Fantasia 2026.03: Anime no Bento '26, Break Free, and Unidentified Murder

Pardon if today seems a little more scattered than usual; I left the apartment without my little five-inch square notebook and so wasn't making notes through most of the day, and that's not great when the first couple films of the day are Japanese shorts and new releases; Japanese studios just do not update English-friendly movie databases and there's a lag on the crowd-sourcing as well. I eventually wound up hitting Pharmaprix to grab pen and paper for the last show, but wasn't quick-thinking enough to record or photograph the English credits of Break Free.

Anyway, late start because the early afternoon was filled with panels and such more than screenings, so we kick off at the Museum with the Anime no Bento package:

Five filmmakers for seven films from Japan is a pretty decent turnout, although the scheduling meant there wouldn't be time for a Q&A - these packages are soon after the "My First Fantasia" shows, and genre festival staff in a museum cinema might not exactly specialize in getting families with kids in and out - so there was little time to do more than introduce director Taka Yuki from "Don't Dodge Life", "20001 An Earth Odyssey" creator Taiki Sakurai, "Echo" filmmaker Asuka Dokai, "Foxing" director Takeru Shinokuza, and Eit Mitsufuchi, who did basically everything on "Dust of the Simulacrum".

It didn't quite run late enough to bump into Break Free, with producer Yusuke Suzuki (CHECK), star Akito Fujii, and writer/ director Yu Nakamoto on hand. It was a fun Q&A, even if it was one where you get the sense of how bizarre it must be to fly halfway around the world to show your movie to a huge room of people who speak two different languages from what you understand, standing in front of them while they chatter and a translator occasionally decides a question is for you. Fujii, in particular, often seems to be listening intently for something he could respond to and then giving a very amusing answer when he got the chance.

It was interesting, though, as I gather the film kind of grew from Fujii starting a TikTok where he did dances in character as a yakuza (his character's cover story in the movie), with the studio boys eventually calling Nakamoto in saying they wanted him to write and direct a movie about a dancing gangster, which sounds pretty old Hollywood for a movie built around social media! Fujii, though he's got the look of a gangster, has been dancing since he was young, and said it was a bit of a challenge to dance crappy in earlier scenes. Nakamoto, meanwhile, answered a question about directing action versus dance by noting that sometimes the work of choreography is similar, but with action you are often doing pieces at a time, often with doubles, and camera work very much plotted alongside motion, while dance is often longer shots, no doubles, and the camera reacting to something more spontaneous.

After that there was an hour and a half or so until Unidentified Murder back at the Museum, time to do a little shopping and grab a slice of pizza. I think it might be the only new Hong Kong film at the festival - Blades of the Guardians probably belongs more to the mainland and there are three archive prints/restorations - which seems kind of crazy.

Next up, another couple big gaps on Sunday with Niko, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, You Are the Film, and Attack on Paradise. Tuesday looks to be Big Break, Levitating, Hayop Ka!, Someone's Daughter, and either Los Vampires or Solo, depending what the release plans for the former look like.

(And here's a look at how the sausage gets made if you're without a notebook or a pen but know you're not going to remember who is who the next day!)

"Echo"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

One from the "cute fantastical representation" school of animated shorts, "Echo" has a pair of twin children traversing a strange landscape, having crashed there in unusual escape pods of sorts, eager to meet their mother, with one more daring and apparently boasting greater stamina than the other. The twist is that they are as yet unborn, and in the outside world, their mother is not doing well, having lost her husband not long after discovering she was pregnant.

It's a lovely movie to look at, with cute designs that walk up to the border of perhaps overly whimsical without quite crossing it. I'm kind of torn on how directly I'd like weekdays happening with the twins to represent what's going on with the mother - they feel very disconnected here, but link them closer and suddenly there are implications best not examined!


"Future Kid Takara Episode 1: The Child From the Future"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This is very clearly built for children, which is no bad thing, but it can be kind of hard to parse as an adult as a result. It's bright and earnest and full of entertaining designs and transformations, but is it too simplistic? Tough to judge, as an adult, especially without seeing more of the series. Little kids do need introductions to the idea of climate change, though, and they might as well be plain-spoken.

This one looks pretty cute, like it will combine fun adventure with good information, and I kind of love that the girl Takara meets in the past/our present looks like she might be an over-enthusiastic chaos source. The opening has a really nice vibe that feels a bit like it's trying be a bit of a spoof of the sort of thing parents thought was fun as a kid while also trying to be that thing for a new generation.


"20001 An Earth Odyssey"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

I am here for the joke about "it must have been used for religious rituals" in any form, which is good, because it basically does three of them as a family of alien archeologists examine a playground on an earth where humans have died out. It's a very fine example of how, if a joke is solid enough and you can tweak the execution just enough, there's a lot to work with.

The style of it is admittedly a bit after my time; in American terms it looks like NickToons from the 1990s or so. I suspect that it hits a sweet spot for kids and adults younger than me, even if the main 2001 reference is kind of corny.


"Don't Dodge Life"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This one's a visually interesting bit of animation, although it probably makes a bit more effort reaching for profundity than it can really manage. Making the abstract concept of life a character can't help but oversimplify something that the other protagonist and potentially the viewer is really struggling with, and filmmaker Taka Yuki seems to struggle with what to do with the idea to make this a story.


"Ambivalent Garden"

Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Two days later, I don't recall anything about this one at all, despite the description and images on the site's pages being striking! Did I nap?


"Foxing: Kitsuné-tsuki"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Write-what-you-know shorts can be dangerous, because they often reveal just how much young artists are pouring into their art to the exclusion of everything else. That's a bit of a weight on "Foxing" for a while, as filmmaker Takeru Shinozuka's avatar Shinano mopes about her work as an animator and how she feels unworthy in a way that's both familiar and also kind of tough to swallow for animation-lovers. We've seen young artists work themselves into and out of funks before, especially with some well-placed encouragement.

Still, the execution is really nice, especially once we meet her kitsune doodle come to life, Koyami. The expected metaphor reveal doesn't have quite so much pressure on it because Shinano has already commented on how much she's like a kitsune in some ways, but I really like the way Koyami is both pure ego and merciless criticism; She's obviously going to be an aspect of Shinano when the mask comes off, but I really like how Shinozuka doesn't separate these traits out into dueling avatars, because not only are both necessary for creating art, but they are more intertwined than usually presented.


"Dust of the Simulacrum"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Filmmaker Eit Mitsufuchi pitched "Dust of the Simulacrum" as, among other things, an argument for working in the 3D CGI medium when the animation industry in Japan is still very much focused on a traditional style, but kind of seems a little too meta about it at times? It's not ReBoot or anything, but it's a lost video game character trying to dodge "bugs" that are overrunning a blank landscape, and I don't know if it ever gets beyond being too on-the-nose.

Oddly enough, it's a case where the human characters look nice enough but the bugs look like they could use a little refinement (although, potentially, to look jankier rather than more realistic), and it's another one where what's going on doesn't quite carry the ambition the filmmakers are trying to project.


Odore! Yakuza (Break Free)

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Break Free opens with text about how Japan's crackdown on organized crime has more or less crippled the yakuza as a force in Japanese life, and if it goes further, one wonders what the effect will be on pop culture. There will be movies like this, chronicling the fall in ways both serious and comic, but will there eventually be nostalgia for it? As much as filmmaker Yu Nakamoto has a great deal of sympathy for his characters, that doesn't extend to bolstering the institution, which is probably a part of what makes it work.

In it, Kunio (Akito Fujii) is 38 and has been a yakuza for twenty years, but the business of organized crime is not great - he's working as a food delivery driver and longtime comrades are struggling as mascots and trying to catfish - beyond how everybody is filming everything these days and it's very easy to get caught doing violence in public. Insulted by a lack of respect by a civilian, he improvises a sort of dance thing where he doesn't quite hit the guy, and it racks up millions of views. The gang decides to monetize this - an odd scheme where Kunio will present himself online as an influencer who is just cosplaying as a gangster, though the intimidation going on in the background is real - but he'll need some better moves, which means taking classes with former background dancer Marie. She, of course, is very cute, and Kunio starts to wonder if he wants more than a life of crime, even as a less organized but more vicious gang makes a play for their territory.

There's a song and dance man inside every tough guy actor - they weren't doing film noir and kung fu in high school drama class - but I don't know that anyone since James Cagney has really had the chance to be both, no matter how much Hugh Jackman wants to. It's treated as a bit of a joke when they do, and both Break Free and the TikTok channel of star Akito Fujii which inspired the film are playing on the incongruity of a guy who looks like Fujii dancing, but the joke hits so well at its best. Fujii's muscles are not quite bulky but he's not exactly wiry, and even when Kunio cleans up, he kind of looks and sounds like a schlub, so it's genuinely entertaining to see him suddenly move with seeming abandon (though I'm not sure he ever becomes quite so competitive in the dance battles as the plot requires him to be), or have the film suddenly double back and remind you of the gangster life he's trying to hide.

