Baan Muay Thai; or, The Measure of a Man When I was 19, I could do anything. Hurt but no real problem. One or two days and I was fine. Now it is not the same. It’s time for another indie feature! In this review, I would like to take a look at Baan Muay Thai, a debut production directed and written by Charles Garrett. I heard about the film for the first time a little over a year ago when the Asian Film Fans team was working on a video review. I was lucky enough to interview the director and hear the surprising and extremely detailed backstory of the film.
Synopsis Max (Charles Garrett) is a Londoner who spends his days in a trading business. One day, he is called by a good friend from Thailand. The ailing coach wants Max to help in reinvigorating their training camp and participate in an exhibition match. Max quits his job and goes back to the land where he once trained in order to rediscover the art of Baan Muay Thai.
Honour of the Gym The first thing which definitely transpires while watching Baan Muay Thai is the naturalistic, guerilla-like filmmaking style. As a viewer, you are really under the impression that what you are seeing is a documentary about a British guy who wants to help out his friends in need and reconnect with his inner self in the process.
In consequence, Baan Muay Thai goes for the feeling rather than the experience. Do not expect this movie to be yet another action-packed rehash of Enter the Dragon (1973) or Ip Man (2008). You will not find Donnie Yen or Angela Mao here. This movie is about real struggles and real characters and it boldly ventures into the kitchen-sink drama territory of the first Rocky (1976) picture.
Be prepared for steady camera work, beautiful overview shots of Thailand, and nuanced but sparse dialogue. The director has recently recut the film, and the updated version certainly has a better pacing and is easier to follow in terms of narration. In addition, the English subtitles are hardcoded which eliminates the problem of translation not displaying properly during the screening.
Recommendations If you are on the lookout for a calm, poignant drama with great visuals, then I recommend Baan Muay Thai. I sincerely hope that Charles Garrett will keep on making more indie films with the same type of true-to-life ambience. My thanks go to the director for sharing the screener and I am looking forward to part II.
Overall score: 7/10
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A Song I Remember; or, Polaroid Memories Why do you take photos, Tsuyoshi? I like your pictures. Recently, I have noticed via Twitter announcement that organisation La Cinémathèque Française has made Kiyoshi Sugita’s A Song I Remember available to watch online legally and for free with English and French subtitles. Needless to say, I took the opportunity and viewed the movie I have heard absolutely nothing about. Here are my thoughts on it.
Language: JapaneseOriginal Title: ひとつの歌
Runtime: 98 min
Synopsis Tsuyoshi (Takenori Kaneko) passes through the streets of Tokyo, trying to capture an interesting moment on his Polaroid camera. He decides to take a photo of a woman waiting at a train station. A few moments later, the woman dies tragically in an accident. While searching for Polaroid accessories, Tsuyoshi befriends Kiriko (Yuri Ishizaka) who runs a local camera shop. It turns out that Kiriko is a daughter of the woman Tsuyoshi encountered at a train station…
A Chance Encounter Before checking out A Song I Remember, you need to know that this is indie filmmaking at its purest. There is absolutely zero pacing. Scenes keep on going and it is up to the viewers to draw proper conclusions. In addition, we mainly get either establishing or tracking shots while following the main protagonist through his daily activities. Nevertheless, all of this works to the film’s advantage.
When you are in the right mindset, you will definitely enjoy the peacefulness of the movie. It is not just about storytelling, but about characters within settings. It is quite interesting that the director chose to film A Song I Remember in 4:3 aspect ratio because, in my opinion, this only gives it an additional charm. It is a pleasure to see Tsuyoshi and Kiriko on real Tokyo streets, within real suburbs, etc. Consequently, the world of the film is not imagined but very much tangible.
Although the movie lasts a little over 90 minutes, the viewing experience itself is much faster. The story in itself is fairly simple, and the theme of a Polaroid camera catching fleeting, and seemingly trivial, moments of our lives is indeed intriguing. Performances of the main leads, Takenori Kaneko and Yuri Ishizaka, cannot go unnoticed as well.
Recommendations All in all, I wish I could have A Song I Remember on either DVD or Blu-Ray, so I could use it as a demo disc on my TV set. The cinematography in this film is just so darn beautiful. Sequences of real Tokyo during the hustle and bustle period are something to be cherished and played on repeat. The movie can be checked out on Henri platform until the 8th of February, 2022.
Overall score: 7/10
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Hell’s Garden: Office Royale; or, The Art of Delinquent War Your problem is you don't know what you are missing. Dignity. Your fighting lacks elegance. That's not office lady fighting. It is just street fighting. After catching a break from experiencing “high culture”, I decided to start off the year 2022 with something a bit more mainstream and light-hearted. Following an MDL recommendation, I gave a chance to Kazuaki Seki’s Hell’s Garden: Office Royale. Super colourful poster and actress Mei Nagano were enough to get me hooked.
