Asian Blockbusters: War 2 and Dead to Rights

Anyone know a good, English-friendly site for Indian box office? It would probably be a tricky sort of thing, since India has at least three or four movie industries based on language and region and international releases maybe account for more than they do in China, but I do get kind of curious about how (a)typical what hangs around Cambridge is compared to what's popular where it comes from.

I can look up how Dead to Rights did readily enough (although the site for Chinese box office has gotten slow!), although it does make me wonder how manipulated audiences and those numbers are; it's way ahead of other summer releases but it's as far from a fun movie as you'll see, though it may be in the "government/orgranizations heartily recommends this patriotic epic and maybe organizes outings or buys out theaters so tickets are free" category. But that's kind of paranoia about China as much as anything, I suppose, me kind of applying something I've heard about to the data because it explains the popularity of a thing I'm sort of lukewarm on.

At any rate, both of these did well enough to get a second week in and around Boston, and you could certainly do worse if you want to see a big movie during the August doldrums.


War 2

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 16 August 2025 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Where to stream the first to catch up (Prime Video link), or order the Indian DVD at Amazon

Even when the interval is completely edited out of an Indian movie for US release - you don't even see the word appear on screen before a fade-out/fade-in these days - there's often no missing how much these movies are built around the cliffhanger. That can be a lot of fun when it's a fun twist that makes it feel like you're getting a movie and its clever sequel at the same time, although for War 2, it's more a case of one half being stronger as it tries to be that, leaving enough action to be fun but not quite great.

It opens with the first film's hero, Kabir Dhaliwal (Hrithik Roshan) singlehandedly taking out an entire yakuza family in Japan, though he's no longer working for Indian intelligence but as a freelance assassin. It's actually kind of both - Colonel Sunil Luthra (Ashutosh Rana) has recruited him to go deep undercover in the hopes of his being recruited by the Kali cartel, a loose confederation of criminal and terrorist organizations surrounding India, with Indian businessman Gautam Gulati (K.C. Shankar) looking to use the organization to secretly control the country. He succeeds, but at terrible cost, leading Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor), the new head of JOCR, to assemble a task force including Luthra's daughter Kavya (Kiara Advani), a hero in the air force, and top special-ops agent Vikram (N.T. Rama Rao Jr. aka "NTR") to track him down, even as Kali plans an operation that could plunge the whole region into chaos.

I do believe that I outright cackled at the increasingly deranged action of the first half just enough to forgive a pretty leaden second half. The opening segment is kind of a mess - it's full of characters who are described as very important but vanish right after the action sequence they are in is done, for instance - but the sheer glee the filmmakers show in immediately escalating after the last sequence and portraying its super-agents as downright superheroic keeps the energy up even as the story starts to emerge. The second part, meanwhile, starts with a flashback that must run a full half hour desperately trying to create a tragic shared backstory for Kabir and Vikram, and later serves up another that is such an obligatory romantic number that it undercuts its intention by being nowhere near as passionate and entertaning as the song featuring Kabir & Vikram. You could probably cut a whole ton of that out, just focusing on the threat to the country, and have a good action movie without the attempts to make the mission personal bogging things down.

As such, it's a messy movie in the opposite way of the first War, which was ridiculous but in audacious ways in how it was always trying to top the last twist. That one was darn near incoherent by the end, but rose to a crescendo. This feels like the sort of movie where they've pre-vizzed the action scenes before the script was done and then struggled to connect them. Maybe that's why it seemed so front-loaded - that's where the good, nutty action fit story-wise, leaving relatively drab material for the finale.

Still, the good action is a lot of fun, betraying only a passing concern for actual physics, but kinetic and leaning into being larger than life. The bit with the wrecking ball, for instance, has a delightfully hilarious cartoon logic, and it's maybe only the second-most ridiculous thing in that set piece; there's also a quality runaway train sequence (although I do seem to recall something similar in one of the Tiger movies). There are bits where the characters supposedly being secret agents working in the shadows makes the bits of Bollywood musical that still cling to these movies even funnier, because they're really riding the line between "there's a song playing and everyone is stopping to dance" at times.

I still kind of dig Roshan in this role, especially when he gets to do grizzled cockiness rather than having to flail at melodrama, especially in contrast to NRT's battering ram, which is very fun in this context even if I might quickly grow impatient with this character as a lead should the filmmakers fork him off into another corner of the YRF Spy Universe. I kind of wish Kiara Advani had more to do even after they've worked to give her a shared backstory; she's kind of hanging around until they need a pilot. Anil Kapoor's Vikrant Kaul, meanwhile, is one eyepatch away from being Indian Nick Fury, which amused me greatly.

War 2 is a very silly movie, and it's at its best when that's what it's going for instead of grasping for tragedy and emotion.


Nanjing Zhao Xiang Guan (Dead to Rights)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 August 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Dead to Rights is one of those movies that is a huge hit in China - $380M+ box office during a summer where few have reached half that - in a way that makes one pause. It's impressively mounted and fairly well made, and between the description and English-language title it has been given, it sounds like a nifty thriller . In actuality, it is a dour film about the horrors visited upon the audience's great-grandparents, and is that really what folks want to see more than anything else when they go to the movies right now, or has attendance been boosted/inflated, as had been known to happen with these patriotic historical films?

In this case, it begins as Nanjing falls to Japan in 1937, and postman Su Liuchang (Liu Haoran) is attempting to flee, as the Japanese are slaughtering them, as their uniforms and mailbags look military enough to their eyes. He flees into a photo studio, only to quickly be confronted by Wang Guanghai (Wang Chan-Jun), who is working as a translator to earn exit passes for himself, his wife, and his son, in this case, for army photographer Hideo Ito (Daichi Harashima), who can shoot but doesn't know how to develop film. Neither does Su, but the actual proprietor Jin Chengzong (Xiao Wang) is hiding under the floorboards with his wife and daughter Wanyi (Yang Enyou). Jin will teach Su (going by the alias A-Tong) the craft if he hides them, but it gets harder - looking to protect his mistress, actress Lin Yuxiu (Gao Ye), Guanghai install her in the photoshop as A-Tong's wife, and she has smuggled wounded soldier Song Cunyi (Zhou You) in via her luggage. It's a lot to keep hidden, and the fact that the photos Ito brings them to develop often contain atrocities, and are they any less complicit than Guanghai for developing them?

There's some irony to wondering if people really want to see this, as one can see; the film is, at times, about its characters being very torn between the feeling that developing photographs of what would later be called The Rape of Nanjing makes them collaborators in these horrors and ultimately realizing that this might be the only way of exposing these atrocities. It's strong medicine, but the generation that experienced this first-hand is almost completely gone, and if you want to reinforce its memory, you've got to make something scarring but compelling enough that people want to see it. A Chinese Schindler's List of sorts, where the horrors are just short of overwhelming, but there's just enough heroism underneath to prevent a message that fighting evil is ultimately pointless.

