Fellow Travelers Capsule Reviews

The following directors have no formal relation to The Chinese Cinema. They have instead their own national traditions, histories and styles. Yet whether as a result of the accidental shorthand of modern film distribution, where films tend to get lumped together as often by continent or region as by nation, or through shared approaches to style and its relation to Western Cinema, or simply the historical byproduct of China’s preeminent role in East Asian culture, it seems somewhat appropriate to include them in this project.

Bong Joonho:

Memories of Murder — September 13, 2019

It always seems like Bong’s movies, while they’re good and I like them, are never really quite as good as they probably should be.

Like how Mother is just a worse version of Poetry, or Shin Godzilla is a much better The Host, or this is just not as good as Zodiac.

Hoping that changes with Parasite, which I hear is just a better version of Shoplifters.

The Host — September 11, 2019

Aren’t we all just waiting for Bae Doona to kill the monsters we’ve created?

Mother — December 31, 2010

In a plot eerily similar, and yet totally different, from Lee Chang-dong’s 2010 film Poetry, Kim Hye-ja sees her developmentally disabled son accused of murdering a young girl. Initially she pleads for help from the police, former customers (she’s an unlicensed acupuncturist), and an arrogant attorney, even the victim’s family, each time adopting a submissive tone of voice and humble mannerisms, straightening and saddening every time she gets shot down. Eventually, with some advice and help from one of her son’s friends, she takes it upon herself to investigate the crime and find the real killer. Her actions once she does are what limit this to being merely a clever genre exercise with a cynical, rather depressing view of the world. It’s as funny, at least in the beginning, as director Bong Joon-ho’s last film, the very fine monster movie The Host, but it leaves you cold. Poetry, on the other hand, has a much more expansive and tragic view of life and its characters, a real affection for them that Bong’s more narrow film doesn’t allow. Or at least, in the film’s final scenes, our sympathy with the Mother either feels forced at best and satirical at worst.

Snowpiercer — June 30, 2014

The George Sanders Show #38: Snowpiercer and Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

Parasite — September 28, 2019

If nothing else, it’s better than Shoplifters.

Even if it isn’t great, and it probably isn’t but I don’t know, it’s a bona fide miracle that this won the Palme d’Or.

Added February 9, 2020:
Winner of the 2019 Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, Best International Film, and Best Picture.

Yamashita Nobuhiro:

Linda Linda Linda — May 13, 2015

Last night, I dreamt that Bae Doona was a professional basketball player and was generating serious All-Star consideration as the point guard for the New York Knicks. It took me awhile, on waking, to realize that that was in fact a dream and not reality, because honestly, she’s capable of anything.

Added September 11, 2019:
A perfect movie.

Can anyone tell me if there were stories of Japanese high school girl bands hanging out and prepping for a big show before this movie, or did it launch a genre which would later include K-On! and Sound! Euphonium?

Added December 31, 2020:

This is our kingdom.

La La La at Rock Bottom — January 10, 2016

The director of Linda Linda Linda with a film about a hood who gets out of jail, becomes amnesiac after a mugging, and reinvents himself as the singer in a small-time band. Modest and precise, somehow, without noticing, it becomes The Last Laugh.

Over the Fence — July 25, 2017

Joe Odagiri plays Shiraiwa, an apparently lost man attempting to rebuild his life. He is studying carpentry at a vocational school and bicycles everyday between that and a tiny house on the outskirts of town. A quiet loner, he’s dragged out for a drink with a classmate where he meets Satoshi (Yû Aoi), a beautiful woman with a fondness for imitating the calls and mating rituals of various bird species. A kind of manic depressive pixie dream girl, Satoshi eventually seduces Shiraiwa, but then flips out on him. Eventually we learn his backstory, but hers is only hinted at. In fact, we learn less about her than we do many of Shiraiwa’s classmates (a reformed yakuza, a retired bartender, a young man enacting a low-key version of Full Metal Jacket). This unfortunately makes the film, for most of its running time, dramatically less compelling than Yamashita’s last feature, La La La at Rock Bottom, let alone his 2005 film Linda Linda Linda, hands-down one of the best movies of the 21st century. But still, Yamashita excels at endings, and there’s some kind of magic when this occasionally funny, but mostly depressing, not-quite love story somehow turns into a stealth remake/inversion of The Natural.

Hard-Core — June 28, 2019

Nobuhiro Yamashita is now almost fifteen years removed from Linda Linda Linda, doubtless the greatest high school film of the century thus far. He remains a regular on the festival circuit, though none of his recent movies have generated anything like the excitement of that masterwork. I’ve seen three of his last four films, La La La at Rock Bottom, Over the Fence, and this year’s NYAFF entry Hard-Core, and all are about sad sack men who don’t properly know how to deal with the worlds in which they find themselves. And each one has been worse than the one before it. La La La was saved, as its hero is, by music, while Over the Fence found escape in carpentry, baseball, and a terrific pair of performances from Joe Odagiri and Yû Aoi. But Hard-Core is simply lost in itself, its collection of losers as charmless and uninteresting as the film’s forced whimsicality. Takayuki Yamada plays the lead, a lonely and honest man who is so certain of his own righteousness that he can only react with violence when others fail to meet his standards. The film’s opening moments are its best, with Yamada drinking in a bar being proud of himself for not hitting on the only woman there, then exploding into rage when another group comes in and enlists her in their drunken revelry. From there it descends into the maudlin and dull, as Yamada and his best friend join an old man digging for treasure and find a robot. They all hang out together looking sad and try to deal with the corruption of their bosses and Yamada’s businessman brother, but our world ultimately proves too impure for them. The longer I’ve sat with it, the less I’ve liked it, whereas every other Yamashita movie has grown on me with time.

