There is an early scene where pseudoscience involving time inversion is being explained by a scientist to The Protagonist. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” That’s probably also an advice for the audience who at that point is about to be thrown into the deep end of quantum physics and thermodynamics. You would wish you had paid more attention during your physics lessons, but then again you would probably need a master’s degree in theoretical physics to suss out all the multiple layers of meaning.
In a twilight world of international espionage, an unnamed CIA operative, known as The Protagonist (John David Washington), is recruited by a mysterious organization called Tenet to participate in a global assignment that unfolds beyond real time. The mission: prevent Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a renegade Russian oligarch with precognition abilities, from starting World War III. The Protagonist will soon master the art of “time inversion” as a way of countering the threat that is to come.
Christopher Nolan has been lobbying Tenet to be screened at the theatres and really, there is no other way you should see this than on the biggest screen possible. If you are fortunate enough in your part of the world where the theatres are opened, it’s worth a risk to step back inside the hallowed darkened cinema halls and be bombarded by a mind-bender of a narrative.
[there are going to be some very light spoilers from this point onwards. Read no further if you want a full-on head trip experience with zilch prior knowledge.]
Tenet is one of those films whose authority is established from its opening moments. The opening scene at a symphony performance in Kiev cracks like a whip. Driven by an incredibly effective soundtrack by Ludwig Göransson, captivating cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema, the narrative grabs your senses and mind with a head-scratcher of a story with nary a dull moment.
Tenet is Nolan’s calling card to become the next director to helm a James Bond movie because once all the bombardment on your senses dulls down to a lull you would realise Tenet is a glorified James Bond movie (with some generous splashes of Mission Impossible thrown in for good measure), complete with a M, a Q, a femme fatale, a sidekick and a megalomaniac out to end the world. This isn’t a complaint; it’s just an observation.
Tenet is strongest in its action spectacles that we have come to expect from the Nolan brand – stupendously orchestrated and meticulously constructed, like something you have never seen before. There is no cheating here because no green screens were used, so the scene of a Boeing crashing into a building is a real plane. Coupled with Nolan-esque high concepts, Tenet lives up to its namesake.
Where Tenet flounders is in the spaces between the action sequences. It was so busy laying on the what, where, when, who and how, with little breathing space for one to unpack. Sometimes, I wonder if it would be better to not explain everything and let us connect the dots on our own. For such a heavily expositional movie, dialogue is crucial and for this reviewer it felt like the dialogue was competing with the bombastic soundtrack. There is a scene of the principals speaking through masks and I did something I have never done – I was reading the Chinese subtitles furiously.
The stakes don’t hit the highs because the emotional tether to the characters is flimsy. Unlike Inception, there isn’t any backstory to The Protagonist. We are not privy to his motivation in wanting to save the world and dammit… we need a good one if we are to be emotionally vested in the end-of-the-world proceedings. However, I am not taking away anything from the cast’s acting which ranges from good to great, especially Robbert Pattinson who turned in yet another charismatic performance.
I have seen my fair share of confusing movies and the great ones like Donnie Darko (2001), Eraserhead (1977) or even Nolan’s very own Inception (2010), know how to make it a remarkable mind-melting experience. They don’t try to explain everything to a T and trust the audience to understand the mechanics in their own unique ways. Tenet just tries too hard to be idiot proof and landed up as anything but. I have no doubt the big picture is simple enough but getting the finer machinations behind it is a frustrating experience. Like I mentioned earlier… don’t try to understand it. Feel it.
Tenet is probably the first water-cooler movie of the year, but I doubt initial conversations will go beyond “WTF is it about?” That said, one would be hard pressed to say the movie is a terrible one. You will know in your bones that buried somewhere beneath the confounding discombobulation is a good movie that wants to be great with ambition that reaches for the highest heights. With multiple viewings, the story and plot will become clearer, but whether Tenet will compel you to do that is another story. What a spectacular, staggering and stupendous mess, emphasis on all the adjectives.
We all live in our little self-important worlds with the internet making us feel our world is much bigger than it actually is. IMHO, movies are windows, giving us a unique empathetic view of the outside world. As a movie begins in a darkened cinema hall, we see the world through the eyes of another person, living vicariously through him or her. We can float in space, know how a serial killer thinks, understand why freedom is worth dying for. If a film is good, it is an out-of-body experience like no other and they have the power to make you want to become a better person.
