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.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 07: Waterloo, The Girl from Rio, and The Last Battle

Okay, hopefully it gets a little less effort-intensive from now on!

Dale rolls an eleven, making her way to Waterloo, one of the first imports I ever got from Imprint in Australia.

Then, the next night, Centipede rolls a 20, making his way out of the Korean section and down to the next row to land on The Girl from Rio, one of many crowdfunded silence in this part of the board. The "rule", inasmuch as you can call them that considering how willing I am to make them up as I go along, is that a 20 gets one a bonus movie, usually something already seen, but I've decided that to keep things fair and random, those will involve stepping through a boxed set, in this case the fancy Luc Besson one put out by Sony last fall, and since the silent was short, I watched The Last Battle the same night.

Given that the difference at the end of the last round came down to Dale having one more movie than Centipede, this might even things up!

Waterloo

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Seen 13 February 2026 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

Many epics end on a historic military battle; of those, many are clearly reverse-engineered to have a story that climaxes in or during that battle. And then there are the likes of Waterloo, which don't so much construct a story that will build to that finale so much as their makers figure out where you have to start so that the battle of Waterloo is the final 45 minutes of a movie long enough to be considered epic-length.

That, then, would be a couple years earlier, when Napoleon (Rod Steiger) is initially exiled to Elba after the French army was pushed all the way back to the suburbs of Paris, the nations of Europe having united to contain him. As we all know, it is not long before he has escaped, and while Louis XVIII (Orson Welles) sends Bonaparte's longtime lieutenant Marshal Ney (Dan O'Herlihy) to capture him, Ney soon rejoins the former Emperor as have many of the soldiers. Bonaparte then looks to pick up where he left off, with Europe once again having the Duke of Wellington (Christopher Plummer) lead the forces to counter him, with the armies eventually converging on Waterloo for a fateful battle.

I suspect that there have been an order of magnitude more books and movies made about Napoleon Bonaparte than Arthur Wellesley - the latter is not singular enough that you hear people described as having a "Wellington complex" - but this is a film about a battle, and a battle requires two people facing off, so we spend a fair time with Wellington. Christopher Plummer is, of course, thoroughly capable in the role, but that's the thing; Wellington is capable and professional and not terribly dramatic compared to his opponent, so Plummer has less to do; his scenes are basically waiting to be sent into battle against this foe, so the movie busies itself a bit with the people around him, notably a nice enough soldier who met a girl at a party they were both attending, more or less marking him as the way one will recognize the human cost of this carnage when he dies. Waterloo is often very dry getting to its title battle, and at times the cast doesn't actually seem to be performing their characters so much as standing in costume while famous words are read in voice-over.

Steiger, by contrast, at least gets to dive into playing this antihero and growl in rage at anyone who stands in his way. It's not really a biography of Napoleon beyond the lead-up to Waterloo, so aside from a few comments about not being able to see his son, there's not much that's personal. Steiger does at least give Bonaparte a sort of forceful charisma, which doesn't particularly contradict how he seems to be doing this campaign to spite the world and show Europe that it had no business resisting him as opposed to trying to achieve some sort of tactical or political victory. Maybe it was, historically, about more than revenge, but that's what animates Steiger's Napoleon and gives the film what emotional stakes it has.

It's striking just how static and dull the shots of the movie stars posing and reciting are when intercut with the massive movements of the Red Army who have been called upon the give the film a cast of thousands, but the scale is nevertheless astounding: Whenever the camera pulls back and up to reveal the armies forming up, shooting at each other's formations, and falling apart, one's jaw drops, and I cannot imagine what it must be like on the big screen. There's so much going on at such a scale that it's hard to conceive of how director Sergei Bondarchuk managed to actually shoot all this without the post-production tools available decades later.

It's not a particularly great movie, and even in the finale when it excels, Waterloo often gives the impression of just a lot going on rather than a sense of what's happening in the battle. But, boy, if one of our local movie theaters gets their hands on a 70mm print, I'll put down money for a ticket. The film does one thing very well and everything else just well enough to justify the time and expense to get there.

