I had intended to finish my Olympic Games 2012 experience with a golden moments review but as the days goes by with a visit to family and to cricket at Nottingham, followed by what should be a fourth successive win in the County Championship I have decided to begin a catch up between now 17.45 August 22nd and September 7th when I return to London for a brief visit to watch a morning swimming event at the Paralympic games
I begin with some films and then some other sport and TV and the hopefully the Golden moments. 33 Postcards was an unexpected and unplanned film viewing joy as the first Australia-China co production directed by Pauline Chan. A Chinese girl in an orphanage has her education sponsored by an Australian who sends her the post cards over a ten year period. When the orphanage is invited to visit Australia and perform with its choir. The girl, now a naive sixteen year old helps train the choir as a conductor, goes on the trip and takes the opportunity to try and locate her sponsor to express her thanks.
She finds that the sponsor is an inmate of a correctional facility have killed a man who was in a building which he set fire with his brother for the insurance on behalf of a local criminal enterprise. With limited English the girl quickly finds herself involved with the gang through the son of a garage owner who she meets collecting loan shark money for the one of the criminal fraternity who is also an inmate in the same institution as her sponsor.
This lad is basically decent despite involvement in aspects of the criminal life of his father, helping to transform stolen cars into new identities as well as the loan sharking collections. He wants a different life going to college to learn to become a cook and first helps the girl to visit the sponsor in prison and then to remain in Australia while she attempts to find a way to help the man who she regards as a father figure as his parole is due. The sponsor at first rejects the girl never imagining that she would find a way to visit Australia and then he finds that she is a way of helping him to come to terms with the crime he committed and assuage the overwhelming sense of guilt. He is helped by the prison counsellor who is impressed that for a decade he had used funds to sponsor the girl and is prepared to arrange for him to help her stay in Australia through placement with foster parents. The authorities want him to provide evidence the crime boss within prison who arranges to beat up and if necessary kill anyway who threatens or fails to provide the money which he requires.
The girl decides to stay in Australian after arrangements are made for her to return to China prematurely because of her attempt to contact her sponsor. She crashes on the sofa of the son of the garage owner and helps to get the stolen cars ready for onward sale without knowing they are stolen. The brother of the sponsor is indebted because he was also a party to the original building burning but was not revealed by the brother who also kept quite about those who had paid him to undertake the crime. The brother is forced to undertake a car theft to help fund his brothers plan to help the girl and the son of the garage owner volunteers to also participate as the way of getting his father to agree to pay for him to go to college. The father also involved the girl as a means of trying to keep control of his son.
The sponsor is given parole and in a panic agrees to give evidence against the prison gang boss in order to obtain immediate release when he hears the girl has become unwittingly involved with the crime gang outside. In the event he and all the parties are arrested and he finds himself back in prison without the promised protection and is stabbed within an inch of his life. He survives and the parole is reinstated when the truth of the situation emerges. The girl decides to return to China and work for the orphanage but having established a more meaningful relationship with the man she regards as her father and she as his daughter. He is able to watch her conduct the choir before returning home with the promise to visit her in China. The film has the accustomed Australian reality edginess with a positive slant on contemporary China which will enable the showing of the film in the mainland. It engaged in part because of its unique subject and strength of the acting.
Columbiana
is a girl power action adventure also covering the development of a young woman from childhood into life as an adult but the contrast between the character in 33 Postcards and the girl Catelya could not be greater. She is present when her parents are executed on behalf of a Columbian Drug Baron because they had wanted out and created an information disk having made contact with the USA authorities. She has already been trained to move with amazing dexterity and after stabbing in the hand the man sent to find the info she escapes the gang, gets to the embassy and into the USA where she makes her way to her mother’s family, and who for some inexplicable reason are unknown to the USA authorities, despite the family connection as well as the uncle’s involvement in crime.
The girl has only revenge in mind but is persuaded to get a good education as well as developing martial art skills. We meet her again when she has become a skilled and sophisticated assassin undertaking assignments arranged by her uncle. The problem from the position of her uncle and grandmother is that she has commenced to freelance in a systematic killing of USA drug lord connections, decorating their bodies with the shape of an orchid bearing her name and which is left as a calling card to gain the attention of the drug lord and his henchman she has vowed to kill.
It quickly emerges that the Drug Lord worked for the CIA and now lives under their protection in New Orleans. They attempt to prevent FBI agent James Ross from the info after he works out the connection between 22 killings over the previous four years. He assumes the killer is a male when a criminal is taken to a police station between prisons. He orders a careful study of everyone at the station on the day and this leads to a partial photo of the girl taken at the station as a drunk and released on bail the following morning but where all the information she provided proved false.
Her uncle becomes aware of what is happening when the FBI man releases information about the drawing on the bodies of the particular orchid. And begs her stop fearing for the life of his mother. There are two developments which lead to the finale. First the FBI is able to identify the girl through a series of increasingly unconvincing events. The girl has established a comes and go sexual relationship with an artist without revealing anything of her past and present life. He has become increasingly attached to her and contemplates asking her to marry him, taking a camera photo while she sleeps. He then shows the photo to a friend admitting his passion for her and lack of info. The friend is able to get hold of the phone and sends a copy of the photo to a police woman contact that uses it to search the national database. This alerts the FBI who locates the artist lover and also the home of the girl. She realises her cover has been blown and makes yet another daring and dramatic escape.
