Cinematic Concerns

This is the thirty-fourth and final film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival.

To be honest, I didn't care too much about the film going in – part of that was the mental fatigue I was harboring after having sat through dozens of films in a short time. If it's good, bonus, otherwise ... meh.

As it turns out, this one is rather good. There are certain things I think the film could do better but on the whole, The Message is a genuinely taut and rather flashy psychological thriller that becomes more involving as it goes along.

The movie is set during WWII in China, and centers around a Japanese officer (played by, ahem, Chinese actor Huang Xiaoming/黄晓明 ... I guess they couldn't find a single famous Japanese actor who can speak Mandarin) who is seeking to make a name for himself by setting up a trap to smoke out a dangerous mole among the Chinese collaborationists. The mole is known to go by the name of Phantom, and has already successfully implemented a number of assassinations; though the assassins are sometimes caught, as we see in the opening scene of the film, and really ghastly things happen to the captured assassins. (There is remarkable gender equality in this story, by the way.)

To weed the mole out, the Japanese officer sends out decoy information, and then enlists the help of four Chinese collaborationists who function at the highest level of Japanese confidence in decrypting messages – and that's when the hunt begins ...

And the characters really go for broke in their mission, as expressed pointedly by this rather nice line: "宁可错杀，不能错放。" (Better to kill the wrong person than to let the culprit go.)

I say the film is flashy, because despite the fact that the movie is a period piece, the directors seem to like to go into visual effects mode when they can, such as animations showing the transmission of a telegraph message through telegraph boxes and then cables, or an animated background which flashes the secret messages that are sent about. The vfx aren't especially great, just adequate.

In fact, even the music occasionally sounds modern, even using what approximates electronic beats (in particular, during a montage sequence where the four Chinese collaborationists were tasked to write about something).

Story-wise, the plotting is satisfyingly smart, in the sense that it does stay at least a step ahead of the audience, and doesn't telegraph the solution to the mystery to the audience, and happily does not assume the audience to be stupid. Also, the characters in the film do actually come across as smarter than the audience; I emphasised that because it is an exceedingly rare thing nowadays. The twists and turns are well-designed, and like an Agather Christie murder mystery I found myself thinking one set of solutions, and then revising as another twist hits. I had a guess at the final twist, and I thought I nailed it, but it wasn't, it was something else, and something else plausible at that. I can buy it. Not bad.

There are some rather brutal scenes in the film – when a female hostage is put through coercive interrogation, you wouldn't be able to guess what the thick rope is for. (No, it is not to hang her till just before the point of asphyxiation.) In fact, I would say that a few of the torture methods are novel onscreen.

Zhou Xun/周迅 appears here as one of the Chinese collaborationists, and perhaps due to her high profile, she does come across with the strongest personality among all the characters.

By the way, note that we are supposed to see the Chinese collaborationists as the main characters of the story, and actually pick among them to root for. I wonder how some of the more conservative Chinese audiences would take to that idea.

Already, plans are afoot to shoot the prequel to the film, with Takeshi Kaneshiro taking on a main role.

Did I Like It? Not bad at all.
Did I Fall Asleep? Nope.

This is the thirty-third film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival. Saw it at the Video Room.

This marks the first Lithuanian film I've ever seen – and the second from the Baltic region – and it looks very professionally done. The technical creds look very professional, and it's neither too artsy nor too mainstream, but falls somewhere in between. However, one needs to be in a particular mood to go into this film, otherwise, yes, it could be boring.

Low Lights is basically one of those city night films, which sees (lonely, ennui-filled) characters (quite often a man and a woman who are strangers at the beginning of the story) traverse the city landscape in the wee hours of the morning as they make conversation about their life and other philosophical stream-of-thoughts, and they usually end up doing something daring (or untypical of them) before the end of the film. Of course, a budding romance is part of the ending too if it involves a man and a woman (or if not, then a feeling that life will be different for the characters when morning arrives). The last such film I saw was In Search Of A Midnight Kiss.

Here you have Tadas, who is married to Laura, but early in the film we see their relationship has settled into a plateau. He goes to work, and she goes to work. Tadas' life is plain, unexceptional ... unexciting. Then he meets Linas, an old friend. Linas talks to Tadas about helping him renovate his new place. Then that somehow evolved into them going out at night. Tadas asks where Linas wants to go. Linas says the point is to just drive somewhere without knowing where one is going.

And so it became that movie.

In fact, there are some rules. From time to time, they engage in totally dangerous behaviour – shutting off all the lights of the car in a streetlight-less stretch of road, and drive while holding their breath, switching the lights back on when they exhale. (That's how you get the film's title.) The other rule is that they will only pump 3 litas worth of gas (which is not a lot of litre) each time, forcing them to search for a gas station every half hour. If it sounds inane, it kind of is.

Meanwhile, Laura is doing her own thing. She gets back home, where it is now empty now that Tadas is gone, so she ... dresses up sexily (presumably in a manner Tadas hasn't seen in, like, forever) and basically becomes a completely different person. (So different that I wasn't sure until the end whether it's the same woman or two different women.) Among other things, she steals a car. (It wasn't difficult.)

As I said earlier, the film looks very professionally done. The night shots look slick. The music is appropriately the downtempo sort, which as my friend Roy always says, is the perfect music to drive to at night – especially when it's the middle of the night and there are basically no cars on the road. (Listen to the song Show Me Lights played over the end credits and sung by lead actress Julia Maria Köhler. It's quite intoxicating.) The acting is adequate for the purposes, certainly not terrible.

I'm quite curious about Köhler, though. See, she's a German actress, how did she end up in a Lithuanian film? The language is totally different. She also exudes a lot of sex appeal here.

The only problem with the film, as with all such films, is that at some point it is just about characters who go from one place to the next and occasionally crossing paths – like a pinball machine, seemingly random and depending on luck and circumstances ... without meaning. And in the end the film doesn't really mean anything. The characters have gone through a night of slight discovery about ... something, I don't really know what it is. In fact, you could say the characters act without any apparent logic behind them.

But fair enough. In the right mood (the only word for it is still ennui), this could be a reassuring movie to watch.

Did I Like It? Sort of.
Did I Fall Asleep? Nope.

This is the thirty-second film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival.