The Girl from Rio '27)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, crowdfunded Blu-ray)
Seen 23 February 2026 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, crowdfunded Blu-ray)

Give a movie a hundred years to age, and the preservation and ability to restore the film will be all over the place: The opening of The Girl from Rio is in two-strip technicolor, and while it's seen some wear, it's enough to make one's eyes go wide at how the filmmakers have clearly done their best to make it so vibrant that the images will persist in one's memory through the film. Other scenes appear to come from a print so damaged and degraded as to be a pasty white mess covering half the frame, obliterating the facial expressions one might be trying to read. It's maybe an unfortunate reflection of the movie itself - you see what the filmmakers can do even though it's often not sharp.

The girl in question is Lola Rojas (Carmel Myers), a dancer in one of Rio de Janeiro's most popular nightclubs. Her regular partner Raul (Edouard Raquello) is clearly enamored of her, but so is Antonio Santos (Richard Tucker), one of the most prominent men in the city with his fingers in every business, legitimate and otherwise, who takes her home every night. Recently arrived in Brazil is Paul Sinclair (Walter Pidgeon), a young Brit representing a coffee concern, who initially talks to Lola to prove she doesn't make a fool of all men; after all, he's got the lovely Helen (Mildred Harris) waiting for him at home. And while he inevitably falls for Lola, she is surprised to find herself intrigued by his resistance.

It's not a terribly substantial movie, running just a bit over an hour and having a plot generic enough that there are likely several similar movies with a different "exotic" city pasted into the title and without one necessarily cribbing from the other, and I wouldn't even be surprised if the two player films with the same name had the same plot but no direct inspiration (they don't, for what it's worth). It's a very basic template, with what stands out being how amusingly oblivious Paul is to how Helen is clearly moving on, and how Lola's landlady is a busybody who will obviously rat them out to Santos. It's a simple template and the movie doesn't stray from it.

Maybe the filmmakers intended to, at some point, because there seem to be vestiges of interesting details left: When Santos strong-arms Paul's supplier into not selling him coffee beans, he goes to "the independents", and it feels like there's some tension there (though, perhaps, it's less unique to this particular story than the sort of dealing that 1920s audiences more familiar with agricultural business would recognize easily). One initially might think that's what Santos means when he tells Lola that Paul has made enemies without his help, but it turns out he mostly means Raul, who is not only attracted to Lola but relies on her as a performance partner. It's a bit frustrating, because one can see the shape of a story here, but Paul especially doesn't really do anything; the filmmakers apparently don't want the audience to think ill of him for cheating on Helen getting involved in other conflicts and so are content for there to be attraction with Lola but for things to otherwise happen around them. For a short movie, it can feel dragged out.

Still, Carmel Myers and Walter Pidgeon are good-looking young leads with some actual chemistry. It being 1926, things aren't going to get too steamy and the film is built to not necessarily rely on sweet words, but the pair look drawn to each other and at ease, bristling meaningfully but not theatricality when folks say that they should maybe see less of each other and looking pained when they may separate for their own good. Richard Tucker (who, amusingly, would also appear in an unrelated film titled "The Girl from Rio" 13 years later) was in the midst of transitioning into silver-temple roles, and really nails the big shot who is handsome and charismatic enough to attract Lola in the first place but small and jealous enough to be a monster.

Drop the opening color sequence, and there's really not much to this bland but capable movie, although that does make it kind of a perfect example of this popular template.


Le dernier combat (The Last Battle)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Headcanon: Luc Besson's The Last Battle and E.L. Katz's Azrael take place in the same post-apocalyptic world, though obviously on different continents and at different times. Not that I think one necessarily inspired the other, because it's not exactly hard to to think "what if a genre movie had no words" independently, and if you're making your first feature on what is likely close to a shoestring budget (apparently expanding a short, "L'avant dernier", with much of the same cast and crew), I bet that not having to worry about dialogue frees up takes to use on action.

It opens on a man (co-writer Pierre Jolivet) constructing an ultralight airplane in an otherwise empty office building, which will allow him to fly above the marauders led by a sadistic "Captain" (Fritz Wepper) operating nearby - although, when it crashes, he's taken care of by an eccentric doctor (Jean Bouise) who has a young woman (Petra Müller) hidden on his property. The man assists the doctor, hoping to get close, but a man outside the gates (Jean Reno) decides that he's going to come for her more directly.

