Tag: travel

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

To The Ends
Of The Earth
(Tabi No Owari
Sekai No Hajimari,
旅のおわり、
世界のはじまり)

Director – Kiyoshi Kurosawa – 2019 – Japan – 120m

****

As a Japanese TV journalist works with a Japanese camera crew in Uzbekistan, she meditates on her life and career – from the BFI London Film Festival 2019 and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) 2019 – and from Wednesday, November 11th on MUBI as part of The Uncanny Universe of Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Yoko (Atsuko Maeda) is a TV journalist working with a production company trying to find magazine format stories as they travel around Uzbekistan. None of them speak Uzbek, so they rely on a local interpreter Temur (Adiz Rajabov). When not shooting, Yoko explores the local city.

The prodigious Kiyoshi Kurosawa is best known for his horror films Cure (1997) and Pulse/Kairo (2001) yet has dabbled in a wide variety of genres. This one is, for want of a better description, a travelogue with a hint of a musical. The heroine desperately wants to be a singer, but has found herself in the job of roving TV presenter – not exactly what she wanted to do, but it’s certainly show business. She wonders if she’s lost her way. Her boyfriend Ryo who we never see is a firefighter working back at Tokyo harbour with whom she periodically communicates by text.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Monsoon

Director – Hong Khaou – 2019 – UK – Cert. 12a – 85m

****1/2

A man who has lived in England for 30 years returns to Saigon and Hanoi to discover the Vietnam his late parents left behind – in cinemas and on Vimeo, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema, Amazon and elsewhere from Friday, September 25th

Saigon, present-day Vietnam, when bicycles and motorbikes swarm along the roads like purposeful, scurrying ants. Kit (Henry Golding) returns there in an attempt to discover the Saigon and Hanoi of his childhood before his now deceased parents left for England 30 years ago. He checks into the posh area of town, putting the wooden box containing his mother’s ashes on a bare shelf in his sparsely furnished, luxury apartment.

High tech housing blocks give way to the less affluent and more traditional blocks where most urban Vietnamese live. Kit meets with Lee (David Tran), with whom he remembers playing as a child and to whose family Kit’s mother loaned a considerable sum of money to help them start a small business, now a small mobile phone shop. Lee wants to repay the loan to Kit.

Kit goes on an English language tour in an attempt to track down some of the places from his childhood, but so many locations have changed or disappeared.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Total Recall

Director – Paul Verhoeven – 1990 – US – Cert. 18 – 113m

***

UK Release: July 27th 1990

Arnold Schwarznegger’s mind has been stolen – and he’s got to go to Mars to get it back! The seeming perpetrator of this heinous crime is Recall Incorporated, a travel company with a difference: they implant memories of the required holiday destination and period in the client’s brain, and it seems to him that he’s having that holiday then. Recall’s latest deal even allows the client to take a break from his/her personality for the period purchased. Arnie opts for two weeks on Mars as a secret agent.

While the requirements of megabudget Hollywood film making often water down the end result, the premise of this film – fashioned after SF author Philip K. Dick’s We Can Remember It For You Wholesale – is not only imaginatively preposterous but also so utterly cinematic that it has a phenomenal amount going for it right from frame one.

Add to this not only Schwarznegger but his contractually binding choice of director being none other than Dutchman Paul Verhoeven (The Fourth Man, 1983; Robocop, 1987) plus a final price tag which might well be as high as $70m, and you can see why expectations on this movie are so high.… Read the rest