Thirst

Bakjwi (Thirst), Korea, 2009

Vampires!

They’re, like, so hot right now.

Admittedly most of this is due to the mind-boggling popularity of the Twilight saga, a series whose continued success remains a source of deep confusion and distress for this particular film-fan! Yet for the last twelve months or so, there seems to have been a considerable surge in vampirism in cinema. Luckily, for every emo vampire love story audiences also seem to be treated to an intelligent take on the vampire myth. First we had the wonderful Let the Right One In, and now Chan-wook Park has had the good sense to make Thirst.

Thirst begins with Park regular Kang-ho Song (also seen in this years spectacularly fun The Good, The Bad and The Weird) as priest Sang-hyun desperately, and often unsuccessfully, trying to heal his sick patients. He volunteers in a programme to find a cure for a fatal illness known as the Emmanuel Virus (EV). He travels to Africa to take part in the experiment, where he is subject an infected blood transfusion. After a near fatal encounter, he returns to Korea, slowly discovering his newly inherited vampirism, and begins feeding on the blood of his comatose patients through their IV drips. He then falls in love with a woman stuck in a loveless marriage. Think Twilight, but infinitely more fucked-up, with explicit sex scenes and graphic violence.

I won’t go any further in-depth into the plot, because most of the pleasure in this film is derived from the unexpected turns it often takes. At a basic level, the vampirism presented in the film is shown as a parasitic disease, as in many of the classic vampire stories. What makes the film interesting, though, is how the characters react to the disease. Sang-hyun, as a Catholic priest, is a moralistic character, unwilling to kill to feed his bloodlust, which is a radical deviation from the Nosferatu myth. It is a fascinating take on vampire mythology, the characters more human than monster. Like Let the Right One In, the film excels in fleshing out the characters while remaining loyal to the classic vampire symbolism. Sunlight still burns, and the infected are remarkably agile creatures.

Thematically, this is an extremely rich and controversial film. Issues such as religion, morality and African healthcare are bound to offend some, but this is a no-holds barred film, as is to be expected from the man who gave us demented masterpieces like Oldboy. The violence is brutal, and it is the first Korean film to feature full frontal male nudity. However, despite the extreme nature of the content, it is fascinating and intelligent viewing. The characterisation is top-notch, the narrative engaging and the humour typically dark. It is simply a fresh and exciting take on a well-explored genre. At its heart, there is a lyrical love story, that is occasionally sweet and occasionally twisted. This unusual romance acts as a solid backbone to the other thematic focuses and subplots.

For a director known for his visual extravagances (see the colourful excesses of I’m A Cyborg) the cinematography of Thirst is surprisingly muted, with the exception of some pleasant final act flourishes. This helps give the film a more personal feel. Indeed, overall Thirst is mostly character-driven, with a relatively small cast of characters. Park invests a lot of time into these people, and it builds to a poignant conclusion – which is also pretty damn funny. One issue I had with the film was a slightly dull fifteen minutes or so as it shifted into a darker third act. However, once the new thematic focus becomes clear, the ending is extremely rewarding, and felt like one of the most natural conclusions I’ve seen to a film in quite a while.

As you can probably tell, I rather liked Thirst. Park is a rare director who seems able to juggle emotionally involving stories, extreme violence, dark humour and genre inventiveness and emerge with a coherent, successful final product. It is a damn shame that this isn’t going to get a wide release when certain angsty nonsense is due once again to pollute screens (good looks win over subtitles, apparently). But Chan-wook Park reminds us that vampires aren’t all just baseball-loving dullards. Thirst is a wonderfully contemporary vampire film, one full of darkness, humour and energy. Oh, and plenty of weird-ass sex and revolting bodily mutilation. What more could you possibly want?

Zombieland

If you plan to survive Zombieland then you're going to have to learn some of the rules of survival. The most important rule to lean is rule number 18: Limber Up, if you forget to do this then there's a good chance that you will leave the theatre with a sever case of sore jaw syndrome due in no small part to spending the last 80 minutes laughing your ass off.

A lot has been written regarding Zombieland's debt to Shaun of the Dead but being honest I really don't see it. Granted both films depict a Zombie pandemic utilising a mixture of horror and comedy but beyond this the films have very little in common. Shaun is a far more emotionally driven film where as Zombieland is more like The Walking Dead with added laughs. I should add that I don't buy the whole zomedy genre as I fell that horror films are entitled to contain a few laughs without instantly being categorised as comedies. No one remembers American Werewolf or Fright Night as comedies yet both have many laughs as they do scares.
Zombieland starts months after the outbreak and follows a rag tag group of survivors in their journey west. The films opens with Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) looking for a quiet place to use the bathroom. Given that most of the human population is now a member of the undead-kind this is difficult. The opening scene is fast paced and exhilarating with director Ruben Fleischer starting things with a bang and never once letting up.

