Fantasia: Some Reviews

I know, I know, I've been lazy. But here are my reviews of the movies I've currently seen at the Fantasia Festival.

First up is A Bittersweet Life, a mobster movie from Korea. First of all, I personaly think that Korea is becoming quite a force in the cinema department. Comedy wise, they have no competition. There stories are original and smartly written. This being my first "crime" movie from Korea, it has not disapointed me. This movie has some of the best fighting scenes with a great un-American ending!

Plot: A mobster boss right-hand man is asked to look after his master's mistress, as he suspects that she is cheating on him with another mook.The plot thickens when the boss turns on his right-hand man, ordering his death via the rest of his henchmen. That doesn't go over too well, and the next thing you know, a certain right-hand man wants revenge upon his boss, his henchmen and anybody else who gets in the way! A cool-ass flick ensues.

The actors are really great, the script is well written, the fights are just so great. It is quite a serious movie but it's got it's funny moments, which is great, not too much, not too little. This is a violent movie, blood is spilled and a lot. I was not expecting it to be this violent.

A must see!

Next on the agenda would be My Scary Girl. A Korean comedy about a virgin teacher meeting a women who pretends to be somebody she is not.

Plot: A timid college lecturer, Dae-woo, who is smart but has never been in love, meets a mysterious but charming woman, Mi-na. With no skills to win a date, he asks her out awkwardly. To his surprise, she accepts. And as a first time lover, he behaves very unnaturally. However, as they fall in love, Dae-woo discovers some disquieting things about Mi-na. Although she claims to be an intellectual and an artist, she has never heard of Crime and Punishment, nor has she heard of Mondrian although one of his paintings hangs in her living room. But Mi-na has even more terrible secrets.

This I went to see because a couple of years ago I saw My Sassy Girl, a Korean comedy that got me interested in the Korean cinema. I have to admit that, when I choose a movie to see at the festival, I mostly choose by title and images alone. I rarely read the plot of the movie, so most of the movies I don't really know what to expect. This movie, I've expected to try to copy My Sassy Girl (almost same title) but they don't have much in common. I laught almost the whole movie. This poor teacher has no clue in what his getting into. The cast of characters are all very interesting and unique. The acting was just amazing, Park Young-woo (the teacher) was just incredible.

Great date movie!� (That's weird... why would a house without kimchi have a kimchi refrigerator?)

Next is A Chinese Tall Story. Again, not knowing what I was getting into, this movie surprised me in more than one way.

Plot: Young Tang monk Tripitaka and his three disciples - Monkey King, Piggy and Sand Monk - are ambushed and captured by the demon tree. Tripitaka escapes with Monkey's golden pole and begins a journey to free them. This pole can turn into any fighting device as long as you say "I'll love you for 10, 000 years." Along the way he meets an unlikely love interest and fighting companion in Meiyan, an ugly girl who falls in with him but is told she has to consume him to achieve immortality. But the mysterious Princess Xiaoshan and her army who used to live on Earth receive the monk's undivided attention. Who are his friends, and who really wants to consume him for his flesh, which contains the key to eternal life? How will he survive aliens, huge armies and mad Celestial gods?

First surprise: this movies uses CG (and bad ones at that) like there is no tomorrow. It's used in most fight scenes and aren't that great. Second surprise: It's actually good. The story is ok but the characters are interesting and the love story is "cute". Only in this movie can you see a fantasy world mixed with sci-fi. There's a cigarette smoking alien, guns, demons, monks, Spider-Man, a magical bow that transform into pretty much everything you could think of, even those robots in The Matrix.

It's good but not the greatest.

My last review for the night is Funky Forest: The First Contact. What can I say about this movie... WEIRDEST MOVIE I'VE SEEN! Really, it's beyond explanation.

Plot: If you look at them just right, the most mundane elements of daily life can seem utterly bizarre. Conversely, the strangest, most inexplicable things can seem perfectly ordinary. That's the lunatic logic behind Funky Forest, a sprawling omnibus of the obvious and the oddball, the casual and the completely insane. If you're reading this in hopes of being handed a sensible synopsis of a straightforward story, you're out of luck - Funky Forest's daringly disjointed narrative is a mish-mash of blackouts, non-sequiturs, flashbacks, lucid dreams, magical moments and so much more. Awkward stumbles on the path to romance, and others of life's little disappointments, are woven together with all sorts of extraterrestrial freaks and incomprehensible biological curiosities, music-video mayhem and mind-bending theatrics, and psychedelic surrealism of the finest grade, delivered with a deadpan shrug.

Ya that sums it up pretty good. This movie is a gem in it's own right. There is actually a Side A and Side B to this movie, with a 3 minutes intermission, really... Side A is more normal, you see 10-20 minutes sketches of the different characters. They all seem unrelated, but on Side B, you start to see them interact between themselves and, aliens. This side really becomes weird. All in all, I really enjoyed this movie, it's quite a ride.

This movie is not for everyone, but if you like weirdness then this is your movie!

Please note that the plots are not mine, I have found them on different websites. I'm way too lazy to write those up.

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