Tag: 0-9

88

  By

★★★
“Not entirely forgettable.”

88More by accident than design, this is the third film I’ve seen in the past couple of weeks which features amnesia as a plot-device. It’s a bit of a scripting minefield, since it’s easy to become a crutch for the writer, with the amnesia being “cured” at the moments necessary to the plot. You need a lot of discipline to avoid this: Memento is likely the platinum standard for this being done well, and to be honest, most other efforts come up short in comparison. This is no different, with an absolutely key piece of data being withheld from the audience [and the lead character] until dramatically convenient at the end – though it doesn’t exactly take Nostradamus to figure it out in advance. Gwen (Isabelle) find herself eating in a diner, with absolutely no memory of how she got there. Checking her purse, she finds a gun, and accidentally shoots a waitress. Fleeing the scene, she also discovers a key to a motel room, #88. Going there, she finds more questions than answers. What was her relationship to local mobster, Cyrus (Lloyd)? Did her really kill her boyfriend, Aster? Who is Ty (Doiron), the cheerful killer who is helping her? And why does everyone keep acting as if she’s a stone-cold killer?

This opens with a caption explaining the concept of the “fugue state”, which Wikipedia tells me is “characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality, and other identifying characteristics of individuality… and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity.” I note that the section there on this disorder in popular culture, is rather longer than the list of real-life incidents, since it’s pretty much an open invitation to scriptwriters, to sculpt as they see fit. The key question is how interesting the story would be without the conceit. Here, I give it a qualified passing grade, since both Gwen and Cyrus are interesting characters, the former particularly when she’s in bad-girl mode, and just not giving  damn [the same can be said about Isabelle’s most well-known performance, as a teenage werewolf in the wonderful Ginger Snaps] It’s also fun to see Lloyd, better known for his mad scientist in Back to the Future, playing a sleazy scumball, But I can’t help thinking the fractured timeline doesn’t actually add all that much to proceedings, and is only made necessary by that single point of data mentioned above. It could have been played as a straightforward revenge flick, without the psychological trappings, and been little or no less effective.

The style here is a mix of the effective and the irritating. The soundtrack seems particularly intrusive, as if the director simply set her iTunes collection on random and let it play, and the shootout at the bowling alley ends with the characters skipping merrily away across the lanes, which as someone who has tried to walk down one knows, is wildly unrealistic [a over-energetic bowl had led to my wedding ring following the ball, and I can state confidently, it’s the only location where the physics of a Tom and Jerry cartoon is actually a good approximation to real life!] But even if you work out where this is going, the underlying story is a solid one, and Isabelle’s performance does a good enough job of compelling attention, to make for a passable 90 minutes of entertainment.

Dir: April Mullen
Star: Katharine Isabelle, Christopher Lloyd, Tim Doiron, Michael Ironside

009-1: The End of the Beginning

  By

★★★★
“Spy vs. Spy”

seal009-1Partly to celebrate the 75th birthday of its late creator, Shotaro Ishinomori, the first live-action feature adaptation of his spy series 009-1 was made – it had previously been made into a TV show, during the late sixties, and a 12-episode anime series in 2006. This version was helmed by Sakamoto, best known for his work on the action in Kamen Rider and Power Rangers, but we’ve been a fan since his involvement in 1997’s Drive, with Mark Dacascos, whose fights still hold up very well today. And this is almost as much fun, combining bone-crunching action with more philosophical insights, into what it means to be human.

The heroine is Mylene (Iwasa), an orphan who was recruited by a Japanese spy group, and transformed into a cyborg superagent, equipped with enhanced senses as well as weapons in unusual places. We first see in her action dismantling a black market organ trafficking ring, and her next mission is to rescue Dr. Clyne, a scientist who was her cyber-“mother”. However, when she discovers Chris (Kinomoto), one of the victims she freed from the organ traffickers, in Clyne’s hands, awkward questions begin to be raised. When she goes off book, and is stripped of her 00 status, Mylene finds herself being hunted both by the bad guys, not the least of whom is played by Nagasawa, and her erstwhile agency allies.

While slightly more restrained on the nudity front, this feels like it could be another entry in the Naked series of movies from Hong Kong started by Naked Killer, sharing a similarly heady combination of sex and violence. Only slightly though, most obviously perhaps the sequence near the end where the heroine, wearing what can only be described as a bondage bra, is tied up and licked from toe to head by someone who’s a convincing simulacrum of her mother. Years of therapy beckon for that, me thinks. But if not perhaps fun for all the family, the action is excellent, and there is plenty to go around, with a laudable number of the chief participants on both sides being female: it’s also pretty messy, though the impact is lessened by the obvious use of CGI for much of the blood (albeit, far from all!). Fortunately, that doesn’t extend to the action, which is almost all in camera, with some stunt doubling that is kept nicely plausible.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have not consumed any of the other versions, so I cannot say how this compares to those, or the original manga. What I can say is, on its own terms, this is more than satisfactory, providing a slickly-produced piece of quality entertainment that contains plenty of hard-hitting action. The universe created certainly has room for further exploration, and I’m hoping this is successful enough that we get to see more of it.

