Novelty alone is worth something at the movies. And there’s plenty about “Give Me Five” that makes it a cinematic unicorn.
Comedies from China are rarely imported. A comedy with a whiff of “Back to the Future” about it, with a young man traveling to the past to ensure his parents meet and mate and make him is pretty novel.
And there are all these People’s Republican touches — a company welding contest staged with Party-approved hoopla, strained mockery of Hong Kong Cantonese pronunciations, abortion, dementia and suicide as jokey subplots and an ungrateful son who seems happy his demented, suicidal dad may never wake up from a coma.
“Give Me Five (Ge, ni hao)” is sentimental and silly, romantic and maudlin, dark and somewhat daft. Whatever its initial inspiration and intent, there’s something equal parts amusing and atonally bizarre about the finished product.
A 30ish e-game training academy entrepreneur (Yuan Chang) copes with his widowed, mercurial dad (Xiang Wei), who suffers from Alzheimer’s now but who frankly “never liked me.” Dad’s moods swing from forgetfully pleasant to raging and judgmental. All it takes is a birthday request for cash for his birthday so that son Xiao can marry his longtime girlfriend to bring out Dad’s generosity and his fury.
It’s no wonder Xiao isn’t all that torn up when the old man jumps off a bridge into a river. He furiously tries to shake him out of his coma with “We can’t AFFORD to be hospitalized (in Mandarin with English subtitles)!”
But going through his father’s things back home, the son stumbles across his late mother’s diary, and an odd copper ring. He’s never known how his mother died, and never will as his father has Alzheimer’s. Slipping on the ring changes that.
Xiao Wu finds himself back in the factory gym where he meets his spirited, smart and outspoken Mom, Lu Chunli (Li Ma). Wouldn’t you know it? That’s the day when she was supposed to meet Wu Hongqi, his Dad, leading to them falling in love and marrying and having a boy. Damned if Xiao, magically appearing in the women’s locker room in 1986 — “Wicked rogue!” — didn’t foul that up.
Pulling the ring off, he’s back in the present where he sees her diary entries change. His existence depends on him fixing this interference in time, which will also allow him to get to know the mother he never met and understand the father who “never liked me” and lies in a coma.
The most charming scenes have this stranger who is actually their son struggle to make the match between the boring, charmless engineer and the opinionated go-getter factory worker who has a secret crush on him. One scene has Wu, crushed because his previous girlfriend is cheating with a boorish Hong Kong capitalist (Bing Jia, pretty funny), but unable to figure out this other cutie has eyes for him.
Xiao encourages and coaches her — “Your happiness is my concern.” — and nags him. “Stop being such a LOSER!”
Xiao ends up borrowing a busker’s guitar to serenade them and close the deal.
Another “trip” back has the son seeing his mother heroically take on all challengers in a regional welding competition, complete with Chinese Communist iconography (big red flags, propaganda poster poses), workplace safety issues and selfless devotion to duty.
The script has several engaging episodes that reveal his family’s story to the son, which change his attitudes towards the parent he knows and doesn’t get along with, and the mother who gave him his fighting spirit. Naturally, all this changing history and changing it back goes to his head.
There are laughs and giggles in the wedding Xiao finds himself officiating and the origin story of the rings, including one that triggers all this time travel.
The performances aren’t bad, and it’s easy to see why Li Ma has been a fixture in Chinese comedies for years.
But this sentimental, sweet and romantic voyage crashes into the rocks in the third act with bizarre turns that lean into Chinese self-sacrifice so hard the indoctrination is the least grating thing about it, and all the added supernaturalism in the world can’t rescue it.
Still, if you’ve never seen a Chinese “Back to the Future” inspired dramedy, the sheer novelty of “Give Me Five” should at least pique your curiosity. It certainly piqued mine.