Release Info
Directed by: Kazuaki Seki Starring: Mei Nagano, Alice Hirose, Nanao, Rina Kawaei, Miyuki Oshima
Language: JapaneseOriginal Title: 地獄の花園 Runtime: 102 min
Synopsis Naoko Tanaka (Mei Nagano) is a 26-year-old office lady. She tries to perform her tasks as diligently as possible, but little do outsiders of the corporate world know that within big companies there is always a power struggle between factions of office ladies. Similarly to yakuza gangs, they challenge each other and fight for dominance. These battles are put to an end with the arrival of a new OL executive, Ran Hojo (Alice Hirose). The new leader unites rival cliques and even befriends Naoko. All of a sudden, Naoko gets kidnapped by office ladies from another company. Ran rushes to rescue her friend, but she is no match to the opponents. It turns out that Naoko is not as innocent as she looks. To protect Ran, she stands up against power-hungry OLs…
The Way of the Office Lady I have to say that Hell’s Garden: Office Royale is simple, ridiculous fun all the way through. Because of its witty puns and outrageous battle scenes, I thought the film is based on a particular manga/anime material, but it is actually a love letter to the delinquent heroine genre, which gave us, for instance, Hana no Asuka Gumi.
Think of this film as a mix between Shomuni drama, Tekken game, and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. It’s all about wild extravaganza revolving around the “what-if” scenario of office ladies being skilled warriors.
Some viewers remark that the film is a parody of the original Battle Royale (2000), but I believe this is not the case. One could think such kind of material could easily be turned into an exploitation flick filled with NSFW jokes, but director Kazuaki Seki and screenwriter Bakarhythm approach the issues of rivalry and workplace abuse with utmost gentleness and innocent humour. To me, the movie feels like a pastiche of Enter the Dragon (1973) with regard to the fact that, in both pictures, the main protagonist has to face a series of formidable foes in order to get to the final boss, who is the most powerful one.
As for the performances, well, I tried the film for Mai Nagano, but I stayed for Alice Hirose. The two are just amazing together. I really enjoyed the sweet “friendship” scenes between them as well as the fight sequences. In addition, make sure to be prepared for surprised cameos from veteran actors and actresses, such as Kenichi Endo, Masanobu Katsumura, and Shigeru Muroi. I failed to recognise some of them under tons of make-up!
Recommendations If you are looking for something to improve your mood, then Hell’s Garden: Office Royale is a very good choice. The movie is funny, yet by no means vulgar. It certainly deserves a sequel or a movie similar in style focusing on some other profession, such as taxi driving or airline services. Please make it happen FujiTV!
Overall score: 9/10
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Drive My Car; or, Depression: The Movie I like that car. I can tell it’s been treated with care. That’s why I also want to drive it with care. Let’s go. I heard about Drive My Car movie for the first time when it started gaining awards at the Cannes Film Festival. It would have almost joined the line of “stuff I wanted to check out but forgot about it” had it not been for a summer movie festival in my country. I was lucky enough to check out the film, but it left me with mixed feelings. Consequently, I hesitated for a long time with this review, but well, here it is.
Language: JapaneseOriginal Title: ドライブ・マイ・カー Runtime: 179 min
Synopsis Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a stage-actor who collaborates closely with his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima). One day, by complete accident, Yusaka discovers that Oto is cheating on him. He never confronts his wife about it, but the marital status quo is disrupted by her untimely passing. Two years later, Yusuke goes to Hiroshima in order to direct a multilingual adaptation of Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya. However, the producers’ regulations prevent Yusuke from driving on his own. He gets assigned a special chauffeur called Misaki Watari (Toko Miura). While driving his car, Misaki learns about Yusuke’s ambiguous past.
A man without a woman I have to be frank and say that my expectations for this film were enormous. Drive My Car gets praised time and time again across film festivals, it is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story, and on top of that the director of the film is Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the man who co-wrote Wife of a Spy (2020).
I have re-read the original short story before the screening, and the movie follows and greatly expands upon major plot points of Murakami’s work. I was all game during the prologue sequence, but when the opening credits hit at about the 40-minute mark, the storyline started going a bit downhill for me.
Please do not get me wrong, but I felt the prologue was meant to prepare the viewers for a massive catharsis, a grand journey in the course of which Yusuke will rediscover himself. Truth be told, I found the protagonist’s actions to be questionable. He goes to Hiroshima to do this super unconventional theatre play (which in itself adds tons of layers to the film’s storyline), but he hires an actor who slept with his wife (Masaki Okada). What was his motivation? To torment the guy? At least, that’s what Yusuke says in the short story, but it does not become transparent enough in the movie. Actually, Yusuke behaves like a depressed individual who enjoys being tormented by his wife’s lover.
