Crush and Blush (Misseu Hongdangmu) Miss Carrot 미쓰 홍당무 [2008] • South Korea

A career making performance from Kong Hyo-jin. This an intelligent Korean comedy, slightly risqué, that wins with wit, good acting, and an award winning screenplay filled with surprises. A number of times it will set you up to dare it to go somewhere, then it will go there and you'll applaud the way it's delicately handled. There is a lot of frank adult humor in the presence of a child so delicacy is warranted. Props to young actress Woo Seo for taking it all in stride, reminding us that kids are usually hip to many of the things adults think they should be protected from. Kong, a tiny woman who somehow makes herself look fat with facial expressions alone, and who's not afraid to look unattractive, is surprisingly accomplished in her comic timing. She plays a frumpy and unpopular high school teacher who blushes easily and is obsessed with one of her fellow teachers. The director seems to know all the cheap ways to make us laugh but instead of utilizing them she steps around them and shows us a sardonic wit behind the humor on the surface. This is both smart and funny. It's not a goof-ball comedy even though it might look like one from time to time.

Kong plays a teacher, Me-sook, with a mad crush on a married colleague, a crush that started when she was a student of his so now it's reached the level of obsession. She discovers he is having an affair with another woman so she forms an alliance with the man's daughter, Yoo-ri, an unpopular girl who attends the school where they teach, to sabotage the affair and, as far as Yoo-ri is concerned, save his marriage and keep the girl's family together. Of course Me-sook just wants the mistress out of the way so she can have the married man to herself. Things get complicated as Me-sook becomes friends with Yoo-ri and her true intention of destroying the affair and the marriage is found out. Me-sook is so delusional she thinks the man wants to be with her as much as she wants to be with him and she's doing him a favor by getting both the mistress and the wife out of the way. Amidst all the scheming a tender side of Me-sook's character's comes out in her budding relationship with Yoo-ri. The two outcasts find something in each other they weren't getting elsewhere and it makes for a nice, underdog-makes-good, uplifting thread as the film develops to its conclusion. 

Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Thirst, Lady Vengeance) has a co-writing credit and might be responsible for the daring tendencies in some of the dialog but it's not just a well-written film. All of the performances are good and the direction is assured. This is a winner.

★★★
Director: Kyoung-mi Lee
Starring: Hyo-jin Kong, Eun-jin Bang, Woo-seul-hye Hwang, Jong-hyeok Lee, Woo Seo
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Ardor 밀애 (Milae) The Deep Love [2002] • South Korea

This started out very promising with a scene where a husband's lover visits the married couple's home and announces her position with frightening authority—on Christmas day, no less. After that it just rolls along with violins, heavy sighs and a plot that takes too long to unfold. The couple move to a small town to try and start over. The wife is too broken to go along and begins an affair with a local womanizer. It's all about sex and forgetting what happened, but there's not enough substance to get the viewer caught up in the emotional goings on. Everything is predictable and thinly plotted. Kim Yun-jin (from Lost) gives a decent performance but the direction of the film is very weak.

★★
Director: Byun Young-Ju
Starring: Yunjin Kim, Jong-won Lee, Seung-Ri Ha, Min-kyeong Kim, Seong-Yong Kye
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Ad Lib Night 아주 특별한 손님 (Aju teukbyeolhan sonnim) (2006) • South Korea

Yoon-ki Lee is a sit back and observe kind of auteur, a method he used to great effect when he directed Kim Ji-su in This Charming Girl. There is no one the caliber of that actress here, and character studies need strong actors to make them shine. Han Hyo-ju, the lead actress in Ad Lib Night is charming and competent, if perhaps a little low-key, but the film focuses on too many of her ad-lib family members at the expense of a clear center, spreading the interest too thin.

The story is intriguing, though. Han Hyo-ju plays a young woman enlisted by two men to play the role of a dying man's estranged daughter. She looks just like the dying man's real daughter and the two men assume she can fill in undetected because the dying man's mind and eyesight are decaying rapidly. The men want to give the dying man his last wish of seeing his daughter before he passes. It's unclear why the girl accepts the challenge or why she ends up taking it more seriously than the real family members do, or expect her to. Her revelation at the end of the film is more like a postscript than a movie explaining motivation.

The film is slow paced, getting a little lost in the middle amidst the family gathering, but there's nothing deal-breakingly wrong with the film. If it had been more tightly controlled, the revelation at the end might have tied things up with better results. I will probably watch it again, as I am a big fan of This Charming Girl and the director's 2008 film My Dear Enemy. I think knowing the girl's motivation from the beginning may result in a different viewing experience.

★★★
Director: Yoon-ki Lee
Starring: Hyo-ju Han, Il-hwa Choi, Ju-bong Gi, Jung-ki Kim, Young-min Kim

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April Story 四月物語 (Shigatsu monogatari) [1998] • Japan

A sweet slice of life portrait of a girl's transition from a high school in Japan's northern countryside to university in Tokyo. It's a series of vignettes that begins with her family seeing her off and ends with a reveal of why she went to this particular university. In between we watch her move into her new apartment, cook meals for herself, meet her neighbors and classmates, buy a bike, and browse a bookstore. It may not sound like much but it's very well crafted. Takako Matsu is as endearing as can be. It was a pleasure to see her, as a teenager, play this naive young girl after having recently seen her, at thirty-two, play an archetypal Japanese woman in Villon's Wife.

