Fantasia Film Fest Review: The Chaser

The Chaser (2008) aka Chugyeogja imdb Fantasia
Directed by Na Hong-jin
Written by Na Hong-jin, Hong Won-Chan and Lee Shinho

"No screaming!" said the guy to my left, a Fantasia Film Festival acquaintance. We save seats for each other, mock each other's taste in movies, and argue about films.

"It's not a horror film," I protested, not bothering to argue that I am not a screamer, since I am a bigger fraidy-cat than Sylvester in the Porky Pig and Sylvester haunted hotel shorts.

"It's a serial killer film. Same difference."

But he was wrong. The Chaser is quite different. It's not a mystery puzzle to be solved. It's not a spooky horror film with the serial killer as the monster. It is just barely a police procedural, only one that shines a spotlight on the bureaucratic failings of South Korea's justice system (and our own).

Our "hero" is Joong-ho Eom (played by Yun-seok Kim) an ex-cop booted off the force for corruption, who now makes a living as a pimp. (Need I say that it's hard out there for a pimp?) Joong is in money trouble because two of his girls have disappeared after borrowing money from him as an advance. Joong believes that they simply ripped him off, but when he realizes that both girls disappeared after doing out-calls to the same phone number, he becomes suspicious. When the customer calls back, Joong decides to set a trap and sends Mi-jin Kim (played by Yeong-hie Seo) with orders to call Joong with the customer's home address. Mi-jin, a single mother, is home sick, but Joong cajoles her into going.

Joong's trap works after a fashion. He catches the man who has been interfering with his business, Young-min Jee (played by Jung-woo Ha) but does so away from Young-min's home. Worse still, Joong thought that he was trapping a rival pimp, at worst a white slaver, but it quickly becomes clear once the police become involved that Young-min is a serial killer.

The problem is that the accidental way that the killer has been caught, away from his lair and without evidence, makes it very difficult for the police to prove that Young-min is a serial killer. The fact that Joong, an ex-cop, brutalized Young-min before the police got invoved only makes prosecution that much more difficult since the only evidence is Yoong-min's confession which any defence attorney could succesfully argue was violently beaten out of their client.

Joong's frustration is that he is convinced that Mi-jin is still alive, but can get no official help to find her. And so begins a race against time, as the police try to find enough evidence to keep a serial killer in jail and Joong simultaneously tries to find the serial killer's lair to rescue Mi-jin, before the police are forced to release him.

The Chaser is by turns suspenseful, incredibly violent, darkly morbid, and bitterly funny. Joong, by far the best detective in the film, works on the principle that mysteries are solved through a combination of perspiration and inspiration. His assistant pimp Meatball supplies most of the perspiration and some of the best gags in the film.

Some people that I saw the film with found the third act of the film too contrived and manipulative. They may be right, all I can say is that I was quite willing to be manipulated, and this film took me on an emotional journey that no serial killer film has ever taken me on.

As I predicted from the start, there was no screaming from me when I saw this film, just the sound of my heart breaking.

The Dead Sleep Easy

Since I am going to see Lee Demarbre's latest film, Smash Cut, on Saturday night, I thought that I would post my review for The Dead Sleep Easy, one of Lee's previous films. Originally written March 13, 2008, so well before the release of The Wrestler, hence the line about "best English language wrestling film ever." It didn't hold the title for long, but number two ain't bad, because there is a hell of a drop off to All the Marbles.

The Dead Sleep Easy (2007) imdb
http://www.thedeadsleepeasy.com

Quotes taken from an interview by Steve "Rockamaniac" Wilson of MainEventRadio
Interview Audio can be downloaded at http://www.sendspace.com/​file/​ualr20

Directed, Shot and Edited by Lee Demarbre
Written by Ian Driscoll
Produced by Robert Menzies

Cast:
Ian Hodgkinson - The Champ (Vampiro)
Ana Sidel - Maya
Martin Kove - Bob Depugh
Phil Caracas - Carlito
Dave Courtney - Tlaloc
Oren Hawxhurt - Fighter#1 (Luke Hawx aka Altar Boy Luke.)
Aaron Katz - Minuteman #1
Joey Munoz - Bar Bouncer (KAOS)
Talia Russo - Bunny
Aaron Aguilera
Joseph Meehan (Joey Ryan)

*****

Lee Demarbre and Ian Driscoll are a team of Ottawa film makers and Fantasia Film Festival veterans who have previously created Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter and Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace. In 2006, they started following around Ian Hodgkinson aka Vampiro to make a documentary film about his life going from a Thunder Bay kid - homeless on the streets of Montreal, eating out of garbage bins - to being the "Hulk Hogan of Mexico". While they were shooting the documentary (due out later this year) Vampiro told Lee and Ian an idea that he had for a film.

