A thing that amused me, earlier this year, was AMC sending me a message about how the price for A-List would go on my next billing cycle but I'd get four movies a week, and then seeing them change the pre-screen ads to emphasize the laser projection. Were they going to have to change them again in a few weeks? So far, no, even though I've been able to do four a week for a month or so. I'm guessing they'll roll the upgrade out to current members first and then launch it later in the year or in 2026.
Obviously, they should do some sort of cross-promotions with Letterboxd's "#LastFourWatched" hashtag when they do. It just occurs to me that it should probably be "#LastFourWatchd", but maybe that's taking things too far.
Anyway, for various reasons, I wound up using them one-a-day for four days in a row this weekend/early week, and while there's almost a pattern - parents having kind of alarming attitudes toward their kids being in danger - Malice doesn't quite fit it. Also, surprisingly, the father in Jurassic World Rebirth comes across looking like a pretty good parent, all things considered, which is usually not the case when your decisions lead to your kids almost being eaten by dinosaurs!
E yi (Malice '25)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #5 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon
Malice (or E yi, to use its Mandarin name and avoid confusion with the Nicole Kidman/Alec Baldwin/Bill Pullman movie from 30-odd years ago) is a pretty good thriller with some interesting things to say until it becomes even more heavy-handed in its last act, and while this is the part where you might expect to ascribe that to Chinese censorship, I'd kind of expect something similar no matter what its origins were. Filmmakers everywhere are vulnerable to twist overload and scolding what media has evolved into since they got their start, after all.
It opens with a heck of a hook, though, as pediatric cancer patient Yu Jingjao (Yang Enyou) races through an eerily empty hospital at night, chased by nurse Li Yue (Chen Yusi), with Jingjing's foster mother Wu Yusie (Ting Mei) following them to the roof when she finds her daughter's room empty, arriving just in time to see them go over the wall. The official investigation of the incident will be led by Captain Liang Guan (Huang Xuan), but it's the work of his soon-to-be-ex-wife, journalist Ye Pan (Zhang Xiaofei) that will have the greatest impact on the case, as she and her team, notably intern Chen (Li Gengxi) post their own findings on Li Yue's lurid history in real time, feeding their website's colorful commentators who shape public opinion.
That opening is the most overtly stylish section of the movie, making it briefly look like a supernatural horror story or the climax of something with a serial killer, but it's soon revealed as something of an anomaly as the film cuts to Ye Pan delivering a lecture about journalistic ethics. That's more the filmmakers' speed for the rest of the movie, and that's not exactly a bad thing; with one of the folks who went off the roof dead and the other in a coma, more action would eliminate more possibilities than it would open, and for most of the movie, the big twists tend to do double duty: When a source caling himself "Lord Dao" (one of a number of cameos and special guest stars I'm not quite familiar enough with the recognize by name) appears on Ye Pan's live stream, it both upends what the audience knows and further highlights the recklessness of real-time journalism and "self-media", which is in many ways the real thing that the film's three credited writers and two credited directors want the audience to ponder as opposed to a murder mystery.
Unfortunately, the film is in some ways too efficient in its tight 100 minutes: Two prior related stories reported by Ye Pan are mentioned just enough to be tied together near the end, along with her crumbling marriage to Liang, and there's a sort of forced parallelism to it, where you can see how this reflecting that and that reflecting this is meant to tie the whole thing together, but so much of it being revealed in the homestretch means the writers' hands are too visible. It's only underlined by how, suddenly, characters are talking about who the "malicious woman" is, especially to non-Chinese ears; it's a phrase that sounds like a trope/attitude that the audience supposed to be familiar with but is so carefully underlined that I suspect it sounds heavy-handed even to the film's local audience.
It's frustrating, because one can see where the mystery story is clearly playing into the idea of the public's willingness to buy into the trope of the malicious woman and the media criticism looks like it fits the idea but maybe doesn't quite. Plus, both the mystery threads and the media criticism are pretty good until the filmmakers decide to stop the film dead with extra twists and lectures that make sure that both the audience and characters get what they're saying, and it's not even crashing in a way that implies censorship or regulation is necessary. Things are going well until the filmmakers suddenly seem to become confident in their bad instincts and timid about their good ones.
Jurassic World: Rebirth
* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #2 (first-run, RealD 3D laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon
When Jurassic World came out, there was an interview with director Colin Treverrow about how the idea behind it was "what if people got bored with dinosaurs?", and while it's not a bad idea, it's potentially poisonous if the filmmaker can't make a film that says this stuff is cool and exciting anyway. Treverrow, it turned out, wasn't the guy to do that; his two movies played out the premise but never gave the sense that he had an antidote for it. Gareth Edwards, working from a screenplay by returning writer David Koepp, seems to have a better handle on the whole thing, as well as a much better handle on what makes for a good adventure movie.
There are different sorts of tragedy in how this attitude manifests as the film opens: A flashback to how the need to engineer bigger and badder dinos has fatal results, a scene where a confused bronto that escaped from a New York City zoo is confused and dying in a modern world the climate and ecosystem are hostile (which also rolls back some of the prior film's unwieldy status quo), and the introduction of Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), who studied under Alan Grant and is kind of heartbroken to see how these creatures he loves no longer seem to inspire wonder. This could all be just world-building, necessary extrapolation to get from the previous six movies to a story about an expedition to another island where genetically-engineered dinosaurs have escaped containment, this time to recover DNA that may be crucial in creating human heart medication, but there's sadness here.
And that's a good thing; it's got the audience in the right mood as they're introduced to Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali as mercenaries who are too professional to wear their feelings about recently lost comrades on their sleeves, and kind of ready when Koepp and Edwards decide they are going to fight against it. The trailer may have featured a version of John Williams's music that was as slowed-down and lower-keyed as you'd expect by the time a series reaches a seventh film and is playing to people who take The Lore seriously, but it shows up in its full, bombastic glory surprisingly often when we arrive on the island, and there's a spot where one may be expecting an action scene but instead gets an earnest and mostly-successful attempt to recreate the awe provoked by the first movie, or a trip to a natural history museum with a dino skeleton.
And around that, Rebirth is a thoroughly capable adventure movie, occasionally catching one aback with how often other blockbusters often seem to strain for its basic competence. Edwards stages a couple of action sequences on boats really well, taking into account how they move and make everything a little harder without ever letting the audience get lost, for instance. Scarlett Johansson reminds the audience that she's a movie star who can create the right sort of chemistry with everyone else in the cast to make things feel fleshed-out even if they're not actually complicated. The side plot about a family that winds up on the island as well actually works when it would usually be pandering idiocy; Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in particular makes the father feel like he knows his kids and is looking out for them rather than like someone annoyed by their presence.
The film stretches on a bit, and the finale doesn't entirely come together as it sinks in that Koepp & Edwards don't have anything new left up their sleeves that six other movies about folks running from corporate hubris in the form of resurrected life forms (with it raining at night to cover any shortcomings in the VFX) haven't covered, with a chase through dark tunnels not the best way to show off the misshapen, almost tragic "D-Rex". It's nevertheless a darn satisfying movie whose makers would rather make it fun than mean and seldom misstep even if they also seldom innovate.
40 Acres
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 July 2025 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon
40 Acres is not the first film in the post-apocalyptic survival genre to have Black creators and a majority-Black (and Native American) cast - heck, Breathe just came out last year, so not even the first in a while - but it's got a chip on its shoulder that other films of its ilk don't necessarily carry. Its family does not feel that they have not carved a safe space out of the chaos around them, specifically because of their backgrounds, and the tension of it is a vise that feels specific even as the themes and actions are familiar.
The matriarch of that family is Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler), an army veteran who returned to her family's Canadian homestead - which they arrived at as escaped slaves around the time of the American Civil War - just as ecological and societal collapse began. She has an 18-year-old son, Emanuel (Kataem O'Connor), In the decade or so since, she has married Galen (Michael Greyeyes) who has a teenage daughter Raine (Leenah Robinson) of his own; they now have two daughters, Danis (Jaeda LeBlanc) and Cookie (Haile Amare). The family are strong farmers and even better at defending their territory, as seen when a group of marauders get too close in the opening. Hailey won't give her location away to anyone, even the people she communicates via CB that she considers friends, which might protect them from a rumored band of cannibal marauders. But Manny is starting to buckle under this pressure, and he's just caught sight of a beautiful woman (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) who is about his age and not his stepsister in a nearby swimming hole.
I suspect that one of the reasons director R.T. Thorne and his co-writers break the film into chapters that shift perspective and emphasis is to prevent Danielle Deadwyler from making it hard to see anybody else with her white-hot intensity. Hailey is the sort of tightly-wound martinet that these films usually reveal to be the real danger compared to the zombies and cannibals, and Deadwyler seldom seems to be holding anything back as she lashes out at the family who occasionally act like children or otherwise don't seem to be at 110% all the time. She's a force of nature and kind of terrifying, even with a load-bearing flashback where what she's seen before returning home seems to have staggered her and the occasional scene with Michael Greyeyes as someone she can't exactly let her guard down with but who can at least talk to her.
But because Deadwyler burns so bright, you've got to get Manny away from Hailey to see what being her son has made of him, and Kataem O'Connor is really great there, cowed but also rebellious as he can be even when he's got no-one to talk to about it. Manny is smart enough and self-aware enough to recognize that being isolated and on a constant combat footing has warped him, and he talks like a guy with holes in his experience who can't be the sort of person his mother wants him to be but can't quite figure out what else he can be. His scenes with Milcania Diaz-Rojas are fun because her Dawn is too worldly to immediately respond to his infatuation in kind and both she and the audience can recognize that his earnest good intentions can read as really dangerous.
Thorne and company keep the audience's eyes on the family dynamics enough that it's not exactly a surprise when he springs the trap doors that will put this blended family into a fight with outsiders - he never gets tunnel-visioned enough to treat what's going on outside the house as a distraction - but it's a flipped switch that leads to things getting slasher-movie bloody with a mean streak that one can't say the filmmakers haven't warned the audience about. It's impressively deployed violence - there's a shot Thorne holds for long enough for everything the film told the audience about mass extinction in passing to line up with everything we know about Galen before the film twists a knife, for example - and it goes to pulpy heights without ever feeling less than serious and potentially deadly. He shows the audience just enough of the marauders to make the audience see how their leaders could be charismatic enough to be followed without tempting the audience to think of them as more than monsters who need to die, even if it's Manny who has to kill them.
And that's the thing at the heart of the film that may be unresolvable: Hailey, Manny, and the rest live in a time where the need to be constantly vigilant and ready for action cannot be denied even if it can't be a healthy way to live, and the Black & Cree characters probably feel it in their bones in the way that Caucasian audiences like myself need to be shown. It doesn't have a single answer for how one stays alert and also stays sane, even as that's becoming the reality for more and more people.
28 Years Later
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 July 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or pre-order the disc at Amazon
It was interesting to rewatch 28 Days Later and 28 Months Later ahead of this long-awaited third film (which itself is the start of a trilogy), because it really highlighted how much the first clicked into place when the former started to have something to say about rage and how hollow the second felt for not doing much more than building zombie-apocalypse lore. 28 Years Later lands someplace in between - I am deeply uninterested in its new infected variants and how a village isolated by the plague goes about its business, but when the filmmakers focus on the need to create mythology in the face of tragedy so big in one way or another that it beggars comprehension, that kind of becomes fascinating.
(Which, come to think of it, was the theme of Sunshine, director Danny Boyle's last collaboration with writer Alex Garland, back in 2007, and I wonder if their perspectives are a bit more in line this time!)
That doesn't make the first half - and first trip to the mainland from an island that is only connected to the mainland by a causeway at low tide - bad; it opens with a nifty sequence that is clearly going to echo through the trilogy. But it mostly exists to give the audience the lay of the land for when 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) returns in the second half, and introduce new forms of infected - "alphas" and "slow lows" - that don't necessarily follow from the pure blind rage of the previous movies. There's some good zombie action and Boyle does some interesting things with fever-dream flashbacks, but even the things we haven't necessarily seen before feel more like talented filmmakers trying to make the most of a played-out genre rather than an exciting addition to it.
It's when Spike returns home and doesn't see the way father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) misrepresents the expedition as his story that things get interesting. What he's found important is very different from what Jamie intended to show him, and his return seeking a doctor for his ailing mother (Jodie Comer) eventually leads him to a Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) who represents a sort of traditional take on zombie stories and Ralph Fiennes's Dr. Kelson, who has gotten a bit peculiar over the last 28 years but represents a humanist point of view usually treated with mockery in these movies. The scenes between Fiennes, Comer, and Williams are odd but rich, a commentary on what we lose when we worry about security above all else and how truth hurts more than the well-intended lie but it creates a solid foundation. Spike matures, but not as this genre usually defines maturing - becoming hard and willing to sacrifice - but by starting to question his assumptions and choosing to learn more.
I'm not entirely sure I'm interested in where the last scene(s) indicate the series is going next year, but I can't say there's not potential.
