Fantasia 2025.09: Redux Redux, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Anna Kiri, and Transcending Dimensions

This is the last post before flying back south, not quite reaching halfway on the blog during the event, and I don't know how much more I'll get through before everything is just too far in the back of my head to finish if I hold true to form, so I just want to say it's been great seeing you all again, we saw some pretty good movies, dealt with a decent AirBNB in a building that kept making things a little difficult (okay, maybe that's just me), and generally had a good time.

I got a late-ish start on Thursday because I saw Fragment opening night, so for me, the day kicked off with the second screenings of Redux Redux. I was a little disappointed that the McManus clan wasn't there, although it turned out my bladder wanted me out right as credits rolled and just got this picture of actor Jeremy Holm ®, who played the villain, starting his Q&A and saying that he got the role by freaking the McManus brothers out, sending them poetry he wrote in-character. I'm torn over whether that was just the start or whether it couldn't get any better.

Next up in De Sève without guests was The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, which has odd in playing late afternoon at the midpoint of the festival and at night on the second-to-last day, when the schedule is usually night then matinee a couple days later. Good for flexibility.

Then I crossed the street for Anna Kiri, the second time in three days where I kind of consider myself lucky that the French-Canadian film listed as having English subtitles actually had English subtitles. I've gotten trapped in the center of a row for something I barely understood before and while that wasn't happening tonight (I am choosing seats with escape routes this year), it would still mean eating a slot. Anyway, there wasn't much of a Q&A afterwards but pretty much everybody involved in the movie was there. That's director Francis Bordeleau in the eye of the storm with a mic.

And, finally, we end the night with Transcending Dimensions director Toshiaki Toyoda. I must admit, I don't know if I've heard his name specifically before, but he's a guy that certainly has a following. among some at the festival. He gave a pretty cheerful Q&A, although one laced with jokes about how difficult it is to make an independent film these days. He also mentioned writing to the cast which meant having to be very fortunate for windows of availability to line up, and that he took a chorus at a buddhist retreat for the specific purpose of getting to blow the conch shell.

I must admit: I zoned out during his movie, so it's a good thing I fell behind enough to see it on the next Monday before writing a review. I was going to see it then in any case, but I'd opted to skip the big Adams Family movie across the way because my experience with their stuff was that it was a fun novelty once, but diminishing returns thereafter. That movie won the Cheval Noir, but I don't regret the decision to zone out during the trippy mystical sci-fi versus the gifted-amateur horror movie.


Huh, no shorts on Thursday the 24th? Unusual! Friday would be The Serpent's Skin, I Live Here Now, Forbidden City, and New Group. Yesterday (the last day!), I was able to run from Burning to A Chinese Ghost Story III, then finished with Holy Night: Demon Hunters, >Fixed, and Tanoman: Expo Explosions.


Redux Redux

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Redux Redux is the sort of genre movie that I arguably go to film festivals looking to discover: Quality, lean sci-fi action that makes sure to deliver the goods right away and then keeps up an impressively steady pace all the way through. It twists and world-builds a bit, but keeps its eye on the prize.

It opens provocatively, with Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus) murdering a man (Jeremy Holm) in ways designed to make him suffer, before the last one goes awry and has her leading the police on a desperate chase before she can return to her hotel room, where she has what looks like a steampunk coffin. It's a machine for jumping between realities, and she's been doing that for some time, taking out every iteration of the serial killer that killed her daughter and 11 other girls. This time, though, something is different - she arrives just in time to find a 13th victim, Mia (Stella Marcus), still alive, and the street-smart orphan wants a piece of this revenge even before discovering Irene's secret.

Michaela McManus Irene gives off some Sarah Connor vibes as her universe-hopping avenger, but a lot of the fun comes when Stella Marcus enters the picture and the movie transforms into something snappier and perhaps more entertaining without lowering the stakes or the melancholy. McManus's Irene is plenty capable as the film's antihero, but one of the things that comes across even during the opening badass imagery is that she's tired; not in a way that seems to have her sluggish or unable to meet a challenge, but questions about the point of all this are starting to kick around in her head. Marcus, meanwhile, is playing Mia as someone who was already a smart-ass teen and this is all turbocharging it. The neat trick is that McManus never makes Irene seem like she's regarding Mia as a new daughter, but that she has had a teenage daughter and knows what she's dealing with enough to parry and appear to relent.

The film in general manages to be very funny without abandoning a grim plot; the universe-hoping often means that narrow escapes are followed by awkward entrances, and filmmakers Kevin & Matthew McManus find ways to ease into heavy situations by finding the absurd in Irene's encounters with new-but-not-so-new people and places. It's never a thing that gives the viewer whiplash, but greases the wheels and reminds the audience that there is this spark of humanity left in Irene and Mia despite her self-imposed missions of revenge.

The whole thing moves, too, offering up quick action that finds new ways to challenge Irene even though the audience is well aware of the escape hatch, doubling down and adding mythology in a way that doesn't distract or diminish what had come before. The finale circles back around to the start but also shows how Irene has expanded her intentions.

It's nice work without being overly flashy, a lot like the original Terminator: A simple but striking sci-fi premise that lends itself to human-scale action and elevated through strong execution.


La Virgen de la Tosquera (The Virgin of the Quarry Lake)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

The Virgin of the Quarry Lake is described as adapting two stories in a collection by Mariana Enriquez, and I kind of wonder how it branches out from this: Up and down the line of Natalia's life? Following side characters? Thematic similarities? And, most curiously, is there more magic compared to the hints we see here, because its placement is pretty convenient but not nearly as cringe-inducingly so as other tales of this type can be.

Natalia (Dolores Oliverio) is a teenager, or just out of school but not yet looking to leave the home of her grandmother Rita (Luisa Merelas), where she's been since her mother left for Spain; it's not like there's a lot of opportunity in turn-of-the-millennium Buenos Aires. She's probably the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, the one everybody presumes will end up with handsome Diego (Agustín Sosa), at least until Silvia (Fernanda Echeverría) enters the picture. Silvia's not quite so pretty as Nati, but she's a bit older and more experienced, with tales of traveling extensively to Mexico and Europe, and it threatens to bring out the worst in Nati.

Everyone is primed to blow in this movie from the opening scene where a neighbor beats an unhoused person almost to death, especially at somebody who might be considered an outsider, and you don't really need the addition of apparent witchcraft to make that point; the abandoned shopping cart lurks in more shots than one expect, a reminder of the potential for evil that exists in everyone and an omen of worse to come. Indeed, for all that the fantastic elements seems to be a settling point, I kind of wondered if it figured more into the other stories from the adapted collection. It winds up a bit of an unarmed big finale though little more than a series of potentially-coincidental metaphors throughout.