Rating: unrated, Chinese chaste
Cast: Li Ma, Yuan Chang, Xiang Wei, Bing Jia
Credits: Directed by Luan Zhang, scripted by Tianyi Dong. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:51
Posted inReviews, previews, profiles and movie news|Comments Off on Movie Review: A Chinese “Back to the Future” with People’s Republic Twists — “Give Me Five (Gee, ni hao)”
The stunning recreations in “Buried: The 1982 Alpine Meadows Avalanche” put the viewer as close to an actual avalanche as anybody’d ever want to get.
A mountain of snow, preceded by a hurricane-force wind-driven shock wave, chases a snowmobile down a slope and access road. A tsunami of white knocks people and buildings down.
And decades later, those who survived it still weep over the losses, and those responsible for avalanche control struggle with decisions they made and didn’t make in this historic disaster, which flattened much of a ski resort in the high Sierras abutting Lake Tahoe in northeast California.
Jared Drake and Steven Siig follow-up their acclaimed Insane Clown Posse music doc “United States of Insanity” with a surprisingly moving and starkly-beautiful film about the power of nature and the lives shattered by a disaster created by a most extraordinary snow event.
“The worst winter storm in history,” the forecasters called it. The snow piled up over 103 inches in a flash. The winds on the mountaintops cleared 120 miles per hour. White-out conditions were bad enough to close the Alpine Meadows Ski Resort, just one valley over from the onetime Olympic venue at Squaw Valley.
But the young staff on hand was well-versed in avalanche amelioration in a place prone to massive snowslides.
Some 300 spots had been identified as the main origin points for avalanches, staff avalanche forecaster Jim Plehn says. In a pre-laptop era, this “citizen scientist,” then just 27, and the ski patrol there gathered data on snowfall, snowpack and watched the danger spots. They’d drop “bombs,” hand-made explosives on the most vulnerable drifts. They’d ski the ridgelines “ski checking,” starting controlled avalanches by kicking their skis to trigger a slide “so that the big one never builds up.”
“The OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) thing was not omnipresent like it is now,” one patrol member recalls.
And when all else failed, they had artillery to shell gigantic deep and teetering drifts high up the mountain.
But that March of 1982 blizzard made them feel “like we were standing on top of a monster,” that all their “purging” efforts were in vain. The tinkling sound of the frigid, snow-laced wind, the staggering height of the drifts in the constantly-cleared entrance road, gave more than one staff member the willies.
“I feel like there was a dragon under the snow.”
So Plehn told his boss to close the resort as he and the staff monitored the onslaught and fired artillery into the gloom.
But there were vacationers staying at condos. Some of the athletic 20somethings on staff got antsy. And none of them were prepared for what came and how much and how far the mountain of snow would smash down.
The filmmakers question a lot of folks now in their 60s who not only remember that awful day, but recall it as “the best job I ever had in my life,” being young and outside and on skis in some of the best skiing terrain in North America. They’re older and sober in their assessments of what they did and what they could and could not have foreseen. And many of them break down, or start to, on camera.
“Took us a while to dig him out…but that’s enough of that.”
Drake and Siig knew they’d have plenty of pathos in remembering this tragedy. But they also knew that most of us wouldn’t remember how everything turned out. And they delicately structure their story to deliver uplifting third act moments in addition to letting us see the trauma these memories bring up for those who had to labor through their grief and survivor’s guilt forty years ago, and still do today.
Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Jim Plehn, Meredith Watson, Larry Heywood and Lanny Johnson
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jared Drake and Steven Siig. A Greenwich release.
A brilliant child tries to keep herself fed and her paralyzed father alive in the mesmerizing science fiction drama “Vesper.” It’s about biological collapse and biological rebirth on an Earth even more starkly-divided into “haves” and “haven’t a prayers.”
