So, I gather nobody's been seeing these, even though I've definitely been posting them!
(You're not buying it, are you?)
I've got several things I want to catch up with on this blog, from T.W.I.T. to FIlm Rolls to Fantasia to the festivals in between, and they feel nested in a way that I wasn't ever getting out of, so now I'm going to try to rotate and keep current and say "you know what, if this isn't done by bedtime it gets a really quick finish tomorrow morning before work because it is cutting into 'watching more movies' time".
Anyway, it was a fairly fun and busy week, starting off with a Chinese double feature -
Tiger Wolf Rabbit being a fairly serviceable thriller from the mainland and
Stuntman is a more ambivalent ode to Hong Kong movies than is typical. I must admit, I can't help but wonder what moving the Chinese and Korean films from Boston Common to Causeway Street is doing to their audience; even if it is leading to theater splits that make double features easier.
The middle of the week (around watching some baseball) was given to watching some Hitchcock at the Somerville.
Marnie on Tuesday was a nice 35mm print, and
Frenzy on Thursday in a new-ish 4K remaster. They're both what I call "post-peak Hitchcock" in the reviews, made after the late-1950s masterpieces and perhaps in some ways more interesting compared to what other folks were doing in the 1960s and early 1970s than the rest of Hitch's career, because other genre filmmakers had started internalizing his lessons.
Friday evening was a trip to Kendall Square for
Rumours, the new Guy Maddin that I wish I liked a bit more, then Saturday morning I headed out to the Seaport for the re-release of Tarsem Singh's restored
The Fall, two filmmakers who can be niche but also have incredible style.
Then I wrapped the weekend with a couple of movies that AMC basically scheduled against each other and made difficult to see during the week, more or less carving out the weekend's late afternoons:
Kensuke's Kingdom on Saturday was a nice little animated film from the UK, and
Panda Plan on Sunday was the latest Jackie Chan film. The most amusing thing about it, perhaps, was that I skipped a film of his at Fantasia figuring Well Go or someone would release it in the USA, but apparently not before his next one.
Anyway -
my Letterboxd account is genuinely more reliable than this, although full of spelling errors and hastily composed thoughts that get sorted out here.
Yu Huo zhi Lu (Tiger Wolf Rabbit)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but
listings for when it is
There are a couple moments in
Tiger Wolf Rabbit when the filmmakers try to pull back from what has become a movie perhaps too dour and grim to get audiences to the finish, and the result is just mild disbelief. It's better than outright whiplash of going from talking about child abduction to romantic comedy material and back again, but the filmmakers don't quite have the knack for taking a little step away from the abyss or occasionally touching solid ground that keeps the audience from drifting away.
It's a movie that really doesn't come together until the second half, like the filmmakers know the three characters they need for later but can't really get them to work together before the main story kicks in. It opens with some striking scenes, but kind of drags between introducing the oddly mismatched trio - Cui Dalu (Yang Xiao), a just-released convict whose child was abducted; Li Hongyng (Zhao Zanilla), the woman he hooked up while searching for his son and wound up running scams with; and Zhao Zishan (Liu Ye), a mysterious figure who wants to hire Dalu to find a worse criminal - and giving them a big mission. That mission, it turns out, is pretty good. It's fragmented, sure, but you can see them building a movie to get there.
I don't know that the full story of the film really holds up; it often feels like the screenwriters came up with its two halves separately and stitched them together the best they could; the screenplay gets the story through but every previously-unrevealed thing about the characters feels more useful for explaining their next steps than making any sense of their previous ones. The cast is good, and vibe well when they're allowed to, but there's a segment in the middle where the characters are literally lost and pulled out via a weird deux ex machina, like the writers had no idea to how to get things to come together naturally.
There's style to the film, too; it feels like the folks involved sought out parts of China that seldom show up on screen and made the most of striking landscapes and village architecture. The big visual swings and plot twists are probably more memorable than things in many more sensibly constructed movies, to the point where it impresses more than it disappoints, even if the result isn't quite the sum of the parts.
Stuntman
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but
listings for when it is
Stuntman starts out with what feels like a really good
Police Story pastiche and gets interesting when that not only goes awry but the film fast-forwards to the present day and tempers its nostalgia for old-school Hong Kong action.
After the energetic stunt show, and the horrible accident at the end, it has once-famed action director Sam Lee (Stephen Tung Wai) running a little first aid clinic, catering mostly to former stuntmen who are now taking shifts as security guards and the like. At a martial-arts society reunion, he meets old friend Cho (To Yin-Gor), a director who wants him to handle the action on a movie he's putting together with action superstar Wai (Philip Ng Wan-Lung), who had been a suntman in Sam's crew but now has his own. Sam hires Lee Sam-Lung (Terrence Lau Chun-Him), who is just about ready to give up stunts to work at his brother's logistics business as the stunt co-ordinator, all while trying to prepare for the wedding of daughter Cherry (Cecliia Choi Si-Wan), though most of the father-of-the-birde work is going to her stepfather.
