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 Hard-Boiled (1992, John Woo)

Watched on beautiful 35mm at Plazadrome, antidote to the DCP Blues. The culmination of Woo’s HK career before he moved to Hollywood and had to make movies with Van Damme and Travolta and Lundgren for a decade. Chow Yun-fat’s first obstacle at the bird bar is machine-gunner Jun Kunimura (most recently seen as the filmmaker friend in Audition, but he’s in everything). His partner is killed, so Chow stays on the arms dealer case. The cops have got informant Little Ko, who cashes out after directing them to the illegal armory beneath a city hospital, and undercover agent Tony Leung, who teams up with Chow. Leung betrays Kwan Hoi-San (a ship captain in Project A) to get close to big boss Anthony Wong (the year before Heroic Trio). Wong’s lead muscle Mad Dog (played by one of the Five Deadly Venoms) fires more bullets and throws more grenades than anyone else here (or anywhere). Teresa Mo (who costarred with Sammo Hung a year earlier) attempts to save the babies while Wong plots to blow up the hospital (hospital bombings are in fashion these days).

Before this, also on 35mm, was In the Mouth of Madness. Given my particular tastes, it’s an even more perfect movie than Hard-Boiled, though it doesn’t feature anybody firing two guns whilst jumping through the air AND holding a baby. Movie connections: Freddy’s Dead… Stranger Than Fiction… The Empty Man.

by ·Comments Off on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, Ang Lee)

I remembered the basics. Come Drink With Me star Cheng Pei-Pei is Jade Fox, Ziyi’s criminal master, who kills a whole bunch of people including, in the end, Chow Yun-Fat. Chang Chen, below, is Ziyi’s desert bandit lover Dark Cloud. Took long enough for this to be available in decent HD.

by ·Comments Off on The Killer (1989, John Woo)

Just trying to chill with some Chinese action movies on Easter, I end up choosing a film where a Mary and Jesus statue explodes.

Mouseover to blow up the statue:
image

Before the church job, Chow’s hit in a restaurant goes bad and he blinds a singer after killing 12 guys while using the infinite ammo cheat code on his dual pistols. Danny Lee is a disgraced supercop who also hurt a woman on a job, sent to protect a guy who Chow is sent to kill, but after witnessing the supposedly ruthless Chow save a girl from the line of fire, Danny falls in love with him and they end up fighting together.

Danny Lee was in City on Fire with Chow, had portrayed Bruce Lee in the 70’s:

Thanks to Woo, I learned it’s hard to lipsync when the song plays at normal speed and everything else is in slow-motion. Also dig the trick of burning gunpowder to seal a wound, which I just saw in Monster Hunter. It’s a just-pretty-good movie beloved by people who need to see invincible sunglasses-wearing heroes firing two guns whilst jumping through the air, Woo’s followup to the Better Tomorrow movies. Tsui Hark produced, while Woo produced Hark’s Better Tomorrow III.

Sally Yeh starred in Hark’s Peking Opera Blues, a singer who retired from movies after this:

by ·Comments Off on Summer 2019 Movie Roundup

Some movies watched before, during, and soon after the China trip:

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The Illinois Parables (2016 Deborah Stratman)

I know I watched it late at night, in Alpharetta, and somehow took no notes, and enjoyed it. Landscapes and history lessons. Sure sounds interesting from the letterboxd writeups! Maybe kinda if General Orders No. 9 was much better, and had been highly influenced by Profit Motive.

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Widows (2018 Steve McQueen)

After all the hype – the follow-up to his best-picture winner with an outstanding cast – somehow I lost interest in this by the time it came out, and caught up months later on the seat-back of a plane. It’s overwrought and overstuffed, but undeniably pleasurable in its performances and genre plotting.

I wonder if the male actors were sabotaged in an attempt to draw attention to the heist-gone-bad widows Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki and Michelle Rodriguez – or if they just misjudged the tone of the movie. Colin Farrell overacts as a cartoon-villain politician, Daniel Kaluuya plays a basic enforcer of a crime boss/politician stalking Viola Davis, and Liam Neeson goes from sympathetic victim to archvillain when he’s discovered by wife Viola (in the movie’s best scene) to be shacking up with the fourth widow after arranging the deaths of his buddies to get away with all the money. Does Viola throw aside spousal emotion for the sake of sweet revenge, killing Liams herself at the end? She does!

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Transit (2018 Christian Petzold)

Watched at the Tara, huge, alone. Sicinski’s review says it all.

