Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters (2003)

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Hong Kong, Horror, Japan, Netherlands, Theatrical, Vampire

The Era of Vampires
*/****
starring Chan Kwok Kwan, Ken Chang, Suet Lam, Michael Chow Man-Kin
screenplay by Tsui Hark
directed by Wellson Chin

by Walter Chaw An incomprehensible bit of garbage produced and written by legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark, Vampire Hunters juggles at least three plots and drops each of them repeatedly and egregiously. Its lore is confused and its heroes are unremarkable but for the unusual degree to which they’re inept and disinteresting. The promise inherent in a chop-socky wuxia opus concerning a quintet of fearless vampire hunters and a cadre of zombies is almost infinite, making the abject failure of the piece something almost awe-inspiring. Though it’s tempting to blame director Wellson Chin’s propensity to stage fight scenes in unrelieved murk, the real culprit of the piece may be a bad guy who looks and moves a lot like a mannequin on a string. William Castle, eat your heart out.

Film Freak Central does the Sixth Aurora Asian Film Festival

Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Japan, Philippines, Romance, South Korea, Thailand

Aurorafestpagelogo6thJune 11, 2003|by Walter Chaw There’s a genuine sense of community engendered by the Aurora Asian Film Festival, down on East Colfax where a great deal has been done to make an old community feel intimate and inviting. Old-growth trees dot the sidewalks and nice cobbled walks bisect the intersections. A lot of construction along Colfax reminds that this area may boom if we ever get Democratic leadership back in office, and a lot of uniformed police officers remind that until we do, economic revitalization is sort of holding its breath down here. On the last night of the festival, I moderated a Q&A with director Gil Portes after an exceedingly well-received screening of his tedious film Small Voices; just before that, my wife and I had dinner at my favourite diner (Pete’s Kitchen) and then dessert at a little Mexican bar across the way that not only had no waitresses who spoke English, but also no menus (and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes playing in Spanish on a beat-up television (it’s better that way)). Nothing like a little cultural displacement to get the juices flowing.

DIFF ’02: Springtime in a Small Town

Posted in****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Romance
Xiao cheng zhi chun****/****starring Wu Jun, Bai Qing Xin, Hu Jingfan, Lu Si Siscreenplay by Ah Chengdirected by Tian Zhuangzhuang by Walter Chaw Something like a Renoir film or a Brontë novel, Tian Zhuangzhuang's first feature film in nearly a decade Springtime in a Small Town ("Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun"), a remake of the Fei Mu's 1948 classic, is painterly and patient--a map of the inner rhythms of love and jealousy and sacrifice drawn with a master's steady stroke. The film introduces its three main characters in the same gently swooping style: the sickly scholar in the antebellum ruins of…

DIFF ’02: Come Drink with Me

Posted in1960s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Martial Arts
Da zui xia***½/****starring Cheng Pei-pei, Yueh Huascreenplay by Yang Yedirected by Hu King by Walter Chaw Directed by Hu King for the legendary Shaw Brothers, 1966's Come Drink with Me, presented at the DIFF in a 35mm print newly minted for this year's Cannes Film Festival, is one of the obvious headwaters for Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, featuring the legendary Cheng Pei-pei (villain Jade Fox in Lee's picture) as swashbuckling Golden Swallow, sister to a kidnapped imperial official. Between this film and its sequel, Golden Swallow, Pei-pei established herself as a watershed action hero, while Hu's style, alternately…

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (2002) [The Chosen Edition] + Contract Killer (1998) – DVDs

Posted in1990s, 2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Satire, Thriller

KUNG POW: ENTER THE FIST
**½ Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Steve Oedekerk
written and directed by Steve Oedekerk

CONTRACT KILLER
*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Jet Li, Eric Tsang, Simon Yam, Gigi Leung
screenplay by Chan Heng Ka, Vincent Kok, Cheng Kam Fa
directed by Tung Wai

by Bill Chambers In addition to putting the fear of God in us about CGI, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (henceforth Kung Pow) makes us wish the technology it employed to seamlessly superimpose writer-director-star Steve Oedekerk into the 1977 kung fu movie Tiger and Crane Fists had been around circa Bruce Lee’s demise. Back then, the producers of Game of Death struggled to complete a half-finished star vehicle minus one star using cardboard cut-outs and a variety of unconvincing doubles. (Lee’s character, the hero, spends most of the picture with his back to the camera.) Oedekerk, playing the archetypal grown-up orphan seeking vengeance against “Master Pain” for his parents’ murder, spends most of Kung Pow looking into the lens with his tongue sticking out, the tongue itself adorned with a face that has its own tongue. Technological advances have always been either too dawdling or too hasty in serving the cinema, alas.

