Kung Fu Hustle

Kung Fu; martial arts comedy, Hong Kong / China, 2004; D: Stephen Chow, S: Stephen Chow, Danny Chan Kwok-kan, Yuen Qiu, Yuen Wah, Leung Siu-lung, Lam Chi-chung, Huang Shengyi

Shanghai. The clumsy Sing and his oveweight friend Bone falsly claim they are members of the Axe Gang in order to try to extort money from people. However, when the Axe Gang really shows up at an apartment complex, they capture Sing and Bone. They let them go and offer them the option to join the gang under the condition that they kill somebody. Sing tries to kill the Landlady with a knife, but it backfires when she chases after him. Sing recalls how, when he was a child, he bought a Kung Fu technique pamphlet, but while trying to save a deaf girl, he was beaten up by bullies, so he decided to become a criminal. Sing uses his lock-picking tricks to free the Beast from a mental asylum, who becomes the new boss of the Axe Gang. The Landlady and the Landlord fight against the Beast, and are assisted by Sing, who decides to become good. Sing develops huge martial arts skills, beats up the Beast and the Axe Gang, and teams up with the deaf girl again.

"Kung Fu Hustle" is a weird patchwork of a live action-cartoon and a homage to Kung Fu and martial arts movies, yet some it its perplexing choices make it feel as a stuipid comedy at times. A huge problem is the meandering-chaotic story which is hard to follow in the first half, as sometimes it's not quite clear why some characters do the things they do, nor why do some episodic characters appear only to disappear without any role in the storyline, but it does improve in the second half when it gets to a satisfaying conclusion. The director and writer Stephen Chow displays a whole array of wacky jokes, some of which are very funny (as kids play association football, one guy catches their ball, plays with, it and then "squashes" it; as the Axe Gang enters the field, a shadow of dark clouds "follows" them; the Landlady says that it's difficult to find a genuine Kung Fu talent, comparing it to finding one person in a million, so one wimp steps forward from the crowd and starts doing the lamest random Kung Fu moves to show off, saying: "He is right in front of you!", but then the Landlady just kicks him out of the frame: "No, he isn't!"), but some other scenes contradict them with their seriousness and harsh brutality (throwing an axe or a knife at someone; a criminal shoots a woman behind her back; bloody wounded victims), creating a disparate tonal shift. One emotional sequence is simply perfection, though, and gives a strong artistic anchor to the film: the main character Sing recounts how, when he was a kid, he wanted to save a little deaf girl with a lollipop from bullies, but was instead just beaten up from them, so he decided to become a criminal, thinking it's the only nature in the world. As he robs a candy cart on the street and takes money from a woman in the present, she tries to communicate with him using sign language, and he realizes she is the deaf girl from his childhood, and he became the very bully he despised, causing him to change his ways and become good again. Despite all the frantic martial arts choreography and elaborate gags, the said quiet and focused emotional mini-character arc involving Sing and the deaf girl overshadows everything else in the film.

Grade:++

Only When I Laugh

Only When I Laugh; comedy / drama, USA, 1981; D: Glenn Jordan, S: Marsha Mason, Kristy McNichol, James Coco, Joan Hackett, David Dukes

New York. After months in a rehab clinic, actress Georgia is finally released and sent back home, vowing never to succomb to alcoholism again. Her teenage daughter Polly moves in to live with her, and Georgia's friends, unemployed gay actor Jimmy and socialite Toby, support her. Georgia is shocked that her ex-lover, David, wrote a play based on their arguments, but she accepts to play the leading role. Georgia resumes drinking alcohol, and thus often argues with Polly. Jimmy is excited to get a role in a new play, but is then fired, whereas Toby's husband divorces her. Georgia is almost raped by a stranger she talked to in a bar, but escapes and has to hide her bruises. Polly moves out. However, Georgia accepts to have lunch with Polly and her dad.

