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RSS Feed - NewsNew York Asian Film Festival announces first half of 2009 line-up
By EdwardHavens
April 2nd, 2009
For the past seven years, the Big Apple has been home of the the best U.S.-based Asian Film Festival, and based on the 19 just-announced titles that will be a part of the 2009 festival, there is no doubt this year's festival will be as joyful and sorrowful as years past.
Joyful, because the NYAFF will be the first opportunity most Americans will get to see much of the best cinema made half a world away in the past year. Sorrowful, because... well, it is likely this will be the only opportunity to see many of these films, be it on the big screen or on home video, outside of file sharing networks and without the guarantee of any subtitles at all. 2005 was the last NYAFF I was able to attend in person, and of the 31 films that played the festival that year, only nine ever made into even a single commercial American cinema (Godzilla Final War, Green Chair, Kamikaze Girls, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, Maribito, Princess Raccoon, R-Point, The Taste of Tea and Three Extremes), and some of those never got an American DVD releases. It was only announced late last week that Paul Spurrier would self-distribute a region-free Blu-Ray disc of his highly regarded horror film "P," more than four years after it banned in its home country of Thailand, due to various rights issues and a decided lack of interest amongst distributors of Asian cinema in the States. And there is still no sign of Seung-wan Ryoo's shattering Crying Fist, which starred Oldboy's Min-sik Choi as an over-the-hill boxer reduced to making money by letting people punch him in the streets who gets one last shot at redemption, which now could be seen as a precursor to The Wrestler, except Choi's performance makes Mickey Rourke look like a third grader playing a shrub in his school play. So if you find yourself in New York City between June 19th and July 5th, make sure to check out just a few of these exemplary titles... and remember, this is only the first half of titles announced for the festival:
ALL AROUND US (Japan, 2008, Ryosuke Hashiguchi)
After a seven-year break, director Ryosuke Hashiguchi is back and the results are shattering. This movie observes eight years of a marriage, marking the passage of time with famous Japanese murder trials covered by the husband who is a courtroom sketch artist. As his wife wrestles with depression and the two of them try to hold on to each other the movie becomes scalding water thrown on all of your emotional weak points. Actress Tae Kimura won “Best Actress” for her
performance as the wife at the Japanese Academy Awards.
BREATHLESS (South Korea, 2009, Lee Hwan & Yang Ik-june)
Winner of the top award at this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival, Breathless was labor of love by Yang Ik-Joon, who wrote, directed and stars. Playing one of the most unrepentant thugs ever to grace the silver screen, he’s a debt collector who’s in it purely for the violence. But when he meets a high school girl who’s as unrelenting and tough as he is he begins to come unraveled and soon the movie’s less about his behavior than the behavior of men everywhere who
would rather punch a woman in the face than expose their feelings. From its first shouted obscenity to its last bloody beat-down, Breathless is an uncompromising dissection of male violence.
CAPE NO. 7 (Taiwan, 2008, Wei Te-sheng)
The highest grossing movie ever, released in Taiwan, Cape No. 7 is less of a movie than a phenomenon. Things kick off when a pop star decides to hold a concert in a tiny seaside town and the civic booster mayor vows to form a local band to be the opening act as an act of self-promotion. Te-sheng even mortgaged his house and borrowed money from friends to make this film.
CHILDREN OF THE DARK (Japan, 2008, Junji Sakamoto)
A Japanese movie shot in Thailand about the child trafficking business (both for sex and for organs) sounds awful, but this movie promises to blow you away with its unblinking, hard-nosed attitude. Full of more horrible sights per second than any other movie made this year, and with a minimum of preaching, the awful truth of this film (which was banned in Thailand) is that all of us are guilty of the exploitation of children, whether we’re the ones actually stealing their
kidneys or not.
CLIMBER’S HIGH (Japan, 2008, Masato Harada)
Harada, director of last year's Shadow Spirit, gets his Howard Hawks on again with this gripping ensemble drama about a group of newspapermen covering the real-life tragedy of a 1985 plane crash in the mountains of central Japan. Headlined by Shinichi Tsutsumi from the ALWAYS movies, who plays a mountaineer-turned-reporter, the story concentrates less on the disaster and more on the moral responsibility of the men assigned to tell the story of
the tragedy, and how the event nearly destroyed their lives and relationships.
