War of the Arrows reviewed

A Korean re-interpretation of the superhero who sacrifices his life to save that of a loved one, his sister in this case, fighting against all odds a superior force of Manchurian 17^th century equivalent of special forces.

The theme has been treated in a number of films, particularly in Hollywood studios productions. However, director Kim Han min has set this saga in 17^th century Korea, or Joseon as it was called then, when the Munchurian invaded from the North, taking a number of prisoners with them. Only a few of those managed to get back to the land of their birth.

In the War of the Arrows, Nam Yi (Hae-il Park), the son of a so-called traitor, has become an accomplished hunter, whilst his sister, Ja-in (Chae-won Moon) is set to marry the son of their protector, a military officer in a garrison in the North. Yet, when the Manchu invaders raided their compound, taking his sister to slavery together with the surviving population, Nam Yi sets to rescue her.

Some spectacular archery feasts follow to his attempt.

Entertaining story, although somewhat jaded.

War of the Arrows is already on sale in Britain on Blu-ray, DVD and VOD formats, courtesy of Cine Asia.

Orphaned as a child, Nam Yi overcame tragic loss to become the most accomplished hunter and archer of his generation. When his beloved Korea comes under attack from Chinese imperial forces, he returns from the forest to discover that his sister, and only living relative, has been taken into slavery by Manchu invaders. Now faced with the most daunting challenge of his life, he must fight to re-unite his family and prove his courage against the greatest archers history has ever known.

MADE IN ARGENTINA reviewed

Absent and Plan B

Marco Berger's two films, his debut feature Plan B (2009), followed by Absent (Ausente), are being released this week by Network Releasing as part of their excellent Made In... series.

In Absent, his most recent feature (2011), a drama depicting the complex relationship formed between Martín, a 16 year old boy in Buenos Aires (Javier de Pietro), and Sebastián (Carlos Echevarría, a well known Argentinian actor), his sport male teacher, in an out of school swimming club, Marco Berger explores the teenager's sexuality, expressed in his crush for the sport coach, and the developing and complex feelings that Sebastián has for the boy, which goes from questioning and brow raising at the beginning, as he is followed everywhere by his eyes, to anger, as he realized that the injury to the eye that Martín claimed to have suffered while being in the pool, which led to a trip to the eye clinic, was no more than a ruse to get closer to him, to test his reactions, as was the subsequent inability to get back to his home, after a series of excuses. As a result of them, Sebastián lodges the boy for one night in his apartment, as he is not prepared to leave him in the street, although he feels uneasy about it because of the impact it could have in his career, in his relationship with his girlfriend Mariana (Antonella Costa, who has been defined by Marco Berger as the “actress of her generation”), and his reputation in the neighbourhood where he lives.

During his stay at Sebastián home, and unknown to him as he sleeps, Martín sensually caresses him, expressing his own feelings by this act. On his part, Sebastián is not entirely sure how to handle the young boy, and the reactions he is getting from his neighbours and the gardener, as they both leave the apartment block in the following morning. Once in the school, in the gossips of the rest room, he learns that the police had been making enquiries, as a student did not go home the previous night, his parents being in utter despair. Sebastián, realizing that the student is Martín, feels extremely uneasy, and keeps his head down. However, when he later on finds the boy lurking around his car, confronts him and expresses his anger, accusing him of lying, and culminating in a slap to his face. We are here into Mamet's territory, as the power relationship between student and teacher switches in favour of the former.

Meanwhile, Martín, with his obsession for Sebastián, does not realize that he is, in turn, the object of affection from Analía (Rocío Pavón), a girl of his own age with whom he has been a friend since both of them were little kids. She, not being aware of the course that the development of Martín's sexuality is taking, insists in hanging on with him. We are now in the territory of complex, ambiguous and forming feelings and identities that the youngsters are developing. Marco Berger certainly has that magic touch of celebrating the complexity, and beauty, of these feelings in just a few frames.

The relationship between Sebastián and Mariana progressively gets more distant and fragile as he struggles with his own feelings towards Martín as time flows, culminating in the final scene where he finally declares his love for the boy, who, at that point, is no longer able to reciprocate.

