Back at Kendall Square: My Zoe and Blithe Spirit

Is it fair that, every time I see a new movie with Julie Delpy, I check IMDB to see if it's time to check in on Jesse and Cecille yet? No. I do not do this when I see something with Ethan Hawke, after all. What's up with that?

(This time, though, we are kind of due for a new one at Sundance 2022 if they follow the 9-year-intervals, though I'm willing to give them a Covid mulligan.)

At any rate, it made for an interesting "sci-fi/fantasy at the boutique house" double feature, even if Kendall Square has kind of stretched toward the mainstream more in the last six months. My Zoe was not exactly a fun surprise - folks with kids may want to avoid this, especially if they've been through a divorce - but it was an interesting one. I grumble a lot about science fiction that reduces big ideas to the sort of story that doesn't require that sort of imagination, but this clearly seems to do the opposite, starting from the mundane (if awful) and doing a what if without the end trying to force it into some contemporary way of thinking.

It was also my first time back at the Kendall since the state started allowing concessions (or the cities; I'm not sure exactly where the mandate stands), and I'm kind of not a fan. Not so much for being more paranoid about whether or not the folks in the other seats are wearing their mask from moment to moment, although that's not great, but for how inconvenient it seems to be. I'm not fully removing my KN-95 to snack, just trying to pull the bottom forward and sneak stuff up, but that works a whole lot better with a straw than a handful of Reese's Pieces or popcorn. It makes each bite more of a production than necessary, at least if you're trying to minimize mask-off time. As much as I know concessions are what really pays the bills at theaters, I'm tempted to buy some candy and just pocket it to eat on a socially distanced bench next time. Or go with Pocky.

Attendance was peculiar, too, in a way that might just be time-of-day and might be something more. I was pretty close to alone for My Zoe at 1:15pm, but had a fair amount of company for Blithe Spirit at around 4:30pm. It was Sunday, so maybe people were just slow getting going, or Blithe Spirit picked up people who would be going to a 7pm-ish show if there was one, but the curious thing is that the latter is available on various SVOD platforms for less than what Landmark charges for a single ticket. I've been pleasantly surprised to see that there are some people willing to come out for the theatrical experience even with stuff available at home and it making more sense to stay there. I've got no idea how that plays out when people are vaccinated and theaters are no longer considering an audience of 12 a win, but it soothes my "this is going to kill theaters" worries a little.

My Zoe

* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 February 2021 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, DCP)

Come for the science fictional premise, stay for the brutal means by which Julie Delpy gets you there, although I'm not exactly complaining about that. Movies like My Zoe are so often focused on the ethics of an innovation as to make the science separate from the everyday life that it will eventually impact. Instead, the ugly divorce and lingering torture that follow are precisely articulated enough that one may forget the two recognizable names in the opening credits who will play a big part in the film's back half.

Delpy plays Isabelle, an immunologist living in Berlin, sharing custody of her seven-year-old daughter Zoe (Sophia Ally) with her British ex-husband James (Richard Armitage). At first glance, they appear to be handling it well, but they squabble over making up days with Zoe when work takes one out of town or when the other can't accommodate their changes of plans. That's before Zoe's seemingly innocuous cold suddenly develops into a neurological emergency. The hospital stay brings out their best and worst in equal measure, and eventually pushes Isabelle to seek the help of Thomas Fischer (Daniel Brühl), a geneticist she met at a conference several years ago whose controversial work has pushed him to set up shop in Moscow rather than the more tightly regulated European Union.

Delpy waits for the moments when Isabelle and James are at their rawest to lay bare why their marriage fell apart - and make no mistake, Delpy and Richard Armitage sell the heck out of what a disaster of a couple they were in ugly, convincing fashion - but those details aren't what matters. The almost clinical detail of managing the separation is what's important; it's painful and seems to make even simple things require a checklist five times as long as necessary, and even as it seems to enrage Isabelle and James it keeps them on track. It provides structure to what's initially a movie about how marriages collapse and how unexpected tragedies can be hell. It's a painfully honest look at how, while kids are wonderful themselves, the responsibilities and societal expectations that come with them can twist a person in ways that aren't totally healthy, too say the least. These two aren't good for each other, but they can't not be a part of one another's lives.

That twisting is how Isabelle can wind up mad-scientist mad with grief, even if Daniel Brühl's Thomas is the one who can't resist the temptation she presents to his ego. There's a bit of Victor Frankenstein to him, for sure, but he and science itself are not self-starting dangers here, even if they are all too willing to do what someone like Isabelle wants. It's fascinating how consuming this quest gets, with Gemma Arterton grounding scenes (and arguably the whole movie) as the sensible person who keeps getting pulled in further because she can't not be: She's too close and it's too relatable. The steady, realistic perspective serves Delpy well here, too; the audience is in the right mindset to appreciate the clinical detail and seeming mundanity of research compared to the convenience and ease presented by more action/horror-oriented sci-fi.

It's not all mundane, of course, but Delpy is really clever with how she deploys the futuristic or weird bits. She keeps the audience in familiar territory for most of the first half - it feels maybe a couple years into the future if that when such things aren't really important - but then the script says something like "Isabelle crumples the iPad" and it's both an emotional moment and a signal that it's time to go further. She and her team make Dr. Fischer's waiting room unnerving in a creative way without busting the budget or hopping genres. It is, arguably, less eccentric than some of her comedy work, but really excellently deployed.

I'm not sure about the coda - I feel like this would be the thing other filmmakers spend the whole movie exploring and it's like four minutes - but there's an honesty to it you maybe don't get in anything but a glimpse. The situation it presents is weird but may not be fifty years from now, and it sits in the middle of all of the uncertainty that came before as much as it defies those feelings. It undercuts what one may feel the movie's theme should be, but in doing so acknowledges that these are people, not philosophical points.

It means that My Zoe is not really the film that one expects or that it seemingly should be at either end, but it's smart and raw in how it defies that conventional wisdom. A lot of science fiction looking for respectability does itself no favors by reducing world-changing ideas to the questions people deal with every day, but Delpy's on the right track by starting from those questions and following them wherever they might lead.

Also at eFilmCritic

Blithe Spirit '20

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 February 2021 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)

You probably don't get more than a minute or two into Blithe Spirit before the flashy colors, imminent broad slapstick, and maybe slightly exaggerated sound effects tell you that this movie is going to work hard to make you laugh. That is no bad thing - it beats the cases when filmmakers seem determined that any comedy that occurs should seem unintentional - but something like this could occasionally do with being sly as well. All that obvious effort means that even randomness has a hard time catching one by surprise.

It opens with writer Charles Condomine (Dan Stevens) having a devil of a time adapting the first of his series of mystery novels into a screenplay. Second wife Ruth (Isla Fisher) is supportive - and eager to move into a new social circle - but not the muse that his first was. The pair join another couple (Emilia Fox & Julian Rhind-Tutt) for an evening out watching spiritualist Cecily Arcati (Judi Dench), which inspires Charles with a new angle, though he'd want to learn more about the tricks of the trade first. But when they arrange a private seance with Madame Arcati, it's accidentally too successful - Charles's deceased first wife Elvira (Leslie Mann) manifests for Charles, and when he's not looking like a lunatic for talking to someone only he can see, neither woman is terribly happy about the presence of the other.

Director Peter Hall has spent a good portion of the past decade or so making television that falls in the same general category as Blithe Spirit - stories set in 1930s Britain with fine Art Deco houses and practical yet striking fashions, where all of the upper-class people in the main cast are free-spirited and educated enough to speak frankly and wittily while the servants who support such a life seem comfortable and not ill-treated in their stations, backed by a peppy soundtrack that is decades away from having a synthesizer or electric guitar involved - and why not? It's just familiar enough to imagine oneself in the situation and just far back enough to be a fantasy. Here, he and the producers do a nice job evoking that sort of fantasy version of the 1930s, with a sprawling house that seems well-suited to the widescreen photography and a pleasing combination of idleness and energy. For movies like this, the particular story being told is less important than the mood, and this one does a very good job of getting the feeling right.

Part of that is freeing the cast up to be less naturalistic than they would be in contemporary productions, but not everyone is quite able to hit that target. The heck of it is that the two actresses who seem most comfortable going broad, Isla Fisher and Leslie Mann, don't get much chance to play off each other, as the latter is playing a ghost that the former can't see. They are individually a lot of fun as society and flapper ladies who seem just sincere enough in their fondness for Charles to smooth over how demanding and oblivious they can be. Dan Stevens, on the other hand, has the raw tools for this sort of thing (consider how he just dives into this sort of chaos on Legion), but is never quite able to see his character defined precisely enough for the triangle to work: Charles is too willing to do whatever will create the most chaos, and Stevens never quite gets a personality out of it the way Fisher and Mann do. Dench does the job asked of her well enough, but Madame Arcati seems to be conceived of as too sincere; there's a sadness to her that is nice work on Dench's part even though the movie would probably be better with Arcati an outright fraud frantic at having actually succeeded in piercing the veil.

