Film Rolls Season 2, Round 02: Chang Cheh x4 and Jackie Chan/Yuen Wo-Ping x2

I've got a pinned post on my Bluesky account saying I was going to go for one post in this series a week, and in retrospect it was kind of silly because (1) I've got a work trip next week and (2) sometimes it's not just a two-night thing.

So, here, Dale rolls an 11, which takes her to Arrow's Chang Cheh box set, featuring four movies - Five Shaolin Masters, Shaolin Temple, The Five Venoms, and Crippled Avengers - and since it turns out these are all new to me, that's a big chunk!

Then Centy rolls an 8, landing on an old Jackie Chan double feature disc of Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master. It turns out I've seen both before - Snake in 2012 and Master back in 2010 - but both were part of Films at the Gate weekends, and while I love those events, there are little kids running around and street noise, so these could be "first time seen and retained" viewings.

The disc's a bit of an oddity now, produced by the now-defunct Twilight Time Films in 2017, which didn't really specialize in this sort of movie - I don't recall them releasing any other Hong Kong action - but they had access to Sony/Columbia's library, which included Destination Films, which included these two movies in more or less the form they were released in America back in the 1970s and 1980s, with different opening credits in some cases (check out Jackie's mustache!) and a soundtrack on Drunken Master that is kind of maddening - it's like they have the complete English soundtrack, but only parts of the Cantonese and Mandarin ones, Apparently, that's just the way it's always been, and I wouldn't be surprised if between licensors like Twilight Time and whatever the successor company to "Seasonal Films" was, it was hard to get hands on better ones until recently. Both of these movies have recently been released on Blu-ray in the UK (via separate distributors!) all fixed up. Which means I could wind up buying them again and seeing them "new" for the first time again.

Anyway! How did our players do by all this?

Shao Lin wu zu (Five Shaolin Masters)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it or buy the disc at Amazon

How many Shaolin Masters is too many Shaolin Masters? The answer isn't necessarily "five, possibly fewer", especially when people seldom complain about seven samurai being excessive, but it kind of feels like the filmmakers should do a bit more to earn that number toward the start, as it introduces five pretty nondescript masters with similar costumes and haircuts, in the middle of a lot of folks with similar looks getting slaughtered, and aside from Fu Sheng's Ma Chao-Hsing, who is more comedic than the rest, they feel kind of interchangeable, especially since they all immediately go their separate ways rather than stick together and explore the contrasts between them and their fighting styles.

Maybe that sort of character work isn't strictly necessary in this sort of movie; writer Ni Kuang and director Chang Cheh don't exactly create a slow burn that explodes into violence at the climax, but a stream of nearly non-stop action as the fugitives encounter resistance, focus on their training, and then draw their foes out for a rematch. Chang and the stunt team led by Liu Chia-Yung and Liu Chia-Liang spend the first half of the film delivering action in bulk, and while there may be a moment or two where you can see punches whiff as the other guy launches themselves in the air, but it's still a bunch going on that's almost all good.

But, as with most Shaw Brothers movies, technique is characterization, and once the characters start training with the goal of defeating specific foes, and then setting up a twenty-minute finale where we see it all put into place, well, that's the good stuff. Chang and the Lius build the action for maximum clarity in the one-on-ones, making the Masters nearly as distinctive as their various foes. It's a very specific sort of giving-the-audience-what-it-wants formula, and I wouldn't necessarily be surprised to learn that the action was designed first and then Ni backfilled a story, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if the thread in the middle where one starts to wonder what makes the Shaolin masters so special that they can be treated as less expendable than the various other Han fighting the Manchus came about by accident and that's why it never really became a theme.

It's a formula that delivers some fine, nifty-looking action, at least; it's no wonder Chang would return to the Shaolin Temple again and again.


Shao Lin si (Shaolin Temple)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

Because of the way I tend to see Shaw Brothers movies - randomly, every few months or so, as they show up at various midnight movie programs or when there's an archival print at a festival - it's easy to forget, or not even realize, that Chang Cheh had a sort of "Shaolin Temple Cinematic Universe" going, reusing characters and actors so that the stories would, at least roughly, line up and form a larger saga. Which is a sort of roundabout way of saying that it was kind of neat when the stars of the previous night's movie, Five Shaoline Warriors, showed up and it became clear that this movie would end more or less where the previous one started.

It hijacks the movie in a way - the film starts out as one thing - three young men determined to prove that they are worthy of entering the temple and given menial tasks that initially seem like little more than hazing until it's revealed that the monks have seen their potential and assigned them the work that will strengthen them and develop the skills they will later need to fight - that is more or les sidelined when the soldiers show up and ask to hide, eventually merging in with that story on the one hand, as they join the fight against the attacking Manchu army on the one hand while two characters sneaks out and other adventures (presumably chronicled in other movies). As with Five Shaolin Masters, there are a fair amount of seemingly redundant characters, with Fu Sheng's Ma Chao-Hsing once again the standout because there's personality to his bluster and braggadocio, the character who can't easily be swapped out for another.

There's a good flow and sense of fun here, though, as the new students banter, with physical comedy in how they learn their lessons, and the intrigue ramps up as the film goes along and a number of plott threads develop. The action, whether it be sparring or training or, finally, fighting with real intent to kill, is good stuff. The filmmakers manage a good balance of the basically supernatural abilities that the students are learning and the more realistically violent action of the soldiers come to sack the temple, and where they overlap, there's a knowing cruelty that's a bit enhanced by the nature of this as a prequel, as we know this particular guy is not just what amounts to a schoolyard bully. Indeed, it handles its prequel nature fairly well, not waving away how much of the thrust of Five Shaolin Masters was that those characters decided they were inadequate fighters while still having an exciting climax.

And now, it will probably be another year before I see another Chang Cheh Shaolin Temple movie, and as such have no idea how it fits in.


Wu Du (The Five Venoms)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it or buy the disc at Amazon

Having only scratched the surface of Chang Cheh's work at Shaw Brothers, I'm in no position to say what might be his best or his masterpiece, but The Five Venoms is solid in ways that make it a real favorite. Its six fighters are just enough for fun mixing and matching without needing a scorecard, the fighting styles are distinct and evocative of their names, there's a story that mostly gives everyone something to do throughout without it just being "martial world" abstractions.

