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Domangja: Plan B (2010)
Pretty decent K-drama
It is really like that, you dig Korean action drama or you don't. If you do, you may actually enjoy it quite a bit. There is not much logic here, true, and reasons for anything are, at the very best, faintly perceptible. But is not really the point. You have plenty of crazy action, sometimes funny, sometimes silly, occasionally a bit sad. What else do you need? Rain (Ninja Assassin) is really good. He steps into the character with ease, playing a rouge, funny, silly and sometimes surprisingly serious PI, in the very best tradition of the original Lupin III manga series. Lee Na-young (Ruler of Your Own World) managed to make her character believable and, trust me, it was not an easy task - see the part about reasons above... :) The supportive crew is really good - Henney being sort of perfect for his character (a dubious honor, but true), and Lee Jung-jin and Yoon Jin-seo complementing each other perfectly. Special prize should go to Seong Dong-il, playing Namkamura Hwang, he is The Nakamura. ;)
Martial arts choreography is impressive, although a little bit too smooth for my taste. Korean directors seem to prefer a dance-like quality in the fighting scenes and it shows - as usual. Yet I cannot honestly say it is some kind of a setback, just part of K-drama experience. ;) I got to really appreciate Lee Na-young performance in fighting scenes. She is not an action heroin and it's well worth seeing the special episode ("21") just to see how much work did she put to make it look like it does.
Good camera work, in some scenes bordering on excellent, music fits the rhythm of action - sometimes vice versa. Seriously, what more could you want? And yes, to be honest, I would say a solid 6 out of 10, but the fact is, I just feel some guys tend to give bad score simply because they don't like K-action drama. So - bear with me and enjoy! :)
Män som hatar kvinnor (2009)
Porn for critics (some minor spoilers)
There is certain view regarding European cinema as sophisticated and intellectual. So on one side is the high art - i.e. European cinema, on the other - commercial hot-dog avatars shoot in the US of A. It is sometimes true, sometimes not, but as a consequence both the audience and critics seems to look at European production already expecting some artistry to be there. Sometimes there is some art there indeed but more then often there isn't much, and "The girl with a dragon tattoo" here is unfortunately an example of the more common case. The problem is, once the critic gets into this "state of expectation" it's sort of easy to fool her or him with a lousy and pseudo-artsy movie.
One thing is good in this otherwise very mediocre production - the pictures by Jens Fisher and Eric Kress. The way they shoot light on snow is remarkable and to them I am truly grateful since otherwise I would have totally lost 150 minutes of my life. The storyline is 100% cliché, how many movies about psychotic killers hiding between rich have we seen? How many about revenge for personal issues? How many mixing these two threads? How very original. About the ultra right twist - there are much better Swedish books - yes, mystery too - dealing with this subject: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö wrote some of the really good ones already in the 60's.
Neither is "The girl" a good mystery. If you force yourself into paying attention , if you somehow managed to focus, the answer to the puzzle is blatantly revealed in about 1/3 of the movie, then you just get bored and irritated looking at both heroes playing really dumb. One of the reason why you wouldn't want to pay attention is rather poor acting, especially from Noomi Rapace, not that Michael Nyqvist is much butter - just watch him jogging, probably his best acting in the whole movie, The other reason - the movie is unnecessary looooong, mostly due to some really gross scenes that carry zero importance for the main plot but effectively change the genre from mystery into something close to exploitation, gore-shock films. "The girl" pretends to be sort of realistic flick, the same way Mou Tun Fei's "Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre" does, and just the same there are people that have a taste for it (or to be precise, a lack of taste whatsoever). Shall the rape and torture scenes be cut off, the audience would get a decent, forgettable mystery, a bit below the original Swedish Wallander series; the way it is we got some pretentious, boring BS, with scenes that can excite only some poor, tormented souls. Oh, and let us not forget about the glorious epilogue, honestly, how low it can go?
One last thing - I use the term "porn" the way Eco ones defined - if for the most of the movie the viewer is just waiting for sth to happen while watching boring stuff, this is definitely a porn movie.
We Own the Night (2007)
Good start, silly finish
Well, the movie goes on pretty well until about 2/3 of its length (and its a long movie!). Pictures are good, music is great, acting is reasonable. And actually story is quite entertaining, with a bit of dark flicks into it. And then... Now spoiler: suddenly a club manager under witness protection becomes appointed a police officer, apparently he doesn't need protection anymore, what's more he starts ordering around senior officers... C'mon guys, that is plain silly and because of that neither Wahlberg nor Phoenix simply cannot do any better then moving around and being totally unconvincing. Luckily for Robert Duvall his character dies just before the movie starts going down the drain.
