></span>
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhm14GECEbUB-8K4Spu77TDBalDWdzcKY7UOz2ssv8xOnuO25MWEHXjO020vr8nfBKsQU0wl5bmFt5qHXCwcKHaVczpzjmoWUoHZLcsIgoZv-hwf0H8rSUB2c2VynLHdktL_btn8JGy1so/s1600/War-of-the-Arrows-1.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Park Hae-il as master archer Nam-Yi in <i>War of the Arrows</i> (2011)</span></span></div>
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By now you may know that <i>War Of The Arrows</i> (<i>Choijongbyeonggi Hwal</i>, 2011), a proud action film of slick economy from the director of <i>Paradise Murdered</i> (<i>Geukrakdo Salinsageon</i>, 2006) and <i>Handphone</i> (2009), is the second highest grossing domestic film in Korea. In true Hollywood style, this big budget period piece opens the festival with a red-carpet screening and an onstage Q&A with its affable director. Although it’s not directly tied to the separate existence of the two Koreas (its hook is, rather, the second Manchu invasion of Korea in 1636), Kim wants international audiences to keep in mind the tensions between the D.P.R.K. and the South, particularly the strong resilience and spirit of modern South Koreans in the face of increasing militant action from the North. It’s a theme that readies us for one of the most engaging film strands on the bill in some years.<br />
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‘North & South,’ the dominant strand of 2011, brings together a selection of interesting cinematic responses to the phenomena of defection and border-crossing. The best of these deal with the harsh difficulties faced by North Korean settlers of cultural integration. In Park Jung-bum’s <i>Journals of Musan</i> (<i>Musan ilgy</i>, 2010) a North Korean settler toils under miserable conditions in a shantytown around Seoul while struggling to remake himself as a deserving citizen-subject. Jeon Kyu-hwan’s <i>Dance Town</i> (<i>Danseu taun</i>, 2010), a tale about a former professional table-tennis player’s successful defection (the third and final instalment in a trilogy based on urban alienation), brings to the fore the concept of gendered modernity and questions the stock representation of North Korean women purely and singularly as victims. In <i>Poongsan</i> (2011), director Juhn Jai-hong relates the current state of the modern nation’s ideological war with the North through the story of a high-priority defector and the Southern trafficker-cum-action hero commissioned to smuggle her out safely. And in Jang Hoon’s civil war film <i>The Front Line</i> (<i>Gojijeon</i>, 2011), which was selected by K.O.F.I.C. this year to be the official Korean entry for the 84th Academy Awards (and I imagine unwisely), the boundaries of ethnicity and nationality are once again overturned as North and South Korean forces fighting mercilessly over the same piece of land begin to lose their personal identities.<br />
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This year’s light comedy strand leads with the biggest domestic success of 2011, and possibly the darling of the festival, <i>Sunny</i> (<i>Sseoni</i>, 2011). Directed by Kang Hyung-chul, whose bright family-values comedy <i>Scandal Makers</i> (<i>Gwasokseukaendeul</i>, 2008) was a major crowd-pleaser two years ago, the film delves into the lives of seven middle-aged women who all attended the same girls high school in the eighties and there formed a gang nicknamed “Sunny.” The bonhomie is enhanced by Kim Sok-yun’s <i>Detective K: Secret of Virtuous Widow</i> (<i>Joseon myungtamjung: Gakshituku ggotui biil</i>, 2010), a daffy adventure romp and whodunit fusing Joseon dynasty conspiracy with rattle-brained slapstick; and there is dark comedy in Jo Jin-mo’s <i>Suicide Forecast</i> (<i>Soosanghan Gogaekdeul</i>, 2011), the picaresque tale of an insurance consultant who sells life policies to suicidal clients in the hope of finally nailing Employee of the Month.
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKAa-QeVUByOFopxUd2SbtbZ2am3rTVRvLBKsJos87ulu0cbwYiUsDVBlgjsnGFS6tod3s-bwFZAz2L84bxChX_yJAHnvilohexrrJeat0UonqraZZMc_T09ugIdgY8Zex8nAVGOE-C7TN/s1600/Crying-Fist.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Choi Min-sik as Kang Tae-shik and Ryoo Seung-beom as Yu Sang-hwan in Ryoo Seung-wan’s boxing drama <i>Crying Fist</i> (2004)</span></span><br />
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Ryoo Seung-wan — the first of two festival attendees returning to film after unexpected sabbaticals — is the subject of this year’s extended retrospective. The director of contemporary crime-action films, one boxing drama and a few unfortunate commercial misfires, Ryoo was obliged to make some interesting though stark choices following the poor revenues from the theatrical run of <i>Dachimawa Lee</i> (<i>Aginiyeo Jioghaeng Geubhaengyeolchareul Tara</i>, 2008). Frank in interview, as well as being refreshingly thoughtful about funding obstacles, the business and South Korea’s identity, Ryoo should lend an engaging personal touch to the retrospective as it’s confirmed he’ll be in attendance (like Jang Jin in 2010) for many of his film screenings. Our starting point appears to be <i>No Blood No Tears</i> (<i>Pido Nunmuldo Eobshi</i>, 2002), the first of Ryoo’s films to be backed by a studio though not the first in the director’s filmography. It’s about violence, opportunism and degradation in modern Korea: two downwardly mobile girls (a former safecracker-now-taxi-driver and an aspiring singer) steal a bag of money in a calculated move to escape their abusive relationships and dreary lives. Ryoo followed <i>Arahan</i> (<i>Arahan jangpung daejakjeon</i>, 2004), a mad melding of the superhero and martial arts genres, and <i>Hey, Man!</i> (2005), his second digital omnibus contribution, with <i>Crying Fist</i> (<i>Joo-meok-ee oon-da</i>, 2004). A less excitable film than its predecessors, <i>Crying Fist</i> unites Ryoo’s brother and long-time collaborator Seung-bum with fanboy favourite Choi Min-sik as two ruined men on a mission to become amateur boxing champions (with Choi fighting to win back his Rookie of the Year title after a fifteen year absence from the sport). The film was based on the true stories of Japanese businessman Hareruya Akira (see “Week in the Life: Hi, I’m Akira and I’ll be your human punchbag today,” <i>The Independent</i>, 1999) and “Korea’s Tyson” Seo-chol. Continuing the organised crime theme, Ryoo’s spin-kicking martial arts film <i>The City Of Violence</i> (<i>Jjakpae</i>, 2006) follows a detective and a reformed gangster (former high school buddies both, with Ryoo taking the role of the latter) from yo-yoing street fight to the guarded compound of their latest enemy, where the boys take on an entire fortressful of uniformed baddies and in the process hack the restaurant to sawdust. In 2008, Ryoo stepped away from his milieu of cops, felons and martial arts masters to reimagine his spy pastiche, <i>Dachimawa Lee</i>, originally conceived as a 35-minute omnibus short film and released digitally in 2000 (it was downloaded 1.5 million times). Drawing on the iconography of domestic 1970s spy films and Manchurian “Westerns” as well as Stateside TV like the <i>Mission Impossible</i> series, <i>Lee</i> (2008) is a bonkers retro parody about a legendary agent and his luckless helper-damsels fighting Japanese imperialists to retrieve a stolen Golden Buddha statuette. <br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Director Ryoo Seung-wan as Seok-hwan in his <i>The City of Violence</i> (2006)</span></span></div>
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_hXdfukwJtJK5kku-N2Bgx7u2-Y3IofhfmKU8qhAy-cj14jwYIPutr3U7l9wwZYSz0eRmDsJr1f2OOJRW3NIkT9VqiI6xhmA_LcoplgPDawDSd6jM5pcW_jsYa15qjxRkcjC4O6paoGyO/s1600/Dachimawa-Lee.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Kong Hyo-jin as Keum Yeon-ja in <i>Dachimawa Lee</i> (2008)</span></span></div>
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Ryoo’s newest film, <i>The Unjust</i> (<i>Budanggeorae</i>, 2010), completes the retrospective. A twisting, looping puzzler which plays to Korean cynicism as well as paranoia about institutional corruption, <i>The Unjust</i> follows cutthroat policemen, businessmen and public prosecutors who plot against each other conspiratorially for personal gain then fight it out until the messy end.<br />
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Without question the most eagerly anticipated overseas visitor at the festival is self-taught filmmaker Kim Ki-duk. A filmmaker of great cultural and political significance today, Kim has overcome commercial changes in his home market by moving increasingly towards totally independent production. His new micro-budget film <i>Arirang</i> (2011), which closes the festival on the 17th November, is a beguiling self-portrait in which the possibly unfathomable director interacts with his more determinate self, Kim-as-private-personality if you can believe. Paying homage along the way to the international festivals which have given Kim so much vital critical acclaim, it uses the filmmaker’s wounded ego as well as personal memories — specifically of an oft-cited on-set accident which almost claimed the life of an actress working on <i>Dream</i> (<i>Bi Mong</i>, 2008) — as the springboard to track a somewhat fantasmatic recovery from what may or may not have been a nervous breakdown. There is no question, Kim Ki-duk’s presence at the festival is big news. And it’s precisely this quality of access to the most engaging filmmakers operating in Korea today that makes the still relatively youthful London Korean Film Festival a welcome and memorable cinematic showcase.
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">23 September, 2011</span></div>
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<i>This article was originally published by New Korean Cinema.</i>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-31390104353718339302013-04-25T17:03:00.000+01:002018-09-05T17:37:12.393+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM<strong> TREELESS MOUNTAIN</strong> DIRECTOR <strong>KIM SO-YONG</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Kim So-yong’s <i>Treeless Mountain</i> (2008)</strong></span></span></div>
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<b>Synopsis:</b> <i>An elementary school in Seoul, the present. Six-year-old Jin spends her penultimate day at elementary school learning about time and playing with friends. Later that evening, she is chastised by her mother for failing to take Bin, her four–year-old sister, off the neighbours’ hands when she was supposed to. The next day, Jin’s contentment is broken when she returns to find removal men emptying the apartment. Her mother bundles the girls onto a bus bound for Hunghae and on arrival deposits them with their Aunt. When Jin is taken to one side and told that her mother must leave to search for their missing father, she is given a small piggybank together with a promise that when it is filled with pocket-money their mom will return ...</i></div>
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Opening with a throwaway line that serves as a grim foretelling of events to come (an elementary school teacher tells her young charges to go home and “have your mother teach you how time works”), <i>Treeless Mountain</i> is a sharply observed drama about the lies we tell children and the things that children do to cover up and defend against loss. Essentially a two-hander between seven-year old Kim Hee-yeon (in the role of elder sister Jin) and the even littler Kim Song-hee (who was five at the time of shooting), the film begins with the girls’ mother deciding she must go in search of their estranged father. In one of the film’s many painful sequences, she leaves her daughters in the care of their aunt, telling Jin (to whom she has entrusted a bright pink piggybank for safekeeping), “Each time you obey your aunt, she’ll give you a coin. Put it in here. By the time it gets full I’ll be back.” The girls attribute to the insentient “Piggy” both a nickname and a helper identity, asking it for help and masterminding new moneymaking schemes to fill it up more quickly. Over the course of the film, Jin transforms from a pampered but bright young thing, topping her classes at elementary level and evidently acing all of her friends when it comes to playground card games, to a stoic and resourceful child, still buoyant and bright, but ultimately deceived by a falsehood. The film sadly tests the rules of the childrens’ reality, but Jin finds her feet on the slopes, taking responsibility for her sister’s wellbeing and perhaps too for both of their futures.</div>
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXU67_W39f0XiixfgwYZSFSmhNJGYT-v-NlVkrE6V9zKvGzLJV3v721esIlWdYigGPbOnI7Mc52kZv73l6ugKGkRdjQ9ctS3FOEChQFX0gmMe6TlVcAYe3Pi4B5gcH9W6B_tjKqxttH3fb/s1600/Treeless-Mountain-01.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Sisters Bin (Kim Song-hee) and Jin (Kim Hee-yeon) play in Kim So-yong’s <em>Treeless Mountain </em>(2008)</span></span>
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<i>Treeless Mountain</i> is set predominantly in the director’s former hometown of Hunghae, a sizeable rural borough north of Pohang (roughly 170 miles from Seoul) where she spent a good deal of her infancy living on her grandparents’ rice farm. (Kim’s mother divorced and emigrated to the States, leaving the young Kim and her sister in the care of their grandparents — though she would later follow her mother to America when she was twelve). Surprisingly (and admirably so in the present standard-issue hi-def climate), the film was shot on Super-16, an unwieldy, noisy format at the best of times and one that does not make the demanding task of recording 40 hours of footage in cramped conditions any easier (or cost effective). The result photographically is, nonetheless, wonderful. Respectful as well as inclusive, D.P. Anne Misawa covers the girls’ lively interactions without sentimentality and in as much detail as circumstances permit: we watch them watching, listening, crying and singing (“me ddoo gi, me ddoo gi, me-me-me-me-me ddoo gi”), sleeping and eating, yawning and procrastinating, grappling with big door handles, fumbling with blocky crayons — everything is seen from the girls’ viewpoint. This approach comes into its own when the film relocates to wintry farmland deep in the Hunghae countryside; in one shot, the camera watches at a certain remove as Bin then Jin tentatively approach their new grandmother for food; in another, Bin taps a window relentlessly until Jin pops into frame to tap the other side (“Peep-peep-peep”). This closeness to the girls is underscored by the film’s soundtrack, which carries not a single note of music (though Asobi Seksu’s score over the end credits is sugary enough to be gorgeous). It looks instead to the natural sounds of the countryside, to the girls’ footfalls around the house, and most effectively of all to the sounds of their breathing: at rest and at play.<br />
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Importantly for a film focusing on character, the indie aesthetic is enriched by some fine supporting performances. Kim Mi-hyang is commanding as the potentially alienating Big Aunt, a blustering, disgruntled alcoholic whose modest self-made image took a severe knock when she sold off her failing business. Lee Soo-ah has less screen time in the role of Mrs Lee, the girls’ mother, but her tender performance hints at the gulf which exists between her maternal duty and her suppressed personal desire. Elsewhere, Kim’s non-professional actors have a naturalistic charm and confidence that reinforces her quasi-social-realist approach. She is aided most ably in this regard by Park Boon-tak, a Hunghae local and farm labourer who was cast just two days before the grandmother’s scenes were scheduled to be shot, and Kim Mi-jung, the mild-mannered neighbour (credited as “Pretty Lady”) whose real son the girls grow to like and play with.<br />
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Inevitably, the film’s main strength lies in the appealing screen presences of the leads. If Kim Hee-yeon sticks with film then the work she does here bodes well for the future. Her performance is an admixture of pain, fascination, glee and compassion, the distress in some of her scenes at times uncomfortably raw. When in one scene a new play-friend charitably hands Jin a sticker to play with she graciously declines it, quietly excuses herself, then takes her sister home; it’s a touching moment, one in which the girl becomes acutely aware that she is more fortunate than the boy, but also that she cannot yet share in the delight of a son indulged so lovingly by his mother. Remarkably, Hee-yeon manages to convey all of this in a simple look. It is also to Kim’s great credit that the transformation of Jin from an amusingly carefree if slightly tardy primary-school student into a sharp-eyed, kind-hearted young girl is kept modestly restrained, and yet a single production still of Jin in school uniform, emblazoned across the D.V.D. menu screen which the film returns us to promptly after the end credits, underscores the extent of this transformation. It’s easy to imagine a contemporary animation making a heroine of Jin in the final act, but here the director’s approach is subtly even-handed, calmly settling Jin into a new life without ever dispelling her aching loneliness. Accordingly, the look she exchanges with an excited Bin towards the end, as their grandmother prepares food at their side, is one of the most satisfying moments in <i>Treeless Mountain</i> — not for nothing does it come as some relief to us when she feels distracted enough to smile again. For her part Song-hee — in addition to producing some truly priceless expressions in her role as Bin (Misawa’s camera regularly finds her staring dimly at some offscreen player, a hint in her eye that she is indeed suffering some sort of fool here) — shows remarkable poise in many of her one-on-one interactions. A scene in which the young mite objects to the others’ maltreatment of some grasshoppers may involve no acting or even instruction, but such is her confidence in front of the lens that she’s a treat to watch. And unsurprisingly, the director lavishes her with attention.</div>
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAxmG5JVLCL7iesQm_NeGYR59uF35ifG16B4lP1Nk1xrKxYBVZMSl4tgMSnHCp25ZbUuSoMPaQABTJrKrto6JkwuDhoK_QgGqT9dNic6Pex9T48YZnj2t_CavDQkRZqXT7v747RsXbMa7I/s1600/Treeless-Mountain-4.png" style="cursor: hand; float: left; margin: 0px 25px 10px 0px;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Not suffering fools: Bin headscratching</span></span><br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioJg9KEiMUdGT5_ZfTGeefGDOGOuaHAsA3tlkVCMvXYvUJQEfk3-m4KFlIuFeGUzTJIp-1GPVxmYGDsqqPTOWuZ1O5w73z-nD2vMhmZX-KeIRzh7oldijJMAQl1_hqeomHpvFFCTkejHSh/s1600/Treeless-Mountain-3.png" style="cursor: hand; float: left; margin: 0px 25px 10px 0px;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Little entrepreneurs: Jin and Bin head off to catch grasshoppers</span></span></div>
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As for the central themes of absence, personal agency and responsibility, the film is harsh but honest. Kim reveals the nature of certain relationships only gradually and accepts that the girls’ problems cannot be easily resolved by the introduction of new owners. In one of the film’s many Hunghae-based street scenes, as a local boy loiters in a side-street text messaging, Jin asks permission to telephone her mum’s old number in Seoul. Checking it out instead for himself, the reply comes: “That number is disconnected.” In a world governed by adults it seems that even in this small task Jin is helpless — she is denied the dignity of learning the knowledge privately for herself, and must take a stranger at his word publicly in front of Bin; quietly she moves on. Kim achieves an extraordinary level of pathos with this approach. There’s no great moment of insurrection against Big Aunt, for instance, just the forceful pronouncement issued by the girls endlessly and behind closed doors that they are hungry. </div>
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Unlike Kore-eda Hirokazu’s <i>Nobody Knows</i> (<i>Dare mo shiranai</i>, 2004, Japan), an earlier portrait of abandoned siblings struggling for a life in Tokyo (to which this film has I think been unfairly compared), there’s no usefully sentimentalising against-all-odds trajectory here, no jeopardy plot to threaten the girls’ lives. Jin’s quiet realisation that she must stay put for the benefit of Bin is compelling enough. And though class mobility is undoubtedly an issue (one which tangles with our natural parenting instinct as viewers), the film is admirably non-partisan, neither idealising finally working-class family life or surreptitiously passing judgement on it. It isn’t an easy work, as many viewers who wish they could influence the on-screen events will undoubtedly find, but it is a real pleasure: sensitive and heart-rending, rich in pathos, and offering a potent glimpse of the ties that bind two resilient young girls together.</div>
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<strong>Disc:</strong> Soda Pictures’ U.K. release comes with a fine audio commentary from director Kim So-yong and husband and producer Bradley Rust Gray. Both shed light on some of the more obscure (salt punishment) or objectionable (grilling insects alive) customs that are culturally accepted practice in South Korea, but they also throw in some lighter stuff, noting for instance the terse attitude of some of the locals who witnessed the Big Aunt scenes shot in the market.<br />
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The extras include a cute-as-buttons chat with the two girls, as they reminisce with Kim about the shoot and (but of course!!) the grasshopper song. As Kim explains in the Q&A featurette (an after-show spot with an audience at the New York Film Forum), the girls were given very rudimentary instructions and guidelines prior to principal photography, and once the real business of shooting on a daily basis began the screenplay was treated with a substantial degree of flexibility. The Region 1 D.V.D. release, which contains all the above, goes one step further with a modest selection of deleted scenes and outtakes — a small contribution admittedly, but one which would have rounded out the contextual material nicely on our own highly recommendable Region 2 release.</div>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">19 July, 2011</span>
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<i>This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.</i><br />
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-85942498040701353922013-04-17T15:50:00.000+01:002018-09-05T17:37:26.132+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM<strong> 71 INTO THE FIRE</strong> DIRECTOR <strong>LEE JAE-HAN</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong><i>71 Into the Fire</i> (2010)<br />‘The day that courage came of age’</strong></span></span></div>
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<b>Synopsis:</b> <i>Young Deok, 1950. The North Korean People’s Army is on the verge of overwhelming the South. Drafted as a student soldier in the 3rd Infantry Division, Oh Jang-beom survives an attack on the town and flees without personally firing a shot. While regiments are diverted to the Nakdong River, a major defence barrier shielding the cities of Daegu and Pusan from invading forces, Jang-beom is left behind in Pohang with seventy untrained student soldiers. Demoralised and shell-shocked, they make their last stand against an advancing heavy artillery force, led by the ruthless Park Moo-rang . . .</i></div>
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“Lead them with heart; if your sincerity gets through they will all follow.” <br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540607663909051970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheVPUp1OrisvM1SAAGt1GBjo-XVQY79f1d9bVJZ535b27eC7P3z37uUXtaOkeD9by4ljYc6bfmmG9tpYr56HxpqmRJxnylvkpxaH5gqbk6GMDZskh_iZ8sekX9O-KMGG1oYq1an6gVPfps/s1600/71-into-the-fire.png" style="cursor: hand; float: left; margin: 0px 25px 10px 0px;" /></td><td>So says the grizzled veteran Captain Kang (Kim Seung-woo) to his reluctant student charge in a pivotal sequence in <i>71 Into the Fire</i>, Lee Jae-han’s lavish dramatisation of the siege at Pohang Girls’ Middle School in the opening stages of the Korean War. It’s advice we expect the film’s makers to also honour. One of the challenges in launching a combat film on this scale is not the staging of practical effects to engender the illusion of combat conditions, but the creation of plausible human characters. Think of Denzel Washington’s Private Tripp struggling to find redemption with his own regiment (and surrogate family) towards the end of Edward Zwick’s masterful <i>Glory</i> (1989, U.S.), or Tom Hanks’ simple backward glances to ensure that his tearful breakdown midway through Steven Spielberg’s <i>Saving Private Ryan</i> (1998, U.S.) remains a private moment. The former example is perhaps the more apt, for Washington’s interaction and open conflict with the inexperienced young men in his own unit lends the film its terrible and finally upsetting momentum; but the Spielberg</td></tr>
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example is equally forceful, the harrowing impact on Hanks’ character of the shock of war eloquently communicated through small gestures and silences. Both films, to borrow the commendable sentiment of <i>71 Into the Fire</i>, lead us the audience with sincerity.<br />
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Regarded in South Korea as a defiant and patriotic stand against communism by the nations’ youth (the fallen soldiers are commemorated in the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul), the siege at Pohang probably won’t be familiar to western audiences: an ad hoc regiment of seventy-one student soldiers fended off an eleven-hour assault by several regiments of the North Korean People’s Army, heroically stalling their advance with dwindling munitions, no military support and barely any combat experience. Though it was just one incident in an expansive build up to the Battle of Pusan Perimeter (which involved the British land army and United States Air, Army and Navy forces), the Pohang siege deserves and in some respects demands attention, both as a tale of spectacular war heroism and as a profound symbol of personal sacrifice. To date, director Lee Jae-han (known internationally as John H. Lee) has produced a mixed bag of short film projects and music videos, making the crossover to feature film production with two high-gloss Korean melodramas. In 2004, he delivered the unabashedly romantic fading-lover yarn <i>A Moment to Remember</i>, followed in 2009 by the missed-opportunities desire-as-memory melodrama <i>Sayonara Itsuka</i>. For this, his third genre piece, Lee sticks with melodrama but demonstrates an adolescent understanding of the ambiguities and emotional suffering of war.