Showing posts with label 3D. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 3D. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Saturday, February 15, 2025
Lunar New Year 2025.04: Ne Zha 2
One thing I'm kind of curious about is whether it got a wider release than most Chinese films get or just a "deeper" one, so to speak. It's playing at four locations I can reach relatively easily, and the AMCS in Burlington, Braintree, and Framington, but that's still pretty close to a major city; my folks in and around Portland, ME, aren't seeing it easily. And while I know these Chinese studios don't really care much about what these movies make in the USA - it's a non-trivial amount of money for stuff that isn't this sort of blockbuster but I suspect it's more about students and other expats not getting used to piracy - I kind of wonder what Well Go would have done if they got gotten the distribution rights for this one. This movie had a bunch of PG-rated trailers before it and there's school vacation next week; some English-dubbed matinees might have sold some tickets and had it break containment here. There's probably an audience for this sort of anime-adjacent fantasy that's not being served this week.
Not that the Chinese producers necessarily are, nor should they. But it's a fun movie, and like with Creation of the Gods a couple weeks ago, I feel like there's an audience here that could really go for this sort of big fantasy that can go anywhere compared to how bland the Western version of it has become.
Nezha: Mo tong nao hai (Ne Zha 2)
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 February 2025 in AMC Causeway #2 (first-run, RealD 3D laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) Where to stream the first (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon
The lagtime that can exist between a movie and its sequel can be interesting, especially for stuff originally aimed at children. The first Ne Zha in 2019 bounced between nifty visuals, childish humor, good action, and a straightforward sort of story despite the elaborate mythology. Re-watching it before the new film, it felt like well-produced kid stuff. Whether intentionally or not, though, filmmaker Yu Yang (aka Xiaozi) made this second film in the series for the teenagers who would have been ten when it came out, and that adjustment lets him build something bigger and more epic (even if there are still plenty of bits with snot and pee).
For those who missed the first film, Ne Zha (voice of Lu Tanting), third son of the guardians a crucial pass (voices of Chen Hao & Lu Qi), and Ao Bing (voice of Han Mo), third son of Dragon of the East Sea, were able to stop an apocalyptic lightning strike but in the process, their bodies were destroyed. Immortal Taiyi (voice of Zhang Jiaming) was able to use the Holy Lotus to create new vessels, but they are initially weak, and an attack by the dragons and demon Shen Gongbao (Yang Wei) leaves Ao Bing forced to share Ne Zha's body and an uneasy truce as Ne Zha and Taiyi travel to the Yu Xu Palace in Kunlun to pass the trials of the Immortals to obtain an elixir that can restore the Lotus. Elder Immortal Wuliang Xianwong (voice of Wang Deshun) assigns Nezha to assist Demon Hunter Wutong (voice of Zhang Yunqi) in vanquishing three demons, but a tragedy midway through the trials threatens to unleash Ne Zha's demonic rage.
Ne Zha 2 is not purely a movie of two halves, but despite the calamitous battle that sends Ne Zha, Taiyi, and Ao Bing on their quest, the first half is really a cleverly built sort of comic fantasy adventure. The whole premise is amusingly rickety - Ne Zha cannot use his powers or the immortals will realize he is a demon, so Ao Bing must take control of his body to fight, but that involves knocking him unconscious, and he comes to at inconvenient times - and the instability of his new body also explains why his abilities are sort of nerfed compared to what he did at the end of the previous movie. This part of the movie is full of whimsical designs, goofy slapstick, and, yes, a bit built around Ne Zha having entirely the wrong idea about where it's acceptable to relieve himself, though it's still a tick more mature than the first film and built to move forward rather than just wander from joke to joke. Indeed, when the tone of the movie changes, some of the characters don't seem to get the memo, like the third demon who is almost like "wait, I'm a funny demon, why so intense?"
It launches into a second half that is full of big, melodramatic action, like playtime is over and now it's time to confront the horrors of what the adult world that Ne Zha's parents have tried to shield him from entails, with betrayals, apocalyptic battles, and discoveries that rock the characters' understanding of the word. The goofiness of the first leg isn't completely lost - the marine-life demons discover that they are actually delicious when pan-seared by hellfire in a particularly bizarre sequence - but the stakes are higher and the villains more monstrous. Xiaozi does an impressive job of keeping up a frantic action pace while also occasionally pulling back to demonstrate the scale of the battle and letting the audience breathe a bit. It's not perfect - the sheer amount going on can make it feel like a video game or a Marvel finale where heroes get lost in a ton of stuff flying around - but it works as well as this sort of battle can, and Xiaozi occasionally does the trick where something terrible is presented in a beautiful image, rattling the audience in a good way when it might get detached.
The whole movie is beautiful, though, evolving the cartoon nature of the first film such that it can shift to stark wastelands without a hitch, and when Ne Zha takes on a more evolved, mature form, it's like the film shifts from Akira Toriyama influence to Tetsuo Hara, still exaggerated in a different way. The color palette shifts too, and the filmmakers make the action three-dimensional in ways that many struggle with, as the sinuous dragon shapes, high-flying heroes, and solidity of the Tian Yu cauldron all get the audience to visualize where things are in space. It works especially well in 3D, although I suspect it will be fine just filling up a large screen.
Given the extent to which the first was great-looking but probably not for me, I'm not shocked by how the visuals and action are terrific, but it's a very pleasant surprise to see that the story has been tweaked to appeal to an older audience on top of kids. The post-credit scenes cheekily admit that it may be a while before we see a third entry (amid an anachronistic gag that made me howl), but with all the hints about the dragons holding back some sort of darkness and a "Deification War", I'm sold on seeing what Xiaozi and company come up with next.
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
This Week in Tickets: 22 January 2024 - 28 January 2024 (Ow, My Back)
Heh, fun thing below: You can pretty clearly tell that the AMC in Boston Common is still using rolls of printer paper from a marketing campaign that's at least five years old (may be closer to ten), with all the morphing little balls, while the new-to-them place in Causeway Street has newer ones that just use the logo.
(Note: Both places have just started their fifth year of celebrating 100 years of AMC. I know 2020 got wiped out, but it's starting to look kind of weird!)
One of the fun parts of turning 50 is when your back just suddenly starts hurting for no apparent reason and it lasts a week. The best part of that is when the ibuprofen you take before going to bed wears off before you wake up and you wonder if getting up is even possible before you start keeping a bill bottle and some water on the nightstand.
Anyway, that made for a weird week, the oddest part of which is that, somehow, my back actually felt pretty good after sitting in the Brattle's seats for Beau Is Afraid for three hours! Which is funny, because there weren't quite points where I was looking for an excuse to bail, but might have taken one.
Same the next day for the more the more obviously-comfortable seats in Causeway where I caught Johnny Keep Walking!, a fun little Chinese comedy that seems to be doing surprisingly well here - though it opened effectively splitting a screen's showtimes with Time Still Turns the Pages, it had a full slate by Monday, and got picked up for second and third weeks. It'll probably go to make room for Lunar New Year releases sometime next weekend, but it's done pretty well in China and it's not like the themes don't work everywhere, although the upbeat ending which flies in the face of capitalism probably seems much more possible there than here.
The next couple days, I wasn't even walking to the T station after work, so I stayed home and watched Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper, which was a tiny bit surreal because he's a friend of a friend, though definitely an arm's-length acquaintance. He's delightfully excited at discovering new birds in six corners of the United States. My late grandfather would have loved it.
Friday night, I headed downtown to catch the big Bollywood action movie, Fighter, in Imax 3D; it's pretty decent, though I was hoping for a bit better. Slick-looking, though; I sometimes wonder if all those FX and 3D conversion companies you see at the end of the credits where 75% of the names are South Asian naturally work a tiny bit harder for the local stuff.
The continuing "let's just not run the Green Line north of Kenmore at all" situation messed up my plans for Saturday, so they got pushed to Sunday, when I took in Rob N Roll & The Storm, and AMC didn't even try to make it difficult as a double feature! Not a bad afternoon, and I wonder if someone like GKids might pick up The Storm for video or the like; it's too nifty to vanish almost completely into some hole as often seems to be the case.
As always, watch my Letterboxd account for first drafts! Maybe follow me. Or just stick around here, because it's a little better than what I do on the subway ride home.
Beau is Afraid
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2024 in the Brattle Theatre ((Some of) The Best of 2023, DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime and to purchase on Blu-ray on Amazon
While trying to decide what to catch on what seemed like a Monday night unusually stacked with good rep-cinema options (Forbidden Planet at the Coolidge, Miike's Audition in the Seaport), I figured on seeing this because it wasn't out of the question that Joaquin Phoenix would have an Oscar nomination announced the next morning, but paused when I saw the runtime on the Brattle's website. Oh, that's right - I didn't see in last spring because 179 minutes seemed like an awful lot of any movie that had its trailer.
And it is. Writer/director Ari Aster is a guy who, over his first few features, has not exactly been worried about efficiency, and has also been fortunate enough that he could indulge himself, just really getting into whatever particular part of the story drew his attention and being able to make sharp turns into different territory if that's what he figured would be the most interesting way to go about a segment. And, truth be told, he is better at that than a lot of people, and you can see it in Beau Is Afraid. At its most heightened and absurd, it's brilliantly funny, and in the moments where you can see the kernel of something genuine underneath the seemingly impossible surface, it's plain brilliant. The opening segment, where we're not quite sure whether Beau's perception of New York City outside his window as a warzone is meant to be literal or not, is electric.
It just keeps going, though, and once Beau is stumbling through other off-kilter stories, it gets too unbalanced. There's maybe an idea there about how the world in general is full of people who can't quite see the world as it is in different ways but everybody treats everyone else like they've got a common point of reference, but that concept is inherently slippery, and Aster can't quite get a grip on it if that's what he's going for. It means much of the movie ends up ping-ponging almost randomly, and never feels like it's getting closer to anything particularly interesting. Aster has all these ideas for weird, darkly comic bits and an order to place them in, but each individual one plays out a little longer than need be until it's three hours.
There are worse movies that seem like the same kind of personal indulgence, of course, and given the state of the industry, filmmakers should do these things whenever an opportunity presents itself, because they might not get another. The cast is actually kind of incredible at finding the spot where they're playing cartoon characters but have to an individual zeroed in on what makes each one of them tick. I laughed more than a few times. But, man, I never felt what he was trying to get out there, and was just glad to be done at the end.
(Note: Both places have just started their fifth year of celebrating 100 years of AMC. I know 2020 got wiped out, but it's starting to look kind of weird!)
Anyway, that made for a weird week, the oddest part of which is that, somehow, my back actually felt pretty good after sitting in the Brattle's seats for Beau Is Afraid for three hours! Which is funny, because there weren't quite points where I was looking for an excuse to bail, but might have taken one.
Same the next day for the more the more obviously-comfortable seats in Causeway where I caught Johnny Keep Walking!, a fun little Chinese comedy that seems to be doing surprisingly well here - though it opened effectively splitting a screen's showtimes with Time Still Turns the Pages, it had a full slate by Monday, and got picked up for second and third weeks. It'll probably go to make room for Lunar New Year releases sometime next weekend, but it's done pretty well in China and it's not like the themes don't work everywhere, although the upbeat ending which flies in the face of capitalism probably seems much more possible there than here.
The next couple days, I wasn't even walking to the T station after work, so I stayed home and watched Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper, which was a tiny bit surreal because he's a friend of a friend, though definitely an arm's-length acquaintance. He's delightfully excited at discovering new birds in six corners of the United States. My late grandfather would have loved it.
Friday night, I headed downtown to catch the big Bollywood action movie, Fighter, in Imax 3D; it's pretty decent, though I was hoping for a bit better. Slick-looking, though; I sometimes wonder if all those FX and 3D conversion companies you see at the end of the credits where 75% of the names are South Asian naturally work a tiny bit harder for the local stuff.
The continuing "let's just not run the Green Line north of Kenmore at all" situation messed up my plans for Saturday, so they got pushed to Sunday, when I took in Rob N Roll & The Storm, and AMC didn't even try to make it difficult as a double feature! Not a bad afternoon, and I wonder if someone like GKids might pick up The Storm for video or the like; it's too nifty to vanish almost completely into some hole as often seems to be the case.
As always, watch my Letterboxd account for first drafts! Maybe follow me. Or just stick around here, because it's a little better than what I do on the subway ride home.
Beau is Afraid
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 January 2024 in the Brattle Theatre ((Some of) The Best of 2023, DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime and to purchase on Blu-ray on Amazon
While trying to decide what to catch on what seemed like a Monday night unusually stacked with good rep-cinema options (Forbidden Planet at the Coolidge, Miike's Audition in the Seaport), I figured on seeing this because it wasn't out of the question that Joaquin Phoenix would have an Oscar nomination announced the next morning, but paused when I saw the runtime on the Brattle's website. Oh, that's right - I didn't see in last spring because 179 minutes seemed like an awful lot of any movie that had its trailer.
And it is. Writer/director Ari Aster is a guy who, over his first few features, has not exactly been worried about efficiency, and has also been fortunate enough that he could indulge himself, just really getting into whatever particular part of the story drew his attention and being able to make sharp turns into different territory if that's what he figured would be the most interesting way to go about a segment. And, truth be told, he is better at that than a lot of people, and you can see it in Beau Is Afraid. At its most heightened and absurd, it's brilliantly funny, and in the moments where you can see the kernel of something genuine underneath the seemingly impossible surface, it's plain brilliant. The opening segment, where we're not quite sure whether Beau's perception of New York City outside his window as a warzone is meant to be literal or not, is electric.