Indeed, it's a fun caper that keeps just enough hidden to have a little mystery while allowing most of the action to take place in plain sight. It almost requires Chang and co-writer Ni Kuang to skip the usual training sequences and master characters, mostly pushing them into a prologue. The images that went with the description of the various styles will be used in the final battle with the sort of flashbacks Chang usually uses training scenes for, and even with the secret identities, the characters are fun to watch bounce off each other. Lo Meng is great as the confident young Toad, puffed up on his invulnerability, with Wai Pak and Lu Feng knowing their parts of the villain pairing cold - Wai's Snake a consummate schemer, Lu's Centipede perfectly nasty as the muscle. Chiang Sheng's "sixth venom", who is sort of an audience surrogate, is a bunch of fun, eventually capable with the martial arts but kind of a dirtbag slacker in the middle of the grand archetypes.

Keeping things moving does kind of require sidelining Chiang and moving Philip Kwok Chun-Fung's Constable Ma off the board for a large part of the middle, as the bad guys start circling around each other - with enough auxiliary villainy that there are multiple suspects for the identity of the Scorpion - and Lo's poor lovable Toad is humbled. The fights are a blast, though, as the martial arts team makes each venom style instantly identifiable and larger than life but not quite silly, the big final five-way showdown a blast.

It's a wuxia with more going on than martial arts, broad enough to seem grandiose, but with earnest stakes. Even if it is basically a set-up for fights, you can describe it in terms that aren't just part of the genre, and maybe that makes it a great was to introduce the Shaw Brothers and Chang to those not looking for the Shaolin mythology.


Can que (Crippled Avengers)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Shaw Brothers was a factory of a studio; with Crippled Avengers coming out three months after The Five Venoms and reuniting much of the cast and crew for a movie that's closer to the Shaw formula but also an outright deranged version of it. If you told me that director Chang Cheh and co-writer Ni Kuang were just throwing everything out there to see what stuck under an insane schedule, I'd believe it; if you said that this was them doing a bit of self-parody, I'd believe that too.

As ridiculous as the movie is, it kind of works because the filmmakers and cast take it seriously where they need to; Lo Meng, Philip Kwok Chug-Fung, Sun Chien, and Chiang Sheng introduce their title characters with broad strokes and their disability representation is just maybe kind of questionable, but there's chemistry between them, a real camaraderie when it comes to helping each other out that makes them more than fighting gimmicks. Philip Kwok and Lo Meng, respectively, play the blinded merchant and deaf-mute blacksmith as keenly aware of just what they and the other are missing and how that can put them in danger. On the flip side, Chen Kuan-tai and Lu Feng are monstrous villains, but the sort that one believes might have once been heroes, if not consumed with rage and ready to see every little thing as a sleight that requires Vengeance.

On the way, the audience gets the humbling/training/rematch cycle, and it's some terrific action choreography, with Chiang Sheng especially showing off some amazing acrobatic ability and some downright absurd use of iron limbs elsewhere. There's a just-run-with it ethos to the whole thing, from the sadistic way the Daos pronounce how they will cripple the future heroes, to the earnest monks training them to be martial artists, to a finale where this massive structure has built and populated with henchmen for the express purpose of thwarting the avengers' remaining senses, which the others blithely dismantle. Chang never leaves a spare moment to wink at the camera, and as a result this whole thing is very silly but never in a way that grinds things to a halt.

Se ying diu sau (Snake in Eagle's Shadow)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Twilight Time Blu-ray)
Where to stream it or buy the UK disc at Amazon

As mentioned, I've seen this before, but somehow I had forgotten the bit with the cat and the cobra, and the subsequent creation of cat's-claw kung fu, and it kind of feels like Chan and director Yuen Wo-Ping realizing that the funny stuff is their wheelhouse. Sure, there was plenty of comedy in this film before - Simon Yuen Siu-Tin, in particular, as a martial arts master who is squarely on the less cool side of the nomad/bum divide, and how fickle the students at the martial arts schools are - but it's a moment of pure, ridiculous slapstick that makes the movie what it is, the difference between Chan being an actor who is good at comedy versus a clown.

And the movie needs that clowning, because the Eagle clan hunting down the Snakes to eradicate their martial arts style is silly but not funny, and the competing martial arts schools storyline feels like the filmmakers trying to figure out what to do with the standing sets they've been allotted to make their movie with. It's the sort of movie where you wonder just what sort of order things were done in, because I could absolutely believe that they came up with a general outline, planned and choreographed the fights, and then tried to connect them with a story. It's kind of a mess.

But, it's a mess with Jackie Chan basically figuring out who he's going to be, this put-upon underdog whose martial-arts gifts come so naturally as to be almost unconscious, and I don't know to what extent Yuen Siu-Tin played comic characters in his long career, but it certainly feels like he's passing a torch to Chan, as the movie moves from his fights full of guile and the old guy being surprisingly spry to Chan doing a bit of comic exaggeration with his snake-style boxing before pulling out the comedy, and there's also something about his sad-sack face that lets one believe in him as the victim of bullying even though he's clearly almost comically fit.

Watching it after four Shaw Brothers movies, even funny ones like Crippled Avengers, one can almost feel this next generation figuring out a new way to make martial arts action, and also feeling like scrappy underdogs because they don't have the system the Shaws do, and the fights staged outside almost feel like guerilla filmmaking (when the Shaws did it, it often seemed like a specific place between others, not like they just needed room to move and had no set in mind). It's Jackie Chan becoming Jackie Chan.


Jui kuen (Drunken Master)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Twilight Time Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the UK disc at Amazon

Another case of "this group worked well, let's put 'em together again", this time with Jackie Chan playing another student, Simon Yuen Siu-Tin as a hobo mentor, and Yuen Wo-Ping orchestrating it. To a certain extent, this one has been kind of obliterated by Drunken Master II, which retreads the material as much as sequelizes it and is considered by many to be Jackie Chan at the absolute peak of his powers, staging his signature stunts on the one hand and recognizes that he comes across better as a goof than a dick, and is more likely to be compared to that film from 15 years later than Eagle's Shadow from six months before.

In some ways, what strikes me as especially funny, especially considering how much the previous film was struggling to build a story between its fights, is that in this one, Yuen Wo-Ping seems to have really internalized that what he is good at is fights, and so absolutely everything in the script is built to lead to a fight, to the point of absurdity. Flirting with a girl? Arguing with your father? Trying to buy a snack? Fight, fight, fight. There's a hitman using a house near where Yuen's Beggar So is training Chan's Wong Fei-hung ("Freddy Wong" in the goofy English dub) as a dead-drop, so you know that's going to lead to a fight, and in fact, we're going to jam a wealthy rival to father Wong Kei-ying just to make sure. It's not exactly a good script, but it's one that knows what it's there for.