The direction also often feels one gear too slow, like the banter would really pop if they were exchanging it without pause, but instead there's just enough time for Charles guy to realize that he looks like a nut yelling at empty air so that it looks weird when he keeps doing it. It also highlights how either Noel Coward or the person adapting his play seems to be making it up as he hopes along, and stuff that would work if they were just zipping along to the next joke flops when the audience has time to try and reconcile it with the last scene. There are bits that occasionally seem like something may come out of them, like just how much Elvira being Charles's "muse" actually entailed, but then the movie will get pulled in another direction, and they're increasingly jarring as the film goes along.

It's often enough the result of following the jokes and sparing no effort in selling them to more or less work, especially with the spiffy production and nifty cast. Blithe Spirit misfires often enough to be frustrating, but works just enough to counter that for an hour and a half or so.

Also at eFilmCritic

Chinese New Year 2021: Endgame and A Writer's Odyssey (plus Hidden Man)

Happy Lunar New Year for those who celebrate! A bit late, but the last year's been the last year, so I didn't get to the first of the two holiday releases that CMC is importing to the USA until its second week, and then my brain wouldn't come together to write them up until almost a week later. It's a bummer that so far, it looks like these are the only two we're getting, with the massive hit Detective Chinatown 3 not making it over. Whether that's because Warner has the distribution rights (as they did with #2) and Wanda doesn't want any part of their HBO Max deal, or because Wanda doesn't see American theaters as worth the effort, I dunno. Heck, maybe they're being socially responsible and not releasing movies that will get people into theaters until America gets its spread more under control.

Anyway, A Writer's Odyssey and Endgame have been the #3 and #4 movies in China for the weekends of the 12th and 19th, making $113M and $43M respectively, which is a pretty nice haul except that #1 and #2, Detective Chinatown 3 and Hi, Mom, have each made $620M in that time frame. It's mind-boggling, because it can be very hard for Americans to grasp just how enormous China is, especially when it's setting records like that.

I wonder if those movies are better that the ones we got, because both Endgame and A Writer's Odyssey are cases where you can see the material for better movies underneath what are fair and entertaining ones. To a certain extent, I wonder if they're unsatisfying to me because I'm not part of the target audience and what seems to me like avoiding things is presenting them in coded fashion. Still, the ways these movies twist to avoid censorship can be kind of screwy. Take the finale of A Writer's Odyssey:

SPOILERS!

There's been a bit of exposition about how Li Mu has set up an elaborate frame job to make it look like Guang Ning has killed Lu Kongwen because he's a nut who thinks Kongwen was involved in child trafficking, ridding himself of the author who is a threat as the son of his former partner on top of how his fantasy world is linked to the real one, and Tu Ling holds him off saying basically "let them keep writing, I want to see if what they do in the other world will actually kill you". Then there's a big crazy fantasy action sequence, and when it returns to the real world... We don't find out what happened to Li Mu at all. It's kind of a funny demonstration on how we look at screen violence - it's okay for fantasy heroes to slay a demigod in a boss battle, but taking action that results in the deliberate killing of the villain is a no-no, and because this draws a line directly between them, you can't actually show the results of it. In an American film, we'd probably call it cowardly and hypocritical, but for a country with the kind of censorship China has, it's just what you do to get around them. I generally find that sort of thing disappointing, but it's as much my perspective as the film.

!SRELIOPS

I also kick-started the weekend by getting Hidden Man off my shelf; it's probably been there since it was a new release. Not a LNY movie, but that sort of big spectacle. It was okay, but also kind of compromised at points. It was kind of wild to look on IMDB and see that at one point Kevin Spacey was in it before the censors demanded most of the espionage material be removed. You can see that in the end result, as there's a lot of things mentioned toward the beginning that don't wind up mattering much (one character's daughter seems important but fades into the background) and maybe the harsh resolution as the background events start catching up (a character's dramatic suicide seems far out of line with their behavior and level of shame).

If nothing else, though, that weekend gave me some impetus to see related material - the Japanese and Korean movies that Endgame remade, the Brotherhood of Blades movies from the maker of A Writer's Odyssey, and the first two "bullets" movies from Jiang Wen. I'm sure the first pair will be tricky to track down, while I may split the Blades ones, getting a local Blu-ray but a 4K from Hong Kong. For the latter, it's kind of crazy how either interest or profitability of Chinese action has dropped off in the USA - Let the Bullets Fly is out as a Blu-ray from Well Go, but Gone with the Bullets only got a DVD from Sony, and Hidden Man just hasn't made it here yet, despite Jiang theoretically getting a higher profile after Rogue One. Surprisingly, I can't find a HK version for Gone either. This stuff just seems to either just not reliably get an easy release or evaporate.

Ren Chao Xiong Yong (Endgame '21)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2021 in AMC Boston Common #18 (first-run, DCP)

I've seen Endgame described as a Chinese remake of a Korean film which was itself a remake of a Japanese film, and it's not so much that things have been lost in translation as the edges have been sanded off. It's got a fine, well-tested premise and the basics of the jokes are known to work, but I'd be surprised if the Chinese crew added that much to what the previous filmmakers came up with.

The high-concept premise has unsuccessful actor Chen Xiaomeng (Xiao Yang) visiting a public bath right when another man (Andy Lau Tak-Wah) slips on a bar of soap and lands on his head. Xiaomeng, already considering ending his own life and remembering how nicely dressed the other man was, switches locker keys and uses the money he finds in the man's car to pay off his debts - until he finds out that the man has survived but has retrograde amnesia, and he can theoretically keep this luxurious new life. There's a catch, though - Zhou Quan is a hitman, and after having her husband disposed of, client Hui Hui (Huang Xiaolei) would like "Mr. Z" to take out his pregnant mistress Zeng Jiurong (Cheng Yi). Meanwhile, "Chen Xiaomeng" is released from the hospital to an unfamiliar apartment, but makes a friend in Li Xiang (Wan Qian), a single mom and newsmagazine writer who needs a subject for a new feature article.

It seems like there's a really clever or zany movie to be made with this premise, but the various bits of it don't wind up playing off each other very well. The thread with Chen living the cushy life of a rich assassin doesn't cross over with Zhou living his enough, and the film often seems neutered in other ways. It's self-aware enough to play like one of a comedy that spoofs conventions except that the filmmakers don't seem to know much else and fall back upon them. The Chinese "Crime Can Not Pay" dictate makes the end a lot messier than it has to be (while also requiring hilariously thorough mid-credits pieces making sure that the audience knows that the system dealt with everybody who deserved it to the exact letter of the law) while undercutting what may be any sort of theme about how each could benefit from some part of the other's lives. There's a brutal observation or two to be made here but the filmmakers don't seem to have the stomach for it, and a ready-made barb early on about Li's readers looking for lurid stories of "amnesia, abortion, and love triangles" is not the set up it should be.

The biggest problem, though, is that it is unbalanced. Andy Lau's character is presented as having been a ruthless hitman before the amnesia, but Lau portrays him as completely good-hearted and earnest and ironically a far better actor than Chen because he's trained to be a master of disguise who vanishes into his character, eventually lecturing his counterpart on why he's not a good actor when they do meet. Xiao Yang, meanwhile, is mugging for the camera and never gets the material that would play to how Chen is both good-hearted and desperate, especially since director Rao Xiaozhi and his co-writers seldom give him the chance to succeed because folks expect gangsters to be flamboyant and dramatic. Both of these actors should be getting a certain combination of sincerity and absurdity to play, but it never works out that way.

They are game for what the filmmakers give them, though, and the movie comes alive when the script hits a quality comedy set-up, even if there are just as many maudlin ones meant to be heartwarming but which don't work nearly so well in a movie that has at least made motions toward acknowledging the medium's artifice. There's one goofy moment involving a ball-pit that makes me wonder what the movie would be like if the whole thing were along those lines, and a side-story going on during the climax that would play even more enjoyably peculiar if it were played off the high-stakes material going on at the same time a little better. It's also worth noting that the women who get to play eccentric but straightforward characters are often a lot more entertaining than the male leads: Wan Qian nails how Li Xiang is good-hearted and funny but also no fool in relatively few scenes, and Huang Xiaolei seems to have a grand old time chewing scenery in what the subtitles suggest is defiantly broken Mandiran as the sort of low-class foil who may be ignorant of a lot but has a sharp mind for what she does know. It would have been a lot more fun to have sparks fly between Xiao's "Mr. Z" and her rather than the sketchily defined Jiurong.

