Category: Uncategorized

Fantasia International Film Festival Confirms Complete 2025 Programme

Posted on by

The Fantasia International Film Festival returns for its 29th edition taking place once again in Montreal from July 17 to Aug. 3. As usual this year’s programme includes a host of new and classic features from East Asia:

China

  • Contact Lens – Experimental drama in which a young woman longs to break free.
  • The Girl Who Stole Time – Animation in which a young girl gains the ability to control time.

Hong Kong

  • The Battle Wizard – Zany Shaw Brothers fantasy in which a man is imbued with the knowledge of kung fu and the ability to shoot lasers after biting a snake.
  • Bullet in the Head – 4K restoration of the John Woo classic in which a trio of friends flee Hong Kong only to be trapped in Vietnam.
  • A Chinese Ghost Story III – 4K restoration of the Tsui Hark /Ching Siu-Tung classic in which the arrival of a young monk destabilises a community of fox vixens.
  • Good Game – With business declining, a middle-aged internet cafe owner sets his sights on an esports championship.
  • Stuntman – A legendary action choreographer gets a second chance on a retro movie but finds himself out of step with modern filmmaking in Herbert Leung & Albert Leung’s elegiac drama. Review.

Indonesia

Japan

South Korea

  • Fragment – Drama in which the children of a murderer and their victim live in the same village.
  • Hi-Five – Five people receive super powers after receiving an organ transplant.
  • Holy Night: Demon Hunters – The mighty fists of Ma Dong-seok punch the Devil right back to hell in Lim Dae-hee’s supernatural action drama. Review.
  • The Last Woman on Earth – A film student writes a vengeful satire against men.
  • Noise – A woman investigates her sister’s disappearance.
  • Omniscient Reader: The Prophecy – Isekai drama in which an office worker is thrust into the world of the web novel he’s been reading.
  • The Woman – A woman suspects a man she was trying to buy a second-hand hoover from may have murdered her friend.

Taiwan

The Fantasia International Film Festival runs in Montreal, Canada, July 17 to Aug 3. Full details for all the films along with scheduling and ticketing information are available via the the official website, and you can also keep up with all the latest news via the festival’s official Facebook page,  X (formerly Twitter) account, Bluesky, Instagram, and Vimeo channels.

BFI to Host “Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema”

Posted on by

Throughout April 2025, the BFI will be hosting a season of films exploring Taiwanese New Cinema from new perspectives including a selection of films from lesser known filmmakers alongside those of heavy hitters such as Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Duckweed (aka Floating Weeds)

Edward Yang’s television debut after returning to Taiwan, Duckweed was part of the Eleven Women TV series produced by Sylvia Chang and Chen Chun-tian, and follows a young woman who moves to Taipei from the countryside to become a model.

In Our Time

1982 anthology film featuring instalments directed by Tao Te-chen, Edward Yang, Ko I-chen, Chang Yi.

The Boys from Fengkuei

1983 drama from Hou Hsiao-hsien following a group of young men who leave their fishing village after getting into trouble with gangsters and try to make new lives for themselves in Kaohsiung.

Chen Kun-hou, who was the film’s cinematographer, will introduce the screening on 11th April.

The Sandwich Man

Tripartite anthology film featuring instalments by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tseng Chuang-hsiang, and Wan Jen adapting short stories by Huang Chun-ming.

Out of the Blue

1984 drama from Chen Kun-hou in which teenagers Jielong and Tangmi spend a single night together before she disappears and Jielong must return to university.

Director Chen Kun-hou will be present for a Q&A following the screening on 10th April.

Ah Fei

Drama adapted from a short story by Liao Hui-ying and following a woman over several decades after the Chinese Civil War.

Kuei-mei, a Woman

A woman’s stoical endurance of hardship as she travels towards hard-won prosperity mirrors that of her nation in Chang Yi’s allegorical maternal melodrama. Review.

My Favorite Season

1985 Chen Kun-hou drama starring Sylvia Chang as a woman who conceives a child with her married boss but wants to break up with him and raise the baby on her own.

Director Chen Kun-hou will be present for a Q&A following the screening on 11th April.

Taipei Story

An ambitious young woman is determined to keep pushing forward while her more traditional boyfriend remains trapped in the past in Yang’s melancholy urban drama. Review.

A Time to Live and a Time to Die

Semi-autobiographical drama from Hou Hsiao-hsien following a young man in Fengshan from 1947 to 1965.

This Love of Mine

Psychological drama from Chang Yi adapted from the novel by Hsiao Sa in which a woman must re-evaluate her life after learning of her husband’s affair.

