Four: LAFF Review

Four characters seeking connection on the Fourth of July form opposing dyads in writer-director Joshua Sanchezs feature debut. Despite an edgy premise, Four is beset by superficial plotting and a problematic degree of equivocating moral relativism. Although festival play is assured, commercial prospects appear dodgy.

Sullen suburban teenager June (Emory Cohen) skips out on a holiday family barbecue for a clandestine rendezvous with middle-aged husband and dad Joe (Wendell Pierce), a mild-mannered Internet predator who encountered June online. Their awkward meeting leads to a long night of driving around as Joe attempts to persuade the young man that hooking up with him might actually be a good idea.

Meanwhile, Joes teenage daughter Abigayle (Aja Naomi King) flirts over the phone with homeboy Dexter (E.J. Bonilla), assuming her father is out if town on a business trip. Although Dexters intentions are fairly clear, Abigayle isnt sure she wants any part of them until they meet so he can work his debatable charms in person. A trip back to his crib shared with his entire family leads to a predictable denouement, as Joe successfully persuades June that they should get a motel room.

Adapting Obie-winner Christopher Shinns stage play, Sanchez crafts a crucible of loneliness and desire, centering around a core of existential longing. Although executive producer Neil LaButes participation on the film might be taken as a signifier, Four lacks both the menace and the pathos of LaButes best work.

Sanchezs script displays a veneer of compassion for the characters various emotional dilemmas -- Joes closeted home life, complicated by an invalid wife; Junes paralyzing inability to embrace his sexuality; and Abigayles painful mix of confusion and indecision -- thats undercut by a barely concealed mix of erotic yearning and peril. The virtues of a nonjudgmental perspective however, are countered by the clearly illicit nature of Joe and Junes assignation.

Stylistically, Sanchezs tightly framed scenes, often slightly destabilized by handheld camerawork, are par for character-driven dramas and offer little in terms of subtextual commentary. Conversely, frequent intercutting between the scenes of the separate but related couples draws unnecessary attention to the similarity of their situations. Perhaps the practically incessant and often digressive dialogue and the sequences of driving and drifting aimlessly through the July night are more compelling onstage with live actors, but onscreen they come off as static and suffocating.

Pierce, a veteran of The Wire and Treme, forms the center of the quartet of characters, but both the scope of his role and his clearly superior skill contribute to minimizing the impact of the other actors. Although Cohens performance is imbued with a blend of fear and menace, he rarely deploys them effectively. King and Bonilla get by mostly on the strength of their dialogue, until later scenes pull their characters more sharply into focus.

Although Four might have made a fine departure point as the inspiration for a more substantial drama, as an adaptation it lacks the visceral qualities perhaps better exploited by live performance.

Venue: Los Angeles Film Festival
Production companies: Four Film, Blue Noon Films
Cast: Wendell Pierce, Emory Cohen, Aja Naomi King, E.J.Bonilla
Director/screenwriter: Joshua Sanchez
Producers: Christine Giorgio, Wendell Pierce
Executive producers: Neil LaBute, Allen Frame
Director of photography: Gregg Conde
Production designer:Liza Donatelli
Costume designer:Mel Puerto
Editor: David Gutnik
Music: Bryan Senti
No rating, 76 minutes.

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London: The Modern Babylon: Film Review

A kaleidoscopic collage of social history and popular culture, momentous public events and intimate human stories, this sprawling documentary attempts the ambitious feat of telling the story of London from the dawn of the 20th century to today. Scheduled for limited release in UK cinemas this week to coincide with the London Olympic celebrations, Julien Temples archive-heavy film is a sensually rich and emotionally engaging experience. Partly backed by the BBC and the British Film Institute, it is a solid piece of work with niche theatrical potential among Anglophile culture vultures outside Britain, but will most likely find its natural audience on TV and DVD.

Emerging from the punk rock scene that energised London in the late 1970s, Temple has made several dramatic features in his three-decade career, but he remains most acclaimed for his socially conscious music-themed documentaries on the Sex Pistols, The Clash singer Joe Strummer, the Glastonbury rock festival, the city of Detroit and more. The irreverent spirit of punk still informs his directing style here -- not only in specific references like the Clash and Pistols songs that pepper the lively soundtrack, but also in the general celebration of London-based rebels and anarchists through the ages.

Incorporating hand-cranked newsreel footage from the end of the 19th century, London: The Modern Babylon has a freewheeling but loosely chronological structure. Moving fluidly through a dense patchwork of extensive archive clips, songs, poems, and interview snippets both old and new, Temple charts the citys bumpy evolution from Victorian capital of the British Empire to multicultural Olympic citadel of 2012. In between newsreel flashbacks, Temple inserts quickfire excerpts from classic London films including Hitchcocks Blackmail, Michael Powells Peeping Tom, John Mackenzies The Long Good Friday and his own lavish musical flop, Absolute Beginners.

Woven into the busy musical soundtrack, a starry cast of narrators including Michael Gambon, Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton and Andy Serkis read quotations from WB Yeats, William Blake, TS Eliot and others. Meanwhile, famous London icons such as Michael Caine, David Bowie, Terence Stamp, Julie Christie, Quentin Crisp and the Rolling Stones all appear in archive cameos. Temple also includes first-hand reflections from a wide variety of Londoners including the 107-year-old former suffragette Hetty Bower, rocker Ray Davies of The Kinks and the veteran left-wing politician Tony Benn plus a background chorus of storekeepers, dock workers, market traders and other cockney archetypes.

London: The Modern Babylon is an upbeat celebration of a city where over 40 per cent of the population are now non-British, and over 300 languages are spoken. But Temple is no simplistic propagandist, also exposing the citys social and economic divisions, terrorist bombs and violent street riots. He pays unequivocal homage to successive waves of incoming immigrants who have reshaped and revitalised London -- from Jewish to Irish, Caribbean to Indian - but not without pausing to show the ugly racial tensions they often faced.

Squeezing more than a century of city life into just over two hours, London: The Modern Babylon inevitably offers only an impressionistic drive-by view of some momentous events: World War II bombing raids, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, Winston Churchills funeral, the current financial crash. But precisely because it is such a messy and fragmented sprawl, Temples film does capture some of the true flavour of modern London plus, most importantly, its heady mix of human stories.

Venue: London press screening,
Production companies: BBC, BFI, Nitrate Films
Cast: Michael Gambon, Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Andy Serkis
Director: Julien Temple
Producers: Amanda Temple, Stephen Malit
Cinematography: Steve Organ
Editor: Caroline Richards
Music: JC Carroll
Sales agent: Ealing Metro International
Rating TBC, 128 minutes

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Big Boys Gone Bananas!: Film Review

One little-seen documentary begets another in Big Boys Gone Bananas!*, Fredrik Gertten's examination of the controversy surrounding his own 2009 film Bananas!*. The picture both benefits and suffers from this self-reflexive approach, failing to adequately explore questions someone on the outside would address immediately. The result is of limited commercial interest, though it raises issues with broad appeal.

Gertten's original film, which took agricultural giant Dole to task for exposing Nicaraguan plantation workers to harmful pesticides, was supposed to compete in 2009's Los Angeles Film Fest. Then Dole launched a heavy-handed intimidation campaign. After bad press and much negotiation, the fest decided it would exclude Bananas!* from competition, holding a special screening and tacking on a disclaimer that stopped just short of saying "this documentary is a big fat lie."

It isn't surprising that Dole would object to a film they hadn't seen -- ask any number of auteurs who've provoked the Catholic Church -- but it is odd the company's lawyers would be so vague about their complaint. Or maybe they weren't. As he recounts the long fight to premiere his film (and to find distribution afterward), Gertten glosses over the specific charges Dole lobbed at him; his tone is that of a truth-teller being bullied, but he barely presents the case that his original film was factually solid.

Facts aside, the attempt to block the film presents a chance to see a multinational megacorp flex its PR muscles, and that narrative is shown clearly here. But while Big Boys addresses the extent to which journalists (particularly in the U.S., Gertten believes) too readily accept the claims of powerful entities, the film misses the opportunity to explore this issue in a more universal way. Instead it sticks with Gertten, whose many damage-control Skype conversations are of limited interest. The case takes an interesting turn toward the end, finding support in unpredictable quarters and lending the story some welcome drama.

Production Company: WG Film
Director: Fredrik Gertten
Producer: Margarete Jangrd
Executive producer: Fredrik Gertten
Music: Conny Malmqvist, Dan "Gisen" Malmquist
Editors: Jesper Osmund, Benjamin Binderup
No rating/ rating, 86 minutes.

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London 2012 Olympic Shorts: Running Jump, What If, Swimmer, The Odyssey: Film Review

Cinema is playing a key role in the avalanche of flag-waving cultural activity around the 2012 Olympics, which have just opened to great fanfare in London. Danny Boyle directed the spectacular opening ceremony, which featured a host of screen stars including Daniel Craig, Kenneth Branagh and Rowan Atkinson. Director Stephen Daldry is also serving as artistic supervisor for all the citys Olympic ceremonies.

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Meanwhile, four specially commissioned short films loosely inspired by the Olympics have just made their UK television debuts following a short theatrical run in portmanteau form. Showcasing several generations of British film-making talent, they are a mixed bunch, mostly love letters to London itself rather than to sporting excellence. Besides specialist festival programs, the small screen seems the most likely platform for them outside Britain.

The elder statesman of the group, Mike Leigh directs the longest of the four films, the lightweight domestic comedy A Running Jump. Leigh regular Eddie Marsan plays Perry, a fast-talking London car salesman forever striding through the citys streets in a breathless hurry, making deals and hustling for business. His bubbly wife is a fitness instructor, his twin daughters are involved in swimming and martial arts, and his father is a cheerfully garrulous cockney cab driver obsessed with sports trivia. Taking the sporting theme lightly, Leighs sunny snapshot of contemporary working-class family life is warm-hearted and fitfully amusing, but disappointingly slight. Too many broadly sketched characters, too little plot.

