Kamikaze Girls tells the story of Momoko -- a Japanese teenager who lives in a tiny rural town some three hours away from Tokyo, who has an obsession with the Roccoco.
The basic story is one that any teenager growing up in the provinces can identify with. The locals are nice enough, but they all shop in the local Mega-Mart which sells everything. Momoko aspires to something rather more for herself, and so she buys her Lolicon outfits at a Tokyo designer store, The Stars Shine Bright. Oh sure, that stuff is expensive, but she's been making a few thousand yen on the side, selling her Yakuza father's counterfeit Versacci clothing. The Versacci/Universal Studio line in t-shirts is a particularly big seller.
Momoko has always been a somewhat isolated girl until she finds herself getting hooked up with Ichigo, an adherent of the Yanqi subculture who is a member of a motorscooter girl gang. Although the two appear to have nothing much in common, over time, they develop an intense loyalty to each other.
This movie had been sitting around on my hard drive for several years before I finally got around to watching it and now I'm kicking myself for waiting as long as I did. The director, Tetsuya Nakashima, has a couple of other great movies under his belt, Memories of Matsuko, which I've seen and can highly recommend, and Lalopipo, which I haven't yet watched but which also gets great notices.
Kamikaze Girls blends elements of surrealism, punk, youth subculture and the Japanese pink eiga tradition -- particularly the girl gang subset -- to turn out a movie that is engaging and unique. I really can't recommend this one highly enough. If you've got any interest at all in contemporary Japanese cinema, this movie is one that you really shouldn't miss.
There are a bunch of Korean directors whose work is always unmissable. Kim Ki-Duk springs to mind, but his work has never really been as popular in Korea as it is on the international film circuit. Bong Joon-Ho, in contrast, opens big in Korea and in the rest of the world.
He's best known in the west for his fantastic monster movie, Gwoemul (The Host), an unmissable popular fantasy that reasserts Korea's need for independence from an imperialist America. While this was the film that turned me on to Korean cinema (and Asian cinema in general), I rapidly became entranced by some of his other work. Madeo (Mother) is a return to many of the themes Bong explores in Memories of Murder. A corrupt, incompetent rural police force operating in a rural Korean backwater. And the obsessively dogged nature of family. The story concerns a young man with learning difficulties who is wrongly accused of murder, and the attempts of his mother, a poor ginseng collector who does a bit of acupuncture on the side, to prove his innocence.
Beautifully photographed, with a compelling plot, Bong paints a picture of a Korea that's very different to the one we see in the rom-coms set in Seoul or Pusan, where the young people portrayed seem barely different to Americans. This film portrays a Korea that remains connected to its tragic past, where ordinary people continue to be exploited by those who are richer and more powerful than they are, and where family ties still dominate relations.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that Madeo is likely to turn out to be the best Korean movie of 2009. It's certainly the best film that I've seen that was made last year.
One of the things that I love about Asian cinema is that everybody smokes. And when I say that they smoke, I mean that they've never got a cigarette out of their mouths. You'd have to go back to the 1940's or 50's to see smoking like you see in the Asian films.
Sadly, China is catching up with the West in a whole host of ways, and one of those ways is in its attitude to smoking.
Love in a Puff centres on the fact that people can no longer smoke in the workplace in Hong Kong, and so, just as they do here in the UK, people have to leave the bar, the restaurant or the office, and congregate on the street to satisfy their nicotine habit.
However, this tendency also has its upside. As one of the film's characters, Eunuch, says: "It does make it easier to meet girls. Before the smoking ban, you only met the women you worked with. Now, I know everybody from all the nearby offices."
And this story is about precisely that -- Jimmy Chung (Shawn Yeu) and Cherie (Miriam Yeung) meet in a smokers den between their two offices. He works in an advertising agency, she works in a cosmetics shop. His relationship has just ended, while hers appears to be struggling. The action all takes place over just a few days, during which they negotiate the future of their relationship.
Ho-Cheung Pang has turned out a number of very fine films in the past. It was one of his movies, Exodus, that got me hooked on H/K cinema in the first place, and others like Men, Suddenly in Black, and his collection of shorts, Trivial Matters are all well worth your time.
