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REVIEWS FILMART IN BRIEF


SCREENINGS, PAGE 18 Reviews edited by Mark Adams mark.adams@screendaily.com


Beautiful 2012 Reviewed by Mark Adams


Four ‘micro-movies’ produced by Youku, China’s leading internet television site, make up Beautiful 2012, a coming together for four short films from award-winning Asian directors that have at their core the concept of ‘What is beautiful?’ while also mulling over life, death and unhappiness. The styles of the four film-makers are all very


Love Is Not Blind Market. Dir: Teng Huatao. Chi. 2011. 109mins One of the box-office hits of 2011, this charm- ing and entertaining rom-com has echoes of Bridget Jones’s Diary (and many other chick flicks) as wedding organiser Huang Xiaox- ian (Bai Baihe) tries to come to terms with the break-up of her relationship. A smart and quirky script from Bao Jingjing (based on her blog), the story offers up plenty of fun for Bai and co-star Wen Zhang as her camp office buddy to plan revenge and mull over the problems with men and relationships (the pair also starred together in one of the segments of anthology The Law Of Attrac- tion). Director Teng Huatao slots in some stylish contemporary quirks, but keeps the focus on his talented stars.


Mark Adams


CONTACT EDKO FILMS com.hk


wujune@edkofilm.


Rent-a-Cat Market. Dir/scr: Naoko Ogigami. Jap. 110mins A gentle charmer of a film, Rent-a-Cat (Rent- aneko) wallows in its quirky feline fun as it dwells on loneliness and cute kittens. While never as laugh-out-loud as it might appear on the surface, it is engaging entertainment, with the large variety of moggies well trained and lead actress Mikako Ichikawa a strong presence. Animal movies have a way of strik- ing a chord with audiences, and combined with writer/director Naoko Ogigami’s trade- mark idiosyncratic sense of humour, the film could prove to be popular in Japan and of interest to niche buyers.


Mark Adams CONTACT NIKKATSU www.nikkatsu.co.jp


No Liar, No Cry Market. Dir: Xu Chuanhai. Chi. 2011. 88mins An engagingly oddball comedy drama, Xu Chuanhai’s directorial debut is a delightfully surreal affair, starring Wi Gang as Old Pi, a gruff man who for the past 10 years has been protecting an undeveloped gold mine deep in the Gobi desert. Word eventually gets out and he finds himself surrounded by a gang of thugs, three wealthy women, a geologist and a film crew, and a battle of schemes and wits ensue. The desert settings make for an unu- sual backdrop and the clever twists keep things intriguing.


Mark Adams


CONTACT INDEX ENTERTAINMENT yyg@gmail.com


n 6 Screen International at Filmart March 21, 2012


different in tone and content — two are fiction- style and two documentary-style — but all are sin- gular and absorbing pieces. As a film Beautiful 2012, which in China will be seen on Youku’s online platform, would be an easy fit for any film festival, while Tsai Ming-liang’s delightfully shot Walker could also work as a gallery installation. Beautiful 2012 opens with South Korean director


Kim Tae-yong’s You Are More Than Beautiful (pic- tured), about a man hiring a young woman named Young-hee to pretend to be his fiancée and show his ill father he is getting married. When his father slips into a coma he pays the woman at the hospi- tal, but she slips into the hospital room and in a charmingly beautiful scene stands and sings a Korean opera song to the father (in a room with five other seriously ill elderly men). Second up is Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker, which


takes an unusual look at the bustling streets of Hong Kong as it features a series of stunningly shot scenes with at the centre a red-robed monk who walks at a snail’s pace. With traffic and pedes-


WORLD PREMIERE


Chi. 2012. 90mins Directors KimTae-yong, Tsai Ming-liang, Gu Changwei, Ann Hui Production company YoukuOriginal Sales contact Hong Kong International Film Society, savita_lam@hkiff.org.uk Main cast YanLianke,Lee Kang-sheng, Gong Hyo-jin, FrancisNg, JadeLeung


trians speeding around him, the man — head intensely bowed, bare-foot and holding a bread roll in one hand and a plastic bag in the other — walks only a step every minute. Gu Changwei’s Long Tou — also shot documen-


tary style — features characters who dwell on the realities of expectation, punctuated by a series of memorable shots ( a cat jumping onto an air condi- tioner unit; an elderly man dragging a series of plastic bottles; a weight-lifter practising his moves and a child blowing bubbles) and nice use of music. The film wraps with Ann Hui’s My Way — star-


ring Francis Ng and Jade Leung — about a pre-op transsexual man nervously waiting for his opera- tion. It is a stylishly melancholic film, and defined by the moment when he goes to the hospital for the operation, goes to sleep in the male ward and wakes as a woman in the female ward… and finally indulges in a smile of relief and happiness.


Robo-G Reviewed by Mark Adams


As fun and frantic piece of mainstream entertain- ment, writer/director Shinobu Yaguchi’s high-con- cept family film Robo-G really hits the spot, and has strong remake possibilities should Hollywood come calling. Given it lacks any arthouse creden- tials it is unlikely to feature much beyond the fam- ily film festival circuit, which is a shame given its all-round commercial value. Screening in the I See It My Way section of the


Hong Kong International Film Festival, Robo-G also features a standout performance by Shinjiro Igar- ashi (aka former Japanese rock star Mickey Curtis) as the grumpy old grandfather whose boredom and lack of stimulation in retirement are transformed when he applies for the unlikeliest of part-time jobs. Director Yaguchi has a strong track record in


terms of comedy hits — such as Water Boys (2001), Swing Girls (2004) and Happy Flight (2008) — and after a gap of four years has returned with a film that might lack the simplistic mainstream fun sen- sibilities of those titles, but is a more rounded film in terms of its concept. The straightforward structure is pretty familiar


— after a disaster the protagonists gradually have success, learning a few life lessons along the way — but handled with a good deal of polish and lack of mawkish sentimentality. When three workers at Kimura Electrical


INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE


Jap. 2011. 95mins Director/screenplay Shinobu Yaguchi Production companies AltamiraPictures, Dentsu, FujiTelevisionNetwork, Toho Company International salesPony Canyon, www.ponycanyon. co.jp Cinematography Katsumi Yanagijima Editor Ryuji Miyajima Main cast Shinjiro Igarashi, Yuriko Yoshitaka, Gaku Hamada, Junya Kawashima, Shogo Kawai, Emi Wakui,TomokoTabata


(played by small Gaku Hamada, tall Junya Kawashima and chunky Shogo Kawai) fail in their bid to build a robot for the company, they decide to advertise for someone to ‘act’ in a supposed Mascot Suit Show —but instead fit them into their New Shiokaze robot suit. They find 73-year-old Mr Suzuki (Igarashi) is


the only one who fits the suit, but to their bemuse- ment he proves such a hit at the Robo Exposition that they have to keep him on for presentations around Japan. But they had not reckoned on the determination of robot-loving science student Sas- aki Yoko (Yuriko Yoshitaka, playing her role for shrill schoolgirl laughs) who gradually learns the truth about the deception. Robo-G is constantly entertaining without ever


being radical or defiantly original, with Igarashi perfect as the curmudgeonly old man who finds a new lease of life.


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