"Only When I Laugh" was released right after the playwright and screenwriter Neil Simon was on a roll in the 70s with his film adaptations ("The Sunshine Boys", "The Goodbye Girl", "California Suite") and managed to promote his specific comic taste through his witty, snappy, tantalizing dialogues, but this film somehow marked the end of it. It consolidated an unwritten rule about inveresly proportional creative effort: as much as Neil Simon's scripts are greatly written, so much are they underwhelmingly directed. The director Glenn Jordan directs the entire film in the most bland, conventional manner, filming everything in medium shots and failing to insert some more visual creativity or ingenuity, which makes the film look old-fashioned. Some plot points were also left underused (for instance, James Coco's gay actor Jimmy always looks for a job, so wouldn't it have been nice for Georgia to hire him in a supporting role for her play? Wouldn't it have been good to connect Georgia's performance in the play with her arguing with her daughter and ex-lover in the finale?), but Simon accumulated so many effervescent lines and dialogues that its rate surpasses even his best films: "Getting healthy really gets you out of shape." / "Do you know how it feels to be turned down by a hemorrhoid commercial?" / "It is 90$ per tube. Do you notice how you never see a single pore on my face?" - "I've never even seen your face!" / "On prom night, I ran off to New York with a boy from my class." - "You never told me that before." - "You were never 17 before". The film is overlong and without a clear story, since it is a 'slice-of-life' observation of life, yet Simon's sharp dialogues are so good you enjoy crunching them down in your mind, and this translates to the characters who become alive and always feature a personality, from the main actress Marsha Mason up to Coco's Jimmy, like in the scene where he confesses that, if he could choose to be anyone in the world, his first choice would be A. Hepburn, his second choice L. Olivier "in his prime", and his third choice would be "anybody else but me".  

Grade:++

Raw

Grave; horror drama, France / Belgium, 2016; D: Julia Ducournau, S: Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Nait Oufella, Laurent Lucas, Joana Preiss

Justine (18) comes from a family of devoted vegetarians. She enlists at a student of a veterinary university, attended also by her older sister Alexia. Justine is annoyed that she was asigned a man as a roommate, Adrien, who claims to be gay. The older students enter the dorm rooms and evacuate the freshmen students, order them in a basement, and force them to eat raw rabbit kidneys, as a hazing ritual. After tasting meat for the first time in her life, Justine starts behaving eratically. When Alexia attempts to remove a depilation tape over Justine's genitalia, Justine kicks her, causing Alexia to accidentally cut off her own finger. Justine enjoys licking blood and eating the cut off finger. Alexia finally admits they come from a family of cannibals, and thus their parents raised them to be vegetarians as to not destroy their own lives. Justine wakes up and realizes Alexia killed Adrien. Alexia lands in prison, while the father tries to calm down Justine.

"Raw" is a dark psychological allegory on vegetarianism and the notion that sometimes some urges are better left untouched from fear that they might lead to self-destructive spiral going out of control. The story about a student girl who finds out her family are cannibals has some interesting points, but is drowned in bizarre Cronenberg-style scenes of "body-horror" which appeal more towards disgust and vileness, and less towards intelligence, similarly as the director Julia Ducournau's later shock film "Titane", whereas it doesn't reach some sort of a satisfaying point in the abrupt ending. The best sequences are in the first act, when the viewers observe Justine's annoyance with the hazing-rituals of freshman students at the university, going so far to pour blood over the students and force them to eat raw rabbit kidneys. One creative moment has the older students pouring blue paint over Justine, and yellow paint over a guy, and then ordering them to make out in an isolated room, and as the couple hug and embrace each other, their colors blend, "connect" and turn into green patches. The dialogues are banal, the writing is rather thin, whereas Justine's descend into unhinged thirst for blood has some rudimentary symbols for adolescence and coming-of-age, or maybe for an unleashing of perversion that subsumes a person's entire personality, yet needed better character development to entrench themselves more towards quality. 