The movie is set during the White Terror period in Taiwan a few years after the closing of WWII, a time when anti-Communist feelings run high and there is a sort of Inquisition of people suspected of having Communist leanings (no matter how unproven) ... which is a period that I didn't even know exist, considering I don't know much about Taiwanese history beyond the basics (you know, how it came to be called Republic of China and that sort of thing).

Which matters a bit less because of the fact that director Yonfan is apparently infamous for not being too fussed about historical accuracies and is more concerned about how elegant and painterly the image looks. And my, does this film look gorgeous.

The cinematography is lush and vibrant and colourful and often saturated; opening scenes feature loving characters strolling through a bamboo forest; and, even more impressively, a windswept grassy cliff where a teacher and the student who tagged along to do some drawing, complete with warm sun rays and a very blue sky, overlooking an even bluer ocean.

It quickly became the setting of a suggested act of violence that is so implicit I don't think some of the audiences even realised what happened.

But boy did it look beautiful.

The rest of the story centers on this one family of four who live in a military compound, a picture perfect one – the handsome husband who belongs in the air force, the doting wife, the two daughters who have yet to shed their innocence. Then one day the father is arrested for treason, the mom too for suspected affiliation, and the uncle takes over. Then it becomes a story of the girls, who find out sinister things. Then the mother returns. And then there are all these little bits about the uncle, the mother, and the mother's ex-best-friend, who happens to be married to a general, whose daughter is friends with the girls, and their individual stories.

As you can tell, it doesn't really go anywhere. Do we feel how the Inquisition rips apart a family? Yeah. But what are all these other stories about? They seem too personal to the point of irrelevance as far as the main theme goes, and yet too inconsequential for us to care. There are no twists, and the whole movie feels predictable, and the beautiful images can only carry us so far (which is not that far at all). Well, except for that one twist at the end, which changes everything, and at the same time doesn't fully make sense, thus turning the movie abstract.

Not sure what to make of it ultimately. At least it wasn't too boring. But boy was the music overselling the emotions.

I have to say though, at certain angles, main actor Joseph Chang Hsiao-Chuan (張孝全) looked a lot like Woo Ming Jin.

Did I Like It? Nah, not really.
Did I Fall Asleep? Nope.

This is the thirty-first film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival.

It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is director Jane Campion's first film after her disastrous last one.

And what a bore it is.

I love English period dramas as much as the general population this side of the world detest it – i.e. a lot. I like the archaic settings, the archaic sentence structure and elaborate phrasal choices, the strictures and conventions that these people live by that no longer apply today. I find them fascinating, and so far, rarely is there a period drama film that disappoints me.

This one achieves a numbing level of dullness, and I'm not entirely sure I know why. Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw deliver competent performances of two young people who begin to fall in love with each other and, because of their emotionally-naïve temperament compounded by the fact that the boy is the poet John Keats (and a Romantic at that), fall far more deeply in love than most people would allow themselves to be (the word intoxicated comes to mind), to the point that they push everything else in their life out of the bubble they create for themselves ... or try anyway. Which sounds like it should be a romantically-affecting, dramatic film. But it's not.

As for direction ... what direction? Anyone could've directed this one. This film couldn't be plainer if it tried.

The story is meandering, though there is one scene where John Keats mentors the girl about poetry and what's it about that's quite insightful (as it should be). There are quite a number of scenes of characters spouting poetry, and they just don't sell the delivery well at all.

I read an article where Cornish was saying how one of the themes of the movie was that they had to fall in love in a very chaste manner (no showing of feelings, no touching, etc), which is of course something that's really unsatisfying for the characters, and we in the audience are meant to feel it. Guess what, Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice relayed that to the audience far more effectively than anything I saw here.

And just watch the trailer – all of the movie could not compete with the passion demonstrated in just that last minute of the music in the trailer.

The one surprise is seeing American actor Paul Schneider here, portraying Keats' Scottish friend Charles A. Brown. His Scottish delivery sounded really good and he comes across without any shred of the American in him (few American actors cross over the English period drama movies perfectly), though it's unfortunate his character is rather a pain in the arse, an irritating sort of fellow. Also, it was nice to see young actor Thomas Sangster growing up (he famously played Liam Neeson's precocious son in Love Actually).

Give it a miss, unless you're one of those that are convinced that Jane Campion is a genius.

Did I Like It? Very much not.
Did I Fall Asleep? About 15 minutes.

This is the thirtieth film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival. Saw it at the Video Room.

I was really looking forward to catch this for two simple reasons – Alexander Siddig and Patricia Clarkson. Clarkson some of you may know, an actress beloved for her elegance in choosing roles (much like Laura Linney or Catherine Keener) and the calming presence she evokes every time she appears onscreen. Siddig, on the other hand, is relatively unknown though he's slowly making his mark, but in particular I liked him for his dignified portrayal of the outplayed Crown Prince in Syriana, and his short presence in Kingdom Of Heaven. Plus, from the synopsis, this looked like it was gonna be something along the lines of Before Sunset (except things happen over several days rather than one afternoon). Although it turned out to be more like Brief Encounters. Or even Lost In Translation.

The story is about a Canadian magazine editor named Juliette who arrives in Egypt as her diplomat husband is getting out of Gaza. That gets delayed, so meanwhile the husband's Cairo friend Tareq comes to pick her up from the airport. With nothing to do at the hotel while waiting and, being a foreign woman, thus attracting too much attention on the streets to sight-see, Juliette goes to Tareq who graciously takes her around various locations in Cairo. Slowly, emotions begin to develop between them.

I wish I could say the same about myself in watching the film.

Because the film was ultimately quite boring. While it is tenderly and sensitively directed, and both actors showing great maturity in keeping their reactions subtle and restrained (not once do the characters express what they think about the growing sense of attachment developing between them), at the end of the day I don't feel that chemistry between Clarkson and Siddig. On the other hand, the stuff that happens in the film is so thoroughly unexciting, and so passive, and so slow-paced, that before the halfway point the film has already stopped engaging me.

I continue watching just because I liked the two actors. But they've done better work. Clarkson speaks with a whisper almost throughout the whole film. And there's too much of staring at each other.

As for the film itself, pacing-wise, I appreciated that it goes straight to the point – the film opens with Juliette arriving at the airport and Tareq picking her up, with many of the set-ups for the rest of the film happening within that first five minutes. The composition of the shots are elegant, with nicely framed tilts here and there. It is, at some level, an excuse to show off the sights of Cairo (and generally avoiding the noisier parts), which is great if you're into that sort of city landscape but for me, Middle Eastern cities hold no romance for me.