THE CLONE RETURNS HOME (Japan, 2008, Kanji Nakajima)
Frequently compared to Tarkovsky's Solaris, and screened at the Sundance Film Festival, this quietly shimmering science fiction movie starts as hard sci-fi
and then morphs into a surreal space opera set on earth. An astronaut dies in an accident while in orbit, but surprise! The Japanese Space Agency cloned him before he went up into space and so now his wife gets the clone as a consolation prize. But life can be hard when you’re the clone of a dead man, and soon this photocopied human is lost in the labyrinth of his own artificial memories.
DACHIMAWA LEE (South Korea, 2008, Ryu Seung-wan)
The direct or City of Violence makes a pitch perfect send-up of Korean spy cinema of the 70’s and 80’s which also stands alone as a gut-busting comedy, a breathtaking action flick and a satire of Korea’s motion picture past. Korea in the 70’s was turning out cut rate anti-communist and anti-Japanese spy films by the
truckload and they’re being rediscovered now with all their glorious wooden dialogue, ridiculous plots and hard-hitting action. Ryu, Korea’s king of action movies, directs this flick like an unholy blend of Stephen Chow and Jackie Chan, full of elaborate set pieces and ridiculous contrivances, sending up Korea’s anti-communist hysteria while serving up some ace martial arts.
DREAM (South Korea, 2008, Kim Ki-duk)
Ki-duk, Korea’s number one cinematic transgressor, returns to cinema with this surreal, dark fantasy about two people who find that their dreams are connected. Being a Kim Ki-Duk film, this leads to all kinds of emotional outrageousness. Starring Japan’s Joe Odagiri and Korea’s Lee Na-Young, it’s said to be the best film from director Kim in years, full of in-your-face physicality and scenes that don’t just go over the line but set the line on fire. Ultimately Kim Ki-Duk is chasing bigger philosophical fish, however, wondering if dreams are a product of reality or if reality is a product of our dreams.
THE EQUATION OF LOVE AND DEATH (China, 2008, Cao Baoping)
A twisty Chinese thriller anchored by an award-winning performance from Zhou Xun as a chain-smoking, obsessive-compulsive cab driver desperate to find her missing boyfriend.
THE FORBIDDEN DOOR (Indonesia, 2009, Joko Anwar)
The director of last year’s festival favorite Kala returns with a twisted tale said to be like a 19th century gothic novel adapted by Alfred Hitchcock and directed by David Lynch. A sculptor will stop at nothing to become successful has often been called one of the sickest, kinkiest movies ever made.
IF YOU ARE THE ONE (China, 2008, Feng Xiaogang)
This is the romantic comedy to end all romantic comedies: a gorgeous, heartfelt and sharply-written romance between Shu Qi and Ge You, directed by
China’s master of the blockbuster, Feng Xiaogang (Assembly). The second-highest grossing movie EVER released in China, it’s like something from MGM in the 1930’s, a throwback to a time when romances made you wish you could get up out of your seat and walk through the screen and into a better, funnier and far more romantic world.
K-20: LEGEND OF THE MASK (Japan, 2008, Shimako Sato)
In a fictional past where Japan never participated in World War II and wealthy aristocrats rule the capital city, a mysterious thief named "K-20" steals from the rich and has become a folk hero to the poor. A master of disguise, no one has ever seen K-20's true face, and when a poor circus acrobat (played by, according to my wife, the "dreamy" Takeshi Kaneshiro, and she's not exactly wrong) is framed as the master criminal, he must seek the help of a rich princess to clear his name and bring the real K-20 to the authorities. One of the biggest Japanese productions of recent years, and featuring special effects by the team behind the Always movies, K-20 looks to be an old-school, running-and-jumping, steampunk action adventure in the grand tradition of silent serials and swashbuckling Errol Flynn movies. Personally, I have been dying to see this since I saw a flyer for it at the American Film Market last November.
LOVE EXPOSURE (Japan, 2008, Sion Sono)
The director of Exte and Noriko’s Dinner Table returns with nothing less than a four-hour epic about pornography, Catholicism, families,
fathers, true love, cross-dressing, kung fu, cults and mental illness. Rejected by every single US distributor, Sono examines the redemptive powers of God, sex and true love, which unite in a holy trinity of motion picture catharsis that promises to send you out of the theater cleansed of sin, and horny as hell. The people who put together the NYAFF say this will probably be your only chance to see it in any American movie theatre, saying if you ever loved movies you cannot afford to miss it.
