Scraps on Cinema

I can't help but recall Hirokazu Kore-eda's recent disappointment Broker  when watching Stonewalling , the latest feature drama from collaborators Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka. Though Stonewalling  is not a quirky, sentimental road movie, it is bounded to Broker  by the shared theme of illicit adoption. An independent Chinese production, there will be those who argue that the narrative of Huang and Otsuka's film is far too particular to the on-going consequences of the "one-child policy" of the People's Republic (abolished in 2015) to create such a flat juxtaposition between the films. While this may be true to a certain extent, and while Stonewalling  is certainly a very different film than Broker , there's no getting around how the timing of both films paints a common tableau of just one aspect of contemporary life in southeast Asia that transcends apparently sweeping distinctions of political history, systems, and policies. The reckoning that both Broker  ...

It's been some seventeen years since filmmaking buddies and Tennessee natives Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen made a movie. And if you've ever seen their preliminary debut, Five Across the Eyes , then you have a pretty good idea as to why there's been such a long downtime between projects. Shot with MiniDV cameras over nine nights in the sticks around their hometown, Five Across the Eyes  is really scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to regional exploitation. It's a grungy, vile mess miscalculated to make some sort of provocative splash rather than tell anything close to a compelling story, cynically riding on the coattails of a new millennium vogue in "torture porn" and New French Extreme while vainly aspiring to some kind of corporeal anti-art. There are plenty of trashy sub-movies like Five Across the Eyes  to go around; and like all cycles of exploitation, it would have been no surprise if it happened to be one of a million fly-by-night credits ...