It’s the end of another year and it’s time to look back to come up with a list of best films. “Best Films” you say, I hear you proclaim through gritted teeth. What constitutes “best” vary from person to person, and cinephiles are the most opinionated folks. Before you start to say “what’s this sh*t” because your favourite movie isn’t on the list or it should be higher up on the list, remember this is just a list, my list. My best films of the year may not cater to the tastes of the mainstream and as far as possible I have explained why I like them and why they deserved to be on my top 10.
10 One Cut of the Dead
How much you will enjoy this depends on whether you could sit through the first 37 minutes. This first act is still reasonably entertaining but it isn’t anything you have seen in other better zombie flicks. Pay attention to every madcap shenanigan and pat yourself on the back for thinking you can probably do better if you were the director. You will revisit the bad film and see it in a different light in the final act. The results are rip-roaringly hilarious. I laughed till my tears rolled down. Indie filmmaker Shinichiro Ueda has pulled off an amazing feat here. The movie subverts all my expectations, crosses the finishing line with finesse and lands up in a heartwarming embrace. Above all, One Cut of the Dead works as an ode to the art of genre filmmaking and the passion in making this film lingers in every frame, including the first 37 minutes.
9 Still Human
Anthony Wong plays a paralegic and he is so amazing he chews up the scenes he is in without breaking a sweat. The acting is so organic and authentic, you won’t feel he is reading from a script. It feels like he ad-libbed the scenes. Playing opposite him is a newcomer who plays the Filipino caregiver. She is equally convincing and in her I see the embodiment of all female foreign helpers who are living away from home to ply an honest living. It plays out like a comedy of manners as the two of them struggle to find a common ground. Still Human hits the funny bone and by golly… grab your emotional heart, filling it with so much human warmth that you burst out in tears. The movie shows you that even a paraplegic and a domestic helper have dreams. How they help each other to realise their dream and aspiration is a great life lesson.
8 Fagara
Fagara doesn’t rush out of the blocks to tell its heartfelt story. The director allows the newly-acquainted half-sisters to live and breathe, filling the scenes they are in with authenticity and authority. It is a well-crafted story of three half-sisters looking back into their painful pasts in order to venture forward into their futures with revitalised hope. These are not soft and malleable women; they are their own women, owing no explanations for the paths they have chosen in life, giving the movie a wonderful freshness, relevance and clarity. It is filled with many nuances and it allows you the time to tease out its narrative subtleties on your own. Instead of ramming into your solar plexus, it gracefully touches you with its strong flavours and deep reds and browns.
7 Guang
Guang is a semi-autobiographical piece of work and the director’s own high-functioning autistic brother appears during the end-credits. Movies like this can become cloying very fast, but Guang remains steadfast and never goes down the road of syrupy sentimentality for the first two acts. By the third act I already gave it a free pass to do the worst to me, and I have to say every tear was earned. There are many movies out there that thrill, make us laugh, scare us, turn us into softies, but you can count on the fingers of probably one hand the few movies in a year that make you understand the impaired person and make you want to become a better person. Guang is the first movie I have seen this year in this latter category.
6 So Long, My Son
The plot of So Long, My Son does not unfold in chronological order and characters’ motivations are not explained in clarity, but we are in the hands of a great storyteller who lets the scenes breathe and the characters flourish. In the end, the Chinese tight-lipped stoicism melts away, the why is explained and the rendering is cathartic. The themes of guilt, forgiveness and acceptance are prevalent in dramas, but in the hands of Wang Xiaoshuai they come like a tsunami of feels. “Less is more” is an axiom that is never easy to achieve without making a movie feel pretentious, So Long, My Son exemplifies it and makes it look easy.
5 Toy Story 4
If Toy Story 1 – 3 is about Andy’s story, Toy Story 4 is the culmination of Woody’s story. What a fitting ending for a character who lives for his kid. He has come full circle and he truly deserves his walk into the sunset with his love. If Toy Story 1- 3 is about the theme of letting go, then this is about moving on. Sometimes there comes a time you have to think about yourself. Toy Story 4 deeply encapsulates all these human feelings in an authenticity that hits the spot.
