iffb 5 : DISTRICT B13

DISTRICT B13. It really is basically what I guessed from the blurbs - a Luc Bessonesque ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, only a bit more dynamic, and daylight... The French take features two Snake Pliskens (one a supercop, the other a vigilante), some really brutal martial arts action, dynamic urban chase scenes, and plotwise, some fair and decent plot points substitutions.

In the near future of 2010, crime-ridden sections of Paris have been walled off from the rest of the city. In a short time, schools, post offices, and finally the police have completely pulled out of the worst of these ghetto districts - B13. With law enforcment out of the picture, drug lord and gang kingpin Hata takes control. When he gets his hands on the military's latest in nuclear weapons development and inadvertantly triggers its 24-hour timer, the authorities have to send their best undercover agent, officer Damien, into B13 to retrieve and disarm the bomb, before it is sold to the highest bidder.

But Damien can't do it alone. With the bomb already ticking, he'll need the help of someone who knows Taha and B13, intimately... Enter, Leito, Taha's old do-gooder nemesis, an upstart vigilante and B13 native who's been captured by the police. Supercop and vigilante team up to beat Taha, each for their own reasons. But in the end, are they working against each other?


For an action film fan, especially one with a taste for the fight scenes in the likes of THE TRANSPORTERs (the first is better than the second, but the bus garage fight scene in 2 is pretty excellent), UNLEASHED/DANNY THE DOG, and espcially ONG BAK (if you haven't seen it, SEE IT!), this is a gorgeous showcase of hard-hitting, powerful martial arts. More of the Muay-Thai one-hit-and-he's-down variety than the "let's dance" lengthy, violent ballet style. Of course, there ARE a couple of "big boss"/"final fight" scenes that are more involved and choreographed, but just as fun and entertaining are a number of chase sequences thru the urban environment of B13, all parkour runner style. Do you remember the Nike ads from two or three years ago with the French kids leaping from rooftop to rooftop and bounding over stairwell bannisters through a story and a half of air? That's parkour running. I don't know the origins of it as an art or practice or school. It may or may not owe to several different martial arts. Personally, my bod, my joints, my cartilage, couldn't even dream of taking on the kind of beating involved, but I'm pretty good at sitting on me bum in a dark room staring at a screen, and a lot of fundamentals SEEM like nothing new to Jackie Chan fans. Think Jackie Chan hoisting himself thru a small window, feet first, to get into a train, or through a transom. Or, when he scales the wall of an apparent dead end by pushing himself up and off of the surface of walls that make a corner to basically leap over it. It's an amazing amount of athleticism and grace applied to the simple challenge of getting from point A to point B. Between A and B however, you'll find obstacles such as locked doors, walls, fences, and oncoming traffic, that these runners transform into pathways. Beautiful stuff.

To be honest, at sometime after midnight, after catching the shorts package and Mamet's EDMOND earlier in the evening, some of the scenes between fights and chases felt a little long, and too quiet, but I can't be sure that that's a very fair assessment. Nevertheless, I heard from one of the fest runners that B13 should be in theaters sometime in May, so if anyone wants a partner for their first viewing, I'll happily oblige and give it another go. You'll hafta endure my giggling and sympathetic chair dancing during the fight and chase sequences, tho.

At the end of the show, I gave it a 4 out of 5 on my ballot. ONG BAK or DRUNKEN MASTER 2 would have been a 5. =)

I DID give out my first 5 out of 5 at that screening, though. For the opening short film, MISSING PAGES (AMENDED VERSION). I was a bit skeptical because what stayed with me from the blurb descriptions from online and postcards/schedules at the theater was that it was "experimental," produced from still photography all kitbashed together on a computer. The little bit about the plot in the description I could remember discussed a father's loss of his child. While all of that info from the blurb is accurate about what I saw, it totally doesn't do the final experience justice. The only "real" motion in the short is computer generated, all of the characters appear on screen as digitally enhanced and manipulated stills, but they were the right stills, and set to the dialogue and pace very well. The experience was like watching a slick and stylish graphic novel with a simple tight story, but in the best possible way, not as a cop-out, failed attempt at something else. Now I'm doing a crappy job at describing it, but the simple story impressed me as much as the very artful and clever use of digital desktop tech, used to make these stills into a film/video experience that still read like a film/video experience, and a good one.

Sorry, I suspect sleep deprivation is addling my rambling generators...

Keep on keepin on~