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The latest from Hirokazu Kore-eda. A so-so review from Variety.
Air Doll
Kuki Ningyo (Japan)
By DEREK ELLEY
'Air Doll'
An Engine Film, Bandai Visual, TV Man Union, Eisei Gekijo, Asmik Ace Entertainment presentation of a TV Man Union production. (International sales: Fortissimo Films, Amsterdam.) Produced by Toshiro Uratani, Hirokazu Kore-eda. Executive producers, Kazumi Kawashiro, Yutaka Shigenobu, Takeo Hisamatsu, Masao Teshima. Directed, written by Hirokazu Kore-eda, based on the graphic short story "Gouda's Philosophical Discourse: The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl" by Yoshiie Gouda.
With: Bae Du-na, Arata, Itsuji Itao, Joe Odagiri, Masaya Takahashi, Kimiko Yo, Ryo Iwamatsu, Mari Hoshino, Susumu Terajima, Sumiko Fuji.
Japanese helmer Hirokazu Kore-eda's ongoing interest in love, loss and souls in limbo is stretched way too thin in "Air Doll," a beautifully lensed (by Taiwanese ace Mark Lee) and charmingly played (by South Korean icon Bae Du-na) modern fairy tale about an inflatable doll who takes on a life of her own. Recut to a trim 90 minutes, this fragile yarn would work perfectly and have a chance of an afterlife as a specialty item. In its present form, pic may not get much farther than the fest netherworld.
Kore-eda can take the most paper-thin ideas and make them play out to feature length ("After Life," "Nobody Knows"), and part of this pic's attraction is that he never overextends the idea (taken from a 20-page graphic short story, published in 2000, by manga artist Yoshiie Gouda) into grand tragedy or melodrama.
Also, unlike several other "living doll" tales of men fascinated by life-sized female playthings -- especially Luis Berlanga's 1975 "Life Size," with Michel Piccoli -- Kore-eda's movie doesn't even flirt with the sexual or social subtexts. Pic has an almost childlike purity, matching the doll's own worldview, that's maintained until the end.
Introduced with a casual naturalness, middle-aged Hideo (Itsuji Itao) waits tables in a Western eatery and has a perfectly happy existence with Nozomi at home. He chats with her over the dinner table, makes love to her in bed and says goodbye to her every morning. Thing is, Nozomi is actually an inflatable doll.
Just after he's left for work one day, the doll starts to twitch in bed and morphs (sans f/x) into a real woman (Bae), who stares in wonder at the real world and, donning a teeny-weeny maid's uniform, walks around the quiet nabe, imitating people's speech and behavioral patterns.
"I found myself with a heart I was not supposed to have," says the new Nozomi, later adding, in a foretaste of her loss of innocence, "Because I found a heart, I told a lie."
As Nozomi gradually loses her mechanical walk (mimicked by the accompanying music) and behaves more like a human, she also develops a parallel life away from Hideo's apartment. Getting a job in a small videostore, she falls for fellow worker Junichi (Arata, "Distance," "After Life"), who doesn't seem the least fazed to discover she's really an air doll.
Nozomi tries to find meaning in her new existence -- even visiting her "maker," Sonoda (Joe Odagiri, in a delightful cameo as a kind of benign Geppetto figure) -- and reconcile it with her ongoing duties as Hideo's companion. But she starts to realize her parallel lives may be incompatible.
Though Bae spends notable sections of the movie in her birthday suit, the actress brings a wide-eyed innocence to her role that (with a compliant wink from Kore-eda toward his audience) prevents the film from becoming mired in its sexual connotations. Even Nozomi's introduction to human carnality is handled with a magical simplicity.
Offbeat beauty Bae, who's carved a career in quirky roles ("The Host," "Take Care of My Cat," "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance"), is perfectly cast here as Nozomi, holding the screen in a tour de force of ingenuous wonderment at the complex world she's discovered; other roles are handled OK. But at more than two hours, the jam is simply spread too thin.
Camera (color), Mark Lee; editor, Kore-eda; music, World's End Girlfriendworld's end girlfriend; production designer, Hiroki Kaneko; art director, Yohei Taneda; sound (Dolby Digital), Yutaka Tsurumaki. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard), May 14, 2009. Running time: 126 MIN.