The slow-ish burn getting there is good stuff, at least, as the strain on Nati builds and she finds it easier to be selfish. The filmmakers are well able to be empathetic even as it becomes clear that Nati is not a particularly good person, especially during a particularly brutal phone call where Dolores Oliverio's face reveals stunned surprise that someone could do this to her but also the genuine hurt of her first stabbing heartbreak. It is, we see, somewhat easy to think well of Nati because of her circumstances, and even understand as this young and angry girl does not necessarily respond maturely, but how does one cope when she doesn't always grow in the right direction.

Oliverio is great in the role, transmuting adolescent naivete to cool rage before the audience's eyes, retaining enough of what makes Nati the cool girl people flock to that it's hard to let go even when she's probably passing points of no return. The folks around her are pretty good, too, most notably Luisa Merelas as Rita, whose kindness seems to hold the neighborhood together but which has its practical limits. Agustin Sosa plays Diego as a sort of handsome cipher, possibly worth Nati's obsession but vague enough to emphasize that this isn't the point. Fernanda Echeverría intrigues as Silvia, coming off as someone who puffs themselves up and flaunts their good fortune at first but seeming more mature and well-rounded as one starts to question Nati's perspective.

The filmmakers do an impressive job of immersing this group in what feels like a very specific time and place. Folks around the world will probably grin at the precision of how they ground it in time with fashion, music, and how internet communication is just beginning to be a major part of teenagers' lives, but the rolling power outages, water shortages, and other infrastructure issues will undoubtedly strike a chord with Argentinians who lived through it. Even the quarry lake of the title, a beautiful oasis, requires leaving the city and walking from the last bus stop, and it's apparently haunted, both by the people who died digging it and the idea that there was once going to be a town where people could live a comfortable middle-class life there.

That's where the shocking finale happens, and while I'm normally not exactly fond of the way it plays out, there's no denying that the final line and the way it seems to set things into place are effectively delivered. I don't so much wonder what happened to these girls next, if that's where the book goes, but I sure felt the process of getting there.


Ana Kiri

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Les Fantastiques Week-Ends du Cinéma Québéçois, laser DCP)

I was wearing a watch during this screening, so I'm kicking myself for not doing a quick check to see how literally this movie is split down the middle for me when the time jump happened. Sure, things had been going well enough not to be tracking elapsed time, and you can't exactly know in the moment that this is when things are going to go downhill, but in retrospect, I certainly couldn't help but wonder.

It starts with how Anna (Catherine Brunet) and her brother Vincent (Maxime de Cotreet) had been on their own since childhood, and though Anna loves him fiercely, she recognizes that he's been buying into his gangster persona too much of late despite their group - Anna, Vincent, his girlfriend Cindy (Charlotte Aubin), and best friend Mirko (JadeHassouné) mostly being small-time crooks at best. And now, Vincent's gotten ambitious - the bowling alley they just knocked over was a stash house for crime boss Micky (Kar Graboshas). Anna loses her diary while fleeing Micky's bar, and it winds up in the hands of French Literature lecturer Phillippe (Fayolle Jean), who is impressed enough to offer Anna a scholarship. She initially refuses, but then realizes it would be a good way to break away from a life that's turned dangerous.

I really loved the grungy crime vibes of the first half, full of Anna's sarcastic self-aware narration, inevitable betrayals, and plenty of colorful small-timers and losers. It just looks and feels right, and even when Anna winds up catching Philippe's interest and visiting his office, there's this nifty tension of how she doesn't feel like she belongs there, whether this is worth sticking her head up for, and what happens when she steps back outside this university building. It's great heist-fallout stuff, and the way the action, Anna's narration, and the scribbled notes that show up on-screen like a telestrator reinforce and contradict each other makes the simple story feel dense and emphasizes just how many directions Anna's mind is being pulled in.

The second half, where Anna is in school and developing her diary into a novel, never quite comes together compared to the first. The filmmakers introduce a bunch of new characters it does little with and their take on the literary world feels broader than their take on crime tropes. The audience isn't given time to acclimate to Anna's new situation before her old life tears its head. And the ending... Oof. The potential is frustrating; there's little exploration over whether Anna fits into this world or not, or the idea that one can hide out in the same city they "fled" by changing social status and associations; working-class neighborhoods and academia can be a block apart and never mingle.

Also, I don't know whether this is a compliment or not, but when we first see Anna's new boyfriend using a laptop, I wondered how he had one because it seemed like this movie took place in 1983 or the like until that point, a pay-phone era crime flick rather than a smartphone-era one.

Catherine Brunet is plenty watchable as Anna regardless; she and the filmmakers do a fine job of capturing a woman who is a little too smart for the life of a small-time crook but too much of that world to truly fit into the art & lit crowd she finds herself in. There are some fun other characters around her - Charlotte Aubin's Cindy plays like a the sort of wannabe femme fatale that wears high heels to go bowling, and Nincolas Michone's Zhao is seemingly trying to work his way up to management of the bar where he sells drugs - though Maxime de Cotret gets a bit caught in between as Vincent, not quite charismatic enough to be as full of himself as he is, even considering that he's not entirely getting away with it..

There's half a good movie here, and half a movie with an interesting idea but not nearly the same execution.


Transcending Dimensions

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Seen 28 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

I ran out of gas during my first screening of transcending Dimensions - running the psychedelic movie at 10m works for an audience that rolls out of bed at 2pm rather than 7am - and came out feeling as though I'd missed a lot. The second time through, at a more civilized noon, I think that maybe I didn't miss quite so much as I thought the first time but was maybe just too tired to absorb it. It's actually more straightforward than the trippiness would indicate.

It opens with Ryosuke (Yosuke Kubozuka), a sort of monk, sitting in nature, pondering; but soon it is visiting a retreat run my Master Ajari Hanzo (Chihara Jr.), who wears the robes but has a sadistic streak. He dares one visitor, Yazu (Masahiro Higashide), to cut off his finger because no knowledge comes without sacrifice; another, Teppei (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), sees where this going and tries to leave. Another, Shinno (Ryuhei Matsuda), is a hitman there at the behest of Nonoka (Haruku Imo), the monk Ryosuke was her boyfriend and disappeared here, so she wants Hanzo dead. But is Rosuke in the forest, at the end of the universe, or someplace stranger?

As all this goes on, the extent to which Transcending Dimensions just looks and sounds cool should not be overlooked. A lot of attention will be paid to the scenes in order space or the mirrored rooms, but it looks generally spiffy whether what's on screen is kaleidoscopic CGI or wide-open nature. The jazzy soundtrack with the diegetic sound of monks blowing on conch shells is excellent, and the sound design is terrific as well, whether it's ordinary but enveloping or built in such a way as to imply heightened senses and awareness of every time Ryosuke's staff raps on a stone.

What's maybe most surprising is the extent to which the assassin is perhaps the sanest, most centered character of the whole lot. While the monks and masters appear to spend their entire lives chasing enlightenment, he comes off as a guy who might actually be living outside of his job, separate from conventional morality but having instincts about how things connect. Enlightenment, the film suggests, is not a particularly important goal on its own; the process has not made Matter Hanzo a better man, and Ryosuke, meditating until the end of the world, will not contribute much to it. The cast is impressive playing this out, from Chihara Jr.'s gleeful sadism to Yosuke Kubozuka's earnest disconnection, with Kiyohiko Shibukawa's frustration hilarious and Haruka Imo eventually giving Nonoka perspective that is both human and ethereal.

