Saturday, September 10, 2011
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Friday, September 2, 2011
as good a place to start as any
spent some time the other night with "chocolate," a flick i've been meaning to sit down with for a couple yrs. from the director of "ong bok" it delivered similarly. by that i mean it delivered many elbows and knees repeatedly. in formally inventive ways.
briefly, the daughter of gangster parents in a forbidden affair, zen is an autistic girl raised by her mother. her cartoony autism enables her to learn how to replicate ass kicking by watching it. so she spends most of her time doing so, like rain man with a bruce lee VHS collection, or like neo with a T3 connection (and no trinity love interest). there's some jackie chan in here, too, particularly one scene with some storage lockers. to give more plot details seems silly. this ain't about plot. it's about a teenage autistic girl kicking ass for a solid hour. and the hour is solid. i think the final "chase down the boss/enact vengeance" sequence is a dense twenty minutes. if one desired to brush the estimated 25 minutes of dialog between gang boss, ass-kicking/cancer ridden mother, ass-kicking/autistic daughter, and the impressive number of gun-toting thai transvestite hookers featured in this "script" into a comb-over of an academic treatise on femininity, i'd surmise you could do so. if you instead would opt for a david carradine joke, well, have at it.
chocolate scores pretty much zero on the gore scale, but very high in instances of groaning and laughing. i had mild buster keaton tingles due to a few gags, but honestly, just tingles. buster's gags were drawn out and precise. blunt physicality rules here. everything is done sans wires with stunt men and heavy editing. this is necessary because people keep getting kicked in the face, forcing cuts in recording and (obviously) faces. (see the footage in the credits.*) bonus points to set locations: an ice company, a fish market, and the finale's side-scrolleresque battle on the facade of a building. ah, and i seem to have omitted mention of the fight with the epileptic boy. pardon me.
i really do the picture no increased favors in blathering on, but bottom line, if more abstract painters approached their craft with the inventiveness that Prachya Pinkaew brings to figuring out how to fill a film with kicking, we'd all enjoy our time in front of canvases a lot more.
*all puns intended.
briefly, the daughter of gangster parents in a forbidden affair, zen is an autistic girl raised by her mother. her cartoony autism enables her to learn how to replicate ass kicking by watching it. so she spends most of her time doing so, like rain man with a bruce lee VHS collection, or like neo with a T3 connection (and no trinity love interest). there's some jackie chan in here, too, particularly one scene with some storage lockers. to give more plot details seems silly. this ain't about plot. it's about a teenage autistic girl kicking ass for a solid hour. and the hour is solid. i think the final "chase down the boss/enact vengeance" sequence is a dense twenty minutes. if one desired to brush the estimated 25 minutes of dialog between gang boss, ass-kicking/cancer ridden mother, ass-kicking/autistic daughter, and the impressive number of gun-toting thai transvestite hookers featured in this "script" into a comb-over of an academic treatise on femininity, i'd surmise you could do so. if you instead would opt for a david carradine joke, well, have at it.
chocolate scores pretty much zero on the gore scale, but very high in instances of groaning and laughing. i had mild buster keaton tingles due to a few gags, but honestly, just tingles. buster's gags were drawn out and precise. blunt physicality rules here. everything is done sans wires with stunt men and heavy editing. this is necessary because people keep getting kicked in the face, forcing cuts in recording and (obviously) faces. (see the footage in the credits.*) bonus points to set locations: an ice company, a fish market, and the finale's side-scrolleresque battle on the facade of a building. ah, and i seem to have omitted mention of the fight with the epileptic boy. pardon me.
i really do the picture no increased favors in blathering on, but bottom line, if more abstract painters approached their craft with the inventiveness that Prachya Pinkaew brings to figuring out how to fill a film with kicking, we'd all enjoy our time in front of canvases a lot more.
*all puns intended.
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