Evidently, there is a big reconciliation scene between the two characters in the third act of the film, but this moment only made me realise how hard it is to adapt Murakami. The author frequently introduces exposition through conversation. In many of his short stories and even novels, we have two characters talking to each other, and in the course of this seemingly casual talk, the readers get to discover some major twist or a whole story. Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car lays out everything chronologically from beginning to the end, leaving little room for this Murakami-specific trope only towards the end of the film. Call me cruel, but I would have appreciated the movie more had the driving scenes looked more like this.
Well, this movie did not click with me, unfortunately. Nevertheless, I have to give justice to the cast and praise nuanced but powerful performances of Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, and Masaki Okada. In addition, I have huge respect for production design and the titular car itself, which indeed felt like a separate character.
Recommendations Out of all Murakami adaptations I have seen so far, I still like Burning (2018) best. Drive My Car deserves your attention in terms of how neatly it manages to handle performance art (a stage play, which makes the characters confront each other). All in all, it’s a film about lost love and an attempt to drive away from traumas of the past. I understand the growing popularity of this adaptation, but it is not a movie for everybody. It certainly was not for me.
Overall score: 6/10
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Doctor X 7; or, Michiko to the Rescue I can only save a patient who is in front of me. When I heard about the seventh series of Doctor X being in development, I just could not believe it. I absolutely love this drama and regard the previous six seasons as sheer epicness. However, I got a little worried when I read that this time round the events are indeed going to be set within the Covid-19 pandemic. Here are my thoughts on the latest (mis)adventures of the infallible surgeon Daimon Michiko:
Release Info
Developed by: Miho NakazonoStarring: Ryoko Yonekura, Yuki Uchida, Ittoku Kishibe
Language: JapaneseOriginal Title: ドクターX～外科医・大門未知子～ No. of eps.: 10
Synopsis It’s the year 2021. Obviously, the Covid-19 pandemic has spread across the globe and impacted (negatively) each and every single human being out there. The infamous Totei University Hospital has somehow managed to withstand the crisis in the field of healthcare. Doctor Shigekatsu Hiruma (Toshiyuki Nishida) has been removed yet again from his directorial position at Totei. The new manager of the hospital is Doctor Ryotaro Hachisuka (Mansai Nomura), a specialist in virology and internal medicine. This man believes in treating patients as efficiently and as non-aggressively as possible. Nevertheless, some extreme cases require extraordinary intervention. In order to ensure the “100%-flawless” surgery, Hachisuka starts cooperating with Daimon Michiko (Ryoko Yonekura), a freelance surgeon who is always against authority, crowds, and herd mentality, a physician who is also known as… Doctor X.
All Quiet on the Totei Front For years I have been meaning to review Doctor X, but I waited for the show to end. Nevertheless, it is never really certain if the show is going to end someday. It’s basically a flagship property of TV Asahi now. In addition, I already wrote an MDL article about the show with my friend ReikaBleu, so I will just share my opinion only on Series 7 here.
Well, after watching the first episode, I was convinced that this season is going to be something special. Doctor X is not only about the brilliant female lead and gripping medical cases, it is also a commentary on medicine and how the figure of Doctor-Hero is portrayed in the media. Episode 1 promises to viewers that the series is going to tackle and expose the pandemic with all the negative baggage of pathologies that developed in the course of its duration. Nevertheless, after episode 2, the whole concept is thrown out the window and we are back to the “good old” conventional episodes we have seen 60 times already!
I could forgive the writing team the shameless attempt to bait the viewers with the pandemic had they actually had something meaningful to convey in these 10 new episodes. Up until this point, each season surpassed the previous one with the level of excitement and unexpected twists. Season 6 ended on such a high note, that (I’m sorry) it makes Season 7 pale in comparison, especially when the writers repeatedly dismiss the supporting characters in order to provide comic relief.
This is my biggest issue with this outing. The supporting characters such as Kaji (Masanobu Katsumura), Ebina (Kenichi Endo), Hara (Kosuke Suzuki), and even Morimoto (Kei Tanaka), although good at heart, are unable to redeem themselves in the operating room. Daimon in action inspires them to do good, they want to save lives, but always in the moment of greatest crisis, they are unable to overcome the challenge, and Daimon has to step in to save the day…
Doctor X is no longer just centred on Daimon. The screenwriters should recognise and address that. It’s been 10 years since the show began and we have some many recurring, colourful characters who can have their own story arcs. For instance, episode 7 had the potential of developing Morimoto’s story and ending it on a grand scale. After all, through this character’s perspective, we met Daimon in Series 1 (2011). But no, everyone has to be incompetent and irredemable because we need at least five scenes of Hiruma and Ebina scheming about shady stuff.
