Tag: movie star

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Features Live Action Movies

Aimless Bullet
(Obaltan,
오발탄)

Director – Yu Hyun-mok – 1961 – South Korea – 110m

****

Former soldiers and others struggle with the effects of post-war economic depression in the newly constituted South Korea – plays in Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank

Made and released in the brief period of about a year between the collapse of one dictatorship and the rise of another, and the temporary relaxation of state censorship that accompanied it in South Korea, Aimless Bullet deals with the struggle to survive in that country amidst economic collapse. Men including demobbed soldiers and officers struggle to find work, others lucky enough to have jobs struggle to support their extended networks of loved ones while women drift into prostitution – or, if they’re really lucky, become movie stars.

It opens with crippled, former officer Gyeong-sik, constantly asking Sgt. Park and other drinking buddies not to call him “The Commander”, making a scene in a bar and smashing a glass door. Wandering through the streets at night alone afterwards, he’s accosted by former girlfriend Song Myeong-suk (Seo Ae-ja) who desperately wants him to fulfil his promise and marry her, but he won’t because as a cripple he feel an incomplete man.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Stuntman
(Mou Tai Do,
武替道)

Directors – Albert & Herbart Leung – 2024 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 114m

****

20 years after a stuntman on his team was hospitalisedwhen a stunt went wrong, an action choreographer takes on his first stunt job since the tragic incident – plays in Competition at the 2024 London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) which runs from Wednesday, October 23rd to Sunday, November 3rd

This opens with a terrific cops and robbers fight in a shopping mall at the top of an escalator bearing remarkable resemblance to (and just as exciting as) the one towards the end of Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985). However, while this might be an obvious homage to that film specifically and 1980s Hong Kong action cinema generally, it’s far from a mere attempt to retread the same ground: we suddenly cut from the cops and robbers scenario to reveal a film crew of that period shooting an action movie.

There is a particularly dangerous stunt coming up. A (stunt)man must jump off a bridge onto a lorry as it passes below, with a car immediately behind. (Again, this is remarkably similar to the stunt in Police Story II (Jackie Chan, 1988) where Chan leaps off a balcony onto a lorry passing in the street.)… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Rock Hudson:
All That
Heaven Allowed

Rock on vacation in Puerto Vallarta (Photo courtesy of Lee Garlington).

Director – Stephen Kijak – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 104m

***1/2

Matinée idol Rock Hudson epitomised the Hollywood dream until he died of AIDS in 1985 – documentary portrait available on digital platforms from Monday, 23 October

It was only when Rock Hudson tragically died of AIDS in 1985 that the fact that he was gay entered into the consciousness of the American, movie-going public.

He originally came to Hollywood to pursue an acting career after a stint in the US Navy in the final years of World War Two, signing up with agent Henry Willson. Willson had a knack for renaming actors, and it was he who gave the young Roy Fitzgerald the name Rock Hudson with which he was to achieve stardom. Even so, the twentysomething spent the best part of a decade playing roles in Westerns and adventures before director Douglas Sirk cast him in the romantic melodrama Magnificent Obsession (1954) opposite Jane Wyman. Sirk clearly saw a quality in the actor that no-one else had identified, and a screen legend was born.

Rock Hudson, 1954

Hudson was to prove the perfect fit for the onscreen romantic lead and would play similar roles for much of his career which included not only further roles for Sirk in All That Heaven Allows (1955), again with Wyman, and Written On The Wind (1956), opposite Lauren Bacall, but also starring with James Dean in what was to be the latter’s final film Giant (George Stevens, 1956).… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Asteroid City

Director – Wes Anderson – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 104m

***

A stage play frames a tale of various characters in a 1950s US desert town, built on the site of an asteroid impact, which becomes the centre of a cover-up after an alien appears – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 23rd

Iconoclast Anderson’s latest is being sold as one thing by its trailer, when it’s actually something else. And watching the film, that something else completely threw me. What we are being sold via the standard letterboxed movie framed image is, a 1950s family trapped in the town of Asteroid City, USA when their car irreparably breaks down, then the entire (not very large) population including visitors imprisoned there following an incident with an extra-terrestrial spaceship and an alien. The overall tone is of whimsy, but maybe there’s something unsettling and disturbing about it too.

Anderson’s movies have never been about photorealism as much as artifice, which is part of their undeniable charm. Perhaps that’s even more true of Asteroid City than most. The costumes, the production design, have gone for a very particular, stylized look. This is fifties American desert romanticised into pastel-shaded eye candy, and if all that were required of going to a movie were to sit down in your seat and soak up the scenery, then provided you’re not the type to insist on photo-representational accuracy, this would be a winner hands down.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies Music

Elvis

Director – Baz Luhrmann – 2022 – US, Australia – Cert. 12a – 159m

***

Elvis Presley’s career from the mid-1950s through to his death in 1977, and his complex business relationship with his manager Colonel Tom Parker – out in cinemas on Friday, June 24th

Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), having a heart attack, reminisces to himself about his career. Many considered him the abuser and exploiter of the singer Elvis Presley, but that wasn’t the way it was. In the early 1950s, when Parker was managing the touring show of country singer Hank Snow (David Wenham), he heard Presley’s first recording on Sun Records though Hank’s son Jimmie Rodgers Snow (Kodi Smit-Mcphee), a singer in his own right who Parker didn’t think was anything like as good as his father.

Parker, an old time carnival showman, is always on the lookout for that one act that’s a little bit different, affects audiences and might well clean up at the box office. When he first sees Elvis (Austin Butler) perform, and notices young girls and older women going wild at the singer’s dance moves, he is convinced there’s money to be made and determines to sign him before someone else does.… Read the rest

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Live Action Series Television

A Day-Off
Of Kasumi Arimura Ep. 1
(Arimura Kasumi
No Satsukyu,
有村架純の撮休 第1話)

Director – Hirokazu Kore-eda – 2020 – Japan – 42m

****

In the first episode of director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s TV series A Day-Off Of Kasumi Arimura, the actress Kazumi Arimura plays herself in a fictionalised version of her life – on BFI Player as part of the BFI London Film Festival 2020 from 13:00 Saturday, October 10th to 13:00 Tuesday, October 13th

This is a curiosity, one-off festival screening that admirers of contemporary Japanese cinema are going to want to see. Kore-eda (Shoplifters, 2018) is one of the highest profile, contemporary directors in Japan and like many other directors around the world in between his theatrical cinema films he also works in small screen television. This is the first of eight episodes of the TV series A Day-Off Of Kasumi Arimura in which actress Kazumi Arimura plays herself in a fictionalised version of her life. As the subtitle of the end title indicates, this drama is fictional. It has nothing to do with Kazumi Arimura’s real life. 

There’s a little pre-amble in which Kazumi learns that tomorrow’s shoot is cancelled because someone has gone down with the ‘flu. Which you might think makes the episode rather close to or currently perilous pandemic times, but it doesn’t really.… Read the rest