ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL Lincoln Center JUNE 29 - JULY 15, 2018

[Chris Knipp]

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NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL at Lincoln Center JUNE 29 - JULY 15, 2018

GENERAL FILM FORUM THREAD (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4502-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36938#post36938)

LINKS TO THE REVIEWS:
Age of Blood, The (Kim Hong-sun 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=37000#post37000)
Blood of Wolves, The (Shiraishi Kazuya, 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36947#post36947)
Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful, The (Yang Ya-che 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=37006#post37006)
BuyBust (Erik Matti 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=37033#post37033)
Crossroads: One Two Jaga (Nam Ron, 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36949#post36949)
Empty Hands, The (Chapman To 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36984#post36984)
Hit the Night (Jeong Ga-young 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36982#post36982)
Inuyashiki (Shinsuke Sato 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=37018#post37018)
Looking for Lucky (Jiang Jiachen 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36965#post36965)
Looming Storm, The (Doug Yue 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36946#post36946)
Microhabitat (Jeon Go-woon, 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36950#post36950)
Old Beast (Zhou Zihang 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36967#post36967)
On the Job (Erik Matti 2013) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=37009#post37009)
One Cut of the Dead (Shin'ichirô Ueda 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36948#post36948)
Paradox (Wilson Yip 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36980#post36980)
Respeto (Treb Monteras, 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36951#post36951)
Return, The (Malene Choi 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36996#post36996)
River's Edge (Isao Yukisada 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36952#post36952)
Sad Beauty (Bongkod Bencharongkul 2018) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=37031#post37031)
Scythian Lamb, The (Daihachi Yoshida 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=37003#post37003)
Smokin' on the Moon (Kanata Wolf 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=37025#post37025)
Wrath of Silence (Xin Yukun 2017) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36968#post36968)

[Chris Knipp]

NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2018

FULL LINEUP (58)
Titles in bold are included in the Main Competition; the list excludes the surprise screening.
===
CHINA (7)
Co-presented with Confucius Institute Headquarters and China Institute
– Dude’s Manual (Kevin Ko, 2018)
– End of Summer (Zhou Quan, 2017) – New York Premiere
– The Ex-Files 3: The Return of the Exes (Tian Yusheng, 2017)
– Looking for Lucky (Jiang Jiachen, 2018) – International Premiere
– The Looming Storm (Dong Yue, 2017) – North American Premiere
– Old Beast (Zhou Ziyang, 2017) – New York Premiere
– Wrath of Silence (Xin Yukun, 2017) – New York Premiere

HONG KONG PANORAMA (9)
Presented with the support of Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in New York
– Beast Stalker (Dante Lam, 2008) – Tribute to Dante Lam
– The Big Call (Oxide Pang, 2017) – North American Premiere
– The Brink (Jonathan Li, 2017) – New York Premiere
– The Empty Hands (Chapman To, 2018) – New York Premiere
– House of the Rising Sons (Antony Chan, 2018) – World Premiere
– Men on the Dragon (Sunny Chan, 2018) – World Premiere
– Operation Red Sea (Dante Lam, 2018) – Tribute to Dante Lam
– Paradox (Wilson Yip, 2017) – New York Premiere
– Unbeatable (Dante Lam, 2003) – Tribute to Dante Lam

INDONESIA (1)
– Buffalo Boys (Mike Wiluan, 2018) – US Premiere

JAPAN (14)
– Blood of Wolves (Shiraishi Kazuya, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Dynamite Graffiti (Tominaga Masanori, 2018) – North American Premiere
– The Hungry Lion (Ogata Takaomi, 2017) – North American Premiere
– Inuyashiki (Sato Shinsuke, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Kakekomi (Harada Masato, 2015) – Tribute to Harada Masato, New York Premiere
– Kamikaze Taxi (Harada Masato, 1995) – Tribute to Harada Masato
– Liverleaf (Naito Eisuke, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Midnight Bus (Takeshita Masao, 2017) – North American Premiere
– One Cut of the Dead (Ueda Shinichiro, 2018) – North American Premiere
– River’s Edge (Yukisada Isao, 2018) – North American Premiere
– The Scythian Lamb (Yoshida Daihachi, 2017) – New York Premiere
– Sekigahara (Harada Masato, 2017) – Tribute to Harada Masato, New York Premiere
– Smokin’ on the Moon (Kanata Wolf, 2017) – International Premiere
– The Third Murder (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 2017) – New York Premiere

MALAYSIA (2)
– Crossroads: One Two Jaga (Nam Ron, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Dukun (Dain Said, 2018) – International Premiere

PHILIPPINES (6)
– BuyBust (Erik Matti, 2018) – Tribute to Erik Matti, World Premiere
– Neomanila (Mikhail Red, 2017) – New York Premiere
– On the Job (Erik Matti, 2013) – Tribute to Erik Matti
– Respeto (Treb Monteras, 2017) – North American Premiere
– Sid & Aya: Not a Love Story (Irene Villamor, 2018) – New York Premiere
– We Will Not Die Tonight (Richard Somes, 2018) – World Premiere

SOUTH KOREA (10)
– 1987: When the Day Comes (Jang Joon-hwan, 2017)
– After My Death (Kim Ui-seok, 2017) – North American Premiere
– The Age of Blood (Kim Hong-sun, 2017) – International premiere
– Counters (Lee Il-ha, 2017) – North American Premiere
– Hit the Night (Jeong Ga-young, 2017) – North American Premiere
– I Can Speak (Kim Hyeon-seok, 2017)
– Little Forest (Yim Soon-rye, 2018) – New York Premiere
– Microhabitat (Jeon Go-woon, 2017) – North American Premiere
– The Return (Malene Choi, 2018) – East Coast Premiere
– What a Man Wants (Lee Byeong-hun, 2018)

TAIWAN (5)
– Gatao 2: Rise of the King (Yen Cheng-kuo, 2018) – North American Premiere
– The Last Verse (Tseng Ying-ting, 2017) – New York Premiere
– Missing Johnny (Huang Xi, 2017) – New York Premiere
– On Happiness Road (Sung Hsin-yin, 2017) – North American Premiere
– The Bold, the Corrupt and the Beautiful (Yang Ya-che, 2017) – New York Premiere

THAILAND (3)
– Premika (Siwakorn Jarupongpa, 2017) – North American Premiere
– Sad Beauty (Bongkod Bencharongkul, 2018) – North American Premiere
– Tears of the Black Tiger (Wisit Sasanatieng, 2000)

[Chris Knipp]

DOUG YUE: THE LOOMING STORM (2017)

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DUAN YIHONG IN THE LOOMING STORM

Theme: "A man who is laid off from a steel factory desperately wants to chase a serial killer in a small city in Southern China."


This is a mood piece and a psychological study on top of a meandering police procedural whose "police" lack real skin in the game and may not have their head screwed on quite right. A better title might be the French one, Une pluie sans fin (but the Mandarin one is , Bàoxuě jiāng zhì,"Blizard is approaching"), because the rain, and later worse, storm, doesn't just loom during the main action of this film but pour down continually on the gloomy dark decaying factory and on protagonist Yu Guowei (Duan Yihong), who is in charge of security, only a minor role at the factory. His main job is catching out petty thefts. But his dream is to be a full-scale detective who can unlock the secrets of the serial killings going on in the region. Details of these are threaded through the narrative, but Yu Gowei's relation to them is shaky. Weaving genre and psychological study with political commentary in a rich and complex and visually pleasing way, much of this film is quite marvelous, even if it's a bit overlong, but toward the end it loses direction, failing to reach a satisfying finale.

The main action takes place in 1997, time of the death of Deng Xiaoping and the handover of Hong Kong, and also when China is shutting down a lot of underperforming factories and casting out most of the workers, a sequence of events talented first time director Doug Yue is registering quiet protest to, along with allusion to the general brutality and crushing effect on the common man of modern China's rapid "progress." It's suggested that many of the employees, once fired, are cast out of their humble dwellings as well. Yet Yu Guowei gets an award as Model Worker of the Year at an annual meeting of the factory for zealously catching thieving workers, and gives an impromptu acceptance speech full of hope. Is this indication of a sudden change of affairs, or of Yu Guowei's cluelessness? Or has he imagined this whole episode? The shakiness of his hold on reality is continually, subtly, referred to. But finally his pursuit of a scrawny individual he intuits is the killer leads to dire consequences. The award ceremony may be real, but it is intensely ironic in relation to the brooding landscape and dire fates of the factory and its workers.

At the outset Yu Guowei appears ten years later in quite a different mode. He has just been released from pirson for an unspecified crime. Eventually we find out what it was. This opening, the present time of the film, is 2008, a time of natural disasters. When Yu Guwei is asked to spell his name on release, for an I.D., his explanation is that it's "yu" for "unnecessary remnants," "guo" for "nation," and "wei" for "glorious." So at the outset there is an allusion to how the "glorious nation" has turned many of its citizens into castoff remnants. And he is one of them.

But in the rained-on main action, Yu Guowei gets minor involvement in investigating serial killings, examining the body of a brutally murdered woman as in so many noir mystery genre films. But there are actual police assigned to the case, primarily Chief Zhang (Du Yuan). Yu Guowei is only called in to give evidence of any absent workers from the factory: but this gives birth to his delusion that he is one of the case investigators.

To bolster Yu Guowei's confidence, but only in a comically inadequate way, he has a dumb but cute assistant, Xiao Liu (Zheng Wei), who clumsily follows him around, gumming things up but praising his brilliance and calling him "maestro." This assistant is deluded too, if in a more benign way. But his eagerness and his boss's indifference to him lead to dire consequences.

Unlike them is the dance hall prostitute, Yanzi (Jiang Yiyang), whom Yu Guowei befriends mainly in hopes that she will have clues about the killer. In a way she is deluded too, notably in thinking that Yu Guowei cares about her. But her dream is practical: to go to Hong Kong and have her own beauty parlor. She gets a humble beauty parlor, and Yu Guowei helps her with that. But she says "There won't be any customers in this weather." We don't see any. Jiang Yiyang's sad, droopy beauty and tawdry elegance give this film much of its atmosphere and beauty - along with the magnificently brooding lineaments of the dark satanic factory, which seems like a decayed building out of Kidnapped even though it is still nominally functioning. The constant rain makes it seem like a grand outhouse of hell.

A long (doubtless too long) late-middle section follows the dreary relationship between Yu and Jiang, the asexual obsessive and the wan dreamer. Does she imagine he cares for him, though they never have sex? Probably not really, certainly not when she discovers he is not mooning over her but spying on her, imagining she may have a relationship with his imaginary killer.

Yue is a subtle and sophisticated weaver of mood, but he needs to find his way to a tighter plotline and clearer action. The Looming Storm melts away in the rain, because when it returns to 2008, it seems to undercut too much of the (intentional) unreliable narrative that has come before, so the viewer can't get a grip on the action at all, and the film's complexities seem to overwhelm it. But Doug Yue is clearly a new director to watch.

The Looming Storm/ 暴雪将至, Bàoxuě jiāng zhì, 120 mins, debuted at Tokyo Oct. 2017, and premiered in Paris 14 June 2018, but its French release to cinemas as Une pluie sans fin ("Endless Rain"") was 25 July: there were good reviews in major journals (AlloCiné press rating 3.5). . Screened for this review as part of the 2018 New York Asian Film Festival, where it shows 9 July .