Dir: Koichi Sakamoto
Star: Mayuko Iwasa. Minehiro Kinomoto, Nao Nagasawa, Mao Ichimichi

300: Rise of an Empire

  By

★★★★
“Faster than Greece-d lightning.”

300riseaI’m going out on a limb here, and predicting that Eva Green is going to be the next great action heroine. She seems very taken by strong female characters, from Morgan Le Fay in Camelot, through Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful, and we recently noted her contribution to the marketing for Sin City 2. But this was unexpected. We watched it, purely because we saw and enjoyed the original film, and didn’t expect this one to come anywhere near qualifying for the site. I mean, we were aware of Artemisia – almost a decade ago, Brian wrote a piece for the site, detailing why she’d be a good subject for a movie. However, we were expecting this to be an entirely macho film, likely bordering on the homoerotic, as mercilessly parodied in Meet the Spartans. We certainly didn’t expect her to be so pivotal to this sequel.

Well, technically, it’s neither sequel nor prequel to 300; it’s more of a companion piece, depicting events elsewhere around the same time, and focusing on the naval battle between the Persian forces, nominally under Xerxes (Santo), and the Greek ones of Themistocles (Stapleton). In an earlier encounter, Themistocles killed Darius, Xerxes’s father, which sent Xerxes off the deep end – carefully shepherded there by Artemisia (Green). She is a Greek citizen whose family was slaughtered by their soldiers when she was young, with her being subject to years of horrific abuse. Left for dead, she was rescued by Persians, switched sides and rose through the ranks, now seeing in Xerxes a chance to extract retribution on her former nation. Unlike Xerxes, who was portrayed in the original as Caligula with muscles, Artemisia is smart and resourceful, not making the mistake of under-estimating the Greeks in general, and Themistocles in particular. Indeed, as far as we are concerned, she was much more interesting than the hero, particularly in terms of back-story. She also kicks serious ass, both with a bow and her pair of swords.

As far as general film-making goes, this seems to have built on Spartacus, in much the same way that Spartacus built on the original 300. Indeed, there’s a fairly explicit nod to it, in the casting of Peter Mensah as Artemisia’s trainer, a similar role to the one he played in Spartacus. This means lots of slow-motion and buckets of digital gore, which seems to hit the camera lens more often than it hits anywhere else. It also perhaps means playing faster and looser with history: neither Darius’s death nor Artemisia’s fate are as depicted in the movie. But, hey, when facts conflict with drama, it makes cinematic sense for the former to give way. If what you have here occasionally topples over into video-game style, it rarely looks less than lovely, and if Artemisia wasn’t enough, we get a bonus action heroine at the end, as Queen Gorgo (Headey), leads the Spartan reinforcements into action. Now, will someone please give Green a full-on starring role in which she can kick butt, and tell me where I go to sign up?

Dir: Noam Murro
Star: Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Rodrigo Santoro, Lena Headey

6 Guns

  By

★★★½
“Hannie Caulder with less cleavage. And no Christopher Lee.”

The Asylum studio are infamous for producing ‘mockbusters’ – straight to DVD look-alikes of big-budget movies, designed to benefit from their publicity budgets. These have included their own versions of Sherlock Holmes and War of the Worlds, but they do make their own original works, including cheesy delights such as Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, starring 80’s popsters Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. They come in for a lot of flak as a result – some justified, some not, for this is neither mockbuster nor cheesy, and is surprisingly solid, if you want a straightforward Western tale of revenge. Selina Stevens (Mears) has to watch as her husband and two young sons are killed by Lee Horn (Mead) and his gang; she is brutally raped and left for dead, beginning a decline into alcoholic despair. Having reached bottom, she meets bounty-hunter Frank Allison (Van Dyke), and asks him to teach her how to shoot – conveniently, just as Horn’s crew start to make their way back to town. The townsfolk’s repeated affirmations that they feel safer with Frank around, might have been a bit premature.

Ok, ‘original’ might be a bit of a stretch, as the storyline is more than a bit reminiscent of Hannie Caulder [which I must get round to reviewing at some point], though sensibly reins back the glamour Raquel Welch provided there. On its own merits, however, this is based on a solid trio of central performances, with Mead particularly memorable as the black-hearted thug – in an interesting twist, it’s revenge which also triggers his initial assault on Stevens’ family. Selina’s transition to a gunslinger is nicely handled; she doesn’t exactly become a sharpshooter – but when opportunity presents itself, can shoot a fairly stationary target at shortish range, which is credible. Against this its low-budget nature is highly-obvious, with the “town” inhabited by about 12 people, and the action in general could have been spliced in from any randomly-selected 1950’s oater.