And, obviously, what it's there for is to set up chances for Chan, Yuen, and Hwang Jeong-Ri (as the assassin "Thunderleg" Yen Tieh-hsin) to show off how they can move and trade punches until you eventually get Jackie doing drunken boxing, which is really just one of the all-time great physical comedy bits in for how he jerks around like a marionette controlled by someone who has never seen a puppet before but somehow unleashes devastating combos . I think what really makes it work, though, is that there is something underneath the fighting that resonates: That last fight is between Chang and Hwang, and Chan's take on Wong Fei-hung spent the start of the movie as a prick who thought he was cool, and to the extent he thought he was capable of improvement, he probably aspired to the kind of cool that Yen represents, dressed in a Nineteenth-Century version of what was natty in the 1970s, the best at what he does, dispensing violence but having a code, that sort of thing, and he eventually rises above it by being loose, letting himself look like a fool but doing the "be water" thing until he has wiped the floor with the killer.

He literally defeats grit with comedy, and he would spend the next 40 or fifty years doing so.


Early to hit a box set, but there are a couple dozen scattered throughout the board, so don't freak out too much.

Dale Evans: 14 ½ stars
Centipede: 8 ¾ stars

Big lead in stars, but they're right next to each other and Centy only needs two bonus pretty-good movies to close the gap.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 01: The Enchanted Cottage and Lights Out

Let's get 2025 on the blog started right, with me trying to make this thing from a couple years ago happen again, with the goal of leaving my shelves less full than when I started.

After Mookie and Bruce basically tied in Season 1, the competitors this time around are the Atari Centipede, who looks much cuter than I expected for a creature that bedeviled me in various arcades and home machines starting in the 1980s, and Dale Arden, the constant companion and true love of Flash Gordon. Look, I'm just going to say it right at the top: I don't particularly care for the movie. Deliberate camp is not my thing, even if it has Timothy Dalton in it. This series isn't going to go there.

And here is this year's "game board", which is taller than the makers of these shelving units recommend at six levels. That's twenty cubes in all, which the competitors will dash across, wrapping around to the next row at the whims of the big d20, and as films get landed on, they get pulled and watched, with the gap filled from below as much as possible. Indeed, the pile to the right of the board is what wouldn't fit into the third column, but will enter the board as space develops at the bottom. The films I haven't seen by Jean-Pierre Melville will probably enter as well, should three or four slots open at the end of a row.

The zones are:

• Column One: Western films from Kidnapped (1917) to The Stewardesses (1969)
• Column Two: Hong Kong/China/Taiwan from Lady Whirlwind & Hapkido (1972) to Streetwise (2023), with the first two of Arrow's ShawScope sets lurking at the bottom waiting to rocket someone ahead
• Column Three: Western films from Zeta One (1969) to Summer of Sam (1999)
• Column Four, Rows One to Three: Korean films from The Flower in Hell (1958) to The Moon (2023), plus directors' sections for Ringo Lam, Jon Woo, and Tsui Hark
• Column Four, Rows Four and Five: Japanese films from Warning from Space (1956) to Last Letter (2020)
Column Four, Row Six: Johnnie To, Wong Jing, and Pang Ho-Cheung

This isn't my entire collection, but just the discs I have bought in the past few years (roughly since the pandemic) of films I haven't seen before. It was out of hand when Season One started and I've only been crowdfunding silent releases, grabbing at things in Kino Lorber, Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome sales, and just otherwise grabbing physical media that might not be around tomorrow at a faster clip since. That Korean Film Archive sale one foreign store had ballooned the K-film section!

(Also, I highly encourage anyone else who has trouble choosing to buy a blind box and a die and play along on their own board and use the hashtag #FilmRolls on Blluesky or, ugh, X to share your progress.)

So, let's go!

Dale rolls first, and gets a 17, which lands her on The Enchanted Cottage, preceded by short "Where the Road Divided" (which will not count toward the scoring).

Centipede rolls next, and gets a 16, catching him (or her; no need to assume gender) to Lights Out. Because we remove discs as they're watched, that leaves them at exactly the same spot!

So, how is that start?

"Where the Road Divided"

* * (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)


The description on IMDB seems to be of a much more interesting movie, a sort of Sliding Doors narrative where what happens at a fork in the road, but that's not the actual short in question, which is a pretty conventional morality play about a pretty young teenager (Louise Huff) who is seduced by a City Slicker (earl Metcalfe) looking to exploit the local mineral rights; her father being a moonshine-swilling wastrel, it's up to her schoolmaster (director Edgar Jones) and a longtime admirer (George Gowan) to stop her being taken advantage of.

The thing about this "morality play" is that the teacher is pretty clearly infatuated with her, at the very least, with early scenes talking about her not getting special treatment because of that and, ick. Like, you could probably make this a movie about a businessman saving a bright young girl from the groomers around her by removing a couple more lascivious looks and changing some intertitles. It's not that movie, to be clear, but its moral authority is undercut more than a bit, and not just because it was made 110 years ago. It leads to a finale that wants to have tragic gravitas but kind of comes out of nowhere.

Nice looking, though, and even if the details are often bad, the story feels right. The cast sketches their characters well, even if I sort of run into issues with how Louise Huff's Rose is probably supposed to be about fifteen or so, but that's mostly be - the actress was about 20 at the time, and the idea of the "teenager" was a few decades away. Anyway, it's not really good, but it's and shows its age, but it's decent enough to pl.ay before something else without sending one to the concession stand.


The Enchanted Cottage '24

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Available on DVD on Amazon (not the crowdfunded Blu-ray)

Pretty dead-simple in its intent but likably earnest, The Enchanted Cottage tells the story of an injured war veteran (Richard Barthelmess) who, after discovering that his fiancée loves another man, runs off and isolates himself in a honeymoon "cottage" where he meets a poor, plain girl (May McAvoy) to whom he semi-cynically proposes marriage to get his own family off his back and give her some stability. The spirits of the centuries of honeymooners watch over them, and one morning they wake up transformed!

