Category: Shorts

Categories
Live Action Movies Shorts

Love Glitch

Director – Lee Kwang-ho – 2019 – South Korea – 26m

*****

On their wedding day, a bride attempts to remove he groom’s memory of a previous girlfriend– in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th

In a large van presumably on her way with her groom to the wedding reception, the bride has him rendered unconscious, so a device can be placed upon his head that will allow her, guided by representatives of the firm she’s hired, to tamper with his brain and erase what she considers undesirable memories, i.e. the memories of the previous girlfriend with whom he spent six years.

Her assistant has a handgun; she is given what appears to be a blue toy pistol. Entering her groom’s memories in this armed state, she is able to, for instance, enter a scenario in a restaurant and shoot at the woman who turns into increasingly large square blocks of pixels before vanishing from sight altogether. It turns out that the hardest image to erase is the final parting when they split up because this image carries with it more emotional pain and trauma than the previous ones.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Giant’ Room

Director – Kim Si-jin – 2012 – South Korea – 11m

***1/2

A man enters a mysterious room and eats a cooked chicken… – in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th

A man enters a room he should probably not have entered. Inside, on a table, is a cooked chicken under a protective metal lattice net. Periodically, the net rises and he eats some of the tasty chicken. He’s devoured maybe 80% of it in several binges of consumption when it starts moving of its own volition, recalling the moving chicken dinner in Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977).

Then the situation changes as a giant arrives and sits at the table, and our protagonist finds himself under the protective metal lattice net.

All this gains a strange, otherworldly, surreal quality through being wrought in stop-frame animation with striking puppets.

Giant’ Room plays in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th.

Categories
Live Action Movies Shorts

The Distance
Between Us

Director – Lee Junggon – 2016 – South Korea – 27 m

**

Dating becomes a problem when your co-ed school implements a rule prohibiting physical contact between boys and girls – in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th

Seondeok Arts High School confronts the problem of co-ed schooling head on by implementing a rule prohibiting physical contact between boys and girls. Consequently, pupil Byung-chan is to be transferred to another school since he has been dating Seo-hyun for quite some time, causing the pair of them some considerable trauma.

Perhaps the school is intended to stand as a microcosm of wider society. Whatever it’s trying to say, at getting on for half an hour, this spends rather too long saying it and has a hard time holding the viewer’s attention.

The Distance Between Us plays in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th.

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Flesh Of God
(Carne De Dios)

Director – Patricion Plaza – 2022 – Argentina, Mexico, Columbia – France 16+ – 21m

*****

When a travelling monk falls prey to a fever, the folk remedy administered by an old woman causes him to experience bizarre hallucinations – from the 2023 Annecy International Animation Festival in the Official Competition section

(Warning: not suitable for work or for those of a sensitive disposition. Potentially offensive to religious i.e. Christian viewers. Also, spoilers.)

In a prologue, a young girl races through a field of crops but runs into a monk, who squishes the mushrooms she’s carrying in her bag with his foot, feels her face and checks out her teeth before she flees.

Some time later (or perhaps some time earlier), the profusely sweating monk falls off on his donkey beside his walking guide and wakes in a nearby hovel, or it might be a church, tended by an old woman muttering unintelligible rituals as she attempts to heal him. The perpendicular bars of the roof’s sole window form a makeshift cross on which hangs a Christ figure, but when mushrooms resembling the ones trampled at the start are placed in the initially reluctant monk’s mouth, glowing sprites exit his body and enter the Christ figure, which assumes a monstrous aspect and attacks him.… Read the rest

Categories
Live Action Movies Shorts

Two Strangers
Who Meet
Five Times

Director – Marcus Markou – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 12m

****

A profound meditation on our common ground, our differences, and the factors which apparently come out of nowhere to can drive us apart or bring us together – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 10th

Life. Paths that unexpectedly cross. While cleverly doing exactly what it says on the title, this achieves a meditation on those meetings with other people that prove cathartic, those moments in which our lives can turn on a knife edge.

The first meeting we see, which is actually the second time they meet, involves two men at a cashpoint, one (Laurence Spellman, who is also one of the leads in the same director’s new feature The Wife And Her House Husband, 2022) losing it while the one in front of him (Sargon Yelda) takes what seems like a ridiculously long time to perform what should be a simple task of withdrawing some money. (Of course, there can be a reasonable explanation for this – the machine isn’t working, it swallowed the card, it’s been tampered with by fraudsters – but none of that applies on this occasion – the ATM appears to be working properly.)… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies Shorts

Piggy
(Cerdita)

Director – Carlota Pereda – 2022 – Spain – Cert. 18 – 99m

*****

Director – Carlota Pereda – 2018 – Spain – 13m

*****

Fat-shaming, bullying, overbearing mothers, growing up as the local butcher’s daughter, and more – feature based on short is out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 6th

Sara (Laura Galán) is attempting to navigate the difficult waters of adolescence. It isn’t much fun if you’re different and cliques of your contemporaries gang up on you. In Sara’s case, she isn’t just fat, she’s also introverted and shuns people, which compounds the amount she gets teased. She often works in her father’s butchers shop, so bullies can easily put together insults based on fat and flesh and pork and meat. A clique of three, thinner girls – Roci (Camille Aguilar) and Maca (Claudia Salas) and their unwilling hanger-on Claudia aka Clau (Irene Ferreiro) – call her Piggy.