Besson was Besson right from the start, apparently: Jean Reno is in the cast, Eric Serra does the music, the script is a genre boiled down to its essence but with style and whimsy, and, boy, is he not doing well by the women in his cast. It's not like the men come off much better, since this is the sort of post-fall-of-civilization future where one grades the various loners on who is just a little bit less selfish than the others, but it's not exactly creative in the midst of a movie where the filmmaker is clearly trying to get notices for having some style so he'll get tapped to make bigger things. This is pretty much a demo reel with a basic story - some action, some jokes that don't stop it, a handle on the tone, and a finale of sorts.

And, sure, it demonstrates that well enough. Besson and cinematographer Carlo Varini get some great shots, taking decent advantage of their black-and-white stock to keep their desert and urban settings interesting to look at but not too pretty or self-consciously dour; the team also stages action well, even at this early stage; there's characterization in the way folks fight. Jean Reno's "brute" attacks with a determined mania while Pierre Jolivet's protagonist is trying to figure things out in a way that reflects that we're introduced to him as a builder. I don't know that anybody watching this in 1983 would look at Reno and figure on him eventually becoming an international star, but it's not exactly surprising looking at it 40 years later.

Like a lot of low-budget early works Le dernier combat is more interesting than great, worth watching for seeing the seeds of what would emerge as Besson earned bigger budgets and moved onto the international stage. It doesn't have the playful, understated energy of his better works; he has to stretch thin material more than he can chase odd impulses. It's good that Sony throws this into the boxed set, but, no, it's probably not worth using 4K replication capacity so it matches the rest.


That pulls the number of films watched even; who's doing better?

Dale Evans: 33¾ stars
Centipede: 34 stars

Centipede pulls ahead by a nose!

Fantasia 2025.08: "Methuselah", A Grand Mockery, Every Heavy Thing, The House with Laughing Windows, "Things That Go Bump in the East", and I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn

This day started early:

3:30am, to be precise, with the alarm right in the room, rather than just the hallway. I don't know what it was about - I just headed out and tried not to bother the firefighters who showed up impressively quickly - but I'm glad it wasn't serious. This is a twelve-story building with 10 rooms on my floor, and there were not 100 people milling about afterward. Maybe it's just usually filled with college students and mostly-empty for the summer (there are about a dozen keyboxes for AirBNB rentals and brokers showing it to prospective tenants locked to the front steps, and that doesn't even include me), but I have a hard time imagining the folks who sleep through that din or say, man, that's a lot of stairs, maybe I'll evacuate when I smell smoke or firefighters pull me out.

So, it was almost 4am by the time I got to bed, which is just shy of the line where I usually say it's not worth going back to sleep. My body was going to wake me up at 8am or so anyway, though, and I wound up dragging something fierce for most of the day. It didn't help that most of the afternoon programming was from the Underground section and I'm not really a giallo guy, so I wound up dozing off or zoning out until the shorts package in the evening.

I mean, after "Methuselah" by Nathan Sellers; his short was 4 minutes long and pretty darn strong. Obviously, Justine was not really looking at my giant lens-covering finger in disdain (why Samsung designed this phone so that ones finger naturally rests there whne using the buttons to snap a picture is beyond me).

On the other hand, Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon made a movie that was often dark and grainy and very easy to zone out to, so I missed some the film, their Q&A gave the impression that Brisbane is not exactly an Australian hive of creative expression, but it was a scene where everybody sort of knows each other, and they wound up working together, if in unfamiliar roles at times.

Mickey Reese and Josh Fadem were really "on" in their intro and Q&A for Every Heavy Thing. I dig the energy which I didn't have, and that Reese wrote it for Fadem, who had played over a hundred supporting roles but never had a lead, so this was made with him in mind, and pretty much the entire cast. I suppose, as with Brisbane, when you're making movies in Oklahoma City, you know who you're working with.

After that, it was The House with Laughing Windows, and, as I say below, I am just not a giallo guy.

At some point after that, though, the caffeine kicked in or something, or maybe the "Things That Go Bump in the East" selections were just more my speed. Here we've got our moderator (Xige Li?), "Mom, Stay Dead" director Lee Na-hee, programmer/translator Steven Lee, "Dhet!" composer Dameer Khan, and "Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension" co-star/producer Eriko Nakamura & director Koji Shiraishi. As you can see, it was a pretty fun session, with Lee talking about how her short was inspired by how her mother actually blossomed once she finally moved out of the house, gaining a bunch of new hobbies and creating art, which got her thinking about how there are a lot of movies about how children grow at times like this but not necessarily parents.

