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24 Mar
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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The King and the Clown bears a strong resemblance to the Hong Kong movie Farewell, My Concubine. Both feature a pair of performers, one of whom always plays female roles. Each of the more feminine men is gay and in love with his partner. In both films the performers are threatened with destruction by powers far beyond their control. But in Concubine the menace is the Communist government’s Cultural Revolution; in Clown it is a traumatized, maddened king.
Gong-gil and Jang-saeng are 15th-century street performers. Gong-gil’s feminine beauty dictates that he plays women’s roles, and the troupe’s manager often pimps him out to rich audience members. This infuriates Jang-saeng. Eventually things come to a head; in the resulting confrontation the manager is killed. Gong-gil and Jang-saeng flee to Seoul, where they join up with other street performers and create a new troupe. The ruler of Korea is the cruel, tyrannical Yeonsan, and when the troupe puts on a play mocking him and his favorite consort, Nok-su, they find themselves swiftly arrested. Jang-saeng manages to get the troupe an audience with the king; if their skit makes him laugh, he reasons, then they’ll be allowed to live. It works, and the performers become King Yeonsan’s personal entertainers, put up in the palace itself.
Yeonsan is especially interested in Gong-gil, and often calls him to his chambers, to the dismay of Jang-saeng. But Yeonsan seems almost as enamored the troupe’s art as he is in Gong-gil; instead of buggering him silly, as one (well, I, because my mind is filthy) might expect, instead he asks Gong-gil to teach him the art of puppetry. He inserts himself into the troupe’s plays, to the surprise of the performers who have to improvise around him. Finally he writes a play for the troupe to perform before an audience that includes the king’s grandmother and some of his father’s former concubines. The play details the story of his mother, who was forced to kill herself due to the machinations of the other jealous concubines and his grandmother. The play causes quite the uproar, and ends in bloodshed.
Things go rapidly downhill from there.
Nok-su decides she doesn’t like her man being more interested in a dude than her. She schemes to get Gong-gil tossed out- or better yet, executed- but her plans go awry when Jang-seang comes once again to his defense. Meanwhile, both the ministers and the citizens are getting tired of their crazy king, which means the joint is ripe for a revolution…in which Gong-gil and Jang-seang will inevitably be caught up.
The King and the Clown, despite being made a budget Hollywood would consider laughable, is a visually lavish historical film, rich with color. The costumes and sets are minutely detailed. The clothes and jewelry alone are enough to keep any girl’s attention, but it’s the acting and the subtle love triangle that really draw the viewer in. King Yeonsan (Jeong Jin-yeong) veers convincingly between brutal tyranny and an almost childlike vulnerability; his eagerness to be accepted into the troupe is almost pathetic. He’s a character that’s hard to like, but easy to pity despite his cruel acts. Jang-saeng (Kam Woo-seong of R-Point, reviewed previously by me) is easily angered, but his affection (love?) for Gong-gil is tender, and his brashness makes you like him whether you want to or not. Gong-gil (Lee Jun-gi) is hauntingly beautiful, a stark, quiet contrast to loud, personable Jang-saeng. But though the men around him variously want to own or protect him, Gong-gil has his own steel backbone, prominently displayed at the end of the film.
The King and the Clown is a movie that should make you cry, much as Farewell, My Concubine does. Yet the ending, while appropriate for the movie, doesn’t bring the tears. I think this is due to the relatively short amount of screen time given to the relationship between Gong-gil and Jang-saeng. Nothing is overt, and it doesn’t need to be. But the tense silences and angry words would be more deeply felt if we saw more scenes of them alone together. Once Yeonsan shows up, the film gives only short nods to the increasing frustration felt by Jang-saeng; Gong-gil’s feelings for him are shown only in tears and pleading. What the second part of the film needs is more of the quiet moments we see between the two in the beginning.
But despite these minor flaws, The King and the Clown will suck you right in and not let you go for two whole hours. It’s definitely a must-see for anyone with an interest in Korean cinema or history.
The Verdict: Not as good as it could be, but certainly worth your two hours.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Reviews | Tag: review, south korea, the king and the clown |
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1 May
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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POP! Goes the Dead Kid
I’ve seen nearly all the famous Asian horror films. And by ‘famous’, I mean the ones that Hollywood tried to remake: The Eye, The Ring, A Tale of Two Sisters, Pulse, Dark Water. There was just one I’d missed: Ju-on, aka The Grudge. That’s been rectified.
The movie begins, as all good movies do, with a murder. More than one murder, actually. We don’t know who or why, but you do know where- so it’s hardly a surprise when Social Welfare Office volunteer Rika shows up on the doorway of the House’o’Murders to check up on the joint’s inhabitant, a really old lady who has let the place go to hell. Like all the idiots in Pulse, when Rika finds a door that’s sealed shut with packing tape, she just has to open it. She finds a cat. Oh, and a little dead ghost kid.
The film then jumps to some unspecified time (but the same bat-location), when the old lady’s son and daughter-in-law are complaining to each other about the mess and ruckus the old lady’s making at night. The daughter-in-law, Kazumi, finally seems to get a clue when little-dead-ghost-kid handprints show up on the doors, and a random cat appears in the house. The son (who has a truly wretched haircut) comes home from work to find his wife all comatose with terror, just before she becomes an ex-parrot. Then Kazumi’s sister comes over for dinner, barges in without knocking, and is promptly treated to the son acting fucking crazy. He kicks her out.
Then we get the sister’s POV- she’s called Hitomi, and we also get our first clue toward placing these sections in some kind of chronological order. She sees some creepy shit in the big, weirdly depopulated building where she works. In her predictably deserted apartment complex, there’s elevator scariness, and her freak-ass brother shows up. So she logically hides under the covers, because if she can’t see him, he can’t see her, right? Then there’s creepy TV stuff and creepy dead people under the covers stuff.
And then it jumps to a Social Welfare Office employee, who goes to the Death House. He finds Rika, comatose with terror, and calls the cops. The old lady has kicked the bucket with the help of a blackish misty spirit ghost thing. The cops show up and find Kazumi and her husband, who have become living-challenged. Rika finds her voice and tells the cops all about the little dead ghost kid, only to learn that some time back this dude went nuts and got all stabby with his wife and their son disappeared, and since then all the people who lived in that house have turned into worm food Welfare Office guy buys the farm and the cops get the old detective who worked on the original murder case to help them. Toyama has some serious PTSD from that case, and it just gets worse.
Meanwhile, dead people keep dogging Hitomi. Toyama wisely decides to burn the haunted place to the ground, but the other cops stop him and are treated to some creepy long-haired dead chick action. Toyama joins the Choir Invisible, and then we’re off again, to the point of view of Izumi, Toyama’s daughter, four years after Toyama dies. She brilliantly goes into the house with some friends on a dare, and all her friends immediately go the way of all flesh like it’s some mass schoolgirl extinction event. Izumi loses her shit. Izumi then takes a dirt nap.
Finally the movie jumps to Kayoko, the perforated housewife, except even though the title says “Kayako” it actually just goes back to Rika, who’s awakened at night by a chorus of cats wailing (like I am, because my neighbors lets her damned felines roam around outside and use my yard for a litter box) and is generally all touchy and shit. Her friend (also a Welfare Office person) calls to say she is at some house where a kid hasn’t shown up to school, and the kid is there, but the parents aren’t, and three guesses as to which house it is and which kid it is and the first two don’t count. Though why the hell Rika’s friend doesn’t know where the Cursed House is and all about it is a mystery to me. Seems like information you might want to tell your friends/co-workers, you know? So Rika books it back to the Evil Abode to save her stupid friend, only to meet her maker when the ghost of the stabby husband pops in to murder her. The end.