It makes for enough of a mess to make one curious to see the original Japanese and Korean versions, or ponder an English-language remake, all responding to their industries' own particular tropes. In a way, Endgame does that in how it's restricted by how far a crime movie made in China can go, but it never shows the satirical courage necessary to properly bite the hand that feeds it.

Also at eFilmCritic

Ci sha xiao shuo jia (A Writer's Odyssey)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 February 2021 in AMC Boston Common #16 (first-run, DCP)

I doubt know if it works this way in China or if the Brotherhood of Blades movies were big enough to merit it, but A Writer's Odyssey feels like when someone scores a surprisingly big hit and gets to make their dream project without a lot of people saying no. It is two or three different ambitious movies merged into one by means of a high concept that needs just as much attention on its own, and is as a result predictably all over the place. It is, at least, the sort that can't help but be intermittently entertaining because filmmaker Lu Yang is swinging so big and so much is going on.

It starts with Guang Ning (Lei Jiayin), a broken man living off the grid haunted by both dreams of a fantastical city and the kidnapping of his daughter Tangerine six years ago, and how he strikes back by forcing a semi full of trafficked kids off the road with uncannily well-aimed rocks, only to have the police think he is one of the criminals. He's busted out of custody by Tu Ling (Yang Mi), Chief Information Officer of the Aladdin Group, who has a strange offer: They believe that they have located Tangerine by applying facial recognition to the pictures taken by their smartphones, and will reunite them if Gaung kills author Lu Kongwen (Dong Zijian) before he livestreams the conclusion of his novel in three days time. Why? Well, Aladdin founder Li Mu (Yu Hewei) has been incapacitated every time Kongwen has mentioned his villain Lord Redmane's old head injury flaring up, and if Kongwen kills him at the story's climax...

That is, of course, not all - Guang Ning has been chosen in part because his unlikely disabling of that truck is no fluke; he can throw stones with impossible power and accuracy, seemingly changing their direction in mid-air, and he's not the only person with superpowers Li has found. Li Mu himself seems to be a Steve Jobs type building up a cult of personality, and Chinese viewers will find it almost impossible to miss that "Aladdin" is awfully similar to "Alibaba", one of China's largest companies with its fingers in everything from internet services to banking to entertainment (including this movie!), though I'm not sure how specifically Li Mu maps to that company's founder Jack Ma. On top of that, a fair amount of time is spent in the world of Kongwen's novel, which has its own lore detailed enough to not just be a generic stand-in. That's something like four different genre movies, from sword & sorcery to superheros, all mashed into one, and for all that the film does an admirably smooth job of moving from one to another, it seldom gets very far down into any of them. There's a whole paranoid thriller to be made on how sinister an organization with the reach of Aladdin is but it's taken for granted when not useful, for instance; the philosophical ramifications of whether Kongwen is tapping into a parallel world with linked doppelgangers or creating it aren't much pondered, even when a battle in the fantasy world has hundreds of casualties, or even how this world's Kongwen has the power to captivate and maybe influence millions despite both Li Mu and Redmane being able to exert more direct control. There's this terrific metaphor at its center but by having Kongwen as a character, the viewer can actually see the writers screwing around with plot devices like they matter more than the bigger themes.

But when Lu throws everything he's got at the movie - and that's a lot; I couldn't really read the end credits but the logos imply that it was filmed with Imax cameras and optimized for Imax 3D - it can be a visual feast, full of exciting high concepts. The audience only dips in and out of the fantasy world occasionally, but Dong Zijian's questing hero version of Kongwen is enjoyable as a protagonist with a hint of whatever the Chinese for Mary Sue/Marty Stu is, and one gets the impression of the sort of enjoyably detailed world-building that could believably suck fans in. That Kongwen's got sentient, parasitic armor that leapt to him from a defeated opponent, the sidekick he acquired is pursued by spiffily designed warriors, and an almost throwaway image of flying dragons that are actually linked pods that function like hot-air balloons feels like the sort of thing that most movies would save as the centerpiece of a finale.

The "real world" pieces are, frustratingly, not quite so compelling, with that Kongwen such a generic dork that viewers will spend a long time wondering why a superpowered assassin is apparently necessary - and, truth be told, the movie would be about a half-hour long if Guang Ning didn't also feel the need to figure this out. For all that the film is built around Lu Kongwen and Li Mu being on a collision course, they both tend to be at the sidelines of what the audience sees. It's not a bad decision, since Lei Jiayin is a solid base for the movie as Guang Ning, and aside from him handling most everything the filmmakers throw at him, it's a neat trick to see a familiar story told from the point of view of the conflicted adversary with hidden depths. With him playing protagonist, Yang Mi gets that adversarial role, impressive during the action (along with a solid stunt team) and icily charismatic enough that it's a shame she doesn't have an opposite number in the novel, just to see another side of her.

It is, in fact, just good enough to make me wonder if some of the sloppiness is deliberate, especially when the action in the other world reaches its climax. Its characters are inspired writers, but not necessarily presented as talented ones, so when a giant boss battle is going on in the other world while the walls are closing in in reality, the final set piece seems impossibly improvised despite being piled high with meticulously executed CGI. It's a strange spot midway between camp and attempted cool, swinging toward both haphazardly, crowd-pleasing enough but also bizarrely chaotic and amateurish at points. On the other hand, the whole thing is whatever was bouncing around the filmmakers' heads, bolted together haphazardly, and that's often fun and frustrating in equal measures.

The rest of the movie is like that, if not to the same spectacular degree. It's full of ideas that don't entirely fit together, with none of them getting all the time they need to breathe, and enthusiastically being that sort of movie doesn't make being decent at a lot of things add up to being great. A Writer's Odyssey is, instead, a strange mosaic built out of some nifty pieces.

Also at eFilmCritic

Xie bu ya zheng (Hidden Man)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 February 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

Hidden Man is the third of writer/director/co-star Jiang Wen "bullets" trilogy, with a detour to Hollywood to be part of Rogue One in between, and it's got to be sort of an odd sensation, doing this sort of sprawling epic in the shadow of the sheer amount of resources Disney was throwing at Star Wars. It almost seems to have Jiang trying to do too much even without making more than the usual effort to include a Western audience, making for a packed, frantic, but often pretty enjoyable bit of period action.

It starts with a martial-arts master celebrating his birthday by betrothing his daughter and his adopted son Li Tianran, only to have someone crash the party - Zhu Qianlong (Liao Fan), a former student the Master has disowned for working with the occupying Japanese forces. He and compatriot Ichiro Nemoto (Kenya Sawada) slaughter the whole family, or so they think - Li escapes and is found by American doctor Wallace Hendler (Andy Friend), who adopts him and sends him to America to study medicine. Fifteen years later, in the 1930s, "Bruce Hendler" (Eddie Peng Yu-Yen) returns to Beijing to work alongside his father in the hospital and support the resistance on behalf of the American government. And, of course, to seek revenge on Zhu, now the chief of police, and Nemoto, now the leader of a gang of assassins. An ally will supposedly reveal themselves with a codeword, but is it Zhu's mistress Tang Fengyi (Summer Xu Qing)? Lan Qingfeng (Jiang), a businessman with his hands in a little bit of everything, legal or not? Guan Qiaohong (Zhou Yun), a master seamstress going through painful rehab to reverse the foot-binding done to her as a child? Any of them could also be working for the Japanese, or the Nationalist armies, and "Bruce" must keep his true identity secret, as Zhu has framed him for the murder of his master.

Jiang and company hit the ground running and don't ever stop for very long, finding skimpy reasons for Li to either get into fights or do the sort of running and jumping on rooftops that has similar energy - and when a physical confrontation isn't warranted, he gets into arguments or pushes at people in a way that suggests he never learned much about not calling attention to himself lest he blow his cover. Even when the story calls for him to lie low later on, he gets the sort of itchy feet that has him seemingly spending more time visiting Guan than hiding away. It's the sort of headstrong hero Gordon Liu used to play without the arc that has him learning discipline at the Shaolin Temple, and while it's kind of obnoxious, Eddie Peng generally finds a way to play Li Tianran so that his bull-headedness is wrapped up with having his eyes on the prize, with a certain cockiness that comes from feeling like he's taken in the best parts of both his Chinese and American backgrounds that crosses over into arrogance just often enough that the audience can enjoy when he faceplants because of it. There's a lot about this guy that should rub the audience the wrong way, but doesn't quite, which is a good thing: There's a lot of Bruce/Li (rimshot) in this movie, and it would collapse if he burned out his goodwill early.