Grade:+

Maybe... Maybe Not

Der bewegte Mann; comedy, Germany, 1994; D: Sönke Wortmann, S: Til Schweiger, Joachim Król, Katja Riemann, Rufus Beck, Armin Rohde

At a gala party, waiter Axel meets a woman and has sex with her in the toilet—where he is caught by his girlfriend Doro who thus decides to throw him out of their apartment. Now without a job and residence, Axel meets the vegetarian gay man Norbert and accepts to stay in his apartment. Norbert has a crush on Axel. When Doro finds out she is pregnant, she tracks Axel and makes up with him. After their wedding, Axel is back in her apartment, but randomly meets an ex-girlfriend, Elke, and decides to have sex with her in Norbert's apartment, while Norbert is persuaded to go with his friends to the cinemas for two hours. However, Elke gives Axel "bull power", a spray that increases the potency, but just randomly gives them hallucinations. When Doro goes into labor, Norbert takes her to the hospital. After the birth, Doro and Axel are again in a feud, while Norbert comforts him.

"Maybe... Maybe Not" once again seems to support the hypothesis that German humor is problematic and a little bit forced—which didn't hinder it in becoming the 3rd highest grossing film at the German box office, where it sold 6,600,000 tickets, and helped catapult its lead actor Til Schweiger into a local superstar. Back in the day, the movie caused quite a hype due to its theme of gay and straight men having a friendship, but from today's perspective, a big deal of that feature became normal in movies and TV shows, and thus the movie doesn't stand out anymore. The director Sonke Wortmann crafts a rather routine comedy about relationships, with only intermittently reaching a few truly funny jokes. It derives humor from awkward situations, but the problem is in the staged, contrived paths which lead up to them and don't feel like the characters got there naturally—for instance, the protagonist Axel goes back to the apartment of his ex-girlfriend Doro, and watches slides of her in the living room with his gay roommate Norbert, who suddenly tells him it's hot and thus he has to take off his clothes. Besides the peculiarly calm reaction with which Axel just accepts that a naked man sits next to him on the couch, just like that, for no reason at all, upon hearing that Doro is entering the apartment, Axel panics and hides the naked Norbert in the closet. Yes, it's all a set-up to have Doro think Axel is hiding a woman and having an affair, but wouldn't it have made much more sense that Axel would just tell Norbert to put his clothes on and simply tell Doro that he is just his friend hanging around with him? After 50 minutes, the story loses its course and feels kind of lost, but it does have a funny sequence where Axel's fling Elke gives them both an aphrodisiac spray, which just gives them wacky hallucinations, as Axel imagines seeing a turkey. Too chaotic, with several 'rough' and dumb jokes (Norbert imagining he is pregnant), yet it does display a few interesting observations about human relationships.

Grade:++

Inside Llewyn Davis

Inside Llewyn Davis; drama, USA, 2013; D: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, S: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Star Sands, Ethan Phillips, Robin Bartlett, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, Justin Timberlake, Adam Driver, F. Murray Abraham

Greenwich Village, 1 9 6 0s. Llewyn Davis is a talented folk musician, but nobody wants to hire him. His partner committed suicide, his manager has no gigs for him. Homeless, Llewyn sleeps over at the apartments of his friends, carrying only his guitar. His fling Jean tells him she is pregnant, and that he needs to pay for the abortion since she doesn't want to carry his child. Llewyn locks himself out of the apartment of a friend and unwillingly takes their cat with him on his trip to Chicago, with two other musicians, Johnny Five and Roland Turner. Llewyn sings in front of a manager there, but he rejects him. Back in New York, Llewyn decides to apply to be a sailor, but his sister threw away his license. Outside of a night club, he is beaten up by a man for making insulting remarks at his wife performing on stage.

Joel and Ethan Coen's 16th feature length film, "Inside Llewyn Davis" is a tragic and depressive contemplation on the bleak situation where a struggling artist is actually good, but still has no success. Through their cynical-sardonic approach, the Coens both show the title protagonist as a lost hero and the society as an uncaring, cold and indifferent system. One of the best sequences is the one where Llewyn goes for an open audition in front of a music manager (F. Murray Abraham), gives it his best and actually performs a really good, heartfelt folk song, but at the end, the manager just says: "I don't see much money in here". The message is clear: you don't just need talent, you also need capitalistic appeal to make it. It may be that the Coens sympathize with Llewyn as they themselves emerged from independent cinema and at first didn't attract a huge audience, despite critical acclaim of their films. The movie is too episodic and overstretched, without that tight sharpness from the Coens' best days, but some of their writing still yields great, sizzling dialogues, for instance when Jean is angry at Llewyn ("You are like king Midas' idiot brother!") or when Llewyn applies for a job of a sailor, and the official asks him: "Hey, you're not Huey Davis' kid, are you?", upon which a sarcastic Llewyn responds with: "Why not?!" The cat gives an emotional anchor to the meandering story where characters just come and go after five minutes, since the animal is a symbol for Llewyn himself in the scene where he accidentally hits it with his car.

