2004
Lionsgate DVD
This is a film that I had lots of friends recommend to me. But it never played any theater near me. Then I forgot about it for years. When Movie Gallery was closing it is one of the films I got extremely cheap.
The film is made up of 3 short films. Each made by an Asian director from a different country.
We start off with Dumplings by Fruit Chan. Fruit Chan is a Hong Kong director. This is the first and so far only film I have seen from him. A still extremely pretty older lady is worried that her aging is causing her husband to lose interest in her. So she goes to this woman, Who is played by the always gorgeous Bai Ling. Bai makes these special dumplings. That are suppose to prevent aging and make you look young. But there is a nasty secret ingredient. I have a pretty strong stomach. But when I found out what the secret was and saw Bai preparing the dumplings my stomach did a few flips.
Up next is Cut by South Korean director Park Chan Wook. Again this is the first film I have seen by Park Chan Wook. It is about a film director who comes home to find out an extra from his films is holding his wife hostage. She is stuck in a very elaborate trap. To me at least this is the worst of the shorts. It isn't horrible. But it isn't amazing either.
The final short is Box by Takashi Miike. This one is very surreal and hard to explain. From what I gather there was two young girls. Who did acrobatic performances. Their manager who might also be their father shows favoritism to one of them. The other gets jealous and burns down the tent they perform in. I had seen some Miike stuff before this. And this doesn't have the same feel as the rest of his films. But I do really enjoy it.
The DVD has some decent extra features.Miike does a commentary on his short. Plus we get an extra DVD which has a feature length version of Dumplings. I need to sit down and watch that one day.
Three Extremes gets a B+.
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