This is a short film, at just over an hour, that doesn't attempt much more than capturing a few moments in the life of a girl who is not only changing her outward surroundings but also following her inward desires. The reason she chose to go to the university in Tokyo is because her unrequited crush on a boy one year her senior is attending it. The film could have been longer and explored their relationship but then it wouldn't have ended as poetically as it does right at the moment they meet. Broken umbrellas, a rainstorm, and a barrel full of young love, idealism, and hope. Simply beautiful.

★★★★
Director: Shunji Iwai
Starring: Takako Matsu, Seiichi Tanabe, Kahori Fujii, Rumi, Kazuhiko Kato
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Breathe In, Breathe Out 深呼吸の必要 (Shinkokyu no hitsuyo) [2004] • Japan

This is a feel good ensemble piece that doesn't do anything special except offer a couple hours quality time spent in Okinawa. The performances are all quite good despite a cliched script. It's about a group of six or seven people who are escaping something and come to cut sugar cane for a month in the countryside. When they are just hanging out and playing around it's a lot of fun but each time it tries to get dramatic and the characters reveal what it is they are escaping from, you gotta roll your eyes. It's not that big a deal, though. The discourses are short and the director seems to know that the drama isn't the selling point. It's the bonding of some drifting souls with each other and with their marvelous Okinawan host family. The film doesn't aim very high and is better for it because it does seem to hit right what it's aiming for. A nice diversion from more serious films.


★★★★
Director: Tetsuo Shinohara
Starring: Sayaka Kaneko, Karina, Saburo Kitamura, Sayaka Kuon, Masami Nagasawa, Hiroki Narimiya, Nao Omori, Shosuke Tanihara
IMDb 7.0/10 85 votes

The Road 芳香之旅 (Fang xiang zhi lu) [2006] • China

I'm continuing my Zhang Jingchu marathon and it's going well. This may be her best and most challenging role yet, and it comes from very early in her career. When she is given a starring role (Night and Fog, Red River) she really shines, seeming less remarkable when she plays a supporting role (Overheard, Protégé, Beast Stalker). Here she plays a character who goes from a teenager to an old lady over the course of a film that spans more than four decades. These kinds of roles come along every so often for actors and actresses, their success relying quite a bit on makeup—which in this case is pretty good for such a low budget film—but the challenge, one which Zhang seems to rise to, is also to convince us that the character has grown and changed along with the events of the film.

Zhang is probably weakest as a teenager, not because she doesn't look the part or do it well, it's more like she is so good it's annoying. She's going at 150 miles an hour constantly and is just a little too charming. Moving along we see her as: a young woman coming to terms with her sexual desire amidst a conservative society; a dutiful wife in an arranged marriage; a middle-aged woman coming to grips with the challenges and changes in her marriage; and finally an older woman dealing with tragedy and a society that seems to have fully left her behind. She is better and more convincing with each progression.

Of course it helps when playing this kind of role if the film is good, and this one is beautiful. Filmed in the Yunnan Province of China, the cinematography is breathtaking, the story a poignant one. The film begins in the mid 1960s when the spirit of the Communist Revolution was still high and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution hadn't kicked in. Zhang plays bus ticket girl, Li Chunfen. The bus driver, played wonderfully by comedian exploring serious film roles Wei Fan, though much older than Li, has a crush on her (like almost everybody else). Li's affection, however, is for a frequent passenger, Dr. Liu, who's been transferred to Yunnan because his family was rich and he's a bit of an intellectual, qualities that are increasingly suspect as the Cultural Revolution begins its life. The doctor has been sent to a hard labor camp and when Li sneaks out to meet him one night and is caught, things change dramatically for her. She is forced into an arranged marriage with the bus driver who uses his clout with the local party leaders to help her avoid a fate worse than the surface level crime of losing face and bringing shame upon herself.

I don't want to give a complete play by play of the storyline, suffice to say The Road is not only a personal journey and a love story—a really touching one, it turns out—it's also an educational story for those of us unfamiliar, as a portrait of changing times in China, lovingly told. The "Old Days" are seen as both good and bad, depending on your place in society or point of view, but most noteworthy is how both sides are presented without judgement. It's a tone poem, an ode, to the complexity that is recent Chinese history. The film takes us from a time when a sense of community and shared values were alive, through the violence and upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, and into modern times where some celebrate the loosening of a moral structure and others remember it fondly. And it does it without any political agenda. It's beautiful. Bravo.

★★★★
Director: Jiarui Zhang
Starring: Wei Fan, Yuan Nie, Jingchu Zhang, Jong Lin
IMDb 7.2 (185 votes)
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Air Doll 空気人形 (Kuki ningyo) [2009] • Japan

If you're thinking: "Oh, those wacky Japanese. A movie about a blow-up doll who, keenly aware that her function is to provide sexual pleasure, comes to life. That'll be fun!", you will be surprised, if not disappointed, by this film. Du-na Bae does a few scenes in her birthday suit, and spends most of the rest of the film in cute little outfits with very short skirts—one of them being the maid's uniform you see in the poster—but there isn't much that's erotic, let alone prurient, about this film at all. It's sad and melancholy. And innocent.

