The Unholy Trinity

No real moviegoing musings to go with this one, other than it ain't bad, but is only hanging around Boston Common through Thursday afternoon, although it continues at the Liberty Tree Mall after that. Kind of got a pretty nice direct-to-video cast, and, man, someone in Montana must be offering people good money to shoot westerns there. I feel like I've seen credits for "Yellowstone Western Town" on a lot, enough to make me wonder if Trinity is the same town I saw in 1923.


The Unholy Trinity

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 June 2025 in AMC Boston Common #9 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime pre-order link for pre-order), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

I almost feel a little sorry for Brandon Lessard, who plays the nominal protagonist of The Unholy Trinity and seems to have spent half of his young career as an actor so far in Montana-shot westerns. He's got the role at the center of the movie and he's not really a leading man, but on top of that, Samuel L. Jackson and Pierce Brosnan have shown up on set with an appetite for the scenery. You can more or less see him vanish as the film goes on, and maybe the movie isn't necessarily better for it, but it's more entertaining.

He plays Henry Broadway, a young man returning in 1888 to the Montana town of his birth from someplace back East to see his father Isaac (Tim Daly) before he is hanged, a preacher (David Arquette) urging repentance and confession during a busy afternoon of executions at the territorial prison. Isaac would have Henry kill Trinity's sheriff, who he says framed him for the murder of a Blackfoot couple, and a former slave lurking around the fort by the name of St. Christopher (Jackson) seems interested in helping. It turns out that the Sheriff in question is dead, though, allegedly killed by that couple's daughter Running Club (Q'orianka Kilcher), although new sheriff Gabriel Dove (Brosnan) is not particularly interested in lynching her the way the townspeople seem to want, and while he's out warning her, Henry get in trouble in town, rescued by St. Christopher, who reveals that he and Henry's father stole a bunch of Confederate gold during the war, but Isaac double-crossed him, and now he wants to know where the loot is.

That's a lot going on to start, and at times it feels like the filmmakers haven't quite figured out what kind of Western they're making: "The Unholy Trinity" has a spaghetti-western name and its opening moments give a fleeting impression of something gritty and full of nasty hypocrisies, but then Henry shows up and seems impossibly clean-cut despite some perfectly even five-o'clock shadow, refuses a couple whiskeys because he doesn't drink, acts awkward around a very sweet prostitute (Kartina Bowden), and really doesn't get the time to make one wonder if he's got the ability to be a cold-blooded killer before the script yanks that away. It spends the first act or so becoming the sort of cliché studio western that makes folks sneer at the genre despite not being that prevalent: A fairly clean town that feels like a standard set, characters that come off as unambiguously good or evil, and literal bars of gold to hunt down.

Pierce Brosnan can thrive a bit in this environment; his tousled silver hair makes him come off as a father figure who has learned a thing or two, and he's got the brogue cranked up to full power, so if Dove does seem to have anachronistically good attitudes toward the land's native people or making sure you get to the truth of a matter before stringing people up, he's making good use of the stereotype of a well-read Irishman with a gift of gab as effective as any pistol. The movie really starts to take off when Samuel L. Jackson gets to go full Samuel L. Jackson, getting the first of a few speeches that let him reel off his intentions and casually reveal himself as a dangerous man before saying he's got to get to ambushin'. It is enough fun to watch Jackson do his thing that we overlook how quick he is to kill, but there's always something simmering in him that makes the film more interesting than it might be: He's been a slave and been badly betrayed, but he's no hero, the cunning agent of chaos that this movie needs.

His scheming is what leads to most of the shootouts, which are strong, with plenty of bullets flying, but director Richard Gray and crew are pretty good at keeping track of everyone and everything, even with a mix of folks getting picked off with rifles, pistols, and fisticuffs. It's good, but not showy staging, and neither looking to be particularly gruesome nor feeling unreasonably sanitized. It also never looks particularly unlikely other than a few jumps Dove makes down inclines and from a second story window that I felt in my knees, which have twenty years less wear than Pierce Brosnan's.

Through all this, it's kind of interesting that Henry Broadway is there and sort of necessary for things to happen, but feels more like a catalyst than a protagonist, the kind of part where you can hopefully write "young Brandon Lessard holds his own with veterans Jackson & Brosnan)". That's not the case here, and the result is that the movie flounders for a while, at least until the old hands come in and assert control.

More Imports: A Gilded Game and Trapped

Another week, another pair of Asian imports that I don't get around to posting about until one has played for the last time in the Boston area and the other is reduced to short filler duty. I'm kind of (but not quite) surprised that A Gilded Game is the one sticking around; Trapped seemed the better movie but maybe Game had better star power. A quick look at the Chinese box office seems to indicate it opened bigger in China as well, although The Dumpling Queen opened a day earlier and has grossed as much as these two put together, and, good lord, Ne Zha 2 is just a long-lasting beast that may have passed Titanic as the #4 movie of all time if those numbers are to be believed with Avatar 2 not out of reach.

Doesn't look to be anything from China opening this weekend, so that's a bit of a breather.

Lie Jin · You Xi (A Gilded Game)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 May 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

It's been almost a whole year since a movie directed by Herman Yau played theaters. That's a long layoff for the guy who seems to be the busiest filmmaker bouncing between Hong Kong and the mainland; glad to see he's all right! Kind of a bummer about the movie. A Gilded Game> isn't bad, really, so much as it's another movie like last week's The Dumpling Queen that kind of straddles the China/Hong Kong border by necessity and kind of feels like it belongs in neither.

As it starts, Goa Han (Oho Ou Hao) is graduating from college, eager to work in an investment bank ("ibank" in the subtitles, though it's not clear if "i" is for "investment" or "internet"), though his parents would prefer he take the civil service exam. As soon as he's about to give up, he gets an internship at the local office of international firm Blue Stone, though that may owe as much to his friendship with Chu Zhihong (Chang Chenkuang), the son of hydropower start-up founder Chu Feng (Jasper Liu) as his skills. He nevertheless scores "Master" Todd Zhang (Andy Lau Tak-Wah), famous for his exhaustive vetting of potential IPOs, as a mentor. The focus on due diligence doesn't particularly fit with the plans of interim CEO Helen Li (Crystal Huang Yi), who dislikes Zhang's investor focus and is planning to feed Chu's company to another client.

A Gilded Game is a movie about the stock market, and for as high-stakes as investments can be both in film and real life, they are also by their nature opaque, putting a layer of abstraction between investors (or audience members) and the operations of both the companies they finance and the brokers who trade them. Because of that, it's tough to make a movie that really sucks you in; stock market plots that are tricky enough to fool the victims in a movie are almost by their nature complicated enough to confuse the audience, and what can be done without slowing the movie down makes smart characters look foolish. That's kind of what happens here; it's never complicated or nasty enough to be really thrilling.

Indeed, the movie reserves its almost cartoonish edge, such as it is, for its villainess and not much else; with Crystal Huang Yi chewing more scenery than the rest of the cast combined. It's kind of amusing, especially considering how nobody else in a business that should be a viper's nest feels very far from nice. Oho Ou Hao, for instance, plays Gao Han as an earnest and pleasant young man to the point that even his inevitable heel turn never feels real; he comes across as a good kid pretending to be a bad guy. Andy Lau plays Zhang as persnickety but the film not only doesn't take advantage of the mean streak he can bring but give him regular scenes with Ni Ni as a nightclub singer who used to be engaged to Zhang and is still very friendly despite pledging not to marry him after his stock tips bankrupted her father. It's a strong effort to make sure we like him.

