Month: July 2016

Written and directed by ‘Six Feet Under‘ writer Jill Soloway, Afternoon Delight follows the relationship between Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Jeff (Josh Radnor). Their relationship is a little lacklustre, they’d much rather live their lives through social networks and even their sex life has dried up. In attempt to kick-start their relationship they go to a strip club, Rachel meets 19 year old stripper McKenna (Juno Temple), and the carefree attitude of McKenna captures Rachel’s curiosity.

Rachel returns to the scene of the crime in an attempt to find out more about McKenna. After sharing a coffee together things escalate quickly when McKenna is suddenly made homeless and Rachel moves her into the family home, introducing her to friends and family as the new nanny! Nothing can go wrong, right?

Afternoon Delight is described a comedy drama, unfortunately it seems to be 80% drama, which buries the mere 20% of comedy. What comedy there is largely comes from the smart mouth of Rachel, her thoughts on the world, her continual references to current social media and her ability to cope when giving back to the community through volunteering.

Juno Temple does a great job as McKenna, the sober living stripper who turns a lot of heads. Her character progression is pretty obvious – never move a stripper into the home of a struggling marriage! Her influence on both halves of the relationship is interesting.

‘How I Met Your Mother‘ star Josh Radnor seems to phone in this performance, he seems to spend most of the film in a fog. His character Jeff is a somewhat accomplished Apps salesman (see, it’s current!), but most of the ideas his wife suggests seem to bore him, all he wants to do is put Percy in the playpen.

Overall Afternoon Delight is mildly entertaining, it’s not really a comedy and there’s no laugh out loud moments. Heck, it seems to be a theme of some indie comedies that they always end up with women crying. I advise against purchasing but suggest waiting and watch the film streaming off Netflix, Amazon etc. instead.

2/5

Director Jonathan Teplitzky delivers a feature length film based on the autobiography of Eric Lomax. Who is Eric Lomax? He calls himself the Railway Man. Our story initially starts with Eric (Colin Firth) discovering his life partner, Patty (Nicole Kidman) on a train. Cut to the wedding day after their whirlwind romance we find out that Lomax suffers from a severe case of Post-traumatic stress syndrome triggered from his service during World War II.

Patty attempts to find out more about Eric’s troubled past, so she meets with his close friend and war buddy, Finlay (Stellan Skarsgård). Finlay reveals that he and Eric were technicians stationed in Malaysia when they were captured by Japanese forces and put into POW Camps. The Japanese forced them to build the Thai-Burma railway line north of the Peninsula of Malaysia.

Without going into too much detail, Finlay reveals to Patty that a key figure from Eric’s is past still alive and resides peacefully in Malaysia. Eric and Patty travel to Malaysia seeking closure from the horrific events, but Eric’s mind is set on vengeance.

This is a heavy film! Witnessing the tortured past of Eric Lomax, all I could think was that this actually happened! Hollywood heavyweights Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Stellan Skarsgård and Hiroyuki Sanada all knock it out the park. I felt that they were the right team needed for this, it needed strong veteran actors to carry these performances. There would be no point attempting the same story with the likes of Pitt, Jolie, Cruise, Chan etc. Sure, it would probably make $100 million, but instead they brought us actors that had some miles on their clock, actors able of giving credible performances. The performances from the “cast in the past”, Jeremy Irvine and Sam Reid – playing the young adult versions of Eric and Finlay – also manage quite well. That said, some of the young officers do ham it up with some very, very British accents that just seem overly forced!

I almost can’t say anything bad about this movie, it’s a truly remarkable story. But the film itself does seem to run a little long, Teplitzky could just be letting the story simmer, with all of us knowing what the pay off will be, we know what was going to happen, but they needed to make us wait.

Special Features don’t go much further than a handful of interviews with the cast and crew. They question Firth’s thought process, on how he met the real Eric Lomax etc. Nicole Kidman receives a similar set of questioning, meeting the real Patty, listening to her telling of the tale and how she made sure to bring these small emotional cues and implement them into her character for key scenes of the film.

Overall a wonderful story and a basic DVD. But, it’s all about the movie for me.

3/5

Surprisingly not terrible… well, not terrible, it’s actually not bad… wait, wait, wait, this is actually pretty funny… and it’s actually really good! That ladies and gentleman is my thought process over the 90 minutes running time of Wong Tsz Ming’s Badge Of Fury. The film stars Jet Li, Wen Zhang and Michelle Chen as a trio of mismatched cops. Li plays Huang Fei Hong (sounds familiar right?) the veteran super cop whilst the young Wang Bu Er (Zhang) thinks of himself as THE ultimate super cop, and he is pretty special but 90% of the time he’s a total idiot. Guiding these two is Angela (Chen) a female inspector who is leading the case of the dreaded Smiley Killer.

Chief suspect is young actress Liu Jin Shui (Liu Shishi) as all of the victims happen to be her ex-partners. Digging a little further we are introduced to her older sister Yiyi, a real heart breaker; graced with supermodel looks and rather outstanding assets, this has led to many of her sister’s men grovelling at her feet.

Then we have their cousin Liu Jun (Stephen Fung) who does his best to help his cousins as well as care for his paralysed uncle. It’s up to our trio of crazy cops to get to the bottom of the grinning murders and all the clues are pointing to the Liu family! This is a comedy right?

