Tag: sport

12 Feet Deep: Trapped Sisters

  By

★★½
“Drowning, not waving.”

There aren’t many films which will be reviewed both here and on aquaticsintl.com, a site offering “Commercial swimming pool and waterpark industry news” [their opinion: a “woefully inaccurate portrayal of pool technology”]. But then, if you see only one film about sisters trapped underneath a swimming-pool cover this year… Yeah, it’s highly likely to be this one. Eskandari deserves some credit for taking a paper-thin and highly dubious premise and almost stretching it out to feature length. But even he eventually runs out of steam at about the hour mark, and derisive snorting will take over from there. 

Siblings Bree (Noone) and Jonna (Park) are the victims, after trying to retrieve the former’s engagement ring from the bottom of the pool. Lackadaisical pool manager (Bell, recognizable to horror fans from the Saw franchise) closes the giant fibreglass pool cover on them – though I defer to the experts at aquaticsintl.com, who said, “There is no way that would possibly ever meet any ASTM standards for pool safety covers used in the U.S.” Having flagrantly disregarded ASTM standards, he then locks up shop, leaving the pair trapped underneath over a long holiday weekend. Their only hope is the pool’s cleaner, Clara (Farr), but she’s not long out of prison, and the felon sees Bree and Jonna as a moist, trapped meal ticket. Her demands to free them begin with the PIN for Bree’s phone, and escalate from there, as the sisters strive for their own escape.

This feels like a descendant of 47 Meters Down, which was the spawn of The Shallows, which called back to Open Water, all using drowning as the main threat. At least here, “being eaten” isn’t on the menu, and the story has to contrive a number of other elements to stretch things out. Thus we (eventually) get the truth about the death of Brie and Jonna’s father, and the latter’s jealousy about the former’s engagement leads to significant quantities of sibling bickering. Jonna initially comes across as quite the bitch, though we eventually discover there are reasons for her being a curmudgeon. Oh, and did I mention that Bree is a diabetic, who needs an insulin shot, like now?

Supposedly “based on true events” – I can hear derisive laughter from acquaticsintl.com as I write – you’d probably need an especially forgiving nature to get past the “I’m so sure” moments here, such as why they bother to tread water for much of the film, when they could just head to the shallow end and stand there [as well as getting much better leverage for their breakout efforts]. In the first half, things are executed with enough energy as to paper over the cracks, and the series of unfortunate events by which the two women end up trapped is more plausible than I expected. However, I can’t helped thinking it would have been much improved, had Bell returned as his Jigsaw character at the half-way point, and released some sharks into the pool.

Dir: Matt Eskandari
Star: Alexandra Park, Nora-Jane Noone, Diane Farr, Tobin Bell

Forever the Moment

  By

★★★
“Women with balls.”

Every four years, when the Olympics arrive, we fall in love with handball. What is handball, you might be asking. Basically, think seven-a-side soccer, except (obviously), played with the hands rather than feet. It’s an amazing sport, all but unknown in the UK and US, and deserving a far wider audience – a YouTube search for “Olympics handball” will get you sorted. Which is why we were fascinated by the idea of a film focusing on it, specially, the story of the 2004 South Korean women’s team. What they did was roughly that country’s equivalent of the 1980 ‘Miracle on Ice’. The once-dominant Korean team had fallen far from grace, and barely qualified for the Athens Olympics. But they reached the final, against the Danish side, which went into double overtime, and then a penalty shootout.

Yeah, much of this is a compendium of sports cliches, right down to the requisite training montage. The fact it’s largely based on true events does not exonerate the movie from criticism here, though I was impressed how closely the depiction of the final match did mirror the real thing, still regarded as an all-time classic contest. Thus, you get tropes such as the veterans, brought back for one last crack at glory, such as Han Mi-sook (Moon), who is now working in a grocery store to try and make ends meet, after her husband is defrauded by his business partner. They inevitably butt heads, both with the younger players, and new coach Ahn Seung-pil (Uhm), who is not only the replacement for interim coach Kim Hye-gyung (Kim J-e), but also her ex. There may eventually be bonding. I won’t spoil that.

