Lee Kang-do’s (Lee Jung-jin) lonely life takes quite a turn in Kim Ki-duk’s Golden Lion–winning PIETÀ
PIETA (Kim Ki-duk, 2013)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, May 17
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
www.drafthousefilms.com
South Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk’s eighteenth film, Pietà, is not exactly the biblical story of Jesus and Mary. Instead, it’s a challenging, difficult psychological thriller that delves into the relationships between mothers and sons, including the Madonna-whore aspects. Lee Jung-jin stars as Lee Kang-do, a lonely young man who works for a usurer in the slums of Cheonggyecheon who charges local businessmen one-thousand-percent interest on three-thousand-dollar loans. The borrowers are forced to take out insurance policies understanding that if they default on the payments, Lee will maim them, with the resultant claim covering what they owe. In the first half of the movie, Lee makes his way through a series of men who have failed to meet their financial obligations, so he hurts them badly, often in front of their wives or mothers, doing so without guilt or any sign of compassion. A strange woman (Cho Min-soo) starts following him around, ultimately identifying herself as the mother who gave him up for adoption when he was born. Initially, Lee just wants her to go away, but after making her do something unconscionable — and very hard for viewers to watch — in order to prove who she is, they start developing an unusual parent-child relationship, and he begins to reconsider his soulless existence. But this being a Kim Ki-duk film, things don’t necessarily end well for all concerned. Written, directed, and edited by Kim (Bad Guy; Time; Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring), Pietà, winner of the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, is an intense cinematic experience that examines truth, justice, family, responsibility, redemption, and revenge as only Kim can.
A lot of documentaries wear their hearts on their sleeves, pushing a specific agenda, but as far as agenda go, A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet has a pretty good one. Directed by Mark Kitchell (Berkeley in the Sixties), the film serves not only as a history of the environmental movement around the world but also demonstrates how one person can indeed make a difference. But the hundred-minute documentary does itself no favors by using several narrators who are certain to infuriate conservative Republicans and naysayers, ensuring that the film is most likely going to preach only to the converted and not spread its vital message to a more mainstream audience. A Fierce Green Fire is divided into five thematic sections, narrated by Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende, and Meryl Streep, respectively. Using archival footage and new interviews, Kitchell examines David Brower and the Sierra Club’s fight to prevent a dam project in the Grand Canyon; Lois Gibbs’s struggle to prove the alarming health problems at Love Canal; Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd, and Greenpeace’s mission to save the whales; Chico Mendes’s bravery trying to protect the Amazon rainforest; and the continuing controversy over climate change as seen through the work of such activist organizations as Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest. Inspired by Philip Shabecoff’s 1993 book, the film features such talking heads as Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand, Earth Day organizer Doug Scott, NRDC founder John Adams, former Sierra Club leader Carl Pope, environmental justice advocate Robert Bullard, Greenpeace cofounder Rex Weyler, WWF conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy, and legendary naturalist Bill McKibben in addition to Gibbs, Hawken, and Watson. While it’s fascinating to learn that the environmental movement really took off once NASA broadcast images of the earth taken from space, revealing the beautiful fragility of the planet, much of the documentary is told in a fairly stagnant manner, more like an expanded news report than a theatrical film. Still, it shares some intriguing insights and, in celebrating a group of individuals from around the world who fought the power (and sometimes even won), goes a long way in showing that every little step matters. A Fierce Green Fire: is screening May 12 & 19 at 8:00 as part of the ongoing Symphony Space series Thalia Docs.
Billed as a horror-comedy, The Happy House is, unfortunately, neither scary nor funny. The debut feature by Brooklyn-based writer-director D. W. Young (A Hole in the Fence) follows a young couple trying to inject something positive into their rocky marriage. Joe (Khan Baykal) hopes that a weekend at an isolated country B&B will bring them closer together, but Wendy (Aya Cash) hates the idea, repeatedly expressing her hatred for those kinds of places. Weirdness ensues upon their arrival at the Happy House, where the weird owner, Hildie (Marceline Hugot), gives them a bizarre set of rules and bakes amazing blueberry muffins that contain an extremely secret ingredient; her weird oaf of a son, Skip (Mike Houston), seems to go everywhere carrying an ax he can’t wait to put to use; and fellow guest and Swedish lepidopterist Hverven (Oliver Henzler) is just downright weird and creepy. When Hverven disappears after getting strike three for breaking Hildie’s rules, Wendy wants to get the hell out of there, as the last time she saw the butterfly man he was being followed into the woods by an ax-carrying Skip. But soon Deputy Marvin (Curtis Shumaker) shows up to tell everyone that an escaped serial killer (Charles Borland) is on the loose and they should all stay locked up inside, which of course turns out to be a very bad idea. The lone saving grace of The Happy House is Cash’s performance, which deserves to be in a better film. Shot in a real B&B on a very low budget, the eighty-minute flick otherwise features bland acting, and Young’s attempts to play with genre conventions fail time and times again, particularly in long scenes in near-total darkness that make you wonder whether they were trying to keep the electricity bill down. The Happy House is about one weekend getaway that is not worth leaving home for. The film opens May 3 at Cinema Village, with Young and various cast members participating in Q&As after the 7:00 shows on Friday and Saturday.