Having that at the film's center probably makes it somewhat easier to tell a story when it's not quite so important to communicate something grandiose and spiritual. Transcending Dimensions has plenty of strange turns, unreliable narrators, sidetracks, and subtle revelations, but filmmaker Toshiaki Toyoda is good at using the time to let a joke or shock breathe so that the rest of the film can sink in as well, meaning that stitching it all together is more straightforward than you might thing.

Anyway, I'm very glad that the schedule worked out so I could see it with the director Q&A and the "what did I just watch?" sensation the first time, and give it a second chance a few days later when my brain was operating normally. It is, perhaps, how this sort of movie is best experienced.

Imports: Yadang: The Snitch and The Dumpling Queen

As usual, I'm running late on everything I want to write up for this blog and even Letterboxd over the past few weeks, so if you want to see Yadang in Boston, you're too late, though it looks like The Dumpling Queen is sticking around another week.

That said, I've got to respect AMC's trailer game on Yadang much more than usual. The AMC trailer block- 20 minutes long, including three ads for seeing a movie at AMC, a thing you're already doing - is justly kind of infamous, but I'd argue that there's some value in that, especially if folks are seeing a big movie, because advertising is kind of useless these days and this gives that audience an overview of what's coming out in the next few months that they'd like to see. Yadang, on the other hand, is the sort of genre movie that's probably only going to last one week, so what do they show for trailers? Three genre movies - Shadow Force, Watch the Skies, and Fight or Flight - that come out the next Friday, with "May 9th" clearly stated at the end. It's kind of the same thinking as the normal package, just targeted at those of us who will go to decent-looking little movies if we know they exist.

That said, I used just about every minute of the big block before The Dumpling Queen waiting for trains and snacks; even most of the Chinese-American audience that normally waits until the last second was in before me!


Yadang: The Snitch

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 May 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #8 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

If Yadang were a book, it would have three pages that were blank except for a roman numeral and maybe a subtitle and/or a year, or whatever the Korean equivalent of that would be. As a movie, the three distinct parts all run together, and the result is never quite the whiplash of shocking revelations or exciting twists. One can follow the story and enjoy the final caper, but maybe not be quite clear on how all that works.

The "snitch", in this case, is Lee Kang-su (Kang Ha-neul), although he's apparently more of a liaison between prosecutor Goo Gwan-hee (Yoo Hae-jin) and the sources he's developing than a mole in any particular criminal enterprise. It didn't start that way - Gwan-hee developed Kang-su as a source when the latter was used as a patsy and placed in a cell with a gangster that the former was prosecuting - but now the ambitious prosecutor's operations are bumping into cases the police are investigating, notably narcotics detective Oh Sang-jae (Park Hae-joon), who has gotten frightened actress Um Su-jin (Chae Won-bin) to lead him to Yoon Tae-su, a dealer in North Korean meth.

Maybe South Korean audiences with a bit more knowledge of their justice system (or at least the police-story tropes of it) will understand how Kang-su's whole deal works, because I can't see how this keeps him in nice suits and a Hummer-sized vehicle three years out of jail. Is there some loophole where prosecutors aren't allowed to speak to criminals directly but can fund consultants? Is it a pyramid scheme? Given that in one case the criminals are calling him to help broker a deal, he must be well-known in the underworld, and in that case, why haven't the gangs murdered him just on general principle? The basics of his character - guy who initially became amoral when let down by the system looking out for himself even though there's an honest man underneath - work but the details are iffy.

A lot of the movie is like that; many parts of the story that settle folks in their positions happen off-screen during time jumps so that a thing that was set up as really bad at first can be somewhat waved away fifteen minutes later. Bits of the election-centered story in the last act was set up earlier, but this high-stakes material seldom feels like an escalation or the culmination of what's come before. There's a lot going on, but emphasis seems to change out of convenience, rather than because the story is following a path.

It tends to work in the moment, at least, especially once it can play Kang Ha-neul's cocky snitch off Park Hae-joon's righteous cop more regularly, while Yoo Hae-jin does nice work scrubbing away the veneer of good intentions his prosecutor has over the course of the film. Director Hwang Byeng keeps things moving and shines particularly well when he gets to get into the con-artist capers of the finale. Sure, the audience can see how the last fifteen or twenty minutes are going to play out as soon as someone asks for a cigarette, but that's perhaps why the film might wind up re-watchable anyway - it's very enjoyable to sit, nodding, waiting for the penny that's already dropped to inevitably land on (mostly) bad people.


Shui Jiao Huang Hou (The Dumpling Queen)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2025 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

It is, in some ways, oddly satisfying to see that the things folks are decrying as if they are somewhat unique issues with Hollywood and its descent into irrelevance are present throughout the world. The "product origin story", for example, which has manifested in North America as movies about Air Jordans, Tetris, the Blackberry, and so on, is apparently also a thing in the People's Republic of China, with Wanchai Ferry Dumplings getting one expected to be a big enough hit that it gets a more or less day-and-date release around the world.

Of course, it's more presented as the biography of founder Zang Jianhe (Ma Li), at least at the start, when she is effectively a single mother of two girls, 5 and 9, living in Qingdao, about to take a trip to Hong Kong to reunite with her husband (Kenny Wong Tak-bun) and join him in Thailand. When she arrives, though, he and his mother (Nina Paw Hee-ching) inform her that he has a second wife there who has already given him a son, but that's allowed in Thailand, and Jianhe will be recognized as his concubine. Having some pride, she stays in Hong Kong, eventually winding up in a boarding house run by widow Hong Jie (Kara Wai/Hui Yinghong), and works two or three jobs until an injury has her laid up and she meets neighbor Tang "Uncle Dessert" Shuibo (Ben Yuen Fu-wah), who suggests she join him at Wanchai Ferry with her well-regarded dumplings. There's no permitting, so they're often chased away by police, including Brother Hua (Zhu Yawen), a handsome widower who soon takes an interest in Jianhe as more than just a vendor, though he intends to emigrate to Canada for his own daughters' education.

A lot of these stories have roughly the same shape - determined immigrant, disrespected as a person and a woman, tremendous work ethic, helpful friends and neighbors, seeing opportunity in idle comments, holding firm when large companies try to dictate terms - so it's often the details that matter. The issue that the filmmakers seem to face, presuming that this is relatively close to the true story, is that a lot of the colorful pieces of Jianhe's story aren't necessarily all that germane to founding her business; Hong Jie's boarding house is full of colorful characters who serve to show just how exceptionally dedicated Jianhe is or what a good decision she made leaving the husband who didn't respect her, but steadiness isn't necessarily as interesting to watch as activity or initiative. The other end of the film has a fair amount of fast-forwarding while montages show what sort of changes Hong Kong was undergoing during this time, with Jianhe having to make a new decision that shifts her business's arc from street food to supermarket shelves. It tells the story, but at a bit of a remove.

