Hong Kong Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

SDAFF ’21: Time

November 10, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, San Diego Asian Film Festival

殺出個黃昏
***/****
starring Chung Suet-ying, Lam Suet, Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung
screenplay by Ho Ching-yi, Lam Ka-tung
directed by Ricky Ko

by Walter Chaw Ricky Ko’s Time is perched a little uneasily between broad slapstick and heartfelt melodrama, and while arguably these are the two modes that define Charlie Chaplin’s shtick, the delicateness of that balance is one explanation for why there’s pretty much only the one Charlie Chaplin. Its Chinese title meaning something like “take a hit out on twilight,” Ko’s flick opens with some throwback Hong Kong action as a trio of hired killers show their stuff in colourful, comic-book-interstitial-aided, ’70s-era vignettes: the master of the Karambit Knife, the master of the barbed chain-whip, the portly getaway driver/comic relief–roles each played at some point in their prolific careers by Hong Kong legends Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo, and Lam Suet, reprised here after a fashion as the film flashes forward to catch up with them well into their dotage. Chau (Tse) uses his knife skills now to slowly, very slowly, slice noodles into broth at a hole-in-the-wall cafe; Fung (Bo-Bo) fronts a lounge act at a geriatric disco; and Chung (Lam) whiles away his hours in the company of an in-call prostitute he hopes one day to marry. Fung’s the only one of them, really, who isn’t all but waiting to die. When Chau gets replaced by a noodle-making robot, Fung offers him a job–a hit, in fact, a last call to glory that Chau answers by practicing his knifing on a log. He’s still got it: slowed considerably, but not squeamish about murder for hire. Turns out, his target is an old woman who just wants to get it over with.

TIFF ’21: Wrap-up

October 6, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Brazil, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Iran, Mexico, Music, Sweden, Thriller, TIFF, UK

by Bill Chambers I’ve been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn’t expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I’m fully vaccinated, I wasn’t about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

Mulan (2020)

September 5, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, Family, Hong Kong, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Yifei Liu, Donnie Yen, Jason Scott Lee, Jet Li
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Lauren Hynek & Elizabeth Martin
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw You can become an expert in the folk history of Mulan if you do a general Google search. Sufficed to say the story of Mulan is an important one for my people, and when I say “my people,” I mean my parents’ culture, to which I am connected despite a lifetime trying to disentangle myself from it. I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness decades ago and found in it the truest expression for me of…strangeness? Uncanniness? The alienation I’ve felt my entire life? I’m not accepted, I have come to accept, by the only culture (American) I have ever known, and my parents’ culture despises me, and so here I am, an outcast caste without safe harbour. Being Asian-American for me has meant nursing an unquenchable yearning to be something else, and a wish never honoured to be mistaken for wholly acceptable. In my attempts to return to my heritage over the past decade, I’ve found myself discouraged by this chasm I’ve dug in my heart. I don’t know if there’s enough soil left in the world to make it whole again.

TIFF ’18: Transit + Shadow

September 11, 20182018, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Romance, TIFF

TRANSIT
*½/****
starring Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien Batman
screenplay by Christian Petzold, based on the novel by Anna Seghers
directed by Christian Petzold

Ying
**/****
starring Deng Chao, Sun Li, Zheng Kai, Wang Qianyuan
screenplay by Li Wei & Zhang Yimou
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Bill Chambers If Christian Petzold's previous film, Phoenix, felt like a joke reverse-engineered with the slightest of pretexts to get us to a killer payoff, Transit feels more like his version of "The Aristocrats!", a shaggy-dog story intoxicated with its own brutal rambling–here almost literalized by third-person narration from a bartender (Matthias Brandt), who paraphrases conversations he had with our hero that are comically steeped in minutiae–on its way to a glib punchline. In Paris during the Occupation, Georg (Franz Rogowski, a downmarket Joaquin Phoenix) is entrusted with delivering two pieces of mail to a renowned novelist squirrelled away in a hotel: a letter from the man's estranged wife, and papers that will help him escape to freedom. The writer, alas, is but a stain when Georg gets there, and soon after he agrees to smuggle a dying man (Grégoire Monsaingeon) into Marseilles, where he can kill two birds with one stone by taking care of the author's unfinished business. Transit generates a moment of real frisson when Georg hops off the train in Marseilles: everything is modern, or at least postwar, including the melting-pot citizenry. I'm sure there's a definitive answer as to whether this is WWII as modern-dress Shakespeare, but for the rest of the movie, whenever something as benign as a contemporary bus advertisement appears, the film briefly and instantly becomes a "Man in the High Castle"-esque work of speculative fiction that curdles the blood, given how frighteningly close we are to resurrecting Hitler with the rise of nationalism on the world stage. One might ask why the characters are still dealing with "letters of transit" like they're in Casablanca (i.e., where are the computers?), but I took that as commentary on the dinosaur ideals of fascism itself. If fascism does one thing well, it's "rolling back" progress, currently the Republican party's favourite pastime.