(It's kind of amusing that this movie from Mainland China seems much less harsh on the whole profession than an American movie would, even though the film is constantly having characters fly to Hong Kong to do stuff at that market as opposed to, say, Shanghai. Is it considered shadier in the Mainland? Is the mood in China to encourage entrepreneurship and investment in Chinese businesses but to be wary of this capitalist structure? I'm kind of curious what the attitudes in play here are.)

Yau's a pro, though, and he and his crew do what they can to make things entertaining; the movie is fairly fast-paced and he indulges in a little trashy melodrama when the film is threatening to bog down. It doesn't always work - you can only add so much bombast to such a timid script - but the film has the soundtrack of something lurid and exciting even if the actual caper or finale is kind of mild. And, if nothing else, props to Andy Lau's costumer, who gives him charming bow ties and pastel shirts that scream "I was with this organization back when it was just a small, non-evil investment firm" in a kind of charming way.

There are just enough odd tidbits to keep the movie running so it's not quite dull, but it's never quite exciting, either, and this continues all the way through a wrap-up that dutifully informs the audience that everyone who committed an illegal act went to jail in a manner that's so obligatory as to be deflating.


Da feng sha (Trapped)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 May 2025 in AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run, laser DCP)

Trapped is the sort of action movie you go to without a lot more than a plot description and an open evening and soon raise your eyebrows, realizing that this is going to be a fancy one, with the muted cinematography and the camera moving in unconventional ways and the fractured timeline and violence coming either after a jittery little ramp-up or with no warning at all. It's enough to make one sit up a little straighter and pay a little more attention, and that tends to be warranted: It's a nifty siege movie that doesn't let its ambition become pretentiousness.

As the film opens, it's 1995, near Mangya, a small town where China, Mongolia, and Tibet meet, that's about to clear out ahead of a major sandstorm. Smuggler Zhou Beishan (Xin Baiqing), has arranged a jailbreak that involves him being rushed out of prison in a coma; lieutenant Qu Maduo (Geng Le) has gone ahead to tell Li Hong (Lang Yueting), the lady who runs the place's diner, that he's coming and she knows what he's looking for, which pushes her to send her sister away. An emergency had them stop at a highway gas station and leaving it a mess, which the local police chief Xia Han (Bai Ke aka "White-K") decodes all too well. Beishan and his men are familiar with Mangya, and are able to isolate it; meanwhile, Xia's three-man police department only has one gun between him, rookie Jian Ning (Sun Ning), and a former tour guide.

This is obviously a Western - band of outlaws, a couple folks in jail because they were fighting over who was rustling whose herd, desert bordertown, haunted sheriff with green deputies, no-nonsense lady running the local saloon - but it doesn't necessarily feel like one. Maybe its the setting, which despite being in the middle of the desert is dense and maze-like compared to a wide-open main street where duels might happen, with brutalist statues and monuments you'll really only find in the People's Republic of China. Maybe it's the colorful group of henchmen, who are definitely crime-movie guys rather than western guys. The upshot is that while the plot is familiar, It almost feels like director Zhang Qi and his co-writers hit upon the central elements of the genre independently without copying the aesthetic.

Zhang and company start the action up quickly despite the cops' relative paucity of firearms, and the staging is generally strong, too, building up to a big final confrontation. It builds to an impressive crescendo, and frequently shocks because it's got enough bad guys who trust each other about as well as you might expect this sort of criminal to that when one knocks off another, it doesn't necessarily make the gang less of a problem for Xia Han but does leave the audience a bit unsure where things are going to go next. Zhang makes solid use of that tension even when the movie is not exactly pushing relentlessly ahead.

It works in large part because there's a nice tension between the grandiose and the restrained: For as much as Leishan starts out seeming fearsome because he's a smart villain who plans ahead, the natural rival to the disciplined, thoughtful Xia Han, his plan is rather big and silly when you get right down to it, and Xin Baiqing has the loose, cocky confidence of someone who would risk that escape plan knowing he'll come out okay, even before the last act has him start to seem unstable. Bai Ke is his obvious counter as Xia Han, carrying a heavy load of guilt but still a consummate professional, not really trusting anyone else to do a job with lives on the line but never quite belittling them. There's a fine rogues gallery of gangsters who may or may not stick around very long - most striking, perhaps, is Li Gan as the silent, almost spectral sniper Tongue - and Lang Yueting nails the part of the former lover is probably not pulled in by Leishan anymore, but maybe at the start, but has points where you don't know whether the connection's still there or if she's putting on a front to protect the other hostages.

Those hostages kind of come and go, as Zhang often seems to be focusing on the central characters to such a point that one can lose track of there being potential innocent victims, and getting back to that makes the end drag out a bit. That's kind of an issue with the fancy action movies; they tend to get attached to some thing or other that feels profound to the filmmakers but may not hit with the audience. Zhang mostly avoids that here, and it makes Trapped a nice surprise among more recent mediocre Chinese imports.

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.

This Week in Tickets: 25 December 2023 - 31 December 2023 (Holiday Week!)

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and can you believe it, I got one of these written and posted every week, give or take a few trips out of town where I wasn't lugging the scanner or the big laptop!

(Note: The reader's checking the veracity of this statement would be personally hurtful to me.)

I kid, but, once again, the state of the blog is sort of a slow acknowledgment that my Letterboxd account does a lot of what I started this blog to do, and it sometimes feels like it does so better, as my phone will buzz with a like a couple times a day, there are stats, and the indexing and searching is better.

But, as I said last year, I like revising what I put down on the ride home a bit, especially if more comes to mind, and I'm ever more cognizant of how what you put on someone else's site can go away in an instant. The visual is fun. Occasionally I'll apparently be the only person writing about an Asian movie in English and get hundreds rather than dozens of views.

So the plan next year is to accept that more people are going to read what I put down on Letterboxd than will here, not worry so much about expanding things into full 6-or-7-paragraph reviews (even for festival films), and use couple hours I might use on expanding a review to see more movies, making for more "Film Rolls" entries. Maybe start a "This Week" entry on Monday and update it as the week goes by, popping stuff out when I'm going long.

But that's the future! For the recent past, we start on Christmas, as I came back home from Maine early, since most of my gift-exchanging and such happened on Christmas Eve to accommodate my nieces' schedules. Not as early as I might have liked, since I failed to not that there would be no 11:45am train and wound up hanging around the station for a couple hours with all the other folks who didn't find out how reduced service would be. Still, got home in time to head down to the Somerville for Ferrari on screen #1.

The next day, I was surprised to see that, much as I'd been expecting Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom to sort of tank, I was surprised to see it losing showtimes already, including the Imax 3D one I'd planned on seeing at Boston Common, so I headed down to Assembly Row to see it there, and be kind of shocked that it's actually kind of good. Then I got home and decided to make some progress on unwatched discs, giving Who Framed Roger Rabbit? a rewatch.

Having taken the week off with the idea of watching a lot of movies, I wound up staying in on Wednesday because it was rainy and I didn't even want to walk to the subway station and then, well, there's an email list that sends you enough crosswords to wreck a whole day, every day. Thursday, I headed to Causeway Street for a double feature of Saltburn and Endless Journey, although the area was swarmed enough with Celtics fans that I couldn't find a place to sit down for dinner. And while I had waited a bit to see that Chinese movie, I grabbed a ticket for The Goldfinger right quick.

Saturday and Sunday were other dreary days, so I wrapped the year watching For a Few Dollars More, again on 4K.