In Ju-on, the curse given by the dead housewife is far-ranging and pretty damn random. Anyone associated with the dead ghost people or the house or people who know other people who were in the house, will die. You’ll probably die if you walk past the house or see it in a real estate ad, too. Apparently we’re just meant to assume that every single character in this movie will eventually die, and from there everyone in Japan, because this curse is like the bird flu. Because of this pervasiveness, there’s no resolution: Rika’s dead, along with about a hundred other people, and none of it matters a bit because the stabbed housewife is so incredibly pissed off that she will never be sated, at least not for several more movies.
Ju-on isn’t scary in the least, mainly because every horror convention it whips out has been done to death before and since. Dead kids in kabuki makeup. Dead women creeping down the stairs on all fours. Dead people in the mirror behind someone. Dead women with their faces hidden by hair, lurking in a bathroom, or under the covers, or under the stairs, or in the attic. TV reception going bonkers, creepy static voices on the phone. The horror bits are really just bloody housewife/little dead ghost kid’s oil-painted faces repetitively popping up into the frame like some kind of weirdo jack-in-the-box. Yawn.
The POV-hopping is interesting enough, but overdone- we never really feel like we get to know any of these characters enough to actually care what happens to them (I mean, they’re all going to die obviously, but I really didn’t give a shit). The way the movie plays with chronology is cool; the curse apparently even gets to time-travel, for poor old freaked-out Toyama gets to see his daughter Izumi in the house, in some kind of future vision, right before he croaks.
Now, I am a big baby. One time I watched a (totally, obviously fake) alien abduction video while my husband wasn’t home, and I didn’t turn off the lights for two days. I sit up nights because if I fall asleep, the Mothman might get me. If I ever actually saw a ghost, I’d run screaming like a little girl. So if I say Ju-on doesn’t do it for me, it honestly doesn’t do it for me, and It definitely won’t do it if you are more skeptical than me- and I believe in damn near everything.
The Verdict: I am holding a grudge against all the people who claim this is the “scariest horror film ever OMG”.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Reviews | Tag: horror, japan, ju-on, movies, review, takashi shimizu |
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22 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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Nightmare Inspector wants to be The Twilight Zone so badly that it hurts. It also wants to be Pet Shop of Horrors. It’s a noble effort and it’s an entertaining little series, but it’s simply not as good as what it aspires to be.
The setting is the Silver Star Teahouse in pre-WWII Japan, in the 1920’s (the setting might be confusing to some, but one story mentions the Great Kanto Earthquake as happening a few years previous, so there you are). The proprietors of the teahouse are a young woman named Mizuki, and the baku (a spirit that devours dreams) named Hiruko. Baku are traditionally depicted as looking like tapirs, but this one looks like a regular guy- well, as regular as any manga character looks. After all, if he was a tapir he couldn’t be dressed in a ridiculous ensemble dripping with buckles, right? The Teahouse for some reason serves mainly coffee, but no one comes there for hot beverages anyway, so whatever. They come to see Hiruko, to ask him if he can help them get rid of their nightmares. He usually does, and the only payment he asks is to eat the nightmare afterwards, so it’s a pretty sweet deal.
Each chapter is a story revolving around a new customer, and with few exceptions the stories are only a chapter long. In volume 1, the clients include a servant who dreams of his mistress’ death, a man so obsessed with a popular actress that he can’t bear seeing her character die in her latest movie, a girl who’s sick of her daily routine, and a man who has fallen in love with a mysterious woman who calls him on the phone, and desperately wants to see her face, if only in his dream. This last story ends volume 1, and is a cliffhanger leading into the next volume. In volume 2 the new customers are a woman who wants to live in the last painting her dead lover made, and a blind girl whose keen hearing is picking up a repetitive sound that is driving her crazy.
The stories are mostly self-contained, but not entirely; there are threads that run through the manga that tie things together. Volume 2 sees the addition of Hifumi, a weird rich kid who visits to see where a baku lives, but ends up taking a room above the teahouse when he falls in love with Mizuki. Hiruko’s job also takes him pretty frequently to The Delirium, some kind of club where people’s deepest desires can be brought to life. As the series progresses you learn who/what Hiruko really is: a baku who took over the body of Mizuki’s emo brother when the brother decided he didn’t feel like living anymore.
There are some neat things about Nightmare Inspector; more than once the human clients turn out to be animals or even objects in disguise (the blind girl, for instance, is a cat). The historical details are scant but interesting, and the twists inherent in every story sometimes work and sometimes don’t, but they’re rarely predictable. After a while though things start to feel terribly repetitive; customer comes in, Hiruko sends them to sleep, solves their problem, all is well, and THEN the twist pops in.
The characters, unfortunately, are right out of the Catalog of Manga Archetypes. Mizuki is sweet and polite and secretly sad about her brother. Hiruko is reticent and rude and secretly angsting about something not mentioned in these volumes. Hifumi is annoying as hell, dopey and silly. The guy who runs The Delirium is all secretive and flirty, very reminiscent of Pet Shop of Horrors’ Count D.
The art is pretty standard; the clothes are the most interesting thing about the designs. Most everyone wears historically accurate garb, except the aforementioned Hiruko, who looks like he fell into an s&m shop and then accessorized at Claire’s. Backgrounds are decent; not crowded but not too spare either.
So how does Nightmare Inspector stack up against its influences? The Twilight Zone was an innovative series that made viewers think; many of the episodes have so permeated the culture that even people who have never seen them can recognize references. Pet Shop of Horrors was a series of striking Japanese morality tales, often haunting and compelling.
Nightmare Inspector is entertaining, but ten minutes after finishing a story, I couldn’t remember what had happened in the chapter (which makes writing a review a pain in the ass, let me tell you). Do I feel like continuing the adventures of Hiruko and crew, and ferreting out their various secrets.
The Verdict: Not really.
| Category: Print Reviews, Reviews | Tag: japan, manga, nightmare inspector, review |
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21 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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The Great Happiness Space takes its title from a bit of Engrish advertising for an Osaka host club, Stylish Club Rakkyo. Being a host at a Japanese host club seems like the easiest job ever; all you have to do is sweet talk some lonely chicks, get them to buy a ton of expensive champagne and make some cash. Simple, yes? Harmless, flirty fun.
No. The dynamics of a host club are complicated, emotional, and sometimes heartbreaking.
There’s no narration here; the film relies on interviews with Rakkyo’s hosts and their clients and footage of the club in action to tell its story. The first set of clips feature various hosts praising Rakkyo’s number one host, Issei, a painfully stylish young man in a sharp suit. Interviews with Issei’s regular clients introduce the first bit of discomfort; without exception they all declare themselves to be in love with him; one woman even says she broke off her engagement after falling for Issei. They then move on to the details of hosting, and what makes a good host; the concensus being that the most important skill is to lie, and lie well. Footage from the club shows their skills in action. The hosts are variously sensitive, kind, affectionate, big-brotherly, sweet, raucous, lecherous…whatever their particular client wants. Their chameleonic abilities are actually unnerving to watch, but not half as unnerving as the string of women declaring their love for a man who’s actively playing them.
Being a host is a complex job; in one scene the hosts are shown picking up business on the street, halfway between animals hunting and prostitute looking for johns. Issei points out that while he’s cleaning up financially, he’s screwed himself in other ways; working at night, in a host club, makes it impossible to meet women elsewhere, so he has no serious relationship. And his excessive drinking at the club is setting him up for health problems.
Several of the women say they love the host club because there, they are treated like princesses. It doesn’t seem like an unusual wish; most women want to be a princess at some point. But the kick in the teeth comes when they are asked about their jobs. Almost all the women interviewed are Soap Land employees (prostitutes), dancers, or even hostesses themselves. And the worst part is that, deep down, most of them seem to know it’s a sham. But they need it badly enough to pretend. And at the same time, they go to other host clubs and pay other hosts for their attention.
