Tony Takitani トニー滝谷 (2004)

This was originally a short story by Haruki Murakami, translated and published in the New York Times in 2002. I’m offering this factoid as a means to explain why this film runs for barely over an hour, and why it is still worth paying to watch. Murakami’s sparse, even Spartan style, the interiority of his characters, and elements of the fantastic and absurd in his prose, have all been forwarded as reasons why his works are impossible to adapt to film.

Perhaps, as Ichikawa Jun seems to imply, the most appropriate material to choose are Murakami’s short stories. The short story format is supposed to be Spartan anyway, and fits in with these mood pieces. Tony Takitani, the short story, is a distillation of Murakami’s pet themes of alienation, loss and longing as the human condition. Tony Takitani (Ogata Issei), the character in the short story and movie, is a living shell of a man who has led a lonely life and has grown used to it, doesn’t know what he is missing, and is perfectly fine with it. The artistic genius frowns on beauty and aesthetics (irrelevant and wrong), doesn’t see the point in human society, and speaks to his father (Ogata Issei) once every 3 years because they wouldn’t know what to do with each other after they run out of things to say. Spartan to a fault, Tony works as a technical illustrator for ad agencies until a chance meeting with a client introduces the one and only time in his life where he is possessed by an emotion, and it changes everything.

If there is a quiet sense of tragedy that hangs over people who lack self-awareness, that sense of tragedy hangs over Tony Takitani like a permanent haze. A man who doesn’t know he is a hollow shell is somewhat pathetic, when the same man fills up that void with something meaningful, only to lose it in the end – this is tragedy.

Ichikawa Jun chooses to make a very straightforward adaptation of the original short story by refusing to turn this into a full length feature. The most interesting and compelling decision, though, is to deliberately film Tony Takitani as an illustrated short story. Scenes are mostly short and sometimes disjointed, with camera panning as a method of screen transition. On the big screen, this evokes the sensation akin to reading a classical Japanese illustrated scroll, with the narrator (Nishijima Hideoshi) standing in for the calligraphic text and Ichikawa’s postcard style photography standing in for the illustrations. An artistic touch that may or may not work on audiences is Ichikawa often has the characters speaking aloud and completing the narrator’s lines. It might seem a little affected, but I personally derived some satisfaction knowing that a film about an ascetic can only be made through a keen aesthetic sense.

First published at incinemas on 31 August 2006

Akeelah and the Bee (2006)

Laurence Fishburne is clearly eyeing Mr Garrison's role in South Park

I loved the 2002 Oscar-nominated documentary Spellbound, which introduced the sport of spelling bees to a much wider audience than English teachers and their students in the high school spelling club. Jeffrey Blitz had good sense to focus on eight ordinary young competitors from the real world: some are geeks and seen as outsiders by their peers, others struggle with teenage parenthood; some are simply precocious, others have been hothoused by yuppie parents, and still others come from much more humble backgrounds. These children come from everywhere; it seems many are immigrants or children of immigrants. Aside from their parents and coaches, most of these kids take the competition with their heads screwed on, and simply shrug, grin and move on if they get a word wrong and are eliminated. As a sports drama featuring little tykes saying the darnest things, Spellbound works because there are very little dramatics despite the potential for drama.

Yet the success of Spellbound has led to the development of an entire genre of movies, coming under the label of "spellingbeekidsploitation". Last year, we had Richard Gere and Flora Cross in Bee Season. Now, we have Laurence Fishburne and Keke Palmer in Akeelah and the Bee. Here, the director has chosen to create an inspiring film, one of those that are designed to get the heartstrings of the audience in a way that only a film about young children doing their best at sports can. In other words, a dramatic and sentimental (thank goodness it’s not based on any real life story!) account that follows the journey an ordinary girl must take to reach the finals of the National Spelling Bee contest.

Just to let you know, the film does succeed at tugging heartstrings, because it is a filmed as a sports film, albeit with an academic and cerebral sport – and sports films with kids, films about students struggling to doing well in academic pursuits are almost impossible to fail at tugging at heartstrings. The only questions are academic: whether the director was overly and overtly manipulative of the audience.

We understand that there are several rules to follow if you intend to make a sports film. Like having a wise old and cranky Karate Kid style mentor. That would be Laurence Fishburne for this movie. You know, the actor who usually plays the huge black man who looks capable of tearing off your head, whether he’s on the side of good or evil. How much did Atchison have to twist to turn Laurence Fishburne into Dr Larabee, a Chicken Soup for Nelson Mandela quoting professor at UCLA? Turns out Fishburne has to don a pink cardigan sweater, act like a prissy schoolmarm, has a gardening hobby like a grandmother, and come in close proximity to a box of puppets and dolls while coaching Akeelah (Keke Palmer) on spelling techniques. There goes a symbol of African American male virility! Doug Atchison will sacrifice anything just to pull your heartstrings! Not only that, but Dr Larabee is given a tragic past that only bears on the film for a scene that lasts shorter than 2 minutes, and only serves to pile on the heart balm.