Air Doll
Kuki Ningyo (Japan)
By DEREK ELLEY
'Air Doll'
An Engine Film, Bandai Visual, TV Man Union, Eisei Gekijo, Asmik Ace Entertainment presentation of a TV Man Union production. (International sales: Fortissimo Films, Amsterdam.) Produced by Toshiro Uratani, Hirokazu Kore-eda. Executive producers, Kazumi Kawashiro, Yutaka Shigenobu, Takeo Hisamatsu, Masao Teshima. Directed, written by Hirokazu Kore-eda, based on the graphic short story "Gouda's Philosophical Discourse: The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl" by Yoshiie Gouda.
With: Bae Du-na, Arata, Itsuji Itao, Joe Odagiri, Masaya Takahashi, Kimiko Yo, Ryo Iwamatsu, Mari Hoshino, Susumu Terajima, Sumiko Fuji.
Japanese helmer Hirokazu Kore-eda's ongoing interest in love, loss and souls in limbo is stretched way too thin in "Air Doll," a beautifully lensed (by Taiwanese ace Mark Lee) and charmingly played (by South Korean icon Bae Du-na) modern fairy tale about an inflatable doll who takes on a life of her own. Recut to a trim 90 minutes, this fragile yarn would work perfectly and have a chance of an afterlife as a specialty item. In its present form, pic may not get much farther than the fest netherworld.
Kore-eda can take the most paper-thin ideas and make them play out to feature length ("After Life," "Nobody Knows"), and part of this pic's attraction is that he never overextends the idea (taken from a 20-page graphic short story, published in 2000, by manga artist Yoshiie Gouda) into grand tragedy or melodrama.
Also, unlike several other "living doll" tales of men fascinated by life-sized female playthings -- especially Luis Berlanga's 1975 "Life Size," with Michel Piccoli -- Kore-eda's movie doesn't even flirt with the sexual or social subtexts. Pic has an almost childlike purity, matching the doll's own worldview, that's maintained until the end.
Introduced with a casual naturalness, middle-aged Hideo (Itsuji Itao) waits tables in a Western eatery and has a perfectly happy existence with Nozomi at home. He chats with her over the dinner table, makes love to her in bed and says goodbye to her every morning. Thing is, Nozomi is actually an inflatable doll.
Just after he's left for work one day, the doll starts to twitch in bed and morphs (sans f/x) into a real woman (Bae), who stares in wonder at the real world and, donning a teeny-weeny maid's uniform, walks around the quiet nabe, imitating people's speech and behavioral patterns.
"I found myself with a heart I was not supposed to have," says the new Nozomi, later adding, in a foretaste of her loss of innocence, "Because I found a heart, I told a lie."
As Nozomi gradually loses her mechanical walk (mimicked by the accompanying music) and behaves more like a human, she also develops a parallel life away from Hideo's apartment. Getting a job in a small videostore, she falls for fellow worker Junichi (Arata, "Distance," "After Life"), who doesn't seem the least fazed to discover she's really an air doll.
Nozomi tries to find meaning in her new existence -- even visiting her "maker," Sonoda (Joe Odagiri, in a delightful cameo as a kind of benign Geppetto figure) -- and reconcile it with her ongoing duties as Hideo's companion. But she starts to realize her parallel lives may be incompatible.
Though Bae spends notable sections of the movie in her birthday suit, the actress brings a wide-eyed innocence to her role that (with a compliant wink from Kore-eda toward his audience) prevents the film from becoming mired in its sexual connotations. Even Nozomi's introduction to human carnality is handled with a magical simplicity.
Offbeat beauty Bae, who's carved a career in quirky roles ("The Host," "Take Care of My Cat," "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance"), is perfectly cast here as Nozomi, holding the screen in a tour de force of ingenuous wonderment at the complex world she's discovered; other roles are handled OK. But at more than two hours, the jam is simply spread too thin.
Camera (color), Mark Lee; editor, Kore-eda; music, World's End Girlfriendworld's end girlfriend; production designer, Hiroki Kaneko; art director, Yohei Taneda; sound (Dolby Digital), Yutaka Tsurumaki. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard), May 14, 2009. Running time: 126 MIN.
"I want cement covering every blade of grass in this nation! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?" Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) in John Waters' Desperate Living (1977)
That was the concert where the Hell's Angels were the guards and it resulted in the death of a fan who was possibly armed during the song "Under My Thumb." It was an incredibly not awesome time.
