Tag: prince

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Features Live Action Movies

The Taste of Things
(The Pot-au-Feu)
(La Passion
de Dodin Bouffant)

Director – Tran Anh Hung – 2023 – France – Cert. 12a – 145m

*****

A nineteenth century, French gastronome tries to persuade his live-in cook to become his wife – in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from Wednesday, February 14th

1885. Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) is the live-in cook for celebrated gastronome Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel). Over the years, he and his male friends have enjoyed her culinary skills. They are in a relationship: some nights, her bedroom door is unlocked and he can gain admission, other nights, it’s locked. She likes things the way they are and has no plans to marry him. However, he has other ideas…

This opens with a bravura cooking sequence in a huge, French chateau kitchen as Eugénie and her assistant Violette (Galatéa Bellugi) and Violette’s younger, visiting cousin Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), with a degree of assistance from Dodin, prepare the most amazing French meal you’ve ever seen. You start to think you’re in for two and a half hours of hunger-inducing food porn when the tone starts to shift, and the threads of a plot impose themselves ever so subtly on the proceedings.

Dodin accepts a challenge from a foreign prince, used to lengthy meals that last longer than 24 hours, to cook a meal the challenger will never forget.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Mr. Vampire IV
aka
Mr. Vampire
Saga IV
(Geung See
Suk Suk,
靈幻先生)

Director – Ricky Lau – 1988 – Hong Kong – Cert. 12 – 96m

***1/2

A feud between Taoist and Buddhist neighbours, and a tentative romance between their boy and girl apprentices, are interrupted by the arrival of a coffin, from which a hopping corpse escapes – out on Blu-ray in the UK on Monday, May 22nd as part of Eureka! Video’s Hopping Mad: The Mr. Vampire Sequels

The fourth and final ‘official’ Mr. Vampire film (i.e. to be made by Sammo Hung / Leonard Ho’s Bo Ho Films company).

This once again shakes up the formula to deliver something different from its predecessors. Where the third film replaced the franchise’s jiangshi (hopping corpses) with flying ghosts, this fourth entry brings jiangshi back again and yet, curiously, they only come into play in about half of the film. The other half concerns two next door neighbours who don’t get on with one another. As with the previous films, the knockabout comedy sensibility holds the whole thing together.

The second major change is the conspicuous absence of star Lam Ching-ying who previously played the jiangshi-fighting, Taoist priest. According to the Blu-ray booklet’s helpful essay on these films by James Oliver, this appears to be down to the fact that Lam simply wasn’t available, a theory backed up by the fact that he subsequently worked again with most of those involved in the franchise.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Eunuch
(Naeshi,
내시)

Director – Shin Sang-ok – 1968 – South Korea – 95m

****

Free to view in the Korean Film Archive as part of

Korean Film Nights Online: Trapped! The Cinema of Confinement

(Friday, July 17th – Thursday, August 27th)

Viewing links at bottom of review.

Away from his main palace, a prince keeps numerous maids in a separate palace at Geumjung. These concubines are for the prince alone, to help him produce an heir, and to ensure that no-one else impregnates them before him the palace is staffed with eunuchs. Every night he chooses a maid to sleep with, usually by picking a token off a tray. He has a pretty low view of women – they’re all the same, he complains.

The women have nothing to do with themselves except wait around to be picked and gossip about who has been lucky enough to be chosen. They have no power whatsoever – there’s a story about a girl who refused to remove her skirt in the prince’s bedchamber and was executed for disobedience. With no sexually functioning men around other than the prince, some of the women turn to each other for fulfilment.

Thus, one night Min sneaks into the room of the sleeping Kim Ja-ok (Yun Jeong-hie) only to be repulsed when the latter wakes up, understandably startled.… Read the rest