Sport is only a minor background presence in What If, a stylish urban fairy tale directed by Max Gwia and Dania Pasquini, the duo behind the StreetDance movies. Shot in eye-catching monochrome, with just a few striking flashes of colour, it stars George Sergeant as Joe, a neglected young teenager growing up in a rough housing project ruled by bullies and street gangs. Joe is a lost soul until a mysterious guardian angel figure, played by Noel Clarke, arrives to boost his confidence by reciting Rudyard Kiplings celebrated poem about courage and self-belief, If... Drawing on their long track record in music videos, Gwia and Pasquini pepper this inner-city fantasy with dynamic scenes of rap, skateboarding and free running. Bold, slick visuals almost make up for stiff performances and a trite, sentimental story.

The Scottish director Lynne Ramsay provides the shortest film of the Olympic quartet, Swimmer. Shot in exquisite black and white by cinematographer Natasha Braier, it is also the most arty and abstract of the group, recalling the poetic feel of Ramsays feature debut Ratcatcher much more than her recent drama, We Need To Talk About Kevin. The 19-year-old Tom Litten plays the title character, swimming gracefully through a series of rural and urban vistas interwoven with stirring music and dialogue clips from classic British films. Essentially a dreamy mood piece, Swimmer is light on narrative, but it has a ravishing style that could serve Ramsay well in a more dramatically substantial format.

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The sole documentary of the group, only The Odyssey by Asif Kapadia addresses the Olympics directly. Largely composed of elegant aerial shots of London laced with the disembodied voices of its citizens, it retraces the citys bumpy seven-year ride since successfully bidding to host the games in 2005, from bomb attacks and financial slumps to all-out street riots just a year ago. Best known for his masterful Formula One documentary Senna, native Londoner Kapadia includes some harsh truths about a capital notorious for extremes of wealth and inequality: Its a wonderful city for rich people, one of his unnamed interviewees remarks. There is a much longer, deeper film to be made about the political and financial backdrop to the London Olympics, but at least The Odyssey strikes a careful balance between anodyne promotional boosterism and healthy scepticism. (END)

A Running Jump
Cast: Eddie Marsan, Samantha Spiro, Sam Kelly, Danielle Bird, Nicole Bird
Director: Mike Leigh
Producer: Georgina Lowe
Writer: Mike Leigh
Editor: Jon Gregory
Cinematographer: Dick Pope
Music: Gary Yershon
Rating TBC, 34 Minutes

What If
Cast: Noel Clarke, George Sargeant, Alexis Simone
Directors: Max And Dania
Producer: Allan Niblo, James Richardson, Huberta Von Liel
Writers: Joshua St Johnston, Dania Pasquini
Editor: Peter Christelis
Cinematographer: Philipp Blaubach
Music: Pete Tong and Paul Rogers
Rating TBC, 24 Minutes

Swimmer
Cast: Tom Litten, Sophie McKeeman, Carolina Main
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Producer: Peter Carlton, Diarmid Scrimshaw
Editor: Adam Biskupski
Cinematographer: Natasha Braier
Rating TBC, 17 Minutes

The Odyssey
Director: Asif Kapadia
Producers: Hannah Ireland, Asif Kapadia, Betrand Faivre
Writers: Asif Kapadia, Simon Robinson
Editor: Nicolas Chauderge
Music: Antonio Pinto
Cinematographer: Adam Dale
Rating TBC, 29 Minutes.

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The Sweeney: Film Review

Rebooting a much-loved British TV drama from the 1970s, this flashy biggest project yet from the writer-director Nick Love, a kind of low-rent Guy Ritchie who has earned a respectable domestic following with simplistic love letters to macho villainy such as The Football Factory and The Business. A play on Sweeney Todd, the title derives from the cockney rhyming-slang nickname for the Flying Squad, a branch of Londons Metropolitan Police first set up in the 1920s to tackle armed robbery and violent crime.

With Ray Winstone and Homeland star Damian Lewis in the cast, and a kinetic visual style that imbues contemporary London with all the glossy swagger of a Michael Mann production, The Sweeney feels muscular and dynamic enough to reel in a worldwide action-movie audience. But fans of the original TV series, or simply of quaint notions like subtlety and wit, are unlikely to be seduced by Loves infantile cops-and-robbers fantasy.

Heading for its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland this week, Loves film is not the first big-screen outing for The Sweeney. Spawning two cinematic spin-offs in the late 1970s, the original series became a hugely successful milestone in British television. Running between 1975 and 1978, it was the first show to portray policemen as rule-bending anti-heroes with a taste for casual brutality, booze and bed-hopping.

The TV show starred John Thaw, who later found global fame as a more refined but equally irascible detective in Inspector Morse. The dinosaur sexism and politically incorrect attitudes of Thaws character, senior Flying Squad detective Jack Regan, has since been much copied and parodied, most recently inspiring the hard-bitten cop Gene Hunt in the BBC police drama Life on Mars and its short-lived US remake.

Ray Winstone steps into Thaws hobnailed boots as Regan, glowering and growling his way through some excruciatingly bad lines. Playing his streetwise young deputy Carter is Ben Drew, aka rapper Plan B, who wrote and directed his own superior London crime drama Ill Manors earlier this year. Drew is a fine musician and promising film-maker, but he looks stiff and muted here, possibly in response to a painfully corny script.

Revolving around a bank heist, a murder in a jewellery shop and a renegade gang of Balkan hit men, Loves contemporary remake borrows little from its TV blueprint besides title, names and basic set-up. The characters are crudely drawn and the plot fairly generic, but the film scores best on a purely visual level. The action scenes have a visceral punch and swagger, especially a fast-moving gun battle around the tourist landmarks of Trafalgar Square, and a climactic car chase through a coastal trailer park.

While the original TV series was mostly shot in scruffy drinking dens and crumbling warehouses in west London, Love relocates the Squads operations to a high-tech skyscraper in Londons newly regenerated East End. Their office resembles a super-slick advertising agency, while their pristine white interrogation rooms could be a modern art gallery in a Kubrick movie. All glass and steel and new money, this emerging 21st century citadel has never been so well captured on screen before. Love makes its gleaming architecture a key motif in his film, shooting it from above in stylishly washed-out greys and blues.

But however appealing these visual touches may be, they are simply not enough to distract us from the films clumsy characterisation, comically bad dialogue and groaningly clichd plot. While Thaws small-screen Regan was a prickly but sharp-witted charmer, Winstones pot-bellied, pugnacious big-screen version comes across as a brutish bully and borderline psychopath. When not punching through walls or head-butting suspected criminals, he is sleeping with the wife of an uptight pen-pushing colleague who is investigating the Squad for alleged corruption.

In the real Metropolitan Police of 2012, Regans leering chauvinism and childish antagonism to his superior officers would get him sacked within a week. Alas, all the evidence suggests that Love expects us to admire him as a bad-ass maverick. The female Squad members, all mysteriously younger and better looking than their male colleagues, naturally find Regan and his boorish crew irresistible. Real men, the script suggests, earn respect with their fists.

In this respect, The Sweeney owes more to Loves previous films than to its vintage TV blueprint. Given the directors track record of reactionary dramas that celebrate lowlife thuggery and vigilante justice, this is a serious flaw. Perhaps Loves testosterone-fuelled exercise in visual razzle-dazzle will help sell him to Hollywood as a maker of shallow but eye-catching crime thrillers in the Tony Scott mould. But on its own merits, The Sweeney is as charmless as an angry drunk at a wedding, and as subtle as a shotgun blast to the face.

Venue: London Press Screening
Production companies: Vertigo Films, Embargo Films
Cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Drew, Damian Lewis, Hayley Atwell, Steven Mackintosh
Director: Nick Love
Producer: Allan Niblo, Rupert Preston, James Richardson, Christopher Simon, Felix Vossen
Cinematography: Simon Dennis
Writer: Nick Love
Editor: James Herbert
Music: Lorne Balfe
Sales agent: Protagonist Pictures
Rating TBC, 108 minutes.

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Supercapitalist: Film Review

Tossing Hong Kong into the mix does little to enliven high-finance clichs in Simon Yin's Supercapitalist, an ostensible morality tale that might've played off the zeitgeist in any number of ways but instead feels no more fresh than (the original) Wall Street. Box office outlook is dim.

Derek Ting plays Conner, an Asian-American hedge fund analyst who, despite a strange arrogant streak around his superiors, gets sent to oversee a major deal in Hong Kong. There he meets fratboyish Quentin (Darren Scott), who gives Conner a crash course in the way things work for aspiring HK plutocrats: "We wear the best. We drink the best. We drive the best. When it comes to chicks, we only do the best."

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Ting, who also wrote the screenplay, offers no hint of moral uncertainty here, even when Conner inevitably meets a love interest who scolds him with lines such as "actions have consequences, Conner." He comes to life only upon learning of a plan to promote innovation in his company using a social-media-inspired game that might keep locals from losing their jobs. (Facebook being well known for boosting productivity.)

Ho-hum boardroom intrigue follows, with Conner's attempts to do the right thing threatened by a ruthless schemer (Linus Roache) back in the Manhattan office.

Production Company: Random Art Workshop

Cast: Linus Roache, Derek Ting, Darren E. Scott, Kathy Uyen, Kenneth Tsang, Richard Ng, Eugene Kang, Lester Chan

Director: Simon Yin

Screenwriter: Derek Ting

Producers: Diana Footitt, Derek Ting, Joyce Yung

Executive producers: James C. Chie, Sam Kwok, Phillip Yin

Director of photography: Derrick Fong

Production designer: Niquan Riley

Music: Dennis Ting

Costume designer: Molly Maguire

Editor: Victor Pena

No rating, 96 minutes

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Football Rebels: Sarajevo Film Review

The French soccer legend turned actor Eric Cantona presents this globe-trotting documentary, a tribute to five fellow footballers who courageously risked their lives and careers by taking high-profile stands against political and social injustice. Co-directed by two award-winning journalists, Football Rebels combines serious subject matter with a sharply edited, fast-paced, glossy visual style. Filmed in multiple languages, it also features commentary from eminent guests including Cantonas film-making comrade, Ken Loach.