While Love in a Puff isn't quite up to those standards, it doesn't disappoint either. On the one hand, it's a rather slight romantic comedy. On the other, it's a rather fine character study with an acute sense of place -- Hong Kong, ten years after reunification.
Even without understanding the film's filthy Cantonese jokes, it's a pleasant way to spend an evening.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, investment advisors were suggesting that people put their money into the Tiger economies of Asia, and of the Asian economies, nowhere can have done as well as South Korea. In the fifty odd years since the end of the Korean war, South Korea has gone from being a country that was as poor as the poorest African countries, to a place with a first world economy that's roughly equivalent to somewhere like Spain.
Once can speculate endlessly as to the reasons why this might be, but there's no question that the Koreans are a determined people who value study and hard work. And you can see the evidence of their ambition on high streets all over the world, through the products of companies like Samsung, Daewoo, LG and Hyundae. Companies that were unknown twenty years ago, but vie for competition with the best of them on the global high street.
The other major manifestation of the Korean wave is less visible in Europe and the USA, but is apparent all over Asia, and that is the way that South Korea has come to dominate the entertainment industry in that part of the world. Korean movies, Korean pop music (K-pop) and Korean TV drama (K-drama) are dominating the whole of the Asian market at the moment. Countries with a long history of high quality cultural output, such as Japan and Hong Kong, are struggling to sustain market share in the face of American cultural imperialism, but not only has South Korea managed to sustain their home-grown entertainment industry, they've actually expanded it, to the extent that it's now dominating the Asian market.
And perhaps this is most true of Korean television drama, K-drama. The country has become an absolute machine when it comes to churning out long-form drama -- generally between 16 and 28 episodes, but they can run as high as 80 or more.
Eminently watchable, these k-dramas generally continue in the same tradition of the Korean film industry. The stories generally have a very high quotient of melodrama, which gives them a cliff-hanging quality that could lead people to compare them to soap operas. Somebody is always dying in K-drama -- a parent, a fiance, a best friend. There's also generally a high level of social injustice -- the wealthy are invariably acting to crush the ambitions and aspirations of the poor. And the corruption of politicians and major corporations is another persistent theme in the stories.
While many of them are set in the present day, a very high proportion are historical costume dramas, dramatizing either real historical events (as in Dae Jang Geum and Queen Seon Duk) or much loved Korean legends (as in the Robin Hood type characters, Hong Gil Dong and Jumong). As with the modern K-drama, some of them are just drawn from modern Manga (Iljimae).
While I tend to avoid the real weepy romantic melodrama form, I've become a big fan of the Romantic Comedy. Anybody who has seen global smash hit, My Sassy Girl, will know that the Koreans are rather good at romantic comedies. The form constrains the writers from relying on explicit sexual contact -- in fact, the star-crossed lovers tend to have to wait for most of the series before their lips ever come to touch, so the form is heavily dependent upon story for its success.
Another enormously popular genre is the youth drama. One of the most popular, Boys Over Flowers, started life as a Japanese Manga and became a smash J-drama hit, before being remade by Korean television, where it sparked yet another amplification of the Korean Wave, selling into television markets all over Asia.
While I haven't watched Boys over Flowers yet, one youth drama I have watched was the remarkable God of Study. This is such a typical Korean drama in so many ways, that it might be worth spending a little more time on it.
God of Study also began life as a Japanese Manga, before first being made into a Japanese Drama series, Dragon Zakura, (starring the wonderful Hiroshi Abe) before being picked up and remade as a Korean TV show.
Like so many of these Kdramas, the show has a fantastic cast, with many significant Korean movie stars in the leading and minor roles. Again, like many Kdramas, a whole mountain of music is performed throughout the series -- performed by K-pop stars, which is released as an original soundtrack album to accompany the show.
While Japanese in origin, the story of God of Study is so typically Korean. A renegade lawyer is struggling against a firm of property developers who are destroying typical working class communities to replace them with luxury apartments. Although small business owners welcome the move because of the profit they'll make from land sales, the headmaster of a school in the area opposes the move and asks our lawyer to intervene.