DIrectors Herbert Leung Kun-Seun and Albert Leung Koon-Yiu - I think they're brothers - have stuntwork bona fides and I wouldn't be terribly shocked if every piece of this movie was based on a real anecdote or experience. What's notable is that they present both the bits about making a movie and what comes after with remarkable clarity; where some may have blind spots about their life's work, the Leungs show what an action director does compared to a stunt co-ordinator, for instance, and what working-class jobs these actually are. Most importantly, while many fans of Hong Kong film and bigger names like Sammo Hung will often look back at the industry's heyday and talk about how a month would be spent on a single fight despite the guerilla filmmaking, they recognize that it was tremendously dangerous, and folks like "Heartless Sam" were a big part of the reason why. Perhaps the key thing they capture is that someone like Sam can be very good at his job and also extremely dangerous; the film's centerpiece is one that many films would play as a thrilling caper but which instead feels like Sam is going to get someone killed.
Hong Kong action is a complicated legacy and the film isn't completely successful at grappling with it; it's too fascinated by Sam to really give sufficient space to the younger characters who maybe want to be smarter about things even when he proves to be a terrible role model. It doesn't exactly help that Stephen Tung Wai has a wonderfully weathered face but never feels as natural as nearly everyone else in the cast as an actor, especially during the scenes with Cecilia Choi, where his smiling too wide and trying too hard only start to feel like something the character does rather than the actor in retrospect. The film is also big on "Hong Kong Spirit", not so much in a way that feels like it's meant to contrast with anywhere else, but also not in a way that examines it. Is it just doing more than such a tiny place should, stretching yourself past the breaking point no matter what, or...?
The stonework is legit, at least - Tung and the directors have extensive stunt backgrounds and know their stuff - and while I suspect the filmmaking is simplified, it's nicely grounded and doesn't seem interested in romanticizing the process too much.
Marnie
* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (A Bit of Hitch, 35mm)
Available to
rent/purchase digitally on Prime or
elsewhere;
4K and DVD available on Amazon
Perhaps the most entertaining thing about
Marnie is that you can see Hitchcock trying to coax a James Stewart or Cary Grant performance out of his lead, who absolutely cannot be anything but Sean Connery. He knew the power of movie stars, but Connery was just starting to be James Bond and broaden his own screen persona beyond that as the film was shooting, so maybe Hitch wasn't fully familiar with his new tool yet.
Connery plays the wealthy head of a publishing company who recognizes the title character (Tippi Hedren) as the woman who robbed her previous job when she applies for work as a secretary but is nonetheless fascinated by her, covering up her crimes and blackmailing her into marriage. There's the makings of an intense thriller there, but Hitchcock, perhaps, is not the man to make it; his world view seems locked into seeing Marnie as the broken women driven to crime by previous psychological trauma and Connery's Mark Rutland mostly holding her tight so that he can see how to fix her. There's a moment - perhaps the film's best - when Hitchcock or screenwriter Jay Presson Allen seem quite happy to undermine the idea, as Marnie mocks Rutland's psychological approach, saying she's seen all the same movies, but hanging a lantern on those issues isn't exactly rising above it. The whole thing might be better off acknowledging Rutland as kind of a bastard and letting Marnie own her choices move, even if they don't wind up together.
Heck, you can see how that works in the second best thing about the movie, watching Diane Baker's Lil mature from bratty to bitchy before the audience's eyes; she's never a conventional good girl but it's tough to really dislike her as she's doing interesting things around the edges, even if it she is working at cross-purposes to the film's central romance. There are also a couple other impressive scenes - the bit where Marnie steals from the safe is a clinic in presenting such a basic bit of crime as genuinely tense, and the way Hitchcock and Hedren present Marnie's panic during the hunt (where she should feel safe and assured) is great as well - but they're often exceptions, the parts the filmmakers can make singe even if what's around them aren't as great.
The movie is very much post-peak Hitchcock: Elaborate psychological constructs, a script stuck between explicit and euphemistic, and an underlying meanness where a younger Hitch would have found chemistry and affection.
