Starring: Andy Lau, Sung Ki Ahn,
Bing Bing Fan, Nicky Wu
Director: Jacob Cheung
Scheduled Release: Now showing

The medieval epic is very much back in vogue in Asia, after the critical success of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou’s one-two punch of Hero and House of Flying Daggers. But what largely attracted audiences to those films was the stylized balletic use of martial arts, combined with solid, coherent narratives. Already this year we have seen Daniel Wu and Zhang Ziyi in Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet and next month Chow Yun Fat, Gong Li and Jay Chou are set to explode onto screens in the highly anticipated Curse Of The Golden Flower.

Nestled in between these two high-profile offerings is Jacob Cheung’s A Battle Of Wits, an adaptation of the much-loved Japanese manga Bokkou, featuring a charismatic central performance by superstar Andy Lau. Set during China’s Warring Kingdoms period more than 2,000 years ago, A Battle Of Wits details the wars and woes of the tiny Liang kingdom, and its struggle for survival when besieged by the vastly superior forces of the Zhao army. The Zhao are a highly organized and well-regimented clan intent on uniting the whole country under their own flag, and when their 100,000 strong army stumbles across the Liang kingdom, they begin what they assume will be a fairly simple siege.

However, the mysterious Gi Le (Andy Lau) wanders into the kingdom shortly before the arrival of the Zhao forces, and is warmly welcomed by the Liang king (Wang Zhiwen). Gi Le is one of the Mozi people, a race famed for their strategic skills as well as their philosophy of universal love. Gi Le explains that he has been sent to offer his services to the imperilled community, and quickly proves his worth as both a military tactician and people’s hero. Showing equal compassion for both the royalty and the common folk, he schools them in such siege-time defence strategies as boiling oil and precision archery. But as his efforts continue to hold off the Zhao and the community rallies around him, the King becomes increasingly paranoid, fearing Gi Le may try to seize control of his kingdom.

A Battle Of Wits starts out with an intriguing premise, but it is not long before the story spirals into incoherence and contrived sentimentality. One can’t help but feel that several integral scenes were hacked out of the second half to make way for a completely unnecessary and totally unjustified love story. Fan Bing Bing’s character makes an inexplicable about face, changing from an intriguing female cavalry commander into a shy, lovelorn waif harbouring a schoolgirl crush. One minute she is barking orders to her troops, oozing confidence and natural leadership, the next she is fussing over Gi Le, dressing him up and making him shoes, never to go near a horse again.

Veteran South Korean actor Ahn Sung Ki (star of such films as Nowhere To Hide and Silmido) is an imposing presence as the Zhao leader, Xiang. But his character is thrown by his army’s unexpected losses in what was supposed to be a straightforward battle, after which his decisions and motivations become increasingly erratic and unclear. But it is Gi Le’s behaviour that causes the most concern. When he first appears, he is a slightly cerebral, philosophical warrior/saviour. He begins to throw doubt into the minds of the other leaders, questioning their motives for fighting and highlighting the futility of their actions. But soon Gi begins questioning his own intentions and, in the ensuing confusion, not even the audience comes away unscathed.

It is not all bad however. Andy Lau’s commanding performance should be acknowledged, even if his character struggles to maintain consistency and plausibility. Cheung’s decision to use swirling, still images for the film’s final confrontation is a flash of stylistic genius, while Kenji Kawaii’s hauntingly melodic score is probably the film’s greatest achievement. But these elements are not enough to create a cohesive and satisfying whole.

The film scrambles desperately towards a moral high ground in the dying minutes, proclaiming in no uncertain terms, for anyone who didn’t know, that there are no real winners in war, and even the survivors are themselves victims. With a final sequence that shows traces of, of all things, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, peeking through the dust and rubble, one can’t help feeling that an opportunity to do something special has been squandered and perhaps Cheung would be more comfortable returning to the small, character-based dramas with which he made his name. James Marsh

Starring: Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Andy Serkis, Bill Nighy, Shane Richie
Director: Sam Fell, David Bowers
Scheduled Release: November 30