It would be very easy for this to topple over into sentimental cliche, yet the strength of the performances generally help it stay just in bounds. Director Im seems particularly interested in developing her characters, and they come across as especially real, as they progress from a sparsely-attended opening game to the cauldron of the Olympic gold medal match. Especially memorable is the feisty Song Jung-nan (Kim J-y), who won’t back down from any confrontation, most notably when some of the other athletes at the Korean training complex try to bully some of her team-mates. Weightlifters or judokas, all learn quickly not to get in her way.

I should mention, you don’t need to know much about handball, since it’s largely self-explanatory. Though even our relatively untrained eye could detect the difference between the actresses playing the game, and their opponents who are the real thing, being actual professionals from a Danish handball club. For the Korean audience, there won’t be any surprises in the eventual outcome; that’s an area where the movie perhaps had a greater impact on us. Im handles the final moments particularly deftly, not even showing the final shot, just the reactions to it, and finishing with archive post-game interviews from the real participants. These do an excellent job of bringing home the reality of what happened.

At a length of over two hours, we could likely have done with more handball and less personal drama (not to mention the unfounded suggestion of biased officiating). Yet I’d be hard-pushed to consider the time wasted, and it was nice not to have to wait until 2020 to have our love of the game rekindled once more.

Dir: Im Soon-rye
Star: Moon So-ri, Kim Jung-eun, Kim Ji-young, Uhm Tae-woong

Beach Volleyball Detectives

  By

★★★
“So, illegal underground beach volleyball matches?”

The above line of dialogue is a perfect litmus test for what you’ll think of this. If your reaction is a derisive snort, this pair of hour-long items – I have qualms about calling them anything as high-minded as “feature films” – is probably not for you. And I cheerfully admit, snorting is probably the default, and understandable, reaction. If, on the other hand, you are giddy with anticipation at the very thought, then I probably cannot recommend it highly enough.

It’s one of those cases where the title pretty much explains the basic idea. Three young, photogenic members of the Foreign Affairs Department, led by Haruka, get paired up with Wakana, a equally young and photogenic visiting policewoman from Hawaii, after they discover blueprints for a mini-nuke, capable of wiping out everything in a 100-mile radius. To find those behind the scheme, the four law-enforcement officials have to go undercover at the training camp for an international volleyball tournament, and figure out which of their opponents – Chinese, Russian or Indian – are after the blueprints.

This manages to be incredibly tacky, while also remaining remarkably chaste. There is no actual content here which would be worse than PG-rated. But it’s all shot in a way that resembles Russ Meyer in heat: focusing on the actresses’ erogenous zones, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else in the frame. Which makes sense, considering the director’s filmography includes what I can only presume are far more explicit titles, such as her debut, Chronic Rutting Adultery Wife. And who can forget Miss Peach: Peachy Sweetness Huge Breasts? Meanwhile, the writer is Takao Nakano, who gave the world – and this site – Big Tits Zombie.

It also turns out that, much like the Force and duct-tape, beach volleyball has a light side and a dark side. These are, respectively, White Sand Beach and Black Sand Beach. This mystical philosophy may help explain the superpowers on display here. For instance, the Indian team can levitate, the Russian player can turn into multiple mirror images of herself, and the Japanese and Chinese have a whole slew of super-powered moves, up to and including “Intercontinental Ballistic Missile No. 1”. I should mention, all these different nationalities are played by Japanese ladies, though in deference to her cultural heritage, the “Russian” does wear a headscarf. The Chinese are defined by their frequent spouting of Socialist dogma, such as “Go ahead and vote on it, you silly democratic people.”

