Japan Cuts 2016 Preview

Along with New York Asian Film Festival, Japan Cuts has become the cultural institution, a must see event in New York Summer tradition. Celebrating its amazing 10th year, the contemporary spread of the choicest Japanese cinema again opens its doors to the salivating public for two weeks at Japan Society. This year's lineup includes a new film from the always controversial Masao Adachi (Artist of Fasting), a couple from ever prolific Sion Sono (Love & Peace, The Whispering Star), a couple from Gakuryu Ishii (Burst City, Bitter Honey) and many more. More so than NYAFF, I find many gems that will eventually end up in my top films list at Japan Cuts every year. And this year is no exception. Japan Cuts 2016 runs July 14 - 24 at Japan Society. Without further a do, here are my take on some of the films presented this year.

Mother, I've Pretty Much Forgotten Your Face

Michiro Endo, once the frontman of Japanese punk group Stalin, turned 60 in 2011. He decided to travel all around Japan and make a movie. Turning 60 in Japan which is called called kanreki, has a special meaning. They consider the birthday as a the day of your rebirth. That you are a newborn into the world again. While touring and performing solo and with a group, Fukushima happens. Being a Fukushima native and hasn't visited his mother regularly, Endo journeys back to his hometown with a Geiger counter. With other musicians, Endo creates Project Fukushima! and launches the festival on August 15, 2011. 'Japan suffered 2 atomic bombs (in August 15), and one nuclear meltdown- the latter one was our own fault' Endo explains, 'that maybe the way we led our country after the war wasn't really right.' The festival was not to make Fukushima another place with forever negative connotation.

Mother is a documentary of not only a poignant personal journey but a hopeful reflection of Japan after such national disaster. Endo cites small radio stations popping up amidst disasters, connecting people, young and old, people getting together and influencing each other. He's still kicking ass on stage though, with his guttural, expletive filled screams against imperialists, parents and capitalism still resonate. The documentary also showcases the beauty of Japan in different seasons as Endo travels around.

Artist of Fasting

Masao Adachi, one of the key figures of the Japanese New Wave and definitely the most radical of the bunch, had to live most of his adult life in hiding because of his associations with the Japanese Red Army, a radical communist student group which took up armed struggle in Lebanon. Even after extradited to Japan in 2000 on some trumped up passport violation charges, the controversial writer/director still kept on making films. His turbulent past has been a subject of many adoring western filmmakers over the years (It Maybe that Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve, dir. Philippe Grandrieux and Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, dir. Eric Baudelair). At age 77, marooned forever in Japan (Japanese gov refuses to issue him a passport), he turns his attention to contemporary Japan, the country in the midst of prolonged economic stagnation and reeling from Fukushima, where the militarism he was so opposed to is once again rising.

With that background, Artist of Fasting is a full blown, not so subtle protest against Japan's rising militarism than a movie, equipped with the footage of the Fukushima disaster, dying third world children, war atrocities, etc. His 'pinku eiga' background also comes to the fore with schoolgirl nudity and rape which will surely raise some eyebrows of modern movie going audiences. Appropriating Kafka's The Hunger Artist, Adachi tells a parable of a misunderstood man: our silent hero (Hiroshi Yamamoto) decides to sit down in the middle of the shopping district and fast. He is a non-emotive man, an empty vessel that everyone can reflect their desires upon. He soon becomes a media sensation and thoroughly exploited by 'entertainment' industry which puts him in a cage adorned with the infamous 'rising-sun' flags for arousing nationalistic fervor. The film ultimately raises a big middle finger to powers that be- current Abe government, religion, media, military, yakuza and just about everyone.

Burst City

Without Gakuryu Ishii's seminal Burst City, there wouldn't have been no Tetsuo: The Iron Man, no Wild Zero and no Japanese cyberpunk culture for years to come. With his new film Bitter Honey playing at this year's Japan Cuts, this cult classic is making a North American theatrical debut and is a not to be missed! Never mind its almost incomprehensible narrative. But there are enough metal attire and rusty weapons to give you tetanus just by watching it. Starring who's who in punk rockers of the day (The Rockers, The Roosters, The Stalin, etc), this frenetic, handheld filmmaking is a dizzying mixture and excess of energy, attitude and absurdity, recalling anywhere from Mad Max to Rebel Without a Cause. It's mad fun!

Bitter Honey

A fantasy love story set in post-war Japan, Gakyuru Ishii's Bitter Honey is a beautiful accomplishment in filmmaking. Loosely based on Saisei Muro's book of the same name, the film tells an old dying writer Saisei (Ren Osugi) and his very unusual muse, Akako (Fumi Nikaido), a goldfish named after her bright red color. Living with his bedridden wife for 19 years, Sai finds an inspiration in the company of child-like Akako, a ¥300 goldfish he bought from a sage-like fishmonger (Masatoshi Nagase), who says the fish has an ass like "Brigitte Bardot". Their love is consummated by her being swallowed whole by Sai, then swimming back up to his mouth. There are many double entendres to be had in her torn tail and him fixing it with his saliva and what not. But Ishii keeps everything classy with immaculate period set design, slick camera movement and fully committed acting from both Osugi and Nikaido. This balance is the key success of Bitter Honey.

Nikaido, always in her red dress with long billowy tail, prancing around making funny faces, somehow makes this muse of a writer who-is-a-goldfish work. She is naive, coquettish, emotional, defiant and more. Her Akako turns out to be a writer's creation he can't control. She turns out to be a thoroughly three dimensional character.

It was his psychological thriller Angel Dust that introduced me to Gakuryu Ishii (then Sogo Ishii). His masterful formalism and haunting images made an indelible mark in my brain. Bitter Honey is filled with equally stunning imagery. Coming from an underground punk filmmaking, Ishii came a long way to direct such a mature and masterful film without ever losing a sense of wonder.

The Actor

Ken Yasuda plays the title role, a bit actor named Kameoka. He is one of those actors who you might recognize from countless movies but don't know the name. But Kameoka is a hard working fellow, whatever the role he takes - in yakuza or samurai films, he gives it all. His craft always gets recognized by his peers and filmmakers alike. When it comes to his work, he is a real professional. But he is a lonely, quiet, single man in life. After meeting an attractive single mother (alluring Kumiko Aso) at her small restaurant while on on the road for a film shoot, Kameoka has to reconsider what it means to be an actor in his own life.