Is this that movie? I'm not sure. Writer/director Shen Ao has seen the power of the central dilemma but not necessarily made it what drives the movie. The characters talk about it on occasion, but it doesn't really become what they're doing on screen until it's time to reveal how something was accomplished at the end, by which time they've kept the thriller elements off the screen so much that it's barely even partially the sort of movie where one is looking for how the sleight of hand is pulled off. It's almost entirely about how the people of Nanjing have been sadistically murdered by the Japanese by that point, whether they are in the midst of heroics, actively or passively collaborating, or just being in the wrong place at that point in history. It's not a story happening against that background; the background is the story, and the heroes must be utterly steadfast while the corruption of those who are less can't quite become interesting enough to take the center.

Shen does it well enough, as filmmakers who are not particularly subtle or subversive go. Dead to Rights one of those war movies that is relentlessly gray and desaturated, right up until the moment a Japanese soldier wishes they had color film to capture the gore and a river soon runs red with blood for some of the only real color in the film. He puts together a few good scenes and does okay pushing how terrible things can be without getting walkouts (I imagine his crew is well-practiced at staging military action with clearly-depicted violence and martyrdom from the sheer number of war films China produces). He's good with his cast, and they contribute performances that wouldn't be out of place in a movie intending to more thoroughly explore various parts of its story: Liu Haoran is an amiable lead and has enough chemistry with Gao Ye's Lin Yuxiu that you could probably build a good movie around the pair getting to know each other rather than skipping to the highlights; Wang Chuan-jun gives Guanghai enough sweaty desperation to be interesting in a movie that isn't going to moderate its contempt for traitors even while occasionally giving lip service to where the line is. Daichi Harashimo does very nice work showing Ito mature into something more willingly monstrous.

For better or worse, Shen doesn't appear to be a guy who tries to get cute or ironic trying to find nuance or poke at the party line, which works better here than in previous film, No More Bets (that one abandoned flawed but interesting protagonists for an extended lecture). Still, he can occasionally go above and beyond, as when the characters briefly stop to solemnly say slogans or when the film ends on the most extreme "cringe does not pay and justice was done" epilogue a film can have. It's not exactly wrong, but the film is not built in a way to allow its heroes to feel any regret or discomfort for what they had to do in awful circumstances, and one can see that.

Ultimately, Dead to Rights is two hours of solemn misery and while I probably wouldn't have this story be anything else, I might like it to be more.

Lunar New Year 2025.05: Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants

I take photos of the end credits just in case IMDB isn't particularly helpful on occasion, but it seldom looks this good.

AMC switched things up a bit for this particular week, opening the Indian films at Causeway Street while this opened at Boston Common, counter to what's become the norm of late; I kind of suspect they didn't necessarily want three Chinese films at the 13-screen Causeway Street location, and that appears to be where Detective Chinatown 1900 is lingering. Something interesting is that, despite being right next to Chinatown, it's the first opening night for a Chinese film in a while where I didn't feel like I was the only person who needed subtitles. A lot of English being spoken on top of ethnicity, and I kind of wonder if some of the young stars are known for other things.

I don't think it was only playing in 2D because there was only room for one screen - although that was probably why 3D shows for Ne Zha 2 were initially scarce before the chain realized showtimes were going to sell out - because Sony seems relatively less enthused about using it these days, and I don't know how much the hardware side no longer putting out 3D televisions and dedicated Blu-ray 3D players has to do with it (their 4K players do tend to have 3D as an unadvertised feature) or if it's just because they're not getting much return. Doesn't much matter, I guess, except that I'd like to see it that way, and you can't even count on regular Blu-rays out of Hong Kong for Chinese movies these days, let alone 3D. But maybe we'll get lucky!

She diao ying xiong zhuan: Xia zhi da zhe (Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2025 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

There's a certain flavor of Tsui Hark film that you don't see quite so much since he started working with the big Chinese studios, the sort where he's seemingly trying to cram all the good parts of a sprawling epic into 100 minutes and doesn't quite have the FX resources it demands. During his Hong Kong heyday, he'd often have a producer credit while someone else directed, but his fingers were all over those movies. Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants is the closest he's come to that in years, for better or worse (but mostly better).

The Gallants in question are Guo Jing (Xiao Zhan), a son of the Song Kingdom who grew up in the grasslands of Mongolia, raised by the Great Khan, but who joined Huang Rong (Zhuang Dafei)on Peach Blossom Island to learn magical martial arts, but rejecting her when it appeared it appeared her father murdered his teachers. The real culprit is likely Western Venom Ouyang Feng (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), who sells the Novem Scripture which Rong-er has hidden and Jing-ge has mastered - and he might well provoke a war between the Mongols and the Jin-dominated Song in order to get it.

That muddies the story up more than a bit; as is Hark's tendency in these pictures, he front-loads with a fair amount of background to get to the stretch of the novel that he figured would make the best movie, but also occasionally jumps into flashbacks like a storyteller who sees his audience getting confused and is like oh, right, that doesn't make sense without this. For a while, it's a bit overwhelming but not much of a problem; the pieces fit even if you have to keep reaching back into the box. Once that's in place, the more serious problems start, as Hark is seemingly trying to include all the cool action scenes and melodramatic heights that there's not a whole lot of room for what goes in between. The back half of the movie has the young lovers dramatically separated and reunited without much time to feel like they're actually apart, and bombastics professions of loyalty that may or may not be enough to get someone killed and are pretty quickly forgiven. The climax is a massive showdown between the Mongol and Song armies that doesn't seem strictly necessary even before considering that all the audience really wants is Jing and Rong facing off against Feng.

It flows well, at least, in large part because, even with tragic backstory and other events pulling at them, Xiao Zuan and Zhuang Dafei have upbeat youthful energy and the chemistry to play scenes so they're not explicitly romantic but establish enough of a connection that there doesn't need to be a lot of hand-wringing about how they really feel later. Tony Leung Ka-Fai is the right villain for them, monstrous and powerful but also kind of amusingly pompous. He's big and rugged but doesn't have the sort of dignity and gravitas Bayaertu brings to The Great Khan in contrast. Zhang Wenxin is good as her daughter, a princess you can watch growing up (although she really doesn't look like the sister of the ethnically-Mongolian actors playing the Khan's sons at all).

