Abbreviated by its cult fans as MST3K, this long-running comic sci-fi television series follows the adventures of a man sent into space by a mad, evil scientist. The unlucky space traveller—named Joel in the first few seasons, Mike thereafter—and his robot companions are trapped aboard the Satellite of Love, and are forced to watch Z-grade sci-fi movies. With nothing much else to do, they heckle the characters on screen and comment on the obviously completely awful quality of the acting, sets, effects, music and, most of all, the terrible writing.
Watching First Spaceship on Venus, Laserblast, Werewolf or the horrendously bad Future War with Joel, Mike, Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot riffing along makes for oddly fascinating and hilarious viewing. A 20th anniversary collection with those four feature-length episodes—spanning the series’ entire run from the late-’80s to 1999—is available from vendettafilms.co.nz, and includes an extensive three-part documentary on the series as well as 2008 San Diego Comic-Con panel material and trailers.
The horror director’s television series, which ran from for ten years from 1955, helped shape the modern TV crime drama. So, ultimately, Hitch can be thanked for Miami Vice, and blamed for David Caruso’s consistently terrible one-liners on CSI: Miami. You know the kind—he says them while taking off his Matrix-esque sunglasses right before The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” opens the title credits with Roger Daltry’s manic “YEEAAAAAAHHH!!”. Anyway, Hitchcock’s series was much better made than Jerry Bruckheimer’s franchise, although obviously not as flashy.
The half-hour show featured many well-known actors, including Joseph Cotten, Bette Davis, Charles Bronson, John Cassavetes, Walter Matthau, Steve McQueen, Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford and William Shatner. Yep, that William Shatner. Only about a third of the episodes were directed by Hitch himself, but all feature a sardonic opening monologue from the director in the style of William Castle, and an epilogue that functions mostly to wrap up plot lines, as the brief running time gave the writers little opportunity for narrative digression. The first season is available now from madman.co.nz in a deluxe six-disc set.
The titular duo of temporarily unemployable thespian alcoholics subsist in Camden Town, London at the tail end of the ’60s. Their apartment, more or less swamped by absolute squalor, is as cold, unforgiving and dispiriting as the drab, grey weather outside. So they swap one drizzly clime for another, and go on holiday “by mistake” to Withnail’s rotund homosexual uncle’s home in the countryside. That’s about the extent of the plot, but the film is filled with so many memorable, quotable lines that the story becomes a secondary concern.
Richard E. Grant, in his first feature film role, is superb as Withnail, as is Richard Griffiths as his uncle. Ralph Brown, who plays Danny, the drug-addled layabout who takes over Withnail’s apartment while they’re away, has some of the best lines, including: “You have done something to your brain: you have made it high.” The character recurs in Wayne’s World 2 as Del Preston, who rambles nonsensically in the most hilarious British accent about the time he, Jeff Beck and Keith Moon got Ozzy Osbourne “one thousand brown M&Ms” so he’d go onstage and why Keith Richards cannot be killed by conventional weapons.
This uproarious, unforgettable film is available in a special two-disc edition from vendettafilms.co.nz—with cover art by Ralph Steadman. It comes with a host of extra features including a half-hour retrospective documentary, Withnail and Us, and two audio commentaries.
Todd Solondz is a director perhaps best known for his 1998 film Happiness, a disturbingly bleak yet brilliantly comic film which takes pride of place near the top of lists like The A.V. Club’s “Not Again: 24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice”. His 1996 feature début, available for the first time on DVD, could almost sit alongside its successor—except that it aims to elicit many more laughs from the viewer, rather than just making him squirm. Richard Linklater’s landmark 1992 film Slacker had paved the way for Kevin Smith’s Clerks to be greenlit, which in turn opened the door for Todd Solondz to enter the independent film realm with Welcome to the Dollhouse, a daring coming-of-age black comedy that centres on 13-year-old Dawn Weiner, an awkward teenager in every sense of the word.