Not that I'd dream of spoiling those moments, especially when the best are a couple layers of absurdity deep, but they bring forth an explosion of laughter, enough to get past how a lot of the movie around them isn't quite so brilliant, coasting a lot on how good the high concept is rather than how any of the details fit together. At their best, though, the filmmakers are great at sending up how goofy something is and then doing a quick pivot to this other very silly thing, catching someone who is just making fun of the one element off guard as the thing they like better isn't spared.

And, underneath it all, this all works because it feels true that the violence of the yakuza is a dead end, even without the steps that the government is taking so that gangsters can't participate in legitimate society. The organization is dying and success requires one to either be completely monstrous (true or not, the yakuza often tried to present themselves as a useful part of society) or otherwise make oneself miserable. Being the kind of gangster Kunio and his friends see themselves as is not manly in the way it once was. Dance isn't either, but there's joy in it if not money or glory, and that's got more value than posturing like a gangster.

The movie fizzles a bit at times, Nakamoto may show violence as ultimately ineffective and obsolete, but he can't quite create the triumphant dance moment that the film needs at or near its climax. It's great fun to watch Fujii play against apparent type, though, enough for the best moments to carry the rest.


Unidentified Murder

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

There's a fun bit at the end of Unidentified Murder where a newscaster is trying to recap what has come before and seems to feel that relating this idiocy is below her dignity, and she's kind of right, but the trick of the film is that, for all we the audience knows what was going on is screwy, it's not quite something that can be dismissed until the movie has finished walking right up to the line.

25 years ago, three kids went out to play and only two came back, saying their friend had been abducted by a UFO. 25 years ago Mark (Ling Man-Lung) and Kit (Ronald Lam) are going on some internet UFO programs to talk about how their friend Ho vanished, laughing dismissively at a host (Kenny Wong) bringing up how it was rumored they killed him. Mark's girlfriend Lau Man (Renci Yeung), who does YouTube pranks on Mark regularly, decides to hire an actor, Kim Chi-Fei, (Peter Chan) to pretend to be Ho and meet them at the site of the disappearance on the 25th anniversary, but, uh, why did Mark and Kit bring shovels - were they going to dig something up?

Suffice it to say, the film has a few more chances to bounce back in time to show what was really going on, adding more layers to its deceptions as it goes. The key, though, is that while Kim is in the middle of all this an explicitly hired to fake something, he is absolutely the most open and earnest character in the group, trying to come up with motivations for his character with three lines as he invested himself completely into something that Man has apparently put about seven seconds of thought into. He's a simple character but never really dumb; Peter Chan does an exceptional job of giving this oddball the right human frustrations.

The whole cast is like that, and it's impressive how, even as the film gleefully reveals how the audience doesn't have the whole story and things aren't as they seem, nobody in the cast has to completely switch things up and say that you were lied to. These folks are, by and large, pretty simple young folks and content creators who haven't grown into something more substantial, but even Renci Yeung's shallow YouTuber makes sense as a person and garners affection beyond not deserving to be murdered.

By the time it's finished, the screenplay has piled a lot of "here's something I didn't tell you before but which changes everything!" on, with some chips investigating the scene besides, but it remains clear and surprisingly linear, dishing out the new information at just the right time to not have to do a lot of sleight-of-hand to keep things out of the audience's sight. The chases and reveals go quick enough to keep things moving without there ever being much risk of missing anything, whether joke or information.

Filmmakers Kwok Ka-Hei and Jack Lee Chun-Kit have a good handle on how to thrive at this scale; the film sort of feels knowingly small, with roughly three or four locations, and doesn't try to trick the audience into it feeling bigger. The movie seems to speak the language of both classic farce and modern media-savvy internet video well, and gets good laughs from each of its about faces.

This Week in Tickets: 1 June 2026 - 7 June 2026 (Thin at the multiplex)

Not sure whether this attempt to get back to doing TWIT as warm-up for Fantasia is working or not - my big problem is getting started, which probably won't be as much of a problem in Montreal, but which also means a lazy morning could totally derail me.

The Somerville's new tickets (and presumably the Capitol's) are kind of weird - like, are they meant to be ripped in half, although that would mess with the QR code, which they don't (yet) scan…? They also seem to fade pretty quickly, although I'm not sure how many folks are buying them for a couple days (or even hours) in advance and I imagine there around something like four of us putting them in scrapbooks. Anyway, the guy at the box office accidentally hit the Backrooms button, but it's no big deal, because there was plenty of room in the main theater for The Accused and Silkwood.

For the rest of the week, there was a fair amount of futile watching of the Red Sox, and sort of performative sighing about not being interested in a lot of the new releases, but that they were taking up so many screens that the release of one of last year's biggest movies from Hong Kong, animated fantasy Another World, was one showtime a day at inconvenient times, which is why I was at Boston Common at 11:45am on Saturday. There's just really been nothing between the extremes of franchise entries that may not excite you and horror for the past month.

Then Sunday, it was off to the Seaport Alamo for Trainspotting, which I somehow missed during its initial run and just never got around to. Anyway, one of the reasons I'd like to see self-applied hashtags on Letterboxd's stats page is so I can easily see to just what extent most of the movies I see at the Seaport Alamo are on screen #3, which I believe is the smallest, so half the rep playing there is saying something about its audience.

Anyway, this week already has nearly this much posted on my Letterboxd account, and next week will be a challenge!


The Accused

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 June 2026 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Kurt & Jodie, 35mm)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

I had just turned 15 when this came out, so I didn't see it in the theaters, but I was aware enough of it that it seemed like someone setting a bomb off in pop culture, like it was the first time sexual assault was so central to something this mainstream. Of course, I was 15, so a fair amount hadn't crossed the path my folks kept relatively clean, but even if it wasn't such a first for anyone at least a little bit older, the movie still feels like dragging something into the open, because the broad complicity and encouragement is just as central as the actual rape, along with the sometimes heavy-handed but earnest demand for Jodie Foster's Sarah to say what happened to her on her own terms.

In a lot of ways, The Accused has the feel of a TV movie-of-the-week minus the sanding off and euphemising necessary for it to be shown over the air, with HBO maybe just starting to do this sort of original programming. That's not really a strike against it, because it's doing the job of one of those presentations, presenting a social issue in a way that will feel relatable to a very broad audience, and there's value in doing it in a relatively familiar form. A lot of the cast beyond stars Kelly McGillis and Jodie Foster are fairly forgettable, the story is paced to allow things to sink in rather than surprise or send one's thinking off in a different direction, and it explains things rather matter-of-factly. It's the sort of straightforward filmmaking where things like a conversation happening at a hockey game where McGillis's prosecutor is clearly not enjoying herself as much as her male colleagues could be an attempt to make a point or a situation where a point gets made because the filmmakers did something that seemed ordinary.

The familiarity helps a bit for when it's not going to be painting in the lines as much. Though parts are heavy-handed, they are in a familiar way, and the film is surprisingly deft in how it seldom feels like the filmmakers are hiding What Really Happened until they hit the audience with it. At that point, it's very clearly from a specific point of view, but one we've been primed to trust despite Bernie Coulson's Ken being a fairly minor character despite also being the first guy we see. The flashback that the audience gets through his testimony is a barn-burner of a scene, as screenwriter Tom Topor and director Jonathan Kaplan let go of what restraint they were showing to draw a clear line with a right side and a wrong side. Though there's some of the usual courtroom movie stuff after it - summations, waiting for the jury to come back, that sort of thing - it's rightfully positioned as the climax despite having no real new revelations, with the rest just necessary business.

Foster's great even before that section, especially since a lesser actress might have lost the sympathy she'd generated as a shell-shocked survivor trying to stand tall given how reckless she seemed in retrospect; it's a terrific evocation of the imperfect victim to the extent that it doesn't actually require someone making a speech about how the law isn't just for the perfect victim. This is also one of Kelly McGillis's most solid roles (Hollywood never really figured out what to do with her after Witness, it seems), and the cast has a working-class feel to it that seldom seems too affected.

This movie came out four or five years after the one that followed it, which I called the last gasp of New Hollywood, and it's a much more commercial movie despite the confrontational subject matter; it seldom fails to underline its drama and fits a familiar template. But it works, and I imagine that it can still serve as a shock to the system today.


Silkwood

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 June 2026 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Kurt & Jodie, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

1983's Silkwood feels a bit like the last gasp of 1970s New Hollywood, an exceptionally down-to-earth film that sometimes boosts its authenticity by meandering rather than staying laser-focused and is full of fine work by people who would thrive in the more consciously-commercial cinematic environment that would replace that movement. It's a good movie, but I must admit that when viewed as the back-end of a double feature with The Accused, I found myself much more aware of where it doesn't quite engage than when it does. It's the sort of film based on a true story that doesn't aim to dramatize in the sense of highlighting its dramatic elements so much as by having talented people meticulously recreate a situation in the hopes that the immersion becomes resonance and sympathy more than voyeurism.