This excessive gratuitousness is grating, especially when you consider that Laurence Fishburne does succeed in the rest of the Karate Kid training sequences with Keke Palmer.

The key point in the standard student sports film genre is that the protagonist often has to struggle against their environments. Since Akeelah is African American, it means that she lives in a bad neighbourhood, her brother is a gang member wannabe, and her mum is a single mum struggling to keep everything going, and is firmly opposed to her daughter wasting time on frivolous extracurricular activities like spelling bee contests. And of course, Akeelah goes to a school where being too clever is a death sentence and an invitation for school bullying.

So far, so good? But Atchison veers wildly off when he ditches the emotional and social realism halfway in the movie and begins to shoot with rose-tinted glasses, dropping issues developing in the background. I am of course talking about the problem of the African American race here. The student community’s suspicion of Akeelah isn’t so much a rejection of success than a symptom of reverse racism: Akeelah, by being too good at her studies and winning regional spelling bees, is too white for them. Her mother (Angela Bassett) forbids her from travelling upstate to a posh school not because it is in the suburbs, but because it is really in a white neighbourhood, populated by token minorities like rich Hispanics and overachieving Chinese. It smacks of intellectual dishonesty that Atchison refuses to acknowledge the real causes of the symptoms in his characters, and then proceeds to mow them down as if they never existed. Don’t ask me how Akeelah wins the approval of her classmates and mother – even I can’t figure out a satisfactory answer.

The bad neighbourhood angle turns ever so suddenly into Sesame Street meets Hillary Clinton’s "It Takes A Village" when Akeelah’s coach persuades her to seek the coaching of her own community. How is it that the friendly local gangster in his pimpmobile is so kind as to offer a poem to the girl, and insist that her wannabe gangster brother spend time with her spelling bee preparation? It boggles the mind. What of the friendly Korean grocery store owner who Akeelah also hangs out with? Has he forgotten the rift between Koreans and African Americans in the US, caused by black gangsters murdering Korean store owners in the early 1990s? After the fantastic sequences of the entire neighbourhood chipping in to coach Akeelah, I was expecting Oscar the Grouch and The Count to join in as well.

Atchison did not need to resort to such Pollyannish measures to sell this movie. What was initially a sound movie might, in hindsight, come off as slightly corny. I am betting that local audiences, being less in tune with the cultural milieu of the American that Atchison whitewashes, will be more accepting of its positive message.

First published at incinemas on 31 August 2006

High Cost of Living, the (2006)

The perfect getaway - or is it?

The High Cost of Living is the third and final feature release this year under the Film Incubator Programme (FIP) for digital films. It is also Leonard Lai’s first ever feature film, and the eighth local feature film to hit cinemas this year. Watching most of these movies, I get the sense of excitement and ambition, much more so in the FIP series (S11 and Unarmed Combat), that directors are more willing to take risks with unconventional topics and stories. In particular, the FIP series is marked by directors rejecting arty films like Eric Khoo’s, as well as broad comedies like Jack Neo’s. In itself, this is no guarantee of a good movie; S11 had a tight script that complemented its relatively original premise, while Unarmed Combat did not manage to expand out of its quirky original short film.

Leonard Lai and Jeremy Chia are certainly ambitious, for The High Cost of Living is an attempt at neo noir, refracted through the lens of Hong Kong criminal action thrillers, set in a mostly Singaporean locale. The central characters are Long (Timothy Nga), a member of the Special Ops department in an unnamed government agency, who also has a license to kill (and never fails to exercise that license), and Gid (Roy Ngerng), a professional assassin who accepts contracts only if the intended victims deserve to die – like a corrupt Singaporean businessman who had too much guanxi in Shanghai. Gid murders nasty people, and Long investigates those murders in a brutal shoot first, ask later fashion. When the driven and merciless bounty hunter begins to hunt down the driven and passionate assassin, who will win? Who will walk away with the cleaner conscience?

You would be forgiven for thinking straight away: neo noir meets Infernal Affairs meets Assassins! But the point about genre films is not about coming up with something completely original, but to create rare combinations from familiar elements of the genre, and to improve the telling of the genre film. By this yardstick, High Cost scores with its mixing of the noir genre with the hardboiled Hongkong 1980s cop vs killer setup, as well as the mutual amorality of the cops and criminals in the Infernal Affairs trilogy. What is disappointing, or perhaps expected, is that screenplay is unable to keep all the balls in the air. Lai and Chia do try to give equal screen time to Timothy Nga and Roy Ngerng, but the key thing that must be done in a proper noir film of this nature is not just to show the amorality of the detective’s actions, but deliver on the existential dissonance or cynicism it creates in his character. Despite their intentions, it is all too easy for the audience to sympathise with Gid killer than with Long, and for them to focus on Gid as the central character.