Shortly after its gala screening at Sarajevo Film Festival last week, Football Rebels premiered on the highbrow Franco-German TV channel Arte, one of the films financial backers, with simultaneous release on home entertainment formats in France. A similar small-screen future seems likely in other markets too, although the films starry guest list and classy production values may help secure theatrical runs in some football-loving territories.

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But it is not necessary to be a soccer fan to enjoy Football Rebels. Indeed, like this reviewer, you can feel utter indifference towards the worlds favorite sport and still find these stories inspiring and informative. As it happens, there is very little actual football footage in the film, because these are primarily stories of heroic principle and self-sacrifice away from the game.

Four of the films five rebels are interviewed on camera. Didier Drogba of Cote dIvoire, who played peacemaker in his countrys civil war. The Chilean Carlos Caszely, who took a daring public stand against General Pinochets brutal regime. Algerias Rachid Mekhloufi, who defected from France to join a symbolic Algerian propaganda team in protest against French colonial rule. And Bosnias Predrag Pai, who braved bombs and bullets in war-torn Sarajevo to run a football school for children from multi-faith backgrounds.

A fifth subject agreed to appear in Football Rebels, but died in December last year, shortly before his scheduled interview. The flamboyant Brazilian midfielder Scrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira was not just a world-class player but also a qualified doctor, public intellectual, newspaper columnist, aspiring novelist, keen smoker, heavy drinker, national hero and high-profile campaigner for democracy when Brazil was still a military dictatorship. Universally known by his first name only, Scrates deserves a feature-length film of his own.

As well as backing the film through his Canto Bros production company, Cantonas chief on-screen contribution is as gruff anchorman, setting up each chapter with his signature mix of homespun philosophy and vague menace. There is an edge of Napoleonic arrogance in his puffed-up public persona, but always undercut by deadpan self-mockery. Anyone who saw Cantona in Loachs Looking for Eric, or his hilarious media interviews during his tenure at Manchester United, will be familiar with his knowing brand of Gallic pomposity.

With limited time for each profile, this densely packed documentary is sometimes guilty of glibness and sloganeering. There is scant room for ambivalence or complexity in these compressed life stories, which are relentlessly positive and often frustratingly low on context. That said, the film-makers cover a lot of ground, jumping fluidly between different decades, continents and languages. Unlike the game which inspired it, Football Rebels is never boring.

Venue: Sarajevo film festival screening, July 11

Production companies: 13 Productions, Canto Bros, Arte France

Cast: Eric Cantona, Didier Drogba, Carlos Caszely, Rachid Mekhloufi, Predrag Pasic, Ken Loach

Directors: Gilles Rof, Gilles Perez

Writers: Gilles Rof, Gilles Perez

Producers: Cyrille Perez, Gilles Perez

Cinematography: Patrick Feinstein, Gherdoussi Sylvain Luini

Editor: Emmanuel Besnard, Laurence Generet

Sales company: Arte France

Rating TBC, 90 minutes

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The Watch: Film Review

The genre mishmash mashup would be an overstatement that cranks up The Watch might sound fresh: guy-centric goofiness meets sci-fi, with a dash of marital coming-of-age story. But the feature feels like part three of a past-its-prime franchise. That might be because topliners Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn are playing the guys they always play, or because the script, credited to Jared Stern, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, moves lazily from setup to punchline to setup, with no particular point and almost no punch.

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Its not likely that a big-screen alien invasion has ever felt less urgent. But as the highest-profile comedy to hit theaters since last months Ted, the Fox release is sure to pull in strong, if not stratospheric, numbers.

Originally called Neighborhood Watch and changed to the more generic title after the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, director Akiva Schaffers pic is set in the fictional Glenview, Ohio, played by Atlanta as a generic suburban fantasyland lined with oversize houses. Stillers Evan Troutwig manages the local Costco, which turns out to be HQ for the invaders the idea of big-box one-stop shopping for planetary takeover one of the movies better jokes among the predictable shock-value guy talk.

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A civically inclined yet angry milquetoast, Evan spearheads a neighborhood watch after the brutal, mysterious murder of one of his employees, a night guard (Joseph A. Nuez) who happens to be a newly minted American citizen but is, more crucially, Expendable Victim No. 1. The recruits are married party guy Bob (Vaughn), wannabe cop Franklin (Jonah Hill) and newly divorced Brit Jamarcus (Richard Ayoade).

The latter two lend the proceedings a bit of unpredictable character, although the maladjusted Franklins bedroom arsenal might give some viewers pause in light of recent horrific events. Vaughn adds a layer of paternal hysteria to his patented loudmouth, as Bob tries to rein in teen daughter Chelsea (Erin Moriarty) and quash her hotshot boyfriend (Nicholas Braun).

Schaffer, a vet SNL writer, tries to frame the quartets heroic misadventures with complicating friction: Theyre continually tormented by a snarky cop (Will Forte), and Evan is trying to evade facts with his eager-to-procreate wife (the talented Rosemarie DeWitt, doing what she can with a paper-thin role). But mainly the film proceeds by gags, with at least as many misses as hits. The guys discover an alien weapon that shoots lethal lasers (cue montage of them blowing things up); the guys capture one of the skeletal aliens (cue montage of them posing for funny photos with said alien). The monster itself, a combination of live-action and digital effects, has the look of an oversize insect and oozes the requisite slime.

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Its m.o. of skinning victims and donning human exteriors introduces a Body Snatchers element and the kernel of a good movie. Knowing that invaders are passing themselves off as members of the Middle American community naturally gives rise to paranoia a good fit for the mistrust and disaffection that Stiller can be so good at conveying. But though he gets to run with mechanical fury like an MI-franchise Tom Cruise, the edgier aspects of Evans personality are downplayed, even in his run-ins with a creepily attentive new neighbor. An uncredited Billy Crudup plays up the neighbors weirdness, while Andy Samberg cameos in the disappointing payoff to this strand of the story.

With its polished but undistinguished design and visuals, The Watch wastes much of its running time on the expected bawdy shtick and man-cave musings. Tying it all up in unmemorable fashion are the usual lessons in being a grownup.

Cast: Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, Richard Ayoade, Rosemarie DeWitt, Will Forte, Doug Jones, R. Lee Ermey, Nicholas Braun, Joseph A. Nuez, Mel Rodriguez
Director: Akiva Schaffer
Screenwriters: Jared Stern and Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg
Producer: Shawn Levy
Executive producers: Dan Levine, Monica Levinson
Director of photography: Barry Peterson
Production designer: Doug Meerdink
Music: Christophe Beck
Co-producers: Jeffrey JP Wetzel, Billy Rosenberg, Tom McNulty, Blondel Aidoo
Costume designer: Wendy Chuck
Editor: Dean Zimmerman
MPAA rating: R, 102 minutes

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Rites of Spring: Film Review

A grindhouse slasher pic that swings from dull to ridiculous without finding any pulpy pleasure in between, Padraig Reynolds' Rites of Spring is as anonymous as its burlap-wrapped boogeyman. Themes of pagan sacrifice and double-cross kidnapping combined don't generate enough exploitable novelty to make it a promising gamble, even on VOD.

One half of the bifurcate plot concerns a farmer who, once a year for over two decades, has been abducting pretty Southern girls and sacrificing them to an unnamed harvest god; after hanging them from chains in his barn for a while, he opens the cellar door and releases a big galoot with a penchant for decapitation. (You might be angry too, if you had maggots living in your face.) The other half concerns a kidnap scheme in which a recently-fired businessman unwisely agrees to help shady characters hold his former boss's daughter for ransom.

The first storyline's attempts to brew up Wicker Man weirdness fall far short, and the latter's soporific performances make it seem even more stale than it is. Then Randolph introduces chocolate to peanut butter: The girl intended for this year's harvest sacrifice escapes from her chains, fleeing through a cornfield to the abandoned silo that just happens to be the kidnappers' hideout.

That's not the least plausible coincidence Rites of Spring has in store, but even at its dopiest the movie fails to generate chuckles. More damningly, Reynolds can't imagine interesting ways for his monster to kill people: He picks the kidnappers off routinely, sans suspenseful foreplay; Reynolds's gore is half-hearted, too, though the pic's lack of MPAA rating might attract sadists hoping for something depraved.

Production Company: Ghostrider Entertainment
Cast: A.J. Bowen, Anessa Ramsey, Sonny Marinelli, Marco St John, Katherine Randolph
Director-Screenwriter: Padraig Reynolds
Producers: Wes Benton, Bobby Benton, John Norris, Eric Thompson
Director of photography: Carl Herse
Production designer: Mary Goodson
Music: Holly Amber Church
Costume designer: Kerrie Kordowski
Editor: Ed Marx
No rating, 80 minutes.

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This Time: Film Review

Greatly overstaying its welcome at 110 minutes, Victor Mignatti's This Time, while intending to celebrate music-industry strivers, lumps together subjects who have little in common beyond the director's apparent affection for them. Commercial prospects are poor, and viewers drawn in by the best-known act here, once-great harmonizers the Sweet Inspirations, will likely be confused.

The Inspirations, a group of female backup singers who spent the '60s and '70s working with everyone from Hendrix and Elvis to Aretha Franklin, are shown here as they work on a comeback record instigated by fan and songwriter Peitor Angell. But rather than cull through the vaults to tell the history preceding this attempt (much less going to interview any of the stars who relied on them), Mignatti keeps his eye on the present tense, treating their story as no more interesting than two others: In New York he finds Bobby Belfry, a singer-songwriter nearing 40 as he waits for his big break on the cabaret scene; in Los Angeles he follows Pat Hodges, a soul belter who was homeless when she had a surprise hit on the club charts.