The vibe of it is in many ways the most important part, showing how things like nuclear power/weapons that we tend to think of as high-tech and cutting-edge science, produced in pristine white clean rooms, are actually having the grunt work done in destitute small towns by blue-collar folks scared enough of losing their jobs and the area's main employer that companies can cut corners down to the bone. Karen Silkwood's specific story didn't do a lot for me - in some ways Meryl Streep makes her too airy to get a hold of even when she's at her most focused - and the finale makes it seem all the less consequential, having characters flash back to what we'd just seen a few minutes before rather than highlighting the rest of the story. It feels real - this is absolutely what her boyfriend would worry about - but this is a movie that occasionally manifests genuine terror about the effects of working with plutonium for an unscrupulous corporation - I will put every time Karen sets off the radiation monitor off at a moment one is expecting the scan to be perfunctory up against any jump scare in a horror movie since - but that's the final example of many of it perhaps being too eager to emphasize character over plot.

Also, 43 years later, it almost distractingly filled with That Guys, creating the odd sensation where movie stars like Kurt Russell and Cher playing unglamorous supporting roles doesn't quite knock one out of the movie so much as recognizing David Strathairn, Craig T. Nelson, Bruce McGill, James Rebhorn, Fred Ward, Ron Silver, or Will Patton every five minutes.


Shì Wài (Another World)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 June 2026 in Boston Common #21 (first-run, DCP)
Prime Video pre-order link)

GKids really needs another imprint that doesn't imply my brother should bring his 5-year-old son to something like Another World, because yikes. There weren't a lot of kids in my Saturday morning screening, but there could have been; aside from the studio name, the posters (and presumably the previews) scan as a more Ghibli-esque sort of eerie, and the folks at the theater loaded it up with previews for G & PG-rated family movies. It's a rather darker fantasy than that.

It opens with narrator Gudo (voice of Chung Suet-Ying) informing the audience that he used to be a spirit guide, helping the recently deceased through the netherworld to a waterfall where they can pass through to their next life, leaving behind their memories and a rope whose knots represents their resentments. The latest lost soul he encounters is Yuri (voice of Christy Choi Hiu-Tung), a green-haired girl looking for her brother Keiji, seemingly not aware she has died. He figures that it cannot hurt to help her find him, but soon we follow another path, as Princess Goran of Flower City (voice of Goofy Yeung Nga-Man) learns that her father the king has died in battle, with her uncle (voice of Raymond Fung Chi-Fai) accusing General Mok (voice of Antonio Cheung Chun-Shing) of murdering him. Considered cursed by the people because her beloved mother died in childbirth, Goran may find it difficult to maintain her kind heart in this situation.

It is not much of a stretch to guess that Goran is Yuri's reincarnation, even before Gudo somehow appears outside of Another World, guardian Dark Sky (voice of Louis Cheung Kai-Chung) by his side with a flame where his head should be, but that's just the start of how writer Polly Yeung (adapting Saijo Naka's novel Sennenki) and director Tommy Kai Chung-Ng are going to both do some impressive world-building and move up and down history. It's also unusually sophisticated narratively, promising that it will be doing interesting things with the timeline early without getting too cute about it: You can feel good about catching on, but it's got a lot more to reveal, and the result grows into something epic without losing track of what's grabbed the audience on a personal level.

It's an impressive movie in other ways, in part because you can see that it's maybe had to stretch a fair amount for its ambitions to fit into its budget - it looks a bit grainy and low resolution at times, and never seems to have the digital creatures and backgrounds that other animated films in this style do. It feels like a throwback to ambitious 1980s anime in terms of where it makes some extra effort and where it lets the background fade back and be static, even if it does feel more Chinese despite its origins (character designs and much of the mythology is fairly specifically Tibetan). Rather than jumping between styles by using CGI for its more complex monsters and machines the way a lot of other modern animated features do, it maintains consistent technique but changes coloring and detail. There's a sharp contrast between the human world and Another World though they do seem to be of a piece, and the design of the creatures and settings is terrific.

It gets pretty harsh at times, though, not necessarily working hard to emphasize how cynical it is even though the sweep of the story certainly indicates a pessimistic outlook on humanity over the course of history; the horrors eventually revealed are not for the squeamish. The filmmakers never really have Gudo doubt himself, or explain what sort of life form he is directly, but they also make it clear that, as this sort of otherworldly being, he doesn't necessarily understand humanity; he's detached and naive about human suffering in a way that a rich person may be about poverty only more so, though his intentions are never bad. There's an intriguing bit of philosophy to consider in its view of reincarnation where the cycle of life, death, and rebirth does not hone a soul to perfection through its suffering so much as the absorbed suffering of individuals seems to corrupt the underlying society, and the focus on untying individuals' knots or waiting for a pivotal moment to remove their Evil Seed just doesn't get the job done.

It's a visual stunner and an epic, though quite a bit heavier than one might expect from the previews. Pretty impressive on the big screen, though, and will probably manage to translate to the living room better than most films with this much spectacle do.


Trainspotting

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 June 2026 in Alamo Seaport #3 (30th anniversary, laser DCP)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

How did I avoid seeing this when it came out? I was a college kid working in a movie theater and not afraid of Scots accents!

(Honestly, it seems quaint how worked up people got about that!)

Thirty years later, with Danny Boyle and Ewan McGregor's careers to look back on, it's amazing how much is right here from the start: Boyle is a director who really demands to be noticed, so clearly wanting you to see his style and clever decisions that it could become obnoxious if he weren't so assured; McGregor is probably too charming to really sell you on Renton being an actual lowlife. Maybe that's the point, that the heroin high is so good that it blots out his better self, but everybody involved is having too much fun to really underline the point except at important moments.

But, then, Boyle is skilled enough to handle the ebb and flow of the movie, and his last little trick where the camera loses focus until Renton is a kind of featureless horror sort of primes one to reconsider things in the way out of the theater, about how Begbie was the obvious psychopath all along, but the rest of them are nearly as bad in how they just don't seem to care. Renton, in particular, is a piece of shit for whom the audience is always given a reason to look the other way - he can't be that bad if his parents care that much for him, he freaks out when he realizes Diane is just a teenager, he's loyal to but annoyed by his friends who have graduated beyond petty crime when they reunite in London, he leaves a share for Spud - but considered in whole, he's arguably the film's greatest monster in part because he is able to slide: It's not clear he's got any probably with Diane being that young other than the chance he might get in trouble, he segues into being an estate agent a little too easily, and he uses that to hopefully dispose of Sick Boy & Begbie. Worst, though, is that he's responsible for Tommy's spiral, and never comes clean when there was a chance to stop it at pretty much no cost to him.

The central question here, I guess, is whether Boyle and company make things too entertaining for the film's central message about how heroin is so good that people will have no compunctions being monstrous pursuing the high. Its best moments deliver a gut punch, but some of its more memorable ones reduce horrors to surreality or slapstick, and for as much as it's not subtle in many ways, there's something odd thirty years on about how casually the film treats the HIV/AIDS epidemic: It's mentioned regularly but casually, and a modern audience may need to be reminded that this was a huge deal in a way that someone seeing this in the mid-1990s might not, but everything else in the movie had an exclamation point.

Anyway, I should probably actually watch that copy of T2 Trainspotting soon, considering I'd intended to watch the first before seeing the sequel, but didn't find the time, so missed it. The original is messy but fascinating, and I'm curious to see where this group landed, 20 years later, on whether the heroin made these guys monsters or whether it kept their awful nature in check.

Cold War 1994

I've been complaining a lot about the multiplexes only showing things at 4pm, which is probably nice for seniors and students but is not great for those of us who can't ditch work terribly easily and maybe can't easily fit a mid-to-late afternoon movie in on the weekend. Sunday wasn't quite my only opportunity to see Cold War 1994, as AMC seemed to sell enough tickets to put late shows on Saturday & Sunday, but 10pm wasn't that much better for me than 4pm. They haven't added any later shows for the workweek or put it on the schedule for next weekend yet, although I wouldn't be surprised to see it get another week - it was much more crowded than some of the other non-mainstream films I've seen there of late and it can't bee that hard to sell a movie with Daniel Wu, Chow Yun-Fat, Aaron Kwok, Yuen Biao, Terrance Lau, etc., to folks who like Hong Kong action.

I also wonder, a bit, how the protracted development time for Cold War 3 led to the filmmakers opting to go the prequel route. There were four years between the first two movies that were supposed to take place right after each other, and four years after #2 would have bumped them not only against the pandemic but the 2019 protests. As much as you'll notice a lot of Hong Kong crime movies being set pre-1997-handover so that they can have a police corruption angle, I suspect that post-2019, there's probably also a lot of pressure to avoid showing contentious politics in the Special Administrative Region. These movies haven't been about ideology so much as maneuvering, but that may be just as bad, with China not wanting to present the SAR as being at the whim of petty grievances and personal ambition, and those were the engine that the first two movies ran on.

Hopefully it gets extended in Boston and plays elsewhere (EDIT - it has, but all afternoon shows other than Sunday the 17th at 6pm), because it was very easy to miss if you weren't actively looking for this sort of small release!


Han zhan 1994 (Cold War 1994)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 May 2026 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (Prime link for Cold War II), or Cold War II Blu-ray at Amazon

Cold War 1994 manages to pull off an impressive trick, in that it's the first time I can recall watching a movie and thinking "I wish Chow Yun-Fat were in this a bit less". Not because of anything Chow does - perish the thought! - but because the story being told in flashback is good enough that there's no need to cut away from it until the end, and doing so eats a little momentum. Not much, but just enough to notice or make one wonder if maybe this was envisioned as a streaming series that wound up good enough to cut into a feature.