Did I Like It? Disappointing.
Did I Fall Asleep? No.

This is the twenty-ninth film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival.

Basically an animation about a cantankerous old Englishman and his relationship with his dog. In fact I love the old man's opening description: "My dog is an Alsatian bitch, and she goes by the name Tulip. It seems to me so wonderful and strange that she should find the world so beautiful."

The entire film is narrated in monologue by the old man, and the language is very English in its character: at once full of elegant phrasings (at one point the word pusillanimous popped up!) but with lots of lewd euphemisms, some with disturbing connotations, like what it suggests is going on in the heads of old men (the sort of stuff never expressed in public). Well, yes it is candid, and it is in fact based on the writings of a real old man named J.R. Ackerley, who did live in London in the middle of the 20th century. Through this film, we get a very intimate look at the inner life of a cranky old man.

The animation itself is hand-drawn, the type where the edges shimmer, and very lively and jumps between scenes and topics a lot; and also the music is of the lively jazzy style (drums, piano, trumpet) – perhaps reflecting the hyperactive, excitable nature of the Alsatian, which is a constant source of exasperation for the old man, of course.

While the first act introduces the story of how the old man came to own an Alsatian, much of the rest of the film details the old man's adventure in trying to find a mate for Tulip ... which was not easy at all, as Tulip rejects Alsatian dog after Alsatian dog. There is a poignant bit about the old man's idea of the ideal friend and his given-up quest of such a thing, only to find the dog becoming just that.


There's a lot of absurdist imagery (many sexual in nature by the way ... see what I mean by disturbing? ... though I don't mean it in a serious way, but rather the whole thing is done in jest, the sort of quirky British humour that you come to know when you've lived in Britain for a while), such as the amusing visual representations of when the dogs were brought together to mate – believe it or not, it was sometimes more obscene than a straightforward representation of dogs mating.

This marks the second time I saw an animated film which features the voice of Christopher Plummer this year, the other being Up; and remember, he is also a voice actor in Shane Acker's 9.

Anyway, it's a very effective piece of animation for what it was trying to do. Something different.

Did I Like It? Amusing. But that's all.
Did I Fall Asleep? Dozed off for a few minutes

This is the twenty-eighth film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival. Saw it at the Video Room.

I was totally craving for more comedies by now, and stumbled upon this one, having skipped past this earlier without realising it – or perhaps I wasn't paying attention to the synopsis, because, why waste time with romantic comedies when at a film festival? Well, I shall remember not to make the same mistake next time.

Far from a sophisticated or smart comedy, this is an Irish rom-com in the best tradition of Hollywood versions – shallow, one-dimensional characters, inconsistent characterisation, slapstick humour, contrived coincidences and other such situations. But if you don't mind all those (I don't), then it is a fairly enjoyable romp.

That's partly thanks to the actors, the cheerful Sally Hawkins (whom I saw last year at the same film fest in her award-winning role in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky ... hey, just realised the titles begin with the same word!), and relatively new British actor Tom Riley who exudes boyish charm. (Useful here, considering that 'bumbling' is the operative adjective in describing his character.)

The setup is simple enough. Two people who are about to marry for unconventional reasons (she is marrying an illegal immigrant to earn some rent-paying money; he is re-marrying his ex to "try again") find their weddings booked at the same hotel at the same time. (Wait a sec, Bride Wars ...) Chaos ensues, because of their situation, and because of their families complicating the matter. Of course the marriages don't happen and the guy and the girl get together in the end – what's new?

The slapstick stuff is sometimes Buster Keaton-esque, and there are lots of broken noses and an obscene amount of blood. Virtually every side character are given conflicts ... not that we care so much, really, but it keeps things moving. The pace is quick and doesn't leave you time to complain (unless you're really that cranky about silly comedies).

Did I Like It? Good enough for its purposes.
Did I Fall Asleep? Nope.

This is the twenty-seventh film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival. It ranks as the best film I saw at the entire film festival.

Comparisons between this film and the other Nanking movie I saw at the film fest, John Rabe, is very much inevitable. This film comes off better in almost every way.

The film is in black and white, which does serve to give it a historical feel, and oddly (in the sense that I can't explain it) makes it feel more real. There's a lot of shaky camerawork going on here, especially in the battle scenes, which is very well executed, meaning it sells the chaos rather than create unnecessary migraines and eye strain. On the other hand, there are some awesome and masterful shots which are more classical in nature; for instance, that instantly memorable shot with a low angle camera of a line of Japanese soldiers which slowly rises and even more gradually tilts downwards until we finally see what it is they're looking at – tens of thousands of fresh Chinese corpses littered across the beach. This plays out to the sound of victorious taiko drumming.

Unlike John Rabe, this one doesn't have a single focused plotline, but instead tells the story of the Nanking massacre through at least five different points of view (i.e. five characters, almost none of whom can be considered protagonists per se), picking up where it is useful and dropping them ... when they die, because almost all of them die. Out of these five people, one is a Japanese soldier, and he comes closest to being classified the main character by virtue of having the longest screentime and the most obvious character arc – and this has caused trouble to director Lu Chuan by way of death threats.

Lu Chuan rose to the fore a few years ago through his near-documentary narrative film Kekexili which understatedly portrayed the dangerous and unrewarding profession of a band of vigilante patrol rangers serving to stop the poaching of the near-extinct Tibetan antelope (藏羚羊) high up in the desolate mountains of Tibet. While not widely-known outside of festival circles and non-mainstream cinema, it was generally praised by those who saw it.

Five years later, Lu Chuan (who is not yet 40 years of age) delivers this film, which is much, much more ambitious in scale and scope. Telling the story of the Nanking massacre is no joke. The first problem is simply, what point of view to use? How do you tell the story of 300,000 deaths and make it impactful to the audience? Lu Chuan's choice is, as I've mentioned, to tell it via multiple points of view to capture different aspects of the massacre, and perhaps to us liberal progressives it makes sense to tell it from the Japanese point of view as well, and there is nothing more fair than to suggest that the Japanese are not all evil to the core ("the truth in fact is very simple, Japanese people are also human beings"), and that from the Japanese point of view, the occupation of Nanking is a victory to be celebrated.