Script-wise, High Cost feels relatively tight, but occasionally there are overlong scenes that disrupt the filmic rhythm that a noir film should have, mostly due to the director lingering too long over death scenes and reaction shots, leading to an undermining of the credibility of some scenes. There are only a few unnecessary scenes, but they are forgivable given that this is the first feature attempt by the director and writer.

More annoying is the dialogue in the movie. While Ngerng, Nga and Hamish Brown are comfortable using English, their older co-stars are not, and it is noticeable when they obviously stumble through their lines. The brilliance about filming on digital video (as the FIP series uses) is the cheapness of film. If the actors stumble through their delivery, with hesitant pauses and extraneous sibilant syllables between words, the director should have just deleted the scene and reshot it. Digital video is so convenient that when mistakes like this slip through, they are even more damning than they would normally be.

Technical skill and production values in High Cost is average. Precisely because the director and cinematographer throws in a kitchen sink’s worth of wide angle, Dutch angle and low angle shots, their efforts scream out the fact that they are haven’t moved beyond the short film mindset. That’s the one where filmmakers feel a pressing need to show the audience how many innovative angles and shots they can cram within a 10 minute short. It looks great at times, but over a period of 90 minutes, continuous mishmash of fancy shooting techniques can get tiring, and is ultimately a distraction from the telling of the story.

The shortcomings of digital video are all but exposed by the (deliberate) constant changes in lighting – some scenes, especially those under fluorescent light, simply look ghastly. Generally, High Cost and S11 prove that low cost digital cameras are better suited for outdoors scenes and handheld scenes. It is also possible that the low end equipment caused a few colour palette changes from just a change in camera angle, and in bright outdoors lighting, cause a blurring effect on moving objects. What this means is digital video is a very sensitive medium, cheap but requiring huge investments in post-production time. We note that colour correction has much to be desired, and hope that High Cost does not dissuade future and aspiring filmmakers to abandon digital video as a legitimate medium.

First published at incinemas on 17 August 2006

Don't Come Knocking (2005)

A special kind of mood is required to watch the world go by. Or a Wim Wenders film, for the matter.

Long before Sofia Coppola was doing Lost in Translation, Wim Wenders was beating a trail in intercultural cinema. The German-born, American-influenced (Wenders grew up in occupied Germany), and French-educated auteur is known for works like Paris, Texas, Tokyo-Ga, and Wings of Desire.

From their titles alone, you’d have an idea of what to expect from a Wim Wenders movie. One can imagine dislocated persons wandering around in foreign landscapes, alienated yet searching for some common humanity with others. As a filmmaker of the old European school, Wenders eschews the tyranny of realism and plot in favour of the image and the soundtrack. Whether it is angels perched on top of skyscrapers and statues or even slow pans of the desert vistas of the American Southwest, watching any of his movies is a cinematic experience of pure experience. Dialogue may be at a minimum and the plot may take a while to develop and then a while for us to figure out, but in those many minutes, we chill out in our seats admiring the stunning cinematography and the soundtrack.

While most of us are used to film as a means of storytelling, Wenders employs film as a mode of philosophy, of mellow observation of the deeper qualities of humanity. That’s not to say that his films are unwatchable or are intimidating and artistic. There is a sense of wry humour and irony that creeps along in each film; we sometimes hear it humming along in the background, and sometimes it just jumps out at the most unexpected places, discreetly and in a non-showy fashion, of course, since Wenders is still more European than American in his directorial sensibility. So when you watch Don’t Come Knocking, all this will hold true for you: the languid pacing, the meditative, taciturn dialogue, the profoundly beautiful camerawork and the unforgettable music – you know what to expect, but the joy is seeing it delivered in an unexpected manner.

While Don’t Come Knocking returns to the setting of Paris, Texas and reprises its opening scene of a cowboy riding off into the desert, everything is different. For one, it turns out that the figure is really an actor, a washed up former Western film star who, after decades of hard living and celebrity scandals and a slow slide to has-been status, has decided to walk off the set of a film so bad that it almost is a parody of all Westerns and The Bridges of Madison County, and had to be financed by a small-time businessman. We will never know why Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) left, but we are treated to half an hour of seeing how this celebrity (however much he is a has-been) manages to pull off and sustain a disappearing trick on his handlers at the production company. Or to appreciate slowly the irony and humour of a man disappearing from the world’s eye by going into the real world, of a man making it difficult to be found in order, perhaps, to find himself. The humour is understated, in the background, and yet sustained over half an hour on just one philosophical joke, will generate tingles in your flesh.