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High Life (2018 Claire Denis)

I took no notes about this, mostly remember the ending of Robert Pattinson and daughter alone on the ship hurtling towards a black hole, and the haunting Pattinson-sung Tindersticks song. These two most recent Claire Denis features have helped offset the brutal unpleasantness of her previous two, and even though this one has its share of rape and murder, it also has beauty and wonder and general strangeness… and that song…

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Us (2019 Jordan Peele)

Watched with Pro at Atlantic Station – on the secret screen with its own bar, not that this mattered. I don’t have a firm handle on the symbolism, but it’s a hell of a thriller regardless. See smart articles by Kyle, Monica, Mike, and Carol.

AUG 2024: Rewatched… In the five years since this came out, Lupita has done three franchise sequels, and the DP has used his beach experience on Old. Young Lupita’s flashback dad became Morpheus + Candyman, her mom starred in Nanny, and I just saw husband Winston Duke in The Fall Guy.

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In Fabric (2018 Peter Strickland)

Watched at the glorious Plaza as part of the Atlanta Film Festival.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets & Lies) visits a creepy clothing store during sales week, is talked into buying a cursed red dress by a cheerfully coercive saleswoman (Fatma Mohamed, speaking in retail-poetry). Marianne dates Barry Adamson (a Bad Seed!), gets chastised by boss Julian Barratt, and keeps getting injured until she’s finally killed in a car crash. It’s a strange tone overall, kind of a creeping dread mixed with splashes of comedy – but Marianne is a sympathetic character stuck in a crappy job, being intimidated in her own house by her son’s new girl (Gwendoline Christie of Top of the Lake season 2), so the campy horror-comedy gets overwhelmed by sadness. The dress survives, and gets shared by another guy with a crappy job (Leo Bill) and his girlfriend Hayley Squires (of the latest Wheatley and second-latest Loach), misfortune and death follow, but this time the department store burns down during a consumer brawl.

Strickland:

A lot of us filmmakers have had to do the kinds of jobs these characters do: temping, retail. The challenge is to usher those experiences into one’s films without it feeling like a vendetta, because a lot of those experiences are quite ball breaking. It’s more desirable to find humor there, to take characters like [Sheila’s employers] Stash and Clive and make them funny.

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Election 1 & 2 (2005/06 Johnnie To)

Watched a couple of HK double-features on the long flight back from HK – on the iPad, tragically, so no screenshots. These are Hong Kong underworld power struggle movies – Lok (Simon Yam, star of at least six other To films) wins the election that Big D (Tony Leung 2: Evil East) thought he’d bought, so Big D revolts and threatens to start a war. Lok placates the dude, offering him the chairman position after Lok’s two years are up, and the two become friends – until the moment Big D lets his guard down and gets murdered.

Part two is more complicated, starring Jimmy (Louis Koo, the movie star in Romancing in Thin Air) as a businessman using his gangster ties to get ahead, but with plans to go straight – until he’s arrested and forced by the mainland government to run as their puppet chairman. Lok attempts to run a second time, which is against the rules, Kun (Ka Tung Lam, a cop in some of the Infernal Affairs movies) kidnaps some of the elders to get ahead, and Jet (Nick Cheung of Exiled) attempts to eliminate the competition. In both movies, the baton signaling the chairman’s power is hidden as a strategic move, then the baton is recovered through scheming and brutality.

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A Better Tomorrow 1 & 2 (1986/87 John Woo)

I alternated these with the Election movies, and they’re either good indicators that John Woo is no Johnnie To, or that the 1980’s were a horrible decade for filmmaking. Gangster Ho (Ti Lung of a ton of Shaw Brothers movies) is protective of his cop little brother Kit (Leslie Cheung). He tries to get out, but they pull him back in! A few years later, Kit and Ho and his best friend Mark (Chow Yun-fat) sort-of team up to take down the gangster boss. The movie’s main attractions are guessing where the shifting loyalties will land, and watching Chow Yun-fat overplay his part as the super-cool guy, a schtik that nobody would fall for (jk, he became a massive star from this role and won the best actor award). At least he definitively dies at the end of the movie, so he won’t be in the sequel.

Part two is pretty much the same movie, Ho and Kit versus new gangster Lung (Dean Shek of Drunken Master), but it turns out Lung is being set up, so they all team up against the new superboss. Kit is killed as his baby is being born across town (by Emily Chu, also Cheung’s costar in Rouge the following year). The movie suffers from the lack of Chow Yun-fat’s stupid energy… ahhhh kidding, he appears as Mark’s identical twin brother, a non-gangster who transforms into a Mark-like badass after about twenty minutes.

