The Boy Trailer REACTION!!!
The January movie doldrums hit Portland hard this week. Without any late-opening award contenders on the slate, multiplex audiences are left to choose between what look to be a middling young-adult alien invasion saga ("The Fifth Wave"), a warmed-over creepy-doll chiller ("The Boy"), and perhaps the most egregious stain yet on the career of Robert DeNiro ("Dirty Grandpa").
In a perfect world, Portland"s art house theaters would offer scintillating alternatives to this mediocrity, but that"s not quite the case.
The Chinese martial arts master Ip Man was, until a few years ago, best known to Westerners as the guy who taught Bruce Lee his stuff. These days, he"s become immortalized as a mythic hero in his own right, thanks to a series of cinematic portrayals, including Wong Kar-Wai"s elegiac, stunningly photographed 2013 movie "The Grandmaster." That, though, was but one of a rash of Ip Man films to emerge in the wake of 2008"s "Ip Man," which starred Hong Kong action hero Donnie Yen and took substantial liberties with Ip"s life story.
The movie was a box-office success, though, and Yen reprised the role in 2010"s "Ip Man 2" and now in "Ip Man 3." Like its predecessors, it"s a decent, relatively generic martial arts flick, with some added poignancy due to both the 52-year-old Yen"s encroaching retirement from action films and a subplot involving the terminal illness of Ip"s wife. Otherwise, it"s all about the fight scenes, and they"re entertaining enough, especially one against a villain played by none other than Mike Tyson. Genre fans won"t be disappointed, but "Ip Man 3" won"t have much crossover appeal. (Grade: B-, opens at Regal Fox Tower on Friday, Jan. 22)
The arrival of a new animated feature from distributors GKids is usually a good thing. The company has enabled international treasures including "Song of the Sea," "Ernest and Celestine," and "Tales of the Night" to reach American audiences over the last few years. Itslatest release is the Oscar-nominated Brazilian film "Boy and the World."While it"s definitely an example of adventurous, artistic animation, it doesn"t reach the heights of those other titles. Without using any intelligible dialogue, it tells the story of a young boy living in the impoverished countryside whose father moves to the city in search of work. The boy follows after him, and has a series of encounters that expose him to the woes of the modern world: urbanization, economic exploitation, environmental degradation, etc.
Director Al Abreu uses a unique visual style that combines childlike, almost stick-figure people with an increasingly frenzied decoupage to represent the overstimulated world he"s swallowed up in. It"s rather like a very talented grade-schooler"s refrigerator-door drawings come to expressive life. Unfortunately, the simplistic moral message of the movie and its insistence on remaining nonverbal make "Boy and the World" feel like something that would have been more tolerable as a 15-minute short than as an 80-minute feature. (Grade: C+, opens at Regal Fox Tower on Friday, Jan. 22)
In the years and decades following World War II, American veterans rarely spoke about the horrors they saw and endured, and American culture rarely delved into the darker side of the combat experience. A similar hesitance seems to have occurred in Israel following the triumph of the Six Day"s War in 1967, one thatthe documentary "Censored Voices" aims to belatedly overcome. In the wake of Israel"s surprising and unequivocal defeat of Egypt and Jordan, Israeli author and intellectual Amos Oz, whose first novel had been published just the year before, interviewed a number of Israeli soldiers.
Over 70% of those interviews were censored by the government at the time, but now they have been incorporated, along with fascinating archival footage, into this testament. The nationalist triumphalism of the day is barely evident as young men talk about the violence they committed and endured, including some instances of what would certainly be classified as war crimes. "Censored Voices" demonstrates that no matter how existential the threat, or how just the cause, war inevitably leaves scars on the victors as well as the vanquished. (Grade: B, opens at the Living Room Theaters on Friday, Jan. 22)
It"s also worth noting that the Northwest Film Center"s two ongoing series continue this weekend. The Reel Music programs on tap include a live musical accompaniment for the groundbreaking 1929 Soviet silent film "The Man with a Movie Camera" as well as documentaries on the 1980"s hard-rock band Twisted Sister, reggae pioneer Lee "Scratch" Perry, and bass legend Jaco Pastorius. Meanwhile, the Film Center"s Bollywood retrospective hits the 1970s with the genre-mashing, crowd-pleasing, cops-vs-bandits flick "Sholay." Check www.nwfilm.org for a full schedule.
-- Marc Mohan for The Oregonian/OregonLive
Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/movies/2016/01/the_week_in_movies_ip_man_3_th.html
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