The Man from Nowhere review

 Number 417 on the top 1000 films of all time is the 2010 Korean neo-noir action-thriller 'The Man from Nowhere.'

Cha Tae-Sik (Won Bin) is a pawn shop owner with a dark past. When his only friend - the ten year old So-Mi (Sae-Ron Kim) is kidnapped by gangsters, he will stop at nothing to get her back.

If there's one thing I've learned from my experience of watching Korean films is that they do not do anything by half-measures. They go in hard with their use of stylised violence and slick fight choreography. Sure, at times, it's over-the-top and even cheesy, but it's still entertaining enough to watch.

At the heart of our action story we have the psychologically-damaged, former black ops soldier Tae-Sik and his touching relationship with the young, innocent So-Mi. The old cinnamon swirl being undone by the cute kid certainly isn't a new idea, but if done, well, it's certainly entertaining to watch. And it was well done here.

Won Bin gave a measured performance taking Tae-Sik from the darkly mysterious loner to an all-out action here. Similarly, So Mi's relationship with her junkie mother is so damaged that it's understandable seeing her latch onto a father figure like Tae-Sik.

If anything I would say the villains weren't as well-developed as they could have been. Tae-Sik was fighting against a series of gangsters running a lethal organ-harvesting operation. There were quite a few of them and they all blended into one after a while.

Overall, the Man from Nowhere, was exactly what it said on-the-tin - an over-the-top, no holds barred K-Thriller.

Clerks review

 Number 421 on the top 1000 films of all time is Kevin Smith's slice-of-life comedy film 'Clerks.'

Clerks follows a day in the life of best friends supermarket cashier Dante Hicks (Brian O'Halloran) and video shop employee Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson,) as they navigate the challenges, customers and struggles of their own personal lives.

I've been fortunate enough to have never worked a retail job. There is no shortage of stories entailing the horrors of working with the general public. It is for that reason that I failed to properly connect with this film. Not to mention, it just wasn't funny.

I had my first chuckle at minute seventeen, my second at minute twenty-nine and I don't think there was a third. If a comedy film only makes you laugh twice in its ninety-minute run time then it has failed. It didn't help a lot of the humour was immature and juvenile.

It also didn't help that the main characters weren't characters I wanted to laugh with or at. Dante is constantly bemoaning how he wasn't supposed to be working that day, but was called in to cover a colleague's shift. At the film's conclusion, Randal correctly admonishes him on his self-pitying behaviour. Yet by this time I had grown weary of both characters. Randal's immaturity was equally annoying.

If I were to say anything positive, it would be about Kevin Smith's vision. He directed, produced and wrote a critical and commercially successful film for a miniscule budget of $27,000. To cut costs, he filmed in black and white, cast his friends and set the film in the video store where he worked during the day. His efforts worked as the film went onto gross almost $4,000,000. All credit to Kevin Smith.

Clerks was not a film that landed for me. It was funny with annoying, unlikeable characters.

The Chorus review

 Number 415 on the top 1000 films of all time is the 2004 German-French-Swiss musical drama 'The Chorus.'

Clement Mathieu (Gerard Jugnot) is a failed musician and teacher starting at the notorious Fond de l'etang French boarding school for delinquent boys. Once there, he is shocked by the headmaster Rachin's (Francois Berleand) tyrannical methods. To instil some discipline and morale, Mathieu decides to turn the delinquent boys into a choir.

If you look past the predictability and cliche, this was an enjoyable enough film.  It's a film that has been done many times before - arguably better too - especially in Dead Poet's Society. Jugnot was no Robin Williams, but he was certainly charming enough as the bumbling, but well-intentioned teacher turned choirmaster. And Rachin was no nurse Ratched but he made for a slimy and scary villain.

Yet it was difficult to look past the cliche. Mathieu is trying to desperately reach his students, so he turns them into a choir. Without too much arguing they quickly and fall into line. I found this all a bit too convenient. I understand the boys do need to agree to be part of the choir for the film to work, but it's difficult to believe they wouldn't have resisted this idea more at first.

The boys themselves were more underdeveloped in comparison to the adult characters. You had Pierre Morhange (Jean-Baptiste Maunier) who despite being one of the best singers is very badly behaved because of a vague troubled homelife, Pepinot (Maxence Perrin) forever waiting for parents who will never come and the hot-headed Mondian (Gregory Gatignol) whose side purpose is to create conflict rather than being a fully-formed character. Most of the boys felt like rough stretches than proper characters.

The film also felt directionless. I couldn't see the end goal for Mathieu's choir. This wasn't like the Blues Brothers when they were trying to stop their childhood orphanage from being closed down. I thought Mathieu would enter the boys in a singing competition or use them to secure more funding, but other than a showing for an investor, there was little else at stake.

The Chorus was certainly an entertaining film, but only entertaining. It was too predictable to be anything more.

Do the Right Thing review

 Number 409 on the top 1000 films of all time is Spike Lee's coming-of-age comedy-drama 'Do the Right Thing.'