It's good to see Satoko Yokohama's work again. Her goofy, good natured and highly original Bare Essence of Life was one of my favorites from Japan Cuts 2010. Here again, her unhurried, low-key film about an actor going about his life is completely unpretentious, agenda-less experience. There is nothing meta about The Actor despite its movie(s) within a movie premise, or actor playing an actor playing an actor. Veteran TV actor Yasuda with his sad, well-worn clown face gives a fine tuned, melancholic performance. It's his likability that makes the film. And we can't stop rooting for Kameoka's awkward attempt at romance. Even with the use of stage and goofy rare projections, nothing juts out in The Actor. Everything is well-rounded and tranquil. It's also very hard to categorize Yokohama's film one way or the other. It could be seen as many things or could be very simple. There are many humorous moments in this film. Albeit hushed, never laugh out loud funny but the gentle film puts a big smile on your face. I guess can be called a dramedy that puts a big smile on your face the whole time you are watching it. Yokohama is a rare, distinctive voice in a current Japanese cinema.

Three Kings

El cant dels ocells/Birdsong (2008) - Serra






Albert Serra's minimalistic approach to a semi-literary figures doesn't really concern itself with its subjects much. The star of his films are its surroundings - the changing weather, drifting clouds that casts shadows upon what's below, the light and darkness. Shot on beautiful black and white, Birdsong tells a story about three kings crossing the desert and sea to pay tribute to the birth of the son of god. On their way, they complain about the rocky terrain and uncomfortable sleeping arrangements. Since everything is shot outside, Serra completely depends on the daylight. When the sun goes down, we can hardly make out the three figures. It's like Three Studges road trip on foot, only the presence of a short haired angel in cassock reminds everyone that this is the story of biblical Three Kings. Once they get to their destination, at the foot of Mary and the humble stone house in nowhere, the music swells, giving some sort of energy. But it dies down. Joseph says something about fleeing to Egypt before the Romans come, and it's time to go home for the trio. They talk about their absurd dreams in the woods while angels watch down from a tree. Beautiful, delightfully minimalistic, Albert Serra is one of a kind filmmaker.

LA Paranoia

The Invitation (2015) - Kusama

As far as the paranoia thriller goes, The Invitation makes the grade. Will (Logan Marshall-Green) with his girlfriend (Emayatsy Corinealdi) are on their way to a dinner party thrown by his ex, Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her husband David. It's a reunion of sort with close friends who lost touch with one another over the years. The dinner party is all polite and cordial and stuff. There are two strangers who are present at the party too - a wild girl Sadie (Lindsay Burdge) and Pruitt (John Caroll Lynch, doing his usual creepy serial killer type), the recent acquisition by Eden and David. They met in Mexico and are following some sort of religious group. The dinner party is hampered by David showing everyone about a video of a dying woman surrounded by other members of the group, saying death is a natural thing and whatnot. Will, already on-edge about the whole dinner party with his ex whose child they shared died in some freak accident, questions David and Eden's weird motives - locking the doors, metal grate on windows and such. Then Pruitt tells a horrible story of him killing his wife and spending time in jail. At this point, party is really awkward and uncomfortable. But time and time again, Will is proven to be wrong (the door's locked and windows shuttered windows because of recent home invasion of the neighbors) and his doubts and outbursts were seen as him being completely out of the line.

Kusama does a great job building tension throughout the film. It seems that loss of a child is the basis of vast majority of horror movies or clutch for some melodrama these days (let's see...what could be the most traumatic thing that can happen to a grown up? Death of an offspring!!). So Will and Eden suffer from the pain and guilt of losing their son and whatnot but they are trying to get over that in their own way or whathaveyou. But the film's yet another sinister take on the city of Angels, a cautionary tale that can be grouped with Mulholland Dr, Starry Eyes and the recent Refn flick, Neon Demon. The Invitation is a thoroughly enjoyable ride.

Master Filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, 1940 - 2016

Abbas Kiarostami, an Iranian master filmmaker, passed away from gastrointestinal cancer in Paris today. As an avid fan of his humanistic, genre transcending films, I can say with a certain conviction that we've lost one of the greatest artists in the world of cinema.

It was his film, Taste of Cherry, winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Fest in 1997 that introduced poetic, meta-fiction laiden Iraninan cinema to the world and put many Kiarostami contemporaries (Jafar Panahi, Asghar Farhadi, Moshen makhmalbaf) on the world cinema map.

But it was seeing one of his Koker trilogy, Wind Will Carry Us, that was a watershed moment for me in my cinematic education. I've never seen such a humanistic and poetic cinema before and the film made me scramble for anything Iranian afterwards.

Over the years, even though his films were never overtly political (although they could easily be seen as Iranian sociopolitical fable), he found filmmaking increasingly difficult within Iran under the government censorship. I reckon it was exactly that transcending subtle artistry that fooled the censorship for a long time. Thankfully for us, it resulted in two international productions - Italy set Certified Copy in 2011 and Japan set Like Someone in Love in 2013.

I had an honor and pleasure to interview Abbas Kiarostami in 2013 when his film Like Someone in Love played at NYFF. As expected, he was the warmest, wisest, humbliest, most thoughtful artist I've ever encountered in my short career as a film critic.

Kiarostami was not only a film director, but a renowned poet as well. Succinct and deceptively simple, his poetry was very much akin to his cinema or vice versa. Ill leave you with one of his short poems from his book of poetry walking with the Wind, published in 2002:


My interview with Kiarostami

Rest in Peace, master.

Los Angeles Eats Itself

The Neon Demon (2016) - Refn

Once again, in David Lynch's absence, NWR carries the torch, delving more and more into flashy, neon-colored abstraction. If Lynch is a true artist creating certain mood with set design and texture (I'm grossly simplifying his artistry, forgive me), Refn is all about the use of lights. Still abiding by a thin narrative, he creates gothic fantasy/nightmare filled with the notion of beauty, fragile innocence and narcissism. The Neon Demon can easily be dubbed as Los Angeles Eats Itself, literally.

The paper thin story revolves around Jesse (Elle Fanning), a beautiful High School dropout from bumfuck nowhere in LA. Living out of a skeeziest motel, run by a menacing, predatory man (Keanu Reeves at his sleaziest- Refn's genius in casting), our wide-eyed ingenue is at first a bunny in a wolf's den. She befriends a pretty makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone) who introduces her to LA modeling scene. Jesse knows she can make money off of her looks. Her natural beauty soon finds her fame and causes her meteoric rise and in doing so accumulates number of enemies. Soon her success gets to her head.