There are a lot of steady hands involved, though - Mainland star Ma Li has a good handle on playing Jianhe as self-respecting even if she's initially nervous about putting her girls in a bad position early on and more firm-but-nice later. I am kind of curious about how Hong Kongers feel about her portrayal of JIanhe as an assimilating immigrant, since her difficulty with Cantonese is a large part of the first half or so of the movie. Kara Wai and Ben Yuen turn in pleasant supporting performances as the neighbors who are Jianhe's most important early supporters; the second half of the film would, perhaps, be more interesting if it got into how their characters fell away as Jianhe's business grew and how her daughters took a more active role as they became adults. Director Andrew Lau Wai-Keung is a journeyman who seldom calls for anything flashy and manages to evoke a nostalgic view of 1970s/1980s Hong Kong without things becoming cloying.

Which isn't to say the movie is particularly subtle or clever; the soundtrack gets mawkish about ten minutes in and more or less stays there, with the songs chosen a mix of Mandarin, Cantonese, and English like they're trying to find the balance that makes the film an international hit. The film does not actually stop to display a cartoon light bulb over Jianhe's head whenever someone mentions something along the lines of freezing dumplings, but almost seems to do so. And there's a sort of odd vibe to the whole thing at times: It's a Mainland production with a Mainland star telling a Hong Kong story with a Hong Kong director and supporting cast which builds to signing a deal with an American company, and given current tensions between the U.S. and China, censors expecting a pro-China message, and how Hong Kong nostalgia usually manifests, it feels oddly muted.

Not bad, as these corporate biographies and standard immigrant stories go, though not exceptional.

Octopus With Broken Arms

Back in the Asian Movie Corner

(In actual fact, this movie was around the corner from those, next to a poster-screen of The Prosecutor, although maybe that was sharing a screen with this today)

I wondered when looking at what was playing in the coming weeks how much continuity the Wu Sha movies have, because while I quite liked Sheep Without a Shepherd (as the first was called in the USA), it doesn't look like the second, Fireflies in the Sun, has made it to the USA at all. At least, it's not streaming anywhere, and I can't even find a Region A disc at DDDHouse or YesAsia. Which is a shame, because it's got a lot of Hong Kong talent. Anyway, it turns out that the answer to the continuity question is "none at all": It's one of those series which have some of the same talent and themes, the sort of thing that would show up under "if you liked X, then you'll like Y" if a site's recommendation algorithm is any good, but no actual links between the stories. In this case, all three movies star Xiao Yang, take place in Thailand, are written by Li Peng, and are produced by Chen Sicheng, but Xiao is playing different characters in all three; they've even got different directors. Not sure whether this one is based on a previous film or not (the first one remade Malayalam thriller Drishyam; the second American film John Q).

So, you should be able to go into this one completely cold if you want. As to whether you should…


Wu sha 3 (Octopus with Broken Arms)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2025 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I can't find if I've talked about it much in a previous entry, but Octopus with Broken Arms fits into a sub-genre specific enough that it's surprising how many entries there are: Chinese movies that take place in Thailand, but within communities where almost everybody is ethnically Chinese and speaks Mandarin, though all the television and conversations of people who are not Chinese occur in English. The reason why is obvious - people like pulpy crime flicks with brutal murders and government corruption and incompetence as part and parcel of the story, but you can't imply that this sort of thing happens in China, but there's a weird sort of alternate reality to them that makes things like Octopus feel weird on top of unpleasant.

It opens with a good sort of weird/uncomfortable blend, as wealthy cosmetics magnate Zheng Bingrui (Xiao Yang) watches his daughter Tingting's octopus-themed dance recital seems to take a weird, accusatory turn. Or maybe that's just his imagination, lingering guilt over her mother dying in childbirth. Soon, though, Tingting has vanished, somehow spirited out of an estate bordered on three sides by water during her birthday party. Zheng immediately suspects Shi Fu-an (Feng Bing), an old associate who showed up to ask for money, and his wife Tinaya (Zhou Chuchu), but there are eyewitnesses for his entire time on the estate. The police, led by detective Zhang Jingxian (Duan Yihong), soon focus on a mute gardener named Lu (Bokeh Kosang). When the ransom call comes in, though, Zheng bypasses the police and opts to hand-deliver it with Tingting's teacher Li Huiping (Tong Liya), but it soon becomes clear that the person on the other end of the phone, Yayin (Cya Liu) is as much interested in digging up Zheng's past as taking his 100 million baht.

There's an early comment in the film about the kidnapping being a locked room mystery inside a locked room mystery that maybe gives the cleverness of the construct a little too much credit, but the filmmakers are trying to build something intricate in roughly that same way one builds a locked-room murder. Not quite so well - there's at least one character who clearly exists because Zheng occasionally needs an escape hatch, and the film engages in unreliable narration exactly once, rather than making it an inescapable element of the story, presumably because the writers couldn't figure out how to use misdirection and so used it as a crutch. It all fits together, but it's not elegant.

(An amusing part of the inelegance is how Yayin's face is initially concealed before the revelation, not so much because we've seen her before, but because the actress is recognizable, but it's odd if you don't know who's a big name in China and may even wind up odd there if her star fades in the coming years.)

Perhaps more frustratingly, director Jacky Gan Jianyu and the editorial team don't show much of a knack for building tension and unease in any but the crudest ways. There's seldom a moment when a question hangs in the air, the audience worried about how it might shake out, with surprises generally dropped at the start of a scene rather than built to or given a moment to breathe and have the audience and the characters re-evaluate. Nearly every character has secrets to reveal such that it's hard to get a grip on who they are when all is said and done, or even get a sense of them struggling with this question. It's a movie with secrets to be revealed that's seldom actually suspenseful, and has to have newscasters telling the audience directly that this is a big deal to the wider world and folks are invested. It's not terribly long before the filmmakers are basically going with more horrific violence, particularly against children, leading to yet more devastated parents.

As such, it's not a movie for the squeamish. It has its moments, though - there's a nifty kick to the octopus-themed opener that kind of shocks Zheng with "so, octopi basically abandon their eggs and/or die", enough to wish there was more with Chloe Ye's Tingting to make her more than just a Macguffin. The filmmakers are smart to put someone charismatic that the audience can easily connect to just off center to ground the movie even if one sort of knows that this bit of grounding will be yanked away, just to keep things moving as the story gets into darker territory. When the filmmakers get a chance to do some sleight-of-hand in a chase or caper set-up, they're not bad, especially with occasionally fun angles on their Thai setting (no way not to have that giant Buddha in the scene, so let's make it interesting).