Platform (2000)

Posted in2000s, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, China, Drama, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Theatrical

***/****
starring Hong Wei Wang, Tao Zhao, Jing Dong Liang, Tian Yi Yang
written and directed by Jia Zhang-Ke

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover To recommend or not to recommend Jia Zhang-ke’s Platform? The question depends on who you are. For those with even a passing interest in Chinese cinema and culture, it’s virtually mandatory viewing: the film is one of the most dense and nuanced portraits of a society in transition from any nation I can think of, and for Westerners, it puts a face to events that we normally hear mentioned only in passing. Those seeking narrative thrills, however, had better look elsewhere, because Platform‘s glacial pace and oppressive mise-en-scène are calculated to test the patience of even the most sympathetic viewer. But even though the film is tough slogging at times (a circumstance I attribute to its having been re-edited for export), those with intellectual priorities are advised to get on this Platform and ride the train to the last stop.

In the Mood for Love (2000) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Drama, DVD, France, Hong Kong, Romance

Fa yeung nin wah
花樣年華
**½/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B-
starring Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung
written and directed by Wong Kar-wai

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love wavers between the surface pleasures of gorgeous imagery and narrative play and the crystallization of themes that have been latent in the director’s work for quite some time. The film is almost aggressively evanescent: informational repressions and structural manipulations relentlessly undercut the doomed, strangled love between two Hong Kong neighbours, turning their half-formed relationship into an exquisite torture for both the characters and the audience.

Rush Hour 2 (2002) [infinifilm] – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Mystery, Thriller

**/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, John Lone, Zhang Ziyi
screenplay by Jeff Nathanson
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw For as long as Jackie Chan has been the logical heir to Buster Keaton’s crown, it becomes apparent during the course of Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 2 that he may also be the heir to Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau/Pink Panther crown. Blithely mixing the broad racial humour with the broad slapstick theatrics that typify Sellers and Blake Edwards’s classic comedies of criminal bad taste, Rush Hour 2 even makes time for a couple of bombshell secret agents, a brief and largely inexplicable interlude involving breasts rendering a man amusingly mute, and a cheerfully inept sidekick who gets in the stray kick now and again. The tenor, then, is dedicatedly light, and the humour is predictably free of cleverness–mostly involving Asians eating dogs and killing chickens, and African-Americans preferring their chickens fried and their karaoke with a heaping helping of Jacko gesticulations. That Rush Hour 2 (and the Pink Panther saga, for that matter) is often so genial in its cheap humour and gratifying in its physical exertions speaks to an almost universal desire to see people get a pie in the face while inelegantly breaking societal taboos. Rush Hour 2 never once aspires to anything other than formula fluff and never once descends into the dangerous realm of superlative entertainment. It is the prototypical summer film: loud, cheap, exploitive, and forgotten almost as soon as it’s over.

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2001)

Posted in2000s, Action, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Hong Kong, Horror, Japan, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Vampire

***½/****
screenplay by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, based on the novel by Hideyuki Kikuchi
directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Vampirehunterdbloodlustby Walter Chaw Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s name is probably not as familiar to anime’s United States fanbase as Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Ôtomo, Mamoru Oshii, Isao Takahata, or Shinichirô Watanabe, but amid those in the “know,” his Ninja Scroll is among the best pure action/fantasy films of the last fifty years in any medium. Tightly plotted and drawn in a style that crosses Bernie Wrightson with Kelley Jones’s work in Neal Gaiman’s Sandman comic series, Ninja Scroll is one of few eloquent stand-alone justifications for Japanese animation as a movement of true cinematic value and lasting merit. Perhaps accounting for his relatively anonymous standing, Kawajiri’s other films veer wildly from the sloppily drawn though viscerally intriguing Wicked City to the frankly awful Demon City Shinjuku. With Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Kawajiri’s first film since Ninja Scroll six years back, the director takes on Hideyuki Kikuchi’s popular manga D–yousatsukou (the sequel to Kyuuketsuki Hantaa ‘D’, made into 1985’s Vampire Hunter D by Toyoo Ashida), and produces something that falls in quality somewhere between the dizzying heights of Ninja Scroll and the occasionally weak Wicked City, while borrowing images and elements from both.