Mookie (Spike Lee) is an African-American living in a rough Brooklyn neighbourhood. All he wants from life is to make enough money from his pizza delivery job at Sal's pizzeria so he can support his family. However, on an excruciatingly hot day, racial tensions between Sal (Danny Aiello,) and his sons Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edson) and the other African-Americans in the neighbourhood including Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) and Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito) a man who fancies himself the next Malcom X. As a race riot threatens to break out, Mookie is forced to pick a side.

Do the Right Thing is just another film in a long list tackling one of the US' most pertinent issues: race relations. The US is known as the greatest melting pot playing home to people from all over the world. It's only natural that some of those people might not like each other as is the case here.

The deeply racist Vito resent working in an African-American neighbourhood and believes they should be with their own kind. Meanwhile, the African-American community doesn't like that white-owned businesses at the heart of their town. They believe there should be black businesses instead. It's a powder keg waiting to blow.

Another theme that Lee is explores is police brutality - another issue that has plagued the US for decades. Do the Right Thing was dedicated to Eleanor Bumpers, Arthur Miller Jr, Edmund Perry, Yvonne Smallwood, Michael Stewart and Michael Griffith - with the former five having been killed by police and the sixth by a white mob. Only a few years later, Rodney King was beaten and I do not have the necessary computer memory to write the name of every single black person who has been killed by the police in the last twenty-five years, except for one of the most notable: George Floyd.

Spike Lee tackles both of these subjects with his stylistic flair - think bold colours, razor-sharp dialogue and all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Sure you can argue that he was exploring themes too important not to tackle head-on, but this exploration was incredibly on the nose. One scene has the different characters speaking directly to the camera, as they monologue racist insults about different groups of people. Sure this racism might be accurate, but its depiction was heavy-handed.

This isn't to denigrate the acting of those involved - least of all from Spike Lee as the lead Mookie. Giancarlo Esposito was also good as the political cognizant Buggin Out - it was amazing to think this was the same man who wowed audiences in Breaking Bad. But the standout star had to be Danny Aiello who received a well-earned Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Initially, Sal is nothing more than hard-working Italian-American who often plays the mediator between his deeply racist son Pino and the black customers. However, not even the good-natured Sal can only keep his demons at bay for so long before he is driven too far on an excruciatingly hot day. Unlike Pino who overly hates blacks, I think Sal was a lot more level-headed, but, like the other characters, he fell victim to the simmering racial tension.

John Turturro was also very good as Vito. He gave a multi-layered performance, as one of the more openly racist characters of the film. It would have been all too easy to have written/portrayed him as a one-dimensional Italian-American "moolie" hating greaseball, but he was more three-dimensional than his.

But I would like to say one thing quickly. Why in these films do you always have the black characters being racist to the East Asian, or in this case, Korean characters? The local supermarket is ran by a Korean couple who are often the subject of racist taunting by the black characters. It was something similar to Menace II Society. Perhaps it was Lee's commitment to realism, but it didn't make his characters very endearing.

However, 'Do the Right Thing,' was a memorable and stylised, if heavy-handed, exploration of two issues that have plagued American society for decades. What was the right thing that Sal and Mookie should have done? Who knows?  

Dogville review

 Number 295 on the top 1000 films of all time is Lars Von Trier's 2003 experimental drama Dogville.

Grace (Nicole Kidman) is a fugitive trying to outrun both the mob and the law. She stumbles into the small mountain town of Dogville, Colorado. At the behest of the town's moral leader Tom Edison Jr (Paul Bettany,) the town's people reluctantly decide to take her in. However, Grace quickly learns that their kindness comes at a steep price. The huge ensemble cast includes Stellan Skarsgaard, Lauren Bacall, Philip Baker Hall, Patricia Clarkson, James Caan with John Hurt providing narration.

Dogville was highly experimental. Was it an experiment that worked? I'm not so sure. Reminiscent of black-box theatre, it was filmed on a minimalist stage-like set. Instead of buildings, there are chalk outlines. Instead of backdrops you have black or white walls. As the name would suggest it was like being in a black box. Although this tradition is common in the theatre, it is rare to see in film. I don't think it translated well.

The minimalism is designed to highlight the story and acting, but it just came across as pretentious. Too much was left to the viewer's imagination. it was like one of those restaurants that gets you took cook the food yourself. This is the chef's job, not the diner's.

Due to the natural limitations of the theatre, the Black Box style works well. But film is a different medium. You can have sets and film on location. There's no reason to have a minimalist style.

What really hurt the film was John Hurt's god-awful narration. It was overly-expository and one of the worse examples of telling, not showing. It was like I was reading a badly-written book with John Hurt telling me the characters were looking around or acting scared or being morally bad - which the characters then repeated. Not faulting John Hurt, of course, but this narration made me roll my eyes.

The film is also divided into nine chapters with title cards denoting when they started. It was like if I wanted to read a book I would have just read a book, not watch a film. When the ninth title said the film would be ending soon, I cheered loudly. This isn't the reaction you want your audience to have.

The dialogue was also eye-roll worthy. Honestly, I don't know how Bettany and Kidman delivered it with a straight faces. One cringe-worthy, innuendo-laden conversation saw Tom Edison Jr telling Grace that you can't plant seeds in the winter. Ew. Much of the dialogue steered toward the more-is-less mindset like I was watching a Shakespearean play.