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Opening with a slow-motion shot that tracks through devastated streets in the war-torn Young Deok region and filmed in obligatorily Rowellesque tones, Lee’s highly fanciful combat picture owes more to the output of global commercials companies such as The Institute and R.S.A. Films than it does to domestic productions like <i>Brotherhood</i> (<i>Taegukgi</i>, Kang Je-gyu, 2004) or the pre-war <i>The Taebaek Mountains</i> (<i>Taebaek Sanmaek</i>, Im Kwon-taek, 1994). As befits his roots as a director primarily of music videos, Lee makes a determined effort to use every grad filter on the globe, instilling proceedings with the gloss of an antiquated Tony Scott film and going out of his way to homage the 360 degree wrap-around shot which Michael Bay personally killed off over fifteen years ago. The effects-laden battle in Young Deok, for instance, which is for the most part covered using fluid steadicam (and dressed up with exploding fireballs which send already dead men flying about like projectile dolls), gradually gives way to saturated panoramic views of the countryside, and endless lines of flags connoting mindless conformity are set against darkening but otherwise lovingly photographed skies. So content is Lee with the cleverness of his design that potentially wrenching moments fall flat and whole story threads are lost. Choi Seung-hyeon’s (a.k.a., T.O.P.) purse-lipped student captain Jang-beom and Kwon Sang-woo’s captious gang leader Gap-jo (as written by Laurents and Sondheim evidently) come to blows on the eve of war, but their Disneyfied high-school rivalry never takes; Park Jin-hee’s sullen nurse drifts into Jang-beom’s orbit when he shows up in hospital, but any serendipitous connection between the pair is forgotten, later to be replaced by shimmering, angelic images of his mother (Kim Seong-ryeong in a thankless cameo); indeed, the letters Jang-beom intends for his mother have no real payoff here; only Cha Seung-won comes close to carrying the film — his unapologetically sinister turn as a commander of the People’s Army a welcome antidote to the designer-sulk styled into much of Choi’s performance — yet when he inexplicably shows mercy to his student opponents, expecting compliance in return, all the signs indicate that the struggling screenwriters have given up and are padding the narrative.<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnjcuX47ui2ytrgrwxFFSBRDmymFVT6WlkDG2Fv8Y4WJujHQBo2ScIFDU1qS2mGipkVbg9szmiM94TDYZw37ga5vU9CckyXko5c1o61kYP5buuM9gTcvH3vlUreHNu0qgyWJF31KdNzmKt/s1600/Into-the-Fire-01.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Saving grace: commander Park Moo-rang (Cha Seung-won) in Lee Jae-han’s <em>71 Into The Fire </em>(2010)</span></span><br />
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With the bulk of the action so shamelessly validated on Bruckheimerian terms, it’s tempting to accept this all as wanton adolescent tosh, but significantly the effort is made to commemorate the real conflict on which the film is based. Executive producer Chung Tae-won was keen to maintain a level of historical veracity and reportedly intervened as pro bono writer once it became clear that Lee himself (being “from a different generation”) had little grasp of the war he was fetishising. Despite Chung’s involvement, the film fails to give us an accurate sense of what the real event must have been like and avoids serious criticism in any way. In one striking example, the detonation of a bridge over the Nakdong river calls to mind the atrocities at Waegwan and Tuksong-dong (according to <i>A.P.</i> writers, whose articles were published originally in the <i>Korea Herald</i>, U.S. forces blasted the bridges in both locations on August 3rd 1950 killing hundreds of South Korean refugees as they attempted to cross), but forgoing any serious look at real or allegorical events Lee keeps his sobbing refugee women and children at a distance and instead directs Kang walking calmly away from a <i>Transformers</i>-size explosion. Meanwhile, the depictions of South Korean nationalists as spiritual victors and North Korean communists as faceless cannon fodder is at best troublesome, at worst asinine. We’re meant to infer from the machine-gunning of one South Korean student soldier, adorned in white and elegantly cut down as he charges headlong into an ambush, that war only punishes the virtuous and the innocent. From this we anticipate that our placid hero will question the masochistic damage of the war, or re-examine his own critical stance towards a North Korea which sends young men just like himself repeatedly into battle, but there’s a distinct unwillingness here to explore even simple emotional truths. The South Korean students share the same language as their aggressors and in some instances the same characteristics (here, mothers are central to the fatherless boys’ lives on both sides of the divide), but Lee takes so much pleasure in pitting teens and their high-tech weaponry against villains that even these melancholic admissions are lost. With scant regard for message films like <i>J.S.A.</i> (Park Chan-wook, 2000) and <i>Secret Reunion</i> (Jang Hoon, 2010), Lee has grisly fun mowing down wave upon wave of communist baddies. Whatever the intentions of its makers (it was released in Korea prior to June 25th, the formal date which in 2010 marked the 60th anniversary of the People’s Army launching its attack along the 38th Parallel), <i>71 Into the Fire</i> is a throwback to the ignominious days of the 1980s. Though this may be a minor film for the director (who goes on to update John Woo’s legendary <i>The Killer</i>) and your archetypal mess-around for Korean teens and western dilettantes, it never makes good on its promise, or its sentiment, and lowers the standard for Korean blockbusters. More importantly than even this, it makes things worse for those filmmakers in Korea who choose not to operate on Hollywood’s terms.<br />
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<strong>Disc:</strong>
For its part, Cine-Asia (D.V.D. distributor of the Showbox Media Group) have turned out a handsome two-disc edition here. No artwork arrived with the review disc but the menu design seems consistent with the advertising in Korea, and navigation isn’t hampered at all by the characteristically jittery effects worked into the menu architecture (a tremor rocks the toolbar whenever there’s an offscreen explosion). Thankfully, Pohang survivors Kim Man-gyu and Son Joo-hyung, whose personal testimonies are only barely glimpsed over the film’s credits, are given a voice in the voxpop interview “Student Soldier Trainees From the Korean War” (conducted in the grounds of the real Pohang middle school no less). It’s fascinating to hear both Kim’s reasons for volunteering (he was just 17) and his memory of the familial conflict this inevitably provoked (the film avoids any such moral equivocation), but alas the interview is a short affair, and lacking their detailed input in a studious documentary format it’s difficult to get an idea of how the siege may have played out that day. The Cine-Asia special production “Men of Valour, Personal Reflections on the Korean War” is an affectionate portmanteau short of unusual interest, presenting the accounts of five servicemen who joined the war effort: Byong Yu, Chang Young Won, Solomon J. Jamerson, Andrew Beavers, and Seiji Koshimizu. The subtitles are fine (and in some featurettes even a bit sneaky).<br />
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By comparison, the conventional point-and-shoot featurettes (“Into the Fire Making of Documentary,” “Behind the Scenes,” “Pre-Production” and “Production Design”) provide less insight and character than most audiences deserve. For fine arts people the “Poster Making of” capsule looks intriguing on paper, but the featurette begins and ends with the on-set publicity shoot (you won’t see what third-party designers do with those images, for instance, once they’ve been outsourced). Meanwhile, H.K. cinema expert Bey Logan and H.K.-based film producer Mike Leeder’s commentary intersperses personal anecdotes with production notes and your usual ho-hum drippy platitudes, the kind of extra for existent fans only.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">11 March, 2011</span></div>
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<i>This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.</i><br />
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-57583130903021770932013-04-09T17:46:00.000+01:002018-09-05T17:37:47.134+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM SOUNDTRACK<strong> A BITTERSWEET LIFE</strong> COMPOSERS <strong>JANG YOUNG-KYU, DALPALAN</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Film music and Kim Jee-woon:<br /> <i>A Bittersweet Life</i> (2005) original soundtrack</strong></span></span><br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540607663909051970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidg2ErF-6Uq56GWXwtoEjClODVg5CAjCDNGxFCHaSxPcRVXk6sQptm7wi8rmP13M1QAn1F_1z6cmFmTkgJDy0YbNU0aeWiBYmWgRiWJpyJg0lvfyPp4aj6BONvL0KS-EAIAUoycDq9-ttJ/s1600/A-Bittersweet-Life.png" style="cursor: hand; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" /></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>The significance of music in the highly iconographic films of Kim Jee-woon is seldom touched on but worth consideration. The use of contemporary radio hits in <i>The Quiet Family</i>, <i>The Foul King</i> and <i>The Good, The Bad, The Weird</i>, and importantly atypical orchestration in <i>A Tale of Two Sisters</i>, <i>A Bittersweet Life</i> and again <i>The Good, The Bad, The Weird</i> speaks volumes for the director’s approach.<br />
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In his debut film <i>The Quiet Family</i> (1998), Kim plays fast and loose with American popular culture and representational conventions. The exuberant soundtrack intersperses retro Long Island band <i>The Stray Cats</i> and Latin-inflected hip hop with <i>The Partridge Family</i> ditty “I Think I Love You” and Memphis soul/rock band <i>The Box Tops</i>; this wonderfully antiquated vision of recycled Americana is further refined by the repetition in several hokey grave-digging and father-on-the-toilet sequences of Nilsson’s “Jump Into the Fire,” the bubbling, tumbling rock tune which Martin Scorsese integrated so well into the final Stones/Harrison rock melange of <i>Goodfellas</i> (1990, U.S.). While his warm-hearted follow-up <i>The Foul King</i> (2000) is positively barren alongside his debut in musical terms, it marked Kim’s first collaboration with Jang</td></tr>
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Young-kyu, whose minimalist electronic score crosses back and forth between easygoing vignettes and scrappily merry interludes (at times creeping in an idiophone for good measure, and a Morricone riff in the denouement).
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For <i>A Tale of Two Sisters</i> (2003), Kim collaborated with the prolific composer Lee Byung-woo, in whose trusty musical care he originally bestowed his <i>Three</i> segment <i>Memories</i> (2002). (Lee has since scored such whopping genre titles as <i>The Red Shoes</i>, <i>The Host</i>, <i>Voice of a Murderer</i>, <i>Hansel & Gretel</i>, <i>Mother</i> and <i>Haeundae</i>.) The result was a profound and unsettling score, eschewing the sort of shrieking, Hermannian variations so regularly used in horror cinema for an extraordinary series of nostalgic cues. Culminating in the perfect “Lullaby,” Lee’s melodies and themes are often at odds with the piercing tone of the film, contrasting the pain of memory and desire with the paranoid sensibilities and Lynchian distortion of a Badalamenti cue. For the positively bonkers <i>The Good, The Bad, The Weird</i> (2008), a score so indiscriminate and unshackled that it genrifies for the film’s rollicking setpiece Nina Simone’s touching “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” Kim collaborated again with Jang Young-kyu and new arrival Dalpalan. For their efforts both artists were nominated in the Composers category at the 3rd Asian Film Awards (they lost out, not unjustly, to Joe Hisaishi). Before this, however, Jang and Dalpalan worked together on Kim’s revenge thriller <i>A Bittersweet Life</i> (2005), producing an excellent score which deserves closer inspection.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Kim Jee-woon’s <em>A Bittersweet Life </em>(2005) was scored by Jang Young-kyu and Dalpalan, featuring Japanese pianist Kuramoto Yuhki</span></span><br />
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The musicians were joined importantly by Japanese pianist Kuramoto Yuhki, who recorded the film’s critical music cue entitled “Romance.” In addition, the composers pay homage to the late classical Spanish guitarist Francisco Tarrega, whose “Etude in E Minor” becomes the signature tune of (and in key respects typifies) the album. What emerges is an unusually jazzy and highly individualistic score which does a fine job of encapsulating the different themes of the film. These include our hero Sun-woo’s loyalty to Kang, the romantic melody for Hee-soo (the girl he shadows), the very culture of femininity which she embodies and which is still unique to Sun-woo, the besieging of Kang by “friendly” enemies, the slapstick fun to be had with knuckleheads Myung-gu and Mikhail, the vengeance theme which pushes the confrontation with Kang in the hotel’s Sky Lounge, and lastly, but of course, Sun-woo’s relationship with his own reflection and image, a motif which the director endows here with great significance. In its simplicity, for example, “Follow” transforms the initial spark of wonder that takes hold of Sun-woo into an unobtrusively cool, tinkling arrangement, the purposeful rhythm of it repeating again as our hero drives into the city late at night, the erotic undertone of the theme surfacing towards the close as he gazes down upon Hee-soo in a busy night-club flirting with her lover on the dance-floor. The “Romance” cue is based on the source music to which Hee-soo later plays cello accompaniment, and though the motif is never once repeated on the album it finds corresponding value nonetheless in familiar themes like “Irreversible Time,” its reprise “(Quartet) Irreversible Time” and in the wry sadness of “Fairness.” With the exception of Tarrega’s “Etude in E Minor,” perhaps the most recognisable cue is “My Sad Night,” which marks the formal introduction on the album of classical guitar and folk elements. A loose and fanciful arrangement, the cue catches the specifically European influences of the film. <br />
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Jang and Dalpalan then provide variations on established themes. For “Escape” they produce a strange synthesised sound which builds to a slower, serious and other-worldly take on the call-to-arms cue “Sky Lounge,” while the more threatening (for being so subtle) “Red Lounge” pulls away from the melody of “Escape” (its close cousin), finally reprising the leitmotif of the album on piano for a telling shift in the fadeout. “A Bittersweet Life II” brings appropriately a sense of small-scale intimacy and heritage to the underworlds of crime bosses Kang and Baek; and though it’s listed after “A Bittersweet Life II” as track number ten on the album (and understandably so), the reprise, entitled “A Bittersweet Life,” appears first in the film over a magnificent scene in which Sun-woo decides that his only course of action is to take bloody revenge against Kang.<br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuCPf67vFT1dcqZ6AcGQUQyhyZtQ29QtaBsFHNS7PnwpVRXGlvyaUC-qFhM713XRp8gGZIpxZS77-ugbRUA8fv2k_bqTurNwtGwdHtL-JmN4erEuZi09PcgnCymmllii27Iul8lSw8Uglz/s1600/The-Quiet-Family.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Kim used a range of popular songs in his debut <i>The Quiet Family</i> (1998)</span></span><br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2lMH3Zy6KCIoD-KKOpw-_0z0Mhc-v7S8hJI9S8EgB_cOuPcYlOgBl_6QZ96UoK8Zmuie9Y8W_q9om4P_KOu-uTHS-DC5xOfBhGv4uQNgKpsHwgW4BPAn0at26_TLgqPmnedu144vkqR1c/s1600/A-Tale-of-Two-Sisters.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Lee Byung-woo composed a nostalgic score for <i>A Tale of Two Sisters</i> (2003) </span></span> </div>
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The most successful track on the album is of course “Sky Lounge,” the film’s introductory music cue. Since vanity is the key theme here, virtually every frame in this sequence is elegantly composed and the grooming impeccable. But for pure swagger and propulsive energy the sequence is indebted to the music: from the eponymous Sky Lounge of the title, where Sun-woo savours one final taste of that exquisite dessert on his table, to the lower levels of the hotel where patrons cross its unblemished marble floors, from the thumping club room where drunken men encumber their young mistresses shepherding them away from harm, to an exclusive member’s suite where Sun-woo has to turf out a trio of petty gangsters — the cue (and the scene) is all about ego and hubris. It rounds out a robust and thoughtful arrangement of eloquent and exciting compositions, and as soundtracks go <i>A Bittersweet Life</i> is a classic of modern Korean cinema.
