by ·Comments Off on Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024, Soi Cheang)

I think the notes I took while watching this can stand on their own:

Girl Fishball’s prost mom gets beaten to death
He’s trying to save up for a fake ID but gets into gambling with the boys
Music is too big but maybe that’s the 1980s setting
This is 1986?

Raymond is the “employed cop” (?) of Detective vs. Sleuths
Cyclone’s doctor is looking for dead Jim’s son to kill his whole family
Chau is the doc, Lui killed his family, Jim was Lui’s killer who seems modeled after Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of NY
Jim is Koo’s Throw Down costar

Boss Tiger lost an eye to Jim, Boss Chau his family, and Cyclone killed Jim
Cyclone was secret friends with Jim and smuggled his family out of town after killing
Our guy is Jim’s son, whitehair doc Chau is pissed
They spent a billion dollars recreating the neighborhood for this film, but needed these guys to play different ages in the 1960s and 1980s and threw some talcum in their hair
Gravity-defying fights, not going for realism despite the kowloon recreation

AV is guy with underwear mask
It uses the godzilla (??)
They all butcher each other while Lok is incapacitated
Some of the goofiest action moves since Dragon Inn
Almost everyone is dead and the cops have Lok

Sammo’s sunglasses guy King uses this fight to move in and take over
King kills his boss Sammo after killing Cyclone
King’s deal is that he is physically indestructible
The action is too choppy, but decently cool
I saw a lady for a few seconds, must have been a mistake

by ·Comments Off on Drug War (2012, Johnnie To)

It’s only been half a year since I’ve watched a Johnnie To movie, but Throw Down left a lasting impression and this one flipped a switch and set me frantically into Johnnie To Mode. About 25 lead actors here, 19 of whom I’ve never seen before, in a complex duplicitous undercover plot, and it’s all still thrilling and comprehensible.

Police Captain Honglei Sun (star of A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop) and undercover cop Yi Huang bust a busload of drug mules, and while they’re dropping their loads, injured methmaster Louis Koo is fleeing the warehouse explosion that killed his family. Koo is busted, and facing the death penalty he cooperates. Most of the movie is their duplicitous dealings, intercepting meetings between drug traffickers who’d never met in person, pretending to be the one guy, then the other guy, the highlight of this being a laughing dealer named Haha. After the offscreen deaths in the prologue explosions, no shots are fired in the first hour of a movie called Drug War… then all of a sudden, very many shots are fired, as docile collaborator Koo violently switches sides. Raid on a drug factory run by deaf-mutes goes bad, Suet “Fatso” Lam turns out to be the mastermind. Don’t think I’ve quite seen an undercover cop movie with this trajectory before.

Koo:

Cops:

Fatso: