Monday 30 January 2012

"War Whores"

FYC: "War Whores" - Yu Hyun-mok's moving account of the rise and fall of a Parisian sex worker during World War 1, and her repeatedly shattered dream of merely being abused and exploited for the sexual gratification of unpleasant men, like the rest of the prostitutes, instead of being literally and figuratively fucked with a sinister ulterior motive. All the while her little brother follows her through France, desperately trying to rescue her from the horrors of prositution and war.

First she is used to settle a dispute between her father and the town pimp, and once she has escaped his clutches and found a life of courtesanship in Paris, she finds herself enveloped in the intrigues of the French political scene whilst working at Le Chabanais. Then she is purchased by the invading German generals, upon whom, for patriotic reasons, she spies, aiding the British with intelligence on troop mvements.

She soon becomes aware of 'troop movements' of a different sort when the British renege on their deal of repatriating her and setting her up with a new life, and she is reduced to being a street walker near the front. There she contracts syphillis, but still manages to find employment as a walking disease-bag for British and American serviceman who wish to incapacitate themselves from action and be sent home on medical leave.

The film climaxes when she unwittingly sleeps with her brother for a pair of nylons, and out of shame they enter a suicide pact. As they kill themselves on the day of the liberation of France the radio plays La Marseillaise and the camera zooms in slowly on an American propaganda poster emblazoned with the slogan: “You wouldn’t use another fellow’s tooth-brush, so why use his whore?”. The ultimate date movie.

Monday 23 January 2012

"A Very Fritzl Family Christmas!"

FYC: "A Very Fritzl Family Christmas!" - A look at the lighter side of Austria's most famous and much-maligned father-figure. When Fritzl brings home some shiny toys and a giant Christmas tree for his incest-rape-family, it gets stuck in the door to his dungeon, and threatens to expose his lair to the outside world. Comedy shennanigans ensue when Papa Josef has to restrain his children/grand-children with psychological and physical intimidation to avoid exposure and arrest, but also learn the true meaning of Christmas in the process. A festive treat about, love, laughter and the importance of family, with a heart-warming ending in which the family get to stay together in their cosy undergound home for another seventeen years.

Saturday 7 January 2012

"Agatha Christie's 'Thirteen Shuriken' "

FYC: "Agatha Christie's 'Thirteen Shuriken' " - Genteel Edwardian detective drama with splashes of 'Kill Bill' in this adaptation of a classic, one of the few stories in which Poirot and Miss Marple both appear, and compete to solve the corpse-riddled riddle. Thirteen English industrialists, together with their friends and staff, gather in a country house in 1919 to decide who will get the lucrative contract for the mustard gas for Churchill's planned genocide against the Kurds. But one by one they are brutally murdered, each by a different, old-school Oriental method, leaving no clues as to the assailant's identity other than an engraved shuriken embedded in their foreheads. It appears that there is a Ninja with a grudge amongst the visitors to Blethien Manor, but who could it be, and can the two amateur sleuths stop him (or could it be... her?) before there is no one left to profit by helping murder the sand-niggers? Includes steamy sleuth-on-sleuth octogenarian sex and Miss Marple's famous Katana duel with the Ninja.