Category: Narrative

By Joe Bendel. It is like a film noir in the middle of an Andrew Wyeth painting, except these are the plains of Saskatchewan rather than the hardscrabble fields of Maine. It is even as quiet as a canvas at times. That can be both good and bad, but at least it suggests some integrity of vision on the part of screenwriter-director Jefferson Moneo when giving his prior short film the feature treatment. Rural Canada gets dark and dangerous in Moneo’s Big Muddy, which screens this weekend at the Catskills’ Mountain Cinema.

Martha Barlow and her current man, Tommy Valente, are no Bonnie and Clyde. Frankly, they are pretty crummy people, who specialize in liquoring up poor slobs to set them up for subsequent home invasion robberies. At least Barlow loves her moody son Andy. She just cannot help surrounding him with chaos. She ain’t seen nothing yet.

Unbeknownst to Barlow, her former lover Donovan Fournier is out to find her, having escaped from his prison farm. Even more ominously, Buford Carver, the horse race fixing gangster who came somewhere between Fournier and Valente, is back in town with a new horse and all kinds of bad intentions. Worried about the influence he exerts over her son, Barlow agrees to meet him at the track, but when Valente crashes the party with a gun and a poorly thought through plan things get very bad, especially for Carver’s prized horse. Suddenly, Barlow and her son are on the run, with a satchel full of Carver’s cash and a couple of highly irritated gangsters on their tail.

The two twains of Muddy will meet in Barlow’s rustic hometown, where she and Andy crash with her less than thrilled old man, Stan. In fact, Moneo handles the intersection of the two major plot lines quite deftly. However, he sure loves character-establishing scenes of Andy and Grandpa stringing up barbed wire fences. The truth is an editor with a free hand could easily trim fifteen or twenty minutes of Muddy without any ill consequences, but that is hardly unusual these days.

Happily, Muddy features the craggy gravitas of Stephen McHattie as Grandpa Stan. As usual, he commands the screen with his forceful badassery. On the other hand, Nadia Litz and David La Haye are not bad per se, but they make the strangest looking couple as Barlow and Fournier. James Le Gros is also reliably villainous, but his Carver seems a bit restrained when it comes to chewing the scenery and talking the trash.

Regardless, Moneo’s strong feel for the lonely, howling plains and Craig Trudeau’s stylish cinematography give Muddy a distinctive pastoral-noir vibe. It can be a bit slow, but it delivers when it needs to. Those who enjoy small town thrillers should find it worth seeing. Recommended accordingly, it has its premiere New York theatrical run this weekend (3/6-3/8) at Mountain Cinema and also just released this week on DVD.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on March 6th, 2015 at 1:24pm.

By Joe Bendel. Considering what debased currency did to the Roman Empire, the Joseon king is right to be concerned about an upsurge in counterfeit silver in circulation. However, it is highly debatable whether Kim Min, a.k.a. Detective K, and his shticky sidekick are the right people to investigate. They dive head-first into the case nonetheless in Kim Sok-yun’s Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island, which opens today in Queens.

Even in the Joseon era, no good deed goes unpunished. As a reward for his brilliant service, Detective K has been banished to the provincial coast. He understands it is just a temporary political thing, but it provides a handy excuse to rebuff young Da-hae. Desperate to find her missing sister Do-hae, she swims the channel every morning to cook and clean for the so-called detective, hoping he will take on the case. Eventually, she sets out to find Do-hae herself. Unfortunately, by the time Det. K grows alarmed by her prolonged absence, he is so deeply embedded on our hate-list, he will probably never redeem himself.

Of course, it is the counterfeit silver that really motivates Kim Min to sneak away from his exile. Naturally, this leads to trouble with the authorities, but at least one high-ranking official will cover for him. His investigation soon brings him to the wild and woolly Japanese port colony that processes most of Joseon’s silver imports. There Detective K encounters Hisako, the femme fatale courtesan, who is either a lethal villain or an alluring ally. Only time will tell. However, the pressure and guilt will quickly mount for Detective K when he realizes the disappearances of Da-hae, Do-hae, and hundreds of other young nobi slave girls are somehow related to the silver counterfeiting ring.

There is something a little off about Lee Nam-gyu and Kim Soo-jin’s screenplay when it makes us despise the franchise character. It is really not Kim Myung-min’s fault, but he never conveys any spark of life as Detective K. For his part, the rubber faced character actor Oh Dal-su continues to be Michael Caine-level busy. Despite a little mugging, he is likable enough as the put-upon sidekick, Seo Pil. On the other hand, Lee Chae-eun and Hwang Chae-won are unusually charismatic and painfully heartrending as Da-hae and Do-hae, respectively. At least for pure entertainment, Lee Yeon-hee scorches up the screen as Hisako.