The Terrorisers

Landmark drama from Edward Yang in which a doctor and his novelist wife teetering on the brink of divorce, a voyeuristic photographer, and a rebellious teen are connected by a single event.

Strawman

Satirical comedy set at the end of the war in which two farmers find an unexploded bomb in their field and decide to carry it to the Japanese police in the hope of a reward.

Autumn Tempest

Huang Yu-shan’s 1988 narrative film debut in which a young man retreats to a mountain temple to study but enters an affair with a young woman who subsequently becomes pregnant.

Director Huang Yu-shan will be present for a Q&A following the screening on 12th April.

A City of Sadness

Historical drama from Hou Hsiao-hsien set immediately after the liberation from Japanese colonial rule following a family who become embroiled in the White Terror following the February 28 incident.

Myriad Voices: Reframing Taiwan New Cinema runs at the BFI Southbank throughout April.

The Last Dance (大病人, Juzo Itami, 1993)

Posted on by

A self-involved film director gets a lesson in what it is to live when he discovers that he has terminal cancer in a lighthearted melodrama from Juzo Itami, The Last Dance (大病人, Daibyonin). Itami was apparently inspired by his own stay in hospital after being attacked by yakuza offended by his previous film Minbo and like his debut The Funeral the film has a few questions to ask about the nature of death along with the functioning of the medical system. 

That’s partly because film director Buhei Mukai (Rentaro Mikuni) is not initially told of his diagnosis. His well-meaning doctor, Ogata (Masahiko Tsugawa) a old university friend of his wife, elects to tell him only that he has a stomach ulcer in keeping with an old-fashioned policy that worries patients may lose hope and give up too easily on discovering the extent of their illness. Buhei meanwhile continues to obsess about his condition, convinced it must be cancer and that his wife, Mariko (Nobuko Miyamoto), and the medical staff are lying to him, at one point pretending to be his own uncle in order to tease the truth out of Ogata over the phone and attempting suicide when he accidentally implies that Buhei may not have long left. 

His distress is compounded by the irony that in the film he was working on when he became ill he was starring as a composer with advanced cancer whose wife has also been diagnosed with a more aggressive form of the disease. Whatever we might think about Buhei, it’s fair to say that the film’s sexual politics have not aged well. Not only was he having an affair with the actress playing his wife, but continues to flirt inappropriately with the medical staff and at one point even tries to force himself on his wife who was in the process of leaving him when he was first diagnosed. His lechery seems primed to appeal to men of a similar age while hinting at his virility and desire for life, but is nevertheless crass and often uncomfortable. Nevertheless, as Mariko says he’s like a child inside cheekily joking with the doctors about his drinking and smoking habits while running away from anything unpleasant and trying to get out of having to undergo treatment. 

Itami had often remarked on the weaknesses of Japanese men who “can’t stand loneliness, can’t make decisions alone, can’t face anyone who disagrees with them and can’t accept responsibility for their mistakes,” Buhei seemingly possessing all four. In part regretting her decision to keep the seriousness of his illness from him, Mariko reflects that in the end all they did was leave Buhei alone in his fear and anxiety as the only one who didn’t know the truth, engineering a kind of conspiracy as they cheerfully told him to “soldier on” knowing there was no hope. Yet during his time in the hospital, Buhei is also confronted by the ethical dilemmas of medical treatment on witnessing doctors desperately try to resuscitate a man who was miserable, in pain, bedridden, and unable to communicate, just waiting for the end. As even his grieving wife calls out to the doctors to let him go, Buhei wonders if it’s right to preserve life at all costs especially when the patient has not been given a choice in his treatment and may not have been informed that they have no possibility of recovery. 

Coming to a new realisation he challenges Ogata’s conviction that death is his enemy, telling him that he should see it less as defeat than acceptance reflecting on the irony that he never felt so alive as when dying. Whimsical if occasionally maudlin, Itami throws in a surrealist dream sequence in which Buhei approaches the other side and comes to realise that death might not be so frightening after all even as he watches himself from above in an out of body experience witnessing the accidental violence inflicted on his body by those trying to save it. In some senses, Buhei is fairly unredeemed, winking at his indifferent mistress even on his death bed, but is in others humbled as he looks back on his life with its regrets and unfulfilled promises, repairing his relationship with his long suffering wife while admitting that under different circumstances he and Ogata might have become good friends. Offering a sometimes critical view of medical practice and ethics, Itami’s poetic meditation on what it is to die loses none of his ironic humour even in its unfolding tragedy. 