And the action, of course, is just as much fun as you might expect; Hark has been honing this sort of high-flying, mystical martial arts for roughly forty years (since Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain in 1983), and though the action here is less aerial than in some cases, it's still larger than life and has the right weight to it, even when it's effectively force fields and chi blasts. There's impact to the blows and some freewheeling creativity to the staging that mostly doesn't quite cross over into slapstick. Even with CGI tools he could probably barely imagine forty years ago, he sometimes seems to want a little more than he has, with the CGI armies and locations not quite being top of the line. The fights between Jing, Rong, and Feng tend to be great fun, though, not quite gravity-defying but big and satisfying.

(I'm guessing that they're even better in a 3D presentation; Tsui Hark clearly plans for the technology and enjoys throwing things at the audience!)

For all that this is a big Tsui Hark fantasy-action movie where his reach exceeds his grasp by a bit, it's also possibly the most grounded of the three films in the genre released for the 2025 Lunar New Year, which is an odd turn of events, when you think about it. The result is a bit messy at times but has personality and assurance; Tsui Hark continues to do Tsui Hark stuff well.

Lunar New Year 2025.02: Creation of the Gods Part II: Demon Force

Been a while since I saw a Chinese movie near this sign, which I still don't quite understand. You would think the Chinese movies would play better in the theater right next to Chinatown, but perhaps the one at North Station is more accessible to students or something? Are Chinese students particular about reclining seats or something? I dunno.

I watched the first to catch up the night before, and found I didn't like it much more than the first time, but it was kind of good to be reminded of the basics before going into the next one. There's going to be a bit more of that going on over the course of the next month - I don't recall much about Ne Zha - but not as much as I'd thought, because apparently The Priests isn't streaming anywhere to prep for Dark Nuns and Operation Hadal does not actually seem to be a sequel to Operation Red Sea, despite how the trailer plays that up. Big "Happy Lunar New Year - Have Some Sequels!" situation this year.

One more thing: These aren't the only movies that literally have a message come up saying to stay through the credits for three extra scenes, but there's something specific about how Wuershan does it that I go back and forth between liking and disliking. Some movies in planned trilogies will say "stick around for a preview of the sequel", and Marvel tends to put in teases that are kind of inconsequential, but Creation of the Gods puts in things that are pretty consequential and which in some cases undoes what happened in the climax. It's as good a place to put these events as anything - they're not really part of either story - but on some level isn't how even serialized movies are expected to work.

I will say, at least, that I kind of felt sorry for the poor folks watching the extended edition of the second Lord of the Rings movie over at the Seaport at roughly the same time - sure, they're good films, but the fantasy adventure isn't as batty as it is here!


Feng Shen 2 (Creation of the Gods II: Demon Force)

* * *¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2025 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I zonked out watching Part I to refresh my memory the night before this sequel opened - it's kind of beautifully mounted but nothing special until the finale - but Demon Force is a big improvement, with all the big fantasy stuff from that finale on display right from the start, exciting action that feels like more than CGI armies rubbing at each other, and some romance and sexiness from someone other than the villains. It's a genuine upgrade beyond being past setting things up.

For those that don't recall, the world is beset by a Great Curse that can only be dispelled using the Fengshan Bang, a scroll that absorbs the chi of the dead which can only be opened by the King of All Realms, but the current Shang king, Yin Shou (Fei Xiang aka Kris Philips), is a monster who heard "more death means more power" and obliged, and though defeated in the previous movie's climax, he has been revived by his lover, a fox demon who has taken the body of Su Daji (Na Ran aka Narana Erdyneeva). Speaking of revivals, immortals Nezha (Wu Yafan) and Yang Jian (Sha Chi) have brought the king's beheaded son Yin Jiao (Luke Chen Murchi) to Kunlun Mountain to be resurrected, while formerly loyal hostage Ji Fa (Yosh Yu Shi) has fled to his home city of Xiqi. Yin Shou wishes to dispatch Commander Wen Zhong (Wu Hsing-Kuo), just returned from a ten year campaign near the North Sea, to destroy Ji Fa and Xiqi, the old man wishes to retire, but General Deng Chanyu (Nashi) is eager to step up, and she leads a force of 800 men, and the four giant Mo brothers.

There is immediate "just kiss already" energy between Ji Fa and Deng Chanyu, and it's a sign that writer/director Wuershan is looking to have more fun this time around; the melodrama that drew snickers in the first has given way to actual jokes without sacrificing the implied cosmic scope of the danger or the more grounded stakes of the siege, and there's room for joy rather than just decadence. Maybe, having examined the formal framework the last time around, there's a little more room to have the characters act human within it.

That's especially the case with Yosh Yu and Nashi, who have solid enough chemistry that they don't have to be making eyes at each other to the audience to pull for them, but very enjoyable as leaders trying to outwit each other. It lets Kris Philips and Na Ran step back a bit, and Huang Bo also gets to be a bit funnier even as he takes a more active role as Xiqi's strategist. Wu Hisng-Kuo is formidable as Wen. Even when Chen Muchi returns, the cast never feels nearly as same-y as it could in the first - or, at least, they're able to have a little fun with the endless succession of characters, like when a character's name appears on-screen three seconds before he is killed.

And, also, there are big fantasy battles, with giants and gargoyles, and a pursuit involving horses that plays like a classic cliffside car chase. There's also a scene where the fancy armor that had been so important for the previous movie and a half becomes more trouble than it's worth, which is a delight. The grand finale has a besieged city having to figure out how to defend itself against flying saucers, and it's an absolute gas. The visual effects are maybe not quite Hollywood quality, but if they're short of photorealism, it's in a way that recalls the artwork for these mythic and fantastic stories that the filmmakers are likely referencing.

A third film in the series is promised, and I must admit, I found myself a lot more excited about the prospect than I had been 24 hours before. It's a big, entertaining adventure that audiences can jump into without having seen the first, and hope that they hold to a two-year schedule and the next comes out in 2027.

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.

Harbin

Today in "hey, I wonder how various movies are doing in various theaters", Harbin opened on screen 6 at Causeway Street, which I think is the second-largest - it's located directly underneath the main screen in the part of the theater where one floor echoes the other, and my eyebrows went up when I saw it there, because it's a Korean film and while there were no big Hollywood releases this week, there were a bunch on Christmas, so - did they expect big things from Harbin? Did A Complete Unknown, Babygirl, or Nosferatu really just tank so hard at Causeway Street that this seemed a better use of the large screen? Does Harbin in particular have good buzz? Does the guy who programs Boston AMCs like Korean films and want the big war/spy movie on the biggest screen he can grab.

I dunno. This stuff's a mystery to me. But, hey, if you're gonna see it and have A-List, you've got three days to see it big.