[Chris Knipp]

SHIRAISHI KAZUYA: THE BLOOD OF WOLVES (2018)

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TORI MATSUZAKA AND KÔJI YAKUSHO IN THE BLOOD OF WOLVES

An old genre reappears

"The yakuza movie used to bestride the Japanese film industry like a colossus," wrote Max Schilling of The Japan Times (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2018/05/09/films/film-reviews/blood-wolves-old-school-yakuza-thrills-back/),"but now clings to its margins." Perhaps it should stay there. Of course diehards sometimes take a crack at the genre again, Schilling notes, Like Takeshi Kitano with Outrage Coda "but a true revival has yet to come." Kitano has done more interesting such films already, even if one watches them in vain for hints of deeper meaning that isn't really there.

The Blood of Wolves features a sleazy bent cop, Shogo Ogami, played by Kôji Yukusho, who is accompanied by a new rookie partner, a recent Hiroshima University graduate called Shūichi Hioka (Tori Matsuzaka), a pretty boy type who holds back his jujitsu skills and also the fact that he's from Internal Affairs and sent to lay bare Ogami's corruption - and get hold of his diary, packed with insider information. Hioka's relation to Ogami is interesting at times, as it swings passionately between shock and admiration. Yukusho and Matsuzaka both have juicy roles, and make the most of them.

There is plenty of violence, right off the bat, including a castration, a clipped off finger, victims fed pig offal, a severed head in a urinal, and the like. The two cops are getting in the way between two rival gangs - Kakomura-gumi and the Odani-gumi - you know the drill. It's slickly done, and there are occasional surprises, particularly coming from a young female pharmacist. There is also an occasional austere-sounding voiceover.

Shiraishi Kazuya's The Blood of Wolves is "more of a homage than a revamp," suggested Schilling. It is a cop thriller based on Yuko Yuzuki's novel, but the director has acknowledged his greater model is Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity, a five-part 1973-74 series. "It would be interesting," Film Alert 101 (http://filmalert101.blogspot.com/2018/06/sydney-film-festival-barrie-pattison.html) speculates, "to know just how [The Blood of Wolves] made its way into the festival circuit." Maybe to remind us how the non-festival circuit world lives? Really Blood of Wolves, for all its genre thrills, is far too familiar, and too long. But still, at times, it's pretty great, too.

The Blood of Wolves / 孤狼の血 (Korô no chi, "Blood of solitary wolf"), 126 mins., debuted at Udine Far East Festival 24 Apr. 2018, opening in Japan 12 May. It showed in the Nippon Connection festival in German in May and at Sidney in June. It was screened for this review as part of the NYAFF at Lincoln Center where it shows July 2 at 9:15 pm.

[Chris Knipp]

SHIN'ICHIRÔ UEDA: ONE CUT OF THE DEAD//KAMERA O TOMERU NO! (2017)

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HARUMI SYUHAMA IN ONE CUT OF THE DEAD

TRAILER (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du2XfUDfjN0)

Careful with that axe!

This movie plays in an original and hilarious manner with the zombie movie genre. It is also a virtuoso display of self-reflection, a making-of a making-of, and it's in three parts. The first part is the film you saw on TV. Later, we learn that it was shot as the first episode for a new all-zombie channel, in a live broadcast single take - no time for edits - so "one cut" has a double meaning. The premise is this: A director whose claim is being "fast, cheap, but average," is making a zombie movie with a small crew in an abandoned water filtration plant in a remote location. During a break caused by the director's discontent (to put it mildly) with the female young lead Chinatsu (Yuzuki Akiyama) for flubbing 42 takes of the scene where she's threatened by her zombified bf, Ko (Kazuaki Nagaya), real zombies begin to attack, and mayhem ensues. After that the director returns and, heedless of the danger and doom coming on the cast, shoots the attacks of the real zombies with delight, maniacally yelling "Action!"

All this movie was in fact made with virtually unknown actors and on a tiny budget, and part of its charm lies in its revelation of Japanese teamwork and artisanal ingenuity.

The whole first segment, ending with the title and credits for "One Cut of the Dead," is a tour-de-force nearly forty-minute take. That cheap zombie movie shoot that turns real is just the beginning.

Part two, set one month earlier, loses the energy and ferocity of the first part, but modulates into a homier, more self-conscious mood. It's from the point of view of the director, Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu) and shows his family life, then how he got hired to do the movie, and its peculiar demands. We learn that his wife Nao (Harumi Syuhama) is an actress who's stopped acting, but comes to his shoots, and that his daughter, Mao (Mao) who comes for the rehearsals and later is recruited into the cast, has a crush on the young man in "One Cut's" cast, Ko, apparently a heartthrob, who emerges as a prima donna. What this segment lacks in excitement it makes up on gemütlichkeit. It humanizes the whole affair and takes us to the human stories behind the making-of that is to follow.

At the last minute, the actress who is to play the older woman can't make it, and Higurashi's retired actress wife Nao steps in. The actor who is to play the director can't make it either, and Higurashi is forced to play the make-believe director as well as the real one. One of the crew members who turns into a zombie, we learn, is an alcoholic who needs a drink to stop his hands from shaking, but if he has one, risks passing out. Another cast member (and make-believe crew member) has something like irritable bowel syndrome, and must be reassured that there will be "port-a-loos" brought in, as the facility has no restrooms.

Now we begin the third part, the complete "making of," of the film we saw in part one, which we fully appreciate now that we understand, as we must, that this has to be by-the-skin-of-your-teeth guerrilla filmmaking at its most demanding. It's a tribute to Ueda that as everything goes wrong in the shoot and the cast brilliantly improvises, you half expect something to go so terribly wrong that a cast member will actually get his or her head or arm hacked off. There are multiple axes in play.

The third segment is the most important, and the most complete, but our appreciation of it entirely depends on our having seen the film as it appeared broadcast on TV. Not only do we see the cast running around in "One Cut of the Dead" T shirts moving equipment, splashing blood, and inserting fake chopped-off heads and limbs. We also observe the tribulations of the cast member with the loose bowel problem and the effort necessary to make him appear when the script calls for it. The director must personally revive the drunken actor.

The hilarity is lightened by the production's success in spite of every malfunction and missed cue. As the TV people watch remotely, things repeatedly go wrong. Yet the cast's improvisations are more gonzo and original than the original script - to which they always return, like a masterful pianist picking up the theme of a concerto after the cadenza. The drunk's wobbly condition makes him an excellent zombie, once they can get him standing up. It's nice to see the prima donna turn into a team player who improvises brilliantly, and it is astonishing to find out why the director's wife is so impressive and even scary as the older woman in the cast.

One Cut of the Dead /カメラを止めるな! Kamera o tomeru na! ("Do not stop the camera!"), 93 mins., opened in Japan 9 Nov. 2017. It gained international notice at Udine and has been in nine international festivals, including the New York Asian Film Festival, as part of which it was screened for this review, showing 13 Jul. 2018 at 10:20 p.m.

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TAKAYUKI HAMATSU, FOREGROUND, IN ONE CUT OF THE DEAD, WITH YUZUKI AKIYAMA, HARUMI SYUHAMA, KAZUAKI NAGAYA

[Chris Knipp]

NAM RON: CROSSROADS: ONE TWO JAGA (2018)

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Eeny meeny, mene mene

Malaysian filmmaker Nam Ron’s third feature is a messy little movie all seen through yellow filters, that aims to show that corruption is everywhere. A longhaired guy carries out his more powerful father's dirty work, starting with burning the body of a worker who died in a fall. He takes a kid along with him who wants to be tough. His older brother hides his sister at a sleazy hotel while arranging for her to return home, because she hates working here. She has lost her passport. Their are other subplots, too many. The main focus is a corrupt cop going around with his new young partner, only 23, whose face is twisted into a scowl of distaste at all the bribes and payoffs he sees. The rookie tries to remain pure, but he turns out to be a loose canon whose desire to play by the rules leads only to tragedy.

The framing scene shows the rookie, but we don't know him yet, after a beating by interrogator. The next shot is of kids playing a Malaysian "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" game that separates cops from robbers, both emblematic of how the two are indistinguishable, and referring to the boy, Jaga, who will be caught up in all the mess. The director, Nam Ron, deserves credit for juggling his excessive number of small plot lines clearly enough, for those who are capable of taking them all in. There are too many, though, and a third of them should have been left on the cutting room floor. The trouble is, we don't care deeply about anybody except, briefly, for the rookie cop, who, like everybody else, betrays out trust.

The film uses Indonesia’s Ario Bayu (Buffalo Boys) and the Philippines’ Timothy Castillo (Neomanila) playing illegal immigrants. (NYAFF festival blurb.)

See David Pountain's review on FILMDO (https://www.filmdoo.com/blog/2018/04/22/review-crossroads-one-two-jaga-2018/) (penned at the Udine Far East Festival).

Crossroads: One Two Jaga/One Two Jaga, 80 mins., debuted at Udine 22 Apr. 2018, also showing at Shanghai 16 Jun. It was screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, where it shows 29 Jun.

[Chris Knipp]

JEON GO-WOON: MICROHABITAT/SO-GONG-NYEO (2017)

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AHN JAE-HONG AND ESOM IN MICROHABITAT

A winter's tale

Microhabitat is a Korean debut feature by a woman director who's part of an independent collective called Gwanghwamun Cinema. It's a unique, meditative character study as well as a series of vignettes that serve as a small panorama of a variety of Seoul lifestyles and economic situations. But it doesn't come off as quite so cold and formal as that sounds. It's governed by the unpredictability of Miso (Esom, Lee So-young), an independent, freewheeling woman of 31. When we first meet her she's working as the housekeeper of a well-off young woman, who treats her as a friend.

Then, Miso discovers the price of a pack of cigarettes has just gone up 80%. It turns out her other essential indulgence is single malt scotch. She considers her carefully allocated finances, and makes the radical decision of moving out of her tiny flat, whose rent has also just gone up $100. She parts on friendly terms with her landlord, who's none too well off himself; the rent on his apartment has just gone up $150.

Miso is now homeless, but she can afford to smoke and order a glass of good whisky in a bar. She's a spartan kind of sybarite. An IMDb plot outline says she suffers from a deep depression that she assuages with chain smoking and heavy drinking. That is not in the least true, and just shows how Miso's nonconformity can be misread. She is a bohemian. Later, when people whom we've seen her serially visit in the film gather several years later for a funeral and talk about her, they speak with admiration of her good cooking, her skill as a housekeeper, the two dozen eggs she arrived with, and the way she "dressed in layers," which seemed "chic then."

Miso is a mystery. But she has a boyfriend (Ahn Jae-hong, a regular of the Gwanghwamun Cinema productions), who's a cartoonist. They are very much in love, though rough digs and a cold Seoul winter cause them to put off having sex till spring. Then, he springs a disappointing but practical surprise: he is giving up cartooning, to "live like a normal person," and has volunteered for a job in Saudi Arabia that will last for two years, so he can save up a lot of money, $50,000, he calculates.

Living with less as she does already, being without her boyfriend for two years is really tough. But Miso is never daunted, never saddened. She smiles, she copes. Each stay with someone - a brother and a sister, neither of whom is as happy as she is by a long shot, a lonely man who lives with his parents, a former classmate who was once needy, but now married to a rich guy. She has a healthy baby boy, and a Freudian slip suggests he may be a torture as much as a joy. When Miso joins her husband for a smoke after dinner, she reveals her insecurity.