Presumably, Mignatti cast a wide net among artists he had easy access to, hoping that one of these showbiz stories would have a happy ending. Having waited since 2005 or so (when the Inspirations self-released the record we see them recording) without lucking into a dramatic conclusion, he offers the three stories as an anodyne follow-your-dreams anthology that doesn't know a provocative moment even when one flits by onscreen: See Hodges's self-serving attempt to rationalize her fundamentalist faith with her popularity in gay clubs -- God told her she should go be a light in their dark world, she says, a sentiment that may rub some of her fans the wrong way.

Production Companies: Village Art Pictures, Inspiration 101, LLC

Director-Editor-Director of photography: Victor Mignatti

Producers: Mark Bower, Victor Mignatti

Music: Peitor Angell

No rating, 110 minutes

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Danube Hospital (Donauspital): FIDMarseille Review

MARSEILLE - A quiet ode to the reassuringly dull super-efficiency of the Austrian healthcare system, Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Danube Hospital (Donauspital SMZ-OST) examines Vienna's second-biggest medical facility with a suitably 'clinical' detachment. Made for Austrian television, this unfussily professional chronicle will prove a popular pick for non-fiction festivals and networks without attaining the impact and exposure of Geyrhalter's 2005 breakthrough Our Daily Bread, which explored industrial food-production practices.

And while the premises of multi-national conglomerates are off-limits for most, nearly all residents of developed countries will require the services of - and most likely pay multiple visits to - such hospitals over the course of their lives. Geyrhalter's cameras record both semi-public areas and zones beyond our usual purview, such as the 'transporter corridor' on level two where dozens of low-lying robot-like vehicles silently glide in Kubrickian splendor.

In scenes that span the proverbial cradle (neo-natal unit) to the grave (morgue) - with locations identified by on-screen captions - Geyrhalter's tripod-mounted, impeccably-framed images capture the interactions of human and machine that have come to define the hospital experience in the 21st century. The roof supports a landing-pad for helicopters; keyhole surgery is conducted with the aid of tiny video-devices; fragile newborns are encased in elaborate life-supporting contraptions; a lancet-type instrument expertly enters an eyeball.

The latter is just the first of several toe-curling - at times stomach-churning - sequences, the ickiest of which involve the pathology department. Many of a sensitive disposition will squirm at the manual post-mortem analysis of intestines and organs, and at the slicing of a brain - freshly extracted from a skull-sliced cadaver - like so much soggy gray meatloaf.

Geyrhalter and his editor Andrea Wagner keep such explicit displays mercifully brief, and the inclusion of such traumatic episodes is justified as they form an important part of the hospital's daily work - although presumably for reasons of practicality and safety (and perhaps to avoid comparisons with television dramas) there's not much ER 'action'. Indeed, this is a film which spends as much time in the (semi-automated) canteen as in the operating-theater, where surgeons chat in hushed tones about unrelated topics in drily amusing fashion.

And while the overall tone is serious and often sombre, humor is seldom very far from the equation in Danube Hospital - as when we see the scene-stealing little transporter-bots undergo surgery-type repairs. Even the 'darker' sequences can raise a smile: an elderly lady being administered a form of last rites tetchily asks the clerics to go about their business at a brisker clip. She'd undoubtedly approve of Geyrhalter and Wagner's preference for short scenes and their overall economy in a film which packs considerable thematic range into its 75 minutes.

Venue: FIDMarseille Film Festival
Production company: NGF, in coproduction with Arte and ORF
Director / Screenwriter / Director of photography: Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Producers: Markus Glaser, Michael Kitzberger, Wolfgang Widerhofer, Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Editor: Andrea Wagner
Sales Agent: Autlook, Vienna
No rating, 75 minutes.

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The Ethnographer (El Etnógrafo): FIDMarseille Review

MARSEILLE -- Director Ulises Rosell adopts a very "softly softly" approach in The Ethnographer (El Etngrafo), a character-study of a quietly scholarly middle-aged Englishman who has devoted his life to helping one of South America's more self-effacing ethnic minorities. Delicated, hushed and sensitive in every respect, this documentary beguiles with its low-key approach to fascinating material, its charms outweighing a certain structural awkwardness. A selection at Buenos Aires' BAFICI before its international premiere at FIDMarseille, it will find plenty of takers among similarly upscale festivals.

Main focus is squarely on John Hillary Palmer, a ruminative pipe-smoker in his late fifties who has lived in rural Argentina for the last 20 years. His relocation was originally for academic purposes, to work and live within a community of the Wich people (who number around 42,000 in all, located in Argentina, Bolivia and Columbia) in furtherance of his Oxford University doctorate. Palmer's dedication to the Wich - helping them with self-determination and the protection of their homelands against the encroachment of big business - is amply chronicled here.

But the film gains depth and impact from its more intimate domestic interludes involving John's wife Tojweya, herself a Wich, and their four young children - including a baby only weeks old. So while Palmer has achieved considerable eminence in his field, winning the Royal Anthropological Institute's Lucy Mair Medal in 2009, his immersion into Wich culture, history and customs has become much more than a matter of dry ethnography.

Despite this immersion, however, Palmer remains recognizably an upper-middle-class Brit in appearance, dress and diction -- he almost invariably uses English at home with his children, who usually respond in Spanish, and are evidently being brought up trilingually thanks to their exposure to the Wich tongue. At one juncture Palmer telephones his mother back home in Britain, their brief chat speaking volumes about the world he has left behind -- "Are you succeeding in getting more freedom from the people?" she earnestly enquires.

In addition to the broader Wich struggle for recognition and respect - a cause not much aided by their general air of resigned, modest meekness - Palmer is engaged in one particular case of restricted "freedom", that of a semi-relative known as Qat. We're told that Qat, in tribal terms a "nephew" of Palmer's has been in prison for five years, charged with - but not yet tried for - the rape of his partner's daughter. The case pivots on the exact age of the girl at the time of the sexual act, and is complicated by the apparent inaccuracy of official documentation relating to that information.

It's a murky business by any measure, even leaving aside the suspicion held by Palmer and others that Qat's prosecution - or perhaps persecution - is primarily a response to his political activism on behalf of the Wich people. The Qat case is evidently a significant element in Palmer's life, but there's something awkward about how Rosell integrates it into the overall form of The Ethnographer. Indeed, the film was for much of its gestation actually entitled Qat, indicating a significant shift of emphasis - perhaps during the editing stage.

The results poses rather more thorny questions than they are able to answer, with Rosell (best known for 2006 romantic comedy-drama Sofabed) and editor Andrs Tambornino perhaps needing a somewhat bigger canvas than their 89-minute running-time can afford. That said, their film serves as a solid introduction to an individual, a people and a place - the dusty, dry, barren-looking regions of Pilcomayo and Tartagal in the far north of Argentina - with sparing use of James Blackshaw's guitar score adding to the backwater atmospherics. And the finale, in which Palmer lovingly and softly says goodnight to each of his sleeping children in turn, is a vignette of genuinely moving beauty.

Venue: FIDMarseille Film Festival
Production company: Fortunato Films
Director / Screenwriter: Ulises Rosell
Producer: Pablo Rey
Director of photography: Guido De Paula
Music: James Blackshaw
Editor: Andrs Tambornino
Sales Agent: Fortunato Films, Buenos Aires
No rating, 89 minutes.

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Step Up Revolution: Film Review

With their second summertime at-bat after Rock of Ages, Offspring Entertainment producers Adam Shankman and Jennifer Gibgot return to one of the things they do best making young unknowns look like the next big thing. In its fourth installment, however, the Step Up franchise has traded an air of inevitability for one of predictability. While diehard fans and dance fanatics will respond in the opening frame, ongoing competition from superheroes and cute cartoon characters may slow momentum in subsequent weeks.

VIDEO: 'Step Up Revolution' Trailer Debuts

After dancing its way across Baltimore and New York City in previous iterations, Step Up moves to Miami, where homeboys Sean (Ryan Guzman) and Eddy (Misha Gabriel) have been best buds since toddler-hood and now lead a local dance flash mob known as, well, The Mob, just to keep things simple. Together with their crew, including choreographers, visual artists and a DJ, the guys have been busting out surprise dance numbers all over Miami and shooting video to compete in a YouTube contest to win $1 million.

Seans day job as a waiter at a luxury hotel helps support his dance habit and pay the rent on the house he shares with his single-mom sister (Megan Boone) and niece. When Emily Anderson (Kathryn McCormick) turns up at the hotel owned by her father Bill (Peter Gallagher), a ruthless real-estate developer -- for a summer of bartending while preparing to audition for a coveted spot with a high-toned local dance company, attraction inevitably sparks between the two.

As it turns out, aloof Emily needs Seans help more than she suspects. Seems that the dance company director (Mia Michaels) thinks Emily is a talented performer but wound a bit too tightly to be truly creative. So if she wants to make it onto the roster, Emily is going to need some new moves, which she figures Sean can help deliver once she discovers hes one of the motivators behind The Mob. After her video debut, a sexy number in a crowded, fancy restaurant, draws millions of hits online, Emilys brought on with the group as they plan their next outrageous mission.

However theres one major obstacle looming over the pairs romantic bliss and professional success: Emilys dad is determined to build a new luxury development after razing the multiracial community where Sean lives and hangs out with other Mob members. Although Sean agrees to keep Emilys identity concealed while she rehearses and performs with his crew, if word gets out, his street cred will be totally shot, which could complicate that business about winning the YouTube video contest. Emily has another idea, though, encouraging Sean and The Mob to stand up to her dads development plans with some proactive dance interventions.

Much like hitmaking music producers, Shankman and Gibgot have orchestrated a surprisingly winning series that takes promising filmmakers and performers and turns them into recognizable professionals, like directing alum John M. Chu and former man-candy dancer Channing Tatum. Making his feature-filmmaking debut, music-video and TV director Scott Speer acquits himself adequately, particularly since the movie is more akin to a long-form video project. Playwright and first-time screenwriter Amanda Brody plays it safe, leaving the pyrotechnics to the choreography team and sticking to the franchises proven dance-romance formula, which offers few surprises but delivers effectively. The attempt to add a modicum of social relevance to an essentially carefree entertainment vehicle by staging dance protests against the resort development is pretty much a nonstarter, particularly since theres no indication that The Mobs illegal assemblies are attracting the least law-enforcement attention.