Issei is the voice of experience in this documentary. While some of the other hosts are flippant or even disgusted by their clients, Issei seems to have real sympathy for them. He’s very perceptive about clientele and matter-of-fact about the requirements of his job; some footage shows him giving tips to new hosts. It’s easy to see why the women fall for him.
Over the course of the documentary, Rakkyo hires some new hosts, and watching the new hosts learn their duties (and their first awkward attempts at luring clients) are funny and even touching. But none of it makes up for the depressing interviews with Issei, who details how to stretch out a relationship with a client to keep her around (and paying) as long as possible; once they snap out of it and realize he’ll never seriously date them, they –and their money- are gone to some other club, some other host.
It’s all depressing, every bit of it. The deception, the self-deception, the endless vicious cycle of nights where some facsimile of love can be bought. It’s emotional prostitution where everyone ends up more damaged than when they started. And where will the hosts go when they lose their looks, what happens to the clients when they age and have no real relationship? The documentary shies away from even contemplating these possibilities.
Host clubs are full of men who no longer know who they are, beneath their suave exteriors, and women whose dream of love destroys their chances at finding the real thing.
The Verdict: Pretty boys, cute girls, but they’re all too sad to enjoy the view. A penetrating documentary that will change everything you think about host and hostess clubs.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Reviews | Tag: documentary, host clubs, japan, review, the great happiness space |
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20 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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I am of the opinion that lesbians don’t get nearly enough screen time. Gay guys are pretty much completely mainstream at this point (remember that show with the gay dudes? Yeah, me too); they show up on CSI, and there was that one series that was all about this gay guy and his female roommate). But lesbians are still stuffed into the network TV closet.
Not so in anime and manga. There’s an entire genre called yuri, which focuses on lesbian relationships…and these titles are all kind of stuffed into the closet, at least in the U.S. The ones that do escape are unbelievably mild, because if we ever saw two chicks getting it on, all women might think it’s just too awesome and turn lesbian and the human race would die out. Or something.
Blue Drop is one of those barely-there yuri escapees. It’s a yuri, science fiction, boarding school story all rolled into one 13-episode series, and it’s honestly better than I thought it would be.
Mari has lived with her grandmother for six years, ever since her parents died in a bizarre incident- all the inhabitants of their small island died in one night, either killing each other in a frenzy or dying in the subsequent tidal wave. Mari was the only survivor, and she has no memory of her life before her rescue.
Mari’s grandma is getting up in years and feels she can’t take care of her anymore, so she ships Mari off to a swanky girls-only boarding school with a headmaster who looks just like Yanni, if Yanni was animated and had purple hair. Mari is understandably pissed off, and is even more pissed off when the class president tries to strangle her on their first meeting. Hagino is the golden girl: the best at everything and the focus of many girl crushes. She also has a secret: she’s really an alien (or from another dimension; differing explanations are offered on this point). Hagino herself isn’t sure why Mari freaks her out so much, so she gets herself assigned as Mari’s roommate to find out.
Hagino’s people came to earth years ago to scope it out for possible invasion; Hagino (aka Echoreal) is the captain of one of their recon ships. It was actually a terrible accident involving her ship that drove everyone on Mari’s island crazy. Hagino’s guilt has caused her to hide from her own people, taking on the persona of a schoolgirl while her ship waits in the ocean, tended by her loyal lieutenant, Subael.
As Mari begins to discover Hagino’s secrets, their relationship develops from antagonism to friendship to more (Hagino’s people are all female, so it’s no big whoop for her). Their feelings even survive Mari’s learning that Hagino was more or less responsible for her parents kicking the bucket. When the aliens commence with their invasion plans, Hagino decides to stop them- for Mari, and for the fragile human race she’s come to love.
Taken on their own, each of Blue Drop’s storylines is nothing new: alien invasion/ boarding school girl crushes. Blah. But tie them together, and you have something different, and fairly interesting.
Mari and Hagino’s relationship develops as naturally as you expect, considering that one of them is an alien who destroyed the other one’s early life. It’s tentative, and angsty, and often sweet and genuinely touching. But as this is mainstream yuri, they never do anything more risqué than holding hands. Mari is a fun sort of heroine; instead of the sickeningly good-hearted girls you see in so much anime, Mari is touchy, angry and fierce. Hagino appears to be the stereotypical perfect schoolmate, but her guilt and regret make her more interesting than the average alien girl. The other characters are generally likable, if not particularly fleshed out (except the morbidly obese RA in Mari’s dorm…haha). One teacher who seems flighty and uber-cheerful is actually a secret agent there to observe Mari in an attempt to find out what happened to her island’s population; as a flaky teacher she’s annoying as hell, but the secret agent bit balances it out nicely.
The show is relatively fast-paced, with a only a couple ‘time-out’ episodes where the girls hang out at the beach or whatever.
The character designs are pretty standard, though the alien ship designs are really neat. It’s Gonzo, so the animation is really slick and the backgrounds are detailed; there’s a lot of sun shimmering on the ocean waves and the like. The ship-on-ship action is rendered in 3D CGI, which is a bit jarring at first but quickly comes to look pretty decent.
I watched the show dubbed (thanks to Netflix’s Instant Stream, where much of the anime is only available dubbed). The voice acting is tolerable all around, though all the girls (save Hagino’s Monica Rial, who barely manages more than a shy whisper) can be strident and shrill when they’re excited. Kind of like real teenage girls, I guess.
The ending of Blue Drop, while not entirely unexpected, manages to be quite touching, especially as it ties into the framing story in the first episode.
The Verdict: Probably not very rewatchable, but definitely enjoyable the first time around.
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19 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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Forbidden Dance is a manga about a high school girl who has to work hard to achieve her dreams and get with the incredibly hot and perfect guy she loves. Because, you know, no manga has ever done that exact storyline before. Even worse, Forbidden Dance indulges in every tired cliché of the genre; the gorgeous ex-girlfriend, the mean girl(s) who pick on the heroine, the apparently arrogant and cruel dude who turns out to have a sad, sad past…it’s enough to make you gag.
Aya is a high school kid and devoted ballet student. She’s the pride of her ballet school, until she chokes up at a competition and falls off the stage. After that she can’t bring herself to dance in front of an audience, despite the encouragement of her teachers and best friend, second-rate ballerina Nachan. This makes Yoshino, her main dancing rival, very happy.
Then one day Aya is chilling in the park and a random guy gives her a free ticket to a performance by a small ballet company called COOL (he’s actually not that random, turns out he’s a classmate/fellow dancer she just noticed before). She attends the show and is blown away by the athletic performances of the dancers, especially the lead dancer, Akira, who is apparently unbelievably attractive. Aya decides that the only way on God’s green Earth that she will ever ever ever be able to dance again is if she can dance with unbelievably attractive Akira. She approaches him after the show and asks to be allowed to join COOL. Unfortunately, she was so obsessed with Akira that she somehow failed to notice that every single member of the company is male. Amused by her pathetic desperation, Akira says he’ll let her in if she can win the National Ballet Competition.
Which she does, despite her rivalry with Yoshino and the fact that Nachan secretly envies Aya’s talent and tries to sabotage her performance. Along the way Aya makes peace with everyone and impresses Akira with her drive and learns about his sad, sad past and blah blah blah.
But then she discovers that she’s kind of out of her league with COOL, and Akira has an ex-girlfriend who is a famous ballet star and who visits Japan and makes Aya jealous, and she has to save COOL’s anniversary performance and gets mixed signals from him and whatever. Honestly, I’m just too bored to write the rest of the summary. You can probably figure out what happens anyway. Luckily the manga is only four volumes long, so it didn’t waste too much of my time.
You might wonder why I am so down on this manga. Sure, it might be familiar, sure it’s packed with clichés, but it’s silly, harmless fun, right?
