Film Picks: Inside Out 2, Hit Man and Sakuran
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Inside Out 2 features the voices of (from left) Tony Hale, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Amy Poehler and Liza Lapira.
PHOTO: THE WALT DISNEY CO
Inside Out 2 (PG)
97 minutes, now showing
4 stars
In this bouncy, often poignant, sequel to Inside Out (2015), Riley (voiced by Kensington Tallman) is now 13 and yearning to be accepted by a group of popular girls led by her idol, Valentina (American actress Lilimar), captain of the ice hockey team.
In her head, the old team of Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black) and others now has to share the console with new teenage emotions – among them Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adele Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).
In the new film, older viewers can continue to play the game of seeing Joy as a mental defence mechanism. She represents wilful ignorance or rose-tinted glasses, doing what she does best – throwing painful imagery down the memory hole.
Younger viewers can enjoy the adventures when the gang has to trek from the back of the mind to the front, along the way overcoming various mental blocks, each one represented by a clever pun or portmanteau playing on the idea of a geographical obstacle, as well as a mental construct.
If nothing else, one steps away from this movie fully aware of words borrowed from nature applied to abstract concepts of the mind.
Sakuran (R21)
111 minutes, ArtScience Cinema
Anna Tsuchiya in the period drama Sakuran (2007).
PHOTO: ASMIK ACE
Screened as part of ArtScience Cinema’s Goddess programme that spotlights women who break boundaries in the film industry, Sakuran (2007) is the debut feature of photographer-turned-director Mika Ninagawa.
The screenplay is based on a manga series of the same name about an 18th-century woman’s rise to prominence in a brothel.
Model-actress Anna Tsuchiya is Kiyoha, sold as a child to a house in the red-light district of Edo, known today as Tokyo. Despite being the black sheep of the establishment, her ambition and will to succeed never leave her.
The Guardian says that Ninagawa, an acclaimed photographer of fashion, brings an “iconoclastic and provocative sensibility” to the story of the courtesan. Her film, shot in “sugar-candy colour schemes”, highlights the geisha’s role as a prostitute, in contrast to other works which emphasise their skills as refined entertainers. Note the R21 rating.
ArtScience Museum’s exhibition Goddess: Brave. Bold. Beautiful. will display two original kimonos worn by Tsuchiya in the movie.
Where: ArtScience Cinema, Level 4 ArtScience Museum, 6 Bayfront Avenue str.sg/aG7i
MRT: Bayfront
When: June 15 to 30, various times
Admission: $13 for standard adult tickets
Info:
Hit Man (M18)
115 minutes, available on Netflix
4 stars
(From left) Adria Arjona and Glen Powell in Hit Man.
PHOTO: NETFLIX
The screwball neo-noir Hit Man by American director Richard Linklater is based on a true story, however much a professor with the hotness of Glen Powell stretches credibility.
Hollywood It Boy Powell plays a mild-mannered New Orleans philosophy professor who has a side hustle posing as a hit man in local police stings. Complications arise when he falls for a beauty (Adria Arjona) engaging him to off her controlling husband (Evan Holtzman).
Powell’s academic is Gary Johnson, and the names of his cats – Id and Ego – hint at the comedy’s mischievously played theme on the construct and mutability of identity.
Indie cinema godhead Linklater has been casting his leading man since Fast Food Nation (2006) and then in Everybody Wants Some!! (2016). This was long before everyone else caught on to Powell’s star power in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and romcom Anyone But You (2023).
The actor collaborated with Linklater on this screenplay. The entertaining meta-commentary on role-playing doubles as a showcase for his performative range in a lark that is altogether jaunty, twisty, sexy and cheerfully amoral.