TIFF ’17: Man Hunt + Happy End

September 18, 20172017, Austria, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Directors: John Woo, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hong Kong, TIFF

ManHunt
**/****
starring Zhang Hanyu, Masaharu Fukuyama, Qi Wei, Ha Jiwon
screenplay by Nip Wan Fung, Gordon Chan, James Yuen, Itaru Era, Ku Zoi Lam, Maria Wong, Sophia Yeh, based on the novel Kimiyo funnu no kawa wo watare by Juko Nishimura
directed by John Woo

HAPPY END
**/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Mathieu Kassovitz, Toby Jones
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Bill Chambers About five seconds into John Woo’s Man Hunt (no relation to that Fritz Lang movie with George Sanders in a cave), there’s a freeze-frame. Followed shortly by another. It’s glorious. Digital filmmaking has no doubt made it easier for Woo to be himself, as has being back in Asia: Hollywood never did warm to his Peckinpah flourishes, nor his melodramatic flair. But something is off in Man Hunt, which finds Woo returning, a touch desperately, to the Heroic Bloodshed genre in the form of a gloss on The Fugitive. (Officially, it’s a remake of a Ken Takakura vehicle variously known as Manhunt and Hot Pursuit.) Chinese Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu) is a hotshot lawyer for a pharmaceutical company that frames him for the murder of an alleged lover (Tao Okamoto, bestowing her iconic look on a role that doesn’t thank her in return) to protect its secrets; Japanese Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) is the hotshot Inspector sent after Du when he escapes custody. Du repeatedly eludes Yamura’s clutches, but over the course of the chase they build a rapport that transcends lawful and cultural barriers and, à la Hard-Boiled, unite against a common enemy, corrupt CEO Yoshihiro Sakai (Jun Kunimura). I should mention the two female super-assassins hot on Du’s trail, since Woo’s daughter Angeles plays one of them. For better or worse, this is personal filmmaking.

Ghost in the Shell (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 24, 20172017, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, China, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mystery, New Zealand, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Scarlett Johansson, ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic “The Ghost in the Shell” by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii’s seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won’t have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country’s post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it’s basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It’s puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn’t know what to do with the images it’s appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there’s something worth excavating here.

In the Mood for Love (2000) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 13, 2012****/****, 2000s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Hong Kong, Romance, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk
written and directed by Wong Kar-wai

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw The middle film in a loose trilogy by
Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-wai (the others are Days of Being Wild and 2046), In the Mood for Love is a love-drunk ode to the confusion,
the intoxication, the magic, and the tragedy of being in love. It speaks in
terms proximate and eternal, presenting lovers cast in various roles across
years and alien geographies, placing some objects in the position of totem and
memento and others in historical dustbins to be abandoned, forgotten. It links
the act of watching a film to the act of seduction (Days of Being Wild
might be even better at this), and there's a
strong sense in In the Mood for Love that Wong is playing the artifactor of both sign and
signifier: He's doing the T.S. Eliot two-step of authoring Prufrock while simultaneously providing the distance to criticize it.