JEFFREY WELLS
I don't know what I was expecting exactly from Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock (Focus Features, 8.14.09), which had its first big press screening this afternoon at the Cannes Film Festival, but what I saw didn't deliver. This backstory saga about the legendary Woodstock Music Festival of '69 works in spots and spurts, but it too often feels ragged and unsure of itself, and doesn't coalesce in a way that feels truly solid or self-knowing.
At best it's a decent try, an in-and-outer. Spit it out -- it's a letdown. I've talked to a few critic friends since the 4:30 screening got out and all but one are feeling and saying the same.
I wish it were otherwise. I'd like to be more obliging because I love many of Lee's films and fully respect his talent. I remember and cherish the spirit and the legend of the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival. I'm looking forward to watching the forthcoming Warner Home Video Bluray of Michael Wadleigh's 1970 documentary (out June 9th). And I appreciate what a massive undertaking it must have been to try and recreate it all as a drama.
James Schamus's script is based on the story of Eliot Tiber, the artist who stepped in and pretty much saved the disenfranchised festival by finagling a land permit in Bethel, New York. (The source is a same-titled book by Tiber and Tom Monte.) The story is basically about how a closeted gay Jewish guy got over feeling obliged to help his parents survive by helping them run their rundown El Monaco motel in White Lake, N.Y., and thereby freed himself to live his own life.
This story comes through but who cares? Imagine a story of the D-Day Invasion that focuses on Francois, a closeted young man in his 30s who doesn't want to work at his parents' Normandy bakery any more. ("Merci, General Eisenhower, for allowing me to move to Nice and be openly gay!") And the Eliot story is weakened, in my book, by Imelda Staunton's strident and braying portrayal of Tiber's mother-from-hell. I've known my share of Jewish moms and I didn't believe her. Nobody is that humorless or stupid (in terms of recognizing economic opportunity) or dark-hearted.
And as noted, the big sprawling back-saga of how the festival came together -- the element that audiences will be coming to see when it opens -- too often feels catch-as-catch-can. It doesn't seem to develop or intensify, and there's no clean sense of chronology. (And there's at least one glaring inaccuracy when a random festivalgoer declares a day or two before the event begins that "it's a free concert, man...haven't you heard?" My recollection is that it wasn't declared free until the concert had begun and the fences had come down and the organizers realized they'd lost control.)
Taking Woodstock should have been dated here and there like The Longest Day. That way, at least, we'd have an idea of how many days are left before the festival begins, a sense of "okay, getting closer, things are heating up."
Lee references Wadleigh's 1970 doc by using the same split-screen editing style and by shooting it with a semblance of '70s grainy color. But no Woodstock concert footage is mixed into Lee's movie, and this just seems unfulfilling somehow. It's a shame that Lee and Schamus (who also produced) and Focus Features couldn't have worked out some kind of cross-promotional deal with Warner Bros. that would have allowed for this. I kept telling myself that it's Eliot's story, not Woodstock II, but I wanted glimpses of the real thing, dammit.
Comedian Demetri Martin is steady and likable as Tiber, although too much of the time he's been directed to look overwhelmed or mildly freaked. (This was a man of 34 who'd been around a bit -- Martin plays him like Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock.) Eugene Levy is quite good as Max Yagur, the kindly but shrewd dairy farmer who leased the land to Woodstock Ventures. Liev Schreiber delivers a mildly amusing turn as Vilma, a blond-haired cross-dresser whom Eliot hires to provide security for the El Monaco, but his character has no real function or arc -- he's just providing Greek-chorus commentary. Jonathan Groff does a decent job as Michael Lang, the most well-known of the concert promoters, playing him as a serenely confident Zen type. (I loved the way he gets around on horseback in the second half of the film, whether or not that's accurate -- it's a good bit.)
It may be impossible to have characters speak in '60s cliches without the effort feeling tiresome, but that's what happens here. I realize that people actually used the terms "groovy" and "far out, man" back then, but every time you hear them in the film...God!
Taking Woodstock was just too big an undertaking, I suppose. In the same way that Lang and his partners instigated but couldn't control the enormity and chaos of the '69 festival, Lee was also overwhelmed. Tough fame, tough call, I'm sorry. Better luck next time.
JEFFREY WELLS
I don't know what I was expecting exactly from Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock (Focus Features, 8.14.09), which had its first big press screening this afternoon at the Cannes Film Festival, but what I saw didn't deliver. This backstory saga about the legendary Woodstock Music Festival of '69 works in spots and spurts, but it too often feels ragged and unsure of itself, and doesn't coalesce in a way that feels truly solid or self-knowing.