Crocodile Island (巨鳄岛, Simon Zhao & Xu Shixing, 2020)

Posted on by

Monster movie streamer Crocodile Island (巨鳄岛, jù è dǎo) became a surprise hit in the early days of the pandemic as people increasingly preferred to entertain themselves at home, though of course in a way it may be somehow comforting to see people battle more obvious threats that they can actually see and physically resist. In any case, the film never promises much more than its nature as fodder for online streaming would suggest while admittedly pinching plot elements from other similarly themed movies such Train to Busan and positioning the central conflict as effective paternity rather than the monster itself.

A brief prologue finds American pilots flying through the Dragon Triangle during the Second World War while ominously carrying cargo labeled as containing dangerous radiation though the reason they later crash on an uncharted island is that they are suddenly attacked by what appear to be pterodactyls. Nevertheless, the radiation is later given as an explanation as to why all the creatures on the island have evolved into huge and terrifying monsters including the titular crocodile.

Flash forward to the present day and grumpy middle-aged man Lin Hao (Gallen Lo Ka-leung) is escorting his estranged 19-year-old daughter Yiyi (Liao Yinyue) home to China following the sudden death of her mother in Australia where the pair had been living. Yiyi has secretly been accompanied by her university student boyfriend Cheng Jie (Wang Bingxiang) of whom Lin clearly does not approve, not yet able to shift his perspective on the daughter he hadn’t seen in five years to realise she is no longer a little girl. Family bonding will however have to wait as the plane they’re travelling on alongside a pregnant lady and her husband, an influencer, and an obnoxious man travelling home for a heart transplant, is pulled into Dragon’s Triangle by magnetic interference and crash lands on the island where several of the survivors are quickly swallowed by the crocodile. 

Those who remain are therefore faced with a series of dilemmas as to whether to help each other or prioritise their own survival with Cao Fang (He Qiwei), the heart transplant candidate, actively pushing several of his fellow passengers towards the crocodile so that he can get away. Lin meanwhile quickly takes charge and is more or less unchallenged as they try to explore the island in search of clues hoping that the radio equipment in the ‘40s plane they read about in a diary one of the pilots left behind will allow them to make contact through the outdated tech of radio waves. 

This is might be something of a plot hole seeing as it obviously didn’t work for the American pilot though perhaps there just weren’t any ships in range given the circumstances, and it seems he too might have come to a sticky end. But thanks to his sudden promotion to father of the group, Lin begins to reassess his role as a father to Yiyi in beginning to cede ground and actually listen to some of her ideas along with accepting support from Cheng Jie to help him protect her not lease because he realises he may not survive. There are also a few other giant and very hungry monsters on the island who in this case turn out to be more of a threat than other people who with the exception of Cao Fang are more community minded than individualistic. 

A mild social message is conveyed through Yiyi’s eventual discarding of the cigarettes she secretly smoked, symbolising the end of her rebellion and the re-acceptance of her father along with his patriarchal authority as if shifting back onto the right path thanks to the experience of fighting a giant crocodile together and realising that he really did stay to protect her instead of just going off on his own. Some undeniably ropey special effects and a general lack of coherence in the film’s internal logic frustrate its ability to maintain momentum though English-speakers aside, the performances are strong even if the plot developments at times feel unoriginal. Even so the film sells its message of family reunion and perhaps less palatably patriarchal social conventions as Lin Hao steps up to protect his daughter and community from the threats that surround them be they giant crocodiles or otherwise.

Crocodile Island is out now in the US on Digital & DVD courtesy of Well Go USA.

US release trailer (English trailer)

Dodes’ka-den (どですかでん, Akira Kurosawa, 1970)

Posted on by

By the late 1960s, Akira Kurosawa was in the midst of a creative crisis having spent two years working on the Japanese segments of the Hollywood war film Tora! Tora! Tora before he was eventually let go by the parsimonious US producers who feared he was spending too much money and making too little progress. Meanwhile, the studio system which had supported his career was collapsing and could no longer offer the kinds of budgets necessary for his personal brand of epic cinema. Teaming up with Masaki Kobayashi, Kon Ichikawa, and Keisuke Kinoshita, he formed the Club of the Four Knights production company but the first and only film they produced, Dodes’kaden (どですかでん), was not perhaps the kind of film many were expecting.

Inspired by a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto, the film like The Lower Depths focuses on a small community living in a slum only in this case on the edge of the modern city. Shot in classical 4:3, it was also Kurosawa’s first foray into colour and makes the most of his painterly eye with its surrealist backdrops and exaggerated sunsets. Once again there is the feeling that these people are already dead or trapped in a kind of purgatory unable to escape their desperate suffering, the slum as much of a mindset as a physical place. “Life is nothing but pain to me” one man claims, stating his hope that he die as quickly as possible while relating the sad story of his life: falling into depression when his sons were killed in the war and losing his wife, business, and finally home to the Tokyo air raids. Yet he is reminded that his family live on in him as long as he does and to kill himself is to kill them too, rediscovering a desire to survive even in his suffering. 