Those bookends take place in 2017, six months after the events of Cold War & Cold War II, when Hong Kong's Chief Executive-elect Adrian Yip Shun-Ting (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) has asked lawyer Oswald Kan (Chow Yun-Fat) to vet M.B. Lee (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), the former chief of operations for the HKPD for a Cabinet position, despite his having resigned in the aftermath of Operation Cold War. Kan is incredibly thorough, and when current Police Commissioner Sean Lau (Aaron Kwok Fu-sing) arrives to inform him that Lee has vanished after an apparent break-in, Kan reveals that he has found a file from British Intelligence detailing a case from over thirty years ago.

In 1994, Lee (Terrance Lau Chun-Him) was the head of Team A of the Organized Crime and Triads Bureau, and after one of his men loses some seized cocaine, he begins an unofficial operation to recover it, leading to "Tiger" Fong (Pang King-Chee); the operation turns deadly when it turns out that Fong is also involved in a kidnapping and Lee has stumbled upon where Fong's men are holding their hostage. That hostage is K.F. Wong (Carlos Chan Ka-lok), Chairman of the Global trade group and husband to Rosa Poon (Fish Liew), tenth sister of family patriarch Sir William Keswyk Poon (Tae Kwan-Ho), who has had his son Simon (Wu Kang-Ren) summon Police Commissioner Dickson Hui (Michael Chow Man-Kin) to make it clear that he and Hong Kong's other wealthy families have paid a cumulative two billion Hong Kong dollars in ransom over the past decade and need the kidnappers put down hard. This falls to his chief of operations Peter Choi (Daniel Wu Yin-Cho), who is none too eager to retire in tandem with Hui as part of the coming handover and sees an opportunity to emerge in a position of greater influence. He intends to use Lee as a pawn, but Lee, when suspended and cut off from his OCTB team, forms an uneasy alliance with Jodie Yuen (Louise Wong Dan-Ni), the new boss of the Lo Yuen crime family which Tiger Fong usually serves.

Having just re-watched Cold War II in preparation (at the present moment, it is much easier to stream in the USA even for those who don't have an import Blu-ray than the first film), and it was a bit of whiplash to see Terence Lau's M.B. Lee so soon after Tony Leung's older version: Both are impulsive, with young Lee a driven rule-breaking detective while older Lee is more defensive and concerned about his job/legacy, and while one sort of expects maverick cops to evolve that way if the rise in the ranks rather than dying or being booted from the force, it's harder to see Leung's Lee in Lau's it is to see Chang Kuo-Chu's Peter Choi in Wu's (though, to be fair, Choi was a much less consequential character in the original films than I remember, actually only appearing in the sequel). More amusingly, it looks like they have tweaked the timeline a bit so that the 2012 original takes place in 2016 rather than the 2016 sequel taking place in 2012, probably to explain how Lee had an adult son on the force without any indication he was a family man in 1994.

Those coming into the movie cold because it's a big Hong Kong blockbuster with a stacked cast don't have to worry about that, though, and will likely have a great time for the same reasons that the other movies were hits: It's a dense thriller where director "Longman" Leung Lok-Man and his co-writers do a nice job of suggesting a ticking clock while still having a chance to explore seemingly every conceivable angle. There's cops of various levels of crookedness, of course, but also time to ponder on how succession plays out in these large family businesses, or how rocky a newly-invested mob boss may be, or how the British aim to maintain influence in the Crown Colony after the handover. It's a busy, busy movie, but the filmmakers juggle especially well to keep from either sprawling or bringing something up because it would logically be important but quickly finding a way to marginalize it. Its period setting is probably also clarifying in some ways, as the writers have had thirty years to ruminate upon and re-examine its issues rather than trying to be topical in a way that may age quickly - in the way that Hong Kong films are not allowed show (successful) police corruption after 1997, they likely can't show the sort of political infighting that fueled the first two films after 2019 for similar reasons.

The three showpiece action sequences are also pretty great: There's a fine shootout near the start, yes, but the motorcycle chase in the middle is fantastic. Not only is it fast but clearly legible despite being at night, it frequently turns surprisingly nasty and cements the (probably not romantic) chemistry between Terrance Lau and Louise Wong; it's not hard to imagine this script streamlined into something just built around them. Even the many-things-go-down-at-once section is strong, bouncing between different sorts of tensions rather than presenting concurrent gunfights.

Nice cast, as well; I've mentioned that I don't really connect Terrance Lau's M.B. Lee to Leung's, but he's a strong lead and pairs well with Daniel Wu's ambition. Louise Wong is often the movie's secret weapon - the film never explicitly states that Yuen is disrespected as Boss because she's a woman but her every bit of body language suggests that she knows she's an unconventional choice and there's a target on her back for it, and she absolutely can't afford any Romeo & Juliet nonsense with Lee. Tse Kwan Ho makes William Poon intriguingly multifaceted despite being situated squarely where one expects the real rich monster of a villain to reside. The film is absolutely packed with impressive stars in smaller roles - Chow Yun-Fat, Aaron Kwok, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, and Louis Koo in 2017 and FIsh Liew, Cecilia Yip Tung, Karen Mok man-Wai, Michael Chow, Yuen Biao, among many in 1994 - some of whom one might expect to have more prominent roles in Cold War 1995 (or Cold War 3, should that ever happen) even if they aren't holdovers from the previous films, while others are there to lend gravitas or establish exactly who they are in a movie that doesn't have a lot of time to introduce everyone individually. This even extends to the Brits, with Aidan Gillen and Hugh Bonneville a cut above the folks usually playing these roles.

(It does not include Sammo Hung, despite his being listed on IMDB and receiving a "thanks" credit; perhaps scenes with him as the boss that the others members of Lo Yuen are mourning were cut, or maybe there are just plenty of photos with him and Yuen Biao together as younger men to be used as props)

As mentioned, the film ends with a tease for Cold War 1995 and leaves a lot to be wrapped up there. Hopefully it won't be quite so long a wait as between the other films, and not just because Tony Leung Ka-Fai and Aaron Kwok can't defy time forever; this is a very satisfying thriller that nevertheless leaves the audience wanting plenty more, whether they've seen the rest of the series or not.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 09: Shipwrecked and Dream Lovers

A couple days later, a couple more movies.

Dale rolls an 8, moving down to the next row and silent movie territory with Shipwrecked, another crowdfunded disc featuring a woman on the run from the murder of an abusive man. Honestly, kind of impressed how okay the silent era was with this.

Centipede, meanwhile, rolls a 13 and jumps from the silent era to 1980s Hong Kong and the pairing of Chow Yun-fat and Brigitte Lin in Dream Lovers. Looking at my camera roll, it looks like I came home to do that right after treating myself to some swordfish schnitzel before starting the pre-colonoscopy fast!



So, uh, that was fun. How about the movies?

Shipwrecked '26

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, crowdfunded Blu-ray)

Shipwrecked is an amiable little silent with a very pleasant cast that sort of stumbles a bit when the plot has to matter more than just watching them bounce off each other. That's hardly fatal at its 74-minute length, though even at that scale, one kind of feels like the movie could have done a little bit more.

It starts with ship's cook Larry O'Neil (Joseph Schildkraut) seeming none too excited to set sail again with Captain Klodel (Matthew Betz) and his ragtag crew, but, hey, it's a living. Meanwhile, Lois Austin (Seena Owen) fought back against a prominent man who tried to rape her and attempts to throw herself into the sea, but Larry pulls her out. Larry eventually finds her hiding among his stores after the ship sails, but can't keep her hidden; the captain installs her in the first mate's cabin (and Larry in the brig), expecting sexual favors as he plans to turn her in. A storm leads the crew to abandon ship and Lois to rescue Larry, eventually making landfall on a small island more or less run by a British trader (Lionel Belmore). They carve out a decent life there, but Klodel is returning, blackmail on his mind.

The name of the movie is "Shipwrecked", but the good stuff happens on the ship and before. Well, for certain values of "good", considering that we're talking about Klodel being a gross letch who puts Lois and Larry in very uncomfortable positions after we've had the fun of Larry sneaking around to make sure Lois gets fed without alerting the crew to how their supplies are dwindling a little faster than they should be. They've got nice chemistry, with Larry pushing the boundary of being just a little too eager to be a white knight and Lois being a bit more of a survivor than she initially thought. The storm's a nicely done action scene, too, recalling Buster Keaton's The Navigator even if it's not quite so elaborate.

Ideally, this would either be most of the movie or an exciting first act that sets up the bulk of the film on the island, but that's never quite set up to be truly exciting. There's Laska Winter as island girl Zanda (she seemed to play a lot of "exotic" beauties in her brief career), who is smitten with the handsome newcomer, men with an interest in Lois, and the question of whether Klodel will be able to force the genteel trader to surrender Lois before news reaches them that she's not as wanted for murder as they think, but not much comes of it. Lois and Larry are seemingly not a couple at this point for vague, unsatisfying reasons, but there never seems to be any real threat of them ending up otherwise.

