By Joe Bendel. When a South Korean officer is killed with one of his troops’ weapons, someone has to investigate. It is also a convenient way to move a trouble-making lieutenant out of the way. Indeed, war is brutal, messy, and soul-deadening in Jang Hun’s The Front Line, Korea’s official best foreign language Oscar submission, which opens this Friday in New York.
A vocal critic of the drawn-out peace negotiating process, Kang Eun-pyo is assigned to investigate irregularities reported within the “Alligator Company” dug-in around the pedestrian looking but strategically prized Aero.K hill. In addition to the suspicious death of a despised commander, several letters from North Korean soldiers have been posted to family members in the south by someone in the company. A mole is suspected.
However, when Kang arrives, he discovers the situation is murkier than that. There has been a form of communication flowing between the two sides, but it is born of survivors’ fellowship rather than espionage. Still, he maintains suspicions regarding Kim Su-hyeok, a comrade from the early days of the war long presumed to be a POW, but evidently serving as the Company’s lieutenant.
Over the course of the film, Alligator Company will take, lose, and regain the fateful hill over and over again. It would get somewhat repetitive if not for the intense warfighting scenes, rendered by Jang in a take-no-prisoners style. Line’s sense of place is so strong, audiences will feel they know every inch of that crummy nub of a hill.
Do not get too attached to any characters in Line. Jang will call up their numbers at the most arbitrary of times, as befits the nature of war. Nonetheless, there are many strongly delineated characters. In fact, the self-medicating Captain Shin Il-yeong and the darkly brooding Lt. Kim, memorably played by Lee Je-hoon and Ko Soo respectively, clearly bear the spiritual scars of war. As the film’s only substantial female character, Kim Ok-bin also hints at a host of inner conflicts as the soon-to-be not so mysterious woman often seen foraging near the battlefield.
Like Jang’s previous film Secret Reunion (which screens February 15th in New York as part of the Korean Cultural Service’s regular cinema showcase), Line not very subtly advocates for reunification, arguing that divisions are merely an arbitrary matter of hills and parallels. Of course, it ignores the grim reality of the DPRK, in which famine is commonplace and the gulags are so extensive that they are the only features of the country that can be seen from space. While the soldiers could easily lose sight of it in the carnage surrounding Aero.K, there were indeed real stakes and consequences to the war. Whether it was also prosecuted competently, is an entirely fair and separate question.
Regardless, Jang masterly stages some of the most realistic, decidedly unheroic battle scenes viewers will see at the theater this year. It is a powerful, draining statement, recommended for connoisseurs of war movies, including the anti-war variety. Line opens this Friday (1/20) in New York at the AMC Empire and in the Bay Area at the AMC Cupertino.
By Joe Bendel. Sure, it is more than 24 hours, but two weeks is not a lot of time for international counter-terrorism agent Jon Wan. That is about how much time he has left before the bullet lodged in his brain finishes the job. During those final days he will have to recover a killer mutant virus and reconcile some tricky family business in Dante Lam’s The Viral Factor (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York and San Francisco.
The spectacular opening action sequence shows exactly how Wan became a dead man walking. He is part of an ambushed convoy escorting a mercenary germ warfare scientist looking to cut a deal. It was not the rpg’s that got him, but a traitor in his ranks. Unfortunately, the doctor of death and his new smallpox strain were lost to their attackers. Tragically, Wan has several more personal scores to settle with Sean the turncoat (and exposition mouthpiece). However, a brief visit to his ailing mother sends Wan on a detour to Malaysia. It seems he has long lost father and brother there, scratching out a meager living through dubious means.
In fact, Wan Yang is a notorious thug for hire, sub-contracted by Sean’s crooked cops to kidnap Dr. Rachel Kan, a specialist working for the Asian CDC. When the gangster brother is also betrayed by the gang, the two Wans team up to recover the virus, rescue assorted friends and loved ones, and do their best to patch up a fraternal relationship interrupted by their parents’ quarrels decades ago.