At a mere 80 minutes, this still manages to feel dragged out at times - to the point where, in the end, the now-attractive Oliver and Laura themselves are wondering what is taking so long! - but that and an ending that doesn't just underline it's moral but is like someone moving their pen back and forth to really emphasize it (kind of the same thing) are the only real knock against it. There's a sincerity to both the fairy-tale elements and the more grounded issues that impresses: I love Oliver's pained decency at seeing his intended Beatrice run to the side of her true love, and how the pair's blinded neighbor privately reveals his despair toward the end after putting on a brave face for the rest of the film.

Richard Barthelmess and May McAvoy don't really look like folks who would be shunned - even a hundred years ago, you didn't want to remove too much glamor from your movie stars - but it kind of works for the film that you can see their inner beauty before Oliver straightens up and Laura gets a magic makeover; it's show-don't-tell in a way that's particularly suited to silents. Barthelmess in particular does some nice physical acting here, capturing Oliver's infirmity by the way he holds one leg and bends his neck without hamming it up, suggesting he's learned how to live with it a bit.

The visual effects look surprisingly good - the transparent spirits don't quite interact with the living, but seem to exist in the same space in the same lighting in a way that later silents an early talkies don't quite manage. It's a simple movie but works well enough.

Lights Out '23

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)


I'm kind of interested to see the 1938 remake/re-adaptation Crashing Hollywood, or see the original play staged somewhere, because Lights Out seems almost there in so many places. Star Theodore von Eitz's glasses make me wonder what it would be like if you dropped Harold Lloyd in and built a big slapstick climax into the finale, while on the other hand, the first act seems like it would be much improved by having rapid-fire dialog to bring out characterization rather than big exposition dumps in the intertitles and characters trying to emote while sitting.

(I'm also not sure whether the train porters and servants are blackface or "just" Steppin Fetchit-style mugging, but that's obviously not great.)

That bit on the train from Austin to Los Angeles takes a long time to set things up: A bank in Austin has been robbed, and the police and private security detectives have their eye on Egbert Winslow (von Eltz), who insured his black valise for $50,000 before boarding the train. He hits it off with the banker's daughter Barbara (Marie Astaire), and while they sit in the observation deck, "Hairpin Annie" (Ruth Stonehouse), who picked the bank's lock but was denied her share of the loot, and her fresh-out-of-stir partner in crime "Sea Bass" (Walter McGrail) try to get at his case. He's surprisingly not upset; he's always wanted to meet real crooks and pick their brains because he's a screenwriter for Hollywood serials. Which suits Sea Bass and Annie fine; the convince him to make one that paints the real robber, "High-Shine" Joe (Ben Deeley), in an unflattering light, figuring that will bring him back from Brazil and lead them to where he's hidden the rest of the take. Of course, Barbara's father and the law note that this production seems to know details about the robbery that weren't given to the press, and figure Winslow must be in on it.

It's a genuinely terrific scenario that is great fun to watch play out once it starts moving ahead in earnest; the filmmakers do a very nice job of shuffling folks around various locations so that they just miss each other or are only privy to enough of a conversation to misunderstand. It's the sort of farce that doesn't always benefit from the way moving from stage to screen opens it up as editing can sometimes blunt the illusion of near misses and the subconscious knowledge that someone is waiting in the wings, but works well here. It helps a lot that the farce seems to be driven forward by the characters' motivations as opposed to having them twisted to move the pieces to a new spot: One can see Barbara becoming fonder of Winslow than the detective she's engaged to (Ben Hewlett), and the time jump from the train to the production of the serial's final episode lets the audience believe that Annie and Sea Bass would not only get closer but start to view Winslow as a friend instead of just a resource to exploit. Ben Deeley, meanwhile, adds spice to how good-natured all this is with a criminal mastermind whose ego is funny but also dangerous enough to feel like a threat; and he also does nice work pulling double duty as the actor playing High-Shine in the serial.

That opening segment is almost a killer, though, devoting a long stretch at the start to honeymooners looking for a bit of privacy to make out who we won't see later, like the movie needs to spend ten minutes to justify pulling a shade. It's got some strained physical comedy around Winslow either keeping the bag close or forgetting it as he flirts with Barbara and too many people circling it, including some of the tackier bits of racial humor and a person mostly seen as a hand reaching out from behind a chair that I lost track of at various points. It's a segment that could use a real slapstick pro rather than van Eltz, who just never sells the physical comedy casually or as someone believably frazzled, which is something of an issue through the movie.

Lights Out is genuinely fun once it gets going, and since the play must be in the public domain by now, it might be fun to see someone take a run at it today. For a century-old farce, it doesn't seem like it would be particularly broken by air travel, cell phones, or other bits of modern tech, which may be a part of why it still works fairly well.

So, two crowdfunded silent movie releases that maybe weren't great - there is, after all, a reason why so many of these lesser-known movies didn't stay in the public consciousness and have Kickstarter goals that would be met if 100 of us bought them - but are worth watching once. And, yes, I've already backed one new campaign in the new year. Which gives us a score of:

Dale Evans: 2 ½ stars
Centipede: 2 ½ stars

Dale may lead by a nose in points, but they're at the same position on the board, with at least one likely to move into the Hong Kong section with the next roll!

Film Rolls, Round 24: Piraha and … oh, never mind

I'm in a sort of ashamed awe at this post, which was nearly a year in the making - the first of the 9 movies intended to be included came off the shelf on 24 February 2023, the last on 19 November 2023, and while there's reasons, I'm certainly going to find ways to tighten this up on the next pass through.

But, it's the final round of the game! How does it play out?

Well, it starts with Mookie rolling a 9, which gets him to Piranha in 4K. As nutty as the choices for what gets put on 4K and what is let to languish on VHS/DVD can be, Joe Dante's first feature that caused people to sit up and take notice certainly seems like one that demands some attention.

Things got a little busy after that - March is Boston Underground Film Festival time, for instance - so it was April before get got back to this, excited about being close to the end. Bruce rolled a 12, and I honestly can't remember whether that got him to the first in the line of Kino Lorber's "Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema" box sets exactly, or if I just decided that the appropriate amount or over stopped you there. At any rate, it's a five-film box, and it seemed unfair to skew the results at the end, so, when I picked this back up in November (hey, there's Fantasia and other stuff in there!)...

Holy cats, Mookie rolled a six and ended up exactly where he needed to be! What are the odds? Okay, obviously 5%, but this picture was definitely staged.