Harbin

* * ½ (out of four)

Seen 3 January 2025 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming; where to watch when it is

Harbin is the second movie I've seen recently where I was really glad the theater had laser projection, because a bulb being pushed past its useful life would have absolutely destroyed the many scenes where Korean freedom fighters gather in rather dimly lit rooms. Looks nice, but very well could have been a disaster.

(Not sure what the other one is, just that I had the thought. Could have been The Fire Inside or Day of the FIght. Of course, it would be hilarious if it was the 35mm print of Nosferatu and I was just thinking of good projection in general.)

Japan annexed Korea in the first years of the Twentieth Century, and soon there was a Korean Independence Army fighting for their freedom, though often from across the border in Russia. As the film opens in 1909, their last operation was a disaster: After surviving a battle where they were outnumbered, General Ahn Jung-deun (Hyun Bin) was loath to execute Japanese soldiers in cold blood as his comrade Lee Chang-sup (Lee Dong-wook) wished to do, leading to a later massacre. Ashamed of failing his people, he proposes a plan to assassinate outgoing Japanese Resident General Ito Hirobumi (Lily Franky) while he is making the case for the annexation. It's a plan that could fall apart in a number of ways - the Japanese are notoriously good at turning captured soldiers into moles - and the investigation is being led by Lt. General Tatsuo Mori (Park Hoon), whose vendetta against Ahn springs as much from not being allowed to commit ritual suicide as from all the Japanese soldiers Ahn's men killed.

"Looks nice, but could have been a disaster" goes for much of the movie, which springs from a notable incident but can only embellish it so much to stretch it into a thriller with tension and a story arc. The film is a short-for-South Korea 108 minutes, but even that includes a fair chunk devoted to an exceptionally bloody flashback to that first battle. Despite how Korean movies are often given plenty of room to breathe, co-writer/director Woo Min-ho doesn't do much to flesh out the ensemble cast or dig into its villains. There's a lot to be said for narrative efficiency, but this isn't necessarily that; Woo moves from event to event without a lot of fuss, but that mostly means he meanders quickly rather than packing multiple layers into every scene. I presume this incident is well-enough known in Korea that much of the home audience knows how it ends, so there's not even a lot of inherent suspense.

It goes through the motions all right, though, and sometimes does more. The opening of a man crossing a river that has frozen, thawed, and regrown enough times to create a series of crisscrossing lines is just the first of a number of striking shots, and the studio splurged on location shooting in Mongolia and Latvia (presumably doubling for Vladivostok) to keep pieces looking nice, although the film will likely revert to dark scenes with people in dark clothing soon enough. The filmmakers also sprang for Japanese star Masaya Nakagawa (aka "Lily Franky") as Hirobumi, giving the role gravitas even as he highlights how, as a politician, he is rather detached from the people dying amid all this fighting. Hyun Bin, Lee Dong-wook, and Park Hoon are all solid as the principals.

The filmmakers are sometimes shockingly up front with the violence, especially in the crucial battle that comes near the start of the film; it often becomes a brawl in the mud as soldiers run out of ammunition and resort to knives, with blood flowing from one slit throat like a waterfall and another Korean fighter stabbing a Japanese soldier so much as to decapitate him. Somewhere in all this, there could be an interesting movie about the various sorts of violence that exist in wartime: Ahn and Mori both feel the need to perform self-harm out of shame; Hirobumi talks about how annexing Korea is a mistake because the Korean people will be more difficult to handle than inbred royalty and scheming scholars while Ahn seems to grasp that war crimes are not just soul-destroying but bad tactics; the volunteer corps that the Koreans are fielding may have more "spirit" than Japan's professional military, but maybe the reason they have to worry so much about spies is because people who are soldiers out of inflamed patriotism rather than being committed to it as a way of life are going to be looking for a way their life can get back to normal. It's all there, I suppose - nothing in the film really contradicts these ideas and it's what I'm thinking about after the movie - but the film never really seems to stop and think about them itself. It's too focused on drawing up plans where the audience doesn't get the thrill of seeing them executed, or ferreting out spies from among candidates who are essentially identical.

More than anything, it's a black-and-gray movie that never finds a great storytelling hook beyond "this was an early, important event in Korea's fight for independence", and it could really use that. Instead, it's serviceable and not bad on an otherwise slow weekend, and I'll bet the patriotic bits play a lot better back home in South Korea.

Fighter

It's not unusual for Indian movies to start with a wall of disclaimers to let you know that no offense was intended or harm was done - recall, for instance, the very specific list of animals we are assured were CGI-created in RRR - but the one before Fighter was absolutely crazy, in English but too much to take in even for those of for whom it is our first language. Some of it, I suspect, is things that I really don't know how to parse, like how the one character in a turban is portrayed as a gullible goofball, though I've got no idea if that's a common thing to do with Sikhs (or if I'm wrong to assume he's a Sikh), and that's why there's something about no disrespect meant to any ethnicity/religion/caste, while others seem to be trying to do a little cover on how the movie kind of progresses from the villains being "Jaish" terrorists (which I took as "not-quite-Da'esh") with many Pakistani officials kind of nervous about associating with them to a more nationalistic finale.

Some of it was just weird to me, though, like a mention that there was no exploitation of children involved or endorsed, and considering that there aren't any kids in the movie, what is up with that?

One thing I find interesting after watching a number of these Indian action movies over the past few years, though I really can't guess as to its significance, is that every time the stakes escalate enough that the Prime Minister is involved in a decision, he's played by an actor who kind of looks like Narendra Modi if you squint, and we don't generally do that when portraying the President in the USA: Depending on the movie, we'll go for some genetically capable-looking upper-middle-aged guy (a William Sadler type) or someone aspirational (Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact), or make him/her a specific character. It could be entirely practical; by the time a movie finishes production, we may have a new President, given the four-year election cycle, while parliamentary systems may have more stable leadership. But it is something I noticed this time!


Fighter

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 January 2024 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax Xenon 3D)

I wonder if, at any point, filmmaker Siddarth Anand and the rest of the people involved with Fighter asked how close the music could get to Top Gun without infringing, before realizing Viacom18 and Paramount were related companies. It's an association that does this decent-enough military action flick no favors, as it's not going to get anywhere near the weird horniness of the original nor is it going to go to the insane lengths the sequel did for realism. It's entertaining enough, but is also the kind of blockbuster that isn't going to do something interesting or surprising with its big budget.

It introduces the audience the the "Air Dragons", an elite unit in the Indian Air Force that includes the IAF's top pilot, Shamsheer Patania (Hrithik Roshan), call sign "Patty"; old classmate and wingman Sartaj "Taj" Gill (Karan Singh Grover) and his back-seater Basheer "Bash" Khan (Akshay Oberoi); veteran pilot "Rocky" Rakishi (Anil Kapoor); and rescue helicopter pilot Minal "Minni" Rathore (Deepika Padukone), among others. Patty is cocky enough to get on Minni's nerves but she can't help but be drawn to him, although it's clear Rocky wants no part of him in his unit. Meanwhile, Pakistan-based "Jaish" terrorist Azhar Akhtar (Rishabh Sawhney) is planning an crippling attack on the air force base at which they are headquartered, which would leave India vulnerable to an attack by Pakistani ace "Red Nose".