During the shooting of Absent, Carlos Echevarría (Sebastián) found difficult to film scenes which were apparently easy, while in others, which were supposed to be more difficult, such as the final one, when he meets Martín for the last time, in his imagination, after he breaks into the swimming pool, he just sailed through. Javier De Pietro, a young performer just out of Acting School, is very convincing as Martín, while Antonella Costa (Mariana) adds that bit of glamour.

Absent is certainly a more mature, and ambiguous, work than Berger's debut feature, Plan B, a comedy of sexual manners, a ménage à trois, where the path that the two male protagonists, Bruno (Manuel Vignau) and Pablo (Lucas Ferraro) is marked from the very beginning, the question is not being when the pair are going to get together rather than if, ditching on the way the third participant of this arrangement, Laura (Mercedes Quinteros). In Absent, Berger's treatment of the subject, of the development of male sexuality, is more subtle, almost every scene ending in a cliff edge, myself not being entirely sure what was going to happen next. Plan B is much more straightforward: Laura has ditched Bruno, as she thinks he is, frankly, an idiot, in favour of a photographer, Pablo, whom she considers to be more serious. Yet, she still occasionally sleeps with Bruno.

Oh the life of this young Buenos Aires people!

Bruno, then, with the advice of his friend Victor (Damián Canduci), decides to put plan B into action, which consists in befriending Pablo, in making him fall for him, abandoning Laura, so that he can reclaim her. However, plan B fails, as most of them do anyway, as he also falls for Pablo, after being taunted in parties by a free spirit girl, Ana (Ana Lucía Antony). The result of all this is that Laura get ditched by both men, who end up as a couple. Mercedes Quinteros' performance as Laura conveys the idea of a strong and free spirited woman who can take these actions in the chin, as Mercedes says in an excellent interview contained in the extra features of the DVD, she is not the one who we can pity her with the words. Oh poor girl she is not.

The score for Absent is just brilliant, almost being a complete work by itself, embodying the complex emotions that are visually expressed in the film, being created by the young Argentinian composer Pedro Irusta, whom Berger met at University. Irusta also composed the score for one of Berger's shorts, Reloj (Clock).

Both films are well paced, particularly in Plan B Berger uses shots of buildings, or fragments of buildings, to let the comedy “breathe” between key scenes, and also conveying the background of the urban life of a metropolis such as Buenos Aires, which is essential for these stories of urbanites, and their life styles.

Both Absent and Plan B explore the theme of the development of male sexuality towards other males, they are not gay films as such, but works that convey how heterosexual men can become entangled in homosexual relationships. Because of this approach, Berger has refused to submit them to Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals, as he does not think them as Gay films. They are not, certainly, militant works.

Marco Berger represents, perhaps, a new generation of Argentinian film makers, as he writes, directs and edits his own films, the three fundamental pillars of auteur cinema. Overall, he keeps to the scripts he had written, with very few changes made during shooting, mostly minor, if at all. He is currently in the preproduction stages for his third film, the first one where he will have a female protagonist. I would not say that he is actually enjoying to be mixed up with the Argentinian arts bureaucracy, a novel experience for him, but, certainly, coping with it.

With thanks to Marco Berger for agreeing to be interviewed.

Made In Argentina: Absent and Plan B DVD set, is on sale in Britain courtesy of Network Releasing.

ABSENT (AUSENTE)

The second feature by Argentinean director Marco Berger, is a psychological thriller. A provocative twist on a familiar scenario – it explores the complex relationship between a teenage boy’s obsession for his sports teacher - played out in an atmosphere of escalating sexual tension and menace. When Martin hurts his eye during a swimming class, his instructor, Sebastian, takes him to hospital. On leaving, Sebastian offers Martin a lift home but, as Martin had arranged to spend the night at a friend’s house, there will be no-one expecting him. He insists it would be better to spend the night with Sebastian. As Sebastian takes charge of the student, he is dangerouslyunaware of the boy’s true intentions: that Martin has engineered the entire situation in order to stay at his instructor’s home…

CAST: Carlos Echevarria and Javier de Pietro

Special Features on MADE IN ARGENTINA – TWO FILMS BY MARCO BERGER:

• The making of PLAN B
• English interviews
• Una Ultima Voluntad (A Last Wish) – short film
• Deleted Scenes
• Image Gallery

This film is included in MADE IN ARGENTINA - TWO FILMS BY MARCO BERGER and available separately.