The execution is woefully inept, The matches play like a low-rent version of Shaolin Soccer, right down to the ball turning into a dragon, a result of the appropriately named “Dragon Spike” move. Except, here, the CGI might barely have passed muster in the 1980’s. What passes for “combat” is hardly any better, if at all. Yet this incompetence actually becomes part of the trashy charm, and there’s a surprising amount of plot here. Our heroines have to handle not just their enemies, but also betrayal from within, and jealous fights between Haruka and Wakana over the attentions of their coach, with the help of a Yoda-esque monk, Harlequin. It’s all undeniably goofy, yet I was amused and entertained – likely more than I should probably admit…

Dir: Yumi Yoshiyuki
Star: Arisu Kagamino, Sakurako Kaoru, Chihiro Koganezaki, Kaori Nakamura

Unsullied

  By

★★
“Tumblr in action-movies”

unsulliedIf you’re looking for unsubtle social commentary, you’re in the right place, because this take on The Most Dangerous Game ticks off the trifecta of -isms:

  • Sexism: men abusing women
  • Classism: the 1% versus the 99%
  • Racism: the main protagonist is black, all the antagonists are white.

Heroine Reagan (Gray) is a track star on her way to a college meet, when her car breaks down in a remote area of Louisiana. Unfortunately for her, this leads her into the grasp of Noah Evans (Joiner, looking very much like Brad Pitt’s stunt double) and Mason Hicks (Gaudison), two stockbrokers with a fondness for kidnapping and hunting down young women. They have the deep pockets to ensure that just about everyone in the local area looks the other way, so Reagan is on her own. However, might her athletic ability make her survival changes rather better than the previous victims?

I was kinda hoping this might be some kind of Game of Thrones spin-off – if you don’t watch the show, the title is shared with one of the fiercest warrior armies there. Unfortunately, Reagan’s main skill is, as you might surmise from the synopsis, running away rather than combat, so there’s a lot of jogging here. And swimming, too, for some reason. You also get copious flashbacks of back-story, since Reagan’s sister mysteriously vanished some time previously. You don’t exactly need to be a psychic to figure out where that plot-thread is going to lead, in a remarkable piece of happenstance which will likely stretch disbelief for even the most credulous of viewers.

Director Rice is actually a former NFL defensive end, which I think is a first. I’ve seen a few go on to be actors, such as Fred Williamson and O.J. Simpson, but not direct. Save for a couple of flashy “Go Pro”-esque shots, he takes a workmanlike approach in his debut feature, which is likely wise. Gray is proficient enough too, putting over strength and resolve which is appealing. The problems here are largely in a script which concentrates on the duller aspects, to the exclusion of potentially more interesting ones, such as the apparent way the hunters have bought the connivance of the entire town. Yet even this doesn’t make sense, with them randomly killing someone who appears to be entirely on their side. Because they’re bad people, that’s why. Hey, they’re bored and rich, young white men. What else would you expect?

That may be the core here: an almost total lack of motivation for everyone in the cast, from the moment Reagan blithely decides to get in her abductors’ truck – minutes after cautiously spurning a single man who tries to help. Thereafter, the film relies too much on mutual idiocy. For every moment where Reagan, say, decides to start a fire for no particular reason, there’s one where a captor doesn’t bother to tie her up. The number of times I rolled my eyes was likely exceeeded only by the number of derisive snorts.

Dir: Simeon Rice
Star: Murray Gray, Rusty Joiner, James Gaudioso, Erin Boyes

Full Strike

  By

★½
“Shaolin Shuttlecocks”

fullstrikeThis mediocre sports comedy seems to want to do for badminton what Shaolin Soccer did for the beautiful game. However, it falls short on just about every level, delivering little more than a shallow series of cliches. Former champion Ng Kau-sau (Ho), a.k.a. “Beast”, was drummed out of the sport ten years ago for anger management issues. However, her love of the game never died, and is rekindled when she bumps into a trio of former armed robbers, led by Lau Dan (Cheng). They have reformed and taken up the sport, under the tuition of an alcoholic former star, Master Champion Chik.

