That sure is a mouthful for a movie title and it also cleverly signifies this is a movie that cannot be taken seriously (not that we need a reminder when we see Quinn’s kaleidoscopic get-up and strange choice for a pet). Let me fire out all the puns first: these Birds not only do not soar, they stay grounded; I won’t be surprised these Birds lay a bad egg at the box office; these Birds are going into a tailspin; my fear of birds just got worse; these Birds won’t be ruffling any feathers; when Birds hit the hour mark my senses went on flight mode.

Okay… it isn’t as bad as what I made it out to be and it definitely isn’t the worse one from DCEU. I think Suicide Squad (2016) takes that unwanted honour. Out from that mess, Harley Quinn was the only colourful spot and the powers-that-be decides that she deserves her own spotlight.

Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) has broken up with the Prince of Crime, Joker. She soon realises that the privileges accorded to her have been revoked and all guises of trouble come looking for her. Meanwhile, club owner Roman Sionis aka the Black Mask (Ewan McGregor) sends his henchman Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina) and driver Dinah Lance (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) to get a special diamond, but it lands up with pickpocket Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco). Sionis enlists Quinn’s help with the promise of protection for her in Gotham City once the job is done, but her path is impeded by Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and driven cop Montoya (Rosie Perez).

A few minutes into the zany movie, my mind is throwing up Deadpool with the same off-the-fly expositions and storytelling that doesn’t adhere to a chronological timeline. It is alright to copy, God knows there practically aren’t many original stories anymore, but to me the borrowed idea needs to be taken to a different place. In the case of Birds of Prey, it just isn’t an interesting place.

The plot is outlandish, the characters cartoonish and the situations absurd. That is all fine because I can take a joke, but the plot is choppy and the story feels like a mess. At least it is a colourful mess. The action scenes also don’t escalate in terms of spectacle and ingenuity. The police station raid is oh-la-la fantastic, but the climatic one at the amusement park isn’t on par with the earlier ones with a lack of inventiveness.

Director Cathy Yan doesn’t understand the dynamics of an ensemble movie. The main focus of Birds of Prey is only on one bird, and her arc isn’t pronounced. You can’t just put a bevy of women together and scream “this is female power” and everyone will get the female empowerment message. I felt none of that because every time it may be going down the road to develop the female characters, we get inundated by noise. That seems to Yan’s goto aesthetics – noise and more noise.

Its other problem is a lack of a convincing villain. McGregor tries his damnedest to chew his scenes out but when you are not given much material to begin with you are probably chewing on your own tongue. Victor Zsasz gets it even worse and from what I have read he features strongly in the comics. I don’t read the comics and don’t get why Roman needs a mask.

Whatever potential Birds of Prey has is buried under a heap of under-realised characters and repetitive action. Birds need to be free and these birds deserve better. They just couldn’t break free from its stylised cage. They didn’t even try.

PS – There is an end-credit scene that drops after you sit through all the credits. Depending on your disposition, you may just shout some expletives at the screen, so I think I better tell you it’s just a cheeky sound-bite involving a certain major character.

Written by Daniel Chiam

How all of us tackle grief differs.

When my dad passed away some time ago, I remember I was in a daze, everything felt surreal and I couldn’t cry. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I felt like a spurious son and I started to question myself. But I remember lyrical moments that underscored that tumultuous period, one of which was the long drive from the crematorium to the columbarium. My dad’s cremated remains was with me and my sister, and Emil Chou’s 在云端 came on the radio. In that moment I felt my dad’s presence, reassuring me that he is in a better place. Then a few days later, the dam finally broke. I was watching Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003), a story about how a frustrated son tries to determine fact from fiction in his dying father’s life and I finally wept. I wasn’t crying because of the demise of the movie-dad, my consciousness was all about my dad. Like me, the people that populate the cine-scape of Birthday are all grieving in their own ways. Grief incapacitates the mother and guilt imprisons the father.

Ripped apart by the loss of their eldest son Su-ho (Yoon Chan-young) to the Sewol Ferry tragedy on 16 April 2014, Jung-il (Sol Kyung-gu) and Soon-nam (Jeon Do-yeon) struggle to keep their family together. No longer able to communicate with each other, they must still bring up their surviving daughter Ye-sol (Kim Bo-min).

