by ·Comments Off on Shinjuku Triad Society (1995, Takashi Miike)

Everyone wants to fuck the knife boy. Gangster Wang (Tomorowo Taguchi, star of Tetsuo I and II) is mad that gangster Ishi fucked the knife boy in exchange for a new knife, so he destroys Ishi’s gang. Kippei Shiina (Outrage) is the lead detective in this typical cops-vs-criminals story, tormented that his brother Shinsuke Izutsu is working for the other side of the law. But Miike is attracted to excess, so the violence is particularly brutal, the gang’s business (organ trading) especially sordid, and the craziest actor (in this case wide-eyed Wang) runs off with the movie. It all leads where it must: the brothers beating the shit out of each other in a decrepit room, the cop pumping how many bullets into Wang, then some narrator (the knife boy?) informing us that the cop will turn up dead a month later.

Feuding brothers and their clueless parents:

Wide-Eyed Wang:

by ·Comments Off on Nemesis (1992, Albert Pyun)

Plays outwardly like a spy drama – armed cyborgs in sunglasses travel to exotic places trading data to rebels – but everyone here is terrible at spying, repeatedly saying all their motivations to each other. Even when alone, this guy speaks his thoughts out loud, to the delight of the bosses who’ve bugged his nervous system Innerspace-style. But delight is the wrong word – everyone is using their direct-to-video serious-voice, with the only fun coming from the cool prosthetic effects. Brion James shows up, since this is a wannabe Blade Runner, and you think finally some class in this joint, then he plays his whole part in a German accent.

After a fun gun-shootin’ waterslide Alex is saved by a little creeper who then knocks him out (Merle Kennedy of Night of the Demons 2, she later gets to bazooka Brion). I paid attention to the wrong side characters, was looking up some guy (Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat) who only lived about one minute, and missed Jackie Earle Haley and Thomas Jane. The lead baddie is Jack Deth of Trancers, a cyborg who replaced the police commissioner I think. Nude Girl Cyborg Julian was Deborah Shelton, who got drill-killed in Body Double. I idly wondered if Pyun cast a French-accented kickboxer as the lead (“Alex”) to rip off JCVD’s Cyborg… but Pyun made Cyborg too. The movie does have three guys at once jumping out windows whilst firing machine guns, so, no complaints.

by ·Comments Off on Dragon Inn (1992, Raymond Lee)

I realized that Tsui Hark wrote/produced this Dragon Inn remake between Once Upon a Time in China movies, and I proceeded to watch it with the wrong soundtrack selected, wondering why everyone was so badly dubbed, damn it. Beautiful action film, with more people twirling through the air holding swords than I’ve ever seen in a movie before.

Tall Tony 2 is protecting the children of his late superior from the power-mad evil eunuch’s forces. He meets up with fellow fighter/girlfriend Brigitte Lin at the desert inn run by Maggie Cheung, a mercenary whose chef serves previous guests for dinner. They spend half the movie looking for the secret exit door and when they finally escape through it after defending a massive attack on the inn, they only get a three second head start over president eunuch Donnie Yen due to a scarf mishap – they might as well have walked out the damn door. Maggie and her chef choose the righteous side and help the others defeat Donnie during a sandstorm. I saw Iron Vest in there somewhere, guess he did not survive.

Mouseover to see what happens when you hold your battle pose for too long:
image

by ·Comments Off on Executioners (1993, Johnnie To & Ching Siu-Tung)

A quickie follow-up to Heroic Trio codirected by the Chinese Ghost Story guy. Nothing but commercial fluff. I’m not angry about it – Criterion can do whatever they want, and I got to see another Johnnie To movie in nice HD.

In the post-apocalyptic future, Maggie Cheung is a water thief and bounty hunter, Michelle Yeoh is working with the mad scientist trying to revive the supply of fresh water, and Anita Mui is retired with a kid and a politician husband (Paul Chun of Peking Opera Blues). But when the idiot police bring a freshly-captured killer to a press conference with the President (Guan Shan of A Better Tomorrow II) without checking him for bombs first, Anita’s husband is murdered and she’s thrown in jail. Maggie takes care of the kid – the two whiniest characters adventuring together with her rival Mad Detective, who she decides she loves ten seconds before he’s crushed by an underwater gate. Takeshi Kaneshiro’s debut as a charismatic pretty boy used as an expendable publicity tool for the mad scientist. Anthony Wong can’t be seen in this movie since he died so hard in part one, so he plays every deformed masked character. Anita finally breaks out of jail, regaining her powers, and takes on the evil inventor Kim, who was really hoarding fresh water while pretending to be providing it. He accidentally blows up his own iron-fisted superfighter with a grenade crossbow, then extremely kills Yeoh, then gets blow’d up.