It just keeps going, though, and once Beau is stumbling through other off-kilter stories, it gets too unbalanced. There's maybe an idea there about how the world in general is full of people who can't quite see the world as it is in different ways but everybody treats everyone else like they've got a common point of reference, but that concept is inherently slippery, and Aster can't quite get a grip on it if that's what he's going for. It means much of the movie ends up ping-ponging almost randomly, and never feels like it's getting closer to anything particularly interesting. Aster has all these ideas for weird, darkly comic bits and an order to place them in, but each individual one plays out a little longer than need be until it's three hours.
There are worse movies that seem like the same kind of personal indulgence, of course, and given the state of the industry, filmmakers should do these things whenever an opportunity presents itself, because they might not get another. The cast is actually kind of incredible at finding the spot where they're playing cartoon characters but have to an individual zeroed in on what makes each one of them tick. I laughed more than a few times. But, man, I never felt what he was trying to get out there, and was just glad to be done at the end.
Sunday, January 28, 2024
Fighter
It's not unusual for Indian movies to start with a wall of disclaimers to let you know that no offense was intended or harm was done - recall, for instance, the very specific list of animals we are assured were CGI-created in RRR - but the one before Fighter was absolutely crazy, in English but too much to take in even for those of for whom it is our first language. Some of it, I suspect, is things that I really don't know how to parse, like how the one character in a turban is portrayed as a gullible goofball, though I've got no idea if that's a common thing to do with Sikhs (or if I'm wrong to assume he's a Sikh), and that's why there's something about no disrespect meant to any ethnicity/religion/caste, while others seem to be trying to do a little cover on how the movie kind of progresses from the villains being "Jaish" terrorists (which I took as "not-quite-Da'esh") with many Pakistani officials kind of nervous about associating with them to a more nationalistic finale.
Some of it was just weird to me, though, like a mention that there was no exploitation of children involved or endorsed, and considering that there aren't any kids in the movie, what is up with that?
One thing I find interesting after watching a number of these Indian action movies over the past few years, though I really can't guess as to its significance, is that every time the stakes escalate enough that the Prime Minister is involved in a decision, he's played by an actor who kind of looks like Narendra Modi if you squint, and we don't generally do that when portraying the President in the USA: Depending on the movie, we'll go for some genetically capable-looking upper-middle-aged guy (a William Sadler type) or someone aspirational (Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact), or make him/her a specific character. It could be entirely practical; by the time a movie finishes production, we may have a new President, given the four-year election cycle, while parliamentary systems may have more stable leadership. But it is something I noticed this time!
Fighter
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 January 2024 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon 3D)
I wonder if, at any point, filmmaker Siddarth Anand and the rest of the people involved with Fighter asked how close the music could get to Top Gun without infringing, before realizing Viacom18 and Paramount were related companies. It's an association that does this decent-enough military action flick no favors, as it's not going to get anywhere near the weird horniness of the original nor is it going to go to the insane lengths the sequel did for realism. It's entertaining enough, but is also the kind of blockbuster that isn't going to do something interesting or surprising with its big budget.
It introduces the audience the the "Air Dragons", an elite unit in the Indian Air Force that includes the IAF's top pilot, Shamsheer Patania (Hrithik Roshan), call sign "Patty"; old classmate and wingman Sartaj "Taj" Gill (Karan Singh Grover) and his back-seater Basheer "Bash" Khan (Akshay Oberoi); veteran pilot "Rocky" Rakishi (Anil Kapoor); and rescue helicopter pilot Minal "Minni" Rathore (Deepika Padukone), among others. Patty is cocky enough to get on Minni's nerves but she can't help but be drawn to him, although it's clear Rocky wants no part of him in his unit. Meanwhile, Pakistan-based "Jaish" terrorist Azhar Akhtar (Rishabh Sawhney) is planning an crippling attack on the air force base at which they are headquartered, which would leave India vulnerable to an attack by Pakistani ace "Red Nose".
As Top Gun knockoffs go, it's not bad, although there are plenty of times when it doesn't seem like Anand, Ramon Chibb, and the other writers started from "air force movie" and never really came up with a more specific hook. You can set your watch by when certain bits of the plot will happen, and the relationship between Patty and Minni never really seems based on more than Hrithik Roshan and Deepika Padukone being the biggest stars/most attractive people in the movie than anything else (I'm not saying that Anand should have made a detour into Vertigo territory, but Patty's dead fiancée was a helicopter pilot in his unit - this should be something people comment on!). The patriotism/nationalism is laid on very thick, to the point of literal flag-waving. Also, by the end you've got to kind of wonder if this was really the whole "Jiash" master plan, because a great deal of time is spent talking about what a menace Akhtar is compared to him doing stuff that seems particularly clever and dangerous.
The aerial action obviously isn't exactly going to be on the same level as what we got in Maverick, but it can nevertheless be a lot of fun, especially when Anand is translating the let-us-say-heightened slo-mo craziness Indian action has become known for to something you might do with fighter jets, with physics-defying spins, zooming through explosions, and unlikely angles of attack, with the FX and 3D work being awfully darn solid, if one is not going out of one's way to compare it to a movie that a Hollywood studio would drop a couple hundred million dollars on. Akhtar not being a fighter pilot means that they're eventually going to have to get things down on the ground, which is maybe not necessarily the climax one might hope for.
The film manages to get further than it might on a pretty nice cast, even if Hritak Roshan and Deepika Padukone kind of seem like they're on parallel movies rather than one where they're supposed to be falling in love. Roshan is pretty good at giving the movie what it's asking for, though; he's aged into a guy whose wear projects both confidence and vulnerability. Less seems to be asked of Padukone, which is a shame. Anil Kapoor winds up the MVP, projecting restrained anger even when he's erupting, hitting the spot where one buys him as a grizzled veteran who can still step into a plane and show the others a thing or two, even if one maybe looks askance when told another character is his younger sister rather than his daughter. Rishabh Sawhney gets an "introducing" credit as Akhtar, but could maybe grow into being part of the next generation of Indian action stars, although it's kind of comical how muscular he is here.
It's not a bad flick, if not quite as jaw-dropping in either realism or the lack thereof as similar movies. Between Anand, Roshan, Padukone, and Kapoor, there's a lot of top-level blockbuster talent here, enough that they could have gotten away with doing something a little more unexpected with the basic premise.
Some of it was just weird to me, though, like a mention that there was no exploitation of children involved or endorsed, and considering that there aren't any kids in the movie, what is up with that?
One thing I find interesting after watching a number of these Indian action movies over the past few years, though I really can't guess as to its significance, is that every time the stakes escalate enough that the Prime Minister is involved in a decision, he's played by an actor who kind of looks like Narendra Modi if you squint, and we don't generally do that when portraying the President in the USA: Depending on the movie, we'll go for some genetically capable-looking upper-middle-aged guy (a William Sadler type) or someone aspirational (Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact), or make him/her a specific character. It could be entirely practical; by the time a movie finishes production, we may have a new President, given the four-year election cycle, while parliamentary systems may have more stable leadership. But it is something I noticed this time!
Fighter
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 January 2024 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon 3D)
I wonder if, at any point, filmmaker Siddarth Anand and the rest of the people involved with Fighter asked how close the music could get to Top Gun without infringing, before realizing Viacom18 and Paramount were related companies. It's an association that does this decent-enough military action flick no favors, as it's not going to get anywhere near the weird horniness of the original nor is it going to go to the insane lengths the sequel did for realism. It's entertaining enough, but is also the kind of blockbuster that isn't going to do something interesting or surprising with its big budget.
It introduces the audience the the "Air Dragons", an elite unit in the Indian Air Force that includes the IAF's top pilot, Shamsheer Patania (Hrithik Roshan), call sign "Patty"; old classmate and wingman Sartaj "Taj" Gill (Karan Singh Grover) and his back-seater Basheer "Bash" Khan (Akshay Oberoi); veteran pilot "Rocky" Rakishi (Anil Kapoor); and rescue helicopter pilot Minal "Minni" Rathore (Deepika Padukone), among others. Patty is cocky enough to get on Minni's nerves but she can't help but be drawn to him, although it's clear Rocky wants no part of him in his unit. Meanwhile, Pakistan-based "Jaish" terrorist Azhar Akhtar (Rishabh Sawhney) is planning an crippling attack on the air force base at which they are headquartered, which would leave India vulnerable to an attack by Pakistani ace "Red Nose".
As Top Gun knockoffs go, it's not bad, although there are plenty of times when it doesn't seem like Anand, Ramon Chibb, and the other writers started from "air force movie" and never really came up with a more specific hook. You can set your watch by when certain bits of the plot will happen, and the relationship between Patty and Minni never really seems based on more than Hrithik Roshan and Deepika Padukone being the biggest stars/most attractive people in the movie than anything else (I'm not saying that Anand should have made a detour into Vertigo territory, but Patty's dead fiancée was a helicopter pilot in his unit - this should be something people comment on!). The patriotism/nationalism is laid on very thick, to the point of literal flag-waving. Also, by the end you've got to kind of wonder if this was really the whole "Jiash" master plan, because a great deal of time is spent talking about what a menace Akhtar is compared to him doing stuff that seems particularly clever and dangerous.
The aerial action obviously isn't exactly going to be on the same level as what we got in Maverick, but it can nevertheless be a lot of fun, especially when Anand is translating the let-us-say-heightened slo-mo craziness Indian action has become known for to something you might do with fighter jets, with physics-defying spins, zooming through explosions, and unlikely angles of attack, with the FX and 3D work being awfully darn solid, if one is not going out of one's way to compare it to a movie that a Hollywood studio would drop a couple hundred million dollars on. Akhtar not being a fighter pilot means that they're eventually going to have to get things down on the ground, which is maybe not necessarily the climax one might hope for.
The film manages to get further than it might on a pretty nice cast, even if Hritak Roshan and Deepika Padukone kind of seem like they're on parallel movies rather than one where they're supposed to be falling in love. Roshan is pretty good at giving the movie what it's asking for, though; he's aged into a guy whose wear projects both confidence and vulnerability. Less seems to be asked of Padukone, which is a shame. Anil Kapoor winds up the MVP, projecting restrained anger even when he's erupting, hitting the spot where one buys him as a grizzled veteran who can still step into a plane and show the others a thing or two, even if one maybe looks askance when told another character is his younger sister rather than his daughter. Rishabh Sawhney gets an "introducing" credit as Akhtar, but could maybe grow into being part of the next generation of Indian action stars, although it's kind of comical how muscular he is here.
It's not a bad flick, if not quite as jaw-dropping in either realism or the lack thereof as similar movies. Between Anand, Roshan, Padukone, and Kapoor, there's a lot of top-level blockbuster talent here, enough that they could have gotten away with doing something a little more unexpected with the basic premise.
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
This Week in Tickets: 13 February 2023 - 19 February 2023 (A Couple of Classics)
It was a pretty good week for seeing movies on the big screen, new and old.
I started off with the first of a couple Film Rolls things from South Korea - EXIT on Monday night and lucky Chan-Sil on Thursday, which are both relatively recent and at completely opposite ends of that country's film industry.
On Tuesday, I hit the night-before showing for Marlowe, which has a darn good pedigree - Sam Neill playing literature's second-greatest detective with Neil Jordan directing a script by William Monahan and a cast that includes Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, and Colm Meaney - but which is missing one important name in Raymond Chandler, alas.
It was back to the Common the next day for the new 3D rerelease of Titanic - I made a point to skip the Valentine's Day crowd for that one - and it's kind of mind-boggling that Cameron has only made a couple features (plus some documentary work) in a quarter-century since then, although all those movies are the sort of grand epic that few other people seem to have the ability to do.
Come the weekend, it was a couple days of noting how multiplexes seem to have grown even more hostile to folks catching two, especially if you're cutting across town. I happily caught Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on the big screen at the Coolidge - the schedule out from said "screening on digital and 35mm", although I didn't see where the 35mm times were, took the 66 back to Harvard Square to pick up the week's comics, and then wound up hanging around and grabbing a bite to eat at the Smoke Shop in Kendall Square so that I could make it to the 9:15pm show of Living, which was the most convenient time, since I'd dilly-dallied in seeing it.
And I don't just mean I'd waited until it was almost gone from local screens - I could have seen it in Dublin back in November, as that's when it was released there and in the UK, but apparently I had better things to do some evenings, though I can't imagine what.
Then, on Sunday, I'd kind of hoped to pair something else with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but the 4pm showtimes for the Imax 3D presentations really don't lend to that. But that's okay; Sunday is crossword & grocery shopping day, after all.
The ticket kiosk ate my ticket, by the way, which is why all that stuff is written in on the page. Not as bad as Assembly Row just not having them, but, c'mon, your loyalty program's name is Stubs, and I need my stubs!
One disappointment aside, a fun week! This coming one looks interesting as well, so catch the first draft of this blog on my Letterboxd or wait around for me to consider things a bit.
Eksiteu (Exit)
Seen 13 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
I will, of course, go longer on this one when I reach it in the Film Rolls queue, but it's a thoroughly fun action/adventure that I could probably recommend to the family members with kids even if it's not specifically made for them. Fun, friendly, always moving forward and fairly non-violent once the inciting incident is over; I think I really would have enjoyed seeing it on the big screen, but it had it's miniature North American release right at the end of Fantasia and skipped Boston anyway. I'd feel kind of dumb if I could have seen it in Montreal, so I won't be looking that up.