Abercrombie & Fitch model Guzman looks every bit the metrosexual romantic lead, but also makes a credible partner for So You Think You Can Dance star McCormick. Fortunately, neither is called upon to stretch too far in the acting department and both are able to get by with good looks and flashy moves. Supporting castmembers are adequate if not outstanding, but its the choreographers, led by franchise vet Jamal Sims, who really put the shine on the production.

Revolutions mix of choreography, contrasting modern dance and street-style performance that incorporates hip-hop, step, acrobatic moves and Cirque du Soleil-style aerial stunts, forms an energetic, constantly shifting mosaic. Several major set pieces, including the opening downtown Miami sequence centering around a parade of low-riders, help anchor significant plot developments, even if they add little narrative impetus.

By now, however, 3D dance performances are routine for the genre and with the exception of a few notable aerial tricks, Revolution doesnt offer many stylistic innovations, although the soundtrack featuring performances by Far East Movement (with an assist from Justin Bieber), M.I.A., M83, Diplo, Timbaland and J.Lo, is appropriately propulsive.

Opens: July 27 (Summit Entertainment)
Production company: Offspring Entertainment
Cast: Ryan Guzman, Kathryn McCormick, Misha Gabriel, Cleopatra Coleman, Stephen tWitch Boss, Tommy Dewey, Peter Gallagher, Mia Michaels, Megan Boone
Director: Scott Speer
Screenwriter: Amanda Brody
Producers: Adam Shankman, Jennifer Gibgot, Patrick Wachsberger, Erik Feig
Executive producers: Bob Hayward, David Garrett, Meredith Milton, Jon M. Chu, Matthew Smith, Nan Morales
Director of photography: Karsten Crash Gopinath
Production designer: Carlos A. Menndez
Costume designer: Rebecca Hofherr
Editors: Matthew Friedman, Avi Youabian
Music: Aaron Zigman
Rated PG-13, 97 minutes.

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Nuit No 1: Film Review

Revealing the existential despair of two young Canadians without quite succumbing to despair itself, Anne mond's quietly raw Nuit 1 begins as a highbrow sex film but quickly becomes something much more interesting. Laudable leads and a refreshingly direct take on its subject should help arthouse prospects, especially if the picture finds some fans in the tastemaker crowd.

Clara (Catherine De Lan) and Nikola (Dimitri Storoge), having met off-camera at a rave, enter Nikola's apartment and enjoy an encounter that, however sexy, is presented with enough real-time verisimilitude to pause for trips to the bathroom and the retrieval of condoms. With light from streetlamps illuminating the grubby apartment in a narrow Academy-sized frame, we watch a slightly-more-than-R-rated coupling that ends with a hot bath for her and sleep for him.

Nikola wakes when Clara tries to sneak out, though, and after getting her back inside he scolds her, sadly. Modern love makes him sick, he says; two people who've seen each other naked owe each other, at least, a proper goodbye. He imagines happier ways the evening might have ended, and after listening to him patiently -- is that contempt or sympathy on her face? -- she returns the favor.

Their sentiments are universal to those who gamble on strangers in search of love, and, since the film's title suggests the first of many nights to come, we imagine a relationship might grow out of all this uncomfortable frankness. But taller hurdles lie ahead, as a long night of talking turns criticism inward: Nikola and Clara prove to be deeply wounded people, and here mond's script makes her characters more than mouthpieces for a million frustrated singles.

The characters' flaws are just specific and distasteful enough for us to step back from them without ceasing to relate; few viewers who've been around the block will fail to see some shard of a past lover or a past self exposed in these soliloquies, which are delivered without histrionics and structured with the finesse of a good play.

Production Company: Metafilms
Cast: Catherine De Lan, Dimitri Storoge
Director-Screenwriter: Anne mond
Producer: Nancy Grant
Director of photography: Mathieu Laverdire
Costume designer: Yola Van Leeuwenkamp
Editor: Mathieu Bouchard-Malo
No rating, 91 minutes.

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What Is Love: Saravejo Film Review

SARAJEVO -- Nine years have elapsed since the young Austrian writer-director Ruth Mader earned critical plaudits for her debut feature, the stark immigration drama Struggle. Fresh from showing in competition at Sarajevo Film Festival, Maders belated follow-up project experiments even further with the same hybrid style, an artful blend of fiction and documentary.

Yoking together five unrelated character studies on the same loose theme, What Is Love has some of the understated bleakness which has become signature of Austrian cinema. But it is also a frustratingly opaque and cerebral work, unwilling or unable to engage on an emotional level. Festivals and specialist screenings seem to offer the films most likely future prospects, although it could just as easily play in an art gallery.

Mader favours long, static, formally composed shots that border on still-life portraits at times. In the films opening section, a young woman sits alone in her tasteful home, applies make-up in the mirror, attends a dinner party, nurses her sisters baby, and dances joylessly in a night club. She has a vague air of lovesick longing, but the film offers neither explanation nor resolution. By contrast, the next chapter features a married suburban office worker who returns home to a frosty confrontation with his wife about the state of their relationship, a quietly riveting piece of passive-aggressive soap opera which unfolds in real time and painstaking detail. A young Catholic priest in an ailing rural parish epitomises a different kind of love, though clearly with its own burden of solitude and self-sacrifice. Then we meet a middle-aged factory worker with a sullen husband and rebellious teenage son, her repetitive routine mirroring that of the earlier woman, no doubt deliberately. And finally a bourgeois couple with a comically matter-of-fact approach to keeping their marriage alive with a multiple-choice bargaining system.

What Is Love is less about romance than the drudgery and compromise that hold relationships together. Mader shoots the robotic domestic routines and petty family squabbles of suburbia with all the forensic distance of an academic anthropologist. And while she does not seek out freak-show grotesques like her fellow Austrian quasi-documentary maker Ulrich Seidl, there is a subtle undercurrent of bone-dry satire and social critique at work here. The quiet desperation behind the neatly trimmed gardens. Hell is other people, especially the people you love.

Sadly, it would take a film-making genius to make the unremarkable lives of disappointed people into a dramatically engaging whole. The chief appeal of Maders elegant anthology lies in its chilly composure and knowingly blank tone, as well as in spotting where reality ends and scripted dialogue begins. But such rarefied aesthetic pleasures are not sufficient to sustain 80 minutes of deliberately open-ended, disconnected, low-wattage docu-drama. What Is Love contains a few choice moments of dark comedy and sharp-eyed social observation, but it ultimately feels like a sketchbook for a grander project, a half-empty canvas with just the edges painted in.

Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival
Production company: KGP Kranzelbinder Gabriele Production GmbH
Cast: Saskia Maca, Helene Bubna, Michael Bubna, Thomas Rath, Walter Scalet, Eva Suchy
Director: Ruth Mader
Writer: Ruth Mader
Producer: Gabriele Kranzelbinder
Cinematographer: Jrg Gnner
Editor: Nina Mossbck
Sales company: KGP Kranzelbinder Gabriele Production GmbH
Rating TBC, 80 minutes.

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Lion of Judah: Film Review

With its bold name and pulpy, barbed-wire-tangled poster art, Matt Mindell's Lion of Judah presents itself as the portrait of "a brave soul" whose "in-your-face" tale will shed new light on the experience of Jews during WWII.

In fact, the doc is little more than the home movie of a tour through Holocaust sites, albeit one whose guide -- 81 year-old Auschwitz survivor Leo Zisman -- exhibited jaw-dropping defiance during his boyhood imprisonment there. There might be a movie in Zisman's story, but this film scrambles his personal recollections up with half-hearted reporting work and others' commonplace expressions of horror, winding up with something of interest only to those for whom "never forget" demands embracing every Holocaust memoir produced in the last 60-plus years.

Having penned one autobiography, Zisman is spending his retirement giving lectures and tours about his survival. We watch as he leads a group of 35 young Jews through what remains of the Warsaw Ghetto, Poland's Majdanek concentration camp, Auschwitz, and other sites of atrocity. This format allows Zisman to recount some anecdotes (too few are included here), but also inspires Mindell to splice in follow-up interviews with three of the tour's participants and his own cameraman (the only non-Jew on the trip). While all four were clearly moved by standing on the ground where so many were killed, the experience hasn't granted any of them an insight we don't already share. Mindell's cursory man-on-street shots of young Poles, seemingly meant to suggest that Europe doesn't dwell sufficiently on its history and that a second Holocaust is therefore not unthinkable, is really just more diversion from the film's ostensible subject.

Production Company: JEC

Director-Screenwriter: Matt Mindell

Producers: Matt Mindell, Joe Kavitski

Directors of photography: Joe Kavitski, Ben Donnellon

Music: Matt Turk

Editor: Joe Kavitski

No rating, 59 minutes

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Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time: Film Review

The lure of power and money creates an unlikely thug in Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time, a muscular and enormously entertaining South Korean crime epic that might have Scorsese looking over his shoulder.

Hitching a blithe surface mood to the violent, amoral world of organized crime a la GoodFellas, the young writer-director Yun Jong-Bin (The Moonlight of Seoul, The Unforgiven) has crafted a brutal study of widespread corruption, powered by a crackerjack performance from leading Korean actor Choi Min-sik (Old Boy) as a civil servant who climbs the underworld ladder to crime lord.

Nameless Gangsterwas a hit at the South Korean box office, where it drew a million moviegoers in its first four days, and holds considerable appeal for international audiences willing to embrace subtitles for a superior slap of violence. It went down a treat at the New York Asian Film Festival earlier this month and has been selected for the Melbourne International Film Festival in August.

