Cloud Atlas (2012)

The Warchowskis are back with an anthology of 6 unconnected stories from 6 different genres, set in the past to distant future.

The gimmick: Everything is connected by the narrative structures of film and story. Yes, it's a 3 hour exercise in Lit 101.

Watch for: Wachowskis riffing off Amistad, Moby Dick, Amadeus, The Talented Mr Ripley, The China Syndrome, Shaft, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Make Way for Tomorrow, Soylent Green, Blade Runner, Logan's Run, Total Recall, The Fifth Element, The Road Warrior, Zardoz, and A Canticle for Liebowitz -- and mashing them into one bland mess.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on16 January 2013.

To Rome With Love (2012)

Woody Allen gets commissioned by the City of Rome to make a "Woody Allen comedy" without realising his best comedies are about love affairs with cities.

To Rome With Love lacks the sincerity of Midnight in Paris but it's funny enough.

It's a generic enough, amiable enough romcom set in Rome, showcasing the sights and sounds of the city. For comedy fans, it's a genuinely funny film with great comic timing and dialogue, with four stories based on the simple theme of infamy and notoriety.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 19 September 2012.

What to expect when you're expecting (2012)

There are two bad ideas that cripple this movie even before it starts.

1. Adapting a pregnancy manual to a narrative film.

2. Have the narrative film based on Rob Marshal's bland anthology movies (Valentine's Day, New Year's Eve), populate its cast with equally underwritten characters and non-sequitur arcs.

The result: a comedy only funny if you have the habit of laughing even at the flattest jokes.

Read my full review, first published at Fridae on 16 May 2012.

New Year's Eve (2011)

If you've watched Valentine's Day, you know exactly what to expect from Rob Marshall's New Year's Eve.

It's an attempt to create a western version of the Chinese Holiday Movie.

You know, where the stories all suck and there's no reason to watch it aside from the fact that the studios put out something for the holidays so you feel obliged to watch as a tradition.

Read my full review of Fridae, first published on 14 December 2011.

Life Without Principle (夺命金) (2011)

Big Statements are made in this rare Asian portmanteau film - about the greed for money and the chronic lack of it in modern Hong Kong society
I call this film "Don't!" since it involves a yuppie couple buying a flat they can't afford, a banker who sells investment products to ordinary people, and a punter who bets on the market on the eve of the Eurozone crisis.

 I also call this film "Don't!" since it's very tedious, shrill, and angsty.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 19 October 2011.

Brown Sugar (น้ำตาลแดง) (2010)

This erotic anthology is to Bangkok what Paris Je'taime is to Paris.

Bangkok here is a sensual city whose inhabitants fall under its spell, succumbing to the multitudinous aspects of love. Old love, new love...

Sadly, the shorts are very hit and miss. It is the final poignant short, a beautiful meditation on loneliness and alienation, that truly deserves the stamp of arthouse erotica.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 13 July 2011.

Lover's discourse (恋人絮语) (2010)

Everyone wants to make a Paris Je'taime these days.

Here, we have 4 quirky short films about love and romance in Hong Kong.

The offbeat storytelling revolves around the moment love is found and lost, and questions the norms of the romantic genre, as it's been written for the past 20 years in Hong Kong.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 12 January 2011.

Flowers (花) (2010)

6 short stories about women in 6 decades of Japanese post-war history, filmed in the style and genre that were predominant in the period the stories are set in.

This is as close as you can get to a live action version of Millennium Actress, and just as touching and sentimental a tribute to Japanese cinema.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 4 November 2010.

Mother and Child (2009)

I'm not a fan of Latin/South American fatalism. That's why I steer clear of melodramas from R Garcia Marquez and the team of Innarritu and Arriaga.

But when Mother and Child is the creative love child of the son of Garcia Marquez and Innarritu, I threw all caution to the winds and entered the cinema...

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 5 May 2010.

New York, I love you (2009)

Did you like Paris, je t'aime?

Did you catch Sawadee Bangkok and Tokyo! because you couldn't get enough of the cities of love concept?

What if I told you the producers of Paris... made an official follow-up?

And that it has Natalie Portman directing?

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 13 January 2010.

