Dir:
Antonio Mendez Esparza
Here
and There doesn't deliver any of that. A while back, Total Film used
to have a 'predicted interest curve', a graph depicting the
highs and lows of some of the films they were reviewing. The biggest
problem with Here and There is simple; that graph would be a straight
line. This is an incredibly flat film. We should be engaged by the
life of the Mexican family at the centre of the film; a mother and
father who seem to be in their mid thirties and three daughters of
about 15, 12 and 1 year old but the ups (the father's band playing a
gig with a well known local musician) and downs (the youngest child
becoming ill) are all treated with the same lack of engagement by
filmmakers and characters alike. There is never an ounce of passion
shown in the film, creating an overwhelming feeling of flatness and
disengagement. The performances don't help matters much as, while
there is a strong family dynamic created, none of the actors ever
rises above a mumbled monotone.
There
is one caveat that I must mention: I fell asleep for about twenty
minutes during the middle of this festival of tedium. These were
easily my favourite twenty minutes of the film, and I suspect that
what I missed wasn't a sudden lapse into genius, but I have to allow
for that possibility. That said, even if that were the case I still
couldn't recommend Here and There, which will surely mount a robust
challenge to be noted as the single dullest film at this year's
festival. Avoid it with extreme prejudice.
★☆☆☆☆
★☆☆☆☆
Save
Your Legs
Dir:
Boyd Hicklin
For
an alleged comedy, Save Your Legs is notably short on jokes, well,
unless you find poo inherently funny, which, no longer being five, I
don't. The characters are all desperately one note; there's the one
who won't grow up, the drunk, the egomaniac, the nerd (who might have
a crush on one of the others), the philosopher, the young upstart and
the fat bearded one. There are more, but they don't even register
that much personality. As the only woman in the film, Pallavi Sharda
registers, but only thanks to her beauty, the film tries to work her
into the climactic scenes, but then forgets to give her anything to
do.
Save
Your Legs is insultingly lazy. The jokes basically hit the peak of
their inventiveness at 'Indian food gives you the trots', the
'bromance' between the team is laughably thin, and the lessons
learned prosaic, unimpressive (apparently when you're 35 you might
want to grow up, thanks for that movie) and predictable and
the cricket sequences are unimpressively shot and totally devoid of
tension, because even before you've seen a frame of them you know
almost to the last beat how each of them will play out.
This
is a terrible film, disregard its advice, if it comes to a choice
between seeing it and running away, do not Save Your Legs.
★☆☆☆☆
★☆☆☆☆
Doomsday
Book
Dir:
Yim Pil-Sung / Kim Jee-Woon
Every
viewer will have a story they prefer and one that they perhaps don't
like as much, and it will differ and provoke much discussion.
Personally I liked the bookending efforts, which seem to match up
better in tone than Kim Jee-Woon's solo entry in the middle. The
film opens with Yim's hilarious The New Generation; a vision of a
zombie apocalypse, which blends absurd humour, bloody violence,
environmental commentary (it's very concerned with recycling) and a
little romance to fine effect. The compressed nature of the story
actually makes it all the more fun, because it becomes hilariously
overblown in a very short space of time.
Kim
Jee-Woon's story of a robot that becomes self aware, and a Buddhist,
causing an existential crisis for itself and for many humans, didn't
work as well for me. To some degree the problem is likely that I
don't know much about or really understand some of the ideas running
through it, I also rather missed the more markedly anarchic tone of
the first film, and thanks to the very familliar design of the robot
I just couldn't shake the expectation that it was about to begin
singing Bjork song at any moment. This film; The Heavenly Creation,
may be the one that really grows on a rewatch, certainly it's the
deepest and most thoughtful of the films, but it's definitely the one
I found least rewarding on a first look.
The
closing collaboration, Happy Birthday, is the best of the shorts for
me. It takes the anarchic apocalypse comedy of The New Generation
and turns it up to eleven, with the story of a family (including The
Host director Bong Joon-Ho) hiding underground from a potentially
world destroying meteor, which turns out to be something they may
have caused (I don't want to spoil it any further than that). The
end of the world newscasts are absolutely priceless, and the short's
almost surreal last moments - which to some degree recall the botched
ending of Save the Green Planet - really surprised me by working very
well (and hey, if nothing else it's always nice to see Bae Doo-Na, if
only for a few minutes).
Doomsday
Book is never less than engaging, and I'm sure that anyone will find
at least two of the three shorts highly entertaining.
★★★☆☆
★★★☆☆
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