PLAN B

Bruno is dumped by his girlfriend. Behind a calm, indifferent exterior, his mind plots a cold, sweet vengeance. She, a modern girl, continues to see him once in a while, but has another boyfriend – Pablo. Bruno becomes Pablo’s friend, with the idea of eroding the couple, perhaps introducing him to another woman. But, along the way, the possibility of a Plan B arises. It may be a more effective one – and it is also one which will put his own sexuality into question, taking him into the secret, unexplored places of his own heart.

Set in Buenos Aires, this witty, beguiling feature masquerades as a familiar romantic comedy, only toconfound expectations by testing the boundaries of gender and social demarcations. PLAN B is Marco Berger’s first feature film.

CAST: Manuel Vignau and Lucas Ferraro

RESISTANCE reviewed

Amit Gupta's Resistance, based on Owen Sheer's novel, looks at the ambiguities resulting from the very thin line separating our impulse to survive and collaborating with the enemy to do so, as a German platoon takes over a desolate and distant Welsh valley, during World War 2, after the failure of the Allied invasion of Normandy in D Day.

The Germans find all the men had left the valley, so they are on edge, yet they slowly start to uneasily befriend the women, who were left behind. In particular, Albrecht (Tom Wlaschiha), the captain, falls for Sarah (Andrea Riseborough), a relationship established between them all the time on a knife edge. Sarah feels incapable to resist the overtures of Albrecht, particularly due to the help given to the women by the Germans to run the farms in the middle of a severe winter, but her devotion to her husband, who is supposed to be in the mountains with the other men from the valley fighting the Germans, and her country, led her to play a double game: on one hand, befriending the captain, on the other, planning her escape.

Soon news about the captured, tortured, and shot men from the valley start to filter to the valley, while the captain tries to keep his men alive until the nearing end of the war.

While I thought that the uneasy relationship between the invading Germans and the women is handled quite sensitively, I found the whole premise of the film unbelievable. A failure of D Day would had not led to a German invasion of Britain, it would had only delayed the end of the war for some time. Allied forces were already advancing from Italy, while the Russian were doing the same from the East, the German army was already weak in terms of men and resources, Germany, the country, was already economically ruined.

Cinematically, I found the constant use of flashbacks to the Russian campaign to be distracting, at best, and completely useless at worst, as a background of contained violence had already been established by some much more effective shots of random executions in the valley.

Resistance DVD and Blu Ray is already on sale in Britain, courtesy of Metrodome Distribution.

Starring Andrea Riseborough and Michael Sheen

D-Day has failed and Britain is under Nazi occupation. Following on from its acclaimed cinema release, RESISTANCE comes to DVD and Blu Ray in March.

Sarah Lewis (Andrea Riseborough), a 26-year-old farmer’s wife, awakes one morning to find that her husband has disappeared along with all the men in the valley. Assuming they have joined the Resistance, the women of this tiny community pull together, taking on the running of the farms, and wait, desperate for news. A German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of its mission a mystery. When a severe winter forces the two groups into co-operation, Sarah begins an acquaintance with the patrol’s commanding officer, Albrecht (Tom Wlaschiha). Cut off from the surrounding war, the lines between collaboration, duty, occupation and survival become blurred.

Based on the critically acclaimed novel by Owen Sheers, RESISTANCE features sensational lead performances from British rising star Andrea Riseborough (Brighton Rock, Made In Dagenham) and Tom Wlaschiha (Enemy At The Gates, Valkyrie, Brideshead Revisited), and co-stars Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon, The Damned United).

Trailer © Metrodome Distribution

Leon The Pig Farmer reviewed

I suspect that to fully enjoy, and appreciate, this comedy, an understanding and knowledge of London Jewish culture and traditions would help, something I am lacking. However, this does not mean that I was incapable of laughing, or, more often, quietly smiling, at the irreverent humour.