Haven (DVD) (2007)

Legolas ditches pretty-boy looks in bid for artistic credibility

Are you still disappointed that Alejandro Inarritu and Guillermo Arriaga did not get their Oscars for Babel? One would think that after their initial critical success with 21 Grams, and Amores perros, the Inarritu/Arriaga signature portmanteau movie style had established itself as a major cinema genre when Crash won the Best Picture Oscar a year later. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but immortality is when your imitators win accolades. I mention these movies because I suspect that some of you really love this genre, but are getting tired of watching the same DVDs over and over again. I’d recommend you pick up Haven right now from the DVD store, on account that it’s a portmanteau movie, and shares producers with Crash.

You’ll have to note, though, that Haven was made before Crash, and adjust your expectations accordingly – the portmanteau formula is still being experimented on here – but I believe that the movie delivers most of what we expect from this genre. For starters, there are only 2 intertwining stories. The first tells of a father-daughter team who arrive in the Cayman Islands not for the tourism or its status as a tax haven, but because the father is on the run from the Feds for illegal banking transactions involving the tax haven. On the exotic, alien island, the two must find a way to rebuild their lives, but what they learn about the island – and themselves – may change them forever. The second tale has Orlando Bloom in an interracial romance with the daughter of a powerful citizen of the Caymans. He’s dirt poor, she’s rich, and their love will never be sanctioned by her brother and father, leading not just to a tragedy for the lovebirds, but a painful and tragic post-tragedy existence for the two. And of course, the principle characters will impact each other in unforeseen and lasting ways...

Like I’ve said, you should lower your expectations for Haven. Bob Yari and Frank Flowers have created a raw work – the lack of a third story in the mixture, the too-linear style of storytelling, and the lack of intercutting between the storylines wound the effectiveness and unity of the movie to a certain extent. In fact you may, by the end of the movie, actually be able to identify where the third story should have come from. What makes Haven a worthy film to watch (despite the mistakes made by its first-time director) is Frank Flowers’s instinctive use of the camera, the editing style, and most importantly, how he brings out the seductive colours and sounds of the Caymans.

DVD review

Haven has an interesting history: although debuting in film festivals in 2004, the movie never had a cinema release till 2006, and only then a limited release in the US, Japan, and Singapore. Whatever the reason behind its late release, it’s disappointing that there is only one feature on the DVD, a very slight making of featurette that has Bob Yari, Frank Flowers, and Anthony Mackie talk briefly about the movie. Their appearances in this video is dwarfed by clips from the movie itself. Why this is so baffles me – the "making of" feature resembles the standard promotional features that air on television to entertain the most casual of audiences, but this movie was never destined for a commercial release. Where is the in-depth feature(s) that we expect on a DVD for a film of such artistic ambitions? Where is the director’s commentary? These are features that fans of portmanteau movies would expect, and this may disappoint them greatly.

First published at incinemas on 13 April 2007

Paris, je'taime (2006)

The rules are simple and straightforward: Paris has 20 districts (or arrondissements, as they call them). Invite 20 directors from all over the world to make 20 short films, each lasting no more than 5 minutes, on each of the 20 districts. Stitch 18 of them together (2 directors created sequences that couldn't fit in with the rest) with brief sequences of overhead shots of Parisian traffic and architecture, and there, you have a film. It sounds impossible that such a film would be anywhere coherent, but then again, these 20 directors count among the most artistic filmmakers in the world, ranging from Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven, the Coen brothers, Christopher Doyle, Alexander Payne, Walter Salles, Richard LaGravenese, Sylvain Chomet, and more. Some of these names would be familiar, others less so, but almost all are mainstays in the film festival and indie scenes.

And what is this Paris that flits by 18 times in 2 hours? It is the Paris of popular imagination, the Paris according to directors from all over the world; the Paris inhabited by natives, immigrants, cosmopolitan visitors and casual tourists (as well as ghosts and vampires!); the infinite Parises we see through their experiences; the Paris of countless films past, and the Paris that directors now pay homage to - in short, Paris, the City of Love. And love, surprisingly, is completely different depending on who you ask, and all 18 answers have nothing to do with the hackneyed ideas that we read in cheap paperback romances about Paris. To Gus Van Sant, it is the feeling the triumphs over a series of beautiful but botched pickup lines; to the Coen Brothers, a cultural misunderstanding by the ugly American tourist; to Tom Tykwer, something that is keenly felt and realised only in its aftermath and passing; to Richard LaGravenese and Isabel Coixet, something that becomes true only when it is self-consciously performed.