Relentlessly tormented by bullies at school, she becomes infatuated with the Jim Morrison-esque lead singer of her nerdy brother’s band, and her sister is kidnapped because Dawn deliberately forgets to give her a message from their mother. The soundtrack is a bizarrely compelling mix of rough-around-the-edges garage rock and selections from Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake. In many ways, the film can be read as a prequel to the 1988 ur-teen-black-comedy, Heathers, wherein Winona Ryder and Christian Slater conspire to eradicate—with bullets, and at point blank range—a high school clique made up of airhead bimbos who address one another as Heather. The world Solondz creates in Dollhouse is enveloped in the same sense of inescapable adolescent ennui and frustration as Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia and Jonathan Kaplan’s once-banned 1979 cult classic Over The Edge.
The critic and video essayist Matt Zoller Seitz, talking about the TV series Freaks and Geeks, noted that “adolescence [is] a period that grows rosy in the memory but sucks ass when you’re actually living through it.” To its credit, Dollhouse, like Geeks, has that morose ambience down pat.The film was universally praised by critics and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1996. Its brand of pointed dark humour reappears in Solondz’s remarkable but difficult-to-watch 2004 film Palindromes, which references Dollhouse with a title card that reads “In Loving Memory of Dawn Wiener.” Palindromes opens with Dawn’s funeral, revealing that she went to college, gained a lot of weight and eventually committed suicide.
Anthology films are commonplace in the anime genre. Perhaps the most notable recent collection is Memorîzu, re-released after the success of The Animatrix. Genius Party combines the talents of seven anime directors, each of whom has been involved in projects as varied as Akira, Steamboy, TekkenKinkreet, Perfect Blue and Cowboy Bebop.
Their films range from the weird, like Shinji Kimura’s Deathtic 4, which combines a steampunk attitude with Real Monsters-like visuals, to the sublime—like Hideki Futamura’s Limit Cycle, an enchantingly psychedelic meditation on life, the universe and everything that is a collage of still photography, computer graphics and manipulated traditional animation. There are no overarching themes—stylistic or otherwise—so it’s best to treat each instalment as a stand-alone short film, dipping in and out of the collection rather than watching all of them consecutively.
A second disc pairs animatics, storyboards and hand-drawn work-in-progress versions of the shorts with commentary from the director and lead animators. The sequel, Genius Party Beyond, is made up of five films that were not included in the original collection, and screened at the International Film Festival in July; it’ll be out on DVD sometime next year.
A collection of Family Guy cut-away scenes rescued from the cutting-room floor; each is about two minutes long and the disc runs about 50 minutes total. Almost all of them arrive at their punch line by way of an anthropomorphised animal or a rip-off of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon or Jim Henson creation. They represent some of the most crude, disgusting, unimaginatively-titled, offensive and defamatory vignettes MacFarlane has ever produced—a fairly inane series entitled “Sex with…” and an execrably bad bit piece called “Fred Flinstone Takes a Shit” are among the worst—and only about a third of all of them are funny. Sadly, it’s not hard to envisage most of these asides being incorporated back into the series when MacFarlane and his writers run out of gags and the show starts devouring its own entrails, Ouroboros-style, midway through its tenth season.
The best by far—because, paradoxically for MacFarlane, it contains no swear words and comes closest to employing subtle wit, something American humorists find almost impossible to fathom—is called “Backstage with Bob Dylan,” wherein the singer chats with Tom Waits, Popeye and Mohamed Ali. If you can’t envisage the joke, it’s on YouTube, along with a bunch of other Cavalcade scenes—and it’s not prefaced by nearly five minutes of unintentionally hilarious anti-piracy ‘warnings’ that double as self-promotional FOX adverts.
“This is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know up front: this is not a love story.” So proclaims the deep-voiced narrator at the start of (500) Days of Summer, the début feature by music video director Marc Webb. The protagonist, Tom, is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a rising star since breaking away from the “that kid from 3rd Rock” label with Brick four years ago. He’s a young man toiling away at a greeting-card company, with aspirations to be an architect and a mildly bleak outlook on life fostered by two things: a love for gloomy ’80s Mancunian pop—he wears both Unknown Pleasures and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” t-shirts, and listens endlessly to Morrisey’s bittersweet balladry—and “a total misreading of the movie The Graduate”. He also reads the essayist, novelist and pseudo-philosopher Alain de Botton, but whether that has any impact on his disposition is left unsaid.
