Film Freak Central

The Hangover Part II (2011) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Craig Mazin & Scot Armstrong & Todd Phillips
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw I guess it says something about picking up speed at the bottom of that proverbial slippery slope that I thought The Hangover Part II was consistently funny and pleasantly vile throughout, and that the only time I felt genuinely offended was during the closing-credits snapshot montage, wherein Eddie Adams's infamous VC execution photograph is re-enacted in a digital tableau mort. That's the line, I guess, and kudos in a heartfelt way to director Todd Phillips and company for finding a lower place to draw it. Until then, The Hangover Part II is a vaguely linear instalment of Jackass, mapping the odd longitudes of male friendship set loose in fleshpot/den of iniquity Bangkok, the Asian equivalent of the first film's Las Vegas; where the original tackles that Sodom's sin-of-choice prostitution, this likewise spends some time with transvestitism and sex-trafficking. Ugly? Well, it's not pretty--but it is pretty funny as it reunites pretty boy Phil (Bradley Cooper), sociopath Alan (Zach Galifianakis), non-descript every-guy Doug (Justin Bartha), and dentist Stu (Ed Helms), for whose wedding the boys have reconvened some ill-defined months after the events of the previous film. Along for the ride this time is adorable little-bro-of-the-bride Teddy (Mason "son of Ang" Lee), who has the de facto Dragon Daddy issues as a Stanford pre-med and concert cellist and who, of course, will go through a heart-warming transformation through the loving attention of unbridled hedonism, drug abuse, organized crime, and mutilation. Oh, and there's a fellating, drug-dealing monkey in a denim Rolling Stones vest. Ah, Bangkok.

Chocolate (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring Yanin Vismitananda, Hiroshi Abe, Pongpat Wachirabunjong, Ammara Siripong
screenplay by Nepalee & Matthew Chukiat Sakveerakul
directed by Prachya Pinkaew

by Bryant Frazer If Prachya Pinkaew's 2003 Ong-bak became a worldwide hit partly on novelty value--star Tony Jaa was a new face, and Muay Thai was sufficiently under-represented in martial-arts movies to come across as a fresh new fighting style--then Chocolate is a logical next career move for the director. After all, how better to one-up your discovery of a lean, mean, ass-kicking machine than with another dazzling kickboxer who just happens to be a girl?

The Protector (2005) + The Covenant (2006)

Tom yum goong
***/****
starring Tony Jaa, Petchtai Wongkamlao, Bongkoj Khongmalai, Xing Jing
screenplay by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee & Napalee & Piyaros Thongdee and Joe Wannapin
directed by Prachya Pinkaew

THE COVENANT
½*/****
starring Steven Strait, Sebastian Stan, Laura Ramsey, Taylor Kitsch
screenplay by J.S. Cardone
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Tony Jaa is a bad motherfucker. There's a moment in his latest export The Protector where it appears as though he's killed someone with his penis (lo, how I would love to avoid that epitaph), and in the meantime, he dispatches foes with the heedless joy of obvious predecessor Jackie Chan (who has a cameo in the film shot so ineptly that it suggests a Jackie Chan impersonator smeared with Vaseline). Alas, there's a plot (something about the kidnapping of two elephants, one of which is turned into a gaudy tchotcke in an evil dragon lady's den of inequity), too, told through a lot of howlingly incompetent narrative chunks you could seemingly rearrange in any order with no tangible disruption of sense. (The Butchers Weinstein may of course be partly to blame.) The film is easily the funniest, most exhilaratingly ridiculous picture in a year in which Snakes on a Plane aspired to the same camp/cult heights, and it does it the only way that you can: by being deadly serious.

Three Extremes II (2002) - DVD

3 Extremes II
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
Memories ***½/****
starring Kim Hye-Soo, Chung Bo-Seok
written and directed by Kim Jee-woon
The Wheel **/****
starring Suwinit Panjamawat, Komgichi Yuttiyong, Pongsanart Vinsiri
screenplay by Nitas Singhamat
directed by Nonzee Nimibutr
Going Home **½/****
starring Leon Lai, Eric Tsang, Eugenia Yuan
screenplay by Jojo Hui/Matt Chow
directed by Peter Ho-Sun Chan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The vogue for Asian pop culture is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we have irrefutable proof that, aside from maybe that of France, Asian cinema has eclipsed the West's in terms of consistency, potency, and sheer aesthetic brio. And yet, the fact that so much of Asia's more subdued product is often shunted aside for the nasty, brutish, and weird has certain negative consequences. Trolling the shelves of my local indie video store, I was a bit distressed to discover a second-tier Japanese "extreme" title insultingly promoted as being from "The Most Perverted Country on Earth"--a conclusion to which you might not jump if you peppered your Takashi Miike viewings with some Naomi Kawase or Hirokazu Kore-eda. Would you judge American culture entirely through the prism of Larry Flynt and Hostel? Does Italian film begin and end with Cannibal Holocaust and Strip Nude for Your Killer?

