Fantasia Day 13 - Raging Phoenix

I had to sneak out of work early to make sure I got a good place in the line-up for this 5:20 showing. I needn't have worried, as it wasn't sold out. Remember the hardcore Fantasiac that I met while waiting in line for The Disappearance of Alice Creed? Well he pulled a fast one! Minutes before the doors were to be opened, he showed up with a friend and a very friendly greeting. We chatted for a bit (I was hiding my anxiety about whether to invite him to join us or not the whole time so wasn't reciprocating in quite the same way). When the line started moving, he subtly slid in with us. Rather than being resentful, I was actually rather impressed. It was very well done! Furthermore, the guy is a veteran and is going to 50 movies this year, so he has earned the right to not always have to wait in the line. And maybe he'll have a debt to me if the roles are reversed!

We got another Shaw Brothers trailer as a treat. This time it was Brave Archer IV. I have not seen any of this much loved and respected series, but this one looked fairly tired, though I could be wrong. Raging Phoenix was certainly entertaining, but once again failed to live up to a great premise. It was also weighted down by excessive sappiness. Still, it had tons of action and a completely over the top plot that almost put it into the realm of science fiction. It was so preposterous that it was fun. People were laughing scornfully, but I really appreciate that kind of stuff. Fuck realism.

Basically, it's about a gang of drunken capoeira muay-thai breakdancing kung fu masters all of whom have lost a lover to a gang of white slavers. They band together to hunt down the gang and get revenge. But as you learn, this isn't just any prostitution racket. These guys are kidnapping special girls who emit a rare pheromone that can be distilled and sold as a highly addictive perfume to the very rich. The essence comes out in the form of tears and the most sorrowful girl produces the best stuff!

You learn all this through the eyes of Deu, a spoiled young rock drummer (and natural muay thai master as it only takes her a few weeks of training to become the best) who is set up to be bait for the gang by the good guys (who hang out in a ruined castle on the beach wearing awesome loose-fitting ethnically hip clothes).

The first and second fight scenes are absolutely delirious and fun. The locations are these hilariously over-designed industrial sites, like a warehouse with different coloured car doors hanging from the ceiling, or an abandoned ship with captured girls draped in nets. The fighting really is a drunken, breakdancing muay thai full of creativity and joy. The audience was laughing aloud in pleasure.

Unfortunately, the style is totally abandoned after that. The three guys who were doing the most fun fighting basically get their ass kicked way too early and we don't get to see them properly perform after that. Even weirder, the use of alcohol is entirely absent from any of the later fight scenes, even though a whole section of the film is devoted to explaining the philosophy of drunken fighting. Furthermore, it would have been the perfect vehicle to allow the heroes to find a second wind when they were just about defeated by the bad guys. Instead, it's just pure emotion that makes a complete turnaround in the fight, a real cop-out.

There are still some great moves in the final fight, but I was sort of out of patience at that point. I suspect there was probably some rush to do the filming in the end and possibly something in the star's contract that made it so she had to be the main fighter. She is great, but there were ways to keep the rest of her team on the screen as well.

The final thing that really annoyed me was the coda, which is each of the good guys saying goodbye to the girl, even though she was now totally alone and had nothing to do. Why do they have to separate? Is there some need in Asian culture for everything to be sorrowful and tragic? Let's see, we've got these 3 cool and wacky dudes whose skills are investigating evil girl-stealing gangs and drunken kung fu breakdancing. And now we've got this girl who has the best kung-fu of them all. Hey, I've got an idea, why don't we stick together and continue to live on the beach, fight crime and kick ass?! No, instead we are all going to go off in the gloomy sunset. Lame ending and lame waste of potential for a great sequel.