Another man, Hei (Hiroshi Akutagawa), dresses in a soldier’s uniform and wanders around like a zombie with, as one person puts it, the eyes of a dead man. Later a woman comes to find him, but he is seemingly unable to reawaken himself and move on from his trauma, now numbed to life, an already spent force. A young woman, Katsuko (Tomoko Yamazaki), is little different. Never speaking she has been raised by her uncle who begins sexually abusing her while her aunt is in hospital. She says that she wants to die, stabbing the only boy who showed her kindness because she feared he’d forget her. 

These people have largely been forgotten, living almost in another era and entirely cut off from mainstream society in a kind of etherial purgatory. Like the residents of The Lower Depths, a degree of fantasy is necessary for their survival a case in point being that of a beggar and his son who live an abandoned car and fantasise about the kind of house they’d build, a vast modernist building in white with a swimming pool. Like Katsuko, the boy is let down by his father who remains the car and sends him out to beg for food, telling him off when he lights a fire to boil fish as the man at the sushi shop had told him to do insisting, with disastrous results, that as it’s pickled it doesn’t need to be cooked. The furthest out of the residents, the pair have an almost grotesque appearance, their faces tinged with a morbid green. 

But then the couples living at the centre seemed to have found an antidote to despair in a surreal process of wife swapping now unable to remember whose husband is whose despite being neatly colour coded in matching outfits. A man with a nervous tic defends his grumpy yet fiercely loyal wife, and another man raises several children who may not be biologically his but are loved all the same. The old man who acts as a kind of confidant giving out advice and settling disputes through benevolent trickery has evidently learned how to live in this world and gets by as best he can while the son of the melancholy woman who runs the tempura stall drives an imaginary train through the slum the rhythm of which gives the film its name in its slow and certain progress towards nowhere at all. Heartbreakingly there are moments where the young man can hear the train in the distance, but it remains forever out of reach. Dodes’kaden didn’t do very well at the box office or with critics, its lack of success of cited as a factor in Kurosawa’s attempt to take his own life the following year, yet had perhaps set him on a new artistic course of colour and light which would define the further direction of his later career.

Dodes’ka-den screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 15th & 16th January 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

The Mole Song: Final (土竜の唄 FINAL, Takashi Miike, 2021)

Posted on by

“He’s horny and looks like a fool but you can count on him” according to top mob boss Todoroki and it’s as good a description as any of the hero of Takashi Miike’s adaptation of the manga by Noboru Takahashi, The Mole Song: Undercover Agent Reiji. Billed as the conclusion of the trilogy each of which is scripted by Kankuro Kudo, The Mole Song: FINAL (土竜の唄 FINAL, Mogura no uta Final) arrives almost 10 years since the series’ first instalment and five years after the second as Reiji (Toma Ikuta) proceeds towards his ultimate target and staves off the next evolution of organised crime.

To rewind a little, as film frequently does in flashbacks to the earlier movies, Reiji was a useless street cop facing a host of complaints not least for being a bit of a creep upskirting the local ladies until offered the opportunity to go undercover in the yakuza in order to break a drug smuggling ring run by ageing boss Todoroki (Koichi Iwaki). No longer technically a law enforcement officer because undercover operations are apparently illegal in Japan, Reiji has begun to find himself torn between his ultimate mission and the codes of gangsterdom not least in his relationship with sympathetic, old school yakuza Papillon (Shinichi Tsutsumi) so named for his love of butterflies many of which adorn his brightly coloured suits. 

Reiji’s inner conflict may ironically mirror the giri/ninjo push and pull central to the yakuza drama as he begins to realise that in completing his mission of taking down Todoroki he will end up betraying Papillon who once saved his life at the cost of his legs. Papillon meanwhile is presented as the idealised figure of the traditional yakuza in his fierce opposition to the drugs trade in the conviction that all they do is make people’s lives miserable and destroy families. He alone maintains the traditional ideas of brotherhood that underpin the underworld society in which a boss is also a father and betrayal is a spiritual if also in a sense literal act of suicide. His opposite number, meanwhile, Todoroki’s son Leo (Ryohei Suzuki), is the evolution of the post-Bubble yakuza, highly corporatised and essentially amoral. Papillon compares him to a mutant butterfly fed on coca lives that will eventually kill all of those with which it is confined while Leo himself claims that he intends to redefine the concept of the yakuza for the new generation. 