Somewhat like last year’s Legend of the Fist, Viral feels a bit unbalanced, because its most ambitious action sequence comes right up front. Of course, that also means viewers do not have to wait for it. Wisely shunning shaky cams, Lam’s action scenes have a refreshing precision and clarity, despite the frequent explosions and whizzing projectiles, so viewers can appreciate the mayhem. Jay (The Green Hornet and True Legend) Chou and Nicolas (Shaolin and Bodyguards and Assassins) Tse have all kinds of action cred, but also handle the familial drama well enough, as Jon and Yang, respectively.
Bai Bing in "The Viral Factor."
While marinated in testosterone and lacking a conventional romantic subplot, Viral also features two strong female characters. Though she appears all too briefly, Bai Bing shows considerable screen presence and action chops as Wan’s former fiancé and fellow agent, Ice. In a somewhat more traditional damsel-in-distress role, Lin Peng at least brings a sense of intelligence and resiliency to Dr. Kan. Young Crystal Lee is also quite poised and endearing as Yang’s responsible daughter, Champ.
Though a big budgeted production, Viral is appealingly old school, with a slick, glossy look reminiscent of Tony Scott’s glory days of high concept action pictures, via the lens of cinematographer Kenny Tse. Lam blows stuff up really nicely and both Chou and Tse certainly know how to handle a fight scene. Add in the cinematically exotic locales of Jordan and Kuala Lumpur and the attractive support of Bai and Lin and you have a solidly entertaining action film. Definitely recommended for genre fans, Viral opens this Friday (1/20) in New York at the AMC Empire and Village 7 as well as in San Francisco at the AMC Metreon and Cupertino, courtesy of China Lion Entertainment.
[Editor’s Note: The post below appears today at The Huffington Post and the newly relaunched AOL-Moviefone site, where LFM’s Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty will also now be blogging.]
By Jason Apuzzo. The Cold War is back – at least at the movies.
This weekend moviegoers can watch Meryl Streep portray ardent Cold Warrior Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Gary Oldman root out a dangerous Soviet mole from the British intelligence service in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Tom Cruise race to prevent a Cold War-style nuclear exchange between America and Russia in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.
These films form part of a major Hollywood trend toward reawakening memories of the Cold War – an era that is suddenly returning with a vengeance on the big screen, with long-term implications for our popular culture.
Currently in the midst of an awards-season run, for example, Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar tells the story of legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s decades’-long confrontation with Soviet infiltration of America. Also in the midst of an awards-season run is the ominous new documentary Khodorkovsky, which depicts how little Russia’s authoritarian governing style has changed since the dark days of the old Soviet Union.
Michael Fassbender in "X-Men: First Class."
And the trend doesn’t stop there. If Santa slipped new Blu-rays of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, X-Men: First Class, Apollo 18 or The Kennedys into your Christmas stocking, you just got another healthy dose of Cold War nostalgia from those films – because 2011 was a watershed year in Hollywood for reviving America’s long-standing rivalry with all things Russian and/or communist.
So, what’s going on here? Why is Hollywood suddenly reviving Russian communists, spies and autocrats as the go-to villains of choice?
The simplest answer may be that the old Soviet Union is gradually replacing Nazi Germany, Imperial Rome and space aliens as Hollywood’s favorite antagonists. In an industry still hesitant to make films about today’s War on Terror, and with memories of World War II fading, Russian authoritarians – including those of the present day variety – are on their way to becoming Hollywood’s safe, consensus villains of the moment.
This trend began in 2008, with of all things an Indiana Jones film. Set in 1957 at the height of the Cold War, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull featured Soviet communists as the villains, and despite grumbling from critics and internet fanboys the film played well in middle America – taking in over $317 million domestically (a figure even Ghost Protocol seems unlikely to match) and $786 worldwide. Perhaps just as significantly, the fact that the film had been made by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas seemingly gave the green light to other left-of-center filmmakers that depicting Reds as the villains was OK again.
Angelina Jolie in "Salt."
Soon Angelina Jolie was hunting sleeper Soviet agents in Salt (2010), Ed Harris and Colin Farrell were escaping a brutal Soviet gulag in Peter Weir’s extraordinary The Way Back (2010), and even Richard Gere and Martin Sheen were getting in on the act – smoking out a Russian mole in The Double (2011). Released here in the U.S. in 2010, Fred Ward played Ronald Reagan in the French Cold War spy thriller Farewell, and Renny Harlin’s action-drama 5 Days of War (2011) depicted the brutality of Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia.
