2003, Korean
Director: Min Byeong-Cheon
Cast: Yu Ji-Tae, Yun Chan, Seo Rin

Plot: In the future, cyborgs can feel, love, and hate…but all of them have an expiration date. Combat cyborgs who are refusing to die and be recycled, launch an attack against Neucom and destroy those who get in the way. In the middle of this battle, a conspiracy starts to unveil behind the curtains.

This film has so many possibilities to be a great film. The filmmakers’ attempt at making Bladerunner of Korea was courageous, yet the film failed their attempts to make its mark on the genre and failed to deliver. It does do justice to a few things. The CGI is done very flawlessly. Its post-apocalyptic world feels very moody and works out pretty well with matching the content of the film.

However, the film is carried out at very slow pace and it becomes very draggy and tedious to follow the plot. Sometimes the action sequences are very cool and the movie feels fast paced, but then everything is drowned out afterward.

I really hate to say it but Natural City isn’t a good film. I really wanted to like it. I was waiting for the moment it would transport me into the film. It never happened. It does have great style, but it is in no way to be considered a Korean Bladerunner. This is much like T3 of Korea except it runs much longer and there are fewer explosions.

Review by Shogo.

2003, Documentary
Directed by: Mike Woolf

Just like it sounds, Growin’ a Beard is a documentary about a beard-growing contest. In particular, the annual St. Patrick’s Day Donegal beard-growing contest in dinky Shamrock, Texas. The Donegal beard is a mustache-less style – think leprechauns and the Amish.

Starting just before New Year’s Day in 1997, director Mike Woolf focuses his camera on four longtime residents (and oft-winners), asking their strategies and secrets. A monkey wrench is thrown into the tradition when a young art director from Austin enters on a lark and threatens to usurp the regulars, even though an outsider has never won.

That man, Scotty McAfee, is the subject of the film’s funniest moment, when people who know him compare the ad man to a series of hirsute pop icons, including Grizzly Adams, the original G.I. Joe doll and Jonny Quest guardian Race Bannon.

Thirty minutes is plenty long for this doc. Though pleasant and unthreatening, its numerous shaving scenes grow tiresome and could have been, um, trimmed. The video is jerky at times, but such is to be expected for a no-budget, handheld effort – and Woolf deserves props for not making fun of his subjects. He shows them as they are, which unintentionally depressed me, because I just get easily bummed out thinking about small-town life.

The real reason to check out this DVD is for a bonus short entitled The 72 Oz. Steak, which packs three times the laughs and suspense in a third of the time. At the famed Big Texan in Amarillo, a friend of Woolf’s attempts to eat the titular object – plus potato, salad, shrimp cocktail and dinner roll – in an hour in order to avoid paying $50 for it. Who knew four pounds of meat could be so enthralling? I would have loved to see this as the main feature and Growin’ a Beard as the supplement.

Also included is a bit on How Not to Make a Documentary and footage from the film’s Austin and Shamrock premieres. The DVD package also contains a second disc, being a soundtrack CD with music performed by The Gourds. Your enjoyment of that hinges completely on your liking for Irish-tinged, banjo-and-fiddle laden music about beards.

Review by Rod Lott.

South Korea, 2003
Director: Moon-Saeng Kim
Voices: Ji-Tae Yu, Joon Ho Chung, Hee-Jin Wu

Plot: It is the year 2142 and Earth has been devastated by pollution; the once blue sky has been obscured behind thick dark clouds. A self-sustaining city, ECOBAN, is created which draws upon the pollution for fuel. A resistance fighter named Shua breaks into the ECOBAN data core, stealing important data, which details ECOBAN’s predicament. Of course as fate would have it, Shua encounters a childhood love, Jay, who has become a law-enforcement officer for ECOBAN. She must choose between her duty to ECOBAN and her feelings for Shua, while he struggles to thwart ECOBAN’s plans and restore Earth’s former beauty.

Wonderful Days is wonderful to your eyes. The film uses a mixture of computer models for vehicles and background and traditional animation for the characters. This technique is nothing new to the world of animation. What makes this film unique is the way he treats the film as almost one enormous opera. Sure, some of you may complain about undeveloped the characters and story are. And how it raises some questions and confusion when the world is given fresh birth at the end of the film.

I could easily overlook that. It was so obvious that the filmmakers were way too overjoyed with their post-apocalyptic world they created. When you can feel that much energy, it should give you nothing to complain about while you enjoy the film. I am not saying that would make a good film. That is not enough to make it good. Sure, there is its lack of story and character developments in the film. But putting that aside, the animation is absolutely superb. The design is simply fascinating. The music is fabulous. Wonderful Days is an amazingly detailed alienated world of its own.

Review by Shogo.

UK, 2002
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Cast: Jamal Udin Torabi
Score: ***

Fascination with people’s behavior has prompted Michael Winterbottom to create some of Britain’s finest films.  The Claim, 24-Hour Party People and Wonderland were character driven portraits of people and their interactions with the outside world.  For his latest effort, Winterbottom tracks the arduous journey of an Afghan boy, Jamal (Jamal Udin Torabi) as he makes his way from his homeland in Asia to his destination, London.

