Seongyong's Private Place

Gyeongju (2014) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4) : One long day in an old South Korean city

Posted on June 13, 2014 by kaist455

If you want me to recommend any other South Korean cites besides Seoul to visit for sightseeing, Gyeongju is one of several good places coming to my mind instantly. As a city which was once the capital of the ancient kingdom named Silla(57 BC ~ 935 AD), it has so many interesting archaeological sites and cultural properties that it is sometimes called “the museum without walls”, and, once you go around this wonderful city for one or two days, you cannot possibly agree more to that nickname. Things have changed for more than 1000 years since the fall of the Silla kingdom, but you can encounter its remains here and there in the city, and that imbues the city with a certain distinctive quality to remember.

Zhang Lu’s new film “Gyeongju” is mainly about its hero’s one long day in this city. After leaving South Korea, Choi Hyeon(Park Hae-il) has been a professor of Northeastern Asian Studies in the Pecking University for several years, and he returns to his country for attending the funeral of one of his old friends. As he talks with the other friend who also comes to the funeral, something comes into his mind, and, out of a sudden impulse, he decides to go down to Gyeongju.

As soon as he arrives at the train station, he goes to a little traditional teahouse where he and his dead friend visited during their trip seven years ago. He remembers seeing a traditional erotic painting, called chunhwa, drawn on the wall during their tea time, and it looks like he just wants to know whether it is still there. When he enters its gate, the teahouse looks same to him as before, but several things are changed, and as being served with a cup of tea by its new owner Yoon-hee(Sin Min-ah), he finds that the painting in question is gone now.

After leaving the teahouse, he meets Yeo-jeong(Yoon Jin-seo), a woman he was close to before he left for China. After called by him, she comes from Seoul to Gyeongju, but, for some reason, she says she will go back to Seoul after around 2 hours, and the awkwardness between them is palpable enough for us to sense that there are still unresolved feelings between them. Regardless of whatever happened between them in the past, they are now more distant than ever to each other as leading their own lives separately, and it is apparent that both of them are not very happy with their respective lives at present. As listening to their conversation, we learn that Hyeon married some Chinese woman, but it seems he does not want to talk much about his wife. In case of Yeo-jeong, she is not so glad to see Hyeon, but she has something to say to him, and that leads to a small bitter moment during their lunch.

Hyeon goes back to the teahouse, and he and Yoon-hee become a little closer to each other as a revisiting customer and the owner. Although she initially thought of him as a weirdo when they first met, Yoon-hee treats him a little more nicely during his second tea time at her place. While they plainly interacting with each other as two civilized human beings, the movie wonderfully captures the tranquil mood surrounding them and the teahouse, and it even inserts one brief imagined moment into this part as its stable camera just simply pans from one side to the other side of its space. We also get an amusing scene in which two Japanese visitors mistake Hyeon for a South Korean movie star, and this deadpan moment will look funnier to you if you know that Park Hae-il is one of prominent South Korean film actors.

As the evening approaches, Yoon-hee invites Hyeon to a drinking meeting with others, so he goes to the meeting with her and her friend Da-yeon(Shin So-yul), and he meets Professor Park(Baek Hyeon-jin) and Mr. Kang(Ryoo Seung-wan). Professor Park, who is an expert on North Korea, recognizes Hyeon instantly when he is introduced to Hyeon, and that results in a comic situation of embarrassment while Professor Park is trying to impress Hyeon in his pathetic drunken attempt reminiscent of Hong Sang-soo’s films.

And we are also introduced to Yeong-min(Kim Tae-hoon), a detective who comes late to the meeting and then is gradually revealed to be carrying a torch for Yoon-hee. He quickly regards Hyeon as a possible romantic competitor, but, as a guy who does not know well how to express his feeling while trying not to hurt the feeling of the woman he loves, he just stays besides them as long as possible.

The problem is, Yoon-hee and Hyeon do not seem to know what to do with something felt between them, either. They and Yeong-min eventually end up spending some private time together as their late night goes on, but this scene is not played out as you would expect from such a situation, and that brings another amusement to the story. As suggesting the feelings beneath their reserved attitude, Park Hae-il and Sin Min-ah do not overplay whatever may be going on inside their characters, and Kim Tae-hoon holds his place well as the third guy who somehow becomes more understandable and sympathetic despite his blunt behaviors.

While all these things and other things are happening in the movie, Gyeongju becomes more than a mere background, and the director/writer Zhang Lu brings a very vivid sense of locations onto the screen. The sights in the movie are mostly familiar to me, but they remind me of why this city is worthwhile to visit again later. After all, not many cities have a bunch of big green mounds as cultural properties inside them, and I was particularly impressed by a very lovely night scene showing the city landscape as viewed from the top of one of these mounds(Caution: as said in the movie, you are not allowed to climb up to any of them in any case).

Compared to his previous films such as “Dooman River”(2010), “Gyeongju” is a lightweight work from Zhang Lu, but it is one of the more interesting South Korean films of this year. The movie is rather long(its running time is 145 minutes), but watching it during last night was an experience both engaging and soothing for me. It is slow indeed, but it is constantly compelling and humorous, and I had several good laughs during some of its playful moments. Although I think it could have been better if its finale had been shortened a bit, this is still a charming journey to be watched on the whole despite its flawed destination.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Professor, Romance, South Korean Film, Teahouse | 2 Comments

The Congress (2013) ☆☆1/2(2.5/4) : Anything is possible – but nothing sticks much

Posted on June 12, 2014 by kaist455

“The Congress” is an offbeat juxtaposition of two different stories which do not work together well in one film. One is a sly satire on Hollywood business which also has a thought-provoking premise involved with the rapid development of current digital technology, and I liked its mix of humor and poignancy, while musing on what might be possible in the future of movie industry. The other one is a minding-bending animation story in which anything is virtually possible on the screen, and that is where the movie merely floats its balls above its ground without anything I can hold onto. There are some visually striking scenes to be admired, but the story loses focus as drifting around its animated hallucinations, and my mind remained confounded and unenthusiastic while not getting much satisfaction from it.

Its first part is about an actress struggling with her downhill career. In the opening scene, Robin Wright, who plays the fictional version of herself with a slight touch of humor, is listening to her agent Al(Harvey Keitel), and he is telling her a hard fact about her situation. There was a time when she could do anything as a new girl in the town, but she is past her prime now, and it has been getting harder for her to get good roles because Hollywood usually does not have much interest in old actresses.

And then there comes a good offer from Jeff(Danny Huston), a wily, smarmy executive of a powerful Hollywood movie company named “Miramount”(you probably know where its name comes from even if you are a casual moviegoer). In the exchange for a considerable sum of money, the company will own the copyright of her actress image, and it is going to use it as a digital actress for their future films. All she is required to do is 1) sign the contract, 2) let herself and her performances be digitally scanned for creating her avatar to be used, and 3) quit her acting career at least during the period stated in her contract.

