AT FILMART

REVIEWS
Reviews edited by Mark Adams mark.adams@screendaily.com
FILMART IN bRIEF
Love Is Not Blind
Market. Dir: Teng Huatao. Chi. 2011. 109mins
One of the box-office hits of 2011, this charming
and entertaining rom-com has echoes of
Bridget Jones’s Diary (and many other chick
flicks) as wedding organiser Huang Xiaoxian
(Bai Baihe) tries to come to terms with
the break-up of her relationship. A smart and
quirky script from Bao Jingjing (based on
her blog), the story offers up plenty of fun for
Bai and co-star Wen Zhang as her camp
office buddy to plan revenge and mull over
the problems with men and relationships
(the pair also starred together in one of the
segments of anthology The Law Of Attraction).
Director Teng Huatao slots in some
stylish contemporary quirks, but keeps the
focus on his talented stars.
Mark Adams
CONTACT EDKO FILMS wujune@edkofilm.
com.hk
Rent-a-Cat
Market. Dir/scr: Naoko Ogigami. Jap. 110mins
A gentle charmer of a film, Rent-a-Cat (Rentaneko)
wallows in its quirky feline fun as it
dwells on loneliness and cute kittens. While
never as laugh-out-loud as it might appear
on the surface, it is engaging entertainment,
with the large variety of moggies well trained
and lead actress Mikako Ichikawa a strong
presence. Animal movies have a way of striking
a chord with audiences, and combined
with writer/director Naoko Ogigami’s trademark
idiosyncratic sense of humour, the film
could prove to be popular in Japan and of
interest to niche buyers.
Mark Adams
CONTACT NIKKATSU www.nikkatsu.co.jp
No Liar, No Cry
Market. Dir: Xu Chuanhai. Chi. 2011. 88mins
An engagingly oddball comedy drama, Xu
Chuanhai’s directorial debut is a delightfully
surreal affair, starring Wi Gang as Old Pi, a
gruff man who for the past 10 years has been
protecting an undeveloped gold mine deep
in the Gobi desert. Word eventually gets out
and he finds himself surrounded by a gang of
thugs, three wealthy women, a geologist and
a film crew, and a battle of schemes and wits
ensue. The desert settings make for an unusual
backdrop and the clever twists keep
things intriguing.
Mark Adams
CONTACT INDEX ENTERTAINMENT
yyg@gmail.com
n 6 Screen International at Filmart March 21, 2012
beautiful 2012
Reviewed by Mark Adams
Four ‘micro-movies’ produced by Youku, China’s
leading internet television site, make up Beautiful
2012, a coming together for four short films from
award-winning Asian directors that have at their
core the concept of ‘What is beautiful?’ while also
mulling over life, death and unhappiness.
The styles of the four film-makers are all very
different in tone and content — two are fictionstyle
and two documentary-style — but all are singular
and absorbing pieces. As a film Beautiful
2012, which in China will be seen on Youku’s
online platform, would be an easy fit for any film
festival, while Tsai Ming-liang’s delightfully shot
Walker could also work as a gallery installation.
Beautiful 2012 opens with South Korean director
Kim Tae-yong’s You Are More Than Beautiful (pictured),
about a man hiring a young woman named
Young-hee to pretend to be his fiancée and show
his ill father he is getting married. When his father
slips into a coma he pays the woman at the hospital,
but she slips into the hospital room and in a
charmingly beautiful scene stands and sings a
Korean opera song to the father (in a room with
five other seriously ill elderly men).
Second up is Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker, which
takes an unusual look at the bustling streets of
Hong Kong as it features a series of stunningly
shot scenes with at the centre a red-robed monk
who walks at a snail’s pace. With traffic and pedes-
Robo-G
Reviewed by Mark Adams
As fun and frantic piece of mainstream entertainment,
writer/director Shinobu Yaguchi’s high-concept
family film Robo-G really hits the spot, and
has strong remake possibilities should Hollywood
come calling. Given it lacks any arthouse credentials
it is unlikely to feature much beyond the family
film festival circuit, which is a shame given its
all-round commercial value.
Screening in the I See It My Way section of the
Hong Kong International Film Festival, Robo-G also
features a standout performance by Shinjiro Igarashi
(aka former Japanese rock star Mickey Curtis)
as the grumpy old grandfather whose boredom and
lack of stimulation in retirement are transformed
when he applies for the unlikeliest of part-time jobs.
Director Yaguchi has a strong track record in
terms of comedy hits — such as Water Boys (2001),
Swing Girls (2004) and Happy Flight (2008) — and
after a gap of four years has returned with a film
that might lack the simplistic mainstream fun sensibilities
of those titles, but is a more rounded film
in terms of its concept.
The straightforward structure is pretty familiar
— after a disaster the protagonists gradually have
success, learning a few life lessons along the way
— but handled with a good deal of polish and lack
of mawkish sentimentality.
When three workers at Kimura Electrical
WoRlD pReMIeRe
Chi. 2012. 90mins
Directors Kim tae-yong,
tsai Ming-liang, Gu
Changwei, Ann Hui
Production company
Youku original
Sales contact Hong Kong
International Film Society,
savita_lam@hkiff.org.uk
Main cast Yan lianke, lee
Kang-sheng, Gong Hyo-jin,
Francis ng, Jade leung
InteRnAtIonAl
pReMIeRe
Jap. 2011. 95mins
Director/screenplay
Shinobu Yaguchi
Production companies
Altamira pictures, Dentsu,
Fuji television network,
toho Company
International sales pony
Canyon, www.ponycanyon.
co.jp
Cinematography
Katsumi Yanagijima
Editor Ryuji Miyajima
Main cast Shinjiro
Igarashi, Yuriko Yoshitaka,
Gaku Hamada, Junya
Kawashima, Shogo Kawai,
emi Wakui, tomoko tabata
SCreeNINgS, page 18
trians speeding around him, the man — head
intensely bowed, bare-foot and holding a bread roll
in one hand and a plastic bag in the other — walks
only a step every minute.
Gu Changwei’s Long Tou — also shot documentary
style — features characters who dwell on the
realities of expectation, punctuated by a series of
memorable shots ( a cat jumping onto an air conditioner
unit; an elderly man dragging a series of
plastic bottles; a weight-lifter practising his moves
and a child blowing bubbles) and nice use of
music.
The film wraps with Ann Hui’s My Way — starring
Francis Ng and Jade Leung — about a pre-op
transsexual man nervously waiting for his operation.
It is a stylishly melancholic film, and defined
by the moment when he goes to the hospital for the
operation, goes to sleep in the male ward and
wakes as a woman in the female ward… and finally
indulges in a smile of relief and happiness.
(played by small Gaku Hamada, tall Junya
Kawashima and chunky Shogo Kawai) fail in their
bid to build a robot for the company, they decide to
advertise for someone to ‘act’ in a supposed Mascot
Suit Show —but instead fit them into their New
Shiokaze robot suit.
They find 73-year-old Mr Suzuki (Igarashi) is
the only one who fits the suit, but to their bemusement
he proves such a hit at the Robo Exposition
that they have to keep him on for presentations
around Japan. But they had not reckoned on the
determination of robot-loving science student Sasaki
Yoko (Yuriko Yoshitaka, playing her role for
shrill schoolgirl laughs) who gradually learns the
truth about the deception.
Robo-G is constantly entertaining without ever
being radical or defiantly original, with Igarashi
perfect as the curmudgeonly old man who finds a
new lease of life.