House at the end of the street (2012)

Newcomers move into sleepy town, next to a serial killer and her tormented, nice brother.

It's a modern horror film, but done entirely with the thriller sensibilities of Hitchcock and Brian de Palma.

Watch for: Jennifer Lawrence, who proves she's not a flash in a pan.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 31 October 2012.

Ted (2012)

Aside from the man-child, the other 21st century innovation to the romantic comedy is the bromance. The gimmick in Ted is the bromantic triangle involves a foul-mouthed magical talking teddy bear, voiced by Seth MacFarlane.

The gimmick kind of runs out of steam halfway, and MacFarlane's schtick for pop cultural references takes over.

Watch for: Not MacFarlane's schtick, not the gimmick, but the evocation of 80s children's urban fantasy movies.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 5 September 2012.

Haywire (2011)

Haywire is Steven Soderbergh's homage to Quentin Tarrantino's homages to 70s sepia-toned B-grade action flicks.

Real-life MMA artist Gina Carano plays the former marine turned assassin whose betrayal by unknown forces leads to a whole load of asskicking vengeance.

Soderbergh is too engrossed in the technicalities of re-creating genre here that he forgets to make an entertaining action pic.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 18 January 2012.

The Artist (2011)

Talkies are in and a silent film star finds himself on the way out, just when he spots a talented starlet.

Michel Hazanavicius continues his project of making parodies and pastiches of film genres from the past.

This time round, the director strikes gold because The Artist transcends the story it tells and becomes a tribute to an era of filmmaking that the world has passed by.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 21 December 2011.

11-11-11

This moody Spanish horror pays tribute to the old masters of the genre.

Without giving too much of the plot away, it’s a mixture of The Number 23 and John Carpenter’s very harrowing The Prince of Darkness, combining the apocalypse with occult rituals, numerology, and modern day scares.

From one of the directors of the Saw franchise, this is surprisingly coherent, full of mythological flavour, and actually frightening.

Read my full review on Fridae, first published on 9 November 2011.

No puedo vivir sin ti (不能没有你) (2009)

Will Taiwan's 2009 Academy Awards entry make it to the shortlist for Best Foreign Film?

No pudeo vivir sin ti is a piece of neorealist cinema set in modern Kaohsiung, focussing on the plight of poorest of the poor in society: squatters and itinerant workers.

Read my full review on Fridae, first published on 23 December 2009.

Peter Pan (DVD) (1953)

What a timely release of the platinum edition of Peter Pan! For one thing, Disney Animation Studios had recently announced its decision to overturn its wrongheaded decision to abandon traditional (read 2D) animation - what better way to celebrate this than releasing a platinum edition for all the Walt Disney Classics? The only possible cure for people who are convinced that 3D animation is the wave of the future, and that traditional animation is just hopelessly déclassé, who have never seen the wonders that Studio Ghibli trots using that outdated medium, is to let them watch the old classics again.

But hasn't everyone watched Peter Pan before? Surely on an old television broadcast, or on a VHS tape in the 1980s - but for the platinum edition, DVD visuals have been restored - dirty spots in degrading prints cleaned up, but not intrusively enhanced - while the audio has been remastered to 5.1 Dolby sound. The result may be more farreaching than you think: for once, it is possible to view this movie as Walt Disney and audiences in 1952 did. It certainly is easier now to see what's so great about Peter Pan (and the rest of the classics) - there's a kind of magical fluidity to movements, a complex choreography that seems more and more rare despite the technical advancements that 3D animation offers. There's the marriage of incidental music and pop music of the day to film sequences that just isn't done anymore (changes in musical taste may have something to do with it). And there's the strange realisation that somehow, backgrounds and characters, even though composed using traditional, visually boring, 2D ("flat") methods, can impart a sense of wonderment, of imagination beyond the over-literal mode of CGI.

And this is what the platinum edition of Peter Pan promises: a return to eternal wonderment, the evocation of magic, the eternal childhood. The story may feel dated - no thanks to our more politically correct age where it's not cool to depict Indians as gutteral-voiced, slope faced tomtom-banging hunters, and no thanks to a certain entertainer who has turned "Neverland" into a name of ill repute - but the animation technique creating challenges for animators in complex yet unflashy sequences and the beauty of well-composed music will speak to audiences' hearts through the ages, for yet another 50 years.

DVD review

Walt Disney thought very highly of JM Barrie's Peter Pan, taking more than 10 years to produce it with a gargantuan committee of animators, writers, artists, and live action models before he gave the go-ahead. The special features on the platinum edition make full use of currently available material from the Disney archives, and it shows.

On Disc 1, the commentary is not so much on what is happening right there and then in the animation, but it is a series of interviews by various voice-over artists, animators, scriptwriters and many many people involved in the decade-long production process. Some of these interviews or reminiscences have been recorded years ago, others are brand new. There's alot of stuff to entertain and inform adults revisiting this classic, animation history buffs - mostly because all the commentors have the benefit of decades separating their interviews with their roles in the film.

Disc 2 has all sorts of goodies for the animation historian. Under "Backstage Disney" are 6 features, each 7 to 15 minutes long, about the history and mechanics of making Peter Pan. Of note is "You can fly", which compares Disney's animated feature to previous stage productions. You'll appreciate the innovativeness of Walt Disney even more after watching this one. Also an eye-opening is "The Peter Pan that almost was", which has an alternate opening sequence and other deleted scenes - some in almost-completed stage, others in storyboard form - thanks to the fact that Walt Disney took his time to fully think through the script and experiment with ideas before fully committing them to film.

Everything that can possibly be in this platinum disc is here, except for the live-action model videos which the Disney animators shot to help them study and realise the characters on film. Footages of these videos are few and far in between, appearing in various featurettes on disc 2, but they're extremely good. One hopes that the full videos can be found in some buried corner of the Disney archives one day, so that the studio can release an ultimate version!

First published at incinemas on 21 May 2007

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

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