From here we move into what has to be one of the greatest opening scenes in cinema history. A montage of everyday events being turned on their head by the inclusion of the undead. It's an absolutely fantastic 3 minutes and manages more laughs than most films can in 90 minutes.
Shortly after we are introduced to Tallahassee played by the ever dependable Woody Harrelson who gives one ethe years best performances. If the Oscars recognised all genres then he would certainly be a shoe in for a nom next January. Columbus and Tallahassee join forces on their journey west and are soon joined by two cone girl sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) who have heard rumours that there is a place untouched by virus.

The film was originally conceived as a pilot for a TV show and at times it shows. While the characters are all interesting they do at times fell like clichés. Columbus is the typical OCD afflicted nerd we've seen a million times before and it's a credit to Eisenberg that he makes the character so immensely likeable. In recent time comparison has been drawn between Eisenberg and Michael Cera with many labelling him Cera mark 2 but if anything it should be the other way round.
Harrelson is as mentioned earlier absolutely fantastic in this and manages to bring an unexpected vulnerability to Tallahassee. The revelation regarding his dog is genuinely heartfelt and the sits alongside the opening of Up as one of this years most moving scenes.

The females of the piece don't fare as good as the men and while both Stone and Breslin are impressive their characters are nowhere near as developed as that of Tallahassee. It's obvious that in the years that the film has been in development little has been done with their characters. The promise of sequels should hopefully redress this.
The one area where the film really doesn't skimp is in the violence department. Gore fans will relish in graphic scenes of zombie death including the truly fantastic kill of the week sequence. The sporadic nature of the violence in the film means that the film never suffers from a sense of overkill and the ever growing sense of threat pays off in the final all out fight to the death between our 4 heroes and a theme park of the undead.

The term cult classic is branded about a little too much these days but if ever a film was destined for cult status it's Zombieland. Do yourself a favour and see it asap. It's easily this years most enjoyable film and one which can be watched over and over again.

Pandorum

About 10 years ago, I first saw the Sci-Fi/Horror film Event Horizon, which I enjoyed immensely. Produced by Paul W.S. Anderson, Pandorum is a film that follows in the same vein. It's also the first American production from German director Christian Alvart, who previously wrote and directed the exceptional serial killer thriller Antibodies. As well as that, I'm always eager to see anything with Ben Foster. From my perspective, Pandorum had quite a lot going for it.

Paul Anderson has certainly made a lot of very terrible films, but I'll always grant that with Event Horizon he showed quite a bit or promise as a director. I'm sorry to say that some of his very worst traits have tainted Pandorum, a film that probably would have been a truly exceptional Horror if it wasn't for certain elements.

It starts out extremely well, with Bower (Foster) waking up from suspended animation on board a gigantic spaceship. He's extremely disorientated, suffering from memory loss, and the ship is seemingly malfunctioning, he can't open any doors, or get power. He manages to revive another crew member, his commanding officer, Payton (Dennis Quaid), and they manage to restore some power to a console. The following scenes are all to familiar to Alien, and have Bower crawling through ducts and maintenance tubes, with Payton monitoring his progress through the console, but the atmosphere and sense of claustrophobia here is immense. The set design and lighting are excellent, and it has a very uncomfortable feel.

But after the fantastic start, it all starts to go a bit pear shaped. The ship is crawling with creatures. Mutated ex-crew members who look and act considerably similar to the reavers in Firefly. Bower also meets two surviving human crew members, both of whom appear to be expert martial artists. One of them is a woman called Nadia (Antje Traue) who doesn't look at all dissimilar to Milla Jovovich, and as the story goes on, it starts to feel more like one of Anderson's Resident Evil films. What started as an extremely tense and psychological (if derivative) horror ends up as a farce that abandons all sense of tension and plays up the hot chick fighting monsters angle. It got me thinking to myself, what video game was this based on again?

I'm always fairly skeptical about international filmmakers who go to America, and I get the sense of director Christian Alvart being under the thumb of the producers on this one, there's too many awful Anderson-isms here. Alvart is a good director, and we get a lot of glimpses of what he's capable of here, but it just feels as though this was a good film squeezed with studio interference, that Anderson got someone to mimic his own style. That's a shame, because I had hoped for more from this.