There are three things that contribute to the superbity (yep, I'm going with it) of this film. The first is the cinematography by Mark "Pin Bing" Lee. Remember that name. If he's the director of photography on a film, you can count on it at least looking good. The second is the soundtrack by World's End Girlfriend—which is actually just one guy who specializes in other-worldly noise experiments with hints of jazz and classical. His work here creates a hip, contemporary, and dreamlike atmosphere, and since this is a film about the emptiness and isolation of modern life, it's a good thing. The third contributing factor is the masterstroke of casting Du-na Bae as the Air Doll. It's hard to think of another actress who could have made such a success of the role. Bae is a fearless, talented, versatile actress and she also somewhat looks the part with her large expressive anime inspired eyes. She's also Korean, giving her a head start playing a fish out of water in this Japanese film. There are few actors who can convincingly run through a range of several emotions in a matter of seconds without moving a muscle in their faces. Bae is one of those actors, and she does it often.

The film starts right off with the Air Doll inexplicably "finding a heart" and coming to life. She sneaks out during the day, while her owner is at work, to discover the world and its characters. She gets a job at a video store and when one day she accidentally cuts herself, and starts losing air instead of bleeding, a co-worker who seems completely non-plussed by the event puts a piece of tape on the tear and blows her back up. They fall in love. If there is one sexy scene in the film, in a sort of convoluted way, it's when the two "make love". The guy wants to take off the tape and watch her lose air and then watch her re-animate by blowing her up again. When the Air Doll wants to do the same by cutting the guy, things don't turn out as she expects. Bae plays the scene in a very convincing way.

Air Doll has a slow pace and a number of characters seem to just float by without explanation but when it's all over they will have made sense. The central conceit of the film doesn't hold up to scrutiny if you think about it too much so if any of these kinds of things bother you, take a pass. There is also an extended scene where the Air Doll meets her maker. The director seems to have wanted to use this meeting to explain the film, "Aren't we all just empty vessels"? Although the scene is a touching one, I could have done without it, not only because it would have tightened up the film, but also because I don't like it when directors make beautiful films and muck them up with verbal explanations of what they are trying to present metaphorically.

★★★★★
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Starring: Du-na Bae, Arata, Itsuji Itao, Jo Odagiri, Sumiko Fuji

IMDb 7.6 (162 votes)
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Happy Times 幸福时光 (Xingfu shiguang) [2000] • China

I love Zhang Yimou when he does these common-people flicks. This one is funny, touching and real. A fifty-something guy, who so desperately wants to get married and have someone to snuggle with at night, ends up housing and employing the beautiful eighteen year old blind step-daughter of some really unattractive and overweight woman as a sign of his commitment. The fat woman doesn't want the girl because she is a hassle to take care of and the girl was abandoned and dumped on her by some previous loser dude anyway.

As part of his marriage scheme the man lies to the woman, telling her he is the manager of a hotel. But the hotel is nothing more than an abandoned bus in a park that a friend of his had convinced him to slap a coat of paint on and charge young couples to sit inside it and make out. The man had at first hired the daughter to clean up the bus between customers, but when the city hauls the bus away as part of a beautifying the parks campaign the guy is forced to find other means to employ the girl who possesses nothing but cleaning and massage skills. Him and several of his retired friends construct a massage parlor room inside an old warehouse and then take turns getting massages from the girl. He has to pay his friends to get the massages, and they in turn give the money to the girl for tips. The farce can't go on forever, as the guy doesn't have much money to begin with, and it doesn't.

There is some disagreement about how this film should have or could have ended. Suffice to say it's pretty sad, and left rather unresolved. So you just have to accept it and be kind of bummed out (but in a good way if you go for that kind of thing). Dong Jie turns in a sweet and convincing performance as the young blind girl. There is nothing creepy about the film at all. Ebert doesn't get it.

★★★★
Director: Zhang Yimou
Starring: Benshan Zhao, Jie Dong, Lifan Dong, Biao Fu, Xuejian Li
IMDb 7.4/10 (2,306 votes)
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Villon's Wife ヴィヨンの妻 〜桜桃とタンポポ〜 (Viyon no tsuma) [2009] • Japan

This film made me crazy. It's a good film, very well acted with some poetic dialog sprinkled throughout, but it's also some of the worst Orientalist horror imaginable. But that's weird because it's a Japanese film, by a Japanese director, based on a short story by a Japanese writer. "Villon's Wife" is the name of the story the film is based upon, and the film is about a wife but there's nobody named Villon in it. If you run the Japanese sub-title, 〜桜桃とタンポポ〜, through Google translation it returns "Cherry and dandelion", which might seem a little abstract but it has a lot more to do with the movie than "Villon's Wife" and actually takes a bit of the sting out of what comes off as the debatable center of attention and refocuses it on what really matters. 