Nobody respects Korean cinema more than we do here, but the not infrequent habit of putting tiny little girls in positions of horrifying peril has become a too familiar custom better honored in the breach than the observance. It makes it difficult to enjoy the action and mayhem. Nevertheless, Detective K has some impressively mounted set piece sequences and several highly effective supporting turns. Recommended for those who enjoy broad comedy mixed with intrigue, Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island opens today (3/6) at the AMC Bay Terrace in Bayside, Queens.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on March 6th, 2015 at 1:23pm.

By Joe Bendel. For young Anna Sasaki, coming of age is a particularly dramatic process, in a dark psychological kind of way. She is like a character out of Daphne du Maurier or Mary Roberts Rinehart novels, who has been sent to spend the summer in a bucolic marshland that could have been painted by the Impressionists. Nobody would be better suited to realize her new environment than the Studio Ghibli team, but alas, this will be their final release for the foreseeable future. While it lacks the tragic sweep of its immediate predecessors (Princess Kaguya and The Wind Rises), Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s When Marnie Was There is an appropriately intimate goodbye that packed the house for the opening night of the 2015 New York International Children’s Film Festival.

Sasaki is far too sensitive to make friends easily with her classmates. Her stress-aggravated asthma does not help, either. After a particularly severe attack, Sasaki’s mother Yoriko sends her to stay with her extended relatives, kindly old Kiyomasa and Setsu Oiwa. However, as a foster child, Sasaki has difficulty accepting any of them as family, including Yoriko, despite their genuine concern.

To humor Setsu, she makes a few half-hearted efforts to befriend some of the village girls her age, but Sasaki prefers to make sketches on her own. One of her favorite subjects is Marsh House, an abandoned mansion only intermittently accessible during low tides. Strangely though, a young girl named Marnie seems to live there with her ominously gothic servants. Sasaki and Marnie are drawn to each other like lonely kindred spirits. At last, each feels they have finally found a true friend. Yet, Marnie’s penchant for vanishing without a trace confuses and sometimes hurts Sasaki.

It does not take much deduction or intuition to figure WMWT is some sort of supernatural story, but it still holds some profoundly resonant secrets. It certainly looks like a Studio Ghibli film, which means it is lushly gorgeous. As with The Secret World of Arrietty, his previous film as a director (also based on a British YA novel), Yonebayashi fully captures the beauty and malevolent power of the natural world. Frankly, it is rather impressive how quickly and yet how smoothly he can change the vibe from sunny pastoral to psychological suspense. There is even a scene in a supposedly haunted grain silo that evokes the mission tower staircase in Vertigo, fittingly enough in a film featuring a titular character named Marnie.

WMWT is a deeply humanist film, brimming with forgiveness and empathy. Through her POV, we will acutely understand how coming to terms with the past will allow Sasaki to carry on and embrace life. As a potential sign-off from Studio Ghibli, that’s not bad. Amongst their storied output, it probably ranks somewhere in the middle, but had it come from just about any other animation house, it would represent their crowning achievement. Granted, the opening act is a little slow getting it in gear, but overall, it is remarkably astute emotionally and refreshingly life-affirming. Highly recommended, When Marnie Was There screens again next Saturday (3/7) at the SVA Theatre, as part of this year’s NYICFF.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on March 4th, 2015 at 10:12pm.

By Joe Bendel. Showa Fujishima has made just about every parenting mistake a father can make and invented some that are uniquely his own. Not surprisingly, he really hasn’t been around much to see the results. At least that allows him to cling to a few willful misconceptions regarding Kanako. However, when his estranged ex-wife begrudgingly requests the ex-cop’s help finding their missing daughter, he learns far more than he bargained for in Tetsuya Nakashima’s The World of Kanako, which screens during the 2015 edition of Film Comment Selects.

Prepare to have your head messed with. Nakashima will fracture his timeline nearly beyond recognition and do his best to represent Fujishima’s warped perspective. The former copper now working as a rent-a-cop always had anger management issues, which directly led to his personal and professional disgrace. He is supposed to take drugs for his temper and mood swings, but they do not seem to be working, even though they might somewhat skew his perception of reality.

Kanako has already been missing for five days before Fujishima’s ex finally asks for his help. Intuitively, he assumes her disappearance is linked to the punky gang kids she has been hanging with, which is largely correct, but his presupposition that Kanako is an innocent victim will be rudely disabused. He soon learns she is up to her neck in drugs and pimping out classmates to well-heeled pedophiles. She was also apparently somehow mixed up in the suicide of her classmate Ogata. We will learn just exactly how so in flashbacks seen through the eyes of Boku, a secondary POV character, whose experiences with Kanako will parallel those of poor Ogata.

Meanwhile, Fujishima’s hostile former colleagues are more than happy to treat him as a suspect in a gangland-style killing perpetrated at the minimart he was ostensibly guarding. It turns out Kanako’s world is a small world when links turn up suggesting a connection between the convenience store massacre and her disappearance. Fujishima is in for a lot of pain and humiliation, but he will deal out plenty more to anyone he considers a potential suspect or accomplice.