He's got a fun ensemble to work against, too, most notably Liao Fan, who does a nice job of making Zhu both a preening villain with delusions of grandeur - he believes himself a descendant of the Ming Dynasty whom the Japanese will restore to the throne - and dangerous ruthlessness, well-matched in a fight with Peng but also just generally a dangerous and cunning loose cannon. Zhou Yun is an equal whose Guan is smarter and more grounded than Li, enough to throw off sparks and play off Peng entertainingly when the pair grow more aligned, with Xu Qing playing a different shade of that as a woman who is well aware of what she can get with just the possibility of sex. Andy Friend acquits himself much better than most folks in his situation do - he's one of those Westerners that shows up in Chinese movies with relatively few acting credits because it's harder to tell how well someone acting in a foreign language is doing, but he's apparently picked up enough in a career doing everything else around the movie business to communicate Hendler's parental angst well, and both he and Peng are comfortably bilingual enough that their arguments and banter can bounce between languages as needed.

It's a lot going on and moving fast, but Jiang and the martial-arts team of Kenji Tanigaki and Yan Hua build some great set-pieces, and even when there's not punching, kicking, or shooting going on, they're maintaining a high energy level. A lot of it is played light and fast-paced enough to get a laugh right up until the point where things get real, quick enough to get past a lot of things the plot skips past. Some of that is because the local audience likely knows more about the real events in the background, and some is because the film was retooled at points to get a pass from the film board. It's slickly produced and has nice effects when needed, although it's sometimes stretched.

I'd love to see the original cut of this, because it's not difficult at all to see where subplots were cut out and the film had to be put back together, but that's not exactly likely. What's left is fast and exciting, enough that I'm excited to go back and see the other two films in the set.

Also at eFilmCritic

Next Week in [Virtual] Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 26 February 2021 - 4 March 2021

Whoa, but does February go by fast. It won't entirely be "Next Week in…" on this blog, but I've got to admit that I'm not really using this to plan my moviegoing week like usual. I have sort of become more of a crossword person than a movie person during the past year - the daily email aggregating the puzzles from both newspapers and independent blogs gives me something to get through, while combining the online offerings with my too-full shelves gives me full-on decision paralysis of not knowing what to watch next, especially since the days blending together means I'm seldom in the mood for anything specific., and I wind up either not watching anything or trying to keep ahead of the TV stuff building up on my DVR. It's a low-turnover week, though, so maybe I'll get to more.

• The Brattle Theatre keeps busy, though, opening a few new releases. Sin stars Alberto Testone as Michelangelo, who is torn by commissions by successive popes who were each members of powerful rival families. For something more modern, documentary Un Film Dramatique follows the first class to attend a newly-constructed middle school in Paris, who also help director Éric Baudelaire put it together. They join Twilight's Kiss, Truth to Power, Demonlover, Lapsis, Crestone, What Happened Was…, Heartworn Highways, Mirror, and Atlantis in the Brattlite virtual theater.
  
  That area also features a one-week booking of Smooth Talk, courtesy of Strictly Brohibited; the new restoration of Laura Dern's breakout role was "at" the Coolidge a while a back. Another group of friends, The DocYard, starts their spring season with Downstream to Kinhasa, a documentary which follows a group of disabled veterans of Congo's 2000 Six Day War seeking reparations, combined with spoken-word pieces. Director Dieudo Hamadi will participate in a live Q&A on Monday afternoon.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre pretty much retains the same virtual lineup of Jumbo, Days of the Bagnold Summer, Test Pattern, Ruth: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words, Our Right to Gaze: Black Film Identities, Two of Us, M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity, Some Kind of Heaven, and City Hall this week, although there's a few noteworthy things coming up. The week's Coolidge Education seminar is for Tod Browning's Freaks - sign up, get an introduction and a Zoom link sent to you, watch the film before and then join Indiewire editor Kristen Lopez at 8pm Thursday.
• ArtsEmerson's Film Program has encores from their "Shared Stories" series through Sunday, with Our Right to Gaze, Savages, Servants, and Specialty Acts, and Alternative Facts: The Lies of Executive Order 9066 "Pick Your Price" features (with Our Right to Gaze and Alternative Facts including pre-recorded Q&As) and six short films being streamed for free.
  
  Also via Emerson, Duty Free is the week's selection from Bright Lights at Home. It streams for up to 175 from Wednesday at noon until 7pm Thursday, and follows a man and his mother traveling after she loses her job (at 75) and worries about her future. Both director Sian-Pierre Regis and mom Rebecca Danigelis will be on-hand for the discussion Thursday evening.
• Landmark Theatres Kendall Square is open Friday to Sunday (and next Thursday) with three new releases. Julie Delpy writes, directs, and stars in My Zoe, playing a scientist trying to keep her daughter alive in some form after she suffers a massive brain hemorrhage, and I'm guessing the "in some form" is important. They also open Herself (which, interestingly for those following windows, has been on Amazon Prime for a month and a half already); it features Clare Dunne as a mother of two escaping an abusive spouse, looking to build a small place to live.
  
  Also opening is Night of the Kings, which I didn't get around to reviewing when it played as part of IFFBoston's Fall Focus, but it's a striking film from the Ivory Coast (its Oscar submission), set in a prison where the inmates are basically left to run things on their own, and a new arrival must make a story last through until dawn or be sacrificed.
• The big opening at the multiplex is Tom and Jerry, a live-action/animation hybrid that functions as an origin story and has Chloë Grace Moretza and Michael Peña in there somewhere as well. It's at West Newton (through Sunday), Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Chestnut Hill (through Sunday), and on HBO Max.
  
  Apple's documentary Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry gets a Friday-evening screening in Imax at Boston Common, with the big screen still used for Nomadland for the rest of the week, with either Raya and the Last Dragon or Chaos Walking moving in on Thursday. South Bay has the Lord of the Rings films on their Imax screen through Wednesday, as well as one-offs of God's Compass (Friday), Get on Up (Saturday), and Boyz n the Hood (Sunday/Wednesday)
• End Game and A Writer's Odyssey continue to play Boston Common for Lunar New Year.
• The West Newton Cinema has spiffed up their website a bit, and offers Leona on Friday and Saturday in addition to having Tom & Jerry on two or three screens.
• The Somerville Theatre is still closed but had construction permits in the windows when I last walked by, so maybe the upstairs theaters will have the same new look as the ones downstairs when they re-open. The site, though, is still just linking to The Slutcracker: The Movie. The Capitol has ice cream and snacks Wednesday through Sunday.
• Theater rentals are available at the Coolidge, the Brattle, Kendall Square, West Newton, the Capitol, The Lexington Venue, and the AMC/Showcase multiplexes. The Coolidge is showing slots available to reserve online through the end of March for Moviehouse II, the screening room, and the GoldScreen, with "Premium Programming" including In the Mood for Love, Sound of Metal, and Wolfwalkers available along with the option to bring your own disc; the AMC app lists some "sold out" showtimes that are probably just meant to show the movies are available as part of rentals. The independent theaters also have other fund-raising offers worth checking out.

I've hit "buy" on Psycho Goreman and Jumbo, so I should probably watch those before time runs out (if I can - I'm stretching PG's availability badly), and I'll probably head to the Kendall for My Zoe and Blithe Spirit it it doesn't rain all weekend. And, well, lots of crosswords in between, including the Boswords Spring Themeless League; that starts Monday night and there's still time to join.

Next Week in [Virtual] Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 19 February 2021 - 25 February 2021

So Detective Chinatown 3 made something like $400M last weekend, but it looks like it won't play near Chinatowns in America because its distributor isn't the one that's booking in US theaters. Which is weird, since they own a large chunk of AMC, the only chain that's committed to being open, but go figure.

• The Brattle Theatre has something to fit Chinese New year, though, with Twilight's Kiss, a film out of Hong Kong about two older men who meet in a park after having been closeted their whole lives. They also bring in Truth to Power, a musician documentary focused on System of a Down's Serj Tankian, as well as a new restoration of the director's cut of Demonlover, and, folks, I do not like this whole deal of time passing to the extent that movies released in the twenty-first century are getting restorations. They join Lapsis, Crestone, What Happened Was…, Heartworn Highways, Mirror, Atlantis, Have You Seen My Movie?, and Psycho Goreman in the Brattlite virtual theater.
  