Each visit shows us a different "habitat," a different house or interior and lifestyle. And one of the film's triumphs is a scene where an agent shows Miso a series of increasingly disastrous possible rentals, each one with a worse window with a worse view, higher up in one of the poorest and cheapest parts of Seoul. Each of the vignettes makes a perfectly turned little short story that is at once a sly, often droll psychological study and a look at current Korean manners and economics. And all the while this is a flowing portrait of the free spirit, living on the edge, that is Miso. This is a wise, comical, meditative debut that makes for enjoyable watching. There are little flaws. Some of the transitions are abrupt, the editing is a bit rough. And the English subtitles need some polishing. An interesting film, though, and a budget production that looks great.

Microhabitat / 소공녀 (So-gong-nyeo,"A Little Princess"), 106 mins., debuted at Busan Oct. 2017, opening in Korea 22 Mar. 2018. It was screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it shows 10 Jul. 2018 at 6:30 p.m.

The film was reviewed at Busan by Pierce Conran for Screen Anarchy (http://screenanarchy.com/2017/10/busan-2017-review-microhabitat-a-poignant-and-lively-debut.html).

[Chris Knipp]

TREB MONTERAS (ALBERTO MONTERAS II): RESPETO (2017)

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ABRA IN RESPETO

The Philippines seeks a voice and finds a cycle of violence

Respeto begins as a hiphop coming-of-age movie, a sort of Filipino Eight Mile whose protagonist, Hendrix (Abra), comes from the very poor down-and-dirty world of the Pandacan slums, the underside of Manila, in which underground rap is the new anthem-maker. But first time filmmaker Alberto Monteras II has things to say about every aspect of the Philippines. Rap is only one voice of a story about politics and society. The oppressive Duterte regime is awakening in older Filipinos horrifying memories of the days of Marcos' dictatorship they thought they had gotten rid of. Monteras and his cowriter Njel De Mesa weave this movie into a powerful myth of ongoing conflict and cruelty.

Petty crime brings Hendrix close to Doc (Dido De La Paz), one of those older Filipinos, a bookseller and protest poet during Marcos, whom Hendrix first tries to rob and then adopts as a mentor. It turns out Doc was a practitioner of balagtasan, a Filipino art of debate conducted in verse, so he was a kind of ancestor rapper.

Hendrix lives with his sister Connie (Thea Yrastorza) and her boyfriend Mando (Brian Arda), and robs the latter to have money to enter the big local "Versus" rap contest, the movie's first big noisy vérité scene, since like Eight Mile, real rappers are used. He goes first, so we know he's going to lose. He fails miserably, trying to better a large female rapper opponent Luxuria with crude fat jokes. She easily destroys him and he is so daunted he pisses himself, which makes him notorious.

Then with his sidekicks Betchai (Chai Fonacier) and Payaso (Yves Bagadion) he conceives the idea of robbing Doc to repay his sister's boyfriend. Thus another world enters his life. The movie is in no hurry. Gradually it emerges that 'Drix's sister and boyfriend are selling drugs and use him as their runner. Getting to know Doc through repairing damage they cause breaking in, Hendrix steals a notebook of poetry and uses lines for his raps. But Doc, who may have early stage dementia, and turns out to have suffered traumatically under Marcos, is watching Hendrix and sees worth in him.

As we learn more about Doc he reveals that his family was abused by Marcos' government thugs and though he smashed one of them in the head with a rock, it felt ineffectual. A parallel was struck early on when at a club Hendrix sees his love Candy (Kate Alejandrino) raped by his perfidious rival Breezy G (Loonie) and can do nothing to stop it. And this mirrors the nation forced to watch impotent as two brutal regimes wreck havoc. In this context while rap contests like Versus are clearly a place where the urban poor can raise a loud voice, they're not seen as saving anything but instead, like the current regime, only play with more conflict, the drug lords bringing awful violence, and the vicious cycle going on.

Sometimes Respeto seems mired in the vulgarity and crude humor of a third world B-picture. On the other hand local reviewers fall into the airy generalizations of a term paper. It's hard to explain how Monteras welds mud into a meaningful shape, and his movie is so deeply vernacular no outsider can appreciate the message of its constant wordplay. But imperfect as it is, Respeto has more meaning and emotion in it than other more polished entries in the festival, and means a great deal to many Filipino viewers.

From Susan Claire Agbayani in Rappeler (https://www.rappler.com/entertainment/movies/182887-respeto-movie-fun-facts-treb-monteras) we learn that "National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera, and poets Vim Nadera (who had a cameo in the Balagtasan scene in the movie), Frank Rivera and Mark Angeles contributed poems to the film," as well as that actual Filipino rappers Mike Swift, Apekz, Abbaddon, J Skeelz, Mike Kosa and M-Zhayt and female rap artist Luxuria" perform in the Versus scenes speaking their own lines.

This feisty little movie won several awards including Best Picture at the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival and received a ten-minute standing ovation Aug. 2017, and was released theatrically in the Philippines in Sept. 2017. It surprised and pleased the filmmakers by also winning awards at Cyprus, and it gained more international attention with a Rotterdam screening. It was screened for this review as part of NYAFF, where it shows at 7:30 p.m. on 14 July 2018.

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Poster by V.Aseo and M.Lazarte (from Esquire (https://www.esquiremag.ph/culture/arts-and-entertainment/inside-the-respeto-movie-poster-a00207-20170919-lfrm))

[Chris Knipp]

ISAO YUKISADA: RIVER'S EDGE (2018)F

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FUMI NIKAIDO AND RYÔ YOSHIKAWA IN RIVER'S EDGE

Angsty and chic Japanese high school drama set in 1994

Ichiru Yamada (Ryô Yoshizawa) is the formerly bullied, closeted gay friend of Haruna, the main character (Fumi Nikaido), whose dreams of UFOs doubtless owe something to Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin , but everything in Isao Yukisada's River's Edge is adapted from a popular manga strip by Kyoko Okazaki. This must explain its appeal to an adolescent audience and also the shallowness of the characters. The title, "Ribâzu ejji" in the original, a transliteration of the English, references the more tightly plotted 1986 American movie that helped bring Crispin Glover and Keanu Reeves to public notice. Perhaps this is nostalgic for Japanese forty-somethings? The veteran director Isao Yukisada is now 49.

Ichiiru is still bullied, because Haruna rescues him locked naked in a locker. His victimizer is her own boyfriend, the tall, longhaired wild boy Kannonzaki (Shuhei Uesugi). There is also Kozue Yoshikawa (Sumiru), a bulimic classmate who is in TV ads. Ichiru dates the naive Kanna (Aoi Morikawa), who's unaware that he's gay, just thinks he's "fashionable and mysterious" (using the English word 'mysterious'). Only Haruna knows. Kannonzaki is having sex and snorting coke with the class slut, Rumi (Shiori Doi) - leading to a couple of surprisingly graphic sex scenes. The sequence where Ichiru takes Haruna out into the high grass to show her the decayed corpse he has discovered a year or so ago, having shared this secret earlier with Yoshikawa (they call each other by last names), may evoke Gregg Araki. Araki's Apocalypse Trilogy is more vivid, more fun, but less cool and chic than River's Edge. This film has a ghoulish side, but is also funny; it makes sense to call it a "tragicomedy."

These are Tokyo sophisticates, yet the atmosphere, the "river's edge" being rough and industrial, is also rather seedy. Rather than developing a coherent plot (though there is plenty of action 3/4 of the way through), the manga narrative seems more designed to show what urban Japanese high schoolers were up to in the Nineties, which could be a revelation for the younger and more naive, and titillation for the older who may have missed out on some of this, or anyway are past it now. But no one would want to be up to all these things, which are both idiotic and terrible. We are witness to crimes. It's manga.

River's Edge / リバーズ・エッジ ("Ribâzu ejji"), 118 mins., debuted in the Panorama section of the Berlinale 15 Feb. 2018 and opened in Japan the next day. It also had festival showings at Hong Kong, South Korea's Jeonju International Festival and Nippon Collection in Germany. It was screened for this review as part of the 2018 New York Asian Film Festival, where it shows 3 Jul. 2018 at 6:30 pm. Jonathan Romney wrote a Screen Daily review (https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/rivers-edge-berlin-review/5126676.article) from Berlin.

[Chris Knipp]

JIANG JIACHEN: LOOKING FOR LUCKY

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DING XINHE (LEFT) IN LOOKING FOR LUCKY

Getting ahead and falling behind

Looking for Lucky is a Chinese comedy-satire about contentiousness and insecurity. The latter exists for nearly all of us, particularly millennials, in a world where there are hardly any truly secure jobs anymore. In fact this film is so realistic, if ramped-up, and anxious, it's hard to see it as a comedy at times. Nonetheless if may have wide appeal, and Jiang Jiachen stands out in his first feature for his original methods and style.

Though the film speaks to today's universal insecurity, it uses very specific regional details of Chinese and more precisely northeastern Chinese culture and language. The director says that in Shenyang, the big city in northeastern China that's his hometown and the setting, "people argue continuously." The continuous quarreling involves everybody. As elsewhere in China, bribes are carefully calibrated, even refereed by the police. If you cause any harm that may be actionable, an immediate payoff is expected, and advisable.

This issue comes up immediately, and maybe nothing quite matches the opening sequence for comedy, or absurd heightening of Shenyang argumentativeness. Zhang Guangsheng (Ding Xinhe), about to finish his master's degree after three years, has been taking care of his Professor, "Old Niu's," white bulldog, Lucky (certainly an ironic name for him). As somebody pointedly declares later, Guangsheng is Old Niu's dog himself. He's momentarily put the care of the dog in the hands of his father (Yu Hai), a laid-off factory worker. A fat woman with a squalling little boy is accusing Guangsheng's father of allowing the dog to bite the kid's finger. The father begs to differ. A little crowd has gathered. Everyone is shouting at the top of their lungs. The dog, however, has disappeared. Guangsheng's father didn't have it on a leash and has let it get out of his sight.

When Guangsheng arrives, he is immediately in a panic. He vociferously blames his father for his negligence. Guangsheng and his father are continually arguing through most of the movie. But this is a father-son buddy picture. Before the end, the dad's true caring emerges from beneath the contentiousness. Guangsheng's panic leads him into other traps and payoffs besides the fat lady. His (also fat, and comedic-intense) printshop owning buddy insists he must offer a reward for a finder of the dog, and when the notice goes up, some scammers offer a whitish bulldog, then force him to take it by threatening to eat it if he doesn't.

For contrast, view, if you can, French comic maaster Étienne Chatiliez's 2001 comedy Tanguy. That too is about a graduate student whose future is uncertain, and is full of feelings of anxiety, sometimes on the part of the student, Tanguy, more often on that his beleaguered dear maman and papà. His speciality, incidentally, is Chinese. Chatilliez's highly-crafted film maintains a light atmosphere even when the parents are being driven nutty by their pretentious, though exemplary, son who just never seems to be going to move out and leave them in peace. But the posh bourgeois setting of Tanguy and its elaborately constructed, and more leisurely, scenes allow the viewer more breathing room to enjoy the fun at an enjoyable remove, even though stay-at-home adult children are becoming more familiar in the first world.

In his director's statement for Hong Kong the thirty-four-year-old director lays claim to "a sense of absurdness" in his premise of "a young guy" who is "looking for a dog and a job upon graduation." There is confidence and intensity in Jiang's Cassavetes-style improvisation and a structure that disappears in the action. But it is the 61 long takes of unrelieved nervous action whose exhausting intensity makes it harder to see this movie as laughable or a satire because the comedy is so high strung.