Wrong. Aya is every bit as bad a role model for girls as that stupid bitch in the Twilight books. Wah wah wah, she fell and lost her confidence. Oh look, she can learn to dance and follow her dreams again, but ONLY if she can dance with this douchebag who treats her like shit but eventually comes to love her because she is so incredibly clingy and pathetic. Oh look, this asshole secretly has a heart of gold or some shit, and he said I made him hit me and he’d never do it again…(OK, the only hitting in this manga is by accident, or chicks slapping each other, but you can totally see where their relationship is going).
And the art? Ick. Unbelievably attractive Akira is…not attractive. None of the characters are. Hinako Ashihara’s characters look like mutants. Their foreheads are huge domes, their eyes are large as squid’s eyes, and all their features are crammed into the bottom 1/3rd of their faces. Her sketching of dance sequences is nice, but while dancing the characters only seem to have three poses apiece.
Maybe that’s because in the (frequent, boring) mangaka’s notes, Ashihara admits she knows sod-all about ballet and doesn’t know why she chose it as a subject. Now, I also know sod-all about ballet, which is why I don’t write about it. I don’t know how accurate her information about ballet is, but with her confession of ignorance being right there in the first volume, I don’t really trust her.
Besides the author’s notes, volume three contains a very long instructional manual on working out like a ballet dancer, which I read while cramming Fig Newtons into my piehole, and a short story called “Princess Line”.
The Verdict: Please God, give me back my two hours of time. I promise I’ll never randomly pick a manga to read out of the library again.
| Category: Print Reviews, Reviews | Tag: forbidden dance, japan, manga, review |
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15 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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Mai, the Psychic Girl is a misleading title. The titular character is not, in fact, psychic. She’s something even cooler: telekinetic, meaning she can manipulate inanimate objects with the power of her mind (though the manga calls it psychokinesis, which is also correct, ‘telkinesis’ just sounds neater).
Mai Kuju is a regular 14-year-old school girl- because all manga heroines are regular school girls…at first- who hides her powers at the request of her beloved, widowed father. She’s silly, doesn’t pay attention in school, gossips with her friends, all the things teenagers do. She’s not particularly concerned when a group of strange men tries to follow her home; after all, she can use her power to cause a traffic jam to hold them up. But then the strange men come to her house and fight her dad, who has awesome mystical martial arts skills. It seems Mai is wanted by a mysterious international organization called The Wisdom Alliance, which is trying to collect people with ESP powers so they can somehow use them to keep world peace (although, considering they are a mysterious international organization, that’s probably a big lie). And Mai is the most powerful ESPer they’ve ever seen. To this end The Wisdom Alliance has made a deal with the Kaieda Agency, some kind of underground information network run by a creepy old dude with amazing martial arts skills. He needs to get Mai for the Alliance, and he personally wants to test Mai’s dad’s kung fu against his own.
Mai and her dad flee to a shrine where he tells her that she inherited her power from her dead mother. Then the Kaieda guys close in; Mai and her dad nearly escape until Kaieda drops in their trump card: a giant demon-like guy with Saiyan hair who knocks Mai’s dad off a cliff and is promptly destroyed (maybe!) by Mai’s powers. She takes off into the woods, where she meets a college boy named Intetsu who is out hiking. He’s huge (like, Kenshiro in Fist of the North Star huge) and has some blazing martial arts skills of his own. He helps Mai get back to Tokyo and lets her stay in his dorm room, where she quickly becomes the mascot/little sister for all the guys. She even adopts a puppy that turns up, but the Kaieda and Wisdom Alliance guys are still after her. And as Mai starts to use her powers more and more, she learns that terrible things can happen unless she gets her emotions under control (like gruesomely killing a big dog that attacks her pup).
By the end of volume one, Mai and Intetsu are on the run again- with their animal sidekick, of course. Volume two gets even more frenetic, with the interesting twist that Kanieda has no intention of turning Mai over to the Alliance, and the appearance of a German girl named Turm Garten, who is the second most powerful telekinetic in the world, and who really doesn’t like being number two. A battle of the minds (literally) ensues, tearing the city apart. Meanwhile, Mai’s dad is alive after all, but he has amnesia.
Mai, The Psychic Girl was released by Viz in 1995, and it acts its age. The art belongs to that school of realism that is no longer popular (similar to Sanctuary), and everything from the outfits to the hairdos to the cultural references (Mickey Mouse and Garfield show up in almost unaltered form)are early 1990’s to the max. Size is relative in this world; Intetsu towers over most of the other characters, while elderly characters are tiny and wizened. There’s a lot of detail, which is nice- you’re always noticing little things-, but it can make the action scenes seem crowded and confusing.
The characters are not terribly interesting. Mai is a typical teenage good kid (in the classic manga mold), so all her reactions to events and revelations are predictable. Her dad has some secrets, as does creepy old Kaieda. Intetsu and his college pals are amusingly stereotypical, Turm Garten is nothing but pure malice without personality. Possibly the most interesting character in the manga is the giant demon-creature-person Kaieda keeps in a cage. What the hell is this guy, after all?
The story is layered enough to keep a reader’s interest, but the whole secret-organization-that-runs-the-world-thing is overdone. The whole telekinesis thing is cool enough to make up for it, though. It’s a nice change that there are lots of people willing to help Mai, instead of everyone being against her like you’d usually see in a story like this. It adds a nice element to the story; how the people who have become concerned will lose or gain by their involvement.
It’s not a series for the kiddies, by any means. There’s a lot of gruesome violence, and a couple bathtub scenes whose only apparent purpose is to show off Mai’s naked, sleek, barely-pubescent figure.
The Verdict: Mai is definitely not the kind of manga that would be popular today, but if you have a craving for something old-school, check it out.
| Category: Print Reviews, Reviews | Tag: japan, mai the psychic girl, manga, review |
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14 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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Death Trance desperately wants to be a Ryuhei Kitamura movie. And it succeeds. Unfortunately, only about half of Kitamura’s movies are really entertaining; the other half are stupid and boring. Death Trance, as a Kitamura wannabe, falls into the latter category.
In a world similar to Edo-era Japan (but way weirder), a mysterious coffin has been kept at a temple for centuries, wrapped in chains. Only the monks know what it really contains, but rumor has it that whatever sleeps in the coffin can grant any wish. The temple’s courtyard is crammed with would-be coffin thieves, turned to stone by some monastic magic.
But in some kind of epic battle that is barely shown, a sword-wielding rogue named Grave (Kitamura favorite Tak Sakaguchi) manages to extract the coffin, and, instead of opening it right away, decides to drag it around by the chains for awhile. He’s trailed by a weird and adorable little girl, whose presence is never quite explained but who apparently comes with the coffin. Grave hauls the kid and coffin all over the damn place, including, bizarrely, to some kind of outdoor diner where people are apparently tortured and sold as lunch. Of course, once every thug in the place sees the coffin, they want a shot at it, wielding swords, guns, gun-swords and their bare fists. He flicks most of them aside like tiddlywinks, but one guy with some seriously impressive Flock of Seagulls hair (played by Kentaro Seagal, and if you knew Steven Seagal has a half-Japanese son, you knew more than I did). Flock of Seagulls keeps popping up to fight some more. All the while, the creepy kid just watches (and eats). There’s also a monk sent by the temple, not to retrieve the coffin- because he can’t fight for shit- but to tote around a sacred sword that can only be drawn from its scabbard by the Chosen One, who is supposed to beat down the thing in the coffin should it escape. He also helpfully explains what is really contained in the coffin, which is not going to grant any wishes. Unless your wish is for the world and everyone in it to be destroyed.
Three guesses as to whom the Chosen One ends up being, and the first two don’t count. Hint: it’s not Anakin Skywalker.
Death Trance pretty much fails at plot and character development. You could sail a cruise ship through the holes in the plot. Grave has absolutely zero personality or even a sliver a charm. The little girl’s role remains unclear; exactly what she is and why she accompanies the coffin is never explained. There is a weak attempt to give Flock of Seagulls a reason for our sympathy, but it falls flat.
As we all know, all of these things could be forgiven if only the movie has some kick-ass action; the only thing that saves many Kitamura film. Death Trance has loads of action (the onset of which is always signaled by heavy metal music from Japanese band Dir en Grey), but it’s less ‘kick-ass’ than ‘technically competent’. Frequent cuts, and the sheer number of combatants in most scenes, often make it hard to see what’s going on.
One thing- no, the only thing- Death Trance has going for it is style. The whole film is shot in moody gray and blue, the costumes are hardly historically accurate but look pretty cool, and there is the afore-mentioned Flock of Seagulls hair. There’s speeded-up action, slowed-down action, and people making elegant arcs with their elegant swords.
And to be honest, I would have sacrificed some of that style for just a teeny-tiny bit of substance.
The Verdict: Only if you’re really, really bored. And only if you can’t get your hands on a copy of Versus instead.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Reviews | Tag: death trance, japan, Movie, review |
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13 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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Back in 2006, reporter Lisa Ling snuck into North Korea by posing as a medical assistant to a Nepalese eye surgeon. Of course, when she tried it again a few years later, she got caught and sent to a North Korean prison camp, where she was rescued by Bill Clinton. But the information she got in 2006 was made into a National Geographic documentary Inside North Korea.
The beginning of the documentary doesn’t tell us much we don’t know; small country (Mississippi-sized), no outside media influence, Kim Jong-Il is god etc.
The Nepalese doctor seems like a nice guy. He travels the world showing third-world country doctors how to treat cataracts. He planned to do one thousand surgeries in ten days in the hermit kingdom. Understandably, he’s nervous about the presence of the reporters.
North Korean minders monitor every movement the medical team makes, starting at the airport in Nepal. Ling and the cameramen surreptitiously take some footage from the car (they were allowed to shoot inside the hospital; as they were supposed to be documenting the surgeries). The streets of Pyongyang look oddly depopulated; images of Kim Jong-Il and his father Kim Il-Sung are literally everywhere.
Ling’s footage is intercut with scenes from a Dutch documentary approved by Dear Leader, which shows a Communist paradise. Artifice and deception is a staple of North Korean propaganda; Ling shows a town visible from the South Korean border, an idyllic little hamlet that is composed of empty buildings.
The danger Ling and her comrades are in is ever-present; at one point one of their minders threatens to throw them out of the country for taking a picture of a statue of Kim Il-Sung.
As the documentary proceeds, I did learn some things; at one point on the North/South Korean border, there is a spot where North Korean soldiers stand only feet from the joint South Korean/American forces who guard the DMZ. The tension in this place is palpable, even through the TV screen. The lengths that must be taken simply to pass a message between the countries- whose soldiers stand only feet apart- are nothing short of absurd.
The crew is allowed to visit the apartment of one of the patients, and is subjected to a farcical show of hero worship- the patient says the worst part of being blind is that she can’t look upon Dear Leader’s face. But the worst thing about these scenes is that everyone genuinely seems moved by the sheer awesomeness of Kim Jong-Il. While many people want to defect from North Korea’s oppressive regime, many others sincerely buy into the propaganda.
The documentary takes time out to explain the basics of cataract surgery and even what a cataract is, which is frustrating when the entire reason I (and most people) watch this is for more information on the notoriously reclusive North Korea.
There’s also an interview with a German doctor who worked in North Korea, and the medical conditions he describes are sickening; no running water, no anesthesia, an entire generation of children stunted by malnourishment. Another sequence on North Korea’s concentration camps shows that the situation there is worse than I ever realized; a single disparaging comment can land your entire family in a concentration for the rest of their lives. A priest who helps defectors flee describes the difficulty of escaping into China, the easiest route; not only do they fear North Korean soldiers, but also Chinese police.
The documentary ends with the cataract patients removing their bandages. A scene of a young woman seeing her father for the first time in years is moving…until her father tells her she must thank Dear Leader for her restored sight, at which point the lump in my throat changed to straight-up gagging. If these people are acting out of fear, they are damn good at it.
The Verdict: If you’re interested in North Korea, this documentary is a must-see; in fact, there’s almost nothing else to see. But no matter how much you know about North Korea, Inside North Korea will show you something new.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Reviews | Tag: documentary, inside north korea, national geographic, review |
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12 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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So, The Sky Crawlers might actually be the best Mamoru Oshii movie I’ve ever seen. There, I said it. I know, right? I feel like I don’t know who I am anymore.
I generally like Oshii, though I know all about his major fault: the endless philosophical bullshit that takes up approximately 60% of every movie he makes. But I always felt his pros outweighed his one giant con: his slow, dreamy pacing, rich character development, kickass action and of course his partnership with Production I.G. (it also helps that I love dogs, particularly hounds, extra-particularly basset hounds). The Sky Crawlers has all the pros and none of the con.
In the future, wars aren’t fought: they’re staged. Nations don’t go to battle anymore, and the world is at peace. But of course that’s not enough for mankind, which demands conflict, so companies are hired to wage war against each other. The soldiers in these wars are ‘kildren’- genetically engineered fighters who are kept in an artificial adolescence for their entire lives; because, as one character remarks, when your only purpose is to fight and die, why bother growing up?
As the film opens, Yuichi, a kildren pilot, arrives at a new military base. The commander of the base is the ice queen Kusanagi, and the mascot a basset hound (of course). There is some mystery concerning the fate of the pilot Yuichi is replacing, but he doesn’t have much time to consider that between battling the rival company’s pilots, including the mysterious Teacher, who is rumored to actually be…a grown up.
Over the course of the film, some of Yuichi’s fellow pilots are killed, the fragile truth behind Kusanagi’s cold shell is revealed, and the mystery surrounding the Teacher gets curiouser and curiouser. The history of the kildren is revealed, and turns out to be even more horrifying than we thought. Much more happens, and even more on the psychological plane, but I can’t reveal too much without spoiling the impact of this quietly powerful movie.
As with most Oshii movies, The Sky Crawlers is slow-moving. The action is interspersed with halting conversations, long shots of scenery and pauses so drawn out that a couple times I checked the DVD player to make sure the DVD wasn’t frozen. The action scenes- all aerial battles- are frenetic yet graceful. It all gives the movie a haunting, surreal atmosphere that is entirely typical of Oshii. The backgrounds are mostly windswept moors (this base is apparently in England); the open landscapes contrast startlingly with the trapped, claustrophobic situations of the most of the characters.
Production I.G.’s animation is always top-notch, and The Sky Crawlers is no exception. Their blending of 3D and 2D animation is always as close to seamless as you can get. The character designs might look a little simplistic to fans of I.G.’s Ghost in the Shell movies, but since the characters are perpetually young, I could accept the lack of lines in their skin. The planes are futuristic but not unrealistic, and the action scenes are amazing to watch; a couple times I had to remind myself I was actually watching animation.
The music, by Kenji Kawai, is compelling without being too noticeable. The voice actors are all fine (even the bits of English that are thrown around are clear!).
Are all the mysteries going to be cleared up, all the problems solved and put in a little box with a bow? Please. If you’re an Oshii fan, you already know the answer to that. Just like real life, The Sky Crawlers doesn’t answer everything. This isn’t a movie to watch late at night when you’re half-asleep. You might even have to watch it twice to catch all the brilliant, wrenching details, but it’s going to make you think (for instance, it’s shown that Kusanagi- in a youthful rebellion- once had a daughter, who is rapidly growing to the same age that her mother perpetually inhabits. Think about that for a while). And while initially the ending may leave you feeling a bit empty, further reflection tells you that it meant more than you ever realized at the time.