It's been a whole year since then, during which I figured on re-watching the eight films noirs in order to write decent reviews but it just never worked out that way, so I'm going to treat those movies as bonuses and wrap this up. So I figured on not starting Season Two until I got this wrapped up, which means my shelf has been bloating all year, and isn't the idea to use this as a way to watch movies without hemming and hawing so much?

So, yeah, here's a quick wrap-up and a clean slate, mostly posted because I've wanted to take the photo at the bottom for at least a couple years.

Piranha '78

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)
Seen 7 February 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)
Available for stream/digital rental/purchase on Prime or elsewhere; 4K Blu-ray on Amazon

There's a moment or two during Piranha when some random old B-movie appears on a TV screen, and 45 years later, you can kind of laugh, saying it's just Joe Dante being Joe Dante, but I found myself kind of wondering if someone seeing it 45 years ago would wonder why Dante was reminding us that there were monster movies out there that were, if not necessarily better, at least more imaginative. I'm not sure what the term folks at the time would use the way we sort of dismissively say "content" in 2024, but that's kind of what Piranha is - producer Roger Corman cranking out a new movie to fill spaces on drive-in and grindhouse screens, or maybe play some late nights where a regular theater had a hole, but not really anything meant to last. It's got a fancy 4K disc not because it's particularly good or noteworthy, but because director Joe Dante and writer John Sayles went on to bigger and better things.

Which, it should be made clear, does not make Piranha bad; it does what it says on the box and does it in pretty capable fashion. Sayles gives Dante a script that includes everything a movie like this needs with the occasional fun variation or bit of dialog; Dante-the-director gets Dante-the-editor good material to cut together, and the cast could often maybe dial it down a bit - you can see a fun dynamic in Heather Menzies's headstrong skip-tracer and Bradford Dillman's grumpy local guide, except that they're too close to shouting when they should maybe be closer to bantering - but more often than not, it's the right people in the right roles and you can see them existing outside the movie. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it's never great but solidly competent throughout - it's often very rought! - but Dante generally seems to get enough that's decent to put together.

The thing is, it's a Corman-produced movie from after he'd peaked, and there are times even a B-movie-lover like Dante seems frustrated with the spots he's got to hit, making sure that Menzies' Maggie is all "really?" about the nature of the distraction Dillman's Grogan suggests before flashing her [body double's] breasts, and there's an obvious need to hang a lantern on how cheap the fancy resort looks. There's a Phil Tippet stop-motion creature that they ran out of money for, but it's in the film because it cost money even if it doesn't go anywhere. Corman's clearly chasing a trend on a tight budget, rather than doing something that anybody involved finds particularly interesting or inspired by. Unlike a lot of those movies, it lucked into having just enough up-and-coming talent to remain watchable.


Okay! That makes the finale score before the Film Noir Box sets

Mookie: 81 ¼ stars
Bruce: 79 ¼ stars

Bruce was ahead until Mookie got that last film, but he would have had five movies compared to Mookie's three, so let's say it's too close to call!

Of course, if you do feel like calling it, here's how the pair stood up… literally!

Okay, that was fun! I'm going to try it again starting next week (next year!), once again trying to find a good balance between "it is a fun thing to do with a movie blog" and "you're not getting paid and have other hobbies, stop making everything a massive writing project!"" Which, if I specifically enumerated resolutions, would absolutely be my New Year's Resolution.

Film Rolls, Round 23: The Internecine Project and The Bad News Bears

The previous update had our guys in 2019 South Korea, but a couple quick rolls of the dice are getting them into the last regular cube!

Mookie, rolling first, gets us to The Internecine Project, which is one of my favorite genres of stuff that comes from Kino Lorber sales: James Coburn movies that make you wonder how he became a first-name-on-the-poster movie star when he never played a likable character!

A couple nights later, Bruce would roll a 9 and land on The Bad News Bears, which stars another unlikely-seeming leading man from the era, Walter Matthau, and everything about its placement here is kind of screwy: That I had somehow never seen it before - I seem to recall everyone else in elementary school having seen it on network TV way back in the day - and that I had ordered an Australian special-edition Blu-ray because, for whatever reason, Paramount had never put it out on Blu-ray. Screwy, considering that bit about it being kind of deeply embedded in Gen X-ers heads and was popular enough to get remade!

So, how did our little plastic guys and big rough-looking guys do?

The Internecine Project

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Available for digital rental/purchase on Prime or elsewhere; Blu-ray on Amazon

The Internecine Project is not much of a movie, really, but you can sort of see how it could be: It's got a devilishly good premise, decent talent in front of and behind the camera, including and perhaps especially star James Coburn. It's just that this particular story demands a certain tone, and the filmmakers can't quite find it. Or maybe they can, but there's someone or something preventing them from getting it right.

The film starts with London-based Professor Robert Elliot (Coburn) being told that he has been tapped for a senior advisory position to the President. But while he's a recommended academic and television talking head, his history as a spy is the sort of thing that will cause a major scandal if discovered. There are five people who can incriminate him (Harry Andrews, Ian Henry, Michael Jayston, Keenan Wynn, and Christiane Kruger), all located close enough that he can, perhaps, pull off an audacious plan, leading them to murder each other in the course of one night, even as he flirts with the reporter (Lee Grant) writing a profile.

This feels like it should be a lot of fun, in a mean-spirited, noose-tightening way, but never quite clicks. It appears to have passed through many creative hands and constant rewrites, and this isn't the sort of thing that can just be slapped together: The plot has to fit together like a Swiss watch, the various antagonistic characters need to be interesting enough to overcome audience disdain, and you've got to put the audience into a specific mood and keep them there. It almost works, most of the time, but neither Elliot nor his five targets are fleshed out enough to engage much emotional response. You need the little thrill of admiring a perfectly-sprung trap closing around a good person, or rooting for an anti-hero in some way, and much of the time, this movie is too tentative to do that fearlessly.

Except, perhaps, for James Coburn. There's precious few out there today with his kind of vibe, a guy with leading-man charisma despite often projecting sneering contempt, sexy because a partner knows they'd be flying too close to the sun. He gets that the argument for a guy like Elliot as a Presidential adviser is that he's smart, charismatic enough to make a good argument, and pragmatic, but that the danger of him is that pragmatism crossing the line into amorality. He knows the assignment and why he signed onto the movie, and seems to hold onto it no matter what else is going on with the production.

Sadly, not everybody is on the same wavelength, and the movie never quite clicks as a result.