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">10 March, 2011</span></div>
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<i>This piece was originally published by New Korean Cinema.</i><br />
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-44602494263769538142013-03-28T17:57:00.000+00:002018-09-05T17:37:59.772+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM<strong> THE UNINVITED</strong> DIRECTOR <strong>LEE SU-YEON</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>‘There is more to this world than is safe to know’:<br />
Lee Su-yeon’s <i>The Uninvited</i> (2003)</strong></span></span></div>
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<b>Synopsis:</b> <i>Uijeongbu, the present. Interior decorator Kang Jung-won begins the long journey home on the Seoul subway. As he sleeps, a single mother and her two daughters board, seating themselves nearby. At the last stop, he wakes to find the girls are dead and their mother missing, but in his panic does nothing; the train drifts away into the night. Safely home, he chats briefly with his fiancée, Hee-Eun, who in his absence has installed a showpiece dining table. She insists that it will be a locus for the family despite appearances: “it’s for each person to sit and talk at as if an actor onstage.” The next evening, when Jung-won is alone in the apartment, the two girls appear to him, slumped at the table . . .</i></div>
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There is a scene midway through <i>The Uninvited</i>, Lee Su-yeon’s cheerless but distinguished portrait of life in modern industrial Korea, that is as chilling and unexpected as it is elegant. A young woman, Yeon, is curled tightly on the sofa in her comfortable high-rise apartment. An incessant whine on the soundtrack shifts register, pulling from nowhere the memory of a crying child; then Yeon intones softly in voice-over: “My mother told me that you shouldn’t keep cats as pets because they take revenge: ‘Unlike other animals, cats have souls.’ But I don’t believe that. I just don’t like their cries.” Moving to the balcony where she stops to admire the rain, Lee’s camera finds a bleak, concrete landscape. Yeon reaches out her hand; sunlight appears through the cloud; and a body falls from above. In an impossible twist of fate the eyelines of both the falling woman and Yeon cross, and Lee’s camera goes in close, matching their reactions in identical shots. When the spell is broken (and it happens quickly and with economy), both women fall out of frame together. This sublime sequence, in a sense the <i>trompe l’oeil</i> of this her debut film, is one example of the often graceful sometimes obvious invention of Lee’s directorial style, and it goes some way to substantiating her preoccupation here with vision, imagination, and with the nature of “experience.”</div>
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5502441580464638786" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYMJMHvlCeTDDWpTLTa7e7DZvB6hjkhWZrznLue50ECAZEHOChuk7m7sJTHszTmNbRYNF3fkegcizUj7ofgeC8e1LjeT3xs7aF_BJ8bowLSXUOQ8eFJkBCnqJltwnVrG-ju0tNPKpo8Puj/s1600/The-Uninvited-Lee-Su-Yeon-%23.png" style="cursor: hand;" /></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>Using unusual angles (one monologue begins with the seemingly wayward camera focused on the ceiling), some long floor-hugging tracking shots and uncanny digital composites, Lee’s finely nuanced staging and fluid photography necessarily lifts the tone. In this sense, she is also well served by the many residential complexes that have radically transformed the Seoul metro area, including Seoul-dependent wards such as Ilsan. Designed to be self-contained, these “new town” projects feature prominently in the Korean cinematic landscape, either as small builds or as fully autonomous, residential-commercial constructions. Films such as Kim Jee-woon’s <i>Memories</i> (which later shared a D.V.D. release with <i>The Uninvited</i> on the Korean issued <i>The Horror Film Collection Vol. 1</i>), Han Jae-rim’s <i>The Show Must Go On</i> (2007), and Kim So-yong’s <i>Treeless Mountain</i> (2008) make the most of the limitless lines and orderly quality of new town space. For its part, <i>The Uninvited</i> draws attention to itself by scaling architecture and finding alternative perspectives; owing an unremarkable debt to the stylistic mannerisms of Hitchcock (circa-<i>Psycho</i>), the film is arguably most successful when the camera is passing through open windows and gliding down building fronts.</td></tr>
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Lee uses these residential builds, variously haunted by death and by dying, to comment more purposefully on the fates of her characters. When we’re first introduced, Jung-won (Park Shin-yang), the affluent, middle-class protagonist of Lee’s story, is caged in a different kind of tower on Seoul’s Line 7 subway, a journey which literally takes him to the end-of-the-line. Though we follow him for most of the film — at work, in the jeep running errands, huddled over blueprints at home — Jung-won remains a particularly sketchy protagonist. He is a timid pooch, this is clear, favouring the traditional family home with his religious father and sister, and genuinely looking flummoxed whenever hot-headed fiancée Hee-Eun springs new ideas on him. He takes a knock to the head one day in the workplace and the shock is enough to keep him second-guessing the origins of his own supernatural “visions”; yet it seems fair to say, based on the prologue alone, that his general misfortune has something to do with spiritual impurity and his ambivalence towards the family religion. In contrast to her fiancé, the materialistic Hee-Eun (Yoo Seon) bounces through the plot hounding her betrothed about wedding invitations and unsuccessfully trying to snap him into action. The mismatch is well emphasised by the variation in the performers’ acting styles, with Park playing the remorseful pup to Yoo Seon’s <i>au courant</i> tigress.
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>It is possible to glean from Yeon’s subtle reaction a sense of the ignominy that Korean society imputed on women of her position, a point which the film underscores as literally every one of her friends and acquaintances grow to disbelieve her</strong></span></span></div>
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Jeon Ji-hyun (her screen name later changed to Jun Gianna) takes the other lead role as Yeon. A narcoleptic, and now grieving young mother, her only child was thrown from an apartment balcony in a fit of despair by depressed friend Jung-sook (Kim Yeo-jin). The symptoms of her narcolepsy are the one constant in the film: the dreamy hallucinations, the incidents of cataplexy that floor her without warning, and, naturally, the drowsy crawl of her shell-shocked delivery (even simple conversation is an imposition). The signs suggest that Jung-won himself shares with Yeon a similar if less chronic form of the disorder, but the film defers to a more supernatural mode as Yeon assumes a prophetic role in the narrative. In recovery from a second sleep attack, she explains that her late mother was in fact a shaman. Though Lee doesn’t define their relationship clearly enough, it is possible to glean from Yeon’s subtle reaction a sense of the ignominy that Korean society imputed on women of her position, a point which the film underscores as literally every one of her friends and acquaintances grow to disbelieve her. Just how her psychic visions fit into this (largely unexplored) domain of religious practice — a folk religion remember in Korean history — is similarly left unclear (there’s never any suggestion, for instance, that she is dealing with gods, or that spirits call upon her to conjure visions). Yet by leaving out so much of her semireligious backstory, Lee pares away the social comment.<br />
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It’s a small shame because the effort has been made here to touch on the effects of socioreligious changes in modern Korea. For one, Lee strikes an effective balance with her secondary Christian characters. Jung-woon’s father, Kang Jae-sung (Jeong Wook), has settled in Ilsan where (for the first time in his life) he has built his own Christian church. A pastor and single-parent, he now finds it impossible to work up much enthusiasm to continue ministering — and perhaps one reason for this is that he fears the stigma of personal failure (he staves off an unfolding economic nightmare by tending day and night to a small number of growing devotees). His general guardedness in the company of his daughter, the person to whom he is presumably closest, indicates that this time he may well have overextended himself. Actor Jeong Wook’s finely pitched performance is often characterised by distraction and sombre introspection; even with the devotion of his congregation, it seems Jae-Sung is unsure about the church’s role in local life. His daughter Young-Suh (Kang Gi-hwa), on the other hand, is bright and perhaps more brittle. She manages the new converts as administrator <i>pro tempore</i> and beams with personal satisfaction at the church’s growth in membership — at one point she is seen liaising with women who have travelled from Mokdong (a flourishing province just south of the Han river) and we sense in that broad smile her intense pride in the moment.</div>
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL6GFNwKOyKxlFvucak64zjGAuBeqnQ1cjOerMjmokJQV0d3mu7kBq_SZl3T79dy_w79m6XKRU8sp-IFOFtx2U4lszlJLLY8Ici8WGTDOzvwZBvpfAm1_23vs_NtTDUqfED34XmoXQekeX/s1600/The-Uninvited-01.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Yeon (Jeon Ji-hyun) surveys her concrete neighbourhood in <i>The Uninvited</i> (2003)</span></span><br />
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While the film observes both characters in a church environment, the scope is limited to their everyday lives behind the scenes; there’s nothing here resembling, for instance, the explicitly theological nature of <i>Secret Sunshine</i> (2007), Lee Chang-dong’s brilliant but punishing melodrama which takes to task the unashamedly materialistic slogan of modern-day Evangelism. By contrast, Lee’s view on Christianity as a now firmly established religion within Korea, indeed her feelings on the so-called Christian “success story” (specifically Protestantism), remains opaque. Again, it is a shame because once we learn of Yeon’s shamanistic heritage Jung-won’s Christian identity takes on a greater edge. Lacking this perspective, a few of her secondary characters feel a bit syrupy. When Hee-Eun witnesses a congregation scatter for their cars in a sudden downpour she uses the moment to convince Jung-won of the rightness of her own faith; it is a smug and obsequious scene that provides a sentimental counterpoint to two earlier exchanges, one in which Hee-Eun borrows Jung-won’s only umbrella, and another in which she begins to suspect Jung-won’s infidelity. Lee seems so compelled to hold on to this moment of poetic reflection that the finer point of the scene (that Hee-Eun prays for the conviction to end their relationship rather than for forgiveness or understanding) is nearly lost.<br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnmqWhD1jQGxQ7qxt8HWKcZuRw5W2-xKvNoOx2l7OG-_80IAda93drxzJi61Wrbz9u4UMcV8gjDf8ZAmwOzbB3ZyTp-EwwSvUtVWYW_QF5BD13XWUgmreARtjScgqII3aSt5-qnUqsulng/s1600/The-Uninvited-02.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Yeon describes her narcolepsy to Jung-woon (Park Shin-yang)</span></span></div>
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Since one assumption of the film is that peoples’ lives can be saved if only someone else will listen, the characters’ happiness rests largely on their ability to communicate; secondary characters make war needlessly upon themselves and others, while the more emotionally complex and introspective Yeon and Jung-won, destined it seems to suffer unbearably grim lives outside society, show little resistance. Ultimately it’s impossible to feel much on this (perhaps preordained) downward spiral when miscommunication and unwarranted conclusions predominate. Any suggestion, for example, of a sexual bond with Yeon would be just about unthinkable for Jung-won given her psychological volatility and her emotional dependency, yet their respective spouses (Park Moon-sub, played here by Park Won-sang, and Hee-Eun) seem to think the pair are going at it like some Bergmanian couple in <i>A Lesson in Love</i>. Still, with assured cinematography, some potent themes and, particularly, its thoughtful stab at rethinking cinematic perspective, <i>The Uninvited</i> is an exceptional calling card. After a quick glance, however, at Lee’s filmography — a range of shorts, including <i>La</i> (1998), <i>The Goggles</i> (2000), which is included in the <i>Korea Short Film Collection: Episode 1</i> (1998), <i>Twenty Questions</i> on the digital shorts omnibus <i>Twentidentity </i>(2004), and the 21 minute short <i>The Rabbit</i> (2008) which was produced for the 10th Women’s Film Festival in Seoul — you’re left wondering if she will return to feature production any time soon.<br />
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<strong>Disc:</strong>
A good transfer but, quite unusually for a Tartan release this late in the game, no extras. They do exist in the form of interviews, music featurettes and production notes on the Korean special edition, but alas we haven’t earned them yet. Some sleeve notes would have been welcome but as it is, the film looks splendid and thankfully the D.T.S. showcases its often damned impressive sound design.<br />
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<i>This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.</i>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">24 February, 2011</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-77998876237687549932013-03-25T12:38:00.000+00:002018-09-15T11:37:29.564+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM<strong> R-POINT</strong> DIRECTOR <strong>KONG SU-CHANG</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>‘The point of no return’<br /> Kong Su-chang’s <i>R-Point</i> (2004)</strong></span></span></div>
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<b>Synopsis:</b> <i>Vietnam, 1972. Private Kim and Lieutenant Choi, a distinguished officer who was awarded the Choong Moo for service in defence of his country, are on R & R. They take up with some hookers in Nha Trang, but in the night Kim is murdered. Choi finds and executes the assassin, a girl, point blank. Back at camp, Choi is brought before Lieutenant Colonel Han who agrees to forget the incident if he leads a platoon into R-Point — a rural area, now designated hostile — to find missing soldiers, presumed K.I.A. Choi acquiesces. In R-Point, the platoon encounter their first insurgent: a peasant, not unlike the girl at Nha Trang, who seems to be fighting all alone in the forest. After a brief firefight, they leave her in a pillbox, ostensibly to rot, but not long after the girl reappears to them again in the night . . .</i></div>
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<i>R-Point</i> (which U.K. distributor Palisades Tartan has seen fit to rebrand this year with the new title <i>Ghosts of War</i>) finds a deliberate balance early on between light and dark, empathy and wickedness, virtue and evil. Its broad range of characters provide variations on these themes; at some point, all of the soldiers caught in R-Point confess either to living a life of deceit in which they have wronged their loved ones, or a cruel and violent life determined by their honed indifference to the “enemy”. It’s some time before we learn who is truly guilty (or, to borrow pre-war language used at the time to describe the French cause in Indochina, “impure”) and who is not, but the maxim “Those who have blood on their hands will not return”, conveyed to the soldiers in the form of an ancestral warning that seems to pervert Confucian philosophy, seems relevant to all. Ostensibly a down and dirty cautionary tale in the tropical hell of Vietnam, the film charts the repercussions of these many and various indiscretions, as one by one the hapless soldiers are targeted by a host of judgmental apparitions, and one by one they each take their chances.<br />
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<table><tbody>
<tr valign="top"><td><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5502441580464638786" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-e-1uQvljFdruug2gZuUwqkx_Z5UFWdndud5GhqD6gJlVKdrfhyphenhyphenX0RE3qqwPD1IdfWmsJEUu9USP1y-B0XAxp3p2WJ77Gy2a4vIHum5V2G4UwcqccQGA8ObwcDzI4ux6h6d2EBfHE4k-I/s1600/R-Point.png" style="cursor: hand;" /></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>Thematically, <i>R-Point</i> is more ambitious than this. For one, director Kong Su-chang doesn’t address the war directly. His film instead assumes audience foreknowledge of North and South Korean participation in Vietnam and perhaps too, though less expected, the cumulative benefits to the South of this participation (in the form of loans, subsidies and preferential trade arrangements with the United States). The specifics aren’t of importance in the film, but the historical arrangement itself, forged between President Park Chung-hee and the Johnson and Nixon administrations respectively, is far from irrelevant. <br />
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According to <i>Time</i> (1999), the largest single source of foreign exchange for Korea in this period came in the form of war-induced revenues (U.S. defence-related expenditures, U.S. government grants, exports and production for U.S. consumption); the success of Korea’s economic development program therefore hangs heavy over proceedings. To the film’s credit, the viewer is always aware of the likely consequences of this participation, and as the many allusions to separated families,</td></tr>
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divided armies, and struggles for reunification particularly make clear, the infusion of foreign capital into the South at such a dramatic rate inevitably impacted its relations with the North. <br />
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To those already primed for an anti-Vietnam War statement then, or for any critique of Korea’s support for American military intervention (Iraq included), the film does at least play well: the soldiers wait anxiously for their orders to return home after the mission, though in what condition they expect to find their country under the authoritarian leadership of its dictator remains unclear (it is appropriate that Su-chang sets his film in the year 1972). In this respect, Korea’s very participation in the war, which the film sees negatively, seems to underlie the economic recovery of the specific period — Su-chang’s implied message being that Korea, like the soldiers in his film, must in some way acknowledge its own guilt.<br />
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The director is also inspired (as one might expect of a script which places so much emphasis on borders and territory) by the merging of old cultures.
<i>R-Point</i>’s setting is an isolated island (which we’re led to believe was of some strategic importance to colonialists) and this evokes the passing of several distinct phases in Vietnamese history: the nation’s split from imperial China in the 10th century, its colonisation by the French in the late 19th, its struggle for autonomy and self-rule during the French-Indochinese War, and the American Vietnam war, viewed itself to be a lost cause, and hence “passing,” even in 1972. The film is most effective when tinkering with these cultural stresses and inventing massacres. Kim Byung-chul’s Cho, an educated mortician’s son, tells the group as he reads from a stone marker that the Chinese executed hundreds of Vietnamese in the area, then dumped them in a lake, terrestrialised it, and erected a Buddhist temple to bring harmony to the site; later in the film a harmless interloper relates another story, this time an act of near-genocide committed by an unknown enemy. The latter tale is relayed by an American marine, the victims he describes are French colonialists; indeed the American himself guards a nasty secret, prohibiting Choi’s men from entering the second floor of their headquarters and snooping around the rooms where a lot of his platoon’s hardware is stored. So, while there is an inevitable loss of depth in any Vietnam film that neglects the Vietnamese experience directly (the identity of the ghost that haunts Choi so persistently is up for debate — is she Viet Cong, is she even Vietnamese — frustrating assertions that Su-chang has feminised the native experience at all), it becomes plain that <i>R-Point</i> is happier gesturing towards these cultural dichotomies. We quickly build an impression, then, of R-Point as some kind of slavish purgatory.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 180%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Director Kong Su-chang cut his teeth co-writing the Vietnam movie <i>White Badge</i> (1992), <i>If It Snows On Christmas</i> (1998), the Korean adaptation <i>The Ring Virus</i> (1999) and <i>Tell Me Something</i> (1999), the third highest grossing domestic film of 1999</strong></span></span><br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfbp7U1-I1rXHHrfEzHLVlAeSpqy8x3enGyORyWqeiVMc5euZxF7IKhlCNmCnN4EQThCjrd_LF9vZEpdvblhNCU7W2jEzMNB40Rc09edJ6eZhWVjBE9Zqh8LMTdjG4DVPwf5KDFbKovkb8/s1600/R-Point-01.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">R-Point as slavish purgatory: Lieutenant Choi (Kam Woo-seong) in Kong Su-chang’s <em>R-Point </em>(2004)</span></span><br />
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In terms of visual spectacle, Su-chang makes splendid use of an intimidating landscape (location shooting exclusively in Kampuchea, Southern Cambodia) and on occasion he provides the unexpected: a reconnaissance mission in which all but one of the platoon vanish in the undergrowth, never to resurface (the scene elegantly held in long take from the remaining soldier’s vantage); or a plantation filling with white headstones as Choi, the man caught in the middle, grasps finally the implications of his mission. After a promising start, though, the film <i>does </i>catch in a familiar groove. The infamous Bokor Hill Station (now Palace Hotel) is an incredible four-storey building from rooftop to entrance, its scorched outer walls red with lichen, the entire complex in reality decimated throughout by mortar shells, by gunfire, by looters of the Khmer Rouge, yet in accordance with Su-chang’s preferences, and needless to say with the eye of his cinematographer Seok Hyeong-jing, the palace is only ever substantially used at night. The “atmospheric” reveal early in the film is extravagant waste (the site cannot be seen for mist), and from then on Bokor barely appears in full light again. In another example, Su-chang aims to convey a spiritual presence: shifting visual register whenever the ghostly apparition appears, his first-person shots are hokey adornments detracting from subtle transitions (the camera rising portentously from the reeds to a solitary light above) or an actor’s expression.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Choi and Sergeant Jin Chang-rok (Son Byung-ho) hope that rescue will come soon</span></span><br />
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On this note, the performances are generally strong. <i>Alone in Love</i> (Han Ji-seung, 2006) star Kam Woo-sung underplays the charismatic Choi, a fearless and competitive fighter who merely awaits the inevitable return of the girl he killed lawlessly in Nha Trang. Son Byung-ho succeeds in creating great menace as Jin Chang-rok, the largely dispassionate growling sergeant who wants to turn the place into a bristling death camp. As their temperamental young charges (split between a grudging respect for Jin and enthusiasm for Choi) the aforementioned Kim Byung-chul as the nebbish Cho Byung-hoon, Oh Tae-kyung as sixteen year-old Jang Young-soo and Park Won-sang as the older, surly, good-natured Mah (aka, Sergeant “Cook”) supply rounded and sensitive performances, enough to offer a glimpse that is into their pre-war lifestyles before the blood falls out of the sky.<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh33RZCfVFSYmLktArawerq16pZru4wk2rsrmJTtAqa4ax642Y3lwtldeKQxjeXG6h3Qq3eaSoHH0VsfxIvRuAX7zeibujORTjR-zLJmo1D4p0kd6fMqnJjhkxNZFnsmwTEOcqBWdhpL5aj/s1600/R-Point-05.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">The incredible Bokor Hill Station, used here as the setting for an abandoned colonial French plantation</span></span><br />
