Starring: Gerard Butler, Vincent Regan, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Michael Fassbender, Rodrigo Santoro, Andrew Tiernan, Dominic West, Andrew Ple廿avin
Director: Zack Snyder
Scheduled release: March 15

The Battle Of Thermopylae, in which King Leonidas and 300 of his Spartan soldiers held off the hugely superior forces of the Persian army, has gone down in history as one of the greatest defensive skirmishes of all time. Refuting a direct order from Sparta’s religious leaders after an oracle warned any engagement would end in defeat, Leonidas and his small legion of committed soldiers headed off to confront the encroaching Persians and their God King, Xerxes, buoyant in their belief that even death in combat would be better than submission and slavery.

Director Zack Snyder’s first film, 2004’s Dawn Of The Dead, was a surprisingly assured and well-received zombie flick, even if it angered purists for unnecessarily remaking George Romero’s 1978 classic of the same name. For his second outing he has chosen to adapt comic artist Frank Miller’s (Sin City) retelling of this ancient battle, crafting, for the most part at least, a shot-for-shot adaptation of Miller’s work, based on the comic’s original dialogue and illustrations. With similar techniques to those employed by Robert Rodriguez for Sin City, 300 was filmed in front of blue screens, with the sets and scenery digitally added afterwards.

Unlike recent sword and sandal epics such as Gladiator and Troy, which attempted to ground their theatrical heroics in some kind of recognizable reality, Snyder’s film wears its comic book roots firmly on its sleeve, creating a hypnotic, surreal landscape of exaggerated hues and colours that leap off the screen in an orgy of airbrushed flesh and bloodshed. But this detachment from reality ensures that what is ultimately little more than a string of imaginatively executed battle sequences is never gruelling, but rather exhilarating and thoroughly entertaining. A wickedly black sense of humour runs through the film, alleviating moments that might otherwise be difficult to bear. After a Persian emissary has his arm brutally severed from his body, he wails for the return of his sky-bound limb, to which his assailant merely growls, “It’s not your arm anymore.”

However, beyond the humour and bloodletting, there is little in the way of real emotional depth, with characterization as thin and skimpy as the loincloths that struggle to cover the actors’ immodesty. Gerard Butler is a commanding presence as King Leonidas, a full-blooded stallion of a man, whose unerring duty to his homeland and destiny never falters, regardless of the insurmountable odds. His wife Queen Gorgo, played with gusto by Lena Headey as the only notable female in an otherwise testosterone-drenched cast, is both the dutiful wife and resilient monarch, more than comfortable standing up to the conniving politicians back in Sparta. But other than that, characters are little more than fodder for the carnage, normally falling away amid fountains of blood, to ensure the film’s dazzling visuals retain centre stage.

As a technical achievement the film is mesmerizing, with every shot processed to within an inch of its life so every drop of blood and well-oiled flesh glimmers with the ’80’s aesthetic sheen of an Athena poster. In fact, 300 may very well come to epitomize what 21st century cinema has morphed into, for better or worse. With technical wizardry of this calibre it is easy to see how any landscape, setting, period or mood can now be conjured up with the flick of a switch at a fraction of the cost. Hardnosed traditionalists and lovers of verite will argue that the soul of cinema is being lost in the process, but there’s no escaping that this is a money-driven industry and 300’s $60-million budget pales beside the $175 million spent on Troy.

And it is a sure bet that 300 will more than make its money back. This is full-blooded entertainment of the highest order; a big, loud, vacuous piece of blood-drunk hokum presented with energy, enthusiasm and visual inventiveness. The impact of the film will doubtless suffer transferred to the small screen, regardless of the size of your plasma TV or the calibre of your sound system. 300 needs to be seen on the big screen, where the visuals dazzle and the thunderous soundtrack shakes you to the core. “Go tell the Spartans,” decrees the epitaph on King Leonidas’ memorial, “that here we lie.” But in 300, they have never seemed more alive. James Marsh.

