Category Archives: culture

Saturday Matinee: The Sorcerer and the White Snake

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By Vern

Source: Vern’s Reviews

After I watched DR. WAI IN “THE SCRIPTURE WITH NO WORDS” for the specific reason that it was a Jet Li movie directed by Ching Siu-Tung, I realized I should watch the more recent movie that fits the same description. THE SORCERER AND THE WHITE SNAKE (2011) is another fantasy martial arts romance, outlandish in a different way than the other one because it’s based on a Chinese legend about animal demons.

Li plays the titular sorcerer, a truck trying to carry explosives across a shaky rope bridge, and of course Whitesnake play themselves, performing many of their hits as well as debuting songs from that year’s album Forevermore. At least I assume that was what Ching intended, but he caved to the bean-counters, so instead Li plays a skilled Buddhist demon hunter called Abbott Fahai, and early in the movie we are abruptly confronted with the sight of two beautiful human lady torsos with scale-covered breasts and giant snake body lower halves, rolling around sexily on top of each other. It’s one of those things where I’m kind of icked out by it but also very happy for whatever number of people there are out there who are into snake ladies and are sorely underserved by mainstream cinema. Merry Christmas, you pervs.

Anyway, they seem to be going at it, but I guess they’re supposed to be sisters frolicking. The green snake is Quingqing (Charlene Choi, THE TWINS EFFECT, TWINS MISSION) and the white snake is Susu (Eva Huang, KUNG FU HUSTLE, DRAGON SQUAD). They’re spying on some humans climbing a mountain to find herbs, and Quingqing decides to go play a prank on them – appearing in giant snake form to hiss at young herbalist Xu Xian (Raymond Lam, SAVING GENERAL YANG), scaring him so bad he falls off the mountain into the water.

Susu has a conscience and/or thinks Xu Xian is a cutey, so she switches to human form and resuscitates him in the form of a romantic underwater kiss. And then it becomes a thing where she comes into civilization in human form and courts him, but he rejects her at first, thinking he’s in love with this person he doesn’t quite remember who saved his life. (Rather than tell him “That’s me, stupid” she knocks him into the water and does it again.) Tagging along, Quingqing befriends Abbott Fahai’s assistant Neng Ren (Wen Zhang, THE GUILLOTINES, THE MERMAID), who luckily is bad at using his little dial that detects demons.

Well, maybe not lucky, because he doesn’t notice the ENTIRE BOAT FULL OF LADY BAT DEMONS that Quingqing casually points out to him. This leads to one of the better action sequences, when the Abbott flies in and leapfrogs across a succession of boats, including several canoes that are mid-air after being launched by a big wave. He and Neng Ren battle a swarm of humans with with bat wings as well as a more monstrous digital character. That part seems kinda like a Hong Kong take on VAN HELSING.

Xu Xian and Susu end up getting married, but he doesn’t know she’s a snake demon, and those type of secrets are not good for marriages. So the scene where Fahai attacks her and she turns into a snake and he sees it is kind of like somebody walking in on their wife straddling some dude. Luckily he forgives her, but only after accidentally stabbing her with a magic dagger (you know how it is) so it becomes a quest to get a rare magic root that will heal her.

The style of the movie is a little schizophrenic. Much of it has a very clean digital look that seems chintzy compared to Hollywood movies. For example, in the opening scene Abbott Fahai and Neng Ren step out into a blizzard and battle an ice harpy (Vivian Hsu, THE ACCIDENTAL SPY) and it’s all extremely green-screeny, with an FX-based battle where Li and his doubles are spinning a staff around and doing moves, but the frame drops, flying and ice beam FX make it seem like it’s pretty much an animated movie. (It’s also one of those movies that is very clearly designed to take advantage of 3D.) But then it cuts to some beautiful actual locations, and the lantern festival sequence looks like a huge set on a soundstage – it kind of feels like a Disneyland ride, which is a compliment.