Refn has grown as a visual artist. His use of shapes, namely triangles in this film, is pastiche of 70s psychedelia or 80s rudimentary video games than actual symbols with meaning. They trigger a certain uneasy mood. Some of the images here are really striking and unforgettable yet again, devoid of any meaning. One might argue that all these are empty symbols and skin deep but so does the subject Refn portrays. Just like Lynch's Mulholland Dr., the parodying LA is not the main draw here. It is certainly imbued in its view, but artistically it's much more. The Neon Demon is very much like a Dario Argento film in his haydays. You have to enjoy it for its aesthetics and mood. Let it wash over you and you will be richly rewarded.

When Desire Trumps Over Fear

Stranger by the Lake (2015) - Guiraudie

A beautiful lake in the woods is the background for this simple yet effective thriller. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), a good looking gay man comes to the lake, cruising, like many other men looking for a casual sexual encounter in the bushes. One man catches his eye. It's rugged, tanned, sexy mustachioed Michel (Christoph Maou). But it seems he is taken, as Franck has a run in with him in the woods while Michel is busy 69ing with somebody. Days go by, same routine and they share meaningful glances. Then even before they hook up, Franck witnesses Michel drowning the man he hooked up with previously. Perhaps the attraction is bigger now. He is falling in love.

The film's done with such a subtle minimalist grace, it has a neutralizing effect in its graphic depiction of gay sex. Franck got the bad case of desire over fear even though the result might be deadly. It's a great filmmaking.

The Krays Story as Comedy

Legend (2015) - Hegeland

The Krays, the notorious twin gangsters in swinging 1960s London are played by Tom Hardy. Ronny is the crazy homosexual one and Reggie is the smooth operator type. I don't know how truthful the Hegeland's script is to the true event, but unlike its gritty, more abstract the 90s predecessor by Peter Medak, simply called The Krays, Legend charts the more conventional narrative and plays out more as a comedy, not as a psychological drama. Even with its sporadic violence, the brothers never come across as scary. With his naturally nasally voice, Reggie resembles a torn down, romantic version of his Bronson performance while his Ronnie, always speaking his indecipherable, I-have-pebbles-in-my-mouth mumble is close to his Bane. Considering that they were identical twins, Hardy/Hegeland's decision to portray them completely separate is an odd choice. But it's always fun to watch Hardy. Legend comes down to Reggie being a faithful brother's keeper, even if that causes their eventual doom.

It gets more and more tiresome to watch films by so called Hollywood screenwriters. Hegeland has nothing much to offer other than relying heavily on Hardy's charm, so he insists upon meaningless/completely unnecessary voice over device by Reggie's young wife (Emily Browning). But all in all, it's a well crafted Hollywood movie with a lot of good British actors.

NYAFF 2016 Preview

Alone - Park

A hilly, labyrinthine shanty town in Seoul is perhaps the biggest star in Alone, a thoroughly intriguing Hitchicockian mystery by Park Hong-min. It starts out with a POV shot of our photographer protagonist Su-min (Lee Ju-won) on all fours scrubbing the blood splatter on the linoleum floor of his photo studio. Then we cut to him witnessing a woman bludgeoned by masked men from a faraway rooftop through his camera. The men notice him taking pictures, give him a chase and catch him. Then right before they kill him with a hammer, we cut to the next scene, where now naked Su-min wakes up at night in the same neighborhood. So begins his descent into a purgatory filled with suppressed childhood memories and guilt and shame of a ne'er do well artist. 

Comprised with mostly a handful of long handheld sequences, Alone is an amazing feat from a technical standpoint. But its thin narrative stretches out a little too long. But its Escher like intricate narrow staircases and alleyways are a site to behold as they reflect the mind-scape of our protagonist perfectly. It's a great intriguing puzzle piece by the first time director Park. 

Hamog (Haze) - Jover

Filipino writer/director Ralston Jover's Hamog (Haze) starts with 4 street urchins of Manila slowly waking up in a discarded giant concrete pipe near the filthy river. The little one keeps insisting that they go swimming. And you instinctively go, oh god, not another third world poverty porn. But what's great about Jover's gritty film besides stellar acting by its little protagonists, is its unpredictability. 
The kids subsist their living on stealing from drivers who are stuck in monstrous city traffic by distracting them as a team. After one such job, Jinky (Teri Malvar), the only girl in the group, gets taken by the angry taxi driver. Then another job cost them the life of Mo, the youngest. It's Rashid (Zaijian Jaranilla) who takes on the responsibilities of giving a proper burial to his friend. In the mean time, Jinky is pushed into a domestic servitude for the taxi driver and his always squabbling wife. But he has other ideas for Jinky to do. Jover concentrates on the strength and the resilience of these kids instead of depravity and ugliness of the streets. Shifting point of view affords Malvar and Jaranilla to shine in their respective roles. It’s a film with a huge heart that takes viewer to unexpected places. A great little film.

The Tenants Downstairs - Tsuei

This sleek, black comedy, based on a book by Taiwanese celeb writer Giddens Ko (You are the Apple of My Eye, Cafe. Waiting. Love) about a passive peeping tom, quickly devolves into a mayhem- murder, incest, sodomy, cannibalism, etc. Hong Kong superstar Simon Yam, speaking Mandarin here, plays a landlord of an apartment complex occupied by- a divorcé with a young daughter, a haughty office worker, a P.E. teacher who loves her, a gay couple and an online gamer.

At first, it is business as usual, through hidden cameras in each apartment, the landlord monitors comings and goings of the each occupant with occasional sexual gratifications, but always from a distance. Everything changes when a comely mysterious new tenant, Yingru (Shao Yu-wei) moves in. With big bulky suit cases adorning the living room seemingly unpacked, Yingru's calm demeanor lures our landlord in to her apartment to snoop, only to discover her American Psycho style habits (complete with a clear plastic raincoat).

They develop an unspoken understanding after she suggests him to set himself and others free from daily routine of ordinary life. So the landlord starts actively messing with the tenants' lives. Pitting them against each other in the most sinister, vile ways, he relishes in his god-like power.

The Tenants Downstairs is depraved, dark comedy that questions the true human nature. Tsai Ming-Liang's regular Lee Kang-sheng also stars as an older gay tenant whose love life becomes a little more complicated by Yam's character's shenanigans.