Alternate prequels were filmed – producer Tsui Hark made the official A Better Tomorrow III, and Woo adapted his own prequel script into Bullet in the Head (in which Simon Yam played a character named Lok, an unexpectin’ Election connection).

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Lu Over The Wall (2017 Masaaki Yuasa)

Schoolkid meets a manic pixie dream mermaid – sort of a Walk On Girl-distorted version of Ponyo. Not as thrillingly nuts as Walk On Girl – surprising, since that’s a teen drinking drama and this one’s about a rock music-loving mermaid. She gets discovered, captured, rescued, etc., less interesting for the story than the wavy-jumbly animation style.

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Diamantino (2018 Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt)

Loopy, extremely fun cult flick about a massive soccer star manipulated by his scheming sisters, a mad scientist, and a cop who masquerades as his adoptive daughter. Everyone spends the movie trying to catch him out, but Diamantino is too simply sweet to be scheming.

Lead actor Carloto Cotta also starred in Tabu, and appears in Mysteries of Lisbon and all three of the Arabian Nights. I’ve been rooting for Abrantes since his Brief History of Princess X, so glad this was wonderful. I haven’t watched many movies at the Plaza since getting back, but between this and In Fabric, they’ve been extremely Plaza-appropriate.

by ·Comments Off on Office (2015, Johnnie To)

Oh man, what an idea – take a story of office politics during the 2008 banking crisis and turn it into a heightened musical on stylishly artificial sets, directed by master of spatial composition Johnnie To. I loved this.

Company IPO, new partnership and financial audit are all happening at once. Chairman Chow Yun Fat (first movie I’ve seen of his since Curse of the Golden Flower) and CEO Ms. Chang (film writer Sylvia Chang, also of Eat Drink Man Woman) run the company and are having a not-so-secret affair.

Cheatin’ David (HK McDonald’s spokeman Eason Chan) also has something going with Ms. Chang but starts warming up to Heartbroken Sophie (Tang Wei of Lust, Caution) in finance so she’ll help him hide a bad trade.

Energetic new guy Wang Ziyi (who introduces himself to people by mentioning Ang Lee, who has directed films starring half this movie’s lead actors) bounces around the office, falling for new girl Lang Yueting, who nobody realizes is the chairman’s daughter, covertly getting to know the company she’ll soon be running.

S. Kraicer:

Wong Kar-wai’s inspired art director William Chang has concocted a highly stylized vision of a postmodern office setting: a theatrical, open-concept, multi-storied abstraction of a contemporary financial firm, complete with lobby and adjoining metro station. As fundamentally structuralist as ever (though he hides it well), To stages the complex romantic and financial-scheme-devising interactions of his stellar cast with a fluency that dazzles.

Probably would’ve dazzled even more in 3D, which is how it was presented in theaters.

D. Kasman:

This abstract pleasure of dashing lines and depth-play is at the service of an ebullient imagining of the corporate world in unparalleled transparency, one which the contemporary architectural trend of glass-scape monuments and faux-communal interior layouts insincerely aim at evoking. But what Chang’s screenplay reveals through this radical transparency is that Office is very much another Johnnie To film about killing: the killing of the soul within the corporate workspace, the killing of romance within a culture of materialism, and the killing of brother- and sisterhood within the machine of corporate capitalism. Its deadly thrust is naked for all to see. It joins To’s triptych drama Life Without Principle and the Don’t Go Breaking My Heart skyscraper romcoms to make for a series of blistering, cynical, and ruthlessly analytic portraits of the luxury-slick surfaces and corrosive-sick structures of global urban capitalism.

by ·Comments Off on Curse of the Golden Flower (2006, Zhang Yimou)

The third of Zhang’s extreme action epics. More colors than you can shake a sceptre at. Maybe a step down to in quality and emotional impact from Flying Daggers level back to Hero level.

Katy liked it a bit.

Emperor Chow Yun-Fat is poisoning his wife Gong Li because she is sleeping with her stepson, the crown prince. His mom, thought to be dead, is really now the wife of the royal chemist, exiled from the kingdom, with a young daughter who is also sleeping (whoops) with the crown prince (Ye Liu, who played the awesome Snow Wolf in The Promise). Gong Li’s two sons are handsomely bearded Jie (Jay Chow, singer, of Initial D), loyal enough to his mom to betray his dad for her, and ignored prince Cheng, who wants to get in on the action. Chow sits around being kingly most of the time, with only a few good enraged moments, and Gong Li gets to act out all manner of desperation, rage, sadness, sickness and everything else.