Wright naturally feels uncomfortable about this deal, but she also sees that there is not any other good option for her career and her life. She is currently living with her two children in a remote place which was once a hangar for the nearby airport, and her dear son Aaron(Kodi Smit-McPhee) has a neurodegenerative disease which will deprive him of his eyesight and, possibly, other senses. We see him being diagnosed by Dr. Baker(Paul Giamatti) at one point, and the movie makes a nice homage to a certain scene from “2001: A Space Odyssey”(1968) while Aaron, who has been well aware of what is happening to him, is observing the conversation between his concerned mother and his kind doctor beyond soundproof glass.

She accepts Jeff’s offer with several conditions of her own(she understandably does not want her digital avatar to be used in porn, for instance), and then she immediately goes through her scanning job. Wearing a tight uniform, she enters a giant sphere structure equipped with many lights and cameras ready to scan everything from her body as well as her performance, but she is still not so sure about her choice, for this feels pretty much like her acting career being sucked by machine.

When she happens to be on the verge of a breakdown during this process, Al helps her through a sincere monologue from his heart, and she genuinely reacts to his words while showing the various range of emotions to be captured on the spot. As the movie watches and listens to him, Harvey Keitel, a great actor who was too good to appear in an abominable film called “The Last Godfather”(2010), makes this scene very poignant as a guy who has gone through lots of things for an actress he deeply cares about, and Wright, who is actually enjoying a big career turn in her real life thanks to the success of the ongoing TV series “House of Cards”, wonderfully responds to Keitel while deftly handling her character’s dynamic emotional state during that moment.

After that, the movie instantly goes forward to 20 years later. We see an older Wright driving her sports car, and she is going to some special place for meeting Jeff again for another deal. Her digital avatar has been used in some popular SF movie and other films, and now they are going to sell its chemical version to everyone who wants to be Robin Wright. Thanks to technological advance, some special drugs are developed to give people vivid alternative experience, and we see the effect right after when Wright drinks her potion. As her mind is being under its influence, the movie changes its mode from live action film to animation film, and the real world is turned into an animation wonderland full of broad, silly figures reminiscent of old Fleischer cartoons(One particular figure is not named in the movie during his brief appearance, but you can probably guess who he is while amused by that).

This is interesting to watch on the surface, but the movie keeps hopping along its confusing plot filled with corporation plot, assassination attempt, anti-technology movement, and many other things to be expected from your average dystopian SF story. The movie freely wields its animation style to create a number of good sights including New York city decorated with an anarchic environment-friendly style, but I began to lose my interest while being a little too confused and confounded to find a way to care about what was shown in the screen. The third act eventually gives something to hold for us, but that is too late, and I still have many questions about its futuristic world. I know anything is possible with imagination in SF or fantasy, but, without any solid ground for its imagination, nothing sticks much in this case.

The director/writer Arie Folman previously made “Waltz with Bashir”(2008), a singular work which was a compelling mixture of animation, documentary, and personal psychotherapy. I am not so satisfied with “The Congress”, which is based on Stanisław Lem’s SF novel “The Futurological Congress”, but it has good performances, and I sort of admire its odd, distinctive style. I think I will have to revisit it someday for possible further understanding, but, for now, you have my 2.5-star recommendation with caution.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Actress, Animation, Family, Mother and Son, Movie, SF | 2 Comments

Albert Nobbs (2011) ☆☆☆(3/4) : Can she possibly be happy?

Posted on June 10, 2014 by kaist455

The titular character of “Albert Nobbs” is a very, very unhappy human being under miserable condition. The lonely, isolated life of this character is so devoid of any joy or happiness that she still does not know what to do even after encountering the possibility of a happier life. The more you look at her drab life, the more you feel sorry about a poor woman being locked inside it.

On the surface, Albert Nobbs(Glenn Close) is a plain middle-aged hotel waiter/butler who works at Morrison’s Hotel in Dublin during the late 19th century. Compared to the other waiters at the hotel, Nobbs is a very good service worker with experience and moderation, and the hotel guests always enjoy Nobbs’ service even though they sense something odd about this small, effeminate waiter. Nobbs has been fairly good with the other employees at the hotel, and Mrs. Baker(Pauline Collins), the owner of the hotel, has been satisfied with her dependable employee, but they all feel a certain distance while interacting with Nobbs, who is always quiet and never talks much with others.

Because many of you already know that Nobbs is played by Glenn Close, it is not much of a spoiler to tell you that Nobbs is a woman disguising as a man. Close, who was Oscar-nominated for her performance in this film, usually stays still and quiet inside her character, and that low-key approach is exactly a right choice. Her character is always hiding behind her disguise while rarely drawing any particular attention to herself, and Close slowly conveys to us what is behind Nobbs’ rigid composure as we watch her going through her daily work with other employees. She may be accustomed to how she looks to others, but that does not change her real identity inside men’s wear, and we can see that she has been always in the fear of getting herself exposed.

We come to learn that she has passed as a man because she needed to be hired and earn money during her desperate past. She has been having a small dream of running her own tobacco shop someday, and she recently sets her eyes on one suitable empty storefront for her future business. She has also been saving a considerable sum of money, and now she is almost close to her dream.

And then something unexpected happens in her life. A guy named Hubert Page(Janet McTeer) comes to the hotel for a painting work to do, and Page happens to sleep in Nobbs’ room during that night. Nobbs is naturally uncomfortable about this sudden bedfellow, and Page soon finds out her secret, but, what do you know, Page turns out to be a woman just like Nobbs. In contrast to Nobbs, Page wears her disguise with swagger and some guts while suspected by no one, and she even has a wife with whom she lives in her cozy house.

Shocked and flabbergasted by this, Nobbs begins to wonder about whether she can also have a nice life just like Page, so she makes a tentative approach to Helen Dawes(Mia Wasikowska), one of young maids in the hotel. She has already been involved with a young new employee named Joe Mackins(Aaron Johnson), but Nobbs does not mind about that much, for all she needs is a woman who will run her future tobacco shop with her – and will live with her as a life partner.

Not so surprising for a woman who has probably never experienced any intimate relationship during her whole life, Nobbs is pretty clumsy and pathetic during her dates with Dawes. She handles her courtship as if it were a business matter, and that surely frustrates Dawes a lot. Persuaded by Mackins, she is ready to exploit Nobbs for their own dream, but she is quickly bored and confused as spending time with Nobbs – and she also realizes how caddish Mackins is.

The movie had been Close’s passion project for a very long time since she played her character in the Off-Broadway production of Simone Benmussa’s play which was based on Irish novelist George Moore’s short story “The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs”. István Szabó, who is included in the credit as the co-writer along with Close, was attached to the project around the early 2000s when the production seemed to be started, but the production was cancelled due to a financing problem, and now the movie was finally made under the direction of Rodrigo Garcia, who previously collaborated with Close in “Nine Lives”(2005) and did a good job of making a solid character-driven drama within the setting of period movie.