At best it's a decent try, an in-and-outer. Spit it out -- it's a letdown. I've talked to a few critic friends since the 4:30 screening got out and all but one are feeling and saying the same.
I wish it were otherwise. I'd like to be more obliging because I love many of Lee's films and fully respect his talent. I remember and cherish the spirit and the legend of the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival. I'm looking forward to watching the forthcoming Warner Home Video Bluray of Michael Wadleigh's 1970 documentary (out June 9th). And I appreciate what a massive undertaking it must have been to try and recreate it all as a drama.
James Schamus's script is based on the story of Eliot Tiber, the artist who stepped in and pretty much saved the disenfranchised festival by finagling a land permit in Bethel, New York. (The source is a same-titled book by Tiber and Tom Monte.) The story is basically about how a closeted gay Jewish guy got over feeling obliged to help his parents survive by helping them run their rundown El Monaco motel in White Lake, N.Y., and thereby freed himself to live his own life.
This story comes through but who cares? Imagine a story of the D-Day Invasion that focuses on Francois, a closeted young man in his 30s who doesn't want to work at his parents' Normandy bakery any more. ("Merci, General Eisenhower, for allowing me to move to Nice and be openly gay!") And the Eliot story is weakened, in my book, by Imelda Staunton's strident and braying portrayal of Tiber's mother-from-hell. I've known my share of Jewish moms and I didn't believe her. Nobody is that humorless or stupid (in terms of recognizing economic opportunity) or dark-hearted.
And as noted, the big sprawling back-saga of how the festival came together -- the element that audiences will be coming to see when it opens -- too often feels catch-as-catch-can. It doesn't seem to develop or intensify, and there's no clean sense of chronology. (And there's at least one glaring inaccuracy when a random festivalgoer declares a day or two before the event begins that "it's a free concert, man...haven't you heard?" My recollection is that it wasn't declared free until the concert had begun and the fences had come down and the organizers realized they'd lost control.)
Taking Woodstock should have been dated here and there like The Longest Day. That way, at least, we'd have an idea of how many days are left before the festival begins, a sense of "okay, getting closer, things are heating up."
Lee references Wadleigh's 1970 doc by using the same split-screen editing style and by shooting it with a semblance of '70s grainy color. But no Woodstock concert footage is mixed into Lee's movie, and this just seems unfulfilling somehow. It's a shame that Lee and Schamus (who also produced) and Focus Features couldn't have worked out some kind of cross-promotional deal with Warner Bros. that would have allowed for this. I kept telling myself that it's Eliot's story, not Woodstock II, but I wanted glimpses of the real thing, dammit.
Comedian Demetri Martin is steady and likable as Tiber, although too much of the time he's been directed to look overwhelmed or mildly freaked. (This was a man of 34 who'd been around a bit -- Martin plays him like Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock.) Eugene Levy is quite good as Max Yagur, the kindly but shrewd dairy farmer who leased the land to Woodstock Ventures. Liev Schreiber delivers a mildly amusing turn as Vilma, a blond-haired cross-dresser whom Eliot hires to provide security for the El Monaco, but his character has no real function or arc -- he's just providing Greek-chorus commentary. Jonathan Groff does a decent job as Michael Lang, the most well-known of the concert promoters, playing him as a serenely confident Zen type. (I loved the way he gets around on horseback in the second half of the film, whether or not that's accurate -- it's a good bit.)
It may be impossible to have characters speak in '60s cliches without the effort feeling tiresome, but that's what happens here. I realize that people actually used the terms "groovy" and "far out, man" back then, but every time you hear them in the film...God!
Taking Woodstock was just too big an undertaking, I suppose. In the same way that Lang and his partners instigated but couldn't control the enormity and chaos of the '69 festival, Lee was also overwhelmed. Tough fame, tough call, I'm sorry. Better luck next time.
"How's the despair?"
Can you translate this?Sabin wrote:Taking Woodstock ('09 Lee): 49. Another fucking Wiki-movie. Typical bit: It ends with a cutesy gonna-be-even-more-awesome ref to Altamont.
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Thorn in the Heart ('09 Gondry): 16. I have half a dozen perfectly nice aunts who've led happy nondescript lives. Be glad I have no camera.