Badge Of Fury is a rollercoaster of a movie, initial impressions from the trailers clearly made this film seem very cringeworthy and it seemed insane that Jet Li would be a part of it, but after watching the movie, I completely get it – this film must have been an absolute blast to film!

Understandably the zany cartoon comedy mixed with CGI and wire-work will annoy many, but it grows on you, and it suits characters like Wang Bu Er. The film also knocks occasionally on the fourth wall poking fun at actors, for example Huang Fei Hong’s reaction when he’s told that people pirate kung fu movies starring Jet Li.

The amount of notable old school kung fu actors making appearances in the film as well was personal highlight for myself, when Wang tails Yiyi they find a courtyard filled with ageing martial artists from the likes of Lau Kar-Leung to Fung Hak-On. Leung Siu-Lung even has a role in the film, not quite matching the bar he set on Kung Fu Hustle, but it was great to see him on screen once again.

Overall it’s like City Hunter for this decade; it’s zany, comical, it’s got villainously buxom females and the action is kick ass!

4/5

Motorway follows the story of two traffic cops, Cheung (Shawn Yue) is the fast paced rookie determined to impress his supervisors and Lo (Anthony Wong) is the seasoned veteran who is counting down the days to sweet, sweet retirement. These two cops become entangled in a case where Cheung is left in hot pursuit of a getaway driver that has haunted Lo in the past. The felon gets away with breaking a known triad out of prison. With the duo now planning a string of robberies, Lo takes it upon himself to teach Cheung that there’s more to driving than what’s under the hood.

Soi Cheang, a director of whole string of gritty crime thrillers (most recently the excellent Accident) essentially takes the drive-in route with Motorway. Not that I’m saying that’s a bad thing, Motorway is a good film, but strangely straightforward. We have the main plot, the clichéd subplot and a very throwaway attempt at romantic storyline.

Lead actors Shawn Yue and Anthony Wong are faultless, both of them do great work here – the main story is interesting with some predictable twists. The supporting cast includes appearances from both Gordon Lam and Josie Ho as higher ranking officers. The car chases are good, choreographed by seasoned action directors Char Kar-Lok and Wong Wai-Fau; the chase scenes taking place in the multi-storey parking garage and the mountains are both gripping and well thought-out.

Special Features on Arrow’s DVD release include roughly one hour of Behind the Scenes footage of almost every scene being shot, with the majority of the footage concentrating on how they constructed and later filmed the chase sequences. We see director Soi Cheang and action choreographer Chin Kar-Lok working out every moment and angle with the actors on set. It may be the only extra on the disc, but you can’t argue with a near hour’s worth of English subtitled footage.

Overall I have to say that Motorway is a good movie, but it’s not reinventing the wheel when it comes to car movies and cop movies to be honest. Although it should be said that we are quite lucky to see it being released in the UK at all, not enough Hong Kong cinema reaches these shores anymore. Sure, it has a very generic cover art which does the film no justice, but let’s be thankful that we get to see this film in the first place!

4/5

Oh In-mo (Park Hae-il), a failed director and a failed husband, who is left in debt, finds himself flirting with suicide. Upon fashioning his noose, he receives a text from his mother inviting him for lunch – he accepts her offer and takes it one step further and decides to move in. Upon his return we’re introduced to his older brother Han-mo (Yoon Je-moon), a useless ex-con who spends his days sleeping on the couch. When he finds out his big shot director brother has moved back, he tries his best to get him out.

The brothers soon put their quarrels aside however and find solidarity when their younger sister Mi-yun (Kong Hyo-jin) and her teenage daughter Min-kyung (Jin Ji-hee) move back home after leaving her second husband. With all of these miserable, arrogant siblings under the same roof, their mother must be a saint, right? Well, it turns out that she too has some skeletons in her closet.

Song Hae-sung, director of Failan, delivers his vision of the South Korean dysfunctional family as based on the novel by Cheon Myung-qwan. In a nutshell, Boomerang Family is an amusing, but inadequate family drama. I couldn’t find any real laugh out loud moments in this film, the family is very dysfunctional, and there are some comical cringeworthy moments, but for most part the film is a real downer. You can only really sympathise with the mother, played by Youn Yun-jung. The story does its best to make us feel sympathetic for Han-mo, the first half of the film portrays him as a loyal family dog, but later ruins that image by turning him into a pervert in need of redemption.

The film just didn’t pay off for me as the story goes into the latter half, the twists in the narrative feel a little overbearing and when they spring the surprise happy ending, it didn’t leave me with that warm feeling.

This review is coming across a little negative; did I enjoy any of the film? Of course! I admit there are some great moments with the family; the uncles tormenting their niece for pizza is very amusing. But the moments of solidarity between the siblings is the most entertaining. When the sister starts a fight in a restaurant against a group of guys and the brothers immediately come to their little sister’s aid is quite pleasant to see, and their mother’s reaction in the car coming home afterwards sums it up perfectly.

When it comes to the Special Features on this DVD release we are spoiled! Boomerang Family was the closing film of the 2013 London Korean Film Festival and we’re shown footage of the closing ceremony with Youn Yun-jung, Yoon Je-moon and director Song Hae-sung. We’re also treated to a Q&A after the film as well as an interview with the director and the cast while at the festival. It’s well over an hour of special features which also includes a brief “Making Of” feature, as well as the standard movie trailer for the film.

Overall, I was mildly disappointed with Boomerang Family, but don’t let my review turn away any keen Korean cinema fans out there! Watch it, form your own opinion and tell me I’m wrong!

3/5