I had a problem scoring the movie, the first part is a good 7+, the last part is well below 5. Altogether is a bit like having a doughnut (c'mon, its a cop's story after all :) when sbd apparently replaced part of the jam with ketchup. Starts great, then sth feels wrong, then you get sick.
Standing ovation in Cannes??? Gosh, audience must have been really bored.
Tau ming chong (2007)
Too many writers?
Could be too much competition among screenplay writers, I mean there are 8 writers mentioned on IMDb for this movie - actually we can see more writers then actors here. Could be, they just didn't cooperate that well... The general idea is good, makes lots of sense, three people swear loyalty to each other, but one is ready to sacrifice the pledge and to kill anybodybody who stands in his way, to fulfill his dream. Still the script doesn't hold, sth is wrong, audience get confused: what's going on with this girl? what was it with court machinations? I had this feeling, maybe each writer had his own agenda and tried to convert the audience during the short sequence he was assigned to... Another huge problem is the cast. There is sth really misplaced there. Jet Lee should not be the main hero here, he can be truly great as a particular kind of hero(a rather simple and silent one) but there is no way he could adjust himself to play a very complicated character. Andy Lau on the other hand is very good - only, he doesn't have that much to do. Still he does his best and somehow holds the story together even though the character he plays is a bit, well, underwritten (script again, sigh...) And of course big thumbs up (is not yet copyrighted, is it ;) for Kaneshiro Takeshi, with the same complain: I so much wish he had more to play. Jinglei Xu doesn't have much to do
- so she doesn't. Music, SIGH... one part (I think around the battle of Suzhou?) it was actually sth like the Pirates of Caribbean; apart from that rather funny piece you mostly get sort of generic holywoodish "War and Love" tunes (fortunately interrupted with a kind of Beijing Opera). Still is not a totally bad movie, cinematography is excellent, there is a bit of decent acting (two bits ;) very good fighting choreography and impressive costumes.
Mou gaan dou (2002)
Not really overrated but... (minor spoiler inside)
I started this comment with title "slightly overrated" and then I realized my vote is almost exactly the average for this movie. It is a good movie no question about it, but to think its "great", "the greatest", etc. you got to be a real fan of Andy Lau. He delivers an "OK" performance although its actually Tony Leung trying to keep the movie together. The best thing about the movie is the ending - well balanced, well paced and - for a few minutes - quite convincing. Nonetheless, few problems remain. First, the story is not that original, its a new variation on the classic "mole" plot already present in many other HK movies. You can't stop comparing and, well, some of them were better IMO. Second - and more serious, it demonstrates a popular contempt toward viewers IQ (well, OK, that contempt may be sometimes justified but still...). I don't mean standard "fairytellness" that has certain charm. There are simply several moments and threads that are just ridiculous, with the very main one (minor SPOILER ->) does HK police really has only about 10 officers, so when they know there is a mole within this small group, they still have to assign to one of the suspects the task of finding the mole's identity? People, that is soooo crazy... There are quite a few other flaws - like both moles could have been easily discovered few times etc. Still the movie is very enjoyable, real fun to watch, acting is decent, music is very good, cinematography good - sometimes excellent, so altogether a solid B grade - 8 points.
Wake of Death (2004)
Poor imitation of French film noir
I rather like Van Damme and some of his movies were quite entertaining but this one is definitely not. The script is poor, and the story is simply ridiculous - c'mon people, how can you spoil a revenge story? Van Damme is not a very bad actor, he can act (within reasonable limits) if he has to but he surely needs a different director for that. There are rather obvious references to classic Marseilles based film noir ("do ya know what we do with a piece of @#%&# like you in Marseilles?") but is sort of frustrating to watch how such a good tradition can inspire something so poor. Someone mentioned Jean-Pierre Melville in this context but is rather sort of secondary tribute to "Borsalino & Co" by Jacques Deray.Well... obviously Van Damme is not Delon - and he shouldn't try to be... The movie contains one of the cruelest torture scenes I have seen (and yes, I have seen Sin City) if you are into this stuff you may enjoy it otherwise you may agree that is just unnecessary and doesn't make much sense. Ringo Lam was supposed to direct this movie and too bad he didn't - the story may fit pure HK action and it would probably be more fun. On the positive side - pictures are actually pretty good, thanks to combined efforts of Emmanuel Kadosh, Michael Swan and Ernie Seegers and that was the main reason i gave it 3 stars.