MONSTER X STRIKES BACK: ATTACK THE G8 SUMMIT (Japan, 2008, Minoru Kawasaki)
Preceded by the short film GEHARA: THE LONG-HAIRED GIANT MONSTER (Japan, 2009, Kiyotaka Taguchi)
Minoru Kawasaki of Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala infamy returns with a remake/sequel hybrid of Kazui Nihonmatsu's 1967 monster movie The X from Outer Space, featuring the hideous space chicken, Guilala. Here, in a tribute to classic giant monster films, Kawasaki turns the “stupid” dial up to 11 and loads the film
with old school special effects as Guilala attacks the G-8 summit and the world’s leaders have to kick its kaiju butt. Throw in Takeshi "Beat" Kitano as the savior of Japan and you know you're coming out of the theatre with more ass-kicking monster love than you’ve had all year.
OLD FISH (China, 2007, Gao Qunshu)
A long-in-the-tooth member of a bomb squad takes on a mad bomber who’s leaving diabolical homemade explosives all over the city. Written and acted mostly by actual cops and bomb squad officers, the movie belongs to real life ex-cop and non-actor Ma Guowei, who plays the titular old fish in this gripping, ultra-realistic look at China’s bomb disposal procedures, which apparently include putting a ticking explosive device in your bicycle basket and pedaling like hell for the river.
ROUGH CUT (South Korea, 2008, Jang Hun)
A high concept action comedy given an intimate, arthouse flavor by the director’s intense focus on his two main characters. A spoiled, pampered and destructive actor known for playing gangsters winds up starring in his latest movie with a real life gangster, hired at the last minute. Plenty of fights and action if you’re here for that sort of thing, but of far more interest is the slowly evolving, ever-unfolding nature of the two lead actors whose journey from star to wreck and from gangster to diva are chronicled in intense close-up. We're told this is one of those movies that under-promises and over-delivers.
SNAKES AND EARRINGS (Japan, 2008, Yukio Ninagawa)
Based on a best-selling novel about a woman who decides that her goal in life is to have her tongue split. Bored of her daily life, she starts with tattoos, moves on to piercing, and finally wants the full bifurcated tongue. Yuriko Yoshitaka gives an incredibly raw, totally exposed performance that’s been cleaning up the awards and its the anchor of this sensitive, emotional, erotic, disturing and beautiful movie for anyone who ever looked at a pierced tongue and thought, "Well, maybe..."
20TH CENTURY BOYS (Japan, 2008, Yukihiko Tsutsumi) and 20TH CENTURY BOYS: CHAPTER TWO - THE LAST HOPE (Japan, 2009, Yukihiko
Tsutsumi)
As revered in Japan as the Death Note series, 20th Century Boys (named after the T. Rex song) is an epic manga story that has finally become three much-anticipated movies, with the third, concluding installment scheduled to be released in Japan in August 2009. When they were kids, a neighborhood gang of buddies wrote an illustrated “Book of Prophecy” about a group of bad guys who destroyed the planet with viruses and giant robots. Now they’ve grown up into hard luck, broken down adults and the events from their homemade comic book are coming true and they’re the only people who can stop it. This hard-charging narrative races ahead full speed, packed with destroyed cities, death cults, funeral banquets, old friends, broken dreams and invincible assassins. The kind of thing to make you laugh and give you goosebumps all at the same time.
WHEN THE FULL MOON RISES (Malaysia, 2008, Mamat Khalid)
When told of this movie, we were asked to imagine Guy Maddin taking on the history of Malaysian cinema. Most of the older Malaysian movies have been destroyed by the ravages of time, so director Mamat Khalid makes a “lost” black-and-white thriller from the 60’s, that’s part loving homage and part sharp-eyed send-up. Full of secret communist cults, werewolves, were-tigers, ghosts, private eyes, midgets and eerie secrets it’s so deadpan you don’t know if you should be laughing or crying.
The remainder of the 2009 New York Asain Film Festival will be announced in the coming weeks. The festival will screen from June 19 to July 2 at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue at West 4th Street) and from July 1 – 5 at Japan Society
(333 East 47th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues). You can learn more about the New York Asain Film Festival by visiting the Subway Cinema web site, promoters of the festival.