The dog serves as a symbol of subservience, the subservience of Guangsheng to his professor, the subservience of everyone, especially millennials, to the system. Guangsheng's vague love interest - though he's too busy being servile to his professor to pursue it, if that were even allowable - is a young female student in his year who turns out to have her own way of getting ahead. As the film brings in fellow students Jiang's strong sense of the milieu and particularly of economic factors comes through even more. Though Guangsheng departs for some job as a finale and Old Niu has been suitably dealt with, Looking for Lucky isn't about resolution. It's about the problem, and the absurdities and extremes it leads people into.

Looking for Lucky debuted at Hong Kong (see listing), also showing at Shanghai, receiving the Asian New Talent Award and two nominations there. It was screened for this review as part of the NYAFF, showing 8 July at 2:30 PM.

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DING XINHE AND YU HAI IN LOOKING FOR LUCKY

[Chris Knipp]

JHOU ZIYANG: OLD BEAST/LAO SHOU (2017)

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TU MEN IN OLD BEAST

Family relations

Lao Yang (Tu Men), the center of this tale, is a despicable sixty-something pater familias who at first just seems a wretch. His wife is dying in the hospital and he is lavishing expensive gifts on his mistress and grandson and blowing cash at cheesy massage parlors and Mahjong dives. And it gets worse. His married siblings wrangle over the cost of an operation for his wife, their mother, and when they reluctantly agree and put money together, he steals it and blows it. Then an old shepherd buddy leaves him his camel, which is awaiting the vet, and he sells the camel and pawns his little motorbike to buy a cow, which he fobs off on his naive friend as more profitable than the camel. The family are so angry they lock him in a cellar. But cell phones are wonderful, and he gets the police to let him out, and sues his family. That, later, he regrets, when he wins.

But in this beautifully photographed film (by Belgian China resident Matthias Delvaux) with its compelling lead performance there is more than just the picture of an aging rogue digging himself into a deep dark hole. This is a grim watch but also a complex and original one - even if its picture of modern China, with its failed new city and squabbling, mercenary and selfish youngsters, is not so unusual.

The setting plays a constant role. It is the city of Ordos. And therein lie Lao Yang's extenuating circumstances. In Inner Mongolia, it's perhaps the government's most spectacular failure among its new towns to resettle populations in (hopefully) growing industrial areas. It's a vast cluster of old slums and abandoned new highrise developments laced with grandiose statuary. As Lao Yang tools around on his little motorbike, with his small, plump body and big head topped with a grand mound of pearly gray hair, his bravely youthful leather jacket and pseudo-stylish sunglasses, the Neverland of failed urban development hovers with mocking indifference behind him.

Here, real estate collapsed, and Lao Yang was in real estate. But before that decline of his fortunes, he was successful, and from his manner, probably powerful (the actor, Tu Men, once notably played Genghis Khan). He worked hard to get his children educations and set them up with careers and spouses. Now, they don't need him. In this context, his dissolute behavior is an act of protest in the face of ingratitude. The spouses of the children are chillier than the children themselves. These general facts either you know or you figure out, in watching. They are embedded in the action, emerging in remarks Lao Yang makes. "You don't like Lao Yang?" this movie says: "Well, just look at the rest of his family." There's no one to like.

At first, with his late night gambling and his outer polish and mask of white hair Lao Yang made me think of Roger Duchesne in Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le Flambeur. But Bob is a benevolent, failed crook, whose gambling hurts nobody. His elegance doesn't get tarnished. He is nice to his concierge. Still Lao Yang is an unusual choice of protagonist and he makes you cast around. Later as events stayed gloomy and got darker and Lao Yang got blood on his nose and mud on his shoes, my thoughts turned to the films of Robert Bresson. But that won't work either because here the struggling is menial and never ennobling as in Bresson.

There are indications in this feature debut that Jhou Ziyang is a quite original voice. He has found a unique point of view in this unlikable protagonist, and a specific place in this big hulk of a city.

What is Lao Yang doing at the end when he returns home to care for his dying wife? Has he reformed? Has he repented? Or has he merely found the only comfortable birth for himself and a new maliciousness behind a new mask? At times he has only his cigarettes and his flip phone, and his cigarettes are rumpled and his flip phone is losing power. Lao Yang is one of the loneliest men in Chinese cinema. And that's something to see.

Old Beast / 老獸 Lǎo shòu ("Old Beast"), 108 mins., first appeared in July 2017 at Xining, then was noticed at Tokyo in Oct., and Taipei in Nov. and it was reviewed by Richard Kuipers in Variety (https://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/old-beast-review-1202606212/) and Clarence Tsui in Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/old-beast-lao-shou-film-review-tokyo-2017-1050968). It won three prizes and four nominations, getting the FIPRESCI Prize, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay (and Zhou penned his own screenplay) at Taiwan's Golden Horse awards. It received theatrical releases in China (Dec. 2017) and Taiwan (Jan. 2018), with other festival showings (Miami, Singapore); it was screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it shows Tues., 3 Jul. 2018 at 9 p.m.

[Chris Knipp]

XIN YUKUN: WRATH OF SILENCE/BAO LIE WU SHEN (2018)

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JIANG WU IN WRATH OF SILENCE WITH "A SQUIFFY HAIRDO" (ELLEY) - A MARCEL WAVE, A RURAL LUXE LIKE FOREIGN CIGS?

Mute revenge in the wilds

Derek Elley of Sino-Cinema (http://sino-cinema.com/2017/12/13/review-wrath-of-silence-2017/) as usual provides informed and linguistically savvy comments on this film, summarizing its elaborate plot, then evaluating the execution, comparing it favorably with careful assessment of the 33-year-old Chinese filmmaker's previous efforts. Clarence Tsui makes further claims for this new film in his Hollywood Reporter review (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/wrath-silence-bao-lie-wu-sheng-film-review-1046406).

The lead character is a mute miner, Zhang Baomin (Song Yang), who returns to the dusty Inner Mongolian hills to find his 12-year-old sheep-herding son missing and foul play, not for the first time, going on among the mining companies on the part of the local tycoon, Chang Wannian (wuxia movie vet Jiang Wu). Chang is "villainous," with all that implies of the slightly over-the-top. In between is Xu Wenjie (Yuan Wenkang), a cleancut looking but morally tainted lawyer under investigation for activities with Chang.

Reviewers consider this to be a film that plays impressively with elements of Western and noir genre. Elley comments that Xin's 2014 debut had "unnecessarily arty" elements, but this movie "falls somewhere between commercial and arthouse cinema in consistently interesting ways."

Whether the balance feels right depends on the viewer's commitment to the action, which for me wavered at first. It seemed the opening scene's exploitation of the photogenic quality of sheep; a suddenly missing small boy; a vengeful, angry mute man; and a sleazy local boss stuffing his face with greasy chunks of meat were laying on the cinematic gestures rather thick for just the first fifteen minutes. But isn't one of my favorite modern movies, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, pretty much an oddball, arty Western through and through? There's no doubt that Xin Yukun wields his version of a cowboy revenge movie with skills equal to ambition,helped by a Korean martial arts director for fight sequences and a cadre of accomplished and known professional actors in key roles.

It's nothing like Dead Man, of course. It does not subvert genre in such an original way and is more just an actioner. Despite occasional artful juxtapositions by the editor, Hu Shuzhen, the arty feel fades by midway when the film settles into a lot of chasing around, with two missing children and Baomin taking on crowds of bad guys singlehanded. It's modern western, basically, with an Asian martial arts vibe, in which people just have flip phone rather than smart phones. Actress Tan Zhuo, by the way, stays at home, underused, as Baomin's wife, Xia Cui.

Wrath of Silence / 暴裂无声 (Bao lie wu shen, "breakless silence") 119 mins., debuted Jul. 2017 at First International Film Festival Xining, then showing at London, Taipei, Singapore, Macao. It was screened for this review as part of the 2018 New York Asian Film Festival, showing 9 July 2018 at 6:30 p.m. New York Premiere · Q&A with director Xin Yukun and actor Jiang Wu, who will receive the Star Asia Award.

[Chris Knipp]

WILSON YIP: PARADOX (2017)

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CHRIS COLLINS AND LOUIS KOO IN PARADOX

A trip to Thailand

Paradox is as adept as many other Hong Kong action movies, including the two previous of the 'SPL' franchise to which it is linked. This one takes us from Hong Kong to a new location and a kidnapping for very nefarious purposes. The themes of pregnant daughters and organ theft are interwoven in a pretty disturbing way. But they're there not so much for any depth of exploration as to function as engines for action requiring a variety of bad guys and some frenetic running around.

At the center is Hong Kong cop Lee Chung-Chi (the handsome and buff and newly martial-arts-ready Louis Koo). His teenaged daughter Wing-Chi (Hanna Chan) brings the unwelcome news that she's pregnant by some uneducated stranger she wants to marry now. Rather than blessing this union, Lee gets the boy arrested, and this leads Wing-Chi to flee to Thailand, where's she's kidnapped by organ thieves to provide a heart transplant for the aging and ailing mayor of Bangkok seeking reelection. Given that his brutality has set off the fate of his daughter, the heroic Lee isn't so heroic after all, an aspect that might have made for richer treatment than it gets here.

The mayor and his breathtakingly unscrupulous manager Cheng Hon-Sau (Gordon Lam) provide one subplot. The organ theft kingpin, a burly and crude American called Sacha (Chris Collins) whose cover is a meatpacking plant, is the other. Lee links up with local cops Chui Kit (Wu Yue) - whose wife is pregnant (another, parallel, subplot) and ranking officer Chai (Vithaya Pansringarm) - a little too close to local government bosses to be honest. They are joined, all too briefly, by the acrobatic Thai martial arts star Tony Jaa, as a another local cop. As Lee pursues his search sometimes with fellow cops, sometimes on his own, he's occasionally also helped by a good-hearted hooker (Jacky Cai).

If a righteous, vengeful cop wiping out a horde of bad guys in a warehouse is your thing Paradox will be all you need. The action sequences are relentless and hyper-active. The scenery is pretty. The bad guys are really bad. But there isn't enough complexity to the plot to make this stand out from so many Hong Kong action movies with cops and bad guys. The local industry is shown by this festival selection to be producing this genre as well as ever, but it becomes ever harder to bring out a truly original one.

If Paradox stands out from its peers, it could be for the preponderance of brutal hand-to-hand combat, which includes a wealth of knife-cuts and spurting blood, all executed with precision and clarity. A man listening to a beating heart may be the most memorable image, however. Sammo Hung was in charge of the fight choreography. The work of dp Kenny Tse is impeccable. The writing of Nick Cheuk and Lai-Yin Leung could have been more plausible. For a convincing tale of organ theft, go to Stephen Frears' 2002 Dirty Pretty Things , or for a truly great film about a dicey heart transplant, watch Claire Denis' 2004 L'intrus/The Intruder.

Paradox / 殺破狼・貪狼 (Sha po lang: taam long, "The Killing Wolf"), 98 mins., opened in China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand in Aug.-Oct. 2017, showing at San Diego and Taipei Nov., releasing i South Korea and Japan in 2018. Screened for this review as part of NYAFF, showing 4 Jul, 2018 at 7:45 p.m.

Reviewed in Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/paradox-film-review-1029824) and Screen Anarchy (http://screenanarchy.com/2017/08/review-paradox-scores-another-hit-for-the-spl-franchise.html) .

[Chris Knipp]

JEONG GA-YOUNG: HIT THE NIGHT (2017)

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PARK JONG-HWAN AND JEONG GA-YOUNG IN HIG THE NIGHT

Boy hunting in the rough

Jeong Ga-young is most known in Korea as an actress, but as she turns to directing as well, she invites the description of "female Hong Sang-soo" with this film consisting, like Hong's, of long scenes of talking and drinking. This variation lacks the polish or the charm of Hong, but in its relative crudeness and its flipping of the gender roles, it may have more bite.

