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Monthly Archives December 2008

Lee Chang-dong, "Oasis" (2002).

Ah, the genius of marketing. I used to own a videotape of the American release of Mike Leigh’s Life Is Sweet (1991) that had a laughably inappropriate cover: candy-colored font, a giant donut with rainbow sprinkles on it, and Jane Horrocks and Claire Skinner – both with noticeably larger Photoshopped cleavages – sitting right on [...]

Posted 31 December 2008 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , ,

Prachya Pinkaew, "The Protector" (2005).

Earlier this year, when I was still teaching, I was supposed to teach a summer class on Southeast Asian cultures and literatures. That didn’t happen, unfortunately, but I did get to the point where I had constructed a syllabus, and had attempted to shoehorn some ”representative” Thai film into it, whatever that meant. (I ended up selecting the [...]

Posted 30 December 2008 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , , ,

John Woo, "Red Cliff, Part 1" (2008).

2008 saw the release of two Chinese historical action dramas by two major Hongkong directors not previously known for the genre: one, the first half of a four-hour epic; the other, a re-edited version of a 1994 original. It’s probably safe to say at this point that Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux (2008) is [...]

Posted 29 December 2008 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (5) ° Tagged: , , , , , ,

Chuck Patton, “Dead Space: Downfall” (2008).

In this new media-synergistic world, we’re now used to seeing merchandise spread out on different platforms: the movie, the officially licensed T-shirt, the videogame, the novelization, the cheap plastic toys that come with your burger. The constant lesson, though, is that quality seems to have an inverse relationship to all this lateral diversification. The videogame [...]

Posted 09 December 2008 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Bryan Bertino, “The Strangers” (2008).

It’s a little dispiriting when you realize, about fifteen minutes after you pop in the video, that the thoroughly unremarkable movie you’re watching is essentially a remake of another thoroughly unremarkable film. The movie in question is Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers, which seems awfully similar to the forgettable 2006 French horror movie Ils. Here’s the [...]

Posted 08 December 2008 † Benito Vergara § review ‡ Comments (6) ° Tagged: , , ,