Iron Monkey (1993)

Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Yu Rong Guang, Donnie Yen, Jean Wang, Tsang Sze Man
screenplay by Tsui Hark, Elsa Tang, Lau Tai Mok
directed by Yuen Wo Ping

by Walter Chaw I first saw Yuen Woo-ping’s Iron Monkey on what must have been a third-generation bootleg: it was in unsubtitled Cantonese and fullscreen pan-and-scan, brought home unlabeled on a cheap Maxell videotape from a Vietnamese grocery down on South Federal. As a native Mandarin speaker, I didn’t understand a word of it, and the quality of the tape was such that it was impossible to decipher any shadow detail, but it was clear to me even then that Iron Monkey was something extremely special. Long a cult favourite in the United States (although it didn’t do particularly well when released theatrically in Asia), Iron Monkey received an extremely nice DVD transfer in 1998 from Media Asia; it is a disc that holds a place of honour in my personal collection. With the massive popularity of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (both choreographed by Woo-ping), as well as the surprising success of Americanized re-issues of Jackie Chan’s old Hong Kong films, Iron Monkey has been cleaned up, freshly subtitled, and booked in American moviehouses in an attempt to capitalize on the sudden popularity of wire-fu in particular and the dizzying HK cinema in general.

Time and Tide (2000) – DVD

Posted in2000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Thriller

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Nicholas Tse, Wu Bai, Anthony Wong, Joventino Couto Remotigue
written by Koan Hui & Tsui Hark
directed by Tsui Hark

by Bill Chambers Director Tsui Hark stands apart from his Chinese contemporaries by committing to a tone and relative congruity. Having made a couple of English-language pictures starring a Belgian (the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles Double Team and Knock-Off) and been schooled at a Southern Methodist university in Dallas, Hark is formally acquainted with the American mainstream, thankyouverymuch. His (post-Van Damme) Hong Kong import Time and Tide, while still a reminder of why it’s easy for us westerners to become a fan of HK cinema yet a bit of a chore to stay one, seems a learned genre concentrate. Although its plot is by and large in the Asia pulp tradition–that is, of an elusive logic–the film wins us over with phenomenal artistry and energy, and its breathers from the mayhem don’t feel like conceptual U-turns.

City on Fire (1987) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Thriller

**½/**** Image B- Sound A-
starring Chow Yun-fat, Sun Yeuh, Lee Sau Yin Danny, Carrie Ng
written and directed by Ringo Lam

by Bill Chambers Although it inspired the quintessential U.S. crime picture of the past decade, Ringo Lam’s 1987 Hong Kong action-thriller City on Fire suffers in a freshly-Americanized form: Dubbed and revised dialogue does not Reservoir Dogs make it, and the few nods to western pop-culture induce groans. (One re-recorded villain exclaims, “Show me the money!”) This new version was overseen by Dimension Films, the Miramax subsidiary whose home-video division has carried on the proud tradition of importing Asian flicks of cult repute and turning them into unintentional laff riots. Since Hollywood rarely makes a decent action picture to save its life, this practice has transcended racism and is beginning to look like sour grapes.