The way they get there, on the other hand, isn't ideal; the last half of the movie hasn't necessarily been leading to much, but Larry jumping from assertive to aggressive doesn't quite seem like the right call, at least from a hundred years later. All the ingredients for a more active finale or there, but the second half just doesn't lead to them.

Mung chung yan (Dream Lovers)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Where to stream it

I wonder just how much trend-chasing was going on when Dream Lovers was made; the filmmakers don't really hide the attempt to draft on how popular the Terra Cotta Soldier exhibit in Hong Kong was at the time even as they don't seem to have much ability to actually include it. In some ways, the way Hong Kong filmmakers turned so many movies around quickly from all sorts of inspiration is what made it so exciting, in that someone with a shotgun is bound to hit something, but it turns out to be more fun in a goofy action movie than this sort of romantic fantasy, despite the star power brought to bear.

Though conductor Song Yu (Chow Yun-fat) has roots in Hong Kong, he has spent much of his career working internationally, but makes sure to visit the exhibition when his latest stop brings him to the Crown Colony. His girlfriend and manager Wah Lei (Cher Yeung Suet-Yee) notes that he bears a striking resemblance to one of the soldiers, which triggers strange, erotic dreams involving a distant age and a beautiful concubine. Jeweler Cheung Yuet-Heung (Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia) has many of the same dreams, from the other perspective, and when their paths cross, they feel a powerful attraction, the sort where even Lei's blind spiritualist grandmother (Wong Man-Lei) warns her that she should probably not just prepare for their relationship to end, but encourage it; this sort of love across incarnations is undeniable.

Dream Lovers often feels like an attempt to build an entire romantic film out of chemistry, and when it reaches its finale, they've almost pulled it off: The final embrace between Chow Yun-fat and Brigitte Lin in the rain is beautiful and sad, the culmination of a ton of scenes where director Tony Au Ting-Ping dials in on the pair's powerful charisma, and the screenplay by Manfred Wong Man-Chun and Chiu Kang-Chien builds up the attendant mythology without making it a puzzle that must be solved to accomplish some sort of task. Cher Yeung leans into the utter thanklessness of her role; Lei is a good person who has put real effort into this relationship and knows she deserves better than being cast aside just because this Yuet-Heung chick has done little more than exist, and Yeung makes this jealousy both righteous and corrosive.

The trouble is, there's not much of a story grappling with what it means. The idea that having a fated lover suddenly appear and turn you on might actually be less romantic than horrifyingly disruptive is buzzed about, but treated as a problem for Lei rather than the reincarnated lovers, who don't really do anything or fret about how these versions of themselves from thousands of years ago are overriding their present selves. There's flashbacks, both to the Qin Dynasty and to the night they were born, and Chow & Lin have the necessary spark, but the eeriness of the start dissipates quickly and there's not a lot to replace it aside from sheer attraction and lust. What makes Yu and Yuet great together besides having this prehistory? I'm open to the idea that, for a culture with a stronger belief in reincarnation than mine, you don't necessarily need more, that a lot of this is assumed and one can see the pairs' reactions in their personalities from the start and the fantasy itself is much more basic and relatable, but, I don't know, it feels like it still needs more.

As an aside: One of the things I do when my mind wanders during a movie is prime factor numbers that get mentioned, and the oft-repeated '2197 years" is 13*13*13. Does that mean something? Is this some powerful Chinese numerology? Not to dismiss numerology - after all, it's kind of fascinating serendipity that my rolling dice paired these two movies, made on opposite sides of the planet and separated by sixty years, but both featuring an intriguing setup and fine casting allowed to fizzle by a back half that knocks around, kind of coasting to an expected ending.


All told, I liked Shipwrecked a little more than Dream Lovers, and when they're expressed in star ratings, it results in the pair pulling even!

Dale Evans: 39¾ stars
Centipede: 39¾ stars

Tight as can be, with more serendipity to come!

Lunar New Year: Night King

Lunar New Years celebrations continue at the Causeway Street AMC, although I don't know that The King's Warden is a LNY release in South Korea if they even celebrate the holiday, and this doesn't include Vietnamese film A Gift from Heaven. All of this is continuing into the next weekend, both because the crowds have been pretty good and I suspect to recover some of the ticket sales lost during the snow.

It was a pretty good crowd for a Cantonese-language film on a Wednesday night, and though I liked rather than loved it, I'm also tempted to bump my opinion up a bit because there were folks behind me laughing in moments when I wasn't even entirely aware that jokes were being told. Maybe a lot of these jokes just land better in Cantonese, or call upon context that I, as a guy who just goes to movies and visited the place once, mostly hitting the touristy stuff, just don't have.

Afterward, I did chuckle a bit at a post on Bluesky talking about how part of what's nice is that it mostly keeps the metaphor for Hong Kong as subtext, because it seems like every movie that comes out of the Special Administrative Region is seen as a metaphor for it and its history/relationship to the larger China. I can sort of see it in this case, and I suspect that it's true for a lot of movies - if your movie is not going to be very HK-specific, there are literally over a billion incentives to cast mainland actors and shoot in Putonghua Mandarin to the north - but I also kind of imagine filmmaker Jack Ng sighing, saying he was just trying to tell a funny story.


Night King (夜王)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 February 2026 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I learned about the Hong Kong Lunar Year Comedy as a genre - that is, a broad, mostly family-friendly farce that often ends with the cast breaking the fourth wall to wish the audience a happy new year - just about as it was more or less going extinct. Now, it seems, the Hong Kong film industry has contracted enough that a movie like Night King - pretty entertaining but not quite that sort of thing - gets that slot. And I didn't think it at the time, but it's kind of ironic that the movie spends a fair amount of time talking about the end of an era and how the next generation wants kind-of-similar entertainment.

East Tsim Sha Tsui was the center of Hong Kong nightlife in the 1980s and 1990s, but now the clubs have dispersed around Hong Kong, and one of its longest-standing managers, Foon Kwan (Dayo Wong Chi-Wah) is running the last outpost in East TST, the EJ Entertainment hostess club, aided by assistant "Turf" (Alan Yeung Wai-Lun) and two "mama-sans", Mimi (Fish Liew) and Coco (Louise Wong Dan-Ni). They're short-staffed as the film starts, because their freelance girls have been poached by "Madame V" Koo (Sammi Cheng Sau-Man), who manages the clubs run by the Muses company… And who divorced Foon ten years ago. When EJ's owner dies, his widow sells to Muses, putting Madame V in charge and ready to replace most of Foon's girls with low-paid foreign/Mainland ringers. The thing is, she doesn't realize just how much her boss's son "Prince Fung" (Lo Chun-Yip) hates her, and has rigged the sale to bankrupt her and EJ.

This is hardly the first movie that sort of flips the script such that the fun-loving older couple fall (back) in love while trying to save their neighborhood club from the young businessmen, but it does feel kind of oddly re-aligned, especially since the narration from the start implies that saving EJ will still be kind of a last gasp, and it actually feels like it could be set pre-2020, in that there's no talk of Covid hurting this sort of social club or shots of phone or cars that might fix a more specific moment in time (the Asian Financial Crisis is mentioned, maybe as something more recent than it is today). It's not really important, I suppose, though as an outsider I have a bit of trouble getting a grip on the changes the city/district/business is going through: It's a Hong Kong (and Macau) devoid of westerners, though there's talk of people leaving for America, an influx of pretty Mainland girls who don't speak Cantonese (and who are called "foreigners"), and hints that Vietnam may become southeast Asia's new hot spot. It's a bit odd, to me, since recent Hong Kong movies have often been specific enough about the time and place they're grounded in to give even folks like me a sense of the identity characters are trying to hold on to.

It doesn't really matter, much, although it might make the run at the end when Foon, V, and company are trying to outwit Fung a bit more fun, as well as help flesh the girls out more. They're a lively group but kind of under-baked, a bunch of pretty faces with reduplicative names and comic flaws tossed out too quickly to attach them to names and faces or have them become recurring jokes. It would be kind of nice to nail down just how prostitution-adjacent these jobs are, too, considering that the last act has Coco and Mimi catching customers' eyes and how they seem to love Foon despite his beating them early on. The gags about running this sort of club are generally pretty good, at least, with Yeung Wai-Lun easily walking off with every scene he's in.

The heart of the film, however, is Dayo Wong and Sammi Cheng, who spark from the first time we see them cross paths even though we can easily imagine what led to them divorcing ten years earlier even if the filmmakers never explicitly tell us. They contrive three or four different reasons to throw these characters together and we're happy with all of them, because there's a fondness and history between them that sharpens and softens their rivalry as need be, and all the beats hit right. Dayo Wong has carved himself a nice niche as this sort of well-intentioned but kind of hapless guy, while Sammi Cheng is a superstar who excels as women who shine bright despite their foibles.

They're so good together here that it can throw off the rest of the movie; it's kind of hard to see Foon & V flirting and then have to believe that Mimi in Foon's bed is more than just a casual hookup, even though Fish Liew does her part. The movie winds up having to conclude a lot more business than reuniting Foon and V, and nothing else is quite as satisfying as that part.