As nice as it can be to see movies at press screenings – nestled in big comfy chairs, away from the masses and ticket prices – there were benefits to watching Flushed Away in a big ol’ auditorium filled to the brim with the 10-and-under crowd. It validated that my finding the movie bland and uninspiring didn’t just mean I’m outside key demographics. Those kids? They weren’t laughing a whole lot either.
Flushed Away is a prototypical anthropomorphic-fish-out-of-water tale about a pampered pet rat named Roddy St. James (voiced by Hugh Jackman), who gets accidentally flushed down the toilet of his owners’ posh Kensington flat and ends up out of his element in a rat-sized version of London down in the sewers. His attempts to make his way back up get him mixed up with sassy lass Rita (Kate Winslet) on the run from a local crime boss and his thugs. Of course, because this is an animated family film, the boss is an ill-tempered toad and one of the henchmen an albino former lab rat, but the ideas are universal.
Certainly moments of Flushed Away are funny and clever, but they are balanced out by others that are decidedly not. Much of it is just silly: the ubiquitous slugs who provide musical commentary throughout have flawless comic timing, for instance, as does a Gallic henchfrog. But too much of the film goes for the easy – and often gross – joke: exploring the full possibility of punchlines from farts, belches and raw sewage, there is not a crotch-pummelling gag Flushed Away does not love.
There are a few jokes for the grown-ups too – a strain of polite British humour is evidence that this is a product of Aardman studios: the warning label on the liquid nitrogen, for instance, warns “Rather Cold”, and not a single jab at the mime-and-misery loving French is left unpoked.
But even with spots of cleverness for the parents and the endless stream of potty humour (forgive the unavoidable pun) for the kiddies, for many, many a long stretch at our screening no one was laughing at all. Too much of the movie has to make way for the frenetic cramming in of unnecessary plot, more hyperactive characters, or cutesy tracking shots set to a tragically hip soundtrack (seriously, what are the Dandy Warhols doing here?). It just ends up feeling forced and vaguely soulless, like the movie must be likable because it crossed every item off an amiability checklist.
Evidently because Flushed Away relies so heavily on water which is not stop-motion friendly, Aardman stepped away from the claymation technique so successful in their lovely Wallace & Gromit work, but it’s an odd choice to explore making CGI animation look as much like clay as possible. Odd, but not unforgivable. Far more tragic was the choice of the star-studded cast – talented actors, most of them, but not voice actors. And so the leads are often overshadowed by the character actors in supporting roles; in this genre Jackman just can’t hold a candle to Andy Serkis or Bill Nighy.
For all that it can be enjoyable, Flushed Away just seems like a paint-by-numbers animated adventure that hits all the right marks but has no real energy of its own. With the wacky hi-jinx, marquee talent and clever moments, it still feels like another of those movies you’ve seen before – probably again and again, if you’re a parent. Anne Gilbert

Starring: Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith, Angus MacFadyen, Bahar Soomekh
Director: Darren Lynn Bousman
Scheduled Release: November 30