Lau “Mad Detective” Ching-wan and Maggie:

Yeoh:

R. Emmet Sweeney for Metrograph:

With Executioners, Ching and To pivot from postmodern comic book to survivalist Mad Max paranoia. They turn the fears and anxieties over 1997 up to 11, detonate a nuclear bomb, and let the trio live in a post-apocalyptic state where most of the drinking water has been poisoned by radiation and survivors are at war for what remains. To claims the sequel was only made to cover the cost overruns of the first movie: “The reason why we produced the second one was because the budget for the first one was very high and we needed to make two films to cover the whole production cost.” Executioners is perhaps more of an accounting trick than a movie, but though it is heavy on exposition it also features moments of crazed creativity — such as Anthony Wong’s unhinged performance as an operatically depressed monster who conspires with the police to hoard water and who keeps the severed head of his unrequited lover (Takeshi Kaneshiro) in a sumptuously appointed leather box.

Anthony:

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China II (1992, Tsui Hark)

Jet Li and Rosamund Kwan are back, taking vacation with Foon (now played by Max Mok, Sammo’s buddy in Pedicab Driver), apparently with no hard feelings after Foon teamed up with the disruptive Iron Vest in part one. Strange for this episode to be the follow-up, since the first one begins with Wong Fei-hung wishing to expel all foreigners, and here his enemy is a violent flaming-arrow-shooting cult which wishes to… expel all foreigners. Kidnapping Rosamund for owning a camera and burning down Jet’s medical conference are direct attacks, true.

The baddest-ass fighter isn’t even a cult member (though the cult’s bulletproof mystic is pretty good, played by Jet’s stunt double), it’s a cop who’s happy to play-fight Wong but won’t help out the children the cult is trying to murder. The cop is Donnie Yen in his breakout year, with Tsui casting him in this and the Dragon Inn remake. Both these guys die in the end, after some magical wire work, as does friendly David Chiang (the dandy of Boxer from Shantung), but beloved Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen (Zhang Tielin of The Magic Crane) escapes safely to begin his revolution.

In the extras, Yen casually refers to himself as “the ultimate martial arts opponent for Jet Li” and explains the difference between being a great martial artist and a great martial arts actor.

by ·Comments Off on Lone Star (1996, John Sayles)

A high-quality modern Western drama, solid cast and writing, with a couple of elevating factors. The stylistic trick of transitioning into flashbacks with a camera move instead of an edit or fade, past characters sharing physical space with the present, is impressive every time. And just when the story is wrapping up, when Chris Cooper learns that his late father Matthew McConaughey did not shoot the sheriff, he also learns that his old flame newly re-enflamed (Elizabeth Peña) is his half-sister… and they decide they can live with that.

Bad Sheriff Kristofferson’s final act:

Bar owner Otis later played a detective in The Empty Man. His estranged military son Joe Morton was the doomed robotics inventor in Terminator 2. Peña was in The Second Civil War, which it’s probably time to rewatch. Nominated for a bunch of awards that Fargo won, so it’s good to see key Coen critic Adam Nayman defending.

Its qualities of thoughtful, hard-edged sociological storytelling and analysis are currently in short supply. They don’t make ’em like this anymore … For all its skepticism about the American tendency to mythologize (and mass market) its sins away, the film is tender about the necessity of forgetting, or at least trying to. It’s a measure of Sayles’s superlative construction that a story that begins with something being unearthed ends with a plea to keep another secret buried — and of his empathy as an artist that the sentiment rings true.

Sisters Lovers:

Coen Connection:

by ·Comments Off on By Brakhage, Volume 2, Program 6 (1995-2003)

I Take These Truths (1995)

It took a frustrating few minutes to figure out how to play albums alongside silent movies on the new TV setup, but it was worth it… Brakhage films are up to 10X more effective at relaxing the mind after a work day than Three Stooges shorts. I Take These Truths is one of the hand-painted films, full of color and texture, and there’s not much else I can say except that I love it very much. Sometimes it feels like you’re seeing a flicker party of unrelated images, every frame a painting, and sometimes you catch a vertical line and feel the film flying through the projector, and if you’re locked in you can fly along with it.

–
The Cat of the Worm’s Green Realm (1997)

These first two were silent so I played the new Prefuse 73 album. It’s a basic groove compared to the wildness of the films and I wondered if I should’ve put on something more crazy or abstract, but maybe it’s good to just have some beats and let the film do the talking. We’re back to photography – both the cat and the worm make appearances, and for a green realm there’s an awful lot of orange and pink and yellow. Seems like the realm might be the backyard, but the camera is so very close to every leaf and blade of grass (worm’s-eye view?) that the yard is reduced to blobs.

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Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind (1997)

Now I’m picking songs to match the length of the movies, and I do have a 17-minute song, an eerie ambient piece from the new Kevin Drumm record. Instead of a rush of imagery in a particular style, this one edits all the styles together, a rush of rushes of imagery. I keep feeling like there’s a Framptonian pattern to crack in the edits, but maybe he just chopped together some mothlit leader, hand painted pieces, too-close photography, shots of whipping the camera around fast enough to leave trails, and the sun sparkling on turbulent water, at semi-random and appreciated the synchronicity.

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… Reel Five (1998)

This one has its own music, an avant-piano piece. We spend some minutes adjusting to the music over a blank screen, then the background turns blinding white, with light black and colored patterns flickering across.