From the Chinas: Busted Water Pipes & Back to the Past

Chinese box office numbers are crazy - I've got no idea how accurate the page I usually use is, because the numbers can be absolutely all over the place, with mega-blockbusters just absolutely rocketing through the top of the scale and head-scratching results like Return to Silent Hill having twice the opening of Busted Water Pipes last weekend, because the former is both foreign and bad, and, also, what do movie tickets cost in China, because these aren't big box-office numbers for a country of over a billion people?

At any rate, both these movies arrived in Boston this weekend, which was probably the roughest one for something to show up in North America of the new year so far - Send Help was probably the intended main attraction but Melania certainly looks like it took a number of screens out of circulation via four-walling and Iron Lung got a whole bunch of screens despite apparently not advertising much to movie audiences at all (I didn't see a single trailer in front of any sci-fi/horor/indie genre entry all month), although it probably has a ton of online fandom that I'm just not aware of because I don't game. As a result, these were scrapping for showtimes at the start of the weekend; I had to leave work early to get to a late afternoon show of Busted Water Pipes and Back to the Past was playing very early and very late at Boston Common on Saturday and Sunday. Apparently, though, you sell out a bunch of those shows and they'll find room; it's now got a full screen at Causeway Street and more accessible showtimes at Boston Common.

Personally, I like Busted Water Pipes more; and it's kind of a bummer that it's getting student/senior-friendly times at best and might be out of town after Wednesday - definitely worth catching if you get a chance!


Busted Water Pipes

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 January 2026 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Busted Water Pipes is one of the more impressively ridiculous movies I've seen lately: The filmmakers are committed to just piling one more bit of silliness on top of another for the whole running time, keeping things so far over the top that it can even ramp up the violence as it goes on while still feeling more slapstick than black comedy.

It opens with a hostage rescue in the capital city of fictional kingdom Ronham going spectacularly wrong, and the cop who led it, Yu Dahai (Eddie Peng Yuyan) transferred to the small town of Hoping even though it was his superior with political aspirations who provided bad information. A bona fide supercop, he basically wipes out crime in Hoping while waiting to be brought back, and seven years later that means the police station in this town could be shut down as an unnecessary expense. What he and his co-workers don't know is that Dahai's friend Luo Siji ("Allen" Ai Lun) is technically a fugitive in hiding, although he turns out to be a better spiritual leader than he ever was a crook, and isn't pleased when tomb-raider uncle Luo Yin (Zhang Qi) and two not-so-bright nephews show up looking for the tomb of legendary pirate Chen Yisao, more so when their psychopathic escaped convict cousin Luo Hao (Zhou You) joins them. The tomb, it turns out, is under the police station, and when the cops bust a water pipe trying to dig for it, that allows the Luos to kidnap plumber Li Baibai (Bu Yu) and use that as a way to gain access.

This skips a lot, because there are more jokes and side characters and determination to get from one to the other in the funniest way possible. There's little done that just advances the plot without having a punchline of some sort attached to it, and the filmmakers' response to needing something to move to the next piece is throwing something new in, even if it doesn't necessarily follow from what comes before.

It's a good thing that they've got a fair amount of material, because the movie would really fall apart otherwise. The same impulse that lets them throw a bunch of goofy jokes into the corners (like the identifiers on the back of Armed Accounting's Kevlar vests) also leads to not fleshing much out at all or abandoning gags they've maybe tapped out even though maybe those guys should be around more (having one character be a psychopath who will murder no longer useful characters helps, I suppose). The script can border on the incoherent, and tends to have two sidekicks any place where it could probably make do with one. It would probably be nice to have a few more ladies mixed in as well - the only one of any note is Dahai's daughter Xioahe, with Yang Chenxi funny enough in the role that one might spend a lot of the film's middle wondering where Xiaohe is during all this.

But there's a lot of good slapstick, and those skills translate into an action finale that is funny and absurd but which could also be dropped into a more serious action movie without a whole lot of damage. That's in large part due to Eddie Peng, who has done a fair amount of action but here gives his super-cop in exile this sort of comically puffed-up masculinity that's had its rougher edges shaved off so he can be larger than life but not a buffoon or playing as mean. He's countered by Zhou You's Luo Hao, who plays like the dumb killer in a Coen Brothers movie, too stupid and casual with his violence to really feel like an antagonist rather than an agent of chaos, which keeps the movie from landing in too-grim territory.

Busted Water Pipes is goofy as heck, and I bet it would be fun to see in a packed theater. Unfortunately, its North American release comes close enough on the heels of its Chinese one and on a week crowded enough that it's mostly playing awkward times and you get pockets of the room laughing rather than a roar. Maybe it hasn't quite done well enough in its home territory for good word of mouth to get to the diaspora, but it's a good enough time to have broad appeal.


Chum Chun Gei (Back to the Past)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2026 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it and the original series

It's oddly reassuring to me when I see that the things people bemoan about American pop culture are not exclusively our problems. For example, A Step Into the Past was a hit show on Hong Kong's TVB network a generation ago, and has had both a reboot (in 2018) and this theatrical sequel 24 years later. American companies aren't the only ones who mine decades-old IP like this, even when name recognition is the most the new project has going for it!

That series posits that in 1999, Hong Siu Lung (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) traveled back in time 2000 years to witness the coronation of the emperor who would unite China's seven warring kingdoms, only to find the man dead, and wound up training Chiu Poon (Raymond Lam Fung) to impersonate him lest history change. 25 years later, he's on the verge of accompanying it while Hong attempts to keep a low profile with wives Wu Ting-Fong (Jessica Hester Hsuan) & Kam Ching (Sonija Kwok Sin-Nae) and son Bowie (Kevin Chu Kam-Yin), ready to flee if the Emperor decides his "Grand Tutor" is now a liability. Along a parallel track in 2025, the man who was originally supposed to go back in time but took the fall for Hong's disappearance, Ken (Michael Miu Kiu-Wai), has just been released in prison and is looking for payback, forcing the scientists to send him, daughter Galie (Fay Bai Baihe) and a number of mercenaries back, where he intends to alter history by using holographic technology to replace the Emperor.

To what end? Cool special effects, basically; although there's lip service paid to Ken wanting to prove history can be changed and the mercenaries intending to loot the palace of lost treasures, it's hard to really grasp what his endgame is. He gets to bring back a lot of futuristic technology, though - a timeline where they built a time machine in 1999 is apparently one where phones are a combination of transparent plastic and holographic projection, a combination motorbike and hoverboard can shrink to something that fits in one's pocket in abject defiance of the law of conservation of mass, and armor that can repel even its time's automatic weapons, let alone the sharp sticks in play here. It's slick enough, though, although a little blandly black-and-silver in its design (producer/star/production mogul Koo's previous sci-fi film, Warriors of the Future, seems to have had the same look from the stills I've seen), but the mashup of futuristic and historical is kind of fun, more often than not.

The original series is on Tubi (or it isn't, apparently leaving at the end of January), so maybe I'll watch a bit to see if it makes this film better at some point. The movie's not bad, exactly, but doesn't really have a reason to be. It's set too early to pick up on the show's implied tease of Hong's son being destined to depose Chiu, there's no real time travel shenanigans in terms of paradoxes effect preceding cause, and on top of Ken not seeming to have a goal, all that material takes time away from what could be an interesting story about how Chiu has become a tyrant and the responsibility Hong bears for that. There are possibilities all over the place - is Hong shaping his son differently than he did Chiu, are there parallels in Bowie's and Galis' relationships to their fathers, is it wiser to maintain the steady status quo or to try to forge a better world? - but nothing winds up emerging as a theme, and the filmmakers never really find anything to do with the decent hook of Ken plotting to do what Hong did out of necessity. Stuff happens, but it's more a series of events than a story where anything really hits if you don't have previous attachment.

It's not entirely difficult to see what the film appears to be a success in both Hong Kong and the mainland (and filling seats in Boston when given a chance): Koo is good in a role that lets him do a bit of everything, and has put a lot of resources into it, with his "One Cool X" companies all over the credits. The returning cast is all pretty solid, enough that one can understand why they'd all be around even if there's not really enough for them to do, and newcomers like Bai Baihe and Kevin Chu carry their parts well. Action director Sammo Hung can still choreograph a pretty darn good fight, especially when it's not all visual effects. It feels like a blockbuster that does a fair job of satisfying long-time fans without leaving the next generation behind.

Maybe it works if you love the show, since it doesn't entirely fail for those of us who didn't know it existed before the movie started. Even not knowing much about the show, though, this seems like a bit of a missed opportunity, something that looks good on a rights-holder's balance sheet but no strong story of its own.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 04: Modesty Blaise and Maybe It's Love

These come quicker when there's no local baseball (and you're not picking up the Fox and/or ESPN services for just a week) and theatrical offerings are thin/the same old Halloween stuff!

So, just before Halloween, Dale rolled an 11 and jumps into a "western" block, landing on Modesty Blaise. Fun fact: This Blu-ray replaces a DVD that was never watched, whose age is pretty easily determined because it's one of several in brightly-colored cases that Fox released to capitalize on the popularity of Austin Powers!