I love the unashamed way movies like this present their mythological reality – it’s so different from the west, where artists fear straying from realism and the literal. Ching, of course, has no such hangups. Not long after he’s given us “Yes, they are sexy half lady/half snakes who can turn into a snake or a lady, fuckin deal with it, buddy,” he also has a computer animated turtle, rabbit and mouse just walk in (upright, but they’re regular animal sizes and not humanoid at all) and start talking, like it’s normal. I wasn’t sure if they were also demons and could turn into people, but they never did, so I decided they were just animals. The mouse continues to be a major character throughout the movie, treated as a peer with the demons and humans. (He should get a spin-off buddy movie with the puppet rat mutant from DR. WAI.)

Apparently there’s some part I didn’t pick up on with a “Chicken Devil” played by the great Lam Suet. I don’t know if this means I wasn’t paying enough attention or if it’s one of those Easter eggs. They don’t have Easter in Buddhism, though.

The story spends more time on the melodrama of the young lovers than on the Abbott, but Li’s performance is good and it’s a pretty interesting character. Rather than killing demons he catches them in little pots like he’s an ancient Ghostbuster, and he keeps them imprisoned in his pagoda, with the promise that if they meditate and improve themselves they can be freed. This seems pretty enlightened at first, but when we meet the snakes we realize that it’s still unfair to assume that every demon is evil and deserving of this kind of punishment. They’re just creatures trying to live their lives, and they should be able to slither around doing what they want, they shouldn’t have to hide out at Midian or something to be safe from guys like him. So, while being well-intentioned, he sort of becomes the antagonist.

And SPOILER due to these events he does learn that his attitude toward demons has been too rigid. I like that it ends on a sweet little character moment – Fahai throwing Neng Ren an apple and talking to him as a friend even though he’s been turned into a bat-demon.

Much of this movie looks beautiful, and some of the stuff that looks cheesier is bizarre enough to still be appealing. But there are definitely points where the digital look is off-putting to me. I can imagine myself being much more drawn into its operatic emotions if it was one of those soft-focus ‘90s Hong Kong fantasies like THE BRIDE WITH THE WHITE HAIR. (I guess I’ll have to check out Tsui Hark’s GREEN SNAKE, a 1993 variation on the same legend.) Still, I gotta respect a movie with the line, “Before I met you I meditated for a thousand years, but those thousand years were worth less than a moment with you.” That’s some passionate love shit only a snake demon could say. I bet you don’t get that in, like, a Nicholas Sparks movie. (I don’t think I’ve seen any, though, so correct me if I’m wrong.)

Watch The Sorcerer and the White Snake on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/15557900

Saturday Matinee: Prisoners of the Ghostland

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PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND, Leave Sanity at the Door

Nicolas Cage. Sofia Boutella. Sono Sion. Need we say more? Yes.

By Eric Ortiz Garcia

Source: Screen Anarchy

More than 30 years after his first film, Sono Sion has established himself as a brilliant, prolific and chameleonic director.

In the past decade alone, you can find some of his best work: a hilarious tribute to guerrilla filmmaking and 35mm, with yakuzas, samurais and martial arts, Why Don’t You Play in Hell?; brutally violent and sordid films, Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance; dramas alluding to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Himizu and The Land of Hope; a crazy hip hop musical, Tokyo Tribe; and an emotional kaiju and Christmas film with catchy rock songs, Love & Peace.

On the other hand, Nicolas Cage became one of the most prolific Hollywood actors, finding in recent years memorable roles in genre cinema that, beyond subversive, are absolutely delirious. Mandy and Color Out of Space are enough to forget his abundant jobs-for-hire.

Considering that, Prisoners of the Ghostland, Sono’s highly anticipated English-language debut starring Cage, is insane. Truly insane.

Sono has excelled in building his own worlds. When I interviewed him in 2015 about Tokyo Tribe, he revealed that he wasn’t interested in using real locations in that city, because he wanted to “make up a whole fake world.” Prisoners of the Ghostland, one of his productions with the biggest budget, isn’t contained in that regard. Its two main universes – or rather, prisons – come to life and are wonderful madness.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is Sono’s Western and his return to samurai cinema, two genres that he feels affection for like his contemporaries: Miike Takashi (Sukiyaki Western Django) and Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill, Django Unchained). A group that shares influences: Sergio Leone, Ennio Morricone, Sergio Corbucci, Bruce Lee, Fukasaku Kinji, Fujita Toshiya, among many others.

