3.0, Hong Kong/China

Overheard

2009 / Felix Chong & Alan Mark > Every Hong Kong filmmaker now has to take into effect mainland China’s demands for the righteousness of mankind, whether it be the clutches of morality or the dearest of cultural sensitivities. If they didn’t, the single largest portion of their box office receipts go out the door. And because of that, we’re back to adjusting for the 21st century’s version of the Hays Code all over again. Earlier this year, the guys behind Infernal Affairs (i.e., the basis for The Departed) released Lady Cop & Papa Crook after a six month delay because of disagreements with the Chinese censors. Critics bashed it. Lesson learned: If the bad guys can’t win, make sure somehow everyone loses. In Overheard, Chong and Mak make sure that they can utilize this technique into fitting their vision into China’s demands.

The problem is this, however: The tone of the film never becomes concrete. Thematically, we don’t know what the focus is. It starts off being a wiretapping thriller that turns into a morality dilemma for cops. That’s fine, but then we’re thrown into some reactionary revenge sequences. As it happens, vengeance isn’t always necessary or appropriate, even if the audience wants it. And if the actual act of vengeance isn’t satisfying, then it isn’t worth putting forth to begin with. Tricky, yes, but the Chinese censorship dilemma has forced directors and writers to into a corner from which they’ll have to climb their way through. This may have been one of the best efforts at it, but there’s still some way to go.

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2.0, Japan

20th Century Boys 2: The Last Hope

New York Asian Film Festival2009 / Yukihiko Tsutsumi > We’ve established that Japan’s incapable of making a proper blockbuster by looking at the treatment the first chapter received, and now that the second chapter’s here, there’s no need to beat that dead rabbit again. But there’s another dead rabbit worth beating, however: Some comics, mangas and books are theoretically unfilmable. They’re considered so because most minds can’t grasp how such works should be portrayed on the screen. In these cases, the director needs to have an innate understanding of not only the work in question, but also the intent of the author as well as a personal vision and style that doesn’t deviate from the aforementioned intent. And that doesn’t happen often, otherwise we wouldn’t be hellbent on panning so many adaptations that’ve peeped through Hollywood’s budget books over the years. But two examples that pop-up instantly in my mind are Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Both utilize different angles of approaching classic works in transforming them into something magical. You could make the argument in each case it was not necessarily the technology that was lacking, but the imaginations. To add further fuel to the fire, consider the creativity that went into Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a grand gesture of the cinematic medium even before sound arrived!

Tsutsumi just hasn’t done that. Chapter Two is confusing, with terrible pacing and mediocre acting. Even the few dubbed dialogues in Thai aren’t synced properly! The show’s a bloody mess, and really, what more can you expect from a manga that jumbles back and forth, each time letting small pieces of information flow through the storyline. Another thing that’s missing is the sense of scope that the manga provided. Compared to the dystopian vision that Naoki Urasawa intended, the recreation here is childish and almost laughable to the point where the whole plot seems ridiculous. But the manga finds ways to make you believe, and that, above all, leads the movie into a realm of failure. All of this, sadly, I still attribute to terrible production value. In the right hands, this is a masterpiece. But here, it’s just box office fodder.

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2.5, United States/Canada

500 Days of Summer

2009 / Marc Webb > This started out well. I can understand the premise of a so-called serious story about how relationships are in the real world. Hollywood doesn’t produce real world stories because they don’t sell tickets. Though frankly, they don’t sell tickets because Hollywood isn’t particularly good at telling real world stories. In that regards, it was with great excitement that I approached 500 Days of Summer, which seemed to be slowly taking the world by storm (as it sits at #116 on the IMDb 250 right now). A small, independent romantic dramedy doing well is something to cheer for. But for me, it just doesn’t stack up.

The biggest epidemic in independent film continues to be quirkiness for the sake of quirkiness. Form fails to follow function, and we end up with a bunch of silly side-effects that don’t necessarily move the story or create a certain mood. The boardroom scene, for example: The speech was bad enough, but his friend’s reaction? Ten times worse. That’s a film groveling to its audience, saying, “I know this is what I’m about so far, but just in case you don’t like it, we also have some silly, stereotypical characters who will make you laugh by doing silly things!” That’s lazy, and honestly, disappointing. Throw in the whole expectations vs. reality sequence, and you’ve got it tailor-made for emotional manipulation.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is as exciting an actor there is in my generation. Walloping this into the group with Mysterious Skin, The Lookout and his work on Third Rock from the Sun exposes his obscene range. On the other end of the spectrum is Zooey Deschanel, who continues to waste her abilities by taking the most banal of roles. If you think she’s two-dimensional in this, you probably shouldn’t watch Gigantic either. The poster girl for the modern hipster female desperately needs to outgrow her peculiarities. Someone get her a role where she plays something other than the girl that every geek wants to get with.

All this being said, I do respect the film for trying to bring a certain feel to the masses. It slipped (quite a bit, in fact), but the direction is good. Hannah Takes the Stairs will never be mainstream, and sadly neither will Chungking Express, but if the story of heartbreaks is going to get bought on Blu-ray (and maybe even get an MTV Movie Award nomination), Webb may be one of the guys to lead the way. And while it doesn’t sound like it, such a feat would deserve accolades.