Summer, played by the unfortunately now-typecast Zooey Deschanel, starts work at Tom’s company one day, and—for him, at least—it’s love at first sight. The conceit behind the parenthetical ‘500’ in the title is that Tom and Summer’s relationship lasts for that many days; the film flits back and forward between days, signalled by title cards that flick over like the flight announcement signage in airports. The story is therefore told out of order, in a way—except that it still ticks all the basic three-act ‘conflict–development–resolution’ storytelling boxes, and in that order too.
The soundtrack—like the characters’ costumes, and the film’s mise-en-scène—is calculated to appeal to a certain audience: Feist, Regina Spektor (twice), The Black Lips, The Smiths (also twice) Doves, Spoon, The Clash—and even an unexpectedly perfect use of “Quelqu’un m’a dit” by Carla Bruni help keep the story buoyant. Deschanel seems intent on showing off her singing skills any chance she gets—see also the recent Jim Carrey flop Yes Man—and here she fits in a syrupy karaoke rendition of Nancy Sinatra’s “Sugartown”. (As a bonus, the soundtrack CD includes Deschanel and M. Ward’s reverb-filled rendition of The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”.) Summer quotes Belle and Sebastian under her high-school yearbook photo, and Simon and Garfunkel make an appearance, too, through Webb’s carefully chosen quotation of the final scene of Mike Nichols’ The Graduate set to the achingly beautiful title track from Bookends; the lyrics couldn’t be more fitting, either: “Time it was, and what a time it was it was / A time of innocence a time of confidences.” Other filmic references include a re-playing of Fellini’s La Strada and Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel’s hilarious lampooning of Bergman’s Persona and The Seventh Seal that play when Tom goes to the movies. Tom’s spontaneous dance number in the middle of the second act is silly but enjoyable, and the spritely, piano-driven score, by Little Miss Sunshine composer Mychael Danna and basso profundo narrator-cum-co-composer Rob Simonsen, perfectly complements the film’s mood.
The writers, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, only have one prior credit thus far: the second instalment of the horrendous Steve Martin remake of The Pink Panther franchise. Without the constrictions of a prior story though, their abilities shine through: the slyly-implemented jokes are just crude enough to seem fresh, and the way the story is told is relatively original—at least in the romantic comedy genre. Webb’s hands-off direction and simple camerawork—the incorporation of 16mm Polaroid footage, for example, and his utterly brilliant use of dual-plotline split screen at a climactic point in the narrative—is not as flashy as might be expected given his background.
Any number of actresses could have played Summer—Olivia Thirlby, Jenna Malone, Emma Stone (the redhead from Superbad) or maybe even Ellen Page, for but a few examples—but only Deschanel can lend her the requisite chic, mid-’60s London mod vibe; only she could pull off that hairdo and the myriad little pale blue summer dresses the character wears—a different one every scene, just about. Similarly, only Gordon-Levitt could have played Tom; it’s nearly impossible to imagine any other actor of this generation in the role.
Chief among the film’s many surprising elements is its unconventional use of architecture. The film is set in Los Angeles, the most photographed city in the world, but what shines through is not the city’s messy tangle of congested sprawling concrete freeways but rather a verdant, hipster mecca Williamsburg-equivalent subsection of L.A., complete with neatly-maintained, meticulously-designed ‘vintage’ apartments with wrought-iron gates and spectacular views. The historic, exquisitely-designed Bradbury Building, used in the climactic scene of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, appears at the end of the film where it plays an architecture firm where Tom has an interview.
Throwing labels like ‘quirky’ and ‘offbeat’ at a film like this isn’t really helpful, as they wouldn’t stick. (500) Days of Summer might not appeal to everyone—that’s certainly not its ambition—but those who will really enjoy it have probably been anticipating its release for a while now, and for anyone else the trailer should help you decide pretty quickly. The only problem with the film comes at the end—but to explore that here would ruin the experience; suffice it to say that the world keeps on turning, and seasons inevitably change.
Diane Birch—Bible Belt (S-Curve Records, 2009)
Review by Hugh Lilly
Diane Birch moved around a lot when she was growing up—her father, a pastor, was born in South Africa, and the family moved from Michigan to Zimbabwe, and then Australia, when Birch was still in elementary school. At age 10, the family moved back to the US and settled in Portland, Oregon. They were deeply religious—to the point of not interacting with their secular neighbours; thus Birch grew up with little knowledge of pop culture or music outside of the classical repertoire—she learnt to play the piano by ear from age 7—save for church hymns and gospel songs.