So there's the last week of 2023. I'm anticipating a busy-ish start to 2024, but with something posted very-late-Sunday/very-early-Monday. And now, the actual reviews…


Ferrari

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 December 2023 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, laser DCP)

It's a sign of just how good Michael Mann and company are at the nuts & bolts of making a movie that even though Ferrari really kicks into high gear with the big race, it never actually feels like it's killing time or anything until then. Instead, it feels like a solid movie filling in all the various stakes up until the Big Race, when the FX and editing challenges seem to grab the filmmakers in a way that the biographical material maybe didn't, as they on the one hand are really into depicting how all this auto racing stuff works, especially after Enzo has had a big speech about what being an aggressive racer means, while also using it to heighten what's going on off the road, with dramatic turning points all over.

The whole thing moves well enough that there seems to be plenty of time for a third act that the movie just doesn't have.

I suppose that if we're going to have a movie that, as I like to say, doesn't so much end as stop, there are worse places to do that, and real life doesn't necessarily match the shape of a movie. That's not so much a problem - one can get too invested in recalling high school English class and saying "what was the theme of this story? how did Enzo Ferrari change over the course of the film?" and act like it's bad for not following instructions rather than seeing what sort of reaction it evokes - but it can make the movie and a viewer's reaction to it a bit harder to shape. The script by the late Troy Kennedy Martin (with Mann and others credited as contributing "additional screenplay material") can be quite scattered, spending a lot of time walking through details and subplots that ultimately don't matter a lot and hitting the audience with a deus ex machina toward the end that on the one hand is executed well but on the other feels like it should be in flux with what else is going on; had Fiat been mentioned before, to give us a sense of whether the phone call was a hole card Enzo was waiting to play or if working with them was eating crow? It certainly seems like this might have been a more formative experience to include than the silent-movie-era race that starts the film (though the style on that is delightful). Nobody ever seems to crack what's going to hook the audience, and a feature film doesn't have the room to examine everything.

Maybe the cast does, a little; Penélope Cruz suggests this whole offscreen life story for Laura as the woman who was passionate and fun until she had to continue being the responsible one even through devastating grief, while Adam Driver's Enzo is always more interesting than what he's doing on screen, possessed of a self-awareness that doesn't mitigate his ego and selfishness. You can see that there's a great movie about these two here - their scenes together crackle even beyond the melodrama - and even apart, Enzo and Laura are both at their most interesting when the absent other is seemingly looming over them, but it's almost like Mann couldn't stretch the story in such a way as to keep them at the center, or make Shailene Woodley's mistress interesting enough to cheat on Penélope Cruz with her. There's probably a neat movie about the daredevil racers to be unlocked as well.


Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 February 2023 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (first-run, 3D Imax Laser)

Ain't it always the way - Warner Brothers decides to scrap the generally-lackluster DC movie universe and start over, but they wind up sending it off with what may be the best flick in the franchise. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom may not be for everyone, perhaps, but it's a big adventure where everyone knows what they're supposed to do and does it pretty competently.

Granted, you've got to love a fairly specific sort of big, pulpy adventure that can have freer reign in comics where the threshold for success is lower and the context is different than it would be for a mainstream movie that needs multiple millions for its audience. Going for the sort of hybrid adventure James Wan and company do means that there is something to make you grin in most frames, especially once they get to the villains' super-submarine that mashes up Captain Nemo, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and Planet of the Vampires. Wan may tend to gravitate toward horror in most of his work, but he's in pure Saturday Serial mode here, keeping things grand but simple, throwing everything he can at the audience, but mostly keeping action clear (and fun in 3D), even during the inevitable CGI-overload finale.

It isn't deep, granted, by design; Jason Momoa plays Arthur as a straightforward scrapper and the movie doesn't aim to push him out of that comfort zone. The basic bits of the story reinforce each other nicely, at least, decent futility of vengeance/sibling rivalry/environmental/anti-xenophobic themes, and they smartly avoid mentioning other characters so one doesn't give much thought to how having the phone number of a guy who could fly over an island and find the secret base with his x-ray vision would be helpful. There are some snags - the King of Atlantis is shown spending a lot of time on dry land early on and comments about it don't go anywhere, they don't really sell the need to bring back Patrick Wilson's King Orm that well, and everybody involved works really hard to minimize Amber Heard's presence in the movie for off-the-screen reasons. It works okay for something intentionally simplified and reliant on tropes, but that sets a ceiling.

Still, in the end, this is a lot more fun than I remember the first Aquaman movie being. Wan et al really hit the sweet spot between superhero action and fantasy adventure where this particular character works best, even if Momoa's semi-comic performance can feel like they're sending up two genres which don't always mix or work in a world that's recognizably close to our own. Still, if you do look at colorfully-costumed men punching pirates before raiding a mad scientist's lair inside a volcano before fighting zombies in a lost Antarctic city and go "heck yeah comics!", this does a pretty good job of throwing all those types of pulp fiction together.


Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 December 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

It's apparently been ten years since I last saw this - too long! - and while part of the intent was to check out how the new 4K disc looks (pretty good if not the sort of disc that hits you upside the head with how great it is), my main reaction this time is to note just what a solidly-constructed movie it is: It does exactly what it sets out to do at every step, somehow managing to obey the rules of cartoons and film noir simultaneously without giving itself the out of winking at the audience. Funny as heck and made with love for every genre involved.

And, boy, do the effects hold up - there are blessed few moments when the combination of practical work, traditional animation, and digital coloring doesn't look completely believable. There is something to the way Zemeckis puts it together that works wonders not so much because it's analog but because it's crafted. Zemeckis shoots with intention in a way that I feel that a lot of today's filmmakers who are less fascinated by the nuts and bolts of it don't, like he wants to build a perfect thing rather than subcontract it out.

What I wrote in 2013.


Saltburn

* * (out of four)
Seen 28 December 2023 in the AMC Causeway #10 (first-run, laser DCP)

There's a credit for a "maze designer" on this, which almost makes me wonder if the shape of the labyrinth in the titular estate has meaning, although I'm not watching it again to see if that's the case. For a movie with all this excess, it's quite dull, after all, like Emerald Fennell couldn't be bothered to make her characters interesting on top of grotesque.

(Which means there was probably not much thought given to the maze's significance, just that it looked properly like the sort of thing an aristocratic family would have.)

I can't even really say the movie's badness is all that frustrating, because you'd have to see a glimmer of something interesting to be frustrated. Apart from some tacky bits, this is a movie that never deviates from expectations, with the most half-hearted twists one can imagine, and no apparent desire on the part of the filmmakers to do something interesting with the situations it creates. Fennell's previous film, Promising Young Woman, at least seemed like it had an interesting idea, even if it wound up silly, but this is a filmmaker deciding to make a movie that started from a generic plot of someone insinuating himself into a rich family and trusting she could shock with the details, but they're never twisted enough. They're occasionally icky and gross, but seldom surprising or revealing.

Oh, and it actually shows people wearing masks when it would be appropriate, probably its most genuinely unusual choice.


Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Considering that the plot is B-movie simple despite the film being half-again as long as that sort of thing traditionally runs, the pacing of For a Few Dollars More is really exquisite. Sergio Leone often goes quite a while without doing much more than demonstrating that Eastwood's Man With No Name and Van Cleef's Mortimer are exceptionally competent bounty killers, too good to ever be in any real peril, and that lack of risk could kill the movie. Instead, there's a genuinely fantastic combination of relaxed and efficient storytelling, with just enough gunfighting and surprisingly funny moments to keep things going. In terms of craft, the whole thing is gorgeously shot and features an unmistakable Ennio Morricone score that alternates between playfulness and high drama.