What’s in the Darkness - Wang

The film is an interesting melding of a serial killer genre and a coming-of-age story set in the early 90s rural China. Su Xiaotong shines as Jingjing, a curious Middle Schooler on the cusp of puberty. While her college-educated, but ineffectual police officer father grapples with unsolved murders of women (possibly by a serial killer, marking his victims with a cross sign on their upper thighs) in their small town, Jingjing slowly learns about opposite sex and how to behave in a society that is still steeped in old ways. It's the 90s China which is still a very conservative, authoritarian society where the country's one-child policy is bearing a new generation of bratty, insolent children.

With this complex backdrop, What's in the Darkness gives up being a police procedural in the middle since the police has no clue on what's going on. Instead the film concentrates on Jingjing's life, as she juggles the school, working at an old folks home, attentions from boys and her clueless parents. Bong Joonho’s Memories of Murder comparison is unavoidable and it’s a hard film to measure up to. But except for some technical issues and pacing, the film is a commendable fine first feature by first time director Wang Yichun.

Ten Years - Au, Ng, Chow, Kwok, Wong

It's hard to believe the handover of Hong Kong from 150 years of British rule back to communist China took place almost 20 years ago, in 1997. As one of Asia's biggest economic powerhouses, the peaceful handover of HK signaled the beginning of China's rise to the global economic superpower status. So what happened to 7 million Cantonese speaking Hong Kongers? After the initial jitters, the things have been relatively quiet. So the West largely ignored and have forgotten the fact that it was as much a cultural annexation as a political, economic one.

Reflecting the uneasy mood of many inhabitants of HK after massive sit-in demonstrations against Beijing's restrictive electoral reform in 2014, known as Umbrella Revolution- a non-violent, pro-democracy protests, 5 filmmakers envision what if scenarios in varying degrees of plausibility in 2025 Hong Kong, where ethnic minorities are used as a pawn for the political gain, housing shortage pushing people into self-sacrificing artifacts, speaking Cantonese is discouraged or worse, self-immolation is contemplated and acted upon as a political statement and children starting to spying on adults.

Ten Years is a contemplative, sobering reflection of what Hong Kongers are feeling now. No wonder it beat out Star Wars: Force Awakens at the HK box office last year and is banned in China.

You don't need to leave to see the world

The World (2004) - Jia








The World Park, a never ending expo/theme park in the suburbs of Beijing is the setting for Jia Zhangke's masterful take on, what else, rapidly changing China. The motto of the park is, 'you don't have to leave to see the world'. As usual Zhao Tao plays the central character Tao, a worker at the park, donning many different costumes- Indian, Japanese, African, etc and dance around on a brightly lit stage every night. All her friends and co-workers and would be lovers are transplants from rural China, trying to eke out a living any way they can. Jia patiently observes and explores every part of the changing society in episodic storytelling, reminding the viewers that behind all the garishness and excess, there are human stories hidden in there, obscured and overwhelmed by the 1/3 actual size Effel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Piramides and camels and space ship-like karaoke bars. He leaves nothing unturned - a sad story of Russian prostitution, fake brand clothing manufacturers, construction workers working dangerous conditions for overtime pay and of course, some on/off love stories thrown in for good measure. This unhurried, soft, fine tuned, long film has many poignant moments that never turn corny. It's one of the best films I've seen in a long while.

Lighthearted Romantic Entanglement

Princess of France (2014) - Piñeiro

Another slice of Shakespearean comedy by Matia Piñeiro. All his regular actors are back to play assortment of characters, romantically entangled among themselves. This time, everything revolves Victor (Julián Larquier Tellarini), who came back to Buenos Aires after spending a year in Mexico. He wants to do a radio project, doing the bard's Love's Labour's Lost with the group of his friends. In the absence of his girlfriend Paula (Agustina Muñoz), Victor flirts with every girl who is going to take part in the project.

Using mutiple takes on same scenes and settings with slightly different outcomes and a copy of Love's Labour's Lost working as a clever communication device, Princess is all about little details. After watching a couple of Hong Sang-soo films last couple of months, I was thinking about his equivalent in the world cinema. And I think I finally found Hong's match in Piñeiros. They are equally distinctive and very regional in their own way, but have a lot in common presenting lighthearted romantic entanglement and its infinite number of possible outcomes.

Na Hong-jin's The Wailing is a major disappointment

The Wailing (2016) - Na

With two taut, impeccable thrillers (Chaser, The Yellow Sea) under his belt, Na Hong-jin shoots for something bigger and grander and falls on his face hard here with The Wailing, an overlong, exorcism/policier movie taking place in rainy rural Korea. Na's great at creating unsettling mood but extremely under-equipped to handle a logical narrative. Obviously your enjoyment in watching a film depends heavily on what you are looking for on a warm sunny Saturday afternoon in June, but The Wailing is so directionless and shallow and muddled while still trying to abide in genre norms, it crumbles at a mere seconds of afterthought and leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth.

The film concerns a strange illness and multiple grisly murders going around in a rural Southwest Korean mountain town named Goksung. The townsfolk are spreading rumors that it all started after an appearance of a reclusive Jap (Jun Kunimura) that many saw him roaming around the forest naked, eating dead deer and having glowing red eyes. Jong-gu (Kwak Do-won), a local bumpkin cop, tries to make sense of everything but odd things are happening and happening too fast, he just goes along while making his emotions getting the better of the situations. When his own daughter falls ill with the same symptoms, Jong-gu summons a renown shaman to exorcise his daughter.

Extreme xenophobia aside, this premise could have gone many different, interesting route. But Na keeps stacking up more and more intriguing elements that don't pay off. With multiple unearned plot twists and overstretched ending in almost 3 hours running time, The Wailing is a muddled jumble of mess that is completely underwhelming and unsatisfying on every level.