4 Marriage Story
Noah Baumbach has crafted a family drama that is masterful, giving us an intimate look at the destruction of a marriage, the legal minefield and the emotional devastation. The principal cast, down to even the supporting cast, lay down a high watermark. It is able to find nuances and dark humour in surprising places. Baumbach’s love for Charlie and Nicole shines like a lighthouse in a perilous stormy night, guiding us to the safety of the shore. Marriage Story is the work of a storyteller at the top of his game.
3 The Irishman
Nobody makes mobster movies like Martin Scorsese. The Irishman is a class reunion of all the noteworthy actors who played gangsters in this century. For a movie that is over 3 hours, it doesn’t feel bloated. There is a lot of talk about trucking, steaks, punctuality, painting houses, fish, guns and f-bombs and the likes thrown around like punctuations. For over 3 hours I entered a nefarious world of wise guys, but it’s a fascinating world that has honour and betrayal. The canvas is huge and Scorsese paints like Michaelangelo.
2 For Sama
For Sama is a love letter “written” by a mother for her baby daughter Sama (it means sky in Arabic). It documents her confessional hope for Syria and the battle-ravaged city of Aleppo. It is a 100-minute documentary of unflinching horror and the senselessness of war, made with the sheer passion of a rebel and the undying love of a mother, wanting her daughter to understand why she continued to live in a city when they could die at any moment. I have seen my fair share of war movies. In my humble opinion, For Sama dwarfs them all in terms of honesty and authenticity. No amount of gloss, sugarcoating and emotional manipulation can reproduce the fervid wallop the film sends to your very core. Sama may be too young to understand the film, but not us. This is essential viewing and a strong contender for Best Documentary of the Year.
1 Parasite
The gold standard of any satire is the ability to turn the camera inwards at the audience making them aware they have been essentially laughing at themselves for two hours. Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or winner Parasite ticks all the boxes and it is a biting social satire of lurid lengths and vivid highs. Parasite is one wicked bridge linking two ends of the wealth divide. Bong successfully makes us see the issue from both sides and our sympathies continue to waver from end to end. Most directors will make us choose sides and elicit hate. Not here, Bong makes us pity them. He keeps the darkly comic perversities and desperate acts coming at such a brisk pace that you barely realise it has shifted gears. Bong has crafted a cynical treatise on the moral and ethical decline of a modern Korean society and a cautionary tale of the love for money.
Honorable Mention
Knives Out, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Ad Astra, The Farewell, Border, Dragged Across Concrete, Midsommar, Pain and Glory, Us, Joker, Dolemite is My Name, Wet Season, Blinded by the Light, Ready or Not
On the TV series front, I have enjoyed these:
Kingdom, Chernobyl, The World Between Us, The Boys, Hotel Del Luna. Out of all these the biggest stand-out is The World Between Us, a Taiwanese series.
The story of The World Between Us is inspired by “The Little Light Bulb” incident in 2016 where a man suffering from schizophrenia beheaded a young girl in broad daylight in Taiwan. The title in Chinese, 我们与恶的距离, literally translates to The Distance Between Us and Evil. A young man shot and killed unsuspecting cinema-goers while a movie is being screened. The story picks up 2 years later when the man is waiting for the death sentence to be carried out, and the fates of his family, the victims’ families and the family of the defense lawyer intertwine into a perfect storm of catharsis and pathos. Over 10 episodes, the series offers no pat answers, instead it provides incisive observations on love, suffering and societal ills. It is full of subtle fluctuations and evolving graduations between characters caught in dire situations. Its power emanates from the absorbing performances of characters duelling between wanting to punish, wanting to seek redemption and everything in between. Filled with so many life lessons, vagaries of kind acts and the vastitude of love, The World Between Us is a must-see. There are no convenient broad strokes, no pat contrivances and no Hollywood-styled walk into the sunset, but yet all the characters experience their little victories in a heartbreaker of a coda that brought tears to our eyes. The idea that small acts make a difference is touching, especially in today’s irony-soaked global hamlets. There are many TV series out there vying for your attention, but there are not many that will make you understand life and society more. The point of the game is not to watch all of them, but to watch the great ones. This is a great one. This one will give you new lenses to see the world and its inhabitants with. Don’t. Miss. This.
Coincidentally, I am headlong into a couple of literature involving time travel. In Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, there is a particular seat in a basement cafe that allows anyone to go back to the past but no matter what happens in the past, the present will not change. In Brian K. Vaughan’s Paper Girls, protagonists can meet themselves from the future, at times up to two future selves, with no repercussions unlike Back to the Future. In the movie Synchronic which I caught recently at the cinema, time travel from one particular spot will take you into a past not of your choosing for seven minutes; another locale will take you to another time in the past. So how does one rescue someone trapped in the past?