The Verdict: A must-see for any anime fan with a brain.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Reviews | Tag: Anime, mamori oshii, Movie, review, the sky crawlers |
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11 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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In a crowded Seoul subway station, a rural visitor boards a train. But his wife of fifty years becomes lost in the crowd; the train pulls away without her. He turns around at the next station, but by the time he returns to where he last saw her, she’s gone.
This disappearance is the driving force behind Kyung-sook Shin’s novel Please Look After Mom, a wrenching look into the complex web of family dynamics, the things that bring them together, and the things that tear them apart.
Mom’s vanishing devastates her five grown children and her husband. As the days turn into months and even the police give up searching for her, they find themselves fraught with guilt, consumed by memories of the woman they loved, yet mostly took for granted. These memories are woven together to create, in rich detail, the portrait of a life that may or not be over.
The story is told from four points of view: Chi-hon, the second eldest child and oldest daughter, Hyung-chol, the eldest son, Father, and Mom herself. We start with Chi-hon, a successful novelist. She recalls a hardworking woman, a country wife and mother who was never educated, who often embarrassed and infuriated Chi-hon with her ignorance and superstition. Hyung-chol suffers wracking guilt; as the adored oldest child, Mom both worshipped and pressured him. His dream of becoming the lawyer she wanted him to be, as well as his dream of raising her above her situation and giving her a comfortable life, were lost somewhere along the path his life has taken. Father finds himself lost, unable even to do the simple household tasks his wife always took care of. He too has plenty to berate himself for: selfishness, resentment, adultery, abandonment. As they all wonder how a grown women could have become so thoroughly lost, their recent memories bring up a common theme that points to their mother having severe health and mental problems that none of them wanted to see.
When Mom’s turn comes, we are given the answer to at least one question, though her children may never learn it. She confesses her worry for her younger daughter, a mother with three small children and the closest to Mom in her situation. She recalls her youth, her arranged marriage, all the terror and wonder of motherhood, and she reveals one or two secrets her family will likely never know.
The final chapter returns the story to Chi-hon, who finds herself facing a strange new world: a place where her mother doesn’t exist. There is no resolution to this story, as such. The characters simply fumble ahead, perhaps never knowing what happened to their wife and mother, and only now appreciating what she meant to all of them.
Please Look After Mom is a gut-wrenching novel that will haunt readers long after they finish it. While anyone with a mother can relate, it will resonate most strongly with people my age (31, if you really want to know) and older- people who are now realizing that their parents are aging, that they may have to serve as their caretakers someday, that their parents will eventually be gone and they will be alone. Readers who also have children will appreciate both points of view: the adult children suddenly unmoored, and the parents watching their kids grow up and away from them.
The writing style of Please Look After Mom is clear and graceful; it’s a relatively quick read, and for once the translation has no awkward moments. Shin uses every point of view available: Hyung-chol is written in third person, Mom is first person, Father and Chi-hon are in second person. Second person is annoying; it has the effect of distancing a reader from the character, probably the opposite of what the author intended. But the sheer intimacy of the novel luckily saves it from being too gimmicky of an approach.
I have one other admittedly minor complaint about Please Look After Mom. Three of the kids are explored in intimate detail: their actions, feelings, memories. But there are five children altogether. What about the second-oldest son or the youngest son? They receive passing mentions, but you can’t help but wonder how they are handling their mother’s disappearance. They have the feel of missing puzzle pieces. Adding them into the story would likely have doubled the length of the book, so you can understand why Shin left them out. Yet you can’t help but feel a bit bereft.
Please Look After Mom paints a vivid picture of modern South Korea. It’s rural and urban, modern and archaic, old and young. But despite the between the lives of the American readers and the Korean characters, we can feel connected to them: families, no matter where they live, are in many ways the same.
Please Look After Mom will be released in the United States in April 2011.
The Verdict: Definitely worth your time. This book will make you call your mom, just to hear her voice and make sure she’s still there.
| Category: Print Reviews, Reviews | Tag: family, Novel, please look after mom, review, south korea |
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10 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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If Tsutomu Nihei is a prophet, the future is going to suck ass, but at least it’s going to look awesome.
In Blame! and its companion manga, Noise, people are repressed by bizarre cyborgs and have to live in an endlessly-ascending cyber-dungeon. In Biomega, they get to go outside, but there are zombies everywhere. And in Biomega, the last hope of saving humanity isn’t…even…human.
It’s 3005 A.D. Mankind completes its first manned mission to Mars in seven centuries. The astronauts find that the formerly populated Martian outpost is wrecked…except for one forlorn, mysterious human- or a forlorn, mysterious human-shaped creature.
Jump forward six months. Mankind has been devastated by the NS5 virus, which the astronauts brought back with them. Instead of killing those who contract it, NS5 just turns them into mindless ‘drones’; zombies, basically, although they can mutate into gross monsters and attck when threatened. As the story opens, Zoichi Kanoe, a ‘synthetic human’ arrives in a city on his badass motorcycle. He’s been sent by his employers, Toa Heavy Industries (a company of the same name was mentioned in Blame!, but the two series don’t seem to be connected, as least so far), to ‘purify’ the city by ridding t of drones.
But as soon as he enters the city he accidentally runs down a teenage girl. Her dismembered leg sticks itself right back on, to Zoichi’s surprise. He’s even more surprised when a bipedal, gun-toting grizzly bear bounds out to protect the girl and usher her back into the city.
The girl, it turns out, is seventeen-year-old Eon Green. She’s an Accommodator- someone who contracts the virus but doesn’t zombify; instead, ZS5 gives them incredible healing powers, and maybe other powers as well.
Toa Heavy Industries wants Accommodators for their own purposes. But other people want Accommodators too, including a mysterious organization called the Public Health Service- which doesn’t seem to be that focused on public health, considering they have something called ‘compulsory execution units’…
Biomega is like Blame! in many ways, but the little annoyances that plagued it (a complete lack of explanation for anything, almost no dialogue, and confusing action scenes) are remedied in Biomega. There’s still not much dialogue, but there’s enough to keep the reader in the loop, so to speak. In this first volume, there are tantalizing hints about the various organizations wanting the Accommodators, and why; about Eon Green herself, about the bear- intriguingly named Kozlov L. Grebnev- and the drones. Since it’s only the first volume, not much is explained, but it looks as if we’re in for some full-on government-military conspiracy shit.
Nihei’s action scene have improved immensely. They’re drawn out over several panels; so while the story is fast-paced, we can still see what’s going on. He also takes advantage of these multiple panels to show us the extent of Zoichi’s powers- in one scene he shoots some murderous drones, then holsters his gun before they even hit the ground.
The main attraction of anything by Tsutomu Nihei is his unique, distinctive art style. Biomega is fascinating to look at. The angular, fish-eyed characters, the intricate weaponry and vehicles, and his backgrounds…his backgrounds are what Heaven looks like, if God is a cyberpunk fan with an affinity for vast spaces, narrow bridges, Gothic architecture and balconies. The designs are simply awesome, and you’ll find yourself going back just to look at them again (and noticing new details every time).
It’s hard to tell how a manga will go from just the first volume, but thus far Biomega shows the potential to be seriously amazing. I just hope Nihei can carry it through.
The Verdict: Pretty damn cool. I just hope it stays that way.
| Category: Print Reviews, Reviews | Tag: biomega, japan, manga, review, tsutomu nihei |
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9 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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One night last week Shapiro Keats came home late to find me curled up on the couch, the living room lights blazing, clutching the cat like a feline shield. “Did you watch a scary movie?” He sighed.