Dissonance

Hill of Freedom (2014) - Hong

The film starts with Kwon (Seo Young-hwa), a suit case in her hand, picking up a thick letter then dropping it on the floor. The multi-page letter was written by Mori (Ryo Kase), a Japanese man who came to Korea to look for her with the intention of confessing his love for her, without knowing she is away. As she picks up the letter all jumbled now and starts reading it, consequently the film too, is jumbled, timeline completely out of wack. With Hong's typical zoom in, we know that there will be some gaps in the storyline too, since she missed picking up some of the pages on the floor. Hill of Freedom is a gentle misadventure of Mori: as he waits for Kwon to appear, he meets people, talks and even have an affair with the cute cafe owner with a dog. It's perhaps the gentlest of all Hong films I've seen that it barely registers. Mori is a sweet, direct man who doesn't suffer from any of Hongian neurosis and selfishness of his usual boorish drunken characters. Dialog is mostly in heavily affected English- since Mori doesn't speak any Korean, and it adds to the overall disarray. I know what Hong is going for- a kind of dissonance and playfulness in structure, but some of the segments doesn't really go with the over all mood of the film, especially the scene with Jeong Eun-chae (of Our Sunhi), as she throws a loud fit for no apparent reason. It is a lesser Hong for me.

Atmospheric Netherworld in Tikkun

Tikkun (2015) - Sivan

Shot beautifully in black and white, Israeli artist and filmmaker Avishai Sivan's Tikkun tells a story about a young orthodox Jewish man, embodied astonishingly here by first time actor Aharon Traitel, slowly losing his faith after a near-death experience. With impressionistic visuals, Sivan paints nighttime Jerusalem as a Lynch-ian netherworld, shrouded in fog, where past and present exist side by side. The result is a hallucinatory tale of urban alienation, invoking the films of Antonioni.

Haim-Aaron (Traitel) is a devout Yeshiva student, seen praying and fasting in the begining. He is not a talkative type and keeps things to himself. His father (Kalifa Natour) is a hard working kosher butcher. Bad plumbing in their cramped apartment causes Haim-Aaron to fall and suffer cardiac arrest while taking a shower and touching himself. EMTs arrive but are unable to resuscitate him, pronouncing him dead after 40 minutes. Haim-Aaron's father, unable to let his first son go, continues on the CPR, and to everyone's surprise, revives him.

This near-death experience is a both a blessing and a curse for father and son. Father struggles with the guilt of undoing god's will by reviving his son. He falls into deep self-doubt and is shunned by many of his ultra orthodox community members.

For Haim-Aaron, being undead affords him a freedom to venture out of his community and confront his hidden earthly desires for the first time in his life.

Unable to sleep, Haim-Aaron wanders the streets at night, hitching rides to anywhere these nocturnal strangers will take him. For him, outside his immediate surroundings is a completely different world: Jerusalem, a cosmopolitan city with just under a million inhabitants, is a wondrous and scary place for him. He meets many strange people and even gets to have a sexual encounter with a street worker. These activities put a strain on his studies, family and community.

Tikkun is, in many ways, an unsettling film. The uneasy tone is accentuated by Haim-Aaron's father's recurring horrific nightmares: evil crocodiles in the toilet, putting a knife to the back of his son and dumping the body in a monster-infested ravine.

Like Sivan’s previous feature The Wanderer, the urban alienation and repressed sexuality figure prominently into Tikkun. The film unveils the ultra-orthodox Jewish community, which is seldom portrayed in film, and perhaps somewhat unflatteringly here: with rigid traditions and rules, the community seems to be permanently stuck in the past.

In the hands of Sivan and his cinematographer Shai Goldman (The Band's Visit, The Kindergarten Teacher), Jerusalem has a look and feel of the lonely, unnamed industrial town in Eraserhead. With sparse dialog and strong visuals, Tikkun is intense, moody filmmaking and signals Sivan as one to watch for in the world of arthouse cinema.

Tikkun screened earlier this year at New Directors New Films series. It opens in New York on Friday, June 10, via Kino Lorber.

Interview: Avishai Sivan Talks Tikkun

Set in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem, Tikkun gives a unique glimpse into a highly reclusive world where tradition and religion dominate private lives. With its haunting imagery and thought provoking subject matter, Tikkun left me a lasting impression long after I left the theater. I had a chance to talk briefly with its fiercely cerebral director Avishai Sivan when he was in town for the New Directors/New Films series in March.

There seems to be a theme going on here, with your first feature WANDERER and TIKKUN, both featuring the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem. Is this because of your background? What’s your fascination with the community?

It’s not my background. But I am interested in those communities, I think, in an almost romantic and stupid way, because they have this strict way of living. They dedicate their whole lives to a simple way of belief. I think you can find this belief not only in Judaism but it can be found everywhere - seeking and exploring. As a filmmaker and an artist, I try to reach that sublime of next masterpiece in films or fine art. Sometimes I have this inner battle, like the theme of this film Tikkun - the battle between mind and body…

What does TIKKUN mean in Hebrew?

It means to rectify, to fix something that went wrong but in Judaism, it has a deeper meaning: when a person dies and something went wrong in his life, his soul needs to go back to his life to fix it. Tikkun is the act of doing so, crossing over to the other life as a true believer of Jewish faith.

It’s interesting. I live in the part of Brooklyn which is a predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Even though we are living right next to each other, I feel they are living in a very different world. What was the reaction of the community when it came out in Israel?

Had several screenings in Jerusalem Film Festival last year. It won almost all the awards there (Best Film, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay) and also small festival in Tel Aviv called Utopia, but that’s about it. It will be out in September in Israel. Those film festivals attendees are film geeks, so I don’t think they (the Ultra Orthodox Community) had a chance to see the film yet. I am assuming they will see it in the future when its widely distributed. And am also assuming their reaction will be not good. (Laughs.) But I’m not doing films to please anybody.

How did you find Aharon Traitel, who portrays Haim-Aaron?

He’s not an actor.

Right. How did you get to cast him?

It took almost two years to find him for that role. It’s not like you can call an agent or find someone who wants to act. Usually the people who come out of religion are very vulnerable and don’t really want to expose themselves. They are also wracked with guilt - usually they left their family and the family is understandably angry with them.

I advertised Haim-Aaron’s role in this on-line community of people who left the religion. I think he was the only one who answered the ad and luckily he was the only one that fit the role.

The film is shot beautifully. I understand your background is in painting and video art. What made you to decide to shoot film on black and white? THE WANDERER was in color.

When I was writing it, I knew instantly that it would be in black and white. From that point on, I tried to reach the vision in black and white. The story is about life and death - the big battle/contrast. I tried to investigate that grey area in-between. Color wouldn’t have worked in that sense. B&W matched perfectly with the big theme of the film.

Haim-Aaron’s journey - his faith is shaken after the near-death experience. It struck me as the story of Golem - the undead. Does he think he is a dead person? Is that why he has a freedom to explore the outside world? Or is he looking for regaining his faith?