The Bad News Bears

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Australian Blu-ray)
Available for digital rental/purchase on Prime or elsewhere; American Blu-ray on Amazon

Oh, that's great; if I were handing out awards for the movies in this little game, The Bad News Bears would definitely take "what took you so long to get around to it?". It's baseball, Walter Matthau, and kids' stuff that is earnest, irreverent, and occasionally absurd, executed just about as well as it can be.

You know the score, even if you don't necessarily know the specifics for this movie: Ragtag group of kids, reluctant mentor, each teaching the other valuable lessons as they compete against a league full of rich twerps who look down on them. What makes it different, perhaps, is the unsanitized nature of the whole thing; these kids aren't one good opportunity from things being good, they don't have good haircuts, they've picked up racist language. Morris Buttermaker is a drunk, and like the kids, there's not something to be fixed. Baseball is an escape, but not a path to escape. The moment when Buttermaker realizes that and accepts that this season need not have higher aspirations than that is kind of joyous.

But on top of that, this is one of the more sincere love stories I can recall, which sounds strange to say, but that's the tragic flip side to the joy of the final game: Matthau's Buttermaker and Tatum O'Neal's Amanda Whurlitzer love each other. It's not romantic or sexual (don't be gross), but he cannot imagine anything that would make happier than being her father, and she badly wants to be his daughter. It can't be, of course - there's her mother, after all, and for all his faults, Buttermaker knows that that will never work, and it's maybe not healthy that she will destroy her arm to gain his approval. They're as doomed as any pairing in a romantic tragedy, and they're going to have to figure out how to fill the holes in their life some other way.

Along the way, there's a lot of good jokes, genuine fondness for these kids, and a knack for shooting unglamorous locations that highlights how ordinary and run-down they are without looking down on them. The movie gets right into it to start and gets right out when it's done. It's enjoyably mixed as the Bears go on a winning streak, as there's clearly both a little of Buttermaker still having enough professional athlete in him to really enjoy winning, but also just not knowing kids enough to realize that the opposite of being checked out isn't being obsessed with winning.

It's a laugh-out-loud funny movie that hides how smart and sentimental it is by looking disreputable, a real gem.


Two very different mid-1970s movies get us to:

Mookie: 78 ¾ stars
Bruce: 79 ¼ stars

Awfully close as we head into the big finish!

Film Rolls, Round 22: Exit and Lucky Chan-Sil

The boys' time in South Korea last year was quick, but eventful!

First up, we get Mookie rolling a 14 and finally getting out of John Woo territory to hop right over Johnnie To and almost, but not quite, blow right past South Korea. Of course, the South Korean film he lands on, Exit, is a disc I imported from Hong Kong when it was probably at a crazy sale price. Interestingly, the disc defaults to neither Chinese nor English subtitles, though I don't know how many people in Hong Kong speak Korean.

Bruce, meanwhile, rolls a seven and lands on a really gorgeous box for Lucky Chan-Sil, which puts him in a dead heat, position-wise, with Mookie. I really wish more South Korean films got Blu-ray releases, and kind of wonder if the format just never took off over there (even though my first player was a Samsung). As mentioned last time around, there don't seem to be many releases, even for the seemingly mainstream stuff that plays Fantasia or North American theaters, to the point where I wonder how many folks in South Korea are importing discs of their own cinema from Japan, Hong Kong, and the USA. This one appears to have gotten a nice disc because the director is Hong Sang-soo adjacent, and Hong is something they can export. Weird situation.

Anyway, we kind of hit the extremes of Korean cinema between the breezy, lightweight genre materia and the films that appeal to art-house die-hards. How'd that work out?

Film Rolls, Round 21: Bullet in the Head and The Foul King

One thing I was kind of afraid of in terms of setting this up last years was potentially weird runs where one "player" rolled much higher numbers than the other, but, luckily, it hasn't happened that often.

Still, mildly concerned as Mookie rolls a 1 and therefore just barely sticks around John Woo territory for Bullet in the Head. Truth be told, I didn't really think we had enough films in some of these sections for us to wind up sticking around, rather than having things change up every round.

Bruce also rolls a fairly low number, with his 2 just getting him into the Korean film section, which is kind of fun because I got a fair chunk from a Korean merchant and after a few days I may have no idea what the disc actually is. Honestly, there are not nearly as many Korean Blu-Rays with English subtitles as I would expect on offer, considering they're Region A and Hong Kong seems to do well by presuming that a certain amount will be exported. Anyway, this landed Bruce on The Foul King, and, wow, I'd forgotten that I had a movie directed by Kim Jee-Woon starring Song Kang-Ho that I'd never seen on the shelf!

So, how'd that go?

Dip huet gai tau (Bullet in the Head '91)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Seen 13 January 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

It's been nearly a full year since I first watched this, in that time learning that the Golden Princess logo at the front means that the odds of seeing this on the big screen are fairly long, unless I get lucky at a Hong-Kong-a-Thon or something. That's a real shame, because it must be a heck of a film to see big as life, surrounded by other people taking in a story of brotherhood and betrayal - like, aside from just feeling the emotional reactions to the movie,, how you feel about having other people that close must vary by the minute.

It follows three friends in 1960s Hong Kong - Ben (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), who wants nothing more than to marry his beloved Jane (Fennie Yuen Kit-Ying); Paul (Waise Lee Chi-Hung) the smart son of a street cleaner who wants a job that will let him rise above his roots; and Frank (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau), their earnest but not-so-bright buddy. Frank is badly beaten after borrowing the money for the wedding banquet, and when Ben goes to teach his assailant a lesson, he winds up beating him to death. Paul arranges their flight to Vietnam, but the material they were supposed to smuggle is destroyed in a terrorist bombing, and they fall in with local fixer Luke (Simon Yam Tat-Wah) and nightclub singer Sally (Yolinda Yan Choh-Sin), being kept in Saigon by a gangster who has locked up her passport.

The thing that's clear from early on, of course, is that Vietnam doesn't so much change this trio of young men from Hong Kong fleeing the law so much as exposing it and distilling them down to the purest version of those traits: Waise Lee's Paul is clearly the pragmatic one with a desire to raise his station from the start, but being in a watching with a box of gold kicks it into overdrive; Jacky Cheung's Frank the poor, well-meaning guy who who will take any amount of abuse for and from those he cares for, needing to be protected from himself; Tony Leung plays Ben as the romantic, which isn't always as great as it sounds: While director John Woo will often let the camera longer on Leung's beautiful, concerned face, and one does not exactly fault him for his outpouring of affection to a new woman just days after his wedding, as "knight rescuing damsel" is his default mindset - but it also means he cannot let things go, especially where those who have wronged poor Frank are concerned. That romanticism, the desire to be an avenger or rescuer, is his fatal flaw, as big as the Vietnam War itself.

