Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Sick Of Myself
(Syk Pike)

Director – Kristoffer Borgli – 2022 – Norway – Cert. 15 – 95m

*****

Fed up with the attention her successful artist partner is getting, a woman deliberately consumes dangerous prescription drugs to make herself the centre of attention– out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 21st

Young Oslo couple Thomas (Eirik Sæther) and Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp from Ninjababy, Ingvild Sve Flikke, 2021; The Burning Sea, John Andreas Andersen, 2022) have an unhealthy relationship. He is a compulsive thief, stealing luxury items such as expensive wine and designer furniture from restaurants and showrooms, respectively. She is a compulsive liar and attention seeker. They somehow co-exist in a state of unstable equilibrium. They are on a collision course because he has a potential celebrity career while she does not. He is an artist having his first show at a major gallery, while she works at an ordinary coffee shop.

At a celebratory gathering with friends, she is constantly belittling him, constantly talking down his achievement through judicious use of fact coupled with any fiction she might care to invent. At a restaurant meal with his gallery owner and assorted invited guests, she invents an allergy, ‘absent-mindedly consumes a small amount of Thomas’ food and suffers an allergy attack, immediately becoming the focus of attention on what should be his evening rather than hers.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Crimes
Of The Future
(2022)

Director – David Cronenberg – 2022 – Canada – Cert. 18 – 107m

*****

Even as two performance artists enact bizarre public rituals exploring the unlikely boundaries between sex, surgery and mutation, a young boy who eats plastic is murdered by his mother – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 9th

Back in 1970, underground filmmaker Cronenberg made a film called Crimes Of The Future, inspired by the title of an unseen poem in an art film he’d seen several years earlier. That 1970 film, consisting of a cast on a campus of modernist architecture shot in colour without sync sound and deploying a monologue voice-over alternating with blocks of weird, improvised sound effects, bears little relation to this new one, except that it likewise briefly and peripherally features a dancer. More significantly, it also features a character whose body produces new organs. We don’t see them in that film, we merely hear a verbal description.

Fast-forward to the present and Cronenberg has had a career from the late 1970s through the 1990s making cinema features packed with icky special effects about something called The New Flesh followed by a series of (arguably) more mainstream, arthouse movies. To those who know the whole body of work, they’re all of a piece; however, to the newcomer they can be overwhelming or potentially offensive.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Heaven:
To The Land
Of Happiness
(Hebeun:
Haengbokeui Nararo,
행복의 나라로)

Director – Im Sang-soo – 2021 – South Korea – 101m

*****

A meds thief on the verge of arrest and an escaped convict inadvertently steal money from gangsters closing gala with a director Q&A as part of a strand of films celebrating actress Youn Yuh-jung at LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival which ran in cinemas from Thursday, November 4th to Friday, November 19th

The sexual frankness of director Im’s earlier A Good Lawyer’s Wife (2003) and The Housemaid (2010) is absent from his latest, a producer-suggested project more lightweight than his usual fare which nevertheless achieves a degree of poignancy. Its template is the German film Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (Thomas Jahn, 1997) in which two terminally ill men steal a car so that one of them can visit the sea before he dies, the car unfortunately belonging to a gangster and carrying a quantity of cash in the boot.

Writing his own script around this loose premise, Im makes the man who wants to see the sea a convict, inmate 203 (Choi Min-sik from The Tiger, Park Hoon-jung, 2015; Lucy, Luc Besson, 2014; New World, Park Hoon-jung, 2013; Lady Vengeance, Park Chan Wook, 2005), sent to the hospital for an MRI scan where it’s discovered he has a brain tumour and two weeks to live.… Read the rest