Two Words, One Answer.
Sunmin Park
 The Emperor and Assassin $9.99 Chen Kaige's The Emperor and the Assassin was one of the more expected Chinese flops of the 90s, coming so soon after the previous telling of the same tale, The Emperor's Shadow had failed to set the box-office alight and long before the stylised Hero would become a breakout international success. Indeed, the running joke at the time was that Chen Kaige thought The Emperor's Shadow only flopped because he didn't direct it. China seems to have the same attitude to its First Emperor (Li Xuejian) as France does to Napoleon, alternating between admiration for the best of his achievements and condemnation for the methods he used to pursue them, and the film does at least embrace these contradictions in its portrait of an often childish but visionary Emperor wanting to end 550 years of hell and unite all of China under one benevolent ruler through increasingly ruthless means. Unlike previous versions of the story, here he even plans to manipulate a rival kingdom into sending an assassin (Jing Ke) to kill him to give him an excuse to invade, despatching his childhood love (Gong Li) as agent provocateur to arrange it only for her to find her sympathies shifting as the Emperor becomes increasingly merciless... Less political than Shadow (though the film was heavily cut by the Chinese censors) and more down to Earth than Hero (the visual palette is much more subdued, favoring earth tones over vivid colors), despite the huge budget, Kaige doesn't really have a feel for spectacle and it's not exactly directed with a surfeit of imagination: the battle scenes are often more functional than inspired despite their scale while the massive sets are rarely employed to their best advantage. Nor is the film's structure always helpful: divided into various chapters of varying degrees of success, it sometimes lends the film a disjointed feel. As a result it's a film that tends to work in fits and starts rather than feeling like a completely successful film, with sideline characters like Kaige's Prime Minister or Wang Ziwen's Marquis constantly playing the fool to avoid being seen as a threat often far more vivid than the central trio. It's far from a disaster, but it wears its length and importance a little too heavily to make for a fully satisfying film. The DVD has an acceptable though not outstanding 1.85:1 widescreen transfer with an English language director's commentary and US theatrical trailer the only extras.  Voices $14.98 What if your family and friends were suddenly obsessed with killing you? That is the scenario explored in VOICES, an Asian horror film in this years 8 Films To Die For festival. This was the second film I chose to view of the 8, trying to go in order of least to most interest. I didn't care much for REINCARNATION from the first festival, and honestly have seen few Asian horror films that I liked, so I didn't bring a very high expectation level to this one. I can say that, despite some flaws, I liked it more than I expected. The film begins with an inexplicable scene of a kid having witnessed a horrible murder in his own home, and then moves swiftly to our main character Ga-in Kim, who witnesses her Aunt being flung from a balcony at her own wedding, and later sees her brutally stabbed by her other Aunt (NOTE: the film is not shy in covering the screen with buckets of blood and gore). The surviving Aunt tells Kim that she had been jealous of her sister, and ultimately felt an overwhelming urge to kill her. It isn't long before Kim seems to have elicited the same feeling in others, as her friends, then family all begin to attack her, one-by-one, trying to kill her. As the film progresses, we soon learn there is indeed a force behind these murderous motives. As Asian horror films go, this one was not so bad. I think there is a natural cultural disconnect when you are dealing with foreign film, so a lot of the difficulty comes from not quite understanding "their world" and in what is lost in translation of the script. The main problem I have with this film is that the pattern of Kim being attacked by her family and friends quickly becomes predictable and tired. Every time she seems completely out matched, and every time someone swoops in at the last moment to save her. It becomes improbable very quickly. The writers try to pad the film out a little by having Kim take a side trip to an old man in the country to hear his story of how he too fell victim to the curse. This device does little more than add to the running time, as he has no answers for her. The film also contains a kind of "SIXTH SENSE" style twist in the end, but you will see it coming from miles away, especially if you are up to date on supernatural films of the last decade. I think this would have been a very effective short film, but as a 90-minute feature, the plot seems stretched pretty thin. Even so, the film is beautiful to look at - the acting seems good all around, and the music stands out - beautiful and haunting, it helps to set the creepy atmosphere. After first viewing it, I gave the film a fairly low rating - but having sat through several of the other Horrorfest clunkers, I am finding myself appreciating this one more and more. |
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