It is, perhaps, so simple that it starts to falter a bit toward the end, when we are reminded that there are like a dozen people in the gang, but none stand out once you get past Klaus Kinski's hunchback, and it would b e one thing if they were just cannon fodder, but Leone goes for a little intrigue at this point and the viewer is expected to have some interest in how they turn on each other, and are maybe wise to their hunters after all, and hasn't necessarily laid the groundwork. It's like Leone felt like he needed a big gang for the primary heist (or needed it to seem like he did) and to establish his villain as an alpha, but then has to clean house to get to that nice, clean, three person confrontation at the end.

It lands, though, a spaghetti western that gets the job done with a minimum of fuss.

Film Rolls, Round 16: X Y & Zee and A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die

When "season two" happens post-Fantasia, I'm going to make a much more earnest attempt to keep up with what the score is rather than just calculating it as I do the posts. Or maybe at least do the posts much more quickly, so that I know that we're getting to an exciting period:

Exciting enough that this round started just two days after the previous one, at least. Mookie rolls a six, landing on X Y & Zee, which got purchased as part of the Twilight Time going out of business sale, although IMDB seems to indicate that the original title is "Zee and Co." and shows a comma in the alternate title that isn't on the box. Both titles kind of feel like they're straining for hipness, to be honest.

Bruce gets a chance the next night, rolling an eleven and reaching A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die!, which is kind of close to what he had last round, in terms of audience.

I'd started to try and do This Week in Tickets again at this point, so I've got some rough draft material for these. Let's see how the boys did!

X Y & Zee (aka Zee and Co.)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 January 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

X Y & Zee is a feature-length soap opera, although I suppose you can dress it up a little by calling it "Sirkian melodrama" or the like - an invitation to gape at beautiful, privileged people, getting caught up in their scandalous lives while standing far enough removed to find them distasteful. In this case, Robert Blakeley (Michael Caine) and wife Zee (Elizabeth Taylor) have a marriage that seems advantageous but not particularly loving, with Robert openly scoping out young widow Stella (Susannah York) at a party. Perhaps sensing that this girl is more of a threat to her position than the ones before, Zee moves to sabotage it in every way that she can without appearing to be some square stick-in-the-mud, to the point of befriending and even flirting with her.

Watching X Y & Zee, two things struck me:

(1) Susanna York's Stella is just too good to have to put up with either of the other characters' nonsense, and not just because the character seems nice and isn't revealed to be scheming; for all that one does get lonely in her position, it's hard to see why she's so readily seduced, given that she's pretty and apparently bright enough to have other suitors. She can do so much better than Michael Caine's obvious cad!

(2) Speaking of Michael Caine being an obvious cad, what was the point, in the 50 years since this film came out, where he stopped taking roles where he was clearly a nasty piece of work from the start? These days, he'll occasionally play a guy who is revealed to be a villain, but even then he's still kind of avuncular and charming until the mask is pulled back, and even then, they tend to keep playing it as him being egocentric rather than revealing a classic Caine bastard. Maybe it's just how he aged, but there was something thrilling about how vitally hard-edged he could be.

Robert and Zee being different sorts of monsters - him an obviously nasty piece of work who can make that appear as confidence and genius, her a product of the right schools whose favor looks like generosity - is part of the nasty fun of it, though, even as we're meant to have a modicum of sympathy for Zee, who is aging out of being a guest who turns heads at parties and has neither the appeal to replace it nor another means of stability should Robert leave her. Writer Edna O'Brien and Brian G. Hutton don't seem particularly interested in teaching a lesson or having any of these three solve a problem; it is, for better or worse, mainly observation of how when this sort of marriage curdles, a man has more opportunity to move on to something more pleasant than a woman.

na ragione per vivere e una per morire (A Reason to Live, A Reason to Die!)

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

Speaking of enjoyably hard-edged leading men, James Coburn will always be one of my favorites; he always feels like he's enjoying himself in these spaghetti westerns in a way that the anti-heroes played by, say, Clint Eastwood don't. Maybe it's the luck of being less iconic - Eastwood became an avatar of the genre and played mysterious figures while Coburn was always a specific guy who could work in an ensemble if that was what was needed.

Here, his Pembroke has a very particular background that serves as the lynchpin to a story that exists in the overlap between the western and the wartime adventure: Disgraced by surrendering his command, Pembroke convinces his jailors to let him lead a team of deserters and criminals condemned to hang anyway, hoping to earn their loyalty by pitching it as a heist, with millions in gold hidden with the fort in a place only he knows. Not that his team outside one member (Bud Spencer) seems particularly concerned with whether he lives or dies even before then.

Director Tonino Valerii and his co-writers take their time getting Pembroke and his team to the fort, but don't string it out too much, because the group can't be too whittled down when they arrive. It's enough to keep the audience worried about Pembroke getting shot in the back while also establishing that he's a mean and cunning cuss, getting tension and cohesion just where they need to be before introducing José Suárez and Telly Savalas as the new leadership of the fort, suave and polished in the way Pembroke isn't but also not exactly scanning as Confederates, and thus almost more detestable as seeming mercenaries.

At this point it becomes a heist film, and one that is probably anachronistic for 1862, between the Gatling guns and security that has electric wires alerting them of attempts to break in. At this point, though, one may not particularly care; Valerii and company often seem to be taking all the best parts of a thousand years of heists and compressing it into one location - this place is built into the environment as is just and proper for a western, with that environment including what functions as a natural moat and drawbridge, with what feels like a twentieth-century security system to be defeated. It winds up mixing the western, war, and crime/caper genres deftly, with all the violence one might want from the genre and a chance for Coburn to peel back a layer of this character and make the whole thing messily emotional even as it's threatened to just be moving pieces around.


It's still kind of tight, but Bruce got the sort of movie I enjoy more, and extends his lead a bit:

Mookie: 58 ½ stars
Bruce: 60 stars

Apparently I forgot to take a picture, but that one with Bruce and Mookie just about in the same place says it all, right? Next up: An actual single-night double feature!

The Old Way

I feel like I've seen more Nicolas Cage VOD-level movies getting a cursory theatrical release at Fresh Pond than I really have - this is really just the third or fourth in a decade or so - but that's still just enough to make me wonder if there's somebody doing the booking for this theater that really likes Cage. It's possible, or more likely, that he's got some sort of "top X markets" or minimum screens count in his contract and this is the place where you four-wall a movie in the Greater Boston Area, especially now that the Embassy is closed. Still, wouldn't you rather imagine that one of the guys who runs the theater that was basically purchased so that Indian films could have a home base is a big Cage fan?

It looked like I was going to be alone at first, but some more folks eventually showed up, one making a comment about whether there was a post-credit scene to this B Western, but if I hadn't stayed to the end, I wouldn't have seen someone credited as a "Bear Safety Officer" despite the fact that there are no bears in the movie. Did a version of the script involve the Briggses encountering a bear on the trail, only to be cut from the final movie? Is this just a standard thing you do when filming on location in Montana because bears are everywhere? It's not like this was ever really in the woods, either - it was pretty wide-open spaces, although I imagine a sufficiently motivated bear could cross them pretty quickly, and there was a kid or two in the cast.

One thing I was kind of curious about but didn't really think to pay attention to was that this was shot at "Yellowstone Film Ranch", and by the end I wondered whether that ranch has multiple wild-west towns or if they redressed one and chose locations carefully, because there are three different towns over the course of the movie, and I didn't check to see if they had the same geography. The last one, I noted, had a restaurant with some pretty modern-looking signage - "café" in slender lower-case letters which would not look out of place in a gentrified Twenty-First Century neighborhood. I'd bet money that this was a working café for tourists who liked the idea of visiting someplace like this but didn't want authentic Nineteenth Century beverages.