Within a month, they had a script, a budget (pennies) and were shooting The Dead Sleep Easy, a "Mexican Wrestling Gangster Movie" in Guadalaraja with many actual Guadalaraja gangsters in key roles because, "Our Line Producer had never made a movie before and when he read the script and saw Gangsters described in the script and instead of hiring actors to play gangsters, he hired real gangsters!" - Lee Demarbre.

When Lee and Ian came to Montreal to deliver a sneak preview, I HAD to be there. Vampiro? Acting? In a Mexican Wrestling Gangster Movie? Filmed by Canadians? The mind boggled.

Here is what I was expecting: A train wreck. A glorious train wreck. A bad movie that revelled in its badness. (Which is as good a description for their first two films as any.)

I didn't get my train wreck.

And I couldn't be happier.

This film is so dirty, so gritty, it is like a lost 70's film (including the obligatory 70's psychedelic scene.) Every one in the film is a son-of-a-bitch. The nicest character in the film, the one who has been saved, the one who wears white? He got there by shooting his best friend in the face with a shot-gun. This is a film about the damned.

Remember the scene at the beginning of The Wild Bunch where the kids are forcing two scorpions to fight a group of fire ants before setting them all on fire? This film might as well take place in that fire.

Vampiro plays "The Champ", a broken-down, drugged-out former wrestling champion barred for life from wrestling because he killed a man in the ring, now earning his drugs as a mob enforcer. Martin Kove (the evil Karate master from the Karate Kid series) is his psychopathic, Peckinpah-obsessed part-time Videographer, full-time assassin, quasi partner.

While stumbling through life like a drunk lurching from lamp post to lamp post, a cross between Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant and Stacy Keach in Fat City, Vampiro bumps heads with most of the Wrestling Society X roster including notably Joey Ryan, KAOS, Alter Boy Luke and Aaron Aguilera.

A few quick caveats for wrestling fans:

While the film is set in Mexico, don't expect to see high flying Lucha Libre action. The style used is more like a dirty bar room bastardization of Mixed Martial Arts, which fits the tone of the film perfectly.

Oddly, the Champ's fall from grace hinges around a rigged fight that he was supposed to lose and didn't, echoing the story of Daredevil's Dad Battlin' Jack Murdock and countless film noir boxing films. Only where Jack gets killed for costing his mob boss money, the Champ becomes the indentured servant of Dave Courtney's Tlaloc. For me this matched the 70's vibe of the rest of the film in that it hearkened back to the days when kay-fabe was still alive and people could believe that someone would actually bet money on a pro wrestling match. .

Wrestling fans will also note the odd echoes of the lives and tragic deaths of Rikidōzan and Bruiser Brody.

The one place where the film falls down a little bit is in the editing. The pacing and the beats just seem a little off like an out-of-shape fighter with a bit too much flab. And I really don't need to be told that you are flashing back to Then when you are also giving me the flash backs in black and white. It is also somewhat redundant to tell me that I am looking at the Day of the Dead celebrations. Not only is the information unnecessary and redundant, but it works against the more subtle vibe of the rest of the film.

But that's quibbling. Ultimately, this is a quantum leap forward for both Director Lee Demarbre and Writer Ian Driscoll and easily the best English language wrestling film ever - ranking only behind The Foul King and The Calamari Wrestler for the World Title.

Most shockingly? Vampiro can act!

"One reviewer told me it was the best performance by a wrestler in a film since Roddy Piper in They Live." - Lee Demarbre.

Granted, it's not a terribly crowded field, but I would argue that it's the best acting performance by a wrestler in a film ever.

Fantasia Film Fest Review: The Warlords (2007)

The Warlords aka Tau ming chong (2007) imdb Fantasia
Directed by Peter Chan and Wai Man Yip
Written by Tin Nam Chun, Junli Guo, Jiping He, Jianxin Huang, Jo Jo Yuet-chun Hui, Oi Wah Lam, Lan Xu and James Yuen

Looking at the list of writers involved in this project, it is a fraking miracle that this film is as good as it is. While it is no The Banquet, it is a solid historical epic which features the most layered and complex performance of Jet Li's career.

Loosely based on the Shaw Brothers' 1973 film The Blood Brothers as well as the life and death of General Ma Xinyi, this is a tragedy in the Greek or Shakespearean sense. Jet Li plays General Pang Qingyun, a general of the Ching army whose command is slaughtered by the Taiping rebels while Pang's allies the Ho Army watch and do nothing.

Injured, delirious and with no one left to command, Pang is nursed back to health by a beautiful woman who turns out to be the wife of Andy Lau's bandit leader Zhao Er-Hu. When the Ho Army raids Lau's village, steals their supplies and kills one of his men, Jet Li convinces Er-Hu and his lieutenant Zhang Wen-Xiang (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) that if they join the Ching Army they will get the respect, money and guns necessary to protect themselves and their village. Pang, Er-Hu and Zhang swear a blood oath to stand together with death as the penalty for oath-breakers.