It’s official – this is the hardest my wifey and I have cried while watching a movie this year. In my opinion, the Chinese title 没有你的生日 carries more emphatic meaning and does more justice than the the English one, Birthday. Literally translated, it means “The Birthday Without You”.

The tragic event of the Sewol ferry disaster, in which 304 people died, many of them high-school students, still looms large and repercussions are still being felt across many guilty parties. Birthday is the first movie that explores the events of the tragedy. Given the subject matter, nobody would fault you for thinking that the cinematic approach would take a big page out of Titanic, but writer-director Lee Jong-un’s sensitive debut chooses to tread on a path less-travelled and by so doing it becomes a movie that will stay with you for a long long time.

This is an assured and confident directorial debut, full of hard-hitting and heart-hitting emotional beats even though it is quiet by nature. Lee Jong-un was assistant director on auteur Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, an emotionally devastating rumination on a woman’s final grasp on the beauty of life before everything is taken from her. One can see how Lee Jong-un has picked up the filmmaker’s many fine attributes. The screenplay is chock-full of keenly observed character studies and I particularly adore how little nuggets of information are lovingly doled out. A lesser director would have rammed up the histrionics and glossed over all the emotional moments, but Lee’s defiant focus on one family torn apart by the loss of their son is refreshing.

The bulk of the narrative is about how the mother Soon-nam and the father Jung-il handle the loss. Soon-nam is adamant that one should never move on and she detests all the rest who grieve in their own special ways. Jung-il, on the other hand, has to deal with the guilt of not being there when it happened and wants to move on. Both their arcs culminate in the last act where the support group holds a birthday party for the departed Su-ho. When this last act arrives it is practically a tsunami of feels; just make sure you are holding on to some tissues. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Established actress Jeon Do-yeon does the heavy lifting. Her intense grief is not described by scream-fests but by her rigid posture and her defiant stance in the face of utter hopelessness. This isn’t a saintly Mother-of-the-Year portrayal; this is a full-on warts-and-all portrayal of a slowly crumbling mother on the brink of a total meltdown. The scene of her finally breaking down in blood-curdling wailing sobs is particularly heartrending and it culminates to a heartwarming scene where a neighbour shows the husband what she needs to overcome that dreadful moment. Lee even has the audacity to show how the neighbour’s daughter angrily handles the commotion that lends a moment of truth to the whole thing.

This could have been an utterly bleak film and in lesser hands it probably would be. But Lee Jong-un has crafted something miraculous. Birthday is a tender build-up of the heartache of losing a loved one towards something remarkably hopeful.

PS – I learned an important lesson in the prolonged final act – nobody remembers the scholastic, materialistic and monetary accomplishments in the end. It is all about the little moments – how you spent time with a friend who needed it, how you loved the people around you by performing little acts of kindness. Su-ho lived a short life, but it was a full one. How many of us can say that about ourselves?

Written by Daniel Chiam

There is a deliciously charged scene near the halfway mark of Bombshell depicting the three principals in a lift. No words are exchanged at first, all of them sizing each other up from the corner of their eye, deciding whether they are friend or foe. Prior to this scene it all feels like a wine and dine build-up of each character’s motivation. The lift scene is momentous with each woman representing different stages of their career and what they have to lose if everything explodes. Their paths intersect and the possibilities are enticing. However, what a could-have-been becomes a flurry of denouements that don’t quite hit the spot.

Bombshell is a retelling of the 2016 sexual harassment scandal at Fox News, which was the harbinger of the #MeToo movement. The story drops us right smack into the presidential campaign and Fox News honcho Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) makes no bones that he likes Donald Trump at the helm. Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) is tasked to pick at Trump which lands her in hot soup. Kayla (Margot Robbie) is new and wants to build a vivid career at the network. She gets more than she bargained for when she finally gets to meet Ailes in his office. Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) is a veteran at Fox News programming, but she has had enough of the male corporate atmosphere, especially when Ailes is trying to squeeze her out of the network as she tries to introduce feminist thinking in her show. Knowing that the end is near, she seeks legal help, eventually suing Ailes for sexual harassment, exposing his sexual deviant behaviour to the world.