Caught between policeman and gangster, Reiji’s identity confusion is mediated through his relationships with Papillon on the one hand and pure-hearted love interest Junna (Riisa Naka) on the other. Each of them at one point tells Reiji that he is dead to them, thereby exiling him to the other side temporarily or otherwise. His yakuza traits which include the perversity which plagued him before endanger his otherwise innocent love for Junna in his inability to control his impulses, upsetting her by revealing a possible fling with a local woman while working on the drug deal in Italy, while his inclination towards police work that informs his sense of “justice” places him at odds with Papillon even though they are in many ways pursuing the same goal in keeping Japan free of dangerous drugs and the crime at surrounds them while purifying the contemporary yakuza of the pollution they have caused and restoring it to the pure ideal of another kind of “justice” advocated by Papillon which Todoroki has in a sense betrayed. 

As the film makes clear, the traditional yakuza is in any case on its way out with successive law enforcement initiatives that perhaps unfairly in some senses prevent them from living their lives. Todoroki’s guys defend their choices to the more idealistic Papillon under the rationale that they can’t open bank accounts, rent apartments, or even make sure their kids have lunch to take to school, so they have to dirty their hands with these less honourable kinds of work. Leo is simply a turbo charged version of their determination to survive. As eccentric cat-like gangster Nekozawa (Takashi Okamura), making a shock reappearance, explains it isn’t as if they can go straight either because who’s going to hire a former yakuza for a regular job? 

There may be in a sense a sympathy for those caught out by their choices with no real way back, a more liberal view of “justice” leaning either towards that by their own code or a simple rejection of the amoral selfishness of those who think nothing of ruining the lives of others for their own gain. With plenty of call backs to earlier instalments, Reiji once again opening the film buck naked with in this case a vase for modesty, Miike maintains the same slapstick sense of humour frequently employing zany animation and even a puppet show to express Reiji’s sometimes simplistic way of thinking. The film even unexpectedly shifts into tokusatsu in its closing sequence, bearing out the similarity in the titular “mole song” to the classic Mothra refrain, while placing Reiji and Papillon back into their respective roles having perhaps exchanged something between them in continuing to pursue their shared goal of a drug-free society. 

The Mole Song: Final streamed as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: Ⓒ2021 FUJI TELEVISION NETWORK/SHOGAKUKAN/JSTORM/TOHO/OLM ⒸNOBORU TAKAHASHI/SHOGAKUKAN

Maggie (메기, Yi Ok-seop, 2018)

Posted on by

Maggie poster 1“When we fall into a pit, what we need to do, is not dig any further but quickly climb out” according to a mysterious post-it discovered by a nurse when picking up the laundry (apparently inexpertly performed by her preferred cleaning service). The aphorism turns out to belong to Doctor Lee (Moon So-ri), the head physician at Love of Maria hospital where the titular Maggie (메기), a catfish, lives in a small tank observing the life around her and sometimes predicting earthquakes and other earth shattering events. A surrealist odyssey across the “pitfalls” of modern society, Yi Ok-seop’s quirky debut feature ponders the ramifications of distance as her various heroes weigh up the nature of “truth” as an absolutist concept.

Narrated by Maggie, the drama begins when the radiographer and her boyfriend are unexpectedly snapped during an intimate moment in the X-Ray room. The picture is then stolen and held up for everyone to see, at which point nurse Yoon-young (Lee Joo-young) worries that she and her boyfriend Sung-won (Koo Kyo-hwan) have been caught out using the privacy of the X-ray booth for unintended purposes. As Maggie says, no one pays much attention to who took the photo only to who might be in it, which is why the entire hospital, except Doctor Lee, ring in sick the next day with only Yoon-young turning up in the morning with the intention to resign. Figuring out what must have happened (and seeing as she’s the only one not embarrassed we can guess who took the photo), Doctor Lee is very upset to realise that the entirety of her staff has probably lied to her. With her intense belief in humanity shaken, Doctor Lee decides to engage in a trust game with her new best friend, Nurse Yoon-young, and simply choose to believe what they’re told, testing their hypothesis by visiting a random employee to verify if they really are “sick”.

Meanwhile, as a result of the earthquakes Maggie intermittently predicts,  mysterious sinkholes have begun appearing all over the nation. This is good news in one sense because it provides lots of extra work for otherwise unoccupied young men like Sung-won who have lost out in Korea’s insanely competitive economy. Like Sung-won, the other men on his team are also well-educated types who otherwise wouldn’t be considering manual work and are hoping for something better once the sinkhole business finally clears up. Mistrust, however, also works its way into their relationship when Sung-won loses a precious white gold ring given to him by Yoon-young, later becoming convinced that one of his colleagues has swiped it.