As Top Gun knockoffs go, it's not bad, although there are plenty of times when it doesn't seem like Anand, Ramon Chibb, and the other writers started from "air force movie" and never really came up with a more specific hook. You can set your watch by when certain bits of the plot will happen, and the relationship between Patty and Minni never really seems based on more than Hrithik Roshan and Deepika Padukone being the biggest stars/most attractive people in the movie than anything else (I'm not saying that Anand should have made a detour into Vertigo territory, but Patty's dead fiancée was a helicopter pilot in his unit - this should be something people comment on!). The patriotism/nationalism is laid on very thick, to the point of literal flag-waving. Also, by the end you've got to kind of wonder if this was really the whole "Jiash" master plan, because a great deal of time is spent talking about what a menace Akhtar is compared to him doing stuff that seems particularly clever and dangerous.

The aerial action obviously isn't exactly going to be on the same level as what we got in Maverick, but it can nevertheless be a lot of fun, especially when Anand is translating the let-us-say-heightened slo-mo craziness Indian action has become known for to something you might do with fighter jets, with physics-defying spins, zooming through explosions, and unlikely angles of attack, with the FX and 3D work being awfully darn solid, if one is not going out of one's way to compare it to a movie that a Hollywood studio would drop a couple hundred million dollars on. Akhtar not being a fighter pilot means that they're eventually going to have to get things down on the ground, which is maybe not necessarily the climax one might hope for.

The film manages to get further than it might on a pretty nice cast, even if Hritak Roshan and Deepika Padukone kind of seem like they're on parallel movies rather than one where they're supposed to be falling in love. Roshan is pretty good at giving the movie what it's asking for, though; he's aged into a guy whose wear projects both confidence and vulnerability. Less seems to be asked of Padukone, which is a shame. Anil Kapoor winds up the MVP, projecting restrained anger even when he's erupting, hitting the spot where one buys him as a grizzled veteran who can still step into a plane and show the others a thing or two, even if one maybe looks askance when told another character is his younger sister rather than his daughter. Rishabh Sawhney gets an "introducing" credit as Akhtar, but could maybe grow into being part of the next generation of Indian action stars, although it's kind of comical how muscular he is here.

It's not a bad flick, if not quite as jaw-dropping in either realism or the lack thereof as similar movies. Between Anand, Roshan, Padukone, and Kapoor, there's a lot of top-level blockbuster talent here, enough that they could have gotten away with doing something a little more unexpected with the basic premise.

This Week in Tickets: 8 January 2024 - 14 January 2024 (No movies in Texas)

Well, none on this trip to meet with the rest of the remote-working team, although when you throw in a couple film festival and previous trips, Texas is probably the state I've seen the third-most movies in, dropping to fourth once you include Canadian provinces, though maintaining the position if you include Australian states…

(Once again, the Alamo reservation is not a real ticket.)

When I look back on this book later, if I do, i won't remember that I had a 7:30am flight Monday, after-work commitments through Wednesday, and then a 1:20pm flight Thursday that had me ready to drop when I got home. But I did, hence the hole.

Friday, I hit the Brattle for the one screening that Ethan Coen's first solo film, Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, is getting in the Boston area, which throws a bit of a wrench into the "one does Macbeth, the other does Drive Away Dolls" analysis.

I kind of screwed up my plans on Saturday, not realizing that basically the whole Green Line was being replaced by buses of some sort, and missed the movie I'd planned to see, eventually just re-watching Bullet in the Head so that I could do a Film Rolls writeup.

Got back on it Sunday, though, catching If You Are the One 3 at the Causeway and then walking to the Seaport for The Book of Clarence, which has been a fun one to turn over in my brain for a bit. It was an accidental folks-playing-two-roles double feature.

(That was also a reminder of some of Boston's weird transit geography; I was planning to take the Orange Line to Downtown Crossing, the Red Line to South Station, and the Silver Line to Courthouse, but the direct route is a pretty straight 20-minute walk. Strange that there's no bus line that goes that way, or maybe there just isn't on Sundays.)

Pretty short week, but it's MLK Day, so I'll likely have two more things in my Letterboxd account by the end of the day and a fun week ahead.


Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2024 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, laser DCP)

Has Matthew McConaughey played Jerry Lee Lewis yet? Look at them; he should.

As to this documentary, which I believe is all archive footage except for a 2020 gospel recording session that feels like it was intended to be the centerpiece of another project, there's an interesting shagginess to it that doesn't always work in its favor. Early on, as rocker Jerry Lee Lewis is telling his story between full-song clips, you see how director Ethan Coen and editor Tricia Cooke are cutting between various interviews in a way that has Lewis in one decade finishing the sentence of Lewis in another, emphasizing how well he's honed his story in some areas, and then there's this sharp realization that parts of Lewis's life fits a pattern we still see today: A rise to broad popularity; a sexual scandal; time spent in the wilderness before a re-emergence playing to a more conservative crowd (in this case, labeling himself country rather than rock & roll); and an ongoing sense of being aggrieved, like it's ridiculous that people fault him for marrying his 12-year-old cousin. It's Louis C.K., or anyone else who complains about being "canceled" rather than questioning their own actions. But once Coen has shown this to the audience, he seemingly stops being interested in it, and never finds something else to talk about, presenting the hit parade and a variety of seemingly self-serving interviews from later in his life and live appearances where he seems to have a chip on his shoulder when they do approach the energy of his youth.

I think, in the ending titles, which reference his death and other events after the 2021 copyright date in the credits, making me curious what they were originally, we get some idea of what intrigued Coen: After the familiar cycle, Lewis kept going being Jerry Lee Lewis. He kept playing, touring constantly, relearning how to play piano after a stroke, somehow survived a bunch of self-destructive behavior, married and divorced four more times after that infamous pairing. It's not a redemption story, really, or a tragedy, and Coen seems fascinated by that lack of an arc.

There's something Coen-esque about that - Coen Brothers films are filled with eccentrics who simply are who they are, for better or worse - but I'm not sure it's a great documentary as a result, or at least not this one. The film winds up mired in this sort of stasis, and never does that much with how there's something uncanny about Lewis's appearance compared to his wild-haired youth, a sort of rigidness to the face and over-gelled hair that Southern folks like him seem especially vulnerable to. Is it just time, bitterness, or something else?