  The Independent Film Festival Boston/A24 virtual premiere run of Minarihas done well enough that all the 7pm shows have been sold out, but they've put extras on at 9pm (and weekend 4pm shows) for the second week of its run, through the 25th. Proceeds from those shows benefits the teater, as does their concessions take-out sale; reserve a time and come away with popcorn, soda, candy, shirts, and more.
• Things get kind of weird at The Coolidge Corner Theatre this week, at least from what I can tell from two of their films. Jumbo is one I didn't get a chance to stream from Fantasia last summer, but it has a unique hook with Noémie Merlant playing a woman who falls in love with an amusement park ride, and if I remember the discussion at the time, it's not exactly a platonic affair. Meanwhile, Days of the Bagnold Summer is a coming-of-age film about a teenager who just wants to stay in his room and listen to Metallica when plans to visit his father for the summer fall through and his single mother, with original songs by Belle and Sebastian, who, if I'm not mistaken, represent the polar opposite of Metallica, musically.
  
  Test Pattern, at least, looks a little more conventional, a taut-looking drama about a couple who drive from hospital to hospital looking to have a rape kit performed after the black girlfriend is attacked, the white boyfriend never having faced that sort of official apathy and hostility. They can be found alongside Ruth: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words, Our Right to Gaze: Black Film Identities, Two of Us, M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity, Some Kind of Heaven, and City Hall as streaming options.
  
  Filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford and co-stars Brittany S. Hall & Will Brill will have a virtual Q&A for Test Pattern on Monday evening, one of three discussions planned for the week. MLK/FBI director Sam Pollard will join State Representative Nika Elugardo for a Panorama discussion on Wednesday; the film was part of IFFBoston's Fall Focus last summer and while it's not at the virtual Coolidge, it's rentable in plenty of places. The same goes for Singin' in the Rain, the subject of critic Josh Spiegel's Thursday seminar (with an introduction available earlier for those who register).
• The page for the GlobeDocs Black History Month Film Festival has some of the earlier discussions meant to follow the films up on line, and still shows links to RSVP to stream Black Boys, Code Switching, and short "Together - 6 Feet Apart" even though the Q&A events have already taken place. Process is the Project Part One is available to stream now (with a RSVP), with a discussion at noon on Monday, right about when Glory will become available (though you have to reserve before 9am on Monday) ahead of a 3pm discussion on Thursday.
  
  Boston Jewish Film continues their preview of The Vigil through Monday, which also gives the viewer a chance to see a live talk with filmmaker Keith Thomas, cast, and crew on the closing night.
• Bright Lights at Home offers a free stream (for up to 175 people) of Coded Bias from noon Wednesday through 7pm Thursday, with director Shalini Kantayya joining a Zoom call at 8pm on Thursday. I remember it being one of those docs that's a decent overview, the sort of thing where you could probably get a lot of extra benefit from picking the director's brain (and that of the moderator and any other guests) afterward.
  
  With both series being virtual, they don't have to share the Bright Screening Room with ArtsEmerson's Film Program, which has a week of encores from their "Shared Stories" series starting on Wednesday. Features Our Right to Gaze, Savages, Servants, and Specialty Acts, and Alternative Facts: The Lies of Executive Order 9066 are marked as "Pick Your Price" (with Our Right to Gaze and Alternative Facts including pre-recorded Q&As); there are also six short films being streamed for free. They come online at 7pm Wednesday and go off at 10pm on the 28th.
• Landmark Theatres Kendall Square is open Friday to Sunday with the main new attraction being Nomadland, Chloé Zhao's terrific film featuring Frances McDormand as a widow living out of her van after her entire town closes. It's been an Imax exclusive for a while, and also shows up on Hulu this weekend, although the big screen adds quite a bit. The film also expands to South Bay and Chestnut Hill.
  
  They also pick up Blithe Spirit, an adaptation of a Noël Coward play which stars Dan Stevens as a novelist whose first wife (Leslie Mann) is manifested by a spiritualist (Judi Dench), and is not exactly pleased with her replacement (Isla Fisher). That is, if nothing else, a heck of a nifty cast.
• It's a quiet week at the multiplexes, with the main addition at Boston Common being End Game, a new film from A Cool Fish director Rao Xiaozhi, in which an out of work actor assumes the life of a man he presumes to be dead, only to find out his new identity is that of an assassin, while that man awakens with amnesia, befriended by a single mother who believes him to be the actor. It joins A Writer's Odyssey, both of which I notice are distributed by CMC, as was The Rescue, as the rest of the folks importing Chinese films don't seem to think it's worth booking in America despite many screens being available.
  
  South Bay has the three Lord of the Rings films at various times this week - I don't quite see the pattern on the weekend, although Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday is clear enough, with both AMCs' Imax screens going to the Billie Eilish documentary on Thursday.
• The West Newton Cinema does not yet have their schedule up; my guess is Nomadland and Judas and the Black Messiah, although they might just go with last weekend's slate of Judas and Leona.
• The Regent Theatre has a livestreamed "My Sweet George" event on Thursday, with a number of artists playing the music of George Harrison from the Beatles to, presumably, the Wilburys, with event posters available and an auction to benefit the theater.
• The Somerville Theatre is still closed while The Slutcracker: The Movie is apparently still available, because why not, I guess. Over in Arlington, The Capitol, has ice cream and snacks Wednesday through Sunday.
• Theater rentals are available at the Coolidge, the Brattle, Kendall Square, West Newton, the Capitol, The Lexington Venue, and the AMC/Showcase multiplexes. The Coolidge is showing slots available to reserve online through the end of March for Moviehouse II, the screening room, and the GoldScreen, with "Premium Programming" including In the Mood for Love, Sound of Metal, and Wolfwalkers available along with the option to bring your own disc; the AMC app lists some "sold out" showtimes that are probably just meant to show the movies are available as part of rentals. The independent theaters also have other fund-raising offers worth checking out.

I'm tempted to do double features this weekend, with the Chinese movies at Boston Common and maybe Blithe Spirit & The World to Come at the Kendall, getting weird with Psycho Goreman and Jumbo around it. Might do Demonlover, because I remember hating it 20 years ago but am now kind of unsure whether it was the movie or me.

Next Week in [Virtual] Tickets: Films sort of playing Boston 12 February 2021 - 18 February 2021

Potentially a very busy weekend - Lunar New Year, Valentine's Day, President's Day - all with attached film stuff. Plus theaters reopening with a fair amount of new material!

• I'm still kind of surprised that it's come down to The Brattle Theatre having to stream Casablanca for Valentine's Day, but here we are, so if that's a tradition for you (or even if it isn't), you can let them send it to you through Sunday. They've also got people manning the concession stand for the weekend, with popcorn, soda, snacks, and other goodies available for pick-up through Sunday night. Pre-order them online, specifying the pick-up time, and maybe get some merch as well.
  
  They also team up with Independent Film Festival Boston and A24 to do a virtual premiere run of the pretty darn great Minari, with shows at 7pm every day through the 25th. They've actually already sold everything through the 21st out, so lock down your ticket if you want your stream to benefit the Brattle!
  
  "Regular" virtual bookings include another that I enjoyed during festival streams last year, with Lapsis having played Fantasia and taking place in an alternate present where working class people lay cable throughout parkland for quantum computing, and a man doing it under false pretenses finds he's in for more than he bargained for. Another new addition, Crestone, has a kind of similar now/future/out of sync vibe, following musicians who come together in a Colorado desert town. They also pick up a new restoration of What Happened Was…, Tom Noonan's directorial debut from 1994 with two people spending Friday night in an intimidating apartment. They join My Little Sister, Heartworn Highways, Mirror, True Mothers, You Will Die at Twenty, Atlantis, Psycho Goreman, and Identifying Features in the Brattlite virtual theater.
• It's a relatively quiet week for The Coolidge Corner Theatre and their streaming options. Ruth: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words opens on Friday; it's a documentary that uses animation and illustration to visualize her letters and opinions. Their second new release arrives on Sunday, with Our Right to Gaze: Black Film Identities an anthology whose six segments are all directed by Black creators. They join Two of Us, A Glitch in the Matrix, M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity, Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, Some Kind of Heaven, and City Hall as streaming options.
  
  The week's virtual talk is a "Shakespeare Reimagined" presentation, with folks from the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company discussing Ten Things I Hate About You at 8pm on Wednesday. As with the usual Thursday entries, you can either dig through your shelves for a DVD or find a stream (JustWatch shows 4K availability!) after registering and before joining the panel.
• The Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival continues through Monday night, with features, shorts, and panels available to stream any time after they premiere and the traditional 24-hour marathon live-streamed starting at noon on Tuesday. I covered Monster Seafood Wars (very much Minoru Kawasaki pastiche, for better or worse) and A Mermaid in Paris (aggressively cute with a nice cast) via Fantasia, and am planning to catch Toxico, Truth or Consequences, Beauty Water, Bruja, Infinitum, The Trouble with Being Born, Deep In, The Unhealer, Tales of Tomorrow, and Curse of Willow Song, and maybe more if I find the time come Monday night.
  