Titanic
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #14 (25th anniversary, 3D Dolby Cinema DCP)
I'm not sure I've seen this since the original release, and might not have gone to an anniversary re-release without the 3D conversion because, like with Avatar, it is very easy to forget how effective James Cameron's movies are in the moment one you've got a little distance, seen them shrunk to the size of a television, and started to break them down into pieces. The man is a precision crafter of motion pictures, though, and knows how to make a classic story work for a broad audience as well as anybody.
Which is kind of funny - the spectacle has been the hook for Cameron since The Abyss in 1989, with story often considered secondary because he doesn't necessarily surprise or break new ground. And yet, for as much as the grandeur and obsessive detail of this movie's production design isn't nearly so overwhelming as it was 25 years ago, it never feels like it's been passed by. There's a command of the form and knowledge of what rings true here, taking a simple enough story that almost anyone can relate and finding the little details that make it feel alive. One never feels like he's switched over to "blockbuster mode" when the catastrophe and visual effects begin to take center stage, and he uses great action work and some horrific imagery to communicate the scale without changing the type of movie.
And, boy, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are great here, both at a spot to make a big leap after a few impressive parts and both exactly what the film needs, full of youthful energy, their characters more polished and rough around the edges than one might expect, and almost effortlessly in love. Cameron's going for simplicity here means they can't really work at explaining or justifying that - the audience just has to believe it - and they hit that mark. That they'd go on to excel in more cynical material enhances how perfect they were at this time, in a way; you can see them as newcomers who still have some illusions here. A special supporting cast shout out to Victor Garber, whose modest engineer is achingly tragic.
The conversion to 3D is nice, if mostly understated; I'm not sure if they did it anew with the upscale or if it's the one from the last re-release a decade ago. It shines a bit of a light on the rare digital effects that haven't aged as well as the rest throughout the film but impresses in the last act - the extra depth and mechanical structure is nice throughout, but when the stem is vertical and the camera looks down, one sees why they'd do this. The 4K upgrade is mostly impressive a swell, aside from a couple shots where it doesn't quite take; Paramount is going to sell some good looking discs later this year.
As they should. It's easy to forget just how great this is, because it hasn't really been imitated enough to be better than its imitators and romance as a genre doesn't get much respect. But it works like crazy, even when that's harder than it looks.
Chansilineun bokdo manhji (Lucky Chan-sil)
Seen 16 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Blu-ray)
The idea of this movie that I had in my head - director Kim Cho-hee, who had spent much of her career as producer for Hong Sang-soo, making a feature about a producer who suddenly has the art-house figure she'd been working with drop dead - had more potential to be a satire that bites the hand that feeds it than Kim goes for. I'm not disappointed that she went the way she did, but no matter how warm and charming this film is, I kind of still want that other one.
As an aside, the Blu-ray edition is gorgeous from packaging to video, and the simple song over the end credits is weirdly catchy. I really wish there were more English-friendly releases like it.
Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2023 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (special engagement, DCP)
I just saw this a few years back (have we really been doing pandemic stuff for three years?), and I once again wonder if Ang Lee would have used flashbacks if the de-aging tech had been available when this came out, and what that would have been like. I think he can be trusted with it as much as anyone, but it's tough to imagine the movie being any better.
Indeed, this film is close enough to perfect that I really don't have that much to say about it: It's some of Michelle Yeoh's and Chow Yun-fat's best work, and what's kind of amazing about that is just how reserved the pair are and how much time they spend basically as sleuths working a case as opposed to would-be lovers totally focused on one another, just really beautiful jobs of revealing who they are through what they do.
And that's considering that what they do is often revealed through impossible action, with Lee and Yuen Woo-ping just making the fact that this group can run up walls and fly feel perfectly natural even though the way they stage it is telling: Chow's Li Mu Bai is a master, defying gravity casually; Zhang Ziyi's Jen is the prodigy, so even if it comes easy to her, she clearly likes to show off; Yeoh's Yu Shu Lien is not quite in the same refined air as Li, so you see her working at it, but always get the feeling that, among normal people, she's one of the best, and never actually looks bad next to the preternaturally gifted folks she meets.
Anyway, I love this movie, and am reminded why every time I see it. I don't know that the new restoration being touted is actually newer than the 4K disc I watched last time, but I have no problem with Sony coming up with a thin veneer of "look, we're going to cash in on Michelle's Oscar buzz". Hopefully they'll have a chance to do so with Chow and Zhang in the next few years.
What I wrote in April '20
Living
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2023 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
Living is just an exquisitely constructed and photographed film from start to finish. The opening made me wonder why we don't present the main credits like that any more, and I want to know how they managed the trick where it looked like the photograph at the funeral was about to come to life, as if imbued with its subject's new found vitality. At the start, there is also a seamless transition from nostalgic grain to painfully sharp digital capture with rich dark shades, and a formal rigidity to the shots throughout that threatens to crush the viewer but only if they allow it.
There are folks who don't necessarily like to see the filmmaker's hand so clearly, but in some ways, that seems the whole point of the film - the characters need to see the forces that are pushing them into unfulfilling situations, not necessarily out of malice, but inertia, propriety, and fear of blame if something goes wrong. Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro often seem to be tipping their hand so that the audience can recognize it applying to them as well. There are metaphors for this sort of control throughout; note, for instance, how Mr. Williams doesn't quite get the knack of the claw game, while the less set-in-her-ways Miss Harris is able to pull her rabbit out.
In the middle of all that, is Bill Nighy, his wiry figure and precise diction the perfect representation of a man who simply doesn't register, but it doesn't take much for him to become a version with a little joie de vivre, even if the flip side is palpable sorrow despite practicality about how much good it does. He's a perfect fit for the role, especially when he is seen as a template for almost every other male character in the movie, from Alex Sharp's newcomer who could choose not to go down the same road, to how the burlier figure and loud clothing Jamie Wilkes sports as Talbot marks him as Williams's opposite.
For a moment, it seems to go on a bit too long, but there's a certain self-awareness in that, as those left behind have to face how their memorable gesture may not last, and one must find new ways to keep oneself on a good path when the system is built to move one away from the daring. Yes, you may feel like it's time to coast out, but you don't really have that option.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon 3D)
People often fairly complain about how fake and weightless some of these movies are, but consider this: Maybe it's just because he's a good actor, but Michael Douglas looks like he's having the time of his life imagining what weird creatures will be digitally composited into his scenes and being a giant nerd about ants in this movie. Other guys with his resume would obviously be wondering how it came to this, but I'm not sure anybody is having quite as much fun as him, although Michelle Pfeiffer sure looks like she's going to enjoy getting to be a sci-fi badass as long as she can.
That aside, Quantumania is a pretty good Marvel movie, not breaking new ground but delivering the goods folks have ordered. By now, you've kind of got to meet these things where they are - yes, this will sacrifice some things that would make it a better individual film for the epic material; there's going to be a sky full of visual effects in the climax even if it maybe would have worked better with a tighter focus. But, the folks making it also know how to make a solid, entertaining adventure with enough danger to make you consider whether Paul Rudd is signed for more movies and enough wisecracking to grease the wheels without it quite becoming cringe material. It hits its marks and the guys doing creature work are clearly having as much of a blast as the folks at the top of this three-generation adventure.
Is it mostly solid, competent work built to look good on an Imax 3D screen? Yeah, and it probably only really transcends that when Jonathan Majors is putting in the work to establish Kang the Conqueror as a worthy foil for the next few years of Marvel material, tweaking what we've already seen on Loki for something more overtly villainous but the sort of confidence that feels human as well as formidable. I'm eager to see where he pops up next in these movies.
At a certain point, I imagine most folks get in a rut writing about Marvel movies, because they are unusually consistent and unambiguously commercial in their storytelling. I probably gave this an extra quarter-star because I like 3D goofiness, the way this particular Marvel crew seems to value kid-friendliness a bit more than the rest (really, this is probably a couple easily-replaced cusswords from being a straight PG), and, heck, I even still kind of like Bill Murray showing up and doing Bill Murray. These guys know what they're doing and don't screw it up.
On Tuesday, I hit the night-before showing for Marlowe, which has a darn good pedigree - Sam Neill playing literature's second-greatest detective with Neil Jordan directing a script by William Monahan and a cast that includes Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, and Colm Meaney - but which is missing one important name in Raymond Chandler, alas.
It was back to the Common the next day for the new 3D rerelease of Titanic - I made a point to skip the Valentine's Day crowd for that one - and it's kind of mind-boggling that Cameron has only made a couple features (plus some documentary work) in a quarter-century since then, although all those movies are the sort of grand epic that few other people seem to have the ability to do.
Come the weekend, it was a couple days of noting how multiplexes seem to have grown even more hostile to folks catching two, especially if you're cutting across town. I happily caught Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on the big screen at the Coolidge - the schedule out from said "screening on digital and 35mm", although I didn't see where the 35mm times were, took the 66 back to Harvard Square to pick up the week's comics, and then wound up hanging around and grabbing a bite to eat at the Smoke Shop in Kendall Square so that I could make it to the 9:15pm show of Living, which was the most convenient time, since I'd dilly-dallied in seeing it.
And I don't just mean I'd waited until it was almost gone from local screens - I could have seen it in Dublin back in November, as that's when it was released there and in the UK, but apparently I had better things to do some evenings, though I can't imagine what.
Then, on Sunday, I'd kind of hoped to pair something else with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but the 4pm showtimes for the Imax 3D presentations really don't lend to that. But that's okay; Sunday is crossword & grocery shopping day, after all.
The ticket kiosk ate my ticket, by the way, which is why all that stuff is written in on the page. Not as bad as Assembly Row just not having them, but, c'mon, your loyalty program's name is Stubs, and I need my stubs!
One disappointment aside, a fun week! This coming one looks interesting as well, so catch the first draft of this blog on my Letterboxd or wait around for me to consider things a bit.
Eksiteu (Exit)
Seen 13 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
I will, of course, go longer on this one when I reach it in the Film Rolls queue, but it's a thoroughly fun action/adventure that I could probably recommend to the family members with kids even if it's not specifically made for them. Fun, friendly, always moving forward and fairly non-violent once the inciting incident is over; I think I really would have enjoyed seeing it on the big screen, but it had it's miniature North American release right at the end of Fantasia and skipped Boston anyway. I'd feel kind of dumb if I could have seen it in Montreal, so I won't be looking that up.
Titanic
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #14 (25th anniversary, 3D Dolby Cinema DCP)
I'm not sure I've seen this since the original release, and might not have gone to an anniversary re-release without the 3D conversion because, like with Avatar, it is very easy to forget how effective James Cameron's movies are in the moment one you've got a little distance, seen them shrunk to the size of a television, and started to break them down into pieces. The man is a precision crafter of motion pictures, though, and knows how to make a classic story work for a broad audience as well as anybody.
Which is kind of funny - the spectacle has been the hook for Cameron since The Abyss in 1989, with story often considered secondary because he doesn't necessarily surprise or break new ground. And yet, for as much as the grandeur and obsessive detail of this movie's production design isn't nearly so overwhelming as it was 25 years ago, it never feels like it's been passed by. There's a command of the form and knowledge of what rings true here, taking a simple enough story that almost anyone can relate and finding the little details that make it feel alive. One never feels like he's switched over to "blockbuster mode" when the catastrophe and visual effects begin to take center stage, and he uses great action work and some horrific imagery to communicate the scale without changing the type of movie.
And, boy, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are great here, both at a spot to make a big leap after a few impressive parts and both exactly what the film needs, full of youthful energy, their characters more polished and rough around the edges than one might expect, and almost effortlessly in love. Cameron's going for simplicity here means they can't really work at explaining or justifying that - the audience just has to believe it - and they hit that mark. That they'd go on to excel in more cynical material enhances how perfect they were at this time, in a way; you can see them as newcomers who still have some illusions here. A special supporting cast shout out to Victor Garber, whose modest engineer is achingly tragic.
The conversion to 3D is nice, if mostly understated; I'm not sure if they did it anew with the upscale or if it's the one from the last re-release a decade ago. It shines a bit of a light on the rare digital effects that haven't aged as well as the rest throughout the film but impresses in the last act - the extra depth and mechanical structure is nice throughout, but when the stem is vertical and the camera looks down, one sees why they'd do this. The 4K upgrade is mostly impressive a swell, aside from a couple shots where it doesn't quite take; Paramount is going to sell some good looking discs later this year.
As they should. It's easy to forget just how great this is, because it hasn't really been imitated enough to be better than its imitators and romance as a genre doesn't get much respect. But it works like crazy, even when that's harder than it looks.
Chansilineun bokdo manhji (Lucky Chan-sil)
Seen 16 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Blu-ray)
The idea of this movie that I had in my head - director Kim Cho-hee, who had spent much of her career as producer for Hong Sang-soo, making a feature about a producer who suddenly has the art-house figure she'd been working with drop dead - had more potential to be a satire that bites the hand that feeds it than Kim goes for. I'm not disappointed that she went the way she did, but no matter how warm and charming this film is, I kind of still want that other one.
As an aside, the Blu-ray edition is gorgeous from packaging to video, and the simple song over the end credits is weirdly catchy. I really wish there were more English-friendly releases like it.
