by ·Comments Off on Vengeance (2009, Johnnie To)

Irene barely survives a violent home invasion, her family killed, her dad Johnny Hallyday (Man on the Train) visits in a Macau hospital and swears revenge. But Johnny’s not an elite killer getting dragged back into the business, he’s just a French restauranteur with a fading memory. He runs across a team of hitmen played by the Johnnie To superstars Suet Lam, Anthony Wong and Lam “Bo in Sparrow” Ka-Tung and they can fit his revenge scheme into their schedule. Of course since their boss is Simon Yam and he barely appears in the first half of the movie, I guessed the (very satisfying) second half would pit our doomed men against their own organization. Since there’s a French lead actor, this was able to play in competition at Cannes, but got robbed by Haneke and Audiard.

by ·Comments Off on A Hero Never Dies (1998, Johnnie To)

I pulled out the earliest Johnnie To movie I could find, thinking “surely his visual and character quirks and his tendency to upend expected narrative weren’t fully developed yet,” but yup, they were. These movies are so stylish and unpredictable, and I could watch them forever.

Boss alliance:

Jack (Leon Lai of Fallen Angels) and cowboy Martin (Ching Wan Lau, the Mad Detective himself) are rival enforcers for crime lords, and when their bosses team up and go straight, their men are left crippled, unemployed and forgotten. After a wheelchair-improvement montage they take righteous revenge on their former organization(s).

Jack up high, Martin down low:

by ·Comments Off on Rolling Thunder (1977, John Flynn)

Knots Landing and Family Plot star William Devane is a traumatized war vet who is pleasantly dispassionate to the investigating cops after his family is murdered and the killers run his hand through the sink disposal. Now with a hook hand, he gathers up war buddy Tommy Lee Jones and takes a revenge trip to Mexico.

Can pretty young Linda Haynes break through Devane’s armor? No

The year after Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader not a fan: “Schrader [says] he basically wrote a film about fascism, and the studio made a fascist film.” Looking up where I knew the director’s name from… wouldn’t have guessed Brainscan!

by ·Comments Off on Irreversible (2002, Gaspar Noé)

It’s Cannes Fortnight 2021! I was gonna watch this anyway, eventually, then noticed there’s a new Gaspar playing Cannes this year, so “eventually” became now. In in the mood for some cinema after taking things easy post-True/False, rounding up some recent Cannes titles I missed, and some by this year’s crop of directors.

Wonked-out closing/opening credits sequence, then the camera spirals and weaves around a courtyard, Massive Attack’s La Protection Centrale. I didn’t know what was happening for a good long time, the I Stand Alone guy philosophizing with anonymous Frenchman Albert Dupontel (a war survivor in A Very Long Engagement), but it becomes clear as the movie woozily whips us through the rest of the story in reverse order. I was gonna say it takes us from one sordid scene to another, but that’d be underselling one of the most extremely sordid films of the last twenty years. I read a piece recently, thought it was by Charles Bramesco but can’t find it now so who knows, calling Promising Young Woman a weaksauce take on the rave/revenge story, and it came to mind a few times while watching this, a decidedly strongsauced rape/revenge story, because is that such a desirable thing? Is the point to seek out the most extreme rape/revenge cinema? Ultimately, the “time destroys all things” thesis, the film title and the reverse-action gimmick framing the horrors had me appreciating this much more than, say, Revenge, though I can’t feel naughtily transgressive about liking a movie that comes highly recommended by every critic I respect.

by ·Comments Off on Fist of Fury (1972, Lo Wei)

“Our tolerance was a mistake.” After the poisoning death of a martial arts master, a brown-suited dude is sent to insult and challenge his disciples during the memorial service, a crass move that earns the wrath of disciple Bruce Lee. This starts out way better than The Big Boss by pitting Bruce against forty guys early on instead of waiting for the second half – “Next time I’ll make you eat the glass.”