I also wonder what must have happened with the script. The concept of 'Pandorum' is that it's a psychological disorder sustained from prolonged suspended animation that it feeds into paranoia, yet the whole notion is side-stepped for the most part in favor of lots of running down metal corridors and screaming mutants. The notions of awakening with no memory aboard a dark, malfunctioning spaceship, with the fear of someone having a dangerous paranoid delusion, it all seems like a great basis for an excellent psychological horror, but the mutant creatures element feels like it was tagged on without much cohesion.

I did enjoy it for what it was, but this is by no means a good film. I think that without the monsters, without the ass-kicking side-kicks, and most of all, without Paul W.S. Anderson, this would have been a really good film. It could have done without most of the minor characters, and it could have focused more on that claustrophobic atmosphere it had at the beginning. Ben Foster is great, especially at the beginning, and there's a lot of good ideas in Pandorum, but it's less of an Event Horizon, and more of a Resident Evil in space.

Roman Polanski - Seperating the man from the director.

I'm a big fan of Roman Polanski. From Rosemary's Baby to The Pianist I think that he has made some of the best films of all time, and is an exemplary filmmaker. There's a lot of controversy after his arrest in Zurich a few days ago, many well known and well respected people in the film industry such as David Lynch and Martin Scorsese have signed a petition for his release, and many of them have come under fire on internet message boards for supporting him. There's no getting around it, he admittedly drugged and raped a 13 year old girl, something I absolutely do not condone for one second, then fled to France to avoid jail. I don't believe that anyone is above the law, and I think that yes, he should be punished. Yet I remain a fan of him as a director, an admirer of his work, and I've enjoyed his films immensely.

For many, I think that's quite an issue. How can someone neither condone the crime, nor condemn the art? Some have said that buying a film of his on DVD is supporting him (well shoot me, I just picked up The Fearless Vampire Hunters), a lot of people boycott his films because of what he did, and some feel that you cannot support his work as a filmmaker if you admonish him for his crimes. Yet most of the time, people do separate a person from their actions in the world of film and appreciate them for their work. Despite outbursts from Russell Crowe or Christian Bale, most admit they are great actors. Robert Downey Jr. has had an extremely destructive career, but he is a remarkable actor. Admittedly though, that's not a direct comparison with what Polanski did.

I'm reminded somewhat of Jeffrey Jones. He's an actor I'm sure most people are familiar with, I had been a fan of his since I was a kid, but in 2002 he was arrested on child pornography charges and getting a 14 year old boy to pose for pictures. I was shocked, I remember watching Deadwood and initially I couldn't get the thought out of my head every time Jones was onscreen 'This man is a pedophile'. But after some time I put it out of my mind. He was still the same actor that I always enjoyed watching. The fact that Matthew Broderick killed two people in a car crash had never impeded my enjoyment of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, so why should Jeffrey Jones's crime?

I feel the same way about Roman Polanski. I'd be lying if I said I didn't love his films, or that I wasn't a big fan of him as a director. Since I've been aware of him, I've known about what he did, and still continued (and will continue) to enjoy his work ever since I first saw Rosemary's Baby all those years ago. I respect the opinions of Martin Scorsese and all those who support Polanski, and I respect the opinions of the people who boycott his films because of his crimes, but I can't respect the idea that someone who simply enjoys Polanski's films is in some way reprehensible for it. I feel that I'll always have a great admiration for him as a filmmaker.

Ichi

Ichi is a new and interesting take on the Zatoichi character. In this film, Ichi is a woman (Haruka Ayase), a blind travelling musician and an expert with a sword who was trained by the original Zatoichi. As such, it's more of a sequel than a remake. We find her as she searches for her mentor, and the plot takes place in a familiar Yakuza-run small town, with many staples from the previous films included, like an obligatory visit to a gambling hall.

She meets Toma Fujihira (Takao Osawa), a man who cannot draw his sword because of a past shame and as he tells her, is currently on a pilgrimage. Soon after, Ichi kills a few members of a bandit gang who threatens them. Local yakuza believe that it was Toma who killed the bandits, and want to hire him as a bodyguard. There's also an annoying kid that hangs around with the two, and provides comic relief.

Now, I'm a fan of the Zatoichi films and I think Fumihiko Sori is an extremely talented director, so I was really looking forward to this. Sadly, it's a disappointment. It's not exactly a bad film, just one that is so dramatically uneven in tone that it doesn't reach it's full potential, so many moments of greatness that are sullied with poor characters, ridiculously cheesy acting and unfunny moments of humor. The character of Toma is rather annoying because he flips between serious and comic roles.

