The New York Asian Film Festival 2011
July 1 – 14
Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center/Japan Society
 

This year, as in the past, the New York Asian Film Festival brings to the Big Apple a feast for those who love the crazy and wild, the tough and action-packed, the subversive, the dramatic, and the obscure. (None of the films below seem to have a U.S. distributor as of yet.) Besides two world premieres (The Last Days of the World and Ninja Kids!!!), there will be retrospectives of cult classics like Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky and Battle Royale and of Hong Kong legend Tsui Hark’s career. Here’s a sampling of some of the titles playing at the festival:

MILOCRORZE: A LOVE STORY (Directed by Yoshimasa Ishibashi)
In what turned out to be my favorite of the festival, Milocrorze: A Love Story tells three stories with outrageous and adorable humor, vicious and stylish violence, and a sense of play and romance that is matched by its strong sense of storytelling. It starts off like an homage to the TV show Pushing Daisies with the fairy tale of a little boy with orange hair, who lives in a little house and goes to work every day, and then one day sees a beautiful woman and falls desperately in love. Then this story is revealed to be just a segment on a TV show itself, hosted by a sleazy man who works as a relationship counselor, the “Love Advisor,” who, when he’s not taking calls telling men how to buck up and approach girls, inexplicably (but awesomely) sings and dances in musical numbers with his bevy of bikini-clad girls. This could be enough for a movie by itself, but then we go into the next, and main, storyline: a man falls deeply in love with a woman, only to have her taken away to a place where prostitution reigns. The movie goes from being super-adorable, like Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, to smutty and outrageously funny to sincerely romantic. Yoshimasa Ishibashi’s direction is always confident, and we’re taken along on stories that go from one mood to another, yet it never feels inorganic. It’s a wild, fantastical spectacle all about love. Milocrorze is funny, brutal, and one of the must-sees of the festival.

MACHETE MAIDENS UNLEASHED! (Directed by Mark Hartley)
From the director of last year’s gift to cinephiles, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation (on Australian exploitation films), comes another must-see. Machete Maidens Unleashed! takes a level-headed but extremely entertaining look back at grindhouse films of the 1960’s and ’70’s shot in the Philippines—it was much, much cheaper to shoot there than in the U.S. Plus Ferdinand Marcos government would loan helicopters, tanks, and soldiers to productions. Anyone who has seen Apocalypse Now, which was shot there, would know that could be a helluva lot.

The real treat about this film, like in Hartley’s previous doc, is the coverage of films known to movie buffs, like The Big Doll-House (Pam Grier’s big trashy break into B-movie stardom), and the work of the not-so well known, like the careers of Filipino directors Eddie Romero and Gerardo de Leon, who made countless horror movies, like Brides of Blood and Terror is a Man, all of which they took seriously as actual films! It’s really seeing the funny, gross, violent, and just plain silly clips from these films that makes this stand out. It’s also a playground for anecdotes big and small from cast and crew. And don’t get them started about bugs and the heat. Once or twice, Hartley loses some of the focus from the Philippines location and goes on a tangent about Roger Corman, the “king of the B’s” and his producing methods at New World Pictures. (Director John Landis has some of the best and cynical anecdotes, while Corman speaks slowly but surely about how it was always about money, and then, hopefully, about art). There are even a few moments for political context about what was going on with the Marcos government at the time. The overall highlight for me: a spotlight on Weng Weng, the two-foot-nine-inch star of the James Bond spoof For Y’ur Height Only!

NINJA KIDS!!! (Directed by Takashi Miike)
Takashi Miike makes so many movies it can be hard to keep up. Like a long-distance runner in a video game, there’s little to stop him from going to one project to another, then another, all in the span of a year. Just earlier this year we were graced by one of his best films (which is saying a lot considering how many he’s made), 13 Assassins, and at Cannes, he had a 3-D remake of the classic Harakiri in competition while this movie, made quickly for Warner Brothers in Japan, screened in the film market. Ninja Kids!!! is something different from his ultra-violent historical pieces, yet it still comes from the same madman style as many of his other movies. And this isn’t even his first kids movie.

Based on a very popular anime series from Japan, Ninja Kids!!! deals with a group of first-year kids in a ninja training school. Our main hero is young Rantaro (cute-as-a-button Seishiro Kato). The first half shows him and his classmates training during the school year, and then during a school break, the movie turns into a story of competition when a group of rival ninjas challenge the school to a race up a mountain to bang a gong (literally) to determine who is the best ninja.

If I were a kid, this would be the best thing ever. Any kid who sees this movie will be overjoyed by these pint-sized units kicking butt and finding their way through the ninja academy with a whole host of colorful supporting characters and villains. One of the villains, I should note, is a marvel of make-up. He has a huge cleft-chin and would be imposing, except his giant head makes him wobble over whenever he pivots downward. If I didn’t totally fall in love with the movie, it might be that Miike just tries too hard in some scenes to go over the top with his special effects and the comedy set pieces (or that midway through the movie, I felt lost with the various new ninja characters and their place in the film’s story). But it’s all so colorful and fast moving and ridiculous that it’s ultimately irresistible.