I don’t think he is looking for regaining his faith again. I think he wants to deepen his faith after he was re-born. All of sudden he can see much better than before. His physical experience is getting much more vivid. And he is feeling like God is testing him. He is a bit confused and trying to find his way. He is still sticking with his community. He is not shedding his clothes or anything. He is trying to find his true path within himself- how he is supposed to act as a believer, even in these radical, extreme places that I put him in as a screenwriter.

One of the most interesting aspects of both your films is the father-son relationship: how they see things differently. It was his father who revives him but also feels guilty that he did something against God’s will. Is this relationship an important theme for you?

Yes. It’s a not so sophisticated, not subtle way of seeing my relationship with my father. Because my father is a very enigmatic character. He speaks very little but he is...a very good person. He can break your heart with how good he can be. He is that kind of person. At the same time he is not very communicative. So his goodness can be seen as problematic.

You mean for you.

Yeah. This element is strongly reflected in Tikkun: he is trying to give his son love but in doing so, he is causing more and more problems. At the end, the accident happens by one of the cows he releases. He is inadvertently causing all the negative things that happens in the film.

That’s very interesting.

Your art and the elements of your films are sexual in nature. Can you tell me a little about that?

It’s human nature. What more can I say? It doesn’t matter what kind of background or environment you are living in, it’s still all there. I just reflect what’s already there.

I also saw some of your drawings of Jean-Luc Godard pleasuring himself on your website. I don’t know what to make of them since I am a big Godard fan.

I have more drawings of Godard. I’d love to compile them as a book and present to him!

Ali the Greatest

Muhammad Ali would laugh at my feeble attempt at an eulogy since he was the most charming, eloquent, charismatic speaker ever. Here is one of the most beautiful speeches he gave:

R.I.P. champ.

Delightful Double Take

Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) - Hong

Right Now, Wrong Then, a double take on a chance encounter is another delightful comedy of errors from Hong Sang-soo. Jeong Jae-yeong plays an arthouse movie director named Ham Chun-soo who finds himself in Suwon, a suburb of Seoul in winter, a day prior to his film screening and following discussions at the city's cultural center. The early voiceover suggests that he is contemplating banging his enthusiastic young guide from the center. Killing time at the near deserted ancient palace/tourist trap, he meets beautiful Hee-jeong (Kim Min-hee) and strikes up a conversation. Defensive at first, Hee-jeong soon finds Chun-soo more interesting once learning that he is a movie director she's heard of, even though she doesn't like watching movies or seen any of his films. He asks her to go out for coffee, even though she doesn't drink coffee or smoke (she is a sensitive type). They awkwardly flirt. It's all pleasantries and flattery. She used to be a model but now she is a painter. He wants to see her paintings, so they move to her atelier. Obviously he wants to bang her so everything that comes out of his mouth is some form of flattery. She goes along with it. Then they go to sushi for dinner and soju. They get shitfaced, still flattering each other but neither making the ultimate move. Hee-jeong suggests they go together to a party of her friends that she can't excuse herself out of. He obliges. Things get uncomfortable as Hee-jeong's friends who are fans of his and start mentioning the rumors of his womanizing ways and his marriage. A disaster!

We try again. Chun-soo this time, is more forward and honest, even though what comes out of his mouth hurts Hee-jeong. As they go through the same routine as the first, this honesty gets them closer, but also it means Chun-soo get more wasted on soju and make bigger ass out of himself in front of Hee-jeong and her unsuspecting friends.

What I appreciate about Hong is not only his steadfast consistency in traipsing the stickiness of the human relationship but also his complete disregard for what he deemed unnecessary bullshit - namely excessive title sequence, dramatic music or coverage (hence the excessive used of funny, automated zooms). Coquettish Kim Min-hee is amazingly cute in this. Right Now, Wrong Then also doesn't really care much about the conventions of a do over/what if romantic comedy. The first take isn't an earth shattering catastrophe or anything and completely plausible as much as second scenario which is obviously more desirable. He plays with the notion of the games we play and certain inhibitions in our society on different occasions. It's also a delight to see reversing those roles fueled by alcohol. His jab at film critics and how to behave in front of them were also telling. All in all, the film is yet another great comedy from prolific Hong who continues building a great, unique body of work.

Riding with the Ghost

Journey to the Shore (2015) - Kurosawa

There is no shortage of similarities in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's new film Journey to the Shore with Kore-eda's 1995 quiet masterpiece, Maborosi. Both films deal with the loss, grief, impermanence of life and letting go. Both films star Tadanobu Asano as the husband who passed on. It is good to note that the books the two films are based on came out around the same time in the 1990s too. It might be my age but I've been thinking about the subject myself a lot lately. Once the thought of death hits you, from then on, you just live under the shadow of its inevitability. Sometimes it keeps me up at night. I don't know how people who are innately more precocious and neurotic than me deal with the fact. Anyway, back to the film:

Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu), a piano teacher and a wife whose husband has been presumed dead in the sea, leads a quiet existence in Tokyo. One day, her dead husband, Yusuke (Asano) appears in her living room, wearing shoes (Japanese take off their shoes indoors usually). He says it was a long journey to come back. His corpse was eaten by the crabs, so that's why there was no trace of him left, he says it matter of factly. She is delighted but also afraid that she will lose him again. Always on her toes, hoping that his semi-permanent reappearance is not just recurring dreams. He suggests they leave town, so he can show her many beautiful places he'd passed through during his home journey.

So begins Mizuki's journey to letting go: Yusuke left great impressions on many people he encountered the last three years in the Japanese countryside. Some of them are already dead like Yusuke - he says, again, very matter of factly, "He's like me," meaning the dead, or "She's like you, the living," and so on. So what does Mizuki learn? That human life is complicated? that nobody know anybody, not that well? That you still make differences in other people's lives even though you are dead? That you can have sex with a ghost? With somewhat conventional TV orchestral music, Kurosawa seems to be well aware of the film's Lifetime channel-like melodramatic nature. But as he demonstrated in Tokyo Sonata, he has a great eye for indoor spaces and framing, shadows and light and playing with supernatural/surreal elements that he has cultivated over many years in genre filmmaking. In this subtle, muted gentle chamber piece, he shows that yearning, grieving and fear of letting go are only a few degrees off from horror of loneliness in his genre films. Journey is not as lyrical nor as poetic as Maborosi, nor has a succinct narrative. But the film features many beautiful moments and fine tuned performances by two leads to make it quite memorable.