With Close’s understated but strong performance as the quiet center of the story, the movie has some colorful supporting characters to be observed in the hotel. Pauline Collins is a jolly but opportunistic hotel owner, and Brendan Gleeson is a kind hotel doctor, and Brenda Fricker is one of older hotel employees. Jonathan Rhys Meyers briefly appears as one of usual rich hotel guests, and the movie makes a subtle point through how he can get away with his sexuality.

Deservedly Oscar-nominated for her scene-stealing supporting performance, Janet McTeer makes a big contrast to Close as a woman fully living her life as a man and husband. When Nobbs visits Page’s house, we meet Page’s thoughtful wife Cathleen(Bronagh Gallagher, who is also good during one brief, quiet shot), and we come to sense that the relationship between this unconventional couple is more than a practical arrangement between them. Later in the movie, Close and McTeer have a warm, tender moment on the beach, and we see how much Nobbs feels good for a while as doing something she has never done for years.

“Albert Nobbs” is ultimately a very sad story, and we feel more pity toward its desolate heroine who has been stifled by a gender role she never wanted but had to accept in the name of social/economic survival. Nobbs says at one point, “A life without decency is unbearable.” Well, a life trapped inside disguise is as intolerable as that, if not more intolerable than that.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Disguise, Hotel, Waiter | 2 Comments

Edge of Tomorrow (2014) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4): A smart SF action film rolling its time loop

Posted on June 8, 2014 by kaist455

“Edge of Tomorrow” is a loud, explosive SF action film which is also smart, witty, and exhilarating inside its gritty, metallic armor. Sure, most of its components are familiar stuffs which will take you back to many other films, but they are mixed together into a clever SF story which keeps finding inventive or engaging ways to play with its repetitive premise throughout the film, and it is exciting and amusing to watch how it surprises and entertains us a lot more than expected.

At first, the background of its story looks so typical that you will not have much expectation if you have seen any recent SF action films about massive alien invasion. Not long after a meteor crashed to the ground near Hamburg, Germany, the alien invasion began, and these aliens, which are named “Mimics”, have been ruthlessly expanding their territory with no mercy for humanity. The United Defense Forces(UDF) were instantly formed among the countries all over the world for fighting against their common enemy, but they have gotten no significant victory yet during last 5 years, while most of the European Continent has been occupied by aliens with the ruins evoking those bleak images from the World War II.

All seem to be lost as the UDF manage to hold their defense line in Great Britain, but then they get their first major victory in Verdun, France thanks to a newly developed equipment called Exosuit, a combat armor reminiscent of a similar one depicted in Robert A. Heinlein’s SF novel “Starship Troopers”. More confident than ever, the UDF are now about to make a decisive move through a big military operation, which is not so different from the Invasion of Normandy.

When Major William Cage(Tom Cruise) comes to London as a UDF public relation officer, he has never thought of being hurled into combat, but General Brigham(Brendan Gleeson) orders him to cover this important military operation for boosting their public image. Cage, a former civilian with no proper military training or battle experience at all, is not very pleased about this sudden order, and he even attempts to blackmail Brigham to avoid being deployed to the battlefield.

Well, that turns out to be not a wise choice. He is promptly arrested, and, when he wakes up in the next morning, he finds himself transported to a massive military base where thousands of soldiers are fully ready for the combat to come. Stripped of his rank, he is put into an infantry unit under the command of Master Sergeant Farell(Bill Paxton), and then he is sent to the battlefield on the very next day without any preparation. He manages to wear Exosuit with some help at least, but he does not know how to operate this combat armor equipped with various weapons including machine gun, and he is utterly helpless when he is about to be dropped to the ground with others.

You think it cannot be possibly worse for him, but then Cage finds himself in the middle of a futuristic PG-13 version of that hellish battle sequence of “Saving Private Ryan”(1998). Because of the unexpected ambush by aliens, thousands of soldiers are instantly slaughtered amid lots of crashes and explosions, and, though he somehow killed one of the Mimics, it does not take much time for Cage to get himself killed….

… and then he wakes up exactly at the same spot where he woke up in the previous morning, and, to his surprise, it is also exactly the very same day. Everything happens exactly as he remembers, and then he finds himself again at the same place and the same time right after he gets killed again on the battlefield.

Yes, as many of you have already guessed, this is similar to “Groundhog Day”(1993), and the premise of the movie will certainly remind you a lot of video games as you watch its hero getting killed again and again during his repeated battle experience. Fortunately, the screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie, John-Henry Butterworth, and Jez Butterworth, which is based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel “All You Need Is Kill”, is not one of those brainless ones merely peppered with loud actions. The movie never lets itself be dragged or monotonous as exploring what can be done inside the rules set upon its story, and it trusts our intelligence while never making a mistake of repeating itself to bore us. Once we understand where it is, it quickly moves to the other point in the next cycle without confusing us, and we can clearly sense the plot progression as its main character continues to learn one thing and then try the other thing during the countless variations of his circumstance. Like “Groundhog Day”, it also finds several moments of wry humor from the inherently absurd aspect of its story, and I saw the audiences around me chuckling as enjoying its humorous moments spread around here and there in the film.

And it also makes us care about Cage’s plight as watching his exhaustion and frustration growing from this repeated situation. He can live again whenever he fails, and he makes some progress as trying to survive every time, but this is not a video game for him at all. Going into almost certain death every day is certainly not a pleasant experience for anyone, so we are not surprised to see him trying to get away from his fate during one scene – but he only comes to realize that he has no choice but to struggle through another same battle as before for himself and, as it is turned out later, for humanity.

After the setup phase, the plot gets thickened when Cage comes across Sergeant Rita Vrataski(Emily Blunt), a female soldier who has been very famous since her heroic fight during the battle in Verdun. Although she is not in the same time loop, it is revealed that she somehow knows what is happening to Cage, and that is how he begins to understand more about his situation through her and Dr. Carter(Noah Talyor), a shabby scientist with some important knowledge about Mimics which may provide a solution to Cage’s problem.

The director Doug Liman, who previously made “The Bourne Identity”(2002) and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”(2005), balances his film well between story and action. The intensity of the battle sequence in the film may be too much for young sensitive audiences, but it is handled well enough to give a solid starting point for the story, and then the movie moves its focus further from that as developing the story to the next steps with more good moments, including the sequence which reminded me of that elegant, fabulous timing of a certain memorable sequence in “Minority Report”(2002).

