by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China IV (1993, Yuen Bun)

Pre-credits scene has Vincent Zhao making some very un-Jet-Li awesome moves, then his name is splashed across the screen – good, they’re not trying to hide the new guy. It’s also the first sequel to start directly after the previous one – they’re still celebrating the end of the Lion King festival when friendly Governor Zhiwen Wang (currently of the Infernal Affairs TV series) shows up and they lion-dance together.

Foon, Clubfoot, and Yan are back in the mix, but 13th Aunt is replaced by (Katy guessed it) 14th Aunt: Jean Wang of Swordsman III and Iron Monkey the same year. New director Yuen doesn’t exactly revitalize the series here. The dubbing is bad, and despite having a subplot about a group using wires to appear to fly, the movie itself is full of unintentionally visible wires, especially in the heinous horse-punching scenes (yes, there’s more than one).

14th Aunt starts a newspaper but nobody in town knows how to read – so, technologically we’ve moved from still photography to motion pictures to the printing press. Anti-foreigner sword cult Red Lantern is menacing everyone, and the foreigners have equipped their lion suits with deadly weapons. The nice governor dies, it’s very sad, then Wong takes a measured bit of revenge before withdrawing to prep for the final(?) movie.

Chin Ka-Lok is angry, I’ve forgotten why:

Ze Germans:

by ·Comments Off on Don’t Play Us Cheap (1972, Melvin Van Peebles)

A filmed version of his own play, which was a stage adaptation of his own novel, which he wrote in French then translated to English – he filmed first, opened the play with the same cast, then released the movie. Sounds exhausting. Instead of the final film in the Van Peebles box set, Criterion could just as easily have released this as a double-feature with To Sleep With Anger, each of them about a happy Black household infiltrated by forces of evil.

A couple of passing imps decide to stop in Harlem to ruin a party thrown by Esther Rolle of Good Times. Instead of going in together, Trinity arrives first and completely fails to wreak havoc then falls for the birthday girl. When he’s belatedly joined by Devil David (Avon Long, who discovered Lena Horne in the 1930s), they only succeed in chasing off the Johnsons, a late-arriving condescending couple and their giant son, whom everyone else is glad to see go.

It’s a musical, and I wish any of the songs was great – too gospelly for me – but there’s a cool bit at the end when everyone’s singing what’s on their mind at once, the whole party semi-harmonizing and semi-chaotic.

Lisa Thompson:

Van Peebles frequently overlaps two different images to make a contrast that is then commented upon in a third shot, such as on the dangers of evil or the inability to stay true to oneself. Van Peebles occasionally uses the same overlapping technique with sound, playing with dissonance and harmony as multiple characters sing their own signature parts, or a single character sings while the others join in a communal chorus.

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Three Pickup Men for Herrick (1957)

Herrick needs three pickup men, but five showed up. The white boss picks the one white guy, then the tough looking guy, then the young guy, and the rejects walk back home. No dialogue, Light humming and harmonica on the soundtrack.

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Sunlight (1957)

I think the pretty girl married someone else because the guy she danced with at the restaurant said you can’t get married without money… but I don’t think restaurant guy was the hat guy who robs some lady and is chased by the cops and ends up at the wedding… maybe the older guy at the wedding is a different hat guy? Try paying attention next time?

by ·Comments Off on Criterion Channel shorts watched July 2024

Watched some shorts on CC. I only mention the source because we know how I love to lean on the screenshot button, but streaming restricts my personal freedom to steal images. And also because they deserve to be mocked for still using the Baby’s First Streaming Platform template, which says “season one” under the titles of short films.

She and Her Cat (1999, Makoto Shinkai)

Talky, narrated by a cat who is sexually attracted to his female human owner, passing the seasons together. Limited animation, mostly gently panning across stills. Not too exciting, but I suppose its success got Shinkai (who also narrated) the budget for Voices of a Distant Star. When Your Name blew up, this got a sequel/remake, and Shinkai returned to narrate.

Voice of a Distant Star (2002, Makoto Shinkai)

The UN Space Force naturally needs morose teens to pilot giant space robots, preferably while wearing their school uniforms. Star pilot Mikako likes a boy called Noboru (same voice actors as the cat movie), and though she’s stationed on Jupiter’s moons they still text using 2002-model flip phones. When she’s sent further away to fight evil aliens, it gets harder to communicate since each message takes years to arrive.

Chuu Chuu (2021, Mackie Mallison)

Medium takes, then quick edits… digital stability with low-gauge colors… focusing on an aging Japanese grandma. Then a section discussing touchy family relationships and identity from the perspective of a doorbell cam. Not as many birds as I was hoping for, but there is a birdwatching section towards the end, then a projector throwing fast-cut home movies over a kid’s face.

