The Missing

Directed by Lee Kang-sheng

Reviewed by Martin Tsai

Best known as the enigmatic star of all of Tsai Ming-liang’s films, Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng has garnered international attention as the alter ego/muse/fetish of the Malaysian-born auteur. Making his directorial debut with The Missing, Lee also establishes himself as Tsai’s worthy apprentice. The film is a deserving companion to Tsai’s haunting masterpiece Goodbye Dragon Inn. In fact the two films were originally conceived as halves of the same feature, but split due to considerations of length.

Following two separate but intersecting narratives, The Missing depicts a grandmother’s frantic search for her lost infant grandson and a student seeking diversions in order to cope with the disappearance of his grandfather. The film offers some fascinating insights into how people helplessly resort to irrationality in dealing with loss and desperation. The grandmother hops onto a random stranger’s motorcycle, while the student skips school and spends all day in an arcade.

Lee borrows some of Tsai’s favourite cinematic techniques, but achieves drastically different results here. His studied long takes and long shots quietly unravel a sense of urgency centering on Lu Yi-ching’s tour-de-force performance as the grandmother. Simultaneously unnerving, frustrating and droll, this masterful effort demonstrates the tremendous potential of a new filmmaking talent.

Reprinted from WestEnder. © Copyright 2004 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.

10 on Ten / Five

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Reviewed by Martin Tsai

The two new documentaries from Iranian visionary Abbas Kiarostami are worthwhile for his loyal fans and daunting for the uninitiated.

In 10 on Ten, he revisits his triumphant 2002 drama Ten and lectures on his cinematic method. Following the same template, he navigates around Tehran in his car and discusses various aspects of filmmaking during the 10 segments. While informative and absorbing, the film requires viewers’ prior knowledge of Ten. A pair of sunglasses largely conceals Kiarostami’s facial expressions, and the unwarranted English dubbing here further eclipses any signs of his animated zeal. Since the film’s visuals are mostly futile, the director’s insights probably better serve as a commentary alongside Ten on DVD.

On the 100th anniversary of Yasujiro Ozu’s birth, Kiarostami pays tribute to the late Japanese master with Five. Kiarostami trades his signature winding dirt roads for the beach, and sets up five Ozu-esque long takes to survey driftwood, people, dogs, ducks, waves and ripples. Some will find this exercise excruciating, as the entire screen is nearly pitch black for over 20 minutes during one segment. But the film’s wonderfully studied details will reward the kind of patient and observant viewers who find amusement staring into a fish tank.

Reprinted from WestEnder. © Copyright 2004 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.

A Silent Love

Directed by Federico Hidalgo Starring Vanessa Bauche and Noel Burton

Reviewed by Martin Tsai

Premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, A Silent Love sets out to explore the dynamics of a mail-order marriage. It's always refreshing to see a homegrown film appropriately reflecting upon Canada's omnipresent diversity and immigration issues, although this particular effort doesn't ultimately venture into any ground not already covered by similar films like Green Card or Sylvia Chang's Siao Yu (a more serious treatment scripted by Ang Lee).

Through an internet service, middle-aged Canadian professor Norman (Noel Burton) and twenty something Mexican schoolteacher Gladys (Vanessa Bauche of Amores Perros) have corresponded for a year with the aid of a translator. Despite the fact that they can barely converse, they decide to get married and invite Gladys' widowed mother Fernanda (Susana Salazar) to join them in Montreal. Apparently still ambivalent about the arrangement, Gladys often bursts into melodramatic tirades worthy of a soap opera on Telemundo. She constantly argues with Fernanda - en Espanol - as if the dumbfounded Noel is invisible.

That language barrier is not something that just the protagonists have to struggle with. Feebly written with prosaic dialogue, the multilingual screenplay makes about as much sense as the lyrics to Livin' la Vida Loca. Like its running silent-film motif, most everything in the screenplay fails to communicate the meaning and significance of the story.