For a talkie movie, it moves at an electric pace. Scenes don’t overstay their welcome, neither does director Jay Roach allow the scene to build to an empathetic level. There is also a cheekiness in that Kelly at times addresses us, educating us in the not too subtle ways of the network that seeks to be the Numero Uno of all television networks. It is an intoxicatingly breathless tour of the network floor where the selling of ideas, ethics, candidates and the truth as they deem it is of paramount importance and it does it through the showing of the female legs and sexuality. 

Charlize Theron superbly nails the twisty character of Megyn Kelly. Theron gets Kelly – her sensuality weaponised to the hilt, every smile calibrated to set off bombs in your body you didn’t you have and the walk to any spot timed to perfection. It is a role that Theron owns and she absolutely deserves her Best Actress nomination. 

Elsewhere, Margot Robbie’s Kayla also does a great job as a composite character. Kayla is essentially our surrogate. The scene of her in Ailes’ office as she is subtly asked to betray her soul to a predator is gobsmackingly scary. It is in this scene that the thought of “why can’t you just walk away” is extinguished because so many elements are in play. The conversation is not immediately discernible as sexual harassment, but Ailes is a skilled predator in playing the game of backing off and pushing it further. When all else fails, he gently, Iike a little lamb, holds you hostage with your career. It is just not easy to stand up and walk away from that. 

Bombshell feels like a greatest hits package – we get all the momentous moments that change history. Don’t accept the unacceptable; speak up; get help; say no to the objectification of your body; stand up to sexual harassment in your workplace. If the message is blunt and the plot’s denouement stodgy, it is all smoothed out by the fine acting. Credit must be given for a nuanced way of telling the story, but it feels over-packed with many pulled punches. What should detonate with stand-up chest-thumping fervour becomes just a flurry of small explosions with little impact.

Written by Daniel Chiam

Terms like “masterpiece” and “breathtaking” are used far too often, yet they define Lee Chang-dong’s latest, eight years after his brutally lyrical Poetry (2010). However, Burning, based on Haruki Murakami’s short story Barn Burning, is not an easy film to watch. Allusive and elusive, it begins as a brilliant character study and gradually shifts its gear segueing into psychological thriller territory.

Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), a part-time worker, bumps into Hae-mi (Jun Jeong-seo) while delivering, who used to live in the same neighborhood. Hae-mi asks him to look after her cat while she’s on a trip to Africa. When Hae-mi comes back, she introduces Ben (Steven Yuen), a mysterious guy she met in Africa, to Jong-su. One day, Ben visits Jong-su’s with Hae-mi and confesses to him during a pot session that he burns abandoned greenhouses. 

In anticipation of the film, I re-read Haruki Murakami’s short story taken from the anthology The Elephant Vanishes. Like a lot of his works, the story feels cryptic, simple on the surface, surreal once it gets under your skin. There is a mystery but Murakami doesn’t quite persuade you to penetrate beneath the veneer. I certainly didn’t think for one second it could be adapted into a film because there doesn’t seem to be much of a plot at all. My wife shared the same sentiment. We were all the more curious as to what Lee could distill from this intriguing short story.

Like Murakami’s distinctive prose, Lee’s Burning retains the other-worldly surreality through arthouse pacing and artful cinematography. The first act moves at a languid pace as we observe Jong-su’s infectious reticence and Hae-mi’s enthusiastic flamboyance. It is an unlikely match, but you will sense the possibility of a sweet romance. They long to cling near one another like satellites, but they will never share the same orbit because forming the third vertex of the triangular relationship is Ben, the coolly detached upper-class, the spanner in the works, the Great Gatsby.

As much as the first act plays like a meditative dance of a fever dream and an elegy for lost innocence, I also recognise that it will be divisive. I have a feeling most filmgoers won’t have the patience to sit through it and be emotionally vested in the characters.  Lee may be an extraordinary image maker, gently probing deep into the human psyche, its desires and impulses, but the story feels opaque, dense, resembling an enigma. But if one is a serious filmgoer, it is easy to slip into Lee’s rhapsodic wonder of a tale, patiently waiting for the bomb to drop. It is when the head film becomes a mind film in the second act that it pays dividends tenfold.

