Not my scene usually but I was tempted to see this thriller set in Ulan Bator, not a common backdrop for movies.
The film is like a low-budget American movie of the 80’s in which an FBI policeman has to escort a Kazakh criminal to Mongolia to testify in a trial against human traffickers (Mongolians, Russians and who knows what else).
The witness is so valuable that the trafficking mafia will do anything to avoid his appearing in court so the film is pretty much a sequence of gun and knife fights and car chases from the start.
Despite the unknown cast (one suspects some are well regarded actors in their home countries), the movie is entertaining and relatively credible and has a nice vein of humour added in.
With a better budget, director Drew Thomas is one to watch. Can’t say the city was that attractive however.
The latest from Rome-based Turkish director Ferzan Oztepek. He’s a director I like as his films are usually easy to watch and capture moments in life and different characters.
One of his main interests are gay characters and this film is no exception. Arturo (Stefano Accorsi) and Alessandro (Edoardo Leo) have been together for 15 years.
Arturo is a translator who could have been more successful in his career while Alessandro is a plumber. As is often the case, the spark has gone out of their romance and both have been having affairs on the side. Alessandro’s best friend who actually introduced them is Annamaria (Jasmine Trinca, very good)
who parks her two delightful children on them while she is in hospital for tests.
This creates more issues between the couple who are heading towards a break-up.
Then, feeling they cannot look after the children they take them against the mother’s wishes to stay with the grandmother in Palermo, Sicily, a bitter twisted witch of a woman.
Basically, the film depicts the way this central relationship is affected by the responsibility of looking after children, when they themselves have not had any.
There is a lot of artifice in this movie and yet it works! Oztepek has chosen to recreate the era of Cinecitta, with the sunny cinematography, the melodrama and the almost fairytale like aspects (the wicked grandmother, the overly nice and happy neighbours, the pending illness of the mother). I was reminded of Cinema Paradiso in this respect.
As some reviewers have said Oztepek glides effortlessly from one mood to another and in all of this there are several magical scenes and several scenes in which the awkward bitter truths of a couple on the verge of break-up are realistically aired.
Sadly, the part with the evil grandmother is a little forced.
Photography by Gian Filippo Corticelli is a treat, showing us delightful scenes of both Rome and Sicily.
More dark doings from middle-aged Nordic women. Anita (Andrea Braein Hovig) has just got a temporary job teaching PE at a High School.
She was a competitive gymnast as a teenager and now in her 40’s we know little about her except that she is married to Hasse, an often absent and rather cold businessman who has daughters from a previous marriage.
Anita seems alone, goes for long jogs and is approaching menopause making her a perfect target for a cocky 16 year-old who starts to flirt with her and send her flowers. Markus, played against type by Skam star Tarjei Sandvik Moer is a typical jock type, full of himself and all bluster on the outside while still a bit of a boy inside. He starts the fire and fans a few flames but soon it is Anita who is the stalker to the point of obsession and at risk to her job and profession.
The film by Henrik Martin Dahlsbakken who seems to be a bit of a Francois Ozon in Norway with his prolific output is no great shakes and the screenplay could probably have been ratcheted up a bit. By the time we reach the somewhat predictable ending, we can’t say we have been surprised but Braein Hovig’s performance which threatened to be irritating actually turns out to be the most solid centre.
By the end, I felt some sorrow for her as she is judged and condemned in a fairly uncaring society, or at least as portrayed here. The actress manages to capture nuances that don’t lie in the script and make us feel the conflicted emotions she has.
Her performance at a book club meeting is several minutes of embarrassing delight. But it is not quite enough to life the whole movie up further.
The film itself seems a little uneven for me but the topic and the story is engrossing. During the Second World War many Korean women were shipped to Japan and obliged to become comfort women or prostitutes which marked their futures even back in Korea.
50 years later in the 90’s, their fate came to light and in the particular case filmed here, a group of women from Busan went to court in Japan to seek reparations, at a time when Japan was expressing regret for some of its excesses during the war.
We follow the group led by Korean business woman Mrs Moon who ‘supported’ them for about 6 years in their case which involved 24 visits to Japan.
They obtained a partial victory speaking volumes about the patriarchal society in Japan and the particular relationship that they have with Korea.
Some of the acting does seem to get a little hysterical at times but the sentiments are well-expressed and Mrs Moon, played by Hee-ae Kim
as a modern businesswoman who won’t stop at no in the search for justice is a very well-drawn character.
A different type of movie from Korea and one that is very valuable, even if the box office results were not so encouraging.
There is a small genre of movies best described as camp High School Musical types, almost always American and almost always protagonised by gays, nerds and jocks.
This one is no different.
Matt Steele is Ricky who wants to be the new Chita Rivera and ends up in a battle for lead of the school musical with injured baseball jock (Timothy Brundidge).
Fat girls, ethnic minorites and fake nuns abound.
The ending just about saves what is otherwise a ragbag of clichés which like The Golden Voices is also remarkable for the lack of music.
Recently saw the latest film by Andrew Ahn, Driveways, which impressed for its portrayal of the relationship between an elderly army vet and a young Asian-American boy staying next door. This, his first feature, is set in Koreatown, Los Angeles and concerns David (Joe Seo) a young man who has finished High School but still needs to do his SATs before going to university. His parents run a small Korean eatery in bad straits and David’s future is on hold to a degree despite the determination of his mother that he should get ahead. We see the conservatism of the Korean society of immigrants, church on Sundays, expensive gifts for christenings, the expectation that the children will marry within the community.