To be fair, Russians haven’t been the only villains in this trend. MGM’s forthcoming remake of Red Dawn (read a review of an early cut of the film here) depicts a communist invasion of America by the North Koreans and Chinese, similar to the invasion of Australia depicted in Stuart Beattie’s recent thriller Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010). Bruce Beresford’s touching Mao’s Last Dancer (2009) recreated in heartbreaking detail the restrictions in Chinese communist society on artists. And perhaps no recent film captured communist tyranny more vividly than Mads Brügger’s gonzo documentary from 2009 on North Korea, The Red Chapel.
Sterling Hayden as Col. Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove."
This movie revival of the Cold War – in its many Russian, Chinese and North Korean variations – has intriguing implications. For the past generation, many left-of-center filmmakers have been deeply invested in the notion that the Cold War was a kind of paranoid mirage, a tragicomic figment of Ronald Reagan and Whittaker Chambers’ imaginations. With few exceptions, the basic image created by these filmmakers of the Cold War – codified in films like Dr. Strangelove (1964), or more recently in Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) – has been one of an artificial conflict fueled by American militarism and bourgeois small-mindedness. The sardonic The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) serves as perhaps the sine qua non of this genre.
This vision of the Cold War appears to be changing, however, among younger, less ideologically driven filmmakers. These filmmakers view the Cold War simply as a fertile field of storytelling possibilities about the struggle for freedom, in much the same way an older generation viewed World War II. Filmmakers today seem more eager to tell such stories about the Cold War, unearthing the past and depicting the sharp political divisions between East and West, perhaps because these filmmakers detect a continuity between communist tyrannies of the 20th century and similarly repressive regimes today.
After all, Brezhnev and Mao may be gone – but an ex-KGB man still runs Russia, and communists still run repressive regimes in China and North Korea. And America’s relationship with these nations sometimes seems no better than it was before.
After a 3D re-release, "Top Gun" is slated for a sequel.
Today’s Hollywood seems alive to these realities as never before, as reflected in a slate of new projects in the development pipeline that channel Cold War themes. Along with sequels to Salt, X-Men: First Class, Die Hard (with Die Hard 5 set to take place in Russia), and even Top Gun, work is also underway to re-boot the Jack Ryan franchise with Chris Pine in a new thriller called Moscow. Remakes of famous Cold War properties like Ice Station Zebra, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and even Colossus: The Forbin Project are also in development – along with adaptations of the books Londongrad, The Reluctant Communist, and the Red Star comic book.
On TV, HBO and FX are working on competing series about ’80s-era Soviet spies in the U.S., and HBO reportedly has another series in development about Cold War spies in Berlin.
As if that were not enough, Gerard Butler and Ed Harris will soon be trying to stop rogue Russian generals and KGB agents from starting World War III in Hunter Killer and Phantom, respectively. Or if your sensibilities run toward the art house, Andrzej Wajda is currently directing a biopic of Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.
Granted, it shouldn’t be assumed that these films will express a uniformity of opinion about the Cold War, or about current international tensions. Indeed, several recent films like The Iron Lady, J. Edgar, and X-Men: First Class express a pronounced ambivalence about the Cold Warriors they depict.
Watching The Iron Lady, for example, you would hardly know why the Soviet Red Army newspaper labelled Margaret Thatcher “the Iron Lady” in the first place. The film is weirdly evasive of Thatcher’s vital role in ending the Cold War – barely alluding to it except in brief moments of Thatcher with Reagan and Gorbachev, or attending an event commemorating the end of the Cold War. The Iron Lady seems more concerned with Thatcher’s current state of physical fragility than in her momentous alliances with Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa in hastening the collapse of the Soviet state.
Still, the fascination that films like The Iron Lady or J. Edgar have with Cold Warriors of the past is obvious. And certainly none of these recent films bothers to romanticize the communist cause. Indeed, the days in Hollywood of dueling Che Guevara biopics (Che, The Motorcycle Diaries) – or of Katherine Hepburn wearing a frayed Mao jacket to the Oscars – seem long gone.