Don't Look Back ('09 De Van): 44. Crushing disappointment. Gets wrong everything that SKIN did right; it's like a New Twilight Zone episode.
Yes, I hate film, Cannes, life, etc.
Don't Look Back ('09 De Van): 44. Crushing disappointment. Gets wrong everything that SKIN did right; it's like a New Twilight Zone episode.
Yes, I hate film, Cannes, life, etc.
"How's the despair?"
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Screendaily (below) loved thirst; Variety doesn't. Hollywood Reporter is in the middle.
Thirst
Bakjwi
By DEREK ELLEY
Variety
Emile Zola meets New Age vampirism in South Korean helmer Park Chan-wook's "Thirst," an overlong stygian comedy that badly needs a transfusion of genuine inspiration. Inspired by and following key plot elements in Zola's 19th-century novel of murder and adultery, "Therese Raquin," the two-hour-plus pic is slow to warm up and largely goes around in circles thereafter, with repetitive (and often plain goofy) jokes about hemoglobin lust and bone-crunching, sanguinary violence. Some major surgery could help its specialized offshore potential, but this is startlingly unnuanced work from the director of such classy fare as "Oldboy" and "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance."
Film opened strongly April 30 in South Korea, and has taken 1.75 million admissions in its first two frames. But in its second week, it was knocked out of the top spot by action-comedy "My Girlfriend Is an Agent."
Setup is strong, as Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho), a well-liked priest in a small town who works at the local hospital, contracts and dies from the deadly Emmanuel virus after volunteering in a project to discover a vaccine. After being brought back to life by a blood transfusion, he gradually realizes he's been turned into a vampire, which gives him an extremely healthy sexual appetite but also requires regular doses of blood to keep his skin free of small boils.
Choice bits of Zola's novel start to appear as Sang-hyeon starts an affair with Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), the wife of his childhood friend, Kang-woo (Shin Ha-gyun). Dowdy, put-upon Tae-ju, who spends her time looking after the sickly Kang-woo and being bullied by his doting mom, Mrs. Ra (as in "Raquin"; Kim Hae-suk), blooms into a voracious, free-spirited lover with Sang-hyeon. Soon they're a pair in more ways than one, as their thirst for sex, thrills and red corpuscles turns them into mass murderers.
Project has been in Park's mind for a decade -- always with thesp Song in mind -- but at some stage, what began as a typically wry, genre-bending take on sin and redemption seems to have shed most of its subtext. Though Sang-hyeon finds himself an object of worship as he develops special powers of strength and flight, what could have been a wonderfully transgressive spin on religion and its flipside devolves, especially in its second half, into blood-spattered, low-key farce revolving around a single, overworked idea.
Early grossout scenes lose their shock value with repetition, as the script amps up the semi-cartoonish violence in the third act. Tae-ju begins to relish the blood-sucking in a way that troubles even Sang-hyeon. But the movie never comes close to tapping the raw, gnawing need of vampirism that fueled pics such as Abel Ferrara's "The Addiction" or Tony Scott's "The Hunger."
Song, perhaps South Korea's most recognizable actor and a Park regular ("JSA," "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance"), is never less than solid as the priest-turned-vampire but lacks some of the sheer physical presence he usually brings to the screen.
The major surprise is 22-year-old actress-model Kim Ok-vin (usually known, more correctly, as Kim Ok-bin), whose doll-like features made her the perfect underdog in the campy high school musical "Dasepo Naughty Girls." Here, she puts to rest any doubts about her ability to take on a challenging role, throwing herself into topless sex scenes and vampiric munching with a lusty, bad-girl abandon.
As usual in Park's movies, design is paramount, with Jeong Jeong-hun's DV-originated lensing savoring the musty Lynchian colors of Ryu Seong-hye's production design. Visual effects, especially in the flying scenes, are just OK by Korean standards.
-------------------------------------
Film Review: Thirst
By Maggie Lee
Hollywood Reporter
CANNES -- Korean auteur extraordinaire Park Chan-wook's "Thirst" is a torrid expression of predatory instinct and insatiable, all-consuming love, embodied through its protagonist's difficulty in holding his day job as a priest-cum-miracle-healer, and his night shift as an accidental vampire and fornicating murderer.