An aspiring female director, also called Ga-young and played by Jeong, seeks to seduce male acquaintance Jin-nyeok (Park Jong-hwan) through a lengthy, provocative interview, ostensibly conducted as parparation for a film (she takes notes). Ga-young delves into Jin-nyeok's love-life over a night of drinking. Jeong is small, with short hair. Jin-nyeok is tall, with bushy, boyish hair (Park has worked as a fashion model). Jeong started as a director with the 2016 Bitch on the Beach, which references Hong Sang-soo directly. This Ga-young is neither subtle nor romantic, starting right out with questions about how many times Jin-nyeok masturbates, whether he thinks of his girlfriend as he does so, and so on. Jin-nyeok is a sufficiently complex (and understated) personality to make the outcome uncertain.

Jin-nyeok may be the boy of Ga-young's dreams, and at least she hints that she's interested, but he repeatedly says that he isn't. Given her laughably inappropriate approach, that's no surprise. We also understand that she is paying him for this "interview," though its purpose as preparation for a film seems dubious. On the other hand, Jin-nyeok doesn't walk away.

The evening starts with dinner, then moves on to drinks, and ends with karaoke. The drinking they do at a kind of club with booths. When Jin-nyeok goes to the bathroom, he has a hard time remembering which booth they were in. At the Karaoke club, a plump, bespectacled friend of Jin-nyeok's appears. She goes walking with this new guy,who unlike Jin-nyeok, is quite willing to kiss her. They seem to hit it off. But she won't allow him to accompany her home. She calls back Jin-nyeok, saying the interview wasn't over, and there is more conversation, unsatisfying for her.

There is discussion of a film Ga-young made or wanted to make, a sort of knockoff of Park Chan-wook'sOldboy, and uncertainty about the ending. And so Jeong prepares us for the non-ending of this film, with Ga-young alone, back at her apartment, sitting at a desk.

As one who has watched with pleasure a dozen or so of Hong Sang-soo's prolific output, it was natural to be curious about a female version, but I was somewhat disappointed, since this movie not only lacks the fluency and sparkle of Hong, but also Jeong, as an actress, is blatantly no match for the beauty and vivacity of Hong's current muse, Kim Min-hee. On the other hand, one can see how Park Jong-hwan could have won an acting prize. He disappears into his role seamlessly, making every reaction and answer feel spontaneous. And there is finally something solid here. In the relative crudity of Jeong's film compared to Hong's, the awkwardness of the situation, with the confident but abashed man and the timid predatory woman, is allowed to feel complex without any external effort, and the role reversal, coming in Korea in the "Me Too" era, has resonance.

But all is not aces here. The minimal situation and talky two-hander wears out its welcome half way through if not before. The tech aspects are only so-so, with some imbalances in the sound.

Hit the Night / 밤치기 (Bam-chi-gi, "Chestnuts"), 85 mins., debuted at Busan, where it won the Actor of the Year Award (for Park Jong-hwan) and the Vision-Director's Award. It also showed at Rotterdam in Jan. 2018 and in competition in the Seoul International Woman's Feature Festival Jun. 2018. Screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, showing July 6, 2018 at 6 p.m.

[Chris Knipp]

CHAPMAN TO: THE EMPTY HANDS (2017)

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STEPHY TANG IN THE EMPTY HANDS

A girl can't be herself

In his second outing as a director, in which he also costars, Hong Kong actor Chapman To (Du Wenze) takes on the amusing and original tale of a young woman called Mari (Stephy Tang, in what has been heralded as a career-best performance) and her struggle to break away from the strict lifestyle of her Japanese karate master father (Kurata Yasuaki) after he suddenly dies. Here is female empowerment, accompanied by many droll as well as serious ironies.

Mari has had to grow up in a not-so-huge Hong Kong apartment that was mostly a karate dojo. Set design is one of this movie's special delights, particularly of the apartment, with its austere, zen dojo and the little, cramped living space it allows, a mass of crushed-together clutter. Daddy forced Mari to participate fully in his karate world, training and competing intensely, which she never liked, despite a gift for it. She finally quit, and they became estranged, while she snuck away frequently to enjoy a love affair with a married man, a radio DJ named Calvin (Ryan Lau). Then, when her father dies, Mari rejoices at the prospect of closing the dojo, whose business has dwindled lately anyway. She will live a free life, subdividing the well-located apartment into tiny apartments and living idly as a Hong Kong slumlord.

But that is not to be. Cue to lawyer-reading-the-will scene. Her father, it transpires, has left 51% of the dojo to a former student Mari can't even remember, the - to her - mysterious Chan Kent (Chapman To) a man who turns out to have just been released from prison. And so, to Mari's distress, Chan Kent comes to take over the running of the dojo with Mute Dog (Stephen Au), her father's main teacher, whose gruff ways she had hoped to be rid of. To make matters worse, Mari's boyfriend, Calvin, has just broken up with her. Her only comfort is her longtime friendship with buxom and down-to-earth BFF Peggy (Dada Chan), who works in a massage parlor with bj finales.

The movie unfolds all these complex details efficiently and entertainingly in the first half hour, including flashbacks to Mari's force-fed karate childhood, love-scenes with boyfriend Calvin, combative cuddles with Peggy, and noble, solitary karate workouts by Mari's chilly but distinguished-looking Japanese father, accompanied by the occasional splash of baroque music. Later an elegant flashback shows how Kent was rejected by Mari's dad for using karate selfishly, then got his several years' jail time for assault using it as he would like, to protect a little girl against a sexual predator. It is at this point, on his release, that he and Mari meet.

Then, when she makes her objection to life with him running the dojo clear, Chan Kent has a proposition: if she will enter a karate contest and simply remain standing, whether she wins or loses, he will sign off his part of the property to her and she'll never see him again. She does this, encountering a small but muscular and rough opponent who smashes her bloody. Many flashbacks - neatly done - show how her father's teachings have fortified her, though, and in the end she triumphs. The fight, despite all the cross-cutting, is very convincingly staged, Stephy Tang's karate chops convincing throughout.

Director To delivers a final sequence that neatly contrasts with this busy action. He takes a step that's so artistically valuable and so rare: he lets the film stop to breathe, with Mari alone in the dojo, having an imaginary dialogue with her father. As the film ends. nothing is decided, and we are left to contemplate its themes of rebellion, responsibility, and self defeat.

THE EMPTY HANDS / 空手道 Hung sau dou ("Karate"), 87 mins, opened theatrically 2 Nov. 2017 in Hong Kong, and in early Jan. 2018 in Taiwan; also was shown at Singapore May 2018. It was screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, showing 6 Jul. 2018 at 8:15 p.m. Q&A with actress Stephy Tang, who will receive the Screen International Rising Star Award.

See Derek Elley's sino-savvy review on Sino-Cinema (http://sino-cinema.com/2018/04/28/review-the-empty-hands-2017/) for further details, including the actual Chinese names of the actors, etc. Elizabeth Kerr wrote a review for Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/empty-hands-film-review-1053241) ("One of the strangest martial arts dramas ever made").

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DESIGNER CLUTTER: MARI'S BEDROOM IN THE EMPTY HANDS.

[Chris Knipp]

MALENE CHOI: THE RETURN (2018)

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THOMAS HWAN IN THE RETURN

Root canal

This quiet, haunting hybrid of documentary and fiction was made by Danish-Korean adoptee Marlene Choi in Korea and focused on the story of two thirtyish Danish Korean adoptees, Karoline (Karoline Sofie Lee) and Thomas (Danish TV actor Thomas Hwan), who come to Korea in search of their origins. Though feeling quite specific, they stand for many. As it turns out, since the Korean War in 1953 South Korea has been a major exporter of babies for adoption, over 200,00 having been raised mainly in Europe and the US.

Karoline arrives at Koroot, a group home specially provided for Korean adoptees. Here Karoline meets Thomas and other visiting Korean adoptees who come from America and communicate in English. A hunky young man from America tells a radical story. This is his second time in Korea. The first time, he immediately felt at home, so much so that when he left, it felt wrong. His adoptive parents objected to his exploration of his origins, and, given a choice between them and that, he has chosen to live in Korea. Like the others, he has not learned the language. Has he ever seen a Korean film? His decision is passionate, instinctive. It may be an emotional reaction to growing up feeling like an outsider. He has no idea what he is getting into but certainly here, he will look like he fits in. It's complicated. He has simplified it.

The visiting adoptees share experiences of being bullied in one way or another for being different, not being white. An older woman adoptee talks about her experiences of finding her biological parents and meeting them. When she met her father, she says she felt nothing. Only later she was very moved by the struggles of her mother, who became disabled relatively young, it turns out. She has returned to spend time with her mother.

Karoline goes to the Holt adoption agency, where the representative offers her little hope of finding out anything. Records were not kept, she says. Thomas says they lie, and offers to go back with her, as they do. Eventually it does emerge from help reading her Korean documents from the agency that she was born in a hospital on a small island off Inchon.

The truly profound scene is the one when Karoline and Thomas go to meet Thomas' biological mother, who has been found. They go with a female interpreter who translates back and forth between Korean and English. Thomas' mother is sweet, plying them with a meal prepared together in a small apartment. He was the result of a quick union with a boy who vanished, when she was very young. Her tale is of heartbreaking regret for having given up Thomas for adoption too hastily.She married, but never had children. All her life she has been haunted by longing to be with him. This quiet, underplayed scene is masterful in administering an emotional wallop with economical means. Realization that this sequence is staged, not "real," may undercut it, but not lessen its almost archetypal emotional power.

The use of staged elements for the framework narrative of the film allows Choi to experiment. The film uses innovative, subtle camerawork, editing, and sound to convey vividly the feeling of excitement and dislocation, of confusion and emotional dissonance Karoline and Thomas feel from first arrival. This helps to strengthen a very thought-provoking film that conveys as well as any movie yet what it is like to be adopted from a far-away country and long to understand and be reunited with one's origins. The writer, Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen, has contributed substantially to giving the dialogue, particularly in Danish, a natural and specific feel.

The Return, 87 minS., debuted at Rotterdam and was reviewed by Screen Anarchy (http://screenanarchy.com/2018/02/rotterdam-2018-review-the-return.html) (Paige Lim) and Variety (https://variety.com/2018/film/festivals/the-return-review-1202692246/) (Alissa Simon) at Göteborg Feb. 2018. Reviewed there for Variety (https://variety.com/2018/film/festivals/the-return-review-1202692246/) by Alissa Simon .

[Chris Knipp]

KIM HONG-SUN: THE AGE OF BLOOD/YEOOKMO - BANRANUI SIDAE (2017)

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JUNG HAE-IN IN AGE OF BLOOD

Historical pleasures

This historical fight movie from Korea is big-time eye-candy built around new local heartthrob Jung Hae-in, usually a smiling and boyish type who looks great topless. It begins with a background review that's animated, and morphs seamlessly into stylized movie mode. Yes, this is about a historical event, though reinterpreted here. It concerns a rebellion. A lot of the fight action takes place at night; hence the sword and bow-and-arrow fights are depicted in extreme chiaroscuro that is frustrating if you want blow-by-blow detail but makes for artistic effects.

