Saturday Fiction (2019)

It’s the first week of December 1941. At this point, Shanghai is partially occupied. The Japanese invaded back in 1937. However, because two-thirds of the city belongs to foreign powers, France and Great Britain, and because Japan is not yet at war with those nations, the city is divided, and there is an uneasy truce between both sides. Of course, neither party intends to keep that peace for long. Both are just itching for the chance to gain valuable Intel on the other. That’s where Yu Jin, a famous Chinese actress, enters the picture. Officially, she’s in Shanghai to star in a play directed by her long-time lover. Unofficially, however, she has many other reasons to be there. For one thing, her ex-husband has been taken prisoner. For another, her French foster father works as a spy for Paris, and he wants her to get him Intel from a Japanese general. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s a young woman following her, who may just admire her in more than a platonic manner. Will she be able to get the information she needs, and come out unscathed? Watch the movie and find out.

High Life (2019)

In the future, death-row inmates are given the choice of either rotting in jail, or going up into space and participating in an experiment. One prisoner (Robert Pattinson) chooses the latter and is put on board a ship with a psychopathic doctor (Juliette Binoche), who is obsessed with creating a child through artificial insemination. It’s never revealed why she wants to do this since it’s never explicitly stated that humans can’t have children the old-fashioned way, but whatever. Sexual contact between the passengers is prohibited, which, as one might expect, drives certain people crazy. So crazy that, eventually, they start killing each other. In the end, Pattinson and his daughter, who was created by Binoche through very questionable means, are left alone on the shuttle, drifting through space. And… yeah. That’s it.

Red Sparrow (2018)

Greetings Loved Ones! Liu Is The Name, And Views Are My Game.

House Of Flying Daggers (2004)

The Tang Dynasty is in shambles. The government is both corrupt and weak, and, every day, it loses more ground to the House of Flying Daggers, a popular rebel group. So, in a desperate ploy to bring the insurgents down, the Tang give two detectives, Leo and Jin, ten days to find and kill the head of the cell. Believing that Mei, a blind dancer at a local brothel, might have connections to the rebels, they arrest and interrogate her. But when Leo decides that they might be able to use Mei to lead them to the group, Jin springs her out of jail, pretending to be sympathetic to the insurgent’s cause. As they travel north, towards the Daggers encampment, however, Jin finds himself growing closer to Mei. So much so that, when they finally find the Daggers, he might not want to bring them down after all.

Empire Of Passion: Deconstructed

Returning to his hometown from a brief stint in the army, young Toyoji begins courting the much older, and married, Seki. Their romance is fairly innocent at first,  with  Toyoji doing nice things for her, like bringing over flowers and sweets. However, things quickly take a turn for the dark when Toyoji forces himself on Seki while she is caring for her infant son. Then, after extorting several, increasingly degrading sexual acts from her, Toyoji, who is extremely jealous, says that they must kill Seki’s husband. “I can’t stand the thought of you being with any other man,” he says. Seki reluctantly agrees, and, one night, after getting her husband good and drunk, she and Toyoji strangle him to death. They then dump his body down a well, and tell everyone in their village that her husband went off to Tokyo. But when the man’s ghost begins haunting the streets of their community, rumors begin circulating, and the authorities are brought in to investigate.

Hope (2013)

The words “rape movie” and “heart-warming” don’t typically mesh well together. And yet, somehow, Lee Joon-ik’s Hope, a film about an 8-year-old girl named So-won getting raped and beaten, manages to be uplifting, rather than depressing. The reason it is able to is simple; it does not show the rape. People talk about it, and we see the victim after the event all bloody and bruised, but there is absolutely no onscreen violence in this film. Instead, the movie focuses on how a victim and her family can recover and rebuild after such a horrible calamity. It shows the protagonist undergoing therapy, both mental and physical, it shows the stages of grief, guilt and gradual acceptance that her community progresses through, and it shows the acts of kindness that people show her to make her feel whole again. It is a beautiful movie about kindness, love, and healing, and it truly surprised me.

What A Bloody Mess Part 2: Takashi Miike’s Ichi The Killer

There are some movies out there that are so vile, so depraved, so unspeakably awful, that they actually transcend the realm of bad taste and, in the eyes of certain critics, become worth watching. No, I’m not talking about Flowers Of Flesh And Blood or The Human Centipede: Full Sequence. I’m referring to films such as Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and, of course, Takashi Miike’s Ichi The Killer. These movies not only sickened audiences to the point of vomiting, walking out and, in the case of Ichi The Killer, unconsciousness, they also got people praising their directors’ “artistic vision” and critics raving about their “social, cultural and political relevance.” Why? Well, at one point in the not to distant past, I would have said, “I have no idea,” or else, “as a means of self-defense.” I used to think that critics and cinephiles made cult classics out of these movies because they just didn’t want to believe that someone would put the time, money, and dare I say, effort, into making something so profoundly twisted. Now, however, I’m not so sure I can stand by that previous assertion. Yes, these movies are disgusting in every sense of the word, but the fact remains, some of these films were actually made with a specific social and/or political agenda in mind. A Clockwork Orange, for example, is a story about freedom, the freedom to do and think as we please, and how society strives to limit that freedom by forcing us all to conform to a certain standard of behavior. As for the others, they might not necessarily have been made with a specific message in mind, but they are just vague, and over the top enough, to have the potential to be profound. Case and point; Ichi The Killer.