In Sono’s “Old West”, West and East coexist, the mystique of the cowboy and the samurai. In fact, it’s set in “Samurai Town.” The iconic sheriff is an obese, long-haired Japanese cowboy, an Elvis Presley fan. The town’s true “boss”, the Governor (Bill Moseley, in a performance to remember), is a “gringo” with a Southern accent who runs a geisha place. He’s accompanied by his favorite heavy: the skilled samurai Yasujiro, played by Sakaguchi Tak himself, “Bruce Lee” in Why Don’t You Play in Hell? and more recently the protagonist of Crazy Samurai Musashi, the exciting and bloody one-take sequence based on an idea by Sono.

The hybrid and extravagant iconography extends to the town, practically an alternate universe where all kinds of people live together regardless of age (there’s a good number of children). It’s a clash between the traditional and the modern: a classic Western/Oriental town adorned with electronic signs, with interiors worthy of a stylized futuristic movie. Well, the Governor travels in a modern car! It’s the cinema of cool at its most striking expression.

Who better to lead the cast than an actor with a perfect understanding of this type of cinema? Is there a better vehicle for Cage than a film where his character is described as “so cool, so badass”?

The actor has been enjoying himself big time. “Personally I find his stylish performances extremely enternaining,” said Richard Stanley when I interviewed him about the Lovecraftian Color Out of Space, “they say it’s campy and over-the-top, that how can you make a serious but pretty fun movie. That’s just what I love about Nic, he’s capable of being funny and serious at the same time.”

Cage maintains that style in Prisoners of the Ghostland, bringing the classic unnamed antihero to life, although unlike those almost silent figures in the Spaghetti Western – Kurosawa Akira’s samurais were a big influence for Leone– Nic held nothing back. The movie is full of hilariously absurd dialogue and moments. It’s a territory that Sono dominates: just remember the hilarious yakuza leader secretly in love with the daughter of his rival, famous for a jingle that the criminal continues to dance, in Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

The plot of Prisoners of the Ghostland is quite simple: the Governor’s “granddaughter”, Bernice (Sofia Boutella), has disappeared; she’s actually a prostitute who managed to escape from her “prison.” The man with no name is imprisoned in Samurai Town and could regain his freedom if he fulfills the mission of bringing Bernice back.

The sequence that exposes the conflict is an extremely enjoyable display of the iconography around Cage’s character. The best example? The high-tech suit that threatens to blow the antihero to pieces if he treats Bernice badly (a comment from Sono about the supposed “misogyny” of his cinema?), or if he doesn’t fulfill the mission in the allotted time by the Governor.

Ok, maybe that doesn’t sound that crazy, how about adding a couple of explosives to the protagonist’s testicles? And we know that Sono wouldn’t add that detail if it wasn’t going to… explode at any moment!

Prisoners of the Ghostland is Sono’s Mad Maxian post-apocalyptic film. A world in ruins with old mannequins everywhere, a recurring figure in Sono’s filmography, as in Exte: Hair Extensions and in that twisted crime scene in Guilty of Romance. At the center of the stage is a crumbling tower topped by an immense clock, owned by a defunct nuclear empire.

After the Fukishima nuclear disaster in 2011, Sono hasn’t stopped showing concern about it in his cinema. There’s Himizu with its characters who lost everything and went on to live in destitute circumstances. In The Land of Hope, the director imagines that an earthquake and a tsunami cause a new nuclear catastrophe in another area of Japan. It’s a harsh criticism of the actions of the government and of the population with little memory, who forget the pain of ordinary people whose life will never be the same again.

In The Land of Hope, Sono thought of the threat of radiation as inherent in his country. Then, in Love & Peace, he used the frenzy for the imminent Tokyo 2020 Olympics (which haven’t happened yet, of course) as a reflection of a country that has forgotten Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima. Not for nothing the filmmaker continues to insist: the mythology of Prisoners of the Ghostland, explained in a stylized dreamlike sequence, is another comment on this topic.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is made up of a lot of elements. This post-apocalyptic world, and its background, is a hybrid. To avoid exploding into pieces, Cage’s character must enter a mythical land of ghosts, inhabited by figures distinguished by their distinctive samurai armor; they wander among men dressed in prison clothes, whose leader is a monstrous type, antagonist halfway between horror and exploitation.