That’s the source of her name, the evening prayer that Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) represents. As in a lot of science fiction, she offers a glimpse of hope in the grimmest of futures
The world-building in this tale by Lithuanian horror/sci-fi filmmakers Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper (“Vanishing Waves”) is next-level dystopian and just gorgeous to behold. Earth has entered “The New Dark Ages” thanks to environmental collapse exacerbated by bio-genetic tinkering and the oligarchical transfer of wealth. Most biodiversity is gone in a rain-soaked landscape of dead or dying forests and swamps teaming with synthetic biological creatures — tentacled blood-sucking fungi, armor-piercing bugs and blind, bird-headed snakes that pop out like deep ocean eels to peck and poke at whatever passes by.
But Vesper prowls this wasteland like a child who grew up with it and who regards it with a scientist’s eye, perhaps thanks to instruction from her bedbound father (Richard Brake). Darius can’t move and doesn’t speak except through the hovering drone that accompanies Vesper everywhere.
Some wag has given the talking drone a “Wilson” face. Yes, some Tom Hanks movies will survive the Apocalypse.
Her father’s life support is bacterial powered, everyone’s starvation diet is heavy on exotic worms and Vesper is studying and experimenting with both in her lab. She wants to create seeds that will give her bargaining chips to get her and Dad into The Citadel.
The superrich haven’t flown off to Mars. They’ve built bubble cities with controlled air and armed protection and synthetic companions called Jugs. The wastelands are peopled by few, but along with the masked, faceless “Pilgrim” scavengers, there are those who do business with the rich. Jonas (Eddie Marsan) is a figure straight out of Dickens. He “cares” for a teeming group of children who act as his gang, and whose blood he sells to The Citadel who use it for heaven knows what.
Then Vesper stumbles across one of the beautiful people of The Citadel whose Wing Glider crashes and the balance of this world changes. She nurses Camellia (Rosy McEwen) back to life, and what they learn about each other could alter lives, the balance of power and the future.
There are traces of the post-nuclear “Threads” and the tubular, liquid tech of “Brazil” in this understated thriller. The visuals are often stunning, with lots of attention paid to creating the biology of a world where science tried several Hail Mary attempts to bring flora back to a fauna-less landscape. Many of these plans are more fauna than flora and the CGI that renders them is stunning.
The disembodied voice of Brake as Darius brings a wary weariness to the advice he tries to pass on to his child.
“You don’t know the cost of dreams.”
Marsan delivers his distinct brand of disarming menace to this Fagin figure, comforting kids as he exploits them, complimenting Vesper as he threatens her.
Young Miss Chapman is given an androgynous look that suits the material, and the character and her performance of her have just the right hint of pluck. McEwen, of TV’s “The Alienist,” has a “Man Who Fell to Earth” ethereal quality in this guise — fragile and worried and lost.
The story’s arc may feel familiar, but it isn’t utterly predictable, with the child’s enterprise and cunning nicely matched against Marsan’s I’m Bigger Than You omnipotence. And the messaging of “Vesper” leaves this bleak tale a little room to breathe and anyone watching it the tiniest prayer of hope.
Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Raffiella Chapman, Rosy McEwen, Richard Brake and Eddie Marsan.
Credits: Directed by Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper, scripted by Kristina Buozyte, Brian Clark and Bruno Samper. An IFC release.
Yeah, it’s a holiday killing spree around the olde Xmas Tree.
Nov. 1 from Uncork’d.
Of COURSE they sent the red band trailer over for this. Looks Bloody Disgusting, to coin a phrase.
the fascinating history isn’t truly given its due, the suspense never has a chance to build and the characters and the cast playing them don’t make that leap from “competent” to compelling.”
Some words I jotted down and scratched out as I took notes on “Plan A,” an historical thriller about Haganah, Nakam and the post-war plot to exact revenge upon Germany for killing six million Jews during the Holocaust.
“Melodramatic.” OK, that works. “Ahistorical.” I shouldn’t say that because the picture teases us in trying to have it both ways, historical and a history-twisting fantasy. We get a taste of the real history, if not its literal truth. “Unaffecting.” It’s rare that a Holocaust drama doesn’t move you, and this one struggles to find its emotional core.