We also see that those young ones who have escaped to university are breaking the bonds and getting drunk and having sex with no qualms. David is a shy devoted young man without this confidence. But during this film he grows up a lot.
He begins to see the limitations of his parents and he secretly gets a job at a Korean spa, one which he has visited, as many local Koreans do but which is also a place where men covertly seek sexual pleasure from other men.
This job accompanies a sexual awakening in David who realizes that he is more attracted to men than women, another factor that creates a conflict between him and the mores of his society.
The film is somewhat minimal but always authentic. Some will say that Seo is undemonstrative in the lead role. But this shyness and Asian inscrutability rings true for me and makes for a very convincing small film. There is no easy resolution but at least David is a little wiser by the end. A nice character portrayal.
This film has a unique premise. Two actresses play the protagonist, at the same time! Cassandra is a 30-something writer who is busy preparing the funeral of her mother, at which she is going to give the eulogy.
Not all the family agree with this as Cassandra had a falling out with her mother some time previously that we only get to know about in the last part of the movie.
The 48-hour period of the film shows two sides of Cassandra as she goes about her tasks, sometimes in agreement, sometimes pulling her in different directions. Oddly enough it works, especially thanks to the direction of Patricia Rozema and the two lead actors: Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, who co-wrote the film based on their stage show.
Maev Beaty also does a good job with the role of the mother and this mother-daughter relationship is really the centre of the film, the dependence and the independence.
Nostbakken is responsible for the soundtrack, very much in the line of Canadian singer-songwriters and the city of Toronto in winter gives us that urban winter blues chill.
There’s a lot to admire here but I wasn’t blown away by it, probably because it is a small personal film that you either resonate with or not.
For Israelis this film must stir important memories. For the rest of us it gives us an insight into an event we know is very significant in recent Israeli history (1995) but which received little investigative coverage elsewhere. The event was the assassination of Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin who was the motor behind the Israeli – Palestinian peace accords, which were basically sunk after this. The movie is the story of his assassin, Yigal Amir, a son of Yemeni Jews who was brought up in an Orthodox family in Israel (his mother was a pre-school teacher) and slowly became more fanatic, especially after serving in the military.
He was studying law at Bar-Ilan university at the time of the murder and had organized various retreats and prayer meetings with the theme that Rabin was selling Israel out and needed to be got rid of somehow.
He went to great lengths to suggest that the Torah validated the killing of an “informer” as he dubbed Rabin, and while some rabbis suggested he had a point none would come out and fully agree that this was acceptable.
Quite a fascinating portrayal and Yehuda Nahari Halevi is compelling as Yigal. He later said he needed therapy to cast off the role.
Anat Ravnitsky as his mother also makes an impact in her part.
Overall, the film by Yaron Zilberman is a sound one and blends real footage from the time with the reconstructed events and it is a good psychological portrait of a fanatic.
As a film I found it a little dry in parts and somewhat crammed with religious information, which made it overall a little less than the sum of all its parts.
Unsure how I reached this Christian cinema movie about a Texan school’s attempt to win a regional competition for school choirs. I would like to be more charitable about this but the whole effort is pretty amateur and most of all is unbelievable. Sidney (Nikki Dixon) plays the choir coach with seemingly little idea of how to go about it. She has lost her job, had her flat flooded (relevance?) and is unable to forgive her paralysed and formerly drunk father. Dixon overacts a lot but just about carries the thread. Irma P Hall deserves a medal for being 85 but is another serial overactor who has a character that can fire a school principle at will and boss everyone else around. Not inspiring.
Then we have Jax Rebel, a former R ‘n’ B star fallen on hard times who has a miraculous turn round thanks to Sidney believing in him and returns to the fold. Amen.
For a song about singing we get a couple of snatches of the same song in 80 minutes, much of it in a frankly unconvincing competition finale. I know the budget was probably minor for this movie but most of what we get is wasted screen time.
The Sidney-father reconciliation is about the only messy but half authentic thing in the film,
that and the donut eating addiction of the principal.
Mike Leigh’s latest is a historical movie about the massacre in St Peter’s Field in Manchester in 1819 when a massive (60,000) turnout of workers at a meeting demanding better pay and the vote is set upon by cavalry and local yeomen resulting in the death of 18 and hundred’s injured.
It is a moment of shame in British history, largely glossed over or unknown until Leigh has brought it into focus in this movie. The detail and care with which it has been written and directed is exemplary, the problem is that it is very long and not that captivating.
The film starts at the end of Waterloo and follows a shell-shocked soldier home to his Manchester family, a poor one struggling to survive on meagre factory wages and selling pies and bread. Maxine Peake as the mother is perhaps the standout here.
We see the different leaders addressing locals on the need to stand up for their rights and one meeting of women’s reformers is an excellent scene. We also see the Prince Regent and the government and their cavalier attitude to the workers.
What is out of sight is out of mind and the Prince is not even aware of where Manchester is. We also see the cowardly magistrates doing everything to protect their privileges.
The massacre and meeting scenes are well enough done but overall I felt quite distanced from the film.
Rory Kinnear as activist Henry Hunt is another standout in a cast that has many figures but also much sameness. Probably more editing and more of a sense of the legacy this event left would have been good (eventually it led to universal suffrage and to a freer press with the founding of the Manchester Guardian).
I guess that the other plus to the film is that we can relate it to countless examples of slavery and oppression taking us right through to today in so many parts of the world.
Good on you Mike Leigh for reminding us about this shadow moment of British history. Should be compulsory viewing for history students in school.
passionfilm 