Sure, we condemn what they do, and today's Chinese are at pains to continue to remind the Japanese people (in particular their government) of this incident and to elicit an apology from them, and that it is infuriating that for many (but not all) Japanese scholars their response is similar to Holocaust-deniers. (On the other hand, most Japanese of the younger generation would be utterly unaware that such a thing occurred.)

Lu Chuan reported, "There were calls for the film to be deleted from the history of Chinese cinema. This is still going on. We were not allowed to be nominated at the Huabiao awards. Initially we were nominated in many categories, then, a week before the event, we were told that our nominations have been canceled." In certain circles in the Chinese film industry, he has been ostracised.

To the narrow-minded, so-called nationalistic Chinese people who are baying for Lu Chuan's blood for making this film: 你们才是没用，没知识，没教育，脑袋狭窄，该死的废材；中国不该容许这样的无知识份子继续存在。That's what I think anyway.

I think, in this post-modern world where nationalities matter less and historical borders are dissolving (though some are strengthening), it is time we learn how to be in the other person's shoes – can you understand the emotions and the thoughts behind those men who raped and killed in such numbers and in such a twisted manner? To understand – not to condone, and not to commit the same. Can you, even as a Chinese person, rejoice along with the Japanese soldiers in seeing a Chinese city conquered? Can you bear to see these Chinese people, who belong to a different historical era, ravaged and slaughtered on screen? Can you feel that conflicted psychology borne by the young Japanese soldiers whose job was to maim and kill and whose reward is entertainment in the form of sex?

End digression.

The first 45 mins or so of the film depicts the losing battle the Chinese soldiers fought against the Japanese army. The sound effects here do a brilliant job of conveying the approaching Japanese army's progress towards Nanking, and you really feel the immensity of the fate that is about to befallen the then Chinese capital. Such was the fear that a group of soldiers' job was to hold back and prevent another group of soldiers from escaping the city. Soon we segueway into the perspective of one Chinese soldier, valiantly portrayed by rising Chinese dramatic actor Liu Ye, who leads a small troupe of soldiers and attempted to fight against fate to defeat the Japanese troops and tanks. The shakycam shots here are well composed and worked extremely well with the sharply focused Chinese cinema editing style, really showing the steely, this-is-it determination of the Chinese soldiers.

The Chinese soldiers lose. And soon we see the appearance of John Rabe, this time portrayed in a far higher state of desperation, as he anxiously negotiates with Japanese soldiers to be allowed to continue his way. (John Paisley's portrayal here makes for a far more realistic John Rabe.) The International Settlement Zone here looks in a far more rundown state than is seen in John Rabe, with most of the buildings broken down and destroyed. Where on earth did they shoot this movie? Did they find themselves a ghost town to destroy or did they erect one for this production?

One thing that I've thought about a few years ago when I read Iris Chang's "The Rape Of Nanking" was how to shoot a sequence depicting the massacre. Here, it's done in that preparation sequence template – I should think of a better term for this ... you know how in Zhang Yimou's films, he likes to present people going through an orderly, almost ritualised preparation routine, whether it's servants laying out the table and gifts for Nameless when he advances through the imperial hall in his meeting with Qin Shi Huang in Hero, or servants hanging the red lanterns off the roof edges every morning in Raise The Red Lantern, or maid servants dressing up for the day in Curse Of The Golden Flower? Here, we see Japanese soldiers rounding up thousands of Chinese prisoners-of-war in four or five different locations, intercutting between them, which culminates in a simultaneous display of noisy bloodshed. It's poetic.

There's a scene in which a family is visited by Japanese soldiers who came to take the women away for prostitution purposes; what Lu Chuan had the soldiers do to a little girl who got in the way, I totally approve of. Not that I rejoice in cruelty, but I approve of what it does to the audience, the way it was so matter-of-factly depicted.

The film does end in a relatively optimistic note; we see survivors walk away from the city, smiling. I say relatively, because by the end we have been through a great deal of deaths and not much life. In all these, it is easy to forget the fact that the European theatre of World War II hasn't even begun, and that it would be 8 more years before the Japanese leave China.

Overall, I liked the ambition and the bravado of the film, and I was impressed by the level of success of execution of the film. This film deserves to be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The sound design is purposeful and masterfully done, accompanied with a largely percussive score that is deadly effective in conferring the double layers of emotions of Japanese victory and Chinese hopelessness.

The horrors of war have never looked so balanced and determined.

Did I Like It? One of the best films I've seen this year.
Did I Fall Asleep? No.

This is the twenty-sixth film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival.

This is a Georgian film, and by Georgia I don't mean one of the 50 United States but am in fact referring to that country just south of Russia, with whom it was forced into a losing war just last year. Now Georgian alphabet is weird – it looks more like squiggly gibberish invented by children, but that's really how their script looks like, completely different from Cyrillic (Russian) alphabets or indeed any alphabet from that region. I had fun searching on the Internet for the Georgian alphabets to type out the title you see above. FYI, the title is pronounced "Gagma Napiri".

The film features an unusual hero, and very quickly shows you his face so that you begin the process of getting used to him early – a cross-eyed 12-year-old kid named Tedo. It's terrible and unfair, but it's often hard to take cross-eyed people seriously, and in fact, that first time when Tedo turns his head to face the camera (just 1 minute into the film), the audience nearly laughed out loud. Frankly, I still found it slightly hard not to focus on the kid's cross-eyed-ness even at the end of the film.

Putting that aside, this is a sympathetic tale of a young boy displaced by the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict, with nothing to live for in a bleak part of Tbilisi (the capital of Georgia). He does not go to school, and his mother essentially sells herself to powerful but dubious characters. At first Tedo hangs out with unscrupulous characters; but, on the verge of turning into Oliver Twist, Tedo decides instead to set off to Tkvarcheli (Тҟəарчал/ტყვარჩელი) in Abkhazia to search for his long lost father. Which is just about the most dangerous thing any person can do these days (short of making your way towards northwest Pakistan or insurgent-heavy parts of Iraq or going to Chechnya for a holiday). Let alone a kid.

