It’s a staple of the vampire/werewolf/witch hunting genre, that moment when some cocky wiseass takes a gander at his or her quarry and asks a colleague that fateful, fatal question.
“What’s so special about THIS one?”
Holmes, you’re about to find out.
“The Witch: Part 2, The Other One” is writer-director Park Hoon-jung’s everything-but-the-Korean-kitchen-sink sequel to 2018’s “The Witch: Suberversion.” The director of “I Saw the Devil,” my favorite Korean horror movie, throws a lot of very cool effects and some beautifully-conceived supernatural throw-downs as he parks his tale squarely in franchise territory.
The fact that he takes an exasperating hour to get to “the good stuff,” that he fills the screen with characters reciting epic-length chunks of back story and exposition, often in the form of insanely-long questions, and that he lets things turn cute and even cutesy in the middle of all this slaughter and blood, works against the film.
He’s stuffed his story with competing witch hunting factions from The Ark (research institute), Chinese and Korean witch hit squads, “civilian” mobsters out to settle scores, caravans of black sedans and SUVs rolling up on our “other one” witch (Shin Si-ah, aka Cynthia) expecting to catch or dispatch her.
“What’s so special about THIS one?” will be answered in blood.
The whole enterprise plays as cluttered as those “Underworld” movies, where it’s hard to keep track of which villains are in play, and working for whom.
“The good stuff” is worth a bit of waiting and wading through, but man, “The Other One” can be a chore.
Our teenaged patient, a high school girl kidnapped in an elaborate school field trip heist, regains consciousness, her hospital gown covered in blood, her hospital plastered in gore. She silently wanders out and away, with barely the barest hints of flashbacks telling us who she is and what’s she’s done.
A van full of goons nabs her. They’ve already been roughing up this woman (Park Eun-bin) in the back seat, who protests that the new hostage “doesn’t KNOW anything, let her go.” All it takes is one poke or jab too many for the blood-spattered teen to snap hands and arms and send thugs flying through closed doors, which are blown off as the van hurtles into a crash.
The woman Kyung hee thinks about abandoning her savior, this “mental” patient. But she takes pity and drags her off to get her wounds tended and offer her shelter with her teenaged brother (Sung Yoo-bin).
A couple of supernatural displays later, the brother wonders “Is she an alien?” before noticing “You’re kind of cute.” Oddly, the teen girl has forgotten the pleasures of food and other human fixations while in the hospital. But there’s barely time to experience the wonderland that is a Korean supermarket before the ongoing threats make themselves obvious.
The gangster (Jin Goo) shows up with a mob, wondering who beat the hell out of his other mob. Korean and Chinese teams converge on a remote farm. It’s all about to go down.
The first two acts hint at what’s to come, but Park choreographs a symphony of violence for the third.
All the talk of the original witch from the first film, the mysterious Dr. X (Dr. Baek, but she’s also in a wheelchair) who runs “the Ark,” of the Transhumanist faction vs. Union vs everybody’s favorite villain, the Chinese is just here to provide a framework for a franchise, and more fodder for The Other One to fling, hurl, stab or explode.
The factions fight it out amongst themselves as well, blade-on-blade brawls on rooftops.
Park is a directing original who flirts with bits of “Blade” and “Twilight” (the jump-cut effects of characters thrown through walls — of distant buildings) as well as “Underworld” at this distinctly Asian view of a witchcraft undergrojund.
The effects are good even if the characters are barely sketched in, despite the pages and pages of dialogue.
Once it finally gets going, “The Witch: Part 2, the Other One” is impressive. But there’s nothing here that transcends the genre, and what is here is a simple, slow-moving witch-hunt story whose clutter keeps it from ever truly getting up to speed.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Shin Si-ah (aka Cynthia), Park Eun-bin, Sung Yoo-bin, Jin Goo, Kim Da-mi, Jo Min-su , Seo Eun-soo and Lee Jong-suk
Credits: Scripted and directed by Park Hoon-jung. A Well Go USA release.
This looks like Austen with a wink, and may work. Richard E. Grant and Henry Golding are in the supporting cast. Don’t recognize the hunk she swoons over.
My favorite version of this novel introduced much of the world to Ciaran Hinds. But that was decades ago.
Listen to the way Spain’s matinee idol hits his lines, the relish he brings to saying his name “Poooos in Boots.”
Damn he’s funny in this part. Same with Salma Hayek, their latest greatest pairing?
“The Last Wish” is “coming soon.
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The title is “Dreaming Walls,” so don’t dive into this documentary about New York’s famous — and infamous — Hotel Chelsea expecting a literal history lesson.
Twelve stories of brick that opened on 23rd St. in 1884, it hosted Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, and was home to everyone from Janis and Hendrix to Marilyn and Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, Arthur C. Clarke — who wrote the screen treatment for “2001” there — and Bob Dylan.
The original “Dylan,” the poet Dylan Thomas, took his boozy, fatal turn for the worse in a Chelsea room, which was a real selling point to poet-rocker Patti Smith, seen in footage dating from the ’70s.
It was “the first place I came to in New York,” a very young Smith enthused, walking around rooftop terrace. “I’m SURE he throw up one too many rums off this roof!”
But the address’s star-studded, woozy history is mostly glimpsed via projections on its hallowed walls by Belgian filmmakers Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt. They made a movie about an institution and landmark cluttered, outdated and in transition.
A string of changes in ownership, a clientele that included many ancient, grandfathered-in apartment tenants (a few of them hoarders) and an endless renovation that ate up the 2010s — it only reopened this past Feb. — makes their film more paleontological than historical. We’re taking a peek at the bones, mid-dig, hearing stories archived on film and remembered by the aging denizens of this dark, stained-glass monument, lamenting what it is becoming, regretting what’s been lost.