Wo hu cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2023 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (special engagement, DCP)
I just saw this a few years back (have we really been doing pandemic stuff for three years?), and I once again wonder if Ang Lee would have used flashbacks if the de-aging tech had been available when this came out, and what that would have been like. I think he can be trusted with it as much as anyone, but it's tough to imagine the movie being any better.
Indeed, this film is close enough to perfect that I really don't have that much to say about it: It's some of Michelle Yeoh's and Chow Yun-fat's best work, and what's kind of amazing about that is just how reserved the pair are and how much time they spend basically as sleuths working a case as opposed to would-be lovers totally focused on one another, just really beautiful jobs of revealing who they are through what they do.
And that's considering that what they do is often revealed through impossible action, with Lee and Yuen Woo-ping just making the fact that this group can run up walls and fly feel perfectly natural even though the way they stage it is telling: Chow's Li Mu Bai is a master, defying gravity casually; Zhang Ziyi's Jen is the prodigy, so even if it comes easy to her, she clearly likes to show off; Yeoh's Yu Shu Lien is not quite in the same refined air as Li, so you see her working at it, but always get the feeling that, among normal people, she's one of the best, and never actually looks bad next to the preternaturally gifted folks she meets.
Anyway, I love this movie, and am reminded why every time I see it. I don't know that the new restoration being touted is actually newer than the 4K disc I watched last time, but I have no problem with Sony coming up with a thin veneer of "look, we're going to cash in on Michelle's Oscar buzz". Hopefully they'll have a chance to do so with Chow and Zhang in the next few years.
What I wrote in April '20
Living
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 February 2023 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
Living is just an exquisitely constructed and photographed film from start to finish. The opening made me wonder why we don't present the main credits like that any more, and I want to know how they managed the trick where it looked like the photograph at the funeral was about to come to life, as if imbued with its subject's new found vitality. At the start, there is also a seamless transition from nostalgic grain to painfully sharp digital capture with rich dark shades, and a formal rigidity to the shots throughout that threatens to crush the viewer but only if they allow it.
There are folks who don't necessarily like to see the filmmaker's hand so clearly, but in some ways, that seems the whole point of the film - the characters need to see the forces that are pushing them into unfulfilling situations, not necessarily out of malice, but inertia, propriety, and fear of blame if something goes wrong. Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro often seem to be tipping their hand so that the audience can recognize it applying to them as well. There are metaphors for this sort of control throughout; note, for instance, how Mr. Williams doesn't quite get the knack of the claw game, while the less set-in-her-ways Miss Harris is able to pull her rabbit out.
In the middle of all that, is Bill Nighy, his wiry figure and precise diction the perfect representation of a man who simply doesn't register, but it doesn't take much for him to become a version with a little joie de vivre, even if the flip side is palpable sorrow despite practicality about how much good it does. He's a perfect fit for the role, especially when he is seen as a template for almost every other male character in the movie, from Alex Sharp's newcomer who could choose not to go down the same road, to how the burlier figure and loud clothing Jamie Wilkes sports as Talbot marks him as Williams's opposite.
For a moment, it seems to go on a bit too long, but there's a certain self-awareness in that, as those left behind have to face how their memorable gesture may not last, and one must find new ways to keep oneself on a good path when the system is built to move one away from the daring. Yes, you may feel like it's time to coast out, but you don't really have that option.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2023 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon 3D)
People often fairly complain about how fake and weightless some of these movies are, but consider this: Maybe it's just because he's a good actor, but Michael Douglas looks like he's having the time of his life imagining what weird creatures will be digitally composited into his scenes and being a giant nerd about ants in this movie. Other guys with his resume would obviously be wondering how it came to this, but I'm not sure anybody is having quite as much fun as him, although Michelle Pfeiffer sure looks like she's going to enjoy getting to be a sci-fi badass as long as she can.
That aside, Quantumania is a pretty good Marvel movie, not breaking new ground but delivering the goods folks have ordered. By now, you've kind of got to meet these things where they are - yes, this will sacrifice some things that would make it a better individual film for the epic material; there's going to be a sky full of visual effects in the climax even if it maybe would have worked better with a tighter focus. But, the folks making it also know how to make a solid, entertaining adventure with enough danger to make you consider whether Paul Rudd is signed for more movies and enough wisecracking to grease the wheels without it quite becoming cringe material. It hits its marks and the guys doing creature work are clearly having as much of a blast as the folks at the top of this three-generation adventure.
Is it mostly solid, competent work built to look good on an Imax 3D screen? Yeah, and it probably only really transcends that when Jonathan Majors is putting in the work to establish Kang the Conqueror as a worthy foil for the next few years of Marvel material, tweaking what we've already seen on Loki for something more overtly villainous but the sort of confidence that feels human as well as formidable. I'm eager to see where he pops up next in these movies.
At a certain point, I imagine most folks get in a rut writing about Marvel movies, because they are unusually consistent and unambiguously commercial in their storytelling. I probably gave this an extra quarter-star because I like 3D goofiness, the way this particular Marvel crew seems to value kid-friendliness a bit more than the rest (really, this is probably a couple easily-replaced cusswords from being a straight PG), and, heck, I even still kind of like Bill Murray showing up and doing Bill Murray. These guys know what they're doing and don't screw it up.
Monday, February 20, 2023
Film Rolls, Round 14: You Shoot, I Shoot and The Shock Labyrinth
Hey, here's a fun spot to land, even if I had some reasons for reservations.given the specific movies. There was a big delay between the stuff in Round 13 and this as the IFFBoston Fall Focus and a vacation had me not messing with the shelf much, but I tried to pick up some speed after that what with orders coming in.
Mookie's 14 gets him to the end of the Pang Ho-Cheung section, which for some reason is his first movie as director, despite me having put most sections in chronological order. I've got a Pang Ho-Cheung because I've liked his stuff at festivals, and figured the ones I've missed would get reissues and the like from Hong Kong, along with the new releases, because he was on the rise and made movies that those in the know say really captures the place. But then there was an exceptionally stupid kerfuffle in Hong Kong about a Chinese flag being vandalized, he voiced support for China, and then his former collaborators turned on him, as did the public, and he retreated to Western Canada, where he was reportedly doing NFT stuff. His production company was behind a poorly-reviewed English-language horror movie in 2020, but nothing since. I do hope he's able to either mend some fences back in HK or find some work in North America.
A couple days later, Bruce rolls a 13 to get to Shock Labyrinth from Takashi Shimizu, and it's another "hey, why isn't there more?" on two fronts. First, Shimizu himself was notable figure when Ju-on: The Grudge was an international hit, and he's kept working ever since, but while the Ju-on reboots tend to show up at the genre festivals, Shimizu's stuff doesn't, and, honest, I don't know if it can be that much worse than what they've done with his best-known creation. There's also not much at all from Japan on the shelf; I've grumbled often about how relatively little makes its way to disc or even theaters aside from anime, but what can you do?
So how's that go for them?
Maai hung paak yan (You Shoot, I Shoot)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
This is the sort of movie where it feels very clear in retrospect that a new filmmaker is going to turn out to be a big deal. The world was swimming in movies like this at the time - indeed, has the self-aware hitman story ever really gone into a lull over the past 30 years - and it's not so much that Pang Ho-Cheung had a terribly unique idea, but that he executes his gags exceptionally well. It may occasionally be rough, but this is exactly the sort of first feature that inspires a producer to give a filmmaker a bigger platform.
It introduces Bart (Eric Kot Man-Fai), a gun for hire who is seeing a downturn in business because things are rough all over in post-handover Hong Kong. He has found a potential new employer in Mrs. Ma (Miu Fei-Lam), a wealthy woman with a lot of petty grudges, but she demands video evidence of the kill, and since it is very hard to hold a gun and camera at the same time, Bart hires a camera operator, Li Tung Chuen (Cheung Tat-Ming). Li is hardly enthusiastic at first, but for all that the murder-for-hire business is a mess, the movie industry is worse, and Bart's a better boss than the folks making adult movies with his crush Michiko (Asuka Higuchi). Business booms, but their newfound success attracts the wrong sort of attention.
Although, really, is there a right sort of attention in either business? Not that Pang really has a lesson to teach here beyond how neither filmmaking nor crime is glamorous, or even as dramatically tragic as both would have you believe; it's all muck and very little glory. As is Pang's wont when doing comedies, he jumps quickly from joke to joke, often able to make one scene turn into something else seemingly on the fly, and gets the whole thing done in just about 90 minutes, because that's about how long it takes before this sort of premise starts to collapse under its own weight. Indeed, the movie gets pretty close to that point at the end, because the climactic gag is more elaborate than the loose construction of the film to that point can really bear.
It's like that all around - Pang's got good jokes, but he's still pretty raw, the young filmmaker eager to declare his fandom and influences, good instincts for when things are about to get out of hand but not practice in cutting them just right. He works with actors fairly well but doesn't quite give them the material to make their characters more than their type very often, so that the jokes spring from who they are rather than the situation. The budget seems tight and the timeframe limited, and he's not quite able to squeeze all he can out of it.
As a first film, it shows enough sparks that you can see folks involved might be going somewhere, even if they aren't quite there yet. It's still got enough jokes to be a good comedy, at least.
Senritsu meikyû 3D (The Shock Labyrinth)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 December 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
Takashi Shimizu is, perhaps, a little too professional at times, spending a large chunk of his early career on various versions of Ju-on/The Grudge, and then soon enough doing this little movie which is apparently a rather obvious tie-in to a famous amusement park and which would get re-purposed itself for Shimizu's Rabbit Horror 3D a couple years later (it says "Tormented" on the box, but, c'mon, it's "Rabbit Horror"). Aside from a few short films as part of anthology projects, his only real foray outside horror was a live-action Kiki's Delivery Service soon after those. He dutifully put himself in work-for-hire boxes, and eventually became out of sight, out of mind to the folks who had gotten into Japanese horror because of his movies.
Shock Labyrinth doesn't do anything to bust him out of those boxes, really. It's a familiar as heck story, with Ken (Yuya Yagira) returning to a place he lived as a kid to reunite with friends Motoko (Ryo Katsuji) and Rin (Ai Maeda), only to have someone crash the party - Yuki (Misako Renbutsu), who vanished ten years ago and gives the impression of having been institutionalized since. They try to contact Yuki's parents, but only find her little sister Miyu (Erina Mizuno), who was with them the day Yuki vanished ten years ago, when they tried to explore the shuttered mental institution next to a popular theme park. When Yuki collapses, the directions to the nearest hospital bring them back full-circle.
It's a J-horror first act that feels kind of rushed and sloppy, doing the bare minimum before putting its young group in a position where they can make even worse decisions, with things feeling rather threadbare, like the shooting schedule for this material is short so there's not a lot of time to refine performances and character, while the crew is looking for easy set-ups to knock things out fast on the way to the trickier material. It's capable enough - much of the cast had the talent to go on to have fairly successful careers, and Shimizu has always been good about wringing as much as he could out of fairly little.
And when he gets to the hospital/park? Shminizu knows what he's doing there, milking both dark passages and garish feel like there's something lurking around the corner. Shimizu and cinematographer Tsukasa Tanabe seem to be having fun with the 3D camera rigs, finding clever angles and uses for the depth along with the sheer fun of dropping down the center of a spiral staircase, having something jump out at the audience, or float uncannily in the middle distance. Writer Diasuke Hosaka gives Shimizu the sort of ouroboros of a screenplay that he had done well in Ju-on: The Grudge 2, and it holds together pretty well.
Like a lot of one-hit wonders, Shimizu was maybe never quite so great again as they were that one time, but he was still the guy who could make Ju-on and has occasionally made a fair movie since.
So, nice to fill in some gaps from filmmakers I've generally liked, and it tightens things up a bit:
Mookie: 46 ¼ stars
Bruce: 54 ¼ stars
Next up: If you're reading to see who wins, not gonna lie, round 15 is huge.
So how's that go for them?
* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 December 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
This is the sort of movie where it feels very clear in retrospect that a new filmmaker is going to turn out to be a big deal. The world was swimming in movies like this at the time - indeed, has the self-aware hitman story ever really gone into a lull over the past 30 years - and it's not so much that Pang Ho-Cheung had a terribly unique idea, but that he executes his gags exceptionally well. It may occasionally be rough, but this is exactly the sort of first feature that inspires a producer to give a filmmaker a bigger platform.
It introduces Bart (Eric Kot Man-Fai), a gun for hire who is seeing a downturn in business because things are rough all over in post-handover Hong Kong. He has found a potential new employer in Mrs. Ma (Miu Fei-Lam), a wealthy woman with a lot of petty grudges, but she demands video evidence of the kill, and since it is very hard to hold a gun and camera at the same time, Bart hires a camera operator, Li Tung Chuen (Cheung Tat-Ming). Li is hardly enthusiastic at first, but for all that the murder-for-hire business is a mess, the movie industry is worse, and Bart's a better boss than the folks making adult movies with his crush Michiko (Asuka Higuchi). Business booms, but their newfound success attracts the wrong sort of attention.
Although, really, is there a right sort of attention in either business? Not that Pang really has a lesson to teach here beyond how neither filmmaking nor crime is glamorous, or even as dramatically tragic as both would have you believe; it's all muck and very little glory. As is Pang's wont when doing comedies, he jumps quickly from joke to joke, often able to make one scene turn into something else seemingly on the fly, and gets the whole thing done in just about 90 minutes, because that's about how long it takes before this sort of premise starts to collapse under its own weight. Indeed, the movie gets pretty close to that point at the end, because the climactic gag is more elaborate than the loose construction of the film to that point can really bear.