Jung Hae-in, who's thirty, has only been a name actor for four years, and thinks his fame won't last. (Maybe so, but he's enjoying himself for now.) He's known from TV series, a historical one, like this, called "The Three Musketeers," and a drama about three people who can foresee crimes, called "While You Were Sleeping." In civvies, Jung Hae-in has a slightly goofy look, like a surprised child. For Age of Blood he has been fitted with long, stylishly unruly tresses, a mustache, and chin whiskers. It makes all the difference. In this disguise, and various sharp period costumes, he sometimes looks dashing. He also looks goofy sometimes too.

In this movie, Yeongjo is the reigning ruler, 21st king of the Korean Joseon Dynasty. He is reputed to have poisoned his brother to become king. Kim Ho (the Jung Hae-in) is an ace swordsman who has been waiting around for an appointment for some time. When it finally comes, he's astonished to learn he's been demoted to the level of prison guard. Little does he know that this will be the most important place to be in the kingdom, and that the night of his arrival will be a decisive time. The prison is a dramatic setting, sometimes seen from above, it is a long one-story complex in a rectangular shape with a big central enclosed space. Kim Ho encounters various guards (he doesn't like the uniform; they mock him for boasting that he'll rise to senior guard quickly), and several unsavory prisoners.

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A striking interlude shows an unbelievably handsome, hunky, and sexy prisoner, nude to the waist in white and hung up by his hands, awaiting execution. Denied a drink of water in a cruel and mocking manner by a guard, he manages to break free, grab a sword, and execute the guard.

The main action begins when a group of conspirators break into the prison to set free their leader, who has been imprisoned, and Kim Ho takes them on. Joe Bendel, who has reviewed this film on JB Spins (http://jbspins.blogspot.com/2018/06/nyaff-18-age-of-blood.html), adds more about the cast: "Hong Soo-a is also shows off some nice chops as Lady Yoo Seo-yeong, Kim Ho’s unexpected ally," and "Kim Ji-hoon’s Lee [the rebel leader] is arguably too cold-blood, but Jo Jae-yun is terrific as Do, the intense but honorable adversary." Kim Ho is arguably defending an illegitimate regime, established through a crime, but he is supporting the office, not the man. Anyway, all this, though entertaining and beautiful to look at, is only skin deep and shouldn't be judged too harshly as historical drama, even if that's what it it ostensibly is. There are discernible characters and there is a historical plot line, but the movie most notably exists as a stylish and polished excuse for a series of dashing battles and other displays of daring-do, with other visual pleasures thrown in.

The Age of Blood/ 역모 - 반란의 시대 Yeokmo - banranui sidae ("Conspiracy - The Age of Rebellion"), 102 mins., opened in Korean cinemas Nov. 2017, and debuted on Japanese TV May 2018. It was screened for this review as part of the 2018 New York Asian Film Festival, where it shows at 12:30 July 4th. It can be watched free on Amazon Prime.

A Korean movie blog in English, Drama Beans (http://www.dramabeans.com/2017/10/jung-hae-in-is-the-only-line-of-defense-in-conspiracy-age-of-rebellion/), provides a knowledgeable preview of this "gritty action sageuk [Korean historical period drama]."

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JUNG HAE-IN, IN AGE OF BLOOD AND IN CIVVIES

[Chris Knipp]

DAIHACHI YOSHIDA: THE SCYTHIAN LAMB/HITSUJI NO KI (2017)

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RYOHEI MATSUDA IN THE SCYTHIAN LAMB

Rich ingredients, small pot

The premise of The Scythian Lamb, based on the manga Hitsuji no ki originated by Tatsuhiko Yamagami and Mikio Igarashi, is almost too good to be true. The city government of Uobuka, a little Japanese seacoast town of declining population, decides to cooperate with the prison system, which is trying to reduce its numbers by releasing low-risk prisoners early, provided they stay in an assigned location for ten years. Uobuka gets six parolees at once, all convicted of murder. The possibilities are infinite. And this is the charm of Daihachi Yoshida's movie. As it unreels some of those and holds others in check, it avoids getting pinned down to any one genre. There is film noir, murder, romance, melodrama, thriller, suspense, and it's all laced with comedy. Rumors, which can't be verified, say that experiments like this actually have been carried out to help repopulate Japan's dwindling rural areas. It's doubtful there's been an all-murderer program, though.

At the center of things is a handsome and gentle young man who works for city hall called Hajime Tsukisue (pop singer Ryo Nishikido). Like any bureaucrat, he's stuck with executing an unappealing plan not at all of his devising. He must greet the new arrivals one by one, knowing only that they're ex-cons, at first, not their crime, and keep an eye on them thereafter. Nobody is to know who these people are, and they are not to know about each other.

The movie provides an opening series of vignettes in which Tsukisue greets the new arrivals one by one, takes them for a drive, and treats them to dinner - six get-acquainted sessions for him, and for us. Hiroki Fukimoto (Shinjo Mizusawa), to start, an angular, nervous type, very ill at ease, who gobbles up food and drink like Robinson Crusoe. Later he will get to work at the barber shop. Is he alcoholic? Yes.

Shinjiro Ono (Min Tanaka), even more angular, and ancient, is yakuza through and through, with a big scar down one side of his face. He doesn't warm to Tsukisue's "It's a nice town, with nice people, great seafood." But he scares away the gangsters that come to reenlist him. He thoroughly rejects his past life. And so, he's perfect for the dry cleaner's. Except his bad back isn't good for the ironing.

Equal opportunity, or sort of: two of the six are women. Both are pretty. One, Reiko (Yuka), goes to work at the senior center. Which is fine, except she and Tsukisue's father enter into a romantic attachment. The other, Kiyomi Kurimoto (Michiko Hichikawa) is sort of sweet, but also a bit dour and spooky. She gets assigned to a crew doing street cleanup. She likes to dig, and she likes to bury stuff. No worries.

There is one nice guy, Itchiro Miyakoshi (Ryuhei Matsuda). He has a positive attitude from arrival. He finds the seafood delicious. He looks and acts quite normal. Watch out!

And there's the snarky Sugiyama (Kazuki Kitamura, an actor whose resume includes Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and The Raid 2 (2014). He's a provocative type, with a menacing, sleazy grin. It's clear from the get-go that going straight is not his intention. He's not only dangerous but wants you to know it. He goes to work down at the docks; he has nautical experience. He's looking for trouble - and other bad guys to join up with.

If Yoshida lingers over these intros, who can blame him? All the enjoyment of the characters doesn't get in the way of an exciting and suspenseful story-line.

Murderers are a diverse lot. Some kill by accident, others by necessity. (One of the ladies did kill an abusive husband.) Others kill by profession, or in their line of criminal work. Or in a unique fit of anger. Anybody might do it. It can happen by accident. Others do so out of overriding compulsion, and that's not an accident. All these categories are represented in the group. All of them are, by their pre-arranged jobs, inserted into the fabric of the community. It's a really small town.

Tsukisue, in a manga touch and a cool one, leads a sort of double life. In the daytime, his hair is combed back and he's always in a suit and tie. Off duty, he dons ragged jeans and T shirt, his hair flops over his eyes, and he's in a loud garage band. Clark Kent becomes a rock star.

The population grows by one without government help, when Aya (Fumino Kimura), Tsukisue's high school crush, returns to Uobuka. Tsukisue persuades her to join the band and play lead guitar, like in high school. There's a guy who plays drums. Guess who wants to learn guitar? Miyakoshi, the friendly, normal-seeming guy, who now drives a blue and yellow delivery truck.

The town has an ancient myth, and a giant bronze statue on a cliff to embody it: Nororo. Kids play around in a park one day stumbling like zombies, chanting "Nororo, Nororo!" - a neat way of introducing the theme. Nororo is a monster overlooking the sea. Legend has it that each year in olden times two men were thrown into the sea to appease Nororo's anger, and only one would survive. There is a Nororo festival every year today, with traditional costumes, and a young colleague of Tsukisue's, who has broken into their boss's computer and found out the identity of the new arrivals, unwisely arranges to have them all invited to participate in the Nororo festival. This makes for a dramatic and revelatory scene, with a dark night, a roiling sea, and men in white traditional costumes. But it's a photo of this in the newspaper that brings on the climactic sequence of events.

Daihachi Yoshida and his writer Masahito Kagawa have contrived an adaptation of their manga source that works - even if there are a few details that may make more sense in an earlier, larger context. The Scythian Lamb concludes with both a violent, suspenseful finale and a happy denouement. It's a delightful, interesting, very Japanese film, a compendium of different genres and moods happily blended in an atmospheric bouillabaisse. Nice town, Uobuka - nice people. Delicious seafood. But some of the fish have to be buried.

The Scythian Lamb / 羊の木 Hitsuji no Ki ("Sheep's tree"), 126 mins., debuted at Busan Oct. 2017, and has been included in five other festivals, including the 2018 New York Asian Film Festival, where it was screened for this review, and will show at 9:15 p.m. July 5.

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[Chris Knipp]

YANG YA-CHE: THE BOLD, THE CORRUPT, AND THE BEAUTIFUL (2017)

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KARA WAI, KE-XI WU AND VICKY CHEN IN THE BOLD, THE CORRUPT, AND THE BEAUTIFUL

Chinese gangster ladies in a gaudy-gorgeous Taiwan film

This Eighties family crime picture from Taiwan is gorgeous, lurid, and camp. On one level it is little more than highfalutin trash, soap opera with better production values. But with its multiple formats and lush mise-en-scène, more often than not more visually complex than it needs to be, it's a delight to the eyes - whether one follows the complicated subplots from the history of Taiwan's political corruption or the mannered dialogue or not. Perhaps better not.

But what one can't miss is, this posh gangster family is female-only. The trio of leads, all juicy roles, are three generations of the Tang family. At center stage is Madame Tang, played by Kara Wai, in the midst of a late-career resurgence. While her cover is an antiques dealership, she really works full time to profit by questionable land speculation laws, cultivates corruptible politicians madly, acting as a go-between for them and dirty businessmen, and waging psychological warfare on any competition.

Madame Tang's daughter Ning (Wu Ke-xi) is her chief partner in crime, but also a liability due to her Valley-of-the-Dolls-style drug use as well as sexual overindulgence. This is lightly sketched in mostly with conversation, and her always having a cigarette in her hand and looking dreamy, but it's hinted that Ning is emotionally as well as morally damaged beyond repair by her mother's machinations. Chen-Chen (Vicky Chen, who's only fourteen, and who, like Kara Wai, got a Golden Horse award), the "innocent," doughty but slightly creepy girl in sailor-boy school uniform or puffy dresses, represents the third, youngest generation of Clan Tang.

There is a mind-boggling, but fun, opening series of multiple formats thrown at us, including a wall of TV screens showing different new stories pertaining to the principals and Taipei politics, then a TV studio set as cluttered and pretty as anything in a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with an old lady plucking an antique stringed instrument and a man on the right chanting narration in traditional Taiwanese-Chinese dialect, as a framework of the main story. Then comes a fancy but tainted teatime for the grand and elegant Lady Wang (Chen Sha-Li), wife of a Speaker expected to become the top local politician. It's tainted by invasions from reporters, the daughter's odd behavior, and a costly gift that arrives with the hand broken off.

In anticipation of a major developed project, Madame Tang has guided her political associates to buy up parcels in an otherwise sleepy rural district, using shell companies.