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It was probably, therefore, a mistake to introduce across the board ghost story conventions into an intense psychological drama — the film suffers for this. An unnecessary plot-point — initiated by the arrival of some American squaddies who cryptically just check in to see if the lights are still on — the idea that an evil spirit, like a curse spiral, is disseminated through people, while obviously supported by the mythologies of Asian cultures, feels like a vain gesture, a conceit which this budget production sadly cannot do justice. Had Su-chang allowed his characters’ increasingly suicidal behaviour to stem from the confusion and suffering caused by war — if Choi, Cho and Jin had inched closer to the “darker side” of humanity as it is described in <i>Apocalypse Now</i> (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979, U.S.A.) by undergoing a natural process of initiation — his film may have had more of an impact. But as a useful primer on why Korean horror of the early 00s, and more broadly East Asian ghost stories, are often so complex and engaging, <i>R-Point</i> is pretty much required viewing and ranks as one of the smartest Korean thrillers of 2004.</div>
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<strong>Disc:</strong>
Little improvement on Tartan’s original Asia Extreme release (in fact, the opposite is the case, as Justin Bowyer’s sleeve notes are absent). The rebranding is no problem, but some godawful package design by Tartan (the original still of Bokor is excised, replaced with something more palatable to Western eyes) will confuse any viewer on the look out now for a wooden barn (there really is no excuse for this and fans will notice). Otherwise, an acceptable not expert transfer, Dolby Digital 5.1, D.T.S. (which pays dividends in some outstanding scenes), comprehensible subtitles, the usual prerequisites are here.<br />
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The film carries a commentary with director Kong, producer Choi Kang-hyuk, and location supervisor Kim Wan-shik. The two anecdotal featurettes “1972 Vietnam” and “Special Effects” are quite self-effacing, but the key elements of principal photography and post can be found in “Mission R-Point” and “Broken Radio”, the latter an amusing overview of the Foley artist’s responsibilities at work, twinned with a glimpse of the final scene in various stages of the mix: pre-effects, pre-score, etc. The feature commentary is surprisingly candid. You suspect the director would have been satisfied if audiences responded to his film as allegory, but on the evidence here he seems content with the more literal readings that members of the crew return to him. One interesting aside early on about the lighting in a key scene gives some genuine insight into the first-time director’s working partnership with his cinematographer (a repeat of this in the Hollywood system would have been downright inexcusable and the D.P. fired). Any commentary in which the speaker drops the line “and the moths were really obnoxious,” and the director sneers at his own product placement, is sweet in my book.<br />
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<i>This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.</i>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">4 February, 2011</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-35244955177373599072013-03-22T19:15:00.001+00:002018-09-05T17:38:41.102+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM<strong> 252: SIGNAL OF LIFE</strong> DIRECTOR <strong>MIZUTA NOBUO</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 180%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>252: Signal of Life</strong></span></span></div>
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<b>Synopsis:</b> <i>A biblical tidal wave strikes Tokyo. In the aftermath, Shizuma leads a rescue squad from the city Fire Department to Shimbashi Station, now an area of devastated wasteland. Shocked to learn that his younger brother Yuji and seven year-old niece are trapped underground, Shizuma mobilises a specialist rescue squad to track down their position. While Yuji brings strong leadership to the lucky survivors who collect around him, a series of aftershocks bury some of their number under the rubble, further jeopardising the rescue mission. Those left unscathed fight exhaustion to communicate an S.O.S. to their rescuers: a code 2-5-2, the signal of life.</i>
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</td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>The disaster film is familiar territory for Japanese audiences. From Shirô Moritani’s <i>Japan Sinks</i> (Nippon Chinbotsu, 1973) and <i>Mt. Hakkoda</i> (<i>Hakkodasan</i>, 1977) to more recent apocalyptic fare such as Shinji Higuchi’s <i>Japan Sinks</i> remake (<i>Nihon Chinbotsu</i>, 2006) and Takehisa Zeze’s <i>Pandemic</i> (<i>Kansen Retto</i>, 2009), tales of earthquakes and catastrophic tidal waves hitting Japan emphasise an unsettling reality which the Japanese deal with on a weekly basis. This the disaster movie duly relates in pointed references to the circum-Pacific belt, the most geographically active zone on the planet across which the Japanese archipelago is distributed. Low intensity earth tremors, earthquakes, volcanic activity and typhoons are so frequent on the islands that the citizenry tend to take things in their stride. In this, Japanese cinema certainly isn’t alone. A diverse range of disaster-related films are emerging across East and Southeast Asia, including Aditya Assarat’s post-tsunami drama <i>Wonderful Town</i> (2007, Thailand), Toranong Srichua’s <i>2022: Tsunami</i> (2009, Thailand), Je-kyoon Yoon’s event movie <i>Haeundae</i> (2009, South Korea) and Xiaogang Feng’s <i>Aftershock</i> (2010, China), but as coarse (or genuinely sobering) as these films can be, not one boasts the idyllic topography of Japan, or the dazzling opulence and expansive imagination of a modernist city such as Tokyo.<br />
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Made in the period after the 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake, when plans to improve the quake-proofing of residential and public buildings were still being drawn, <i>252: Signal of Life</i> is something of a public relations exercise, a semi-educational but wholly impassioned melodrama conceived to spotlight the necessity of advanced rescue teams and to raise the profile of projects such as the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. Using under- and over-cranked photography, digital enhancement, full-CGI shots and a fluid simulator to render photorealistic 3D waves, the film reads, surprisingly in summary, like a catalogue of spectacular attractions: it features an enormous tidal wave that looms over Tokyo Bay and takes out both the Rainbow Bridge and the Fuji TV building, a deadly hailstorm over the Ginza Yon-chome crossing which defaces familiar landmarks the Wako and San-ai buildings, the flooding and collapse of Shimbashi subway station, a super typhoon grand enough in scale to cover the archipelago, rescue operations played out on the same grimy streets, and a multiplex-friendly eye-of-the-storm sequence that clears the winds and torrential rain long enough for panoramic views of a now waterlogged Tokyo. Nothing, however, quite survives comparison with Higuchi’s <i>Japan Sinks</i> or the Korean <i>Haeundae</i>. The main location of the film, for instance, is neither Daiba, where tantalisingly the round observation deck of the Fuji building is displaced into the Bay, nor even Shiba Park where the iconic Tokyo Tower is seen in context standing defiant against the typhoon; it is, rather, the largely subterranean Shimbashi station, a set befitting of a 12-certificate film which cannot match the open-air carnage of larger-scale big-budget productions. Like Oliver Stone’s <i>World Trade Centre</i> (2006, USA), <i>252: Signal of Life</i> is a more intimate record of the specifics of the day. Set-pieces in and around the station create an alarming authenticity and so convey something of the nightmare endured by drowning citizens as seen from a variety of “subjective” perspectives.<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDuF4rcBdQuedtd_Pc-s_JCNEI6Z9byEI9-_GURaBVttGJ3U-lDCx1DqbAoevgDCBlfYXnNvUlExVGfkHrpy0DW9Lvjd5c78Xy9kPXDdQFyc5w4of7JhUOtk_7-VLNjtLsiZhidx8nKtcm/s1600/252-Signal-of-Life.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Kim Sumin (Minji) and Yuji Shinohara (Hideaki Itô) brave the floods in Mizuta Nobuo’s <em>252: Signal of Life</em> (2008, Japan)</span></span><br />
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The resourceful hero of this tale is Yuji Shinohara (played with token efficiency by star Hideaki Itô). Yuji is an ex-sergeant of the Tokyo Fire Department who has cooked up an existence as a bad car salesman in the hope of keeping his sympathetic wife Yumi (Sachiko Sakurai) and deaf mute daughter Shiori (Ayane Omori) safe at home. When the flood clears and the family awaken, bruised and bloodied, only Yumi has made it out unscathed, leaving both husband and daughter trapped below ground. Confined to a disused subway station where they endeavour to signal their position using the 2-5-2 rescue code, the two are painstakingly helped by a trainee med. student (Takayuki Yamada), a small-time entrepreneur and president of the lowly Hyotanyama Engineering firm (Yûichi Kimura) and the largely out of commission Korean babe Kim Sumin (model turned K-pop star Minji, whose teen-ditty plays out over the credits). Above ground, Yuji’s older brother Shizuma (Masaaki Uchino), beset by memories of a failed operation, tests the patience of his increasingly strained crew (here representing the 8th Division of the Tokyo Fire Department) by resisting more hazardous rescue attempts, while Saki Umino (the evidently popular Yu Kashii), embodying the spirit of the National Meteorological Agency, predicts the chain of events which lead inevitably to catastrophe and fathoms one last rescue plan.<br />
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It is, then, a faithful tale of human resolve—its classic patriarchal message issued in no uncertain terms. Every character is saddled with his or her own tale of personal ruin, scripted to accentuate the long curve of their rehabilitation. The water filtration device “Mr. Bubbles,” a prototype designed by the hapless president of Hyotanyama Engineering is a case in point. Here, we see the downtrodden entrepreneur (Kimura in the role of Keisuke Fujii) pinning his last hopes on the commercial prospects of (of all things) a fish-tank filter, only for its highly secretive components to be stripped by his fellow survivors and used in a lifesaving blood transfusion—the success of which rekindles, but of course, Fujii’s mojo. Indeed, the film cares so much about the interior lives of the supporting cast, and the Shinohara brothers particularly, that when the storm eventually hits we’re left in no doubt about character motives, the importance of family ties, or the cyclical course of the narrative.<br />
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The film doesn’t belong to either brother necessarily, nor to much of the support cast, but instead to little Shiori, the seven year-old tyke who clings to her safety whistle with both paws and wrinkles her nose at daddy throughout every reprieve. As such, child actress Ayane Omori (who was eight years old at the time) bears the full weight of the most demanding scenes and the effect is extraordinarily forceful. Throughout the key Shimbashi setpiece, Shiori becomes separated from her mum and braves the station collapse alone, gluing herself to a ticket barrier for protection while Mizuta’s camera goes in close to scrutinise the extent of her disorientation. Late in the picture, Shiori is involved again in a tearful requiem that ends with a miraculous shift in tenor, a <i>volte-face</i> which subsumes—but cannot match for sheer feeling—the dying echo of the young girl’s agonising lament. While there’s no doubt that both scenes are unnecessarily protracted they are moving, and not without some merit as testimony to the trauma inflicted on innocents in such circumstances. Given that writer Yoichi Komori was inspired by the rescue in the 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake of a two year-old boy, Yuta Minagawa (coupled with the fact that the Tokyo Fire Department’s 8th Division were singularly responsible for his rescue), it is no surprise that so many of Shiori’s scenes are either so charming or forceful.</div>
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<strong>Disc:</strong>
The film itself presents well, though audio is only two-channel Dolby stereo. While the Japanese editions come with interviews, making-of featurettes and a television special, this no-frills D.V.D. released in the U.K. by anime specialist M.V.M. Entertainment comes unadorned. Given that the film was made with the assistance of both the Tokyo Fire Department (members of the 8th Division) and the Japan Meteorological Agency a few “new” bases could well have been covered here. Granted, the brace of extras accompanying its Japanese cousin appear insubstantial, but the inclusion of context setting extras for British audiences would have been welcome. Artwork does at least reflect adequately the film’s chief concern with grumpy men of conviction.<br />
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<i>This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.</i>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">4 January, 2011</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-64082203458169915972011-09-29T16:03:00.007+01:002018-09-05T17:41:02.818+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM | <strong>THE REEF</strong> | DIRECTOR | <strong>ANDREW TRAUCKI</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Eyes watching horror and calculated assaults in, <br />Andrew Traucki’s <i>The Reef</i> (2010)</strong></span></span>
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In horror cinema the appetite for explicit, punishing and phantasmagoric deaths is insatiable. At the Frightfest screening of <em>Final Destination 5</em> (Steven Quale, 2011, USA) this year, the artless nature of gymnast Candice Hooper’s (Ellen Wroe) death was so breathtaking, so lingeringly unashamedly brazen, that we very nearly gave this one sequence a standing ovation in the aisles (it received enthusiastic applause instead). By the time Miles Fisher’s Peter decides much later on in the film to intervene in the <em>Final Destination </em>schema (he fixes, in the third and dullest act, to kill off a survivor in order to save himself), not one Frightfest attendee in Cinema 1 that night wasn’t wishing for a return to the Fischli & Weissian chain-reaction of death that made Candice’s earlier comeuppance so memorable. Her death scene is up on YouTube with a three hundred thousand view count and rising. This fetishistic adulation of the “death spectacle” (very much the USP of the <em>Destination </em>series) is largely absent from <em>The Reef</em> (2010, Australia), Andrew Traucki’s low-budget horror film about a group of stranded vacationers who are stalked by a Great White as they navigate the Coral Sea Islands. This absence allows for a more interesting cinematic world. The gags may be staler (this is the most humourless Australian thriller I think I’ve seen in years), but Traucki makes particularly effective use of the first-person camera, exploring the potentialities of objective and subjective camera work in underwater photography. Our sense of fear, curiosity and alarm derives in great part from this point-of-view structure: like all slasher films, <em>The Reef </em>teases us, it makes us look, and then it hurts us. So in addition to our common hunger for the death spectacle, there is then the simple fact that we pay good money to experience an assault of sorts on ourselves; the pleasure of surviving unscathed, though deeply shaken, simultaneously liberates and excites us.<br />
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In some respects <em>The Reef </em>is a film about our compulsion to look at and register horror. Carol Clover (1992), who’s written extensively on horror cinema and particularly on our spectatorial need to see horror films, uses the phrase “eyes watching horror.” Her phrasing can and does encompass many eyes of horror: the victim’s eye looking in at horror, an innocent who sees telepathically the harm done to others, the eye of the killer itself, the “memory eye” which visualises people or events otherwise lost in the past, and not least the spectatorial eye which is assaulted by horror over and over (from Hitchcock and Powell to Hooper and Craven, through even to Gens and Laugier). Those familiar with both the fatalistic desire of protagonist Heather Donahue to capture the eponymous entity of <em>The Blair Witch Project </em>(Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999, USA) on film and with the cartoonish assault which floors her in the final reel will recognise in <em>The Reef </em>similar strategies at play, though clearly reformulated to achieve different ends. In <em>The Blair Witch</em>, for instance, the many “incidents” captured by the documentary filmmakers on handheld cameras in the dead of night are memorable for being disorienting but also for containing absolutely nothing—as Mallin (2001) states: the film “makes the fact of <em>not </em>seeing the proof of a malevolent otherworldly presence.” Mallin adds that “the story is about the need to complete the story.” As consumers of narrative, we search for information and certitude—<em>our </em>personal “project” as an audience therefore is to become active participants and to “see” in the footage of <em>The Blair Witch Project</em> that which the documentary filmmakers ultimately failed to see and fully grasp for themselves. In <em>The Reef</em>, more than simply involving us in the scene, first-person cinematography is used repeatedly to train our spectatorial eye to similarly drop its guard—to borrow terminology used by Cumbow (1990), it <em>imposes a way of seeing, a vision, on the audience,</em> a vision that is not necessarily adversarial but which plays to and plays on our compulsion to look. Inevitably, as the film moves on, <em>we </em>begin to search for the thing that now hunts us.<br />
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Two things occur from the outset. Firstly, <em>The Reef </em>owes much to its unique geographic location. Set in the Coral Sea off the coast of Queensland, the film traces the plight of four victims—Luke (Damian Walshe-Howling) and Kate (Zoe Naylor), and Matt (Gyton Grantley) and Suzie (Adrienne Pickering)—as they use small sections of the Great Barrier Reef to escape the dangers of the open ocean. Filmed almost entirely offshore and in ubiquitous light, Daniel Ardilley’s camera moves effortlessly from the pastel-blues and off-white glare of the surface to the clear warm waters of the reef and the ominous voids that appear beyond its magnificent sections of coral. So effective is the approach that the whole endeavour feels like an underwater movie. It becomes quite clear early on that <em>The Reef </em>offers audiences of popular thrillers, especially those in the west, respite from the <em>animated </em>environments that plague the screen victims of <em>Open Water </em>(Chris Kentis, 2003, USA) and <em>Adrift </em>(Hans Horn, 2006, Germany). The ocean is idyllic, the characters bathed in sunlight, the currents aid their survival plan, and errant objects that appear on the surface are visible at much greater distances. In this environment, not only can we see telltale signs of danger adequately from far away, we also see adequately enough <em>below </em>the surface (rarely have the two approaches been coupled competently in Hollywood film). This produces an uncanny affect. One could argue that the film channels and exorcises Joseph Sargent’s <em>Jaws the Revenge </em>(1987, USA)—the third sequel in the Universal franchise—for the fact that Traucki’s staging of the drama recalls the Ellen Brody character’s nightmarish vision of herself swimming alone in crystal waters, a vision which betrays a fatalistic longing to return to the ocean despite her overt fears. When we dream we are not so much in control of our bodies as watching our bodies forcefully rebel; common-sense takes a walk, and reality dawns on us cuttingly fast. This dream-logic marries well with <em>The Reef</em>’s fantastic environments: human rationality, emotional reasoning and decision-making at the non-conscious level all figure large in the film. A sequence in which Matt breaks away from the tightly-grouped party of survivors in order to retrieve a stray kickboard is a sound example of bodily rebellion: the scene works cheerfully as suspense, but we instantly write off Matt’s chances because his actions are foolhardy, no one in their right mind would ever attempt the same thing. Yet Matt’s compulsion to swim for the kickboard overtakes him, primordial feelings—I have a body, it must be protected—kick in. Another immersive set-piece—in which Luke and Kate, still far from making landfall, make it to several coral clusters that break the surface of the water—plays well too, but once again seems more in keeping with our expectations concerning fantasy and dream-logic. The conceit is so effective allegorically, and in addition it plays so well on primordial feelings (during, and especially in the hours after the film), that the entire sequence delivers an authentic experience for us as viewers—in Todd McGowan’s (2007) words (used about a different film but helpful here too) it keeps <em>us in the attitude of questioning</em>. With its survival theme and fantasmatic set-pieces set in colourful environments, <em>The Reef </em>feels like a wish-fulfilment narrative dreamt up by an anxious, and fevered, and <em>desiring </em>Luke.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Stranded: Kate (Zoe Naylor), Luke (Damian Walshe-Howling), Suzie (Adrienne Pickering) and Matt (Gyton Grantley)<br /> consider their options, while Warren (Kieran Darcy-Smith) looks on in <i>The Reef</i> (2010)</span></span><br />
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The second point to make concerns the first-person camera. Thankfully we’re spared in this scenario anything quite so roundly stupid as a Jawsian camera—mounted behind the dorsal fin in Jeannot Szwarc’s not-terrible sequel <em>Jaws 2 </em>(1978, USA); sharing the nodding, bobbing shark’s-eye-view in <em>Jaws: The Revenge</em>; or matter-of-factly conjuring shark-vision through a goldfish bowl in Renny Harlin’s godawful <em>Deep Blue Sea </em>(1999, USA). However, Traucki uses unusually long takes of the stalking shark, pieced together from footage shot with underwater cameras from the safety of a cage and a boat respectively, in order to create the illusion of the first-person subjective camera. This footage, remastered, edited, and digitally cleaned, becomes everything that Luke sees underwater through his goggles, or at the very least it privileges an omniscient film-world camera that captures the same things Luke sees. The film makes good use of this device to generate tension—it is Luke who monitors the shark as it circles the defenceless group and only Luke; the others remain none the wiser. But more than a gimmick, the first-person camera is used over and over again. This makes clear two things: that the filmmakers aim for a verisimilitude which is difficult to attain (particularly for low-budget productions) without recourse to authentic underwater footage of real sharks; and secondly, that the first-person camera becomes effectively the reactive gaze of slasher horror cinema—it performs the same job as Pablo’s (Pablo Rosso) infrared camera in the memorable closing moments of <em>[Rec.]</em> (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007, Spain), as Heather and Josh’s cameras in <em>The Blair Witch Project</em>.