The loss of the ring leads to an increasing unease between Yoon-young and her boyfriend which is deepened by a visit from Sung-won’s ex who suggests there may have been problems in their relationship which she feels Yoon-young ought to be aware of. Though Sung-won seems sweet natured and laidback, never having acted in any way that would have given Yoon-young cause for concern, she begins to doubt him – suddenly worried by his overly violent crushing of a can out in the street. Doctor Lee’s advice is to simply ask Sung-won directly if the accusations are true, but Yoon-young can’t seem to do it and continues living along side him somewhat resentfully as she eventually comes to the decision to “believe” her friend at face value without investigating further.

“The truth cannot exist wholesomely”, according to Maggie’s “father” (Kwon Hae-hyo). It will always be polluted by self-interest and personal bias. As Doctor Lee says, there will always be people who believe you and people who don’t, so perhaps a healthy level of cynicism is something you need to accept in order to go on living in the world. Even Love of Maria Hospital is not immune to the disease of misrepresentation – a former convent given over as a place of healing it was later bought by an arch capitalist and is now run as a private hospital business (not that it appears to have many “customers”), despite Doctor Lee’s rather amusing ad which proclaims it “of the patients, by the patients, for the patients”.

Finally Yoon-young concedes she’ll need to simply ask Sung-won about his past and gets an honest response, but his honesty only seems to see him falling into a deep pit of despair, calling out from the bottom in the hope of being understood. A surreal exploration of contemporary social woes from the rabidly capitalist society to the growing distance between people in an increasingly interconnected age, Maggie attempts to find the emotional honesty sweet spot but discovers that trust, like everything else, is a complicated business.

Maggie screens on 13th July as part of the 2019 New York Asian Film Festival. It will also be screening as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival on 17th/18th July.

Interview with director Yi Ok-seop from the Busan International Film Festival

A Day Makes UK Premiere at Nottingham’s Mayhem Film Festival

Posted on by Leave a comment

A Day posterCho Sun-ho’s time-loop drama A Day (하루, Haroo) will make its UK premiere at Nottingham’s genre leaning film festival, Mayhem.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAJun-young, a successful surgeon but less than successful father, witnesses a car accident involving his daughter only to wake up as if it were just a dream. Realising that the events of his dream are proceeding as he saw them, Jun-young tries to save his daughter only to fail and have the exact same events repeat themselves over and over again until he meets another man in the same position who has been trying to save the life of the other victim. Together, the two men unite to save the lives of their loved ones and escape the nightmarish temporal loop in which they are both trapped.

Fantasia film festival trailer

A Day screens at 1.45pm on 14th October.

The festival will also play host to Sion Sono’s surreal sci-fi/horror odyssey Tag which receives a long awaited UK DVD/blu-ray release from Eureka this November.

tagTag screens on 14th October at 12pm. Check out our review of the film here.

Mayhem runs at Nottingham’s Broadway cinema from 12th – 15th October, 2017. You can find the complete lineup as well as ticketing information on the official website and you can also keep up with all the latest festival news via the official Facebook page, and Twitter account.

Jang Hoon’s A Taxi Driver to Close Fantasia 2017

Posted on by Leave a comment

Taxi Driver stillNow in its 21st year, Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival is back with some of the best genre movies from across the world. Like every other year, the festival has a large and varied selection of East Asian cinema on offer beginning with opening night movies The Villainess and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and continuing right until the closing gala, Jang-hoon’s A Taxi Driver. The full complement of East Asian feature films runs as follows:

China

extraordinary mission.jpg

  • Extraordinary Mission – undercover cop action drama from Infernal Affairs’ Alan Mak and Anthony Pun
  • The Final Master – martial arts drama from Xu Haofeng
  • Free and Easy – winner of the Special Jury Award for Cinematic Vision at this year’s Sundance, Geng Jun’s Free and Easy is an absurd crime caper and exposé of small town life.
  • God of War – historical action from Gordon Chan
  • Have a Nice Day – animated crime drama from Liu Jian
  • Wu Kong – Eddie Peng stars as the titular Monkey King in Derek Kwok’s take on the classic tale.

Hong Kong

vampire cleanup department still

  • Bastard Swordsman – classic Shaw Brothers action from 1983 directed by Tony Liu Chun-Ku (screening on 35mm Shaw Scope)
  • Made in Hong Kong – Fruit Chan’s tragic tale of alienated youth in handover over Hong Kong screens in the brand new 4K restoration premiered at the Udine Far East Film Festival.
  • Shock Wave – Andy Lau plays a valiant bomb disposal officer in Herman Yau’s impressively staged action drama. Review.
  • Vampire Cleanup Department – a vampire hunter falls in love with a vampire in this retro comedy from Yan Pak-Wing and Chiu Sin-Hang.