Khan, meanwhile, is local to Montreal, representing "Dhet!" since director Ummid Ashraf had visa issues. There seemed to be more trouble with visas this year then I remember being a case before, although that could just be random variation. It does demonstrate how even relatively small-scale shorts like this have international collaborators, and Khan talked about how the giant highways the protagonist is traveling make Dhaka a very loud city, so the music had to be layered and a bit discordant, enough so that when it is suddenly quiet, the eeriness of it really hits.

If you look at IMDB, "Red Spider Lilies" is listed as "Pilot Version", and Eriko Nakamura said that, yes, they were very much looking do something more with it. I hope they do; it's a fun premise! She also mentioned that she was in another film at Fantasia this year, Dollhouse, but also not to go see it on her account because it wasn't really one of her great acting roles.

Finally, I made it across the street to Hall, where this is sort of the best picture I got of the surprisingly big contingent for I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn: Writer/director Kenichi Ugana plus actors Lissa Cranadang-Sweeney, Rocko Zevenbergen, Madeline Barbush, Estevan Muñoz, Ui Mihara, and Katsunari Nakagawa. One thing Mihara mentioned is that she felt a lot like her character going into the movie: If you look at her IMDB page, she seems to be have done an episode of TV every week or so for the past couple years, and felt pretty darn burnt out before doing this one. Though she maybe could have done without the amount of gross things she had to put in her mouth to spit out.


That's the start of Week Two on Wednesday the 23rd; Thursday would be Redux Redux, The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, Anna Kiri, and my first go at Transcending Dimensions. Today (Saturday the 2nd), my plans are Foreigner, Circo Animato, Mononoke II, and Queens of the Dead. The School Duel and The Virgin of the Quarry Lake are pretty good.


"Methuselah"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP):
:
A poem of a short film, using striking words and imagery to how trees are both dynamic and static features of nature - always growing but persisting for centuries in some cases - and how too many have been used by humans as sites for hangings and lynchings, tainting them forever. The narration by Jordan Mullins walks a line between reverence and rage, and the images from filmmaker Nathan Sellers manage to emphasize the evil men do with these marvelous things.


A Grand Mockery

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

A Grand Mockery is engrossing for as long as it feels like an 8mm pseudo-documentary, but as soon as it tries to consciously be transgressive or experimental, it starts to get a bit tiresome. The filmmakers have vision, but it's not necessarily clear.

It follows "Josie" (Sam Dixon), initially seen walking through a Brisbane cemetery, seemingly one of the few green spots in the city and a sort of postal network where folks leave messages and meet up. There's not much going in the city - things are cool with his girlfriend, the father he tends to is mostly non-responsive, and his job at a cinema involves either cleaning up the disgusting messes customers leave behind or trying to handle their obstinacy. It wears on him, both physically and in the increasingly unhinged notes from possibly-imaginary correspondents.

The wear doesn't really kick in for audiences until the film's final scenes; up until then, even the moments when it approaches the grotesque and despairing feel immediate and earnest, the portrait of a man in a place where his artistic instincts seemingly can't take him anywhere, the cemetery seemingly the only source of tranquility. There are drugs and drink accelerating it, but one mostly sees a situation where folks get ground down because there's no seeming mobility. Josie doesn't necessarily seem inclined to make a living out of his drawings and the like, but they go unshared and he seems to have no other avenue to express himself to others.

The finale, though, is just endless. The filmmakers are good at sneaking up on the audience for a while, Josie's increasingly scraggly hair hiding how some health issue is distorting his face until he winds up in a strange bar that may only bear a passing connection with reality. At that point the movie starts banging on past any point it could be making, drawing out its grotesquerie until Josie is a drunken, distorted mess. Fair enough, I guess - that's arguably where lives of quiet desperation wind up - but after a while the filmmakers have eroded a lot of the goodwill the film had earned.

It goes on a bit as he gets outside the city, and the green of the woods and swamp seems like a bookend to the cemetery at the start (8mm green seems like a very specific color), and for a bit I wondered if it was intentional, starting in a city graveyard and ending outside the city in a place dense with life, but, apparently, the decay is too strong at this point, and the film trundles on until it ends in a whimper.


Every Heavy Thing

* * ¼-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I'm mostly giving this a pass, because even though I didn't doze off much, I feel like I missed a lot of pieces that were important to the story.