I like time travel narratives. It is all about setting up the rules in a believable fashion. As long as the protagonists are functioning within the parameters all would be fine. The world-building and rules establishment are always fun in these time continuum narratives, but the good ones do a whole lot more – they know how to drive up the stakes, creating characters you will care about. Netflix’s The Call is a rip-roaring thriller that borrows from Frequency (2000) liberally, and knowing the Koreans, they always know how to take an idea and make it theirs.
The Call begins with a young woman named Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye) at a house in the countryside with gothic vibes. Soon, she hears the incessant ring from a landline telephone. Picking it up, she hears the desperate cries of a young woman named Young-sook (Jun Jong-seo), who asserts vehemently that her shaman mother is trying to kill her. The two women soon realise that both of them live in the same house separated by a time of two decades and the landline somehow allows them to connect across time.
Then it gets messed up, albeit in a nice way. Young-sook learns that she can prevent the death of Seo-yeon’s father in her present and he miraculously appears in Seo-yeon’s reality without any prior knowledge of what had happened. That’s a nice moment when they opened the time-traversing Pandora’s Box but things get pretty messed up from that moment onwards.
The Call milks the premise for all it’s worth and then some. It is a frantic mystery thriller that moves at a frenetic pace. There are twists at every narrative turn and it is satisfyingly unpredictable right up until the end-credits. What happens after that is a shambolic plug for a sequel that should never happen, but this part you are in full control – you can simply choose to ignore the coda.
The Call rises up above the formulaic with its sleek execution and a showcase of two outstanding central performances. Park Shin-hye plays Seo-yeon with the right amount of vulnerability coupled with a resolve to best her best-friend-turned-nemesis, while Jun Jong-seo with only her second major role after Lee Chang-dong’s Burning displays an engaging unhinged performance. It is largely on the strength of her character we are not sure what would happen next. However, like Frequency, it reaches a double showdown that feels a tad trite.
The good time travel narratives know that it is a skill to not give the audience time to question the conceit. Otherwise, plot holes the size of moon craters will open up and we fall in. Like I have to question the scene when Young-sook kidnaps the younger version of Seo-yoon and the older version of Seo-yoon doesn’t possess that piece of crucial knowledge till later. Who or what decides the time frame of information becoming sentient for the older person? Arghh… I am getting a headache. Thankfully, The Call doesn’t give me much time to think about the physics and the logic and by far and large this is a piece of solid entertainment, buoyed by a pair of compelling performances. This is one call you need to pick up.
1930s Korea, in the period of Japanese occupation, a new girl (Sookee) is hired as a handmaiden to a Japanese heiress (Hideko) who lives a secluded life on a large countryside estate with her domineering Uncle (Kouzuki). But the maid has a secret. She is a pickpocket recruited by a swindler posing as a Japanese Count to help him seduce the Lady to elope with him, rob her of her fortune, and lock her up in a madhouse. The plan seems to proceed according to plan until Sookee and Hideko discover some unexpected emotions.
Auteur Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden is a superb exercise in form, structure and tone. With the latter, Park(Oldboy & Joint Security Area) has achieved something extraordinary. If any scene were to linger a few seconds longer or he had decided to focus on a certain issue, the film would have veered off to a different territory. As it is, and with all the major characters’ kooky off-kilter portrayals, I can’t pinpoint whether I was watching something real or abstract. I was also kept in awe by the intricate and resplendent set-design which suggests something dark and Gothic is working the undercurrents. There are of course some serious girl on girl action but that never encroaches into the spine of the story.
Adapting Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a Victorian tale awash with all manner of Dickensian motifs, Park spins an engrossing tale that ebbs and flows with a Hitchcockian suspense; it withholds as much as it discloses; it is an erotic tale that beats with raw fervour. It is at once a love story but also a menagerie showcasing human beings in their vilest forms. Park’s finger hovers over all the buttons, teasing us gleefully but it is with the ultimate restraint that he never descends down to the usual tropes. The story is divided into three chapters; each told from a different character’s perspective. The structure is Rashomon-esque but Park puts his own stamp on it. The film may be nearly 2.5 hours but I hardly moved in my seat; my senses kept spellbound as each twist hit me hard. When it ended I couldn’t believe 2.5 hours had whizzed by. The plot is pulsating and it never lets up. There’s even an octopus in it!