Frenzy
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (A Bit of Hitch, 4K laser DCP)
Available to
rent/purchase digitally on Prime or
elsewhere;
4K and DVD available on Amazon
Fifty years later,
Frenzy feels like it's in a weird, in-between spot, where a casual viewer might not be able to tell where Alfred Hitchcock is ahead of the times, where he's catching up, and where his experiments are having mixed results. It's good, but there are moments when I'd wonder what he's getting at; it can feel like a Monty Python sketch, and Hitchcock's dark sense of humor means it could be a joke or the sort of thing the Pythons were spoofing.
(And that's setting aside stuff like the joke about how exotic and terrible a "Margarita" is, which has aged about as well as James Bond scoffing at the Beatles)
Some of those bits are obvious bad ideas, like a long recap of what has already happened that exists to beat the joke about the detective's wife's cooking into the ground. Sometimes I wondered whether stuff like using a freeze-frame instead of holding a shot was meant to be unnerving or not. Other times, Hitchcock seems to be trying to get every morbid gag he's ever thought of in during what he probably figures will be one of his last few films.
But, on the other hand, some pieces are legitimately great. The armchair psychoanalysis might be terrible, but the way the killer slides from affable to vicious is genuinely terrific, and a scene where the camera seems to nervously back away from a murder and then wait for the body to be found feels about three layers deep. The film tortures by waiting just a little too long, but not so much that giggling breaks out. It's mean, and the results of murder are undignified in a way that makes the whole idea even more awful.
At times, it feels like Hitchcock wants to scratch the same itch as
Psycho but knows folks will compare the two films and maybe tries too hard to differentiate between them (and his other "wrong man" stories). But it works more often than not, and looks gorgeous to boot.
Previous review (2013)
Rumours
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 October 2024 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
Available to
pre-order digitally on Prime; not yet streaming in the USA, but
listings for when it is
Everything about
Rumours feels like it should not just be a lot of fun, but work well together: Guy Maddin (And his frequent collaborators)! Bog body zombies! At the G7 summit! With a giant brain! And a fun cast, including an increasingly game-for-anything Cate Blanchett! And yet, it resolutely fails to come together. One of cinema's greatest weirdos seems too timid to be absurd or satiric.
You can tell early on, too, when the leaders are chummy but won't say what sort of crisis they are meeting to discuss, and then seem like they're being taxed to write out platitudes. In 2024, it seems like the weakest jokes you can make about politicians, even if the G7 feels like a lot of empty hype (has anything concrete actually emerged from one?); if you're making them, put some tension in it. Make them seem paralyzed into politeness rather than empty. Or maybe go all in on absurdity, which is often this group's specialty, but they seldom push a joke past odd into weird or unnerving territory.
Rumours is all the little bits a movie puts in between the big gags that you might miss, elevated to the foreground.
When the jokes land and linger, the film can be pretty fun - a late gag with the Canadian Prime Minister going for the land acknowledgment in an emergency feels downright clever for instance. The cast is admittedly terrific: Everybody seems to at least be digging into the various bits of pompous dignity of their characters, with Roy Dupuis (as Canada's virile, scandal-plagued PM) and Denis Ménochet (as France's intellectual President) in particular making off with any scene that's not tied down. It's also very fun to see Maddin's silent-influenced style emerge from a movie that initially looks downright normal, especially once one learns that they have taken an actual forest and used lighting and smoke to make it look like a set. The melodramatic score is fun.
The filmmakers just don't seem to know how to connect all those ideas that probably seemed like they would write themselves once that failed to happen.
The Fall
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 October 2024 in Alamo Boston #4 (re-release, laser DCP)
Available to
rent/purchase digitally on Prime or
elsewhere;
original DVD available on Amazon (new one likely on the way)
The Fall is arguably one of the great cinematic follies of our time, and that's no insult: It's just acknowledging that there's clearly a lot of time, money, and effort poured into a film that was probably never going to connect with a mainstream audience unless it got very lucky. It's a folly, but one that's worth being in the world. The world is richer for having such things in it.
And it's worth checking out during this re-release, even if it hadn't been cleaned up and presented as the finest digital file possible. The film is more eye-poppingly gorgeous than one likely remembers, for a start, even if you remember it looking pretty good; 15 years of movies being increasingly built inside machines rather than from figuring out how to populate a grand landscape or striving for consistency rather than this movie's glorious contradictions makes something like this harder to conceive even in memory, as we often remember things in relation to other things, and that can cause something as singular as this to fade precisely because there's nothing like it. Watching it for the first time in years allows it to stun anew because there is very little like, say, a scene where an elaborately-costumed army makes their way down an almost Escher-like series of stairs in sync.
