reelcitizen - freelance entertainment journalist

In his native Japan, Takeshi Kitano has always been revered. As a comedian, TV personality, actor, director, even a game show host, he’s not a man in need of more exposure. Back in 2000, he featured in the cult horror Battle Royale, a film that helped put Japanese cinema on the radar of hip young geeks in the West. In the same year, Kitano also directed and starred in Brother, his first and only (to date) film shot outside Japan and an intriguing attempt at transporting his hard-boiled yakuza persona into an American setting.

Producers expecting Kitano to land in Los Angeles and make a slick gangster movie must have been very disappointed. It’s obvious from Brother that Kitano was never really bothered about breaking into Hollywood; he barely speaks any English in the film and rarely reaches for the tenderness of his previous masterpieces like Sonatine and Hana-Bi. Instead he comes off as nonchalant and uncompromising, trying to wrestle with an unfamiliar language that refuses to fit his style, and the result is sometimes stilted and disengaging. But Kitano’s recurring themes are still apparent and Brother has plenty to say about the fraternity of the gang world, and the hollowness at its centre.

Brother’s strength is that it refuses to conform to the Hollywood portrayal of gangsters as glamorous icons who lead a life of danger and excitement. Kitano plays a yakuza, Yamamoto, forced to leave Japan and head to LA to see his half-brother Ken (Claude Maki), who is a low-level drug dealer with his buddy Denny (Omar Epps). Yamamoto is soon killing off the…

Continued on Electric Sheep

Smells Like Mega Crap

Just when you thought it was safe to back in the water, the studio that brought you Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus unleashes… Mega Piranha! But don’t worry, the water is more than safe if these scorched pancakes with eyes are anything to go by. While Mega Shark was a mild hit – everyone had heard of the title at least – Piranha doesn’t quite earn the so-bad-it’s-good tag, going for tedious action instead of hammy acting and not even attempting to have any fun along the way. Basically, it doesn’t have Lorenzo Lamas in it.

So Alexandre Aja has Piranha 3-D coming out soon and low-budget schlock factory The Asylum aren’t a company to miss the wave of someone else’s marketing hype. They’ve already capitalized on the success of other Hollywood blockbusters with 2012: Supernova and their own version of Sherlock Holmes (with Dinosaurs, naturally) and now we have Mega Piranha, their latest creature feature and a spiritual sequel to last year’s Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. So again we have mutant sea monsters set to wipe out anything in their path and an unnecessary attempt at resurrecting an 80s pop icon – this time Tiffany. I’ll leave you to decide where the true horror lies.

The difference between this and Mega Shark is that it tries to move things forward at a lightening pace. Part of Mega Shark’s charm was the ridiculous plans the heroes came up with. It tried to have characters and relationships (OK, sex in a cupboard) and story, but Mega Piranha doesn’t bother. Each scene starts and ends with speeded up photography so there’s a constant establishing shot of the White House with the flags jangling at 500 frames a second, and then characters leave with a Benny Hill style flash. One thing’s for sure, director Eric Forsberg isn’t Paul Greengrass and his attempts at urgency simply induce a headache – and that’s even before you’ve seen the…

Continued on The Smell of Napalm

Smells Like Round 163… Fight!

A sequel to the 1998 Hong Kong blockbuster The Storm Riders, Warriors sees Kwok and Ekin reprise their roles as mythical warriors Cloud and Wind for another slice of fantasy action. It’s cartoonish hokum that revels in its own ridiculousness but soon grows tiresome, quickly descending into an extended fight scene with all the subtlety of a few finger-mashing rounds of Mortal Kombat. The Pang Brothers make it look good but weak stunts and hastily edited choreography means it rarely excites.

An early scene in The Storm Warriors shows the villain, Lord Godless (Yam), and his army laying waste to ancient China’s martial arts schools. It’s basically an animated Iron Maiden cover and sets the tone for the film’s unsubtle take on the fantasy genre which is all big swords, big hair and crazy names. The Pang Brothers play it completely straight of course, even with a love interest called Second Dream (Choi).

For a while it looks like it all might be pretty fun. Lord Godless is hellbent on taking over China by finding the secret Dragon Tomb while Cloud is trained to become a better warrior by the legendary Nameless (Ho). Meanwhile, Wind has decided to take the easier option and just ‘become evil’ in order to advance his skills quickly and defeat Godless, although he hopes it’s more Diet Coke Evil so that he can return to normal later on. But the grand, epic promise of the beginning is soon lost as the film simply becomes a long, never-ending fight between Godless, Cloud and Wind and then just Cloud and Wind.