Anyway - get Coen, McConnaughey, and some other interesting folks together for a feature, and we might have something; more than this doc gives, at least.


The Book of Clarence

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2024 in Alamo Drafthouse Seaport #4 (first-run, DCP)

The most entertaining parts of this movie are when filmmaker Jeymes Samuel is at his most irreverent, but I suspect that, when I've turned it over in my head a few times more, the central thing that will stick out is that he likely is a believer, but one full of anger that other Christians don't live up to their professed ideals. He makes jokes, but they're steeped in drawing lines and calling people out.

It opens in "Lower Jerusalem", AD 34, with hustler Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield) and his best friend Elijah (RJ Cyler) in a street race that goes awry, leaving them with thirty days to pay back Jedediah the Terrible (Eric Kofi-Abrefa) or be killed, and the fact that Clarence is hopelessly smitten with Jedediah's sister Varinia (Anna Diop) isn't going to work in his favor. The best way to escape, Clarence figures, is to join or emulate the Messianic Jesus (Nichola Pinnock), but everybody knows Clarence to be an atheist looking for an angle - although when Judas (Michael Ward) challenges him to free the gladiator slaves held by Asher (Babs Olusanmokun), he at least manages one, Barabbas the Immortal (Omar Sy), which is kind of more than Jesus and his apostles have done on the ground.

That, I think, is the real crux of the movie: For all that Samuel is doing a surface-level sendup of Biblical epics - a Black Life of Brian, in a lot of ways - there's sharp intention here. Recasting the New Testament (except the Romans) with Black actors draws a straight line between two oppressed peoples, making those stories immediately relevant in a way they might not have been before. But he tweaks them in other ways to draw other lines, most notably in how he uses the miracles: The first we see is when Jesus stops the stoning of Mary Magdalene (Teyana Taylor) - it's unmistakably supernatural, but Elijah has already been shielding her with his body, taking the brunt of the stones - the effect is to burnish Jesus's reputation as much as it is to save Mary. Afterward, he asks the woman leading the stoning her name, and says everybody will know it soon enough. It's a good line, but it's also kind of pointedly cruel, and it's not the only time Jesus and his apostles are shown being superficially good but ultimately self-serving. Samuel is not necessarily saying Jesus was like this, but if you draw a line between Christianity as institutions across two thousand years, it very much seems like a man frustrated that the people who use Jesus's words and have immense power that they can use often do not do as much to help people as dirt-poor, seemingly self-centered Clarence does.

The jokes are also good, though, from an opening that takes a Ben Hur-style chariot race and puts it in the streets, because it's that sort of movie, to LaKeith Stanfield and Alfre Woodard playing a scene where Clarence tries to learn Jesus's tricks from his mother Mary like they're in different movies that somehow come together. Samuel has characters throw off funny, bantery bits that he could have easily saved for a more conventional movie. The whole movie is so off-kilter that every scene calls attention to the weirdness of it while, underneath, Stanfield is getting ready to do something interesting with Clarence becoming a better person. Stanfield is generally great, making little gags like pronouncing the T in "apostle" funnier than they could be while handling the fact that his crazy schemer is the straight man much of the time like it's easy. He does a great job of playing twins, making both very clearly the children of the same mother but finding nuances between them, and plays well off everybody. His best partner is probably Omar Sy, though, as Barabbas is entertainingly confident and chill in his claims of being "un-sword-able", but also has two of the film's best comic outbursts.

As with his previous film, The Harder They Fall, Samuel not only writes, directs, and produces, but composes the score and sings lead vocals on the new songs that make up much of the soundtrack, which more often leans more toward soul and hip-hop than conventional orchestration. It makes for an exceptionally singular experience, and while he's not afraid to get weird between the floating, almost-anachronistic lightbulb moments, and "papers please" bits, he's also a solid filmmaker when it comes down to it: He can stage action for thrills, heightened emotion, or laughs; he doesn't overload the audience trying to fit too many easter eggs into a scene; he can let an impactful moment breathe.

Yes, I think this one is going to grow on me. It's unsteady as heck while you're watching, but Samuel is making the sort of ambitiously weird movies that deserve some attention, and I hope folks keep giving him the resources to make different old-Hollywood genres his own.

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

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

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

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

So, how'd that go?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Banchikwang (The Foul King)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Mookie: 73 stars
Bruce: 72 ¾ stars

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

This Week in Tickets: 1 January 2024 - 7 January 2024 (Happy New Year!)

I do like a nice clean break between years on a thing like this. Figuring in the leap years, I think the next should be 2029!

(At some point I'm going to have to replace my printer/scanner, because the A Town Called Panic stub isn't real, though I'd like to be able to copy them from my phone, print them, and tape them in.)

Starting the new year on a high note, and also making sure I got to see the big guy at actual size again, I hit Godzilla Minus One a second time, kind of surprised just how well it drew on a New Year's Day matinee. It also felt like there were a lot more folks of Japanese descent than I usually see for something otaku-adjacent, which is kind of interesting, since this is the first time I can recall something from Japan really getting a quick release the way Chinese, Indian, and some Korean movies do rather than having a distributor sit on it and calculate empty weeks and mid-week showcases. It certainly makes G-1 one of the year's most interesting box office stories.

(Of course, there was, also, one guy who was maybe hung over from New Year's Eve or something and was cheering like a sports fan at the start and finish and snoring during the middle.)

This interfered with my plan to be kind of cute with Letterboxd by starting the new year with A Fistful of Dollars after ending with For a Few Dollars More, but, oh well. Also, I thought I had accidentally moved backward with these over about a year but it turns out I watched the Kino Lorber 4K for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly back in 2001. Yikes!

Tuesday, I headed down to the Seaport for the A Town Called Panic twin bill, which was a ton of fun, but, man, that place is weird right now. They're not sufficiently staffed or licensed or whatever for a full house, which means I'm always sitting further back than I want and the "sold-out" show has us all crammed into an area comprising a third of the theater. And, I suspect, there's a vicious circle where because this led to things selling out when the place first opened, people with the season pass plan are booking a lot of stuff they may or may not see early to avoid missing out, knowing they can cancel if they're not feeling it without penalty, but leading to a really-not-sold out show.

Wednesday was a night I couldn't get out of the apartment early enough for what I wanted to see, but somehow managed for 6pm shows the next couple of days: Thursday was a Scorsese double feature of GoodFellas and After Hours at the Brattle, filling in a blind spot and a half. I'm mildly amused that back when it came out, GoodFellas was considered a pretty expansive movie, but people don't notice 145 minutes that much these days. Friday was Noryang: Deadly Sea, the latest Korean blockbuster about Admiral Yi Sun-sin, with plenty of fine naval action.