A little context first… over the weekend we saw two movies that stopped way short of being great. The first was Jeethu Joseph’s The Body (2019), a Hindi remake of Oriol Paulo’s El Cuerpo (2012). What should have been a twist-galore suspense-driven thriller turned out to be a turgid affair because of the necessitated song and dance numbers; a case of death by cultural traditional practices. We followed that up with Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018), an uncomfortably tragic and elemental revenge tale let down by an unsatisfying and bloated to-and-fro final act. Then we made a trip to the cinema to catch The Invisible Man and our faith with great storytelling is restored. This, in my humble opinion, is the first awesome film of 2020.
Cecilia Kass (Elizabeth Moss) is escaping from the grip of her abusive boyfriend Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a scientist. Freed from him, Cecilia starts to rebuild her life, but her nightmare is just beginning when weird things begin to happen around her that only she can perceive.
Time and time again, H.G. Wells’ classic novel of the same name is revisited by Hollywood. The narrative track is usually one of two (or both) – it portrays either the perks or tribulations of becoming invisible. The first cool thing Australian writer-director Leigh Whannell does is to frame the ubiquitous storyline as a riveting domestic thriller making it thoroughly relevant in this #MeToo era.
The opening sequence is a symphony of gradually swelling music, thrills and spills with nary any exposition of the explicit kind. We have no idea what is going on, but it is so effective we are eagerly clutching at every detail. I love it when a storyteller respects the intelligence of the audience who can connect the dots.
A lot of the story is told from Cecilia’s point of view and in Elizabeth Moss who has a knack for playing strong female characters, we have our perfect guide into a nightmarish world of extreme stalking. Her glazed and terrorised eyes can convey a world of crazy. Her unhinged acting will draw you in. The concept of invisibility is not just a literal concept, it is also a metaphorical one. Being consistently abused by a sociopath, Cecilia is always haunted by shame, anguish and pain even when the tormentor is not around (or is he?). Her mind takes a beating by an invisible force – is Adrian tormenting her or is it post-traumatic stress? It all feels relatable and real.
The camera work is simple but effective. At times, it pans to an empty space and stays there for an eternity, and we sense a presence that isn’t there. The special effects is of a high calibre and it serves the enraging story. The science behind the invisibility is niftily presented and the movement of humans getting plummeted by an unseen brute force is downright scary.
Above all else, it is the nail-biting tension that is deftly maintained from the first scene to the last that is a high-wire act. The twist of an ending is thoroughly earned and cathartic, and in Moss we have the ultimate portrayal of a female heroine gradually finding a latent power within her to strike back at a seemingly insurmountable force that threatens her very being. This is worth the risk of sitting among a cinema full of patrons with the threat of the coronavirus hanging in the air.
If all my words are not enough, try this on for size. That night, after we came home from watching the movie, the missus had one nightmare after another. If that’s not a huge thumbs up, I don’t know what it is.
At the age of 38, Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes), a man who uses an iron lung, decides he no longer wishes to be a virgin. With the help of his therapist and his priest (William H. Macy), he contacts Cheryl Cohen-Greene (Helen Hunt), a professional sex surrogate and a typical soccer mom with a house, a mortgage and a husband. Inspired by a true story, The Sessions, follows the fascinating relationship which evolves between Cheryl and Mark as she takes him on his journey to manhood.
The synopsis above doesn’t even begin to convey how sensitive the risqué subject matter is handled. John Hawkes, one of the most versatile actors in the field, continues to amaze in any role he takes up. This time round he spends his time in an iron lung. For a few hours each day, he can be out of the metal coffin, pushed around on a gurney by a caregiver to the grocery store and even to shop for clothes. He speaks in a reedy voice which makes absolute sense because he lies down all the time. He had polio during his childhood which rendered him bed-ridden his entire life. His muscles don’t work anymore from the neck down but God in a wicked sense of humor retained his sense of feeling on every inch of his inert body. Yes, he still gets a boner but never the release. He is a writer, a poet and a Catholic. In a brilliant counterpoint, the director lets Ben shares his frustrations and feelings to his parish priest, a celibate person. Herein lies a brilliant scene where Ben shares his need for sexual healing outside of marriage, and the priest says he believes God is going to give him a free pass and commands Ben to “go for it”.