Octopus with Broken Arms is, overall, pretty capable as these movies go, and there's probably something perversely tension-relieving about these films in China, scratching an itch without a tacked-on upbeat resolution or overt scaremongering about how dangerous other places are; even the finale where a Chinese movie would assure the audience that everyone was sentenced appropriately at trial and the government was working to make sure it never happened again is replaced with something that could be redemptive or even more devastatingly bleak. If you're not in the mood for having that itch scratched, though, it can be dreary. The first Wu sha movie, Sheep Without a Shepherd, excelled because it invited the audience to enjoy the idea of getting away with things; while this mostly overwhelms the audience with cruelty but doesn't make it gripping.

The Prosecutor

I occasionally take surreptitious photos during the credits for Asian movies because they don't reliably make it into IMDB for later reference, but sometimes you have a couple things that need noting:

First, the opening credits included "Locker Lam", and I kind of had to know who that was. Apparently he plays one of the accused criminals the title character is prosecuting. A little research indicates that he's popped up a lot lately and his full-and-then-some name is Matthew "Locker" Lam Ka-Hei, and "Locker" was the name of the character he played in his first movie, Weeds on Fire, which is about the first Hong Kong youth baseball team, which I am disappointed to see is only available on AppleTV here, because yeah, this sounds like my sort of thing.

Second, there's always one guy among the goons fighting the hero in these movies that makes you sit up and take notice, and in this case that would be Yu Kang. He's apparently been part of Donnie Yen's stunt team for a while - his credits are almost entirely in features starring Donnie - and has been doing a fair amount of direction and choreography of late. Not a bad living if it pays, I guess, although I wonder if he could be an action star on his own. At least in this movie, he's not movie-star handsome and there's not a whole lot of acting asked of him, so I'm not sure if he could break out of this niche.

It wasn't a bad crowd for a 6pm show. I used to think of as sort of a weird in-between time but maybe it's reasonable for a downtown theater today, since people are likely ordering their tickets and snacks in advance and taking the subway a couple stops rather than driving and thus finding parking, which I must imagine cuts out a lot of waiting in line time and lets you move everything up. Truth be told, it seemed to draw out the local fanbase of Boston's Own Donnie Yen better than when Chinese movies played at the Common near Chinatown. I'm also mildly curious what folks think of Yen these days, as he's had the reputation of being eager to make nice with the mainland even though he mostly still makes movies in Hong Kong, and when Big Brother came out, I remember reading that for Hong Kongers there was something insidious about it, like it gave surface-level praise to teaching critical thinking but implied a sort of systemic weakness, and you can kind of see something like that in The Prosecutor: It's full of heroic cops and prosecutors and the like who want to do the right thing in the way that a lot of Chinese movies are, but the (British-derived) legal system is full of loopholes and rules that work against justice. Which is probably not wrong - see every legal system on Earth - but knowing that previous context makes me wonder. Honestly, I kind of miss having the Hong Kong movie times app on my phone from back when I visited (it didn't carry over when I got new phones twice in the past 6 years), just to see if people are still review-bombing Yen's movies for this sort of thing.


Ng poon (The Prosecutor)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 January 2025 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when it leaves theaters)

There are five writers credited on The Prosecutor - "Writer" Edward Wong Chi-Mun in the main titles, "Scriptwriter" Cheung Chun-Ho in the end titles, and three assistant scriptwriters next to him - and yet, somehow, none of them managed to find a reason for director and star Donnie Yen to get into a fight while wearing his robes and wig. It would be silly, yes, but this is a movie that is at its best when played over the top and at its most cringe-inducing when played straight and earnest. Unfortunately, it aims for the latter far too often.

As the film opens, Fok Chi-Ho (Yen) is on his last major case as a police officer, a daring raid on a suspected drug dealer that ends with the perp getting off and Fok injuring himself rescuing a fellow officer (Sisley Choi Si-Pui). He retires from the force and goes to law school, and seven years later is starting as a prosecutor in the office of Yeung Dit-Lap (Francis Ng Chun Yu) under the mentorship of Bao Ding (Cheng Jut-Si). His first case is that of Ma Ka-Kit (Mason Fung Ho-Yeung), who was busted receiving a kilo of heroin but claims that he had just loaned his address to Chan Kwok-Wing (Locker Lam Ka-Hei); Kit is advised by pro bono attorneys Lee Sze-Man (Shirley Chan Yan-Yin) and Au Pak-man (Julian Cheung Chi-Lam) to plead guilty and recant some of his testimony for a reduced sentence. To a former detective like Fok, this stinks to high heaven, but the other prosecutors see their job as clearing the docket and winning cases. Nevertheless, Fok keeps digging with former partner Lee King-Wai (Cheung Tin-Fu), to the discomfort of both his co-workers in the prosecutor's office and the gangsters Au consorts with.

The film is, in many ways, a tale of two Donnie Yens. Yen is perhaps the last true action superstar produced by the Hong Kong film industry, and though the film openly acknowledges he's lost a step physically - Fok literally says "I got old" and complains about his knees, with his fight with fellow sexagenarian action star Francis Ng obligatory and ending in wheezing - he still seems engaged and excited about how to push Hong Kong action forward rather than sticking with formula. The opening gambit works hand-to-hand work into the gun-heavy mechanics of a police raid better than most before shifting to something out of a first-person shooter, and most of the big fights feature impressive use of space: One nests a delivery truck in a tight alleyway, another has folks taking vertical shortcuts in a parking garage, and the finale empties out a subway train and has Yen, action choreographer Ouchi Takahito, and featured stuntman Yu Kang incorporating the poles that keep riders from falling into their motions. It's impressive as heck and incorporates UFC-style ground-and-pound well without that always being terribly cinematical.

On the flip side, though, there's Donnie Yen the actor and more conventional filmmaker; he's become quite capable over the course of his career but is still at his best when his emoting is part of a fight rather than more conventional scenes and has often been more charismatic when doing comedy than drama. And for as much as he seemingly thrives on innovating and trying new things on the action side, he's got a tendency toward the earnestly conventional when it's time to justify that, playing as very bland, and on top of that he still looks just youthful enough that Fok's lecturing other characters, often more experienced prosecutors, comes off as unearned arrogance rather than earnest idealism or hard-won experience. It's a conservative sort of movie and character, the sort of conservatism that earnestly repeats slogans, trusts that the system is good and can make sure that people are treated fairly. Yen probably could play fiery and anti-establishment if he wanted, but that's not his game, and there's no hook to Fok beyond duty - his friends are co-workers, and his only family is a sundowning father whom he dutifully looks after.

It's weird, because it seems like there should be fun to be had here: He winks at the audience by showing a Lego Millennium Falcon in Fok's apartment (and is it too much to see the soccer balls as referencing Butterfly & Sword?), drops a couple of goofy courtroom one-liners in the big final fight, and, knowing he grew up in Boston, I laughed when he dug through a car's trunk to find hockey sticks to fight with. As mentioned, you can practically see him seem to come alive staging the fights, even if they do often have a "it's been fifteen minutes and things have slowed down, so let's try and murder a witness" vibe. He and Julian Cheung also perk up when it comes time to establish just how awful criminals are, and Cheung does a nice job of doing a flustered "why can't my criminal associates be friggin' professional rather than killing people unnecessarily?" thing without making the guy sympathetic.