The Old Way

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 January 2023 in Apple Cinemas Fresh Pond #4 (first-run, DCP)

There should be more movies like The Old Way - honest western B-movies running about 90 minutes - being made and playing in theaters. Granted, they should be better than this one, where the makers often seem to know the general shape of the genre but don't necessarily find ways to make it its own interesting movie so much as just presenting the concept of "a nice, no-nonsense kind of Western".

Twenty years ago, Colton Briggs (Nicolas Cage) was one of the most feared gunslingers in the West, but now he's settled down, married to a good woman (Kerry Knuppe) with a bright but odd daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), running a respectable mercantile shop in town. His past is about to catch up with him, though, with James McCallister (Noah Le Gros) recently broken out of prison and leading his gang to the Briggs homestead. Colton doesn't recognize that name at all, but he made a lot of enemies in his younger days, and he'll put a final end to this - even if he has to go through a U.S. Marshal (Nick Searcy) who figures his job would be much easier without a psychopath having a head start on his revenge.

For better or worse, it's a pretty simple story, with the presence of daughter Brooke arguably the biggest wild card of the film. Writer Carl W. Lucas and director Brett Donowho have a tendency to take the most obvious route when it's necessary to get a little extra information out, and the early scenes between Colton and his wife Ruth especially feel like placeholder material put there with the intent of fleshing it out once they'd pinned down how that relationship worked and never really did. It's the sort of thing that highlights how Ruth and Brooke are the only women of any note in the movie, and Brooke comes across as neurodivergent enough that Lucas is writing that rather than a young girl. The music by Andrew Morgan Smith is exactly the sort of music that goes with the wide-open spaces being traversed, and the combination of sharp digital photography and locations that are likely kept squeaky-clean for tourists (as opposed to being built to look lived-in) adds a bit to the "generic western " feel.

A large chunk of the cast is exactly what you want, though, starting with Nicholas Cage once again maybe not doing his best work but giving a minor film more than a lot of other actors collecting a paycheck do (even if he, sadly, only gets to wear entertaining facial hair in the opening flashback). There's a moment early on where his former mercenary turned merchant is stuck listening to a customer's long story where he looks more and more aghast at what his life has become until he seems to seriously be considering whether Ruth will forgive just one little murder that I suspect few actors even go for, let alone nail, and plenty of others he's clearly giving the character more than is on the page. It doesn't always work, which can also be said for what Ryan Kiera Armstrong is doing as Brooke - she and/or the script is much better when how she processes and displays emotion is not the entire point of a scene - but also one the sort where part of the fun is watching Cage go at least a little bigger than is necessarily called for.

ONe of the best things about a good western is a bunch of well-targeted character actors, and this is as That-Guy-rich a cast as you'll find: Nick Searcy, arguably, was born to play no-nonsense lawmen of this type, and McCallister's gang is a thing of beauty: Abraham Benrubi as the hulking but not dumb "Big Mike", Shiloh Fernandez as the cocky junior gunslinger, and Clint Howard as Eustice, all the sort of Clint Howard bluster that makes one think this guy must be one nasty piece of work to have survived so long with how stupid he seems to be. These are the guys that fill out a posse or a gang in good, memorable fashion even if they don't get subplots.

Noah Le Gros, on the other hand, seems like he maybe should have switched parts with Fenandez; he makes for too handsome and charismatic an outlaw to be in a movie that's not particularly about the handsome, charismatic outlaw - there's no place for his charm to go, most of the time. He also gets a big speech toward the end that's supposed to give the audience something to chew on, in how he counts himself as Brigg's child as much as Brooke is his daughter, because Colton's actions made him what he is, but it maybe doesn't quite hit right, given how Brooke's poker face isn't the sort of psychopathy McCallister and Colton display. One can see where the movie is going with it, but it doesn't land like it should.

If those threads had connected, The Old Way would have been a pretty darn good western, the sort that gets to an audience on a gut level despite being of this other, bygone age. INstead, it's mostly the sort of thing an audience enjoys because Hollywood doesn't make enough westerns these days and the tropes are satisfying even if the film itself is not what it could be.

Fantasia 2022.21: Ring Wandering, Next Sohee, "They Call It… Red Cemetery", and Frágil

Well, this is it, and while I haven't been taking a while to get this last one posted on purpose, it's a bit of a bummer to be done with this festival again until 2023. I mean, obviously I have to come back home at some point, and I'm sure everyone involved with the festival can use the rest.

Nice day, though, starting with the observation that Ring Wandering could also have been the title of Sadako DX, through an impressive closing night film, to finally hitting the wall for real during the last feature.

So, one last guest:

July Jung here with her film Next Sohee, and as you can see, she won the Cheval Noir, which continues to surprise and please filmmakers with how terrific a trophy it is. She talked some about how the film was inspired by a true story that got under her skin. I haven't seen her first film, A Girl at My Door, but it almost looks like Bae Doo-na could be playing the same character in both, disgruntled police detectives, with her character in this one apparently just back from an assignment in the country, which was apparently what Bae played in that last one. Different names, though.

Amusingly-to-me, I took a note during the film and later tweeted afterward that it's crazy to see time march on and now Bae Doo-na is in the "world-weary police detective" stage of her career, which is in part because of how filtered her career has often been as it gets in front of my eyes: I see the early art-house oddities she did in Japan, The Host with Bong Joon-ho, the stuff she did with the Wachoskis, and that gets screens and festival slots on this side of the Pacific because it's unusual and noteworthy, but the steady work is TV and smaller moves built around a crime, and it just doesn't surface until one of them (like this) is unusually good. But it means you might see someone aging into that all at once rather than over time.

Once that Q&A was over, I headed out and saw that the passholder line for Bodies Bodies Bodies was already stretching out of its corral. Well, I figured, it was opening in Boston that weekend, so I might as well head across the street and see the underground queer Portuguese comedy, which probably wouldn't be.playing anywhere and might be very difficult to find on streaming. It was, to put it mildly, not really my thing, and I wound up kind of frantically taking notes to try and stay engaged but it was still a struggle.

Maybe I would have been better off back in Hall sending the festival off with a bang, but you should only go so far trying to script your festival experience. That I finished stretching a bit too far out of my comfort zone may not finish the story of this return to Montreal being delightful and reinvigorating quite the way one might hope, but it's still pretty thrilling.

Next up… Well, we're done! Although I may have a very niche sort of bonus post coming up if I can get some stuff to work.

Ring Wandering

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

As it goes on, Ring Wandering does an odd sort of metamorphosis in how it changes from one sort of film to another without necessarily putting a distinctive twist on either, but impressing for how artfully filmmaker Maakazu Kaneko and his team navigate these paths. The film is quiet, charming, and built out of canny misdirections that coalesce into a different final picture than the obvious without being self-consciously outrageous.

Sosuke (Sho Kasamatsu) has a manga he wants to create, a tale of a hunter obsessively chasing a Japanese wolf, and while he is carefully scouting and sketching the setting, there's no way to capture the animal, which has been extinct for over a century, though a kid he meets thinks he can find one. Back in Tokyo, he works in a crew digging a foundation for a new high-rise, discovering animal bones a couple meters down but keeping it quiet, both because that's the sort of thing that can get a job shut down and because they may be the reference he needs. Returning to the site after hours, he meets Midori (Junko Abe), out looking for her brother's dog. She sprains her ankle, so he helps her get home, to a neighborhood that is strangely quiet, her parents waiting with a late dinner.

I find myself fascinated with what this is ultimately trying to say because it is easy to construct a plot which would have Sosuke actively accomplishing something, but instead the film reaches its end without moving in the direction of what the plot seemingly should be. There is something beautiful in the way that it does come together, that this is ultimately a story of finding self-confidence as opposed to figuring a mechanism out in order to defy fate. There are not clear parallels between the various threads, despite several characters pursuing a canid of some sort. The ultimate smallness of the story, and the ones not told, describe a small, personal lesson that applies to Sosuke but not necessarily anybody else. The world may not owe or provide explanations, and time down that rabbit hole is time wasted.