This is much to the consternation of the locals, who believe “Once a thief, always a thief.” They set up an opposing team, with their own coach, and both sign up for the Fantastic Five Asia-Pacific Badminton Tournament in Macau. Meanwhile, Lau Dan’s old buddies are trying to lure him back into a life of crime, and are plotting a raid on the Macau casinos the same night. What are the odds? About the same as both teams making it to the tournament final and facing off in a climactic showdown. Which, in this kind of film, is probably close to 100%.

There are a bunch of problems here, starting with the lead character, who isn’t exactly sympathetic. Let’s just say, her nickname is justified. The film then diverts into a middle section which seems almost to forget about her, being more concerned with Lau Dan. The height of the comedic stylings on view is when Master Champion Chik throws up, delivering the longest and grossest projectile vomit scene since The Meaning of Life. I will admit, I actually laughed. Still, it gives you a new appreciation for the true genius of Stephen Chow, who makes this kind of “plucky under-dog” comedy look easy. He combines plot, characters and, yes, jokes with grace into a consistent whole.

This never achieves anything like the same degree of cohesiveness, lurching uneasily from broad comedy to heartfelt drama. Then we reach the tournament, which covers most of the film’s second half. This involves a contrived version of badminton, requiring teams to substitute personnel half-way through the game. Why? The sole reason is, because the plot demands it. There’s no sense of escalation here either, unlike Shaolin Soccer. If you’ve seen one slow-motion shot of a shuttlecock crossing marginally above the net, or landing just inside the line, you’ve seen… The last 20 minutes of the movie to be honest.  The idea here isn’t without potential, and most of the personnel involved here have proven their talent elsewhere. The actual end product, unfortunately, falls well short of delivering.

Dir: Derek Kwok and Henri Wong
Star: Josie Ho, Ekin Cheng, Ronald Cheng, Tse Kwan-ho

Sumo Vixens

  By

★★★
“Su’mo money, su’mo problems.”

sumovixensYes, it’s a thinly-disguised excuse to see topless women grappling with each other. It’s from the director of Big Tits Zombie and the charmingly-titled Sexual Parasite: Killer Pussy. The budget appears to have been several thousand yen, at least. But, you know what? I didn’t mind this. There’s a sense of self-awareness here that helps defuse (though certainly not eliminate) the creepier elements. When the heroine proclaims, “People have dirty thoughts about women’s sumo, but I believe there’s something more than that,” you want to believe her. Well, at least until the lesbian canoodling starts, anyway.

Said heroine is Ruriko Sakura (Eba), whose aunt used to be a woman’s sumo champion in her day, which gives Ruriko the idea of reviving the sport. To this end, she recruits former master Szenjirou Arakami (Arase), who has just been relesed from jail for pushing a car loaded with Yakuza into a river. The women they recruit are a motley bunch at best, but Komasa (Mizutani) appears to have strayed in from a pinky violence film, so has promise. However, the Domino Group, a Yakuza-run “agency” has their eye on Ruriko and owns loans held by Arakami. A challenge match is arranged against the Domino girls, and if they win, the loans will be forgiven. If they lose, Ruriko must become their exclusive talent.

It’s the little things that keep this memorable, like the quirky characters, such as the tattooed, green-haired and pierced sumo who spends literally the entire film huffing paint thinner from a plastic bag – even for her bout, she’s like “Here, hold this” to the referee. Or Komasa’s one-eyed nemesis and former partner in a lesbian strip show, Oryu (Kudou), who I’m fairly sure is another pulp cinema tribute. Nakano also slyly subverts some of the obvious sports movie cliches. I trust I’m not spoiling this for anyone, when I tell you plucky underdog Ruriko loses her climactic match in about 0.3 seconds. I think he also takes pot-shots at cable TV – the final match is broadcast there – and its fondness for staged reaction shots.