The Untold Story is conceivably Hong Kong’s most infamous film, yet the man behind the movie is on a pedestal at this year’s 31st Hong Kong International Film Festival. bc tried to eke out some of Herman Yau’s untold story…

What was your first thought when you found out the Hong Kong International Film Festival selected you as the Director in Focus for this year?
I was surprised and happy. Whenever one of my films gets played, I’m happy. And now especially so as two films will be showing.
Two of your films will have their world premiere at the festival – Whispers and Moans and A Mob Story. Interestingly, Whispers and Moans covers the Hong Kong sex industry, what made you decide to make a film on that subject?
Sex workers have always been discriminated against, people feel they are lower than normal people because of their line of work. Even though they’re sex workers, it’s still a job, and they have their own principles. Jobs like these exist because there is a demand in society for them. Most people just assume sex workers are bad people, which I don’t believe is right. In many European countries, sex workers actually have rights, because they’re human too.
The film is based on a book of the same title by Yang Yee-shan, who also worked on the script with you. This is the fourth time you two have collaborated, was this experience different from the others?
Actually, no, we are so familiar with each other, collaborating is easy.
Your other new film, A Mob Story, takes on the typical HK triad theme. What sets this film apart from the others?
This film, unlike Whispers and Moans, doesn’t take place in a realistic world. I would compare it to a Japanese manga, only it’s with real people.
Two of your older works, The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome, were controversial and shocking at the time, perhaps to the point it hurt the films’ initial reception. But now, more than a decade later, both films are considered cult classics, especially to western fans of Hong Kong cinema. What do you think about the somewhat delayed response?
I’m happy my films are being seen. The fact that people still talk about the films now is quite satisfying.
Anthony Wong is one of the actors you have collaborated with on many occasions, any new projects planned with him?
There is actually an old film he directed and I acted in I want to remake. It’s called New Tenant. It’s an interesting tale.
You have directed over 40 films covering a larger range of genres than any other director – everything from gory exploitation to satire to slapstick comedies. Which type of genre is actually your favourite?
I really have an interest in every genre. The one thing I try to do is not repeat a genre in back-to-back films. If my last film was a horror, I want to do a comedy next, then a drama after that. I try to mix it up – not for professional reasons, but because I just think it’s fun!
In 1994, you directed Rescue Action, a documentary on rock and roll. The rock genre is not mainstream in Hong Kong, so how did you get into it?
There are places where you can find rock and roll in Hong Kong. It’s just not as easily accessible. You got to search for it.

Dororo
Director: Akihiki Shiota

Adapted from legendary manga artist Tezuka Osamu, Dororo is set in the year 3048 when warlords fight for the dictatorship of the world. A battle-weary Daigo Kagemitsu, determined to end the anarchy and unify the land, turns to the demon underworld for help. A deal is made but the price is a son, born without eyes, ears, mouth or any limbs, all of which have been parcelled out to 48 different demons that inhabit the land. Kagemitsu orders the ‘abomination’ destroyed. But his wife decides to send the infant down river in a basket, subject to the winds of fate. Starring Kou Shibasaki, Satoshi Tsumabuki.

Christmas on
July 24th Avenue
Director: Shosuke Murakami

A Christmas movie in spring? Sayuri is a homely office girl in Nagasaki, longing for a dream man to take her to July 24th Avenue in Lisbon, Portugal, her idealized paradise. However, her world is turned upside down when she runs into an old high-school crush, Satoshi. The talented lighting technician surprises her with a newfound intimacy but, as all love stories go, things do not work out perfectly. Directed by Shosuke Murakami and starring Nakatani Miki and Osawa Takao.

I’m a Cyborg,
But That’s Ok
Director: Park Chan-wook

This is a heart-warming love story from Park Chan-wook, director of Oldboy. Starring Korean superstar Rain, Kim Byeong-ok and Lim Su-jeong, the story centres on a girl who thinks she is a combat cyborg. When she is checked into a mental hospital, she meets and falls for a man who thinks he can steal people’s souls. If you couldn’t get a ticket for the two screenings during the film festival (they sold out in 30 minutes!), make sure you get one this time.