And so 18 short films show the crucial moments when characters realise they've fallen in love, fallen out of love, have love rekindled, thwarted, awakened, relived, realised, and lost. They hit you in a perfect rhythm: just enough time to realise you've never quite seen any love story told in such an unconventional manner, or focusing on such a peculiar aspect of love, or told from such an unexpected angle (a muslim hijab sparks off a love affair, a mother's love for a child is sacrificed because she needs to babysit for another's, and what happens when two mimes fall in love?), and just enough time for you to realise that each short film is a perfectly formed miniature. But then, the short film has always been more difficult to write, direct, and realise to screen than a feature film, because its time constraints demands that the filmmakers demonstrate their point, maximise its impact, and make it so different yet emotionally true in order to impress audiences into remembering it 10 or 20 short films later. That all 18 directors succeed is a testament to the height of their skill to weave a short story that is both compelling and self-sufficient.

I cannot recall any other anthology film that has worked so well (most others have just 3-4 short stories in 2 hours), aside from the brilliant 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. A tribute to the late pianist, the movie consisted of 32 very different short films, each forming a different impression of the artists, through vastly different types of storytelling - comedy, drama, animation and so on. Paris, je t'aime has the same inspired genius and brilliant execution as 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, but it may be a far better film because it is made by not one, but 18 directors.

I would recommend Paris, je t'aime for lovebirds and lovers of Paris and short films. Its 18 unique and individualistic stories - romances, Murakami-styled miniatures, comedies, tragedies, and above all, whimsy - will appeal to romantics and cynics alike. The good news is that Paris, je t'aime is only the first of 3 movies. I'm already looking forward to the next ones on New York and Tokyo, and wondering which talented directors will be chosen for their 5 minutes in these movies.

First published at incinemas on 22 February 2007

Love for Share (Berbagi Suami) (2006)

Not a campaign poster for polygamy

Love For Share is about the issue of polygamy as seen through the eyes of women who are married to men who have other wives. Already, I can hear you groan, probably because you found out this movie is made of three interconnected stories about 3 women, each from a different social class, facing a serious and widespread social problem in Indonesia. Yes, Love For Share sounds like An Artsy, Independent Film With An Important Social Message by a fresh director that's destined to play at film festivals around the world. You'd expect normal audiences to be turned off by the self-importance that such a movie exudes. Looking at the director's previous films, you'd probably come to this suspicion as well - Arisan had a group of well-to-do 20somethings gossiping willynilly in their gatherings as they match make each other with all sorts of wrong partners, which Ca-bau-kan tackled adoption and concubinage in society.

Enough already, you must protest. But it might be better to give Nia Di Nata the benefit of the doubt in her third film, because she does the right thing finally, and saves the audience from terminal boredom. Instead of a dreary social problem movie about polygamy, Di Nata offers a comedy on polygamy. Instead of preaching down to us about the ills of polygamy (oppresses women, spreads STDs, robs people of their dignity and independance) and hammering her message (don't practise polygamy!), the director invests a healthy sense of humour to her stories, so that we can laugh with her characters, who look nothing like the stock long-suffering concubines or neglected first wives that we'd expect.

Sure there's a modern Muslim woman, a highly-educated doctor who simmers with years of disappointment after her husband takes on a second wife (telling her off-hand when No. 2 bears him a daughter) but the delicious comedy begins when the husband suffers a stroke and is found to have a third wive, unknown to both warring households. There's a young girl who becomes the newest mistress in a household filled with interesting marital rituals (shades of Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern?), but the comedy begins when instead of fighting amongst themselves, the wives build up a close friendship to collaborate and collude with each other to share their childrearing burdens - and overcome the wretched poverty of their home. It's this sense of situational irony that makes Love For Share a charming and fun film to watch, and what makes its final story a partial letdown, as it feels out of place with the other two parts. It has no situational irony and unexpected twist, and an attentive audience would probably notice that it must have been included only because it completes the third possible permutation in a relationship between a man and his two wives. Viewers will also wonder about the Aceh tsunami disaster of 26 December 2005 - this time, the groans are entirely justified because the the tsunamis are throwaway references that don't quite play a necessary part in the movie.

When it works, though, Love For Share works brilliantly. Through her latest movie, Nia Di Nata proves that her instinct for subtle urban comedy is rapidly maturing, and her at times overwritten scripts are finally coming under control. She may one day be Indonesia's Feng Xiaogang, and I'd certainly pay serious attention to her next movie - it could be the big one.