The film also handles its different environments and the transitions between in striking fashion, maybe not exactly letting the audience feel unsure about the transit between Sosuke's world and Midori's for far longer than might seem logical, but giving its characters reasons not to assume something extraordinary is afoot as one time becomes another in the dark. It's laid bare in the modern daylight, which is not exactly harsh, but revealing and unmysterious. The extended sequences inside the manga are kind of fascinating as well - the first, toward the beginning, seems a little off, amateurish, a good idea not quite executed right. The second, inked with a makeshift but meaningful tool, is filled with lush, beautiful compositions. Something clicked there.



Kaneko keeps things fairly quiet in between, but he and his cast have a good grasp of the way that this sort of low intensity can be used, establishing Sosuke's self-doubt but not exactly playing him as introverted otherwise: There's a pleasant sort of back-and-forth with a co-worker about various types of manga (it's neat to see working-class people talking about art seriously), and a genuine spark between Sosuke and Midori; Sho Kasamatsu and Junko Abe quickly home in on how these two are fundamentally similar but also very different, with Abe and the actors playing Midori's parents doing well playing just off enough that the audience notices it but still concentrates on how they have more in common with Sosuke than not. Kasamatsu does well to play Sosuke as a step behind many viewers without seeming slow, because he doesn't realize he's in a movie that's at least partly a fantasy.

That's important, because there are days when I watch a movie such as this and get frustrated at missed opportunities, and how the pieces laid out in front of the viewers don't quite fit together the way they seemingly should. I'm not sure whether it's the day or the film in this case, but I like how this all connects just fine.

Da-eum So-hee (Next Sohee)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Movies are not necessarily the best way to depict the interconnected ways in which the world is seemingly rigged to make good people miserable; they're designed to mimic being there, and the issues July Jung looks at in Next Sohee are built to be things people experience obliquely, a little bit at a time. It means that she's got to stop and explain on occasion, but she's still got a fine knack for putting her characters through the wringer in between.

When the audience first sees Kim Sohee (Kim Si-eun-I), she's doggedly practicing dance moves, stumbling frequently but not without ability. She's not going to make a career out of it - she is a pet care major at a minor vocational school rather than a student at a performing arts academy - so the externship she is placed in is presented as a real opportunity. It's a call center job for a company that contracts with a cable & internet service (pointedly not part of that corporation), and it's miserable, reciting scripts seemingly designed to anger customers, with co-workers competing for bonuses that somehow never seem to come through. If it's already wearing manager Lee Jun-ho down, to the point where his replacement is making everyone sign NDAs, what chance does Sohee have?

The film has two clear acts, each designed to enrage the audience in a different way. The first half is told from Sohee's perspective, and that opening bit does a great job of setting the tone, highlighting her exuberance and willingness to get back up, with Jung getting a lot of mileage from how she serves as a sort of audience surrogate in that phone bank, rolling her eyes, questioning why they can't just cancel the service of callers looking to do that rather than trying to upsell them. Kim Si-eun-I's performance is winning and has bits that bring a smile even as the film turns more grim, and the tone-deaf nature of this semi-automated method of continuing to extract money from customers is recognizable as the sort of thing that gets on one's nerves but maybe just short of evil. The audience is going to pull for Sohee as long as they can, and they'll be able to.

Still, she's going to break down, and it seems to happen quickly. Kim Si-eun-I and Jung don't actually have Sohee change overnight - the audience has been watching the light go out of her eyes bit by bit - but they stress that losing Manager Lee is a breaking point, and that she has trouble reconciling what she's part of. They change the way she interacts with the other characters here, and for all that the film is still from Sohee's point of view, the view gets a little wider; and the audience gets the sense of how she is perhaps not the only one being broken here - dance partners are being bullied, co-workers are cracking, she's arguing with longtime friends. This may be a coming-of-age story, but there's no wisdom to be found in its lessons, and Sohee appears to be unusually capable of seeing that.

The aftermath of that realization shifts the point of view, with Bae Doona taking center stage as Oh Yoo-jin, the detective called in when everything goes to hell. World-weary and returning to the city after a sort of exile, Yoo-jin has seemingly been where Sohee wound up for a while, but maybe it's crushed her a little less - the other cops seem to resent her continued pulling at the threads of a case that won't lead to anything, but her resigned anger only looks like numbness. If Bae's performance looks muted, even when she's about to erupt, the audience can still appreciate her doggedness, even if it may not ultimately lead anywhere useful.

Bae and Jung manage an odd sort of alchemy during this back half of the movie, because by all rights it should become a crushing bore: Yoo-jin isn't discovering anything the audience doesn't know, either from watching the rest of the movie or from living in South Korea (or other capitalist economies where the structures are similar); spending a lot of her time following a trail from one institution to another and having someone explain that the systems she's encountering are either carefully designed to be technically legal or such that enforcement would cause a collapse with a lot of collateral damage. It's a lot of detail on how the system fails people and is seemingly designed to be too dreary and convoluted to keep one's attention, but actor and filmmaker are good at presenting how it's numbing but also managing to stoke anger despite that - Yoo-jin might not wind up radicalized by this, but she's at least guided the audience to what they should be angry at.

That isn't necessarily exciting - Jung knows these women are in a hole that is currently too deep for most people to climb out of on their own, and she's not going to make it appear otherwise in order to give her movie a thrilling climax. Still, there's value in pointing out the way that the mess is big and interrelated. Next Sohee isn't going to leave anyone feeling that a problem has been solved, but it maybe can point a viewer to thinking about them differently.

"Cemitério Vermelho" ("They Call It… Red Cemetary")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, digital)

The great spaghetti westerns are so iconic that they can fool fans into not so much thinking that they're easy but that there's a schematic: Amorality plus widescreen framing plus a distinctive musical riff yields a moment indelible enough that it doesn't seem to need the rest of the movie around it. You see a lot more short pieces like "Cemitério Vermelho" trying to get those moments on their own than features that build up the whole world surrounding those moments, both because westerns can be a tough sell and because that steady approach is awfully fine work.

That's the sort of short this is, which isn't a complaint. Filmmaker Francisco Lacerda and his crew have found a terrific location in the Azores, and they've built a last confrontation that's good enough to skip to, packing in enough double-crosses and confrontation into its ten minutes that the audience can dive right in, not necessarily needing the two-hour simmer that would get them to the point where they're ready for the slightest twitch to lead to an explosion. Thomas Aske Berg and Francisco Afonso Lopes recall Eastwood and Wallach in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly without quite seeming to imitate them. It's the sort of spaghetti western pastiche that works even does seem as much a declaration of love for the genre as a great example of it.

Can the likes of this rise above being that sort of pastiche? Probably, although it doesn't necessarily happen very often. As much as it generally works, it's still one that feels like it's imitating a style and peeling up the edges as much as coming by it naturally.

Frágil

Seen 3 August 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Underground, digital)

Maybe I've always been an old man, but I've got the feeling that I wouldn't have like the characters of Frágil even if we were the same age; they are, almost to a one, obnoxious, juvenile supposed-adults who have more personality than drama and not necessarily a lot of that. By the end of the movie, one gets a sort of sense of how central character Miguel is maybe more fragile than his bluster, but there's not a lot to it. You can sort of infer a generic story about him being directionless and on his own because of his queerness, trying to find his tribe (despite his mother's frequent phone calls), but it's so formless that it has to rely on style to get there.