The Cold War is back in Hollywood, but this time the idea seems to be to support the winning side.
By Joe Bendel. Evidently, during the Stalinist era the term “Cosmopolitan” served as a euphemism for Jewish. It might sound relatively benign, but its usage was far from polite. It was an ugly fact of Soviet life that Ukrainian documentarian Andrei Zagdansky’s parents were all too aware of. The letters of his state filmmaker father provide a window into the history of his family and his country in My Father Evgeni (excerpt here), which screens during this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival.
Born two years after the Russian Revolution, Evgeni Zagdansky would outlive Communism as the official state ideology, only to bemoan Russia remaining under the rule of “criminal mediocrities.” The great Zagdansky family secret was his mother’s Jewish heritage, a dangerous inheritance during the time of Stalin’s Doctors’ Plot anti-Semitic show trials. It would be even worse for the Zagdansky family, considering his father’s bourgeoisie roots. Zagdansky’s grandfather Peter made women’s shoes in a modest storefront before the new regime confiscated his property and exiled him to the provinces.
Somehow during the war Evgeni Zagdansky cleared his record to the extent he could work with the state system. For eighteen years, Zagdansky père served as editor-in-chief of the Kiev Popular Science Film Studio, where he earned his spurs producing propaganda pictures about the triumph of scientific materialism over superstitious notions of God.
Clearly, filmmaking is a generation-bridging bond for Evgeni and Andrei Zagdansky. Drawing on home movies and film archives, the junior Zagdansky captures the sweep of Russian and Ukrainian history as well as documenting the ebb and flow of his family’s standing. Particularly valuable are the topics of furtive family conversations in each successive era. Oftentimes, these are well known figures and events, such as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia or celebrated dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. However, he also includes important figures now largely faded from short-term Western memories, like dissident Ukrainian poet Vasil Stus and oppressed Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov in the honor role of discussion subjects.
Father is a bit slow and unfocused out of the blocks, but once Zagdansky gets into the rhythm of it, the film is a parade of striking images. War, famine, and propaganda campaigns all factor prominently, but sometimes the little details are the most telling, like the frequently changing street names, ever reflecting the political tenor of the times. For film programmers, it would be a fitting companion film to either Mikhail Zheleznikov’s short For Home Viewing or Sergei Loznitsa’s Revue. Recommended for Cold War students and scholars, it screens this coming Tuesday (1/17) at the Francesca Beale Theater and Wednesday (1/18) at the Walter Reade Theater, as part of the 2012 NYJFF.
Robert Hunger-Bühler and Nicolette Krebitz in "The City Below."
By Joe Bendel. It is almost like a modern-contemporary version of Metropolis. The financial titans rule the Frankfurt financial world high atop their glass and steel towers, while everyone else scurries about like ants on the sidewalk. However, very real dangers accompany their power games in Christoph Hochhäusler’s The City Below (trailer here), which screens during the Museum of the Moving Image’s inaugural First Look film series that has leapfrogged other festivals to kick-off 2012 for cineastes in earnest.
Roland Cordes is about to become the banker of the year and broker a blockbuster merger for his firm, because he is one of Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe, who always gets what he wants. Then he meets Svenja Steve, the wife of a junior colleague. Finally, someone is willing to say “no” to Cordes, or at least “probably not.” While she refuses to immediately fall into bed with the banker, she does not exactly discourage his attention. In fact, she seems to enjoy sparring with the older man, at least on days when she is in the right frame of mind.
Meanwhile, the stakes are rising at Cordes’ Lobau Bank. The board is keeping the assassination of the head of their Indonesian office hush-hush. However, it leaves an opening for Cordes to move the ambitious Olli Steve up and out of the picture, despite the presence of more qualified candidates. Shrewdly he keeps his fingerprints off the decision, but there are still signs he might be losing his Midas touch.
Below is not a film for uninformed Occupy-This simpletons. Essentially, it is a cerebral character study with overtones of a Paul Erdman financial thriller that takes a slightly weird turn into Lars von Trier territory at the eleventh hour. The net effect is quite distinctive, if hard to categorize.