Ichi opens with a very bleak scene, it sets a dark and serious tone for the film. It's matched with beautiful cinematography, at times it echoed a Yoji Yamada samurai drama, and Ayase puts in an extremely good performance as the title character. But there's a complete shift in tone when the villains are onscreen; brash over the top characters that seem like they're from another film entirely and just don't fit in at all. It's almost as if The Hidden Blade collided with Azumi, and the result was a film that unexpectedly hops from serious and somber to camp and silly. Shido Nakamura plays the bandit leader Banki, a one note character devoid of any depth, notable only because of his ridiculous cackle. It's a shame because Nakamura is a far, far better actor than this, as his roles in Ping Pong and Letters From Iwo Jima show.

Sori is indeed a very capable director, his first film Ping Pong was absolutely brilliant, and the animated Vexille was a fairly decent piece of Sci-Fi action, so it's a pity that Ichi went so terribly wrong. There's a lot of the film I liked, many stand out moments, and the scenes that gave back story on the character of Ichi were especially good, but it's just too uneven and ultimately ends up as a film that is less than the sum of it's parts. With such a great concept, a talented director and good cast, it should have been so much more. Kitano's Zatôichi from 2003 will probably remain the best new take on the classic character for some time.

Solomon Kane the Trailer

As many of you know I have been away for the past while. The reasons for this are known to a few but mainly it's been down to damned writers block which is something not easily over come. I believed that over time my ability to write about obscure cult cinema would return unprompted but alas this was not the case. In reality it took, 4 bottles of bourbon, a Thai hooker called Love You Long Time and a badger to restore my talent.

With my returning ability I decided to give what many of you want in your daily diet of cinema: sex and violence. While the above seems to skim on the sex it does deliver shed-loads of violence and having seen some of the film I can testify that it will be something special. Unfortunately the release date is still some time away with European distribution for Solomon Kane only recently being attained. In the mean time, enjoy the rather brilliant trailer. I'll be back sometime tomorrow with my thoughts on Antichrist which does contain copious amounts of sex. Till then...

District 9

I've been eagerly anticipating District 9, and I'm extremely happy to say that it doesn't disappoint. The film by director Neill Blomkamp is a triumph, one of the most refreshing and unique experiences I've had in the cinema for a long time. Perhaps it's that on the meager budget of $30 million, with no big name stars attached, District 9 was a more exciting, more engrossing, and by far more relevant than any big budget Hollywood Science Fiction in the last 20 years.

Blomkamp's film directly references apartheid in South Africa, with the animosity towards aliens an allegory for how black South Africans were treated. That's a large part of what makes this such a unique and stirringly real science fiction tale, a sense that if aliens did come to earth, this is how humanity could react and how they would be treated, interned and exploited. The setting of Johannesburg is certainly a part of what makes District 9 such a refreshing experience, apart from the usual America-centric Sci-Fi films.

Another thing that sets it apart is protagonist Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley) because as the film starts out, he's almost unlikable. He's someone who's got his job because of who he knows, not because he was suited to the job, and he is in fact a bit incompetent. Wikus is a prat, but an extremely unique and interesting character. There's a scene near the start of the film where he's describing to the camera with a kind of giddy apathy what happens when they're aborting alien babies with a flamethrower, a callous act of policy by the MNU corporation who are facilitating the internment of the aliens.

When Wikus is exposed to an alien substance that begins to alter his DNA, he's treated by his employers in the very same cold and clinical way as his jobsworth approach to dealing with the aliens (whom he and others refer to as 'prawns'), as he now becomes the key for adapting alien technology and weaponry for human use. When he goes on the run, he's put in an undignified position of having to steal clothing and food, and we gain a lot of sympathy for a character who feels authentically real. Wikus is not a hero, he's not the clean, wise cracking Will Smith type, and that's what makes him so compelling as a protagonist, he's a bit of an asshole and he swears a lot.

And on the subject of swearing, that's another thing that I loved about District 9. I find that a lot of Science Fiction films these days are often very watered down kid-friendly affairs, rarely do you hear someone swear, and any violence is quite tame. Characters in District 9 actually talk like real people, and they curse and swear when it's appropriate, which really adds to the realism of the film. The violence is also suitably bloody. This is a mature film, with mature themes and content, and it's extremely good to see a film like this that is aimed at a mature audience, rather than the usual notion that Sci-Fi = kids film.

Another thing I found that really grounded the film for me was the idea of the aliens adopting human names, the main alien character is named Christopher Johnson. Something I've experienced myself here in Ireland was that people from other countries living here would often take western European names like John or Jim, and seeing this mirrored in District 9 was something that definitely added to the feel of realism.