Sounds great you might say, and it would be if the fights were anything more interesting than a series of videogame style bouts. …

Continued on The Smell of Napalm

Smells Like You Will Have Great Career, Jaden-san

A number of changes make this an almost unrecognisable remake of an 80s classic but the central themes of a boy standing up for himself and learning about the harsh realities of the world from a wise mentor remain, and you still cheer him on in the end, punching the air with unashamed glee. It’s never going to meet the expectations of someone who still practices the crane kick in front of the mirror, but it repackages the story for a new audience, albeit one slightly more bloodthirsty than the kids of the 80s. And there’re montages, lots of montages.

For those that remember, the original Karate Kid movie was basically Rocky for kids; an underdog tale in which David takes on Goliath and beats him with cool moves and 80s power rock. It was a movie that mixed all-American attitude with Eastern honour and was full of iconic imagery and mystical quotes, so much so that it inspired a generation to seek out their local dojo and learn Karate. So can Harald Zwart, director of such classics as The Pink Panther 2, reach a new audience of wayward youths with his 2010 remake?

The big change is the setting is now the backstreets of Beijing, a welcome switch that embraces China’s increasing dominance, even if it does often look like it was directed by the tourist board as we get sweeping shots of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. The Chinese Mr Han replaces the Japanese Mr Miyagi and, in a masterstroke of casting, is played by China’s biggest star – Jackie Chan. The grumpy handyman finds himself training 12-year-old Dre (Jaden Smith), a Detroit kid finding it hard adjusting to his new surroundings when he’s bullied by a gang who are taught ‘bad’ martial arts by an evil instructor (Rongguang Yu – who disconcertingly has exactly the same grimace as Martin Kove from the original).

The odd couple relationship plays out as you’d expect with Han and Dre both being wary of each other, but it feels fresh thanks to the pair’s easy chemistry and sharp dialogue. Sadly for die…

Continued on The Smell of Napalm

As with most horror anthologies, Phobia (or 4bia to give the film its alternative, gimmicky title) is a mixed bag. A quartet of ghost stories from Thailand that vary in stylistic tricks and genre clichés, they are united by the impression they give of being extended 10-minute shorts hastily jammed together with no particular format. Some of the stories are linked by references to other characters but there’s no common theme or central thread, and the title itself is misleading: this isn’t an exploration of different phobias, just a straightforward play on people’s understandable and natural fear of ghosts.

The first segment, Happiness, is throwaway. A lonely woman is trapped in her apartment thanks to a broken leg and begins a text conversation with an admirer from beyond the grave. With little dialogue and the girl constantly flipping up her mobile to check for messages, it seems to have been written by the cut-throat producers from the Orange ads and proves why interacting with technology just doesn’t make for good cinema, no matter how much the phone companies want it to happen.

This is followed by Tit for Tat, a jittery, flashy attempt to create a mythological villain in the style of Japan’s Ring or Death Note. The rushed story sees a school kid take revenge on a gang of bullies by invoking some sort of devilish spirit from a book, the gimmick being that whoever looks at the page is instantly killed. This results in some splattery deaths that would be vastly improved if director Paween Purikitpanya stopped his pop video editing and filter changes to give the characters some room to breathe. Tension is sacrificed for gore, perhaps to cram in the thrills lacking from…

Continued on Electric Sheep

In his recent movies, Hong Kong director Johnnie To has been pushing the crime genre in strange new directions. Mad Detective blended a police procedural with barmy surrealism, while Sparrow was much more light-hearted, a hip caper with plenty of nods to 60s French cinema. But Vengeance marks a return to what To does best – stripped down gangster stories with a hard-boiled edge and slickly executed stand-offs. With this film, he has gone back to the action of Exiled and the detachment of his crime saga Election.

The plot is simple – a woman barely survives the assassination of her family and demands that her father Costello (Hallyday), a French chef, take revenge on those responsible. Costello employs a trio of hitmen (played by To favourites Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Gordon Lam and Lam Suet) to track them down, but there are a number of twists and turns as the group make their way to Simon Yam’s unrepentant crime lord.

The main stumbling block is Costello’s own memory, which is slowly failing him. He takes pictures of people to remember their names and faces and his condition worsens to the point where he can forget where he actually is. While this all sounds a bit Memento, To keeps this theme very much in the background, playing out the shoot-outs and double crosses as you’d expect but leaving Costello’s degrading motivation as a nagging question for the audience – can he take revenge if he cannot even remember why he’s doing it?

Revenge in cinema often falls into two camps; either it is a moment of glorious catharsis or it transforms the…

Continued on Electric Sheep

After the recent success of martial arts biopic Ip Man, director Wilson Yip and action star Donnie Yen’s 2005 crime thriller Kill Zone (a.k.a. SPL) finally gets the proper release it deserves. In terms of plot the Hong Kong set movie is nothing new, a weary detective (Simon Yam) is close to retirement and wants to put away crime lord Wong Po (Sammo Hung) once and for all, but the fight choreography is some of the most spectacular in…

Continued on Combat Magazine

Underground fight tournaments, stoic hero with a point to prove, Blood and Bone doesn’t shatter action movie traditions but it does show how it’s supposed to be done. Although it has the colourful appearance of a Fast & Furious sequel, director Ben Ramsey makes sure that the fights take centre stage and even structures the story so it has a few surprises.