Contagion (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

January 12, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law
screenplay by Scott Z. Burns
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Less smug (if only be a few degrees) than Steven Soderbergh's other starfucker balls, Contagion surprises with its consistent serious-mindedness, even as it finally disappoints by contenting itself to be a cautionary tale rather than, in a year of world-busters, an end-of-times tale. Even Fail Safe and the inch of dust settled on it has Hank Fonda levelling NYC–all Contagion does is kill Gwyneth Paltrow ugly, which, in the grand scheme of things, is only what every sentient human being in the United States has contemplated already. (I confess I amused myself during the scene in which Paltrow's afflicted adulteress has her brain scooped out of her head by muttering "Goop, indeed." Sue me.) Still, it earns pith points for making Paltrow, typecast as a woman of privilege and longueurs, the Typhoid Mary of the new millennium, and more points still for being resolutely unafraid to characterize all of Asia as a giant petri dish ready to make a mass grave out of the rest of the world. Essentially, Contagion, as it goes about what it's about with absolute professionalism and class, earns its keep by being right, more or less, about everything it bothers to talk about.

The Killer/Hard-Boiled [Blu-ray Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 2011****/****, 1980s, 1990s, 2011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: John Woo, Drama, Hong Kong, Romance, Thriller

THE KILLER (1989)
****/**** Image C- Sound C Extras B
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh, Chu Kong
written and directed by John Woo

HARD-BOILED (1992)
***/**** Image C Sound B Extras A+
starring Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan
screenplay by Barry Wong
directed by John Woo

by Walter Chaw It's possible to try to detail the history of John Woo at the beginning of the Heroic Bloodshed movement in Hong Kong–how, with the first two A Better Tomorrows (the second of which features a genuinely astonishing amount of violence and the infamous subtitled malapropism "don't fuck on my family!"), he created in buddy Chow Yun-Fat a fashion/role model in the James Dean mold, and how he eventually left for Hollywood's golden shore at the service of Jean-Claude Van Damme and John Travolta (twice) and Nicolas Cage (twice). It's possible–but Planet Hong Kong, City on Fire, Hong Kong Babylon, and on and on have done a pretty fair job of it already. Better to say that Woo's group of films from this period–the A Better Tomorrow pictures, his acknowledged masterpiece The Killer, his flawed but undeniably bombastic Hard-Boiled, and his ambitious, deeply felt Bullet in the Head–meant the world to me as a Chinese kid growing up in a predominantly white area in predominantly white Colorado. I saw a devastated 35mm print of The Killer at a midnight show in CU Boulder's Chem 140 auditorium in the early-'90s. It was dubbed (a mess), the screening was packed, and I, for maybe the first time in my life (and still one of the only times in my life), felt a genuine kinship with my countrymen and a certain pride in being Chinese. Here, after all, was the best action film I'd ever seen, and it wasn't John McTiernan's or Robert Zemeckis's or Steven Spielberg's name above the title, but someone called John Woo. And he was directing not Bruce Willis nor Arnie nor Sly nor any of the tools he would eventually work with in the United States, but a handsomer version of me with the same last name. As existential epiphanies go, it wasn't bad.

CJ7 (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

August 4, 20092000s, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, China, Comedy, Esoterica, Family, Hong Kong, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Stephen Chow, Xu Jiao, Huang Lei, Kitty Zhang
screenplay by Vincent Kok, Tsang Kan Cheong, Sandy Shaw Lai King, Fung Chih Chiang, Lam Fung
directed by Stephen Chow

by Bryant Frazer Lord knows we need inspired lunatics like Stephen Chow. Chow is a genial, graceful physical comic in the mode of Jackie Chan, yet even sillier, if you can imagine that. Like Chan, he makes movies that feel conspicuously alien in a Hollywood context, in large part because he's expert in a discipline that Hollywood has lately devalued. In the U.S., the dominant style of comedy is verbally oriented, with quips, awkward characters, and contrived situations driving the gags. For Stephen Chow, comedy is largely body-oriented. It's not that he doesn't script situation comedy–a movie like God of Cookery, with its parody of celebrity-chef competitions (and John Woo movies!), is built on an elaborate sitcom frame–but that he's more obsessed with performance. Chow is preoccupied with people's faces, their body types, the way they approach one another, and how they stand in conversation or confrontation. By the time he did Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, it was easy to see how he found the newly-affordable field of digital VFX work to be an avenue for extending the reach of a physical gag, using digital doubles to subject characters to the kind of strain and abuse that wouldn't fly with real actors.