The attempt to bring into the open of the Drug Lord also has the undesired effect of his chief assistant torturing and killing her grand mother and uncle in the effort to find her whereabouts. She then captures the FBI man and threatens his family as a means of learning the location of the Drug Lord. The FBI man visits the CIA and amazingly the girl is in a position with a high velocity rifle to force the CIA man to reveal the location of the Drug Lord in exchanging for his life. There are two spectacular and horrific death finale moments. One in which she kills a criminal feeding him to the sharks he keeps as pets and the other when after a prolonged martial arts fight she stabs the chief assistant with the barrel of a gun in the neck and in the second when after killing about a score of his men it appears the Drug Lord has escaped in his large four wheel vehicle and he tells her he will find and kill her, she discloses that her plan is still in being and she orders the two killer dogs she has trained and placed in the vehicle to eat. She goes off to start a new life and with the artist also released without charge there is the prospect of the two getting together again. The film has been vigorously criticised, including for it’s stereotyping of Columbian culture and is unlikely to sequel given the publicised loss.
Seeking Justice
is also about Revenge, Nicolas Cage is a good English Teacher and husband when his wife on her way home from a concert where she is a musician in the orchestra is attacked in her car and raped. A colleague at work advises that the attacker will be found and brought to justice. Cage is then approached by a stranger who says he is part of an organisation which meters justice to the victims when the system fails. The attacker is known, has raped before and was paroled only weeks before the attack on the wife of Cage. The man offers to arrange justice without his wife having to go through the event again during a trial. The price will be that Cage undertakes a no questions favour later.
Cage agrees and is sent a photo of man when he is killed together the medallion the man had taken from the neck of the wife. The code trigger is used “the hungry rabbit jumps.”
Six months later Cage is asked to follow a woman and her two children to a zoo and report in when she contacts a man. Cage optimistically agrees thinking this is his favour only to find that he is told to follow the man and push him off a walkway to look as an accidental death. He is not prepared to do this and engages the man who he is told is a sex offender. The man is in a state and attacks Cage and in the struggle the man falls despite the attempt of Cage to save him.
Cage is then arrested and taken to a police station where officers are convinced they have the killer of an investigative journalist, the man falling from the walkway. The station Lieutenant insists on interviewing Cage and asks him to complete the sentence “The hungry white rabbit”, and the reply “jumps” and this enables him to leave the station a free man much to horror of the investigating detectives. When he finds that the man who dies is a journalist he attends the memorial services and engages with the man’s colleagues and learns he was investigating a vigilante organisation but that his file on the work has gone missing.
Cage then finds himself under attack from someone who he thwarts and is then killed by a truck as he runs off after disclosing that he was also the subject of vigilante action who required a favour in terms of killing Cage. Cage also goes in search of the work records and discovers a DVD. Meanwhile his wife discovers the medallion in the glove compartment of his car, demands to know what has happened and when he admits the sequence of events she admits she would have behaved in the same way.
In order to make contact with the secret organisation he approaches his colleague at work who first suggested the possibility of the vigilante group and then he attempts to trade the DVD for a security tape which reveals that he did not kill the journalist. This leads to his wife being kidnapped and held hostage in effort to get the tape and also silence the couple. Fortunately with help of the colleagues who loses his life, it is possible for his wife to kill their pursuer and at this point the Lieutenant arrives and tells them to go, saying that from his perspective it looks as if the two men killed each other. Cage is in the clear because he now has the evidence that he did not kill the journalist and decides to provide the evidence of conspiracy disk to someone as the New Orleans Post who I assume is the editor or newsroom chief. He thanks Cage adding The Hungry rabbit jumps revealing that he too is part of the vigilante organisation.
The final film of this first August round up is Behind Enemy Lines and which had a predictable outcome and familiar feel. The film set in Bosnia in 1995 when a USA carrier plane is assigned a Christmas holiday recognisance mission during the ceasefire and a demilitarised zone. The pilot and navigator are ordered on the otherwise routine mission because of their rowdy and anti authority behaviour and because one of the officers has requested to leave the service and become a commercial pilot. When they spot unusual and suspicious activity in the no fly zone they decide to investigate filming with a view to study on return but find themselves shot down on the orders of the local Serbian commander who has been secretly exterminating Muslims using mass graves which the plane has unknowingly filmed.
Because of the truce the Rear Admiral Commanding officer, Gene Hackman is ordered not to use naval helicopters to collect the downed officers and orders them to make their way to safety despite information that they are being hunted by armed forces. One of the officers witnesses the execution of the other who pretended he was the only flier. The reaction of the second officer, albeit at a distance, is sufficient to alert the Serbians who in addition to the regular forces appoint the man who executed the flier to find and execute the other. The second part of the films involves the successful attempt to evade capture which includes hiding himself among bodies in one of the open genocide burial sites. Although prevented from going to rescue the officer Hackman uses satellite surveillance to track the movements and to attempt to persuade the authorities to give permission. Instead of moving to safety the flier decides to return to the crashed aircraft site to retrieve the recordings from the camera located in one of the ejector seats. Hackman also decides to risk his command by taking three helicopters with volunteers to retrieve his man and the film.
Although he has the recordings the officers remains on the scene to await the arrival of the man who executed his navigator and kills him after a hand to hand combat. The Film advises the audience that the Rear Admiral lost his command and retired rather than accept a desk job in Washington. The pilot who had decided to resign his commission elects to remain in the force. Yjis of course is all fiction.
The film has some basis in reality as a USAF Captain Scott Brady was shot down in Bosnia on 2 June 1995 and survived for six days before being extracted (rescued). He commenced legal action because the film was made without his permission and because of the way his character is portrayed. The producers demonstrated that the film was fictional and bore no resemblance to the experience of O’Grady who did not interact with civilians, entered populated areas or flew a plane of the same make. The film was primarily concerned with bringing to attention once more the genocide which the Serbians committed. Two sequels have been made which went straight to DVD and which may appear on TV in due course.
No comments:
Post a Comment