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Persian Series 1-3 (1999)

Persian 1 gives us peak swirling oil painting flicker action, then #2 bends our minds by tracking into and out of the frame, an effect I can feel without being able to tell how they’re doing it without a consistent background to zoom into, and #3 cranks the pace into overdrive and adds a Rorschach mirror effect. Just outstanding. I played an anxious saxey Sons of Kemet song, a good fit.

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Chinese Series (2003)

Just white scratch-figures on widescreen windowboxed black background for a brief, light ending to the program. I unwisely played a heavy Zappa-quoting Pere Ubu track.

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For Stan (2009, Marilyn Brakhage)

Marilyn traces the landscape with her own camera and provides valuable footage of Stan filming in a cave wearing a Canyon Cinema shirt – and also walking into a wall because he couldn’t see where he was going. I played the Simon Hanes album – track 2 made the film too cartoony, then track 3 settled in nicely.

–
By now it’s been forever since I watched some of the other shorts on this blu-ray, and instead of pining for the 400-ish Brakhage films that it’s very hard to see, I could watch one from this set daily on a loop, forever. It’s not like I run the risk of memorizing them or tiring them out.

Loved the Brakhage on Brakhage series in the extras, like a scrapbook of choice Stan quotes, speaking clearly and sensibly about his work.

…the scratching of titles directly onto the film surface which had this effect: that from the beginning the viewer was given the rhythm of the very projector that was going to show them the rest of the film. They were given the sense of the film’s surface itself.

There’s crazy footage of him filming in the field. He says he edited a film for Joseph Cornell in Maya Deren’s apartment, talks about learning from Marie Menken, and his thoughts on the labels “experimental” and “avant-garde” and “underground.” Then the Sunday Salon segments are Q&A pieces about one film at a time:

  • Psalm Branch is a Freud film, Stan is a big Freud fan
  • Under Childhood was recognizing the dark side of his children’s existence
  • Murder Psalm was a “trance-state miracle” made in a rage after a nightmare about killing his mother
  • Boulder Blues: “I wanted the film to be composed of things that are mostly in people’s peripheral vision.”
  • Worm’s Green Realm: you can attempt to follow narratively with the “kinds of feelings that are intrinsic to story” but are purely visual

by ·Comments Off on Until the End of the World (1991, Wim Wenders)

Nice thing about the five-hour movie being spread across two discs is it’s an easy way to break it up across two evenings. The down side is my brain played the title U2 song on a loop for the 22 hours between discs. This began Wenders’ U2 era – they also did songs for Faraway, So Close and Beyond the Clouds and The End of Violence, and Bono wrote and produced the awful Million Dollar Hotel, beginning a drought during which WW couldn’t make a decent fiction film until (here’s hoping) 2023.

Sam Neill is our narrator writing a book about what happened after Claire left him. I thought there’d be some play between the real versions of events and the way he writes them, but no, he’s just following the story as we are and typing it up neatly so we don’t get lost. Claire is Solveig Dommartin, star of the two angel movies and Claire Denis’s No Fear, No Die. She takes an abandoned road to avoid a traffic jam and crashes into a couple of thieves with bags full of money, beginning the road movie tradition of accumulating a cast of friendly characters. Next she’ll add tech fugitive William Hurt and original road man Rudiger Vogler as a bounty hunter. In various configurations they travel to Lisbon, Berlin, China, Japan, USA. Across the shabby chaotic cities of nuclear crisis 1999, WW nailed how annoying computer voices and graphics would be in our future.

It’s all very plotty, not a loose hangout piece like the earlier films with Vogler. That’s not a problem, just a different sort of thing, but when they settle down in Australia for part two, it becomes a problem. Hurt (“Trevor”) and Claire gerry their way through the desert clutching the airplane door she’s been handcuffed to, soundtracked by Peter Gabriel. I imagine Rabbit Proof Fence was a reference to this – also imagine that their character names are a shout-out to Stagecoach star Claire Trevor. When they arrive at Hurt’s family tech lab, the brisk travel plot abruptly stops and we get bogged down in the plot of transmitting brainwave images to Hurt’s blind mom Jeanne Moreau. Dad Max von Sydow (my second 1980s von Sydow this month) changes the focus of his project to dream capture, alienating the locals and the viewers. Neill keeps writing as Hurt and Claire lose their sense of waking reality and the movie turns to drug addiction metaphors (she goes through withdrawal when her dream-viewer runs out of battery). The gang starts to fall away and it all peters out, ending with a postscript of Claire taking a zoom call in space. Spotted in the credits: Michael Almereyda, Paulo Branco, Chen Kaige.

The Australia half is almost redeemed by this band:

Chico can dig it:

From the extras: Almereyda tried to write a draft. Wenders very interested in creating and distorting the HD images, a prototype technology at the time, and talks about being a music collector. “That was another reason why the movie had to be so long” – he wrote all his fave musicians asking them to write a futuristic song, thinking most would say no, then ended up with a ton of songs. He wanted an Elvis song he couldn’t have, so “I don’t know how it happened but” David Lynch produced a cover version.