The action is, as you’d expect, entirely woeful and the camera angles are particularly predatory, tending to focus on specific body parts to the exclusion of, say, the women’s faces. Yet the makers are clearly aware of the idiocy on view, and certainly cannot be accused of taking themselves too seriously. Ruriko somehow manages to keep her clothes on, when all about her are losing theirs, and though she has a boyfriend, he doesn’t turn up until literally the final scene. She’s goal-oriented, committed and you could make the case she’s actually a better role-model of independent womanhood than many depictions in more mainstream works. At heart, though, this could only be fully appreciated by the 16-year-old male audience, for whom it was apparently made.

Dir: Takao Nakano
Star: Eba, Arase, Kei Mizutani, Shouku Kudou

The Shallows

  By

★★★½
“Does for surfing what Open Water did for scuba-diving.”

the-shallowsThe older I get, the less any kind of extreme sports appeal. It’s likely an awareness that life is limited, and I’d rather hang on to it for as long as possible, rather than risk it in pursuit of a quick thrill. Parachuting? Skiing? Hell, even camping? No, thanks. I’ll be by the pool – not in it – with a cold drink and an exciting novel. This inevitably limits the attraction of this kind of “true life” adventures, because they rarely bother to demonstrate why the protagonist is doing what they are. Admittedly, that’s not the point: it’s all about the peril into which they get, and their struggles to extricate themselves. Everything else is somewhat superfluous, and that’s one of the issues here. Do we care about Nancy’s mid-twenties career choice crisis? Or that she’s on the beach because her late mother was there decades previously? Probably not. We’re here to see woman vs. shark.

Fortunately, the film largely delivers on this front, and it’s also nice to see a film where the heroine has absolutely no romantic interest at all. Once shark hits surfboard, and woman hits water, there are virtually no other speaking parts. It’s Nancy (Lively) in a stark battle for survival against the creature that’s circling her small, rock outcrop sanctuary. And with a large, dead whale nearby, the shark certainly isn’t going anywhere. That’s a problem for Nancy, because the initial attack has left her with a very badly-gashed thigh and potential gangrene. Fortunately, her medical training helps her patch up her own wounds, though the degree of damage she takes over the course of the film remains impressive. Enjoy the bikini-clad hottie, over whom the camera lingers in the early scenes – because by the end, Nancy looks more like she has gone five rounds with Gina Carano.

Inevitably, there are some concessions required. You’ve got a film that largely consists of a woman on a rock, so there’s more “thinking out loud” scenes than one normally sees. The shark, like most movie monsters, also demonstrates admirable dramatic timing, showing up when needed for the plot, and staying away during the moments necessary for the audience to get its breath back. Collet-Serra does an admirable job with the pacing, and the economical 87 minute running-time flies by. If the gilled antagonist here is a killing machine, streamlined by evolution over millions of years, with all extraneous irrelevancies removed, much the same can probably be said about this movie.

It has now been more than 40 years since Jaws made the entire world afraid to go into the water, but over the past few years, the shark movie has become more of a running-joke. Much as I must confess to having enjoyed Sharknado and its cronies, it’s nice to see something which redresses the balance somewhat. The Shallows certainly treats these lethal denizens of the deep with the respect and fear which they likely deserve, and endorses my ongoing decision to stick to dry land.

Dir: Jaume Collet-Serra
Star: Blake Lively

Mary Kom

  By

★★★
“Firsts of fury…”

marykomThis was far from our first traditionally “Bollywood” film, but was the first such with what could be described as an action heroine. Traditionally, the women in Bollywood films are relegated to love interests for the square-jawed heroes. Not that this necessarily makes for a bad film [far from it, some are enormously entertaining], just that they don’t fall within the remit of our coverage here. This one squarely does, although also succumbs to many of the clichés of plucky underdog sports stories, shamelessly manipulating what was already an impressive story, purely to tug on the cinematic heart-strings.