The Saw series, like most horror franchises, uses a lot of constants in its formula – even when those constants don’t seem particularly vital to the quality of the series. Saw III, for example, matches its predecessors in the dubious categories of histrionic yelling, equally histrionic smash-editing (often incorporating a generous helping of footage from the previous films or even from earlier in this one), and plot twists that depend on those histrionics to drown out implausibility.
But Saw III does actually have a plot to twist which, like its predecessors, sets it apart from most slasher films. When we last left Jigsaw (Bell, the only cast member who doesn’t have to scream half his dialogue), he was dying, and taking young Amanda (Smith) under his wing to continue his work. Saw III picks up with Jigsaw in even worse shape than before, his body breaking down while his moralizing creepiness remains more or less intact. Amanda brings in an unhappy doctor (Soomekh) to keep Jigsaw alive long enough to see one of his most elaborate games played all the way through.
The subject of this game is Jeff (Macfadyen) who is tortured not by a series of chains hooked into his flesh that must be ripped out to avoid a ticking time bomb (that’s reserved for a side character), but by the memory of his young son killed by a drunk driver and his desire for vengeance. Jeff is sent through one of Jigsaw’s by-now-patented house of horrors (he must make all of his torture seed money in real estate) for twisted lessons in, um, well, the screenplay goes with “forgiveness”. I’d probably say “anatomy” or possibly “physics”.
Not all of the story makes sense, but the plain fact that this horror movie cuts between two stories, rather than following the standard explore/get stalked/get killed model (with optional ‘capture/torture’, and even more optional ‘rescue’, add-ons), is sort of gratifying. Bell may be given a similar assignment each time around – whisper: don’t ever surrender control, and act a little smug about it – but to the filmmakers’ credit, his character’s story does have a progression of sorts from film to film. And to Bell’s credit, he gives evil an enjoyably calm, human facade. A couple of brief, wordless flashbacks in Saw III seem to hint at further backstory, presumably to be explored in Saws 4 through to 6. This is impressive for a slasher villain; some other franchises don’t bother to have the same actor play the bad guy more than once or twice in a row.
Indeed, the Saw films pay an inordinate amount of attention to continuity, such that the gaping plot holes from the first Saw are still being plugged in number three. It’s almost as if the filmmakers know they’re half-assing it, and what they can’t fix in post is saved for sequels.
The exception is Jigsaw’s games, of course, which are clearly given far more thought than the characters and story put together. They’re perverse, but also more inventive by now than figuring out ways for a child’s ghost to pop out and screech at people. The Saw series is, by this point, pretty far removed from being scary, but its self-guided torture sessions at least promote visceral shudders. Saw III may be more of the same, but its can-do spirit – yes, we can make three movies in three years, each making more money than the last – is engagingly American. Jesse Hassenger

Starring: Gael Garcìa Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat,
Miou-Miou, Emma de Caunes, Aurèlia Petit, Sacha Bourdo
Director: Michel Gondry
Scheduled Release: November 30

How exactly could such an astoundingly well-crafted and adventurous vision like The Science of Sleep end up the throwaway curiosity that it is? To be sure, there’s no lack of effort from writer/director Michel Gondry, ringleader of this particular reality-blurring carnival, who brings to bear all his singular skills at drawing dreamscapes disturbingly close to the frame of our everyday lives. His well-directed cast fling themselves right into the mix, going at their roles with enthusiastic abandon. The story is a delightful fantasia about a young man (grown-up boy, really) whose dream life flows over into his waking hours – in which he’s smitten with his friendly but romantically distant next-door neighbour – a problem he doesn’t seem to even consider a problem. But the film’s wild images and sense of fun are fleeting at best, and start to leak away the second the credits begin to roll.

After scoring so perfectly with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and its follow-up, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, it was maybe inevitable that Gondry was going to slip up. For one, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the scraps of story around the visuals are not much more than leftover ideas from Eternal Sunshine, further notes on the fantastic. As Stephane, the neurotic star of his own dream TV show, Gael Garcìa Bernal uses his slightly blank charisma to singular effect. Though Gondry takes a while to reveal this character, leaving audiences not entirely sure whether Stephane is an innocent dreamer or immature creep, it’s hard not to warm to Bernal’s enthusiasm – even though he put it to better use in The King.

Much screen time in The Science of Sleep is spent inside Stephane’s dreaming mind, a joyously weird wonderland built from jerry-rigged materials, where cars are made of cardboard tubing and water of cellophane – it’s as though the world

has been recreated by a sixth-grade crafts class with a lot of time on its hands and a deep supply closet. Unlike most artists who attempt to capture the world of dreams with easily recognizable symbols and heavily symbolic storylines, Gondry is amazingly
able to hold true to the illogic of dreams. Items from Stephane’s waking life are scattered throughout the dreams, but never portentously; they’re just raw material that help juice along his feverishly detailed scenarios.

The problems come when Stephane wakes, or at least seems to. Just moved back into his childhood Paris apartment – his mom’s the landlady – Stephane develops a crush on the girl next door, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg). She’s a beanpole artist of similarly fanciful temperament not quite able to reciprocate Stephane’s childish and easily-crushed infatuation. Another strike against Stephane is his (and often the audience’s) inability to figure out whether he’s awake or dreaming, the lines between the two worlds being erased by Gondry, bit by bit. The last third of the film deals almost entirely with Stephane and Stephanie’s melodramatic relationship, skipping out unfortunately on the film’s most enjoyable segments, when the bickering co-workers at Stephane’s office job, especially the wonderfully profane Alain Chabat, help keep the film from drifting off on its cloud of whimsy.