It's like that all around - Pang's got good jokes, but he's still pretty raw, the young filmmaker eager to declare his fandom and influences, good instincts for when things are about to get out of hand but not practice in cutting them just right. He works with actors fairly well but doesn't quite give them the material to make their characters more than their type very often, so that the jokes spring from who they are rather than the situation. The budget seems tight and the timeframe limited, and he's not quite able to squeeze all he can out of it.
As a first film, it shows enough sparks that you can see folks involved might be going somewhere, even if they aren't quite there yet. It's still got enough jokes to be a good comedy, at least.
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 9 December 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)
Takashi Shimizu is, perhaps, a little too professional at times, spending a large chunk of his early career on various versions of Ju-on/The Grudge, and then soon enough doing this little movie which is apparently a rather obvious tie-in to a famous amusement park and which would get re-purposed itself for Shimizu's Rabbit Horror 3D a couple years later (it says "Tormented" on the box, but, c'mon, it's "Rabbit Horror"). Aside from a few short films as part of anthology projects, his only real foray outside horror was a live-action Kiki's Delivery Service soon after those. He dutifully put himself in work-for-hire boxes, and eventually became out of sight, out of mind to the folks who had gotten into Japanese horror because of his movies.
Shock Labyrinth doesn't do anything to bust him out of those boxes, really. It's a familiar as heck story, with Ken (Yuya Yagira) returning to a place he lived as a kid to reunite with friends Motoko (Ryo Katsuji) and Rin (Ai Maeda), only to have someone crash the party - Yuki (Misako Renbutsu), who vanished ten years ago and gives the impression of having been institutionalized since. They try to contact Yuki's parents, but only find her little sister Miyu (Erina Mizuno), who was with them the day Yuki vanished ten years ago, when they tried to explore the shuttered mental institution next to a popular theme park. When Yuki collapses, the directions to the nearest hospital bring them back full-circle.
It's a J-horror first act that feels kind of rushed and sloppy, doing the bare minimum before putting its young group in a position where they can make even worse decisions, with things feeling rather threadbare, like the shooting schedule for this material is short so there's not a lot of time to refine performances and character, while the crew is looking for easy set-ups to knock things out fast on the way to the trickier material. It's capable enough - much of the cast had the talent to go on to have fairly successful careers, and Shimizu has always been good about wringing as much as he could out of fairly little.
And when he gets to the hospital/park? Shminizu knows what he's doing there, milking both dark passages and garish feel like there's something lurking around the corner. Shimizu and cinematographer Tsukasa Tanabe seem to be having fun with the 3D camera rigs, finding clever angles and uses for the depth along with the sheer fun of dropping down the center of a spiral staircase, having something jump out at the audience, or float uncannily in the middle distance. Writer Diasuke Hosaka gives Shimizu the sort of ouroboros of a screenplay that he had done well in Ju-on: The Grudge 2, and it holds together pretty well.
Like a lot of one-hit wonders, Shimizu was maybe never quite so great again as they were that one time, but he was still the guy who could make Ju-on and has occasionally made a fair movie since.
So, nice to fill in some gaps from filmmakers I've generally liked, and it tightens things up a bit:
Mookie: 46 ¼ stars
Bruce: 54 ¼ stars
Saturday, February 11, 2023
Film Rolls, Round 13: Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain and Sex & Zen 3D: Extreme Ecstasy
Oops, I skipped Mookie and Bruce wound up going first this round! Not that it really matters, because this is not a real game as opposed to a game-shaed thing, but fortunately fate made it up to Mookie.
Bruce rolls a 17 and lands in the Tsui Hark zone, specifically Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. I don't tend to give a lot of thought to connecting the figures with the movies - maybe for "season 2", I'll try to have the figures be more in-character - but this did make me ponder that about five years separated Bruce Lee's death from Tsui Hark's first film as a director, and, dang, does that seem like a great what-if!
Mookie, meanwhile, rolls a 20! That gets him to Sex & Zen 3D: Extreme Ecstasy, which I was kind of annoyed didn't play Boston back when 3D was at its peak and Chinese film distribution in the US was just starting to take tis current shape. I was mistaken to feel that way.
The rule with 20s is that you get a freebie from the recent arrivals shelf, but I kind of forgot that, so Mookie benefits from a Halloween viewing of Army of Darkness.
So how did this weird round work out?
Shu Shan - Xin Shu shan jian ke (Zu: Warriors of Magic Mountain)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Even beyond Tsui Hark remaking this film 20 years later, it's fun to look at this and the big fantasy adventures he would make in the 21st Century and see how those are what he wanted to do all along - he did this right at the start of his career, and it's just taken circumstances this long to catch up, between Mainland Chinese financing and more accessible effects.
For as much as watching this forty years later is to imagine what he would be doing with modern CGI - he stages these scenes the same way modern directors do, a generation ahead of time - it often seems to take its inspiration from Saturday Serials as much as anything else, a regular barrage of action that tosses soldier Di Ming Qi (Yuen Biao) into a newer, crazier situation every fifteen minutes or so, teaming him first with an aloof master (Adam Cheng Siu-Chow) and then an equally overwhelmed monk (Mang Hoi). The pacing kind of feels like a serial edited down to a movie, a combination of zipping from one episode to another to sort of running in loops as the crew goes to and from the Ice Queen's Palace, the sort of quest that there are lots of stops on and a roundabout path that occasionally allows the good guys to fight each other.
The action's a ton of fun, though, starting with classic period swordplay done exceptionally well - Corey Yuen and star Yuen Biao are handling a lot of the martial arts, and Yuen gets to play off Sammo Hung in the early going - to increasingly crazy and abstract wire fu that Tsui and his crew put together well. For all that Tsui is anticipating later digital blockbusters, he's still building monsters with papier-mache and ingenuity, with a demon represented by a dyed-red sheet being stretched over faces and other shapes a standout for being exceptionally practical but nevertheless very cool. Effects have got to both communicate and look cool on screen. The martial-arts team does darn good meshing weightlessness and momentum throughout.
This is also about the right time to be a star-making performance for Yuen Biao, who previously seemed to be one of his classmates Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung's favorite sparring partners but got few lead roles; he's got a charmingly earnest persona here, a puppy dog audiences will happily follow who slips easily into screen fighting in a way that seems natural. He pairs well with Mang Hoi, a different sort of naive (there's a real delight in movies like this where the action feels like it's following sidekicks until they come through), while Adam Cheng and Damian Lau are a more abrasive odd couple as the masters. A lot of folks get underused - even with two roles, one wants more Sammo Hung, for instance, while Brigitte Lin doesn't show up until 45 minutes in and has little to do, which is also when Moon Lee makes her first appearance and makes the audience wish that the filmmakers knew what they had and gave her a bigger role.
Underneath, there's something going on about war wearing down the gates of Hell, making it possible for demons to escape, but Tsui's not looking to make something that deep, even if he does see how that might strike a chord with viewers. He's just trying to make the big wuxia action he wants to see on screen, and honing his chops for when he'll have the right tools.
3D Yuk po tuen: Gik lok bo gam (3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy)
* (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-ray)
Look, I'm not going to tell you that the original Sex & Zen was a good movie - although it apparently played the Weekly Wednesday Ass-Kickings at the Allston Cinema (remember that?) just before I made this into a full-time movie blog so I don't have any record of what I thought, though I remember it as mostly good fun, a Category III film built to entertain as well as titillate. This reboot from 2011 is more porn-y, not much more than excuses to stitch its sex scenes together.
The main problem, though, is that it's mean. There's not much joy in its sex, just selfish lust and cruelty; though Ruizhu (Hara Saori) initially intends to learn from the Prince (Tony Ho Wah-Chiu), the latter is a despot and the former picks up his attitudes quickly enough, and the audience is left to get its vicarious pleasure in watching people be victimized, with the story taking increasingly violent as it moves toward the end.
The filmmakers certainly seem to be having fun with their 3D and virtual backlot tools, at least - this was during the period when folks were shooting with actual 3D rigs, and it's just professional enough to be watchable - the cast (many imported from Japan's adult film industry) understand their particular sorts of sex appeal and play to it, and while the non-digital scenery is not elaborate, it doesn't immediately strike one as cheap.
It's not fun, though. There may be some who get some thrill out of erotica leaving them feeling kind of gross, but that's not for me.
Army of Darkness
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)
Army of Darkness wasn't quite my first big cult film - I'm of the age that inhaled Monty Python and the Holy Grail in high school - but it hit me just right in college, and was probably my favorite movie for a long time. I don't know how many copies of it I've purchased - a VHS, probably 2 DVD editions, an HD-DVD, a Blu-ray, and now this Shout Factor 4K disc. This will probably be the last, unless I find a 35mm print at a yard sale somewhere, and what are the odds of that?
I occasionally worry that I'll outgrow it, but it never quite happens. The jokes are still good. Sam Raimi stages action and slapstick as well as anybody ever has, and has a unique ability to blend the two so that they both impress without undercutting each other (someone should have put him and Jackie Chan together at some point). Bruce Campbell taps into this unique dumbass persona that makes Ash weirdly relatable whether he's being a moron or weirdly competent. It's earnest in its love for old Harryhausen films but is its own thing rather than a slavish recreation.
Why? I think because it came at a very specific point in this team's careers. This was probably not not meant to be one last project right at the point where they were still folks screwing around but had just graduated to having a real crew, making a movie for fun before everyone got professional, but it sure feels like it exists at that turning point, and that's a large part of what makes it a blast. It's why even the studio interference works in the movie's favor; rather than sulk, Raimi made that absolutely bonkers ending.
I don't love it quite as intently as I did in college and soon thereafter; I can't. But I appreciate it as fun in a way that is awful hard to accomplish on purpose.
Mookie really lucks out with that 20, doesn't he?
Mookie: 43 ¼ stars
Bruce: 51 ¾ stars
Next up: A big jump forward in time, a couple more favorites, including a bit more 3D.
The rule with 20s is that you get a freebie from the recent arrivals shelf, but I kind of forgot that, so Mookie benefits from a Halloween viewing of Army of Darkness.
So how did this weird round work out?
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Even beyond Tsui Hark remaking this film 20 years later, it's fun to look at this and the big fantasy adventures he would make in the 21st Century and see how those are what he wanted to do all along - he did this right at the start of his career, and it's just taken circumstances this long to catch up, between Mainland Chinese financing and more accessible effects.
For as much as watching this forty years later is to imagine what he would be doing with modern CGI - he stages these scenes the same way modern directors do, a generation ahead of time - it often seems to take its inspiration from Saturday Serials as much as anything else, a regular barrage of action that tosses soldier Di Ming Qi (Yuen Biao) into a newer, crazier situation every fifteen minutes or so, teaming him first with an aloof master (Adam Cheng Siu-Chow) and then an equally overwhelmed monk (Mang Hoi). The pacing kind of feels like a serial edited down to a movie, a combination of zipping from one episode to another to sort of running in loops as the crew goes to and from the Ice Queen's Palace, the sort of quest that there are lots of stops on and a roundabout path that occasionally allows the good guys to fight each other.
The action's a ton of fun, though, starting with classic period swordplay done exceptionally well - Corey Yuen and star Yuen Biao are handling a lot of the martial arts, and Yuen gets to play off Sammo Hung in the early going - to increasingly crazy and abstract wire fu that Tsui and his crew put together well. For all that Tsui is anticipating later digital blockbusters, he's still building monsters with papier-mache and ingenuity, with a demon represented by a dyed-red sheet being stretched over faces and other shapes a standout for being exceptionally practical but nevertheless very cool. Effects have got to both communicate and look cool on screen. The martial-arts team does darn good meshing weightlessness and momentum throughout.
This is also about the right time to be a star-making performance for Yuen Biao, who previously seemed to be one of his classmates Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung's favorite sparring partners but got few lead roles; he's got a charmingly earnest persona here, a puppy dog audiences will happily follow who slips easily into screen fighting in a way that seems natural. He pairs well with Mang Hoi, a different sort of naive (there's a real delight in movies like this where the action feels like it's following sidekicks until they come through), while Adam Cheng and Damian Lau are a more abrasive odd couple as the masters. A lot of folks get underused - even with two roles, one wants more Sammo Hung, for instance, while Brigitte Lin doesn't show up until 45 minutes in and has little to do, which is also when Moon Lee makes her first appearance and makes the audience wish that the filmmakers knew what they had and gave her a bigger role.
Underneath, there's something going on about war wearing down the gates of Hell, making it possible for demons to escape, but Tsui's not looking to make something that deep, even if he does see how that might strike a chord with viewers. He's just trying to make the big wuxia action he wants to see on screen, and honing his chops for when he'll have the right tools.
* (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-ray)
Look, I'm not going to tell you that the original Sex & Zen was a good movie - although it apparently played the Weekly Wednesday Ass-Kickings at the Allston Cinema (remember that?) just before I made this into a full-time movie blog so I don't have any record of what I thought, though I remember it as mostly good fun, a Category III film built to entertain as well as titillate. This reboot from 2011 is more porn-y, not much more than excuses to stitch its sex scenes together.
