by ·Comments Off on A Better Tomorrow III (1989, Tsui Hark)

Prequel about the formation of the supercool badass who is MARK. Chow Yun-fat is an ordinary civilian until he meets Anita Mui in Saigon and she teaches him to shoot – but why’d they name her Kit when that’s Leslie Cheung’s character name in part one?

Mark tries to do straight business deals in a corrupt, turbulent country with his cousin Mun (Tony 2), keeps getting rescued by Anita. The plan is to close Mark’s uncle’s shop and move him to Hong Kong, but customs fucks up their shit so bad that the uncle (Sek Kin of Enter the Dragon) has a heart attack. Anita saves them yet again and they make it to HK halfway through the movie, but Mark and Mun both love the girl, so they return to Vietnam at the same time her long-lost mentor/bf Ho appears. A circle of vendettas ensues, everyone killing everyone else. You can sing “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” to the theme song. The fun music montages are the bad-80s aspect of an otherwise cool movie, Tsui taking over the series while John Woo renamed his own Vietnam-set pseudo-prequel Bullet in the Head.

by ·Comments Off on May December (2023, Todd Haynes)

Shot (digitally) with major grain, in Savannah/Tybee. Natalie Portman comes to visit the scandal-couple to prep for a role, portraying criminal wife/mom Julianne Moore. Portman learns how to wear the makeup and do the lisping voice, and seduce Charles Melton, and that might be all she learned.

by ·Comments Off on National Gallery (2014, Frederick Wiseman)

I’ve started to appreciate how fast Wiseman’s cutting is – the movies are long but he wastes no time. We hear from preservationists, lectures on individual paintings, internal meetings. Some unusual perspectives: an art appreciation workshop for the blind, creating ornate picture frames, protests outside. Most mindblowing segment was about researching where a painting was commissioned, how the angles and lighting in the painting match the location where it originally hung.

by ·Comments Off on Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (1980, Tsui Hark)

A bloodier, sleazier and more despairing predecessor to Made in Hong Kong, positing that the world is a violent shithole. I’d be completely in favor of this sleazy punk nightmare if someone would please censor the animal torture scenes for me… they’re sticking pins into mice right in the first scene… not sure if throwing the cat out the window Grand Budapest-style was faked. First movie watched in 2024, bad omens for the year to come.

Three boys are experimenting with antisocial behavior by setting off a homemade bomb in a movie theater. They’re followed by witness Wan-chu, malcontent younger sister of a detective (Five Fingers of Death star Lo Lieh), who blackmails them into committing ever-greater crimes. And she is not fucking around, starts by hijacking a bus full of passengers. She steals a lot of money orders from a foreigner, setting off a whole secondary gangster plot (the guy’s exposition buddy tells us they’re “in a deadly business”). Inevitably, Detective Brother gets involved in the gangster case until disciplined by his boss, the most dubbed white guy of all time. The girl dies in the same way as her cat, while all the boys get shot in a climactic cop-gangster shootout, only one surviving, wounded and poisoned and insane.

Mouseover to waste this foreigner:
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by ·Comments Off on Verboten! & Dogface (1959, Samuel Fuller)

Verboten! (1959)

Fuller WWII film six months before The Crimson Kimono with a Paul Anka theme song (oh no), starring nobody in particular. Our not-so-bright hero Sgt. Brent is The Killer Shrews star James Best. He survives the sniper attack that killed a bunch of his men, is rescued by German girl Susan Cummings (Bavarian, of Corman’s Swamp Women), then stays behind after the war to marry her.

Post-war, Brent works for Captain Harvey (Fuller regular Paul Dubov, a master criminal in Underworld USA) in cleanup, along with wide-mouthed Bruno (star of High School Big Shot), his new wife’s secret confidant and a member of the Werewolves, a secret Himmler youth army aiming to carry on the war after defeat. “Hungry people are easy to bamboozle.” Susan’s little brother Franz (not great) is of course a werewolf, but comes to his senses, rats on his mates and pummels his werewolf boss to a fiery death. “Ride of the Valkyries” soundtracks a bombing/assassination montage twenty years before Apocalypse Now. The cuts to stock footage are hardly seamless but all the postwar Germany film is interesting on its own.

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Dogface (1959)

“Siegfried has located the enemy” – the nazis send a dog to locate dogfaces, and Infantry Sergeant Rock’s first mission in this would-be TV series is to assassinate the nazi dog. I imagine network TV execs weren’t on the edge of their seats wondering what unseemly missions Rock would take on next. Good movie though, better than Verboten!. Our lunkhead hero injures the dog but lets it live, and it saves him after a steamy shower shootout. The plan was an authentic war series with basic tech, tough-guy actors, and a ton of military slang – since this never aired, Sgt. Rock’s career went nowhere.

by ·Comments Off on Mad Fate (2023, Soi Cheang)

Catching up… I shouldn’t have watched this within a couple weeks of Detective vs. Sleuths. Johnnie To may be retired but his particular way of lighting street scenes lives on – writer, editor, and DP are all from Drug War, Blind Detective, and Romancing in Thin Air.

Bo from Sparrow is a twitchy guy trying to help people change their fates. His latest client leaves and is immediately murdered, witnessed by a pervert delivery boy whose hobby is killing CG cats, always pursued by a mustache cop. According to fate, Bo will go insane and the delivery guy will do a murder, so they team up to change the future. Then a bad-luck prostitute moves into the apartment building, looking like an excellent victim to both the delivery boy and the real killer whose bag of knives keeps changing hands. My second HK movie lately with scenes in a morgue, as Bo tries some spirit-transfer business, but tragically he ends up becoming an MPD psycho and getting locked up, as the cop retires young and the delivery boy learns to be kind to CG animals.

by ·Comments Off on It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)

Jimmy Stewart throws away his dreams to run his dad’s bank while his brother Harry is off being a war hero. Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell of every great movie in 1939) loses a bunch of money, putting the bank at risk of takeover from evil rival Potter (Mark of the Vampire star Lionel Barrymore). Jimmy tries to kill himself but angel Clarence (The Invisible Man scientist Henry Travers) saves him, shows him that Harry and Billy and his wife Mary (Donna Reed of Scandal Sheet) and the guy at the drugstore (HB Warner, DeMille’s Jesus) would’ve all been ruined without him (Potter would be fine). The townspeople contribute to pay Jimmy’s bank’s debts and he’s newly happy to be alive. Good movie while watching, the moment it’s over I always get annoyed by it again.

by ·Comments Off on Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

Brigitte Mira (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) plays the most naive German woman ever, who hasn’t heard about racism. She wanders into a bar full of foreigners to get out of the rain, doesn’t know how bars work, and Moroccan mechanic Ali is coerced into dancing with her. He starts coming over, and she blurts out that they’re married as a cover story to the landlord, so they really do get married, and her kids (incl. Irm Hermann and the director) disown her. The grocer bans her, coworkers stop speaking to her, only the landlord doesn’t seem to mind, weird to make a landlord the sympathetic one. When the happy couple returns from vacation everyone warms up to them, realizing they each need something from Brigitte. Marital woes – he is after all 20 years younger and she refuses to make couscous, then strange ending, he’s hospitalized for a stress ulcer after they’ve made up. Movie lives up to its high reputation, looks beautifully Kaurismakian, people standing very still when it’s not their turn to speak.