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5.0, Europe

La Dolce Vita

1960 / Federico Fellini > Movies about one’s own person, as to say how a person matures, even in older age, how one adjusts to aging itself, how to basically understand life and one’s position in that life, these are notions that have been tackled over and over in cinema. Such a view of humanity is usually inspected in a smaller scope, observing the nuances and tackling singular topics. But more often than not, this lack of scope leaves too many gaps from the palette of life’s emotions.

Fellini, though, captures everything in La Dolce Vita. There are no other ways to describe this than with the kind of love and admiration one has for the medium itself, and how glad I am to have finally witnessed the kind of work that makes watching cinema a necessary part of life. It’s as if Holden Caulfield grew up and just happened to be Italian. From head to toe, the superficial glitter slides off to always reveal a piece of the puzzle. The world around him seems to be a joke, but at the end, nobody’s laughing. When you’re not laughing, is it because the joke wasn’t funny? Or is it because the joke’s on you?

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3.5, United States/Canada

Observe and Report

2009 / Jody Hill > Been a few months since I saw this, yet I still haven’t fully digested it. I know that I respect it for its guts without escaping into a sensationalist romp. It walked on the border of exploitation so many times but never crossed it, and regardless of how one feels about the violence and the probable yet peculiar plot devices, Hill’s got me interested in seeing whatever he may direct next. Observe and Report has the unusual achievement of leaving me with a gleeful smile for the future of the human race—not because of the typical melodramatic hope that pervades the movies but because of the sheer raw energy of Seth Rogen’s character and the way it makes him so damn human.

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3.5, Southeast Asia

Serbis

2008 / Brillante Mendoza > Premiering at Cannes in 2008, Serbis drew a lot of controversy for its explicit sex sequences and—wait for it—boil popping visuals (you’ll have to see it to know what I mean). And in 2009, Mendoza scored a coup for the Philippines by taking home the best director prize from the same festival for his follow-up Kinatay. The world can thank him for two simple aspects of his style seen in this movie: He shows a part of his country that most don’t know about, as a family in Angeles struggles to survive by running a theatre running heterosexual pornography for a homosexual clientele. And more interestingly, he approaches this culture with a kind of hands-off, natural viewpoint that feels neither forced nor sensational. There are scenes in the film that initially contain shock value, but over a complete run-through, the whole thing works surprisingly well. As my introduction to Filipino cinema, I feel fairly confident that we’ve only scratched the surface. But if this is any indication of what’s to come, the industry should have a brighter future. Its colonial history and the Marcos “reign” along with its positioning in the current globalization climate gives it access to stories that maybe only Thailand can rival.

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3.0, United States/Canada

Watchmen

2009 / Zack Snyder > Respectably ambitious, Watchmen is an epic on a small scale: It has no big name movie stars, nor does it field superheroes of mainstream lore. There are two things it does very, very well: The cinematography is stunning with vibrant colors and imaginative awareness, and the violence is gruesome, righteously effective with exacting choreography. Then there are things that just don’t seem to fit: The music is a mess. No film should ever use Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence.” It reeks of empty ambition since it’s already been used nearly perfectly in The Graduate. A lot of the other, more well-known tracks also seem forced (“99 Luft Balloons?” Really?). This, ironically, actually detracts from the mood the film tries to set. But let’s talk adaptation: Faithfulness is good and all, but a comic is a different medium. Whatever you think of Alan Moore, he had it right in saying that the reader has time to reflect back on what he’s just read, maybe even doubleback to check facts and link a character to his speech bubbles. But a film of this supposed gravity almost becomes a joke in its obtuse seriousness without being given the time to digest. The awkward pacing and plot jumps that leave us filling in gaps with a considerable level of assumptions also don’t help. The graphic novel walked a very thin line between the pretentious and the cautionary, and unfortunately Snyder may have fallen on the wrong side of those tracks.

Rated 3.0 out of 5.0

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4.0, United States/Canada

Stalag 17

1953 / Billy Wilder > Though he’s not particularly known for layered works, Wilder definitely swings the bat hard when it comes to making the audience enjoy a movie. Together with William Holden in his Oscar-winning performance, he cooks up a rip-roaring adventure in what could be called the bachelor’s version of The Great Escape. The comedy easily surpasses the drama in Stalag 17, as the latter is often predictable if simple and honest. A German POW camp during World War II shouldn’t be something you laugh about, but give the writers of the original play some credit for giving us a reminder that laughter remains an alternative tool for vengeance.

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2.5, Europe

Life of Brian

1979 / Terry Jones > There are a lot of renowned comic troupes in the world, and often they exist in variety because different audiences clamor for different styles of humor. Well, count me out of the Monty Python crowd. This isn’t my cup of tea. Life of Brian definitely had moments of ingenuity, but far too often it missed and felt repetitious. Moreover, when the joke’s on someone who’s made into a punching bag (as these characters are), the intended satire can lose a lot of its charm.

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3.5, United States/Canada

Jaws

1975 / Steven Spielberg > There are a lot of stories behind production mishaps in Jaws, most of them dealing with issues with faulty animatronics of the shark. How right they were, and how sad. For 70% of the film, it’s really something swell, atmospheric even when bordering on the expected cliché. More often than not, Spielberg just couldn’t get the villain to look real, so he used clever methods of making sure the audience would feel its presence other ways (like filming from its point of view, below the water, with the menacing theme music signaling impending doom). But then you see it, and it’s over. Unlike The Thing, where the literal creativeness of the special effects made up for its outdated looks, here I had trouble digesting the climactic battle because it looked just downright silly. It’s really sad when special effects ruin the potential for a great film to age well, and this is no exception.

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