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What excites me about this approach is that the film affords us, albeit in edited form, several opportunities to observe characteristically small changes in the Great White’s threat display. The sharks (we use here the plural because the film-shark is of course represented by many different Whites) move slowly from non-aggressive posturing into a subtly more pronounced display advertising at first bulk and body length, and then jaw size and gape. Of course, Traucki’s footage of the shark circling its prey still provides a distortion—a White which has been drawn to a fish carcass by human agency via chumming moves in on its prey <em>very </em>differently to an unmonitored White that is provoked by something far larger, less familiar, and potentially more dangerous than itself, like a swimmer—therefore, we are still watching an imaginary. The available footage is configured and manipulated for fantasy cinema, thus the shark’s behaviour is still misrepresented. But considering we’re in an age where Hollywood productions (and news organisations) can barely do a thing with Whites, Makos or even Reef Sharks beyond recapitulating the same tired representational strategies employed by Steven Spielberg thirty-six years ago, this sense of a half-turn towards real-world experience and real-world behaviour does at least offer us, as engaged audiences, possibilities for making sense of the cinematic White shark in less mercurial ways. <br />
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Thus bringing us to the importance of looking. In <em>The Reef</em>, looking is about as helpful as screaming and kicking. Luke lowers his head into the water compulsively, both to see if the threat is still real and to see from where the next attack is coming, but he gleans no useful information by doing this (he can’t help the others because the shark is unpredictable, fast and, in its circling patterns, mildly hypnotic); all he <em>can </em>do is look. Why, then, does Traucki make him look so often? We, on the other hand, scrutinise the frame and anticipate the assault because we <em>need </em>to see, it is part and parcel of our masochistic (to cite Clover again) <em>investment in pain</em>. We do so not out of curiosity, but of necessity. The most interesting aspect of <em>The Reef </em>for me concerned the nature of this desire to look. On the one hand, the subjective camera is very clearly a device which can be manipulated by filmmakers (in this case Traucki) to create a desired effect: to heighten suspense, to collapse the visible distance between the shark and its prey, or to launch a visual attack on an audience. Being on the receiving end, we either overlook this system of production in order to preserve the illusion of an autonomous world, or we suppress our direct involvement altogether and remain detached. On the other hand, the very cinematic image generated by the subjective camera takes on and brings into being a variety of meanings/ideas which move cinema beyond the technical aspects of its construction. On this website, we’re mainly concerned with the latter. This idea that cinematic images in some way convey or hold consciousness, or thought, inspires many of the responses on these pages. In the end, <em>The Reef </em>is possibly no different from a film like <em>Peeping Tom </em>(Michael Powell, 1960, UK), which brings the protagonist Mark’s victims face to face with their own deaths, but which critically trades on Mark’s own masochistic identification with their suffering. Traucki’s film turns on a similar pleasure: the very human compulsion to see with our own eyes the horror which is about to befall us.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">29 September, 2011</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-75117362186984717072011-04-13T01:34:00.022+01:002018-09-05T17:39:27.134+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">EVENT | <strong>2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY LIVE</strong> | VENUE | <strong>ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong><i>2001: A Space Odyssey Live</i> concert<br />Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre<br />(7 April 2011 performance)</strong></span></span></div>
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The Royal Albert Hall’s <em>Films With Live Orchestra</em> series — in which an orchestra provides full accompaniment to a film that has been specially prepared with an effects and dialogue only soundtrack — follows a predictable model: watchable blockbuster productions with strong intergenerational appeal. The prominence of science-fiction and fantasy-adventure films isn’t unusual given that so many of these superblockbuster films (already huge audience favourites) appeal to a nostalgic fondness across the board for old-fashioned family entertainment. The screenings of recent years illustrate this. In 2010, over two warm evenings in late September, the final installment of Peter Jackson’s <em>The Lord of the Rings </em>trilogy <em>The Return of the King</em> (2003) was screened with accompaniment by the London Philharmonic (this concluded a small cycle of one-off annual events which began in 2009 with <em>The Fellowship of the Ring</em>); this June, the R.P.O. continue their <em>Film Music Gala</em> with a farrago of greatest-hits cues taken from the populist works of John Williams (<em>Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter</em>), Hans Zimmer (<em>Gladiator</em>) and in collaboration Klaus Badelt (<em>Pirates of the Caribbean</em>), Howard Shore (<em>The Lord of the Rings</em>), and James Horner (<em>Avatar</em>); and in October, Germany’s N.D.R. Radio Philharmonic perform Don Davis’ score for <em>The Matrix</em> (<em>The Matrix Live</em>, 23 October 2011), though I’m skeptical that even live accompaniment can scale the iconographic and immediately more gratifying sounds of the Propellerheads, Rage Against the Machine and Rob D. Classical musicians may finally differ on the artistic validity of these “special presentations,” and anyone who shares my interest in the performances of key orchestra players will know that a few onstage can at times appear thoroughly underwhelmed by such affairs, some of them apparently dozing; but these projects, often mammoth undertakings requiring the assistance of the releasing studio to produce special prints, seem to delight us all and the best-remembered events of recent years have to my mind been at the Albert Hall.<br />
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While the setting for the L.P.O.’s performance of <em>The Lord of the Rings</em> was the world of mostly middle-aged, middlebrow, quiescent out-of-towners, <em>2001: A Space Odyssey </em>(1968) — which premiered at Festival Hall twelve months ago on June 25 and plays here again now — opened against a clamorous but friendly backdrop, the village hall atmosphere and turbulent swell of the crowds on the sun-scorched Southbank in sharp contrast to the often sobering Friday night dash for taxis further west on the gloomy Kensington Road.<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnQX7RV7Ef3CoaobnAGFMtKN4bQZ2tfsV_nNNJRAdq1A3VX3Pe2okhYhPvIXmzsW7H5EPtr-WAsoxDWrpG2LiZ03Xj2vjNbnvYHu9EJh1kWXWVJtBlT3PMJzLZAod_wabBUvWVCpNEMjBT/s1600/2001-A-Space-Odyssey.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Dr Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) in Stanley Kubrick’s <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i> (1968)</span></span><br />
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In proof of the fact that things are indeed done differently here, patrons kicked over wine cups and doors clattered mid-performance, at times catching the attention of players onstage. Yes, things are different here. In the Albert Hall I recall the one light source of real note came from the conductor’s video monitor in the form of a series of coloured streamers and punches — visual aids which helped the conductor, on that occasion Ludwig Wicki, to keep tempo with the scenes (this was barely a distraction, so low beneath the projected image that it sank into darkness, but it is one of the requirements nonetheless of conducting to picture). By contrast in Festival Hall, the resolution of the projected image was thinned out by the performers’ illuminated music stands, and much later during two of the film’s more intense sequences the Philharmonia settled back into a new darkness, which arrived from nowhere, for long (and completely natural) stretches of inactivity. What emerged was a conundrum. Was the film important? Was the stage important? Whether or not one attends these events to watch the film for all its subtle musical shades and powerful imagery — or alternatively the Philharmonia if one is concerned wholly with technique — is moot if aspects of the experience are determined beforehand by event organisers. We were to conceive of this event as neither cinema nor orchestration but instead something which engenders a new experience, one that precluded us all reclining in our chairs with an iPad in our hands and whistling for burgers. In this respect, the venue itself decided what it needed to give of two simultaneously running performances: orchestra over film, diegetic sound over choir, then film image over orchestral nothing. In other words, the concept of <em>A Space Odyssey Live </em>became simply, and collectively, “the event” and not as we’d expected “the film.”
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All attention, therefore, went away from the screen and immediately on to the players. But this in itself was thoroughly worthwhile. The stand-out artist was Maya Iwabuchi. As principal of the first violin section and orchestra leader, Iwabuchi readied the orchestra in preparation for the film’s two overtures and led with a performance of quiet intensity, exhibiting overall a relaxed and intimate style that was technically compelling and continually encouraged (as well as rewarded) closer inspection; it was sometimes just as much fun to observe others keeping time with her (take for example Fiona Cornall in the second), as it was just to admire Iwabuchi’s painterly mannerisms and technique. Being seated not two rows away and positioned immediately in front of her as I was, it was some delight (at least to my untrained ears) to be able to pick out her lead from, say, the also excellent Imogen East or Choo Soong who were playing slightly to her left. Karen Stephenson (cello number two) was also an enjoyable presence onstage, as was Samantha Reagan and Jan Regulski of the second violins.<br />
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The Philharmonia Voices surprised us all, I think, with their portrayal of Ligeti’s mindfuck <em>Requiem</em> — I suspect there was nothing experimental about their performance, it was a faultless rendition, but in the flesh this cacophony of quivering voices from both sides of the stage, de Ridder delicately teasing out one layer from beneath the other, the requiem building until the female choir came to rest and the mad pitches of the male voices withered away into ringing silence, was enough to tip any drunk over the edge. Total heebie-jeebies. Characteristically audacious, Kubrick’s use of Johann Strauss’ <em>Blue Danube </em>waltz in the docking of the Orion spacecraft sequence is always delightful and the Philharmonia were outstanding on both occasions of its use here. Finally, when the third caption appeared (“Jupiter Mission: Eighteen Months Later”) and the adagio from Aram Khachaturian’s <em>Gayaneh </em>ballet suite began, many in the room, including myself, seemed to tense. A mix of dislocation, lyricism and absolute yearning, the adagio reinforced the notion of the “space odyssey” of the film’s title (as Peter Krämer puts it “a steady process of separation”) — this exploration, this sense, of what it means to be a lone traveller in a desolate landscape.<br />
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So there was no denying the emotional effects and the instrumental force of the music, nor the brilliance of Iwabuchi and de Ridder’s (among others) performances. But although the Southbank Centre was good enough to partner with the B.F.I. and studio Warner Bros. on this one (with funding from the Royal Society), its understanding of “the event” as another real-world, real-life experience meant that the film sat alongside the orchestration, where in fairness I felt the orchestration should support and inform our experience, our feeling, primarily of the film. Still, I will always, always remember that wonderful opening performance. Back in 1968, audiences would have found their places in the auditorium as György Ligeti’s <em>Atmospheres </em>played from behind a screen, curtains drawn — but we were already seated, the conductor André de Ridder also already introduced, and everyone in attendance was busily awaiting the triumphant, space-filling fanfare of Richard Strauss’ <em>Thus Spake Zarathustra </em>and the sight of that piercing sun rise above Earth and Moon. The overture at an end we allowed ourselves a moment of relaxation to tune out the environment; then it began: the leisurely Nature theme, played three times with horns, the metronomic pounding of the kettledrums, then full-on orchestration, the instrumental symphonic force of the piece cutting right into us (as Kubrick once said, “short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness”), arriving finally at that incredible C major chord sustained as the orchestra came to rest. Oh yes, this was close to an unmitigated triumph.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">12 April, 2011</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-11083874537216443462011-01-29T19:46:00.018+00:002018-09-14T11:50:22.699+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">EVENT <strong>THE SOCIAL NETWORK + AARON SORKIN Q & A</strong> VENUE<strong> THE B.F.I. SOUTHBANK</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong><i>The Social Network</i> (2010)<br /> BFI interview with Aaron Sorkin, 20 January 2011</strong></span></span><br />
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I have some reservations about <em>The Social Network</em>. Not in soundtrack terms, the score very <em>definitely </em>owned 2010, so no argument there; just, not the screenplay. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable (read: a twat): the third act is a rooster tail of wrap-ups which knock off every character except Zuckerberg in ways the previous acts don’t earn; some of the characterisation I squarely couldn’t give a rat’s ass for; and a lot of the Palo Alto stuff (the “Was that a parable?” / “This is our time” scene notwithstanding, because it’s a knockout) <em>does </em>read like TV. So, no, the screenplay isn’t quite of a par with Chayefsky. And to claim as Sorkin has that the story—the founding of Facebook and the testimonies of the chief complainants who filed lawsuits against its C.E.O.—would be of interest to Shakespeare or *blink* Aeschylus is, well, you decide if we should lay the smack down on him for that one.
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5567726388377715906" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrGRZE0V46cufztag8GZhXCJKl1VwA-FWWo2mpnxX5DkIdtbhCY19Wl4S2dRQiczsjRel3m8mKbIRrItvHvSJDh3ppJnThOmMYI7BrJedV0ubAYhObAh9ZBJaeLTEF-DyuedvFQZJCLoep/s1600/Sorkin-Aaron.png" style="cursor: hand; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" /></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>The above does at least explain why it made little sense to me that The Script Factory (a development house which for fifteen years has offered basic training for prospective screenwriters in Western Europe) was co-presenting the Q & A—in its structuring and presentation this was your archetypal celebrity interview and not quite a screenwriting brainstorm, a round of appropriate and familiar questions therefore that steered around the topic of writing, process and tasking (so it was more of a “this <em>is </em>a wordy script isn’t it?” party than an “about these compromises with the Zuckerberg/Sean Parker/Narendra/Winklevoss/Christy Lee characters, tell me more” deal); on the other hand, none of that explains in the end why I enjoyed the whole darn evening so much at the B.F.I. <br />
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For one, Sorkin is an authoritative voice whenever he’s nervous (his admission), so he’s well-rehearsed, which means his comments are always adroit and on point, which also means that he is basically repeating everything you’ve heard on Wittertainment or seen on <em>Collider </em>or <em>Wmag</em>, making this literally the <em>same </em>interview, but okay, fine; secondly, Francine Stock, always a fine master of ceremonies, made several good enquiries, placing the film in the context of Zuckerberg’s relationship with Erica, acknowledging multiple logics at work in the Hollywood industry, and underscoring the disruptive power of the film’s opening scene, a sequence which cuts right through the commonplace routines of cinema spectatorship (to which the catchy response, “[opening] scenes which require you to start running to catch up with the movie … are good”); thirdly, <em>The Social Network </em>ends on “Baby You’re A Rich a Man,” which pretty much puts me in a good mood for anything; and perhaps most welcome of all, Sorkin is a fun, sharp, and endearing speaker.</td></tr>
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In the space of forty minutes he paid lip service to Seurat (he claimed that between Seurat's distinctive mode of French Post-Impressionism and modern storytelling there are conceptually few barriers), Peter Shaffer, his <em>Equus </em>and <em>Amadeus </em>specifically, <em>The Queen </em>(Stephen Frears, 2006, France/U.K.) screenwriter Peter Morgan, journalist George Crile, cellist/virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma, and the Hollywood satire <em>Entourage</em>; he joked about the development executive’s prerogative as opposed to the writer’s and hence the commercial imperatives of Hollywood, lampooning a fantasy scenario in which notes are returned to him requesting a “scene of Mark saving a drowning child” or “Mark when he’s twelve years old being stuffed into his locker” (you know, for the sake of empathy); he described himself as an “outsider, shy and awkward in social situations,” and believes that modern celebrity culture is “fundamentally wrong and bad for us, [turning] us into meaner people.”<br />
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In his digressions a note or two on the state of package production in today’s conglomerated industry stimulated some curiosity: for one, both Sony and Random House appear to have mobilised behind <em>The Social Network </em>and Mezrich’s <em>The Accidental Billionaires—The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal</em> with some force, cognisant of the fact that neither are particularly timeless entities. Towards the end of the evening, Sorkin seemed genuinely upbeat about Sony’s future with Zuckerberg, pointing out that the connections his screenplay makes with the man are reasonable, and observing that, “you’re not gonna play it fast and loose with people’s lives.” Finally he returned to the idea of false light and defamation in cinematic works of fiction. “If [as a writer] your moral compass is broken for some reason,” he mused, “there is the Sony legal department to help you out. This script is vetted by a legal team who could not fit inside this theatre. We’re talking about a group of people who have demonstrated they’re not opposed to suing anyone and who have the resources to spend you to death. If I had said something that was untrue and defamatory you would know it because Mark Zuckerberg would own Sony right now.” Which isn't ... wholly accurate. As several entertainment lawyers have stated on their own websites, deposing Mark Zuckerberg again today could potentially cause more damage than either Sorkin and Fincher's film, or Mezrich's book. Still, it's a fun note to end on.
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">21 January, 2011</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-44408759399232145362011-01-10T19:55:00.008+00:002018-09-05T15:37:43.850+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM <strong>127 HOURS</strong> DIRECTOR <strong>DANNY BOYLE</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Danny Boyle’s <i>127 Hours</i> (2010)<br />‘Every Second Counts’</strong></span></span><br />
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“I’m a big believer that we are all bound together,” begins Danny Boyle, his tentative response to an audience question at last night’s Q & A at the B.F.I. Southbank. “Not in a hippie way, but it’s why we live in cities, why we don’t go and live in monkish isolation, and I believe those forces … connect and protect us all.” In the humble auditorium of N.F.T.1, the reverence generally accorded to Boyle as one of the finest British filmmakers of the last quarter century held firm. His latest project, <em>127 Hours</em>, reworks canyoneer Aron Ralston’s world famous story of self-rescue in the Utah desert with a spin that points up not just the director’s enthusiasm for playing with form and style, but his own personal alacrity. I’ve seen Boyle a couple of times at these events, and in each he has suited the occasion, flattening out any prudish British reserve which hangs over in his audience after a screening, and with confidence involving one and all in the general conversation. Joined by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy and producer Christian Colson, he discussed <em>127 Hours’ </em>strong social and to a lesser degree political themes, his collaboration with Indian musician A. R. Rahman, and tantalisingly his belief that camera operation as a skill is more critical than lighting in the service of meaning. Typically for Boyle, whereas cinematographic lighting (akin to a symbolic act) produces one effect in the filmgoer, the camera’s function is to probe, and to question, and to respond with an actor; in fashioning a cinema that is “obsessive” and so wedded to human experience almost in terms of physical proximity he aims to capture some of the mechanisms of thought and perhaps the spontaneity of feeling.<br />
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His film, opening in Aron’s apartment but set almost exclusively thereafter in the dreaded Canyonlands National Park, begins with a slideshow of images. Marathon runners baking in the sun, a packed thousand-seater stadium, crowded escalators, and commuters filing onto already teeming subways; the film keeps at hand these and other unbearable public scenarios as references for civilisation and humanity, civilisation as a comfortably remote army of bodies, the throng which we all struggle to get out from under. Meanwhile, in a foreshadowing of what’s to come the protagonist hastily fills his water bottle at the kitchen sink while Free Blood sing “Never Hear Surf Music Again” on the soundtrack. So begins Danny Boyle’s biographical misadventure, which lays bare the extent of Aron Ralston’s five-day ordeal in the isolated Blue John canyon, starved, dehydrated, and pinned to the wall by an immovable 800lb boulder. As the weekend passes, Aron’s many escape attempts fail, he aborts one amputation, and his psychological condition worsens. Using a digital camera, he films his deterioration in a series of daily recordings which become increasingly apologetic. Heartbroken and his supplies depleted, Aron finally accepts his fate. On his fifth day, suffering from an intense fever as well as frequent prophetic hallucinations, he amputates his arm below the elbow in a surgical operation which lasts a little under an hour. Weakened from the stresses of his ordeal, he fashions a makeshift sling for his arm, crawls out of the canyon, rappels down a 60-foot wall, and hikes five miles through the desert until he's spotted. In the company of three fellow hikers he issues a personal plea for help, and is flown by helicopter to Allen Memorial Hospital.<br />
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By Boyle’s own frank admission, James Franco’s Aron is “a bit of a tosser.” He finds bliss in silence and emptiness, goes out of his way in fact to engage with it, then runs roughshod over the Canyonlands terrain by cycle and on foot, brain and heart we presume dulled to the aesthetic pleasures both of freedom and adventure; his brain is instead caught up in the sensory overload of physical adventure and (so the diegesis infers) the patterns of musical experience stirred by the pounding in his earphones. The setting is wonderful, the light above all incredible, but its enchantments, though clearly once within his comprehension, seem secondary to the pursuits that amuse/awaken him; he may well have fled the city but operates still on its highly reflexive level, organising data, scheduling his runs, substituting city noise for mp3s. The division of the screen into a split-panel frame spells out this message (after enough repetition of this technique the multi-purpose frame assumes the characteristics of a digital interface, like a screen displaying only open web browsers, each one recycling and streaming relevant information for an over-consumptive mind); but it also distorts the horizontal photographic image, it thins out the landscape, coercing our eye into tracing something that is, for a while, idiosyncratic and behavioural.<br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166890439178338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpV7poV1ovTWzr-ioBiR_ZscKhsW26Y3MUq2T1bei774mXy_A0kWY-RKOBeIBfYav8J7twMT7MF17Y9-reNDbI1kRBDIYZ4Oc_tV2gKwlMCaMcxFAlJxll7OcVRRwMPONbioWsUwJlf5tH/s1600/127-Hours.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /> </td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>With this Boyle illuminates a point: frivolity, mischief, arrogance, self-interest are pure character. That arrogance is an American speciality particularly is a little unhelpful and old-fashioned as a viewpoint, but it is one that Boyle has certainly considered and probably welcomes in any commentary. His personal suggestion that Aron’s story is quintessentially American, and Aron the quintessential American, is on the other hand a right and an earnest point but one that’s hard to warm to. Boyle sees in Aron’s story an allegory for U.S. foreign policy, and his thesis is that the film highlights the danger of a global superpower turning its back on collaboration to enforce more fiercely a policy of bourgeois individualism/egotism. His comment at the previous evening’s Q & A that “It’s only when America embraces the whole world, when it sees outside [its own borders] that it’s a magnificent country—as it is, as it can be,” sounds like a well rehearsed line, and although the linking of his argument to the current “showdown” in the U.S. between the Republicans, backed by Tea Party drones, and the Democrats amused both the panel and audience, the point was left respectfully hanging.<br />
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That the film works so well is due largely to the resourcefulness of Aron himself and an almost inscrutable performance from Franco. This is a hero (Boyle calls him a “superhero” in a nod to the press attention which Aron’s story garnered internationally) who can fashion a tourniquet from a hydration pack and rig his ropes and climbing gear to winch a boulder, but who has no idea how punishing and difficult life already is without either a support network, or (because he is lucky enough) some family, to look out for him. </td></tr>
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As Aron, sporting the same blue cap, crimson T-shirt and silver earphones familiar from the canyoneer’s own photographs, James Franco gives a real sense of how this man’s independence and confidence in himself is suddenly shot by the embarrassment of his mistake, the look of stranded relief in his eyes rarely betraying full despair in his most intimate scenes—only loss, of pride and of self-image. This is an excellent performance. Whenever scenes call for a personal address to camera (and there are many) the DeNiro-esque veneer (present in that supercilious stare) slips away, and a real sense of shared amusement with his (imagined) audience shines through. It just seems a pity Boyle’s film can’t adopt a more conciliatory, and hence settled, tone. Accepting that audience empathy with Aron’s predicament is very much a given from the outset, Beaufoy’s script (co-written with the director) leads to an appreciation of a banal “epiphany,” which authorises the self-amputation, via a collection of memory fragments: sentimental (and I felt unnecessary) distractions which overcompensate for the fixed setting and the story’s swing towards existentialism.