On the surface this is a film of questionable merit about a long-suffering and loyal wife, named Sachi, to a cheating, thieving, alcoholic husband named Otani. They have a two year old child. Otani is a writer and an attempt is made to give his awful ways a pass by portraying them as self-destructive in that poetic way only artists can be, and be loved. He characterizes the owners of a local pub, where Sachi is working to pay off his debt, as "mercenaries" who feed him liquor so they can profit off him. That's the twisted logic of a drunk. He says things like "Distant yet close, are man and woman", and "Women know neither joy nor grief ... men know only grief. They are always fighting fear". Goodness.

Which brings us to cherries and dandelions. Otani has written a dandelion story about "a dandelion's sincerity". The story moved a young factory worker named Okada so deeply he begins stalking Otani but meets and falls in love with Sachi instead, quickly sussing Otani's ill-treatment of her. Over drinks with this would be suitor to his wife Otani, as a self-reflective woe-is-me justification for his abuse of Sachi, says "I can't even love a dandelion the way I should. I want to pluck its petals, scrunch it in my fist ... stick it in my mouth..." Otani is suspicious of the relationship between his wife and the factory worker and, feeling like a cuckold, meets with one of his lovers, portrayed as equally self-destructive (somehow, as a woman she is able to feel grief too, I guess), and they attempt suicide together. They fail. Sachi dutifully hires a lawyer, an old flame who is still in love with her, to defend Otani who is charged with the attempted murder of the girl. Sachi doesn't have any money and might have slept with the lawyer as payment.

The film ends with Sachi trying to mend things with Otani who is eating cherries that were given to him to give to his son. He acknowledges he is a terrible father. Sachi eats one of the cherries, says they are good and tells her husband that "Being a monster is fine. As long as at least we're alive, it's just fine." I wanted to pull my hair out.

Japanese sexism may not be peculiar but it is certainly intense and complex. On first blush, Villon's Wife seems to be one big stereotype celebrating the loyal, subservient, and beautiful Japanese woman. And props must be given to Takako Matsu who plays Sachi. She is beautiful, beaming that stereotype loud and clear. Everyone in the film is portrayed as loving her. She is so radiant it might be hard to take your eyes off her and see what else is going on in the film. Villon's Wife is a period piece set in the late 1940s and all the characters seem self-destructive. The Japanese have lost the war and GI Joe is everywhere. When Sachi goes to meet with the lawyer who helped her husband, she first approaches a woman on the street who is applying red lipstick to entice GI Joe, and says "Please sell me your lipstick". The woman replies "A Yankee gave it to me. It's American." Sachi makes the woman an offer she can't refuse, applies the lipstick and goes in to see the lawyer. When she comes out, her hair ever so slightly disheveled, she sees the lipstick woman in the back of a Jeep with a few other women and a bunch of GI Joes. The woman is waving and saying "Good bye. Good bye". At first Sachi seems confused, but eventually smiles and returns the "Good bye". She sets the lipstick down in the grass and, with an apparent sense of shame (or empowerment?), wipes her hand across her lips.

I don't really know for sure if this film is that smart and subtle, but if it's not, it's awful. I can't even say for sure what exactly the film is exploring or trying to say. It would help if I were Japanese, I think, and had read the source material but that kind of movie going is for college students. I can say that Villon's Wife presents itself as being a whole lot more than a simple character study of an abused but loyal wife. I blame the chosen English title for throwing me off. All of the performances are outstanding. Takako Matsu is brilliant and beautiful as Sachi. Asano Tadanobu was born to play the role of Otani and Ryoko Hirosue is wonderful in her bit part as his partner in the attempted Love-Suicide. All the characters are good and the film looks great. I'm not so creeped out any more, but be warned: watching this film at face value is a little troubling. If you don't look for deeper meaning it might not appeal.

★★★★
Director: Kichitaro Negishi
Starring: Takako Matsu, Asano Tadanobu, Ryoko Hirosue, Shigeru Muroi, Masatô Ibu
IMDb 7.7 (58 votes)

Non-Ko (Nonko 36-sai ノン子36歳 (家事手伝い) (kaji-tetsudai)) [2008] • Japan

Another nearly great film from director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri. The direction isn't as innovative as in Green Mind, Metal Bats, and the story isn't as novel either but Maki Sakai's performance carries the film more than enough for it to be engaging. I don't know why Saki isn't a bigger star. She seems like such an intelligent and courageous actress. Here she plays a thirty-something divorcee who used to be a popular movie actress starring in films with titles like Sexy Gambler and such. She has retreated to the countryside to live with her family who are caretakers of a Shinto shrine that is about to hold its annual celebration. Sakai's character isn't very likable, by viewers or by the other characters in the film, but somehow she makes her internal disappointment with life palpable and it brings you along for the ride. My only problem with the film is that I didn't like the one character who does like her, mostly because I couldn't understand why she comes to, momentarily at least, like him. He's a younger goofball of sorts who's come to set up a stall at the shrine celebration and ends up staying with Sakai's family. It's probably only his youthful ambition she finds attractive. The film is mostly bleak, punctuated with a few happy moments that seem a little out of place, and a couple sex scenes that require the infamous Japanese pixel blur.

