A solid, good looking action film with great fight sequences by choreographer Corey Yuen, but plot inconsistencies and a baffling conclusion don’t make the best for Chris Nahon’s live-action adaption… (more…)
This year at Cannes sees the real heavy hitters come out to play, as the world’s greatest auteur directors gather to compete for the coverted Palme d’Or. As well as the latest films from Pedro Almodóvar, Ken Loach, Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, and Terry Gilliam, there’s a strong Asian presence. Highlights include Park Chan-wook’s new vampire flick Thirst; Lou Ye’s Tiananmen Square-themed Summer Palace, which has incensed authorities to the point of them slapping a five-year ban on him; Tsai Ming-Liang’s film within a film Face; Johnnie To’s Vengeance; and Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock. Other films screening include Kore-eda Hirokaz’s Air Doll; the latest from The Host and Memories Of Murder director Bong Joon-Ho, Mother; and Petiton by Zhao Liang.
See the Guardian’s gallery guide to directors vying for the Palme d’Or »
Korean director Park Chan-wook’s vampire flick Thirst, which won the Jury prize at Cannes Film Festival, will be released in UK cinemas on 16 October by Metrodome in association with Palisades Tartan – the new name for the Tartan label which went out of business July last year .
To coincide with the film’s release, Palisades Tartan has launched a competition offering entrants the chance to win a trip for two to London to attend the UK premiere of Thirst and to have lunch with Park Chan-Wook.
Following its hugely successful theatrical release in October, which saw it being hailed as Film of the Week in both Time Out and The Guardian and being awarded Four Star reviews in The Daily Express, Time Out, The Sun, Empire, Total Film and Loaded, Park Chan-wook’s THIRST comes to DVD and Blu-ray on 25th January 2009.
The joint winner of the Jury Prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, THIRST sees the director of such acclaimed and varied films as the military thriller “JSA: Joint Security Area”, the comedy romance “I’m A Cyborg” and the standout movie of his “vengeance” trilogy “Oldboy” further emphasising his versatility as a storyteller and a filmmaker by turning his hand to Western horror traditions and taking on the ever-popular vampire genre.
Very loosely based on Emile Zola’s novel “Therese Raquin”, the story concerns a priest who, accidentally cursed with vampirism, is thrown into a whirlpool of moral decline that leads to him into a nightmare world of lust, adultery and murder.
Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) is a priest who cherishes life; so much so, that he selflessly volunteers for a secret vaccine research project designed to eradicate a deadly virus. When the virus is found to be affecting the priest and threatening his life, a blood transfusion is urgently ordered up for him. However, the blood he receives is unknowingly infected, the result of the transfusion being that Sang-hyun survives the viral attack but now exists as a vampire dependent upon the life blood of others.
Struggling with his newfound carnal desire for this vital fluid, Sang-hyun’s faith is further strained when a childhood friend’s wife, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), comes to him asking for his help in escaping her tormented life. It’s not long before the former priest is plunged headlong into a world of sensual pleasures, finding himself on intimate terms with the deadliest of the Seven Sins.
Starring Song Kang-ho as Sang-hyun (The Host; The Good, The Bad, The Weird; Lady Vengeance; Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance) and Kim Ok-vin as Tae-ju (Dasepo Naughty Girls; The Accidental Gangster), THIRST is a visceral, thought-provoking and darkly comic exploration of human existence in extreme circumstances from one of the most original and provocative directors working in modern cinema.
DVD Features
Audio commentary by director Park Chan-wook; Dolby 2.0 and 5.1 and half-rate DTS 5.1 audio options; trailer; UK exclusive interview with Park Chan-wook.
Blu-ray Features
Audio commentary by director Park Chan-wook; Dolby 2.0 and 5.1 and DTS 5.1 audio options; trailer; UK exclusive interview with Park Chan-wook.
Hailed as “a new cult classic in the making” by Ain’t It Cool News, the latest movie from award winning Korean director Lee Je-yong (Untold Scandal), DASEPO NAUGHTY GIRLS is an eye-popping musical comedy about teenage sex, non-conformity and dysfunctional relationships set against the backdrop of the appropriately named “No Use High School”.