And for all that filmmaker Pedro Henrique hits the audience with a lo-fi fire hose - stylized color choices, square low-res/grainy images for that home-movie feel, animation, inventive cutting - most of the many chapters come and go without a good sting, characters popping in and out without the dynamics being that interesting. The characters are high half the time but that seldom leads to them doing anything interesting. It wants to be a hangout movie with style, but never quite finds a vibe that works.

Or at least, not for me; I readily admit that I was both a little too wiped for this sort of film at the end of a 21-day festival and this group, with their focus on drugs, booze, and "the club", just didn't seem to care about anything that interested me. I nodded off a lot, enough that I can't really say whether the movie was good or bad at being what it was going for but that it most certainly wasn't my thing.

Fantasia 2022.07: Just Remembering, The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future, One and Four, Chun Tae-Il, and On the Line

Wednesday was a busy day but not one with a lot of guests, and also a relatively rare day where I stuck around De Sève into the evening, which is when Hong Jun-pyo made an appearance:

He was there to talk about his film Chun Tae-il: A Flame That Lives On (there are some other variations on the name, but that's what's on the schedule), an unusual project because you don't see many animated films, whether aimed at adults or younger viewers, about labor. Chun Tae-il was a seminal figure in such matters in South Korea, with Hong saying that the history of workers' rights in the country is basically seen as before him and after him. As you might expect, this isn't a corporate-funded feature, but something crowdfunded, as one can see from the extraordinarily long credits even if you don't read Korean, which must surely include everybody who made a 1-won donation.

The film itself was part of a special spotlight on Korean animation, and likely the only part I'll wind up seeing, as most of the others are short film packages playing a bit away from the core venues and sometimes in such a way that seeing them would take up two "slots". As animation programmer Rupert Bottenberg pointed out, there is a bunch of great work being done in shorts there, often as part of student projects, but once folks graduate, most animation houses there are doing work for Japanese and other foreign projects, with just the occasional home-grown feature being commissioned by studios. Occasionally one gets interesting enough to make it to the festival circuit - Beauty Water a couple years ago, for example - but it's fairly slim pickings.

Which is a shame. Chun Tae-il isn't necessarily a great movie so much as a noble one, but it's well-made enough to show there's talent there with visions beyond working for someone else.

Next up: Thursday and the start of week two, with All Jacked Up and Full of Worms, Detectives vs. Sleuths, Shin Ultraman, and Glorious.

Chotto omoidashita dake (Just Remembering)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

If you'd told me that Daigo Matsui and his cast had shot Just Remembering a bit at a time over the past six years and had to integrate covid when they got to the end (or beginning), if believe it; there's a genuine sense of time passing and things taking place at specific moments. That's not the case, apparently, it's "just" a story doled out in reverse order, one day at a time over seven years.

That day happens to be the birthday of Teruo Sako (Sosuke Ikematsu), who in 2021 works as a lighting technician at various stages around Seoul, on this particular night at the ballet. Elsewhere, taxi driver Yo Nobara (Sairi Ito) picks up a musician (Sekaikan Ozaki) who needs to make a pit stop mid-ride. Yo wanders into the theater and sees Teruo semi-awkwardly dancing on the stage after the show is over, and then it's 2020, when Teruo is working at a small rock club and Yo is on an awkward group date with friends after her shift. The guy she bumps into during a smoke break notes that her social-media avatar is a cat which she mentions is an artifact of her time living with her ex-boyfriend. It is, in fact, the same cat that Teruo feeds before going to work each day. And then it's 2019…

Clearly, the two used to be a couple, and the film will eventually get to the end, the good times, and how they meet. It's often all quite straightforward, with a deliberate lack of melodrama: Their relationship highs and lows believably ordinary, with no sense of destiny fulfilled or thwarted, even with major events tending to coincidentally happen on this day. This happens, and some other side story does or doesn't, but there's beauty and melancholy in it. In a way, Matsui's unconventional structure frees him from having to create an arc with conventional foreshadowing or tragic flaws. Things just happen, and there's not necessarily any grand lesson to be learned from it or code to crack, especially when viewed from outside.

Matsui and company have fun with that, though. There's an enjoyable playfulness with the recurring characters who often seem unstuck in time or something other than parallel. There's a man waiting for his wife to return outside Teruo's apartment, saying she's in the future; other characters will say they look familiar whether their encounters are in the past or the future. Jim Jarmusch's Night On Earth looms large in Teruo's apartment - a poster, a frequently-watched DVD where the audience often sees him viewing the Winona Ryder segment, both an indication of how he's probably sort of hung up on Yo years later and a wink at how this film inverts its one-night-in-parallel structure.

There are also a couple really nice performances by the leads - I love the little rasp that strengthens in Sairi Ito's voice as the film goes back in time, something Yo smoothed out as she matured but never lost. There are a lot of signifiers of how Yo seems to gain confidence and maturity over the course of her twenties even though her circumstances seemingly don't change that much, from the cars she drives to standing a little straighter. Teruo has more obvious changes in his life but Sosuke Ikematsu keeps him something closer to level - amiable and appealing and also foolishly stubborn in spots.

There are movies that play this sort of structural game with grander ambitions, but this one does well for being what it is and of its time.

La Vaca Que Cantó Una Canción Hacia El Futuro (The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Camera Lucida, DCP)

Movies like The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future can be either very easy or very difficult to love depending on the audience's general inclinations; their plan of attack involves going around the parts of the brain that reason, and some of us don't have minds that make that easy. This one's good enough to mostly work with a left-brained type like me, so I suspect it will hit even harder for those who think more symbolically.

It opens with a terrific sequence, music over nature leading the audience to a river, from which a barefoot woman in motorcycle leathers (Mia Maestro) emerges, unspeaking, and eventually heads into a local town, where a man collapses in shock seeing her through a window. That's Enrique (Alfredo Castro), and soon his daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela) will be arriving with children "Tomas" (Enzo Ferrada) and Alma (Laura del Rio) to join brother Bernado (Marcial Tagle) to look after him as he recovers and help tend to the family dairy farm. The strange woman soon makes her way there, and longtime servant Felicia (María Velásquez) recognizes her as the mother Cecilia witnessed committing suicide decades ago, apparently no older or worse for the wear.

(Tomas is clearly transitioning socially, but if her chosen name is ever stated, I didn't catch it, so that's what I'll use here.)

Maybe there's some bit of Chilean folklore that makes this all seem, if not logical, then natural, but it's not stated, for better or worse. Personally, even when I wind up liking the pieces of something magic realist like this, I often find myself resenting the way it seems to substitute for story or agency. It can feel like a whole genre built on deus ex machina. Like, here, the opening return of the forty-years-gone Magdalena is so striking that it's hard not to be intrigued by just what's going on there, but she's seemingly literally just there to be a catalyst for her descendants rather than someone who has/had her own tumultuous life and issues. Those stories aren't bad at all, but that part of the movie is sort of spread out by the fantasy and the occasional annoying concessions made to it, like Felicia deciding Magdalena's family can't handle their return (even though Tomas and Alma already saw and recognized her) and doing a bit of awkward physical comedy to keep Cecilia from seeing her out a window.

It's a good group to watch, though - Leonor Varela doesn't exactly have a lot to do as Cecilia, really, but she inhabits this woman who is clearly quite capable in a high-stress job as a doctor and doesn't necessarily know how to fully relax and just let things happen around her family. Marcial Tagle sketches out a man who has been penned in by expectations of taking over the family business and not being able to be his own true self (the closet door appears to be open even if he can't step out, so to speak) without really having a full story to call his own. And Mia Maestro does nifty work presenting Magdalena as both some sort of nature-spawned entity and someone with a connection to these people, giving the impression that being simplified to a more primal existence allows her to more easily exist with them.