The titular fist:

Lee’s confuse-o-vision technique:

This is Shanghai, and all the villains are Japanese. Not a master of history, I’d forgotten that the Japanese colonized parts of China throughout the 1930’s and I was amazed at their nerve. Bruce goes on a righteous rampage through the city, smashing racist Japanese in their jerk faces, then in case we’re tempted to feel bad for them, the Japanese massacre all of Bruce’s friends (including poor James Tien again). There is a love interest, just barely, and a couple of fun disguises. The big boss sports an absurd long mustache and has hired an English-speaking Russian tough who fights in a bow-tie – Bruce punches a guy’s dick off before taking them on, the action in this movie always great. Same as The Big Boss, the army closes in on Bruce post-killing-spree. Must see Lo Wei’s New Fist of Fury, a sequel starring Jackie Chan in his first major role.

love interest Nora Miao:

the big boss Chikara Hashimoto:

by ·Comments Off on Point Blank (1967, John Boorman)

“Profit is the only principle.” Double featuring this with No No Sleep, I was tickled that the lead character is named Walker. During a robbery turned murderous, Lee Marvin’s wife and his partner turn on him and leave him for dead. Years later he’s on a singleminded revenge rampage, demanding his share of what turns out to be a relatively small amount of money from the people involved… I feel like the “I want my two dollars” kid from Better Off Dead was based on Lee Marvin.

After visiting traitorous wife Sharon Acker he beats up a car dealer who leads him to Sharon’s sister Angie Dickinson, who offers to help. He catches up with his killer an hour in (never trust a man named Mal) and the guy’s a whiny bitch who gives up his bosses immediately. Marvin drops him off a building anyway. Instead of paying him to go away, Mal’s organization boss Keenan Wynn uses Marvin’s uncautious killing spree to their advantage, letting him kill off Wynn’s enemies/partners.

Besides being a satisfying Lee Marvin action story, the movie has some of the most baller shots and editing of all time, every bit as good as I remembered. Dispatched crime bosses include Lloyd Bochner (The Dunwich Horror) then Carroll “Archie Bunker” O’Connor. Car dealer Michael Strong looked familiar, but it must’ve been from this since I barely remember Patton. Mal was John Vernon who’d later go up against Clint Eastwood a few times and presumably lose. Big Bad Wynn had recently been in Dr. Strangelove, and I haven’t seen Dickinson or Marvin in enough movies.

by ·Comments Off on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, vol. 1

101: Revenge

1955 was a busy year to launch a TV series while also releasing To Catch a Thief and The Trouble With Harry. Episode one was directed by the man himself. Vera Miles (year before The Searchers and The Wrong Man) is a sweetie living in a seaside trailer with her new husband, trying to rest after “a small breakdown,” when she’s found collapsed after an attack. “He killed me,” she says about a salesman she wouldn’t buy from. Some fun noir lighting along the way, but at this point I knew how it’d end, as husband Ralph Meeker (same year as Kiss Me Deadly) has revenge on his mind, and you can’t trust a woman with a history of breakdowns… she points out the man who attacked her… then another, and another. The kindly neighbor was in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the murdered man an FBI agent in Pickup on South Street. Was it the American writers or British Hitch who named the lead character Spann and had him kill someone with a spanner?

How to help a woman with anxiety:

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106: Salvage

“We don’t serve unescorted ladies at the bar.” Nancy Gates (Some Came Running, the crazy-sounding Suddenly) has heard local gangster Gene Barry (a Brock in a Fuller film) is out of prison, wants to confront him about her involvement in the arrest and death of his brother, is pretty sure he’s gonna kill her. Instead he sees her desperation and helps her out, bankrolls the dressmaking shop of her dreams, waits until she’s at her happiest point – then kills her. From a writer of Too Late Blues and the director of Jack Nicholson’s feature debut The Cry Baby Killer. I wasn’t trying to watch all forty episodes this season, so I chose based on particular factors, such as the presence of Elisha Cook Jr., which paid off.

Elisha, drunk and confused:

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107: Breakdown

Joseph Cotten is a shithead business leader who fires a longtime employee then drives the long way home. I was expecting a Roadwork revenge scenario, but I guess there wasn’t time for the blubbering victim to plan an interception route – instead, Cotten crashes into construction equipment and we spend the rest of the movie in his head as he’s paralyzed and assumed dead by all who come to the scene. Gave me flashbacks to another anthology episode, which research suggests was Tales from the Crypt “Abra Cadaver.” The blubbering man was a silent star, notably of The Cat and the Canary, and Cotten’s only film of the year was a West German comedy that nobody has seen since.