Unfortunately, the school is a sink school. Nobody loves it and they don't care. Radical intervention is required, and so the lawyer says that he'll take any six students and get them into Seoul National University -- the most prestigious university in Korea.
Initially, nobody is interested, but eventually, he ends up with his six students. Unfortunately, they are the least promising students in the school. There's the rebellious youth who just wants to be out at work so he can support his grandmother. The not-clever kid whose parents want him to work in the family restaurant. The nice girl whose mother is a bar girl/prostitute. A couple of children of rich parents who don't pay them any attention. etc.
And so over time, our lawyer has to take this unpromising crew and weld them into a-list academic material -- and he has to do so, in the face of almost total opposition from the existing teachers.
The message behind this drama is all about the importance of studying like a maniac to achieve your goals. Which appears to involve dancing teachers, staying up until 4.00am, and co-educational boot camp. The idea that such a series would play with any success in the UK is completely unfeasible, yet I found the series completely compelling.
This blog is called Guns and Talks after a Korean crime film, so it would be remiss of me not to highlight some of the wonderful Korean crime drama series that I've had the pleasure of watching recently. Two of the best were both remakes of well-received Korean films, at least one of which was by the same director. Friend (Chin-gu) was a very well received coming of age movie that gave rise to a great deal of online discussion over what the ending actually signified. Almost ten years later, the director got the opportunity to extend the work in a sixteen part series, and so was able to give us much more backstory, and provide much more depth to the characters. Personally, I much preferred the TV dramatization to the original movie.
Another recent crime series which was based on a movie was the TV dramatization of Tazza: War of the Flowers.
The Asian gambling movie is one of my very favourite of all cinematic genres. Whether they be Hong Kong Mah Jong movies, or Chow Yun Fat's very silly God of Gamblers series, I love them all. But I really disliked the original version of Tazza. I didn't understand the game they were gambling on -- the Korean card game, Stop Go, and the movie just didn't offer enough length to develop the back story to a tale with so many characters.
By moving to the long form, there's so much more time to develop character, to have complex, multi-threaded plots and situations. It's like the difference between a comic and a novel, in my view.
A word of caution here: the K-drama isn't for everybody. And it's definitely an acquired taste. Before I watched one, I asked about, 'what's worth watching', and everybody almost with one voice recommended one of the most popular Rom Coms, Coffee Prince.
Now, although I was seriously into Korean cinema by this point, and I had come to love Korean Rom Coms in the movies, I just couldn't get interested in Coffee Prince at all. I still have it on my hard drive though. Perhaps I should give it another shot?
aka None Of Your Cheek aka Kkabuljima Korea, 2004 Dir: Oh Ji-myeong Genre: Comedy, Action, Crime
Of all of the countries of South East Asia, my favourite movies are the films of South Korea.
I've talked before how it was films like The Host and Old Boy that turned me on to Asian film in the first place -- both films that have played a big part in popularizing Korean films abroad. And initially, I just watched the stuff that was critically acclaimed at had already gained the attention of an international audience.
The more films I watched though, the more I fell in love with the place. Not just the movies, but the country as well, with it's tragic backstory of the last hundred years or so, and the huge economic miracle that the Korean people have pulled off since 1945, in which they've gone from being economically equivalent to one of the African states, to the thirteenth wealthiest country in the world, on a par with somewhere like Spain.
So now, I watch them all. Not just the good stuff, but the mediocre stuff as well. Not just the critically acclaimed, but the lowliest genre cinema. I don't really watch the horror movies -- though they're very highly rated by people who enjoy that genre. But the dramas, the melodramas, the romantic comedies, the costume dramas -- the sort of commercial stuff that I wouldn't watch if it were a British or American film -- I'm all over when it's a Korean movie. And I love them.