  GlobeDocs continues their Black History Month Film Festival, with Code Switching and short "Together - 6 Feet Apart" available to stream now (Process is the Project Part One goes online Thursday). RSVP for the discussions (Tuesday noon for Code Switching, Thursday noon for "Together") to be sent links for both those Zoom calls and the film itself.
  
  Boston Jewish Film will be presenting the Boston Israeli Film Festival next month, but team up with the Coolidge and IFC Midnight for a preview of The Vigil, in which a man who has left his Hasidic community takes a job watching a recently-deceased man overnight and does not have it go smooth at all. It's available starting on Tuesday the 16th, and the ticket also includes a discussion with filmmaker Keith Thomas, cast, and crew on the 22nd.
• The week's Bright Lights at Home presentation is Welcome to Chechnya, available from noon Wednesday through 7pm Thursday. Director David France and producer Alice Henty will then join a Zoom call (also part of the same stream) to discuss their film on how the republic's leader is trying to eradicate LGBTQ-ness in the region. It's also available on HBO's streams if you don't want to count against the 175-person limit, although I don't know if that gets you into the Zoom.
• Landmark Theatres Kendall Square re-opens Friday through Monday with concessions on sale as well - in fact, if you have a vaccination card, they'll give you a free popcorn. They've got Minari on two screens, and five other new releases besides.
  
  Two are true-story dramas: The Mauritanian stars Tahar Rahim as the title character, imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay without charge for years, with Jodie Foster and Shailene Woodley as his attorneys and Benedict Cumberbatch as their opponent; it's also at Boston Common and Chestnut Hill. Judas and the Black Messiah stars Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield as Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and William O'Neal, who has been sent in undercover but has his loyalties tested as he rises through the ranks. It also plays Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), West Newton, Chestnut Hill, and HBO Max.
  
  Two more have women in isolated parts of America, with Robin Wright's Land (also at Boston Common/South Bay/Chestnut Hill) contemporary and featuring the director's character retreating to a cabin after a tragic loss, while The World to Come takes place in the 19th century and has two farmers' wives growing closer as they find themselves with needs that their husbands cannot fill.
  
  Serbian Oscar submission Dara of Jasenovac also opens, with director Predrag Peter Antonijević telling a tale from World War II about a young Serbian girl in a Croat concentration camp, the only one during the war not run by Germany. That one is also at Boston Common; Kendall Square also has Amazon's One Night in Miami… and Netflix's Mank.
• So far, there is only one Chinese movie at Boston Common opening to celebrate the Year of the Ox, with A Writer's Odyssey coming from Brotherhood of Blades director Lu Yang and featuring Dong Zijian as a fantasy writer whose world is starting to bleed into our own, which leads to a price being put on his head.
  
  Boston Common continues Nomadland on the Imax screen, while South Bay gives it over to the second and third parts of Lord of the Rings. Valentines/Black History presentations include Pretty in Pink at South Bay on Friday & Sunday, The Notebook at Boston Common Saturday & Sunday, and Ray at South Bay on Saturday.
• The West Newton Cinema is open through Sunday, and in addition to Judas and the Black Messiah, they have Leona, which stars Naian González Norvind as a young Jewish woman in Mexico City who falls for a man outside the faith.
• The Regent Theatre has their last planned stream of Jimmy Tingle's featurette "2020 Vision" this weekend; as usual, the one-hour featurette is followed by comedy and talk, with virtual tickets marked as "pay what you can"; unlike the previous three, this one is on Sunday at 5pm.
• The Somerville Theatre is still closed but the site offering The Slutcracker: The Movie is still showing tickets for sale. The Somerville's sister theater in Arlington, The Capitol, has ice cream and snacks Wednesday through Sunday.
• Theater rentals are available at the Coolidge, the Brattle, Kendall Square, West Newton, the Capitol, The Lexington Venue, and the AMC/Showcase multiplexes. The Coolidge is showing slots available to reserve online through the end of March for Moviehouse II, the screening room, and the GoldScreen, with "Premium Programming" including In the Mood for Love, Sound of Metal, and Wolfwalkers available along with the option to bring your own disc. The independent theaters also have other fund-raising offers worth checking out.

As you can see, I've got a lot of Sci-Fi fest stuff to get through before Monday night and am very tempted to head out for A Writer's Odyssey, The World to Come, The Mauritanian, and/or Judas and the Black Messiah on top of it.

I Wasn't Really Seeing This as a Double Feature, But...: 76 Days and Monk Comes Down the Mountain

"Stuff from China" is a nebulous-enough theme weekend, but I figured (based upon my previous experience with works of these filmmakers that I'd seen at Fantasia) they might be a little closer. 76 Days was sort of locked in for the Saturday I saw it - after delaying too long on streaming it via the Coolidge, I noted that there was a free one-day thing to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Wuhan locking down, and then I figured that I might as well finally pull Monk Comes Down the Mountain from the shelf because the people involved had made somewhat stately, almost too-serious martial arts stories, and I'd left it there because that hadn't been what I was looking for when in the mood for some action.

This wasn't that; it was big and broad and so full of slapstick that I'm still not sure what to do with how the oft-child-like protagonist murders a couple of people for revenge and then kind of feels bad about it but still runs the shop he inherited as a result. The movie mostly just needs him to be in the right place at the right time, but, still, it's weird.

Also weird: I got this disc from Hong Kong but you'd never know it.

It's not the only disc I've ever received from there that doesn't have any Chinese on it, but even the copy of Drunken Master II from Warner Brothers that I ordered from the same place said "licensed for sale in Hong Kong and Macau" on in, while this says "authorized for use in the place where it's sold, for example, the U.S. or Canada". There's no UPC on the package, and I think the special features are all in English as well. I honestly wonder if Sony intended to release this disc in the US, and then just opted not to for some reason, dropping it in HK. It makes no sense, but it feels like madness trying to figure out why certain things get released in one place in one format but not others these days.

76 Days

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 January 2021 in Jay's Living Room (special presentation, Eventive via Roku)

There is, I'm sure, a lot left out of 76 Days that documentaries with a little more time for reflection and focus on a larger picture will eventually cover, and it's probably wise to look at it as something that presents something close to a best-case scenario, or one where the situation was managed to look good for cameras. Even if that's the case, though, it's useful to watch as an example of how things can or could be handled that is not entirely hypothetical. It's a process-oriented doc about heroes doing their thing selflessly, and is reassuring for it.

Not that it's entirely serving up soothing competence, although I suspect that it may not necessarily hit that way for some viewers - there's a stern stoicism to the people going about their work here that I imagine some viewers might find cold and uncomfortable, especially considering its Chinese source, and the filmmakers will sometimes play into it by cutting to a shot of a terrified patient that seems too close in, maybe highlighting how the older man's mind is starting to and he maybe can't comprehend the pandemic despite being near the epicenter. The level of lockdown when the camera leaves the hospital late is also unnerving, with barricades and signage up everywhere. You cannot help but wonder about a community that has what's needed to do this on-hand even as it seems prudent.

Mostly, though, you just feel the stress on the Wuhan hospital's staff, as intended. The fact that the camera seldom leaves the hospital or even shows one person replacing another in shift changes underlines what a marathon it is, hinting at no downtime whatsoever, and there's a weight on everybody even as they pull together. It's likely not the whole story, but it's an important part of it presented in focused, but not quite detached, fashion.

(Monk Comes Down the Mountain)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 January 2021 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong (?) Blu-Ray)

It's kind of weird getting to Monk Comes Down the Mountain by way of writer Xu Haofeng, whose own movies (and, I presume, novels) are so rigorous and serious about martial arts that they almost come all the way back around to self-parody, while this movie - for which it turns out he merely has a story credit - is broad and over-the-top from the start, when a Shaolin monastery facing lean times has a battle royale over who will be expelled, and the slapstick orphan is sent packing because he cleaned everyone else's clock.

It doesn't just get sillier from there, but it takes a while to find any sort of equilibrium. Director Chen Kaige and action director Ku Huen-Chieu go for the big lightweight wire-fu in a heightened early-twentieth century China, and it's often a lot of fun as that, but there's a dark and mean heart to some of the adventures "He Anxia" gets into, and the tones don't line up until almost the end. It all looks great and the action is high-quality, though it feels a bit end-of-cycle - I'm not sure that this is the last of the big-budget prestige wuxia films that came into vogue after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it seems to be around the right time and seems a bit confused, like it's trying to evolve into something else.