It starts out conventionally enough, with a Scream-style pre-credits murder before introducing the audience to Joe (Josh Fadem), who sells ads for the local alt-weekly, one of the last in the country, reluctantly accompanying a friend to a show - he and wife Lux (Tipper Newton) seem to have separate social lives - only to enjoy it more than expected, and see the singer get murdered. Killer William Shaffer (James Urbaniak) says he's going to let Joe live because it amuses him, but it will amuse him much less if Joe does anything stupid. Like helping the paper's new writer (Kaylene Snarsky) when she has leads on the disappearance William is responsible for.

The problem in a nutshell is that the story really doesn't have any place to go after William reveals himself, about ten ten minutes into the movie; Joe winds up in this holding pattern but it plays more like awkward social situations rather than walls closing in or real danger. Writer/director Mickey Reese puts in other threads - Shaffer as the vanguard of various tech companies moving their operations to the city, an old friend (Vera Drew) returning to town after her transition, various family concerns - but none of them seem ironically more urgent than the man who is murdering women and apparently disposing of the bodies very well, which isn't presented as a big deal itself versus how it puts a man in an uncomfortable situation.

Plus, the jokes are only about half as funny as the writers seem to think. It gets by on volume for a while, and Tipper Newton is maybe the film's most valuable asset as Lux, seeming to put a weird and amusing spin on just about everything. After a while, though, things just aren't that funny, and the film made in part to give Josh Fadem a lead role after a lot of character work winds up showing why he hasn't been cast in one before: He's affable and has pleasant chemistry with almost everyone else, but it highlights him as a glue guy in a cast the way Joe is in his community, but maybe not with the sort of charisma that puts him at the center of a story.

One admires the attempt that this sort of outside-of-Hollywood indie is making. Unfortunately, it seems too committed to a twist that seems inspired at first but goes nowhere.


La casa dalle finestre che ridono (The House with Laughing Windows)

* * ½-ish (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Order the old DVD at Amazon

I've probably posted some variation of this before, but I think I'm just not a giallo person. No matter the extent to which the director is regarded as a master, or how sexy the cast is, or how shocking or lurid the twists are, I just don't get drawn in, and The House with the Laughing Walls was not an exception to this rule. Like so many things in the genre, it falls in that gap between intriguing mysteries and unnerving horror for me.

(In fairness, all the films this afternoon suffered from my sleep being interrupted the night before, so I wasn't absorbing as much as I'd like.)

It feels like it should be a little more intriguing than it is, with an art expert (Lino Capolicchio) arriving to restore a church's peculiar painting, mysterious disappearances, and secretive villagers, but the film is too arch for much of its running time. Stefano doesn't really feel like anything, drifting through the story as strange things happen around him, not particularly defining himself as an academic or artist, and there seems to be an opportunity missed in using the restoration as a thing to hand the story and investigation on, where immersing himself in this artist's life and techniques draws him closer to the man's demons. Even with a new restoration, everything feels pre-faded, like there's never been any life to the story to start with. The mystery feels too distant.

It gets crazy toward the end, even audaciously so, but maybe it's a problem of genre-awareness, where knowing something is a giallo means that one is awaiting rather than dreading the inevitable, and the finale is surprising just because it's random rather than lying in wait to blindside a viewer. Sure, okay, the sisters are messed up, but not in a way that has anything to do with what Stefano has experienced, so it's not resonating.


"Magai-Gami"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Magai-Gami" has a pretty darn basic premise - folks in a scary place investigating an urban legend come face to face with monsters that will kill them if they look away - but it executes exceptionally well: Leads Ion Obata and Nagisa Toriumi are a fun pairing even as most of their banter is done over the phone, and the audience picks upon their dynamic very quickly even as the movie starts with them already on the ground. Mostly, the monsters are kind of great, feeling like a mix of visual effects and practical work that capture the freaky images of old illustrations while not looking more out of place next to a girl in a puffer jacket talking on a cell phone than a more modern design would.

Filmmaker Norihiro Niwatsukino doesn't have a particularly long résumé, but he seems very assured here, keeping the film moving even when it involves standing still, displaying a good handle on using what his effects team gives him, and setting up a supernatural-containment mythology in the closing minute or two that doesn't feel too much like it's trying to impress with how clever it is. The program guide describe the short as a proof-of-concept, and, yes, I'd like to see more.