Tea with Lady Wang is an over-elaborate but culturally nuanced mood-setter that would be worthy of a Godfather epic, were the filmmaking on a higher level and the plot richer. It shows, as Zhuo-Ning Su explains in his Film Stage review (https://thefilmstage.com/reviews/busan-review-the-bold-the-corrupt-and-the-beautiful-is-a-sumptuous-entertaining-taiwanese-thriller/), that behind the "fake smiles, every word, gesture, look is code." Behind the elegant tea-time rituals, deals and bribes are being set up. Madame Tang speaks "Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese and her native Cantonese, which in itself fills in a lot of blanks with regard to her character’s back story, " Su notes, as well as indicating her level of ambition - information that provides a hint of how much the non-Taiwanese non-Chinese speaker may miss beyond the visual surfaces of this eye-candy movie.

A big plot complication comes, the next day, with the massacre in their home of local bank director Lin along with his entire family, except for young heiress Pien Pien, left in a coma. Conveniently, the chief suspect is a groom, now disappeared, who was having an affair with one of Lin's daughters. Other deaths turn up. This morphs into a murder case - yes, it's a little bit police procedural too - and brings out Madame Tang's criminal activities, a process leading to what Elizabeth Kerr in her Hollywood Reporter revie (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/bold-corrupt-beautiful-film-review-1070940)w calls "a wonderfully tragic, lurid, soapy reckoning." Actually the ending is a little weak and anticlimactic, however.

The summing-up by David D'Arcy in his Screen Daily review, (https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-bold-the-corrupt-and-the-beautiful-busan-review/5122834.article) "While grim, this story can also be wonderfully camp," is stating the obvious. This is at best a guilty pleasure, but one must give credit to the production crew and the actors and whoever thought up all the different visual formats to gild the overripe lily. Kudos to production designer Penny Pei-Ling Tsai and dp Ko-Chin Chen. Whatever its flaws, this movie leaves an impression.

The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful / 血觀音 Xuè guān yīn ("Blood guanyin [goddess]"), 112 mins., debuted at Busan Oct. 2017 and showed at Taipei, Rotterdam, Singapore, Seattle, and Buenos Aires, and was screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, where it's showing July 5 at 2:15 p.m.

[Chris Knipp]

ERIK MATTI: ON THE JOB (2013)

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JOEL TORRE IN ON THE JOB

Training days

Erik Matti of the Philippines is a leading figure of Southeast Asian genre cinema. His new feature BuyBust, also included in the NYAFF, is his first pure action film. This one from 2013, also in the festival, is highly admired. It gained him international notice through inclusion in Cannes Directors' Fortnight , and was a New York Times Critic's Pick when reviewed by Jeannette Catsoulis (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/movies/on-the-job-directed-by-erik-matti.html). It shows Matti's élan and brilliance as a filmmaker.

Mario aka Tatang (Joel Torre, who looks like Argentine star Ricardo Darín) is the central figure here, and the central relationship is between him and his cocky protege, Daniel (Filipino-American Gerald Anderson). Both are hit men, and both are prisoners. They are let out to do a hit, then go back in, a perfect cover. They live as ordinary prisoners - it's important to maintain a low profile - in a prison that's more like a cross between a fantasy boy's school and a teeming slum with gay-dominated independent laundry and food services. Tatang explains the game to Daniel, and is with him when he does his first and subsequent hits. The first hit is done by Tatang right out in the open in a crowded and chaotic market place location that's like something in the Bourne series, but more organic.

Parallel to this pair is Francis, a classy, clean cut, and model-handsome NBI (like the FBI) academy grad (Piolo Pascual, a Manila TV matinee idol) who becomes the protegee of principled cop Acosta (Joey Marquez), but whose key relationship ultimately is with Manrique, a powerful politician (Michael De Mesa), due to marrying his daughter. That marriage, Francis learns, puts him in line not just for distinction in law enforcement but possible high political office. But before long he learns the assassinations have a source close to Manrique, and the whole system is rotten.

Manrique schools and advises Francis as Tatang tutors Daniel. Francis is investigating the assassinations, which we learn are by hit men from various prisons. At first the film cuts back and forth seamlessly between these two stories without our understanding them or their connection. Also confusing is the fact that the two men not only hide from fellow prisoners what they're doing on the outside but hide from their families that they're even in jail. Tatang's family, including a daughter in law school, which he visits, thinks he's simply working in another town. Daniel only calls mom and pretends he's got a job in Dubai.

It's all dark, messy, loud, and chaotic. But it's also got atmosphere you could cut with a knife. Our attention is held by the world-class gritty authenticity of the action as staged by Matti and shot by dp Francis Ricardo Buhay III, the skill of the editing by Jay Halil, which makes the film enjoyable even before we understand it, and the punchy score by Erwin Romulo, which adds pizzazz precisely when and where it's needed.

Call this genre, call it a B picture or merely workmanlike, but up to the inevitable Godfather-style hospital kill and chase that leads to an action showdown linking cops, hit men, and politicoes, the writing by Matti and screenwriter Michiko Yamamoto is skillful in making all elements convincing. They draw us into Tatang and Daniel's weird lifestyle so thoroughly we start to worry when we learn that, now that Tatang has been notified he'll soon be released from prison, his job is over, and he may be put on Daniel's hit list. On the Job makes you enter a full-fledged other world, and Matti uses this B-actioner mode to critique real Filipino corruption and violence.

On the Job, 118 mins., debuted May 2013 in Cannes Directors' Fortnight and has been in at least 13 other festivals. Its Metascore was 70%. This film was also featured at Toronto (https://www.tiff.net/the-review/erik-matti-is-one-of-the-greatest-filipino-directors-of-all-time/) last year. It is being revived for the 2018 NYAFF at Lincoln Center, where it shows July 14 at 12:30 p.m.

[Chris Knipp]

SHINSUKE SATO: INUYASHIKI (2018)

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TAKERU SATOH IN INUYASHIKI

Dangerous youth

With the story of the meek salaryman or hirashain, Inuyashiki, and the teenager who're simultaneously struck by a a flashing white light like a cosmic ray and wake up turned into cyborgs, we are plunged into the world of manga at its least realistic, but still with plenty of human touches. (The original is by Hiroya Oku.) We also enter a franchise starting for director Shinsuke Sato, who has already done several cult manga films. The 2018 NYAFF includes a couple of other manga adaptations, the high school nightmare River's Edge (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=36952#post36952)(which makes one long for Eighties American youth pictures) and The Scythian Lamb (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=37003#post37003), a highly entertaining genre mix, with its absurd but promising premise of a brace of convicted murderers dropped into a small town as part of a nutty "repopulation" scheme.

Inuyashiki plays with several familiar Japanese tropes. There is the browbeaten salaryman or hirashain, the titular character, who uses his powers to do good, and there is the evil, malicious teenager who goes around murdering people, ultimately forcing Inuyashiki to stop him. The empowered teenager is Hiro Shishigami, played by Takeru Satoh of the "Rurouni Kenshin" series. (Takeru Satoh is a fantasy-manga-sci-fi star, but at 29 a bit old now for tthe role of an 18-year-old.) Hiro is a youthful bad seed. Whereever he goes, people die. A more haunting version of this type is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure. (Takeru himself starred in Kurosawa's Real (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3583-New-York-Film-Festival-2013&p=31016#post31016).)

Shishigami seems more adept at using his cyborg powers than Inuyashiki, right away, as he shows them off to his pal Ando/aks/Chokko (Kanata Hongou), by crashing parked cars into each other in a parking garage. The powers are like a new technology kids have more of a feel for. When Inuyashiki catches on that his young counterpart is "shooting" people right and left by pointing his finger and yelling "bam!" he has to learn how to do the same thing in order to stop him - but it's hard. This recalls Josh Trank's 2012 Chronicle (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3233-CHRONICLE-(Josh-Trank-2012)&p=27345#post27345), where Dane DeHaan shone, about American high schoolers abruptly gifted with special powers who struggle to learn how to use them and make a mess of it. Like Hiro they have teen angst and superpowers are a bad thing to have with poor impulse control.

The cyborg idea itself relates most notably to the seminal Nineties body-horror series Tetsuo directed by Shinya Tsukamoto, but this time without the creepy, haunting cyberpunk heavy metal style, only occasional dramatic flashes of CGI where man and boy sprout metal innards that flash, then fold back inside.

When it comes to the browbeaten salaryman who becomes an unexpected hero, there is no greater or more memorable example of the theme than Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) in Akira Kurosawa's 1952 masterpiece Ikiru, whose profound humanism contrasts sharply with the falling off from moral values and good sense represented by manga and modern films. We must give Inuyashiki credit for highlighting feelings and behavior over violence and pure action, compared to many similar manga films; but in Ikiru, we're in the world of real life andInuyashiki, depicts a thin, comic book world full of cliché.

Stopped by police for the family he killed after visiting his father, Hiro hides with a female admirer, Shion (Sumire Morohoshi). Then he begins killing people remotely through their PC or cell phone screens. He is mocked by trolls, so he kills 26 this way. He becomes the ultimate psychopathic young mass murderer now, deciding everyone is against him and that he must kill all of Japan, starting from the giant screen in Shinjuku. Now Inuyashiki becomes a disaster movie, with textbook fleeing, terrified crowd sequences out of Battleship Potemkin. Meanwhile the old salaryman tries to prepare to stop him, coached by Hiro's former best friend, Chokko.

From then on for the last twenty minutes or so of this rather long movie it's a battle of the titans in the air and on the ruined tops of tall buildings in what, for Japanese cinema, is a pretty Hollywood-style display of grand special effects. Inuyashiki finally wins the respect of his hitherto utterly mean family (especially the female members) - even if the evil Hiro has a more prettily-sculpted torso.

Sato directed the live-action film adaptation of Oku's Gantz manga, as well as its Gantz II:

Inuyashiki / いぬやしき, 127 mins., debuted 20 Apr. 2018 in Brussels, at the International Fantastic Film Festival, also showing at Udine and at Montreal's Fantasia. It opened theatrically in Japan 20 Apr. 2018. It was screened for this review as part of the NYAFF, where it shows at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center Sun, 15 Jul. at 1 p.m.

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NORITAKE KINASHI IN INUYASHIKI

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FINAL BATTLE FROM INUYASHIKI

[Chris Knipp]

KANATA WOLF: SMOKIN' ON THE MOON (2017)

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RYO NARITA, ARATA IURA IN SMIOKIN' ON THE MOON

Japanese ganja bromance

Whether you take the action in Smokin' on the Moon seriously or not, it's fun to watch this first feature by Osaka-based musician and filmmaker Wolf (aka Yuichiro Tanaka) for its playful way with formats and punk visual style (including two animated dream sequences), which, except for the beginning, is vibrant without being overwhelming. Based by Wolf on his own manga, the film was filmed by dp Hiroo Takaoka in a manner that's intimate, yet clear, and gives the action and main characters a naturalism to counteract the fantastic stoned element. The main characters are appealing, and the story comes to a sweet, touching end. Wolf gives an engaging feel to his grungy slice of life with Hiroyasu Koizumi's intentionally decrepit set and production design (notably for the pair's mess of a flat supplied them by a wannabe rapper), idiosyncratic fast edits, and deliberately unrelated scene shifts. That's balanced by up-close camerawork of people that's surprisingly intimate, aided by the charm of the two main actors.

The early scenes, a Kaleidoscopic whirlwind of vignettes of the guys' lifestyle, seem like pure visual play, as they introduce the frivolous, wigged out pair of buddies, thirtyish Sota (Arata Iura) and twenty-something, scrawny-stylish, tattooed and red-haired "rooster" Rakuto (former model Ryo Narita), who work at a Tokyo bar and deal marijuana on the side. Their affection for each other is the emotional anchor of the film. We meet other colorful characters, including an oversexed landlady (LiLiCo) and a loud-mouthed rapper pot dealer called Jay (Yasu Peron).