Helen Hunt appears nearly half an hour later. She lays down the rules – the most important of which is that there will only be six sessions. She says that is the difference between her and a hooker – the hooker would want Ben to visit her all the time. Hunt plays the trying role with understated histrionics. She really wants to heal an invalid man through sex and after every session she speaks into her tape-recorder and takes down notes of the proceedings and ponders what issues to deal with in the next session. She plays the role with total abandon and a certain elusive warmth. Hunt appears totally nude in many scenes and they are lingering scenes, none of those fleeting half-concealed blink-and-it’s-gone scenes. Oh my goodness… I actually feel quite guilty seeing her in her birthday suit because when I was a teenager I wanted to get married because of her in Mad About You. Every person I know then wants to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer… me? I just wanted to get married.
The tone of the film is exquisitely handled – the director didn’t go for Daniel Day “My Left Foot” Louis-type of extreme histrionics to emotionally manipulate us to the high heavens. The risqué subject matter is sensitively handled and it even has humor. I dare you to not laugh as Ben ejaculates prematurely during the early sessions. As I was watching this, I had no idea how it would end and that itself is a superb feat. As much as the taboo subject matter goes, this is NOT a film about sex but more of what sex is all about. I think Ben says it well when Vera, his caregiver asked him how did it go. “I felt cleansed and victorious!”
When the movie ended I picked up quite a lot of life lessons (what they were I shan’t share because they are different for everyone) and it made me want to spit on films like James Bond movies where sex is trivialized into conquests and a number game.
It is four years after South Korea’s zombie apocalypse in Train to Busan (2016). Director Yeon Sang-ho brings us on another journey through the wasteland of South Korea, now overrun by zombies. Soldier Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won) makes a journey back with a rag-tag team of three others, including his brother-in-law. Their mission which they chose to accept is to recover an abandoned food truck which was transporting a princely sum of US$20 million. Things of course do not go as planned as they have to battle hordes of zombies and stumble upon human survivors. As if that’s not enough to make it a helluva tough time for the protagonists, they also have to face off with a militia group that has their own unique version of Fight Club.
Okay… Gong Yoo and Ma Dong-seok are not in this which is not surprising, but there are also no trains in this latest installment. They are cars, lots of modified cars, trucks, vans, a ship, a helicopter and lots of guns.
Gone is the high concept of putting a motley crew of characters onboard a bullet train filled with zombies and in comes a hotchpotch of recycled story ideas from Escape From New York and Mad Max: Fury Road. The canvas is bigger but it doesn’t have the same emotional heft as the original.
The characters are too one-note for my taste and they just aren’t street wise enough. The bad guy says he will give the crew half of the stash if they recover the truck. I guess only desperados will believe that. I just know they will eat a bullet if they are successful and yet these guys decide to go to Zombieland like it’s prom night.
There are some great ideas that are mentioned – the xenophobia and that North Korea is now safer than the South, but they are thrown out so fast like it’s a disease. What you have here is a straight-up survival flick that is just serviceable. This won’t be something that will stay in your mind long after the house lights come on.
Even though it loses the inventive claustrophobia of the original, it retains the problem solving element that I enjoyed tremendously. Here, cars are retro-fitted with tools that make them versatile in evading zombies. There are some action set-pieces that are inventive, in particular the gladiator rink located in a mall and the climatic car chase that will surely make you think of the Fast and Furious franchise and Mad Max. I mentioned Mad Max but Peninsula is not in the same ballpark because the night-time car chase is laden with CGI which is splotchy at best, barely hiding the impossible physics and motion of the vehicular mayhem and the marauding zombies.
It all culminates in an extended ending that hardly makes any sense. If you aren’t weaned on sappy K-dramas, you might be tearing your hair out watching human behaviour that doesn’t fall within the logical range.
But what do I know? I know one thing – in a cinema landscape that is bereft of good films, let alone blockbusters, Train to Busan: Peninsula is a godsend and it is going to bring in the moola by the truckloads.
PS – I have just learned that a COVID-19 patient visited a cinema recently. Sitting in a cinema hall for 2 hours with a person with the virus is one scary prospect. So Train to Busan: Peninsula will be the only time I will step back into the cinema for now. You can say I went through the valley of death to bring you this review 😎
“Léon…. Nikita… there’s another… wait a second… John Wick.”