This starts Pang on his quest to save his country from itself, building an army from the unwanted, the poor, the brigands. In the process, Pang must fight Imperial politics as much as the enemy Taiping rebels. Each step along the way, Pang has to barter away a little piece of his soul to achieve victory, with Zhang reacting with hero-worshipping approval, while Er-Hu becomes increasingly disgusted.

The down side to working with a star of Jet Li's caliber is that in every role he is Jet Li, bringing with it his quiet heroism and idealism. This film turns that drawback into an advantage by casting Jet Li as a man who does increasingly villainous things for the purest of motives. Like a Chinese Robespierre, Pang is trying to build a free, united China on a pyramid of corpses.

The film that The Warlords reminds me of the most is John Ford's The Searchers.

Like The Searchers, The Warlords starts with a massacre. Both films feature characters who leave their homes on an obsessive quest that seems impossible and takes them years to complete.

John Ford uses John Wayne's iconic, heroic status and subverts it, as the obsessive quest slowly destroys Wayne from within. Jet Li's character in The Warlords follows the same arc, beginning his quest with idealistic purity and finishing just inches from total madness. Both men succeed in their quests, Jet Li's Pang in saving his country, Wayne's Ethan Edwards in rescuing his niece, but in both cases their quest is ultimately futile, because what they saved was the reality and what they wanted to save was an ideal. Both men end their films framed in a doorway that they can no longer cross, because their journeys have turned them into men of war who have no place in the world of peace on the other side of the doorway.

Fantasia Film Fest Review: Mutants (2009)

Despite my intentions to see two other films earlier in the week, this is the first Fantasia film that I have seen at this year's Festival.

Mutants (2009) imdb Fantasia
Directed by David Morlet
Written by David Morlet and Louis-Paul Desanges
David Morlet has also spelled his name as David Morley in the past. Pronounciation of his name stays the same.

In its very first minute, Mutants reminds us that in order to survive the inevitable zombie apocalypse, it is best not to get too attached to anyone or anything.

And of course, the problem is that it is very easy to say that, but much harder to put theory into practice. The difficulty with zombies, besides the fact that they are the tireless, ravenous living dead is that they are monsters with the faces of our loved ones. Random zombies are a problem, but one that can be solved with ruthless application of violence. From Romero's Night of the Living Dead to Robert Kirkland's The Walking Dead the most difficult zombies haven't been the faceless hordes, but the zombies that we knew when they were human, our sons, daughters, parents and lovers.

The zombies being offered in Mutants are viral mutants similar to the ones in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, but where Boyle's film gave us a transformation that was almost simultaneous with infection, Mutants offers a much crueler plight. It imagines a delay between infection to full viral mutation of about four days. The cruelty of a long and painful transformation (in this case strongly reminiscent of Cronenberg's The Fly) is that it offers the illusion that a cure is possible. In this case, the main character, Sonia, is a medical professional. (It is unclear if she is a doctor or a nurse.) Sonia's identity is vested in her belief that any disease can be cured, that her infected lover Marco can be saved and she has secrets that help convince her that a cure is possible, even likely.

This is heresy for zombie affliction afficionados, where the only true cure for infection is immediate amputation, but by flirting with heresy, Mutants asks some compelling questions. In the process, it offers an eloquent elegy to the moral quandry of euthanasia.

At what point is medical treatment crueler than death? At what point has your loved one become so consumed by disease that all that they were and all that they could be have been replaced by the disease? Where does humanity end and death begin?

Bad enough to be faced with those impossible questions, but Morlet ups the ante on Sonia by reminding us that the inevitable zombie apocalypse is not just about the zombies, it is also about the apocalypse - the end of everything. The end of easy transportation, the end of gas, the end of warmth, the end of light, the end of communication, the end of parts, the end of bullets, the end of civility, the end of love and the end of trust.

The film is not perfect. It uses a but too much of the shock-cam technique currently in vogue. There are also a couple of steps in the mutation that make little sense. Mutant zombies losing their hair makes sense, but losing their teeth? Really?

The reason that the zombie apocalypse is inevitable has everything to do with our voracious and insatiable appetite that will eventually overcome and overwhelm our ability to feed it. The zombie apocalypse is the contrast between the death of our ability to feed the hunger and the dark monstrous face of that hunger lying just behind the mask of civility.

David Morel reminds us in Mutants not just of that inevitability, but also that when the end comes it will be both painful and beautiful, and that the barrier between life and death, love and hate, civilization and chaos is not a barrier that is crossed in an instant. It is one that is crossed so slowly and the hair, the blood, the fluids and all the mess of life and living shed in the crossing are so distracting that by the time you know that you have passed the tipping point, it is too late to turn back.