The fate of those who cross the road of ghosts is the nuclear ruins. There’s no way out of this place, where an extravagant but well-meaning tribe lives. Some of these characters –like the charismatic Rat Man, a fanatic of vehicles and fuel-gatherer– might very well inhabit a fantastic adventure in a galaxy far, far away. In Prisoners of the Ghostland, Sono again turns his attention to the outcast; to children who have grown up without water or clean air, to ghosts that end up representing the aftermath of worldly horror, nuclear horror.

Prisoners of the Ghostland was filmed in Japan because Sono suffered a heart attack during its pre-production and, although the Japanese auteur doesn’t appear among the writers, the theme of reincarnation and redemption drives the film. Cage’s character is initially painted as a criminal of the worst kind, worthy of the Wild West of Corbucci. One of the ghosts that haunt him is an innocent Japanese boy, who had the misfortune of witnessing a disastrous bank robbery in which many of the characters and elements present in the story participated.

Prisoners of the Ghostland follows the man with no name until he earns the right to appear as a “hero” in the end credits. It’s an always insane absurdly entertaining redemption. Cage doesn’t stop, not even when he has to give the motivational speech as the “chosen one” that will make the impossible possible.

This is a quite violent film, although without reaching the most brutal, horrifying and controversial Sono of Cold Fish; there are stylized duels, sword thrusts, bullets and, of course, blood spurts. Prisoners of the Ghostland is absolutely bonkers and one of the most satisfying efforts by the great Sono Sion.

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Watch Prisoners of the Ghostland on tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100041245/prisoners-of-the-ghostland

Saturday Matinee: Junk Head

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By Niels Matthijs

Source: onderhond.com

It must’ve been two or three years ago when I first heard about Takahide Tori’s Junk Head [Janku Heddo]. I didn’t need more than a single screenshot to know this was a film that was going to be right up my ally. Several years and countless geo-locked film festivals later, I was finally able to watch it. Junk Head is one of those rare films that actually managed to surpass my initial expectations, Tori’s passion project is an absolute wet dream for fans of stop-motion and sci-fi, with gleaming bonus appeal for those who have an appetite for the weird and creative.

To brand this film a passion project is in fact a gross understatement. Takahide Tori is an interior decorator by profession, who started this project in 2009 without any of the formal training needed to tackle a project like this. What’s more is that he started this journey all on his own. It took him about 4 years and an endless amount of YouTube tutorials to create a 30-minute short. After garnering the vocal support of some big industry names (Guillermo del Toro being one of them), additional funding and a little outside help pushed him to make a 115-minute version, which was later trimmed down to the 101-minute cut that is currently making the rounds.

Reviewers have cited many influences when writing about Junk Head, the most prominent (and interesting) one for me is Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame (coincidentally Nihei is an architect turned mangaka). But where Nihei’s first masterpiece is all about rising through a superstructure, Junk Head’s hero is descending into an underground one. And sure enough, the creature design borrows happily from H.R. Giger, Tsukamoto’s cyberpunk roots peek around every corner and names like Lynch or Cronenberg make for sane analogies, but when all is said and done, there’s nothing really quite like Junk Head out there.

The plot is set in a distant future. Mankind has lost its ability to procreate, a human-created species has revolted and developed a separate society underground. When a virus wreaks havoc on the surface, an expedition is launched to study how this newly developed species procreate, in an ultimate but somewhat desperate attempt to save humankind. The human delegate immediately finds himself in a pickle and as he travels deeper and deeper underground, his chances to complete his mission diminish with every step taken. Instead, his journey becomes an ultimate struggle for survival.

It’s difficult to overstate the visual grandeur present in Junk Head. Looking at the lushly decorated, detailed and expansive sets, Hori surely benefitted from his experience as an interior decorator, but even then it’s hard to believe what he accomplished here. The camera work is insane, the art design superb, the stop-motion animation on point. It’s crazy to think most of it was done by a single guy, but even without taking that into account Junk Head still looks mighty impressive. Not counting some CG work that was added at a later stage, this is true craftsmanship from start to finish. The style is extremely coherent though, which is great if you love this kind of gritty and ugly bleakness, those hoping for a more colorful and jolly universe better stay clear.