The characters are constantly making rash decisions and taking action on a whim, such as Noel giving Gladys a home office or Gladys taking a job as a dishwasher in a Chinese-owned Japanese restaurant. What do these episodes mean? Should we care? It's not as if they shed any light on the characters' personalities or advance the story. On the rare occasion the screenplay allows some explanation, it awkwardly engages the characters in tactless and humiliating confrontations. For instance, Gladys and Norman's dinner party guest dishes out hot potatoes like "You got to admit this system of wife-buying is pretty colonial."

A Silent Love misses several opportunities to meaningfully explore obvious subjects, such as the cultural shock of moving from Mexico to Canada or the effect that a generation gap has on a marriage. First-time director Federico Hidalgo seems totally uninterested in his characters, and invests no time in examining their motivations, values and cultural differences. It's really a shame, because the film might have been fascinating if he actually bothered to.

Reprinted from WestEnder. © Copyright 2004 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.

Intern Academy

Directed by Dave Thomas Starring Peter Oldring, Pat Kelly, Dave Foley and Dan Aykroyd

Reviewed by Martin Tsai

Intern Academy offers viewers a new appreciation for the TV series Scrubs. Both revolve around the misadventures of hospital interns/residents, but that's where the similarity ends. This film gives you an idea what the sitcom would be like if everything went horribly wrong. Not only does it lack the engaging plots, likable characters and zany silliness that make Scrubs a success, Intern Academy alternates between the embarrassingly unfunny and the repulsively crude throughout.

Within its opening minutes, Academy already resorts to such lowbrow humour as a plastic doll stuck in a patient's rectum. It continues to scrape the bottom of the bedpan with more mind-numbing gags involving body fluids and waste products, gratuitous nudity and the obligatory strippers. The film is shamelessly sexist, and eventually turns even its most uptight female characters into total whores.

As if the juvenile humour isn't offensive enough, it ups the ante with blood and guts. There are some messy surgeries - including one in which the surgeon vomits into the incision opening - plus a fight with characters throwing organs at each other. Unfortunately this isn't a Takashi Miike film, so all the gore elicits more cringes than laughs. Equally unpleasant is Matt Frewer's Jim Carrey impersonation as a knife-happy surgical instructor.

Aside from its tasteless sense of humour, the film has plenty of unintentional logistical gaffes. For starters, the characters are still learning pre-med basics in a classroom despite the fact they are already hospital interns. Plus, nobody ever wears a surgical mask during the operations here. Moreover, a doctor in the film has just performed open-heart surgery but immediately tells the patient's family that his office will call to schedule a follow-up, when in reality the patient would recuperate in the hospital. This lack of attention to detail reflects the filmmaker's laziness.

Writer/director Dave Thomas (of SCTV fame) provides a series of situational skits complete with amateurish shot/reverse-shot filmmaking in the total absence of an intelligible storyline. All of the characters are merely plot devices, and they fail to register even by the film's end. The climax-if you can even call it such-is so inconsequential, that it only serves to give the viewers a sense of relief knowing this mess is nearly over. Thomas continues to dig deeper into his colostomy bag of tricks with a desperate gag reel during the credit sequence, but even that cannot resuscitate this incurable film.

Reprinted from WestEnder. © Copyright 2004 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.

Wicker Park

Directed by Paul McGuigan Starring Josh Hartnett, Rose Byrne, Diane Kruger and Matthew Lillard

Reviewed by Martin Tsai

Despite its stylish appearance and engaging plot, Wicker Park unwittingly falls into the common traps that encumber most American remakes of foreign films. It is a by-the-numbers adaptation of Gilles Mimouni's 1996 French thriller L'Appartement, but unfortunately far too many elements here get lost in Hollywood translation.

Josh Hartnett stars as Matt, who spontaneously puts off an important business trip and a marriage proposal after a brush with a woman reminiscent of his old flame Lisa (Diane Kruger). He traces her using a hotel key she has left behind, which eventually leads him to a different woman (Rose Byrne) who claims that her name is also Lisa. It turns out that her name is really Alex, and she has an ulterior motive to keep Matt and Lisa apart. The jigsaw puzzle of a story weaves a web of obsession, and every character appears to be stalking someone else.

Fresh-faced Hartnett seems awkward in the lead role, which probably demands someone slightly older (think Vincent Cassel of the original). Essentially playing himself as always, Matthew Lillard somehow gives the most memorable performance in the film as Matt's best friend Luke.