STORY: New York Asian Film Festival Features Takashi Miike World Premiere

Set in the Korean port city of Busan, Jong-Bin spins a fictional mob thriller from the real-life underworld clashes that followed president Roh Tae-woos official declaration of war on organized crime in 1990. Flashing back to an authentically recreated 1980s, we meet Choi Ik-hyun (Min-sik), a chubby customs official with a bad haircut who is not averse to taking a low-level bribe.

Fate and circumstance, including a massive methamphetamine shipment landing in his lap at the docks, lead Ik-hyun to gangland kingpin Hyung-bae Choi (The Chasers charismatic Ha Jung-woo.) The young Hyung-bae is as cool and suave as the often-drunk Ik-hyun is rumpled and bumbling but the two discover they are tenuously related and, due to the heavy-duty role afforded family ties in Korea, form a mutually beneficial partnership.

With Ik-hyun exploiting his little black book of political connections and his partner providing the muscle, they rise to rule the criminal underworld but the relationship, forever on shaky ground, begins to crumble when the government starts its clampdown and Ik-hyun appears to be in cahoots with rival gangster Kim Pan-ho (Jo Jin-woong.)

Ik-hyun is a fascinating, if often detestable, character.

Thanks to a brilliant, full-throttle performance by the changeable Min-sik, we are never sure whether the civil servant with the hangdog features and the loud mouth is a devious mastermind or a doofus who got lucky. We do know he is grasping and opportunistic with a much shakier moral code than his dyed-in-the-wool gangster cohorts.

He slips through the underworld and the corrupt tiers of government, greasing palms and flattering egos, manipulating the countless familial connections that prop up Korean society and occasionally resorting to flashes of uber-violence.

Vicious beatdowns are rife here but the standard trappings of the genre and the rise-and-fall narrative arc are transcended by a witty bordering on satirical social commentary on the times. Director Yun Jong-Bin captures the raw excitement of the criminal underbelly but appears to pity its denizens, sketching a bleak portrait of a society mired in corruption and packed with individuals playing dirty for their own survival.

The complex interplay between the two leads forms the nucleus of this sharply written drama, although performances are uniformly committed. As in most organized crime films, female characters are scarce, although Kim Hye-eun manages to distinguish herself as a cold-blooded nightclub queen.

From the cars to the tailored power suits, the period detail cant be faulted, lending a compelling authenticity to the filmmakers examination of the eras questionable mores and political realities.

Production company: Palette Pictures
Cast: Choi Min-Sik, Ha Jung-Woo, Jo Jin-Woong, Ko In-Beom
Writer-director: Yun Jong-Bin
Producers: Park Shin-kyu, Han Jae-duk
Executive producers: You Jeong-hun
Director of photography: Ko Rak-sun
Production designer: Cho Hwa-sung
Costume designers: Kwon Yoo-jin, Rim Seung-hee
Music: Cho Young-wuk
Editor: Kim Sang-bum
Sales: Showbox, Seoul
No MPAA rating, 133 minutes

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Porn in the Hood (Les Kaira): Film Review

PARIS -- As boldly idiotic as its English-language title, the French banlieue comedy Porn in the Hood (Les Kaira) follows the lowly adventures of three down-on-their-luck thugs trying to break into the adult film industry and make a quick Euro. Adapting from his popular Canal + series, writer-director-star Franck Gastambide piles on the tasteless jokesmany of them involving untamed animals and/or women treated as suchbut rarely offers up the self-deprecating ghetto parody one could hope for.

Gaumonts mid-sized July 11^th release scored a sizeable 400K admissions in its first frame and is well on its way to becoming a sleeper summer hit, at least locally. Overseas action will be limited to Francophone territories, while other distributors will require a decent urban dictionary and perhaps a large bag of weed to translate the films unbeatable slang, delivered in rapid-fire bursts by its trio of man-boy hoodlums.

Indeed, the original title, Les Kaira, is French verlan (slang) for racaille (thug), and part of what made Gastambides show Kaira Shoppinga faux HSN set in a Parisian housing project and anchored by the three numbskullsso successful was its combination of DIY aesthetics, street attitudes and over-the-top salesmanship.

Here, the team has upped the ante with a decent budget (reported at 4 million), a handful of cameos and something thats meant to resemble a plot, but what they wind up with is a tedious exercise in outr humor that lacks the spontaneity, not to mention the brevity (the TV sketches normally clock in at under 3 minutes), of their YouTube-style phenomenon.

A speedy opening introduces us to lifelong friends Abdelkrim (Medi Sadoun), Mousten (Gastambide) and Momo (Jib Pochtier), who spend their days lounging around the latters apartment while insulting one another with fits ofhood lingo. Avid readers of porno mags, the three realize they can get rich quick by becoming pro studs themselves, and meet up with a sleazebag producer (Francois Damiens, in a fun bit role) who asks to see their demo reel by Monday morning.

Thus kicks off a long weekend of mayhem as the threesome tries to score any which way they can, although that story soon gives way to a more conventional tale of lost loves and local bullies. As for the jokes, Gastambide lays them on mighty thick with several over-the-top sequences (including one that combines taxidermy, cat allergies and female ejaculation), but everything is so in-your-face childish that he never quite hits a sustainable tone. When all else fails, Momo, a little person, becomes the go-to guy, and is literally thrown to the dogs in one scene that shows to what extent Porn in the Hood has run out of ideas by its midpoint.

Most disappointing is the films failure to tackle real questions about the notoriously nasty French suburbs, and although the characters are somewhat clever amalgams of banlieue types, their obsessions with porn and circus animals are closer to Jackass than to Dave Chappelle, turning the whole production into a high school-level prank.

Performances are exaggerated to the point that you can often see the actorsespecially Sadountrying way too hard to seem funny. Tech credits are flashy, with certain gags staged in fisheye widescreen by cinematographer Antoine Marteau (Twisted Souls) and a hip-hoppy soundtrack by a team that includes DJ Cut Killer (La Haine).

Production companies: Save Ferris, Mandarin Cinema, Gaumont
Cast: Medi Sadoun, Franck Gastambide, Jib Pocthier, Ramzy, Alice Belaidi
Director, screenwriter: Franck Gastambide, based on the series Kaira Shopping
Producers: Jean-Charles Felli, Christophe Tomas, Eric Altmayer, Nicolas Altmayer
Director of photography: Antoine Marteau
Production designer: Laurent Tesseyre
Costume designer: Sandra Berrebi
Editor: Veronique Parnet
Music: DJ Cut Killer, Herve Rakotofiringa, Eric Neveux
Sales: Gaumont
No rating, 96 minutes.

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A Band Called Death: LAFF Review

Detroit -- renowned home of Motown -- isnt the first touchstone associated with punk rock, despite its distinction for producing Death, regarded as the first African-American punk band. While countless docs attempt to make the case for near-forgotten musicians, Deaths unique place in musical history and the fascinating turns the bands story takes as it winds its way out of obscurity present a promising opportunity for a proactive theatrical or home-entertainment distributor.

The Hackney brothers David, Bobby and Dannis started out playing rock and funk as teenagers, rehearsing at their Detroit home with the encouragement of their parents. Inspired by Jimi Hendrix, Alice Cooper and The Who, oldest brother David started leading the band in the direction of harder rock and their sound gradually became more hardcore, taking on the characteristics of prototypical punk rock as the band adopted their fateful name.

Incredibly they secured a recording contract with their first demo tapes, laying down the tracks for their debut full-length For the World To See in a Motor City studio in 1975. Ironically, the music world never heard the album in that incarnation, after their representatives failed to sell the disc to a distribution company. Arista Records Clive Davis did offer to release the recording, but only if the band changed their name, which David flatly refused to do. If we give them the name of our band, we might as well give then everything else, he reportedly told his brothers.

With their contract cancelled, the Hackneys attempted to self-distribute singles on 45s, but radio stations passed them over and with the pressing and marketing costs, the brothers were soon broke and forced to sell off their instruments. Bobby and Dannis relocated to Vermont and formed the successful reggae band Lambsbread, while David remained in Detroit, plagued by his demons and advancing alcoholism, dying of cancer in 2000.

Conventionally the narrative would wrap up with Death being rediscovered and promoted online by an avid record collector, but instead the film takes a couple more unlikely turns. With the master tapes that David gave Bobby for safekeeping, Drag City finally released For the World To See in 2009 and after nearly 30 years of obscurity, people started giving the group some long overdue attention.

Although filmmakers Jeff Howlett and Mark Covino rely primarily on a series of generous and introspective interviews with Dannis, Bobby and other family members, along with archival photos and memorabilia, segments featuring Cooper, Henry Rollins and Kid Rock among others demonstrate Deaths visceral appeal. More than any other factor though, its the surviving Hackney brothers emotional and enthusiastic reminiscences that prove the most riveting material in the film, particularly their recollections of David and his central role in forming and guiding the band.

The films final twist, revealing how the bands songs are being played live for the first time in decades, proves a moving testament to the enduring power of family ties and groundbreaking music.

Venue: Los Angeles Film Festival
Production company: Haven Entertainment
Directors: Jeff Howlett, Mark Covino
Producers: Matthew Perniciaro, Scott Mosier, Kevin Mann, Jerry Ferrara
Director of photography: Mark Covino
Music: Sam Retzer, Tim Boland
Editor: Rich Fox
No rating, 98 minutes

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30 Beats: Film Review

Its definitely time for a moratorium on any new films or plays inspired by Arthur Schnitzlers classic La Ronde. This theatrical depiction of a sexual roundelay has served as the basis for innumerable loose adaptations since its 1920 premiere, the latest being writer-director Alexis Lloyds 30 Beats, following ten New Yorkers getting it on in a series of unmemorable vignettes. The film is mainly notable for its diverse and talented ensemble cast, including several performers who have gone on to greater prominence since it was shot several years ago.

