Author Topic: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts  (Read 561913 times)

roujin

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #700 on: June 28, 2009, 11:11:21 PM »
roujin turns himself inside out and delivers his 9th verdict

He's A Woman, She's A Man vs. Sumo Do, Sumo Don't


He's A Woman, She's A Man (Peter Chan + Chi Lee, 1994)

It made me laugh. What can I say? This gender-twisting comedy just really made me laugh. Maybe it was the random asides and references to Cantopop stars and the random articles of theirs that people were selling or it was just Leslie Cheung constantly saying "But I'm not gay!!!" It's probably one of the funniest movies I've seen that deals with homo panic. I don't know. I just fell for it. The premise is simple: Leslie Cheung is bigshot producer. He's going out with Carina Lau who is a singer that whose career he helped build up. He feels frustrated in the relationship and decides to find a new singer (a male singer so he won't get involved as he has in the past). Here comes Anita Yuen (in a totally wide-eyed and shiny performance) as a mega fan of the couple. She decides to pose as a man so she can audition. Thru weird turn of events, she/he gets hired, ends up moving in with Leslie Cheung and causes havoc. It's familiar stuff but the performers really sell it for me. Then there's Eric Tsang who's still fat and this time plays a gay elder named Auntie who's kinda regressive but in a weirdly lovable way (there's a scene in a buffet where he picks out what he wants from the line and then points toward a waiter's package LOL). But the film belongs to Leslie Cheung who goes back and forth, locks his room to make sure that his new gay roommate doesn't come in during the night, tears his hair out, wondering if he could possibly be... gay? He's both in love and scared shitless. It's hilarious. Besides all that, it's just fun to see Cheung and Lau back together from Days of Being Wild.


Sumo Do, Sumo Don't (Masayuki Suo, 1992)

I'm sure I've seen a film like this but right now I can only think of anime equivalents. Stuff like Eyeshield 21 and other crap like that. Or dramas like Water Boys (also starring Naoto Takenaka). You know, ragtag team gets together and succeeds at unlikely task. In this film, it's sumo. In Water Boys, it's synchronized swimming. In Eyeshield, it's football. I guess something like Bad News Bears (except I haven't seen that film). There's the hero who reluctantly joins, starts recruiting others with their own fears and goals, whatever. There's a tournament, too, and a possible love interest. They lose at first and then... Well, you know. It's that kind of movie and for that kind of movie, it's okay. The ending is ruined by a totally tone-altering piece of crap song. Naoto Takenaka, how many gems can I discover in your filmography? You're a director, too? Time for auteurist readings!

He's A Woman, She's A Man moves on.

worm@work

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #701 on: June 28, 2009, 11:15:13 PM »
Maybe it was the random asides and references to Cantopop stars and the random articles of theirs that people were selling or it was just Leslie Cheung constantly saying "But I'm not gay!!!"
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But the film belongs to Leslie Cheung who goes back and forth, locks his room to make sure that his new gay roommate doesn't come in during the night, tears his hair out, wondering if he could possibly be... gay? He's both in love and scared shitless. It's hilarious. Besides all that, it's just fun to see Cheung and Lau back together from Days of Being Wild.

Done, I agree. Even without watching the films. Btw, I don't think I've ever seen Leslie Cheung do comedy. This needs to change.

smirnoff

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #702 on: June 29, 2009, 07:16:31 AM »
I wonder this one'll do in the future.

FifthCityMuse

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #703 on: July 07, 2009, 02:04:01 AM »
Eighteen Springs
vs
Shall We Dance(1996)

Eighteen Springs
This is the fairly simple story of a man and a woman who work together. They fall in love, but he doesn’t act soon enough, and things happen. Problems arise, people say the wrong thing, and the romance never reaches the conclusion it perhaps should. It’s a melodrama, but, for the most part, it manages not to fall into the traps of the soap opera.

And that’s one of the best things about it. It plays out, especially in the first half, so, so subtly, and that’s really beautiful. The development of these relationships between the characters is slow and careful, and it paints a picture of love lost.

Except I never felt I was watching a film I hadn’t seen before. And that was a problem for me. This is a story that’s been told before in another film (Written on the Wind, maybe?) and nothing new is really added.

There’s also problems when the melodrama goes over the top. It’s mostly in the scenes with the sister, and when it happens, it goes way, way, way over the top, and its not fun or interesting to watch.

The second half is too long as a rule also, and it’s full of the stuff I mentioned above, the stuff with the sister. This is kinda long. I mean, it’s only just over two hours long, but it could easily lose twenty minutes or so, and would be a far better film. The tone changes also really make it drag.