It’s not in the least surprising, then, that her début album would be drenched in a gospel sound—Mahalia Jackson and Joan Armatrading loom over the record like spiritual aural Godmothers—but there are numerous other influences as well. Her first foray into popular culture—what she described as losing her “musical virginity”—was seeing the music video for “Bad” by Michael Jackson, which ignited in her “a sort of primal mystery” that cast its spell over her “like never before or since.”
“I stood there watching in complete disbelief,” she recalls. “I remember the feeling so vividly: ‘Was this a real human? What was he wearing? Was he the devil?’” She soon branched out and discovered The Carpenters, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles and, judging from the influences stamped on the record, soul music and the mid-’70s singer-songwriter Laurel Canyon sound—Joni Mitchell, James Taylor et al.
But perhaps one of her biggest influences would come from the opposite coast: Brooklyn-born songstress Carole King released her ground-breaking masterpiece Tapestry in March of 1971, after almost a decade of success writing for The Drifters, The Crystals and Dusty Springfield, among others, in the Brill Building. The rock critic Robert Christgau says about the landmark record that it “liberated [the female voice] from technical decorum”.
On Tapestry, King re-tooled a song she had co-written for The Shirelles, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and made a massive impact with the soulful, era-defining “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Too Late”. King’s influence on Birch is evident on nearly every track, from the opener “Fire Escape”—which builds from a basic, Dusty Springfield-esque vocal to a pleading, rhapsodic waltz soaked in Rhodes piano and lavish strings—to the closer, “Magic View,” a quiet piano ballad that sees Birch also incorporate the vocal stylings of Sia Furler, the Australian singer who rose to prominence through her work with Zero 7—and, to top it off, there’s a hint of the raspy curl of Beth Gibbons, the lead singer of Portishead.
Another white girl with bangs, and someone the blog Brooklyn Vegan once called an “indie sexpot,” Jenny Lewis took a break from her band Rilo Kiley in 2006 and joined up with The Watson Twins to make one of the best albums of the decade, Rabbit Fur Coat. Replete with a multi-tracked call-and-response gospel choir sound, and brushed with a touch of country, the record alternates between sad songs and songs that are genuinely—but beautifully—depressing. While Bible Belt doesn’t share the same morbid fascination lyrically, there are occasional echoes of Lewis’ style in Birch’s voice, and there are similar themes: Lewis’ religious upbringing figures prominently in songs such as “Born Secular” and “Rise Up With Fists!!”
“Ariel,” the standout track on Bible Belt, echoes early Elton John both superficially in its single-word-man’s-name title—à la “Daniel” and “Levon”—and more tangibly in Birch’s double-tracked vocal delivery, which imitates John’s nuances—particularly at the end of phrases and in the bridge passage. But while it might be melodically reminiscent of early-’70s classics like “Tiny Dancer” and “My Father’s Gun,” the song’s lyrics have obviously been written with our digital age of instant, always-on social networking in mind: “I got news today that you’re go see the Great Wall of China / I guess I’ll see all the pictures on your page… / Does it hurt more to lose you or to love you baby / Or does it hurt more to look at you on my screen?”
Not every track is flawless, though: the Michelle Branch-esque “Mirror, Mirror” has an awful easy-listening commercial gloss to it, and will probably enter regular rotation on The Breeze radio station about a year from now. Elsewhere, “Photograph” is largely forgettable, but is redeemed by a brilliant gospel-inspired coda; “Valentino,” “Choo Choo” and the lead single “Rise Up” are all jaunty, brassy hymns that unfortunately lack a solid core but are enjoyable nonetheless. Birch’s gospel penchant is again indulged on the rambunctious “Don’t Wait Up,” and “Forgiveness” is a sublime horn-filled odyssey with a superb, pulsing bass line and jubilant backing chorus.