It has a hard time, though, in large part because the script is a mess. He Anxia could be an interesting character, and Wang Baoqiang gives Chen his best stab at whatever's being asked for in a given scene, but the writers never really figure out how to make this his story. He's at the edges of a few family conflicts, but they never coalesce into what he needs to learn about life outside the monastery, and the film doesn't do close to enough work to deal with the murders that end the first segment. I wondered if this was like CTHD in that it was based on parts of a longer saga only zoomed-out rather than in, the parts that made it into a whole lost.

Also: It's more than a little weird that most of the movie is shot on big, impressive period sets (or at least given a decent virtual environment) but a pivotal scene is literally on a contemporary playground basketball court. What's up with that?

Stuff that's been waiting: Monster Hunter and The Rescue

So, AMCs in Boston are selling concessions now. The offerings are exceptionally limited compared to the old usual - popcorn, nachos, and soda, maybe candy - and you don't get to serve yourself at the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine. I went with a soda because it was my second movie of the day and there aren't any water fountains, and it turns out that even with Chinatown right outside the emergency exit for screen #1, there are not a whole lot of people lining up to see The Rescue on the date of the Large Football Game when there's a snowstorm and it came out in China a month and a half ago, allowing the pirates to do what they do. I was alone and probably could have taken my mask off, but I like the front so there could have been people behind me.

Fun fact #1: It is a fair amount harder to snake a straw up under a KN-95 mask than it is the cloth masks I was using during the last round of movie theaters being open. Not saying I ever brought a can of soda in there, but I may have had one in between shows.

Fun fact #2: That's at least two delays ago! Those cups have been waiting for someone to pull them out for almost a year!

Fact that is fun to fewer people: Both of these films were produced by Chinese entertainment company Tencent, whose logo does not include a Minion as American viewers might suspect, but Wuba, the adorable star of their hit Monster Hunt series, which as you might imagine is in no way connected to Capcom's game. I vaguely wondered if they had to cut Tencent in to play China, although they apparently got pulled and banned for a joke that I don't remember at all.

Anyway, while Monster Hunter is the only one of the two specifically based on a video game, they both occasionally have that feel - mission-oriented, the physics and rendering sometimes a little off, camera doing weird things and pulling back to give you the lay of the land. It's messier in Monster Hunter, because the writing is, but it's a sensation that's definitely in play during The Rescue too.

Also, both of them look like they would have been more fun in 3D, with The Rescue possibly also wanting HFR and "4D" enhancements. Unfortunately, 3D home releases are getting harder to find - Hong Kong used to be my go to for that but it's dried up, and even the UK is iffier these days. It's a bummer, considering how it looks like the virus has apparently killed 3D here, although we'll see what happens in March when Ray and Godzilla vs Kong come out.

Oh, one final aside - I'm mildly surprised that The Rescue is available to stream on Prime already, although maybe I shouldn't be, as it's only at Boston Common for another couple days and was likely only there this weekend as a holdover from two months ago, and, besides, pandemic windows are weird. Still, it's the sort of thing that makes me do a little bit more digging before linking to it to see if it's legit or a pirate stream, since you can't always tell with Prime Video.

Monster Hunter

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2021 in AMC Boston Common #13 (first-run, DCP)

You don't buy a ticket to Monster Hunter without knowing what you're in for, on a certain level - whether it's because you're a fan of the games, you know what sort of movies Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich make together, or you just looked at the poster and/or trailer and caught the vibe. Still, even if you know the sort of thing it's going to be, it's not unfair to hope that it might be more, or at least be a better version of that thing. It's barely a movie as a whole, really only able to be appreciated for its various parts.

And some of those parts are pretty good! I admire Anderson's decision to not screw around much in the early going, as the movie kicks off with a nutso bit of fantasy action and a bland but no-nonsense bit getting folks from our world to the new one and fighting for their life. There's a fun, propulsive synth-heavy score, and it's probably a lot of fun in 3D, because if nothing else, Anderson knows how to build a shot. Don't ever suggest that Milla Jovovich ever gives half effort in this sort of movie, though the world is still trying to figure out what to do with Tony Jaa. He's fun, but he doesn't really get a chance to show his stuff with little but visual effects to fight.

This sure gets mired in a place where I badly wanted to see something half as cool as the prologue as soon as it gets to the point where any sort of story would be really helpful, though - things slow to a crawl, one group of characters is shuffled off, time is killed while Jovovich and Jaa play out the "people with no obvious reason to be enemies" fight bit, and then a new crew is brought in but never given a chance to make individual impressions (though I imagine fans of the game will enjoy seeing them). Anderson never engages with the bits of world-building that look fun, ending on an orgy of mean-spirited violence and hints at a sequel that seems unlikely to come.

It's a bummer to watch the movie sink from showing a ton of potential to becoming a complete mess. Maybe they can build on it - the Resident Evil movies hit their stride with #4 and #5, after all - but who knows if they'll get the chance?

Jin Ji Jiu Yuan (The Rescue)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2021 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)

Dante Lam Chiu-Yin's latest patriotic blockbuster has everything it needs to be a crowd pleaser and then some, the "then some" coming from a tendency to pile things on a little too high when there's already plenty for the audience to worry about. It's one of those action movies that puts just enough fairly predictable material between spectacles to get by but can escape feeling completely rote thanks to its star's charisma.

It follows a unit of the Chinese Coast Guard based in Xiamen and co-captained by Gao Qian (Eddie Peng Yu-Yen), the "winchman" who is lowered into danger via helicopter, and kicks off with the evacuation of an offshore oil rig in danger of collapse after a fire, hairy enough that one helicopter pilot is injured and the other loses his nerve. Fang Yuling (Xin Zhilei) and Liu Bun (Mario Li Mingcheng) are assigned to replace them, and while she's as good as anyone in the service, she's naturally a bit more conservative than Gao, leading to a little friction between her, Gao, and winchmen Zhao Cheng (Wang Yang-Lin) & Bai Yang (Xu Yang). She's also pretty, and Gao's five-year-old son Congcong (Zhang Jingyi) thinks it's about time the widower found him a new mother.

Lam and the other producers seemed to have had box-office ambitions even beyond being one of the big releases for the Lunar New Year holidays in 2020 - an English-dubbed trailer played American theaters in the weeks leading up to its intended release, and not only do the big set-pieces have a lot of English, but the film goes easy on the flag-waving and nationalism in ways that Lam's last two most certainly did not. It's not likely the film would have had that sort of crossover success before 2020 went haywire, but it's polished, the themes have broad appeal, and the Xiamen location looks good on screen; it's the sort of thing I can see recommending to people who are going to find any opportunity to dismiss a foreign film as weird or a Chinese film as hostile.

And it's enjoyable if not exactly deep. Eddie Peng is a pretty easygoing center of the film, making Gao Qian believably cocky on the job but a big dork around his son, playing his bond with his team as tight but not exclusionary. He and Xin Zhilei play off each other as colleagues and possibly friends well, although the script never bothers to find any reason for them to be paired romantically other than being the male and female leads. The rest of the cast is fine, good enough to pass the time between adventures with, whether it's Wang Yang-Lin as Gao Qian's younger and brasher partner or Lyric Lan Ying-Ying as his finacée, or Zhang Jingyi as the maybe-just-slightly-too-cute kid. It's not his fault that the film puts Congcong in the middle of a late subplot that stretches the film too far because it means cutting away from the big tanker fire that's already got two or three threads going (but I guess a Chinese movie needs Gao Qian to serve the people even when he's got personal concerns).

There's not much arguing with the search-and-rescue action, at least. Thus must be a heck of a thing to see with every bell and whistle a theater can throw at it from the exciting opening gambit to a plane-crash centerpiece that would probably be the grand finale of other movies. Lam is credited with action choreography as well as "regular" direction, and it lets him combine the large-scale set pieces with the up-close-and-personal very well even though that can often seem like the work of two completely different filmmakers cut together (and often is). He's got a good enough handle on how this all fits together than even the sequences where the CGI budget being stretched work better than they look.

It is, at times, a bit too much movie for how simple it is at heart, especially when it gets to the end and it's hard not to feel like there's been too much too often. Nevertheless, when Lam just gets down to delivering the thrills promised, The Rescue is a blast and goes down a lot easier than the more militaristic adventures.

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Road Trips at the End: Supernova and Nomadland

So, I figure that this should last me until vaccination, and if it doesn't, then I've been out waaaaay too often. I probably really don't need the temptation of movie theaters reopening right now, especially since I've started to slip back into the habit of making small runs for a thing or two that I need rather than loading up and hunkering down for the whole week. If I'm going to justify going out to movies to myself - which I would talk myself into during the fall because I live alone and mostly stay home for days afterward - I should tighten that up.