My only complaint is that the aliens in the film are not very interesting to watch even though they do their job as scary, menacing creatures which look like Sentinels from “Matrix”(1999). As your average CGI creatures, these aliens move very fast or attack very quickly like those transformer robots, and all I can remember about them are their slick tentacles and the fluorescent light from their mouth. During the climax sequence, we encounter a big creature which looks like a giant sea anemone from the outside, but that is not particularly interesting either, except functioning as the final stage for the story.

Still, the movie is a highly enjoyable action flick made under skillful direction, and it is also supported by good performances. While being a credible action movie hero as usual, Tom Cruise is particularly good as presenting his character’s gradual development along the story. In the beginning, Cage is not so different from a brash sports agent Cruise played in “Jerry Maguire”(1996), but then, like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day”, Cruise adds nice nuances to his character as he keeps going through his predicament, and you can always sense the accumulating changes inside his character through his performacne.

As a brave, strong female character who has a good reason to believe a man she has never met before, Emily Blunt shows here a surprisingly tough side we have never seen from her. She has a good subdued chemistry with Cruise, and the movie wisely underplays the potential of romance between their characters as they repetitively struggle together to find any possible way to defeat their enemy. While Cage remembers everything that has happened between them during his seemingly endless cycles, Vrataski is always reset to where she was just like everything else while remembering nothing, and both of them are well aware of the gap between them. As spending so much time with her again and again, Cage naturally comes to care about her despite the impossibility of their relationship, and there is a poignant moment when they happen to have a little private time between them at some remote place.

Although they play less developed supporting characters in the film, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Paxton, and Noah Talyor are dependable actors who can be interesting even when playing the most thankless roles, and they bring humor and life into their respective characters while maintaining their straight faces. Gleeson looks inflexible and adamantine at first, but his character turns out to be a lot more reasonable than we thought, and he is convincing during the crucial transition of his character at one point. While Paxton gives a droll Southern-style performance as a tough sergeant from Tennessee, Taylor is well-cast in his nerdy supporting role, and he brings some nervous energy to the obligatory explanation scene in the film.

When I watched “Edge of Tomorrow” at the local theater during Wednesday night, I had a terrific time with others, and I found myself musing on the story as its end credits rolled – and that is not something which usually happens to me when I watch a summer blockbuster action film. To be frank with you, I still cannot explain well about how its ending can be possible and I think its climax part is rather contrived, but the movie plays well with its premise and story, and, with its increased dramatic stakes, the climax part actually works as a thrilling and satisfying way to clear its playground for us after all those fun and excitement it gives to us. This is surely a first-class Hollywood entertainment which makes our another blockbuster season less boring, and it is really nice to see that a blockbuster film can be equipped with ideas and drama to intrigue and excite us at the same time.

Sidenote: This is a busy action film which is not so appropriate for 3D from the beginning, so I strongly recommend you to watch the 2D version for a clearer and brighter view. Yes, I have said this to you many times before, but I have never been tiring of this repetition because it is a good advice which may help you saving a bit of money at the movie theater.

Posted in Movies | Tagged action, Alien, SF, Time Travel, War | Leave a comment

Oculus (2013) ☆☆☆(3/4) : A family matter with one sinister mirror

Posted on June 6, 2014 by kaist455

“Oculus” did a fairly good job of building the sense of dread around one sinister object which turns out to a lot more dangerous and diabolical than we expected. While there are a few moments for shocks, the movie disturbs us mainly through its ominous mood virtually telling us something bad is going to happen sooner or later, and then we are thrown into the nightmarish climax in which its main characters cannot possibly trust what they see or feel amid their confusing terror. We begin to fear for them, and then we get some dreadful idea about what will happen in the end.

At the beginning, we get some brief information about what happened to Tim(Brenton Thwaites) and Kaylie(Karen Gillan) and their parents 11 years ago. Their father suddenly went crazy for some unknown reason, and, after killing his dear wife, he also tried to kill young Tim and Kaylie, who luckily survive because, as far as Tim remembers, he managed to shoot his father to death.

Kaylie and Tim have been separated from each other since that horrible tragedy, and Tim has struggled to process what happened during that terrible night. When we see him having a brief conversation with his therapist Dr. Graham(Miguel Sandoval) right before his discharge from the mental hospital, he still seems to be haunted by his traumatic experience in the past, but he sort of begins to accept a realistic(and official) explanation of why his dad committed such an atrocious thing to his family, and he thinks he is ready to move on with his life.

However, Kaylie has a different idea on how they should free themselves from the past. She has been obsessed with an antique mirror which was hung on the wall in her father’s office room during that time, and she wants to prove to others that the mirror was really responsible for their family tragedy. As she explains in front of her video camera during one scene, the mirror in question has a long history of very unpleasant incidents involved with its previous owners, and she firmly believes that their parents were its latest victims. Considering how many shocking happenings, including a woman unintentionally drowning her children and a fat guy hanging himself after losing lots of weight, have happened around the mirror for more than 100 years, it is rather amazing that it draws no particular attention when it is presented at some respectable auction place where Kaylie works, but this provides a very good chance for her. After it is sold(I wonder who bought that), it is put into the storehouse for a while, and Kaylie takes it to their old family house, while lying to others that it needs some repair job.

The mirror is put back to where it was in her father’s room 11 years ago, and we see how she has carefully planned to prove its evil force and then destroy it once for all. While the room is brightly lit, she sets two digital video cameras respectively connected with two separate desktop computers, which will help detecting and recording anything strange or weird. Room temperature is constantly monitored just in case, and plant pots are placed around the house as a sort of litmus paper for evil influence, and there is also a nice emergency measure which will be her last card in this confrontation.

Nobody will say she is not prepared well for what she will go into, but she is not that wise in case of choosing someone to help her. As soon as her brother gets out of the hospital, Kaylie takes Tim to their former residence in spite of his visible reluctance. I think there are many other ways more sensible and secure than having a mentally vulnerable guy as your only partner in the investigation of something paranormal, but blood is thicker than water, isn’t it?

As Tim and Kaylie argue with each other on what really happened to them, some of you may begin to wonder whether the mirror is really evil as Kaylie claims, but there is no doubt about that, because 1) the heavy bass sound on the soundtrack keeps reminding you of the presence of something sinister, 2) the movie makes no secret about the evil power of the mirror even before Kaylie takes it to the house, and 3) the main story is frequently intercut with the flashback part showing how Tim and Kaylie and their parents happily moved into the house and then gradually came under the evil influence from the mirror.

The director/co-screenplay writer Mike Flanagan made a solid horror movie out of a simple but nice premise from his short film “Oculus: Chapter 3 – The Man with the Plan”, and there are good scenes built upon mood and suspense. Still feeling unstable even after 11 years, Tim sometimes sees the things remembered from the past, and Kaylie also begins to lose her initial confidence while facing the possibility that the mirror is far more formidable than she has ever imagined. It turns out that the mirror is capable of manipulating their minds and perceptions, and there is a quiet but cringe-inducing moment when Kaylie realizes to her horror that she has just bitten something which is not an apple she held a few seconds before.