Then two days later, Centipede rolls a 13 and gets to the very end of the first Chinese block and Maybe It's Love. I'm not going to lie, it threw me to see the Shaw Brothers logo before something that was not a genre film, whether it be martial-arts action or horror. These days, you probably only see a Shaw Brothers logo (updated and digitally animated for the twenty-first century) in front of movies made by their associated TV station (TVB, I think, although maybe it's ATV), ironically more likely to be this sort of movie than the kung fu and horror most folks know them for.

So, how did that work out?

Modesty Blaise

* * ¼ (out of four)

Seen 30 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Kino Lorber Blu-ray)

Where to stream it (when available), or buy the disc (used) at Amazon

One reason that I'm much more fond of the first Austin Powers movie than is sequels is that there's something more akin to a real movie under the silliness, and in fact it's probably got more going on than the movies it sends up, a list that includes Modesty Blaise. This is a thin little flick, which may or may not bear much resemblance to the adventure strip which inspired it - I've only occasionally flipped through collections at the comic shop - if only because it's full of Swinging Sixties color rather than the strip's strong black lines.

Its coolness may peak with its first scene, with Monica Zitti's Modesty at ease in her penthouse apartment, bantering idly with her Chinese butler. It's clearly her space rather than that of a mistress, as one might have assumed it to be at the time, and it says her flighty mien might be deceptive. Once she's out of that room and talking with various officials, accomplices, and villains, Vitti and the filmmakers are seldom able to imply or demonstrate that her breezy attitude comes from being so capable that she seldom has to break a sweat; people know who she is and prior adventures are name-checked, but she never feels formidable. Vitti is saying the lines but not adding subtext to them, and it's the sort of cliff-hanging adventure where escaping one scrape puts you in another as opposed to something where one sees Modesty's skills as a master thief even in "here's how the heist went down" retrospect.

Vitti's not bad, really, although it feels like the filmmakers are either reluctant to let her carry the movie or didn't have a completed script at filmmaking, because there is a whole mess of narration from older men explaining to each other what's going on. Dirk Bogarde doesn't quite land as arch-nemesis Gabriel; the take seems consciously unconventional, the super-villain who's kind of a pleasant guy without being an interesting villain. There's no spark between him and Rossella Falk as his dominatrix-adjacent lieutenant, and there seems to be some sort of friction over Bogarde's wig; in the same way Gene Hackman later wouldn't want to be bald throughout Superman: The Movie, Bogarde seemingly makes a point of showing that he hasn't gone gray by ripping it off. Terence Stamp could probably have absolutely walked off with the movie if he wanted to, but he politely hovers just below stealing scenes, like he recognizes that it would be unseemly to overshadow the title character.

It never quite comes together, though; the stakes seem oddly low-key for all this effort, and there's only one really nifty heist sequence. It's a gorgeous-looking movie, at least - you can't go very far wrong putting Monica Vitti in nice outfits, and for the most part, the colorful clothing, locations, and ambiance of the late 1960s looks fashionable - a fashion firmly in the past, but nice aesthetically - rather than garish, and there's much less "oh my, she's a woman but somehow competent!" than one might fear. It's just good enough to still get watched 60 years later, when a lot of things trying to ride the combined waves of James Bond and rock & roll have faded to justified obscurity, and not entirely because the folks in the cast stayed famous.

Kwai Ching (Maybe It's Love)

* * ½ (out of four)

Seen 1 November 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Kani Blu-ray)

Not currently streaming (buy the disc at Amazon)

I mention a little surprise at seeing the Shaw Brothers logo before this film in the introduction, while the credits had me raising my eyebrows because of few Hong Kong movies I've seen directed by women, especially in this period. Angie Chen On-Kei does not appear to have a particularly distinguished career as a writer-director during the 1980s, and there's a big hole in her career on IMDB and HKMDB that was apparently spent making commercials. Is she as unusual as she seems, or is this just an example of how there's good infrastructure for importing Hong Kong action, in part because there's not a whole lot else like it, but not so much romantic comedies or other pictures targeted at women? Kani's release of this film is one of the few of its ilk I've seen; is it among the best or just the most readily available?

It's a sort of screwball take on Rear Window, at least to start: 12-year-old "Marble" Shu Ker-Ying (Chui Hoh-Ying), handicapped at the hands of her ne'er-do-well father and now being raised by her grandmother (Mok Chui-Jan), keeps going to the police, claiming that she's seen a woman be murdered, although she proves to be mistaken. Not that there's not something going on, occasionally; what's a girl her age to think when she sees gwailo actor Martin (Ronnie) and his wife (Lau Siu-Pool) engaging in some kinky sex through her binoculars, for example? Up on the bluff, a rich man (Stuart Ong) has installed his mistress Rita (Cherie Chung Cho-Hung) in a nice house (which Marble's grandmother occasionally cleans), although his wife (Chan Sze-Kai) occasionally comes poking around. Postman Yau Ju (Kent Tong Chun-Yip) also takes an interest, although he's generally a playboy, also carrying on with Lin (Elaine Jin), the young wife of shopkeeper Wang (Ku Feng), who often seems frustrated and ready to return to the mainland.

There's potential in the screenplay; writer Lillian Lee Pik-Wah is a noted novelist whose name might be familiar from Farewell, My Concubine and Dumplings, and one can see that she's doing something interesting most of the time. Marble and Rita are both outsiders, the one ostracized by the other kids for her handicap and the other for trading on her body. They don't exactly become a found family with Yao Ju (who dreams of being an actor or stuntman, showing his kung fu moves off to the neighborhood kids), but the audience can see how they're in opposite ends of the same boat anyway. There's something really solid in how Marble, who grew up in an abusive household and is permanently scarred from it, has even more difficulty telling sex from violence than the average adolescent and is determined to watch out for it and sound the alarm.

It's a solid foundation to build on, but Chen's first feature is a bit rough; it's got a few very nice scenes but has a bit of trouble establishing a rhythm at times, and the eventual hard turn when it turns out Marble may have seen something after all is wobbly as heck. That's the problem with a lot of takes on Rear Window - it looks very simple in how methodical it is but that's because Hitchcock was a genius and most of the rest of the folks who try to cover the same ground aren't - and Chen doesn't quite land how the last act combines real danger and farce as the violence and willingness to kill this kid bump up against how she is right about the what but wrong about the how in screwball fashion. It's a fun mystery when it's untangled but the audience isn't quite in a place to enjoy that.

Chen doesn't necessarily have a whole lot to work with; there's something about it that seems short on resources, even beyond how it's very much not taking place in an upper-class neighborhood. Young Chui Hoh-Ying proves a very solid center to the movie, despite it being one of just two rules in the databases, but the ensemble around her is shaky, mostly folks who wouldn't have notable careers or whose acting style seems more fit to the studio's period martial arts films. The exception is obviously Cherie Chung, and both she and Chen seem to kind of know it - a scene where she silently but angrily sunbathes to the adults' consternation and adolescent boys' delight doesn't work unless she has movie-star charisma to match her figure, and the way Rita initially toys with Yau Ju or gets frustrated at the locals looking down on her is enhanced by her having that extra bit going on.

Chung and Chen make Maybe It's Love as notable as it is; it's the first Shaw Brothers film directed by a woman and Chung would become a big star who burned bright before retiring relatively young. One wonders what it could have been with just a little more going for it.


Dead heat!

Dale Evans: 20 stars
Centipede: 20 stars

Next entry hopefully coming quick, because i was rolling dice again even before writing this.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 03: Prodigal Sons and Lau Kar-Leung x3 (+1)

Crap, there's an eight-month gap in here. How does that even happen? I really do want to get through this wall, but, nope, just adding to it while doing other stuff.

Way back in January, Dale rolled a 9 getting her to The Prodigal Son, one of Yuen Biao's most popular movies from the 1980s.

A couple days later, Centipede would roll a 4, which got him to Arrow's Lau Kar-Leung box set, but it would be March before I started in on it with Challenge of the Masters, then Executioners from Shaolin in April, Heroes of the East in September, and Dirty Ho in October. Which is crazy, even though there are three entire film festivals in there covering a whole month and attempts to catch up writing which led to me not hitting the shelf. Obviously, I have a problem with making movie-watching projects into writing projects .

So, how did all this time treat the players?

Baai ga jai (The Prodigal Son)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Seen 18 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

This is kind of a weird one, especially the first time through, as the filmmakers make some abrupt transitions and tone shifts, like they've got a good outline that doesn't always work in detail, but you can see the ambition there. A second time through, it works a bit better, especially after watching some of the Shaw Brothers films this evolved from. The comedy's goofier, but the greater themes are closer to the surface.

The man of the title is Leung Chang (Yuen Biao), the son of a wealthy merchant whose father pays martial artists to lose to him in street brawls, lest he get injured; he doesn't find out he's really bad at kung fu until friends ask him to take on Leung Yee-Tai (Lam Ching-Ying), an opera singer in female roles who is actually a master. Chang finagles his way into the troupe to attempt to learn from him, but winds up revealing Tai to Ngai Fei (Frankie Chan Fan-Kei), another enthusiast looking for a fight, eventually requiring a retreat to heal and train with Tai old friend and rival Wong Wa-po (Sammo Hung Kam=Bo).

