When The Man kills his brother, gives black orphans heroin and floods the neighborhood with bad malt liquor, former CIA agent Black Dynamite takes on the bad guys and fights his way from the street to the Honky House.
Logar, the evil commander-in-chief of Planet G.O.R.A, kidnaps a carpet salesman named Arif, who inadvertently becomes a hero when he saves the planet by thwarting Logar’s diabolical schemes.
Movies with plots like these are shunned by most Taiwanese film festivals, but they take center stage at the 2009 Kaohsiung Film Festival (高雄電影節). Since it changed tack in 2007, the festival has made a name for itself as a hip annual showcase for genre cinema, B movies and manga-influenced flicks, although it continues its nine-year-old tradition of screening socially conscious movies on labor and human rights issues.
The main attraction at this year’s fest is the Hero/Antihero section, which features films that subvert the superhero tradition.
Team America: World Police, by the creators of South Park, is a hilarious parody of the “war on terror” with an all-marionette cast that’s reminiscent of the 1960s British television show Thunderbirds. With its story of a battle between the anti-terrorist force Team America and a terrorist organization led by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who is supported by his movie-star friends in Hollywood, Team America plays with cliches and stereotypes in Hollywood action movies and pokes fun at the idea of the US as the world’s policeman.
The genre-bending Stingray Sam is a sci-fi musical that centers on an ex con-turned-singer living on Mars who reunites with prison pal
The Quasar Kid for a mission to rescue a kidnapped girl.
Another sci-fi comedy, Turkish movie G.O.R.A. is a campy parody of such genre classics as Star Wars, The Matrix and The
Fifth Element.
The main event in the Kaohsiung Film Festival’s People Power section is The 10 Conditions of Love, a documentary about exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer. Plans to screen the film drew criticism from Beijing and representatives of Kaohsiung’s tourism industry, who expressed fear that Chinese tourists would be less inclined to visit the city if the film were shown. Earlier this year, the Chinese government pressured the Melbourne International Film Festival to not show the documentary. When Melbourne refused to cave in to its demands, Beijing withdrew five films from the festival and the festival’s Web site was hacked and content replaced with a Chinese flag and anti-Kadeer slogans.
Also showing in the People Power section is Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country. This powerful documentary is comprised largely of footage shot with hidden cameras by journalists from The Democratic Voice of Burma, who risked their lives to document the failed 2007 uprising led by Buddhist monks against Myanmar’s ruling junta.
Among the other highlights at this year’s Kaohsiung Film Festival:
* Black Dynamite, a flashy throwback to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s whose hero, played by Michael Jai White, likes to fight smack without his shirt on.
* Suck, a comedy about a group of aspiring rock stars who trade their souls for fame and fortune. The film features Malcolm McDowell as a vampire hunter who is afraid of the dark, with cameos by Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and Moby.
* A program of films by up-and-coming directors Lee Yoon-ki of South Korea and Yoshihiro Nakamura of Japan.
Lee has made a name for himself on the international film festival circuit in recent years with his subtle and delicate portraits of women in contemporary Korean society.
Nakamura is known for his whimsical, almost fairy-tale-like movies, such as Route 225, in which a 14-year-old girl and her little brother find themselves in a parallel universe where their home is almost the same but where their parents do not exist.
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