If Murakami’s short story feels deceptively simple, Lee takes it into the nether region of complexity. He unravels what it means to be consumed by a mystery and what it means to be alive. The production is meticulously artful – ponder over how Jong-su’s home is a stone’s throw from the border of both Koreas and how propaganda is blaring every other hour, and ravel in the beautiful light of the sunset as Ben shares his unusual hobby. Lee is able to externalise the interior states of the human mind in extraordinary ways. The subtext of social classes in the Korean society also plunges a knife into one’s consciousness. He is also helped by a unique soundtrack of discordant musical cues that grow in mysterious power as the story grows in stature. Lee builds the final act to a feverish high and he almost wants to deny us the satisfaction of a resolution, but it does arrive at an ending that is shocking and inevitable. There is no celebration; there is only the quiet satisfaction of arriving at the solution of a baffling Math problem that has nagged at you for many sleepless nights.

Lee fills every frame with meaning, enhanced and accentuated in no small part by the three superb leads. He priorities rhythm and texture over narrative clarity, immersing us in a hypnotic menagerie of the basest of human behaviour. Burning is an engrossing tale of the unravelling of a rational and innocent mind by sheer desire, rich with characterisations and themes. It is a Korean film unlike any other Korean film I have seen and it immediately warrants a second or third viewing to catch all the nuances. I hope I don’t have to wait another eight years for his next film.

Written by Daniel Chiam

At the time this review is posted, Exit has hit #21 of Korea’s all-time top grossing locally made films and I have no doubt it will climb further up (pun intended).

Yong-nam (Jung-suk Jo) was one of the best rock climbers in college but hasn’t had much luck elsewhere after graduation. He has failed to get a job for many years and has to rely on his parents just to get by. For his mother’s 70th birthday, he insisted on having the party at Dream Garden because his old crush, Eui-ju (Yoona) works there. When a disaster strikes, covering an entire district in Seoul with mysterious white gas, he has to use all of his rock climbing skills with the help of Eui-ju to get everyone to safety.

Remember those days during physical training lessons and your coach instructed you to run round the school? You probably dashed off looking like a winner, but once you were no longer in the eye-line of your coach you started walking. Exit will instil the real deal in you and you will realise you are keeping fit not for the coach, but for yourself, and dammit… you will never know that one day all those extra rounds you ran and the additional weight you bench-pressed is going to save lives.

Exit is a blast. I sat in a near full house screening and judging by the ecstatic screams I heard all around me this is a winner, but Exit is sandwiched by some of the laziest filmmaking ever. The cloying melodrama, the extreme over-acting, the comedic broad-strokes, are all on show. Right at the end, writer-director Sang Geun Lee had no idea how to wrap up all the good work done, but trust me, nobody cares because Lee scores with the mind-blowing action in this action-comedy.

Disaster genre films have no reason to be this fun. For me, this is a sub-genre of the disaster genre and I termed it the problem-solving sub-genre. Don’t worry, I won’t share any surprises here but I will just say some of the ways Yong-nam and Eui-ju negotiate the obstacles as the toxic gas threatens to rise up and envelope them are truly inventive. The cinematography is stellar and the two leads are entirely convincing as rock wall climbers. Some scenes are so exhilarating that my heart parked in my mouth.

Sometimes a movie can do one thing so well that you can look past all the missteps and contrivances. I had so much fun watching this that it is almost criminal. This is Sang Geun Lee’s debut and he has lots of room for growth, but in the action element he is a top dawg.

Written by Daniel Chiam

One of the silver linings of this dreaded worldwide lockdown is the opportunity to watch the movies I have amassed through the years. I took Yasujiro Ozu’s A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) and Floating Weeds (1959) Criterion DVD off my shelf and put it on a pile of movies to be watched. Even by this conscious action, the movie sometimes doesn’t get to be watched because there are so many movies vying for my time and attention. Sitting next to my wifey at breakfast one morning, she showed me a FaceBook share by a friend about great Japanese movies that are must-sees. Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (1959) was in the inspired list and it was the perfect motivation to give the DVD a spin. It turned out to be a fascinating experience because we were in the hands of a master storyteller.