"Ba Dong Yao" ("Hungry")

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Taiwanese puppet fantasy adventure is one of the best bits of any Fantasia Festival that contains it - I've rearranged schedules to make it work - and it was a really delightful surprise to see it show up in the middle of what initially looked like an animated short. It's a good animated short - it's got a strong style and a story about an ailing kid and his busy father in the middle of a festival that spans the traditional and the modern - but the live-action puppets means this film zigs where one expects it to zag, making his fever dreams feel a bit more real in the moment than his actual world even as they're clearly mythic.

Oh, and bonkers, as these goddesses fight to become his mother and the puppet combat is a kick to watch, fully embracing the capabilities and limitations of what these things can do, especially with a little FX work to eliminate rods and strings. It's great fun that leads into neat music and a satisfying finale.


"Mati Adat" ("Kill Tradition")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Compared to the others, "Kill Tradition" is a nifty slow-burner of a short, keeping just what the stakes are on the horizon as it builds the relationship between Idah (Nik Waheeda), the sort of precocious kid that gets into trouble, and her recently-widowed mother Iman (Ezzar Nurzhaffira) as they prepare a meal for an upcoming ritual. Waheeda is charming, and Nurzhaffira really nails this vibe of how having this girl is wonderful yet tiring. They're highly watchable, especially Nurzhaffira, once the inevitable reveals itself.

That's when the audience sees where the title is going, in a couple of ways, and while Nurzhaffira plays up how this is more than she can take and the devastation of it, writer/director Juliana Reza and the rest of the team emphasize what sort of inertia tradition and ritual have. It's evil tradition - even with what appear to be actual supernatural entities, there's no strong justification that this is effective or necessary - and Reza highlights the callousness of it as much as the grace of those consumed by it.


"Mom, Stay Dead"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

Filmmaker Lee Na-hee kicks off her short with a fun image - grieving daughter Sora (Oh Sohyeon) working her way through a book with "101 Ways to Summon the Dead", with #44 being the Ghost Summoning Dance - before coming up with a neat twist: The ghost she summons (Cho Ahra) seems to be roughly her age, having moved on from Earthly concerns, including the daughter she left behind, into her idealized form. There's maybe a fun sitcom premise in here, something about how family members would really relate if you removed the societal obligations and expectations from them.

It's maybe not far from the likes of Back to the Future or Chinese hit Hi, Mom - though I can't think of any that pull someone into the future rather than having their kids in the past - but aside from what Lee discussed in her Q&A about discovering what her mother could become once she was no longer worried about taking care of her daughter on a day-to-day basis, there's something intriguingly weighty here about spirituality. Sora has been using religion and magic as a way to fulfil her desires rather than really contemplating what all this implies, even as the mother recognizes innately that this girl needs something from her.

A very nifty twist on the idea of moving on that feels all the more honest because of how absurd and thought-provoking it can be simultaneously.


"Dhet!"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

There's a really strong theme across short films and anthologies this year of how gig work like rideshares and delivery is a sort of hell designed to be inescapable until it finally crushes a person, and I kind of worry that it will wind up staying in shorts and their equivalents in other media, because if you've got the money to make a feature, the business model behind this is kind of an abstract thing and you mostly see the convenience. It's a longer distance between classes than it used to be.

"Khet!", from Bangladesh, is a pretty decent example. The story itself is pretty basic - motorcycle-taxi guy (Ahsabul Yamin Riad) ignores a homeless man (Fozie Rabby) telling him not to take a certain turn and winds up unable to leave one of Dhaka's highways - and is perhaps ultimately more about the maddening geography of the city than the rider's circumstances. It's not a bad idea, since cities built around such highways are a topic of conversation in themselves, but it leaves writer/director Ummid Ashraf without a metaphorical offramp on top of the literal lack of one; the story kind of runs in circles without much chance of an ending that truly satisfies.


"Red Spider Lilies: The Ascension"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Things That Go Bump in the East, laser DCP)

"Red Spider Lilies" isn't quite made just for me, but it does take a genre I tend to really like - the haunted family calling the sort of professional exorcist who carries themselves more like an exterminator than a religious fanatic - and eventually twists it into one I like even more (which would be telling). Here, that's the Aoi sisters, living in an old family house, where one night something possesses Kotoko (Tomomi Kono), leaving Nana (Tomona Hirota) to call the famed Teshigawara (Hirotaro Honda), whom younger sister Ami (Eriko Nakamura) has seen a lot on television. Once there, though, Teshigawara finds this to be much more serious than his usual situation.