Of course, there's the whole question of theaters being open at all, which got some extra teeth-gnashing this week as Imax announced the Lord of the Rings movies getting giant-screen re-releases starting on Friday using the new 4K masters, with folks grumbling about why Imax and Warner had to do that now. I tended to look at it from the opposite side - if theaters like the local AMCs figure they need to be open because insurance won't cover the rent if they're not legally forced to close, then they need to show something, and if you figure that the places getting LOTR are going to have it for a few weeks so that people can spread the long movies out a bit... Well, it's not like those sorts of windows come along very often in non-pandemic times. Maybe you can plan for a couple weeks around Labor Day, but that's about it.

We didn't get LOTR here, but Boston Common did re-open with Nomadland on the Imax-branded screen, and that's also something that doesn't often happen under normal, non-pandemic circumstances, as studios roll out a constant stream of bigger, more VFX-based spectacles. It's a crying shame, because it proves incredibly well-suited to the format, and not just for the striking widescreen photography. I was reminded of what someone described as "big mood" after watching Shunji Iwai's Last Letter from the front section a couple years ago. There is power in letting a film fully envelop oneself, especially when it takes you out of doors and out of one's comfort zone the way Nomadland does, especially as Chloé Zhao makes good use of the screen, giving us lots of chances to look study Frances McDormand's face without being up her nose. I'm sure that this will be a fine move when it hits Hulu in a couple of weeks, but it's sublime on the giant screen.

It also makes a surprisingly good double feature with Supernova, especially when one looks at them as the opposite sides of losing someone. The trailer for Supernova isn't exactly deceptive, but it definitely starts in the middle and obscures just how much of the movie is just Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci on the road. That's fine - the film is brief enough that one doesn't lose patience getting there and makes for a tighter film than one might expect. All that road time made me wonder how it would look in Imax as well, which is not exactly the usual thing I'm musing about when seeing two films of such tight, personal focus.

But it's a weird time. I would never have imagined seeing the same trailer for a Serbian WWII drama distributed by a tiny label twice at the mainstream theater, but that happened as well.

Supernova '21

* * * (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2021 in AMC Boston Common #4 (first-run, DCP)

The title of Supernova gives the game away if you know your astronomy, but this is not a film about surprising you so much as getting you settled in for the inevitable, so that's fine. It's bucolic in its way, contrasting cozy spaces with lovely landscapes, letting the small cast enjoy each other so that the audience can enjoy them as well.

Sam (Colin Firth) and Tusker (Stanley Tucci) have been together for a long time, and used to go on road trips like the one they're on more often, but life gets busy and people slow down. This time, they're loaded into their RV for a trip out to the country where Sam will be giving a piano recital, stopping to see Sam's sister Lily (Pippa Haywood) and her husband Clive (Peter MacQueen) along the way. There probably won't be many more like it; though still fairly lively and witty, and young for its onset, Tusker is in the early stages of dementia.

Writer/director Harry Macqueen doesn't exactly try to hide that in the early going, but does present it as something that Sam and Tusker are trying hard to work around. The solitude of the film's first act means that there is no reason to explain the situation but plenty of time to observe the different levels of energy between the two and take note of how the activities presented as therapeutic are seeping into the rest of how they interact. It's early, so Sam's life is not yet consumed with accommodating Tusker's illness, but one can see it starting. It's a dynamic that will change when they reach Sam's childhood home; Lilly and Clive know the score, and they can't pretend it's not a big deal.

Not that Macqueen is going to have this be terribly melodramatic. Though there are moments when the couple's separate intentions for dealing with this come into conflict, Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth are playing smart people who have already played this out in their heads, whether they admit it or not. They play a couple that has settled in nicely, able to poke at each other with affection but also simply be affectionate, because there's nothing for them to prove after all these years. They take good advantage of their characters' shared history so that moments of confusion have weight, and little bits of stress in their voices stand out. Tucci in particular does a nice job of creating alternating layers to Tusker, his innate friendliness getting a coat of fear which he is mostly successful in covering with more earnest cheer, letting the moments where the physical symptoms of dementia appear imply more to come. Firth does well to project strength in a way that is seldom rigid, even when he's breaking down.

But for some time in the middle, this is by and large a two-person show, the sort that could almost be a play, but Macqueen seldom limits it to that sort of stage-bound limitation, especially during the pair's time on the road. There's both the comfort and unsteadiness to the way the filmmakers switch scales from wide shots of the road that seem designed for Imax but quickly narrow to tight shots that would be at home on small TVs. There's never anything to distract, maybe as much for in-story reasons as Sam tries to keep Tusker from having to process too much as for us, and despite the film being rooted in the present, all but one or two scenes occur in places unchanged for decades or generations, focusing and grounding. The world endures even as we burn out, and the light sent out generations ago still endures.

It's a fairly simple film and plays out as the audience expects (and, as an aside, a great double feature with Nomadland), and indeed almost assures the viewer that it won't do otherwise as Tusker explains what a supernova is to Sam's niece without actually using that word. But that's okay; everyone's good at what's being asked of them, and there's value in learning to sit with something that can't be avoided.

Also at eFilmCritic

Nomadland

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2021 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax digital)

For as much good reason as there is not to go to theaters right now, there's some small consolation in how it gives something like Nomadland some time on a multiplex's Imax screen that it would not normally be afforded with new blockbusters coming out weekly. It's beautifully shot, yes, but seeing it like that makes it all-enveloping, and seeing it after a month and a half of theaters not being open reminds one how a movie built for immersion can hit differently when not limited to the size of one's TV.

The nomad of the title is Fern (Frances McDormand); she and her late husband never had kids and had settled in a Nevada company town that completely disintegrated when said company closed the gypsum mine. She's converted a van to live in and is parking it near the Amazon fulfillment center where she's found work, but all the Christmas music on the soundtrack in the early going suggests that it might be seasonal. A co-worker tells her about an annual gathering people living a similar life in Arkansas which acts as both support system and education, so she heads there and makes some new friends - notably Dave (David Strathairn), who trades extra can openers for potholders - and then heads out for the next adventure.

As with filmmaker Chloé Zhao's previous features, she blurs the line between traditional narrative and non-fiction filmmaking here, even more so than in The Rider, with much of the movie feeling like fly-on-the-wall documentary, especially since it's not really time to unlock Frances McDormand's Fern yet, meaning that she spends a lot of time hanging around people with stories to tell and wisdom to impart, and it's something Zhao and McDormand handle exceptionally well. McDormand immerses herself in this world and is able to emerge seeming like part of it such that Fern's eccentricities and discomfort with conventional life never feel like performance or put-on. The veteran actress never feels like she's imitating the working-class folks around her, but she's also able to make the little adjustments necessary as a story starts to form.

That story is inevitably going to be tied to David Strathairn's eponymous character, and the audience can kind of guess that when Strathairn shows up; he's familiar in a way nobody else Fern meets is. But the fact that she merges with the non-actors and he sticks out is something Zhao uses; the way he knows how to connect to an audience means Dave-the-character connects to her, and as we see this world through her eyes, he shines just a little brighter. Just a little - he is never far off the film's wavelength - but Zhao knows the effect he has, and mines the pleasure of seeing a much-appreciated character actor show up in a film a few times and has it work each time. That Mcdormand and Strathairn approach their jobs in different ways but each serves their characters' rootlessness in a way that fits means that as much as the audience inevitably enjoys them together, we also see how it might just not work.

Both manage to immerse themselves in this world without much ego, and that's necessary, because the documentary side to this film demands respect. It doesn't work if Zhao can't step back and recognize that this life fits these people's needs even if the circumstances that led them there often means that they have been failed in some way. There's empathy but not pity for these people that she mostly allows to just be themselves on screen, and love for both the wide-open country and honest work surrounding them. Zhao doesn't romanticize this life - I suspect she included three or four scenes about relieving oneself in awkward situations to drive home that it isn't necessarily fun in very basic ways - but she does find beauty in things that many in the audience have likely walled themselves off from in the name of safety and comfort.

And there is a lot of beauty here; when Zhao and cinematographer aren't pointing the camera at something beautiful - just look at the Badlands in this movie - they're catching the ends of days, either during the golden hour or with the sun setting in the background, lending either bare parking lots or deserts a sort of warm glow that reflects the people Fern finds there who are generally kind despite being weathered and disappointed. Ludovico Einaudi's score contributes to that as well - it's simple, but firm, never trying to do too much or impress with subtlety.

As a snapshot, Nomandland is appealing without trying to be convincing, but it's not just about a different way of life. By the end, Zhao and McDormand have communicated just how it can feel to be unable to either stay put or let go, and though few will act upon that feeling in this fashion, there is something universal to that, especially when presented with what feels like less artifice than usual.

Also at eFilmCritic