Pencak Silat master Iko Yuwais faces a seemingly impossible task in THE RAID: REDEMPTION
THE RAID: REDEMPTION (SERBUAN MAUT) (Gareth Huw Evans, 2011)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, July 27, $12, 8:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.sonyclassics.com
The Raid: Redemption is a nonstop claustrophobic thrill ride through a fifteen-story apartment complex where danger lurks around every corner and behind nearly every door. The gated, heavily protected building is run by Tama (Ray Sahetapy), a well-connected drug lord who enjoys terrorizing and killing traitors and enemies. Early one morning Jaka (Joe Taslim) leads his elite special forces unit on a raid of the complex, ordered to get Tama and end his brutal reign. As Jaka’s team falls one by one, it is left to a determined young rookie, Rama (Iko Uwais), to complete the mission, which is not quite what it appears to be. Written, directed, and edited by Welsh-born Gareth Huw Evans, The Raid: Redemption is a furious, testosterone-heavy action flick filled with breathtaking scenes of ultraviolence countered by moments of intense, quiet drama where one wrong move will be a character’s last. Primarily shot with a handheld camera that puts the audience in the middle of the battle, the film uses a variety of weapons in the well-choreographed fight scenes, from machine guns and pistols to serrated knives and machetes, while focusing on the martial art of Pencak Silat. Uwais, a former truck driver and Silat champion who was discovered by Evans while the director was researching a documentary on the martial art — the two previously teamed up on 2009’s Merantau — is outstanding as Rama, a father-to-be who might have met his match in Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian), one of Tama’s chief operatives and a killer who prefers using his hands, fists, and feet to eliminate his opponents. (Uwais, Ruhian, and Evans collaborated on the action choreography.) Buoyed by a pulsating score by Joseph Trapanese and Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda and evoking elements of the first Die Hard, Assault on Precinct 13, and New Jack City, The Raid: Redemption is a pulse-pounding, wildly successful film that has kicked off a franchise, with two sequels in the works. (Here’s hoping the translator does a better job in the next two movies, taking a much-needed crash course in punctuation.) Even the credits are awesome, with dozens of characters listed as Hole Drop Attacker, Riot Van Shooter, Carrying Bowo Fighter, Machete Gang, AK47 Attacker, Panic Man, Tortured Man, and Junkie Guy. “I deal in blood and mayhem,” Evans, who has been based in Indonesia since 2007, states in the film’s production notes. Indeed he does. The Raid: Redemption is screening July 27 at 8:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s monthly Fist and Sword series, which continues August 18 with Te-Sheng Wei’s Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale and September 22 with Thanakorn Pongsuwan’s Fireball.
Martin Scorsese wears his cinematic heart on his sleeve in his first family-friendly film, Hugo. Based on Brian Selznick’s Caldecott-winning 2007 illustrated historical-fiction novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the movie follows the adventures of the title character, a homeless orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) who survives by his wits in a Paris train station in the early 1900s. He spends his days stealing small bits of food, winding the big clock, avoiding Inspector Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen), and trying to find parts for an automaton he is rebuilding, hoping it will have a message for him from his father (Jude Law). He soon makes his only friend, a girl named Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) who is being raised by her godparents, the bitter Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley) and his wife, Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory). When it turns out that Papa Georges is the one and only Georges Méliès, who made the world’s first science-fiction film, A Trip to the Moon, among hundreds of others, then was thought to have died in obscurity, all of his work destroyed, Hugo and Isabelle, along with the help of film historian René Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), are determined to resurrect Papa Georges and his reputation. Gorgeously shot by Robert Richardson and featuring marvelous period sets by Dante Ferretti, Hugo is beautiful to look at, the camera roaming through the immense train station and up the tall clock tower like in a Jules Verne story. Such side plots as the budding romances between a café owner (Frances de la Tour) and the newspaper seller (Richard Griffiths) and between Gustav and a shy flower girl (Emily Mortimer) feel forced, and the main narrative meanders its way into treacly territory as all the parts slowly come together. At its heart, Hugo is a movie about the love of movies, paying tribute to the early cinema of Méliès, Harold Lloyd, and others but it gets too stuck on the underlying theme of the preservation of old films, one of Scorsese’s driving forces. Still, Hugo is a visual treat, particularly in the first half, before things get a little too sticky (and slickly) sweet, even for a children’s film. Hugo is being shown on Pier 46 in Hudson River Park on July 27 as part of the free River Flicks for Kids series, which continues August 3 with Puss in Boots, August 10 with Rango, August 17 with Back to the Future, and August 24 with The Smurfs.
Hector Babenco’s gripping, heart-wrenching docudrama is set in São Paulo, where a group of young boys struggle to survive on the streets and in a reform school that is more like a prison. When four of them bust out, they get caught up in a dangerous life of drugs, prostitution, and guns. Marília Pêra won numerous international awards for her performance as a prostitute, but the film belongs to eleven-year-old Fernando Ramos da Silva, who plays the title character; you won’t be able to take your eyes off him, except to wipe away the tears. Unable to get his life together after the film, Fernando was later killed by police under suspicious circumstances when he was only nineteen. The Argentine-born Babenco went on to make such films as Kiss of the Spider Woman, Ironweed, and At Play in the Fields of the Lord, but Pixote is his masterpiece. Pixote is screening July 27 and 30 with Orlando Mesquita’s 2001 short, The Ball, as part of the MoMA film series “Unaccompanied Minors: Views of Youth in Films from the Collection,” being held in conjunction with the new exhibit “Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000.” Running through August 14, the festival includes such other compelling films about childhood as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun, Laslo Benedek’s Sons, Mothers, and a General, and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter.