I spent a bit of time looking up what the "home video cut" on this disc was (apparently, the same thing except with actor credits up front rather than as they appear), which was how I learned that it was apparently a prequel to Warriors Two; I suspect may explain the big weird jump in the middle where Leung and Ngai flee the circus and wind up at the home of Wong Wah-bo without much in-film work to connect them at all. I thought it was cut for time, but apparently it just wouldn't have been necessary for the Hong Kong audience. It's an odd and unusual shift - the film had just finished ramping up from mostly-comic to deadly-serious, and then it's getting slapstick and goofy again.

Sammo Hung and company do an impressive job of balancing whimsy and cruel violence here, though, better than should be possible. It's an especially nice showcase for Yuen Biao, who gets to play comic and earnest to start and shift his fighting to match. Biao never became quite so famous in the West as schoolmates Jackie Chan and Sammo, but his physicality here is impressive - he doesn't pratfall as the inexperienced student who doesn't really know kung fu, but he's a bit sloppy, and one can see him tightening that up as the film proceeds to its final confrontation. The last act nicely underlines the parallels between Chang and Ngai, both scions of rich families whose patriarchs take pains to insulate them from defeat. There's maybe not a particular lesson in this, but it's something that gives a little extra heft to a situation where both the comedy and violence could be hollow.

Liu A-Cai yu Huang Fei-Hong (Challenge of the Masters)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 March 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Seen 18 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Every once in a while, I wonder what Wong Fei-Hung's defendants think of his status as a folk hero, his life being rewritten to fit a story's needs, perhaps because you can't tell a story in this era without referring to him. He's such a legend that every martial arts movie in the mid-1800s must be a Wong Fei-Hung movie, even if they're not really Wong Fei-Hung movies.

In this one, Wong Fei-Hung (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) is presented as a teenager who loves martial arts despite his father's refusal to teach him, especially the annual "Pau Battle", an annual free-for-all where the various schools compete to collect tokens launched from fireworks. But there's more going on, as Yuan Ching (Lau Kar-Leung), who studied under the same master as Fei-Hung's father Kay-Ying (Chiang Yang), Lu Ah Tsai (Che Kuan-Tai), has arrived in pursuit of a fugitive (Lau Kar-Leung) who has embedded himself in a rival school. He sees Fei-Hung's natural aptitude, but may not be prepared for how desperate and deadly his quarry is.

At its best, Challenge of the Masters contemplates the question of what martial arts is for and the journey to understanding it; Gordon Liu plays Won Fei-Hung as a shallow kid who only sees the respect and action, and his attempts to force himself into the Pau battles without the requisite training are immature and dangerous, though maybe not arrogantly so, but is later forged into a righteous weapon of justice and vengeance. If Liu is a bit stiffer at this point, it's fine; it plays like he's mastered his rage, an exclamation point to how his performance evolves over the long stretch of training.

Director Lau Kar-Leung's action is on point throughout; there's an edge to the violence, with the way that the Pau battles get out of control a warning about how dangerous undisciplined martial arts can be, and he imbues his villain with a nastiness that is both confident and cowardly. It's what makes the final duel between him and Liu's Wong Fei-Hung so satisfying; it's a fast-paced fight where we've see that both can do damage, but we can see the earnest purpose to what Wong has become. Lau's He Fu is too skilled to be afraid, but his vibe is different.

The story is thin as heck; the Pau contest feels a bit like stuffing, a great spectacle tied to the more substantive story, but it reinforces things well enough. Like a lot of Lau's output (and that of writer I Kuang), it's a movie built to show the action with other stuff going on, but it runs smoothly in doing so.


Hong Xi Guan (Executioners from Shaolin)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 April 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Seen 19 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Arrow Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

I'm not sure exactly how this fits in with Chang Cheh's Shaw Brothers Extended Shaolin Temple Universe, though it doesn't really matter that much, other than how one can't necessarily help but think of the timeline and history throughout.

It picks up as the Temple burns, and Pai Mei (Lo Lieh) sends the governor's forces to ideally capture the fleeing monks, hoping they can be tortured into revealing the locations of others. After Tong Qianjin (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) buys them some time to escape, Hong Xiguan (Chen Kuan-Tai) and his friend Xiaohu (Cheng Kang-Yeh) are among those taking refuge on the red boats, disguised as opera troupes. In one village, street performer Fang Yung Chun ("Lily" Li Li-Li) objects to their arrogance, but soon she and Hong are spending all their time together. But while they travel and perform, Pai Mei is consolidating his power, and it's not long after the couple marry that soldiers mount an attack on the red boats, sending them further into hiding.

Executioners has the feel of something that is based around history and/or legends and has been sort of messily cobbled together and then pushed to be irreverent, and I sometimes wonder if the legends retold in these martial-arts epics need an environment where both they and the creators can breathe. It's one thing to say someone trains for years in anticipation of a decisive fight in a serialized novel, but another when two or ten years occur between shots but only one character is being recast and the visual changes are too minor to really feel like time has passed. Often, "he trained for years" is used as a shorthand for it being very important but the other impact isn't felt on screen. Warrior monks seemingly only get more powerful and skilled, as opposed to a trade-off between one's technique improving but the body starting to turn.

So against this background, the romance between Xiguan and Yung-Chun is just kind of there, necessary but not passionate, the "comedy" is mostly abrasive, and the preparations for/fights against Pai Mei tend to be about hitting specific weak spots rather than strategy: The finale could be about the value of knowing multiple styles versus attempting to hone one to perfection, but that's mostly mentioned in passing. The big fights are, of course, good stuff, even if Pai Mei's signature move is apparently to let people kick him in the nuts so that he can grasp their foot with his groin and drag them around. The fights are good, of course, although the early ones with their desperation top the later ones with their silly rules


Zhong hua zhang fu (Heroes of the East)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 September2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

This and the other Lau Kar-Leung movie on the second disc of the box set are kung fu comedies that feel like they were completely dispensing with any pretense that the kung fu was just part of these movies' appeal or a way of telling the story. Here are guys who know how to fight, this story says, some wacky situations, and then let's go.

In this case, the wacky situation has Ho Tao (Gordon Liu Chia-Hui) objecting to an arranged marriage with a childhood friend - the daughter of one of his father's Japanese business associates - until he sees that Yumiko (Yuka Mizuno) is gorgeous. It turns out she shares his interest in martial arts, though her studies have naturally tended toward Japanese forms, and she quickly moves to monopolize the estate's training grounds. Eventually, Yumiko returns to Japan, where she reacquaints herself with old friend (and ninjutsu expert) Takeno (Yasuaki Kurata), who brings an entire brace of Japanese martial artists to challenge Tao.

The back half especially is one duel after another, more or less completely arbitrary, without much in the way of dramatic stakes once one sees that Tao and Yumiko have more or less put their issues behind them. But, hey, it works; the movie's a ton of fun. I wish that I knew a bit more about Hong Kong/Japan relations in the late 1970s, because in some ways this movie has a weird tension underneath: The arranged marriage eventually becomes reasonably warm, but while Ho Tao is initially described as just being pretty good at martial arts, he defeats a whole bunch of masters of various Japanese disciplines. Lots of movies and other bits of pop culture will try and walk a line where one is earnestly interested in and admiring of a foreign culture but with the unspoken assumption that one's own is better, although, hey, some of these folks are old enough to be WWII vets (and I've seen a lot of recent Chinese movies very focused on Japan as a sadistic occupying army), and one can't help but wonder what the thinking is here.

The long string of duels kind of overwhelms anything going on between Tao and Kumiko, which is a bit of a shame; one can see how the couple can be fun once they're a bit less at odds, and Cheng Kang-Yeh is kind of obnoxious fun as the servant who enjoys stirring the pot. The various Japanese martial-arts masters are kind of one-note aside from Yasuaki Kurata's Takeno, but they're generally entertaining notes. I'm a bit surprised that Yuka Mizuno seems to have had quite a short career - only two other films after this one - and while she's sort of rough as an actress, one can see potential enough to make one wonder what her story is.

Heroes of the East could be a really fun kung fu romantic comedy, but it's just focused on the fights. It's a very entertaining fight movie, and that's enough.


Lan tou He (Dirty Ho)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Treating this as a bonus, since I have seen the film before, though it's been nearly 20 years since it played on film at Fantasia. I reviewed it at the time, although, yikes, is my writing and general familiarity with Asian genre film rough. Can't claim to be too much of a kid, either, at 32.

Ah, well. It was still a real kick to revisit . For all that "Dirty Ho" probably didn't have the same meaning at the time, it's full of winking innuendo to start, and Gordon Liu Chia-Hui is a real delight as the jewel merchant who is eventually revealed as more, cool and confident but eventually revealing the burden of his position - too decent, really, to want to be king, which ultimately makes him the only acceptable choice. He's a fun pairing with Wong Yu's title character - it's not quite a buddy movie, as it winds up too much a master-student situation - but Wong really finds a nice comic groove as someone half scammer, half put-upon, and manages to keep it even as the stakes get higher.

Good fun.


Not counting Dirty Ho because it's a re-watch, that gets both our players up to six movies, and nearly tied:

Dale Evans: 17 ¾ stars
Centipede: 17 ½ stars

Now, let's hope the next rolls don't get bogged down!