Japan

mole song still

  • Almost Coming, Almost Dying – New Year’s Eve goes very wrong for the protagonist of Toshimasa Kobayashi’s surreal comedy.
  • Death Note: Light up the NEW World – the Death Note saga continues in Shinsuke Sato’s big budget sequel starring Masahiro Higashide, Sosuke Ikematsu, and Masaki Suda. Review.
  • Genocidal Organ – sci-fi techno thriller and third in the series of anime adaptations of novels by Project Itoh.
  • Gintama – Yuichi Fukuda adapts the much loved manga for the big screen with Shun Oguri in the lead role.
  • The H-Man – classic Toho special effects thriller directed by Ishiro Honda in which a radiation enhanced threat reemerges to stalk the rain drenched streets of Tokyo. Review.
  • Innocent Curse – Takashi Shimizu’s latest slice of J-horror complete with creepy ghost kids and a shady avenger.
  • Japanese Girls Never Die – the disappearance of a young woman sparks a mini revolution in Daigo Matsui’s exuberant drama.
  • JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable – Takashi Miike picks up Hirohiko Araki’s classic manga about a long running family feud in which heroes and villains duke it out by proxy with a power known as Stand.
  • Junk Head – witty steampunk themed stop motion from Takahide Hori.
  • Kodoku Meatball Machine – another slice of splatter horror from Yoshihiro Nishimura
  • Love and Other Cults – youth drifts in search of safe resting place in Eiji Uchida’s latest irreverent drama. Review.
  • The Mole Song: Hong Kong Capriccio – Reiji’s got himself into another mess in this sequel to the original Mole Song directed by Takashi Miike and scripted by Kankuro Kudo.
  • Mumon: Land of Stealth – an ace ninja has to attend to the encroaching threat of Oda Nobunaga as well as being recently married in Yoshihiro Nakamura’s jidaigeki.
  • Museum – Shun Oguri stars as a maverick cop in Keishi Otomo’s noirish adaptation of the Ryosuke Tomoe manga.
  • Napping Princess – Kenji Kamiyama returns with a strange story of a young girl dreaming her life (and perhaps that of many others) away.
  • Night is Short, Walk on Girl – Masaaki Yuasa adapts another of Tomihiko Morimi’s novels in this surreal, animated romantic comedy.
  • Rage – Lee Sang-il adapts another Shuichi Yoshida novel as a Tokyo murder provokes three stories of suspicion and mistrust.
  • Shin Godzilla – Godzilla is back and bigger than ever in Hideaki Anno and Shin Higuchi’s reboot.
  • Shinjuku Swan II – Sion Sono returns to the red light district for another round of turf wars in the Shinjuku Swan sequel.
  • Teiichi: Battle of Supreme High – politics rules at an elite Japanese high school where teenager Teiichi is plotting his path to the prime-ministership of Japan. Review.
  • Tokyo Ghoul – Kentaro Hagiwara adapts Sui Ishida’s hidden zombie manga in which a young boy suddenly finds himself half-ghoul after a near fatal accident leaving him with a craving for human flesh.
  • The Tokyo Night Sky is Always the Densest Shade of Blue – Yuya Ishii’s poetic love/hate letter to Tokyo inspired by the poems of Tahi Saihate. Review.
  • What a Wonderful Family 2 – the Hirata family is back for another round of hilarious family drama in Yoji Yamada’s comedy sequel.

Korea

fabricated city still

  • Confidential Assignment – a North Korean special forces officer chases a suspect into the south and teams up with a bumbling but good hearted policeman in this action packed buddy cop comedy. Review.
  • A Day  – a father desperately tries to save his daughter in this time loop drama.
  • Fabricated City – a disillusioned young man makes a hero of himself online but gets caught up in a real world conspiracy when he’s framed for murder, prompting his online squad to step out of the shadows in his defence. Review.
  • House of the Disappeared – A woman tries to find the truth behind the disappearances of her husband and son in this creepy haunted house horror movie.
  • The Senior Class – a group of art students approach graduation in Hong Deok-pyo’s gritty adult animation.
  • The Sheriff in Town – An ex-cop decides its time to clean up his seaside town in this comedy action movie.
  • Split – a washed up former bowler takes in an autistic boy for his savant bowling skills in this warmhearted sports drama.
  • A Taxi Driver – Song Kang-ho drives a German photo journalist into the Gwanju Massacre in this hard-hitting yet lighthearted historical venture.
  • The Villainess – a sleeper assassin’s life is threatened by the reappearance of two men from her past.