Non-Ko is a successful portrait of a woman who feels anger, isolation, and disappointment in equal measure.


★★
Director: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri
Starring: Maki Sakai, Gen Hoshino, Shingo Tsurumi, Kanji Tsuda, Ryûto Kondô

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Beast Stalker 证人 (Ching yan) [2008] • Hong Kong

There isn't one single monster in this (what's up with that?), although Nick Cheung looks pretty spooky with his fake eyeball and possesses some über-human qualities like always being out of the blue and into the right place always at the right time, moving at speeds faster than light, and getting bashed in the face with a rock and not bleeding. The (contrived and typical) story construction which explores the tug of war among duty, friendship, love, and responsibility is done well, and Nicholas Tse and Cheung both turn in top notch performances, as does the little girl. All the acting is pretty good when you can actually see what's going on. I had to stop frame and inch through a scene on a bridge/overpass where they hung the little girl over the edge. I wonder what the film could have been without being a stylized action pic.

Jingchu Zhang also stars but she seems to come up unremarkable in manly action movies like Overheard, Protégé and this one.

★★★
Director: Dante Lam
Starring: Nicholas Tse, Jingchu Zhang, Nick Cheung, Philip Keung, Esther Kwan
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Green Mind, Metal Bats 青春☆金属バット (Seishun kinzoku batto) [2006] • Japan

This is a hard film to describe except to say that it's deadpan funny, delightful and successful in it's earnest attempt to remain off-kilter. It's about two guys who are bummed out their dreams of becoming baseball stars didn't pan out, and a girl who loves baseball and baseball players. One of the guys was a pitcher, played with finely nuanced body language by Masanobu Ando, who's become a bicycle cop and hates everything except himself. He uses his position of authority to do things like get shoplifting housewives to show him the color of their underwear. The other guy is a batter (of unknown position), played by Pistol Takehara, who still wants to make it, practicing his swing a thousand times a day. He's a little numb in the noggin, having been beaned by the bicycle cop pitcher ten years ago and becomes an accomplice in love and illegal activities with a drunken, violent woman who shares his love of baseball. The show stealing woman is played way over the top by Maki Sakai, and now I'm sort of in love with her myself. I generally dislike watching actors play drunk, but with the exception of some of her stumbling, Sakai creates a believable and engaging character who's pushing forty, still hot, not so nice, but fun to have around. She had to wear prosthetics to round out her role as "the chick with a rack".

Green Mind, Metal Bats is a low-key, low budget absurd comedy with an edginess that keeps it unpredictable and unsettling. A bit part by Noriko Eguchi, as the pitcher's wife, gets this one a bonus point. Anything with Eguchi is better for it.

★★★★
Director: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri
Starring: Pistol Takehara, Masanobu Ando, Maki Sakai, Noriko Eguchi
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Crossing Hennessy (Yue man xuan ni shi) [2010] • Hong Kong

A gigantic disappointment for Lust, Caution star Tang Wei's return to the big screen. She's woefully under-used, pouting a little bit here and there or acting obviously phony as her character tries to pretend that Jacky Cheung's character is interesting or funny. I've seen 5th graders act better than Cheung does in this film. It's almost as if he mistakenly wandered onto the set of the wrong movie. He's out of sync and irritating the whole way through. And not funny at all. The suspension of disbelief factor has to be in full force to accept that Tang Wei's character might fall for this guy. Of the many supporting characters in the film, his extended family verges on being likable but they whined so much it became annoying. Cantonese is not a pleasant sounding language for that kind of communication. The film does show a seldom seen side of everyday Hong Kong which is refreshing but beyond that the film's pretty much a train wreck without chemistry, comedy, or cuteness.

★★
Director: Ivy Ho
Starring: Jacky Cheung, Wei Tang, Maggie Cheung, Danny Lee, Lowell Lo
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Red River (Hong he) [2009] • China

Another film starring Jingchu Zhang. This woman is surprising me. I have seen, and liked, her bit parts in Overheard and Protégé, a couple manly pictures where the female roles amount to no more than looking good, which she does very well, and assisting the story arc of the manly men moving forward, which she does very well. I didn't imagine her being capable of so much more than that. Ann Hui gave her a starring role in a film I recently reviewed, Night and Fog, and Zhang owned that film. So here comes Red River, another starring role.

The film didn't make a big splash and seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle of the many films that were produced to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Communist China. I'm not entirely sure of what connection this film has to that celebration because many of the cultural particulars were lost on me. The film is set near the Red River at the border of China's Yunnan Province and Vietnam. Problem is, Zhang is a Mainland Chinese woman playing a young Vietnamese girl and the other three stars are Hong Kong actors. The dialog seems to drift between some Mandarin dialect and broken Vietnamese—phonetically spoken by the Hong Kong actors—and I couldn't keep a firm grip on who was supposed to be Chinese and who was supposed to be Vietnamese or when things were supposed to be happening in China, or in Vietnam. Things become clearer as the film goes on but while I was working through it, I was confused.