First published at incinemas on 8 February 2007

Bobby (2006)

And a liberal conspiracy is born

It’s a sign of how low George W Bush’s popularity has plunged that Emilio Estevez, a former Brat Pack actor of the 1980s who was reduced to starring in the Mighty Ducks movies, has resurfaced to become a director, persuading 23 other top Hollywood actors to star in a film that is nothing less than an full frontal attack on the president’s handling of the Iraq invasion and occupation. At this point, you’d probably throw up your hands, give a good laugh, and move on to the next review. But please bear with me. It’s easy to expect Hollywood liberals to make a political movie out of good intentions, but fall completely and utterly flat due to either incompetence, arrogance, a tone-deaf script, or any combination of the three.

Yet to my surprise, Emilio Estevez has probably pulled off a coup here. Bobby works well precisely because it doesn’t mention Bush or Iraq at all, and yet somehow compels the audience to connect the dots inevitably, like an involuntary muscle twitch. Theoretically, Bobby is about an ordinary day in 1968 – an “interesting time” in history, with the civil rights movement making its hugest gains, a strongly grassroots movement protesting against a wasteful and unjustified war that had killed too many Americans and Iraqis Vietnamese, and the hippie subculture spreading its message of universal love and peace for all to the wider population. It’s also a special day: the California primaries to decide the candidate for the Democrat nominee for President would be held that day, and senator Robert Kennedy was widely expected to win California and go on to win the Presidency, pull the troops out of Iraq Vietnam, heal the racial divide once and for all, and possibly lift hundreds of thousand out of poverty. Robert Kennedy would be shot and killed by a crazed gunman later that night at the Ambassador Hotel.

Through 24 characters who live and work at the hotel, Bobby is a film that evokes the optimism and sense of social justice of 1968, despite the very bad state of the nation then. There are the rank and file employees in the hotel and their managers. There are guests of the hotel, each struggling with their own problems and tribulations. And there are the campaign staff of the senator, who have set up their campaign headquarters at the Ambassador Hotel. Estevez flits from character to character, vignette to vignette, plumbing their emotional depths, private tragedies, and minor epiphanies. The director manages even to evoke the ghost of Robert Altman, working in very obliquely issues of class and race divides, turning the Ambassador Hotel at times into an American Gosford Park. With more than half the characters working at the hotel or for the primary campaign, you’ll be fascinated with the hidden world of the servants, with the plays of power and relationships between the many-layered hotel hierarchy that is further complicated by issues of race and the Vietnam war.

For a movie that’s based on the 24 hours at the hotel before Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Estevez devotes much screentime to historical reels of the senator’s actual campaign tour around America, as well as a lengthy voice montage of his best and most idealistic speeches. For an ensemble movie, Estevez lets almost every character deliver a really grand or profound speech. Ordinarily, this is a recipe for a disaster, but somehow it all fits together, because of the well-written script. The best performances, speeches and storylines that you should look out for are from Laurence Fishburne as a head chef who is resented by the Latino busboys; Demi Moore and Emilio Estevez as an alcoholic fading diva and her depressed manager husband; Shiaf LeBouf, Nick Cannon and Ashton Kutcher as two young Kennedy campaign volunteers who spend the afternoon at a hippie drug dealer’s room; and Sharon Stone’s portrayal of a beautician married to a manager at the hotel.

Fortunately though, the balance is just right: watching this movie, you realise how easily it could have gone wrong with its liberal politics and an overload of big-name stars giving grand speeches. And then you realise that this movie didn’t just turn out all right, but is a great success and an inspiring film to boot. And all this is credit to the directing and writing skills of Emilio Estevez. The movie puts forth a convincing case that all is not lost, that idealism is necessary even for these dark times, and that the world will be a better place if we place more value on the lives of others – and should be watched just for that.

First published at incinemas on 25 January 2007

Babel (2006)

Are we there yet???!!!

Imagine a movie made of 3 seemingly unconnected stories whose characters eventually end up being linked to one another, either through the unintended consequences of their actions, or through their common suffering or the thematic unity of their separate stories. That’s what make up the concept for Traffic, 3 Needles, Requiem for a Dream, Crash, Amores perros, 21 Grams and now, Babel – the last 3 efforts of Inarritu and Arriaga. Now these may employ a large ensemble of actors with interweaving storylines like the complex pieces Robert Altman and his spiritual successors make, but instead of the plot being driven forward by the interactions between a huge cast, a portmanteau movie builds up its own structure through mirror movements of the characters in each of its short stories. In other words, Altmanesque films create a frisson through an intricate social reality, whereas portmanteau movies are formalistic exercises in structure: you derive pleasure spotting the layering of similarities and coincidences multiplying between unrelated plots. That is its greatest strength and worst weakness: in the hands of a master, a movie like this approaches artistry; in the clumsier hands of a mere apprentice, a movie like this will appear too forced, contrived, and manipulative.

