Vampire/Gothic
Thirst (Bakjwi)
dir: Chan-wook Park
I, too, am thirsty, but not for Korean blood
It’s an odd film. It’s interesting at times, boring at others, mostly enjoyable but also emotionally and stylistically flat some times. I’m sure it was deliberate. Chan-wook Park is an accomplished director, but don’t go expecting this to be too much in line with either Old Boy or Sympathy for Mr Vengeance.
It’s clear to me that he really intended on telling a very different vampire story from the ones popular with the girls and their wine cooler soaked mothers at the multiplex. He also intended on supplying the audience with a fairly leisurely, some might say lazy, broad satire of Catholicism. It seems odd to me that a Korean director would give a damn about Christianity, but then again I have no idea how widespread the Christbotherers are in South Korea, or even if the sky is blue and grass is green over there.
All I know about the peninsula is that the North Koreans have some fiercely choreographed high goose-stepping soldiers, millions of them, all starving for attention, freedom and a handful of rice.
South Korea is where the action is, and where the steady streams of films are coming from. It seems, though it’s not true, that Kang-ho Song is in most of them. He is, at least, even fleetingly in all the ones that I’ve seen thus far, whether good, bad or just plain weird.
Here he plays the main character, a Catholic priest called Sang-hyeon, who is very dedicated to his vocation. So dedicated is he that he decides, for reasons we can’t fathom, to sacrifice himself as a medical guinea pig in Africa, where a dreaded disease caused by the Emmanuel virus kills everyone infected with it. Sang-hyeon volunteers to have the virus injected into him.
I don’t know why he swallowed a virus, but there it is. Instead of dying painfully, Sang-hyeon covers himself in bandages, because of a bunch of pustules, and discovers that, whilst reoccurring, his symptoms disappear when he drinks blood. And sunlight disagrees with him. And he’s super strong, and he doesn’t feel very priestly any more.
Upon returning to Korea, he eventually drifts out of the church, mostly because people venerate him as some kind of super Jesus powered healer. One person who miraculously turns around from the brink of death under his tender ministrations happens to be someone he knew when he was a kid. Thus does Sang-hyeon get involved with Kang-woo (Ha-kyun Shin) and his despicable family.
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Forsaken: Desert Vampires
dir: J.S. Cardone
This film opened yesterday. 
Good advice
I watched the first session with about three other people in the audience. I'm amazed they stayed until the end. I'm amazed I stayed until the end.
The actual cinema (no. 4 Hoyts) I watched it in has a grand tradition, a legacy to live up to. Nearly ten years ago I had the good fortune to be horribly drunk on a Sunday night, and the female friend in my company was even more drunk than I. As she was an esteemed employee of the Hoyts Corporation, we were lucky enough to just be able to walk into any of the films showing, whenever we wanted to. This particular night we staggered into a "special" screening, an advance screening for an upcoming release that was expected to do big business.
The audience was packed, we tried to quietly make our may to the only available seats, but had as much luck as a sumo wrestler wearing nylon. It was about half way through the film, but considering our blood alcohol levels, it didn't matter.
We settled in our seats, dazzled by the bright lights and the big people on the screen, watched fifteen minutes, laughed uproariously at its high crappiness, loudly screamed "This is shit!" and staggered out again. That film was called Garbo, one of the worst Australian films (if that isn't a tautology) of all time. We found out later that the special screening included members of the cast and crew, and their families.
So, this particular theatre has a history of showing quality films. I was ready for anything. But this time I didn't have the luxury of being drunk to dull the pain.
This is easily one of the dumbest vampire films ever made. Trust me on this, I pride myself on my knowledge and my watching of as many vampire films as inhumanly possible. This is of the most worthless, certainly. This isn't one of those "it's so bad, it's good, in a campy sort of way" type of deals, it doesn't have at least a sufficiency of breasts, gore, fucking and fighting to make up for the lack of plot. It just sucked.
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Underworld
dir: Len Wiseman
Sure she looks cool all in leather holding two guns. Even I would look cool all in leather holding two guns. And I ain't cool.
Read here, my people, read and weep...