Sugar (2009) + Tokyo Sonata (2008)

April 7, 2009****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Dominican Republic, Drama, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands, Sports, Theatrical

SUGAR
***½/****
starring Algenis Perez Soto, Rayniel Rufino, Andre Holland, Ann Whitney
written and directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck

TOKYO SONATA
****/****
starring Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyôko Koizumi, Yû Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki
screenplay by Max Mannix, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sachiko Tanaka
directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw In case you haven't noticed, there's a cinematic trend afoot that looks to the fringes for stories of survival in a world where it's suddenly chic to shop at the thrift store. I credit Harmony Korine and David Gordon Green with first finding the poetry in destitution in this new American cycle, with maybe Gus Van Sant (with his Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho) acting as the accidental primogenitor. If it's not Frozen River's trailer-park heroine and her dalliance with human trafficking, it's Wendy & Lucy's despair from the bottom of the capitalist food chain. In the mainstream, there's Sean Penn's fantastic Into the Wild and the reboot of 3:10 to Yuma, which at its heart is a drama about the toll of being the breadwinner. Even Hancock, a movie that keeps improving in the rearview, can be read with profit as a document of how tough it is for the everyday Joe to eke out a living in a culture designed for the affluent, the physically gifted, the innately well-spoken. Like any social movement in film, however, a lot of the stuff is minimally affecting, message-oriented garbage that seems very pleased with itself as it, like the exec pushing a broken cart through Goodwill, wears its limitations as if dragging a cross uphill. There appears to be a race to the bottom: the first to total, Warholian inertia wins the booby prize. Most of it's destined to be remembered as symptoms of the affliction and not as the illness itself; the runny nose, not the Plague.

W. (2008) + Trouble the Water (2008)

October 28, 20082000s, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Theatrical

W.
**½/****
starring Josh Brolin, James Cromwell, Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Burstyn
screenplay by Stanley Weiser
directed by Oliver Stone

TROUBLE THE WATER
**½/****
directed by Carl Deal & Tia Lessin

by Walter Chaw John Powers once called Nixon-era Oliver Stone our most Nixonian director: smart, driven, divisive, unlikeable. So the neatest trick of Stone's latest biopic, W., is to make George W. Bush–arguably the most reviled, detached, ideologically arrogant president since James Buchanan–a figure of genuine pathos. Never mind that this incurious, adolescent, fundamentalist fanatic is our proverbial Nero, fiddling while every foundational tenet of Lincoln's party is fed to anti-intellectualism and evangelical Christianity. George Orwell said something once about how the end of democracy is heralded by millionaires leading dishwashers; what's unexpected for me is the extent to which the Republican party in the new millennium has not only convinced the blue-collar to vote against its own self-interests by waging class warfare against liberals, but also begun to turn against the intellectuals in its own party. "Georgetown cocktail party" conservatives are now painted with the same broad brushstroke as "Latte-sipping" lefties–and this idea of abandoning the middle class takes on the onus of not just money and privilege, but education and eloquence as well. The logical end-point of wanting a President as ill-read, venal, and feckless as your alcoholic born-again Uncle Festus is a figure like Governor Sarah Palin, whose chief qualification appears to be her ability to blend into your local chapter of Oprah's Fan Club without a ripple. Hate, division, ugly innuendo, and racism: sowing fear and reaping the political benefits until the house falls down.

Kill Bill, Volume 1 (2003) – Blu-ray Disc

September 1, 2008****/****, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Revenge, Road Movie, Thriller

Kill Bill, Vol. 1
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, David Carradine
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw There is a palpable, undeniable perversity to Quentin Tarantino's fourth feature film, a taste for the extreme so gleeful and smart that its references are homage and its puerility virtue. I seem to find a reason between every Tarantino film to dislike him, to cast aspersions on my memories of his films, but I'm starting to think the source of my dislike is jealousy. Tarantino is the director Spielberg is too timid to be: a gifted visual craftsman unafraid of the contents of his psychic closet, and a film brat whose teachers happen to be blaxploitation, samurai epics, and Shaw Brothers chop-socky instead of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. And it isn't that I have aspirations of becoming a filmmaker, it's just that I want to be as good at something as Tarantino is at making movies.