Grade:++

The Trapp Family

Die Trapp-Familie; drama, Germany, 1956; D: Wolfgang Liebeneiner, S: Ruth Leuwerik, Hans Holt, Maria Holst, Ursula Wolff, Angelika Werth, Michael Ande, Knut Mahlke

Salzburg, 1 9 3 0s. Maria is a free-spirited nun and elementary school teacher in a monastery. She is ordered by her superior to go to the Trapp family mansion and be the nanny of their seven children. At first, Maria is shocked by the too strict widowed father, Georg, an ex-commander of the submarine division, yet it able to losen him up and cheer up the kids by allowing them to play, or by singing songs with them. Georg and Maria fall in love and eventually marry. They get a baby. Georg lends money to an anti-Nazi friend whose savings evaporated due to the economic crisis, but the latter commits suicide, anyway. Now broke, Maria decides to open a hotel inside their mansion. The two kids notice a singing contest in the city, and Maria enlists the entire family to sing on stage, where they win the first prize. As the Nazi dictatorship annexes Austria, the Trapp family rushes to the New York immigration center to try to get an asylum, following the promise of an agent who loved their singing. His boss doesn't want to sponsor the Trapps, but when they start singing, he is charmed and helps them to get an asylum in the US.

After the American remake "The Sound of Music" became one of the highest grossing movies in the US, many viewers retroactively gained renewed interest for the German original, based on the memoirs of Maria von Trapp. Similarly like in the US, "The Trapp Family" was one of the highest grossing movies in German cinemas, with a then record 27,000,000 tickets sold at the local box office, and it is fascinating comparing it to Wise's '65 remake. The first half is almost identical, since the heroine Maria (excellent Ruth Leuwerik, who even looks like J. Andrews) is such an energetic, happy character with a positive energy that she is able to solve any problem, and she is able to carry 90% of the film. Even at just the basic level, she simply has a fascinating life journey—from a nun, through a nanny for a widowed father with seven children, up to a wife. In the opening act, Maria is shown as an untypical nun, whistling in church or sliding down the handrail staircases, until she gets a new calling. The father, Georg, reveals his military background as he demands utter discpline and introduces his children by calling them through a whistle, as they march down to meet Maria. 

This becomes a typical story about a free-spirited person who loosens up a stiff group and awakens their liberty, obvious in the sequence where Maria orders the kids should throw away their uniforms, has the maid sew playing clothes for them, and when a madam protests, Maria argues: "And I can't stand how the children are treated here! So oppressed and unfree. Every village child has it better than them!" After their public performance on stage, Georg is angry and refuses any offer from the entertainment industry, leading to this exchange with Maria: "I actually accepted an offer!" - "Cancel it!" - "Alright. Oh, Georg, can one call the Chancellor at this time?" - "The Federal Chancellor?!" - "Yes, yes, we were meant to sing for him at the great reception...". The first half is comical, uplifting, and Maria is the leading protagonist, yet in the second half, the movie becomes more "grounded", dramatic and darker, as Georg suddenly becomes the main protagonist, when the story chronicles Anschluss and his shock at the Nazi dictatorship taking over so swiftly. Their choices aren't that simple anymore, and several problems and obstacles appear. Luckily, no musical sequences are present, since only the Trapp family singing on stage is shown. The direction is a bit simplistic and conventional, especially in the second half, yet there is simply something fascinating, timeless and universal about this story about the power of happiness that overcomes dark circumstances. "The Trapp Family" is one of those movies that are more endearing and sympathetic than they are high-quality—but even that means a lot sometimes.

