Kamikase Girls

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.

Four stars.

Mother

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.

Unconditionally recommended. Don't miss it.

Love in a Puff

Love in a Puff
Hong Kong, 2010
Ho-Cheung Pang

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.