Reign Over Me (2007) + TMNT (2007)|TMNT – DVD

August 5, 20072000s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Family, Hong Kong, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

REIGN OVER ME
**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett Smith, Liv Tyler
written and directed by Mike Binder

TMNT
*/****
written and directed by Kevin Munroe

by Walter Chaw In response to the charge that critics are "downers" because they're too judgmental, a colleague and friend said on a panel that I participated in that some films only deserve judgment. It's a wonderfully bleak declaration, and dead on–think of it as an expansion of Pauline Kael's belief that no one ever takes the time to bash terrible pictures. But there's more to it than simply that brittle shattering of cinema's impregnable mythic mystique. I think certain movies deflect even judgment–movies that are the exact equivalent of, say, Michael Bolton and Kenny G collaborating on a cover of a Richard Marx song. Rail against them if you must, but there's no sport in it, and definitely no swaying of the assembled masses. There are films that are what they are, deserving neither praise nor condemnation in providing precisely the comfort of a tattered terry cloth robe worn ritualistically until disintegration. It's possible to meticulously, ruthlessly, intellectually deconstruct the aesthetic and functional properties of a favourite pair of sneakers, you know, but it's masturbatory and redundant and like swatting a fly with a Buick. I suspect that deep down everyone knows films like Reign Over Me and TMNT are as worthless as a plug nickel, that their appeal lies entirely in the fact that they'll present no surprises along with their usual meek payload of cheap emotional prattle and pocket uplift. And I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with that, either–I'm just saying I feel like I don't have much more to say after reviewing the same fucking movie about a dozen times a year.

Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) – DVD

July 24, 20072000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Romance

**½/**** Image B Sound A Extras D
starring Chow Yun Fat, Gong Li, Jay Chou, Liu Ye
screenplay by Zhang Yimou, Wu Nan, Bian Zhihong
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw I recently had the opportunity to see for the first time the cut of Zhang Yimou's virtuoso Hero prepared for Yankee viewers, complete with the subtitles and framing cards slapped on by American distributors. Before now, the only contact I'd had with the film was through a region-free DVD from Hong Kong that preceded the U.S. theatrical release by a couple of years. (After buying the rights to it, Miramax, you'll recall, decided to sit on it until such time as its unleashing wouldn't somehow interfere with timeless masterpieces of misguided schlock like Cold Mountain.) Anyway, I was appalled. The extent to which Hero has been dumbed-down–the insertion of "our country" for a term that means, in Mandarin, "beneath the sky" drums up this weird nationalistic gumbo at the end where, before, it was sober and idealistic–manages to paint Zhang as the worst kind of toad. There's an animated map at the beginning now, I guess to show the great unwashed American moron that there is land outside the range of purple mountains majesty, while much mystical bullshit about "over two thousand years ago" mainly obscures the fact that Hero takes place well over two thousand years ago. I feel a lot of anger towards what's been done to one of the best films ever to come out of the Mainland to make it more suited for white consumption, both because of the sacrilege and because whoever's responsible has a lot of answering to do for how far they've undersold the intelligence of Western audiences. I finally understand why a lot of people in the United States didn't think much of Hero: the version I saw was a Zhang Yimou picture, whereas the version most in this country saw was a Miramax picture.

The Departed (2006)

October 6, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Gangster, Hong Kong, Jack Nicholson, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg
screenplay by William Monahan
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is his funniest–and most nihilistic–film since After Hours, which remains for me the most enjoyable of his pictures, not the least for its travelogue of the Wasteland, complete with a gallery of freaks and grotesque statuary. It’s a bleak, Kirkegaardian thing more oppressive as fraught cityscape than Travis Bickle’s New York, seeing as how there’s no filter of the unreasonable to buffer against the assertion that scum does, indeed, need to be washed off those mean streets. That city finds a doppelgänger in the blasted, depressed Boston of The Departed, whose set-pieces unfurl inside dives, abandoned warehouses, and condemned buildings, and in which we find the only relationship worth saving is between a brilliantly profane Massachusetts State Trooper Sergeant, Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), and his captain in the Special Investigations Unit, Queenan (Martin Sheen). The brutality with which that relationship is preserved, in fact, ultimately delineates this as a rare comedy (in the traditional sense) among Scorsese’s long legacy of American tragedies, albeit one that’s laced with poison and the unmistakable taint of a post-millennial/post-apocalyptic stench.