(Outside the core trio, I ask this question - is this the coolest that Simon Yam has ever been in a film? For someone so ubiquitous in Hong Kong cinema, this is somehow his only collaboration with John Woo, and while Johnnie To gave him terrific roles, it's hard to compete with Franco-Chinese ex-CIA killer with constant five o'clock shadow who carries dynamite disguised as cigars and hides weapons in a nightclub's piano for when he needs to rescue his torch singer lover. It's an overload of cool, really, for anything but a John Woo movie.)

It's a lot of movie, as well; dropping these characters into the middle of the Vietnam War lets Woo start stripping them down to their essences quickly; they're under fire from the moment they arrive in Saigon and the rest of the film can't really be set over much more than a few days, with Woo and his co-writers escalating the action and retaining just enough of the politics to make it clear that the violence has taken on a life of its own. There's so much that it's no wonder that it breaks these guys even more than they were broken before, and nobody stages action on this scale like Woo.. He and four cinematographers shoot the hell out of Thailand, and when he slows down, it's often to make something more grandiose and tragic.

I do wonder a bit what he was thinking with the bookends. The opening is downright weird, cutting between the trio being poor but fun-loving folks and their being street goons, with an especially odd disconnect that comes from the tune of the Monkees' "I'm a Believer" being a big part of Sherman Chow's score - one's brain says it really can't be that, right? But no, it is, made clear when a cover band is playing the song in Saigon, and it's maybe a bit too much "this is kind of subversive, no?" There's also a big action sequence at the end that feels like Woo just having a couple characters come untethered from reality - there's just no reason for one to do this or be so sloppy - and I kind of wonder if the studio demanded a big finale from how the alternate ending on the disc cuts it out, but it's Woo, and the romanticism-versus-pragmatism theme must be resolved with blood, rather than "I showed you!"

Part of me thinks this may be Woo's masterwork, even without Chow Yun-fat in it. It's maybe a bit too frantic and overheated in some places, but turning up the heat like that is what lets Woo soar when it's working.

Banchikwang (The Foul King)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Blu-ray)

Sometime during 2023, I wrote a review or two where I talked about how you can see a certain filmmaker was destined for bigger things in his early work, at least in retrospect, but I don't know that it's the case here. It feels like a case where Kim Jee-Woon got a script that was kind of a mess but did everything he could to make every scene as good as it could be, and put them together into something coherent - although, of course, Kim is also one of the writers, so he clearly had room to grow in some areas, even if one could certainly see a bunch of talent in others.

He introduces Im Dae-ho (Song Kang-ho), a loser bank clerk who is not just harangued but beat up by his boss, street punks, you name it. He eventually finds himself at a run-down professional wrestling school, hoping to just learn how to get out of a headlock, because he's too big a fan to imagine himself as an actual wrestler, with the run down old man who runs the place (Jang Gwan-jang) agreeing. But when a promoter needs a nobody who specializes in cheating, they wind up running Dae-ho out there, and he winds up surprisingly good, especially once the owner's daughter (Jang Jin-yong) starts training him. Can his newfound confidence mean anything outside the ring?

Maybe, maybe not - what matters is that things get very weird, very quickly, even beyond how the world of professional (if you're able to get paid for it) wrestling is seemingly very weird in every country where the activity is popular, with performers encouraged to blur the distinction between themselves and the characters, the broad strokes of the matches and storylines pre-planned but with a lot of room for improv, and a lot of people climbing the ladder who are roughly as skilled as Dae-ho, and in many cases kind of the same sort of screw-up. It's entertainment that can be astounding at its best, but moving between incredibly dangerous and hilariously chincy more often than not. When the film is at its weakest, Kim will seemingly be standing back, asking if you can believe this shit, or seeing how far he can push it into weird territory even if he's not also pushing forward.

Fortunately, while this was only Kim's second film as a director, he would soon become one of South Korea's very best genre directors, and he's constantly trying to find ways to make a shot interesting, even if he doesn't necessarily have the chance for elaborate set-ups that would come later. Indeed, the trick here is often capturing how the whole business is low-rent and disreputable, making the fighting look kind of silly but also having the sort of energy and danger that attracts not just losers like Dae-ho, but fans in general

And, in the middle, Song Kang-ho in one of his first leading roles, maybe one that would wind up setting the tone for his entire career: His charisma and talent are there for all to see, but there's something about him that makes people cast him as guys who are sort of weird, even in leads. He embraces that fully here, never seeming to push back against the idea that Dae-ho is a genuine screw-up rather than someone who has had some lousy breaks, but also catching something earnest there. If one likes Dae-ho, it's kind of in spite of who he is, and what confidence he gains is often horribly misplaced, but he's strangely watchable. Song's an odd sort of movie star, but he is a movie star.

I do still kind of wish I liked this one a bit better, considering the talent involved. Part of it may just be the professional wrestling of it all - I liked it as a kid, but it was kind of strange seeing folks I knew as movie people really get into wrestling during the pandemic, and I never managed to get interesting enough to want to see what goes on below the top-level promotions. Something about the material just puts me off, even when what's around it is good.


Once again, we have solid works by favorite filmmakers, which leads us to…

Mookie: 73 stars
Bruce: 72 ¾ stars

Mookie takes the lead for the first time since the first round! What a comeback - how will the next, Korean-centric round build on this?

Film Rolls, Round 20: Once a Thief and Romancing in Thin Air

The legitimacy of both these rolls is kind of stretched. I'll admit that. Sometimes you've got to make weird calls on the gameboard.

Like, right here, Mookie rolls a 2, which lands him on Once a Thief. I have seen Once a Thief, although at various points I tell myself that maybe I fell asleep while it played at the Brattle, or I saw the American series pilot that Woo also directed, but, c'mon, I just put it in with all the unwatched Woos I imported and now Mookie's kind of got a ringer.