If I had to choose a favourite though, it would be the Korean crime movie, and particularly the Korean gangster movie. In fact, this blog takes its name from just such a film, Guns and Talks. As we've never really had a relationship with Korea here in the UK, we really don't know much about them, so much of what I do know, I've had to summarize from the films, or from this Wikipedia article on the Kkangpae. They appear to form gangs while still at school, and then get recruited by a local boss, at which point they operate in ways that seem very similar to the Japanese Yakuza, in very rigid, heirarchical organisations in which the footsoldiers appear to pledge absolute fealty to the boss, who beats and humiliates them regularly. The film Three Fellas aka Bar Legends aka Riverside Legends provides an entertaining account of this sort of process at work.
One explanation that I've read for the lack of info. on the Kkangpae is that the Koreans are deeply ashamed of their existance, and so they've never really done any significant reporting on the issue. Consequently, there's almost no information in English about them. No books whatsoever. But if this were true, how the hell can they have so many films in which they play a central role?
The most famous of the Korean gangsters is the much revered Kim Du-Han, a beggar who became a politician and was lionized in legendary Korean director Im Kwon-Taek film, The General's Son. I'll discuss this movie and the work of Kim Ki-Duk in a forthcoming post, but if the films are to be believed, the relationship between gangsters and politicians is a deep and abiding one, and one that continues to the current day.
So gangsters play a peculiar role in Korean life -- and in their movies. Like the Yakuza, they seem to have a quasi-legitimate role insofar as they're used by politicians and some businesses. They play an abiding role in the Korean melodrama, where they are often seen being used to put the poor out of their affordable accomodation to make way for property redevelopment and the construction of luxury high-rise buildings. (c.f. Holiday) or acting on behalf of loan sharks who have loaned money to the credit unworthy at horrendous interest rates (cf Sympathy for Mr Vengeance). But they also appear in a host of lighthearted comedies as lovable rogues -- vaguely incompetent and anachronistic, a relic of old, traditional Korea as they struggle to come to terms with things like the Internet and the new financial markets. (cf My Boss, My Hero)
Shit up is a movie in the latter tradition. A group of older Kkangpae have recently been released from prison, having sworn to get even with the co-conspirator that put them there. Instead, they take a job acting as a bodyguard for his daughter.
The actors who play the leading roles are among the most popular and experienced veterans of the film and theatre scene, and the performance that they turn in in this movie is more than competent. Unfortunately, the story on it's own just isn't strong enough to carry the movie. I understand that a lot of the humour is based on the wordplay in the film, but as usual, this just doesn't make it across into the translation for the English subtitles.
Shit Up wasn't a terrible film, but it's only really worth seeing if you're an obsessive completist of Korean Gangster Movies. Fortunately for you, (and unfortunately for me), I am.
I watch films like this so that you don't have to.
Initially, I didn't think much of Fruit Chan. I don't really do horror movies, so while I'd watched the 'Dumplings' piece, Fruit Chan's story from portmanteu movie, Three Extremes, I wasn't particularly impressed.
I was really taken by the idea behind Public Toilet, but I'm not really an arthouse guy either, and this was the most arthouse of his oeuvre. The film struck me as being rather like it's subject -- shit -- and I really struggled to watch but eventually gave up half way through.
I didn't give up on him though, and his earlier films, Made in Hong Kong (1997) and Little Cheung (1999) eventually turned me into a fan. So I thought I'd seen all his work when I turned up a copy of Hollywood Hong Kong (2002) last weekend.
Which was a piece of luck, really, because for my money, Hollywood Hong Kong is Fruit Chan's best film. Set in Tai Hom, a grim shanty town in the shadows of the Hollywood Housing Plaza and Shopping Mall, the film tells the story of what happens when a mainland prostitute (Zhou Xun) enters the life of a wannabe pimp (played by boy-band member Wong Yau-Nam) and a fabulous family of pork butchers (Glen Chin, Leung Sze-Ping and Ho Sai-Man.)
Apart from the butcher's youngest son, Tiny, all the men in the film fall under the spell of this magical young woman, and it's not surprising to see why -- the screen lights up whenever she appears. But despite the close proximity of the pimp and the butchers, none of them know about their relationship with the others. She's a woman who likes to compartmentalize her lives.
It isn't until people start getting letters from a Hong Kong lawyer that they begin to suspect that there might be more to this young woman than meets the eye.