Setting all that aside, Red River is also a rather sweet gender-swapped Oedipal love story interrupted by gangsters. The story starts off with a brief prologue set in the Vietnam war era seventies. A little girl, Ah Tao, witnesses her father being blown to bits by a land mine when they're flying a kite together. Big Bummer, that. It then jumps to the nineties with Zhang playing Ah Tao, all grown up but suffering mentally from the trauma. She's working as a cleaner in a massage parlor (in China) owned by her aunt who has a friend, Ah Ha (Cheung), who happens to look a lot like Ah Tao's father. Ah Ha discovers Ah Tao has a marketable singing voice so he's nice to her while trying to make money off her by charging people a couple dollars to Karaoke with her. The aunt also has a wealthy and cruel gangster client who's pissed off because he had a leg blown off in the Vietnam War, and he takes an interest in ah Tao because, since she's mentally challenged, she doesn't know enough to avoid him. Ah Tao's affection is for Ah Ha, because he's nice to her and he doesn't kill people for a living—and the other thing—so she runs off with him. This angers the gangster who chases after them to get her back. Tragedy and trouble ensue. Things end sadly.

So much for the story. I really like Zhang's performance. Playing a mentally challenged person is a tough role. More often than not actors resort to obnoxiousness and slobbering to get the point across. Zhang plays it sweet and clean. A Variety reviewer calls Zhang's performance too "one-dimensionally wide-eyed" to be convincing. She is wide-eyed, to be sure, and she may be one dimensional, but her dimension comes off as childlike freedom, unencumbered by the nuances of modern bullshit living that clobber any hope for happiness. That's the beauty of the way Zhang plays it. Her handicap is a freedom to approach the world in a state of honest and hopeful wonderment. She's seems happy scrubbing floors and singing for people, and Zhang does a fantastic job bringing that to life.

I may object on principle to the film business habit of having drop-dead gorgeous women with perfect skin, hair, teeth, and nails playing mentally retarded Vietnamese refugees scrubbing floors in massage parlors—but not in practice. Zhang is both beautiful and talented. She's pleasant to look at and she does a good job.

★★★★
Director: Jiarui Zhang
Starring: Jingchu Zhang, Loletta Lee, Nick Cheung, Danny Lee
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Nuan [2003] • China

This is very good looking film. It's a fairly typical Chinese story about a village boy who goes to the city for university and returns ten years later for a quick visit and runs into the girl who was his first love, and to whom he promised he would return to after university. Liar! The woman gave up waiting for the guy and married the village idiot who is also mute.

It's a Chinese film, but Japanese actor Teruyuki Kagawa plays the mute guy and it's the first of the many roles I've seen him in that I haven't liked. He pretty much killed the film for me. He won awards for his performance, it's just that I dislike characters who act like ill-mannered assholes, so your mileage may vary.

The whole film is a little slow on the uptake with all kinds of flashbacks going on to show the young lovers. The back and forth from present to past has an odd rhythm. And the big moral of the story comes up wimpy sealing the deal: "I'm a liar but the girl I lied to seems happy, so that's good. I guess I'm a loser". Or something like that. Excepting the beautiful cinematography, the film feels like it was put together by folks with good intentions lacking a mature vision beyond simply capturing a place in time. Some times that works and some times it doesn't. I liked the early love birds and the scenery but the film kept frustrating me in its execution.

★★★
Director: Huo Jianqi
Starring: Xiaodong Guo, Teruyuki Kagawa, Jia Li
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Night and Fog (Tin shui wai dik ye yu mo) [2009] • Hong Kong

Stories of domestic abuse are often so unreal or surreal, if/when they are made into movies they often come off as unbelievable or too melodramatic, leaving the facts of the case alone to provide the emotional impact. The aesthetics of the film itself seem less of a priority. The acting and direction of Night and Fog are so pitch perfect, that even though the story starts at the end so we know the result and it's unraveled through flashbacks and police interrogations, it plays out like a mystery. It's not the what of what happened but the how of what happened that compels. And don't write off Jingchu Zhang as just another pretty face. She nails the part of an ambitious peasant girl from the heartland, in this case Sichuan, who appears to have made it to the top by marrying a Hong Kong man. Her sisters made it only halfway, marrying men from the industrial Shenzhen. This is the ladder of success many young women from the disadvantaged rural areas attempt to climb. No matter that many of the men they pursue, especially the ones from Hong Kong, might already have a wife.

Director Ann Hui places the micro of domestic abuse into a wider macro social context with such honesty it's scary. The film reveals a plight of a segment of the Chinese population it hurts to know about. Hui pushes hard on the social buttons of an issue that many would like to ignore, but that's what gives the film its power. This is one of the more painfully sad films I've seen in a long time. I put it on when it was already way past my bed time, thinking I'd just get a feel for it and fall asleep. Well, a feel for it I got, and ended up staring at it, bug-eyed, the entire two hour runtime.