Yes, yes I did. And I fully admit that Filipino horror movie The Maid probably wouldn’t have been half as scary if I had watched it, say, in the day time, when there was someone else in the house.
Rosa is a cute 18-year-old Filipino girl who arrives in Singapore to work as a maid for a Chinese family living there. Her employers are a retired Peking opera star and his wife. They seem like pretty cool people, except- oops!- they forgot to mention they have a mentally challenged adult son. But Ah Soon is a good guy, a grown man who acts like a toddler (a lot like my son, actually). Rosa doesn’t actually seem to do much work; she spends most of her time peeking into dark closets and opening and closing creaky doors. She finds a mysterious bag of clothes stuck under her bed, and does the only logical thing; she starts wearing them.
Rosa has had the bad luck to start work during the Chinese seventh month, when the gate to the afterlife is supposedly open. Her employers spend lots of time placating the ancestors by burning money and leaving food in front of the house. Her mistress even flips her shit when Rosa goes to the mailbox by herself; the ‘hungry ghost man’ is everywhere, just looking for some cute girl to terrorize. But Rosa doesn’t know all the superstitions: at an opera performance she sits in a seat reserved for the ancestors, and she nearly sweeps up a pile of ash from a burned offering. This pisses off the ancestors to no end, apparently, because immediately she starts seeing ghosts, all the usual Asian kinds- little kids, long-haired women, dead peeps in various stages of decomposition. But it’s cool, her mistress assures her. Once the seventh month is over, the ghosts will split and leave Rosa alone.
Then Ah Soon eats some of the food left out for the ancestors, and he starts seeing ghosts too. Rosa gets more and more freaked out, until it doesn’t look like she can wait until the end of the month to get rid of the dead people. Of course there’s a reason why Rosa’s employers are so hell-bent on keeping the ghosts at bay. Rosa’s not their first maid, after all. Esther ran off with some guy…or maybe she didn’t.
The plot of The Maid is pretty straightforward, and, in the end, predictable, except for one nice little twist that took me by surprise (but I tend to be rather dense about these things, too; Shapiro Keats would have figured it out in five minutes).
Most of the scares in The Maid are shock effects; quick cuts that flash a ghostly face at you, accompanied by a sudden burst of background music. None of the ghosts seems particularly menacing, besides being, well, ghosts; a dead child deliberately scares Rosa, but the ones who occupy the empty row at the opera house just wave cheerfully at her. There are hands popping out of laundry piles, ghosts showing up in the reflection in a cabinet door, translucent figures floating past doorways. There are nicely creepy dream/vision sequences, as when Rosa follows a trail of blood through a deserted apartment complex. In another, a Filipino girl Rosa has befriended is struck instantly mad when she is hit by the shadow of a coffin as a hearse passes by.
The dialogue is conducted in Cantonese and English. Alessandra de Rossi , who plays Rosa, speaks perfectly fine English, but the Asian actors are harder to understand, and there are no subtitles. I had to go back a couple times and listen to a couple conversations twice to figure it all out. The acting is decent; Benny Soh as Ah Soon is endearing if occasionally annoying. de Rossi is a little wooden, but it may simply be because English isn’t her first language.
One of the irritating things about The Maid is that the sound levels are uneven. I had to turn it up several times to hear the dialogue, and down when the music was overwhelming. Since I watched it on the Netflix Instant Stream and not a DVD, this is a problem with the sound mixing.
The Verdict: Watch it alone, and it will freak your shit out. Even if you watch it during the day, it’s interesting to learn the various superstitions associated with the Chinese seventh month.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: horror, Movie, phlippines, review, the maid |
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8 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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I know what you guys have been thinking. “She’s already on Day 8, but she hasn’t reviewed a single kung fu movie? WTF?”. Well, here it is, in all its spoiler-ific glory.
8 Masters opens with a fight, as all good kung fu movies do. As credits fill the screen, two men meet for a duel. One of them asks for a temporary reprieve of three months, as he is sick. The other refuses and they fight. The sick guy, unsurprisingly, kicks the bucket just as the credits end.
In the next scene, a man shows up to his sister-in-law’s house with the news that her husband is dead, poisoned by the 8 Masters, a group of fighters who are pissed about being defeated by him. The uncle takes his dead brother’s son to a Shaolin monastery where he will be safe from the 8 Masters, but dies as soon as they get there. He makes young Chu Sao Chieh promise that after he grows up, he will leave the monastery and find his mother and his uncle’s daughter and take care of them.
Of course, it’s a Shaolin monastery, so next we’re treated to a bunch of scenes of the kid learning kung fu from the monks, including a scene that is apparently not related to anything, where a bunch of ninjas attack the monastery and get their asses kicked. After a while the kid wanders off screen, and when he comes back into camera range he has turned into a fully-grown, perpetually pissed-off looking Carter Wong.
Chieh wants to hang in the monastery and become a monk, but the abbot kicks him out with a long speech about repaying debts and remembering three principles: keep the peace, have patience, and forgive offense. Then he throws Chieh into a kung fu test that everyone has to pass in order to leave the monastery. Chieh has to fight his way through some Indiana Jones shit, like bridges swaying over huge wooden spikes, and then he has to fight a bunch of dudes painted gold and silver (this is apparently a reference to another film collaboration between Kuo and Wong), and then he has to move a really hot, heavy pot of fire. After that he is finally permitted to leave the monastery (which he didn’t actually want to leave in the first place) to find his mom and cousin.
As soon as he stops for lunch, he gets involved in a fight in a restaurant. A gang of ruffians is trying to make off with a woman, despite the protests of her husband, and Chieh steps in to keep the peace by kicking some ass (the proliferation of items like giant buckets of alcohol and bags of flour make for an incongruously comedic fight). Chieh continues on to his old home, where he finds his now-blind mother and his cousin, Ming Chu. It’s a happy family reunion until the 8 Masters show up. Even 18 years (or 10 years- there’s some disagreement on the time) after they killed his dad, the 8 Masters are still nursing a grudge. They want Chieh to fight them, but he refuses, remembering the last principle the abbot gave him. But the 8 Masters won’t take no for an answer, so Chieh ends up fleeing to the country with his mom and cousin to avoid them. When they hunt him down there, he takes his family to a cave. The 8 Masters and their minions continually beat him silly, but he won’t fight back. The 8 Masters are still intent on fighting him, so they eventually wise up and do what they should have done in the first place: kidnap his old blind mother and hold her hostage until he accepts the challenge.
Meanwhile, Ming Chu is meeting with some old guy in a conical hat that hides his face, who tells her she has to kill Chieh. When Chieh stumbles on a meeting, she confesses she’s not really his cousin, but some orphan that was passed off as the real Ming Chu 18 (or 10) years ago. The real Ming Chu is missing. The fake one was ordered by the mysterious hat guy to watch Chieh and kill him when she was told. But she can’t kill Chieh because he’s too hot and she’s fallen in love with him.
Chieh concocts a plan to sneak into the 8 Masters’ hangout (apparently they all live together) and rescue his mother. But it doesn’t go as planned, the 8 Masters catch them, and Chieh receives yet another ass-whooping courtesy of the 8 Masters. His hysterical mother decides to kill herself because she thinks that will somehow save her son. Conveniently, her suicide is the thing Chieh needs to get pissed enough to fight the 8 Masters.
Despite the fact that all the 8 Masters live in the same house, they somehow manage to teleport or something all over the damn place, so Chieh has to hop on a horse and fight each one in a different area, like by a rushing waterfall or in a field or a courtyard. Master Fight # 5 is where things start to get really fucking weird. Master # 5 has a weapon with an aluminum fist on one end and a nunchuck on the other. Chieh starts out fighting Master #6 in his courtyard, but then they leap out of the shot and suddenly they’re fighting in a forest, unless Master #6’s garden just seriously needed some attention. Master #7 is a woman who tells Chieh that his dad killed her dad, even though her dad was sick…bazinga! Chieh’s dad is the douchebag from the first scene! No wonder people wanted to poison him, if he was such a dick. Chieh feels bad about it, but I guess after you hand out 7 kung fu beatings you might as well go for #8 while you’re at it.