Released domestically two weeks ahead of its Cannes Competition premiere, "Thirst" instantly became the year's national boxoffice champion. A co-investment and co-production between CJ Entertainment and Universal Pictures (touted as a first of its kind Korean-Hollywood collaboration), it will be released stateside by Focus Features. Stunning production quality and the story's extremity should arouse interest beyond the specialty Asian market.
Park takes his famed eroticization of violence, pain and cruelty to new, feverish heights, and garnishes it with deliciously sadistic gallows humor. Those who thrive on gore, twisted sexuality and brutish handling of women can drink their fill from this film. More serious arthouse critics, however, may balk at the script's soapy excesses, as well as the tonal discordance of yoking the horror-fantasy genre to a love tragedy with classical, literary trappings.
Korea's actor supremo Song Kang-ho turns in another forceful yet controlled performance as Sang Hyun, a provincial priest who volunteers to undergo an experiment in Africa to find a cure for a deadly virus. He survives, but becomes a vampire through an unknown blood transfusion. Unlike conventional vampires who only crave blood, Sang Hyun discovers that he "thirsts after all sinful pleasures." He develops a flair for mahjong, justifies his way of obtaining blood supplies, and covets his childhood classmate, Kang-woo's wife Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin).
Layered with satire on religious and social hypocrisy, Sang Hyun's conflict between repression and impulse (memorably represented by his thwacking his groin with a recorder) constitutes the film's most amusing and penetrating moments. However, once Tae-ju conspires with him to murder Kang-woo in what Park professed is a re-envisioning of Zola's "Therese Racquin," the characters swing wildly between gleeful amorality and extreme tormented conscience. The atmosphere is that of macabre farce rather than the novel's haunting psychological depth.
Kim Ok-vin's high-pitched neurosis is sometimes grating, but for a relative newcomer, she keeps her continuous personality transformations in stride, even when she finally becomes a de-humanized hunter driven only by instinct.
Like all of Park's films, cinematic technique is highly distinctive in "Thirst," though art direction is more naturalistic than his last three films. In the final reels, a blue-against-white color scheme begins to dominate, providing a striking contrast to the lurid bloodletting.
Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242400804
Thirst
Bakjwi
By DEREK ELLEY
Variety
Emile Zola meets New Age vampirism in South Korean helmer Park Chan-wook's "Thirst," an overlong stygian comedy that badly needs a transfusion of genuine inspiration. Inspired by and following key plot elements in Zola's 19th-century novel of murder and adultery, "Therese Raquin," the two-hour-plus pic is slow to warm up and largely goes around in circles thereafter, with repetitive (and often plain goofy) jokes about hemoglobin lust and bone-crunching, sanguinary violence. Some major surgery could help its specialized offshore potential, but this is startlingly unnuanced work from the director of such classy fare as "Oldboy" and "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance."
Film opened strongly April 30 in South Korea, and has taken 1.75 million admissions in its first two frames. But in its second week, it was knocked out of the top spot by action-comedy "My Girlfriend Is an Agent."
Setup is strong, as Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho), a well-liked priest in a small town who works at the local hospital, contracts and dies from the deadly Emmanuel virus after volunteering in a project to discover a vaccine. After being brought back to life by a blood transfusion, he gradually realizes he's been turned into a vampire, which gives him an extremely healthy sexual appetite but also requires regular doses of blood to keep his skin free of small boils.
Choice bits of Zola's novel start to appear as Sang-hyeon starts an affair with Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), the wife of his childhood friend, Kang-woo (Shin Ha-gyun). Dowdy, put-upon Tae-ju, who spends her time looking after the sickly Kang-woo and being bullied by his doting mom, Mrs. Ra (as in "Raquin"; Kim Hae-suk), blooms into a voracious, free-spirited lover with Sang-hyeon. Soon they're a pair in more ways than one, as their thirst for sex, thrills and red corpuscles turns them into mass murderers.
Project has been in Park's mind for a decade -- always with thesp Song in mind -- but at some stage, what began as a typically wry, genre-bending take on sin and redemption seems to have shed most of its subtext. Though Sang-hyeon finds himself an object of worship as he develops special powers of strength and flight, what could have been a wonderfully transgressive spin on religion and its flipside devolves, especially in its second half, into blood-spattered, low-key farce revolving around a single, overworked idea.