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Thus, the film becomes a skein of phantasms and illusions, memories and visions, a cat’s cradle almost for the seemingly endless games played on common reality by hallucination as Aron’s health deteriorates further. This descent into fantasy, illusion and delusion seems entirely consistent with the Boyle <em>oeuvre</em>; the real-time horror of Aron’s flash-flood fantasy, for instance, a pivotal sequence conjuring memories of an ex lover brought on by his sheer thirst for water, recalls the agony of Renton’s detoxification scene in <em>Trainspotting </em>(1996, UK), the tracing of Rana’s fingers over Aron’s skin as they lay in bed together just as powerful as the encroaching baby that looms over Renton’s deathbed. But whereas that film’s fantasy sequences take us to the savage depths of Renton’s subconscious, as do Richard’s hyperactive videogame hallucinations in <em>The Beach </em>(2000, USA/UK), in this Aron’s flights of fancy are allied to the things he envisages in a state of calm, reflection, detachment, etc.; they are closer in style and tone therefore to the closing dazzling moments of <em>Sunshine </em>(2007, UK/USA)—the single moment in fact <em>prior </em>to the unimaginable solar event, which that film selects (to quote Lessing in his <em>Laocoön: an Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry</em>) for “immutable permanence from art.” For a long time I held in my memory a lasting image of this sequence which was unlike anything I’ve seen since on repeat viewings of the film; unrealised onscreen, but acted on, extended, and completed in memory, it resembled the fleeting moment as described by Lessing. Like many works of contemporary Hollywood which offer a glimpse of what it must be like to move, at least photographically, closer towards the mind (and hence to our acts of memory), the visions and “episodes”-cum-epiphanies of <em>127 Hours </em>are strictly formal by comparison, comprising that is of slightly obvious common experiences (remembering a past event) shared via the traditional language of cinema. Though well observed and offering I imagine for some powerful emotional identification with Aron at his (spiritually) strongest point, the film’s recourse to warm, fluffy images offers disappointingly little support for Boyle’s stated aim which is to unlearn the laws and ideas associated with classical cinema by frequently testing genre models. He captures I think the timelessness of memory well, the abrupt and transient appearance of visions equally so—but in truth these comments and others like it are pleasantries which help us to move beyond or simply overlook the political challenge which Boyle has set himself. So I’m reminded of a passage from <em>The Alchemy of the Eye</em>, quoting Gilbert-Lecomte: “the Himalayas can appear in the stone of a ring, a train can turn around a man’s head, a posse in the Far West and the swell of the sea occur on a sleeper’s pillow … a drama is played out on a blackened fingernail.”<br />
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">7 January, 2011</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-84259851500992276062010-11-28T12:56:00.018+00:002018-09-05T15:40:56.690+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">EVENT <strong>THE LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2010</strong> VENUE <strong>O.W.E., APOLLO PICCADILLY, I.C.A.</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>The 5th London Korean Film Festival 2010,<br />Korean film back in the West End<br />(5-23 November)</strong></span></span><br />
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This year the London Korean Film Festival UK (LKFF) screened twenty-one films, hosted six Q&A sessions, held two filmmaker retrospectives, generated good publicity in the West End, and had few if any restrictions on admission at the point of purchase, making it easy for theatergoers to attend many of the screenings they wanted. Its only flaw was the shunting into the ICA’s ugly theater space and tiny screening room of a whole range of lauded and popular films. These included the erotic comedy <i>The Servant</i> (2010) from director Kim Dae-woo, the prison drama <i>Harmony</i> (2010) starring <i>Lost</i>’s Kim Yun-jin, revenge-horror <i>Bedevilled</i> (2010), and the mystery thrillers <i>Bestseller</i> (2010) and <i>Moss</i> (2010). Also in the ICA mix were four of the most anticipated LKFF films: Jang Hoon’s <i>Secret Reunion</i> (2010) starring Song Kang-ho, Im Sang-soo’s thriller <i>The Housemaid</i> (2010) with Jeon Do-yeon (plus Q&A), Joseon-dynasty actioner <i>Blades of Blood</i> (2010), and John H Lee’s Korean War film <i>71 into the Fire</i> (2010), which marks the 60th anniversary of the war. Lastly, the ICA hosted Tony Rayn’s ‘What is the future of Korean film?’ panel discussion with the filmmaker Jang Jin.<br />
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Top of many a fan’s list was Lee Jeong-beom’s <i>The Man From Nowhere</i> (2010), an action shoot-’em-up starring the Korean heartthrob Won Bin; and Kim Jee-woon’s “bloody vengeance” movie <i>I Saw the Devil</i> (2010) which the director describes dryly as “a love story about a man who is willing to do anything for the one he loves”. Both films helped to launch the festival at the Odeon West End: <i>The Man From Nowhere</i> on Friday 5 November with a director’s Q&A, <i>I Saw the Devil</i> on 6 November, also with director’s Q&A.
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I saw both and neither really struck a chord with originality, but such is the messy curatorial business of film selection. Lee’s <i>The Man From Nowhere</i> shared some common virtues with lesser known, social agenda films on the programme — via its commentary on human trafficking and organ harvesting — but Kim Jee-woon's <i>I Saw the Devil</i>, which stars two actors of charisma and great talent in Choi Min-sik and Lee Byung-hun, was a disappointment. This said, the prestige Kim lends the festival as one of the top directors in Korean cinema is absolutely indispensable, and his popularity here in the city probably far greater than he realises. Elsewhere, the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ effort to support and manage the bulk of the L.K.F.F.’s screenings was welcomed—its café/bar a decent place to catch up with others, the cinema reasonable enough to fit in Im Sang-soo’s Q & A—but the venue for the roundtable sucked: the theatre space was still set up for amdram, advertising stands came in late, and for good measure the seating was 1000 times worse than high school. But the topic—the future of the Korean film industry—was wholly prescient.</div>
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwoZK9Zh9AJ7KIljR8auhcWLYc3ygk2ZCZbseEvalQhj1xPxSiWgDA990ucHRXwJ-H6-jcRvwiAXdNghvpGD05k11oxPFaMQvC5H3tlsnp4pR6qXzVDTUmZui6wMJTO4_VgOD1areUCwPi/s1600/The-Man-From-Nowhere.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Cha Tae-sik (Won Bin) in Lee Jeong-beom’s <i>The Man From Nowhere</i> (2010)</span></span></div>
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In the last five years, the production of multi-purpose would-be blockbusters has bolstered commercial cinema, deepening anxieties regarding the promotion of domestic independent filmmakers and the sustainability of New Korean Cinema. Rayns, Simon Ward and mainstream filmmaker Jang Jin considered many aspects of the film business, including the present distribution system after the old lines collapsed, sources of financing for independents, and the merits of the Korean Film Council (K.O.F.I.C.)—a state-funded organisation which, for Jang at least, is having little success fostering artistic experimentation via its promotion, theatrical distribution and direct funding initiatives. In fairness, though, K.O.F.I.C. surely is about helping budding student filmmakers with short films and independents that can play internationally more than anything else? Bringing things back to the festival itself, Ward discussed the role of the Independent Cinema Office (I.C.O.) and particularly its association with K.O.F.I.C. and the Korean Cultural Centre in composing a viable film programme.<br />
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The addition of the Piccadilly Apollo on the list of venues showed the organisers’ ambition to enhance the L.K.F.F.’s image as a prestigious, cosmopolitan event. Consequently, crossing La Galleria Pall Mall to the mini-club atmosphere of the Apollo was some antidote to the I.C.A.: intelligent lighting system, relaxed lounge rooms, reflective surfaces, I’ll bet the place has a late night license too. For this opulent setting, the festival organisers mounted a Jang Jin retrospective. Jang’s visibility as a “pivotal voice” in Korean cinema (though amusingly he himself proposed “mysterious creature” as a more fitting description) is certainly less clear to audiences in the U.K.—particularly to those for whom Kim Ki-duk and Hong Sang-soo’s distinction has already been well confirmed—but his films, nonetheless, helped to differentiate this year’s festival from those of previous years, tactfully guiding our eye away from auteur showmen like Bong Joon-ho (2009) and Park Chan-wook (2007) if only to deposit us in the fairly mainstream realm of the black comedy, satirical thriller and the romcom. The exhibition featured <em>Guns & Talks </em>(2001), the sweetly comic <em>Someone Special </em>(2004), <em>Murder Take One </em>(a.k.a., <em>The Big Scene</em>, 2005) which screened at the L.K.F.F.’s inaugural launch four years ago, and <em>Good Morning President </em>(2009), a film which outgrossed Park Chan-wook’s <em>Thirst </em>at last year’s box office. In this, the festival’s reputation was well deserved, due to its close co-ordination of the four screenings with post-film Q & A sessions and film-specific introductions by the director.<br />
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Of this, however, there can be no doubt: the festival badly needs women. Oh, yes. See, I don’t mind attending the retrospectives, I dig the high-profile visits too, but between Jang, Kim, Im, Lee Jeong-beom, Ahn Jae-hoon, Simon Field, Simon Ward, Tony Rayns, Jonathan Ross and the South Korean ambassador popping in to wish us all the best, festival priorities are unreservedly edging out the girl guests in this equation. So this year’s spotlight category included a feature on leading ladies—the four films being <em>Harmony </em>(dir. Kang Dae-gyu, 2010), <em>The Servant</em> (dir. Kim Dae-woo, 2010), <em>Bedevilled </em>(dir. Jang Cheol-soo, 2010) which I think was screened earlier this summer at FrightFest, and the most relevant, <em>Paju </em>(dir. Park Chan-ok, 2009)—but to my knowledge Han Hye-jin, the co-director on the animated <em>Green Days </em>(co-dir. Ahn Jae-hoon, with whom Ahn runs Studio M.W.P.), was the only woman promoting Korean cinema this year. On the face of it, rare opportunities might have passed this Autumn to involve international star Kim Yoon-jin (<em>Harmony</em>) or the awesomely talented Jeon Do-yeon (<em>The Housemaid</em>), but as the press gambits for both films ended long ago (they screened in January and May respectively) nothing much was going to happen on that front. This has to change. If the L.K.F.F. is to continue revamping itself and consolidate its position alongside the London Film Festival as one of the finest film cultural events in this city—and it deserves its reputation—then perhaps it can turn to film actresses like, for instance, Yum Jung-ah and Bae Doo-na. As cultural ambassadors with interests that extend beyond cinema, both actresses would change the mindset of future festivalgoers. For the better.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">28 November, 2010</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-81438756907753019112010-11-15T12:14:00.011+00:002018-09-05T17:40:49.485+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM <strong>I SAW THE DEVIL</strong> DIRECTOR <strong>KIM JEE WOON</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Kim Jee-woon’s <i>I Saw the Devil</i> (2010)<br />‘Battle not with monsters’</strong></span></span><br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="446" data-original-width="350" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTj3TB8IcyRWMK1ROkr6StXrEa8rtu6bvex46Gw7Lcwnon-P4lhfLBy-54W5oL_gna3ITzc5XJ6iKK_CbvIDuIuFBKkoGlm-tlVpJftxX-Nzr-2ynW8aeH_KAyfxk_vgpwTeMZ26jKTItG/s1600/Untitled-26BGI.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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Noteworthy for being the first feature in which South Korean director Kim Jee-woon has no formal writing credit (and less so for the number of cuts — seven — which were made to appease the Korea Media Rating Board, a sensationalist story which is publicised anywhere the film plays internationally), <i>I Saw the Devil</i> is an undeniably engaging thriller, thanks in no small part to the slapstick mannerisms of lead actor Choi Min-sik and the streetwise populism of megastar Lee Byeong-heon. The film’s formidable pairing of internationally renowned stars, its relatively high profile crew including Lee Mo-gae (who also shot this year’s <i>Secret Reunion</i>, in addition to Kim’s <i>A Tale of Two Sisters</i> and <i>The Good The Bad and The Weird</i>) and Nam Na-young (who has edited mainstream works like <i>Castaway on the Moon, Insadong Scandal</i>, and <i>The Doll Master</i>), its spotless production values and big budget (the reported $6 million is extraordinary for a horror thriller) immediately suggest a multi-purpose event movie, a highly marketable package which its makers hope will capitalise on international territories and help rekindle industry fortunes in light of a poor 2009. <br />
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But if <em>I Saw the Devil</em> is indeed intended as a blockbuster then it’s a curious one with a far from expansive audience. The casting of Lee in the lead role of Kim Soo-hyeon is the only concession to a female demographic, while the presence of content that showcases violence, nudity, bloody gore, cannibalism and dismemberment is likely to appeal to a predominantly male adult audience (the film’s 18+ rating, which prohibits teenagers, severely limits its prospects at the box-office). Even in Korea, where it was distributed by Showbox, the marketing aestheticised the bloody conflict between the two stars, pairing them off in tight smoky close-ups, and barely noting the presence of other cast members. Crucially, <em>I Saw the Devil </em>premiered this August in Korea one week after its biggest rival, Lee Jeong-beom’s <em>The Man From Nowhere</em>, and it has not measured at all well since in aesthetic, critical or financial terms — this despite the reappearance of its major star (Choi Min-sik) after a five year screen absence.
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf_AcdvJRMo0ZZc-KNGOnIopL5bXe14mlsa_7gwPF-MLXX4UxqE4LUx6n_AVKKNbHiPLYr1x-TyphpKxCRTnTcUjhS-em4C3Kz6HN1pcEITfTlPgFyPmu6TE6o_cVOVFJKWIvqHo14Lnyt/s1600/I-Saw-the-Devil-02.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Motivated by a need to punish the man who murdered his fiancée and then desecrated her body,<br /> Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee Byeong-heon) embarks on a ruthless campaign of vigilantism which transforms him ultimately into the object of his own obsessive rage</span></span><br />
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<i>I Saw the Devil</i> opens with the discovery by the roadside of a stranded car and a vicious assault on its sole occupant, Joo-yeon (Oh San-ha). Her assailant, Kyeong-cheol (Choi), snatches her body from the scene and returns her to his lair where she is summarily executed, dismembered and the body parts deposited by a culvert shortly thereafter. However, it turns out that Joo-yeon’s fiancé Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee) is a highly skilled and well-regarded federal agent; with the Chief’s unspoken blessing, Soo-hyeon vows to hunt down the culprit and seek violent revenge against him. Thus his reason for tracking Kyeong-cheol is already a spurious one: convinced that Joo-yeon’s execution was itself a meaningless and predatory act, he requires neither an explanation nor necessarily a confession from the man responsible; he instead administers his own punishment, matching brute force with brute force. When Soo-hyeon finally overcomes his prey in the film’s key setpiece (a much publicised night sequence shot in a series of greenhouses), he tags Kyeong-cheol with a sensor, breaks one of his hands, and then leaves him in his own burial plot, ostensibly to die but in truth to recover. It is only after he has fully regained his composure and been tempted to assault another that Soo-hyeon next intervenes, a decision, partly judicious, which endows his vengeance-driven acts of violence with a peculiar moral quality.<br />
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On this very theme, Park Hoon-jung’s script plays fast and loose with an assortment of morally superior and inferior characters. On the one hand are those innocents who are overpowered by unimaginable evil, like Soo-hyeon and Joo-yeon, who are in many ways the contented couple happy with their lot before Kyeong-cheol tears them apart; in addition, there are Soo-hyeon’s father-in-law, ex-Squad Chief Jang (Jeon Gook-hwan), and his sister-in-law Se-yeon (Kim Yoon-seo), both virtuous people who implore him not to take revenge and risk throwing the family further into turmoil; and Han Song-I (Yoon Chae-yeong), a nurse working in the practice of the old doctor (Kim Jae-geon) who treats Kyeong-cheol after his first showdown with Soo-yeon. Fleshing out the pathological element of the film are the first two suspects on Soo hyeon’s hit list, Jjang-goo (Yoon Byeong-hee) and the unnamed cyclist (Kil Geum-seong); two taxi burglars (Lee Seol-goo and Jeong Mi-nam) who opportunistically prey on hitchhikers in the night; Kyeong-cheol’s old buddy Tae-joo (Choi Moo-seong), a cannibal whose pathology is never really explained (though he fits the cinematic tradition of the now obsolete slaughterhouse worker); and Tae-joo’s insane accomplice Se-jeong (Kim In-seo). As this short list demonstrates, <em>I Saw the Devil </em>is acute in presenting a range of virtues and vices for a distinct range of character types, not individuals. This places added pressure on actor Lee Byeong-heon who must work doubly hard to convey his character’s transformation from devastated victim to haunted perpetrator through several key exchanges with his animalistic adversary. For his part, Choi seems to be in his element (though no way near his best), trumping Robert De Niro’s sweaty Max Cady from <em>Cape Fear </em>(dir. Martin Scorsese, 1991) with a technically brilliant performance which sees him meting out remorseless forms of punishment in one scene and in the next tumbling from his car like a startled Foghorn Leghorn.</div>
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540585845378172002" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVxnL_Q8YML5kGlmAinHtXllCQiofXCAOuWlgZMDANck90FakXJXSGyBfXL2j9QD6fybTksTEjlMZiY-FQC4ylK-sIGVDEhgUw1NsO8OMs658ZAvpVUh-ht8_-mIp_NJKW8Z2ZgImhOtv4/s1600/I-Saw-the-Devil.png" style="cursor: hand; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" /></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td></td><td>Since Choi’s Kyeong-cheol is classified as irredeemably psychotic from the outset, tension in the picture can only and does ultimately stem from those vengeful cinematic moments which appear to codify Soo-hyeon, the “good” man in this equation, as psychotic — at least in the tradition of these typically “Korean” / Shakespearean serial-killer films. It therefore follows a line of thrillers, procedurals and horrors — <em>Nowhere to Hide</em> (dir. Lee Myung-se, 1999), Park’s <em>Vengeance </em>trilogy (2002/2003/ 2005), <em>A Bittersweet Life </em>(dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2005), <em>A Bloody Aria </em>(dir. Won Shin-yeon, 2006), <em>Beautiful Sunday</em> (dir. Jin Kwang-gyo, 2007), <em>The Chaser </em>(dir. Na Hong-jin, 2008), <em>The Man From Nowhere</em>, even an icy drama like Yang Ik-joon’s sterling <em>Breathless </em>(2009) — which both renounce traditional distinctions of good and evil, and debunk the myth that violence can be in any way constructive or personally rewarding. As portrayed in this movie, vengeance distorts and disorients the hero ethically; I suspect it is not necessarily the monster that Soo-hyeon fears becoming, but that other state of being: isolated and widowed; heart-broken and alone. Soo-hyeon will fully crave the attention again of his soul-mate long after the credits have rolled and Kyeong-cheol’s body found, but Joo-yeon will never answer him, his faith in prayer will diminish year upon year, and so too his sense of purpose. What interests me about this film, then, is that the desire which drives Soo-hyeon to sadism and brutality does <em>not </em>destroy him — this experience, this course of action, while indescribably harrowing, lacking any semblance of a cathartic resolution, and almost certainly tarnishing the man forever, <em>is in some way necessary</em>. </td></tr>
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It therefore detracts from the well-acknowledged pattern of the films noted above by shifting the emphasis away from salvation, and in a sense vengeance itself as an abstract concept, onto two core ideas instead: mechanical ritual, and mutual identification. In order for Soo-hyeon to truly experience and release grief he must revert to a truer nature. The film, therefore, taps into the mechanical act of the ritual itself to make its point: vengeance, in this context, <em>can </em>serve a purpose; rather than free Soo-hyeon <em>from </em>grief, it frees him <em>to </em>grieve. The memorable climactic shot in which Lee’s Soo-hyeon is seen wandering aimlessly in Kyeong-cheol’s neighbourhood utterly consumed by unbearable sorrow is an interesting one. Has the terrible nature of his obsession at last hit home? Or does he despair for his own salvation? I trust that neither concern matters to him; he grieves for Joo-yeon. The only other vengeance film to touch on a similar theme is the truly harrowing masterpiece, <em>Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance</em>, a film which ultimately has more to say on the reality and pain of grief than anything on offer here.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">14 November, 2010</span></div>
<br />Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-15351635432511874402010-11-06T00:20:00.053+00:002023-01-13T11:21:41.705+00:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM SOUNDTRACKS<strong></strong><strong></strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Five glorious music cues from movie soundtracks </strong></span></span></div>
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In September I saw the London Philharmonic Orchestra perform the score live for <em>The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King</em> (2003), in honour of which I am writing this. Here are my five favourite O.S.T. cues currently playing on shuffle.<br />
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<strong>5. A Familiar Taste (<em>The Social Network</em>)</strong><br />
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In 1999, the Dust Brothers combined industrial effects and unorthodox musical instruments in their multi-layered <i>Fight Club</i> (1999) score, but for <i>The Social Network</i> (2010), an album alike in technique, director David Fincher teamed with Trent Reznor whose work on <i>The Downward Spiral </i>with the Nine Inch Nails yielded several variations of the track “Closer,” the most intense of which, “Precursor,” was used in the title sequence of Fincher’s classic thriller <i>Se7en</i> (1995). These albums are appropriate to “A Familiar Taste” because they establish a context that isn’t immediately apparent in <i>The Social Network</i> itself — a film about a computer-scientist. I flit between cues like “Hand Covers Bruise” (which, for me, stirs memories of lonely Autumn evenings in the city), “Intriguing Possibilities” (a sort of electronic paean to cyberspace) and “Complication with Optimistic Outcome” (more of a paean to Ridley Scott’s <i>Blade Runner</i> (1982)), but I return to “A Familiar Taste.” The cue appears in its original, longer cut as “35 Ghosts IV” on the <i>Ghosts I-IV</i> double album (which Fincher listened to ritually during the production of <i>Zodiac</i>), but used here in <i>The Social Network</i> it transforms the film’s underscoring into a force.