Based on the wildly popular, taboo-breaking Internet comic strip, “Multi-Cell Girl”, and starring Kim Ok-bin (Thirst) and Lee Won-jong (Kick The Moon), the film’s episodic storyline centres on the bizarre and comical sexual ambiguities and aberrations of a group of teenage students, all of whom are looking for their own kind of love.
Welcome to No Use High School, an educational institution where the student president and vice-present flaunt their taste for S&M, extracurricular studies and supplementary classes are done on homosexuality and transgenderism, and teachers and students alike leave school early due to outbreaks of sexually-transmitted diseases.
Amidst this environment are several students struggling to adapt to their unconventional situation. Among them is Poor Girl, who endeavours to make ends meet by selling her body but only attracts clients (including a butch transvestite gangster with a thing for school uniforms) who aren’t interested in actually having sex. Similarly troubled is the cyclopean One-Eye, the school’s only virgin. Further complications for this pair arise when Poor Girl falls for pretty boy Anthony, who secretly carries a torch for One-Eye’s sister, Two-Eyes, not knowing that the breathtakingly beautiful object of his desire is actually a boy awaiting a sex-change operation. But, as the usual sexual confusion reigns, a new problem begins to emerge. Students who have never shown an interest in anything but sex have suddenly given up dating and become emerged in studying!
Sumptuously shot in a riot of gaudy colours, with brilliantly staged music and dance numbers and boasting an irresistible charm, DASEPO NAUGHTY GIRLS is a musical teen comedy in a class of its own.
DASEPO NAUGHTY GIRLS (cert. 15) will be released on DVD (£14.99) by Third Window Films on 8th June 2009. Special Features include “Making of” featurette and theatrical trailer.
Hailed as a “bizarre, baroque, hilarious epic” (Total Film) and a “crazy, perversely monumental teen comedy romance” (Metro) on its UK theatrical release in October, director Sion Sono’s LOVE EXPOSURE comes to DVD in January 2010 as a two-disc release courtesy of Third Window Films.
Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize and the Caligari Film Award at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival, the latest film from acclaimed Japanese writer-director Sion Sono (Exte: Hair Extensions), LOVE EXPOSURE is a monumental work of cinema that manages to combine comedy, action, romance and drama into its compelling, satirical and frequently violent commentary on religion, morality, sexual perversion and, of course, love, both requited and unrequited.
Following the untimely death of his mother during his early childhood, Tokyo teenager Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) is raised by his father, Tetsu (Atsuro Watabe), who has dealt with his grief by becoming a Catholic priest. Despite his new calling, Tetsu is seduced into a love affair with an emotionally unstable parishioner, an act that causes him to transfer his guilt onto Yu, whom he forces to attend confession as often as possible. Eager to satisfy his father’s demands, but quickly running out of false transgressions to own up to, Yu begins to find new and genuine sins to confess, the most effective of which proves to be taking covert up-skirt panty photographs of young women on the city’s streets.
Eventually, Yu’s misdemeanours attract the attention of teenage girl Aya Koike (Sakura Ando) – a con artist, coke dealer, the regional leader of a bizarre religious cult and a victim of paternal abuse – who decides she can use the wayward “king of perverts” for her own means. Shortly after their auspicious meeting, a cross-dressing incident resulting from a lost bet also brings Yu into contact with Kurt Cobain-loving, but otherwise totally man-hating, schoolgirl Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), with whom he falls instantly in love. The fates of this trio become hopelessly connected and sealed when Yu’s father decides to give up the cloth to marry his lover and Yu discovers that Yoko is about to become his stepsister!
Running at just under four hours (although moving at such a brisk pace it’s barely noticeable) and already being hailed as Sion Sono’s career masterpiece in many quarters, LOVE EXPOSURE stars Hikari Mitsushima (Shaolin Girl; Death Note: The Last Name; Death Note), Takahiro Nishijima (star of Japanese TV’s Ghost Friends), Sakura Ando (Crime Or Punishment) and Astsuro Watabe (Echo Of Silence) and was the recipient of the 2009 awards for the Best Asian Film, the Jury Prize for Best Female Performance (Hikari Mitsushima), the Jury Special Prize for Feature Film and the Most Innovative Film at Montreal’s Fant-Asia Film Festival.