Recently, the team of Inarritu and Arriaga have added their own touch to the portmanteau movie, by telling the stories in his movies out of chronological order. A portmanteau movie like this – regardless of what its constituent stories are about – will begin to resemble a Greek play of yore, a meditation on causality (who caused what to happen?), irony (because we don’t know what happened first, until the very end when we piece the stories together), guilt (who/what should be the one to blame for everything that happens), retribution (tied in to irony: perhaps bad things happen to everyone because they have some innate flaw), and justice (are people punished by karma for what they might have done, or can bad things really happen to decent if flawed people?). Watching the wrenching drama that is Babel, you realise that Inarritu and Arriaga have pioneered and perfected the structure of their film to evoke the best of Greek tragedy: there is irony, guilty, retribution, justice, and perhaps some painful redemption.

That being said, Babel does not quite measure up to the genius and freshness of Amore perros or 21 Grams: director and scriptwriter appear to have put in all their energy into honing perfect structure and storytelling that they have neglected to tell compelling stories. Indeed, watching Babel, one gets the impression that the team didn’t really care this time about the individual stories they told, as long as they link back into each other inevitably, in a fatalistic fashion.

Here’s the greatest puzzle about the movie: if the audience is not bedazzled by how brilliant the stories are structured to crash into each other, viewers would be forced to pay attention to these stories in themselves – and realise that these stories are poorly chosen, consist of mostly unpleasant characters too wrapped up in themselves to be unworthy of our sympathy, trapped in offensively racist and laughably fantastic situations (there’s a teenage nymphomaniac deaf and mute girl who flashes men and boys - obviously Japanese!) involving a high number of improbable coincidences (A pair of ugly American tourists are accidentally shot by two young goatherd boys playing with their father’s rifle because the boys got tired of masturbating behind a rock - obviously Arab!). Occasionally, attempts at drama actually fail, because you don’t care for the characters, and because the drama can be rather heavyhanded and blatantly manipulative at times, and because when that happens (for example, when a chicken gets decapitated the natural way, are you supposed to feel shock and horror, or bemusement at the horror of the two rich white kids who’ve never stepped into a farm before?) you get the urge to actually laugh at how terribly off the point the director-scriptwriter team can get. Don’t worry, the urge to laugh at some scenes in Babel aren’t as perverse as you think.

Perhaps the best part about Babel is the first half hour, where Inarritu and Arriaga set up the individual stories, and you have almost no inkling how everyone will be linked to each other. At this stage, some of the storylines are actually compelling, especially the one involving a Mexican illegal immigrant working as a nanny. Yet after some time, you begin to suspect that everyone will be linked to each other, and how the movie contorts itself to achieve that proves it is a product of brilliant structure, but a victim of weak and contrived writing.

Frankly, the director-writer team could have substituted any other storyline involving other characters, and it won’t affect to their study of irony, causality, guilt, karma, and so on. Personally, I’d like to see them tackle a feature version of The Bloody Case that Started from a Steam Bun, but it’s a pity that the team has recently broken up and are unlikely to collaborate again. Babel is indeed a strong contender for this year’s Best Picture Oscar, but you will either love it or loathe it.

First published at incinemas on 25 January 2007

Black Night 黑夜 (2006)

Run quickly, it’s coming after your purse! You’ll wish this film never existed.

It must have sounded like a sure-win idea. Making a film is an increasingly expensive enterprise as consumers demand higher production standards, while pirates make bootlegs of your movies scarcely a week after it hits the screens, and distributors release the VCD or DVD a month after that. What you need is a cheaper way to make a film, so how about finding 3 directors from different countries to make 3 separate short films and join them together after they’re done shooting? The costs of production will be spread out among the investors, while you can get fans from 3 countries to watch. And then, you can market it to film markets in the West as an “Asian Horror Anthology”, and their critics will go soft in the knees over the exotic and cultural importance of your film.

It’s a fool-proof plan. It’s also not far removed from the very smart plan in The Producers. I watched Three in 2002 and realised that you can’t count on each member in a 3-legged film to produce work is as good as the other two. In fact, like most similar anthologies, you can count on the film to contain one dud, one indifferent effort, and one rough gem. Since short films are used by directors to pitch for a full-length feature, you might see the longer version of the best short as a bonus on the DVD.