Master #8 is…surprise! The mysterious old dude in the conical hat, who is revealed to also be the same man whose wife was getting harassed in the restaurant. They fight a bit, then the mysterious hat man disappears into his house. Chieh follows and finds himself in some kind of screwed-up Chinese haunted house walkthrough. First he is attacked by four hopping Chinese vampires with knives for hands. Then has to fight four more vampires who have hands, but are holding knives in them. Then he has to fight mysterious hat man while darts and spears fly out of the walls at them. Finally he wins, but since he doesn’t want to kill hat man, hat man kills himself with his own kung fu. But not before revealing that Chieh’s real cousin, Ming Chu, is actually Master #7, who was told that Chieh’s dad killed her dad for some reason. So Chieh goes back to inform her of their kinship, but oh no! He’s been hit by one of the poison-tipped darts that were flying out of the walls. The real Ming Chu goes into the forest to find some random old healer woman, who explains everything we already know about the real and fake Ming Chus, and gives her medicine for Chieh.
Then it cuts to the next scene, and in the space of that split-second edit, Chieh apparently got better and went back to the monastery to become a monk, to the dismay of the fake Ming Chu. The last scene shows her wailing on the steps of the monastery as Chieh turns his back on her and goes inside.
It’s a feel-good movie.
Yeah, I just ruined the plot for you, but seriously: the plot is the least-important part of a kung fu movie.
I was excited to see 8 Masters after I realized it was directed by Joseph Kuo, who directed what is probably my favorite kung fu film of all time, 7 Grand Masters. But 8 Masters, despite the addition of an extra master, isn’t quite as good. The story is ridiculous and chock-full of holes, which usuall wouldn’t matter, but where 7 Grand Masters’ story was engineered to create 90 minutes of wall-to-wall combat, 8 Masters crams in a forced romance and a bunch of histrionics concerning Chieh’s mother. It’s tedious to get through all the yapping before you can see some fighting (which is what we’re really here for, after all). Besides, Chieh spends a good portion of the movie refusing to fight.
The fighting itself is excellent, at least on Carter Wong’s part. He has an intense style that is accentuated by his perpetual scowl, and he’s smooth and incredibly fast. His opponents aren’t quite as good, a couple of the so-called ‘masters’ don’t even present much of a challenge. Overall, though, the action is well-done, if not as pervasive as one could hope.
The acting is…well, who gives a shit? The English sub is actually pretty good; the mouths don’t match up to the voices, of course, but at least the actors don’t sound bored or attempt preposterous accents. They even sound like they care sometimes.
Is it worth an evening of your time (or an afternoon, if you are among the unemployed)? Well, yeah. Carter Wong alone makes this movie worth watching, and the crazy story is entertaining as Hell.
The Verdict: Watch it as a double feature with 7 Grand Masters, and it will be a perfect evening. Don’t forget the vodka and a friend who can MST3K it with you.
| Category: DVD Reviews, Film Reviews, Reviews | Tag: 8 masters, carter wong, kung fu movie, review |
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7 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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This one is spoiler-iffic!
Of all my guilty anime/manga pleasures (Najica: BlitzTactics and Demon City Shinjuku among them), Kitchen Princess may just be the guiltiest. It’s one of the hundreds of shoujo manga about poor teenagers who go to boarding schools packed with rich kids, who have to prove themselves to the Mean Girls and win the hearts of the handsomest boys. Most of these manga have some sort of gimmick to make them stand out: the kids are fashion models, or fairies, or they’re on the field hockey team. Kitchen Princess’ gimmick is food. Lots and lots of food.
The story begins a little like Revolutionary Girl Utena. Najika is a little orphan whose parents have just died in some vague sort of accident. While walking one day she Jumps into a stream, and is rescued from drowning by a little boy. He gives her the snack he was carrying- a cup of flan- and comforts her. The food and the head-patting give Najika the will to live again. He leaves behind the teeny-tiny silver spoon that came with the flan.
Unfortunately, unlike Utena, Kitchen Princess doesn’t go into a delightfully weird tale of swordfights, incest and lesbianism. Instead, Najika just keeps the spoon as a reminder of her ‘flan prince’, and vows to find him someday as she grows up in an orphanage, where she learns to be disgustingly sweet and helpful.
The markings on the spoon lead Najika to an elite private boarding school in Tokyo. She applies and gets in, with a special recommendation from the Director, to the ‘A’ class. The A class is full of kids with special talents- musicians, actors, models- and no one can figure out why Najika is in it, least of all Najika herself. She’s only the best cook ever in the history of the world, after all, as all the other kids are going to find out.
The other kids in the A class automatically hate Najika because she’s poor and an orphan and she has attracted the attention of the two hot brothers Daichi and Sora, sons of the director, who are feuding over something or other. Both boys defend her from the Mean Girls, and of course both fall in love with her as well.
The head Mean Girl is Akane, aspiring supermodel and childhood friend of the brothers. She has a crush on Daichi and hates the attention Najika and her delicious desserts are getting. She tries to get Najika kicked out of school, humiliates her in front of the other students, and tells lies left and right. By the end of the second volume, Najika has made a friend of Akane by making peach pie just like her grandma’s- and thus curing her of her anorexia/bulimia! The other girls try to shut down the diner where Najika works. But every time Najika wants to give up and return to the orphanage, Daichi and Sora are there to talk her down. Could one of the brothers be her flan prince? Well, duh. The question is, which one?
Kitchen Princess is ridiculous, like almost all of the other manga that share this exact plot. Ridiculous, and predictable, and shallow- and for some reason, I really want to know how it’s resolved. Is Daichi or Sora the flan prince? How does Najika win the hearts of everyone around her? Why do I want to finish this manga?
It can’t be the characters. They’re thin as paper: Najika is lonely and loving. Akane is mean, but only because she’s insecure. Daichi is the angry one, and Sora is the perfect eldest son. The minor characters have even less depth; the head of Najika’s orphanage is the nice old grandma. The other students at the school are blips on the radar, not even important enough to name.
It’s not the art. The art is completely standard for a shoujo manga: impossibly svelte teen girls (despite the fact that Najika eats like a starving hog, she’s a skinny bitch), broad-shouldered young men with pretty faces. In close-ups, Najika’s soulful eyes are disturbingly enormous, and somehow she manages to have a wardrobe full of cute dresses with ruffles and ribbons. The clothes are neat (shut up, I’m a chick) but highly unlikely.
It must be…the food. Kitchen Princess is jammed with drawings of delicious-looking food, from French onion soup, to peach pie, to Cake Boss-complex desserts. There are cookies and sandwiches. Even in black-and-white, it’s enough to make your mouth water. The mangaka adds notes about which foods she’s personally eaten and how they were, what she likes and dislikes. The end of each volume has recipes for foods mentioned in that volume, most of which are surprisingly simple. It’s food porn, plain and simple, and it’s incredibly tantalizing, especially if you’re trying to lose those last five pounds.
Or maybe it’s because in volume 4, Kitchen Princess totally kicks the genre in the nuts by killing off Sora. Yep, the kid gets splattered all over the road by a truck. And now Najika has all kinds of grief to deal with.
So there it is. My love for Kitchen Princess is born from my innate delight in food, coupled with the tail end of a diet, and mixed with a dead teenager.
The Verdict: Silly, predictable shoujo fluff. But damn, those cupcakes looks delectable…and that kid is seriously dead.
| Category: News | Tag: japan, kitchen priness, manga, review |