Once it is quite clear that Kaylie and Tim are trapped in the house by the mirror, the movie shifts its gear into full horror mode, and we get a mind-bending sequence in which past and present are mixed and linked together on the screen as the characters trying to find any way to save themselves. This is rather confusing and I lost my attention at times, but it is an effective climax, and it is a shame that the movie finishes this labyrinthal moment with its contrived ending which feels too much like a cheap exit.

The performances are as good as you can expect from a competent horror film. Karen Gillan is commendable as a feisty heroine determined to settle the old score with her own Moby Dick, and Brenton Thwaites, whom I recently saw in “Maleficent”(2014), is a good counterpart to his co-actress in their scenes. Annalise Basso, Garrett Ryan, Rory Cochrane, and Katee Sackhoff are believable in the flashback scenes in the film, and their descent into malevolence and madness is disturbing enough to hold our attention, even though their final destination is evident from the start.

“Oculus” did as much as the people behind it hoped, and that is fine with me. The only reason I give this film 3 stars is that I grumbled less than when I watched “The Conjuring”, and that reminds me of how infrequently I have been scared by recent horror films nowadays. Some great horror films still can scare or frighten me regardless of their age, and “Oculus” looks trivial in comparison, but I think you can give it a try – if there is not any good scary film to watch besides that right now.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Curse, Family, Horror, Mirror, Sibling | 1 Comment

Maleficent (2014) ☆☆☆(3/4) : She had a reason to be a fairy in black

Posted on June 1, 2014 by kaist455

Fairy tales in movies have been going through an interesting revisionist trend during recent years. “Enchanted”(2007) was an enjoyable clash between Disney fairy tale world and our real world, and its major delight came from how it deconstructed and then reconstructed many conventions of fairy tales through the amusing interactions between two different worlds. While “Mirror Mirror”(2012) and “Snow White and the Huntsman”(2012) were not very good in my opinion, both had distinctive approaches to freshen up their original tale, and then we recently got “Frozen”(2013), which surprisingly presented one of its main characters as a troubled, sympathetic figure while making an interesting variation of one conventional solution for happy ending.

“Maleficent”, the latest offering from this trend, also provides a revisionist version of a well-known fairy tale, and it succeeds to some degrees in creating a complex heroine we understand and care about. Although the other things in the film mostly feel bland or passable in comparison and they are not usually held together well in its problematic plot, its strong center is still memorable enough to talk about, and there are also some striking moments to haunt you for not only their beauty on the surface but also their darkness behind it.

Its story is mainly told through the view of Maleficent(Angelina Jolie), who was the villain character in Disney animation film “Sleeping Beauty”(1959). While following a plot not so different from that 1959 animation film, the movie presents a more sympathetic and complex version of this character, and we come to see that she had an understandable reason to be bitter and angry enough to put such a cruel curse on the young princess in the story.

When she was young, Maleficent(played by Isobelle Molloy at this stage) was a gentle and lively fairy, and she was also a major force guarding a magic realm called Moors, which sometimes looks like a close cousin to fantasy worlds we have seen from other movies including “Avatar”(2009) and “Alice in Wonderland”(2010). Not so surprisingly, the movie was directed by Robert Stromberg, who won two Oscars for his work in these two films mentioned above, and his technical skills are well utilized here in this movie although the result is not as enchanting as his Oscar-winning works(but James Newton Howard’s score is very impressive as the enhancing accompaniment to the visuals on the screen, by the way).

Moors is located next to the kingdom of humans, so Maleficent and other fantasy creatures are watchful of humans who want to invade into Moors for snatching abundant amount of jewels. On one day, Maleficent catches a young boy thief named Stefan(Michael Higgins), and something clicks between them despite their difference. They meet again later, and then they become close to each other as spending their time together.

But their relationship does not last long as she hoped. After growing up, Stefan(now played by Sharlto Copley) becomes very ambitious, and he does not hesitate to grab the chance when his dying king(Kenneth Cranham), who has kept trying to conquer Moors but failed for years due to Maleficent, declares on his dying bed that anyone who slays her will be his heir apparent. While hiding his purpose from her, he approaches to Maleficent, and then he betrays her when she gets asleep due to drugged drink given to her. He initially intends to kill her, but he chooses to cut her wings instead and takes them to the king, and she is devastated by his betrayal when she wakes up. Young audiences might not see the disturbing aspect of this cruel moment, but adult audiences will probably be reminded of those sad cases of women drugged and then raped, and you can feel the real heartbreaking pain from Jolie’s performance when Maleficent realizes what has happened to her.

As a consequence, Maleficent is turned into an angry and hostile woman in black who is as thorny as the big barrier she puts on the boundary between two kingdoms(again, you may see the parallel between her and the sexually abused here). Through her sidekick crow Diaval(Sam Riley), she gets the news about Stefan and his big rise to the throne, and, when she hears that King Stefan and his wife are about to have their baby princess, she does not miss the chance for letting out her cold fury in front of King Stefan and others.

So we see that infamous curse involved with spindle wheel needle, and we also see how the young princess is sent to a place far from the kingdom for her safety. Of course, Maleficent sees and knows everything, and, to her surprise, she finds herself unexpectedly becoming an unofficial fairy godmother to Aurora(Elle Fanning). She cannot help but feel attachment to this good-natured princess even though she is as reluctant as Mary Poppins to admit her feeling, and her affection on Aurora grows more and more as years go by.

Realizing that Aurora should not be the victim of her spite, Maleficent regrets more about her curse, especially when she is reminded again that she made it almost unbreakable from the beginning. She tries her best even though she does not believe in true love’s kiss which can solve the situation, and she eventually comes to confront King Stefan, who, after long years of brooding alone in his room, becomes spiteful and vengeful just like she was.

Like many recent fantasy films, the movie becomes less interesting as its climax is being packed with CGI action scenes and, yes, that fire-breathing dragon, and I felt my interest decreased a lot during that part. The screenplay by Linda Woolverton tries hard to fit its new elements into the original story, but the story frequently feels incoherent as shifting between different moods during its short running time, and it is rather disappointing to see that talented actresses like Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton, and Juno Temple have a few things to do besides playing the Three Stooges version of fairy godmother trio. To be frank with you, these silly fairy godmothers in the movie are so inept that we could have forgiven Maleficent if she had thrown the sleeping curse on them for dear Aurora’s wellbeing.