Man, Kanako is dark, even by the standard Nakashima set in his previous films, Confessions and Memories of Matsuko. However, unlike the seamlessly constructed escalation of Confessions, WoK is a bit of a rat’s nest, compulsively flashing forward and backwards and liberally tossing unreliable perceptions or downright hallucinations to the point where many viewers will just drop the narrative thread and stop caring altogether, despite the occasional tongue-in-cheek hat-tips to 1970s exploitation cinema. The form of the film is enough to give you a headache, separate and apart from the rampant cruelty it depicts. Based on Akio Fukamachi’s novel, WoK is a nihilistic indictment of just about everything—that’s nihilism spelled with a capital “F” and a capital “U.”

To his credit, Kôji Yakusho doubles down over and over again as the violently erratic Fujishima. It is a messy, let-it-all-hang-out performance, but Yakusho takes it to such dark places, it is ultimately rather soul-scarring. Nana Komatsu is ethereally evil as the deceptively innocent looking Kanako, while Satoshi Tsumabuki chews the scenery with swaggering glee as Det. Asai, the sucker-sucking cop who apparently thinks he’s Kojack. Ai Hashimoto manages to add a thimble full of humanity to the film as Kanako’s estranged and disgusted middle school friend Morishita, but such figures of decency are few and far between in Kanako’s world. Frankly, it is hard to fully judge Kanako’s former homeroom teacher, Rie Higashi, but (Matsuko star) Miki Nakatani’s performance is truly riveting and maybe even redemptive.

If this is what life is really like for Japanese middle and high school students, I would immigrate if I were a parent. It is hard to imagine a more exhausting film than WoK, for reasons of both style and content. It is clearly the work of a genuine auteur, who does not get his just international due, but Nakashima really demands a great deal of indulgence this time around. Lacking the tightness of Confessions and the pure gut-wrenching emotional payoff of Matsuko, it just starts to feel like it is piling it on after a while. For those who enjoyed cult hits like Confessions, Lady Snowblood, Audition, and the real Oldboy, but found them too artificially optimistic, WoK will give you the straight shot of bile you crave. Recommended accordingly for ardent Nakashima admirers, The World of Kanako screens this Thursday (3/5), at the Walter Reade Theater, concluding this year’s Film Comment Selects.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on March 4th, 2015 at 10:11pm.

By Joe Bendel. Even if you believe “violence is never the answer and what the world really needs is more love and understanding,” just keep it to yourself. Everly does not have time for warm and fuzzy liberal new age platitudes and we do not want to hear them. She is simply too busy worrying about escape and payback. For several years, she was enslaved as a prostitute by the Yakuza, but now she will try to shoot her way out of their fortified brothel. It is not a well thought out  plan, but at least she will be able to take a lot of bad guys with her in Joe Lynch’s Everly, which opens this Friday in targeted markets.

Everly used to be the favorite of the kingpin, Taiko, but not anymore. An honest cop also lost his head over her. Taiko had it boxed up and presented to her. She had agreed to testify for the late detective, but obviously that will not be happening. Taiko’s men were supposed to do their worst to her, but she was able to stash a gun in the toilet bowl. Bullets will fly—and they will keep flying, but Everly is not immune to them. In fact, she starts the film pretty dinged up, but she is able to patch herself up and keep going.

Unfortunately for him, one of Taiko’s bean-counters gets gut-shot in the first volley. There is clearly no way he will make it. Much to her surprise, the dying paper-pushing gangster offers her some helpful strategic consultation as he slowly expires. Acting on his advice, she makes a risky play, arranging a pretext for her mother and the daughter she never knew to pick up a bag of traveling money from Taiko’s high-rise of hedonism-turned war zone.

To their credit, Lynch and screenwriter Yale Hannon understand the point of a film like this and therefore never cheapen it with a disingenuous take-away about the supposed dangers of firearm possession or the folly of vengeance taking. Taiko and his associates need to die—period. Frankly, some bits are rather disturbingly explicit, particularly those involving the “Sadist” played by the classy Togo Igawa (the first Japanese member of the Royal Shakespeare Company), but that makes it extra satisfying when they get theirs.

It should also be noted that the forty-eight year old Salma Hayek looks all kinds of dangerous as Everly. She is in tremendous shape and shows real action chops, but in a grittier, less cartoony way. She conveys the well-armed rage of a desperate mother, which makes each showdown deeply primal. There are real stakes in Everly—and plenty of blood, but her relatively quiet scenes with Akie Kotabe as the dying suit are some of the film’s best.

We have often lamented the dearth of legitimate female action stars in Hollywood and mainstream indie movies. It is so bad, Meryl Streep has laughably been suggested for the female Expendables film in development. With Everly, Hayek blasts herself into contention to lead the whole darned shooting match. Despite its obvious debt of inspiration to Gareth Huw Evans’ The Raid, it is an old school, deliciously sleazy revenge thriller that always delivers the goods right to your doorstep and never expects a tip. Highly recommended for fans of exploitation action, Everly is now available on VOD via iTunes and opens this Friday (2/27) in selected cities.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on February 25th, 2015 at 9:59pm.