Starring: Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Doug Jones, Maribel Verdú
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Scheduled release: March 15

Most people are probably well aware of Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro’s latest venture by now, a fantastical fairytale set during the fallout of the Spanish Civil War. Pan’s Labyrinth has received almost universal acclaim wherever it has been shown, and gathered a whole host of awards, including three Oscars, in the process. But as is often the case with such highly praised fare, the feverous hype actually threatens to damage the film.
Del Toro’s protagonista, the pre-pubescent Ofelia, arrives with her heavily pregnant mother at a new home, a large country house deep in the forest, inhabited by Captain Vidal, her new stepfather. The beautiful countryside and picturesque homestead should provide the perfect environment for a young, inquisitive girl like Ofelia to grow up in, but Republican rebels are camped out in the surrounding forest and to say the captain is a sadistic, heartless beast of a man would only serve to flatter him. Here is a man who fantasizes about slitting his own throat when there are no torture victims around to quench his bloodlust.
Needless to say Ofelia is less than happy with her mother’s decision to remarry, not least because it happens so soon after the premature death of her father at the hands of Franco’s soldiers. Ofelia is so affected she begins to fantasize of a mysterious other world and alternate destiny that might be her way of escape.
In the forest, she discovers the entrance to an underground maze where she meets a mysterious, sinewy faun who recognizes her as the reincarnated princess long missing from his underground kingdom. He challenges her to perform three tasks: if she completes them successfully she will take up her rightful position as heir to the throne. In her weakened emotional state, the faun’s offer of reunification with a loving family is impossible for Ofelia to resist.
The girl’s quests take her deep into the labyrinth, a slimy, stinking maze of caverns and tunnels, filled with bugs and creatures that adjectives of this world can only begin to describe. A featureless ‘pale man’, whose skin hangs loosely from his bones and whose eyes fit into the palms of his hands, is a truly horrific adversary, a repulsive figure who bites the heads off fairies as he chases Ofelia down baroque-style corridors.
There is no doubt that during these sequences the film works best. The make-up and
design of Pan’s Labyrinth is an intoxicating blend of the grandiose and the grotesque: the labyrinth is a sanctuary of Catholic torments and fairytale ghouls so well-realized you can almost smell it. The film thoroughly deserves its Academy Awards for art direction, make-up and cinematography – a more accomplished fantasy world has not been seen since Lord of the Rings.
But the film’s one failing is that the labyrinth sequences are surprisingly few and far between. They are but momentary flashes of imaginative brilliance within an otherwise rather predictable and melodramatic war film. The faun is a far more complex and ambiguous personality than the captain, who remains the same one-dimensional bastard throughout. The faun’s motives are never clear, his actions never entirely honest, whereas the captain is given no chance to evolve beyond pantomime villainy. The rest of the cast too remain stock caricatures, be they spies, soldiers or sympathizers. Even Ofelia’s mother has little more to do than sweat and moan from her bed every few minutes.
The opening scene suggests that everything we are watching is a flashback, the disturbing memories of a very troubled young girl. Perhaps the only way she can deal with the events which have befallen her family is to exaggerate them into a fairytale of her own. The faun’s fantasy world, as Ofelia’s desired reality, is therefore seen as more vivid and realistic, if ultimately still mysterious and foreboding. But even so, what the film ultimately lacks is grounding in a recognizable reality from which to escape. When the fantastical seems more real than reality, and vice versa, it is difficult to know what to believe or, more importantly, how to truly feel about it. James Marsh

Starring: Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Mayra Serbulo, Gerardo Taracena, Raoul Trujillo
Director: Mel Gibson
Scheduled release: March 22