Early grossout scenes lose their shock value with repetition, as the script amps up the semi-cartoonish violence in the third act. Tae-ju begins to relish the blood-sucking in a way that troubles even Sang-hyeon. But the movie never comes close to tapping the raw, gnawing need of vampirism that fueled pics such as Abel Ferrara's "The Addiction" or Tony Scott's "The Hunger."
Song, perhaps South Korea's most recognizable actor and a Park regular ("JSA," "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance"), is never less than solid as the priest-turned-vampire but lacks some of the sheer physical presence he usually brings to the screen.
The major surprise is 22-year-old actress-model Kim Ok-vin (usually known, more correctly, as Kim Ok-bin), whose doll-like features made her the perfect underdog in the campy high school musical "Dasepo Naughty Girls." Here, she puts to rest any doubts about her ability to take on a challenging role, throwing herself into topless sex scenes and vampiric munching with a lusty, bad-girl abandon.
As usual in Park's movies, design is paramount, with Jeong Jeong-hun's DV-originated lensing savoring the musty Lynchian colors of Ryu Seong-hye's production design. Visual effects, especially in the flying scenes, are just OK by Korean standards.
-------------------------------------
Film Review: Thirst
By Maggie Lee
Hollywood Reporter
CANNES -- Korean auteur extraordinaire Park Chan-wook's "Thirst" is a torrid expression of predatory instinct and insatiable, all-consuming love, embodied through its protagonist's difficulty in holding his day job as a priest-cum-miracle-healer, and his night shift as an accidental vampire and fornicating murderer.
Released domestically two weeks ahead of its Cannes Competition premiere, "Thirst" instantly became the year's national boxoffice champion. A co-investment and co-production between CJ Entertainment and Universal Pictures (touted as a first of its kind Korean-Hollywood collaboration), it will be released stateside by Focus Features. Stunning production quality and the story's extremity should arouse interest beyond the specialty Asian market.
Park takes his famed eroticization of violence, pain and cruelty to new, feverish heights, and garnishes it with deliciously sadistic gallows humor. Those who thrive on gore, twisted sexuality and brutish handling of women can drink their fill from this film. More serious arthouse critics, however, may balk at the script's soapy excesses, as well as the tonal discordance of yoking the horror-fantasy genre to a love tragedy with classical, literary trappings.
Korea's actor supremo Song Kang-ho turns in another forceful yet controlled performance as Sang Hyun, a provincial priest who volunteers to undergo an experiment in Africa to find a cure for a deadly virus. He survives, but becomes a vampire through an unknown blood transfusion. Unlike conventional vampires who only crave blood, Sang Hyun discovers that he "thirsts after all sinful pleasures." He develops a flair for mahjong, justifies his way of obtaining blood supplies, and covets his childhood classmate, Kang-woo's wife Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin).
Layered with satire on religious and social hypocrisy, Sang Hyun's conflict between repression and impulse (memorably represented by his thwacking his groin with a recorder) constitutes the film's most amusing and penetrating moments. However, once Tae-ju conspires with him to murder Kang-woo in what Park professed is a re-envisioning of Zola's "Therese Racquin," the characters swing wildly between gleeful amorality and extreme tormented conscience. The atmosphere is that of macabre farce rather than the novel's haunting psychological depth.
Kim Ok-vin's high-pitched neurosis is sometimes grating, but for a relative newcomer, she keeps her continuous personality transformations in stride, even when she finally becomes a de-humanized hunter driven only by instinct.
Like all of Park's films, cinematic technique is highly distinctive in "Thirst," though art direction is more naturalistic than his last three films. In the final reels, a blue-against-white color scheme begins to dominate, providing a striking contrast to the lurid bloodletting.
Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242400804
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
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Sonic Youth
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- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
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Sonic Youth
- Tenured Laureate
- Posts: 8005
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
- Location: USA
Peter Bradshaw calls Andrea Arnold "one of the most powerful voices in British cinema." And it's only her second film. Not bad.
In the claustrophobic flats which incubate family dysfunction and rage, and the wild beautiful spaces thereabouts, where the urban sprawls out into the country, film-maker Andrea Arnold finds a powerful story of betrayed love. One of three British movies in competition at Cannes this year, Fish Tank is a powerfully acted drama, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who intersperses bleak interiors with sudden, gasp-inducing landscapes like something by Turner. Arnold takes elements of tough social-realist drama which are, if not cliches exactly, then certainly familiar — but makes them live again and steers the movie away from miserabilism, driven by a heartfelt central performance.