However, I did think that much of the humour, and the central story line of the film, is constructed onto a series of stereotypes, those of the Jewish family, the Yorkshire pig farmer, the supposedly liberal artist (Maryam D'Abo), the adventuress, the arriving Jewish boy in a flashy car, the male attitudes towards fatherhood, the artificial insemination establishment, just to name a few. As a result of this structure, I thought that the inherent humanity of the central character, Leon Geller, is somewhat washed away.

The story is quite simple: Leon (Mark Frankel), a sensitive Jewish boy, after resigning as a state agent for ethical reasons, finds that his real biological father is a Yorkshire based pig farmer (Brian Glover), due to a human error in the artificial insemination clinic, to the horror of his “adoptive” father (David de Keyser), an Orthodox Jew. This hiatus between the cultural traditions of the two families, and the transgressive nature of their relationship, is the engine driving the laughs.

Leon The Pig Farmer The Kosher Edition DVD is directed by Vadim Jean and Gary Sinyor, and is already in sale in Britain, courtesy of Network Releasing.

Mark Frankel, Janet Suzman, Brian Glover, Maryam d’Abo, Connie Booth and Gina Bellman star in Jean Vadim and Gary Sinyor’s hilarious, acclaimed debut feature film Leon the Pig Farmer. Winner of 5 awards, including the Venice FIPRESCI Prize and Edinburgh International Film Festival’s Best First Feature in 1992, this 2-disc set titled LEON THE PIG FARMER – THE KOSHER EDITION contains high definition and standard versions of the film and is available to own on 26th March 2012, RRP £19.99. 

Leon Geller is a sensitive, angst-ridden Jewish boy at breaking point. Disgusted by his job at a London estate agent, he quits to work in the catering business. Equally frustrated by a thwarted romance, he then throws himself into an intense affair with Madeleine, a non-Jewish, slightly unhinged artist whom he befriends after a near-fatal collision. These developments do not please Leon’s family…

Then, he learns an unimaginable truth: he owes his existence to artificial insemination, and thanks to a mix-up at the sperm bank the donor was Brian Chadwick, a pig farmerfrom Lower Dinthorpe, Yorkshire. In deepening turmoil, Leon decides he must now get to know his biological father – making yet more extraordinary discoveries in theprocess!

SPECIAL FEATURES: 

 “The Unkindest Cut of All” short film  

 Audio commentary 

 Theatrical trailer.     

Jackie Chan 1911 Revolution reviewed

A nationalistic biopic of Sun Yat-sen (Winston Chao), who has been said to be the founder of modern China, after overthrowing the corrupt Qing dynasty and setting up the republic in 1911, and his top military commander, Huang Xing (Jackie Chan).

1911 Revolution is a conventional propagandistic film reminiscent of the wide eyed Soviet era films exalting the “achievements” and the “virtues” of the Revolution, or the North Korean propaganda machine, where everybody speak, or rather, declaims like in the history books, wide eyed, standing stiff, looking at a bright future, usually symbolized by the rising sun over the horizon, or a similar visual cliché, the camera filming them from below.  A bad history lesson, without the usual Jackie Chan humour or his antics, the last scene clearly indicating the attempt by the Chinese Communist Party to cast itself as the true heirs of Sun Yat-sen's legacy.

Some of its themes were brilliantly treated by Bertolucci's The Last Emperor of China. None of the subtlety and depth of analysis and characterization of Bertolucci's film is found in Jackie Chan 1911 Revolution, being no more than a Stalinist cult to a a significant historical figure portrayed as a one dimensional cartoon-like hero.

Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution deserve a serious cinematic treatment, this one is not.

Jackie Chan 1911 Revolution is on sale now in Britain in DVD and Blu-ray formats, distributed by Cine-Asia.

Action legend, Jackie Chan, commands the screen as Huang Xing: the fearless resistance leader and military genius, who opposed a 20,000-strong Imperial Army during the 1908 Guang Xi Uprising with only 200 men! Now, as military commander to legendary revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen, he will lead an impoverished and vastly outnumbered rebel army against the Emperor’s elite Royal Forces in a battle that will change the course of history!