The main problem, though, is that it's mean. There's not much joy in its sex, just selfish lust and cruelty; though Ruizhu (Hara Saori) initially intends to learn from the Prince (Tony Ho Wah-Chiu), the latter is a despot and the former picks up his attitudes quickly enough, and the audience is left to get its vicarious pleasure in watching people be victimized, with the story taking increasingly violent as it moves toward the end.
The filmmakers certainly seem to be having fun with their 3D and virtual backlot tools, at least - this was during the period when folks were shooting with actual 3D rigs, and it's just professional enough to be watchable - the cast (many imported from Japan's adult film industry) understand their particular sorts of sex appeal and play to it, and while the non-digital scenery is not elaborate, it doesn't immediately strike one as cheap.
It's not fun, though. There may be some who get some thrill out of erotica leaving them feeling kind of gross, but that's not for me.
Army of Darkness
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 October 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)
Army of Darkness wasn't quite my first big cult film - I'm of the age that inhaled Monty Python and the Holy Grail in high school - but it hit me just right in college, and was probably my favorite movie for a long time. I don't know how many copies of it I've purchased - a VHS, probably 2 DVD editions, an HD-DVD, a Blu-ray, and now this Shout Factor 4K disc. This will probably be the last, unless I find a 35mm print at a yard sale somewhere, and what are the odds of that?
I occasionally worry that I'll outgrow it, but it never quite happens. The jokes are still good. Sam Raimi stages action and slapstick as well as anybody ever has, and has a unique ability to blend the two so that they both impress without undercutting each other (someone should have put him and Jackie Chan together at some point). Bruce Campbell taps into this unique dumbass persona that makes Ash weirdly relatable whether he's being a moron or weirdly competent. It's earnest in its love for old Harryhausen films but is its own thing rather than a slavish recreation.
Why? I think because it came at a very specific point in this team's careers. This was probably not not meant to be one last project right at the point where they were still folks screwing around but had just graduated to having a real crew, making a movie for fun before everyone got professional, but it sure feels like it exists at that turning point, and that's a large part of what makes it a blast. It's why even the studio interference works in the movie's favor; rather than sulk, Raimi made that absolutely bonkers ending.
I don't love it quite as intently as I did in college and soon thereafter; I can't. But I appreciate it as fun in a way that is awful hard to accomplish on purpose.
Mookie really lucks out with that 20, doesn't he?
Mookie: 43 ¼ stars
Bruce: 51 ¾ stars
Monday, September 12, 2022
Brahmastra Part One: Shiva
We're going to wind up with something like a month and a half or so of foreign/repertory/alternative Imax releases around Labor Day rather than the usual one weekend where they pull out a "best of summer" or "upscaled classic" for that odd holiday weekend where people apparently aren't going to the movies, whether because they feel like they really shouldn't waste the last nice time to be outside or because there are family gatherings or moves planned (and, hey, moving is kind of a family activity). It's not that things like Brahmastra don't get any time on the big screens, but it's usually one Thursday night or something. This got a pretty broad release, even playing out at the furniture stores.
I don't know if it will get anybody who doesn't normally go for Indian cinema interested, although it's not the right sort of thing to splash across giant screens after a spring & summer of people getting turned on to RRR - it's big, easily digestible (especially in that there are songs but it only kind of dips toes into becoming a musical), and even if one doesn't recognize that it's got an all-star cast, that's the sort of thing that will excite the Desi folks in the audience and maybe rub off on you. Of course, if your audience is anything like mine, they'll also be kind of amusingly ruthless in mocking the ways in which various bits of the screenplay are rickety as heck - there was a lot of laughter at any point when Shiva and Isha professed their love, because they only met each other a couple days before, and you can really only push love at sight so far. I don't get the impression it was really a film-killer for the audience, but not the same sort of "turn your brain off" thing we usually get from American audiences when this sort of thing happens.
Anyway, it's going to be in the big rooms until Wednesday night/Thursday afternoon, when Moonage Daydream and The Woman King grab the Imax screens, although it may still have some 3D showings kicking around (and this is a pretty spiffy-looking movie in 3D). If you've seen all the western blockbusters or want something a bit different, it's a fair amount of fun even if it's not exactly a masterpiece.
Aside: The studio logo amuse the heck out of me. Apparently this was a production of "Fox Star India" when it started, but Disney is avoiding using the Fox name anywhere (good job, awful news network, for making a trusted century-old name in entertainment radioactive!), so it's just become "Star Studios", with "Star" also being the thing that more adult-skewing Disney-owned streaming content goes to outside the US. Anyway, the opening animation is basically the Twentieth Century Fox one with some Indian instruments added to the fanfare, but incongruous because "Star" doesn't really have any connection to the "Twentieth Century Fox".
Anyway, just a reminder that this massive merger is apparently even bigger than one can see just from what it's done to the US movie industry.
Brahmastra Part One: Shiva
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 September 2022 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon 3D)
I'm sure this film's local audience might feel different, but as an outsider, watching one of these big Bollywood fantasy epics in Imax 3D is far more fun for the colorful dancing and festivals in the early, "normal-life" bits than the CGI avatars fighting in an otherwise empty environment of the finale. I can see the latter sort of thing in practically any movie that gets a wide release, after all! Still, the visuals are at least coming from a different place, and all the Indian names you see in a Marvel movie's stereo conversion credits seem to put a little extra effort in for the hometown jobs.
The film opens by dropping a lot of mythology on the audience, with powerful Astras given to various mystics in the Himalayas centuries ago, with the most powerful being the "Brahmastra". The empowered wise men and their successors - known among themselves as the Brahmansh - have been working unseen ever since, although things changed thirty years ago when the Brahmastra was shattered into three pieces. One piece is with scientist Mohan Bhargav (Shah Rukh Khan), although he is attacked on Dussehra by Junoon (Mouni Roy), who has some connection to the fire astra and her two goons (Rohallah Ghazi & Saurav Gurjar). Mohan has a few tricks up his sleeve, but she still winds up with both the Brahmastra fragment and another mystic weapon. What they don't realize is that, in another city, DJ Shiva (Ranbir Kapoor) is having visions of these events as they happen, which is less pleasant than falling in love with Isha (Alia Bhatt), a posh visitor from London, at first sight. It means he recognizes that the other pieces are in the hands of Artist Anish Shetty (Nagarjuna Akkineni) and a hidden Guru (Amitabh Bachchan), but can the pair warn them in time, and how does it connect to other strange events that have occurred in Shiva's live all the way back to childhood?
There's probably some sort of cogent mythology to the fantasy adventure, especially if the underpinnings are what one has been raised on rather than came to later, but like a lot of fantasy adventures, the heady mythic concepts will often fall by the wayside to service simple action needs. For instance, there's something potentially intriguing about how the three Brahmastra pieces are in the hands of Bramansh labeled as The Scientist, The Artist, and The Guru, capital letters included, arguably representing the three ways humanity can understand the universe, but filmmaker Ayan Mukerji never does much to explore that, sort of jettisoning it when he needs to set up action sequences along other lines. Similarly, there's not a lot of rhyme or reason to when astras bestow animal-themed powers and auras and when they don't.
On a more basic level, the characters and stories are often written as a bunch of cliches where one can see the filmmakers taking shortcuts for some material - the audience laughed at bit about the deep love between Shiva and Isha for the first three quarters or so of the movie, what with these two only knowing each other for two days or so - while they neglecting anything to make the main villains on the ground interesting beyond Junoon having some cool tattoos. There's a feeling that everybody around the world wants their own big fantasy franchise, with Shiva marketed as the first film in a larger "Astraverse", but the task is not only so daunting that their makers very careful to stick to what they know works in other crowd-pleasers, but they want to skip right to the big climax without building up the individual pieces. The Avengers is name-dropped here, but its very existence seems to make other aspirants want to catch up quickly rather than do the same sort of multi-film buildup needed for the big final battle with multiple superpowered protagonists.
It's all amiable enough, as such things go: The actors cheerfully recite nonsense, with stars Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt at least displaying apparent fondness for each other if not actual chemistry. As is often the case, it's the smaller parts where someone can dip in and out that are the most fun: Shah Rukh Khan is around to kick things off in fun fashion, for instance, and Amitabh Bachchan is exactly the guy you call for the part of the wise but not decrepit mentor in the second half. Mouni Roy seems to enjoy playing the villain - well, the one Shiva and company are going to be facing directly for right now - even if the audience doesn't get much insight into what makes her tick. Maybe she and another star making a wordless cameo appearance will have more to do in the next movie, at least in flashbacks.
On top of that, Shiva is a lot of fun to look at, even if it could maybe use more crazy animal avatars and maybe fewer Green Lantern constructs in the big battles. The action may be what the story is built around, and although it can sometimes be rough around the edges where one can see the stunts seemingly performed by digital or physical ragdolls (or the occasional bit of wonky physics), it is solid and often entertainingly designed; Mukerji and the action team are good at putting normal people together with superhumans and recognizing that sometimes you have to go right up to the edge of cartoon stuff to make that work. That said, two of my favorite sequences come early - Khan's Mohan doing goofy monkey action while Roy's Junoon and her flunkies are very serious, quickly followed by a big song & dance number that the characters winkingly admit may be more Diwali than Dussehra. In some ways, the film is visually more fun when the VFX guys are basically using a blockbuster budget to build cool-looking things that can linger rather than fly across the screen and kill someone. Mukerji and the 3D effects guys also seem to be letting it rip, and I wonder if actors being expected to dance and directors being able to stage such things means that they're better prepared to give the action and effects units what they need to produce impressive results despite a lower budget than what Hollywood has.
That said, will I show up for Part Two if it ever gets made (this one has what appears to be an exceptionally long gestation period)? Sure, obviously, I'm a sucker for spectacle like this, even if I suspect it will be an even less coherent mess.
I don't know if it will get anybody who doesn't normally go for Indian cinema interested, although it's not the right sort of thing to splash across giant screens after a spring & summer of people getting turned on to RRR - it's big, easily digestible (especially in that there are songs but it only kind of dips toes into becoming a musical), and even if one doesn't recognize that it's got an all-star cast, that's the sort of thing that will excite the Desi folks in the audience and maybe rub off on you. Of course, if your audience is anything like mine, they'll also be kind of amusingly ruthless in mocking the ways in which various bits of the screenplay are rickety as heck - there was a lot of laughter at any point when Shiva and Isha professed their love, because they only met each other a couple days before, and you can really only push love at sight so far. I don't get the impression it was really a film-killer for the audience, but not the same sort of "turn your brain off" thing we usually get from American audiences when this sort of thing happens.
Anyway, it's going to be in the big rooms until Wednesday night/Thursday afternoon, when Moonage Daydream and The Woman King grab the Imax screens, although it may still have some 3D showings kicking around (and this is a pretty spiffy-looking movie in 3D). If you've seen all the western blockbusters or want something a bit different, it's a fair amount of fun even if it's not exactly a masterpiece.
Aside: The studio logo amuse the heck out of me. Apparently this was a production of "Fox Star India" when it started, but Disney is avoiding using the Fox name anywhere (good job, awful news network, for making a trusted century-old name in entertainment radioactive!), so it's just become "Star Studios", with "Star" also being the thing that more adult-skewing Disney-owned streaming content goes to outside the US. Anyway, the opening animation is basically the Twentieth Century Fox one with some Indian instruments added to the fanfare, but incongruous because "Star" doesn't really have any connection to the "Twentieth Century Fox".
Anyway, just a reminder that this massive merger is apparently even bigger than one can see just from what it's done to the US movie industry.
Brahmastra Part One: Shiva
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 September 2022 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon 3D)
I'm sure this film's local audience might feel different, but as an outsider, watching one of these big Bollywood fantasy epics in Imax 3D is far more fun for the colorful dancing and festivals in the early, "normal-life" bits than the CGI avatars fighting in an otherwise empty environment of the finale. I can see the latter sort of thing in practically any movie that gets a wide release, after all! Still, the visuals are at least coming from a different place, and all the Indian names you see in a Marvel movie's stereo conversion credits seem to put a little extra effort in for the hometown jobs.
The film opens by dropping a lot of mythology on the audience, with powerful Astras given to various mystics in the Himalayas centuries ago, with the most powerful being the "Brahmastra". The empowered wise men and their successors - known among themselves as the Brahmansh - have been working unseen ever since, although things changed thirty years ago when the Brahmastra was shattered into three pieces. One piece is with scientist Mohan Bhargav (Shah Rukh Khan), although he is attacked on Dussehra by Junoon (Mouni Roy), who has some connection to the fire astra and her two goons (Rohallah Ghazi & Saurav Gurjar). Mohan has a few tricks up his sleeve, but she still winds up with both the Brahmastra fragment and another mystic weapon. What they don't realize is that, in another city, DJ Shiva (Ranbir Kapoor) is having visions of these events as they happen, which is less pleasant than falling in love with Isha (Alia Bhatt), a posh visitor from London, at first sight. It means he recognizes that the other pieces are in the hands of Artist Anish Shetty (Nagarjuna Akkineni) and a hidden Guru (Amitabh Bachchan), but can the pair warn them in time, and how does it connect to other strange events that have occurred in Shiva's live all the way back to childhood?