Fantasia Day 4 - Da Sève and Clash

Fantasia takes place primarily in two theatres on the Concordia campus, the large and slightly beat-up Hall theatre on the north side of Maisonneuve and the smaller and slightly modern J.A. de Sève on the south side. Da Seve, as I like to call it, also has a very different vibe. The room feels more academic. It's a good atmosphere for movies where there may be a presenter who is an expert in something, for instance when artist Steve Bissette came to do a talk on early 20th century Japanese horror art or an expert on Taiwanese exploitation cinema presented a rare copy of (oh dang, I can't remember the name now, but it was an awesome rape revenge flick from the '70s).


(It may look about the same size as my other lame, grainy photos of the inside of the Hall building, but what you see here is almost the entire theatre, whereas the Hall it was only about a sixth or less that was visible.)

Movies that are in Da Seve, as I like to call it, tend to be either targetted to a smaller niche or mediocre (well really I should say not as good as you might expect). You can often sift through the excessive optimism in the program text based on which theatre the movie is playing in. Clash is a perfect example of that. It's a Vietnamese action film from the team who did far superior The Rebel (Interestingly, a friend told me that The Rebel was shown in da Seve last year as well, which I would consider an error now).

It was entertaining, but unfortunately pretty standard, with a bare bones plot involving an ass-kicking woman forced to do jobs for a crime boss in whose hands rests the life of her daughter. She teams up, unknowingly of course, with an undercover cop. The action comes pretty consistently, often with a hilariously inaccurate bunch of gunfire before we can move into the hand-to-hand stuff. The combat isn't bad and there is some neat chin-na and leg-locking, but it never really explodes. The whole thing is kind of dour and grim as well, with the tired operatic chorus singing over every other scene. The main actress is quite beautiful and she is interesting in that she has a model's body but seems to have some pretty impressive kung fu. Usually that kind of skininess doesn't mix with the martial arts, but she does seem to be the real deal.

Ironically, though it earned its place in da Seve, Clash would have been much more fun in the Hall building. The audience was dead, barely able to even muster applause at the end and with no reaction to the highly stimulating full length preview for Ip Man 2. At least in the Hall we would have had some screaming and yelling.

Up next is a 10:00 showing of I Spit on your Grave. I am really not a fan of cruelty and rape in movies, so I am quite nervous about this one. My wife watched the original last night on video. I had planned to do it, but thought I had a bit more time before the Fantasia screening of the remake. I may be glad I didn't, because she said that she found it equally as harrowing as Last House on the Left. I saw a snippet of that flick when she was watching it and heard some of the sound track and it was enough to leave a queezy feeling in my gut for days. It's something about the low-budget grittiness of those true '70s grindhouse movies that really freaks my shit out. I suspect that the remake of I Spit on your Grave will be easier to take for me, simpy because of its polish. And we'll see if they pull any punches as they did in the remake of Last House on the Left.

[Fantasia day 3] Gallants - FUCK YEAH!

Well during the introduction to Ip Man 2, King, the kung fu programmer for Fantasia said that Clement Cheng, the director of Gallants, is a part of the new wave of kung fu cinema coming from Hong Kong. That's a big statement but I am very pleased to say that if Gallants is indicative of Cheng's future work then King was not exaggerating.

This screening seemed to be a much bigger event for the sponsor, the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Society, compared to that of Ip Man 2, possibly because the director and one of the stars, Bruce Leung, were here to present it. There was a camera crew from Fairchild News, which is I guess a satellite network playing to the Chinese diaspora.



Bruce Leung has been working in kung fu films in Hong Kong for over 40 years, but you probably best know him as The Beast from Kung Fu Hustle, the humble old man who fights on all fours and inflates like a toad. He was wearing a pretty rough toupee and for a while, I thought he was the director's mom or something!

(That's him in the middle and the director, Clement Cheng, on the right.)

Real actors are often strangely bland and shy outside of the movies and Bruce Leung is definitely a real actor. When you see him on screen, he is so full of energy and charisma and utterly unmistakable. But in real life, he just looks like any middle-aged chinese dude with a bad wig.