The more historical longtime tenants recognize it and themselves as “remnants of another time in New York,” when Warhol shot “Chelsea Girls” on one floor, when “Bohemians” of several generations were drawn to it, right up to and including that aspiring Michigan dancer Madonna Louise Ciccone, who returned to shoot photos for her book “Sex” after she became the world’s most famous bottle blonde.
There’s a little archival footage — an interview with composer Virgil Thomson, a longtime resident who died there in 1989. But mostly, we’re seeing an arduous renovation through the camera’s lens, hearing the reveries and gripes of a lot of seriously elderly residents — dancers and drag queens, retired painters and others who got into this cheap, centrally-located piece of Manhattan real estate through the machinations and indulgence of the longtime manager Stanley Bard, son of one of its many longtime owners over the decades.
If there’s a failure to this approach with their film it’s in the reliance on the viewer to know much of that history tied to the place going in. We’re invited to dream along with the filmmakers, without a lot of background, footnotes or interviews with experts or the celebrated folks who once lived there.
They gave us an 80 minute movie. Another 10 minutes, summarizing its notoriety, getting snippets of Mick and Elliott Gould or Patti S. or Bette or Jane Fonda or Russell Brand, Robbie Robertson or Eddie Izzard doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.
“Dreaming Walls” still manages to play as a visual poem to the place at the tail end of its long decay, before its latest pricey sprucing up and upscale reinvention.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Rose Cory, Merle Lester Levine, Stanley Bard, Gina Healey, Pablo Martinez, Zoe Serac Pappas, Nicholas Pappas, Virgil Thomson, Steve Willis and Bettina Grossman
Credits: Scripted and directed by Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt. A Magnolia release.
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Interview enough actors or read enough actors’ autobiographies and you’ll run across what has to be their most common pet peeve.
It’s a stage direction that everybody who steps onto a set and into the frame seems to hate.
“OK, let’s do it again. But FASTER.”
Hate it they might, but there probably isn’t a more important edict in screen comedy. By and large, faster is funnier. Slow burns and deadpan have their place, but comedy that’s in your face and quick on the draw has a better shot at delivering laughs.
“Heart Parade” is a pokey Polish rom-com about finding love amongst the wiener dogs of Krakow. It’s set up for “fish-out-of-water” jokes, contrasting “What’s your hurry?” Krakow with “Go go go we’ve got deadlines” Warsaw. There’s not enough here that’s funny, and what is here passes by like, well, a dachshund parade.
Anna Próchniak of “Bad Day for the Cut” and “The Innocents” stars as Magda, a go-getter TV producer and top aide to Arena TV’s Director of Programming, Zula (Monika Krzywkowska). Magda shares a penthouse apartment with star TV presenter Anatol (Wasyl Wasylik) and has their lives planned out well into the future.
Promotion to Zula’s job, marriage and “eighteen months from” that date, babies.
But Magda’s got a mild case of cynophobia. She has nightmares about dogs. And it’s driven by, we figure, her boss’s doted-on dachshund, Todd. Magda has to walk him, cater to him and care for him when the boss is distracted.
And like many a dachshund, Todd is a stinker. On the day her promotion is announced, Madga messes up and the dog gets into something he shouldn’t and it’s “You’re FIRED.” No promotion for you!
She can’t even pack up her desk without catching opportunistic Anatol hooking up with another pretty colleague.
“Heart Parade” is about Madga’s plan to get back in the game. There’s this famous dachshund parade/”trial” over in Krakow that she already knows a lot about, thanks to Todd. Funny thing about it, they don’t want any publicity.
Somehow, there’s a media blackout about a dachshund parade. Is somebody worried the country will OD on “cute?” That seems nuts, but Poland can be…different.
Hyper-organized Magda will infiltrate the secret organization that runs this event, befriend the leaders and get a story her ex-employer will love.
“Heart Parade” is a romantic comedy, so here’s hunky sculptor and tombstone carver Krzysztof (Michal Czernecki). as a possible love interest. Magda rents a room from him, which should make love blossom, right?
Except neither he nor his quirky co-leaders of the Dachshund Day Afternoon is all that keen on taking in the fish-out-of-Warsaw stranger.
There’s a neighbor (Katarzyna Zielinska) who has her eye on Krzysztof and is willing to sabotage anyone who gets in her way.
Krzysztof is widowed, with a little boy, Karol (Iwo Rajski). Karol has this dog he’d love to be able to train to get him into the wiener trials. If only somebody had the time to help him.
And there’s an entire bureaucracy of “My hands are tied” slow-walking Krakow-pokes to overcome.
So we have a cute couple, the obstacles to their romance and a backdrop of adorable little dogs. Why doesn’t “Heart Parade” work?
The filmmakers can’t manage a single decent sight gag for the dogs, not one thing. Hell, I’d have settled for a couple of recycled gags from Disney’s “The Ugly Dachshund.” I guess they’ve never seen that 1966 classic, and they certainly didn’t hire trained dogs who could manage that.
The jokes are of the “You’re not from around here?” and “Why the big hurry? Like a cup of tea?” variety.
There’s no real spark between the leads, although Próchniak pairs up nicely — and “maternally” — with the kid.
Mainly, it’s a question of pace. This 107 minute romp never romps. Even adjusting the speed (it’s in your Netflix screen controls) doesn’t help. Even playing back the movie faster can’t get it moving.
This dog never manages much more than a waddle.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Anna Próchniak, Michal Czernecki, Iwo Rajski, Monika Krzywkowska, Katarzyna Zielinska and Wasyl Wasylik
Credits: Directed by Filip Zylber, scripted by Wiktor Piatkowski, Natalia Matuszek and Marianna Pochron. A Netflix release.
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