Tag: 2004

Death Row Girls

  By

★★
“Despite the poster, more WiP than GwG.”

Misaki (Hoshino) is in prison for stabbing a policeman to death, but is taken from her jail to a remote island. There, she joins the rest of the hand-picked prisoners, who are there to be trained by a mysterious government organization, and moulded into operatives who can be used to protect national security. Most of the inmates just want to make things easy, sleeping with the guards in exchange for privileges, but Misaki is made of tougher stuff, and won’t buckle down to the authorities. While she begins plotting how to escape the island, she needs to overcome a number of problems, not least having no idea about where it is, and whether the small boat they stumble across will be capable of getting them to any other land.

There’s definitely elements of Nikita here, not least the sequence where Misaki tries to take the facility head hostage. Except that, where that breezed through the training inside 25 minutes, it is, more or less, the entire focus of proceedings here. Hoshino snarls nicely as an independent and feisty bad girl, yet neither she nor any of the other residents are in the slightest bit convincing. I’d normally avoid using a phrase like “runs like a girl” as unnecessarily demeaning… except here, where it’s entirely accurate. I can see absolutely no chance – zero, zip, nada – that any credible group would select her, or the rest of the inmates, as potential trainees.

The film does deliver the expected helpings of gratuitous nudity and moderate violence, as things bumble along towards the climax, where Misaki has to battle her jail friend, to the death. Winner gets to leave, loser…well, will be dead, so shouldn’t worry themselves about it. It’s not exactly the best knife-fight you’ve ever seen, and the ending leaves a good deal to be desired in terms of tying up the loose ends as well. The 84 minutes passed reasonably enough though, and it’s reasonably competent, albeit by the genre’s fairly-low standards.

Dir: Sadaaki Haginiwa
Star: Aki Hoshino, Emi Kitagawa, Ren Suzuki, Ami Natsui
a.k.a. Female Prisoner 1316

Monica la mitraille

  By

★★½
“Bonnie et les Clydes.”

I think this really comes down to a question of managing expectations. Hearing this was a film based on the life of Monica Proetti, Canada’s premiere female bank-robber, responsible for 20+ hold-ups before being gunned down by the cops… Well, seems like plenty of potential for action, doesn’t it? The reality is less concerned with the robberies, than the events which lead up to them. Monique Sparvieri (Bonnier) lives in the Montreal slums, working part-time as a hooker, for fun and profit. Her first husband Michael (Schorpion), is a safe-cracker who vanishes after his planned robbery is snatched from under his nose. She then hooks up with Gaston (Huard), another member of the team, and begins her own life of crime. When he is sent to jail in the mid-1960’s, she is left with limited options to provide for her children, and goes full-bore into the banking business, with yet another lover, Gerald (Dupuis).

It certainly shines light into the “whys” of her life, one that offered little or no hope of escaping the poverty of her upbringing. Crime, of one form or another, was the main way out, and that led to an extremely relaxed attitude towards law-breaking for Monica. The film does take too long to make this point: it’s 125 minutes in total, and could easily lose half an hour off that, though the performances, Bonnier’s in particular, are solid enough not to make it too much of a chore. But the raids themselves are perfunctory. They’re more snatch-and-grabs, with the gang aiming to spend little more than 30 second in the bank. The only one where there’s any real tension is the final robbery, where the gang gets lost in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, while Monica’s previously-jailed confederates huddle round a radio tuned to the police-band, from prison.

What we have here illustrates the tension between real-life and cinematic drama. The two rarely align perfectly, and I get the feeling this example was more concerned about factual accuracy and, inevitably, the entertainment value suffers as a result.

Dir: Pierre Houle
Star: Céline Bonnier, Roy Dupuis, Patrick Huard, Frank Schorpion

Double Dare

  By

★★★★½
“Zoë Bell, you’re our heroine. Never change.”

The day after watching this documentary, I was clearing out the shed in preparation for our house move. I twisted my back, and thought about giving up, but soldiered on until the job was done – because that’s what Zoë Bell would do. It’s now my life philosophy: WWZD? She’s the main focus here, from working as Lucy Lawless’s double on Xena in New Zealand, through an unsuccessful attempt to break in to Hollywood, and on to a second try, where she’s hired to stand-in for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Paralleling this, it looks at Jeannie Epper, a veteran stuntwoman who shadowed Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman. Now nearing her 60th birthday, Epper is still active and seeking work, fighting against the problems of being a female in an extremely male-dominated industry.

The thing that comes over is how delightfully un-Hollywood Bell is, innocent almost to the point of naivety – she’s blissfully unaware of the need, for example, to have head shots, and drops F-bombs with a marvellously casual air. The cameras are rolling when she gets the call telling her she’s got the Kill Bill job, and her obvious, genuine delight at the news, brought a huge grin to our faces, and is completely endearing. It’s to be hoped that Hollywood doesn’t change her in the slightest, and Zoë remains the same, down-to-earth, well-grounded person shown here, who is now even more solidly entrenched among our favourite contemporary action heroines.

I have some concerns there, based on Epper; her contemplation of plastic surgery and liposuction at her age is more sad than anything else, as is watching Jeannie working the phones, basically begging for work, even though she’s a legend in the business. There’s a good heart beating in there (Epper donated a kidney to a friend, for instance), but she has clearly been ground down by her decades in the film industry, and become a lot more cynical and battle-weary as a result. That’s no wonder, when you witness her struggles trying to get equal treatment for women at the annual awards ceremony. It’s a somewhat grim reality-check, warning of the potential perils ahead for Bell in her career.

But aside from the contrast in the two heroines, this is a fascinating study in a side of the business that doesn’t get anything like the recognition it deserves. As one comment I read elsewhere said, “If you liked Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, Zoë Bell is the reason why,” and that sums up the shadows in which stuntwomen work. This film shines a light into that darkness, and both Epper and Bell deserve enormous respect and admiration for putting their bodies on the line, in the name of our entertainment. And while I’m not really a big Tarantino fan, if he turns out to be responsible for bringing Bell to a wider audience, then it’s perhaps the biggest gift his career will have given us.

Dir: Amanda Micheli
Star: Jeannie Epper, Zoë Bell