Instead, it often seems like Yen, Wong, and company took what they felt was an important story (whether "based on true events" or not) with a good message and spent more time trying to tell it with the earnest respect it deserves rather than playing to their strengths. Doing martial arts with the wig on might have looked disrespectful, but it could also look like a symbol of the law fighting for victims; sadly, this movie isn't going to risk people getting the wrong idea.

This Week in Tickets: 30 December 2024 - 5 January 2025 (New Year, Old-Time Horror)

Place your bets, folks, at how long until I fall hopelessly behind. Last year, we didn't make it to the Oscars, but I'm feeling good about 2025!

Latest appointment book layout is vertical, like most movie tickets these days, although they're wide enough that there's going to need to be some staggering. Not sure what's up with the yellow, though, though.

I had enough vacation time I couldn't entirely roll over to have the last couple days of the year off, so I caught the Coolidge's 35mm print of Nosferatu '24 in the afternoon, really enjoying it far more than I expected, having fallen a little short of loving Robert Eggers's previous work at times. It was obviously very much influenced by the original silent version, which made a nice sort of way to roll into restarting Film Rolls, which by the nature of how my new-to-me shelf is setup will almost always start with silents, in this case The Enchanted Cottage '24 and Lights Out '23 on Monday and Tuesday evenings respectively, As you might expect from movies that were released on crowdfunded Blu-rays, they're not exactly classics, but they're interesting; you can absolutely see what the filmmakers were going for.

First film of the new year was Honey Money Phony, a New Year's Eve romantic comedy from China that gets a long way on just how crush-worthy star Jin Chen is in her role, and most of the cast around her is the kind of good company that helps this sort of movie roll even when you notice it doesn't have a lot of great, big jokes.

Thursday, I got started on the next round of Film Rolls by starting a box set, with the first film of four on tape being Five Shaolin Masters. Friday night had me hitting a new film from Korea, Harbin, which is undoubtedly a big part of Korean history but maybe doesn't quite make for a great movie, at least for those of us who aren't already have particular investment in its subjects. Saturday, it was back to Film Rolls with Shaolin Temple.

Then on Sunday, I closed the week with The Damned, a period thriller that has a lot going for it but only intermittently lands - which, truth be told, is better than the average horror movie that grabs a release on the first weekend of a new year.

As much as I always intend to keep the New Year's resolution to keep up with this, it can't hurt to follow my Letterboxd account just in case, although I'll generally at least try to have Film Rolls entries on the blog first.


Nosferatu 2024

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Coolidge Corner #1 (first-run, 35mm)
Where to stream it (when available)

This might become my favorite version of Dracula, even if I was kind of skeptical going in: I don't like sexy vampires, especially preferring "the walking embodiment of death and decay" for this variant in particular,, and some of the bits I do really like cause the end to leave a more sour taste in my mouth. It doesn't quite reinvent the story - indeed, by filming it as Nosferatu, Robert Eggers is more or less committed to a specific strain - but finds interesting things to do within those bounds.

There's an impressive streamlining of the story that many adaptations of Bram Stoker's epistletory novel don't always manage - Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) has a pre-existing mystical connection to Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), so it can be assumed that he somehow corrupted Knock (Simon McBurney), the employer of Ellen's wife Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), in such a way as to serve the dual purpose of disposing of the romantic rival and establishing a foothold in a new place. Eggers highlights how Ellen's stay at the home of Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin) highlights both financial precarity and questions of mental health, both assumed and real, that lurk under the couples' friendship. The decision of Ellen's physician, Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson), to call in mentor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe) feels like both a wise move and desperation because physicians aren't really equipped to deal with contagion, whether biological or supernatural.

Some of this reorganization makes me curious how the first half or so will play on later viewings, because I think the familiarity of the story means director Robert Eggers is able to play things for laughs a bit. He doesn't crank it up to 11, but maybe 10.5, having fun pushing the whole thing as overtly stylized without having to worry too much about what folks will take literally. It also means that he can bring the nastiness of the horror down to earth later. The film is often quite funny but folks might not realize they've got permission to laugh until the second or third time they see it.

I was also kind of suspicious of him making Orlock this muscular, mustachioed warlord instead of the silent version's wraith or Bela Lugisi's elegant noble, but it really works: It lets him dig into the Eastern European origins for all manner of designs on the one hand, and it makes the death and pestilence that Orlok embodies a brutish thing that sacks the city, not just consuming the lifeblood that it needs to fend true death off but gorging itself. Bill Skarsgård may be a handsome Dracula, but his gluttony is monstrous and precludes romance or sympathy.

It's a contrast to the core of this movie which I really like, a scene with Lily-Rose Depp and Nicolas Hoult that has a strikingly modern feel as it becomes clear just how real their love is. They challenge each other and demand explanations, but in the end, they trust each other far more than the pair who said pretty words and did what was expected of people like them at the start. Eggers uses them to see the imbalance between gender roles that this sort of period piece takes for granted, reject it, and put both in position to drive for the rest of the film.

There's tons of good stuff around all this, too: Art design where the architecture is just askew enough to remind one of German Expressionist silents without being an obvious imitation. The carriage ride to the castle that recalls 2001 as much as previous versions of Dracula with its threatening bass and slow zooms of doors opening and closing on their own. Willem Defoe's Van Helsing equivalent is funny and almost always right but also mad enough that he probably should have been thrown off the university faculty. Heck, now that I think about it, I wonder if his madness doesn't lead to the bits of the finale I find unsatisfying because, as one character points out in a grieving rage, his zealous obsession with the supernatural threat blind him to the individual and aggregate humanity around him.

Darn good all around, and that comes from someone who often describes the F.W. Murnau Nosferatu as his favorite vampire movie and has often been left cold by Eggers style.


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.

(More to come when I finish the Film Rolls round!)


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 (Prime link), 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.

(More to come when I finish the Film Rolls round!)


The Damned

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 January 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #1 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The Damned is solidly in the category of films that i would have loved to see at BUFF or Fantasia with a packed horse on a hair trigger, but where I just figure it's got some nifty pieces at a Sunday 7pm show in the AMC's smallest screen with one or two other folks in the audience who are occasionally coughing. It's a long 89 minutes, but there's at least one shot of snow covering a house built of black wood and the black volcanic mountains in the background which looks like it's a hand-printed woodcut worth 10% of my A-List membership for the month.