The script often seems shaggier than the precisely-planned visuals, and the fact that it's a bit of meta-commentary - Roy's story shifts and expands and contracts to capture his young visitor's attention to a purpose - the viewer can perhaps see that a bit too plainly. It stays to grind at a certain point, but then, the movie is about to change, and perhaps wearing out its welcome keeps the audience from rejecting the shift, and Tarsem's choice to plunge what had spent a lot of time as a children's story with dark undertones into not just darkness but despair can feels audacious: There's no winking or quipping, but the sincerity is powerful, and Tarsem isn't trying to impress us so much as be honest about how hard crawling out can be.
The filmmaker never got to make this sort of big swing again, but what a thing to spend your credit on.
Kensuke's Kingdom
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 October 2024 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but
listings for when it is
Kensuke's Kingdom certainly starts out in that easily-maligned category of "British animated films that look kind of cheap but somehow have an amazing voice cast", but happily grows into something better. The language barrier that never really gets bridged forces it to be more visual, and the filmmakers are wise to keep the scale manageable.
And it could be easy for it to seem too big, opening with Michael (voice of Aaron MacGregor) sailing around the world at some point in the 1990s, presumably, with his parents (voices of Cillian Murphy & Sally Hawkins) and older sister (voice of Raffey Cassidy), none too pleased about supposedly leaving his dog stella behind, though he's somehow managed to smuggle the pup on board and keep him hidden for days despite being not that great a sailor otherwise. It all leads to him being swept off the deck during a storm, landing on a seemingly deserted island, although eventually he'll meet Kensuke (voice of Ken Watanabe), who appears to have been there since World War II.
It's kind of wobbly at times, but the filmmakers are wise to lavish attention on what will get the most benefit: They quietly show how ow great it is to have a dog in this situation, lovingly render tropical animals, and make sure Kensuke's those doesn't look like a CGI effect on the middle of a hand-drawn film, as can happen. Heck, it happens here, as a choppy sea and the boat upon it are clearly created using different methods. The style switch to show his origins is very nice, and the animators give him a lot of dignity without making him stiff.
The filmmakers do sometimes seem to have a bit of trouble with how to tell the best part of the story; one suspects that the heart of the original book is Michael and Kensuke somehow getting to know each other without being able to speak, but that's probably more internal and time-consuming than the film can likely manage, while Michael remains a rather passive part of the story. The introduction of an external danger sometimes feels like something needs to be going on, but feels like an interruption more than a climax.
Still, as these small family movies which are fortunate to get one show a day for a week go, it's pretty decent.
Xiong Mao Ji Hua (Panda Plan)
* * (out of four)
Seen 20 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but
listings for when it is
You don't have to do this, Jackie Chan. You're a seventy-year-old legend who has recently expressed a fair amount of interest in being seen as a serious filmmaker rather than a clown. You don't have to sign up for the movie with the CGI panda cub, ego-puffing self-referentiality, and action scenes where everyone can see you've lost a step. You can just do one movie a year, play mentor on and off the screen, and just enjoy the fruits of an incredibly successful career.
Maybe someone gave Jackie that advice before
Panda Plan, which takes what must have at one point seemed like a clever idea for a movie - action movie star gets caught up in the middle of a plan to steal baby pandas while at a symbolic "adoption ceremony" - and just sucks the life out of it. Part of it is probably Chan's ego - when going meta, he's willing to have people joke about his nose and make himself look like a goofball, but he's not going to let folks take out the knives like Andy Lau did in
The Movie Emperor - which means that a lot of this movie is heroes and villains alike fawning over Jackie-the-character and he never quite plays himself as an older man who needs choreography in a way that would add tension. The filmmakers don't spend much of their Dairy Queen product placement money on actors who can play English-speaking mercenaries like people who actually speak English. The effects work isn't great and the last stretch is a cringe-worthy attempt to give the heartstrings an unwarrented tug.
(It's interesting that Jackie has a line about receiving an Oscar, though; it's clearly what he says, rather than subtitles, and while he did receive an honorary award in 2015, I wonder if this takes place in an alternate universe where
The Diary got made out he didn't pass on
Everything Everywhere All at Once. Plus you kind of expect him to go with the Mainland China equivalent these days)
Of course, Jackie Chan can star in a movie like this and get a National Week release because he knows the ropes as well as anybody ever has, and it's not just habit to smile as he slips through gaps in leaders or dodges punches. He may not be as spry as he was, but the choreography is still pretty good, inventive and funny, and there's a moment when things slow down enough to let Jackie talk about why he loves making movies where we're reminded of his genuine charisma and how good he can be given a chance to play it straight.
Sometimes you can say that the rest of the movie is worth it for those good bits, but this isn't one of them; it's a bit that could fit in many other movies and have the whole thing be much better.