My ancient-language skills are rusty, so until I get my hands on a Mayan-to-English dictionary, I’m going to assume Apocalypto translates into “vicious, unwieldy, and relentless brutality staged with ambitious fervor for a fruitless cause”.
That sums up Mel Gibson’s blood-spurting debacle of the same name, a perverse and sadistic historical sprint that suffers the excesses of a successful director who believes he’s earned the right not to be told no.
Even as Gibson’s blockbuster biblical epic The Passion of the Christ took in record-breaking box office totals two years ago, the filmmaker faced accusations that the on-screen violence was gratuitous. (I’d defend him by saying the final hours of Jesus Christ were supposedly difficult, so the heavy-handed brutality served the story.) Gibson’s puzzling response to that controversy: create a savage exercise in tribal torture that slaughters hundreds of innocents but furthers absolutely no credible plot point.
His main character in the subtitled plodder is Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), the soft-spoken leader of a Mayan village who stashes his son and pregnant wife in a deep cave when Holcane warriors storm his unsuspecting forest community. After massive amounts of blood are spilled – Gibson’s rapid-slice battle choreography was stimulating in Braveheart but chaotic here – the survivors are marched to a nearby city where their options range from being sold into slavery to being sacrificed for the pleasure of a sun god.
When I tell you heads roll, I’m being literal. Apocalypto has at least three shots of severed heads tumbling down the steps of stone temples. For every bouncing noggin, Gibson also includes a scene of a heart being pulled from a chest cavity and dropped on a sizzling slab for grilling. Again, the point of these torturous asides is unclear.
Because Gibson thinks we care about Jaguar Paw’s abandoned family, he shifts the film’s second half into third gear and turns Apocalypto into a frantic foot race for their safety. The lanky warrior, turned loose by his captives, is hunted through the dense brush as he calls on the previously unseen combat
skills of Arnold Schwarzenegger circa Predator. As Jaguar Paw picks off his pursuers, Gibson – a proven sadist as demon-
strated by his bone-crunching body of work – celebrates each kill with glee.
Apocalypto will only please audiences who pay to see characters they know nothing about be speared, clubbed, impaled, beheaded, hanged, raped, pushed off cliffs, and bitten through the face by a jaguar. Gibson has a bright future making illegal snuff films. That’s not a compliment.
The director precedes Apocalypto with a cryptic quote by philosopher Will Durant: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Since the quote has nothing, in context, to do with the film, I’ll assume it refers to Gibson himself. If the press, by pouncing on his much publicized statements of Semitic hatred, attempted to conquer Gibson’s career from without, then Apocalypto shows he already has successfully destroyed it from within. Sean O’Connell

The Postmodern Life of my Aunt
Staring: Sioin Gaowa, Chow Yun-Fat, Vicky Zhao Wei
Director: Ann Hui
Scheduled release: Now showing

The Postmodern Life of my Aunt is simultaneously tragedy and comedy. The story centres on Aunt, a divorced middle-class woman living alone in Shanghai, a metropolis she has no connection with at all.
Aunt, played by the one and only Sioin Gaowa, refuses to accept new technology like cell phones, and insists on speaking and teaching Shakespearean English, which leaves her jobless when her students’ parents prefer the American version, deciding their kids are “set to go to the US in the future”. Yet, though the modern world may see her as rigidly old fashioned, she is a woman of virtue: she complains of a street vendor dumping waste onto the road and recites moralistic aphorisms unpopular in a city governed by self-interest.
The generation clash intensifies with the arrival of her 12-year-old nephew Kuan Kuan, a product of the 21st century, always with an iPod, mobile phone or video game in hand, who has an interest in strangers on the internet and who cannot sleep without an air-conditioner. And who views his aunt as the victim for a money-making scam cooked up with an online girlfriend.
But the real fraudster is Poon, played brilliantly by Chow Yun-fat, a man knowledgeable in Chinese opera and poetry who woos Aunt, but then runs off with her lifelong savings. The combination of Chow and Sioin Gaowa on the screen is unforgettable. While the most acclaimed Chinese actresses such as Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi have high-tailed it to fame and fortune in Hollywood, Sioin Gaowa remains more low profile. And it is hard to think of anyone else capable of carrying the character so convincingly – Gaowa is the Aunt. On the other hand, Chow has not played this sort of common-breed character for a long time. But The Postmodern Life shows it is the sort of character he is probably best at or, at least, which Hong Kong audiences miss him in the most.
Written by Li Qiang, whose previous work includes Berlin’s Silver Bear-winner Peacock, The Postmodern Life of My Aunt is not a movie of emotional crescendos and diminuendos. Instead it is more descriptive of a series of events any ordinary person may encounter in day-to-day life. And like last year’s heart-warming Getting Home, it is a meditation on modern, ever-changing China. The link between that and the more slow, less self-serving life of Aunt’s upbringing is Kuan Kuan as he watches the “little bit bitchy, little bit self-righteous” Aunt becoming an old, forlorn and physically harmed housewife after returning to her family in the northeast. Is that any better for her? The bitter ending leaves us wondering where her home really is: in the vibrant Shanghai, or with the family she abandoned so many years ago?
Rachel Mok