As you might expect from a Von Trier film, it utilised elements from his own cinematic style of Dogme 54 including the hand-held camerawork. In a different film, this might have made things more intense, but alas it could not save Dogville.

Although the beginning and middle were slow and ponderous, it did build toward an unexpected and thrilling conclusion. The mob finally tracks Grace down to Dogville where we learn the mob boss (James Caan) is her father. Grace ran away from them after being sickened by their violent nature. Yet her father insists that she is hypocritical acting like she is morally better than everybody else when that could be furthest from the truth. 

Having spent much of the film's second act being bullied by the townspeople, she soon realises they're not much different from the mob. At the gentle encouragement of her father, she agrees for all of them, including the children and her would-be lover, Tom, to be shot dead. This was a dark, twist ending that I did not see coming. It also separated Grace from Von Trier's more naive female protagonists in Breaking the Waves or Dancer in the Dark.

Dogville was like a failed science experiment. Maybe it could have worked as a stageplay, but it didn't translate to film. Instead, it was boring, overly-long and just plain pretentious.

The Fall review

 Number 404 on the top 1000 films of all time is the adventure-fantasy film 'The Fall.'

In 1915 Los Angeles, stunt man Roy Walker (Lee Pace) is hospitalised after a stunt gone wrong. In hospital, he forms an unlikely friendship with fellow patient, eight-year-old Romanian girl Alexandria  (Catinca Untaru) who is recovering from a broken arm. He entertains her with a wild and fantasy tale about a rag-tag group of rebels to team up to kill a common enemy, but he has an agenda of his own. 

Although I understand respect director Tarsem's vision, The Fall didn't land for me. This was because of the story-within-a story format. Other films such as the Chinese Wuxia Hero also employ this format, but they only work if the framing story is as interesting as the secondary story.

This was not the case for the Fall, where the secondary story was infinitely more interesting than the framing story of Roy and Alexandria in the hospital. Yes, their relationship was cute and touching, but it didn't quite resonate for me.

*spoilers*

Roy has a dark secret. In exchange for entertaining Alexandria with these stories, he asks her to steal morphine for him. Ostensibly, this is to help him sleep, but he actually intends to commit suicide. His beloved has left him for the actor he was doubling for. Now he now longer wants to live. This was suitably tragic with Pace and Catinca giving good performances, but this framing story lacked the same forward momentum of the supporting story.

It also lacked the same, great visual style. Our B-story sees a range of quirky characters including a masked bandit, a silent Indian warrior, an ex-slave, an Italian explosives expert and Charles Darwin. They all team up to take revenge on a governor who has wronged them all. The fantasy land they inhabited was marked by bold colours and a distinct look - similar to the Chinese Hero film.

I do think this was just a case of a film not working for me, Obviously, The Fall is held in high regard, the IMDB fan base voted it as the 405th best film for a reason, but alas I was not one of those fans.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

 Number 403 on the top 1000 films of all time is the Romanian drama '4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.'

Set in Romania in the waning years of Communism, we are introduced to friends and college roommates Otilla (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasilu.) When Gabita has an unexpected pregnancy, she asks her friend to help her obtain an abortion. However, due to Romania's draconian Decree 770 that largely outlawed abortion, this is far easier said than done.

I have seen almost seven hundred films on IMDB's 2015 edition of the top 1000 films of all time. Yet this is the first film that I've seen so explicitly address the topic of abortion in such a frank and open way. I'm not even referring to the IMDB list, but films full stop. 

This is because abortion is the epitome of a hot-button issue - probably even more so now due to the US Supreme court overturning Roe Vs Wade in 2022. I suspect this was one major reason why this film was not nominated for the Best International Film Academy Award. I think this snubbing was down to the academy not being ready for this conversation.

Yet this is a conversation that director Christian Mungiu forces you to have whether you want to or not. much of the film consists of long takes where audiences have to watch and engage with the film. There's nowhere else to look.

Gabita makes a number of unwise decisions that imperils both her and Otila. The pair even have to sleep with the abortionist to ensure his cooperation. Naturally, this strains their relationship and we see its disintegration in uncomfortable detail. The long takes focus purely on Otila, as she chastises her friend.

Another long take sees Otila at the world's most awkward family dinner. She's supposed to be celebrating her boyfriend's mother's birthday, but instead they are all blissfully unaware of the inner turmoil she is facing.  With the uncomfortable long take, it's difficult not to feel what Otila must have been feeling at that time.

Arguably, the film's most shocking scene was the thirty-second long take of the aborted feotus, probably shocking due to its rarity on-screen.

4 months also brilliantly addressed the theme of womanhood and femininity. Too many conversations about abortion and women's bodies are made by men. However, there the script is correctly flipped. All of the important relationships take place between women while the male characters are relegated to supporting roles. Otila and Gabita's friendship is always at the centre of the film, as it should be. Both actresses excelled in the lead roles.

4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days might have been an uncomfortable film to watch, but it was an necessary one too. And without doubt it was unfairly snubbed by the Academy.