Set during three days of a summer heat wave, the episodic storyline follows a series of characters as they progress from one fling to the next. It begins with an innocent young woman (Condola Rashad) enticing a sexually experienced anthropologist (Justin Kirk) to deflower her. Feeling guilty afterwards, he heads to a psychic (Jennifer Tilly) whose unorthodox treatment involves his rubbing his genitals with some kind of magic cream. She later fools around with a young bike messenger (Jason Day), who is obsessed with a facially scarred beauty (Paz de la Huerta), who tries to seduce her chiropractor (Lee Pace), whoyou get the idea.

While the dramatic premise has certainly proved its durability throughout the decades, this cinematic variation falls short on almost every level. The pseudo-exoticism, from the eccentric characters to the kinky sexual activities on display, isnt enough to compensate for the banal dialogue and contrived situations.

Clearly aiming for high artistic ground, the film doesnt even satisfy on an arousal level, with the discreet nudity and endless yakking not exactly proving a turn-on.

The performers are mainly adrift, with such normally terrific theater and TV veterans as Thomas Sadowski (The Newsroom), Pace (Pushing Daisies) and Kirk (Weeds) not making much of an impression in their brief roles.

Opens: July 20 (Roadside Attractions)
Production: Latitude 49 Production, Black Nexxus Inc., Highbrow Entertainment
Cast: Paz de la Huerta, Justin Kirk, Lee Pace, Condola Rashad, Thomas Sadowski, Jennifer Tilly, Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Jason Day, Vahina Giocante, Ben Levin
Director/screenwriter: Alexis Loyld
Producers: Alexis Lloyd, Molly Conners, Carl Ford
Executive producers: Susan Batson, Ronald Guttman, Pierre Lagrange
Director of photography: Lisa Rinzler
Editor: Xavier Loutreuil
Editor: Roberto Silvi
Production designer: Brian Rzepka
Costume designers: Linda Belkebir, Katie Calcaterra
Music: C.C. Adcock
Rated R, 88 min.

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Being There (Être là ): FIDMarseille Review

MARSEILLE -- There have been many documentaries about the world's penal facilities over the years, but very few can have looked or sounded much like Rgis Sauder's simultaneously slick and jagged Being There (tre l). Shot in austerely striking black and white high-definition video, the focus is here not on prison inmates - who, for reasons of confidentiality, are heard but not seen -- but rather on the female psychiatrists who treat them.

Sauder's stylized approach occasionally veers towards the mannered, but overall this is a solid and accessible example of non-fiction filmmaking whose experimental aspects won't imperil its general prospects. Festivals and upscale TV networks -- particularly those with an emphasis on women -- will want to check it out, and there's also the possibility of limited theatrical play in French-speaking countries.

Of the eight psychiatrists on view, first among equals is thirtysomething Sophie Sirere, who throughout the film delivers to-camera monologues about her experiences, speaking in articulate, world-weary and occasionally philosophical/poetic style ("I wait for a civilized bandage to cover his screaming arm.") These punctuate footage shot at Sirere's main workplace, Marseille's Baumettes jail, where the overstretched psych unit welcomes patients from across the region.

We observe Sophie and her colleagues -- vivacious Aude Daniel enjoying nearly as much screen-time -- as they go about their professional activities: cameras remain fixed on their faces as they interview prisoners about their mental-health problems. Being There is thus a portrait of empathy in action, as the women's expressions, body-language and humor prove crucial in creating and maintaining bonds with their patients. This is in contrast to the more functional and downbeat relationships between the latter and their guards -- men, largely presented at floor-level as pairs of uniform boots.

Sauder (previously responsible for 2011's Children of the Princess of Cleves) has a strong, unfussy compositional sense, and h'ss clearly fascinated by each of his subjects and how they deal with unusually high-pressure, high-stress environments week in week out. But whereas most directors would probably present such strong material in time-honored, detached and observational style, Sauder here deploys - in collaboration with editor Florent Mangeot -- all manner of visual and aural techniques to keep the viewer off-balance, including whip-pan camera-movements, sudden zooms and stark whiteouts. Gildas Etevenard's discordant soundtrack of sharp strings and staccato percussion amps up the atmosphere of tension and disorientation, occasionally to the extent of sounding like offcuts from a spine-tingling horror movie.

The overall package is, then, rather flashier than recent notable European examples of monochrome, digital 'artistic' documentary such as Peter Schreiner's Tot (2009) or Maria Speth's 9 Lives (2019), and may strike some as excessive in its confrontational, herky-jerky aesthetic. But overall Sauder's approach does prove an effective showcase for us to understand these women's work, implicitly and eloquently supporting their belief in the necessity of prison psychiatric services in times of acute financial strain.

Venue: FIDMarseille Film Festival
Production companies: Shellac Sud
Director / Screenwriter: Rgis Sauder
Producer: Thomas Ordonneau
Directors of photography: Rgis Sauder, Jrme Olivier
Music: Gildas Etevenard
Editor: Florent Mangeot
Sales Agent: Shellac Sud, Marseille
No rating, 95 minutes.

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The Runway: Film Review

If you ever find yourself in trouble its probably best to make your way to a remote Irish village, where the quirky residents are bound to be all too happy to help you in your plight. This narrative staple of Irish films reappears yet again in The Runway, director/screenwriter Ian Powers mild but likeable debut feature starring Demian Bichir. Opening in Arizona for a limited release, the film could well score on VOD and cable thanks to its Oscar nominated (A Better Life) leading mans newly high profile.

Apparently inspired by a true-life incident, the film, which reveals no small influence by E.T., concerns a Columbian pilot, Ernesto, whose plane crash lands in the small village of Drumalee in County Cork. Speaking not a word of English, Ernesto finds a chief ally in nine-year-old Paco (Jamie Kierans), the only resident who speaks any Spanish. It seems that the lad has learned the language in the hope of someday reconnecting with his long-absent father, who according to his mother Grace (Kerry Condon) is a Spaniard.

Providing exactly the sort of mistranslation designed to encourage the townspeople to come to aid of the otherwise shady pilot, Paco quickly begins looking at his new friend as a father figure, with Ernesto helping things along by taking a romantic interest in his comely mother. Meanwhile, prodded by a no-nonsense local engineer (an entertaining James Cosmo), the villagers set about trying to help Ernesto repair his plane and construct a make-shift runway from which he can take flight.

The formulaic but amusing goings-on, which include the late arrival of a fellow Columbian on Ernestos tail (played by Bichirs brother Bruno), are thankfully elevated by the central performances. Young Kierans is effortlessly natural in his film debut; Kondon is charming as the wary but lonely single mom, and Bichir uses his smoldering good looks and natural charisma to excellent effect. The talented Mexican actor, so effective as the villainous crime boss in Weeds, displays the sort of soulful presence that renders the improbable plotline reasonably believable.

Opens July 20 (Tribeca Film)
Production: Fastnet Films, Ponderosa Pictures
Cast: Demian Bichir, Kerry Condon, Jamie Kierans, James Cosmo, Donncha Crowley, Pat Laffan
Director/screenwriter: Ian Power
Producer: Macdara Kelleher
Executive producers: James Atherton, Jan Pace, Marina Fuentes, Arredonda
Director of photography: P.J. Dillon
Editor: Amine Jaber
Production designer: Ray Ball
Costume designer: Uli Simon
Music: Gast Waltzing
Not rated, 93 min.

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The Ethnographer: FIDMarseille Review

MARSEILLE - Director Ulises Rosell adopts a very "softly softly" approach in The Ethnographer, a character-study of a quietly scholarly middle-aged Englishman who has devoted his life to helping one of South America's more self-effacing ethnic minorities. Delicated, hushed and sensitive in every respect, this documentary beguiles with its low-key approach to fascinating material, its charms outweighing a certain structural awkwardness. A selection at Buenos Aires' BAFICI before its international premiere at FIDMarseille, it will find plenty of takers among similarly upscale festivals.

Main focus is squarely on John Hillary Palmer, a ruminative pipe-smoker in his late fifties who has lived in rural Argentina for the last 20 years. His relocation was originally for academic purposes, to work and live within a community of the Wich people (who number around 42,000 in all, located in Argentina, Bolivia and Columbia) in furtherance of his Oxford University doctorate. Palmer's dedication to the Wich - helping them with self-determination and the protection of their homelands against the encroachment of big business - is amply chronicled here.

But the film gains depth and impact from its more intimate domestic interludes involving John's wife Tojweya, herself a Wich, and their four young children - including a baby only weeks old. So while Palmer has achieved considerable eminence in his field, winning the Royal Anthropological Institute's Lucy Mair Medal in 2009, his immersion into Wich culture, history and customs has become much more than a matter of dry ethnography.

Despite this immersion, however, Palmer remains recognizably an upper-middle-class Brit in appearance, dress and diction -- he almost invariably uses English at home with his children, who usually respond in Spanish, and are evidently being brought up trilingually thanks to their exposure to the Wich tongue. At one juncture Palmer telephones his mother back home in Britain, their brief chat speaking volumes about the world he has left behind -- "Are you succeeding in getting more freedom from the people?" she earnestly enquires.

In addition to the broader Wich struggle for recognition and respect - a cause not much aided by their general air of resigned, modest meekness - Palmer is engaged in one particular case of restricted "freedom", that of a semi-relative known as Qat. We're told that Qat, in tribal terms a "nephew" of Palmer's has been in prison for five years, charged with - but not yet tried for - the rape of his partner's daughter. The case pivots on the exact age of the girl at the time of the sexual act, and is complicated by the apparent inaccuracy of official documentation relating to that information.

It's a murky business by any measure, even leaving aside the suspicion held by Palmer and others that Qat's prosecution - or perhaps persecution - is primarily a response to his political activism on behalf of the Wich people. The Qat case is evidently a significant element in Palmer's life, but there's something awkward about how Rosell integrates it into the overall form of The Ethnographer. Indeed, the film was for much of its gestation actually entitled Qat, indicating a significant shift of emphasis - perhaps during the editing stage.