This really happened. Nakam, the Hebrew word for “revenge,” was a real group of Holocaust survivors hellbent on making the German populace pay, en masse, for condoning and/or participating in genocide. Their “Plan A” was a mass poisoning of a city’s water supply. It’s a fascinating piece of little-known history and well worth a filmed treatment.
But it proves a slippery subject for Israeli co-writers/directors Yoav Paz and Doron Paz. Their fictionalized take on it gives us an invented eyewitness/infiltrator of Nakam, a necessary plot device to give the viewer someone to identify with. And they try to credit the future State of Israel and its Haganah paramilitary group for leading the hunt for this rogue band of avengers, trying to prevent an event that could only have been remembered in infamy. That doesn’t seem to jibe with the historical record.
August Diehl of “The Last Vermeer” and Netflix’s “Munich: The Edge of War,” is Max, a haggard, filthy camp survivor when we meet him. He’s returned to his family’s rural German home after being released from a concentration camp, and his greeting is a beating from the Nazi sympathizer who ratted him and his missing wife and daughter out to the Gestapo.
“Just because the war is over doesn’t mean we can’t kill Jews anymore,” the home’s treacherous new owner hisses between blows.
Max is traumatized, weak and wandering. He meets an aged survivor (Yehuda Almagor) who passes on rumors about where they can go for food, transport and information about lost loved ones, and he cackles and rants that “The dead give you no rest.” He’s trapped death in a cloth bag he keeps on him, he insists.
The metaphor? Grief and lusting for revenge will eat you alive.
But when Max falls in with members of Britain’s Jewish Infantry Brigade who have undertaken their own off-the-books post-war mission, he may have found his purpose. He observes as their leader, Michael (Michael Aloni) “enhanced interrogates” a town burgher, demanding names of Nazis who have slipped back into the local population.
Max is shocked when this leads to summary executions by the score. Should he join in, or should he settle in a refugee camp with the hopes of emigrating to Palestine? Then word of another, even more extreme group, catches his ear. When asked, he volunteers to infiltrate Nakam, get close to its charismatic leader, Abba Kovner (Ishai Golan) and find out what they’re planning.
Because whatever the Jewish Brigade and its undercover Haganah members are up to on the sly, Nakam is planning something big. “I want my revenge. I deserve it,” has gotten him into this world. And these people, among the first to use the phrase “Never again” intend to do something about it.
The film is about the battle of conscience within Max, who cannot “move on” himself, and yet is troubled by the fanatics he has joined.
“These people are not victims,” the haunted widow Anna (Sylvia Hoeks of “The Girl in the Spider’s Web”) declares. “They heard our screams! An eye for an eye, six million for six million!”
The dialogue is sharp, quotable and accusatory.
And it’s not hard to identify with characters who know “the courts and their so-called justice” will “never get them all.” There were serious proposals that Germany be de-industrialized, its populace scattered and its economy reduced to farms at the end of the barbaric war a nation of Hitler cultists unleashed. However the world would have reacted to a mass murder of Germans in ’45-46, the passage of time hasn’t watered down the feeling that they had it coming.
But the characters and performances rob this story of much of its pathos and empathy. The pacing’s a bit slack. One of the cinema’s most clumsily shoehorned-in love/sex scenes doesn’t help. And the “have our revenge and rise above it” tease messaging of the third act is a blunder.
“Plan A” starts with promise, and features that rare novel take on The Holocaust as a subject. But the fascinating history isn’t truly given its due, the suspense never has a chance to build and the characters and the cast playing them don’t make that leap from “competent” to compelling.”
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, torture, sex
Cast: August Diehl, Sylvia Hoeks, Ishai Golan, Yehuda Almagor and Michael Aloni
Credits: Scripted and directed by Yoav Paz, Doron Paz. A Menemsha release.
Movie Nation 