Let me explain. (Courtesy of Wikipedia.) Abkhazia is a breakaway region from Georgia, and it fought a war in 1992-3 to declare itself independence. Today, its independence is recognised only by itself and Russia (coz Russia loves to spite Georgia); Georgia still considers Abkhazia to be part of Georgia. Anyway, it was a brutal war with terrible human rights violations from both sides, and displaced a great number of the people who became permanent refugees (Wikipedia has the figure of 250,000). This, from a region that is only slightly larger than Selangor Darul Ehsan. It is also largely unknown conflict to the average person (very likely including you, the reader), unless you're the sort who reads (very) widely and have some interest in current affairs and geography.

This conflict isn't completely over – low-level fighting still occurs. Suffice to understand the point that Georgians and Russians and Abkhazians can be fatally hostile to each other ...

... and here you have a kid who supposedly came from Abkhazia but who can't speak a single word in Abkhazian (or Russian for that matter) to save his life, having lived in Georgia for much of his short life, trying to enter Abkhazia from Georgia.

Its middle section is a bit of a road trip movie, where he encounters all kinds of characters, some unscrupulous and others kind. His efforts to find his way is thwarted by detours at every step. But finally, he makes his way to Tkvarcheli, and you know he's bound to be disappointed one way or another. Does he know how his father looks like? Will his father want to accept him?

Tedo is actually a rather handsome kid, if not for the cross-eyes. All the other characters generally seem either to be decrepit, or are criminals. It's a grey, dreary world they live in, and human lives seem quite worthless. The war-torn landscapes in the film are suitably desolate and eerily silent. The score in the film is untypically interesting.

The acting here is naturalistic, and young actor Tedo Bekhauri doesn't have to do too much to make his character sympathetic to the audience. The cinematography is okay, but there were quite a few instances when the film hue changes drastically within the same scene from one shot to the next, indicating perhaps that production wasn't smooth, or maybe even inexperienced camera crew. (Unless it's a post-production thing.)

The film doesn't end on a high note; it doesn't end conclusively either. But I suppose the journey is the point, following Tedo as he journeys through a land that is as alien to us as New York City would be to the poor kid, and perhaps growing up a little along with him.

One article puts it best:

“The Other Bank” is a film about a child but it is not exactly a film for children.

I just found out the film won the Grand Jury Prize for the Seattle International Film Festival New Directors Showcase Competition this year. Another really interesting thing about this film is that it peruses a very international set of talents: a Georgian director, a Russian screenwriter living in Azerbaijan, Kazakh and Kyrgyz producers, an Iranian cinematographer, a Czech sound mixer, a Korean editor, and so on. It is to director George Ovashvili's credit that he is able to pull together such an eclectic bunch of crew members from such diverse countries.

Did I Like It? I'm fond of it.
Did I Fall Asleep? Not this time.

This is the twenty-fifth film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival.

And this is the first 3D movie so far to prove that a 3D movie can still bore you to death.

It was probably considered a foolproof idea when it was conceived – and indeed, I was very much attracted to see this film because of the premise of seeing living creatures of the sea interact with each other in oceanspace in glorious 3D. Heck, I like these types of documentaries. (Especially those BBC ones with David Attenborough narrating. C'mon, how many of you don't enjoy watching those? Raise your hands. I didn't think so.)

And yet, somehow, it was absolutely boring, to the point that I fell asleep. And really, I was surprised at how much I fell asleep. Imagine, falling asleep with those 3D glasses on. Mind you, I wasn't the only one; when I woke up intermittently, I distinctly remember the Korean fellow next to me snoring away.

The first mistake the filmmakers made was to emulate the original French version of popular documentary March Of The Penguins – by having cheesy monologue for the main character, which in this case is a lone sea turtle making its way across the ocean to find the right spot of land to lay its hundred plus eggs. It's distracting, annoying, and somewhat condescending to me. I would have preferred to just see a documentary of sea creatures and the deep sea ocean world without a tacked-on story, and without anthropomorphising (i.e. giving human attributes or personalities to) the animals.

The next thing wrong with it is ... I don't know, coming after the BBC documentaries? I was basically just bored with the images – been there, seen that. I would've expected the 3D effect would give it more of a feeling like one is physically there in the ocean, but somehow, that effect is rarely ever felt. It's terrible, really. I'm sure much effort and resources were expended and much research done to produce this documentary.

It's bizarre, because I was really expecting to enjoy this, and I was really surprised that I didn't. Maybe we still have a long way to go before we understand how to really use 3D to create that holographic effect of being illusorily physically there.

The end credits is when the film chose to deliver its most important point – that all the animals we saw are either threatened, endangered, or critically near extinction.

Did I Like It? Sigh, no.
Did I Fall Asleep? Maybe close to a fifth of the film's running time?

This is the twenty-fourth film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival.

One of the reasons that made it attractive for me to attend this particular film festival is that the films that have recently won awards at Cannes, Berlin, or Venice often find their way here. Last year that includes movies like Hunger, Happy-Go-Lucky and last year's winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or, Entre Les Murs. This year's contribution from Cannes is ... this film.

I had some reservations about this film; I had earlier swore off Haneke's films after having to fast-forward through the static CCTV shots in his Cannes-winning and Juliette Binoche-starring Caché, and really if not for the Palme d'Or I would not have had the desire to watch this one. But I thought, hey, maybe it'll be different this time. Maybe Haneke will do something untypical compared to his past works and I might actually find something to like here.

My bad.

The White Ribbon is a narrative, but its story is so pedestrian (it's really just a long series of episodes in a German village in the year before World War I broke out) that it can't possibly be the point, and it isn't. The film is about the underlying stuff it wants to say, which, according to so many reviews and articles which talk about the film reverentially, is about the rise of Fascism in Germany and how violence is instilled among a group of people. Which is a layer I would have missed entirely had I not read those articles, because the film was filmed as if everything happens on the surface, without any symbolism or metaphors or esoteric language or surrealities or anything of any kind to indicate at the hidden layer.

That hidden layer can only be discerned if you look at the film from a higher perspective – i.e. you need to connect certain characters or certain scenes to the larger picture. I don't and thus I can't. I take scenes as they are when I watch movies; the meaning is contained within the scene itself, and so are the emotions – though that is not to say that scenes don't relate to each other, far from it, but scenes relate to each other to create continuity and build a story. If they're building meaning instead ... that's when a film becomes academic. Go read the praise this film is receiving. Are they ever praising its emotional aspects? In all sincerity?

Giving credit where it is due, the scenes are just compelling enough that, despite my palpable impatience with the film, and despite the rather disjointed plotting, I couldn't help but wonder what the ending of the film will be.