The heroine is Mangte Chungeijang Kom (Chopra), the tomboyish daughter of a poor rice-farmer (Das), whose quick temper has got her into trouble more than once. Her parents try to deflect this energy into sports, but when she stumbles into a gym run by the stern coach Narjit Singh (Thapa), she realizes that’s her true calling, and begins training there with the knowledge of her mother, but not her father. When he finds out, he gives Mary an ultimatum: boxing or her family. Guess how that goes. She becomes world champion in her weight class, but then gives up the sport for marriage and to start a family. However, unable to settle down, her husband (Kumaar) convinces Mary to make a comeback, something rarely seen after becoming a mother. She’ll face obstacles, not just from her opponents, but also from her own body, the sport’s administrators and the distraction of a child’s health issues.

Wisely, Kumar avoids the traditional staged musical numbers, instead incorporating the songs which are almost de rigeur for Bollywood, into things such as multiple training montages. Some are more effective than others, and as noted, it does tend to fall into the trap of shallow stereotypes too often. I’m not sure about Chopra, who certainly is nowhere near as well-muscled as the poster would have you believe, and the fights themselves are a bit of a mixed bag. However, Chopra’s acting talents are certainly up to the task, and if the final reel is factually dubious, Kumar throws everything but the kitchen sink into its depiction and, much like Mary herself, pulls off an unlikely victory – albeit by a split decision on points. With a central character that’s not only a woman, but one from an area of India barely regarded as part of the country, credit is certainly due for pushing the boundaries of popular Indian cinema. It’s just a shame there was no such sense of adventure with the well-worn storyline.

Dir: Omung Kumar
Star: Priyanka Chopra, Darshan Kumaar, Sunil Thapa, Robin Das

Fair Play

  By

★★★
“Czech out those legs…”

fairplayTeenage sprinter Anna (Bárdos) is on the edge of making the Olympics with the Czech national team, but still needs to meet the qualifying time. She’s being brought up by her mother, Irena (Geislerová), a former tennis prodigy, now reduced to working as a cleaning lady – in part because of the defection for the West of her husband. Irena also secretly transcribes underground documents for a dissident, Marek. Coach Bohdan (Luknár) pushes Anna hard to reach her maximum potential, and gives her “Stromba”, a substance that helps her performance, but screws up her health. She stops taking it, believing it to be an illegal steroid: when her coach finds out, he enlists Irena’s help to inject her daughter surreptitiously, saying it’s the only way Anna will make the squad. Reluctantly, Irena agrees, unwilling to see her daughter lose out in the same way she did. But as the authorities close in on Marek, the two women become pawns in a political game, with their common Olympic dream now used as leverage against them.

This makes an interesting companion piece to Goldengirl, with both films telling a similar story about female runners in the early eighties, whose family and mentors are prepared to go to any lengths to achieve success at the Olympics. Goldengirl unfolded in the lead-up to 1980’s Moscow Games, but subsequent history rendered it obsolete, as America boycotted them. Fair Play shows things from the other side of the Iron Curtain, in the lead-up to the 1984 Los Angeles games – which the Eastern Bloc similarly spurned. The benefit of time allows the film to incorporate this history into an ironic postscript for its narrative and, while less SF-oriented than its American cousin, the attitudes of both heroines, and the approach of their supporting cast, have a surprising amount in common. The main difference here is, the doping regime is state-sanctioned; in Goldengirl, it’s free-market forces driving the “win at any costs” mentality.

The piece makes a pointed connection between Anna and Irena’s situations, both coming under pressure to compromise their personal morality for personal gain – one sporting, the other judicial. It’s this stand which represents the true heroism to be found here, though the script struggles to escape from the obvious clichés of Soviet Bloc culture. The other main weakness is the actual athletics, which never give the impression of anyone moving at more than an energetic jog, while the thread involving Anna’s relationship with a boy doesn’t go anywhere of significance at all. In the final analysis, it’s a worthy enough effort, if rather too earnest to be wholly successful. You can see why it became the official Czech entry for this year’s Academy Awards – and equally as much, why the Academy then decided it wasn’t worthy of making the final nominees.

Dir: Andrea Sedláčková
Star: Judit Bárdos, Roman Luknár, Anna Geislerová, Ondrej Novák