It is certainly not worth the wait. Released here in Ostraya about
four months after its Stateside release, instead of maturing in the
interim like wine it has festered like a dead possum in some
particularly inaccessible part of your roof. And whilst it's not so
bad that it made me want to punch other patrons for being as dumb as
myself for buying a ticket, it didn't leave me with a feeling of deep
joy in my underpants.
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Blade: Trinity
dir: David S. Goyer
Even dumber than it looks
You have to wonder what the attraction is with this franchise. Wesley Snipes hasn't exactly done any memorable acting work in donkey's years. The Blade character is so two-dimensional that when Blade walks side-on from the camera I always expect the guy to be paper-thin. It hasn't really set the box office alight (none of the three films were big earners in that respect). Marvel, I'm sure, has plenty of other comic book franchises dying to be made (and I'm sure plenty of them are already in development).
As a vampire scenario it's not a particularly intelligent, original, amusing or otherwise worthwhile one. The main character's motivation is solely to kill vampires and try to gruffly protect humanity (which seems secondary). There's not a lot of room for character arcs, thematic development, social significance or transcendent insights into human or vampire nature amidst the averagely choreographed fight scenes and the most ordinary action set pieces.
I am taking the piss, but a film doesn't have to be dumb just to be an action film. Then again there doesn't need to be any of those elements in a full on action film, but a little would be nice. After setting up the franchise credibly in the first Blade film, they squandered it in the second by turning it into a sloppy Aliens clone complete with WWE wrestling moves and completely lowered the bar for fight scene choreography, wasting the talents of numerous decent people (not least of which being Donnie Yen).
Rumours of director / 'star' conflict arose which did nothing to dispel the feeling of crappiness that pervaded everything. A third film didn't really need to be made, but got made anyway. Think of this as a quickie for a few extra bucks. At the very least they admit right from the start that the premise is empty, and they need two other legs to prop up this shaky three-legged coffee table upon.
Killing off Blade's mentor character and sidekick Whistler (Kris Kristofferson, who looks older than Gandalf) they introduce Whistler's daughter Abigail (Jessica Biel) and Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds) to pick up the slack.
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Underworld Evolution
dir: Len Wiseman
Excuse me, could you get me a can opener? I'm having trouble getting out of this outfit
Evolution, if we are to believe in Darwin’s satanically inspired theory, occurs incrementally over a great amount of time, resulting in minute changes on the micro level, and new species on the macro level. But over a great expanse of time.
The only connection the term ‘evolution’ has with this vampire / werewolf action flick, Underworld: Evolution, is that as if by a miracle, this sequel is better than the original film. The improvement, however, is tiny, almost invisible to the naked eye, and, like changes in species, will require millions of years before it really matters.
No ‘evolution’ of any sort occurs in this film, as far as I can tell. Wiseman and screenwriter Danny McBride go to extraordinary lengths to embellish the backstory they created in the first one, with painstaking attempts at linking everything and avoiding obvious plotholes and continuity mistakes. Really, they spent a great deal of time on the script.
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Twilight
dir: Catherine Hardwick
Love is stronger than Death, stronger even than mental retardation
Oh good gods is it terrible! Make it stop!
Stop the night terrors, the images of atrocious acting that march through my nightmares each night since subjecting myself to this awful, awful movie. I know I’m prone to exaggeration, but this truly is a flick so atrocious that it almost seems like a parody of itself, a parody of teen vampire romances, and a parody of filmmaking in general. This film uniquely captures, the way dogcatchers uniquely capture stray and rabid dogs, a collection of actors giving performances so terrible that if they were racehorses, you would surround the cast and crew with screens, load up the shotguns, and put them all out of our misery.
I’ve seen this director direct decent films before, with young casts, so it’s not like she’s out of touch with the young ‘uns and completely unable to elicit decent performances from them. She seemed to do okay with Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, the former dealing with young girls, the latter with young boys. Here, well, it’s as if she either a) didn’t care how terrible the performances were, using takes of scenes with obviously unintended mistakes and woeful line readings instead of redoing them, b) thought wooden, unconvincing performances would be more inline with the terrible prose of Stephanie Meyer’s truly awful books, or c) she was so angry at studio interference that she deliberately set out to sabotage the production with substandard everythings on every level.
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