There's probably some sort of cogent mythology to the fantasy adventure, especially if the underpinnings are what one has been raised on rather than came to later, but like a lot of fantasy adventures, the heady mythic concepts will often fall by the wayside to service simple action needs. For instance, there's something potentially intriguing about how the three Brahmastra pieces are in the hands of Bramansh labeled as The Scientist, The Artist, and The Guru, capital letters included, arguably representing the three ways humanity can understand the universe, but filmmaker Ayan Mukerji never does much to explore that, sort of jettisoning it when he needs to set up action sequences along other lines. Similarly, there's not a lot of rhyme or reason to when astras bestow animal-themed powers and auras and when they don't.
On a more basic level, the characters and stories are often written as a bunch of cliches where one can see the filmmakers taking shortcuts for some material - the audience laughed at bit about the deep love between Shiva and Isha for the first three quarters or so of the movie, what with these two only knowing each other for two days or so - while they neglecting anything to make the main villains on the ground interesting beyond Junoon having some cool tattoos. There's a feeling that everybody around the world wants their own big fantasy franchise, with Shiva marketed as the first film in a larger "Astraverse", but the task is not only so daunting that their makers very careful to stick to what they know works in other crowd-pleasers, but they want to skip right to the big climax without building up the individual pieces. The Avengers is name-dropped here, but its very existence seems to make other aspirants want to catch up quickly rather than do the same sort of multi-film buildup needed for the big final battle with multiple superpowered protagonists.
It's all amiable enough, as such things go: The actors cheerfully recite nonsense, with stars Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt at least displaying apparent fondness for each other if not actual chemistry. As is often the case, it's the smaller parts where someone can dip in and out that are the most fun: Shah Rukh Khan is around to kick things off in fun fashion, for instance, and Amitabh Bachchan is exactly the guy you call for the part of the wise but not decrepit mentor in the second half. Mouni Roy seems to enjoy playing the villain - well, the one Shiva and company are going to be facing directly for right now - even if the audience doesn't get much insight into what makes her tick. Maybe she and another star making a wordless cameo appearance will have more to do in the next movie, at least in flashbacks.
On top of that, Shiva is a lot of fun to look at, even if it could maybe use more crazy animal avatars and maybe fewer Green Lantern constructs in the big battles. The action may be what the story is built around, and although it can sometimes be rough around the edges where one can see the stunts seemingly performed by digital or physical ragdolls (or the occasional bit of wonky physics), it is solid and often entertainingly designed; Mukerji and the action team are good at putting normal people together with superhumans and recognizing that sometimes you have to go right up to the edge of cartoon stuff to make that work. That said, two of my favorite sequences come early - Khan's Mohan doing goofy monkey action while Roy's Junoon and her flunkies are very serious, quickly followed by a big song & dance number that the characters winkingly admit may be more Diwali than Dussehra. In some ways, the film is visually more fun when the VFX guys are basically using a blockbuster budget to build cool-looking things that can linger rather than fly across the screen and kill someone. Mukerji and the 3D effects guys also seem to be letting it rip, and I wonder if actors being expected to dance and directors being able to stage such things means that they're better prepared to give the action and effects units what they need to produce impressive results despite a lower budget than what Hollywood has.
That said, will I show up for Part Two if it ever gets made (this one has what appears to be an exceptionally long gestation period)? Sure, obviously, I'm a sucker for spectacle like this, even if I suspect it will be an even less coherent mess.
Tuesday, February 08, 2022
Freaky Dolls in 3D: Baby Blues & Coraline
Most of the time, I prefer Ned at the Brattle or someone else to program my double features; as someone who has trouble choosing just one movie when standing in front of the "unwatched discs" shelving unit, asking me to assemble a themed pairing is, well, ridiculous. I am so legitimately terrible at choosing between likely-good options that I come up with ways to take the decision about what to watch/read/etc. next out of my hands.
In this case, I saw G Storm the night before and, for the fifth time in that series I said something like "hey, I like the actress who plays Tammy; what else is she in?" This time, though, I went to IMDB or HKMDB, saw that I actually had one of them on the shelf, and pulled it down.
This was a mistake.
I mean, I wasn't expecting greatness; I don't know whether I grabbed Baby Blues more or less and random because I figured I'd never see it again while poking around one of the video stores in the basement of the Ladies' Market during my HK vacation or if it was something I got off DDDHouse because they've had their 3D stock on sale for a while and I figure I should try and grab every 3D disc I can before they're impossible to find. At any rate, let's just say that this thing was on my shelf less out of curation than hoarding, and its obscurity/blowout pricing was deserved.
Not wanting to go to bed on that note, I figured I'd grab something else, and a Coraline chaser seemed pretty natural - it also involved a creepy doll, I already had the 3D glasses on, and, hey, that disc was already on my shelf for similar reasons: When Shout Factory announced that they had acquired the license for the Laika catalog, I went on Amazon and found the 3D editions of Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls (I already had Kubo and I don't know if Missing Link got a 3D release anywhere).
This was not a mistake; I don't know that I was quite so taken with the movie as before, but it's still pretty darn good, and what Laika does with the stop-motion/3D medium never ceases to amaze.
The lesson? Dunno; maybe something about running with an idea when you've got it rather than worrying about finding the right answer. Yeah, it gets you Baby Blues sometimes, but it also reminds you to watch Coraline - and you've got time, because there's no twenty minutes of dithering up front!
Gui ying (Baby Blues)
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-Ray)
The first thing you think when watching Baby Blues is "I have never seen a doll so obviously cursed in my life" and, okay, sure, it's the 21st Century so "cursed doll" is not going to be anyone's first explanation for things, but when the creepy thing appears to be bleeding from its eyes, get rid of it! It was left behind by the house's previous owners, so it's not like you've got any real attachment to it.
That aside, this isn't what you'd call a good movie by any means; it's full of inexplicable decisions, things that are just vaguely connected, and a last act that feels like the filmmakers shot a lot of possibilities so that they could figure out what ending they liked while editing. None of it makes a damn bit of sense, and it's not even in the headspace to run with its randomness and its goofy, never-believable killer doll, which at its most ambulatory makes it clear there's no CGI budget and that they haven't really figured out how to manipulate the puppet so that the audience can suspend disbelief just enough to worry. You also can't just tease the audience with a song that's so sad that it apparently drives people mad and only have it show up kind of obliquely.
Maybe all of this being a little more winking would work, with Tao (Raymond Lam Fung) and/or sister-in-law Qing (Karena Ng Chin-Yu) kind of incredulous about the whole situation or something, or new mom who somehow previously made a living by blogging Tian-Qing-(Janelle Sing Kwan) not shifting to obviously crazy like a switch was flipped. Or maybe if the writers had just found some way to make all the various pieces have a unifying theme - you have to stretch things a great deal to get from the doll inspiring Tao's tremendously sad song to the other ways it drives people mad - it would be creepy. Instead, it's just a bunch of pieces of other scary movies.
Someone had fun with the 3D camera rig, at least, not going for subtlety at all but always making sure a pointing finger or flying knife is ready to enhance a jump scare. It figures - the one thing which this movie kind of does right is the part that will be harder and harder to appreciate as time goes by.
Coraline
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-Ray)
As mentioned, this is an exceptionally good thing to notice on one's "unwatched disc" shelf right after watching a disappointing 3D evil doll movie, and I am very glad I got my hands on the Canadian 3D disc before it became impossible to find!
I'm not sure I've seen this since its original theatrical run, and the amount I loved it then makes me suspect that I was more or less completely floored by the 3D stop-motion animation and was not yet wondering who the heck this movie was for. I'm probably more pro-horror-movies-for-kids than most, but if you're going to do that, I'm not sure you want the burlesque sequence in the middle, for instance. I've probably got even less instincts for what's age-appropriate than I did at the time, so maybe it's just hitting me weird. At any rate, the film is eccentric in the way Neil Gaiman and Harry Selick things often are individually, only more so, either striking a deep chord or keeping you at arm's length and hoping you admire the individual eccentricity, which is about where I was this time.
It's close to unparalleled on a "look at this!" basis, though, with gorgeously colorful designs used to offset the initially bland world in which Coraline lives, and a world that's just busy enough without going overboard the way Laika could occasionally find themselves doing in later films. It's still one of the most fantastic uses of 3D in a movie and has just enough of a visual stutter at times that a viewer can't forget that someone made this and maybe pays slightly closer attention because that means that there is meaning and intent in every detail.
Every time I see a Laika movie, I find myself kind of stunned that they aren't more popular; they're clever and meticulous and don't talk down to kids. It's the second time around when one maybe finds oneself nodding and thinking that, okay, maybe these things are going to be hard sells for both parents and kids expecting something a little more straightforward.
Original review from 2009
In this case, I saw G Storm the night before and, for the fifth time in that series I said something like "hey, I like the actress who plays Tammy; what else is she in?" This time, though, I went to IMDB or HKMDB, saw that I actually had one of them on the shelf, and pulled it down.
This was a mistake.
I mean, I wasn't expecting greatness; I don't know whether I grabbed Baby Blues more or less and random because I figured I'd never see it again while poking around one of the video stores in the basement of the Ladies' Market during my HK vacation or if it was something I got off DDDHouse because they've had their 3D stock on sale for a while and I figure I should try and grab every 3D disc I can before they're impossible to find. At any rate, let's just say that this thing was on my shelf less out of curation than hoarding, and its obscurity/blowout pricing was deserved.
Not wanting to go to bed on that note, I figured I'd grab something else, and a Coraline chaser seemed pretty natural - it also involved a creepy doll, I already had the 3D glasses on, and, hey, that disc was already on my shelf for similar reasons: When Shout Factory announced that they had acquired the license for the Laika catalog, I went on Amazon and found the 3D editions of Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls (I already had Kubo and I don't know if Missing Link got a 3D release anywhere).
This was not a mistake; I don't know that I was quite so taken with the movie as before, but it's still pretty darn good, and what Laika does with the stop-motion/3D medium never ceases to amaze.
The lesson? Dunno; maybe something about running with an idea when you've got it rather than worrying about finding the right answer. Yeah, it gets you Baby Blues sometimes, but it also reminds you to watch Coraline - and you've got time, because there's no twenty minutes of dithering up front!
Gui ying (Baby Blues)
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong 3D Blu-Ray)
The first thing you think when watching Baby Blues is "I have never seen a doll so obviously cursed in my life" and, okay, sure, it's the 21st Century so "cursed doll" is not going to be anyone's first explanation for things, but when the creepy thing appears to be bleeding from its eyes, get rid of it! It was left behind by the house's previous owners, so it's not like you've got any real attachment to it.
That aside, this isn't what you'd call a good movie by any means; it's full of inexplicable decisions, things that are just vaguely connected, and a last act that feels like the filmmakers shot a lot of possibilities so that they could figure out what ending they liked while editing. None of it makes a damn bit of sense, and it's not even in the headspace to run with its randomness and its goofy, never-believable killer doll, which at its most ambulatory makes it clear there's no CGI budget and that they haven't really figured out how to manipulate the puppet so that the audience can suspend disbelief just enough to worry. You also can't just tease the audience with a song that's so sad that it apparently drives people mad and only have it show up kind of obliquely.
Maybe all of this being a little more winking would work, with Tao (Raymond Lam Fung) and/or sister-in-law Qing (Karena Ng Chin-Yu) kind of incredulous about the whole situation or something, or new mom who somehow previously made a living by blogging Tian-Qing-(Janelle Sing Kwan) not shifting to obviously crazy like a switch was flipped. Or maybe if the writers had just found some way to make all the various pieces have a unifying theme - you have to stretch things a great deal to get from the doll inspiring Tao's tremendously sad song to the other ways it drives people mad - it would be creepy. Instead, it's just a bunch of pieces of other scary movies.
Someone had fun with the 3D camera rig, at least, not going for subtlety at all but always making sure a pointing finger or flying knife is ready to enhance a jump scare. It figures - the one thing which this movie kind of does right is the part that will be harder and harder to appreciate as time goes by.
Coraline
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-Ray)
As mentioned, this is an exceptionally good thing to notice on one's "unwatched disc" shelf right after watching a disappointing 3D evil doll movie, and I am very glad I got my hands on the Canadian 3D disc before it became impossible to find!
I'm not sure I've seen this since its original theatrical run, and the amount I loved it then makes me suspect that I was more or less completely floored by the 3D stop-motion animation and was not yet wondering who the heck this movie was for. I'm probably more pro-horror-movies-for-kids than most, but if you're going to do that, I'm not sure you want the burlesque sequence in the middle, for instance. I've probably got even less instincts for what's age-appropriate than I did at the time, so maybe it's just hitting me weird. At any rate, the film is eccentric in the way Neil Gaiman and Harry Selick things often are individually, only more so, either striking a deep chord or keeping you at arm's length and hoping you admire the individual eccentricity, which is about where I was this time.
It's close to unparalleled on a "look at this!" basis, though, with gorgeously colorful designs used to offset the initially bland world in which Coraline lives, and a world that's just busy enough without going overboard the way Laika could occasionally find themselves doing in later films. It's still one of the most fantastic uses of 3D in a movie and has just enough of a visual stutter at times that a viewer can't forget that someone made this and maybe pays slightly closer attention because that means that there is meaning and intent in every detail.
Every time I see a Laika movie, I find myself kind of stunned that they aren't more popular; they're clever and meticulous and don't talk down to kids. It's the second time around when one maybe finds oneself nodding and thinking that, okay, maybe these things are going to be hard sells for both parents and kids expecting something a little more straightforward.
Original review from 2009
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