★★★★★
Director: Ann Hui
Starring: Jingchu Zhang, Simon Yam
IMDb 7.2 (24 votes)

Trailer:

Cafe Lumiere (Kohi jiko) [2003] • Japan, Taiwan

You have to like trains, find them romantic or aesthetically pleasing in order to enjoy this movie to the fullest: there's a train going by; there she is walking to the train; there she is getting on the train; there she is on the train; there she is getting off the train; there she is walking away from the train ... cut. Rinse and repeat.

Having said that, she, Yo Hitoto, a Japanese singer making her film debut here, is fabulous. I enjoyed her 'hmm', 'hai', 'mmm', 'grunt' style acting. I've never heard acting like it before. She gives a very natural and genuine performance. She's great. Her mom and dad are great. Tadanobu Asano is here. He's a good enough actor that you can sense his muted desire in subtle ways. Almost every minute of people interaction in this film, even in silence, is superb. But the film is padded with a lot of train rides and walking.

I assume we are to live with Hitoto's internals while she is traveling around doing nothing. The problem (or contradiction) with that approach is that we are presented with a character who appears not to have much going on inside, problem-wise. She is overtly presented as someone rather carefree. The spectacular scene where her parents come to visit and she speaks her mind about the man who made her pregnant gave me no sense that it was troubling to her. This seems at odds with the desire of the film. Or else it's genius. I was touched by (what turned out to be) the end of the film, until it turned out to be the end of the film. Hitoto's reaction both times to waking up to Asano's character, the first time when she has the flu and the second time at the end of the film, were lovely as could be. I give Hou high marks for reiterating the theme and for making it obvious the first time and subtle the second but sadly, final time. Waking up to the little joys in life, done without fanfare.

I understand what Hou is trying to do. I really think I get his thing. Well ... a couple things. One is the pace, creating a tempo, a rhythm. The other is creating a scenario with compelling characters that is deep enough to be immersive but not thick enough to proceed and resolve in traditionally expected ways. Basically, we should be left wanting more. We're given the gift of letting our imaginations fill in the blanks. That's a good thing. I just think Hou filled Cafe Lumiere with a little too much un-engaging material, although the Taiwanese director did highlight, very well, many of the family and generational issues that show up as the theme in many of the best Japanese films. The nonchalance of the daughter towards her pregnancy is not an approach her parents share. Nor is her un-romantic, pragmatic view of the man who made her pregnant.

I am suspicious of (these whatever generation) film makers who employ the nothingness technique in the name of realism. I think some of them are jerks who just want to be challenging, some of them are inept and don't realize they aren't succeeding in making something good, and some of them do things that appeal to others but not to me.

I'm not against the technique. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes trains, or at least train tracks, are used very effectively.

★★
Director: Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Starring: Yo Hitoto, Tadanobu Asano
IMDb 6.9 (1,171 votes)
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A.F.R.I.K.A [2002] • South Korea

I don't want to go on record as saying this is a good film but I enjoyed it. It's a toned down Korean version of Thelma and Louise with hotter chicks and twice as many of them. A couple girls borrow a car for a weekend getaway and discover two revolvers in the back seat. They initially think the guns are toys but when a trigger is pulled, blowing out the windshield, we know it's going to keep getting pulled. The guns belong to a cop and a gangster who want them back and don't want it known that they lost them, so there will be chasing. The film's got pretty girls robbing places, sticking it to the Man and other icky men, shooting guns but never killing anyone, and getting makeovers. Min-sun (aka Gyu-ri) Kim looks awesome with blond streaks in her long hair. Young-jin Lee, who usually plays brooding and intense, seems a little out of place but it's nice to see her trying to have fun. I actually enjoyed the shenanigans of the cop and the gangster more than the girls. All in all, a decent popcorn rental.

The title A.F.R.I.K.A stands for "Adoring Four Revolutionary Idols Korean Association".

★★★
Director: Shin Seung-soo
Starring: Lee Yo-Won, Kim Min-Sun, Cho Eun-Ji, Lee Young-Jin, Sung Ji-Roo
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Shanghai Dreams (Qing hong) [2005] • China

This is one of those Chinese films about things Chinese. In this case the underlying subject matter is the Third Front, where families were sent from the cities to live and work in the countryside in case the Soviet Union invaded China and clobbered its cities. The main interest here, for me, is this historical angle. China has pulled off a number of wacky full-on country-wide social experiments and I found it interesting to become acquainted with this particular one. Imagine for yourself if you are a big city dweller that you are persuaded (or coerced) by your government to move your family to the sticks. You'd probably dream every day of moving back to the city but the reality is that the dream becomes more and more remote as time goes by. You'd try to think about what's best for your children, but they might have different aspirations. All of this is explored in Shanghai Dreams.

The film takes place in the early eighties which means certain seventies western fashion trends were just filtering in and the director captures some of these with a sad hilarity. The "dance party" scene is priceless. Consider the film more educational than emotional. Big complaint: Gao Yuanyuan, so good in Season of Good Rain, is too old for her character and, honestly, doesn't seem to have honed her acting chops just yet.