The Science of Sleep is a free-flowing lollapalooza of realistic dreams and strange reality where the audience rarely knows where they stand and are further undermined by the cast speaking a mesh of French, Spanish, and English. This in itself wouldn’t keep the film from succeeding, but Gondry spends more time on the texture of Stephane’s interior world than in the vicissitudes of his actual existence, especially the fitful, clumsily resolved romance with Stephanie. It’s a pity because one thing is utterly clear after seeing this film; if there are any more Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak films in production without directors, Gondry is the first one they should call. Chris Barsanti

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Hugh Jackman, Woody Allen, Ian McShane
Director: Woody Allen
Scheduled Release: Now showing

Maybe it was just too soon. Maybe after coming back so strongly with last year’s bracing morality thriller Match Point, Woody Allen should have taken a year or so off. Caught up on his reading, taken care of the garden, whatever. But, being the manically productive filmmaker that he is, he had to follow up his best film in years almost immediately after with another one, Scoop, featuring his newest favorite leading lady Scarlett Johansson (we are many years removed from the Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton phases), and a 180-degree turn in mood. No icy tension or investigations of ethical behavior this time, just hijinks and one-liners — though for the second time in a row, the most famously New York-centric filmmaker sets the action in London. As Allen’s character in Scoop notes, the restaurants are great, and the theatre’s better.
Taking a page from his last truly funny frivolous comedy, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Allen puts a pair of fairly clueless but nosy characters in the middle of a murder mystery and hopes that their bickering will carry the day. It almost does. Johansson is a long way from her previous Allen role as a soulless social-climber, playing this time American journalism student Sondra Pransky, who’s so awkward and out of her element that, in order to get a story, she sleeps with a famous actor, and then forgets to get the interview. Johansson’s better at playing daffy than one might expect, and unlike films like The Devil Wears Prada — where a bad sweater and bangs are supposed to make Anne Hathaway some sort of hideous ogre — this one doesn’t pretend that she’s unattractive behind the big glasses and careless hair.
Allen is Sid Waterman, a nervous and none-too-good magician, with the tattered nom de plume Splendini. In a rather clumsily handled setup, during his act he invites Pransky on stage for a magic act, whereupon she’s confronted by the ghost of recently dead legendary investigative journalist Joe Strombel (Ian McShane, in full rake mode), who breathlessly gives her the scoop of a lifetime (he found out about it in the afterlife, so can’t get the byline himself): the Tarot Card Killer terrorizing London is none other than the rich, royal, famous, and quite popular Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman). It’s more meet-weird than meet-cute, but it gets things moving nicely at the start, and allows Allen a mordantly funny scene where Strombel finds himself on a boat crossing the River Styx.
Given Pransky’s habit of falling into the wrong beds and Lyman being, well, Hugh Jackman with a royal title, she uses herself as the bait to get into Lyman’s pants and good graces to flush out the truth. Meanwhile, Waterman kvetches about her insane theories and predicts disaster (“I see the glass half-full — only it’s full of poison”). Scoop is really just an excuse for Allen and Johansson to run around London and play sleuth, a bickering sort of semi-adult Hardy boy/Nancy Drew duo who pretend to be father and daughter in order to fool the Brits (not too bright a bunch, it appears). Some viewers will have more of an appetite for this than others, though the worst one can ultimately say of it is that it’s typical late-period Allen, with all the attractive cinematography, fine acting, and only semi-funny jokes that that entails — less enjoyable, say, than Small Time Crooks but a far sight better than The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Although that means Allen knocks out a few decent lines (as he and Johansson puzzle the case out, she says, “If you put our heads together, you’d get a hollow sound”), if one of the best things one can say about a film is that it’s funnier than Jade Scorpion, that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. Chris Barsanti

Starring: John Cena, Robert Patrick, Kelly Carlson, Abigail Bianca
Director: John Bonito
Scheduled Release: Now showing