The plot is similar to Van Damme’s A.W.O.L. and sees Michael Jai White take on various real-life MMA stars (Maurice Smith, Bob Sapp, Kimbo Slice) in impressively choreographed bouts that deliver plenty of blood and bone-breaking as the title would suggest. White is a powerhouse but UK actor Eamonn Walker really shines as the Genghis Khan-spouting gangster. Not even Julian Sands can ruin the fun.

Film Rating: 3/5
Action Rating: 4/5

If you liked this try: Bloodsport, A.W.O.L., Never Back Down

Following the first Terracotta last year, festival director Joey Leung has once again been scouring the Far East for his second mixtape of Asian blockbusters and mysterious oddities. As before, his MO is to provide a short, yet eclectic program that demonstrates the wonders of Eastern cinema, one accessible to both film geeks and casual viewers.

Terracotta will open with Asia’s biggest name – Jackie Chan. Little Big Soldier (2010) is his latest action movie, and although it’s another buddy movie of sorts, this time set in ancient China, it’s an assured return to form for the veteran martial artist. The festival will close with another spectacular period piece, Bodyguards and Assassins (2009), a lavish crowd-pleaser that follows an assassination attempt in 1905 Hong Kong. For those tired of headache-inducing 3-D cartoons, the Far East proves there’s nothing wrong with the old-fashioned way of delivering thrills.

While Chan is a household name, Leung is keen to highlight emerging talents such as Huang Bo, star of Cow (2009), a Chinese black comedy about a peasant tasked with saving a cow’s life during World War II. ‘This little-known film has won some major awards and is set to take off internationally – we were glad we got to it early!’ explains Leung. He also uncovered Japan’s Fish Story (2009), a sci-fi comedy set in several different time frames about punk rock and meteorites: ‘These two films are must-sees for people out to discover something different.’

Leung has also acted on feedback from last year’s festival and added late-night horror screenings and documentaries to the Terracotta programme. The Thai film Meat Grinder (2009) is…

Continued on Electric Sheep

For over 10 years, Combat has been following actor and martial artist Glenn Salvage. As the brutal hero of Left for Dead and The Silencer his blend of Tai Kwon Do and Wing Chun will already be familiar to action movie fans, but he’s now set to reach a whole new audience – on television.

Several years ago Salvage was on the verge of quitting acting but his persistence, through low to no-budget filmmaking, has allowed him to develop a respected tough guy image, an image that TV directors now want to harness. Throughout 2009 he’s been filming roles for ITV’s new drama series Identity – following an elite police unit tackling Identity crime - and the second season of the BBC’s cult horror hit Being Human, he’s even appearing in a documentary, The Death Penalty on Trial, for Channel 4.

As Salvage begins a new chapter of an already fascinating career, he talks to Combat about swapping the big screen for the small.

A few years ago you were ready to give-up acting…

“I went through this period of doing absolutely nothing which was down to becoming the father of twin girls, who are going to be 4 next month. At the time I didn’t know if I really wanted to carry on - I was a bit sick of the whole industry. As the girl’s got a little bit older, I got a bit more time back and I started getting the interest again.”

How did you get involved with horror flick The Dead last year?

“I had a tiny role – about 10 seconds – in Distant Shadow (1999) by Howard J. Ford. I said if he ever made another movie he’d have to give me a bigger part. So he came back after 10 years in Africa and said he was shooting a zombie movie and I got a part playing a mercenary. We shot that in an airbase in Redhill, in a set that was used for Band of Brothers.”

And then everything seemed to go right in 2009!

“Channel 4, ITV, and the BBC – not bad in the space of 3 months! It’s the busiest I’ve been for a long time and I’m very lucky to be falling on my feet with my career, the start of many things to come.”

When did ITV come calling about Identity?

“In May. I was getting frustrated because there wasn’t really anything happening. Then I got a call from my agent asking me if I could get to the ITV studios in London for 7pm. The director of this new drama Identity had seen my picture and was casting for the role of a young Clive Russell.”

Did you have time to prepare for the audition?

“Luckily, I didn’t have too long to think about it! The audition only lasted for about 10 minutes. I talked a little bit about my professional experience and how much it would mean to me to win this role. That evening, I don’t think I slept. My agent called me in the morning saying he hadn’t heard from the director but the wardrobe department had asked for my measurements. I was excited but I’d learned from past experiences not to crack open the champagne just yet. When it was confirmed that I’d been cast it was an amazing feeling. It’s a real step…

Continued on Combat Magazine