Slackers are a poignant element in a Japanese society that doesn't afford a productive or lucrative spot for all its citizens. And we need to have sympathy for the two stoner pals in the foreground. They do most of the smokin', and spend life in a pleasant weed haze. That will end as the film moves along, going from stoner movie to crime story to medical melodrama, but the drug-inspired vibe and the spirit of visual play never completely disappear. A scene of extreme violence is mitigated, aestheticized, even, by casting it in low-resolution black-and-white, with splashes of red.

The guys' constant high numbs them from from the real danger posed by the yakuza toughs who come into their Tokyo lowlife sphere as part of drug dealing. That works for them till Jay is executed by the mob, and a sadistic baddie called Hatta (Kanji Tsuda) turns up to make sure Sota and Rakuto are in the dark about this. Sota is shocked by this encounter into the realization that at thirty-four, he needs to get serious about his life, while Rakuta considers going over to the yakuza side in a peripheral, safe capacity; a "straight" job isn't much of an option for a middle-school dropout with flaming red-dyed hair and arms full of tattoos. Sota's dad (Eiji Okuda) runs a restaurant in Okinawa specialized in okonomiyaki grilled pancakes, and this is an obivious legit birth for Sota. He left that life because it seemed boring, but his eight years in Tokyo have yielded nothing but one strong friendship, with Rakuto.

Flashbacks toward the end - the editing is constantly deft and playful - illustrate why Rakuto has nothing to go back to. He deeply resents his mother for not protecting him, or herself, from a stepfather who beat them every day - also in Okinawa. Now, perhaps to give back good for bad, he has become a surrogate dad for a little boy and his mother Tsukimi (Mary Sara), an old friend who's trying to kick a crack habit.

The shift from slacker bromance to addiction drama to crime story to a focus on child abuse, drug addiction, and a fatal case of Hodgkin's lymphoma may seem a bit much, and certainly turns sentimental. It's hard to take it all seriously. But while the visual dynamics make it still fun to watch, Wolf's sincerity never seems in doubt. As Rakuto, Ryo Narita is an irresistible boy-man who's sweet and nice. It's all so various and playful that the two hours pass smoothly, at least for this viewer.

Smokin' on the Moon / ニワトリ★スター ("Rooster [chicken] star"), 119 mins., screened for this review as part of the NYAFF, its North American Premiere, where it's showing Tues. Jul. 10, 2018 at 9:15 p.m. including a Q&A with diretor Kanata Wolf.

[Chris Knipp]

BONGKOD BENCHARONGKUL: SAD BEAUTY (2018)

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FLORENCE FAIVRE AND PAKKAWADEE PENGSUWAN IN SAD BEAUTY

Extremes of friendship

Bencharongkul's Sad Beauty is a picture that delves into friendship of women, narcissism, spousal abuse, even murder, but it seems most notable (in this combination) for, as the title says, its beauty, a glamour and sensuality that's so strong even when a corpse is being fed to crocodiles, it's pretty. This somehow fits with the tropical magic of Thailand that's evoked by the country's most famous filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. This is veteran actress Bencharongkul's second sortie as a director, and she seems to know what she's doing. This is a movie that's interesting and intriguing. It's an odd combination of elements, fashion shoots, a sordid beating and murder, a body disposal worthy of the Coen brothers with a touch of Patricia Highsmith, and then back to the night club scene where the model-failed actress Yo (Florence Faivre, well cast) looks glamorous even when she's bruised.

Yo's best friend, companion and unpaid assistant is Pim (Pakkawadee Pengsuwan, excellent), who's smaller, seems younger, also more stable, but is sorely tested. Pim's diagnosis with serious eye cancer - following a club night and a steamy, sensuous shared shower - leads the two women to Pim's house, where her mother has been badly beaten, and the fatal confrontation of Yo and Pim with Pim's brutal, abusive stepfather takes place. The body disposal, requiring a trip to Pim's "uncle," her mother's ex-boyfriend, way up in the woods, is the central, most absorbing section in the movie. Sparse, Hemingwayesque hints at his remote house suggest he may have experience in combat and big game hunting, or maybe he's just a tropical he-man. But he's young. Though he's a total contrast, and not a talker, he plays the same role as The Wolf (Harvey Keitel) when Jules and Vincent accidentally have a corpse on their hands in Pulp Fiction.

This is a hard act to follow, but one of Sad Beauty's best aspects is the assurance of its sudden shifts. Suddenly it's a year later but Yo and Pim, who had a bitter little spat after the corpse disposal (that was a long, tough night), are still friends. Pim has been having chemo. Yo is still making good money, but still has bad vibes in the business. She still is dissolute, has no purpose, is pursued by handsome guys after a good time, and now has nightmares inspired by that night of the crocodiles. Gradually it sinks in that this is a woman's picture, centered on an intense, dysfunctional woman's friendship, in which the killing is forgotten and the greatest crime is the failure to be there for one's friend at the crucial moment. But this failure is n't without repentance. This is a female director who can handle film noir with its appropriate violence, but also delve deeply into the complexity of a women's friendship. . The sensuousness also extends to things that are icky or disgusting, like the wrapped, seeping body and Pim's diseased eye, but also to a delicate handling of the lost friend that's sad without being sentimental.

The Far East Film Festival 20 (http://www.fareastfilm.com/eng/film/sad-beauty/?IDLYT=7505) blurb points out interesting details about the film and the filmmaker. More known in Thailand as Tak Bongkod, or her acting name before being married, Bongkod Kongmalai (Thai names aren't easy!) Bencharongkul began acting at fifteen in 2000, the "early days of the New Thai Cinema era." She starred in more than twenty movies for Sahamongkol Film, including blockbusters, and has also starred in TV series. This film, her first as an independent writer-producer-director (fortunate position) benefits from cult film director Kongkiat Khomsiri for details of production. The writer suggests an expressionistic role in the camerawork, bird's eye view angles "perhaps to signify the patriarchal control surrounding the protagonists," and handheld camera movement "to stress the convulsive sensibilities and feelings of being female in Thai society." But that seems to me secondary to the way the images deliver beauty even at the ugliest or ickiest moments in the action - an effect that is both cloying and liberating. And beyond the style, this director has something important and heartfelt to say. An excellent and original film.

Sad Beauty, 92 mins., debuted at Udine Apr. 2018, also Shanghai and Bucheon. Screened for this review as part of the 2018 New York Asian Film Festival, showing at the Walter Reade Theater on 14 July 2018 at 5 p.m.

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PAKAWADEE PENGSUWAN IN SAD BEAUTY

[Chris Knipp]

World premiere at the New York Asian Film Festival as its Closing Night Film.

ERIK MATTI: BUYBUST (2018)

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ANNE CURTIS IN BUYBUST

World premiere at the New York Asian Film Festival as its Closing Night Film.

The heroics of a female cop, Nina Manigan (Australian actress Anne Curtis) are the highlight of a prolonged, scruffy gun battle of the Manila police against rank and file members of the local drug mafia in ace Filipino genre director Erik Matti's new film BubBust. The cops plan a "buybust" in which two teams infiltrate a drug deal with a local they've "turned," then surround and arrest. But in the event, the dealers change the location to an even seedier part of the city slums. Out of their element, they keep the audience waiting nearly an hour before the hard core action begins. Then, after the shooting starts, the police find themselves trapped when one of their own seems to have betrayed them. Armed members of the local population, enraged at being caught in the crossfire, turn on them too, and Manigan is a leader of the fight when they must struggle for hours to pull out without necessary backup. This is the essence of a chaotic, violent, and hard to follow action film (much of it takes place in the dark, in heavy rain) that is nonetheless, typically, well choreographed by Matti and his team. The elaborate production reportedly includes 1,278 extras and 309 stuntmen. Curtin does most of her stunts herself.

A premise is that Manigan, a newcomer to the force and unhampered by old loyalties or corruption, has seen her entire squad shot out around her during a previous raid. Mixed Martial Arts star Brandon Vera co-stars. The project is billed as one of the most ambitious Philippine productions to date. Whhile not merely a series of hand-to-hand combats like Gareth Evans' ultra-violent, now cult status, The Raid: Redemption (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3246-New-Directors-New-Films-and-Film-Comment-Selects-2012&p=27502#post27502) (ND/NF 2012), BuyBust does consist largely of hand-to-hand and gun fighting.

Matti and his editor Jay Halili focus on moving rapidly around among the combatants. This makes the action sometimes confusing, but nice flashing light effects in the darkness photographed by dp Neil Derrick Bion and his team make the visuals often attractive and, however artificial, are necessary for the audience even to glimpse what's going on. The soundtrack includes the threatening broadcast voice of the drug gang leader, as well as loud, clangorous musical score by Erwin Romulo and Malek Lopez that often changes abruptly in mood and instrument, from guitar to strings to synthesizer to harpsichord to harmonica go drum. A harpsichord probably was never used to accompany a cops-and-robbers gun battle before.

There are some very, very violent moments, including a beheading - and, seconds later, we get to see the head sitting in a puddle of burning oil - one of dozens of elaborately-planned vignettes that punctuate the chaotic, exhausting action. At one point when Manigan and Yatco, aka Rico (Brandon Vera) are fighting off - to the death - a gang of angry locals in a claustrophobic space, a short circuit of crossed wires from above (in the heavy rain) causes a shower of sparks that electrocutes some of the combatants, including Rico, whom Madigan must fight to revive. They will continue, though, as a team of avengers.

There are moments of narrow escape for Manigan and Rico, but even three quarters of the way through this two-hour film, another crowd of angry, armed ghetto dwellers pours into a shabby square. There is more a sense of perpetual motion than of progress. One longs for the lean loneliness of a Western shootout. Finally there is a cool but deadly encounter between Madingan and the local drug kingpin, Biggie Chen (Arjo Alayde), and a final ironic voiceover that alludes to the current president's "war on drugs" to which perhaps this whole farrago of violence is an oblique allusion.

This is an exceptionally elaborate and demanding production that's as impressive as it is grueling to watch. But the action, however varied, ultimately becomes monotonous. In human terms this not ultimately as interesting a film as Matti's masterful 2013 actioner On the Job (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?4506-ASIAN-FILM-FESTIVAL-Lincoln-Center-JUNE-29-JULY-15-2018&p=37009#post37009), also shown at the New York Asian Film Festival (and reviewed here), which has a more complex trajectory and an interesting relationship between two convicts of different generations who carry out targeted assassinations during releases from prison. Hopefully now that Matti has proven that he can do complex virtually non-stop action, he will go back to films that have more human nuance and variety.

The slum setting where the cops are trapped and must fight their way out of is a beehive of multi-storied makeshift cells, closed in, yet unprotected from the rain. This is a fascinatingly complex and picturesque feat of claustrophobic production design. But its basically uniform, indecipherable nature is one reason the action's logistics are hard to parse.

Other cast members include Joross Gamboa, Mara Lopez, Nonie Buencamino, AJ Muhlach and Victor Neri.

BuyBust, Phillippines 126 mins., debuted at the New York Asian Film Festival on Closing Night, 15 Jul. 2018 at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, at 8:30 p.m. World Premiere. Q&A with director Erik Matti and actors Anne Curtis & Brandon Vera · Closing Night Party. It will show at Fantasia International Film Festival in Canada 18 July, on 19 July at Comicon as part of the 21st Annuel Superhero Kung Fu Extravaganza panel, and at Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, at Fantasia in Montreal 18 July, and opening theatrically in the U.S. 10 Aug.