★★★
Director: Wang Xiaoshuai
Starring: Yuanyuan Gao

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How to Create Myself of Tomorrow (Ashita no watashi no tsukurikata) How to Become Myself (2007) • Japan

There are two reasons to watch this movie, assuming of course that flicks about teen angst aren't off limits. The first reason is Riko Narumi. She's got looks, talent, and a maturity beyond her age which should protect her from catching disposable idol syndrome. She's got the skill to bring us inside the film and not question the all too common premise of how the best looking and smartest girl in class, who's from a well to do but unassuming family, can be an introverted social outcast. Her parents fight a little and that's what's got her down. It isn't until the second act, when the class prize loses her social standing allowing Narumi's character to sweep in and relate, that we become engaged and the film picks up its rhythm. And it does it through film technique more than simple storytelling.

The second reason to enjoy this film is the creative way director Jun Ichikawa has put the package together. He uses fades and split screens and shots about nothing all in the service of a poetic rhythm that carries the viewer from start to finish. The two girls don't just meet and bond. In fact, they live in different parts of the city and go to different schools. They communicate with one another via email and text messages. Narumi's character is an aspiring writer and she uses her skill to create a persona to share with her new friend. On one hand, she is trying to give her friend a role model, and on the other she is using the character as a vehicle to express the thoughts and feelings she doesn't have the confidence to own up to herself. Her friend likes the character Narumi has created so much she assumes its identity. Things get complicated and the girls have to finally give in and be themselves. It's not a challenging story but it is innovatively rendered and scored.

I prefer the literal, if a little overly formal, English translation of this film's title, How to Create Myself of Tomorrow, over the one you're likely to find on the DVD box in your favorite import video store, How to Become Myself. I think it better reflects the imaginative presentation of this lovely little teen flick.

★★★★
Director: Jun Ichikawa
Starring: Riko Narumi, Atsuko Maeda, Mariko Ishihara, Yoshizumi Ishihara, Sosuke Takaoka
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Secret (Himitsu) [1999] • Japan ... & ... The Secret (Si j'etais toi) If I Were You (2007) • France

I saw the 2007 French/American version of this film first without knowing it was a remake. I liked it, especially the performance by Olivia Thirlby, but when I discovered the 1999 Japanese version, which I liked even more, it highlighted for me a little of why I like Japanese films in particular, and East Asian films in general. It's a lot sweeter and more subtle. More sad too, casts a wider emotional net. As a matter of disclosure I'll point out that I am not a remake basher, on principle, at all.

The basic story centers on a seventeen year old girl whose body is inhabited by her mother's soul. The two of them were in a terrible accident, and while in the hospital, just as the mother is about to die she reaches over, all ceiling of the Sistine Chapel like, and transfers her soul into the body of her daughter. The daughter keeps her body but becomes her mother in personality and memories. When she goes to school and hangs out with her friends she doesn't really know what's going on, who the people are or what her homework assignments are, because ... well, she's her mother now, for all practical purposes. It takes her a while to come to terms with what's happened and even longer to convince her father/husband.

Now, to cut right to the chase in case you can't see the 400 pound gorilla in the room, once the father is convinced that his wife is living in the body of his daughter and they, well, ya know, they're all in love and stuff ... so what about sex?

Things get a little creepy but I give both films high marks for how delicately the sex question is handled. I'll leave it at that and say it's not the main theme of either film, just one of many issues that come up.

The English version is loud and antagonistic. It's not a horror movie (not sure how it got marketed as such) unless you consider David Duchovny spooning with a seventeen year old girl to be horror. The daughter is in rebellion mode against the mother before the accident and their relationship takes center stage—the mother discovering her daughter’s world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll while the daughter comes to recognize the love that her mother has always had for her. The Japanese version is much quieter in comparison. The mother and daughter love each other very much and the antagonism angle focuses on the husband/wife relationship. The husband becomes sad and wimpy, feeling oppressed by having his wife around only as a roadblock to his moving on. The diet of sadness is served in small introspective doses, though, and changes how the film resolves. In the English version the resolution occurs between the mother and daughter. In the Japanese version it is between the husband and wife and involves a big twist that should serve to remind viewers that this has been a fantasy film, after all. As mentioned, I saw the English remake first and it didn’t do the twist, and when I watched the original (with the twist) I thought to myself “This is why I like Asian cinema.” It is so Japanese. Just when the limits of despair seem to have been reached, another complex layer of sadness is revealed for your weeping pleasure. (I wonder how the book they're both based upon ends.)

I’m not a remake basher but I think if I had seen the Japanese version first I might have railed against the remake for changing focus and tone. Having seen the English version first allowed me to enjoy it for what it was, and it didn’t in any way impinge upon my enjoyment of the original. I recommend both films but suggest, oddly, seeing the remake first. Both films explore, and handle, the creepy dilemma of “Would you have sex with your wife if she was living in your daughter’s body?” quite well. They’re both sweet and touching ... except for some of the touching.

★★★★ 
(Japanese version)
Director Yojiro Takita
Starring: Ryoko Hirosue, Kaoru Kobayashi

IMDb
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★★★★ 
(English version)
Director: Vincent Perez  
Starring: David Duchovny, Olivia Thirlby, Lili Taylor

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