Anthony Chen:

Wet Season — September 28, 2019

Literally everything but the plot is great. All the details, performance, sound design, subtext about language and changing culture: great. Plot though — totally generic.

Eric Khoo:

Ramen Shop — July 21, 2018

After his father, a successful ramen chef, dies, a young man heads to Singapore in search of his mother’s family. Gauzy flashbacks fill in his parents’ back story in-between meetings with his estranged uncle and grandmother. His father, Japanese, and his mother, Chinese, married against her mother’s wishes, her hostility a result of lingering hatred of the Japanese following their occupation of the city-state during World War II. But as resentments and hatred are passed down through the generations, so too are recipes, taught from parent to child, adding personal touches learned from their own life experience. The cuisine of Singapore, with its influences from throughout East and South Asia as well as Europe is the blunt instrument of metaphor in Eric Khoo’s quiet, yet maudlin melodrama. The young man’s journey is as much about learning the recipes of his mother’s family as it is reconciling himself to the past atrocities of his father’s homeland. English serves as the lingua franca, bridging the gap between ancient hatreds, facilitating the fusion of Japanese ramen (itself a combination of Japanese flavors with Chinese noodles) with Singaporean pork rib soup (a combination of Chinese soup with Southeast Asian flavors). As a vision of transnational solidarity dramatized by a Japanese person’s trip to Singapore, it’s vastly more conventional and less interesting than Daisuke Miyazaki’s Tourism, also playing at this year’s Japan Cuts. But the food, at least, looks much better.

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang:

Last Life in the Universe — May 10, 2006

A possibly suicidal Japanese librarian (he keeps failing to kill himself) hangs out with a Thai girl after his brother and her sister are killed. He’s an obsessive-compulsive neatfreak while she’s a pot-smoking slob. He spends a couple days cleaning up her house (right by the beach), they fall in love and are separated and learn a lot about life and love and all that. Neither one speaks the other’s language, so they spend most of their time communicating in English, and eventually each of them spends some time transformed into their deceased sibling, both of whom are cultural stereotypes (Japanese yakuza and Thai prostitute). It’s Harold & Maude with the gap the lovers overcome being culture instead of age. It’s a beautiful movie, some of Christopher Doyle’s finest cinematography, though it’s totally different than his work with Wong Kar-wai, more deadpan than stylish, but with moments of pure magic.

Wisit Sasanatieng:

Tears of the Black Tiger — July 19, 2013

The George Sanders Show #4: Duel of Fists and Tears of the Black Tiger

Added June 29, 2018:
The most vibrant colors of the festival,⁠1 though, come not from Korea but from Thailand, with a 35mm archival presentation of Wisit Sasanatieng’s Tears of the Black Tiger. Emerging at the dawn of the century in a Thai New Wave alongside Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, Sasanatieng has become largely a forgotten figure nowadays, it seems the international arthouse circuit had room for only one Thai director, and it chose Apichatpong. As far as I can tell, none of his subsequent films were ever commercially released in the US, and even Tears of the Black Tiger only got a limited release from Magnolia Pictures¹.⁠ Which is a shame, because the film is one of the true marvels of the 2000s, a kaleidoscope of pinks and greens, fake backdrops and Thai pop music. An homage to (and most definitely not a parody of) the Thai melodramas Sasanatieng grew up watching, it’s also informed by a whole history of all-caps cinema, from American musicals to Italian Westerns, Indian masala films and Hong Kong Heroic Bloodshed sagas. Tears of the Black Tiger, in its seriousness, confronts these passé cinematic forms on their own terms, without the veil of irony, and so captures the bleeding heart of expressive cinema in all its overwhelming, delirious glory.

¹ After it had been recut and shelved for years by Miramax, the Magnolia release was the real version, though as recently as 2013 the Miramax cut was the one streaming on Netflix.

Lê Thanh Sơn

Clash — June 17, 2020

A fairly standard gangster action movie, with shades of Kill Bill and a smattering of John Woo, enlivened by impressively quick and well-choreographed action and two bona fide superstars in Veronica Ngo and Johnny Tri Nguyen.

Those two are so pretty I honestly had trouble following the plot. Hong Kong cinema has been looking for action stars like this since the Handover and the best they’ve found is Nick Cheung and Max Zhang.

Charlie Nguyen

The Rebel — June 18, 2020

I really like the way Johnny Tri Nguyen jumps in the air and spins around before kicking someone in the head.

This is kind of like House of Flying Daggers, but done more in the style of the first Donnie Yen Ip Man movie. The action has that same kind of fast, precise, bone-crunching as in Donnie’s 2000s movies with Wilson Yip, but it’s more thoughtful in its anti-colonialist plotting.