It's not a new observation that exorcism stories arguably work better in East Asian environs than elsewhere is that there is a sort of formal place for ghosts and demons in local mythologies with the opposing forces less formalized (in the West, there's the rigid hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the likes of snake-handlers but not a lot in between). So there's room for Teshigawara to be a professional and a celebrity and a lot of entertainment as the Aois interact with him like that, but also to be able to go in another direction when a twist comes without a whole lot of effort. Honda sells it well and injects dry humor into the film that doesn't undercut what else is going on, but the three sisters are great fun as well: Eriko Nakamura gets attention as the very funny Ami, but Tomona Hirota and Tomomi Kono solidify their older siblings as the short goes on.

Like "Magai-Gami", this is pretty explicitly a pilot/proof of concept, and I would quite like to see more.


I Fell in Love with a Z-Grade Director in Brooklyn)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festiva, laser DCP)

Watching this film, I chuckled at a low-budget horror-film producer being named "Rusty Festerson", and the actor playing him. Are they going to get that this Larry Fessenden cameo is a joke in Japan, or is this a film made for an extremely specific audience? If it is, that niche definitely includes me, and I'm glad to see it.

It opens by introducing two folks from different worlds. Shina (Ui Mihara) grew up in Japan with things coming relatively easy: Naturally pretty and doing okay in school and sports despite not really having to work very hard at them, show business was the first time she really had to apply herself, and really take pride in succeeding. Jack grew up in Eugene, Oregon, without anything ever coming easy, diving into horror movies and heavy metal, and eventually moving to New York City to work for Festerson's company and getting frustrated when it's just a job. Shina is frustrated too, showing disdain for her work, and taking a trip to New York with boyfriend Ren (Katsunari Nakagawa) to escape the limelight. Once there, though, English-speaking Ren finds himself frustrated by her nonsense and she feels disrespected, and an argument winds up with Shina, with no money or ID, outside a bar where Jack and his friends are commiserating over the star of their movie dropping out at the last minute. When Shina has nowhere to go at closing time, Jack lets her sleep on his couch, and manages to communicate that he'll pay for a flight back home if she acts in his movie, not knowing she's a big star rather than just a pretty face.

All in all, it's a fun little movie, charming as all get-out with the filmmakers keenly aware that a romantic comedy must be that, with everything else a secondary concern. And it works; even if I don't entirely buy that this pair falls in love with each other, I do believe that they fall in love with making movies with each other, and that's nearly as good for the movie's purposes. If that's something writer/director Kenichi Ugana planned for, that's smart, giving him a fallback position in case the romance doesn't quite get over, as the "making movies with friends" energy is solid enough to believe in Shina's half of the story.

That's sort of the film's biggest issue - Shina is a lot funnier and sympathetic, with a stronger arc than Jack, and I don't think it's necessarily a matter of assuming a foreign-language preform meets a certain standard even when you'll notice the flaws in one's native tongue. Ui Mihara is given a lot of assignments and mostly pulls them off, from the celebrity who is shallow enough that one can laugh at her arrogance to the professional kind of appalled by the mess she's found herself in to smitten to hurt; all kind of tying back to her opening mission statement. Estevan Muñoz isn't quite just given one note as Jack, but he's always playing it at full volume, and I don't know that it's a matter of Ugana being more comfortable in his native language and culture. The English-speaking supporting characters are by and large fun, but Jack is not a complementary half of the movie.

Fortunately, the rest of the movie is a good time, full of deadpan humor, missed translation jokes, and the ability to walk the line between getting laughs from what a sketchy production this is for what will almost certainly be a terrible movie and earnest respect for them making it. Ugana seem genuinely fond enough of its scrappers and has the knack for getting the audience to smile at them, which not all movies rooting for underdogs manage. He and the cast make the tricky transition from Jack and company clearly exploiting Shina in an uncomfortable way to her being part of the gang, and if you can feel an ending being jammed into place, it is at least jammed solidly into place.

I do kind of wonder how well this plays at places other than Fantasia, which is in large part about this sort of love affair between Eastern and Western pop culture, as well as mixing the global mainstream and the lowbrow. Still, even it's obviously going to play like gangbusters in that specific room, I suspect it's going to really amuse the folks who would enjoy being in that room if they could.

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!