Others

bad genius still

  • Jailbreak – Cambodian prison break action.
  • Town in a Lake – atmospheric Philippine thriller
  • Mon Mon Mon Monsters – horrible kids torture monsters in this oddly funny nihilistic teen drama from Taiwan
  • Bad Genius – a group of brainy Thai teens attempt to fly to Australia, take an exam, and then fly back to give their friends the answers before the time difference catches up with them.
  • Broken Sword Hero – Thai martial arts drama.

Fantasia International Film Festival takes place in Montreal from July 13 – Aug. 2, 2017. You can find full details for all the films as well as ticketing information on the official website,  and you can keep up with all the latest festival news via the official Facebook page, Twitter account, Instagram and Vimeo channels.

Scoop! (Hitoshi One, 2016)

Posted on by 2 Comments

scoop!Hitoshi One has a history of trying to find the humour in an old fashioned sleazy guy but the hero of his latest film, Scoop!, is an appropriately ‘80s throwback complete with loud shirt, leather jacket, and a mop of curly hair. Inspired by a 1985 TV movie written and directed by Masato Harada, Scoop! is equal parts satire, exposé and tragic character study as it attempts to capture the image of a photographer desperately trying to pretend he cares about nothing whilst caring too much about everything.

Shizuka (Masaharu Fukuyama) is a man out of time. Once the best photojournalist on his paper, he’s ridden the waves of a changing industry and become a high earning freelance paparazzo. Shizuka’s nights are spent in all of the fashionable if occasionally squalid drinking holes of the city in which the elites of the entertainment world attempt to disappear. Sadako (Yo Yoshida), the editor of Scoop! – a once proud publication now a seedy scandal rag, worries about her old friend, his debts, and his legacy. Offering to pay him well above the going rate for anything useable, she saddles him with the latest new recruit – Nobi (Fumi Nikaido), a naive young woman dressing in the bold childhood nostalgia inspired fashion trends of Harajuku. As might be assumed the pair do not hit it off but gradually a kind of closeness develops as Nobi gets into the thrill of the paparazzo chase.

In keeping with his inspiration, One shoots with a very ‘80s aesthetic of a city bathed in neon and moving to the beat of electropop and synth strings. Grainy and grungy, the images are seedy as is the world they capture though this is the Tokyo of the present day, not the bubble era underground. Shizuka claims his major inspiration came from the famous war photographer Robert Capa though now he can’t even remember if he really meant to become a photographer at all. Chasing cheating celebrities and exposing the odd politician for the kind of scandal that sells newspapers is all Shizuka thinks he’s good for, any pretence of journalistic integrity or the “people have a right to know” justification was dropped long ago.

Sadako, however, has more of a business head than her colleagues and is starting to think that Scoop! could be both a serious news outlet and nasty tabloid full of gravure shots and shocking tales of the rich and famous. Getting Shizuka to mentor Nobi is an attempt at killing to two birds with one stone – unite the plucky rookie with the down on his luck veteran for a new kind of reporting, and help Shizuka return to his better days by paying off those massive debts and getting his self esteem back.

Unfortunately Shizuka is his own worst enemy, hanging around with his strange friend Chara-Gen (Lily Franky) who is intermittently helpful but a definite liability. The world of the newspaper is certainly a sexist one – Sadako and Nobi seem to be the only two women around and the banter is distinctly laddish. An ongoing newsroom war leaves Sadako lamenting that the men only think about their careers and promotions rather than the bigger picture while the suggestion that she may win the position of editor has other colleagues bemusedly asking if a woman has ever helmed such a high office. The men ask each other for brothel recommendations and pass sexist comments back and fore amongst themselves with Shizuka trying to out do them all even going so far as to put down the new girl by describing her as “probably a virgin”.

Sadako’s plan begins to work as Shizuka and Nobi become closer, she becoming the kind of reporter who files the story no matter what and he finally agreeing to work on a more serious case. Having spent so long believing everything’s pointless, Shizuka’s reawakening maybe his undoing as a noble desire to help a friend who is so obviously beyond help leads to unexpected tragedy. Nevertheless, the presses keep rolling. A throwback in more ways than one, One’s 80s inspired tale of disillusioned reporters and mass media’s circulation numbers obsessed race to the bottom is all too modern. Unexpectedly melancholy yet often raucously funny, Scoop! is an old fashioned media satire but one with genuine affection for the embattled newsroom as it tries to clean up its act.

Scoop! was screened as part of the Udine Far East Film Festival 2017

Original trailer (no subtitles)