Acacia (2003): starring Hye-jin Shim, Jin-geun Kim, Oh-bin Mun, Na-yoon Jeong
Acacia is a South Korean horror film about a Doctor and his wife seeking to adopt a child together. The wife is attracted to a little orphan boy's artistic talent (for drawing creepy looking pictures of trees), thinking he's got a high I.Q. When they get the boy home, strange things start happening. He has a strange fascination with insects and the acacia tree in their back yard. Soon, the mother gets pregnant and the couple have their own "real" child, and the adopted son gets jealous. It even seems as though he'll hurt the baby, and the couple start to discuss the real possibility of sending him back to the orphanage. He overhears this conversation though, and before running off into the night, he declares his mom is a "tree". Meanwhile, the dad, who is an ob/gyn, delivers a dead baby then rushes home. It was around the halfway mark I realized this movie wasn't very coherent, scary or even interesting. After the boy runs away, the tree grows leaves, and then there's a pointless rape scene. It's obvious the filmmakers were trying to take an artistic approach to making a horror movie, but in the end it is just about a "killer tree", and how scary can you possibly make such a thing?
** out of *****
Tokyo Story a.k.a. "Tokyo Monogatari" (1953): starring Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Kyoko Kagawa, Eijiro Tono, Kuniko Miyake, So Yamamura
Directed by legendary director Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo Story is the story of an aging Japanese couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children. On the surface, it's a film about the banalities of life, visiting family, trying to find things to entertain out-of-town guests with, etc., but in the end it goes much deeper. First the couple stay with their doctor son, his wife and their two bratty kids (there's a particularly touching scene when the grandmother takes the youngest grandson for a walk and wonders aloud if he'll grow up to be a doctor like his father). Then it's off to stay with the disinterested daughter at her beauty parlor. She sees her parents as a burden and pawns them off on the daughter-in-law. The daughter-in-law lives alone as her husband, their son, has died in the war, but it's she who shows them the most affection. Their two "real" children conspire to send them off to a spa, so that they'll be out of the way, but the spa is overrun with young people who play loud music and party all night, so they decide to split up and stay with separate relatives to be less of a burden. The grandmother goes back to the daughter-in-law and the grandfather looks up old friends and promptly gets drunk. He makes his way back to the beauty parlor much to the daughter's disappointment. The movie takes a surprising emotional turn at the end, just when you think it's taking you one way, it reveals its true path, the one it was on all along. The moment it unfold it's petals. On the surface, it's a movie about the eternal generation gap, and traditional Japanese values falling by the wayside, but it's really serving as a warning. Painful truthes might always be relevant.
****1/2 out of *****
Phantom of The Opera (1925): starring Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry, Mary Fabian
The prototype for all horror movies that followed, Phantom of the Opera is an early piece of cinematic achievement. The movie opens with the sale of an opera house and a warning of ghosts to the new owners from the old. Box 5 is occupied by a phantom, they say. The phantom uses intimidation to get his favorite actress, Christine, the leading role, even dropping a chandelier on the audience. Christine finally gets to meet her "master" when her brings her down to her lair beneath the opera house, but he wears a bizarre mask and claims to be in love with her. Despite his warnings, she pulls off his mask exposing his hideous face. His dreams of love are forever vanquished, he swears revenge. If she ever tries to meet with her lover Raoul again, he will kill them both. It is soon discovered that the Phantom is actually an escaped mental
patient named Eric. "Born during the Boulevard Massacre, Self-taught musician and master of black art. Exiled to Devil's Island for the criminal insane. Escaped. Now at large." Erik's not such a pitiful case. He's a violent sociopath who's severe disfigurement and subsequent status as a social outcast have led to his mental breakdown. Yeah, it sounds like a Wes Craven movie, doesn't it? There's much to admire in this movie: the sets, costumes and general direction of the movie are all done well, to evoke a freakshow-like fear of the unknown. But it's of course Lon Chaney as the Phantom that makes this movie a classic. He doesn't hold anything back in his portrayal of a scary monster. The Hunchback of Notre Dame might've been sympathetic, but the Phantom doesn't want sympathy, he wants to destroy the world.
**** out of *****
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Sat Mar 14, 2009 5:51 am