Though Hori’s visual accomplishments may be the obvious standout, it’s worth noting that he also took almost all the sound work upon himself. From the actual score, to the sound effects and character dubs (which aren’t in a decipherable language, but do feature distinct voices), it’s all done by Hori himself. And while this may have been out of necessity, the quality of his work is once again exemplary. The electronic score is very fitting, adding oodles of atmosphere, the voice acting is fun and distinctive and the sound effects are spot on. Together with the visuals it creates a tight and immersive experience, the kind you can only get when an entire team is entirely in sync, or when one guy does everything by himself.

Junk Head is an expansive sci-fi adventure, where the audience is forced to discover a strange and alien underground world together with the main character. Hori does take a little time to explain the broader lore of this universe, but doesn’t get into too much detail. It keeps his world wrapped in a veil of mystery, which probably won’t be to everybody’s liking. Personally, I welcome the mystery and adventure, following the events as they are experienced by the main character. Those who need more grounded explanations for what they see on screen may feel a bit disoriented at times.

As for any additional themes, the broader story offers some food for thought if needed. The premise isn’t all that original though, with humanity’s usual flaws sending us to the brink of extinction, having to resort to desperate measures to find a way out of the mess we created for ourselves. I’m not even certain whether Hori takes any of this too seriously, it could just as well be a convenient excuse for the gritty and uninhabitable world he wanted to depict, but at least it’s there for those who care about such things. The fact that there’s not really a clear-cut ending or an easy way out of this mess certainly helps too.

Every fan of Japanese cyberpunk will tell you not nearly enough films are being produced in this niche. That alone makes Junk Head a notable film. The (admittedly slim) bright side of this is that filmmakers who do try their hand at it are usually very spirited and driven to do the genre justice. With Junk Head, Hori delivers a sprawling sci-fi adventure, meticulously styled, set in a dark and perilous universe that harbors neat surprises around every corner. It’s a living testament that one person can still deliver a professional film, even if it costs him 7 years of his life. An absolute must-see this one, make sure you catch it if the opportunity arises.

Watch Junk Head on Tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/100040381/junk-head

Saturday Matinee: The Beach Bum

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Review: Impulsivity, vice and margaritas reign in ‘The Beach Bum’

By alexlynch695

Source: David A. Lynch

It’s hard, after sitting through the sunshined-draped “The Beach Bum,” not to wonder that something substantial and substantially life-altering has happened to writer-director Harmony Korine in the seven years since his dark escapist drama “Spring Breakers.”

While that movie was an exercise in causticity and bringing to life some strange, morbid fantasy involving bikini-clad Disney products trading in their Mickey Mouse ears for Uzis, “The Beach Bum” – here referring to a blissful, good vibes-distributing Matthew McConaughey who has never Matthew McConaughey’d harder – uses that same degree of impulsivity as a force for inebriated l-i-v-i-n livin’. The movie is equally about abiding by one’s own rules and flourishing by our self-made excuses for success, but “Spring Breakers’s” coldness made sure that success came at the expense of ostensible innocence. In “Beach Bum,” it comes by way of a colorful drink in a cocktail glass garnished with a mini umbrella.

Korine once again shows he’s a sucker for spontaneity – both on the parts of himself as filmmakers and his characters – to a near-surreal degree. In telling the story of McConaughey’s coastal hillbilly author Moon Dog (a name as conspicuous as it is appropriate) drinking, smoking or typewriting the days away, he stitches a hypnotic yarn that is more a collection of experiences than a traditional movie, and perhaps one that doesn’t have anything to teach or tell so much as suggest.

Moon Dog is seemingly living on the lowest rung of society’s ladder, but over “Beach Bum’s” 90ish minutes, the creeping feeling may rear its head that his ceaselessly-smiling attitude towards everything that comes his way is something to be envious of. While we continue searching for some grand truth to life, Moon Dog has found it, and he’s drinking it through a martini glass. Think Jack Sparrow with margaritas replacing the rum, escapades much lower in stakes and an androgynous sense of fashion. He’s a gloriously cheery character in a gloriously cheery comedy, one that wishes goodwill through storms of marijuana smoke even as it gently pushes us off a pier. It doesn’t run off after doing so; it rumbles in good-natured laughter as if to say, “It looks like you were getting hot and could use a dip.”