A number of critics have erroneously compared Birch to Stevie Nicks; while the Fleetwood Mac lead singer is arguably an aesthetic influence on Birch—not least her imitation of Nicks’ mid-’70s Charlie’s Angel’s-like hairdo—there’s no basis for a musical comparison. Birch has a significantly warmer, more rounded, soulful and upbeat tone to her voice; the only possible point of comparison would be Nicks circa 1973/74 on the album Buckingham Nicks—but even then, before she all but destroyed it with copious cocaine consumption, Nicks’ voice was enveloped in a pronounced Arizona twang.
Birch wrote every track on the album, and the production—by the R ‘n’ B singer Betty Wright and the same engineer who propelled Joss Stone toward stardom—is second-to-none. This is particularly obvious on “Nothing But a Miracle” and “Fools”; in the background of the latter, the session musicians, including Patti Smith’s guitarist Lenny Kaye, tool about splendidly.
Bible Belt encompasses a wide range of influences and sounds—and, perhaps most remarkably for a début, showcases just as wide a range of soulful vocal styles. The record is an auspicious, praiseworthy first album from a massively talented young artist who deserves to be thrust head-on into the spotlight, however reluctantly she might greet it.
Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock has it all: a motel commandeered by a band of hippies, an extravagant music festival, an experimental theatre troupe, and Liev Schrieber in a dress. Why, then, does it leave audiences wanting more? Hugh Lilly explains.
Woodstock was an era-defining event; it’s the yardstick to which all future music festivals try and measure up. Forty years ago, half a million grass-smokin’, guitar-totin’, probably somewhat smelly hippies descended upon the town of Bethel, New York, and enjoyed three days of “peace, love and music” on Max Yasgur’s farm, in the process defining the mood and moral outlook of their generation. At least that’s how the story goes. A new film by Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm) tells the story of a motel owner’s son and the mob that overtook his parents’ motel for a weekend in July 1969.
Taking Woodstock is not about the music, a subject already well-documented in Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 film, but looks rather at the hundreds of millions of people who flooded into upstate New York through the eyes of Elliot Tiber (né Teichberg), an aspiring interior decorator and heir to a run-down motel in Bethel, NY, whose book of the same title formed the basis for the film’s script. Teichberg, using his position as head of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, allowed Michael Lang’s Woodstock Ventures company to take over Bethel, a town on the opposite side of the Catskill Mountains to Woodstock, after the nearby town of Wallkill killed his buzz by denying him a permit.
The film opens in a flat, anaemic mood as Lee laboriously establishes all the characters with gratuitous exposition and sets the tone. Demetri Martin, a painfully unfunny—supposedly ‘quirky’—stand-up comic, plays Elliott. His wooden appearance and staccato line delivery make the character far more anxious than is necessary; only at one point—sliding around in the mud mid-trip on the Sunday—does he look comfortable in the role. Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood) and Kelly Garner (Thumbsucker) appear momentarily as a couple who give Elliot his first acid tab; the ensuing trip inside the couple’s VW Combi van is about as clichéd as has ever been committed to film. Not only is it a bore to watch, but it obscures the one thing everyone came to see: the performances on stage.
Music seems to function only as background noise in the film. Danny Elfman’s flaccid, wallpaper-like score that oscillates between dull acoustic tinkering and pandering psychedelic flourishes seems pointless—why not just use contemporaneous tracks from the era, the kind of songs people expect to hear in a film about the world’s biggest music festival? If Lee had no intention of ever showing the stage, why not at least compensate by having some of the music punctuate certain scenes? To be fair, there is one shot which uses a Crosby, Stills & Nash song to great effect—although the only reason it seems so enjoyable is because the audience is denied anything else, starved for any kind of musical sustinence.
The script is full of problems—clunky dialogue and the like—but its major problem is that it allows certain plotlines to simply evaporate. Why show us Liev Schrieber in full drag, announce his ambition to be a dedicated, tough-yet-benevolent ambisexual security guard—and then have him disappear? Why have Elliott kiss a man in a bar, and never again explore his blatant homosexual leanings, except for a brief moment waking up next to a man after the festival? Similarly, Emile Hirsch’s continuously stoned shell-shocked Vietnam veteran is relegated to the sidelines of the film, only to appear briefly every so often in cartoonish manner, making his portrayal just a notch above “despicable caricature”. Elliott’s mother, a neurotic Jewish woman, is given the same treatment, appearing only at opportune times to remind the audience that she’s a money-grubbing, strict matriarch who deserves respect.