This remains a decent tale, satisfactorily told, with interesting characters, good performances and more than a local resonance, given its placedropping of Arizona names. And in case you’re wondering, no, there are not six guns in the movie, despite the title [depending on the count, there might be five or seven…] Still, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that this doesn’t fall in the upper echelon of the studio’s movies: this kind of thing should escape from The Asylum more often.

Dir: Shane Van Dyke
Star: Sage Mears, Barry Van Dyke, Geoff Meed, Greg Evigan

6 Angels

  By

★★★
“Like The Prophecy, made for 75 cents and without Christopher Walken.”

Poverty-row production though this might be, I can’t bring myself to hate this as much as it perhaps deserves. While it’s ambitions are far beyond its means [the DVD sleeve promises ‘female warriors in awesome fights’ – let’s just say, it was probably a mistake for me to rewatch Crouching Tiger the same day!], writer-director Almeida does, at least, have an imagination. After 12 years in a coma, Taileen (Fabre) finds herself reborn as one of The Circle, a group of six angels, three good and three evil, who keep the balance of the world. However, Ezekiel (Mazzola), the leader of the devil’s team, plans to wipe out the holy trinity, in order for his master to reign, and Taileen soon finds herself the only thing standing between the forces of darkness and their goal.

Really, if you’re going to offer religious apocalypse, you’d probably better have a budget that could not be described as ‘loose change’. The action is often teetering on the edge of laughable, and the film doesn’t even play by its own rules. In an early scene, Taileen learns she can only be killed by a “profane blade”, but the devil’s advocates still blaze away at her with mundane guns, even after they’ve learned she can stop bullets with her mind. Despite this, there are enough elements that worked to keep me interested: Stiga (Kastel, menacing the heroine in the pic at lower right) comes over nicely, both dressing and acting like a slutty version of Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix. I also have to credit Scott Buckley’s excellent, sweeping and orchestral score, which appears to have strayed in from a far bigger movie. That really yanks the film up by its boot-straps.

Things build to a final showdown in a warehouse, where the makers finally locate their supply of fake blood, which has been largely notable by its absence for the first hour, and it is quite effective. I do wonder why the angels, on both sides, don’t make better uses of their powers, though must also say, said powers are also somewhat crap: if I was responsible for holding the balance between good and evil, I’d want something better than the ability to turn into a fat guy. Overall, one would quite like to see this remade as a big-budget work, because the ideas here are good; with a good effects studio – and significantly better fight choreography – this has a lot of potential. However, Hollywood appears too busy remaking mostly-mediocre Asian horror to notice. We are therefore stuck with a cheap version, whose flaws likely distract too much from its merits for this to find a wide audience.

Dir: Luis Almeida
Star: Allison Fabre, Greg Mazzola, Jasmine Kastel, Rolando Millet

2LDK

  By

★★★★
“Sharing an apartment with the wrong person can be murder…”

This inspired film came about as the result of a bet at the Berlin Film Festival between Tsutsumi and Azumi director Ryuhei Kitamura (who is also doing the next Godzilla movie): make a film about a duel to the death, with just one setting, two characters, and seven days shooting. Kitamura made Aragami about two samurai in a temple; Tsutsumi, however, came up with this, about two warring flatmates (the title is Japanese shorthand for an apartment with 2 bedrooms, a living-room, a dining-room and a kitchen – luxurious by the cramped standards of their cities). Specifically, two actresses who, over the course of an evening, discover they are not only the final contenders for the same part, they also want the same man…

The first half is an edgy comedy about the perils of sharing accommodation: one girl (Koike) is a country girl, new to the profession, but is the sort who puts her name on her food in the fridge, right down to individual eggs; the other (Nonami) is a seasoned pro, with few moral scruples, least of all about possessions. You just know it’s going to go horribly bad, and the girls’ true thoughts are conveyed by voiceovers, as they maintain a thin veneer of politeness, at least for the first 40 minutes. Then the gloves finally come off, and the pair brawl throughout the apartment, using every weapon at their disposal – samurai swords, bleach, straw mats, you name it. Though I do have to wonder, why the hell is there a chainsaw among all the elegant furnishings?

It does probably count as mean-spirited, but this is outweighed by surprising wit, and credit is due for being a very rare example of a film where you never see a man (you hear them on the phone, or in photos, that’s all). Tsutsumi does tend to push the camera in too close for the violence, when a more detached approach would perhaps be both better, and less confusing. At barely 70 minutes, it’s almost a throwaway, yet still remains largely entertaining, and is certainly unique.

Dir: Yukihiko Tsutsumi
Star: Maho Nonami, Eiko Koike