Adriatico My Love

Wine, olives, fish and olive oil, Adriatico My Love is a charming romantic culinary comedy and sentimental journey back to a quaint Mediterranean village along the same lines as Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) and Mamma Mia! (2008). But don’t expect a slick Hollywood production like those films. This long in the making Canadian film was made on a shoestring budget using a mix of professional and non-professional actors.

Have digital camera, will travel. A Toronto based cooking show host and single mother Alex (Valerie Buhagiar), whose career is in jeopardy when her producers threaten to pull the plug after the show’s ratings drop, decides that now is the time to take the show to a whole new level. 

Filmed in the ancient historical town of Stari Grad, which literally means ‘Old Town’ and is one of the oldest in Europe, located on the island of Hvar, Croatia, this story will appeal to many Canadians who have roots in Europe and eventually get the irresistible urge to return to the homeland.  

Taking her show on the road, Alex decides to bring along her reluctant daughter Lucy (Dorian Kolinas) and seek out the authentic local cuisine of this small Adriatic settlement where she once had a romantic fling as a young teenager.

The film has a home video quality that’s a little rough around the edges, especially in the beginning stages, but is totally in keeping with the documentarian feel of a TV hostess who brings a video camera on a European trip, not knowing what to expect. 

After arriving at a picturesque rundown village nestled in the seaside shores of the Adriatic Sea, troubled daughter Lucy is ready to return home when their accommodations turn out to be an uninhabitable ruin. However, they quickly warm to the endearing village characters as they acclimatize to their new rustic surroundings.

Director Nikola Curcin allows this gentle story to unfold organically and gives the multicultural cast freedom to experiment and improvise. The cooking scenes, mixed with stunning natural village scenery and accompanied by traditional music, have a fun travelogue quality that keeps the tone light and enjoyable to watch.

Relying on the hospitable locals to put them up in a temporary lodging, mother and daughter begin filming footage for the show, and with the help of some citizens, the two foreign women eventually start discovering the charming local flavors while capturing townsfolk in their natural surroundings as they cook customary dishes. 

This type of film is not easy to make on such a tight sparse budget, but the makers of this film have somehow managed to pull it off quite well under the less than ideal circumstances.

While Alex secretly searches the island for someone from her past, she hides a family secret from her daughter, who makes some romantic connections of her own. But as in real life, some of the mysteries and relationships in the film are not fully explained and left to the audience’s imagination. 

One of the major attractions of this film is the allure of the breathtaking island locations, which gives one a real sense of having been to a unique magical place. Despite the films unpolished homemade look, its heart is in the right place and in the end, our time with the characters pays off as we see them genuinely bond and grow, and become part of an intimate isolated community.

JP

Pacific Rim

No, this is not a new Transformers sequel. But it does feature loud titanic smackdowns, in the kaiju tradition, between mammoth monsters and giant battle robots, in this overwrought, audacious new Sci-fi fantasy epic Pacific Rim. It’s an affectionate tribute to Japan’s epic monster action films and more recent alien invasion and superhero trends.

Can Earth’s cities survive a barrage of attacks by gargantuan plasma-spitting creatures emerging from a fissure in the ocean floor? After earth's nuclear arsenals are no longer an option during the war against the enormous enemies, an unusual group of soldiers and scientists known as The Pan-Pacific Defense Corps is called upon to develop giant military robots to destroy them. 

Inspired by del Toro’s childhood love of Japanese Kaiju films, featuring mega monsters like Godzilla, Mothra, Gamera, Rodan, Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla, the story is a loving amalgam of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s Godzilla (1998) and Independence Day (1996) with elements from Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997), James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), Tony Scott’s Top Gun (1986) and del Toro’s own Hellboy films.

Set in the near future, when giant robotic suits of armor, known as Jaegers, fail to stop the extra-terrestrial creatures from wreaking havoc on earth’s cities, they’re disbanded in favor of huge anti-kaiju barriers built around heavily populated cities like Hong Kong. But the walls are no defense against the powerful skyscraper sized terrors from beyond and soon the Jaeger program is brought back.

Following in the footsteps of George Lucas and James Cameron, Guillermo del Toro, who directed the Hellboy films and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), has now created his own original epic sci-fi fantasy franchise for the 12 year old in all of us. Although it has the ambitious spectacle of Star Wars (1977) and Avatar, unlike those beloved films, Pacific Rim doesn’t feel as polished story wise, but has the potential to be a great franchise.