That’s the type of conversations my better half and I have in the car while driving to and from our usual movie dates. I got to hand it to her in that I don’t even need to explain the concept of cleaners in movies (not just the hitman but also the clean-up crew) and I have the utmost respect for her when she exclaimed “Léon” and not “The Professional”.
Ever since Nikita (1990), I have been fascinated by this necessary subset of the criminal underground, the cleaners. You can’t just have the assassin go round piling up bodies and not think about who does the cleaning up to the point that nobody suspects it was a place of uber-violence? John Wick (2014) furthers the concept and adds a sleek freshness. It is high time somebody actually makes a movie about the cleaners, the criminals’ unsung heroes and the unseen extension of the crime syndicates. Voice of Silence is about a pair of cleaners, but unfortunately I am still waiting for a better movie that showcases these professional cleaners. This ain’t it.
Tae-in (Yoo Ah-in), a mute and Chang-bok (Yoo Jae-myung) work as the clean-up crew for a crime organisation. Things are going like clockwork until their client wants a favour from them: they need to take care of an eleven year-old kidnapped girl Cho-hee (Moon Seung-ah), while the ransom is being negotiated. But all the pretty plans go awry when the next body they are getting rid of is the kidnapper’s.
Dark comedy is tricky business; it’s not just about taking a taboo and morbid subject and making it funny, it has to be grounded in some sort of truthfulness within the characters. Dark humour should come from characters in an organic manner. If done well, it can be wickedly funny without sacrificing the characters’ humanity.
On paper, the premise of Voice of Silence is ripe for dark comedy, nothing beats laughing in the face of impending death. But the story makes a number of odd choices in both its narrative as well as its human logic aspects. Show me an eleven year-old girl who isn’t afraid of dead bodies and copious blood, and I would eat a tuft of hair. Frankly, I just can’t buy into how Tae-in and Chang-bok are such bumbling amateurs in their dealings with the crime syndicate in that they are constantly being used and manipulated. A little back story of how they come into this dark business would have helped me get behind them, but there isn’t. It was amateur hour for a pair of lovable fools who clean up scenes of crime. But what do I know? Voice of Silence is nominated for Best Film, Best New Director (Hong Eui-jeong), Best Screenplay and Best Actor (Yoo Ah-in) at the 41st Blue Dragon Film Awards.
For mainly the reasons stated above, I watch the proceedings of Voice of Silence at arm’s length, not fully invested in the characters and the story. Acting-wise, I already know prior to watching the movie I will be in for a good time. This year I have seen Yoo Jae-myung in Reply 1988, Prison Playbook and Itaewon Class, and in all his roles his characters are always distinctly delineated with each other. In fact, my wife had to tell me the villain in Itaewon Class is the father in Reply 1988. That’s the hallmark of a great actor – when you can’t see remnants of past characters he had played in his present one. Yoo Ah-in, I have seen what he is capable of in the excellent Burning (2018) and here he furthers the craft in a role with no speaking lines. His feelings are laid bare, saying so much without uttering a word. He absolutely deserves his Best Actor nomination.
Voice of Silence also makes for an interesting case study of the Stockholm Syndrome in that Cho-hee is allowed to feel needed and dared I say appreciated in a unique home environment. There is a little back story to her that gives credence to why she behaves in this manner, and it is heartwarming to see her being an older sister to Tae-in’s young sister and keeping the ramshackle home in order. It is this unusual relationship between Cho-hee and Tae-in that I feel is the beating heart of the story. But yet, late in the last act, Cho-hee makes an odd choice in character motivation that had me sighing in disappointment.
Voice of Silence is a story of characters making bizarre choices that mars the flow of good storytelling. It may have done enough to blur the lines between the good and the bad in humanity, but the out-of-turn choices made by the characters bring a degree of unreality to the proceedings that deflate any suspense. And I really have to say this last bit – depending on your predilection for story endings, you will either think of this as poetry in motion or a tight slap in the face. It was the latter for me.
