Fantastic Fest 2011 – Body Temperature/The Eternal Evil Of Asia
Show me your bitchy look.
THE LEGEND OF THE MIGHTY SOAP (2011)
Directed by: Andrew Bond
Written by: Andrew Bond
In a land where everyone is dirty, soap is a strange, strange thing. Especially when it has a face. And talks. And has magical powers.
This is meant to be a children’s adventure short about a dirty world that wants to be clean. The Mighty Soap comes along to teach them how. It’s alright, but I think it’s a bit on the slow side for kids…and long for a short. Kinda fun, though. Just super silly.
Directed by: Takaomi Ogata
Written by: Takaomi Ogata
Speaking of super silly, that’s something that this movie actually isn’t. Rintaro (Chavetaro Ishizaki) is a lonely guy. The only love he gets is from his trusty sex doll. To him, she’s a real person. (So much so that, at this point, she IS a real person.)
His perfect relationship is threatened when he meets Rinko (Rin Sakuragi, who also plays the sex doll), a girl who looks just like his sex doll. Could she be better than the fake thing?
Super slow and methodical, Ogata’s very short feature draws things out just like they’re drawn out in real life. This guy’s life is boring and Ogata wants us to know it. (No, really. That was his intention. I’m not just being sarcastic.) Not only are there some long and boring scenes, but there are a lot of really uncomfortable scenes. Rintaro is terrible with real women and…well, sex with a sex doll is kind of uncomfortable anyway. Of course, when you treat a real girl like a sex doll…nevermind.
Not a bad movie at all. It does what it needs to do and then gets out. And I really felt for Rintaro. This guy is a real sad-sack and doesn’t know how to be a real human being. Rinko is his first true link to life. She brings a spark out that even he didn’t know was there.
Heartbreaking and painful, Body Temperature certainly isn’t for everyone. In fact, I think most audiences would probably run away from it. It certainly isn’t Lars And The Real Girl.
By the way, the Japanese don’t truly understand how we Americans laugh at uncomfortable situations. Ogata said that he was trying to make a film that was not funny at all, so he was a little bit disturbed when we laughed a few scenes.
THE ETERNAL EVIL OF ASIA (1995)
Directed by: Man Kei Chin
Written by: no one?
Hong Kong must have been a weird place in the mid-90s. I just watched a man rape a woman from another room.
There was a string of films made from the 70s until about this movie that showed how afraid of the outside world Hong Kong truly was. Anyone from other places in Asia were total hicks who believed every bit of the voodoo religions from ancient times and they will kill you with it. Devil Fetus is one of these.
In The Eternal Evil Of Asia, Bon and his buddies go to Thailand for a good time. Bon is totally in love with his girlfriend, May, so he doesn’t do any fuckin’. His friends, though, are fuck machines.
They all meet a Thai wizard, save his life and become his friends. (This is where the flesh-eating placenta comes in. Stick with me, here.) His sister falls in love with Bon, but he won’t love her because of May. Brother tries to put a hex on Bon to make him have sex with her, but it backfires and hits the other three guys. Of course, the four of them have sex, wake up and they suddenly have fuck remorse. Then there’s the “whoops” killing of the sister.
Brother Wizard goes on a ravenous rampage of revenge.
There’s lots of sex, lots of blood, lots of gore and, of course, lots of rape. Can’t have a decent Category III film without lots of rape. Of course, it’s all tied together with a story that is so simple that, even though it’s chopped to hell, it doesn’t matter. Revenge and sex. That’s all you need to know.
Why is the movie choppy? Well, here’s a little something I learned about Hong Kong films:
The production companies would hold midnight screenings the day before the movie was set to release. The filmmaker and producer would sit in the projection booth and take notes on what the audience liked. (Read: what didn’t make them throw things at the screen. The crowds were violent as shit, sometimes beating the shit out of the filmmakers in the lobby.)
If they wanted to at the end, they would get the editor, throw him in a van and have him run from theatre to theatre editing bits out of the film. As the guy who introduced the film said, “They liked the sex at the beginning and the flesh-eating placenta in the middle, but they didn’t like the dialogue between? Oh well. Cut the dialogue!”
Hong Kong must have been a weird place in the mid-90s.