Resurrected with funding by a colorful black-market kingpin, Hannibal Chau, played with hilarious comic relish by Ron Pearlman (Hellboy himself), the new Pan-Pacific Defense program of hotshot Jaeger pilots now has a more steampunkish retro riveted, heavy metal look with an international variety of unique armored robot defenders. 

Visually, we get a chaotic visceral mix of heroic battle scenes between a variety of unnatural colossal creatures and heavily armored robots, the Jaeger pilots manipulating the robots from inside its head, and the military base of strategists monitoring the battle from the ground. As in Star Wars, instead of The Force, here we get The Drift; a kind of neural connection between the two Jaeger pilots when operating their robotic suit.

The movie is full of derivative characters such as the ragtag group of Jaeger pilots who are more like macho WWE wrestlers, as it takes physical and mental stamina to operate the robots, and a comic duo of bickering scientists who seem to be modeled after R2-D2 and C-3PO. Some of the better performances come from Idris Elba, who was recently seen in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), and the Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi, who is best known to western audiences for her breakout role in Babel (2006).

This is purely a popcorn film that will appeal to young fan boys and it’s definitely fun to watch the mega mayhem on the big screen. The special effects by Lucasfilm’s ILM are breathtakingly spectacular. If there was ever a film that takes full advantage of the IMAX and 3D format, this is it.

Pacific Rim is dedicated to the late stop-motion effects legend Ray Harryhausen and Ishirô Honda, the Japanese director of many of the original Godzilla films.

Overall it’s a fun blend of sci-fi, action and creature feature disaster tropes, which is what Guillermo del Toro is so good at and where his passion lies. 

JP

In the Mood for Love

Not your average love story, this is romance Hong Kong style. During a hot humid summer in 1962, the bustling Shanghainese community provides a sensuous grungy backdrop to one of the most unusual love stories ever told by one of cinemas most interesting directors.

Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), a melancholic, nostalgic movie that is more about mood than love, follows the tentative encounters between two well dressed, married office workers living in shabby surroundings. 

The story follows a young journalist (Tony Leung) and a secretary (Maggie Cheung) who both moved into rooms next to each other on the same day in a rundown apartment building. Dressed in the latest chic, while spending much of the time awaiting the return of their spouses, who are frequently away on business, they eventually come to the conclusion that their spouses may be having an affair. 

Filmed mostly in dark narrow alleyways, stairwells and claustrophobic corridors of Bangkok, during the sweltering summer heat, and using a seductive color palate of deep reds, jade greens and slick blacks, the sensual steamy imagery is mesmerizing with its contrasting textures.

Lonely and bored, the fashion conscious neighbors find themselves coming together for casual dinners and conversation as they relate the possible infidelity they each suspect is occurring. While comparing notes they recognize their spouses’ cover stories and some gift items they have in common, and soon make a surprising discovery.  

In slow motion sequences with soft latin Nat King Cole musical refrains playing in the background, there’s a sense of longing and loneliness of people dreaming of an intimate connection in a rainy nocturnal underworld. They seem to be locked in a dance of regret, suggested with subtle non-verbal body gestures and expressions.

When they realize the unfortunate connection they have in common, they try to understand how it happened by roll playing the possible circumstances that may have led to the current situation and how they will confront their spouses about their extra marital activities. 

The overwhelming experience you get while watching this film is one of total immersion into a cloistered environment. We are shown vignettes of a hidden world of tight spaces and smoke filled alleys and noddle shops where people pass each other anonymously.  

When they decide to collaborate on writing a martial-arts serial, which they both enjoy reading, and secretly rendezvous away from their gossipy landladies; they form an unexpected close bond of friendship. The platonic affair is almost like a forbidden act of pleasure in an oppressive Orwellian style environment.

In a world where infidelity seems commonplace, this couple resists the urge, stopping just short of being unfaithful. Even though they’re probably more justified than most, they are unable to bring themselves down, morally, to that level.

The pleasure of watching this film is not so much in the story but more in the visual style, the ambience, the 50s set design and decoration, the romantic soundtrack and the photogenic actors. It takes several viewings and careful observations to fully capture the subtle nuances. It’s very much an art-house film with a capital A. 

JP