1984 was an eventful year. Let’s see… Indira Gandhi was murdered by her trusted bodyguards, UK and China came to an agreement that Hong Kong will revert to China in 1997. In pop-culture, 44 members of Band Aid came together to record the phenomenal single Do They Know It’s Christmas? The most popular movies were Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It was also the year of breakdancing, shoulder-pads, fanny packs, loud get-ups in vivid colours, parachute pants and big hair-dos. Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman would fit right in like a glove, but for a movie that situates itself in that year, it doesn’t use the stuff that are synonymous with the year resoundingly; it doesn’t even have head-bangers like New Order’s Blue Monday, which was featured in the trailer. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Wonder Woman 1984 begins with a soaring prologue of a Themyscira-set Amazonian Olympics, reminiscent of the Quidditch matches in the Harry Potter movies. This opening scene alone is testament that some movies should be seen on the big screen, and not streamed on your telly at home. Young Diana (Lilly Aspell) learns an important life lesson that becomes her mantra for life.
Fast forward to 1984 and Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is working at the Smithsonian, while still pining for Steve Trevor (Chris Pine). Her co-worker and new friend, Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) discovers an unusual relic called Dreamstone which grants one’s deepest wishes. Enters a desperate con-man, Max Lord (Pedro Pascal), who wants the Dreamstone for his own selfish needs, basically to become the world’s most powerful man, but not before Diana unsuspectingly makes a wish of her own.
WW84 opens with two excellent action sequences. From the Themyscira set-piece, it races to a mall fight with robbers who read too much into Max Lord’s “all you need is to want it” chant. This action sequence fuses comedy, action, 80s scene-setting and showcases Wonder Woman as a female role model. That last bit is seen from the eyes of a little girl who watches the superhero make short work of the hoodlums. Her pride and sense of wonder is palpable. Then the movie settles down on building its story and here is where it starts to be on flimsy ground.
A story based on a variation of The Monkey’s Paw is always going to be kooky. Aren’t all of us brought up with the notion that if you ever get your hands on a magic lamp granting you three wishes, you wish that the wishes never end? The final denouement of this arc doesn’t lend itself to a grandiosity which is very much a staple in a superhero genre film.
No prizes for guessing how Steve Trevor lands up in 1984. It’s a coup really because the chemistry between Pine and Gadot was what made the first one a special movie. In my books, Gadot resembles a gorgeous statue and doesn’t have the range as an actress, but pair her with an ensemble of good actors she starts to shine. The roles are reversed in this sequel with Steve being the fish out of the water and Diana giving him a tour of America in 1984.
WW84 is about Wonder Woman, and like all movies about a continuing hero or heroine, villains are what give it its flavour. We get two here – Cheetah and Max Lord. On a wide spectrum of superhero movies which have at least two villains, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 (2007) on the lowest end and Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) on the other, WW84 is probably right smack in the middle.
Of the two, Wiig as Minerva is more interesting. She is timid, lacks confidence and is your basic “invisible” woman in today’s society. Her growth as a character is engaging, but the moment she becomes Cheetah she becomes short shrift. Max Lord is more straightforward – he is your basic charlatan, the man with a huge personality but with zero substance. Pedro Pascal does his best with his character and maxes out his lines to the best of his ability, channeling Gordon Gekko of Wall Street (1987), but using him to close out the climax feels very meh. Mind you, a battle of wits using mere words can be epic and my mind is now swimming in the scene of Sandman battling Satan in Hell in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, but here Patty Jenkins gives us the most cringe-worthy speech for Wonder Woman ever. If I have to listen to one more time that the world is beautiful, I would slice my arm with a knife because only then can I feel something.
If villains are what gives a superhero movie its flavour, then the action set-pieces are what brings in the moola. For a movie that runs at 151 minutes, WW84 has only four (excluding the opening prologue sequence). I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day and he told me his nephew said WW84 is lousy because it only has two action scenes. Okay, I get it… one of them is probably so unmemorable that it didn’t register in his consciousness and he definitely dismissed the last one as an action spectacle. Fair warning, everyone.
WW84 is a morality story warning against greed and the excesses of capitalism. Whether it succeeds in making you think twice about buying the Louis Vuitton bag is another thing. It is churned out from a superhero algorithm machine and ticks all the right boxes, but does so with such lacklustre ebullience that you will notice all the puppet strings pulling everything, including you, throughout. But I think I am too harsh. I should be grateful there is actually a tentpole superhero opening in the cinemas. In a horrid year where superheroes are all hiding out waiting for the opportune time to rein in the dollars, Wonder Woman is a shiny beacon of hope.
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