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCND01UUuMvxI9UIgh3DZ1x4mbCCq5s3iA_9Y7mRAft5dS9g7hH9JdO4qaO3Eix66t35d7_p5TmfhPkft7sq8f6oC3rGf_dd6x_L4BhleoqSJVtm7z31FyHYnBCyB_o5jMA5BdWVrHGqq3/s1600/Spirited-Away.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Chihiro / Sen (voiced by Rumi Hiiragi) in <i>Spirited Away</i> (2001)</span></span></div>
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<strong>4. Day of the River (<em>Spirited Away</em>)</strong><br />
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I love Miyazaki’s <i>Spirited Away</i> (2001). I’m in thrall to its purity — of landscape, of mood and character, of Chihiro’s capricious, flawed and stumbling personality. The moment, animated by Miyazaki, when Chihiro ties back her hair and puts it into a band is so precise it just melts me; and likewise, her plaintive stare across the ocean as, from the bathhouse balcony, she sees a train running along the surface of the water: the exhausted worker, legs aching and eyes burning, indulging for a moment in the wonder of fantasy.<br />
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At the outset, composer Joe Hisaishi establishes a celestial mood, a cue designed to interest the imagination before a simple piano melody brings us back again to character. Chihiro has just been reacquainted with her transmogrified parents in a pig-pen, where they are lined up for slaughter; horrified, Chihiro vows to save them, then flees outside into the arms of Haku who cheers her up with a generous offering of rice. Here the melody is swept into full ensemble: a child once again in our eyes, she devours the food before breaking down into a pathetic wail (also an action animated by Miyazaki), the delicate switch back to a few instruments a fleeting reminder of just how much sorrow this girl is bottling up. In this way, the score never indulges in sentiment or whimsy, it always looks forward, it always digs deep down and shares the same spirit. Enthused again to try harder, Chihiro runs across the bridge to the bathhouse, the invisible No Face observing everything.<br />
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Then, awakening from slumber, Kamaji the old boiler man reaches across the room to slide a blanket over Chihiro, who has tucked herself into a sleeping ball beside the soot-slaves that shift all the coal. Here, Hisaishi’s cue holds on the lullaby melody, dipping out prematurely, as if to deprive us of closure.<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq51XuIHbmwdM5EkRFhydauKTDJRPoF5yml81R6E_DkcXeY2z0XU-OLzAyU5rSKMAUEo8FjnYejUXO5IzszqD0ah2kh-KEfMh2OfCTb-rcZLZNDEafg7Q48z-ZoQbyQyAt2hlaOyO2A1rk/s1600/Lust-Caution.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Wong Chia Chi / Mak Tai Tai (Tang Wei) with Mr Yee (Tony Leung) in <i>Lust Caution</i> (2007)</span></span></div>
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<strong>3. The Angel (<em>Lust, Caution</em>)</strong><br />
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Though only a short track (at little over two minutes), this one calls upon <em>Lust Caution</em>’s (2007) signature “Wong Chia Chi’s Theme,” the melody for which is brought to the fore in isolation later in the album. “The Angel” is the more deeply felt I think and artfully arranged, and as used both in the film (towards its conclusion) and on Alexandre Desplat’s album it just gets me right where I live. The track begins deceptively warm, a fairytale told as memory; at a little under midway it swells to the romantic vision of Wong’s generic theme, but critically the motif doesn’t hold. It cannot believe in the possibility of love, only love’s inherent contradictions; breathless the theme intones to her friends, to her allies, to <em>us </em>that Wong is well and truly lost. The delayed notes passing over the piano invoke a life that is never meant to be; and thus diminished, closed-in and doomed, Wong embraces her fate, head bowed and with eyes shut.<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVCqQlb5Hrkn6cj-xFQIpTnWI3udiY9rhIhUhSJIGGJPu2gWwan1pEOFHIgN9q4dRbN6PA3Ylu0CcloyBWVwPRm_H0U4OMYAubuIs2R7n_oDAzfNGvDlBj4AdDTPUbgfKqWqbz8LiJ_987/s1600/A-Bittersweet-Life-1.pn" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Sun Woo (Lee Byeong-heon) in <i>A Bittersweet Life</i> (2005)</span></span><br />
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<strong>2. Sky Lounge (<em>A Bittersweet Life</em>)</strong><br />
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Perhaps the place to begin this one is with Kim Jee-woon’s key collaborations in recent years. For <em>A Tale of Two Sisters</em> (2003), the Korean director worked with the prolific Lee Byung-woo, in whose great musical care Kim originally entrusted his <em>Three</em> (2000) segment, <em>Memories</em> (2003) (Lee has since scored for such whopping genre movies as <i>The Red Shoes</i> (2005), <i>The Host</i> (2006), <i>Voice of a Murderer</i> (2007), <i>Hansel & Gretel</i> (2007), <i>Mother</i> (2009) and <i>Tidal Wave / Haeundae</i> (2009)); for the positively bonkers <i>The Good, The Bad, The Weird</i> in 2008 (a score so indiscriminate and unshackled that it genrifies for its key setpiece Nina Simone’s touching “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” — quite an ostentatious move), Kim collaborated with Jang Yeong-gyu and Dalpalan, and for their efforts both were nominated in the Composers category at the 3rd Asian Film Awards (they lost out, not unjustly, to Joe Hisaishi). But before this, the pair worked together on Kim’s revenge thriller, <i>A Bittersweet Life</i> (2005), and produced an imitative though not unchallenging score which shouldn’t be so easily overlooked. On this, Jang and Dalpalan were joined importantly by Japanese pianist Kuramoto Yuhki, who recorded the film’s critical music cue entitled “Romance” on the album, and in addition sampled the work of the late classical guitarist Francisco Tarrega, whose performance of “Etude in E Minor” brings a sense of small-scale intimacy and heritage to Kang and Baek’s criminal underworld.
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The album’s themes do a fine job of encapsulating different aspects of the film. These include our hero Sun Woo’s loyalty to Kang, the romantic melody for Hee Soo (the girl he shadows), the very culture of femininity which she embodies and which is still unique to Sun Woo, the besieging of Kang by “friendly” enemies, the slapstick fun to be had with Myung-gu and Mikhail, the vengeance theme which pushes the confrontation with Kang in the hotel’s Sky Lounge, and finally, Sun Woo’s relationship with his own reflection and image, a motif which the director endows with great importance. In its simplicity, “Follow” for instance characterises the spark of wonder which initially takes hold of Sun Woo, the purposeful rhythm of it repeating again and again as he drives into the city, the erotic undertone of the theme surfacing towards the close as he observes Hee Soo dancing in a busy club with her lover. The cue “Romance” is based on the source music to which Hee Soo later plays cello accompaniment, and though the motif is never once repeated on the album it nevertheless finds corresponding value in the themes of “Irreversible Time,” its reprise “(Quartet) Irreversible Time” and “Fairness.” So while I cannot deny outright the streamlined elegance that is “Follow” or (a track I haven’t even mentioned yet) the seductive “Escape” which is powered by a detached and utterly primal sense of survivalism, I’m going with “Sky Lounge” for my favourite on the album, the film’s introductory music cue. Vanity is the key theme: virtually every frame in this sequence is gorgeous, the grooming impeccable, and it benefits <em>greatly </em>from the presence of the music: from the eponymous Sky Lounge of the title, where Sun Woo savours one final taste of that exquisite dessert on his table, to the lower levels of the hotel where patrons cross its unblemished marble floors, from the thumping club room where drunken assholes encumber their young mistresses shepherding them away from harm, to an exclusive members’ lounge where Sun Woo has to turf out a trio of petty gangsters, it is all about display, discovery, and absolute assurance in the self.<br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="744" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxZQZr-bk0c5L14YvbyBTm4skMOZg3lpVVnwEI6I4hzNCEWvc71xy90AESUYKvsxBKs3t8dAbvnI6dssSCPgv_tQ0l6hlBKIeyvYqPXBDMQGsnIdNHRfVRmt9l0CmTHddRq0EBq_1AYHya/s1600/Se7en.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) in <i>Se7en</i> (1995)</span></span><br />
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<strong>1. The Finale (<em>Se7en</em>)</strong><br />
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Unlike the music cues listed above I don’t exactly own this on an album (because New Line Records still has not issued a full score) but this may be the only track on my shortlist that I regard as masterful. Howard Shore combined a range of techniques in the past to generate similar apocalyptic textures (see <i>The Silence of the Lambs</i>, 1991; <i>Philadelphia</i>, 1993; and also Cronenberg’s <i>Scanners</i>, 1991; <i>Videodrome</i>, 1983; <i>The Fly</i>, 1986; <i>Dead Ringers</i>, 1988; and <i>Naked Lunch</i> 1991) but in <i>Se7en</i>, acoustic, percussive, electronic and ambient sounds are given a crucial emphasis, as if the very project of his original composition was to sour the film it supports. And I suppose this <i>is</i> the project of the score. In this world, we as the audience are as much the subject of mistrustful scepticism as the honourable characters we follow onscreen; just as the film throws game-show noise and screaming kids and other hostilities our way, so too does Shore’s industrial score, which though certainly more tonal and less overpowering in the film’s first half, nevertheless tugs us beneath the surface on several occasions in its second and we invariably claw hard for breath. Shore stretches conventional instruments thin and slows them down, he mixes pure electronic sounds with live sounds not recorded in a studio, and he articulates absolute unearthly despair once the film is sucked down into the abyss. It is nothing like, for instance, Bernard Hermann’s score for <i>Taxi Driver</i> (1976), the tumbling routine of which becomes one and the same with the paranoid psychopath himself, dragging and stifling his senses. <i>Se7en</i> frightens by touch, it overcomes everything including the sunlight to trouble and hazard the frame.<br />
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We hear reverberation in recordings many times when watching film, but only in unique cases is this intended or does it feel correspondingly <em>appropriate </em>to the drama. In “The Finale” reverberation heightens our awareness of the acoustic space in which the recording has been made; when consumed independently of the dialogue and effects track (see the Special Edition DVD), the impression is that of a grand church hall. It restates for me an earlier signature which is heard just once in the track “Searching Doe’s Apartment,” a cue which emphasises the serial killer’s religious background (what Amy Taubin called “a particularly American strain of apocalyptic Christianity”) by establishing the appropriate connections to Catholic mass, to the recitation of prayer, to the presence in one giant space of the faithful. These non-diegetic sounds of mass and prayer are there in “Searching Doe’s Apartment,” but they’re not there in “The Finale.” They echo, rather, due to the accidental or intended elements of human agency. That’s a connection I wonder if other people make, but it is one that really sells the existential doom and magnitude of “The Finale”.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">4 November, 2010</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-68102544640073418692010-09-18T00:33:00.014+01:002018-09-05T15:53:57.110+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">FILM | <strong>VINYAN</strong> | DIRECTOR | <strong>FABRICE DU WELZ</strong></span>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong><br /><i>Vinyan</i> (2008)<br />‘Some things are better left not found’</strong></span></span><br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGk3UinENqpoDZCFYzSjwUBNunpQ5TTizDl0f_ES91rI2f6NGVDgTaJRh5Z5_LjzyKqG5LwuPGvyuYoAk7RRWfHPt_jE-1SEHzWZ771xtKQs2wgZTPwKqi5LdPS3ARFcIA23UjJ8HOLcQv/s1600/Vinyan-header.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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The intertextual nods to psychological thrillers, horrors and survival adventures in <em>Vinyan</em>, Fabrice du Welz’s second feature which charts the metaphorical retreat of a grieving couple into the jungle, serve as a reminder of his relative inexperience at making his point primarily through images. Specifically, the works of Hook (<em>Lord of the Flies</em>), Roeg (<em>Don’t Look Now</em>), Cronenberg (<em>The Brood</em>), Lynch (<em>The Lost Highway</em>), Coppola (<em>Apocalypse Now</em>) and of Uruguayan filmmaker Chicho Ibáñez Serrador (<em>Death is Child’s Play</em>) provide du Welz with more than he can chew, most in their own way jungle survivalist tales of a sort, some so painstakingly detailed and expertly crafted on a cinematographic level that the successful tend to operate outside language. The way in which <em>Vinyan </em>traces the division of its traumatised couple, the Belhmers, is a bit rotten, the outcome a pale but not uninvolving conception of fantasy in which emotional connection and intimacy is sacrificed for the power and force of mimicry. The cluttering of diegetic space, the muddying of dialogue on the soundtrack, the consuming threat posed by the communal world and the iconography of this world matters more. It’s disappointing, because in interview du Welz is a good guy, self-aware too (a rare thing, even rarer to hear that he’s learning from mistakes), the sometimes contradictory public responses to his first two films (this and <em>Calvaire</em>) enough to stir serious reflection on his part; he too displays an obvious affection for Thai society, and in this film’s early Phuket street scenes, fashionably composed in a tight frame and bumping shoulder to shoulder with hookers, vendors, traffickers and vagrants all, we glimpse sometimes the objects of his fascination. It’s a shame, then, that he denies repeating here the stylistic choices of others, most blatantly Coppola, when the less conventional film techniques he employs appear conceived for that very purpose. None of this undercuts importantly his themes, which are well worth exploring in detail and I’ll get to below, but the cumulative impact of this repetition, with little or no variation in tone and light, weakens the quality, and ultimately the weight, of our interest.
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At a fundraiser evening, footage of children in a Burmese jungle is played to aid workers Jeanne (Emmanuelle Béart) and Paul (Rufus Sewell), a grieving middle-class white couple who lost their preadolescent son, Joshua, to the Asian tsunami disaster of 2004. The blurry image of a boy, his back turned to camera, the colour of his shirt calling to mind for us the red-caped figure of <em>Don’t Look Now</em> but for Jeanne the distinctive brand of her son’s favourite football team, serves as an inducement to action. Although the quality of the magnified image is poor and the isolated figure an anonymous jumble of pixels, for Jeanne and Jeanne alone the video has some authority. I suspect that not even she is convinced finally of its credibility (the video attests to the existence of a boy, not <em>her </em>boy), but it is nonetheless <em>her belief that Joshua </em>(wherever he may be) <em>needs her</em>, a belief premised upon seeing this stranger in the video which in some sense does contain the soul of her missing son. She may or may not relinquish finally her belief in the material existence of Joshua, the mystery is to a point irrelevant, but what’s far more intriguing is her compulsion to inhabit, to enter into and thus occupy, presumably for the sake of occupying, the timeless physical space pictured in the video. With this in mind, her quest to track down the boy which structures the film feels like a ritual of initiation motivated by an immutable sense of personal, i.e., parental (and since it is of importance, <em>maternal</em>), duty.<br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166615596500898" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq5zt__kj4pQH8uH74PYtm5Ct6vePtQ4gLzou-bpEMSQxkr89qqEEVMJo-K13K6VsbU39-HYK-46GvH8TFQLzeTtVrulAjRT0x8YeRrY53jhtzpCTquQpOpm24ZbMZ0e9ZXAvrKj0LzCSq/s1600/Vinyan-2.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Jeanne Bellmer (Emmanuelle Béart) in Fabrice du Welz’s <em>Vinyan </em>(2008)</span></span><br />
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Alternatively Paul, who sees what his wife sees, is just another supportive husband, sceptical from a rationalist’s perspective but always trying to give her what she wants, his conviction that in time Jeanne will accept the thanklessness of their impossible mission penetrating deeper into Burmese territory and turn back. It’s with Paul’s story that the film’s passing acquaintance with Roeg’s aforementioned begins to cement, the strictures which he has placed around such metaphysical concepts as the supernatural and the invisible start to loosen, and the connection between his desire and Jeanne’s own all but severed completely. As a vulnerable man, susceptible to the fraud of human traffickers and moreover voiceless in their company, we sense that Paul will reinforce somehow his position come the resolution—the tragedy which split the family so potent to effect some kind of transformation in his character—but unlike Jeanne, he seems to get by in reality suffering less torment, almost certainly owing to less responsibility. He’s not welcome in the fantasy, and for knowing this he is constantly ill at ease.<br />
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In summary, their quest to track down the boy is on the one hand an escape into fantasy, a fantasy which it appears is motivated by the anguish of Jeanne’s lonely reality; on the other, it is a ritual of initiation motivated by maternal duty. Though both hypothetical scenarios support a metaphorical reading of the film, only the former scenario (the flight into fantasy) honours a redemptive reconciliation with the memory of Joshua; the latter scenario (in which the fantasy becomes a rites of passage and both parents learn to tolerate the loss) moves away from Joshua, towards something confounding and altogether uncomfortable. I favoured the latter reading, but it’s of course entirely reasonable to interpret <i>Vinyan</i> in accordance with the former. For example, in some instances the “cinematic” quest for reconciliation with lost loves, with lost children, results in what McGowan termed in response to the films of Lynch a “deadlock,” an alternative reality into which one necessarily withdraws in order to escape the tormenting cause of desire (and yet at the same time finally realising that desire). This is why the Belhmers can only, ideally, connect with the memory of their boy, and not the boy himself—so for this reason, I take it for granted that Joshua is dead. The deadlock which Jeanne and Paul, both figuratively “in the dark” about the fate of their son, encounter returns them to their original starting positions—he, as the guilty party, and she as the primary caretaker. In fact, the privileging of her initiation rite over the film’s climax goes some way towards supporting this. The denouement depicts the mother’s apparent socialisation into a posse of feral children who swarm around her in great number; Paul, however, for committing the cardinal sin of leaving their son apparently unsupervised at the time of the disaster, is in the scene shunted from view entirely, his body yanked to the ground where it’s beaten and stamped on, his intestines routinely stripped and pored over by the same cannibalistic children. Here, then, it appears that Jeanne finds salvation in the demented illusion created by and for herself, a fantasy wherein the failed father is indicted for denying (until it’s too late) his crime and the mother deserving of her privileged role pictures herself as a madonna; this hopeful conceit is echoed in the sunlit beauty of <i>Vinyan</i>’s final image, an affectionate portrait of Jeanne, now a giggling mom again, surrounded and tickled by dozens and dozens of worshipping children.