Anyway, “Maleficent” is an interesting attempt on a familiar fairy tale, and it is partially successful thanks to Angelina Jolie’s magnificent lead performance, which is the main reason to watch this rather uneven film. With her arresting star presence, she is always convincing as vividly charting her character’s emotional drama, and that reminds us again of how she has been sometimes underrated as an actress despite her stellar performances rewarded with several major awards including Oscar. Her performance in “Maleficent” really deserves a movie better than this, but she surely elevates the movie to considerable degrees for our enjoyment, while proving that she is indeed a star actress of our time deserving to be cherished and valued.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Fairy, Fairy tale, Fantasy, Princess | 1 Comment

A Hard Day (2014) ☆☆☆(3/4) : It is indeed a very hard day for him

Posted on June 1, 2014 by kaist455

It is indeed a very hard day for him. His wife has left him, and his mother died recently, and his career is tumbled into a big jeopardy, and now he also gets himself into another serious trouble which is going to make the situation far worse than before. Time is running out with increasing pressure on him, and he sometimes falters and trembles in fear and desperation, but he knows too well that he must be ready to do anything for getting out of his messy situation.

This surely sounds like a generic set-up for thriller plot, but South Korean thriller film “A Hard Day” has its own ways to surprise and excite us, and it is fun to see how this solid thriller plays with our expectation while not holding its cards behind its back during most of its running time. Whenever we thinks we are one or two steps ahead of it, the movie surprises us as pulling out unexpected moments of thrill and suspense from its seemingly simple thriller plot, and it gradually turns out to be smarter than expected as following the busy and twisted plight of its corrupt hero.

After his mother’s death, Go Geon-soo(Lee Seon-gyoon) is supposed to receive condolers at his mother’s funeral as her only son, but he has an urgent matter right now, and his mind is more occupied with that matter although he does feel sad about his mother’s passing. He is a detective, and the guys from internal investigations division are already ready to scorch him and his colleagues for taking bribery for years. There is no doubt that Geon-soo and his fellow cops are guilty; a definite evidence exposing their misdemeanors is discovered, and now they all worry about disciplinary punishment to strike them sooner or later, while mulling over whether there is any possible way out for them – or some of them, perhaps.

You may think this situation is pretty bad enough, but then there comes another bad thing Geon-soo happens to crash into. While hurriedly driving his car from the funeral site to his police station, he accidentally hits some guy who suddenly appears on the road. After finding that the guy is dead, he decides to cover his track as far as he can because he fears that this incident can further worsen his situation. He puts the body in the truck of his car, and then he gets a good idea of where he can hide the body.

For not spoiling your entertainment, I will not detail how he hides the body, but I can tell you that the movie gives us a wonderfully suspenseful sequence as he attempts to hide the body within the limited amount of time. He has a rather clever plan for bringing the body to a certain space while not noticed by anyone, but his plan can go wrong at any moment, and the movie keeps tightening the screw in this sequence as his chance is being decreased second by second through actions beyond his control.

When it finally looks like everything will be all right for him, Geon-soo only finds himself in a more difficult situation. He and others get a new assignment, and that turns out to be the search for the very dead guy, who is revealed to be a man with long criminal record. To make the matters worse, someone saw that accident, and he blackmails Geon-soo for some purpose at the same time. He demands Geon-soo that he should retrieve the body and then give it to him in the next morning, and he is not joking at all. He is going to disclose Geon-soo’s deed if Geon-soo does not follow his order, and both know that will be the end of Geon-soo’s career – and his life.

While Geon-soo juggles many balls to avoid getting caught in his increasingly frantic situation, the director/writer Kim Seong-hoon continues to push his story with competent direction as he did during the first part of his film. While his screenplay consists of familiar genre elements, they are efficiently handled to generate the constant forward momentum driving the plot, and the movie is fully focused on building suspense while not wasting too much time on other things. The characterization in the movie is mostly simple, but that works along well with its brisk pacing, and the movie sometimes loosens its strings to allow the sense of wry humor into a few darkly funny moments.

As the center of the movie, Lee Seon-gyoon gives a good lead performance as a man stuck in what is probably the biggest crisis in his life. Geon-soo is not a model cop at all, and the movie does not make any cheap excuse about what he has done, but, thanks to Lee’s engaging performance, we come to sense that he is not a very bad man despite his flaws. The movie does not give much personal information about him except his family he has supported, but we see from him an ordinary man who has probably followed others’ corrupt way without any serious thoughts and then suddenly faces the possibility of paying a very big price for that.

On the opposite, Cho Jin-woong, who has become more notable since his supporting performance in “Nameless Gangster”(2012), is effectively menacing as the villain of the story. From the moment when his coldly aggressive voice is heard on the phone, you can feel a big trouble to come, and I liked the way how the movie eventually reveals his identity at one point for a nice dramatic effect. Jeong Man-sik, who has steadily built his career since his breakthrough turn in “Breathless”(2009), is Geon-soo’s close colleague who begins to sense something suspicious about his friend, and Sin Jeong-Guen is the chief who is as corrupt as his cops, and Shin Dong-mi is Geon-soo’s sister who has no idea about what is happening to her brother thanks to his good covering job.

While it does not have something to elevate it to the level of “The Chaser”(2008), “A Hard Day” is a solid crime thriller which does exactly what it intends to do, and it exceeds my initial low expectation I had when I heard about it. While it has some shaky spots in its plot, I enjoyed its surprise turns even though I predicted at least half of them in advance, and I found that the time passed quickly during my viewing. The people behind the movie really knows how to make a good thriller, and they deserve good marks for that.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Blackmail, Crime, Familly, Murder, Police, South Korean Film, Thriller | 1 Comment

Escape from Tomorrow (2013) ☆☆☆(3/4) : One freaky day at Disney World

Posted on May 31, 2014 by kaist455

“Escape from Tomorrow” is a curious work resulted from one small, interesting attempt, and this little independent film was made under the limited conditions which could have made its production quite impossible from the start. The people behind it had a good idea for their movie, so they went for that by any means necessary while managing to hide their project from one of the most powerful corporations in the American entertainment business, and they have also managed to show their final result to the small but significant number of audiences since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in last year.

The movie is about one freaky day at Disney World, Florida. After its ambiguous opening sequence which ends with a disturbing final note, we are introduced to Jim(Ray Abramsohn), an average family man who has just begun the last day of his family vacation with an unpleasant news for him. His boss notifies during their early phone call that he is fired, and Jim is visibly upset about that, but he decides not to tell this to his family because he does not want to ruin their happy vacation – at least for a while.

Everything looks fine when he and his family leave their resort room and then go to Disney world for another day of fun, but, not long after they pass the main entrance, Jim begins to experience weird things. When he goes through “It’s a Small World” ride with his family, those small cheerful doll figures welcoming them and other visitors are momentarily changed into something sinister in front of his eyes, and that certainly freaks him out. He also experiences a brief spooky moment as searching for his daughter in a dark, confusing place, and then he hears about some epidemic being spread around visitors when he takes his daughter to a nurse later.

