In Yourself and Yours, we find Hong Sang-soo amusing himself by writing scenes that are completely ambivalent in nature, mainly due to having lead actress Lee Yoo-Young play a woman, Min-jeong, who refuses to be identified — either to other characters, to the audience, even to herself. She takes up this gambit after a fight with her long-term boyfriend, Yeong-soo (Kim Joo-hyuk), over issues related to her conduct — she drinks too much, had agreed to limit herself, was seen…
Distilled down to a one-sentence summary, the calmly melancholic Right Now, Wrong Then is the very essence of a Hong Sang-soo film: A bibulous director pursues an alluring young woman, and things go awry. With its sad, voluble characters drowning their problems in soju; its laconic narrative; those exacting zooms; the conversations between despondent men and women over coffee; the swells of ironically triumphant music; and the proleptic chit-chat — this film showcases all of Hong’s thematic and aesthetic affinities. And…
#32: Beyond the Masked Tortilla: Musicians Making Movies Download episode here. Episode Description: “This is where we came in…” Like guilty men returning to the scene of a crime, Simon and Steve decide to revisit an idea they’ve had before — in fact, the idea behind the very first Bad Idea, the cinematic career of Frank Zappa.…
The 16th annual New York Asian Film Festival recently ended its two-week run. We’ve already published two dispatches from the fest—for our third and final one, we have a few quick-takes on some exciting new Japanese films, including another entry in Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno reboot (Isao Yukisada’s Aroused by Gymnopedies), a project which we wrote about in our first dispatch from the fest; the latest film from the very prolific Takashi Miike (The Mole Song: Hong Kong Capriccio); and a deceptively grim psychological horror effort from divisive cult auteur Sabu (Happiness).…
The 16th annual New York Asian Film Festival (June 30th – July 16th) is now nearing the end of its two-week run. Our first dispatch included films from Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, China, and North and South Korea. Dispatch 2 skews more extensively Chinese, including two films that were actually already released in theaters in the U.S. (Han Han’s Duckweed and Derek Tsang’s Soul Mate) and several first-time filmmakers (Wong Chun with Mad World, Derek Hui with This Is Not What I Expected, and Liu Lin with Someone to…
The 2017 BAMcinemafest ends this Sunday, and this dispatch concludes our coverage. Among the takes below, you’ll find several more holdovers from Sundance—including hit comedy The Big Sick and Alex Ross Perry’s unfairly panned Golden Exits—and two films (a narrative and a documentary) from American indie film director Michael Almereyda. Be sure to also check out our first dispatch, which featured new films from the Amer-indie scene’s Aaron Katz, Stephen Cone, and Koganda. You can also find the remainder of the fest’s full schedule here.…
Through a career that’s spanned 16 mixtapes (four of them released commercially), three label deals (Cash Money Records, 1017 Records, and 300 Entertainment), and yet still no studio album, Young Thug has maintained a reputation as the most elusive rapper going; one really need only listen to his music to get a sense of his radically non-conforming style, which relies heavily on unpredictable, usually high-pitched vocal fluctuations. In a growing sphere of auto-tuned “mumble rap,” Thug stands out for his sound specifically. But that’s…
What Kenneth Lonergan understands, probably better than any other writer-director working today, is how difficult it is to communicate grief in a convincing way on screen. With three feature films thus far, Lonergan’s acute exploration of coping mechanisms seems almost universal in scope, yet minimal in execution; with Manchester by the Sea, he’s crafted another incredibly…
Park Chan-wook’s career has largely been steeped in a particular fusion of twisty revenge narratives padded with philosophical implications. His latest, The Handmaiden, feels particularly lacking in the latter area. In a 1930s, Japanese-occupied Korea, Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) is hired by conman Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) to assist in stealing the fortune of a Japanese heiress (Kim Min-hee of…
Soon, just as there are plenty of adults who no longer remember a world before The Simpsons, nobody will recall a time when, for good or ill, there was not a new annual Star Wars movie. It’s no longer enough (neither for shareholders nor pop culture at large) to expect a new installment of the core saga every few years (let alone every other decade), so with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Disney kicks off a line of one-off adventures. This one, set…
The Harry Potter franchise officially becomes an Expanded Cinematic Universe with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the first in what Warner Bros. promises will be five J.K. Rowling-scripted original films, prequels to the Potter‘s proper. Centering around conservationalist wizard Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), who travels the globe capturing said fantastic beasts and shoving them into…