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166615596500898" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDQ57lZ5ACjp-EPDdlzrsRZM7Z7xkr8p9lqOSWmKSPUCtMRIT0wpd2n8a9dQbSft5Ql3EnRj7tFbFN98MA0hXSpp6gMRz7M2XXosNu7FcTNxP9VOJzxjLhZMC9eCbNkxPFPDplmhjo2Y9h/s1600/Vinyan-1.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Affectionate portrait: Jeanne Bellmer (Emmanuelle Béart) in <em>Vinyan </em>(2008)</span></span><br />
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This is all good stuff from a theoretical perspective and it’s helpful that du Welz leaves any uncertainties we have as audiences hanging, but this isn’t a sympathetic portrait, the essences of the mood and feeling I sense beyond du Welz's control. The final shot provides a fine example: seen as a purging of guilt and sorrow, it’s the moment at which Jeanne’s soul rises from the torment and into the light, the infants guiding her away from Vinyan and towards peace. But I’m unconvinced. If Jeanne’s successful withdrawal into fantasy requires that she find salvation in the illusion, then the image of salvation which it finally produces is imperfect. For that reason, it’s difficult to believe in her salvation. Though consistent with our general understanding of fantasy (Jeanne’s reemergence as a madonna figure offers respite from the pain of her desire to see Joshua again), the provocative final image of the film feels far from redemptive or cathartic. Or even pleasant. Far better to begin from a point at which we can all agree that the mother gives up on herself, and then move on to further details. Thus her stay of execution, which is generous against anything afforded her husband, is precisely that, and is therefore less likely to be a spiritual reprieve or second birth. As to the question of whether or not she can mother successfully again, the film rests on a harsher note. Mother no more, not even a bona fide surrogate, she becomes a material plaything, poked, prodded, fondled, pushed and pulled. I guess this is intended as it was damn well conceived, to be wholly innocent that is (if a little uncomfortable to witness), but it poses implicitly the question “what becomes of Jeanne outside the fantasy?” The positive resolution that occurs within the metaphor obscures something more hopeless and psychologically troubled occurring outside it. Rather than embrace the supernatural nature of the culture and draw from its Buddhist code in the hope of achieving spiritual rejuvenation, she, I suspect, surrenders to its darker underbelly beyond the fantasy.</div>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">18 September, 2010</span></div>
<br />Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-24968475184149091452010-09-10T22:15:00.006+01:002018-09-05T15:55:53.615+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">EVENT | <strong>THE PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE</strong> | VENUE | <strong>THE VAUDEVILLE THEATRE</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>LOW IS HIGH, MEDIUM IS HIGH: <br />‘THE PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE’<br />OLD VIC WEST END, LONDON</strong></span></span></div>
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For those whose paramount concern is not for the ambience of the theatre or the many tricks of its architectural add-ons, but for the length of a stare or for the stillness in a moment the front row (or failing this any of the stalls behind) is the ideal place to be. Here, the brevity, virtue and detail of the performance survives untouched: the patience of the lonely man poised on the edge of his seat awaiting the lights, the dust plume that coughs up into the air, the softened voice changing pitch, the trembling weakness in the stance, the winking eye as curtain later descends. I was front row centre for <em>The Prisoner of Second Avenue </em>and the reward of seeing these moments has done away completely with any inclination to book anything again in the dress circle. The little that was not on view held absolutely no consequence. Beanbags, for instance, don’t interest me. It was, instead, the kind of seat where your date’s partially exposed foot is close to those spinning oranges, the ones the principal just scattered in your direction and sent thumping to the floor; where in one comic instance Jeff Goldblum’s brain-damaged stare into the middle distance where the TV sits reaches and connects fleetingly with yours (and you are invariably giggling like some mad drinker); it is the kind of seat where those projectile buttons that come whizzing off his shirt in a state of supreme vexation come whizzing by your head, and are recovered at the interval by an apologetic stagehand. No seat is more rewarding in the service of this Neil Simon production than the centre seat in the Vaudeville’s front row.<br />
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His play dates from 1971, before President Ford rebuffed New York City Mayor Abraham Beame’s appeals in 1975 for help in the city’s debt obligations, and after a nationwide strike by auto workers against General Motors and the massacre at Kent State of four students by young and inexperienced national guardsmen, both in 1970. Scripted, therefore, long after the elegantly framed social comedies of <em>Come Blow Your Horn</em> (1961), <em>Barefoot in the Park</em> (1963) and <em>The Odd Couple</em> (1965), <em>Prisoner</em> revels in anxiety and syntactical expression, its subject the burgeoning ‘70s economic downturn and the burgeoning of a sense of collective working class protest. In this sense, the satirical re-staging of Grant Wood’s pre-Depression era American Gothic in much of the Old Vic’s publicity bears some meaning.<br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166615596500898" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUOkjgvU_YBRfM-4oW8WNHZ9Kw-P6qcgmSHDavu2saWwJIVRaVSvwmpUq426eoxNsuDOa1lXVrMnIDm8Eabktul3_dvO6UlmuhFCCJ4pE9nKE9D6O4blLj5rvR7MXRyheGP6IWT-qpAisi/s1600/Prisoner-Second-Av-2.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Jeff Goldblum (Mel Edison) and Mercedes Ruehl (Edna Edison) at the close of the show: <i>The Prisoner of Second Avenue</i> (2010)</span></span><br />
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As the now terminally redundant Mel Edison, a once dedicated advertising accounts executive in the service of his employer for 22 years, Jeff Goldblum is a pathetic and lively hero, his performance an enjoyable confection befitting of Simon’s broad characterisation. In great form, his idiosyncratic approach — less with the hands this time, far more with the eyes — owes perhaps a fair bit to the eccentric mannerisms of his Seth Brundle under the direction of David Cronenberg, and the actor has of course touched on similar social crises before, the John Landis film <em>Into the Night</em> (1985) for one. In that film, his Ed Okin abandons his unfaithful wife and drives around L.A. for hours, hoping this will have a therapeutic effect; in <em>Prisoner</em>, on the other hand, Mel never once loses that literal connection back to his wife. Domestic servitude and love are, for Edna, indissociable. Despite herself being part of a more egalitarian world wherein the professional sphere need not necessarily be male dominated, Edna is always supportive and always nurturing, a quality that actress Mercedes Ruehl presumably had to overlook in order to get at the meat. On occasion Simon addresses this, at one point joking that Mel’s reliance on Edna for care will one day extend into the bathroom, but in contrast less is made of her dependence on him, particularly when it comes down to the basics of personal attraction and fidelity.
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The desire to transcend their white-collar lives, the impact of economic decline and of crime, the unjust punishment subsequently brought down upon them both, the emotional breakdowns they suffer, the sudden appearance of three equally nuts sisters, the implacable brother who scoffs at any desire to improve one’s lot, and the final return to a wintry scene of domestic harmony are characteristic of Simon, and in that sense <em>Prisoner</em> is as distanced from the current economic climate as Woody Allen’s <em>Vicky Cristina Barcelona</em> (2008) or <em>Whatever Works</em> (2009) are to the heyday of his stand-up. With <em>Prisoner</em>, he creates a specifically American idealisation with a socially therapeutic edge, his feed lines are often so indelicate you’d think this was a Chuck Lorre comedy, plus the trajectory of his narrative, from a metaphoric crucifixion to resurrection, is never once in question. These aren’t notes of dissent necessarily: just as we grow to accept a crude setting or an ill-placed stagelight we all enjoy a Simon play withstanding the happy ending; these are, nonetheless, points to which we must invariably turn when considering the relevance of a New York City play, set and originally staged in the early 1970s, to a twenty-first century London in the economic downturn. Written for <i>The New York Times</i>, Patrick Healy’s piece, “Second Avenue Hits Home on West End” (from July 30), for some reason downsizes this point. It is not Simon’s play and themes that are of relevance, it is the wit and skill of the performer. To my relief, the principals were brilliantly suited to their roles, he dowdy and unfashionable, Ruehl impetuous and outrageous, the pair in the sharpest form from the very start.<br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5670166615596500898" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirTRELD0woCY0Oy9VF6MDerfEa_UKJ6w9V3tKbR7EdhMwbv2tExWFQR_nPyF5PB2rR7E2eG8z6PPHhhVP9mvnCL_FLTFq0F5lj4tvPPOPjyBNzWKc2l14uR-xpbmGT6Ca4yuTd3PXDhlOt/s1600/Prisoner-Second-Av-1.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">Jeff Goldblum and Mercedes Ruehl with support cast: <i>The Prisoner of Second Avenue</i> (2010)</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">4 September, 2010</span></div>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-47164761526797593742010-09-02T11:36:00.025+01:002018-09-05T15:59:46.948+01:00Film4 FrightFest 2010 Video Nasties Panel<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">EVENT | <strong>VIDEO NASTIES: MORAL PANIC, CENSORSHIP AND VIDEOTAPE / PANEL DISCUSSION</strong> | VENUE | <strong>THE EMPIRE LEICESTER SQUARE, LONDON</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong><em>Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape</em> (2010)<br /> Whooping it up at FrightFest:<br />on the need to flog the BBFC for all its failures<br />(30 August panel discussion)</strong></span></span><br />
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Trust us English to build up so much resentment over a piece of legislation that wasn’t enforceable. Jake West’s imperturbably neat <em>Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape</em> screened on Monday morning to an enthused FrightFest crowd, and was followed by a panel discussion featuring many of its contributors. The documentary addresses a captivating and downright ludicrous period in the history of film regulation in this country: the attempted expulsion from within its borders of every kind of video “nasty” deemed unsuitable, chiefly by moral activists and rightwing sections of the press, under the outdated Obscene Publications Act. Though the pacing is rarely quicker than that of television, West’s film is scrupulously ordered, its story very well told, and the arguments of its key collaborator Martin Barker acutely felt. It is also impossible to watch in that it has scant regard for the visual invention of its subject matter or worse still the visual appreciation of its audience. Mark Hartley’s account, for instance, of the commercial growth of Australian exploitation cinema, <em>Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!</em> (2008), uses film footage and high impact motion graphics with the latter bumping, bleeding, splashing and folding into the former—the whole thing is about as cinematically subtle as the subjects it devours, but it is at least <em>brave </em>and <em>bold </em>with it, familiarising us with striking images of the era and animating the one-dimensional characters, objects and dialogue bubbles that appear in their advertising. The best <em>Video Nasties</em> can do, evidently lacking the budget for rotoscope artists and 3D animators, is to drape newspaper clippings in the empty portion of frame and stack together, to the dim accompaniment of The Damned no less, brief clips from the 72 films included on the D.P.P. list. It is a motley thing, redeemed by the penetrating insight of an expert who has already covered this matter elsewhere, and with better contributors.<br />
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The <em>Video Nasties</em> panel discussion—which involved West, Barker, producer Marc Morris, Tobe Hooper and Allan Bryce—tested, appropriately enough, the current mood at FrightFest. The decision by the B.B.F.C. to recommend 49 cuts to Srdjan Spasojevic’s <em>A Serbian Film</em>, which it says would approximate three minutes 48 seconds of footage, has obviously angered fans here. Many in the FrightFest audience who openly derided the B.B.F.C. for its assessment of the film opposed the passing of the Video Recordings Act originally in 1984, thus, they <em>know something </em>of the potential idiocy of mostly conservative politicians (including the newest clones of Graham Bright) and talking heads—a key note to which the <em>Video Nasties </em>film turns ultimately. This sentiment carried through into the panel discussion, where the B.B.F.C. was roundly stomped. The solidarity this inspired in the auditorium, particularly among the most vocal fans who knew that much admired filmmakers like Neil Marshall and commentator Kim Newman were in their vicinity, all felt a bit sorry, the cheering and applause an expression of allegiance without real foundation. The session might just as well have ended on director Jake West’s note that the prime purpose of these FrightFest audiences is to back the principle, supported by the casualties of the Video Recordings Act, that adults have the fundamental right to pick and choose their entertainment. Again, this drew applause from the crowd, and while the sincerity of their reaction cannot be doubted, I question the herd mentality that strings them along.<br />
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It was fashionable over the course of FrightFest to condemn the B.B.F.C. on the specific issue of <em>A Serbian Film</em>, which cannot play in Westminster City Council unless cuts are made, but not, however, its report for the <em>I Spit on Your Grave </em>remake, which required 17 cuts, all of which were duly made by Anchor Bay Entertainment. To which the response must be, why this distinction? According to its August 26 report, the B.B.F.C.’s proposal for compulsory edits to <em>A Serbian Film </em>were necessarily intrusive, and as such the 49 proposals clashed with a number of formal strategies (interrupted time schemes, the unreliable protagonist) that deliberately complicate the narrative; the cuts applied to specific images in <em>I Spit on Your Grave</em>, by contrast, resulted in less narrative or thematic disruption due to its more forgiving structure and the higher level of narrative redundancy. This fired the perception that the B.B.F.C. were responsible, however indirectly, for withholding from the public again a film of quality, a film equally if not more interested in the politics of ideology and narrative complexity than with generic provocation. FrightFest, therefore, pulled Spasojevic’s film to honour the festival’s “global integrity” and the “director’s [original] intention,” while <em>I Spit on Your Grave</em>, a far bigger picture with an established pedigree (in the form of a classic predecessor), played to a substantial audience on Saturday night—to which I’m inclined to argue that few here I’m sure would protest on the key matter of principle if <em>A Serbian Film</em> had been eligible to play in its B.B.F.C.-certified format. It would still have drawn enthused festivalgoers, just without quite so much rowdy bullshit.<br />
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It would be wise, therefore, to have a sense of the thing that one is rallying for before decrying this a return to the dipshit madnesses of the eighties. Today, the B.B.F.C. provides, as wittertainment fans know all too well, what it terms “extended classification information” for every film it examines. The E.C.I. text for <em>I Spit on Your Grave </em>is available freely online, together with the press release qualifying its proposals for <em>A Serbian Film</em>. It is, therefore, fairly transparent about its findings ... and yet it relies on public consultation largely to refine its guidelines and as a film and videogames regulator it operates from the starting position that the representations of a film or videogame have direct, predictable effects on us as consumers. I’m reminded again of West’s concluding note about the principle that as adult consumers we should be free to choose our own entertainment. The final word of the session went to Martin Barker who impressed upon his audience the value of producing intelligent film criticism for the internet, his point that our responses, if serious and evaluative about film, should serve to counter the earliest stages of reactionary public opinion in the event of a future video nasties scare. This makes far more sense to me, for being more constructive and persuasive than venting resentment in an enclosed, comfortable environment.
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">2 September, 2010</span></div>
Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-18773306911687839592010-08-29T22:30:00.000+01:002017-03-09T15:18:40.799+00:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 85%;">EVENT <strong>FRIGHTFEST 2010</strong> VENUE <strong>THE EMPIRE OF LEICESTER SQUARE</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 180%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Tobe Hooper</strong></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 78%;">American director Tobe Hooper answers questions for journalists after an onstage interview at FrightFest, 27 August 2010. The director’s<br /> credits include <i>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</i> (1974), <i>The Funhouse</i> (1981), <i>Poltergeist</i> (1982) and <i>Toolbox Murders</i> (2004)</span></span><br />
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<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540607663909051970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGRHtcPdDfKfYN137MVbBKo21Egb9fSSM-ComNtNa0WW0zVfinbw8pe-spICHa9dr0nUn4duao4idVHHDHnfSap6zh80ZEjdEI0cev5pYIZ-YZW-uLkftQ4hyphenhyphenz_17KC4wewuyzox-t46XT/s1600/Tobe-Hooper-FFTI-3.png" style="cursor: hand; margin: 0px 0px 3px 0px;" />
<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540607663909051970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9t79P2dHFbWeyyXxBhUQhy_JQSNWDQIe-03CJu0fBDY3NQMODfsfX6qg8T_KjPoCQ5ecC4LCbpV3g6pt3MknHFttHsnzkzJx-vxEvUn-aekKZ07czrkL4ioIWqYTzQpbmn05KZXri1wEZ/s1600/Tobe-Hooper-FFTI-2.png" style="cursor: hand; margin: 0px 0px 3px 0px;" />
<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540607663909051970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdKFOxPQ8Oz0PWcl-DCThbrHwA6FBWShZogpPjVq6BVZFWXYfX26smVVgzDWBjTWfJoPcKRJPUYCvmu4UDC5KpQNsiTIgSviqTopLdFWC3LqZ4RcCgf71i7O2mnapyOIUqjt4uhOzssrku/s1600/Tobe-Hooper-int-3.png" style="cursor: hand; margin: 0px 0px 3px 0px;" />
<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540607663909051970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLuApvi2QUNuuKkbv6LoCeWU0CTci_ALy_xzp2xfhxWw_jCNpSRik_ZenJ_JzYpNOeHTeB6OuMNdMqsJNr4PdM3r7bN0hx_0j0NBkL_C2S9ZkjYFfHgyt7bYcQoVYJGHPk56Cz_cs3M-FJ/s1600/Tobe-Hooper-FFTI-5.png" style="cursor: hand; margin: 0px 0px 20px 0px;" />
<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5540607663909051970" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLb9y9HK16mIfjXBuEW0HVAvv_GpkcBsBPSaA272IXjYnT_DchqiviqThVhfAEPDcXbG28IviqARgPErqpuLYlG5BX3ldzHMKEH_fMhwYneHvAXNEhb_f_jMRoBRbCygS8Jl3rafq-dbmD/s1600/Tobe-Hooper-FFTI-4.png" style="cursor: hand; margin: 0px 0px 20px 0px;" />
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2397301222715996767.post-21819145485336666302010-08-29T12:28:00.032+01:002018-09-15T11:38:35.887+01:00<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 65%;">EVENT | <strong>TOBE HOOPER RETROSPECTIVE</strong> | VENUE | <strong>THE EMPIRE LEICESTER SQUARE, LONDON</strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong><i>‘Eggshells</i> (1969), <i>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</i> (1974)<br />and<i> Tobe Hooper Total Icon Interview</i> Q&A’<br /> Welcome step up for still imperfect FrightFest</strong></span></span><br />
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<img border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZfNfCODKYWMCsrL2HGgYQfrt78UjVg6u53qooX6rWKJct0FaNbaBlyiACtse8FGGybyNQo5p5u0dco2tWoBYqONaZ8VdwXOZ07xXNnaLdQddoXvJ2jBCFAZ9rrDYoMeKPMNLF8_1HWYnu/s1600/Texas-Chain-Saw-header.png" style="cursor: hand; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" />
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To boost the profile of the 2010 FrightFest film festival and to keep sweet the major online and high street retailers, the Phoenix AC, <i>Total Film</i> magazine and headliner Film4, on whose sponsorship deals the festival so depends, the organising committee of the UK’s dominant fantasy/horror film tribute have secured several UK premieres ahead of this Autumn’s London Film Festival (13-28 October), and invited a handful of directors to make a contribution. This year, the major star to excite anticipation across the PR departments of all its investors is Eli Roth. <i>The Last Exorcism</i>, which he’s publicising in his capacity as star producer, rounds out the festival on Monday evening and is bound to gratify sponsors, punters, organisers all. <i>Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape</i>, on the other hand, sounds far more deserving of its premiere. A historical account of the so-called “Video Nasties” fuss that descended on the country in the eighties, the documentary promises a comprehensive overview of film censorship and classification at a time when the BBFC, under the direction of James Ferman, struggled with the implications of home-video exhibition, as well as new criteria for assessing the nature of cinematic violence. The premiere also gives occasion for an as yet undisclosed celebrity panel discussion immediately afterwards.
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Without some rehearsal, though, these onstage events can reflect poorly on their subjects. Friday afternoon’s Total Icon attraction (27 August), which welcomed <i>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</i> (1974) director Tobe Hooper for a retrospective of his work in the enormous space of the Empire 1 auditorium, should have been compelling but was a bit drab. There were some shortcomings for which the interviewer, Total Film journalist Jamie Graham, cannot be blamed: I generously include here the onstage seating and lighting arrangements, the muddling of which meant Hooper’s face was perpetually in Graham’s shadow (come on, sort that out); and the positioning around the stage of other Film4 and Total Film people, synopsising and videotaping for their online channels, must have riled those unfortunate to be seated, and thus not compensated, directly behind. However, other weak points in Graham’s control undoubtedly diminished the experience. Less inquisitorial interviewers get away with their style because, more often than not, they’re being harried for time (for the opposite approach, see comedian Joe Cornish’s brilliant Q&A with Edgar Wright, the main event two weeks ago at the BFI), in which circumstances the quality of interview is largely set by the interviewee (and based on their appearances in London over the last two years, Danny Boyle and Terry Gilliam, both funny and extrovert, are great at steering interview). Hooper, however, is an introspective man: serious and contemplative onstage, cheery and interesting when one-to-one with fans, if evasive when questioned he is unlikely to expand an issue (and why would he?) unless an interviewer persists or relaxes his approach. Graham’s stiff questioning reflected the tone of the magazine he co-edits, which has never done much to help its readership understand the cinematic works that so inspire either its staff or its commercial alliances with DVD retailers. Far better would it have been to shake up this antiquated routine, thematise the questioning in line with the two Hooper works in exhibition (<i>The Texas Chain Saw</i>, and his 1969 debut, <i>Eggshells</i>), and throw the rest out to the FrightFest audience who are <i>far</i> more adept at cross-referencing <i>Poltergeist </i>(1982) with <i>Invaders From Mars</i> (1986) and <i>Death Trap </i>(1977). In such a case as this, those who attend the more upmarket In Conversation events at the BFI Southbank must bear in mind the FrightFest’s humble origins as a celebratory knees-up in the Prince Charles ten years ago, a vital qualification, still relevant today, which does little for the Head of Film4 Julia Wrigley’s claim that while “some cultural commentators may look down on horror,” and hence by extension this festival, they’re fools to do so.<br />
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<span style="font-size: 160%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><strong>Tobe Hooper is an introspective man: serious and contemplative onstage, cheery and interesting when one-to-one with fans, if evasive when questioned he is unlikely to expand an issue (and why would he?) unless an interviewer relaxes his approach</strong></span></span></div>
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Those who left the room early, diverted by the need to claim a spot in the autograph queue (and damnit, I envy all who now own a signed <em>Texas Chain Saw</em> poster), missed a treat. The interview may have been short and routine, but the five minute Q&A afterward elicited some really fun responses: from Hooper’s tactful assessment of Eli Roth’s career to date (more a delicate sidestepping) to his high praise for Guillermo del Toro’s, from his fond memory of working with British icon James Mason on the Stephen King miniseries <em>‘Salem’s Lot</em> (1979) to the friendly gibe he made at compatriot Gunnar Hansen for his similarly congenial historical embellishments. Spirited, as well as candid, we glimpsed in this brief final session a clever and important director, the once ambitious filmmaker responsible for one of the most gruelling productions in North American movie history, whose distinctive Texan growl so familiar from commentary was like some kind of music to many ears, mine included.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 78%;">29 August, 2010</span>
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Ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00327425242530872303noreply@blogger.com0