Mia, played by newcomer Katie Jarvis, is a lary 15-year-old who lives with single mum Joanne, played by Kierston Wareing, her lippy younger sister Tyler — a scene-stealer from Rebecca Griffiths — and their drolly named dog, Tennents. As well as a sincere devotion to cheap supermarket booze, the girls have learned from their mother mannerisms of pre-emptive scorn and rage to cover up perennially hurt feelings. Mia herself is a wannabe dancer, and when she's trying out some moves in the kitchen one morning, her mother's new boyfriend ambles in half-naked, looking to put the kettle on.
This is handsome, charming Connor, outstandingly played by Michael Fassbender, and he looks at Mia with frank appraisal. "You dance like a black," he says, " ... I mean that as a compliment." Poor Mia has never had a compliment or any praise in her life and responds with alternating suspicion and fierce, semi-controlled gratitude, especially when Connor behaves like a real dad, taking everyone out for drives in the country.
Of course there is a sexual atmosphere between Connor and Mia, so tropically humid that the ceiling is almost dripping. Mia pretends to be asleep one night so Connor will carry her to bed, and there is an extremely gamey mock-spanking scene, when Connor pretends to "discipline" her. Mia has no idea how to express or manage huge, unspent reserves of passion: she doesn't know if she wants a lover, or a father — or just someone to love her unconditionally. Connor is perhaps the man for this, but the slippery charmer has secrets.
The performances of Jarvis and Fassbender are outstanding and their chemistry fizzes — and then explodes. It is another highly intelligent, involving film from one of the most powerful voices in British cinema.
Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242326212
In the claustrophobic flats which incubate family dysfunction and rage, and the wild beautiful spaces thereabouts, where the urban sprawls out into the country, film-maker Andrea Arnold finds a powerful story of betrayed love. One of three British movies in competition at Cannes this year, Fish Tank is a powerfully acted drama, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who intersperses bleak interiors with sudden, gasp-inducing landscapes like something by Turner. Arnold takes elements of tough social-realist drama which are, if not cliches exactly, then certainly familiar — but makes them live again and steers the movie away from miserabilism, driven by a heartfelt central performance.
Mia, played by newcomer Katie Jarvis, is a lary 15-year-old who lives with single mum Joanne, played by Kierston Wareing, her lippy younger sister Tyler — a scene-stealer from Rebecca Griffiths — and their drolly named dog, Tennents. As well as a sincere devotion to cheap supermarket booze, the girls have learned from their mother mannerisms of pre-emptive scorn and rage to cover up perennially hurt feelings. Mia herself is a wannabe dancer, and when she's trying out some moves in the kitchen one morning, her mother's new boyfriend ambles in half-naked, looking to put the kettle on.
This is handsome, charming Connor, outstandingly played by Michael Fassbender, and he looks at Mia with frank appraisal. "You dance like a black," he says, " ... I mean that as a compliment." Poor Mia has never had a compliment or any praise in her life and responds with alternating suspicion and fierce, semi-controlled gratitude, especially when Connor behaves like a real dad, taking everyone out for drives in the country.
Of course there is a sexual atmosphere between Connor and Mia, so tropically humid that the ceiling is almost dripping. Mia pretends to be asleep one night so Connor will carry her to bed, and there is an extremely gamey mock-spanking scene, when Connor pretends to "discipline" her. Mia has no idea how to express or manage huge, unspent reserves of passion: she doesn't know if she wants a lover, or a father — or just someone to love her unconditionally. Connor is perhaps the man for this, but the slippery charmer has secrets.
The performances of Jarvis and Fassbender are outstanding and their chemistry fizzes — and then explodes. It is another highly intelligent, involving film from one of the most powerful voices in British cinema.
Edited By Sonic Youth on 1242326212
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
I have a friend at Cannes seeking distribution right now, who beyond anything else, cannot wait to see Antichrist. I'll report back on whatever he sees. Consider it no reflection on the film's consensus of quality, but...
MD'A - Fish Tank
Fish Tank ('09 Arnold): 54/C+. Solid enough but *exceedingly* familiar kitchen-sink/angry-young-(wo)man piece with great M. Fassbender perf.
MD'A - Fish Tank
Fish Tank ('09 Arnold): 54/C+. Solid enough but *exceedingly* familiar kitchen-sink/angry-young-(wo)man piece with great M. Fassbender perf.
"How's the despair?"
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Sonic Youth
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