It has problems with the timeline, and the setting. It’s set in China, in Shanghai and Nanking, I believe, but there’s nothing specific to these places and the culture presented that cement these stories. It would have to be set around 30 years earlier, but it could be set as easily in England or America and nothing major about it would have to be changed. I don’t know if that’s a terrible thing, but it doesn’t feel good.

As for the timeline, well, it starts in the winter of 1933. At the end, we’re told it’s 14 years later, and the only indication we really have of this is the aging of child characters. There’s a few more, I suppose (we do see summer once) and the characters have aged a little by the end, but there’s major stuff missing. LIKE WORLD WAR II. I mean, really. It’s probably the single biggest problem I have with the film.

I make it sound worse than it is. It is a nice, relatively entertaining piece of populist film. But it’s just not that good either. And the problems are kinda major. It also doesn’t seem to have any real heft. There doesn’t seem to be any overriding themes or messages, and while I don’t know if I really need any, it’s kinda disappointing.

Shall We Dance
In an attempt at full disclosure, I will reveal that yes, I have seen the US remake with Richard Gere and J-Lo. I think it was on TV. And I remember it being relatively entertaining, at the least.

Like Eighteen Springs, this is populist entertainment. It’s not setting out to be great art, or change the world, or anything like that. It’s shot and edited pretty conventionally. But it is very entertaining. Really, I had a lot of fun with this. Yeah, it’s a very simple film, about a man and a woman who connect, not in a romantic way, despite initial expectations, and help each other reconnect with their lives.

It’s simple, and it’s really effective.

I don’t think I stopped smiling once during this. It’s just that fun, that nice, that simple and effective. The story develops simply and well, as do the characters, and the actors have really great chemistry, which isn’t obvious at first, but develops with a really slow burn and becomes obvious when it needs to.

There’s also something that works better with this film in terms of the cultural problems related to dancing. An opening voice over explains how dancing is basically shunned in Japan. We then see a middle class, white collar, respectable man being drawn into this world that is on the cultural outside. There’s something compelling in that, and it makes more sense than it does in the US version, where we never quite understand why he’s so uptight about the dancing.

Verdict
This turned out to be a really well matched couple. The ideas are sorta the same between the two, and the intentions. But really, it should be obvious where I stand on this one. It’s a simple film, and I really don’t expect it to go to the end, but Shall We Dance is a fine film, and deserves a spot in the second round.

Melvil

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #704 on: July 07, 2009, 10:01:06 AM »
Nice writeup, FCM. I never knew Shall We Dance was originally a Japanese movie. Who knew! Not that I've seen the remake, but it still sounds like a fun movie.

smirnoff

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #705 on: July 07, 2009, 10:06:54 AM »
Nicely done.

worm@work

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #706 on: July 08, 2009, 01:09:14 AM »

Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie (Sun-Woo Jang, 1997)



I love the audacity of that title and the film starts off on exactly that note proclaiming that it has no script and that none of the actors are professionals and that the entire objective is to make a "bad movie". Having set that up, it ventures into docudrama territory and I guess it ends up being this scathing exposé on this group of alienated, delinquent Korean teens living on the streets of Seoul. The film starts off recruiting them to act in a movie but then ends up just chronicling whatever it is they are upto. This in turn ends up being mostly lots of drugs, begging for money on the streets, doing drugs again, getting girls drunk and then raping them and so on. In the filmmaker's own words:

So, the film really doesn't do much beyond 'documenting' these kids' lives on the streets. It doesn't really investigate the "whys" (not in any depth anyway) nor does it seek to examine or offer any solutions. There is some attempt at drawing some parallels between these kids and other older homeless people living on the streets and the general message I took away was pretty much that both these groups are doomed and I guess juxtaposing these really young kids against these hobos underlines the tragedy of the situation.

When I mentioned earlier that it only chronicles these episodes without really going into the reasons or consequences, it wasn't necessarily a complaint. I always got the sense that the director was truly fascinated with these kids and wanted to just let them be themselves in front of the camera. Let the story tell itself, in some sense. But somehow this strategy did not really work all that well for me in execution. I wasn't as shocked as I was supposed to be, I think, and never felt very connected to these kids and I feel like the point was made long before the end credits were ready to roll.

There are a few scenes that pretty much condemns the adults (law-enforcement officers I think) and makes them out to be misguided and callous and maybe even worse than these kids. And there are allusions to the fact that these kids were misunderstood by the parents and thrown out and so on, but none of this is really examined any more closely than this.

