Wednesday, September 11
The currywurst is locked and loaded. I just chugged a Coke Zero. Let's do this.
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ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY
First of all, this movie is absolutely gorgeous to look at. The cinematography, the colors, the cartoonish special effects. In some ways, i feel like the effects are fulfilling the promise made by the 1977 Japanese cult classic House, a promise that no one wanted back then but has finally gotten its due. House is fun because it looks cheap and amateurish; Escape from the 21st Century is fun because it makes that style look slick and professional.
I'mma just need to gush about this movie from front to back, it might be my new favorite thing.
It takes place on another planet, Planet K, which has evolved similarly to Earth. It's basically Earth. There's just occasional wild shifts in lore so that we can have some weird stuff, as a treat.
It starts out with a teenager climbing a water tower to write his name at the top. His friend hands him an umbrella to use as a parachute, which fails predictably, and he falls straight to the ground. Then the entire water tower crumbles. It's like a live-action Looney Toon. This sets the tone immediately.
The two teens and a third friend then need to respond to a challenge from another boy at their school, which turns into a full-on anime-style brawl. At the end, they're defeated, and thrown off a cliff into a dangerous chemical spill, which gives them the ability to time travel. Every time they sneeze, they are transported between 1999, where we started, when they are teenagers, and 2019, when they are in their late 30s, and all of their lives have gone to shit.
Despite how light-hearted and fun this movie starts out, as it goes on, it does get darker. For as silly as it starts out, it has a lot of depth and heart, and has to deal with a lot of hard emotions. The action scenes are also incredible.
I have to do it, though.
***SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT (HIGHLIGHT TO READ)***
I have to talk about the core theme of the movie. There's definitely a lot of grief at the heart of it. Overall, in the end, even with the power of time travel, and knowledge of the future, as hard as the three friends try, they can't change the past. They have to learn to keep going forward, keep growing as people, and live each day trying to become the best that they can. They have to accept their own faults, their mistakes, and the things that were beyond their control. And just keep living.
That's it.
That's.
Something that i am very susceptible to right now.
Anyway it does have some fat jokes which i didn't really appreciate, so it's not quite perfect. But still.
***OKAY I'M DONE SPOILING THAT ONE***
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Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
The trailer for this one looked absolutely bonkers, and the film mostly delivers on that. It is much more grounded in reality than Escape from the 21st Century was, and seeing two back-to-back Chinese action films with such wildly different tones was a nice variety.
All in all, i would've rather seen them in the other order, though, i think.
I was also very excited about this one because one of the main villains is played by Sammo Hung. My Monday night gaming group has shifted to watching old Jackie Chan movies instead of playing games most of the time lately, so we've seen a lot of young Sammo in the 70s and 80s, and always as a clumsy, bumbling hero.
Seeing him now, in this dark, gritty modern crime drama, now in his 70s, playing a ruthless, irredeemable Triad boss is kind of jarring. But he nails it.
I don't know how much i really enjoyed this one, though. It's a lot of action, right from the jump, and it's all shot in shakycam, with shots lasting less than a second. I mentioned the Paul Greenglass effect previously, when i was talking about how badly Dark Match screwed that up. It's better here, for the most part i can still tell what's going on, most of the time, but it's not perfect. It had me yearning for a bit of the old-fashioned Jackie and Sammo style, where the kung fu plays out in long, wide shots so you can see exactly what's going on and where everybody is at all times. I've come to prefer that.
The movie takes place in the 1980s in the Kowloon Walled City, and makes full use of the setting. You do really get a sense of the city as a character, like this story couldn't take place anywhere else, which is a thing i've been looking for in movies lately. There are several locations where you can see walls have been roughly torn out, and for a while i was wondering if that was meant to be taken literally, that those walls actually aren't there, or if it's just a visual shorthand for us being able to see into multiple rooms at once, for story purposes. In the final battle, a bunch of characters end up jumping through one of these open ceilings, though, so no, in the end i determined that that's literally what it looks like. It does fit with everything this film has told us about Kowloon Walled City. I don't know what it was actually like there; in the real world, it was torn down in 1993, and i don't feel like we in the West are told much, or anything, about it. I've been watching more Hong Kong films lately though, so maybe i'll learn a bit more.
The action does get a bit grating after a while, mostly because of the way it's shot. The fight scenes just go on for so long, and without a good sense of geography sometimes, and where it's too dark to be able to tell who's even hitting who sometimes, it becomes tiring.
I'm also a bit unsure how to feel about the character King. While the action is, yes, often over the top, with characters being flung through walls or dropped from great heights, only to get up and keep fighting, the film is otherwise pretty grounded in reality. It's no different than other modern action movies that way, like, say, the Mission: Impossible franchise. People always seem indestructible in those movies until the plot demands they're not.
But King is literally indestructible. Completely invincible. Metal pipes break over his head, he laughs it off. Knives snap when he's stabbed. Punching him is described as "like hitting a brick wall." The only explanation we get is that he "has the power of spirit."
I don't know. This feels like too far of a stretch.
Overall, pretty good though. I liked it, but i didn't love it. May or may not watch again.
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And that concludes the Berlin Fantasy Filmfest! I had a good time. I guess if i'd known how the festival worked ahead of time, i might have made different decisions here. Like, it's just one screen, movies play one after the other; if i had known, i might have purchased a full festival pass, gotten here four days earlier, and just parked my butt in the seat and seen everything.
Maybe next year?
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