Screenwriter Brandon Boyce substantially retains the characters and the scenes from L'Appartement, but inevitably simplifies and demystifies their complexity for North American consumption. He maintains the original's effective structure that constantly shifts time and perspective, and then patronizingly goes on to explain all the twists and turns to a degree that is totally unnecessary. In an attempt to dumb down the story further, Boyce sacrifices the original's murder-mystery subplot involving Lisa's widowed stalker. Although that character remains in the film, he has been reduced to relative insignificance.

Director Paul McGuigan infuses a few gracefully layered images, making even split-screens pleasing to the eye. But he ultimately utilizes this device too infrequently, despite the fact that it works wonders with the film's fragmented storytelling.

McGuigan seems to be on autopilot the rest of the time, duplicating scenarios from L'Appartement while completely missing the point. The original pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock classics such as Vertigo, Rear Window and Strangers on a Train and while some of those elements remain in Wicker Park, the director leaves an impression that he is oblivious to the Hitchcockian references in Mimouni's version. To make matters worse, the film blasts an ill-conceived pop-rock soundtrack with placid guitars slowly strumming away what little suspense remains.

Reprinted from WestEnder. © Copyright 2004 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.

The Story of the Weeping Camel

Directed by Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni

Reviewed by Martin Tsai

Set against the desolate Gobi Desert in Mongolia, The Story of the Weeping Camel is a simple fable that blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction. Shot on location with a cast of non-professional actors and untrained animals, it's devoid of the ubiquitous trappings of most narrative films. Despite its National Geographic/PBS facade, the film is no less magical than an effects-laden Hollywood flick.

The story concerns a newborn camel rejected by his mother after a particularly arduous labour, and the lengths that a nomadic family goes through to reunite them. While its plot seems pedestrian, the film delivers some of the most heart-wrenching and life-affirming moments on celluloid in recent memory.

Imagine an abandoned baby camel helplessly crying and whimpering alone, while another calf nearby is nuzzling up with her mother. It would take a heart of stone to resist the effect of such powerful images.

Members of a nomadic family portray themselves here, and the film follows their routines and rituals with wide-eyed wonder. Weeping Camel is reminiscent of early ethnographic films such as Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North and Sergei Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico!, as it documents real people performing or re-enacting their activities during the course of narrative storytelling. In contrast to those films, Weeping Camel depicts its cultural milieu with an affectionate clarity rather than a distorting mysticism. Unlike Flaherty or Eisenstein however, the film's co-writer/co-director Byambasuren Davaa is part of the culture she is presenting, as her grandparents are also Mongolian nomads.

The illusion of ethnographic mysticism vanishes as the family's two sons venture into Aimak-a settlement some 50 kilometres away from their yurts-to invite a musician whose performance is vital to the traditional ceremony that will reconcile the estranged mother and child. Viewers get a dose of reality shock here, as sights of power lines, motorcycles, televisions and satellite dishes disrupt what initially appears to be a timeless rustic fable.

With the vast Gobi Desert as its sweeping backdrop, the film has a scope that begs to be seen on the big screen. Viewing it on television would somehow trivialize it because of its visual resemblance to educational documentaries. As the camel of the title finally begins to weep, viewers get to witness a miracle so incredible that it's closer to a religious experience than anything Mel Gibson conjured up in The Passion of the Christ.

Reprinted from WestEnder. © Copyright 2004 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.

Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie

Directed by Hatsuki Tsuji

Reviewed by Martin Tsai

If watching something as devoid of action as World Championship Poker is your idea of a good time, you may find Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie tolerable provided that you fully comprehend the rules. Yu-Gi-Oh! - literally meaning king of games - is a popular Japanese franchise that has spawned an animated series, video games, comic books and a trading-card game which plays like Magic: The Gathering.

Yu-Gi-Oh! has clearly capitalized on the fact that many kids have outgrown the Pokemon craze that stormed North America four years ago. The two franchises share a similar premise that allows players to duel using their arsenal of monsters. With more grotesque monsters and more graphic battles, Yu-Gi-Oh! naturally appeals to former Pokemon fans who now find the cutesy pocket monsters embarrassing and unacceptable amongst peers.