It was in 1996, I think, when I was treated to one of Ozu’s great masterpieces Tokyo Story (1953) one night at the university during a lecture on film narratives. How one equates the experience of watching the film in words is a tall order. The story is so deceptively simple, but it demands the audience’s vigilance. The plot is not labyrinthine, but it has psychological and emotional resonance. There is something deeply familiar and familial about it, and I remember coming up for breath when the house lights came on. I felt I was touched by the hand of God. Ozu has the power to take a sad song and make it better.

Like all of Ozu’s films, the story and plot of Floating Weeds, a remake of his silent classic A Story of Floating Weeds, is simple. An aging actor, together with his troupe, returns to a small town to put on performances. He reunites with his former lover and illegitimate son, which enrages his present mistress. She then cooks up a plan to bring downfall to his son, which leads to heartbreak for all.

Watching the silent film followed by the colour film offers a unique glimpse into the evolution of one of cinema’s great auteurs. The main difference between the two films is one of tone. The 1934 film is bleaker, but funnier at certain parts. The 1959 is more optimistic and hopeful, but never felt like there was a need to be funny. You can feel Ozu’s confidence with the material and what he wanted to communicate. In terms of composition of shots it is almost the same, so one can notice that from way back in 1934 he has arrived at a way of how his stories should be told.

In Ozu’s hands, films are tapestries for him to create characters, not outlandish plots. He is more interested in who the characters are than what they did. His films are doorways into a time and space of Japan that is long gone, but they are not defined by it. There is a sense of universality in them that if someone were to see his film a hundred years from now, that someone will understand the breadth of the themes because life, love, death, marriage, illness and parental love will not change over time.

The story of Floating Weeds could be approached in many ways – a tragedy, a soap opera, even a musical, but Ozu uses the everyday to tell it. There are no fake highs, no condescending lows, no swells in music to dictate what he wants you to feel. Ozu’s love for his characters is transcending and no cinematic tricks are employed to put you on a certain path.

Ozu has a visual style that he has honed through the years. His camera is always stationary. It doesn’t pan. It doesn’t track. The cuts are just cuts. No dissolves. No wipes. Nothing that draws attention. His camera stays a few feet from the ground, always looking slightly up at characters, mirroring the point of view of someone sitting on the tatami mat ogling at a family going about their daily business. Ozu likes to shoot a conversation by focusing on only one character at any one time. The dialogue doesn’t bleed into the next cut so there isn’t the fluidity that we are accustomed to. By doing this, we are persuaded to identify with each character as they speak and then the other. The pace of his scenes mirrors life. A less accustomed person might say his films are slow, but I prefer to say they progress at a pace that leaves room for thought. In Ozu’s hands, it is the way the story is told that makes it memorable, not the story itself.

One can always revisit an Ozu film and notice certain aspects missed the first time. At first go with A Story of Floating Weeds and Floating Weeds, one of the most memorable scenes is the heated exchange between the master and his mistress. They are standing at opposite sides of a narrow street. Between them, torrential rain is pelting the ground. The camera refuses to move. There are no dramatic close-ups because it would cheapen the emotional heft of the scene. The mistress paces up and down with a red umbrella in the background. The dialogue carries vindictive knives as they try to “kill” each other, with the rain and space working as counterpoint to their heated argument. It is a beautifully composed scene, everything in that scene is there for a reason.

Unlike the silent film, Floating Weeds ends on a more hopeful note. Perhaps even with a nostalgically autumnal feel and an aura of philosophical hangs in the air. The master and his mistress are down, but they are not out. As the train pulls away, one will hope that they will mend the fences and experience small successes in the new chapter of their lives.

The late film critic Roger Ebert once wrote: “Sooner or later, everyone who loves movies comes to Ozu.” He is quite right. Don’t worry if you don’t get what the fuss it’s about or how there are people who are touched so deeply by his films. Ozu is a patient storyteller. He will wait for you. One of these days you will understand and his stories will hit you like a thunderbolt.

Written by Daniel Chiam