BEDEVILLED (Directed by Jang Cheol-su)
Ah, South Korea, a place where revenge films are so much tougher than what we’re used to in America. By this film’s end, you’ll feel your skin’s 10 times rougher because of it. The story doesn’t appear to have a revenge angle, at least not at first. It’s about a young woman, Hae-won (Ji Seong-won), who, after some trouble at work with some co-workers, decides to take a week-long vacation and head back to the island of her birth and childhood. The island only has about a dozen inhabitants, all whom work either fishing (the men) or farming (the women), and where the men are all misogynistic a-holes and the women all mostly older and condescending. Bok-nam (Seo Young-hee) grew up with Hae-won as her friend, but she is now a (to put it lightly) an abused mother and wants to escape the island with Hae-won. But after a thwarted attempt and a tragedy that sends Bok-nam into a numbed stupor, she snaps.

How she snaps is one of those scenes that the audience knows is coming, and yet it is a startling moment—mostly for how director builds up to it. That is followed by a whole lot of bloodshed (and by blood, I mean also body parts and heads). It’s at about the halfway point that the film turns into a full-on revenge movie. Up until then, the movie is kind of a quasi-weepy melodrama with Bok-nam as the downtrodden Lifetime-movie mother of the week. By the time Bok-nam turns into mad-as-hell mode, the film picks up dramatic steam and becomes like a horror movie.

Among the films at the festival, Bedeviled might be the one you could wait to see later in a regular release or on DVD. Aside from actress Young-hee, who is really fantastic as the scorned mother-turned-mad-slayer, the performances are mostly weak, and many characters just flatly written and acted. However, the second half, and especially the climax, carries such visceral weight that the movie could garner a cult audience. If nothing else, it features the best sword licking scene in the history of cinema… take that what you will.

OSAMU TEZUKA’S BUDDHA: THE GREAT DEPARTURE (Directed by Kozo Morishita)
This anime production is based upon the manga of Osamu Tezuka (of Astro Boy fame). It’s epic anime made in a grand animated style, slightly above TV-level quality. It tells two sprawling stories. One is about the early years of Siddhartha, who became known as the Buddha, growing up as an anointed prince at odds with his father, the king, who for the most part has a lack of respect for life. (Siddhartha has also trained as a solider, against his better judgment). The other storyline concerns a young boy, Chapra, who grows up poor on the streets in another kingdom. Through a series of events, he saves the life of a brutal general, is adopted by the man, and, leaving the slums behind, becomes a warrior and a member of the aristocracy.

The action is well-paced and exciting, the battle scenes executed with breathless attention to style, and the animation is never less than beautiful and colorful. But if you’re looking for anything past the surface of the characters, you’ll be disappointed. With its ultimate message of “respect ALL life and be at peace,” it’s Miyazaki-lite.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE WORLD (Directed by Eiji Uchida)
A teenage boy sits slumped in his class and suddenly sees a little man (I would say seven- or eight-inches tall tops) on his desk in a suit and top hat telling him that the world is going to end. Then a talking dog also tells Kanou (Jyonmyon Pe) of the impending apocalypse. So do car radios. At this point, Kanou, pretty calmly, decides that if the world is going to end, he’s going to have sex. With a girl. Preferably the one he loves from class. And so he heads out on the road to have some last-days excitement. That is until he runs into a group of people even more messed up than him. They have a hot-tub, wear cool hats, and dance to punk rock.

The Last Days of the World, based on the manga by Naoki Yamamoto, should be something really great as a dark comedy about a disaffected kid from an ordinary family (maybe something like a Japanese Donnie Darko, only without the ’80’s affectations), and for a little while it works. I liked Pe’s deadpan performance. And the film may also feature the most awkward sex scene I’ve ever encountered, if only for its prominent use of mayonnaise. There is a point where it loses its energy, though. By the time Kanou hooks up with the weird cult at the end, it tries hard to bring the audience into the madness, and turns flat and uninteresting. Perhaps I was hoping for more on-the-road hijinks, maybe along the lines of Buffalo ’66, another quirky kidnapping comedy. Luckily, whenever the talking dog or radio comes into play, the film’s humor shoots up 100%.

FOXY FESTIVAL (Directed by Lee Hae-yeong)
Foxy Festival means to be like a Robert Altman style comedy. At least, that was my first impression. It’s a warped movie about people’s obsessions with sex, or lack thereof. (What one woman reveals is about the strangest thing(s) you’ll see at the festival, involving violin playing and leather suits.) If the film never fully grabbed me it might be because the story strands are disconnected and only intermittently entertaining. Sexy comedies can be a lot of fun, and there are times when the actors here really help to sell it, especially a cop, proud of his endowment, who becomes obsessed with a fellow officer’s genitals (size may matter, at least in the mind). About halfway through, I just wanted the director to stay on something long enough so I could become invested in the characters past the shock-gag laughs. Jack Gattanella
July 1, 2011