It’s Summer, and everyone is going down to the Madrigal (Waterfall) festivities at the pool on the river, where a mysterious out-of-towner is lounging about, but Sara sneaks down there later for a swim when she hopes nobody is around. She’s just getting into the water when the stranger (Richard Holmes) surfaces innocently, startling her.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies Shorts

London Korean
Film Festival
(LKFF)
2022

Alienoid

LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 3rd to Thursday, November 17th

The London Korean Film Festival kicks off tonight with Alienoid (Choi Dong-hoon, 2022), the first instalment of a two-part SF epic which mashes up ideas from Hollywood SF and time travel fare Alien, The Terminator and Back To The Future with epic Korean period dramas. The plot apparently involves a robot guard, prisoners trapped in human brain cells, time travel back some 600 years and a MacGuffin known as the Divine Blade. Cast includes Kim Tae-ri (The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook, 2016).

Friday 4th sees one of the director’s earlier blockbusters, the heist movie The Thieves (Choi Dong-hoon, 2012) in which five Korean criminals head for Macao to steal another MacGuffin, a 318-carat diamond called ‘Tear of the Sun’ worth over $20 million. The latter film is presented in collaboration with the V&A’s current exhibition Hallyu! The Korean Wave. Both screenings will be followed by a Q&A with director Choi.

The Festival bows out in two weeks time with two naval warfare blockbusters, again epic historical productions, this time the first two parts of a proposed trilogy.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies Shorts

Memories
(Memorizu,
メモリーズ)

1/ Magnetic Rose (Kanojo no Omoide, 彼女の想いで)

2/ Stink Bomb (Saishu Heiki, 最臭兵器)

3/ Cannon Fodder (Taiho no Machi, 大砲の街)

Directors

– 1/ Koji Morimoto, 2/ Tensai Okamura, 3/ Katsuhiro Otomo

– 1995 – Japan – Cert. 12 – 113m

*****

Executive producer Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime anthology adapts three of his dystopian-themed manga stories into animation – out on Blu-ray from All The Anime, Monday, 12th September, details below review

The film that made Otomo’s name and the one with which he’s most frequently associated is Akira (1988). It wasn’t his first film, though. Previously, he was one of nine directors who collaborated on the uneven portmanteau Robot Carnival (1987), a compendium of different animated stories based around robots of various types. One of the other directors was Koji Morimoto.

Memories is loosely similar – it only has three stories (and three directors), allowing each of the segments a bit more room. Its three episodes are very different yet perfectly complement each other. Otomo directed the third section Cannon Fodder.

Parts of the roughly two hour Akira drag, while Otomo’s later Steamboy (2004) gets lost within a massive set piece after a near perfect opening first reel or so.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Dance Movies Shorts

Boxballet
(Boxbalet,
БоксБалет)

Director – Anton Dyakov – 2020 – Russia – 15m 15s

*****

A pencil-thin ballerina becomes involved with a rough, stocky boxer. Some things seem destined not to be… And yet… – nominated for Best Animated Short in the 2021/22 (94th) Oscars

Olya and Evgeny live near each other’s flats. When running to catch the subway train, tall, thin ballerina Olya’s movements are grace personified, the epitome of precision timing. The world of shorter, stocky boxer Evgeny, whose face is a patchwork of scars from his career in the ring, couldn’t be more different. Should she object to the hands of her choreographer on her leg when he’s showing her the position she needs to achieve? Is he being a little overly fresh? She’s unaware of Evgeny buying booze from the local shop and drinking it at home.

Then one day, he sees her in distress and rescues her cat from a tree. She invites him in for a cup of tea, but his embarrassment there causes him to know a cup off the table, breaking it. She takes him to an art gallery, a shooting gallery, roller skating. He retrieves her bag after she’s robbed in broad daylight. He goes to watch her at the ballet, but sees her drive off with her choreographer.… Read the rest

Categories
Live Action Movies Shorts

Ladies
Of The Forest
(San-na-mul
Cheo-nyeo,
산나물처녀)

Director – Kim Cho-hee – 2016 – South Korea – 29m

*****

A woman descends from the heavens in search of a mate, but lands in a forest where the pickings are slim – part of a strand of films celebrating actress Youn Yuh-jung at LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 4th to Friday, November 19th

The source of this plot is a folk tale known as The Fairy And The Woodcutter or The Heavenly Maiden And The Woodcutter. There seem to be a number of variants of the story – a good, much longer summation can be found here – but, broadly speaking, it concerns a woodcutter so poor that no woman will marry him. He lives alone with his mother. One day, he hides a deer from a hunter and in return, the deer offers to grant him a wish. He wishes to be married. The deer tells him of a pool to which beautiful maidens descend from the heavens to bathe. If he steals the clothes of one, she’ll be unable to return and he’ll be able to make her his wife. He must not, however, return her clothes until she has birthed three children, otherwise she will use her clothes to fly back to the heavens.… Read the rest