Part Shakespearean tragic hero and part moustache twisting financial villain (sans the facial hair), Robert Hunger-Bühler creates one of the most fascinating and confounding characters to ever stride through a cinematic boardroom. It is an open question whether there is a soul buried deep within him, but there is certainly a multiplicity of layers to peel back in search of it. Nicolette Krebitz matches him note for note as the seemingly fickle, but more complicated than we initial realize Svenja Steve. Watching their verbal fencing is a pleasure.
Cinematographer Bernhard Keller’s austere color palate and use of glassy, reflective surfaces creates a cold, eerie vibe that nicely enhances Hochhäusler’s sense of mounting dread. While hinting at much, he refrains from answering many questions. Indeed, this film is chocked full of odd little bafflements, yet everything seems to follow according to some strange logic. Smart and ambiguous in an intriguing (rather than smugly self-satisfied) way, Below is one of the highlights of the first First Look, screening once-and-only-once this Sunday (1/15) at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens.
By Joe Bendel. Paul Roberts and Mac Armstrong are obsessive Stars Wars fans. They claim to hate Twilight, but are far too familiar with the franchise mythology for that to hold water. It is just as well, though. They can use some uncanny insight when Roberts starts seeing ghosts. All is not right with the afterlife in Jack Thorne’s The Fades (promo here), which debuts for U.S. audiences this Saturday on BBC America.
Roberts and Armstrong are geeks with father issues. The former’s has absconded, while the latter is a less than nurturing workaholic copper. Girls scare them, but Roberts still has a monster crush on his popular sister’s best friend Jay (she’s a girl with a boyish name and bob). For a while, Roberts has been plagued by apocalyptic dreams, but recently he has started seeing apparitions.
After a rather nasty encounter with a so-called “Fade,” the wildly anti-social Neil Valentine explains the nature of the secret battle underway. The Fades are indeed spirits, terrestrially bound because of the inadvertent closure of their cosmic ascension points. Mortals like Valentine and Roberts who can see them are known as “Angelics.” Some of the brethren have special psychic abilities and Roberts might just be the most powerful of them all. That will be a curse, rather than a blessing. Some rogue Fades have developed an ability to touch the living, in a really bad way. It turns out they have plans and they know about Roberts.
At times, Fades risks overdoing its geek chic. The comedic weekly recap provided by Armstrong’s character at the top of each episode, complete with “nanu nanu” sign off, is a particular case in point. Yet considering how dark the series gets, the desire for some comic relief is understandable.
Lily Loveless in "The Fades."
As a paranormal thriller, Fades is pretty scary for television, creating a creepily convincing supernatural ecosystem. Writer-creator Thorne nicely preys on viewers’ fears of unseen forces, while mostly respecting the show’s internal logic. Although there is quite a bit of teen angst, it is definitely not for youngsters, featuring some flesh-eating and the occasional spot of NYPD Blue style nudity.
While a bit sullen, Iain de Caestecker makes a passable enough rooting interest as Roberts. In contrast, Daniel Kaluuya’s Armstrong is too shticky for adult tastes. However, Sophie Wu (geek famous for Kick-Ass) brings a bright and engaging presence as Jay. Yet it is Johnny Harris who really steals the spotlight as the Byronic Valentine. It is the sort of twitchy character and brooding performance genre fans eat up with a big spoon.
Frustratingly, sometimes the wrong characters do not survive Fades’ first season. Still, given the nature of the show, viewers cannot rule out seeing them again. Tightly helmed by Farren Blackburn and Tom Shankland (at three episodes apiece), it is a polished production that should pull in fans of dark fantasy. Pretty good stuff overall, The Fades premieres this week (1/14) on BBC America’s “Supernatural Saturday.”
Over the course of the film, Alligator Company will take, lose, and regain the fateful hill over and over again. It would get somewhat repetitive if not for the intense warfighting scenes, rendered by Jang in a take-no-prisoners style. Line’s sense of place is so strong, audiences will feel they know every inch of that crummy nub of a hill.