Fly, Fly Sadness (2015, Miryam Charles)

Story of an explosion that affected everyone in the country, so now they all have the same girlish speaking voice, coincidentally the voice of the director, who narrates over short clips and loops. CC didn’t care to correct the subtitles.

by ·Comments Off on Peppers & Garlic double-feature (Les Blank)

Hot Pepper (1973)

Rock doc about accordionist Clifton Chenier, made two decades into his recording career, and one decade before he’d win a grammy. No awards or recording studios in sight here, it’s more front porches and basement parties. Interviews with locals about their thoughts on racial integration (they’re for it). No fly on the wall, everybody waves at Les while he’s filming street scenes, and his camera is attentive to passers-by and animals and clouds, as usual. I imagine the interview with Chenier’s grandma would’ve killed with a crowd. Made the same year as another Louisiana music doc Dry Wood, and right before the Leon Russell movie.

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Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980)

Just a doc about garlic and its many uses and the people who are into it, but this is Les Blank so of course it’s a musical. Glad to see the featured Oakland barbecue joint is still family owned and sort-of in business. He digs up Werner Herzog for a sound bite about why his Nosferatu didn’t have a garlic subplot (this was pre-Fitzcarraldo/Burden of Dreams). Wim Wenders did some camerawork for this – why?

Garlic & Flamenco:

by ·Comments Off on Hamlet (1948, Laurence Olivier)

Opens unpromisingly with text onscreen accompanying a narrator, but then we get a castle in the mist, the camera roaming to show off its fancy sets. I don’t think “this is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind” is from the original text.

Hamlet’s first monologue is in partial voiceover, a really good portrayal of someone tormentedly talking to themself. Elsewhere Ophelia narrates Hamlet’s wordless visit to her room, and he performs every word she’s saying in flashback-pantomime, a bit overkill. The zoom inside Hamlet’s head before “to be or not to be” was also odd. I would understand if other versions cut the scene where Hamlet gives long-winded direction to the actors before the play (and so they do). There are only two women in the movie and he throws both of them onto the floor. Hamlet gets kidnapped by pirates before the finale, did I dream this?

HAM-let:

Queen, King, Ophelia, Laertes:

Won best picture over The Red Shoes, a travesty, and Olivier got actor, but at least John Huston beat him for director. The king-uncle was in Went the Day Well and Disney’s Treasure Island, the queen in John Huston’s Freud movie, Horatio in The Projected Man, Polonius in The Mummy, and Laertes in that movie’s sequel/reboot The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb. Speaking of mummies, we get Peter Cushing as the silly-ass courier, also officiating the swordfight. Ophelia is Jean Simmons of Guys and Dolls, Estelle in Great Expectations, soon to be seen in The Big Country.

The actors:

The duel:

The Peter Cushing:

by ·Comments Off on Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971, Melvin Van Peebles)

Wild pedophiliac opening. Disorienting movie, the repeated lines of dialogue and action both odd. Feels like a cross between a quickie semi-competent crime flick and an advanced experimental film (at least three times I thought of Kenneth Anger). They’ll shoot multiple takes and instead of choosing, just use all of them strung together. The music (by the filmmaker and Earth, Wind & Fire) anxiously stops and starts. Since I am culturally and historically challenged, when I heard the song “C’mon Feet” I realized it must be a blaxploitation parody – but it’s not, this was credited with inventing the genre.

Our guy gets a front seat to some police brutality, snaps and beats two cops half to death. Sweetback is arrested but the locals torch the police car and he takes off. A motorcycle gang makes him duel their boss, a woman with long red hair – offered the choice of weapon, SB suggests fucking. The cops always close behind, at the end he’s injured, on the run for Mexico, the soundtrack chorus chanting “run Sweetback, run motherfucker!”

In the great Criterion essay, Michael Gillespie provides a useful list of films to watch next:

It’s vital to appreciate that not all Black films of the seventies can be adequately labeled as blaxploitation but that many were made possible by the popular cycle, even though they ultimately exceeded the expectations of the industry, critics, and moviegoing public, including Bone (Larry Cohen, 1972), Wattstax (Mel Stuart, 1973), Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973), The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Ivan Dixon, 1973), Claudine (John Berry, 1974), and Coonskin (Ralph Bakshi, 1974).

by ·Comments Off on The Great Beauty (2013, Paolo Sorrentino)

Welcome to Cannes Fortnight at Casa Brandon. Last held in 2022, this year the focus is on watching movies by 2024 Cannes directors who are completely unfamiliar to me, such as Sorrentino. For a while there, every couple years he released a new must-see film (Il Divo, This Must Be The Place, Youth), which I would never see, and The Great Beauty is the Criterion-crowned consensus favorite.

Initially more avant-garde than expected. I thought the sound mixing in first scene was cool – we hear a choir but no dialogue or sound effects as some minor tourist drama plays out – but it turns out the scene was mixed normally and I had the headphones plugged in halfway. Paolo’s muse Toni Servillo plays an unproductive writer who knows everyone in Rome and can go everywhere attending all their parties. So we get to go everywhere, making me wonder who is Sorrentino that he has such access. It’s a splendidly expensive-looking movie if nothing else. Seems to be an attempted remake of La Dolce Vita – for me, Fellini’s least interesting movie, so this was an improvement.

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.