I don't know why it never occured earlier to me that what I experienced the last time I saw a Haneke film would occur again here. That Haneke does NOT provide unambiguous answers to the mysteries (or even the central mystery) he poses in his films. There will not be answers, just more questions that accumulate across the film ... and then the film ends, though it is obvious it isn't the end of the narrative.

But then the narrative isn't the point.

So the point is academic.

Oh, and another reason why I fell asleep: no score. Not a single note.

Did I Like It? No.
Did I Fall Asleep? Yes, for 10 mins or so.

This is the twenty-third film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival.

When the film began, the biggest surprise, the thing that made my eyes pop out, is the sight of Eric Tsang playing a Taiwanese businessman speaking unbroken English (though with a moderately strong Chinese accent), and completely without the usual flamboyance he portrays in character in the movies and TV shows he's in. His character is at first seen through the Internet flirting with our eponymous main character, Kicki, who lives in Sweden and is lonely in her solitary apartment. We get it, and thankfully young Scandinavian-Chinese director Håkon Liu (劉漢威) doesn't linger on these scenes for too long. In 15 minutes, we understood (or at least, have an idea, but do not have the facts confirmed until later in the film) that Kicki lives alone after being away from Sweden for a long time, and is thus estranged from her fatherless son Viktor who lives with Kicki's mother.

Out of nowhere, she decides to go to Taiwan for a holiday, and invites Viktor to come along with her. (We know of course, that it's not really "out of nowhere".) Viktor, shy as he is, is of course happy to come along to get to know better the mother who normally seems so distant. And thus begins two sets of misadventures which eventually converge (rather unwillingly): one is Kicki who, now having found herself halfway round the world, finds it difficult to summon the courage to actually see the Taiwanese businessman; the other is Viktor, who is sort of stalked by an odd Taiwanese boy his age with dubious connections but who seems really in need of a friend and somehow finds it in Viktor, and who goes by the name of Didi. Didi keeps taking Viktor around Taipei, despite Viktor never asking and always politely declining.

When Kicki finally meets the Taiwanese businessman, the meeting is awkward and has a huge number of unwanted witnesses. How Liu handles that scene is accomplished, in that he doesn't do any flashy stuff and just shoots it simply, allowing the actors to emote at two different levels – the surface and the underlying, with the underlying layer being what the scene is actually about. At the end of that, you find that you're only an hour into the film – what happens next? I thought it might falter and get boring, but the film sustains audience interest by ...

... I just halted my stream of thoughts right there because I got stuck wondering which phrase to use: "by having the characters go through such and such scenes" or "by having the plot twist this way or that", and I realised that I can't really use just one or the other. It's both, a very properly welded combination of character and plot.

This is possible because the script did a good job with its setups that leads to natural (or at least plausible) pay-offs later on. I say this because a dilemma involving gangsters appears late in the story, but we buy it, and somehow it is the perfect set-up that forces Kicki to go into action and get her close to Viktor again after screwing up before. Gangsters, in what is essentially a fairly quiet relationship drama.

There is a moment between Viktor and Didi which will surprise audiences, probably make some of them uncomfortable. I thought it was quite tender.

I am generally quite impressed with the writing and direction – and this being Liu's first feature film. There is a lot of playing with the audience, in the form of withholding of information; but unlike true arthouse films the film does finally reveal those pieces of information. It's sort of fun like that, keeps you guessing. Plotwise, it is ultimately quite predictable, but really, the actors are mostly quite compelling to watch, and you become almost as self-conscious as the characters are about the scenes they find themselves in, that it is still an engrossing film – but a quietly engrossing one; I suspect if one is in a distracted or unfocussed mood it would be easy to lose interest in the film.

Acting-wise, obviously Eric Tsang stands out by being so different from what we have seen him before; Pernilla August as Miss Kicki is just wonderful, her character could easily alienate audiences if not played properly but she didn't, in fact we like her and she feels like a real person, and any idiosyncracies or stuff she does which we don't understand, well, we attribute it to the fact that we don't know her well enough, rather than poor characterisation. (I also stumbled upon the rather surprising fact that Pernilla August played Shmi Skywalker in the Star War prequels.)

I also observed that people when they are travelling, the travelling tends to bring out something different in them, and this makes for good movies because of the emotions that surface ... but only if done well.

I actually would like to watch this again.

Did I Like It? Very much yes.
Did I Fall Asleep? Thankfully no.

This is the twenty-second film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival. Saw it at the Video Room.

I think it is the first film I've seen from Nepal, which I believe is a country that does not often produce a lot of movies anyway. (It is not, however, the first film I've seen that is set in a part of the Himalayas, which, if you remember, is shared by at least four different countries.) This one ups the ante by setting its story high up in the mountains of the Himalayas, which presumably makes everything harder – equipment problems, casting, etc. This part of South Asia, the people don't look, well, Indian, but have Asiatic features to their appearances (despite the fact that they speak Hindi) ... which adds another layer of novelty to the experience of watching this film.

Ten year old Siddarth loves his mother very much. One day, a horrible accident with a prayer ritual kills his mother, and from then on, Siddarth questions God. Not the existence of God, he believe that God exists, since adults told him so and he's seen people pray to this God at the temples; rather, he wants to find out from God why, if he didn't do anything wrong, and if his mother didn't do anything wrong (and is, in fact, praying to this God), did God take his mother away from him forever? Problem is, how does one go about looking for God and demanding an answer from Him?

In the Bible there is a famous story about Jesus telling his disciples that to enter Heaven they need to learn to be more like children. And here we see that Siddarth is far more determined than any adult to search for God, no matter what it takes. His determination becomes like a magnet for other kids, who admire his temerity and would like to have answers to their own burning questions, and so a troupe of them set off to the treacherous mountains where Siddarth was told that he could find God.

And so it becomes an adventure story. And we cheer the kids along, small figures trudging through the snow-covered landscape, which is well-shot enough that we inevitably get awed by the scenery – this is the Himalayas we're talking about, after all. If the director's point to making the film was to show off the scenery, he certainly accomplished that. Meanwhile, the kids get closer and closer to their destination ...