This is not as easy film to watch.  Though Winterbottom does not over-dramatize any situation, most are harrowing enough standing on their own.  The one of the silent baby brought out of a crate after days of darkness makes up one of the film’s most disturbing scenes.  The viewer is also forced to take up judgment when Jamal resorts to purse snatching after fruitlessly trying to make an honest living by selling fortune bracelets (2 for 1 euro).  As the scenes switch from Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and then to the cities of Europe, the travelogue continues to get uglier.

Though what is offered on screen is nothing that the viewer has not heard nor read about before, watching the trip first hand on film is still quite the experience.  Winterbottom and writer Tony Grisoni have done their homework well and the footage shows.  The film has a newsreel feel to it (cinematographer Marcel Zyskind shot the film on a small digital video camera using available natural light) giving the re-creation of the journey some clout.

In This World is minor Winterbottom but nevertheless, one that comes from the heart.  The last scene tells it all as he freely allows his curious Afghan subjects, young and old alike, free reign to peer, look and smile at his camera as he relaxes after the boy’s story has been told.  Their various astonished expressions remind one of the classic Punch ‘n’ Judy scene with the children’s faces in Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows. In This World deservedly won the Golden Bear at the 2003 Berlin International Film Festival.

Review by Gilbert Seah.

USA, 2004
Director: Mel Gibson
Cast: Jim Caviezel, Monica Bellucci

I really don’t know how to review this.

After watching it, I have so many mixed emotions. Part of me wants to go out and make the world a better place where an injustice like this will never happen again, but then there’s another part that knows I have to get up in the morning and go back to work and be in the real world where there’s no time for all that.

I know that I’m going to have to go back out into the world where so-called Christians are going to curse me, scream at me or act like I’m the anti-Christ because we’re sold out of tickets for this movie.  I know that there are going to be people walking out of this hating Jews more than ever. I know that there are going to be those that leave learning nothing.

And I guess that’s what saddens me most about this film—the entire “well-meaning” audience. But you know, I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to talk about the audiences who have acted decidedly un-Christian at the theater or even about my own personal disillusion with religion on whole. I want to talk about the film itself.

I put aside the cynicism. Put aside the hatred that modern Christians have instilled in us and turned many of you against religion. Put aside all the prejudices and pre-conceived notions that we may have about this film.

You have to.

The Passion of the Christ is a beautiful, brutal epic that may go down as one of the greatest films ever made. And I say this not as a Christian (I am actually a non-practicing bad Catholic), but as a film critic and a film lover. But even more than that, I say that as a human who has witnessed far too much injustice and evil in his own life—so much that, like so many of my generation, that I have become practically desensitized to it—yet as I watched the film, I was reduced to tears throughout the whole thing.

Gone is the clean-cut Aryan Jesus of the ’50’s, with only one drop of blood dripping down is forehead—we’re now shown a realistic Jesus, cut to shreds and beaten beyond recognition. A Jesus that is actually fearful of his future. A Jesus that is more human than any film has ever dared to portray him (with the minor exception of The Last Temptation of Christ).

Chronicling the final hours of Jesus Christ, The Passion is a stark, atmospheric, lush retelling, but in no way a retread of previous versions. Mel Gibson has created a visceral, bloody world where you feel every sting of the whip and every barb of the thorn. Every inch of the screen fills with images that you can’t shake out of your head—from the whips with hooks that rips out flesh to the demons that taunt Judas—it’s a nightmarish visage that needs to be seen, not because it’s saying that you should believe this or you should practice that, but because it’s the ultimate story, the ultimate dissertation of man’s cruelty to man—one that goes on today, whether we like it or not.

In a lot of ways, its message reminds me of another powerful film, Schindler’s List. Like that film was about a man trying to save those from the madness around him, The Passion uses Jesus basically as a case study in redemption and hope. And while that may dissuade many modern Christians who want the film to be simpler than that, I feel that that makes the message of the film—a plea for tolerance, understanding and forgiveness—only more universal.

James Caviezel’s Christ is subdued and barely speaks. He doesn’t need to—I’ve never seen an actor convey so much with just a few facial expressions. The same goes for Maia Morgenstern, who’s Mary is one of the best portrayed roles I have ever seen on film. Like Caviezel’s, her role is mainly one of looks and expressions, but I have never seen someone with so much pain in their face as when she’s witnessing her son carrying the cross to it’s final resting place.  Monica Bellucci, as Mary Magdalene, is understated perfection. Particularity moving is the flashback where Jesus saved her from being stoned by Pharisees—once again, no words, just images and expressions, yet they all say so much.

The decision to have the dialogue entirely in Aramaic and Latin is brilliantly inspired and only add to it’s air of authenticity. I know many of you hate subtitles, but there is so little dialogue, you tend to forget they’re even there.

As for the controversy as to whether the film is anti-Semitic or not: the Jewish priests who condemn Christ are not representative of Jewish people on whole as many have claimed—they are more representative of all religious leaders who defile the beliefs of their congregation though underhanded means, from Catholic priests who cover up molestations to televangelists that steal the money of the elderly for their own wealth. It is indictive of all of us who have ever looked the other way whenever we knew a grave injustice was occurring and decided it was none of our business. Instead of focusing on who it’s offending, people need to focus on themselves and ask themselves if they are living the best possible life they can.

The Passion doesn’t preach. It doesn’t try to convert. It may sicken you, disgust you, shock you or make you want to change your life. Everyone will come away with something different.

It won’t entertain you.

It won’t be the feel good hit of the year.

But I dare anyone to leave this film unmoved.

Review by Louis Fowler.