Hell, maybe what Korine did since “Spring Breakers” to access a much more optimistic view of life was don the blunt for himself. Moon Dog is cut from the same cloth as James Franco’s violence-prone, chickie-hunting Alien, but the former feels like he slept next to a shrine made to Jimmy Buffer, the latter to Scarface. Moon Dog is the yin go Alien’s yang; a cosmic contradiction with two halves that live life two seconds at a time.

Moon Dog’s world reflects his good-times-should-be-had-by-all template to life, even if his circumstances don’t. He may be content passing the days away slumped over in a rowboat miles away from shore, but he’s got responsibilities too, as well as a reputation that he curates about as carefully as a chainsaw to a tree. He has a past as a renowned author of poetry, you see, but you wouldn’t mistake his vernacular for someone who comparably looks like he takes a bath every one in a while; it’s as profanely low-bar as he is, and it’s also struck an unexpected chord in Korine’s strangely unwieldy world. The more “The Beach Bum” breezes along, the more we see those who inhabit it are more in lockstep with Moon Dog’s sensibilities than we might expect.

That penchant for the outrageous is evident in the people Moon Dog associates himself with, from his stunning wife (a just-as-here-for-the-good-vibes-and-good-times Isla Fisher) to others who range from associates to drinking buddies to part-time employers. Embodying them is an illustrious supporting cast that looks like they’re having the time of their lives: Jonah Hill, Snoop Dogg, Martin Lawrence, even Zac Efron are here to facilitate Moon Dog’s life choices, and to take part in the belligerence.

Where “The Beach Bum” moves beyond us simply watching disciples of easy living endlessly getting high, getting drunk and getting into ill-advised situations is in Korine’s challenging us to question whether it’s right to label those choices as questionable. Or whether we even have the right. The sense of ambition that drives Moon Dog and Co. is emphatically one of a much different caliber than probably any of us can relate to (perhaps south Floridians can tell me otherwise), but does mean we can criticize it?

Unlike “Spring Breakers,” Korine does good work in ensuring that question remains one of deliberation instead of emphatically and blatantly answering it for us by film’s end, although “The Beach Bum” does provide a visual coda much more explicit than most of what has come before. It’s both jarring and also as appropriate as ending as you could expect for Moon Dog, one not out of place with everything we’ve witnessed prior.

If you’re not interested in such thematic minutiae, “The Beach Bum” is still a source for plenty of laughs, improv seemingly as much a tool for its characters as self-deprecation. It doesn’t outstay its welcome and never particularly lingers, moving from hilarious anecdote to hilarious (and sometimes gruesome) anecdote with a trance-life geniality, like bar-hopping with a bucket hat-wearing old-timer recounting stories of past adventures that just keep getting more and more incredulous, either as a result of alcohol intake or creative liberty on the storyteller’s part.

Who’s to say what Moon Dog – the haggard man’s Hemingway who carries around his typewriter in a pillowsack while searching strangers’ coolers for Pabst – would refer to it as, but from our perspective, spontaneity is a founding father of his world. It’s almost a superpower, actually, his capacity to instinctively accomplish something on his own terms, which sometimes means avoiding it at all costs, eventually morphing from habit to uncannily consistent skill. Moon Dog seems to never know where he’ll be five minutes from any given minute—and it might just be his best-kept secret.

“The Beach Bum” is essentially a Korine-led seminar on blissful existentialism. The filmmaker isn’t giving the middle finger to the establishment so much as he is nodding to those for whom practicing stringency means trapping yourself in an uncomfortably rigid life of routines dictated by everyone else but you. That is to say, it’s best to avoid practicing it all costs.

The movie and its characters and their self-created, self-governing laws pursue buoyancy. And “The Beach Bum” is groggily, profanely, deliriously buoyant in that pursuit.

“” is rated R for pervasive drug and alcohol use, language throughout, nudity and some strong sexual content

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Stefania LaVie Owen

Directed by Harmony Korine

2019

Watch The Beach Bum on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/11359834