... And then it hits you. What destination? Where is Siddarth leading these kids? And the cold? And they don't seem to be carrying food. Where are they going to stay for the nights? Almost imperceptibly, I realised that these kids are actually in a very dangerous place. And the tone of the story up till that point does not preclude danger happening to these kids. And I felt an almost sudden sense of regret at enjoying the story so much up till then, and feeling a bit stupid that I had become just as gullible as the kids throughout their journey, and sure enough, terrible and realistic things start happening to the kids.

Now, the film isn't ultimately tragic. Big hint: the film pulls a deus ex machina. (Those of you who don't know the term, it is time to start Googling. Very useful term in film and literature.) But I didn't think it was unexpected, sort of saw it coming. In fact, how Siddarth finds God shouldn't be a surprise to audiences. What God ultimately has to say to Siddarth, which is really the main question of the film, is at once enlightening and yet unoriginal and almost patronising, were the person asking the question an adult. It is, however, still a fairly touching ending.

The music is quite nice, very good beats, though at certain points it was doing too much, playing louder than the emotions of the scene.

Did I Like It? I'd recommend it.
Did I Fall Asleep? No.

This is the twenty-first film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival.

In short, I didn't enjoy watching this film, which is directed by the only Afghan filmmaker who seems capable of making high-profile films in Afghanistan (or indeed, to make a film in Afghanistan at all), Siddiq Barmak, who previously directed the Golden Globe-nominated Osama, whose nomination seemed more like a pat on the back for good effort from the Americans to the Afghans than a real praise for the film's merits, for that film, just like this one, features the same odd pacing and unfocussed storytelling, but makes its impact by way of its depiction of certain aspects of Afghan society which are quite alien to the rest of the world, i.e. us.

(And yes, I'm aware that I've just written the longest sentence in the entire blog.)

The film begins with the word "Motherfucker!" in Dari, and it comes from a rather oddball adolescent character subtitle-named Scorpion. (And I can see him becoming popular among film critics and film fest types.) He is rude and foul-mouthed and perpetually hostile, to his dog, to his family (a whole harem of women and children belonging to his 'brother', who is 50 years older than him), to the American soldiers who wander into his territory, and, it seems, to anything alive or not that gets in his way. And we're supposed to laugh at him, by the way.

Then there are a couple of American soldiers whose chopper had just crashed, but they remain alive, though slightly injured. Their interaction with each other is REALLY weird. Why would one American soldier threaten another American soldier with a gun in order to force him to carry him on his back? And then later, they seemed to be frightened by a child. Granted, that child is Scorpion. But these are American soldiers with guns.

Anyway, all we see are things happening, one after another, seemingly without relation. Scorpion and the other children first terrorise the soldiers, then bring them into their territory ... to trap them. (I fell asleep for some time and don't know what happened in between.) The unpopular third wife is ganged up upon by the first two wives who burn her 'house' down; which is terrible, because now I hate the first two wives and feel sorry for the third wife.

In the film, Afghan society is depicted as one where everyone (and this includes the women and the children, but the men do it while summoning the utmost authority) clamours over each other to claim responsibility for events or actions, and one where everyone lets loose curses at the slightest sign of anything foreign, or just simply different from their routines. They find enemies everywhere, and live in abject superstition.

The Americans are just not very convincing, and this is perhaps down to the acting (the lead American is actually a UN worker and not an actor), and a lot of it down to the dialogue, which is usually on-the-nose, and at other times aiming towards some poetic metaphorical shit but falls utterly short on that count. They're just boring, and the same goes to the Afghan characters, all of which only seem to have one mode. (Film criticism might entail using the description one-dimensional, but then Afghans might really be like that, and then we would have insulted them.) The Afghan women and children also cry a lot, and I often don't know what it is they are crying about.

Then, out of nowhere, an important scene happens in the end, when a group of UN observers and Afghan voting official arrive with ballot boxes to get the extended Afghan family to vote – or at least the few women and the one young man who are eligible to vote. I noted down on my notes that it's "an important scene depicting vote-rigging" ––

Did I Like It? Errr ... nope.
Did I Fall Asleep? For all of 20 mins.


But during the Q&A,

–– director Siddiq Barmak talked about that last scene as a symbol of the premature democracy that Afghanistan has been foisted upon, indicating that it isn't a scene about vote-rigging, but that's how they actually got the people to vote. Without introducing manifestos and portfolios, or even the candidates. Wow.

Still an important scene for that reason. The consequences of an America too eager to shove democracy down on a population which does not understand what it means.

I didn't realise until the end credits that a retarded girl character seen briefly in the first half of the film was played by Marina Golbahari, that talented actress who played 'Osama' in Barmak's earlier film. Hers is the only sympathetic character ... well, her character sobs but never wails and she looks beautiful, so that helps. She also doubles up as continuity girl in the production. According to Barmak, Marina is getting into acting and theatre, and may eventually go into directing as well. That's good to hear, and we should pay attention to her career.

About the film and how it relates to present-state Afghanistan, Barmak talked about how the film is about confusion. (Got that part right, he did.) Afghans today are so confused, they don't even know who the enemy is – the Taliban? the Americans? themselves?

As for Afghan cinema, it is very difficult for them to compete with the usual films that play in their cinemas – Bollywood films. And of course the Afghan government isn't helping.


Excerpts from Variety's review:

... in "Opium War," Siddiq Barmak's baffling second feature, [which] inexplicably won best film (from a jury composed entirely of critics) at the Rome fest, and represents Afghanistan in the foreign-language Oscar race. ... As in "Osama," the Afghan writer-helmer again uses a non-pro cast, but the result is stifled by poorly written English dialogue and a failure to reconcile apparent realism with occasional detours into absurdist tragicomedy.

This is the twentieth film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival. It had previously won the Leone d'Oro (or we say Best Film) at this year's Venice Film Festival.

It will probably be known henceforth as 'that Israeli tank movie', for as reported the film is located entirely inside a tank – and inside it are four young soldiers of varying experiences (none experienced enough to be jaded with war), as well as their sweat and their piss spillage and oil and other fluids mingling together to form vibrating puddles on the floor. Which the camera keeps going to for insert shots, to the point that you'd swear you could smell the tank. The events in the film are set during the First Lebanon War of 1982 (Israel invaded southern Lebanon).