Still, I appreciate this season for what it is. I love the Hara-centred story (episode 6), and the bromance level between him and Kaji is just amazing. Episode 8 was simply perfect for Jounouchi. Episode 9 focusing on Hiruma’s wife (played brilliantly by Mariko Fuji) is top notch across the board. The new characters are great as well, such as Masako Oma (Mio Imada), assistant Mikuni (Kaoru Sugita), and Doctor Kuwagata (Kazutoyo Koyabu). The absolute show stealer of the finale is Mansai Nomura as “Hachi”. The chemistry between his character and Daimon is off the freaking charts! Normally, you would not think that there is something like “a male love interest” for Daimon, but he manages to pull it off so well. Yeah, I’m not in Daimon/Jounouchi camp anymore. Now I ship Hachimon pairing all the way.
Recommendations All in all, this is the first Doctor X season, I have had major problems with. Still, it was by no means a bad ride. The scripts may be wonky, but the actors and actresses really care about the legacy of this show and give their best performances. Now, I am hoping for Season 8 where (fingers crossed) we will see Daimon at her very own hospital! On a side note, please support the hard work of fansubbers and download subtitles directly from them. Do not rely on sites that shamelessly steal their work and capitalise on that through ads. My thanks go to MadmanSubs for translating Doctor X 7.
Overall score: 7/10
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Heroic Duo; or, Laiception There are many doors to the human brain. If you know the code, you can open them and see the secrets inside. It was a sunny afternoon a few years ago. I was peg hunting at a local bookstore when I suddenly noticed a whole shelf with down-priced DVDs. The store was clearly trying to get rid of the titles, mainly obscure documentaries, but I managed to notice a cover with a title... “Hong Kong Cops”. I was like “What is this?” A quick look at the back revealed that this film is actually Heroic Duo, directed by the late Benny Chan, and starring Ekin Cheng, Leon Lai, and Francis Ng. I thought to myself that half a dollar for a HK flick is a good deal, so I grabbed the disc. Is Heroic Duo really worth 50 cents (or more)? Let’s find out together.
Release Info
Directed by: Benny ChanStarring: Ekin Chen, Leon Lai, Francis Ng
Language: CantoneseOriginal Title: 雙雄 Runtime: 100 min
Synopsis Senior Inspector Ken Li (Ekin Chen) investigates the bizarre case of a police officer who was hypnotised to commit a crime. He consults a specialist in the matter, Professor Jack Lai (Leon Lai), who currently serves a sentence in prison. The two men with contrasting personalities have to work together in order to counteract the outrageous diamond heist orchestrated by a dangerous mobster known as Au-Yeung Hoi (Francis Ng).
Hypnotic Affairs Judging from the synopsis, you would think that Heroic Duo has an interesting premise. Indeed, the first half of the film is quite engaging. It is quite refreshing to see Ekin Chen playing a frustrated and egocentric cop, but who still values order and justice above anything else. He and the laid-back Leon Lai have an awesome onscreen chemistry together, which is a shame to see this potential wasted in the second half of the picture.
That is to say, after an interesting heist sequence, Heroic Duo goes completely bonkers. The police (the same police who were aware of who Jack Lai is) are now convinced that Inspector Li committed the robbery, so they are chasing him. In the meantime, it turns out that Lai actually knows the main baddie, whose actions are also erratic and do not make any sense.
It seems that the scriptwriting team had a great idea for a short film, but they just kept adding layers of plot twists and action scenes, just to make this movie hit the two hour mark. I also believe that the presence of Leon Lai and Francis Ng is not without a reason. All in all, both actors were fresh after the success of the Infernal Affairs trilogy in which they played supporting roles.
Without revealing any spoilers, let me say that the bombastic finale just made me roll my eyes. The scenes are thrown at you without proper explanation, so you find yourself rewinding the film a couple of minutes backwards to make out what the heck is going on. It is almost as if you were hypnotised to misunderstand Heroic Duo… If that was the intention of the filmmakers, then congratulations. Mission accomplished.
Recommendations All things considered, the cast is great, the beginning interesting, but the storyline gradually falls apart. I would appreciate it if the film was a standard crime thriller with Ekin Chen and Leon Lai working as partners throughout the whole thing. Additional word on the DVD release I have: Actually, the picture format is letterboxed, and for some reason, the distributor chose to convert the film into PAL system, which inevitably resulted in noticeable frame skipping here and there. I would say that Heroic Duo is not really worth half a dollar to watch.
Overall score: 5/10
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