Fantasia Film Festival: The Beginning

The Fantasia Film Festival started yesterday, my favourite film festival in the whole wide world - amongst those that I don't actually run that is.

Fantasia programs the fantastic, the bizarre, the gruesome, the horrible and the just plain weird. They were the first festival in North America to play Ringu. Fantasia was off the J-Horror craze in search of Korea and Thailand before most people even caught on to Japanese Horror as a cool trend.

Tickets are $8.00 or 10 for $70, so I have a list of twenty films to see. A friend of mine (Ken Hwang) just e-mailed me today to tell me that he has a ticket for me for one of the twenty on my list, so I have to pick a 21st film.

Here is my current plan-to-see at Fantasia film list:

Sunday, July 12 7PM Evil Spirit Viy (Korean anthology adaptation with three takes on a classic Russian ghost story.)

Monday July 14 7PM Book of Blood (Clive Barker.)

Wednesday July 16 7:30 Mutants (2 people in love during the Zombie apocalypse - one who is turning and the other who was in the process of turning when medical intervention reversed the process and who is now immune.)

Thursday July 17 7PM The Warlords (Jet Li is defending China and is prepared to be a complete dick in the process - based on HISTORY!) The film that I am seeing with Ken.

Friday July 18 9:25 The Chaser (Ex-cop turned pimp fights a serial killer targetting his hookers.)

Saturday July 18 10PM The Horseman (Australian Death Wish only with nastier weapons and less discrimination on the part of the vigilante. His daughter died doing porn, so anyone involved in the porn community is getting it right in the neck sort of thing.)

Sunday July 19 2:05 20 Century Boys (Manga Adaptation about the secret history of the future)

Sunday July 19 4:45 20 Century Boys 2: Electric Boogaloo The Last Hope (Part two of a trilogy about the secret history of the future.)

Monday July 20 8:10 Coweb (Female bodyguard has client kidnapped, must kill loads of people to get him back.)

Wednesday July 22 7PM Black (Parisian bank robber returns to Africa while being stalked by an African Shaman trying to release the bank robber's tribal super powers.)

Thursday July 23 7:30 Cryptic (Time travel story based on a woman calling her 12 year-old self on the telephone and trying to convince herself to change her present to save her future.)

Friday July 24 7:30 My Dear Enemy (Korean romantic comedy - that would be code for weirdness is about to break out.)

Saturday July 25 1:15 Private Eye (Korean murder mystery set during the 1920's Japaneses Occupation.)

Saturday July 25 6:30 Rough Cut (Gangster who moonlights as a Stunt Man agrees to work on a film with notorious Actor who never pulls his punches, but only if he gets to fight back.)

Sunday July 26 2:00 K-20: Legend of the Mask (About a Robin-Hood vigilante in 1949 Japan in a world where WWII never happened.)

Sunday July 26 4:45 Fireball (Full contact Basketball - TO THE DEATH!)

Monday July 27 7:20 Antique (Korean romantic comedy about a bakery shop run by a retired thug - adapted from the Manga.)

Monday July 27 9:45 I Sell the Dead (19th Century grave robbers in a world with real undead.)

Wednesday July 29 7:30 Trick R Treat (Modern horror anthology set on Hallowe'en.)

Wednesday July 20 9:45 TBA (The Fantasia Closing Film is usually good.)

Hopefully, I will bring back reviews!

Adventures of a Grammar Nazi

I was at Van Houtte getting breakfast (bagel with butter, Earl Grey tea and yogurt with blueberries and mueslix) when I spotted a nice display with two hanging baskets. The top basket had bananas and the bottom basket had some nice Granny Smith (green) apples.

There was a sign that said "Banane et Pomme 40¢", (Banana and Apple 40¢) so I asked as a bit as a joke, "Est-ce que c'est banane et pomme pour 40 sous ou est-ce que c'est banane ou pomme pour 40 sous?" (Is it banana and apple for 40 cents or is it banana or apple for 40 cents?)

This caused incredible confusion. "Oui c'est 40 sous pour les deux." (Yes, it's 40 cents for both.)

"Parfait, je prends les deux pour 40 sous." (Great, I will take both for 40 cents.)

"Non, non, ce'st 40 sous pour chaque." (No, no, they are 40 cents each.)

Which is of course not what the sign said and not what she said originally. Of course what she meant was that both the apple and the banana were 40 cents each, not that they were both 40 cents together, or in French, "Oui, les deux sont 40 sous chaque."

I only ended up buying the apple for 40 cents.

Sign is still wrong though.

The Meaning of Life

I am 42 today.

Happy Birthday me!