It's a pretty high-concept idea. The point is to make an experiential film (like Cloverfield or Children Of Men) which allows the audience to understand what it's like to be at war while inside a tank. While certain things seem obvious while watching the film – of course it would be hot and dank and sweaty and dirty and smelly and uncomfortable – what is really the point is the limited point-of-view and the barriers of information that comes with being a soldier in a tank. You really are forced to take orders as they are (fire at that car, blow out that building), without questioning too much whether the orders handed down are accurate, or ethically sound. As the soldiers in the film find out, wait too long and you miss the opportunity to engage the enemy. On the other hand, you force yourself not to hesitate and just open fire in the direction indicated by the command, and you find yourself a murderer of innocent civilians – and seemingly losing control over what's left of humanity inside you.

At one point, I noted down that a soldier's contact with a bloodied body makes the expression "blood on his hands" very much literal.

As mentioned, the close-ups of certain parts of the insides of the tank shows you what it's really like; shows you how much the walls or the puddles on the floor vibrates, and in that spacing-out mode that many of us men sink into, these would be the sort of things that our eyes look at when we're in that mode.

Nothing is explained to the audience. It was nearly fifteen minutes into the film before I realised that there were 4 people in the tank, and not 3 – by counting the names that were called out, for there was never a wide shot. (There is no way to shoot a wide shot in a tank anyway.) Any image of the exterior is seen only through the tank's periscope device, with crosshairs, and as the tank suffer hits the periscope device takes on more cracks and shatter distortions.

The one exterior image that is not seen from outside the tank (and you know this because you see the tank in the shot) is of a sunflower field. It provides contrast.

The film really should be considered for the Academy Awards for its sound effects and sound mixing (sound designer is Alex Claude). The noise of a moving tank is deafening (and what's new is that this time we're hearing it from inside). But then there are the moments when the soldier in charge of operating the periscope device moves it or switches to a zoom, when you get this mechanical whoo-ing sound or a popping sound for the zoom. It gives the movie almost the same feeling you get watching a dystopian movie, when characters are completely surrounded by and depend on machines to live.

As for the four characters (Herzl, Yigal, Assi and Shmulik), the only way for us to have an inkling of what it's like to be them, is to think of our Singaporean male friends who've been through National Service – and imagine if they were actually called to go to war. Sure they were trained, but are they actually ready to fight, murder and pillage?

One surprising moment is when the troops get lost and needed help from a couple of Phalangist fighters, whom the soldiers don't seem to trust fully – and who should play the lead Phalangist but Ashraf Barhom, who plays Colonel Al Ghazi in Peter Berg's The Kingdom. While there he was a compassionate, exasperated Saudi officer trying his best to control a bunch of American FBI agents and eventually befriending them, here he plays a creepily demented but supremely confident soldier who totally buys the confidence of the four young Israeli soldiers (at least for a while) while completely stressing out a Syrian prisoner-of-war that was captured along the way. Honestly, I might be biased, but Barhom's performance here is something to look out for.

Nicolas Becker's score is very much geared towards building the atmosphere, and correspondingly doesn't vary much; since he is only using the same notes and the same tone, he makes it count and his composition is appropriately bleak and desolate and devoid of humanity.

Despite all the imagery of bleakness and hopelessness that this review has given, it has to be said, however, that this is utterly compelling filmmaking; and it's not depressing for the purpose of depressing you the audience, but it's depressing because war is and is thus not actually all that depressing; it has its poetic moments and it works because it is so well shot (the DP could totally pull off a noir film in the future); and you do come to sympathise and possibly even empathise with these four characters. I'm totally recommending this as a must-watch to anyone who has a chance to catch it.

Did I Like It? Yes.
Did I Fall Asleep? I couldn't.

This is the nineteenth film I saw at the 14th Pusan International Film Festival. Saw it at the Video Room.

Cole is a Canadian film about a small-town character who yearns to escape his small-town life among people with no future and ambitions and where everything about the town spells dead and where he doesn't feel he could belong but is continually held down by family and other such obligations. Directed by Carl Bessai, the film has a bit of that autobiographical feel, and is shot on location on a small town called Lytton. In real life, Lytton doesn't even have cellphone service.

Cole is played by Richard de Klerk, who doesn't exactly exude suave – but look closer and you see a pair of soulful, forlorn eyes staring back at you, which is what the character needs. Trapped in a house with an Alzheimer's-stricken mother with zombie-level life left in her eyes and (worse) a sister married to a useless, temperamental redneck, as well as surrounded by friends who are drinkers and slackers, Cole's life ambition is to be a writer. Making an initiative to break out into the bigger world, Cole's story begins when he signs up for a class at a university in the big-city (Vancouver?), which he finds exhilarating despite the three-hour drive each way. Part of that is a new girl he's fallen for, an upper-class black young woman with the fancy name of Serafina.

True to the mundane lives of the people in small-town, nothing much happens in the film, but things happens in cycles – Cole's best friend hangs out with him, then finds out what Cole thinks of him in his writings and gets pissed off, then is friends with Cole again; Cole's redneck brother-in-law beats up his sister or his nephew, but is always accepted back by Cole's sister, which neither Cole (or us) understands. With some effort, the filmmakers summon a certain amount of story momentum to deliver a slightly tragic event that occurs towards the end of the film, with moderate amounts of tension buildup along the way there – but it's never gonna be anything too exciting so one should temper one's expectations. The story does grow at you, however. Otherwise I would've been bored and never would've finished the film.

At the end of the day, it comes down to whether Cole should leave town, and that is really not that hard a question to answer, despite the story plot's best attempts at complicating things for Cole. We let ourselves be tied down because we decide to adhere to obligations – because we do not want to be called ungrateful, and because we see ourselves perhaps as a way of preventing certain terrible consequences from happening (that would happen were we to leave). And having understood that, is it still morally wrong to just cut all of that loose and leave?

The actors generally do a fine job – they look the part and seemed authentic to their characters, especially Chad Willett who portrays the much-hated redneck character. The romance between Cole and Serafina is sincere and tender, not one of those hot-blooded passionate types nor the cold, cynical type. Cole's expression and behaviour when he is among richer, city people and their very different lifestyles seemed very ill-at-ease – pretty good considering de Klerk himself is from the city.

Online articles make much of the landscapes of British Columbia shown in the film which "seemed almost like a character in the film". Well, it wasn't prominent enough for me to pay attention to it. The music consists almost entirely of country music, of course – which I'm not fond of, but it totally sets the pace and the tone of the film.

Did I Like It? Okay, but wouldn't watch it again.
Did I Fall Asleep? No.