Grade:++

Skoplje '63

Skopje '63; documentary, Croatia / Macedonia, 1964; D: Veljko Bulajić

The director Veljko Bulajic hosts an open screening of his documentary about the '63 earthquake that hit Skoplje, Macedonia, in front of the audience of survivors of said disaster. The movie shows the destroyed buildings in Skoplje; the international community sending airplanes with medical aid and food; the Yugoslav Army being sent to help find survivors under the rubble; people on the cemetary mourning their loved ones who died; the local community calling in people to try to identify unknown corpses without any documents; homeless people living in tents; workers starting reconstruction efforts and buildings new residential buildings; musicians performing on stage in front of the crowd. People live in barracks. It ends with new buildings being resurrected, announcing that the city will be renewed in '65, '66, '67.

Right after the disastrous '63 earthquake that hit Skoplje and destroyed over 70% of its buildings, the director Veljko Bulajic was contacted if he could make a film on the spot, and the result was this documentary that chronicles its aftermath. It starts off in a surprisingly creative, metafilm manner: the director announces a live screening of the film in front of hundreds of survivors in the audience, and then asks them to give their suggestions and complaints about the film so it can be amended. The opening credits start, consisting out of still frames of rescue workers saving people from the rubble. Then archive footage of people walking on the streets of Skoplje is shown, depicting life before the earthquake. At one point, as a group of women are marching on the street during 1 May, a man interupts the screening by standing in front of the screen, the film "freezes", and then one woman from the audience points at the scene: she recognizes herself in the frame, while the woman on the left is a certain Vaska Lazova, who went missing. At around 14 minutes into the film, there is an impressive sequence of dozens of brigadirs driving on trucks through the streets, observing destroyed residential buildings, in areas where almost nothing is left intact. The rest of the movie is strangely less interesting, sometimes even too routine, since Bulajic is somehow unable to extract some excitement, intrigue or engagement out of these scenes which only follow post-earthquake events. The final 30 minutes feel as if the movie is lost and doesn't know what to do with itself, showing only people walking on the streets, an especially the overlong 7-minute sequence of singers performing on the drums on stage, entertaining the audience, which has no place in the story and is suitable only for fast-forward button. "Skoplje '63" is thus one of those movies that are more valuable from a humanitarian than a cinematic standpoint.

Grade:++

Ode

Oda; documentary, Croatia, 2024; D: Mia Maros Živković, S: Mia Maros Živković

In the hospital, Mia is advised to have a laparoscopy, scheduled in three months. She is angry because her stomach is "her favorite part of the body", but agrees. Before the surgery, she must not eat anything for 34 hours nor drink anything for 24 hours. During the surgery, a benign tumor is removed from her abdomen, leaving three small stitches below the stomach. Mia chronicles her stay in the hospital bed and other patients in her room. She is released and sent back home.

Another creative coup from Kino Klub Zagreb, "Ode" is an excellent documentary about the director's personal and intimate experience with a laparoscopy in the hospital—even though it could have ended depressing, the author Mia Maros Zivkovic refuses to treat is as such and instead makes a creative, vibrant, unusual portrait with humor. The opening scene of a giant uterus lingering on the screen while Mia's words "Is it uncomfortable for you?" can be heard in the background, sum up her own feeling while waiting for a medical diagnosis and procedure of her abdomen. She uses several inventive details, from drawing a smiley sign on each of the three tapes glued over her three scars on the abdomen, up to depicting her feeling of a painful menstruation (an animated flow of a "red current with small sharp particles flowing through her"), allowing for a delicate depiction that outgrows just the clinical side of the story. One episode is interesting: Mia mentions a woman on the hospital bed left of her who was bizarrely diagnosed with both a normal pregnancy and an ectopic pregnancy at the same time, and thus the doctors gave her two options—a surgery "burns" the ectopic fetus, or a needle injects poison in the ectopic fetus, removing it, though both threaten to affect the healthy fetus in her uterus. Luckily, the woman's normal fetus was left unaffected after the surgery. Using the situation almost everyone will experience at least once in their life, Zivkovic was able to create a POV "video blog" of this situation in the hospital, creating a brave, honest, genuine and cinematically skilful film essay.

Grade:+++