The Science of Sleep (2006) + Jet Li’s Fearless (2006)

September 27, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, China, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Martial Arts, Romance, Theatrical

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP
*½/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat, Miou-Miou
written and directed by Michel Gondry

Fearless
**/****
starring Jet Li, Nakamura Shidou, Sun Li, Dong Yong
screenplay by Chris Chow, Christine To
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw A cacophony of cascading whimsy, Michel Gondry's exercise in Freudian bric-a-brac The Science of Sleep plays like a movie based on a thrift store specializing in Harlequin novels–French Harlequin novels. It adheres to the music-video director's maxim of maximum images per second, and it casts Gael García Bernal as Stéphane, a useless lug endlessly working on a calendar of calamitous events and pining after his across-hall neighbour Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), with whom he is too smitten to confess that his mother is her landlord. His dreams take the form of a one-man variety show, while Gondry revels in scenes where he inflates his hero's hands and has him ride an animated patchwork horse. But The Science of Sleep is more exhausting than illuminating–more a loud masturbation than any kind of intercourse with the audience. The difference between the Gondry of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Gondry of The Science of Sleep, it seems obvious to say, is the difference between a film scripted by Charlie Kaufman and one not, though it's more complicated than that in that the Kaufman of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an artist who finally struck a balance between affectation and a much finer connective tissue. Gondry is still just engaged in the twist.

Three… Extremes (2005) + Hellbent (2005) – DVDs

September 26, 20062000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Hong Kong, Horror, Japan, South Korea, Thriller

THREE… EXTREMES
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
DUMPLINGS-The Hong Kong Extreme: starring Miriam Yeung, Bai Ling
screenplay by Lilian Lee
directed by Fruit Chan
CUT-The Korean Extreme: starring Lee Byung-Hun, Lim Won-Hee
written and directed by Park Chanwook
BOX-The Japan Extreme: starring Kyoko Hasegawa,Atsuro Watabe
screenplay by Haruko Fukushima
directed by Takashi Miike

HELLBENT
***½/**** Image C- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dylan Fergus, Bryan Kirkwood, Hank Harris, Andrew Levitas
written and directed by Paul Etheredge-Ouzts

by Walter Chaw My favourite working cinematographer is Harris Savides. His collaborations with Gus Van Sant and his contribution to Jonathan Glazer's Birth demonstrate to me an agility with aspect ratio and rhythm that's particularly pleasing to my own ways of seeing. A close second, though, is Christopher Doyle, the great Australian cinematographer who teams almost exclusively with Asian directors (most notably on the bulk of Wong Kar Wai's visually arresting filmography, Zhang Yimou's Hero, and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe)–his stuff indicative of a kind of lyrical, ritualistic devouring that matches the best of the Asian sensibility in pace and narrative. Doyle joins an elite crowd (Greg Toland, James Wong Howe, Raoul Coutard, Sven Nykvist, Vilmos Zsigmond, Conrad Hall, and a select few others) of cinematographers worthy of the auteur label: a certain mood, a certain style, haunts every frame on which he works with a distinct, unmistakable bouquet. He's an interesting choice, then, as the only constant of an anthology film, Three… Extremes, a sequel in structure to an Asian portmanteau from a couple years back, featuring, again, three different frontline Asian directors, each enlisted to provide a horror-based short film.