And he comes across certain people again and again. There are two young French girls whom he encounters on the monorail to Disney World, and he finds himself drawn to them, although he does not seem to know why he is attracted to them or what exactly he wants from these chirpy girls. A fat guy on scooter and his family appear from time to time with no apparent reason, and then there is a strange woman who virtually gives off her unstable sensuality when she happens to talk with Jim on a bench. When they meet again later, the movie gives us a morbidly funny scene with deranged humor, which is surely not a pleasant moment for some guys at the Walt Disney Company.

That is just one of many weird moments in the film, and it is not so surprising that the director/writer Randy Moore did not consider getting the permission to shoot his film from the Walt Disney Company from the beginning. With some caution and meticulous shooting plan, he and his actors and crew members went inside Disney World and Disneyland several times, and, according to the director, they did not draw much attention while they were secretly working at these locations. They kept the script in iPhones which were used as not only walkie-talkie but also sound recorders, and their Canon digital cameras were not noticed among many digital cameras brought by other visitors. They had to shoot the film in monochrome mode due to the technical limit during shooting, but that becomes a blessing in disguise; its black-and-white film tone imbues the movie with a certain surreal quality, and that further enhances the warped reality of its disturbed hero, who increasingly looks like being under some elusive, sinister influence.

The movie goes wilder than before during its third act, but that is where the movie begins to spin its wheels. As the sun is going down during the evening, more weird things happen, and the movie even goes into the realm of paranoia and conspiracy, especially when Jim suddenly finds himself trapped inside one of the giant architectures in Disney World. Regardless of whether this is just his paranoid delusion or not, this scene itself is amusing to watch for its outrageousness, but it does not add much to the movie, and neither does its finale, which feels rather fizzled compared to the potential glimpsed at the beginning.

Furthermore, you may notice a number of technical flaws here and there throughout the movie. Although it is not distracting enough to disrupt its narrative flow, it is apparent that actors are inserted into background shots during several scenes, and it is also pretty easy to distinguish the shots made at the locations from the ones made at the studio later. I kept wondering about how Moore and his crew shot some of their difficult scenes, but, as observing camera angles and editing, I also sensed the limits they must have faced during their covert production.

Nevertheless, the movie is an interesting experiment despite its many shortcomings, and I enjoyed its offbeat mood even while recognizing its thin premise. I also liked how Bernard Herrmann’s classic score for “Fahrenheit 451”(1966) was used during one scene in the film, and the composer Abel Korzeniowski, who incidentally quoted Herrmann’s score for “Vertigo”(1958) in his elegiac music for “A Single Man”(2009), provides a nice score reminiscent of classic Hollywood film scores, which sometimes functions as an ironic counterpart to the scenes far from being romantic or peaceful.

After being shown at the Sundance Film Festival and others film festivals including 2013 Ebertfest(it was one of the films selected by my late friend Roger Ebert not long before his death), “Escape From Tomorrow” was shown a little more widely to audiences late in 2013, and the Walt Disney Company, which has been known to be very sensitive about its intellectual properties, has so far taken no direct legal action against the film and its makers. That was probably a wise choice for them, considering that suppressing a movie usually draws more attention and curiosity, as we have seen from many cases.

I do not think it is very good on the whole, but this little film is a nice example which shows us that, if there is a will, there is a way and then there will be a movie. It is something different to be watched if you seek for such movies, and Disney World or Disneyland may look a little creepier to you than before after you watch it.

By the way, after I watched the movie, my mind came back to that hilarious piece written by my Internet acquaintance Michał Oleszczyk, which amusingly tells about how he and his fellow critic Odie Henderson had a horrible experience during their Toy Story ride at Disney World. While reading it, I had a pretty vivid idea about how awful that experience was for them; after writing this review, now I understand their unspeakable ordeal more than ever.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Disney World, Family, Fantasy, Horror | Leave a comment

Enemy (2013) ☆☆1/2(2.5/4) : Cold, abstract bafflement surrounding two dopplegangers

Posted on May 28, 2014 by kaist455

It is both creepy and fascinating to encounter someone who looks exactly like you, and that is the main source of intrigue and tension in Denis Vilenueve’s little moody film “Enemy”. We know that something bad is going to happen sooner or later, and the movie keeps us being nervous and confounded through its mystery with no clean-cut answers. This may feel interesting at first, but the movie ultimately looks like a thin existential exercise in elusiveness, and I am still wondering what it is about even while mildly appreciating how it is about.

The story begins with a young college history professor named Adam(Jake Gyllenhaal), an introverted, soft-spoken guy who has been going through drab, uneventful daily routines with no apparent joy of life. His lectures are not that bad, but he does not feel much rewarded as repeating his lectures, and his apartment feels lonely and isolated as decorated with sickly yellow-brown light and dark shadow. He usually spends his solitary evening on evaluating his students’ homeworks or exam papers, and his girlfriend Mary(Mélanie Laurent) does not bring any sense of excitement or happiness even when they have a sex together. As a matter of fact, they look so impersonal that you might think she is his usual call girl rather than his lover.

And then, on one day, there comes an unexpected discovery which is going to change his life forever. One of his colleagues casually recommends Adam to watch a movie he recently enjoyed, so Adam watches it at his home later. He is not particularly impressed by the movie at first, but then he remembers something strange from the movie. He checks it again, and, what do you know, there is an extra uncannily resembling him a lot during one brief shot.

Naturally unsettled by this discovery, Adam starts to do some investigation work to find out who the hell this guy is. He checks the end credits to get the name of his doppelganger, and then, thanks to the advance of Internet search engine, it does not take much time for him to acquire some basic information about this guy. Anthony, also played by Gyllenhaal, is an unknown actor with a few movies in his short acting career, and it also turns out that he happens to live in the same city Adam lives in.

Becoming more curious about Anthony than ever, Adam tentatively approaches to Anthony. He gets Anthony’s current address, and he even makes a clumsy phone call to Anthony’s apartment, and he is confirmed again and again by how much they resemble each other. He is mistaken for Anthony by a security guard at one point, and Anthony’s wife Helen(Sarah Gordon) also thinks she is speaking with her husband when she happens to receive Adam’s call.

After that attempt for contact by Adam, we also see this strange circumstance through the view of Anthony, who more looks like Adam than before thanks to the beard he has recently grown but is slightly different from Adam in several small aspects. Compared to Adam, he is direct and aggressive in his personality, and he is ready to take care of the matter as a dominant counterpart. He instructs Adam to meet him at a remote motel outside the city, and we get a tense moment in which both of them look directly into each other, while being perplexed and disturbed by their identical appearance.

Are they twin brothers? Are they just resembling each other? Or are they two sides of one personality like the twin brothers in David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers”(1988)? The movie does not give us any plausible explanation for this happening, and Adam’s mother, played by Isabella Rossellini, does not say anything helpful or revealing to her good son, while not believing any of what he says to her during their conversation. If he is indeed her only biological son, can we say this is just a genetic coincidence? But then what about a certain physical mark, which cannot possibly be explained by that?