Then Bruce rolls an 8, and how far should that get him into the Johnnie To section? I ordered all the PTU: Police Tactical Unit movies during one spree, but it would be weird to not watch them in order, and if someone lands in the middle, do I just watch up to that one? I'm opting to treat them as a box set, which means that 8 is more like a 13 or something and gets Bruce to Romancing in Thin Air.

My game, my rules. Where's it get us?

Chung hang sei hoi (Once a Thief '91)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

Go long enough between viewings for Once a Thief and you may suspect that you've never watched it before, because there are almost guaranteed to be moments when it is, quite simply, nothing like the movie you think you remember. And yet, while it's not unusual for a Hong Kong movie to have stylistic shifts, especially coming from John Woo, it seldom works quite as well as here. By the end of the movie, Woo has made this into a completely different sort of movie, but it doesn't really seem screwy until the very end.

It starts as a light caper, with Joe (Chow Yun-Fat), Jim (Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing), and Cherie (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung) a crew of art thieves in Europe, pulling impressive heists ever since they were found as orphans in the streets of Hong Kong. Joe and Cherie are a couple, though Jim obviously carries a torch for the lovely Cherie. But when a heist goes wrong, Jim and Cherie return to Asia and draw closer, with things taking a turn for the melodramatic when a wheelchair-using Jim reappears, and it becomes clear that the fun "gentleman thieves" portion of their lives may soon come to an end, and not in the retirement Cherie desires.

Dang, but Leslie Cheung was a movie star, wasn't he? Chow Yun-Fat is billed first, and at this point in their careers Woo and Chow know that that they'll be mentioned together in the history of Hong Kong cinema, so they kind of play how the audience knows that up; Woo sets Chow up to shine in a way that's almost blinding, such that when he gets taken off the board for a while, the audience can feel his absence. But never fear, Cheung is an A-list romantic lead himself, and he charms the audience just as much as his Jim does Cherie. In hindsight (or even at-the-time-sight), his character is just about as believably straight as the actor is, but it doesn't particularly matter, because you still believe his leading lady has this pure romantic love for him and vice versa.

It holds the movie in place for a bit in the middle, between the joyful adventure of the European beginning - which features a mobile heist that reminds one that Woo and his team, including action choreographer Philip Kwok Chung-Fung and stunt driver Remy Julienne, are just as adroit with sleek staging as with bullet-ballet overkill - and a finale where enough bullets are flying to make it clear that this crew is not to be betrayed. The action is fantastic, of course, but there were a lot of people in Hong Kong who could work with the world's top technicians and use a lot of squibs; what makes this film great is that the exceptionally-staged violence tracks the emotion and mood so well. It's all fun, but by the end, it's a lot to the point where one maybe looks a bit askance.

Which isn't to say John Woo is making a film about how, eventually, the underworld consumes and corrupts even this sort of noble criminal; even in the last act, the film is often too goofy and the filmmakers to fond of their familiar tropes to become more than relatively lightweight entertainment. But there's something there, even if Woo decides not to bring all of it to the foreground, and the central core of Chow, Cheung, and Chung are folks who know how to keep a film like this floating.

Gao hai ba zhi lian II (Romancing in Thin Air)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

There's a "II" in the Chinese title for Romancing in Thin Air, and the film opens with what feels like a quick recap of a previous film about the movie stars played by Louis Koo and Gao Yuan-Yuan, but I'll be damned if I can find any sign of such a thing existing. Are Johnny To, Wai Ka-Fai, and company doing something meta here, maybe as a tie-in with the film-within-a-film stuff? Did it cause folks in Hong Kong some confusion during its initial release? I should look that up, but I kind of don't want to know until I'm finished here.

Not that it really matters, I suppose, aside from serving as a signal that there's a lot of "wait, what?" to a movie that otherwise plays as a nice, low-key romance. That's kind of how Johnnie To & Wai Ka-Fai collaborations work sometimes, I guess: To is as good at turning a script into a movie as anybody, while Wai comes up with bold stories, and they seldom work against each other but don't always achieve synergy, either.

So here, Louis Koo Tin-Lok is Michael Liu Baiqian, a much beloved actor about to tie the knot with frequent co-star Ding Yuanyuan (Gao), right up until her first love resurfaces on the day of their wedding. Michael seems to vanish into, as they say, thin air, somewhat literally: He surfaces, drunk, at a mountain hotel run by Sue (Sammi Cheng Sau-Man) in the absence of her missing husband Tian (Li Guangjie). It should be closed for the season, if not completely, but Sue is certain her husband will return and will need everything in place when he does, despite it being almost certain that he has died of exposure years ago.

I have mentioned before that it's kind of intimidating just how good To, someone best known in the West for his gangster pictures and action, is at romance. Romancing in Thin Air is kind of standard fare in its way - Sue is going to help Michael dry out, he will prove more than just some callow celebrity, and odds are good that Michael's management will track him down and Tian's fate will be revealed just at the moment when it will most test the bond that the pair have found. This may be formulaic, but that's fine; it's a formula that folks can relate to despite the heightened circumstances, and To's got Louis Koo and Sammi Cheng. Koo being cast as a movie star is obvious but works due in part to its obviousness; Louis Koo with two day's growth of beard and shaggy hair still looks like a "disheveled" movie star. Cheng, even before we see flashbacks, does nice work making sure that the audience has some idea of how Sue has adopted this place, as opposed to being a local to be either awed or unimpressed by Michael.

The thing about Michael being a movie star is not just that there are higher stakes, though - fame and art has a specific way of twisting the story, and it makes the last stretch of the film kind of fascinating in how it connects to the start: Being with someone like Michael means that Sue's story is no longer her own - not just because there are now fans who are going to be all up in their business, but because, for an artist, everything is fodder for their art. Michael may intend to respect that, but, inevitably, not only will the world at large have an investment in Sue and Michael, but Sue and Tian's love story will become something else as well. Indeed, though the film seems to reference another film from the viewer's world that does not exist, it is also, in a way, a sequel to its own film within a film, an ouroborus of narrative that, while it never finishes devouring itself, perhaps hints at the danger of the arts always looking inward.

Or, perhaps, it's just a charming romantic drama from playful filmmakers. Either way, it's a reminder that To is more than crime and simple stories can be satisfying and have room for ornamentation.


A strong pairing of favorite filmmakers, leading to things getting a little tighter:

Mookie: 69 ½ stars
Bruce: 70 stars

Ah, looking at my camera roll, I see this was the night the building's pipes burst. Good times! (Not actually good times)