The Protector (2005) + The Covenant (2006)

September 13, 20062000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Thailand, Thriller

Tom yum goong
***/****
starring Tony Jaa, Petchtai Wongkamlao, Bongkoj Khongmalai, Xing Jing
screenplay by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee & Napalee & Piyaros Thongdee and Joe Wannapin
directed by Prachya Pinkaew

THE COVENANT
½*/****
starring Steven Strait, Sebastian Stan, Laura Ramsey, Taylor Kitsch
screenplay by J.S. Cardone
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Tony Jaa is a bad motherfucker. There's a moment in his latest export The Protector where it appears as though he's killed someone with his penis (lo, how I would love to avoid that epitaph), and in the meantime, he dispatches foes with the heedless joy of obvious predecessor Jackie Chan (who has a cameo in the film shot so ineptly that it suggests a Jackie Chan impersonator smeared with Vaseline). Alas, there's a plot (something about the kidnapping of two elephants, one of which is turned into a gaudy tchotcke in an evil dragon lady's den of inequity), too, told through a lot of howlingly incompetent narrative chunks you could seemingly rearrange in any order with no tangible disruption of sense. (The Butchers Weinstein may of course be partly to blame.) The film is easily the funniest, most exhilaratingly ridiculous picture in a year in which Snakes on a Plane aspired to the same camp/cult heights, and it does it the only way that you can: by being deadly serious.

Three Extremes II (2002) – DVD

June 12, 20062000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, DVD, Hong Kong, Horror, Mystery, South Korea, Thailand

3 Extremes II
**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
Memories ***½/****
starring Kim Hye-Soo, Chung Bo-Seok
written and directed by Kim Jee-woon
The Wheel **/****
starring Suwinit Panjamawat, Komgichi Yuttiyong, Pongsanart Vinsiri
screenplay by Nitas Singhamat
directed by Nonzee Nimibutr
Going Home **½/****
starring Leon Lai, Eric Tsang, Eugenia Yuan
screenplay by Jojo Hui/Matt Chow
directed by Peter Ho-Sun Chan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The vogue for Asian pop culture is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we have irrefutable proof that, aside from maybe that of France, Asian cinema has eclipsed the West's in terms of consistency, potency, and sheer aesthetic brio. And yet, the fact that so much of Asia's more subdued product is often shunted aside for the nasty, brutish, and weird has certain negative consequences. Trolling the shelves of my local indie video store, I was a bit distressed to discover a second-tier Japanese "extreme" title insultingly promoted as being from "The Most Perverted Country on Earth"–a conclusion to which you might not jump if you peppered your Takashi Miike viewings with some Naomi Kawase or Hirokazu Kore-eda. Would you judge American culture entirely through the prism of Larry Flynt and Hostel? Does Italian film begin and end with Cannibal Holocaust and Strip Nude for Your Killer?

TIFF ’05: The Myth

September 18, 20052000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, TIFF

½*/****starring Jackie Chan, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Kim Hee-seon, Mallika Sherawatscreenplay by Stanley Tong, Wang Hui-ling, Li Hai-shudirected by Stanley Tong by Bill Chambers The Myth, or: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Turdbath. Sabotaging a potential comeback by trying to catch a wave (not unlike the myriad has-beens in the music industry who jumped on the disco bandwagon), Jackie Chan dips a toe in the unfriendly, nay, hostile waters of the wu xia genre recently revitalized by the likes of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou. Although The Myth is cruddy-looking (HD's fine for George Lucas excretions and Robert Rodriguez fantasias, but it has…

Kung Fu Hustle (2004) [Widescreen] – DVD

August 7, 20052000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Stephen Chow, Yuen Wah, Yuen Qiu, Lam Tze Chung
screenplay by Stephen Chow, Tsang Kan Cheong, Lola Huo, Chan Man Keung
directed by Stephen Chow

by Walter Chaw There's a moment near the beginning of Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer where a reverie about sweet buns turns into a spontaneous, slightly Asian-fied street recreation of the zombie shuffle from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. If Chow is going to break through into the American mainstream with more success than fellow Hong Kong émigrés Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, John Woo, Jet Li, Ringo Lam, and Sammo Hung, it'll be because of his savvy and respect for Western pop archetypes. Evidence of this has surfaced with some regularity in all of his pictures to date, no less so in Kung Fu Hustle, a delirious-verging-on-surreal send-up of Kung Fu attitudes and traditions mutated with a Tex Avery cartoon. It's the film Joe Dante has been trying to make for the whole of his career: a multi-cultural pop explosion cross-pollinated to produce a fevered hybrid of the post-industrial standard of Asian innovation of Western invention. Chow is Asia's answer to hip-hop: fugitive poetry primed to gratify the Yankee ruling culture while laying out a subtext of Chinese pride that would feel like a threat if it didn't get your hips shaking and your fingers snapping.