Whatever we think about that, the director Denis Villeneuve makes it sure to constantly remind us that his film does not follow the logics of our real world. The cinematography and score in the film always signify something ominous behind the screen, and that accordingly brings nightmarish quality into its story. The city in the movie, which is not named in the film but is apparently Toronto, Canada, is fully shrouded in a gray, smoky ambience of alienation which takes me back to that baffling feeling I experienced as watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Red Desert”(1964). It seems at times that the main characters in the film are only human beings in the city which mostly feels empty and sterile, and that further emphasizes the disquiet surrounding them. While Anthony seems to be living in a more comfortable home environment, there is a certain degree of estrangement between him and his wife. Helen, who is currently pregnant, is naturally suspicious about what her husband is hiding from her, and that leads to another moment of subtle tension in the film.

Dual performance has been always an interesting and challenging opportunity for any talented actors, and Jake Gyllenhaal, who previously collaborated with Villeneuve in “Prisoners”(2013), gives a solid performance in his dual role. While giving some subtle touches to each of his two characters, Gyllenhaal makes the interaction between them believable and engaging, and it is interesting to watch how he controls his performance as the line between his characters begins to be blurred through their disturbing interactions during the second half of the film.

But still, I remain as baffled as when I watched the first scene of the film, and there is very little for me to grasp besides a few obvious things expected from its weird premise. It is not boring despite its slow pace and elusive narrative, and I understand that it does not intend to explain everything in its story, but I did not feel enough about what possibly exists behind its enigmatic surface. While its last scene throws another confounding surprise to us, it only baffled me further, and that was all in case of me.

I forgot to mention that the movie was adapted from “The Double”, a novel written by Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago. I have not read the novel yet, but I read Saramago’s other novel “Blindness”, and I also remember how unsuccessful its movie adaptation was for good reasons. Villeneuve, Gyllenhaal, and others in and behind the film did try, and that should be respected, but I must confess that my mind had already been set to read the novel as watching their efforts.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Doppelganger, Thriller | Leave a comment

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) ☆☆☆(3/4) : X-Men reset/recharged

Posted on May 27, 2014 by kaist455

As the latest attempt to boost the franchise which was started 14 years ago, “X-Men: Days of Future Past” is a fairly entertaining film which mixes old things and new things through a familiar science fiction premise involved with a grim dystopian future to come and an urgent time travel to prevent it. This is not exactly fresh, but the movie is fun and exciting despite some shaky spots in its plot, and it does a nice job of cleaning its playground for, yes, another sequel to come.

As briefly implied at the end of “The Wolverine”(2013), mutants come to face their biggest crisis in the future, and it is not a good news for ordinary humans either. High-tech robots called Sentinels are developed to detect and exterminate mutants, and the human society is turned into a harsh, barren world not so different from the future world shown in Terminator films. While many of them are mercilessly killed as a result, mutants have resisted against this oppression with their superpowers for years, but they are losing the war day by day, and it seems the end is near for all of surviving mutants.

But there is still a chance to change everything, and Charles Xavior/Professor X(Patrick Stewart) and Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto(Ian McKellen), two leading mutant figures who unite together despite their long history of antagonism, are ready to fight for that along with other mutants. They send Logan/Wolverine(Hugh Jackman) to 1973 to prevent one historical turning point, and it is Wolverine’s job to convince young Xavior(James McAvoy) and young Lehnsherr(Michael Fassbender) to help him changing the course of history for the future of mutants and humans.

That historical incident in question was associated with Dr. Bolivar Trask(Peter Dinklage, who incidentally(and ironically) has a FGFR3 gene mutation which causes his dwarfism), and he was the one who designed the first model of Sentinels as the weapons against possible threats from mutants. After Raven/Mystique(Jennifer Lawrence), a blue shape-shifter mutant who can disguise herself into anyone including Lawrence, assassinated him during the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, his project was fully approved by the US government as a consequence, and that was the first small but important step toward the annihilation of mutants.

When Logan comes to young Xavier for help, Xavier is not particularly in good mood to help Logan. After what happened during the climax of “X-Men: First Class”(2011), he becomes bitter and morose while leading the life of a recluse, and he is also addicted to a special serum developed by his trustful assistant Hank/Beast(Nicholas Hoult). The serum enables him to overcome his spinal injury and to walk normally as before, but it also inhibits his immense ability to read and control others’ minds.

Logan manages to persuade Xavier to work together with Lehnsherr to stop Raven from killing Trask, but old hard feelings are still remained between Xavier and Lehnsherr, and they also have different opinions on how the circumstance should be handled. Xavier, who was once very close to Raven in the past, thinks she can be persuaded if they try, but Lehnsherr, who has been incarcerated under maximum caution after being arrested for assassinating President Kennedy, thinks of a more drastic way because, in his view, the survival of their species must be secured by any means necessary, even if that means killing a woman who chose to go with him instead of staying with Xavier.

The director Bryan Singer, who started the franchise with “X-Men”(2000) and “X2”(2003), maintains the dramatic momentum well throughout the running time, and the movie provides several nice action sequences with interesting choices of styles. The Pentagon building sequence is handled with a cheerful mood reminiscent of those lightweight caper films, and it eventually culminates into a humorous slow-motion shot involved with Peter/Quicksilver(Evan Peters), a teenager mutant who helps Logan and Xavier through his ability to move very quickly within a few seconds. The climax sequence features a big stadium lifted above Washington D.C. by Lehnsherr’s magnetic power, and that is just one of many things in the movie to remind us that its 20th century world is a sort of alternative world to ours. As far as I know, nothing shocking happened during the Paris Peace Accords in our history, and we all know there was not anything more disastrous than the Watergate Scandal during the Nixon presidency, but I guess I should not be serious about that.

The cast mainly consists of the actors who appeared in the previous X-men movies, and they adequately fill their roles as they did before. Michael Fassbender, who was the best thing in “X-Men: First Class”, magnetizes every scene of his again with dark, smoldering intensity, and James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, and Nicholas Hoult are competent in their respective roles, though I cannot help but think that these talented actors all had better times in other films. Besides Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellen, and Patrick Stewart, we also meet several cast members from the first three X-men movies, and their presence is welcoming although most of them appear briefly.

Since I watched its first movie at the campus during my first year of undergraduate course, the X-men series has gone through several ups and downs during last 14 years. After hitting the lowest point with “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”(2009), the series started to recover with “X-Men: First Class”, and “X-Men: Days of Future Past” shows us that the series still has some potential to entertain us. Maybe because I have been rather tired of superhero films in these days, I am not very enthusiastic about the movie while finding that its story feels weak and unfocused at times, but, as a blockbuster film which cares about interactions between characters as much as actions, it is good enough for us to have some expectation for whatever will come next.

Sidenote: I saw the 2D version – and I did not feel any need to watch it in 3D.