Saturday was meant to be Anselm day, but my bus to Kendall Square just didn't come, so I put it off a day, catching it Sunday afternoon.

And that's the week! As usual, the plan is to update my Letterboxd account as I see more, but since I'm on a work trip through Thursday morning, who knows how well that will work out?


Gojira -1.0 (Godzilla Minus One)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2024 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, laser DCP)

Godzilla Minus One is a downright terrific Godzilla movie - you can split hairs over it being a remake, a prequel, or something else to the point where "Godzilla movie" is the best description - which finds a new angle on what to do with the material and creates what may be the most intense film of the series on a human level, making each appearance of its title monster a powerful punch in the gut apart from its great kaiju action. It may only touch on the atomic fears of the original and Shin Gojira, but the shell shock angle works terrifically. It is, in fact, a really fantastic way to use a kaiju in a movie, having him represent the overwhelming, towering guilt Koichi Shikishima (a terrific Ryunosuke Kamiki) feels; even if it's never stated, one easily comprehends the idea that Godzilla is following Koichi around, punishing him for his survival, daring him to die, or at least that this is the way it feels to him.

Some folks would have made that literal, but writer/director/effects head Takashi Yamazaki seems to respect both Koichi and Godzilla enough to reduce the giant monster to serving narrative needs for one character whose demons are not fundamentally different than those of nearly everyone around him. Godzilla resonates best when he represents something humanity must grapple with, yes, but he also must be Godzilla, a challenge that lifts the story out of the conventional.

On top of that, the film is also a lovingly-made period piece that does impressive work in recalling the image of mid-century Japan without making it seem ostentatious in either its detail or squalor, even as it does good work blending in modern effects. There are moments as people go about their lives in the devastated and rebuilding Tokyo that the movie feels like it could have been made in the fifties, maybe sharing sets and props with something by Ozu shooting next door, capturing the cultural memory of this time and place if nothing else. The filmmakers show restraint throughout that they cash in when it's time for grand spectacle or an emotional wallop.

The closest thing I've got to a complaint is that this isn't exactly my favorite Godzilla design; he's all armor plating on top of a beefy torso but not much personality (there's often a moment in these movies when he'll pause and create tension as to where he goes next, hinting at some sort of malice or connection with the Japanese people, but he's too much a force of nature for that here, aside from how it would tie him too closely to Koichi when the point is that Koichi isn't responsible for Godzilla). The action built around him is fantastic, though, highlighting the scale but giving humanity some agency. It's fitted into the story insmart ways, and Yamazaki does an especially nice job of building to the finale in a way that not-quite-quietly says "let's go". The filmmakers are also extremely well aware of the response certain music cues will get and deploy them at the exact right time.

It's just downright terrific, worth multiple trips to the theater and hopefully a spiffy 4k disc in a few months.


Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Heh, I had forgotten this was Yojimbo/Red Harvest at first. That's kind of the movie's issue - one doesn't necessarily make direct comparisons, but Clint Eastwood doesn't quite bring anything to match the mischievous cunning of Toshiro Mifune to this role yet (to the extent that The Man with No Name is truly a single role). He's good, of course, and it may just be that the film around him is a little unbalanced, focusing more on one of the two bosses than the other and making the gangs so big that there's not a whole lot of individual animus as they get gunned down. It doesn't quite feel like "Joe" is playing two gangs against each other, so much as deciding he wants to free the pretty girl from the Rojos and finding the Baxters kind of useful in doing so.

Still, one can easily see how it propelled Eastwood to stardom and shifted the style of the genre. The idea of his character isn't exactly fully formed in this first appearance, but Eastwood and director Sergio Leone know they want him to be kind of amoral but also quietly charismatic, likely to do the right thing when there's a right thing to do and people who deserve better. One can also see Leone injecting Italian pulp and style into this naturally American genre- there's a lot of blood shared between spaghetti westerns and gialli - with an eye that turns the dirty border town into something grandiose and mythic, though not the myths America tells about itself.

Leone and Eastwood, of course, would refine all of this to an incredible extent over the next two years - an amazingly rapid evolution when you look at it that way - but there's just enough here of what is to come to make a western that still holds up pretty well sixty years (and even more evolution) later.


"La bûche de Noël" ("The Christmas Log" aka "A Town Called Panic: Christmas Panic")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2024 in the Alamo Drafthouse Seaport #3 (special presentation, DCP)

As per usual, an enjoyably absurd vignette, even if it feels a little bit off from the last one of these I remember seeing: Horse seems unusually testy and the misbehavior of Cowboy & Indian a bit more malicious than usual, I think (it's been a while). It's still a fun, fast-moving cartoon that gets delightfully intricate during a daffy plan to heist a yule log and is just anarchic enough to avoid the obvious ironic ending.

One thing I did kind of like is just how self-explanatory and built-out the whole thing is. It has, as mentioned, been a while since I saw the feature (or even the latest special, "Summer Holidays"), and while some of the characters were old friends, some had been completely forgotten, but the filmmakers are absolutely able to acquaint (or reacquaint) a viewer with their world and all the folks in the orbit of Horse, Indian, and Cowboy, almost instantly so that one can roll along and let it get silly.


"La rentrée des classes" ("A Town Called Panic: Back to School Panic")

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2024 in the Alamo Drafthouse Seaport #3 (special presentation, DCP)

"A Town Called Panic" is at its best when the creators max out the absurd impossibility of its slapstick, and this is some of their most genuinely peculiar work, climaxing in a surreal trip inside a classmate's brain to try and steal the answer to a test that packs enough weirdness and invention for a feature into, what, five minutes? It's even better because it follows up on some minimal bit perfectly precise animation as Pig studiously works a problem out.

Part of what's delightfully on display here is how they embrace the weird style they've established over the series's first 15 years and get weird or smash through it when it doesn't work. I don't think I'd noticed how the bases of the Cowboy and Indian figures kind of hang around near their feet when they sit or otherwise don't quite touch the ground before, for instance, and the school bus is very much retrofitted to work with the animation style. And while I suspect these have always had some CGI enhancement on top of compositing, it's generally seamless, and the growing/shrinking potions here really have to rely on that even more, even though it's just as invisible as ever.


GoodFellas

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Warner Brothers in the 1980s: Enter the Blockbuster, 35mm)

Man, but does mafia stuff just bounce right off me, in a way that yakuza movies and British gangsters and a lot of triad movies generally don't. I'm not sure why that is, beyond the yakuza and triads being intriguingly foreign while the mafia seems establishment in some ways. It's so eager to present itself as respectable that even when Martin Scorsese is tearing that down - and this movie is all about screaming that these guys are amoral jackasses - it's drenched in nostalgia.