Alexander (2004)

*/****
starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto
screenplay by Oliver Stone and Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis
directed by Oliver Stone

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Oliver Stone's Alexander is packed tight to the girders with catchphrases like "By the sweet breath of Aphrodite" and "By Apollo's eye" and "By Dionysus yours is the very soul of Prometheus!" It's stuffed to the gills with sword-and-sandal histrionics and props that become kitsch artifacts the instant they're rolled out for display in this awards season's gaudiest rummage sale. If it's not going to set anybody's codpiece on fire, Alexander at least lays claim to being one of the funniest movies of the year. It would have worn the title Oliver! more comfortably, opening as it does with Virgil's "fortune favours the bold" and ending, after a ridiculously long time, with the not-stunning revelation that what Stone has done is imagine the travails of a fourth-century B.C. Macedonian king as his very own. Conspiracies abound, popularity in the court of public opinion fades, bottomless campaign budgets are squandered in faraway lands for mysterious personal reasons, Oedipus rears his travel-worn head, and gay subtext begins to feel a little homophobic because it's subtext. Rosario Dawson in all her animalized glory? No problem. Colin Farrell giving Jared Leto a little peck on the cheek? Not in this house, buddy.

Film Freak Central does the Sixth Aurora Asian Film Festival

June 11, 2003|by Walter Chaw There's a genuine sense of community engendered by the Aurora Asian Film Festival, down on East Colfax where a great deal has been done to make an old community feel intimate and inviting. Old-growth trees dot the sidewalks and nice cobbled walks bisect the intersections. A lot of construction along Colfax reminds that this area may boom if we ever get Democratic leadership back in office, and a lot of uniformed police officers remind that until we do, economic revitalization is sort of holding its breath down here. On the last night of the festival, I moderated a Q&A with director Gil Portes after an exceedingly well-received screening of his tedious film Small Voices; just before that, my wife and I had dinner at my favourite diner (Pete's Kitchen) and then dessert at a little Mexican bar across the way that not only had no waitresses who spoke English, but also no menus (and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes playing in Spanish on a beat-up television (it's better that way)). Nothing like a little cultural displacement to get the juices flowing.

DIFF '02: The Damned

Zatracení
**½/****
starring Jan Plouhar, Jan Révai, Isabela Bencová, Dana Vávrová
written and directed by Dan Svátek

by Walter Chaw The first drug-themed film to be shot in the Kingdom of Thailand, Czech director Dan Svátek's The Damned is a handheld, vérité version of Return to Paradise (or Brokedown Palace, or Midnight Express) as two Czech nationals find themselves adrift in an island nirvana before being spirited away to a third-world prison. A handful of gritty, genuinely affecting Blair Witch moments, aided immeasurably by a gorgeously vigorous performance from Czech star Jan Révai, lend the picture an H-tinted immediacy and, now and again, a taste of the true horror of draconian drug laws to foreign nationals accustomed to broader freedoms--or, at the least, justice that is neither so swift nor so sure. (The sharpest twist of the screw comes as a woman informs a young heterosexual man just imprisoned that his days of vaginal sex are a distant memory.) Never a pretty picture, The Damned heightens the grimness of its setting with its jittery DV medium, achieving at once an intimacy and colour-bleached desolation (note a moonlit-suicide with blood cast jet-black) that transcends its amateurish score and melodramatic instincts. (The worst moment arrives when it's revealed--none-too-subtly--that a prisoner is reading the collected works of Samuel Beckett.) Missteps and amateurishness aside, The Damned is a promising work that bodes well for Svátek as well as for the DV medium, which, with the dual triumphs this year of 24 Hour Party People and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, appears to be coming into its own.

Jan Dara (2001)

*½/****
starring Suwinit Panjamawat, Santisuk Promsiri, Christy Chung, Eakarat Sarsukh
screenplay by Nonzee Nimibutr, Sirapak Paoboonkerd, based on the novel The Story of Jan Dara by Utsana Phleungtham
directed by Nonzee Nimibutr

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It's a testament to the failure of Nonzee Nimibutr's Jan Dara that it contains parental sex, adolescent sex, inter-generational sex, lesbian sex, light bondage sex, even ice-cube sex--and still manages to wear out its welcome. You'd think that with all that screwing, you couldn't help but be a little titillated, but after half-an-hour of its melodramatic excesses it wears on you so heavily that you may decide you have a headache and just go to bed. Sure, Jan Dara contains the sordid detail and shocking revelations that make for really good melodrama, but it turns them all on their head: Instead of releasing the madness that lurks beneath the surface, it chastely peels away the hysterical rind to suck on the virginal fruit beneath. For the sensualist likes of me, this is totally unacceptable, as it takes what could have been a rakish romp and makes it a hypocritical object lesson in the virtues of clean living.