When The Rock unofficially decided, several years ago, that he’d like to be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger, someone must’ve sensed an opening down the action-hero totem pole; who’s going to be the next Jean-Claude Van Damme, the next Chuck Norris, or the next The Rock, for that matter? Enter another professional wrestler, John Cena, and his film debut, The Marine. Cena plays John Triton, established early in the movie as the only US soldier ever to feel depressed about leaving Iraq. It’s not even by choice – he is discharged for disobeying a direct order, and saving fellow soldiers in the process. Marines, as we all know, are not trained to follow orders, just as commanding officers are not trained to give orders to save lives.
Triton returns home to his loving wife Kate, played by Kelly Carlson. In their brief romantic interludes, she appears distressingly close to fitting into a single palm of Cena, who looks sort of like a prehistoric Matt Damon. Fortunately for the restless marine, his wife is soon taken hostage by a disorganized band of jewel-thieving psychopaths, led by Rome (Robert Patrick). Psychopaths, as we all know, frequently channel their bloodlust into diamond heists. When the thieves kill a bunch of cops and abscond with Kate, Triton pursues them in a beat-up cop car, withstanding a hail of automatic gunfire as he barrels down the highway to reclaim his stolen property, er, wife. This sequence is actually pretty neat; the cop car takes about a thousand bullets and sheds all kinds of parts, but Triton keeps driving. It’s a good thing someone sees fit to finally blow it up, because I have no doubt that had the chase continued, John Triton would’ve had no problem sticking his feet out of the bottom of the car and running it himself, Flintstones style.
Despite the explosions, and the locations that look ordered from a low-budget action movie catalogue, The Marine isn’t quite the movie I’d hoped it would be. Its stupidity/gratuity ratio is off. During the first half hour or so, I felt something approaching delight in the way it kicks ass at being totally lousy. Isn’t this kind of gang supposed to have a really huge dumb guy with a nickname like ‘Beast’ or ‘Bear’ who Triton has to fight before his final confrontation with Rome?
The Marine regains some so-dumb-it-rules ground for the finale, which takes place in a warehouse that seems to store explosions. But at this point, it’s not enough – at least not for a theatrical release. By all means, if you’re up at three in the morning watching TV, and this movie comes on, put on a pot of coffee... Jesse Hassenger

Starring: Patcharasri Benjamas, Thianchai Chaisawatdee, Dawido Dorigo, Orpreeya Hunsat, voices of Wyman Wong, Yuen Siu Yee, Sandra Ng
Director: Youngyooth Thongkonthun
Scheduled Release: Now showing
(No English sub-titles)

Metrosexual is a screwball comedy from director Youngyooth Thongkonthun, whose previous works include The Iron Ladies 1 and 2, and sexuality and relationships are still his main focus in this rather simple plot. Imagine the ladies in Sex and the City – but here only five – who use every means they can to test whether the too-cute-to-be-straight, too-good-to-be-true guy one of them is marrying, is gay or not.
It’s a crazy journey made even more so by each having to deal with her own love life. Yet a sober note is struck by one of the girls with a Japanese lover old enough to be mistaken for her father. Which he is – for instance, when they are on a dinner date, a waitress tries to promote the restaurant’s Father’s Day offer to the couple. It’s a little embarrassing incident which highlights the difficulty of the relationship, but brings a moment more real and touching than any other in this movie.
A particular complaint against the Hong Kong release is the Cantonese voice-over. A local star cast dubbed the voices and, as with The Iron Ladies series, did a brilliant job to make the film entertaining – probably even more entertaining than it really is. They poke fun at local celebrities such as photographer Wing Shya and divas Sandy Lam and Deanie Ip in the ‘gaydar’s checklist’, which makes it easy for a local audience to identify with the story. But without original or English subtitles, much of the film is lost in translation. It becomes merely a Hong Kong comedy with Thai faces and viewers are deprived of the chance to appreciate the original Thai creation.
And while he has made an enjoyable comedy, the director unfortunately cannot escape gay stereotyping – although sporting the title Metrosexual, the movie doesn’t have much to do with metrosexuality at all. The groom, who likes cooking, shopping and skin care, is finally proved to be homosexual and Thongkonthun’s attempt to exploit the current trend for metrosexuality ultimately can’t escape the old tag that a man who loves to look good is gay. Metrosexual? I’d put a question mark after it. RM