I will have to admit that my critique of this movie has been strongly influenced by seeing it at Fantasia with Bruce Leung and the director there to present. Bruce Leung's speech in particular was really heartfelt and inspiring. After a basic greeting in strongly accented, but understandable english, where he said he hadn't gone to high school and thus couldn't speak english, he spoke the rest of the time in Cantonese with a translator. So his words were delivered in short segments, followed by the translation and then loud applause and cheering from the appreciative crowd. After many very generous and kind comments about us, he thanked many people, including the Hong Kong government (who paid for his trip). But he followed that up with an oblique political critique, which left the translator stammering and saying she didn't know if she should translate it for fear of getting punished! He said that the Hong Kong government had done a really good thing in sending him here, after having done many bad things since 1997. Quite interesting. I read over on the Fantasia blog that he had been out of movies for 15 years because of "a misunderstood diplomatic visit to Red China". I would love to know what the backstory behind that was!

Before the movie, we saw a neat little business promo short vaunting the many attributes of Hong Kong, narrated by Chow Yun-Fat in english. Very cool. It had a hilarious part where an Australian guy, looking exactly like one of the British expat heavies from Ip Man 2 said "I've been living here for 8 years and I haven't had to learn a word of Cantonese!". The audience burst out laughing.

Gallants starts out with a bang. It's the story of a total loser, low man on the totem pole in his real estate firm (he is literally beaten by his co-workers and boss) whose only period of ascendancy in his whole life was when he was 8 years old and used to bully this one other kid. This is all explained with tons of jump cuts and a hilarious, portentous voice over. And then some super lively credits, reminiscent of the old Shaw Brothers movies. The whole movie is just full of energy, in the lighting, in the cuts, in the actors themselves. Energy is what Hong Kong cinema does best and the look of Gallants does appear to be another step forward in style.

The nerdy guy, because of one more fuck-up at work, is sent on a 7-week, no pay vacation/project to settle some real estate dispute in a small town. Starting with an altercation with a little boy, things go from bad to worse for him until he stumbles upon a tea house that happens to be the property in dispute. It's a world of old, forgotten people, far from the importance of the big city. But everyone here has their role and there is a hilarious stand-off, where the protagonists and antagonists are established, each announcing their nickname and their low-level position in the community ("I am JADE KIRIN, night watchman for the Southern district!"). In the tradition of the old kung fu movies, the actor's name and the name of their character show up on the screen when they first appear.

Thematically, Gallants isn't such a big departure from other Hong Kong movies. The respect for old kung fu stars and the appreciation of the spirit of kung fu can be found in Kung Fu Hustle. The romance of the old time neighbourhood and local community is rife, but particularly strong in movies like "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Father". But it's all given such a rich, energetic spin and the actors are all so much fun (tons of old faces with a particularly hilarious spin from Teddy Robin Kwan, whom one could argue steals the movie), that it feels fresh and new.

It's funny, because I loved the trailer for this movie (if you want a sense of the style and energy of the movie, check out the trailer), but I didn't have any expectations. I think the title is the problem. My wife just looked up the word Gallant and confirmed that it can be used as a noun or an adjective. In the movie, it is referenced to mean old time heroes and it is the perfect word for the movie. But it's one of those weird words that nobody uses in english (at least not as a noun anymore), but because of Hong Kong's colonial past and British education, it pops up in a popular movie.

There was a Q&A at the end and the director said the movie, which opened up last month, is currently 10th in the HK box office for the year, which is not bad at all and bodes well for Clement's future (and ours as Hong Kong movie fans). Also, he thanked Andy Lau, who bankrolled it and got a producer credit. Good on you, Andy, for not only having a kickass acting career that went well beyond your pretty boy "Heaven King" early days, but for also being a positive force behind the scenes. Things are looking up.

Tomorrow it is Vietnamese ass-kicker Clash followed by (dear god help me) the remake of I Spit on your Grave. The latter is my wife's doing. She is much more hardcore than I am.