Behind the Great Museum

Das Große Museum (2014) - Holzhausen




Das Große Museum shows the painstaking preparation of Vienna's the Kunsthistorisches Museum's special exhibition of Hapsburg's treasures, named Kunstkammer in 2013. They did a total renovations inside this huge, multi-building museum complex from wall papers, floor, electric wiring to new modern chandeliers. We see there are hundreds of people involved in running one of the greatest museums in the world - archivists, restorers, accountants, construction workers, marketing people and so on. We are invited to their budget meetings- where one learns that Bruegel room has its own budget supported by Getty. We get the tour of thousands and thousands of ancient artifacts and paintings carefully handled by handlers and sweaty restorers- carefully removing dust and various insects eating away at old paintings, doing touch ups on a ceiling frescoes, counting all the pearls on an imperial crown and such. It's a fascinating watch. I remember spending a whole afternoon just in the Bruegel room alone. The place was massive and I didn't have enough time to see it all. :cry:

Spritual Music

The World According to John Coltrane (1990) - Palmer, Byron

Focusing on his middle period with his original quartet (Elvin Jones on drums, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass), the World According to JC is still a satisfying doc for music alone. There are some uninterrupted long takes of My Favorite Things and some others. But it also shows his interests in music from different culture that shaped his later, post-Miles Quintet innovative period - India, Africa and shows interests in spiritual side of music. There's no info on his personal life except for his religious North Carolinian upbringing to Navy band player. The hodgepodge interviews are informative but pretty bare boned. But I'm not complaining. The music is glorious. As I am waiting for Sam Pollard's A Love Supreme: A Portrait of John Coltrane in 4 Parts to finish up, this will do for now.

Here is The World According to JC in its entirety on youtube:

They Look Like People - Well Done Buddy-Cohorrormedy

They Look Like People (2015) - Blackshear

Don't let the Williamsburg hipster setting scare you. Perry Blackshear's economically executed buddy-cohorrormedy is an exemplary minimalist filmmaking at its best. The director knows exactly what he's got - no money, a great character driven, self contained script, fantastic actors. The film doesn't try to be anything other than a little paranoia thriller and it works superbly.

The film sets up its eerie mood in the beginning with Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews), looking at his fiancee in bed at night. We can't see her face because the shadows and how her face is positioned. This prolonged shot is extremely unsettling. Wyatt gets phone calls telling him that the world is going to be taken over by monsters, that he needs to prepare, that he can't trust his friends or family because they may be infected. He sets out to the city to meet his childhood best friend Christian (Evan Dumouchel), an office worker in an advertising agency whose overtly outward personality and fit physique hides his former nerdy loser self. Christian insists Wyatt staying on until whenever. Wyatt, still schizo, still getting phone calls in the middle of the night, starts to prepare for the worst in Christian's basement with knives, axes, duct tapes, ropes, sulfuric acid...

Everything seems normal for a while - Christian has sort of a date with Mara (Magaret Ying Drake), a cute co-worker at the office whose attraction he's buffing off at the moment because of his too self-confident personality he put on for himself. This date turns out to be spending all night in an emergency room because a friend of Mara (who was supposed to be Wyatt's date) slipped on ice and has a mild concussion.

So how does these two storylines - a schizo trying to prepare the end of the world and a former loser trying to overcompensate go together? Marvelously. With natural dialog and performances, They Look Like People slowly builds up its tension into a thrilling conclusion. And it even somehow ends up very touching. They Look Like People is now available on Netflix. Please check it out.

All That Desert Allows

Queen of the Desert (2015) - Herzog





Seeking freedom and solitude is the driving force that attracted Gertrude Bell, a learned English woman from a well to do family who became largely responsible for divving up the Middle East. Bell could easily be made as the first proto-feminist of her kind way before Dora the Explorer. Oddly enough, despite it being a Werner Herzog film, Queen of the Desert is a weepy melodrama most of the time, dangerously treading Douglas Sirk territory. Surely, there are some stunning vistas of the desert and camels and ancient citadels made of mud and underground rivers and salt crusted earth and all that too in true Herzogian fashion. Not enough though. It plays out more like Love Affairs of Gertrude Bell, starring Nicole Kidman.

Bell (played by Kidman, radiantly photographed), an amateur archeologist whose short affair with Cadogan (James Franco), a gentle, lower ranking diplomat at the British embassy in Bagdad and his love fueled suicide leaves her men/love weary and makes her devote herself deeper into the desert, despite objections from British army men. She builds up a reputation as a foreigner who understands the intricate political/cultural landscapes in the desert, fully taking advantages of being a white woman in a male dominant world. She stacks up admirers, including many tribal leaders, T.E. Lawrence (Robert Pattinson), then a young archeologist, and Major Doughty-Wiley (Damian Lewis), a married army man stationed in Damascus. A romance blooms between Bell and the Major and she starts writing correspondences with him, fully knowing he won't leave his unhappy marriage, and so on.

Queen of the Desert is a perfectly respectable, largely entertaining film. James Franco's I'm a puppy about to die performance nor a Bambi outside the window didn't bother me too much. I'm just disappointed that it is a very un-Herzogian film. We are obviously not expecting some dry treatise on a historical figure nor a high melodrama from him. Kidman's very coquettish and alluring despite her age, but doesn't really have the balls to play a determined, strong willed woman (Charlize Theron might have been a better choice). And it's missing that audacity, that search for ecstatic truth the director is usually known for.

Kaili Blues, The Most Impressive Debut in Years

Kaili Blues (2015) - Bi
A country doctor's search for his nephew becomes an unforgettable existential road trip in Kaili Blues, directed by a 26-year old Chinese filmmaker, Bi Gan. It's an ambitious, mesmerizing film that you'd never think it is the work of a first time director. I don’t think I’ll be seeing another film as audacious and beautiful as this one anytime soon.

Chen (Chen Yongzhong) lives and works as an assistant doctor in Kaili, a sub-tropical region of southeast China. Through Chen’s sporadic conversation with the elderly woman doctor and with his irresponsible half-brother, Crazy Face, we gather Chen's past: he was in jail for taking the rap for his boss. His sickly wife died while he was incarcerated. Crazy Face resents the fact that their mother left Chen her house to continue housing the doctor's clinic to this day.