I have the feeling that the filmmaker's intention is to show us that these kids aren't really all bad but are just lost and misguided. Maybe it's the schoolteacher in me but I found myself getting rather impatient with these silly glue-sniffing kids and had this huge urge to give them a much-deserved slap and ask them to pick themselves back up. This was especially true for the girls who seem to be perfectly happy being treated as mere sex objects.

The film does have a few nice moments though. The free-wheeling handheld camera style lends itself well to capturing the energy of youth. Despite the fact that these kids are wayward and doped out most of the time, they still exhibit this vivacity, at least physically, that constantly reminded me of just how young these kids are and how close they are to completely wasting their lives away. There are a couple of scenes where a bunch of these kids are the metro station and each one of them has his or her own specific style when it comes to crossing the turnstiles. Some jump over it, some bend down and crawl underneath it and some just dance their way across it.

The film also uses some crazy anime sequences to depict certain disturbing scenes which I guess is somewhat creative.

But ultimately, I can only mildly recommend the film unless you have a particular interest in drug-addled Korean teenagers!


Cageman (Chi Leung 'Jacob' Cheung, 1992)

So just when I thought I had seen the worst of marginalized Asian people, this movie began with what by its own claim, is a fate worse than living out on the streets - namely living in a cage. Yes, that is exactly what the film is about. It's about a bunch of people who live in cages. But the awesomeness of that kinda wore off when I learnt that the whole cage thing was just a form of low-income housing in Hong Kong (so much for my plans of moving there!). So the movie is basically about a bunch of people who rent these stacked cages and live there since they can't afford better accommodations.

Anyway, so when the movie started off, I got the impression that the film was going to be a scathing exposé (seems to be a theme in this matchup) on the horrible living conditions that these cage people are experiencing. At the very beginning, we learn that one of the residents, a junkie, died in his sleep. Immediately, we see people scrambling to grab whatever he left behind and I figured the idea was that living in a cage was a dog-eat-dog world.

But then, we gradually get introduced to this motley crew of characters who live in this cage complex. There's this old man (I forget just how old he is supposed to be but he's very old) who never gets out of his cage. There's the manager who is in charge of the cages and collecting rent and so on and his son, who seems to be suffering from some kind of mental disability and a whole group of residents with their own quirks. Soon after, we learn that the building owners are about to demolish the structure, rendering these residents homeless.

In the meantime, it also becomes somewhat apparent that living in those cages isn't quite as bad as we initially thought it would be. The residents seem to share a general sense of camaraderie and they end up singing and gambling together and so on and soon the whole place seemed like a pretty jolly good time, despite the uncomfortable sleeping arrangements.

The film sorta wanders about aimlessly like this for a while and eventually turns into an admonition of the corrupt city officials. All of this is handled pretty good-heartedly for the most part. There's some comic relief in the form of a couple of officials who decide to spend a few nights in cages themselves for the sake of publicity.

There's also this side-plot about an ex-con who rents one of the cages and is constantly being harassed by the cops. I guess his character is sort of the main focus and his transformation is what we get to hold on to in terms of the plot but there're also some random scenes involving him that I didn't quite understand.

Anyway, things pretty much turn out the way we expect them to and despite that, the ending did have some impact on me. Unfortunately, the filmmaker chooses not to end the film once the fate of these people is decided but instead has this additional sequence set in a zoo with animals in cages and it all gets a little too heavy-handed at that point.

Verdict

So both films are pretty messy and they could both have used some more judicious editing. Neither of them is particularly remarkable visually and the second one doesn't even have an excuse.

But whereas I quickly forgot most of Timeless Bottomless after watching it, the characters in Cageman had somehow endeared themselves to me. The made-up family in this film felt pretty real and by the end, I was at least a little charmed by some of these interactions, heavy-handed though they may be.

Cageman moves on.

Edit: I am done with social critiques for now. I think I want my next matchup to be pure entertainment!
« Last Edit: July 08, 2009, 09:05:46 AM by worm@work »

smirnoff

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #707 on: July 08, 2009, 07:25:35 AM »
Edit: I am done with social critiques for now. I think I want my next matchup to be pure entertainment!

;D You deserve it. Great write-up.

Thor

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #708 on: July 08, 2009, 09:54:58 AM »
Sounds like you could just change the setting to America and substitute the title "Kids" for "Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie" and you have pretty much the same film...
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edgar00

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Re: 1990s Far East Bracket: Verdicts
« Reply #709 on: July 08, 2009, 09:59:59 PM »
Wait, you don't want to move to Hong Kong now? Sheesh, you ask for too much.
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