It takes place at a fishing station on the coast of Iceland; Eva (Odessa Young) has inherited the business from her late husband, with some question as to whether she would keep it going. The helmsman of the small boat is Ragnar (Rory McCann); his second-in-command is Daniel (Joe Cole), a longtime friend of the dead man. There are four other men on the team, plus Helga (Siobhan Finneran), the cook. It's a lean year pulling fish out of the treacherous waters, and the group is horrified when they see a large ship foundering, but seek to salvage needed supplies. Helga worries that the morbid mission will result in the drowned sailors becoming draugur, angry undead revenants, but the rest are too practical for such superstition.

I want to like the film a lot more, because it does a thing I love in this sort of period indie, pulling us into a very specific time and place and making it feel accessible rather than opaque, grounding the fantasy in procedure that may not be familiar but which is interesting to learn. All the characters tend to feel exactly like they should, but human rather than types. Even the one guy who feels a bit too 21sr Century does so in a way that says there must have been people like this in 1871 as well. It's got a really nice cast - Rory McCann and Francis Magee capture the period without being consumed by it, and filmmaker Thordur Palsson doesn't make Odessa Young protest that a woman can handle this amid the difficult decisions. She's got a nice chemistry with Joe Cole; when they're not dealing with potential monsters, it's interesting to watch them feel their way around the void left by Eva's husband as they clearly have feelings for each other.

On the other hand, while I feel like I should like the spot it hits between folklore and guilt and maybe guilt come to life, the telling of the tale is a slog. There is just not enough for these people to do while the draugur stalks them or rifts that can be exploited as the evil gets in their head and makes them turn on each other. We're constantly waiting for something to happen, but only really on edge a couple of times. There are a few striking images and scenes - I particularly like one where the perspective has the viewer not sure whether the black shape in the center of the screen is a person, a creature, or just a rocky outgrop with one's eyes playing the same tricks that the characters' are.

Get It in another environment, and I'm probably along for the ride if the rest of the audience is. Without a crowd, though, I've got way too much time to think about why I'm not as scared as I should be.

Honey Money Phony

I ask you, and not just because posts with pictures tend to perform better, if this is the optimal way to name this movie:

Understand - I actually really like the title, because I like almost-rhymes as much as the real thing, and it kind of gets across the vibe of what the movie is going for, and I kind of like the old-school "doesn't quite get the nuances of English" vibe of another generation of Chinese movie titles - think Wheels on Meals - but maybe the two together is too much? There are six ways to arrange these three words, and which works the best?

Honey Money Phony
Honey Phony Money
Money Honey Phony
Money Phony Honey
Phony Honey Money
Phony Money Honey

I'm not going to get out the "English adjectives go in this order but we're never specifically taught it" post out, but most of these sound vaguely wrong except Money Honey Phony and Phony Honey Money. It probably comes from the Chinese title - "骗骗喜欢你" transliterated as "Pian Pian Xi Huan Ni" and (according to Google) translated to "Lie, Lie, Like You" having something like "Honey" in it. Three-quarters clever, but stumbly.

Anyway, it had the odd New Year's Eve opening, which is apparently a thing in China, perhaps particularly with romances, with probably the most (in)famous being Long Day's Journey Into Night, which was promoted with special screenings timed so the on-screen couple would kiss at exactly midnight and presumably all the lovers in the audience would join in, only to find they'd walked into a long, slow-moving art-house picture with a half-hour oner you needed to put 3D glasses on for, and audiences haaaaaaated being fooled like that. Last year, If You Were the One 3 came out a few days before New Year's Eve and it kind of played weird, with the traditional Chinese New Year postscript despite coming out for Western New Year's, and I wonder if it was also synched to midnight for some shows. Heck, i wonder if Honey Money Phony was at Causeway Street; I don't recall whether they were open late or closed early.

Oh, and one last thing - I was cheered to see the logo for Da Peng's company before the movie, and didn't realize that he was producing it. It turns out to be the directorial debut of his regular co-writer, although the script is credited to someone else. The vibe is similar but not quite the same, and it's interesting that Da Peng has a credit as "Supervisor" right up with the writer and director credits, and I'm kind of curious what that means. Super hands-on line producer? Shadow director? Chilling on set because the studio doesn't trust the first-time director? It's a category I've seen a fair amount on Hong Kong films and animation, and I wonder how different the workflow/division of labor is.


Pian Pian Xi Huan Ni (Honey Money Phony)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #5 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it when it's out of theaters

Is this getting a bonus quarter-star for Jin Chen's crush-worthiness? Yeah, probably. When you get down to it, it's neither a terribly clever con artist movie or a terribly romantic romantic comedy. But the cast counts for a lot on this sort of feather-light feature, and they make their characters a fun two-hour hang even though the outcome is never really in doubt. It's pleasant, which can be a back-handed compliment for a movie even if it's often what the audience wants.

Jin plays Lin Qinglang, a single 29-year-old woman who has a salaried job at an insurance company but also does side jobs, gig work, and a monetized vlog because her ex-boyfriend Zhang Zijun (Wang Hao) grifted 200,000 yuan (about $27,000) from her before casting her aside. She's wise enough to recognize when Ouyang Hui (Sunny Sun Yang) is posing as a customer service rep for her video host and turn the tables, convincing him to help her steal her money back. He agrees, but his plan will require a couple of accomplices - Dong Xiaohui (Li Xueqin), an aspiring actress and auto-bump scammer that Qinglang knows from work and Ouyang's mentor Bo Shitong (David Wang Yaoqing) - and will need to net 600K to break even.

honey Money Phony seldom gets the big belly laugh despite its jokes often being broad and always feeling like the filmmakers are about to take a big swing (there's an article to be written about about movies that use countdowns as a crutch rather than making the events feel pressing), but it gets a steady stream of chuckles, and probably more than I recognize because they're based on Mandarin wordplay and what may be an untranslated text gag about folks being punished for their crimes toward the end. The folks in the audience who spoke the language were laughing enough for me to take their word for it at points. The movie is full of funny set-ups that end in a decent punchline but seldom snowball, which is fine, and occasionally finds a little barb to stick the audience with, like Qinglang's self-aware narration describing her cheerful and eccentric videos.

The narration doesn't go on that long because director Su Biao and writer Yang Yuting want the audience to feel Qinglang's can-do optimism more than cynical reflection; from the start, it's fairly clear that she has reacted to getting scammed by reading up on them but not necessarily building defenses against them. Jin Chen plays her a couple steps removed from Manic Pixie Dream Girl status - she's been through enough that she doesn't quite have that energy - but she's cute as heck and charismatic enough with that to keep the movie her story even when the other characters are more active participants in the scams and being given moving backstories.

The rest of the cast around her is playing some sort of oddball or another, even if it's muted: Sunny Sun's Ouyang is the secretly sad one, Wang Hao's Zijun is malicious, Li Xueqin's Xiaohui is the performer, David Wang's Shitong the veteran who never quite fit into normal society, with Song Muzi a one-joke character for how much he spits when he talks. That's pretty much fine, for the most part - there's enough to Ouyang to make him an interesting romantic interest for Qinglang, and most of the rest are fun but no threat to make the movie scattered. Sometimes the movie doesn't quite know what to do with Zijun, especially when they hint that he's got enough skills as a con artist himself to see through things but not doing much with it.