Crazy Face's young son, Weiwei, neglected and locked up most of the time at home while he's out gambling, is in danger of being sold off, according to townsfolk. It's usually under Chen's care Weiwei eats properly and goes to school. One day, Chen finds Weiwei missing and discovers that Crazy Face has dumped him at his old boss's house who lives in nearby Zhenyuan, because he is fleeing Kaili in order to evade debtors and won't take the boy with him. The old doctor happens to have an old fling living in Zhenyuan, of whom she hasn’t seen since the days of the Cultural Revolution, and wants Chen to find him and deliver a shirt and a mix-tape she made for him, too. So begins Chen's dreamlike journey, where past, present and future are all mixed in with lush greenery and sinewy river system in picturesque Southern China.

The 40 minute no-cut, wide angle traveling shot on a moped in the middle of the film is a legend in the making – it is a pure bravura filmmaking at its most playful and a feast for your senses. Wang Tianxing's fluid camera work is just as much a star in Kaili Blues. Even though all the scenes are exquisitely framed and every slow pan shot beautifully and meticulously composed, the technical aspect doesn't overshadow the overall lucid, mysterious, fantastic tone of the film. The camera freely moves from one conversation to another, often mingling with Chen's beautiful poetry (the director's own, I'm told) voiceover.

I think of Kaili Blues as school of fish. All the small characters and stories and their connections are illusive, fluid and gone in a flash, but when caught, every one of those fishes are unique, shiny, slippery individual jewels. The only way to catch them is with a net and your hands in the water. This very loose and thin net, full of holes and tears, that Bi uses is made of seemingly unrelated recurring motifs -- Weiwei's hand drawn clocks, an old photograph of the old doctor's lover, motor bikes, a disco ball, a childish pop song -- and Bi deliberately doesn't catch them all. What's left is a palpable, lasting sensation of fish swimming and touching your hands as they get away from your grasp.

I don’t want to pull ageism here but Kaili Blues doesn’t feel like a debut film of a 20 something director. If I had to compare it to the works of another filmmaker, I guess the film most resembles the films of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao Hsien, particularly Goodbye South, Goodbye but with added lyricism and dreamlike quality. Infinitely wise and breathtakingly beautiful, Kaili Blues is definitely one of the very best films I've seen so far this year.

Kaili Blues has an exclusive one week engagement at New York's Metrograph, starting on May 20.

Anarchy in the UK

High-Rise (2015) - Wheatley

JG Ballard's High-Rise was published in 1970s. This was the time of London Garbage Strike, the rise of punk movement, the rise of Thatcher and conservatism and the Winter of Discontent. In this parable, he saw our materialistic society contained in a 40 story concrete high-rise building. This complete biosphere is equipped with a supermarket, swimming pools, gym, a rooftop garden and a ground parking space that stretches as far as eye can see in this imagined, still barren and developing London suburb. He painted an ugly, disturbing picture of how quickly this microcosm of our society devolved into anarchy with greed and desire for power. Just like his other novels that took place in a materialistic, soulless machine age, High-Rise was a far-fetched, all out satire. With that, Ben Wheatley, a talented British director of such films as Kill List and Sightseers, takes on this darkly satirical material and wastes no time in plunging it into total chaos. The material is highly relevant to the late stages of capitalistic society we are living in.

This highly stylized film sees a physiologist/prof Dr. Laing (Tom Hiddleston) in the center, who just moved in to a much prized high-rise, on the respectable 25th floor. He is an embodiment of upper-middle class, whose meek demeanor and antipathy suits the supposedly anonymous apartment living perfectly. Impeccably dressed and stoic, Laing tries to keep to himself. Charlotte (Sienna Miller), a foxy single-mom neighbor from a floor above, takes a liking to him and introduces to the upper-upper class of the food chain of the high-rise which revolves around Royal (Jeremy Irons), the architect of the high-rise and its sister buildings sprouting up nearby, who with his snobby young wife occupies the penthouse with a private lift. His entourage includes a well-known TV announcer, Cosgrove (Peter Ferdinando), a gynecologist Pangborne (James Purefoy, in his best British twit) and his bodyguard (Dan Renton Skinner). Laing quickly realizes himself that he is not the top one percent and is put in his place. Then there is hard partying TV cameraman Wilder (Luke Evans in his best performance) who lives on the first floor with his very pregnant wife (Elizatbeth Moss) and two young kids. He represents the working class, whose determination to taste the high-life and Royal's gang trying to suppress him are the two main drives for the narrative.

Things devolves quickly into anarchy (the film starts with Laing in disheveled clothes and prickly beard looking like a Robinson Crusoe in an urban decay eating dog food out of a can surrounded by mountains of black garbage bags and debris and the next scene is 3 months earlier). Wilder, incensed by his kids and other children from the lower floors (only lower floor residents seem to have kids) rejected by entering the pool, located on 30th floor for making too much noise, he commandiers all the kids to go up through the stairs (elevators are constantly out of service) and break into a private pool party held by upper floor residents. The tension between upper and lower residents grows with rumors of checkout girl (from the lower floor) at the supermarket being fondled by upper floor residents in the elevator. Things gets violent with retaliations on their pets, and violent raid gangs are formed on both sides and women get assaulted. Strangely, even though garbage shoots get jammed, water stops running, electricity fails, all expensive cars down below get smashed by falling liquor bottles, people are reluctant to leave the building. A police patrol car stops by because of the state of the parking lot and the destroyed lobby seen through the garbage blocked, spray paint covered glass doors. Royal happens to be at the lobby, looking for his wife. He tells officers that everything is fine. Laing stops going to work all together. Everybody is into playing the parts of this addictive game, called social hierarchy in the capitalistic society.

High-Rise's pacing is so breathless that if you haven't read the book, you might find yourself being lost quickly. Why do they devolve so quickly into chaos? What's the reason for all the resentment? Wheatley and collaborator Amy Jump explain too much and too little. There are a lot of character omissions and some of the choices are too explanatory, leaving little rooms for mystery as in the book. Wilder's ascension to the top floor, that symbolic physical trip is the driving force of the book, not meeting Royal the architect as in the movie. I'd like to have seen that actual journey.

There are a lot to like in High-Rise. The look of the film: all textured concrete but chintzy furnishing of the 70s gives the world much sleazier feel than the usual retro-futuristic, cold, antiseptic world that we see too often in films. Even though it doesn't go far into cannibalism as in the book, it's a fun, entertaining film.