Like all the best Hong Kong cinema, Hollywood Hong Kong transcends genre boundaries. Part comedy, part romance, part coming of age drama, part social realist drama, part triad flick -- Hollywood Hong Kong has something for everybody. The movie is really stolen by the pork butchers. Fruit might have cast them for their bodies, but they don't have any trouble carrying the movie with their acting. And Zhou Xun as Ting Ting/Ming Ming/Ping Ping is a sheer delight. But as with so many of Chan's other films, the real star of Hollywood Hong Kong is the island itself.
After years of films that had minimal plots but were simply vehicles for his ridiculous, life-threatening stunts and nigh-on impossible kung fu, Jackie Chan appears to have decided to give it all and become a serious actor.
It's not surprising that he's throwing in the towel. The punishment that he's inflicted on his body over the years is ludicrous, and the older he gets, the more he's likely to suffer as a consequence. Children who trained in the old Chinese Opera schools must learn to be somewhat stoical -- separated from their families and beaten mercilessly while they coerce and cajole their bodies into doing virtually impossible stunts. But there's only so much trauma that a body can take, and now he's got to be feeling it.
I've watched a couple of very good Jackie Chan biopics lately. Curious, because I'm not really a fan. One was about his relationship with his father, who had a second family in a remote village in China that Jackie knew nothing about. This was less a biopic than a documentary as his father reveals his story for the camera, and a tearful reunion with his kids is recorded by the cameras. Not compelling, but more interesting than your average Jackie Chan film.
The other movie was much better. Painted Faces is a Sammo Hung vehicle, in which Sammo plays the master who runs the Chinese Opera school at which Sammo, Jackie and a bunch of other people from Hong Kong cinema trained. Although some people have said that the cruelty that was inflicted on children in the school seemed unrealistic and over the top, in fact, Sammo is believed to have been overly generous to his old master when it came to the brutal severity of punishments at the school. I enjoyed that one a lot.
So, what to make of Shinjuku Incident -- Chan's first attempt at a serious role? As with so much in HK cinema, it tries to broaden its appeal by being part refugee drama, part triad/yakuza crime drama and while watchable, it suffers from many of the same flaws from so many films that are constructed with an eye to the cash register rather than simply trying to tell the best story that you can.
Jackie plays Steelhead -- a refugee from the industrial rural North of China, who leaves his home town to try and find his one true love who has gone missing in Japan. He takes lowly jobs to support himself, attempting to stay on the righteous path -- until he learns that his girlfriend has run off with a Yakuza, and the leader of the Taiwan triad group chops off the hand of his best pal.
From there on in, it starts to get a bit ludicrous as Jackie organizes his pals into their own little triad crew, and after saving the life of a Yakuza underboss, they get enough protection to steal the turf of the triads.
Shinjuku Incident isn't exactly a bad film -- OK, it *is* a bad film, but that didn't stop me enjoying it -- but there are problems all the way through. Chan appears to have had either a facelift, or he's shot so full of Botox his range of emotions runs from sad to sad. The plot is piss poor -- even by the standards of the Hong Kong Triad movie, which is pretty low indeed. Somewhere inside all this, was a good film, struggling to get out -- but it never actually makes it.
He does get into a couple of fights, but they lack the extreme coreography of the typical Chan movie. In fact, during the first fight, when a hostess escorting a drunk punter is set upon by muggers, Jackie simply trades a few blows and then starts shouting for the police.
And despite being a killer and the leader of a criminal gang, at heart, Jackie is still a hero who would risk his liberty to save a dying cop, and refuses to take protection money from the other Chinese merchants in the area. This lack of a killer instinct proves to be his undoing as his gang start engaging in moneymaking schemes behind his back, and the fortunes of his Yakuza protector turn around.
I'm sure this won't be Jackie's last attempt at a serious film. It probably won't be his worst attempt at a serious film either. In a couple of years time, it'll pop up on Film 4 as a late night option, and it's worth watching if you've nothing better to do. But I wouldn't recommend that you go out of your way to catch it.
Oh, one last thing. Lam Suet has a small supporting role. As ever, he's wonderful. Best thing in the whole film.