It's mesmerizing to look at and listen to, though. The unusual musical interludes are memorable and intriguing in the way that they seem to burrow into something about the land that exists outside humanity, or tries to. The apocalyptic-feeling collapse of the family business would be a great metaphor for the family as a whole, and still works well enough in the film. And, I've got to admit, the ability to make a character like "Cow 2222" somehow look disapproving and expressive is an impressive feat.

The Cow Who Sang… could hold together a little better for those of us who value such things, although I don't know how well it would retain its odd beauty if it did. Where it works, it dazzles.

One and Four

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

There certainly seems to be a solid-enough premise for a mystery or noir here, but the filmmakers seem to run into a dead end because, while everyone talks about stripping a genre down to its essentials, there is a limit to how far that can go. Filmmaker Jingme Trinley spends a lot of time near that limit, maybe on the wrong side of it, and it can make even a tight-seeming film start to drag.

The premise is good - Tibetan forest ranger Sangyue (Jinpa) wakes up hungover; he's not supposed to have alcohol at his isolated lookout, but everyone breaks that rule, he's had some bad personal news, and he can go weeks without seeing other people. But today, a man (Wang Zheng) shows up at his door, injured, saying he's a forest cop who has been chasing poacher Ma Chunya. Something about this guy strikes him wrong, but Sangyue is aware he's not at his best, and everything seems to check out.

How to make the situation uncertain enough with just the two of them? It's going to take someone else showing up, but that doesn't happen for a while, and in the meantime, the movie kind of spins its wheels, having the two sit around the station drinking, trying to get potatoes warm enough to eat, and tending wounds, then taking some time in the woods to track down the poacher (or play at doing so) and check out the car crash (one car empty, one dead cop in the passenger seat of the other), but until Sangyue's neighbor/supplier Kunbo (Kunde) arrives, and even more importantly the driver of the other car, there's not a lot of detective work Sangyue can do.

Still, playing it out can be enjoyable in some ways. The environment is appropriately chilly, the forest where humans are out of place can feel enjoyably surreal, and the moments of action are well-staged. The basic set-up of a confused rural villager playing off the more sophisticated guy from further east who nevertheless does not speak Tibetan is a good pairing. Jinpa and Wang Zheng make a good contrast, but there's a lot more blunt yelling than potential mind games.

And on top of that, it's not exactly a satisfying ending, with Trinley resolving a few things but maybe a little too fond of the idea of uncertainty and ambiguity to ruin it by saying too much one way or the other. Which is the problem with stripping things down to essentials - an idea is general and open to everything, but an actual story must be specific, or at least more specific than this movie gets.

Chun Tae-il (aka Chun Tae-il: A Flame That Lives On)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Axis Korean Animation Spotlight, DCP)

The festival introduction stated that part of the idea of this animated film was to expose the story to an audience that includes kids, and I am therefore once again impressed with how hard Korean film will go given half a chance. Who else is gonna make sure their kids know their labor history like this, even among independents?

Chung Tae-Il (voice of Jang Dong-yoon) and his family came from the country but would migrate to the city to work in the clothing industry as that work dried up - mother first, then Tae-il, and eventually the rest, all still children aside from the parents. Tae-il started as a sewer's helper, then was a sewer himself, but at 19 opted to apprentice as a tailor, which was less guaranteed money but the chance at more, and perhaps a necessary step to the family opening its own shop. That being more of a management position put the inequities on the floor into sharp relief - long hours, illness from inhaling lint, and so much child labor - that when he found out that there were actual unenforced laws on the books to prevent this, he jeopardized his position by documenting offenses and attempting to submit a report to the police, only to find the government more interested in building Korean industry than protecting the people working in it.

Hong Jun-pyo's take on Chun's life is a fairly family-friendly version of the story, presenting information in easily-digested chunks with some repetition for it to be clear, but generally not patronizing. There are likely a number of factors left out - no mention of how South Korea's government at the time was more a military dictatorship than a democracy, for instance - and the other organizers likely have a bigger impact than is shown, as the labor movement would go on without Chun. Violence is probably softened a fair amount (especially the climax!), but it results in clarity more than overload.

The visual and animation styles are pleasantly clean - cel-styled people whose features have generally not been exaggerated or overly stylized, digital backgrounds that allow for camera movement that have enough processor cycles allocated for detail if not a lot of wear and irregularity. The style emphasizes the more timeless aspects of the story and characters rather than grounding them in the specific period with fashions or references (though older folks may get a laugh out of the young labor organizers along if anybody knows university students to ask for tips when organizing a demonstration).

It is, all told, an oddly likable story considering how dead serious the subject matter is, but that's how one introduces big ideas to new people.

Boiseu (On The Line aka Voice)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

I (semi-ironically) use that old saw about when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail quite often, but On the Line does frequently feel like the embodiment of it: A movie about infiltrating the voice-phishjng scheme that ruined one's life for revenge seems like it calls for capers and con-artistry, but these the folks making it are action guys, so they're going to use that hammer.

As it opens, Han Seo-joon (Byun Yo-han) is an ex-cop who found there was more money in construction, and it's going well; he's expecting a promotion from foreman to project manager on the next job. But then, disaster strikes - not just a worker potentially falling to his death, but a coordinated communications blackout, barrage of calls to folks like Seo-joon's wife Mi-yeon (Won Jin-a), and fraudulent insurance policies has both workers and company losing everything. With just the name of a fake lawyer and the help of Kkang-chil (Lee Joo-young), a hacker he busted in his old job, he tracks things to a compound in China run by "Director Chan" (Park Myoung-joon) and Mr. Kwak (Kim Mu-yeol). The Korean police are already investigating the operation and tell Han to back off but that's obviously not happening.

You can see what the best version of this movie would be right away, with Han assembling a team and attacking the operation from every direction, only to find Chan seems to have outplanned him, or so it seems. It's an episode of Leverage (which had a South Korean edition), but it's a working formula, and there are enough off-kilter elements to make it interesting here: There's the entire cult-like call center, the writer with the brilliant scripts, the on-site operations.

Instead, the whole thing often comes off kind of clumsily. Han is such an obvious plant on top of being a blunt object quick to hesitate to ruin someone else's life that it seems impossible these meticulous planners would let him rise nearly as quickly as he does based on one reference, and there's really no reason to have both Kwak and Chan except to kill time by having them fight, while the guy writing their scripts is some sort of blackmail victim. There's no intrigue inside the call center worth keeping up with, and Han sneaking away or busting through back rooms never feels like a great undercover operation.

On the other hand, Byun Yo-han is at least a guy who brings a fair amount of charisma to this blue-collar-at-heart guy who is nevertheless smart enough to take on the schemers, coming across as a sort of Korean Gerard Butler. He can throw down in a fun bull-in-a-china-shop way but isn't invincible and lets out righteous fury without seeming to be a prick about it. It's a shame the filmmakers didn't figure out how to pair him with Lee Joo-young more; her hyper-capable techie who isn't nearly as smooth as she thinks she is works as a great complement and she's a natural in ridiculous, dangerous situations. Kim Mu-yeol has some fun chewing scenery - again, in a better movie you might do without Chan and just run with how Kwak sort of spins the same web for his crew that he does for his victims.

Ultimately, this maybe wants to be a little too straightforward, with an ending that feels like a cop show's introduction, making sure the audience feels the righteous fury of the scammed for the scammers. The thing is, the movie never really convinces that this is a problem that can be punched, even if punching is what it's got.