Three was an average anthology with hits and misses. Its sequel, Three Extremes, was a real gem since all the directors cut no corners, gave their best efforts and made each segment unforgettable by going beyond the typical horror fare. And since we already have an average Three, a brilliant Three Extremes, perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised that Black Night is the dud. Black Night is not related, funded, or produced by the same people who made Three and Three Extremes. But clearly the temptation to use a winning formula proved to be too much...

Next Door

The fact was simple: he wanted to take care of Annie Wilkes himself. He had been that man, and he supposed he ought to be ashamed, but that man had had two big advantages over this one: that man had had two feet. The snow storm to which Paul had awakened the day after his expedition to the bathroom had gone on for two days — there had been at least eighteen inches of new fall, and heavy drifting. Aye, she were a great lady, and it is a terrible thing the way His Lordship's went on about it — “Aye, she was fine,” Geoffrey said gently, and found to his dismay that his own tears were now close, like a cloudburst which threatens on a late summer's afternoon.

Indeed, the paragraph above doesn’t make any sense at all. It is in English and consists of grammatically-correct phrases that even make sense when taken singly. You’ve probably seen something like this before, perhaps in a spam email that you promptly sent to the trash with your delete button. Patrick Leung’s Next Door segment is like that. It is recognisably a horror short. The scares kind of make sense when taken singly. Yet they make no coherent story as Leung’s approach is to just take out every scare tactic and horror movie convention and string them together without sense or sensibility.

How did it work on the audience? By the nth time he brought out another stock ghost sequence near the end, the folks in the cinema had gotten so tired of the everything and the kitchen sink approach that they burst into laughter at the sheer horror of watching a horror film written by a director who apparently doesn’t know how to make a short film, and understands very little about horror.

Leung has none of the originality of Peter Chan in Three and none of the pointed social commentary of Fruit Chan in Three Extremes. He doesn’t even have Christopher Doyle, who did the cinematography for both directors and ensured their short segments looked nothing like a typical bad Hong Kong ghost movie from the 1980s. Leung should be very, very afraid.

Black Hole

Takahiko Akiyama was the man who did the art direction in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. He also wrote and did the special effects in last year’s underappreciated Hinokio. If you didn’t walk out of the cinema in the middle of Next Door, Akiyama shows how to make a decent short horror film. It’s so engrossing that you won’t even notice he did it on a low budget. Actually, you’d notice how cheap and cheaply made Next Door looks.

Akiyama’s short combines creative use of camera angles and judicious CGI effects to tell a psychological thriller and horror story about a woman who remembers nothing about her childhood, despite having people close to her die mysteriously. Of all 3 directors, Akiyama is the only one who understands that true horror lies in not unveiling the real monster – every thing becomes more scary if it’s mediated through hazy childhood memories, hallucinations, and mutilated corpses. The material is sufficiently coherent and plausible enough to warrant a longer script, and I look forward to watching a feature-length version of Black Hole from Akiyama soon.

The Lost Memory

Thanit Jitnukul never ceases to make trashy and interesting movies. From a director whose oeuvre includes Andaman Girl, a mistaken identity gangster gay porn comedy, and Bang Rajan, a B-grade no-budget version of Suryothai, I expect many great things. You wouldn’t have known that THE Thanit Jitnukul could make an average, boring, conventional horror picture – he must’ve been sleepwalking through this segment somehow. Think of how it could’ve turned out if Thanit stamped the segment with his extreme B-grade sensibilities. Instead, the audience gets yet another boy in full-body paint, puddles of water flowing down the stairs, and a mother-child story, combined with the same amnesia plot device as Kim Ji-woon’s segment in Three.

The Round-up

When the Scary Movie series makes fun of Ju-on, Dark Water and Ring, it’s a sure sign to move on to new gimmicks and ways of telling horror stories. Even Takashi Shimizu reinvents the genre with every subsequent entry in his J-Horror Theatre project. It is clear that Three Extremes represents the peak of the Asian Horror Anthology franchise, with Fruit Chan’s social commentary, Park Chan-wook’s morality play, and Takashi Miike’s extreme, disturbing and bizarre perversions.

Dark Night merely looks like a movie put together by disowned drop-outs from a film school run by Shimizu.

First published at incinemas on 13 April 2006