One of Taking Woodstock’ssaving graces, though, is its cinematography: Lee takes 16mm footage from Wadleigh’s original film and meticulously matches it with recreations of scenes; his use of split screen—partly in homage to Wadleigh—and the few Steadicam tracking shots in the film are perfectly constructed. Emanuel Levy is superbly cast as the farmer Max Yasgur, as is Elliot’s father Jake, played by the British TV actor Henry Goodman.
Let down by a poorly-articulated story and some acting as tremendously boring as the décor in the Teichberg family’s motel, Taking Woodstock has little to offer in the way of entertainment, and if it’s music you’re after you’d be better just putting on a record or watching the original documentary. If you’re really adventurous, go out and get the new six-disc anthology Woodstock 40 Years on: Back to Yasgur’s Farm—it’d be a far more rewarding trip.
UP Pixar’s latest spectacle tells the story of Carl Fredricksen, an octogenarian who ties balloons to his house and flies away to South America, a place he and his late wife wanted to visit together. But Carl’s life is made difficult by Russell, a kid who, while trying to get his ‘assisting the elderly’ Boy Scout badge, stows away on his front porch. Hilarity ensues, in typical Pixar style. Although the film is obviously aimed at children there’s much for all viewers to marvel at and while UP doesn’t have anything on the studio’s crowning achievement thus far, last year’s WALL●E, it is nonetheless enjoyable on multiple levels.
Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino’s marauding band of Nazi-scalping Basterds, comprised of Brad Pitt, B.J. Novak and Michael Fassbender—and assisted by the torture porn director Eli Roth as Sgt. Donny Donowitz, ‘The Bear Jew’—face off against Col. Hans Landa, played in a star-making turn by the Austrian television actor Christoph Waltz.
Daniel Brühl (The Edukators) plays a German actor starring in a Nazi-glorifying film that will première at a Parisian cinema operated by Shoshanna Dreyfuss (the beautiful Mélanie Laurent, De Battre mon Coeur s’est Arête), a Jew hiding in France whose family is brutally executed by Landa in the film’s first scene. The Basterds conspire to bomb the theatre, in the process killing every upper member of the Third Reich in attendance, including Hitler, while at the same time Shoshanna plans to burn a gigantic pile of highly-flammable nitrate celluloid negative film.
Tarantino exposes his cinephilia here more than in any other of his films to date; Inglourious Basterds is a film more about the cinema, and the explosive power it wields, than about the Holocaust, World War II, or anything else. In the film’s final shot, Brad Pitt stares straight down the barrel of the camera as he looks upon a freshly-carved Swastika in a Nazi’s forehead—a signature of his—and remarks, “This might just be my masterpiece.” Well, Quentin, it just might be.
竊聽風雲 (Qie Ting Feng Yun/Overheard) The Hong Kong film industry has long punched above its own weight, and was one of the largest in the world for much of the 20th century. However, this status has faced major challenges in recent years: greater competition from the emerging film industries of its neighbours; depressed economic fortunes following the Asian Financial Crisis, and the increasing popularity of Western movies amongst the rising Hong Kong middle classes.
Nevertheless, films like Overheard show that Hong Kong may be down but not out. The film reunites director Alan Mak and writer Felix Chong, the makers of the stunning Infernal Affairs trilogy, and centres on a police taskforce monitoring illegal stock trading activities. Mak and Chong have successfully assembled an all-star cast, bringing together Sean Lau Ching-Wan—a mainstay of Hong Kong cop television and movie dramas—and his long-time collaborators Louis Koo (Protégé; Election I & II) and the incredibly versatile Daniel Wu (The Banquet; Shinjuku Incident).
Sadly, due to my assumptions based upon the fantastic casting and production team, I was disappointed. While the cinematography uses the limitations of Hong Kong’s tight urban sprawl to tremendous advantage, the plot simply had one too many clichéd twists and turns. While I would heartily recommend the film as a taste of modern Hong Kong cinema, do not enter expect an equal to Infernal Affairs. (Oliver Woods)
UP IN THE AIR is an irritatingly dry study of an utterly boring character. Also, stupidly misplaced use of "Angel in the Snow". /cc @nictate—8 hours ago
Recent Comments