At the same time, Don’t Come Knocking is still a Western. Relentlessly and mercilessly on the heels of the outlaw is some kind of bounty hunter (Tim Roth), a creepy man who speaks ever so politely in clipped syllables and even pays a visit to Mrs Spencer (Eva Marie Saint), a little old lady in Nevada who Howard has never spoken to in more than 20 years. Perhaps he’s fled to the safety of his childhood home. Or perhaps, like outlaws in the movies, Howard has escaped in order to come to terms with the hearts he’s broken – after all, he did have a wild past – and reap the seeds he has sown before he meets (and will surely meet) the bounty hunter.

I liked Wender’s handling of what appears to turn out as Howard’s quest for personal redemption. In the hands of a lesser director, this would turn out to be a preachy, moralising film about the evils of the Hollywood lifestyle, If Howard realises that much of his time was lost in his youth and literally suspended in the endless succession of film shoots, can he regain it? Instead of asking dramatically if Howard can be saved, Wenders gently asks if he could regain that lost time. Instead of asking if Howard’s attempts at rapprochement with an old flame (Jessica Lange) could ever lead to his redemption, Wenders asks with a twinkle in his eye whether how Howard attempts to make up for his lost time is the test of redemption in itself.

First published at incinemas on 17 August 2006

Ghost Game ล่า-ท้า-ผ (2006)

This movie bombed at the Thai box office, was pulled out after a 3-week run, sparked off protests in Cambodia and caused a diplomatic incident. Watch it now!

The cast of Academy Fantasia (a popular Thai reality show about aspiring actors) star in Ghost Game, a horror movie about a paranormal Fear Factor type reality show where contestants are apparently taken to creepy locations to rough it out, and the last one to be spooked out wins. Imagine what would happen if the contestants were brought to a really haunted prison camp formerly run by a bloodthirsty commander.

That’s an interesting enough premise, but something has gone very wrong. I’m guessing it might have something to do with letting a first-time director helm this film, or the fact that this is the very first film from this production company. I wouldn’t be surprised if the producers are rookies as well – that would fit in just nicely with the amateur acting cast of Academy Fantasia.

The reality game horror movie is something that hasn’t been fully tested, aside from a mild flirtation in Halloween: Resurrection. While reviewers complained its director was underinformed about the very plot device he used to update the Halloween series, it is clear that Sarawuth Wichiensan has even less of a clue about reality television than he has of horror movies.

Here is my list of cinematic crimes that Sarawuth Wichiensan is guilty of:

1. For a reality show set on a sizeable island, where are the crew with handheld cameras tagging along each of the 11 contestants for almost all their waking and sleeping hours? How do we see what happens in the film if there are no camera crew around to film the footage?

It’s rather bizarre since we do know that the CCTV-style cameras on the ceilings of the rooms and corridors in the former prison camp are incapable of broadcast quality footage and not to mention are incapable of shooting close-up angles or even moving about. Yet at times, parts of Ghost Game look as though they are shot in hand-held, and we know there are no on-site camera crew in those scenes. What gives?

2. Sarawuth Wichiensan has this rather cute impression that a reality show that follows the movements of 11 contestants over a few days can be aired live on television at apparently all times of the day in Bangkok. In real life, reality shows are filmed on location, then edited at a studio, and broadcast on television months later.

That this ill-conceived notion went uncorrected is quite a feat when you realise that at least 11 people on the set just went through a reality TV show, and would know much more than the director on the topic.

3. Can someone tell me why there are tonnes of screeching violins and assorted horror movie sound effects when the horror movie is about what takes place during the actual shoot of a reality TV show?

Either the Ghost Game takes place in supposedly “real life” and “real time” – in which case there should not be any non-diegetic music – or the Ghost Game is a partial parody of reality shows, in which case the director should play up the music, using cheesy Survivor tribal council style theme and the Tribal Challenge theme, and arrange to bump off the annoying characters in style, accompanied by more cheesy music of the non-horror kind.

4. Perhaps the greatest crime is this: at the beginning of Ghost Game, footage is shown of a previous camera crew mysteriously dying of extreme shock at the same site. At the end of Ghost Game, when the killings begin, the contestants and crew do not die in the same manner, despite the fact that they encounter the same forces that killed of the previous crew.

5. A horror movie is simply not worth watching if it breaks its own rules. Or if the makeup for the ghosts is so amateurish and half-baked that it reminds you of your secondary school drama night event.

Ghost Game is a horror movie so poorly conceived and far worse executed that the only horror you can experience comes with the realisation that you paid money to watch it. It is incompetently made, yet unlike the glorious trash of Ed Wood, it lacks creativity or even entertainment value. Yet there is one way to get me watching this movie again, and to pay good money too: some enterprising television network should get the rights to do an Asian version of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and screen this with a running commentary by sock puppets making fun of every bad line, scene, and concept in the movie.

First published at incinemas on 17 August 2006