House of Flying Daggers (2004) – DVD

April 17, 2005****/****, 2000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Romance

****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau, Ziyi Zhang, Song Dandan
screenplay by Li Feng & Zhang Yimou & Wang Bin
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the dozen or so eye-bleedingly beautiful sequences in Zhang Yimou's new wuxia pian, the encapsulating image is that of the incandescent Ziyi Zhang prostrate beneath a would-be paramour, her delicate, ivory hand pressed against his lips in an eloquently ineffective ward. It's a tableau introduced in a more overt attempted rape in a brothel and revisited in a stream where a quartet of thugs nearly succeed in literally/metaphorically piercing Ziyi with their long spears. House of Flying Daggers (its title in Chinese the loaded "Ambush from Ten Directions"–essentially an ambush from everywhere) is at its essence an allegory for rape and the Chinese tradition of concubinage that Zhang has already explored to varying degrees in Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad, and, of course, Red Sorghum, in which a young woman played by Gong Li (Ziyi's predecessor as Zhang's muse) is saved from rape by a young man with whom she later runs a winery. But the conceit of a young woman teaming with her knight in shining armour is complicated in House of Flying Daggers by the fact that she is more than capable of taking care of herself, except, fascinatingly, when the attacks against her are sexualized.

Last of the Finest: FFC Interviews Stephen Chow

April 9, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Hong Kong, Interviews

April 10, 2005|Between the time that John Woo and Chow Yun Fat spawned a hipster fad on this island Hong Kong with 1986's A Better Tomorrow and the moment about a decade later when poor Jackie Chan starred with Chris Tucker in Rush Hour, a picture directed by solid gold jackass Brett Ratner (who still refers to Chan as "that Jap," possibly the worst thing you can call a Chinese man–worse than "that Chinaman," something Ratner also enjoys calling Chan), the HK film industry was the most vibrant and exciting in the world. It redefined action cinema by itself, pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in motion pictures, and valorized the "heroic bloodshed" genre by elevating old Chinese dictums of honour and brotherhood into ballets of romanticized violence. "One Cop, One Killer, 10,000 Bullets" became the byline for not only Woo's classic The Killer, but also an industry that made the Western world supple and accommodating to films like The Matrix, Reservoir Dogs, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Unfortunately, as Hollywood's siren call lulled away talents as diverse and incandescent as Ringo Lam, Jet Li, John Woo, Chow Yun Fat, Tsui Hark, and, finally, Jackie Chan, from Hong Kong (in Chan's case, for the second time), so, too, did the handover from British colony to Communist show pony take hold, rendering a film like Full Contact (where a bite-wound subbed for a wedding ring) impossible under the stringent censorship policies of Mainland China. The Hong Kong film industry has fallen, and hard. Almost as hard as its roster of superstars, finding themselves ethnic sidekicks and starfuckers in American dreck.

Cannonball (1976) – DVD

October 11, 20041970s, Action, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Blue Underground, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Thriller

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring David Carradine, Bill McKinney, Veronica Hamel, Belinda Balaski
screenplay by Paul Bartel and Donald C. Simpson
directed by Paul Bartel

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover On paper, Cannonball is a no-brainer, with the thought of re-teaming Death Race 2000 director Paul Bartel and star David Carradine looking as tantalizing as it does obvious–the gravitas of the latter having so successfully anchored the satirical jabs of the former. Alas, Roger Corman's low threshold for resisting an easy buck seems to have saddled Cannonball with the thing that interested Bartel the least, forcing him to shoehorn his attempts at spoofery into a road-race format where they don't really belong. Thus the film is constantly at cross-purposes with itself, crushing the satire under the wheels of expediency and diluting the adrenaline rush with comedic asides that now lack relevance. The result jerks forward like a beginning driver trying to pop a wheelie. A few choice bits hint at a better movie, but that's it.