Of course, the main reason the film works so well is Sharlto Copley. His performance as Wikus van de Merwe is absolutely astonishing, especially when you consider that this is someone who's never acted before. It takes an extremely good actor to play a character who is first presented as a prick, then make that character sympathetic to audiences. But as the character goes through his ordeal, I don't think I've seen someone who looks as genuinely frightened and distraught as Copley does, it's quite amazing.

The action is really terrific as well, but what director Neill Blomkamp does is perfectly immerse us in the setting and the characters before introducing any action scenes. When the pace is upped and more action is introduced, it's never really presented in a way that they make a spectacle of it. When we see the gloriously designed mech introduced, there's never any typical Hollywood style lingering shots of it that say "Phwoar! Look at the mech, look at the awesome CGI!" and the action that takes place is never over stylized. It really is, just some of the best action I've seen in a Sci-Fi film, and there's even a reference to Half Life 2 that absolutely make me laugh with glee.

I would say that District 9 is probably film of the year for me so far, and definitely one of the best Science Fiction films I've seen in a very long time. It's not exactly perfect, and there's a few too many plot conveniences for my liking, but on the whole it is just a magnificent work. Every other aspect of it works so very well, that I can easily forget any of the minor contrivances because of what an absolutely immersing and thrilling experience District 9 has been. It's just fokken brilliant.

Inglourious Basterds

The film opens on a farm. A man is chopping wood. He spots someone approaching, and hurriedly tells his child to get inside the house. It could be the opening of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, but instead of Angel Eyes, it's a man they call the Jew hunter, SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). The two men then enter the house and sit down at the table where Waltz, echoing Van Cleef completely, is calmly getting the information he wants from the other visibly nervous man.

Tarantino pays tribute to Leone's masterpiece in his opening sequence. It matches the corresponding opening in the classic western perfectly in tone, in mounting tension, and drags out the suspense for maximum effect. It is quite honestly one of the best start to any film I've seen in a long time, which is such a shame that the rest of Inglourious Basterds just can't keep up the same quality.

My main problem with Basterds is that it's extremely uneven. There's a lot of time spent talking about film, half of it is practically a film about film, and film plays an integral part of the plot. Characters have conversations about German cinema, during a briefing there's talk of how important film is to the German military's propaganda, and there is a lot of name drops in dialogue. What's interesting at first, becomes tired and forced. When one of the main characters says the line "In France, we respect the directors" I couldn't help but feel this is a little ego-trip on Quentin's part. I think it would have been better if it hadn't concentrated on so much reference.

When the film is at it's best, it's all Christoph Waltz. Hans Landa, The Jew Hunter is equal parts charming and chilling, it's rare to see a villain of this stature and the film is all his. No other character in Basterds is as interesting, no other actor here is as brilliant, and no scene of the film is as good as those with Landa. Apart from one moment of awful dialogue where he says "That's a bingo" (I think it's far too cheesy having a foreign character gaffe a common saying), I'd say he is by far Tarantino's best written character.

I think the reason I like Landa so much is because he's extremely unlike other Tarantino characters, he's particularly subtle, his motives are hidden rather than overt, and he probably has some of the best dialogue out of any character in any of Tarantino's films. Brad Pitt by comparison plays a one dimensional cartoon: Lieutenant Aldo Raine is good for a few laughs, like when he's posing an Italian, but there really isn't anything interesting about him at all. The only other character in the film who seems like a fully fleshed out person is Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), and her and Landa share one of the best scenes of the film.

As far as the direction goes, if there's one thing I'll say about Quentin, he knows how to pace a scene. He can really prolong the suspense without it dragging into boredom. Take the scene in Pulp Fiction for example, where Butch takes his time selecting his weapon before rescuing Marsellus. He never rushes things. There's an absolutely magnificent scene half way through Inglourious Basterds where the basterds are meeting a contact in a basement pub. It culminates in a spectacular (if brief) shoot-out, but it's everything leading up to the action that makes it so brilliant, the tension as the undercover soldiers risk being found out builds up so well.

Overall, it is a film that falls short of being great. While we're treated to one of the most charismatic movie villains in a long time, none of the other characters are really engaging. There's some absolutely terrific scenes, like the opening and bar shoot-out, but even though it didn't seem like the film ran for 153 minutes, there was still some scenes where the film dragged, and I felt that all the pontificating about films was fairly unnecessary. Tarantino cheekily ends the film with a very self-referential line "I think this might be my masterpiece", but it would take a lot more to topple Pulp Fiction as the masterpiece. It's a hell of a lot better than Kill Bill though.