Boarding Gate (2007)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Sick Product of a Sick System

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

This is fine, better than I had expected. Madsen is good at the start and helps get things going but it is Asia Argento that really holds this together with a most compelling performance. The direction is a bit frenetic but gradually we learn to live with the rapidity and apparent random nature of things, helped or not helped, depending on your view by pretty inconsequential storyline. With a combination of a lack of solid narrative, fast editing and Asia Argento we come to 'go with the flow' on this one and thereby enjoyment is to be had. The switch to a Hong Kong setting for the second half is entirely appropriate but still everything looks much the same and moves along just as quickly. So, in summary, you might not always know what's going on but if you've half a yen for Ms Argento and like things tough and speedy, this is for you.

This is one of the great "Who gives a bleep!" movies of all time. Most of the film isn't really that bad, but it never gives you a reason to care what happens to any of characters or wonder how the story will turn out.Sandra (Asia Argento) used to be a prostitute in love with rich and screwed up investment banker Miles (Michael Madsen). They used to have depraved sex and Miles also used Sandra to have sex with other businessmen to get inside information from them. That so-called relationship ended and now Sandra works for Lester and Sue Wang (Carl Ng and Kelly Lin), helping manage their import/export business. Sandra also works for herself, smuggling drugs inside the Wang's shipments and selling those drugs with the help of her apparent friend Lisa (Joanne Preiss). After one of Sandra's drug deals goes bad, Lester inexplicably shows up to help her out, somebody ends up dead and Sandra flees to Singapore, where someone else ends up dead and people try to kill her until a blonde (Kim Gordon) playing the part of Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction shows up to solve all of Sandra's immediate problems.This is an excruciatingly boring movie. If you're not fidgeting in your seat, wishing for it to be over before it's even halfway done, you'd have to be either stoned out of your mind or dead. But Boarding Gate isn't boring because the acting is flat or the plot is lame or anything like that. Most of the dialog is fairly ridiculous and there's a silly twist in the middle, but a lot of Oliver Assayas' work is fairly decent. The story is okay and the movie looks fine. None of the actors embarrass themselves, or anything like that. However, nothing that happens in this movie to any of the characters matters at all, because you don't care if they succeed or fail, live or die.Sandra is the star of this story. She's the one we're supposed to identify with, the one we worry about when she's threatened or in danger. The movie, though, only defines her as a drug-dealing, former prostitute. We're given nothing else about Sandra and how she came to be this person. The film doesn't even seem to care if Sandra is good or bad. She's just the star and the audience is expected to care about her. I t's as though Assayas looked at Argento and was so blinded by what he saw, he thinks everyone else will be just as blind. I can see fine, though, and Argento's nothing special.That applies to the other characters in the film as well. Carl Ng and Kelly Lin try hard to pump some genuine emotion into Lester and Sue, but it's so unconnected to anything in the story that it just makes Lester and Sue seem weird and overexcited. Miles is, essentially, Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen. If you like Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen, you'll enjoy his time on screen. If you want anything more than Michael Madsen being Michael Madsen, you'll be greatly disappointed.There are three points where the movie tries to make us care about these people. Sandra and Miles have two unbelievably long and pointless scenes where they spout unmemorable and obviously contrived dialog at each other and Sandra and Sue have their own scene that's not quite as long but just as useless. I think the conversations are supposed to give us insight into these people but they really just dwell on a lot of the backstory to this movie and run over some exposition. These scenes tell us nothing about Sandra, Miles or Sue that isn't readily apparent from the moment we encounter them.Argento goes topless at one point and rubs her crotch at another. Those moments make you think Boarding Gate is going to be one of those exploitive, sex-and-guns, late-night-cable thrillers. That's all the sex in the movie, though, and there's not much more violence. It's like Assayas thought he could take the script for a crude and prurient melodrama and "class it up" enough to make it a serious drama. He couldn't, which leaves this movie in a weird limbo. If you could relate to these characters as real people, you might be interested in what happens to them. But since you can't relate to them, all you can focus on is how the story manages to be both pretentious and uneventful.

Two things are interesting about the film.The first and most discussed is the actress, Asia Argento. She and Beatrice Dalle are similar I think. They both have the quality of fearless commitment - like Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves" and never afterward. They both have fumbled around facial features. They both are known as sexy — only because of nudity and the roles.But more fundamental to me is that they both know things. I believe that an artist has to both have talent and be truly an interesting person; they have to know things we do not. Asia does. In fact, you can see it even in her first movie just as she is hitting puberty. This woman shows us a character that has qualities that this woman understands. Streep has talent but no knowledge. Asia has less talent but she matters. This is one of her best. Don't miss it. Don't miss how she breathes. The nudity and story is nothing compared the grace of her visible breathing.Here, she plays a woman who does what we all do: make compromises for companionship which if it has what we want we call love. The missing bits always catch up with us and with her the writer maps these pretty deftly into components of a thriller.The structure of that thriller is the second notable bit. Of all genres, the thriller is most plastic. Allowing many flows so long as tension and guns are involved.The story here sneaks up on you. Almost nothing is predictable. It starts slowly, and then bam. It goes off in an unexpected direction. The interesting narrative device here is that we follow her and discover things as she does. But she knows things, many things, that we do not. She does get surprised as we do, but not always so. At the end, she is allowed to write the future, for her lover at any rate.My guess is that if she had never gotten and displayed that labial tattoo, she would have been taken more seriously. And we would be better off cinematically.This is a good one. Angelic.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Asia Argento has never done a film (so far as I know, and this includes ones directed by her own father, Dario) where she fails to show all of her anatomy at some point. Sure enough, in the most boring opening dialogue scene ever, poor Madsen has her coming into his office and right there, reminding us that even though her hair is up, she can still stick her fingers in her crotch at any given second (which she does but in such a random "what? am I really seeing that?" kind of way). The DVD box, packaging, makes this look like a femme fatale film so you keep waiting to see her turn into a sleek and minimalist killer.. no such luck. She's verbose, hung up on some aging has been and even worse, has no credible skills in physical agility other than (surprise!) taking off ALL the clothes when any scene allows it. Her accented English would be cool if only she didn't try to make it sound so affected and try to talk like a 12 year old. How about this plot? Weak-minded but simultaneously nymphomaniacal woman is suddenly driven to kill while she already has another affair on the go and is running some cheap drug deal ... huh? what? does anyone have motivation in this movie to do anything other than buy a hamster? The screenplay seems to be oriented by letting everyone talk a lot about the same things over and over (I was expecting to see the worst acting on this appear as a producer who dumped money in it just to have some screen time) - there is nothing going on sub the obvious flaws of Asia's character that at any point in the movie delivers what the DVD cover promises. She's weak... but she knows how to kill. she flails A LOT. She flails naked, she flails half dressed, she even flails in a dead woman's clothing.. she is very floppy and unmotivated. In fact "Floppy" would have been a great name for this movie.. and a shot of Asia passed out looking angry on the cover would have been a better representation ... there are actually shots of her eating airplane food!!! What's that about? THe ending makes 0 sense - everyone is just annoyingly wishy washy in their intent and their execution of all objectives. The wife of Lester doesn't deliver any REAL vengeance (taking someone to bad karoeke IS life threatening but not really valid).. and Lester just floats around without really making much proclaimation of anything. Totally misleading key art... yeah, we know Asia lost the baby fat of her first born but really, a whole movie trying to pretend like that's interesting enough to drive a film about a passive-aggressive chick is not worth your while. See Point of No Return instead.