Dragon Forever (1988) – DVD

Posted in1980s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Romance

Dragons Forever
飛龍猛將
Fei lung mang jeung
***/**** Image C Sound A –
starring Jackie Chan, Samo Hung, Yuen Biao, Corey Yuen Kwai
screenplay by Szeto Cheuk Hon
directed by Sammo Hung & Corey Yuen

by Bill Chambers To my mind, the formation of “the three kung-fu-teers”–Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, and Yuen Biao–was more of a shock than their eventual break-up. The latter two are portrayed as the former’s punching bags in Chan’s autobiography, I Am Jackie Chan, whose early chapters recount the Dickensian power structure at the China Drama Academy, known colloquially as the Peking Opera School. The school’s unforgiving master sanctioned his older pupils (collectively, “Big Brothers”) to administer swift, cruel punishments to the younger students; the wrath of Hung, the biggest Brother of them all (in body mass as well as reputation), seemed measureless and reserved explicitly for Chan and Biao. At least in Jackie’s memory.

Twin Dragons (1992) – DVD

Posted in1990s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts

**½/**** Image C Sound B+ Extras D
starring Jackie Chan, Maggie Cheung, Nina Li, Teddy Robin
screenplay by Barry Wong and Tsui Hark and Cheung Tung Jo and Wong Yik
directed by Tsui Hark

by Bill Chambers The day Steven Seagal inflicts two performances on us within the same film I’ll hang up my film critic’s apron and call it a life. Soap opera actors and fighting stars, you see, are not so much nonimmune as prone to landing the dual role of identical twins, and one muumuu-wearin’ aikido “master” is already too much to bear. But a couple of Jackie Chans, that I can and did handle: Chan’s 1992 action-comedy (emphasis on comedy) Twin Dragons isn’t as seedy as the similarly plotted Van Damme vehicle Double Impact. With action auteurs Tsui Hark and, purportedly, Ringo Lam at its helm, though, and choreographer Yuen Wo Ping (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) behind the stuntwork, one has every reason to expect more combat and spectacle than Twin Dragons actually delivers.

Jackie Chan’s First Strike (1996) + Rush Hour (1998) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVDs

Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Thriller

First Strike
**½/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Jackie Chan, Chen Chun Wu, Jackson Lou
screenplay by Stanley Tong, Nick Tramontane, Greg Mellott, and Elliot Tong
directed by Stanley Tong

RUSH HOUR
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, Tom Wilkinson, Elizabeth Peña
screenplay by Jim Kouf and Ross LaManna
directed by Brett Ratner

by Bill Chambers Early on in Rush Hour, the smash-hit buddy-cop movie from last fall, there’s a shot of Jackie Chan clinging tenaciously to a Hollywood street sign as he dangles several feet above the L.A. traffic. It’s a powerful metaphor for Chan’s career: Rush Hour represents his last-ditch effort to become a Stateside action star after finally finding a measure of Hollywood success with the popularity of HK imports like Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop. (Indeed, Chan includes said image in the colour stills portion of his autobiography I Am Jackie Chan, annotated by this caption: “On the set of Rush Hour–hanging on to another chance at Hollywood success.”) This final gamble, after striking out in the early-’80s with Cannonball Run II and The Big Brawl, his English-language debut, paid off handsomely. But why?

Rumble in the Bronx (1996) + Mr. Nice Guy (1998) – DVDs

Posted in1990s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, DVD, Hong Kong, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Thriller

RUMBLE IN THE BRONX
***/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Jackie Chan, Anita Mui, Francoise Yip, Bill Tung
screenplay by Edward Tang and Fibe Ma
directed by Stanley Tong

MR. NICE GUY
**/**** Image A Sound B+
starring Jackie Chan, Richard Norton, Miki Lee, Karen McLymont
screenplay by Fibe Ma and Edward Tang
directed by Sammo Hung Kam-Bo

by Bill Chambers Prior to his breakout stateside hit Rush Hour, Chinese box-office sensation Jackie Chan's Hollywood forays were the terrifically unsuccessful films The Cannonball Run I & II and The Big Brawl (which planted Jackie in Prohibition-era Chicago!). When American studios–namely, "mini-majors" New Line and Miramax–elected to give him a second chance, not by casting him in their movies but by importing, dubbing, and retitling his more recent Hong Kong hits and putting the full force of their niche-adept marketing machines behind them, the results were much different: Rumble in the Bronx made a small mint for New Line, which almost immediately signed him up for Rush Hour (review forthcoming), last year's sleeper hit. (Sadly, Chan's masterpiece, Drunken Master II, has yet to be distributed in North America by a North American company. Perhaps it's too, well, drunken.)