While the Pokemon animation always makes an attempt at a coherent plotline, the Yu-Gi-Oh! animation comes off solely as a commercial for the merchandising. Poorly disguised behind the veneer of some bogus 5,000-year-old Egyptian myth, the series often devotes several episodes to a single duel just to showcase the various monsters and their special powers.

Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie is very much like an extended episode of the TV series. There isn't much of a storyline, as it takes only 45 minutes before the hour-long climactic card game begins. The film sporadically interrupts its pageantry of monsters to deliver its awkward, ham-handed message. For example, the characters pause to reflect on the value of their friendship while the scary mummies chasing them have already caught up. Fearing that viewers may somehow miss that important message, the film continues to bludgeon with dialogue like "Victory means nothing unless you share it with people you love!"

You may seriously consider submitting to your children's constant begging and taking them to see Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie against your better judgment. But why take them to see something they already watch on television everyday? Is it because all of their friends are seeing it? Could it be the can't-live-without collector's trading cards the theatres are handing out with each ticket purchase? Do you really see yourself struggling to make sense of a silly card game while kids all around you yap away about the monsters in their decks? Let's face it, you've probably just read this review because you want to be talked out of it.

Reprinted from WestEnder. © Copyright 2004 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.

The Manchurian Candidate

Directed by Jonathan Demme Starring Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep and Liev Schreiber

Reviewed by Martin Tsai

Updating John Frankenheimer’s 1962 cultural monument, Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate is a timely and effective political thriller in its own right. Frankenheimer’s Cold War conspiracy debuted amidst the Cuban Missile Crisis, and foreshadowed the shootings of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and George Wallace that would later change the outcomes of American presidential elections in 1968 and 1972. Demme’s conglomerate conspiracy has an equally well-timed release concurrent with last week’s Democratic National Convention, but it’s unlikely to have the same impact since Fahrenheit 9/11 has already changed the present cultural climate.

This soldier-programmed-into-political-assassin remake is rather faithful to Frankenheimer’s original while also drawing from The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 corporate variation on the Manchurian theme. Changes are inevitable, as Communism no longer poses an immediate threat. Manchurian Global, an amalgam of Halliburton and The Carlyle Group, substitutes for the Communists as the villain. Exploiting fears of terrorist threats takes the place of Communist witch-hunts.

Faux war hero Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) himself is now the vice-presidential candidate, replacing his McCarthy-esque stepfather who is notably absent here. Shaw’s venomous mother (Meryl Streep) is a senator herself, beyond being just a shadowy string-puller. Shaw and his commanding officer Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) have been abducted during Operation Desert Storm instead of the Korean War, and brainwashed with high-tech implants rather than hypnosis.

Candidate is the first true thriller and perhaps the most successful film that Demme has made since 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. It still alarmingly signals a creative dry spell, as this is his second remake in a row (following his misguided Charade-remake The Truth About Charlie – his documentary The Agronomist notwithstanding). While very engaging and entertaining, Demme’s version doesn’t quite measure up to Frankenheimer’s original. Several key scenes fall short here, including the pivotal nightmare sequence and the precisely paced climactic assassination. The new screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris often lifts entire scenes from the source material, but with sporadic shorthand that seems to presume the viewers’ familiarity with the original.

The remake appropriately incorporates governmental branches such as the FBI and the U.S. Army as part of the conspiracy. Its visual vocabulary – complete with surveillance cameras, colour-coded terrorism alerts and some graphic details recalling Lambs and even Ridley Scott’s Hannibal – does help intensify the paranoid atmosphere. Supporting performances by Kimberly Elise and Jeffrey Wright add significant depth to their respective characters. Another decided improvement is the omission of the original’s offensive racial stereotypes and its ridiculous kung-fu fight scene.

Demme’s Candidate would almost be complete if instead of entirely omitting the character of Shaw’s demagogue stepfather, it modernized him to a Rush Limbaugh-type political pundit. Something to try if yet another remake is unavoidable.

Reprinted from WestEnder. © Copyright 2004 Martin Tsai. All rights reserved.