NZIFF: A Touch of Zen

A martial arts movie, why not? But from before they had Wire Fu. It's Xia nu.

A middle aged scholar gets caught up in events as a young woman moves into the ruins next door. It turns out, she's on the run after her high official father is killed, and she has two other generals to help her. The scholar won't leave her, and helps guide her to fighting off an entire army.

And then, the movie finishes with 30 minutes to go, and so they stuck on a sequel? It feels like that. The main character from the rest of the movie is gone, and a new villain is introduced, and other minor characters are back in a bigger role... it's only one scene, really, but it so feels like the sequel they didn't have other ideas for.

The main character is interesting, in that he isn't a fighter. And suddenly doesn't become one when he meets up with the actual fighters. I was a little expecting him to suddenly bust out moves, but nope, they keep him as the brains. And then the moment where he's confronted with the consequences of his actions...

The action sequences have lots of sword fighting, with occasional moments of people jumping about (usually shot from underneath so we only see flowing robes). There aren't any moments of standing on trees or moving with the wind or anything, just choreographed scenes and people being slapped about.

It's a decent movie, although it could do with a shorter than three hour running time.

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Drakula Has Risen from the Grave

Christopher Lee is back in looming form, and he even speaks!

Dracula is brought back to life in one of the more coincidental convenient resurrection scenes even to grace movies. From there, it's basically a revenge flick, from Dracula's point of view, as Monsignor dared to put a cross on his castle. So we go to the town of... I missed the name, and find a young pair of lovers who, of course, get caught up in Dracula's blood soaked eyes, and there's a chase, and you can see the end coming right before it does, but it works thematically so I'm liking it.

One thing about this movie that didn't strike me in the others is that this is a more personal story. Instead of this malevolent force striking across the country, and a group of people trying to survive/battle it, it's about Dracula vs the one man and drawing revenge on him. We get plenty of chase and crossing across house tops, but it's on a more smaller emotional scale than the other movies.

Interestingly they have an atheist character in this movie. Which has Dracula. It's hard to deny supernatural elements when you have a legitimate vampire in your face. While it does seem that he goes religious at the end, this is used as a drive for the priest to find his courage to face down Dracula, which is a nice close to that arc.

Then we finally get the death of Dracula, which looks pretty final. No way he's coming back from that...

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Second Likely Stories

The next Neil Gaiman story, and he talks about the weird images in dreams, so with that set up.

This is sort of set in a cafe. The waitress is expecting, and compares the baby inside to eating her from the inside. An old friend turns up and they spend time talking. He chats about a place he was staying, and this (to him) beautiful older woman who lived there. She has unusual eating habits, and he helps her as only he can...

This feels more shorted out pacing wise than the previous story. And yet that's largely because of the frame of one story inside another, so there only needs to be two shorter stories to make up time. The second story is the point, and is nearly getting creepy, but I think we would need to develop the true nature a bit more to really get there.

So far this series is feeling like 'let's take a germ of an idea from NG... and fail to use it properly',

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NZIFF: Michael Smither: Portraits

It's the next Michael Smither documentary (we're up to seven of ten) with Portraits.

This follows Michael as he creates a series of portraits. He used to do them, but was just following a formula. Now he actually seeing them as human heads with their own properties to bring out. (He was inspired to create these as a reaction to seeing the emotions on people who's heads were to be cut off by terrorists.) We mainly see him paint the local doctor, but there are other paintings as well. Including one of himself. And despite seeing many of these done, there are still more to go.

Afterwards we had the director Tony Hiles at the screening answering questions. Although he pointed out that Michael Smither was in the audience, and so never mind Tony, we asked questions of Michael instead. Neat! And a bonus for attending the actual screening.

This was quite short, being just about some of the portraits, so it was quite a concentrated story. As such, it did feel very short, especially compared with the other movies I've seen this festival, but that'll work better when the entire set is available.

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NZIFF: Ants on a Shrimp

I've always liked watching food/chef documentary, so here's Ants on a Shrimp.

This follows the restaurant Noma as it decides to move from Copenhagen to Tokyo for 5 weeks. This has a lot of build up, we follow the decision to move (because it's fun!) then the task of trying to find a collection of dishes that represent Noma and Japan. The main people taste all sorts of things, and prepare lots of foods... and we get to see them kill turtles, and serve up still living shrimps that have had their shells removed... Cuisine! However, we get up to the opening moment... and that's pretty much where the movie ends. We get the dishes and then the end credits. Eh? How did they do? We never know...

So it's a decent enough movie for what we see. This isn't the first time I've seen a "let's create a new menu" chef documentary (indeed, I've seen a fair few, and will probably track down more), and we get to see some really weird concoctions. I'm sure food buffs would be able to point out various delicacies and even suggest how tastes work together... but for the rest of us, it's just odd what chefs can come up with. I doubt I'll ever experience a tasting menu...

Anyway, it's a good 2/3 of a movie, shame they never did the other 1/3.

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NZIFF: Under the Sun

The Sun in this case is North Korea, and we are Under The Sun.

The basic set up of this movie is that this is a documentary about a young girl joining the Children's Union. The documentary is written, approved, and overseen by the DPRK... so they helped create this. But does that mean this is a propaganda piece? Not quite...

The filmmakers leave the scenes running a little too long. They leave in the instructor (who I think was the Korean director working with them) telling them what to do. We see a few different takes of scenes. And we have some b-roll footage that might not show an entirely brilliant light. The only thing the film maker adds beyond that is a few subscript notes to explain what was originally in place, like Zim-mi's parents having other jobs and where the script wholesale added scenes.

That said, what we get is that NK is largely a personality cult run state with indoctrination education. Although they don't point out that ultra-conservative ideologies do exactly the same thing (because they are staying entirely within NK), whereas I'm now tempted to parallel this film with some teaching styles happening in America...

On one hand, the film makers get away with this. On the other hand, they had so much film from running the camera all the time (as documentary crews do), that they had plenty of material to work with.

While I'm sure the DPRK wouldn't like this edit, this is their own film used against them.

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NZIFF: Operation Avalanche

At last the documentary has come to light, the tale of Operation Avalanche.

This is the story of a collection new CIA recruits. After a successful operation, they want in on finding the mole inside NASA. However, while there, they find out NASA can't get to land on the moon in time, so they come up with a plan to make it seem like they did. And from there, this gets into paranoid conspiracy.

This is presented as a documentary, with video of the time (ie low quality), although like most documentaries it still somehow has close up shots and such that wouldn't have been shot at the time. Anyway, the moon landings need to be faked, so this is about as real as you're going to get about how the CIA did it. It even references a number of conspiracies, such as c rock, and Room 237.

This felt a little over long, and tries to shift tone too much, but otherwise is quite watchable.

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