Tag: Laos

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Features Live Action Movies

Air America

Director – Roger Spottiswoode – 1990 – US – Cert. 15 – 113m

*

Reviewed in What’s On in London, January 1991.

Released on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD in the UK on Monday, 7th October, 2024.

One of the most accurate ways to judge whether or not a movie is worth seeing is to look at the credits. Air America‘s director is Roger Spottiswoode, whose career has spanned such diverse movies as the gripping political thriller Under Fire (1983) and the tedious Tom Hanks and dog cop buddy movie for children Turner & Hooch (1989).

Spottiswoode has Mel Gibson heading his cast, but it isn’t a great help with a script as dire as this. Worse, Gibson these days is getting more comedy roles, and he simply isn’t as good in these as he was in more serious parts earlier in his career. Here, he plays a pilot of Air America, the secret, CIA-owned airline network which flies covert missions and goods around the Far East.

This might well have been another Under Fire, but as it stands, I’m afraid, the resemblance to Turner & Hooch is more evident. Like that film, this bores rather than entertains, lumbering along without any overall sense of structure or direction.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Samsara (2023)

Director – Lois Patiño – 2023 – South Korea, Spain – Cert. U –113m

*****

The story of two lives – an old woman dying in Laos and a goat born in Zanzibar – and the connection between them – is out in cinemas in the UK in the new year on Friday, January 26th following its screening in the 2023 London Film Festival

You think you’ve seen everything there is to see in movies, and then along comes a movie that does something unexpected that completely breaks the mould. In the middle of this film, we are invited to close our eyes and not open them again until asked; if we follow this instruction, something extraordinary occurs.

The word Samsara is used in a number of Asian religious systems (notably Hinduism and Buddhism) to denote the idea of a constant cycle of reincarnation: you are born, you die, you are reborn in another form, you die, you are reborn in another form, an so on. This idea is contrary to that of the Judeo-Christian religions in which you are born, you die, once only, and you are judged.

What Samsara does so brilliantly is show us the first of these two systems, showing the end of one life and the beginning of another.… Read the rest

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Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Beyond Utopia

Director – Madeleine Gavin – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 115m

*****

North Koreans flee their repressive country over the Chinese border and through several communist countries, where repatriation would mean imprisonment, torture and possibly death – heartstopping documentary is out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 27th

Whether you’re coming to the subject of North Korea cold or whether you already know a little about the subject from the documentary Camp 14: Total Control Zone (Marc Weise, 2012), the animated feature True North (Eiji Han Shimizu, 2020) or Korean War movies like Operation Chromite (John H. Lee, 2016) or Nambugan: North Korean Partisan In South Korea (Chung Ji-Young, 1990), this contemporary take on the North Korean refugee experience throws much fresh light on the subject.

To augment its twin central narratives – two entirely separate stories of North Koreans attempting to escape their country – director Gavin helpfully breaks them up with an intermittent primer on North Korea. Much of this comes from Hyeonseo Lee, who fled the country over 20 years ago and has subsequently talked about it in TED and other public speaking forums. Lee was the producer’s original intended subject for the film, which changed considerably as director Gavin began researching the subject.… Read the rest