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Friday, Sep 25, 2009, Page 16

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Burma VJ

The 10 Conditions of Love is getting all the press, but those looking for a first-class political documentary have another option — and it’s coming to a university campus near you. Burma VJ is an award-winning film by Anders Ostergaard that depicts and recreates the activities of underground Burmese journalists who risked their lives to get video footage of the 2007 protests out of the country.

Details on this highly regarded film are at burmavjmovie.com, while playdates and locations are listed in Chinese at tasskn.blogspot.com.



Surrogates

Bruce Willis isn’t getting any younger, but unlike other big action stars over the years, he has managed to stay very credible. In Surrogates, Willis is a law enforcer in a world where idealized android copies interact on behalf of their homebound human versions. When a rare murder occurs, Willis goes off the grid to investigate — using his real self. Jonathan Mostow, who ably directed another aging action star in the third Terminator installment, is at the reins of this movie metaphor for the overuse of technology. With a bit of luck he won’t deliver a generic futuristic flick like The Sixth Day, which this film resembles in places, but the lack of press previews does not fill one with confidence.



Sorority Row

Speaking of new installments of aging material, this is yet another remake of a horror flick from the late 1970s-early 1980s. Like the original The House on Sorority Row, a bunch of young ladies kill one of their sorority sisters when a … wait for it … prank goes wrong, and some time later, oddly enough, a psycho returns with a trusty tire iron for some gory payback. The vengeful return of the mistreated was done to death in My Bloody Valentine and its remake, The Burning, I Know What You Did Last Summer and a host of others. The main difference to be noted in this film, therefore, is not the updated script (date rape drugs, fashionable technology) but the changing ethnic makeup of the girls on sorority row (there’s one Asian: Jamie Chung from Dragonball: Evolution).



Amalfi

The title refers to the famed region of Italy, which is where this family-friendly Japanese thriller was shot. An efficient embassy official investigates when a Japanese kid is kidnapped, putting in train a series of adventures that might impress stay-at-home folks in Japan (and Taiwan), but not those seeking high-octane confrontations and bloodshed. The Japan Times said the film is “pretty to look at, mildly entertaining and reaffirms the essential niceness of Japanese folks.”



Ichi

In feudal Japan, a blind musician with lethal sword skills (Haruka Ayase from Oppai Volleyball and Happy Flight) sets out to find her blind masseuse father, encountering the usual bandits and deadly political intrigue. This is an update of the famed series centering on the blind Zatoichi character, who could be this forlorn young woman’s father. Critics admired the film’s visuals and noted its retention of genre conventions rather than a modern reworking of theme and character, notwithstanding the female lead.



Naoko

Another manga-based film from Japan, this one turns to the curious sport of relay marathons and the relationships among the members of one team. Naoko (Juri Ueno) is a manager for the team, but her ability to deal with the best of its runners is compromised by memories of a fatal accident some years before. Of more interest than the manga-based, baseball-themed Rookies: Graduation, which opened last month, if only because marathons have better scenery.



The Little Finger and the Forbidden Body

A mannered Japanese incest potboiler from 2005, this is being promoted as an earlier feature starring Hiroyuki Ikeuchi (Ip Man). Ikeuchi gets it on — and on — with his sister, only to later block the memory of the experience. But his line of work in a red light district doesn’t let his repressed past stay buried. Actor-director Kei Horie seems to have a thing for grim subject matter. Also known in English as Finger and Body and The Whole Body and the Little Finger — the mind boggles. The Baixue theater in Ximending is the best possible place for a movie like this.

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