The results poses rather more thorny questions than they are able to answer, with Rosell (best known for 2006 romantic comedy-drama Sofabed) and editor Andrs Tambornino perhaps needing a somewhat bigger canvas than their 89-minute running-time can afford. That said, their film serves as a solid introduction to an individual, a people and a place - the dusty, dry, barren-looking regions of Pilcomayo and Tartagal in the far north of Argentina - with sparing use of James Blackshaw's guitar score adding to the backwater atmospherics. And the finale, in which Palmer lovingly and softly says goodnight to each of his sleeping children in turn, is a vignette of genuinely moving beauty.

Venue: FIDMarseille Film Festival, July 6, 2012.
Production company: Fortunato Films
Director / Screenwriter: Ulises Rosell
Producer: Pablo Rey
Director of photography: Guido De Paula
Music: James Blackshaw
Editor: Andrs Tambornino
Sales Agent: Fortunato Films, Buenos Aires
No rating, 89 minutes.

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Valley of Strength: Film Review

Considering the exoticism of its setting, Gei Oni (Valley of Strength), an Israeli historical drama set in 1880s Palestine, doesnt live up to its full potential. Dan Wolmans film about a young female survivor of Russian pogroms who forges a new life in the Ottoman-ruled land is a deeply humanistic drama that sheds light on the plight of the first wave of Jewish migrants to the area. But its choppy, lackluster execution robs the piece of much of its innate drama.

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The story begins with 17-year-old Fania (Tamar Alkan) arriving in Palestine with her infant daughter, her aged uncle, and her emotionally traumatized brother. Unable to provide for herself and her helpless charges, she has little choice but to accept a marriage proposal from Yechiel (Zion Ashkenazi), a young widower with two children of his own. The two are virtual strangers, and Fanias refusal to consummate the marriage despite her husbands obvious interest doesnt exactly bring them closer together. Her reticence has to do with a dark secret from her past which is not revealed until the melodramatic final act.

Director/screenwriter Dan Wolman presents an evocative portrait of the difficulties facing these Jewish pioneers to the region, including the hostility from their Arab neighbors and the backbreaking work needed to farm the barren landscape.

But hes less successful in negotiating the dramatic aspects of his tale, with its plodding plotline and lengthy, talky scenes often devoid of tension. That the film was edited down from a television mini-series is often evident via the sketchy narrative, which ultimately has Fania emerging as a strong-willed and highly capable businesswoman.

Still, the novelty of the setting provides some rewards, as do the sensitive turns by the movingly restrained Ashkenazi and the luminous Alka, who won an Israeli Film Critic Association award for her performance.

Opened July 13
Production: Dan Wolman Productions.
Cast: Tamar Alkan, Zion Ashkenazi, Ya'ackow Bodo, Levana Finkelstein, Ezra Dagan.
Director/screenwriter: Dan Wolman.
Director of photography: Ran Aviad.
Editor; Shoshi Wolman.
Music: Ori Vidslavski.
Not rated, 102 min.

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Babylon: FIDMarseille Review

An outstanding documentary whose Unique Selling Point is also, ironically, the biggest obstacle to the widespread exposure it deserves, Babylon announces in the very first seconds that its three directors "have chosen not to resort to subtitles." But while two hours of 'unintelligible' footage from a Tunisian refugee camp may sound a daunting prospect on paper, viewers willing to take the risk will find themselves amply rewarded by this rough-edged but consistently engaging dispatch from behind the headlines.

Nabbing top prize at the prestigious, documentary-slanted FIDMarseille festival will surely open more doors for this audaciously uncompromising enterprise. Not so much as a commercial prospect for either theatrical or small-screen, more's the pity, rather more as a prestige item for upscale, edgier festivals and those specializing in current-affairs subjects.

The massive social upheavals in Libya over the past year and a half have been well chronicled, but while sensational events such as the death of Colonel Gaddafi attracted global attention, the revolution's collateral effects on neighboring countries are less widely known.

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In the immediate aftermath of its own political turmoils, Tunisia received a significant influx of displaced persons - many of them laborers from countries such as Bangladesh, who were housed in impromptu camps in mainly rural areas. Babylon traces the construction, habitation and eventual closure of one such camp, in which hundreds - perhaps thousands - of men are provided with basic food and shelter before being moved on. First-time directors Youssef Chebbi, Ala Eddine Slim and 'ismal' (no family-name given) - all three handling camera duties, the latter pair also taking care of the editing - enjoy what looks like 'access all areas' latitude, observing many facets of the refugees' lives during both day and night.

Ad-hoc forms of religious worship, showbiz entertainment and sport are shown, alongside more quotidian matters of eating, sleeping and hygiene. And while no-nonsense lo-fi reportage is generally the order of the day the editors do find room for some contemplatively poetic grace-notes, often involving scrutiny of the camp's surrounding flora and fauna.

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Sometimes looking on from a distance, sometimes right in among the 'action' as when a protest turns cacophonously violent in the latter stages of the camp's existence, the unintrusive and organically 'embedded' directors assemble a fast-paced and fully immersive example of old-school fly-on-the-wall cinema-verit. It's one whose impact is enhanced, rather than reduced, by the absence of subtitles - which would have been a logistical nightmare given the many occasions when numerous people are talking at once.

The directors' decision - no gimmick, rather a creative gambit - means that we pay much closer attention to the sound and vision of this 'unmediated' film. And while only true polyglots conversant with Arabic, French, English, Bangladeshi and various north-African tongues will know exactly what's going on at all times, intonation and body-language generally prove just as eloquent as speech.
Babylon, its title a reference to the location of the legendary 'Tower of Babel' - supposedly the source of mankind's dizzying language differentiations - thus harks back to the days of Silent Cinema when directors like Griffith and Eisenstein hoped that the new medium might become a kind of 'visual Esperanto', equally accessible to all. As such, the film - which also eschews explanatory captions, voiceover and music - will be of significant interest for its bold aesthetic and philosophical aspects, in addition to its obvious invaluable status as historical document.

Venue: FIDMarseille Film Festival, July 8, 2012.

Production companies: Exit Productions
Directors / Screenwriters / Directors of photography / Producers: 'ismal', Youssef Chebbi, Ala Eddine Slim
Editors: 'ismal', Ala Eddine Slim
Sales Agent: Exit Productions, Tunis, Tunisia
No rating, 119 minutes.

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Deranged (Yeon-ga-si): Film Review

Contagion gets a make-over in Deranged, Park Joung-woos high-pitched but engrossing South Korean medical disaster film, which has out-grossed The Amazing Spiderman in its opening two weeks domestically and is slated for U.S. release on July 27. The source of a million infections that brings Korea to its knees is a long, mutant horsehair worm that develops from a larva in the human intestine until its gruesomely ready to come out. The idea certainly has merit, and how not to be impressed by the snake-like creepy crawlers that are discreetly glimpsed emerging from drowned cadavers and the like? Focused on one familys personal drama, without lingering on repulsive footage, the tale is watchable by the young and squeamish and could make for exotic summer entertainment offshore.

The first 20 minutes are invested in character development, creating a believable web of relationships between Jae-hyeok (Kim Myung-min), disgruntled sales exec in a pharmaceutical company, his beleaguered wife (Mun Jung-hee) and kids and his brother Jae-pil (Kim Don-wan), a lowly cop dating (why?) smart Dr. Kim (former Miss Korea Honey Lee.) Foreboding music and screams at an amusement park keep the audience guessing when and how the action will begin.

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The pandemic starts when skin-and-bones corpses start floating down the river, bearing horrific signs of malnourishment. First the police are called in, and Jae-pil is sent upcountry to check for chemical pollution at the rivers source. Then, as more and more emaciated people are found drowned, enter the medics, with young Dr. Kim playing the role of patients advocate and inveighing against the inhuman measures employed by the governments national emergency task force. As the compassionate Prime Minister strains to get the epidemic under control, its hard not to flash on Japans recent tsunami tragedy and official response to that disaster.

The most anti-Big Pharma film since The Constant Gardener, though the ending softens its criticism considerably, Deranged addresses the question of what would happen if the paranoiacs were right and there really was a giant conspiracy by a pharmaceutical company to create an unknown disease and stockpile the only drug able to cure it, killing thousands to maximize its own profit. In this indictment of human greed, there is something very Korean about the way the government scrupulously observes legal niceties in an attempt to persuade the killer company to forego its patent on the healing drug. But its not just big business thats guilty, but also the brother-heroes addicted to playing the stock market; they parallel the masses of unbalanced victims in prey to the parasite eating away inside them and taking control of their brains, until it pushes them to commit suicide by throwing themselves into a body of water where it can continue its life cycle. That's greed for you.

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Social comment aside, writer-director Park Joung-woo does a fine job entwining the expected genre scenes of quarantine camps and mass hysteria, emergency task forces and martial law with Jae-hyeoks drama as a below-average husband who turn into a hero when his wife and kids get infected. His relentless search for the remedy that his own company produced and hid furnishes the driving force for the main action, and Kim Myung-min projects unflinching intensity in the role. The supporting cast members, best known for their TV work, are perfectly adequate, particularly Mun Jung-hee as the infected but self-sacrificing wife who clutches her children in the segregated quarantine camp where even cell phones, the victims last shard of human dignity, are taken away by the anonymous authorities.

With all this material to cover, pacing is perforce fast and never self-indulgent. However, there are a number of missed opportunities to pump up the adrenaline, had the wide-screen camera only lingered a bit longer on the victims faces, the dogs being unleashed into the river at night or even offered us one good, long close-up at that nasty horsehair worm.

Reviewed on DVD, July 16, 2012.

Production Company: Ozone Film

Cast: Kim Myung-min, Mun Jung-hee, Kim Don-wan, Honey Lee

Director: Park Joung-woo

Screenwriter: Park Joung-woo

Producers: Charles Park, Kim Song-o

Executive producer: Jeon Taesung

Director of photography: Ki Se-hoon

Production designer: Kang Seung-yong

Composer of music: Jo Young-wook

Sales agent: C J Entertainment

No rating, 109 minutes

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