I can appreciate the craft here, don't get me wrong, and I suspect that I'd see it in a bit of a new light if I made myself sit through The Godfather and its first sequel without a heck of a cold battering my brain, because it almost seems like a response to those films, a reminder that the ugliness of the mob wasn't buried particularly deep. There's a story of someone maybe (or maybe not) realizing that the life he dreamed about as a kid was ultimately hollow, eventually, but the material itself, the stuff that gets Ray Liotta's Henry Hill to realize that the organization he loves will never love him back in the same way? Not interesting.

The execution, however, is legitimately terrific - it's a gorgeous-looking movie with a number of performances that rightly became iconic, and Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker are probably the best ever at making shocking, game-changing acts of violence feel repugnant rather than thrilling. It's talky to the point of just telling you what is about at points, though, and its great moments only scan as "pretty good" when you've absorbed them through the test of pop culture already, which I haven't found the case with other classics. Joe Pesci's character can't quite remain as far above being lampooned by a cartoon pigeon in the way that Casablanca still completely delivers even if one absorbs thirty different homages before seeing it.

This does have one of the all-time great "man, the casting director has a good eye" line-ups, though - check out early roles from Debi Mazar, Kevin Corrigan, Michael Imperioli, Illeana Douglas, and Samuel L. Jackson! Well, maybe not early-early for Jackson, as Spike Lee was already using him and he had more than a handful of other credits, but he hadn't really come up with the Sam Jackson delivery yet, either.


After Hours

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 January 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Warner Brothers in the 1980s: Enter the Blockbuster, 35mm)

I don't know that I was expecting a whole lot from After Hours, especially not as part of a double feature with the much more heralded GoodFellas, but I wound up loving it for what it is: A fantastically weird odyssey that kind of doesn't hold together, but is a mess in the way that works, like narrative rules don't matter after 1am either. Or, maybe, its cockeyed script reflects how the city kind of shrinks then - with only so many people up, coincidences happen and the eccentrics are a bigger part of the population.

Whatever the case, this is an impressively funny movie whose shifts straddle the line between the filmmakers warning the audience what they're in for and going off in completely unexpected directions. There's something about Griffin Dunne's lead that seems even more fitting years later, like he doesn't quite have what it takes to be a leading man even though he superficially has all the traits, and as such sort of wanders this place in between days, never able to bend it to his will or stake out a space the way that, say, Tom Hanks or Michael Keaton might have been able to. He's relatable, but we kind of don't want him to be.

The itinerant nature of the story means we wind up getting a lot less Rosanna Arquette as the girl he meets in a coffee shop and can't initially resist than one might hope, which is really a shame because she's got terrific screwball chops: More than anyone else here, she absolutely nails the overlap between conventionally charismatic and downright peculiar. There's a shot of her winking at Dunne that says she'll be more trouble than her weird roommate, but you're hooked anyway. Director Martin Scorsese and writer Joseph Minion set up what feels like it should be a great hangout flick/romantic comedy, but these two screw it up. There's just an inch too much distance between her seeming cool and him being square, and the city will eat you up.

I don't make lists, but I'd be tempted to put this in my top 5 Scorsese movies if I did (though there are plenty of large gaps in what I've seen). I genuinely love how all the dark, mean humor that gives his dramas a sting is out front and ready to play here, and kind of wish he'd do straight comedy more often.


Anselm

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 January 2024 in Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)

I don't usually react to a film with envy; I know full well on what side of the creator/audience divide on which I sit and I know just enough about the sort of work that goes into them and how it's not my thing that I don't identify enough with that sort of emotion. And yet, I've spent enough vacations over the last few years toting 3D cameras around, trying to capture sculpture gardens, statues, and other solid artifacts in such a way that I can revisit them as something closer to objects rather than just images but seldom quite feeling like I've succeeded that from the first few moments of the film, I found myself wishing I could do that. I spent a lot of time reminding myself that director Wim Wenders, cinematographer Franz Lustig, and stereographer Sebastian Cramer were using an enormously sophisticated camera rig and actually had the ability to put it where they wanted.

So, yes, if you are considering attending this movie as a fan of stereo photography, do so; it's really fantastic work as Wenders finds ways to keep the composition interesting despite how this medium works best on the thing right in front of you, moves about without making the audience nauseous, and doesn't just capture the obvious relation of things in space, but does so while also allowing the audience to focus on the texture of works, maybe enhancing it a bit so that even subtle ones are noticeable.

Of course, it does not hurt that Wenders is capturing the art of Anselm Kiefer, a German artist who moved from painting into sculpture and installations in the 1980s. Kiefer has spent much of the past thirty-odd years working at scale, often wrestling with what it means to be a German artist when the culture's folkloric language was so thoroughly tainted by association with the Nazis, knowing that he will never be able to completely reclaim it because he will always have to confront that use. There is violence in many of his works, both from the twisted, peculiar imagery itself and as an acknowledgment that even works inspired by the natural world must be created in the sort of former factories and facilities used for industry, including weapons production.

Which is not to say that the film is dour. There is, often, a sense of play as he walks around his massive atelier outside Paris, a warehouse where massive canvases sti on dollies that are pushed around and allowed to drift to their eventual place. Kiefer uses a bicycle to traverse from one end to another, and creates pocket worlds that are sometimes dark, but always grand, and occasionally whimsical. The viewer may not realize that he or she has wanted to see how one creates art using a flamethrower before, but will likely be glad that they have; it is unique.

One thing Wenders and Kiefer do not do to any great extent is to make the audience feel they know or understand the artist. There are recreations of moments in his youth and childhood, but the young Kiefer is mostly shown creating his art; the child is shown absorbing art, working in a sketchbook, and seeming confused by a world that contains the potential for beauty alongside actual cruelty, but not things like hanging out with friends or the ordinary times with family. There are recordings of interviews where a younger Kiefer defends his more provocative creations in the way artists often do, with arch words that don't necessarily connect with people who haven't studied the discipline. What commentary comes from the present-day Kiefer refuses to reconsider his youth and perhaps suggests that he cannot. If one wants to understand how much of the artist is in the art, this is not the film to lay it bare. Fortunately, what Wenders has done is so meticulously abstracted that it feels like a bargain that has been struck between him, Kiefer, and the audience, trading the ability to examine the work and the process closely enough that one can perhaps infer something about the artist's mind without necessarily entering his personal existence as a man.

It's a very specific way to approach this sort of film, and one that perhaps wouldn't satisfy if the high-resolution 3D images did not feel like more than what this sort of film generally offers. It's a detailed, close-up look, but also reminds one that all art, from the sculpture to the film about the sculpture, is made with intent and direction, omitting as much as it includes.