Extreme basketball doesn’t sound like the basis of a great action movie. But just for a moment, imagine Yao Ming going for three points when he’s taking an elbow slash to the face.
Fireball may be a bybrid martial arts/sports movie, but this is no Shaolin Soccer. Instead, it’s a gritty and stunt-heavy actioneer set in the wild world of fireball, a no-holds-barred street basketball game run by the local mob bosses. Forget dribbling fouls: This is five-on-five meets muay thai, and if players die in the game, that’s just fewer team members to split the winnings. Continue reading Review: Fireball (2009)→
It made sense that this documentary was preceded at its SXSW screenings by the short <i>Star Wars: Retold</i> (retold by someone who’s never seen it). Even people who have never sat through George Lucas’ epic tale of a galaxy far, far away have been touched by its cultural impact.
The T. Don Hutto Residential Center has become infamous as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility up in Williamson County that used to house immigrant and asylum-seeking families as their appeals go through the courts. That makes Hutto a prison for children and parents, none of whom has been convicted of anything.
Starring: Jackson Kuehn, Dan Sumpter, Syna Zhang, Deng Jung
Novelties are the benchmark of a great society, proclaims starry-eyed inventor Johnson (Kuehn). But he’s no Da Vinci or Edison: His genius lies in the realm of sneezing powder, pet rocks, and Slinkies – the pieces of irrelevant crap that make someone a millionaire. Flying on a whim and a dream from Woodville, Texas (population 2,415), to Shanghai, China (population 20 million), to find someone to manufacture his closely guarded “humorous domestic hygiene product,” the sweet-natured Johnson falls under the sway of Magnus (Sumpter), an English snake-oil-dealing business consultant after his money. Continue reading Review: Made in China (2009)→
Starring: Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Tony Wilson, Paul Morley
Joy Division is not a documentary about the band Joy Division. Or, rather, it’s not that simple. It’s about the English city of Manchester in the 1970s: the rain-soaked, crumbling, devastated, crime-infested and hopeless city that helped form the band and that they in turn kick-started culturally. Inevitably, it must delicately contend with the suicide of singer Ian Curtis and the still-raw wound of his relationships with his wife, Deborah, and his lover, Anik Honore. Continue reading Review: Joy Division (2008)→
For anyone that yearns for the days when heroes were cool and lantern-jawed, heroines wore cocktail dresses, and every punch sounded like a baseball bat smacking beef, fear not. Mandrill is here to kick some ass and wear a big fat tie while he’s doing it.
Mandrill (Zaror) is a hit man, the best in the business in all of Chile: But he’s also a man on a mission, seeking the one-eyed killer that slew his parents. Forget any Fugitive chest-beating: Inspired by his lascivious uncle Cheno and the cheesy Johnny Colt detective movies of his youth, he’s become a red-blooded pastiche of unflinching masculinity.
Starring: Benno Fürmann, Henry Strange, Alexandra Maria Lara
Ah, the countryside, so serene and peaceful. Yeah, right, unless it’s the remote Bavarian village of Kaifeck. Like Tom Waits sang, there’s always some killing you gotta do around the farm.
Photographer Marc Barenberg (Fürmann) and his son Tyll (Strange) are on a tour of the Bavarian hinterlands. They’re looking for the last traces of rural culture and folklore, and they find that in spades in the mist-shrouded Kaifeck. There they still celebrate the old ways, like the annual Epiphany festival, where the locals dress as wild spirits or percheta to chase away the devil. Continue reading Review: Kaifeck Murders (2009)→
Issa Sesay is a convicted war criminal. The tragically small number of Westerners who followed the 11 years of blood-soaked revolution in the African state of Sierra Leone know that, and it’s the first fact presented in this measured analysis of Sesay’s five-year trial.
From page to screen: Kick-Ass, as portrayed on film Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and drawn in the original comic by John Romita Jr.
Every boy dreams of becoming a superhero and fighting crime. Then he wakes up, realizes that’s a dumb idea, and gets on with his life before he gets his dreams and skull crushed. Same thing tends to apply when a comic writer dreams that there will be a faithful movie adaptation of his creation: When it gets to the big screen, he just cringes through the premiere, takes the paycheck, and retreats to his fortress of solitude.
So nobody would have expected a comic like Kick-Ass, in which a nerdy teen decides to become a costumed vigilante, could make it to the screen intact. Yet somehow the tale of powerless and clueless less-than-super heroes has become one of the crudest, lewdest, and wildly entertaining big-budget indie films ever.
While Kick-Ass the comic seems like a poke at mainstream superheroes, it’s actually published by Marvel Comics where …. Hold up; we need a secret origin flashback: In 1993 a young Scottish writer named Mark Millar started working for the British anthology comic 2000 AD. America beckoned, and the Scot crossed the Atlantic to work for DC Comics and then Marvel. There he met artist John Romita Jr., son of industry legend John Romita Sr. and a superstar sketcher with a reputation for down-and-dirty, action-packed panels. The pair collaborated on the superbloody “Enemy of the State” storyline for the firm’s top-selling Wolverine title. Millar said, “After it was finished, we said, ‘Let’s do it again,'”
Marvel, eager to keep Millar writing its big-gun titles, allowed him to self-publish his less mainstream, creator-owned work through its Icon imprint – the perfect home for Kick-Ass. When it came to the gritty, crude, and bloodily realistic tale of a dumb kid in a mask, Millar knew it was time for a team-up. “The honest truth is, I only ever had Johnny in my head doing this, and I told him I would wait a year for him. It’s kind of like when a director has an actor in mind. Anyone with too clean a style, it just wouldn’t have worked. I can’t visualize these characters being drawn by anyone except him.”
Part of the appeal of Japanese cinema to the occidental audience is that it is a little more likely to catch a viewer jaded by Western conventions off guard. And then there’s House.
The last film to see the inside of a US cinema that made this little sense was probably Transformers 2. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 oddity has previously never escaped Japan, and there are probably good reasons for that: Not least that it’s completely insane, borderline incoherent, and shot with so much visual panache and mid-70s excess that it comes off like Ringu on a Pixy Stix-fueled hug-a-thon.
It’s in many ways a fairly conventional Japanese supernatural horror film. Seven schoolgirls travel to visit an infirm old aunt and start getting picked off, one-by-one, by the occult forces that lurk in her home. But Obayashi abandons any pretense of horror, instead shooting in a neon palate and day-glo mindset that may have inspired such more recent oddities as Happiness of the Katakuris or Big Man Japan.
Directed by Thanakorn Pongsuwan