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131: The Gentleman from America

Sir Stephen (Ralph Clanton, good at being desperate and sinister) needs money, and rich Biff McGuire (The Thomas Crown Affair) is loaded, so Sir S and his less exciting sidekick John Irving bet the guy that he can’t stay the night in their haunted castle. After a flashback ghost story they win that bet, but hard, only realizing years later that the rich guy lost all of his marbles that night. Director Robert Stevens was an anthology TV heavyweight, appropriately ending his career on an episode of Amazing Stories.

Sir S shows Biff his pistol:

by ·Comments Off on The Match Factory Girl (1990, Aki Kaurismäki)

The MFG pays the bills, does all the cooking and cleaning for her mom and stepdad, but they still kick her out when she gets knocked up by hateful Aarne. Then she buys some rat poison and takes care of her tormentors. For such an unrelentingly dark premise, the movie itself is very fun, with good music of course (accordion and surf guitar).

AK’s 7th feature… played Berlin in some sidebar I don’t understand, same year as Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Asthenic Syndrome. Opened in the USA belatedly, where it had the misfortune to be up against Raise The Red Lantern in the critics’ awards. MFG Kati Outinen has been in everything, was the sick wife in Le Havre, costarred with her mom again in Drifting Clouds. Her brother is a Leningrad Cowboy, and her dad is Polonius.

Her brother’s apartment is sweet:

by ·Comments Off on Cold Pursuit (2019, Hans Petter Moland)

It’s nearing the end of the year, so time to catch up on all the best films of 2019 that we’ve missed so far, but sometimes on a Friday night after a long week you just want to watch Liam Neeson take bloody revenge after a member of his family gets taken.

In the beginning, Liam is being honored at a nice dinner for driving the snowplow in a Denver suburb, his loving wife Laura Dern in attendance, but meanwhile their son is killed by some drug dudes who probably meant to kill his coworker instead, and Neeson finds the first guy he suspects to be involved (Michael Eklund, a Canadian who recently played Eadweard Muybridge), beats him until he gives up the name of the next guy up the ladder (Bradley Stryker of an upcoming Kevin Costner movie), and so on.

Love to see Major Rawls of The Wire tell his rookie partner Emmy Rossum (Shameless) about the importance of balanced community policing. The Major’s Wire costar Herc is bodyguard to the big bad Viking (Tom Bateman, star of a Jekyll & Hyde series), who is trying to figure out who’s killing his men, takes out a hitman called Eskimo and Neeson’s brother (William Forsythe, who plays J. Edgar Hoover on TV), then accidentally goes to war with his Indian rivals led by White Bull (Tom Jackson, a Shining Time Station regular), which significantly ups the body count.

Herc and Viking:

It’s not a good movie for wives! Neeson’s wife Laura Dern leaves early and never returns, Viking’s wife is fighting for custody of their kid, and Neeson’s brother’s wife spits on her husband’s grave. The kid survives, as does Neeson and White Bull, and the movie ends on a typically black-comic note, accidentally running over a lost parasailing Indian with a snowblower, before cutting to the credits listing actors “in order of disappearance”. That was the English title of Molland’s own 2014 film starring Stellan Skarsgård, which he’s remaking here. IMDB says this will be Neeson’s final action movie role, also says he has three action movies in development.

The Brother and his wife:

Katie Rife in AV Club:

The film, first and foremost, is rolling its eyes at swaggering machismo, giggling at the hyper-masculine phallic symbol literally plowing its way across the screen with man’s man Neeson behind the wheel … The female characters in the film are uniformly fed up and uninterested in whatever dick-measuring contest these men have gotten themselves into this time. Cold Pursuit knows that killing a man with a snow plow is a ridiculous macho fantasy, and it’s going to give it to you anyway — but not without a wink and a smile.