Back to last Friday. Let’s give that summary of Kinetta another look:
In the off-season after all the tourists have left for home, there is a sudden spate of murders. An unnamed plain-clothes cop with a pathological weakness for luxury cars and naughty Russian women investigates the killings. He enlists the help of a photo-store clerk and a young hotel maid, both with their own quirks. This strange threesome re-enacts the crimes in an attempt to solve them, but also come to delight in their dramatic rituals of dress-up.
I say, let’s give the writer of this blurb a prize! This 10-second read is by far more entertaining than the actual movie. Yes, we have our first dud of the film festival.
The first five minutes are spent fighting motion sickness from the unsteady camera work. The next twenty are a haze from nodding off while waiting for something … anything … interesting to happen. Then we have bouts of thinking to ourselves, “What the hell is going on?! Get to the damn point!” It doesn’t take long for the first group of people to take the plunge and leave the theatre. There is a regular stream of freedom-seeking patrons from that point on. Those of us stubborn enough to wait for some sort of redeeming action sit through the entire painful movie. I’m all for movies being obscure and requiring some thinking, but at some point they need to be entertaining and have something of worth to offer. Ugh.
Things got decidedly better from that point on. I happened to look at the regular movie listings that morning and found that Corpse Bride was showing a week early at the Paramount. Mike and I fit in a showing of that between Kinetta and SPL, and I’m happy to report that it’s a great start to the fall movie season. Comparisons with Nightmare Before Christmas are inevitable, and it holds up extremely well. The animation feels much sleeker and polished, and is a treat to behold. It’s most definitely a Tim Burton film, with a dark atmosphere and great, inventive designs. While the characters may never endear as much as the Nightmare cast (they just aren’t strange enough), the story itself is enjoyable and the short 75 min presentation moves along swiftly.
So apparently Sammo Hung is some sort of Hong Kong martial arts legend, with pages and pages of movies to his credit on IMDB. And I guess Donnie Yen is no slouch himself. The Ryerson theatre was packed and totally pumped up for the midnight showing of SPL … and once the director and Sammo himself showed up on stage to a standing ovation, it was just that much crazier.
The movie was a lot of fun, a real gritty crime drama set in Hong Kong. No elaborate special effects or graceful martial arts flying around here: it’s all bone-crunching up close and personal fighting, knife fights, grappling, and gunplay. Lots of amazing choreography involved, and that alley fight was just incredible. Very cool flick. Newcomer Wu Jing creepily kicked some ass; we’ll probably be seeing more of him.
Next update: last two movies of the festival!
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