One thing that I kind of like about the film, at least as an idea, is how the filmmakers eschew certain staples, in that they never put Qinglang in a tight dress and made her seduce someone, or otherwise go in for elaborate disguises and transformations. Qinglang, like most of the characters, really, is kind of a dork, and even when she's lying and scamming alongside the others, it's by letting her eccentricity and vulnerability out rather than faking something. By and large the movie world rather have the team triumph by being who they are rather than otherwise, even if giving the actors a bunch of alternate personae is where the jokes usually are in this genre.

It's a risky trade-off, and I'm not sure it always works. The earnestness is nice, but the movie could really use a moment or two when the audience can really erupt in laughter or marvel at how slyly the filmmakers have misdirected them for the previous couple hours. I laughed a bit and liked the group, but think i still would have liked them if I laughed more.

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!

Veteran 2 / I, The Executioner

I tend to talk about Chinese and Korean companies releasing their films direct to American theaters with minimal delay as a "new" thing, but Veteran was, near as I can tell, directly distributed by CJ nine years ago (although I think they were presenting as "CJ Entertainment" versus "CJ ENM" back then), so, yeah, we're looking at South Korean companies doing this for roughly a decade. The funny thing is, there's been enough growth in Korean pop-culture in that decade that this movie's sequel is probably hitting a lot more theaters than the first did, so it makes sense to rename it rather than have it look like a sequel to something the audience hasn't seen. Thus "I, The Executioner", which is accurate if more Mickey Spillane-coded than the movie is, most of the time.

One kind of funny thing about this is, Veteran was a movie that fold who were not really that into Korean movies were telling me they really liked back at the time, even though I kind of didn't, so it's in my head as a popular-enough Korean movie that the name which highlights the original might grab more interest than this, even though I assume CJ has research saying otherwise. Also, the original somehow got lodged in my head as a different sort of not-great actioner - more nasty violence than bloat - so I spent a fair amount of this one scratching my head, thinking it feels like a weird sort of sequel to Veteran before looking at my old review and realizing, no, it's kind of the same issues. Time and memory are weird.

Kind of amusingly, depending on where you look for listings, this is sometimes shown as "Veteran 2: I, The Executioner". I guess this used to happen all the time - consider Police Story 3 becoming Supercop which leads to the oddity of Police Story 3: Supercop 2.


Beterang 2 (Veteran 2 aka I, The Executioner)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 September 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #5 (first-run, laser DCP)

For some reason, I had a different lingering impression of Veteran in my head from when I saw it in its original release nine years ago, which had me thinking that the new sequel felt kind of off, kind of like those later Jackie Chan movies where they called them Police Story sequels just because he was playing a detective even if they didn't really feel like the first two. It turns out, the problem is the opposite: Veteran 2 is kind of the same as the first, gassy and meandering enough that the reminders that Ryoo Seung-wan can do some great action make one wonder why there's not more.

For those that forget, the cop of the title is Seo Do-Cheol (Hwang Jung-Min), who tends to take point on a detective team led by Oh Jae-pyeong (Oh Dal-su) and also including Bong Yoon-joo (Jang Yoon-joo), Yoon Si-yeong (Kim Shi-hoo), and Wang Dong-heyon (Oh Dae-hwan). Their latest target is "Haechi", a vigilante who is killing criminals who seem to get off light, egged on by "Editor Justice" Park (Shin Seung-Hwan) and his YouTube channel, and they've been assigned to guard Jeon Seok-woo (Jeong Man-sik), a character from the first film who only served three years for the death of a pregnant woman he drunkenly attacked. For assistance, they are seconded Park Sun-woo (Jung Hae-in), who has gained a reputation as the "UFC Patrolman" thanks to videos of his takedowns, but the trails lead in directions that don't quite add up.

The timelines don't quite add up to think that someone at CJ saw the money being made by Ma Dong-seok's The Roundup series, themselves sequels to a movie from several years earlier, and realized they had something like that themselves, but there are some frustrating similarities: Investigative teams that are too big for everyone to be part of the story, trying to find a space to use other returning characters, trying to build a story around the lead cracking a case when his primary skill is fighting. It's got a lot of what made the first feel kind of bloated to start in a couple of side plots involving Do-cheol's wife Ju-yeon (Jin Kyung) and son Woo-jin (Byun Hong-jun), and even a lot of the main threads aren't as interesting as they could be, especially the ones that put Do-cheol and company well behind the audience. It all comes together in the finale, but the reaction is often that it kind of had to, not edge-of-one's seat excitement at how Ryoo and co-writer Lee Won-jae tie things together.

It is a bit more streamlined than the first, though, and what's interesting is that the filmmakers do seem to be trying to walk the walk in terms of their meta-commentary: Where the first one sort of did the standard shades of gray with how it was tough to be married to this sort of tough-guy cop, this film has how posturing about violent crime tends to increase it and make society more dangerous near its heart. Do-cheol has seemingly mellowed a bit, in that where he tends to pop off about wanting to lay a beatdown on suspects, he's actually a bit more methodical and by-the-book; Hwang Jung-min handles the assignment in a way that's eminently believable though not operatic in highlighting the conflict. There are points made about how Korea is actually very safe (the chief is frustrated by casual talk of serial killers because there haven't been any in almost fifteen years and doesn't want this treated lightly) and that claims of various dangers are exaggerated by those looking to profit that are eventually connected by action rather than lecture. There is, perhaps, a little consideration of how movies like this shape this perception, which maybe makes it tricky to build a truly satisfying story, and pulls Ryoo, often top-tier in how he stages action, away from what he does best.

When he does get to do more action, though, it's still noteworthy just how good he is: The opening especially is playful and fun, as Miss Bong infiltrates what is apparently an underground casino for wine moms behind the scenes of an all-night plastic surgery clinic, a funny idea that leads to some well-staged bits that find a sweet spot between slapstick comedy and quality action. The finale tries to adapt that somewhat, balancing the danger of a setting where one wrong step can be deadly with how the confrontation can't just be Do-cheol beating the hell out of someone without betraying the story, and does fairly well. In between, it makes for an odd situation as the characters plug away until it comes time for a confrontation and one is reminded that Ryoo, Hwang, and newcomer Jung Hae-in (and various stunt performers) are good at this: There's not just impressive physicality on display, but intent and characterization: Do-cheol seems good at this but showing a bit of age; Sun-woo shows a certain earned pride in his abilities; and Ahn Bo-hun's Min Gang-hun does carry himself like a junkie ex-special forces type whose skills are still sharp and almost instinctive beneath a mourning, drugged-out haze.

Like the first film, Veteran 2 feels like a good editor could get a really great 105-minute movie out of its two hours, even before getting to how the film just really will not stop tying up every sublot after it is basically over. There are a lot of good pieces here, but it bogs down trying not to contradict itself.