Film Rolls, Round 9: The Dragon Chronicles: The Maidens of Heavenly Mountain and Mr. & Mrs. Gambler

I'm not sure whether the "Western" or "Chinese" section of the gameboard is larger, but I have to admit that the Western one feels a bit more diverse; the random impulse buys from Kino Lorber seem to cast a bigger net than when I'm loading up on familiar names from DDDHouse, if only time-wise. Not that I'm eager to get out of this section, just that, for as screwy as some of these choices are, I'm looking to find a way to inject even more chaos into the next go-round.

But first, what may be the longest round of the year!

First up, we have Mookie rolling a 12, which gets him close to the end of the "general Hong Kong/China" section and The Dragon Chronicles (which has no dragons), a bit of mid-1990s wuxia.

Then, it was off to Fantasia, which took me away from the board for the better part of a month and then being sort of heads-down writing after that, so the next roll came six-plus weeks later.

Bruce rolls a 19, which lets him jump all the way over the Ringo Lam section to almost the end of the Wong Jing section, and, honestly, I hadn't expected to have a Wong Jing section, but he's prolific enough and has been around long enough that it wound up making as much sense to pull out as other Hong Kong auteurs. The movie in question would be Mr. & Mrs. Gambler, which is fairly apropos.

So how'd they do?

San tin lung bat bo: Tin San Tung Lo (The Dragon Chronicles: The Maidens of Heavenly Mountains)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 June 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

As always, I don't know that this is the actual case, but Maidens of Heavenly Mountains feels like a movie that started with one set of expectations only to find that the good stuff was somewhere else. That's how you wind up with Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia and Gong Li first-billed and playing demigods while all the fun is being had by more Earth-bound characters played by the perhaps less-celebrated Sharla Cheung Man and Frankie Lam Man-Lung. The feud between Lin's Li Chau Shui and Gong's Mo Han Wan is what makes everything happen, but the most entertaining thing going on is the mismatched monk and henchwoman who wind up thrown together almost as comic relief.

Maybe that's the inevitable result of hiring Andy Chin Wing-Keung to direct the film; most of his career was in comedies, and he often seems most at home here when things are the goofiest, not just with the antics of Cheung's "Purple" and Lam's Hui Chok, who banter well without it ever becoming romantic, but in the nervous piece where the senior monk is fleeing the Shaolin Temple, or a moment when Gong Li gets to mug a bit as she wishes she were the one in charge. The "melting blow" that can basically disintegrate any opponent seems almost knowingly overpowerful. Much of the initial melodrama is dispensed with in an opening scroll, but he doesn't entirely dispense with it, and if he's winking hard about not making Mo Han Wan and Li Chau Shui's "good twin" Li Chong Hoi explicitly gay, he's not quite mocking the genre either, keeping up a good pace so that there's forward momentum.

The wire-fu he and martial arts director Poon Kin-Kwan put together is often pretty nifty as well, with the centerpiece a cloud-hopping fight between Lin and Gong where the camera smoothly follows them as they fly over impossible mountaintops with the occasional quick step to keep moving. These are martial artists who can project force blasts from their hands, but the best bits play more as Star Wars than static posing, with the camera banking and energy coming in rapid-fire like tracers. It's the sort of movie that takes place in monasteries, palaces, caves, and mystic mountaintops, but just enough care taken to make them a bit more detailed than usual for the period, and a finale that pulls everyone i with a lot of crazy magic stuff that doesn't cede the entire film to the visual effects team.

It is, like a lot of movies in this corner of the martial-arts genre, kind of weightless nonsense, but grounded by the supporting characters who steal the movie away and just funny enough to work.

Lan to fu dau lan to chai (Mr. & Mrs. Gambler)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 August 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

Wong Jing has made roughly 100 movies in 40 years and I suspect that a good solid 70 of them have involved mahjongg or gambling, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's how he spent a lot of time during those apparently rare periods when he is not making movies. He likes it so much that he seemingly has a hard time making a romantic comedy where the idea is that its pair of compulsive gamblers (Chapman To Man-Chat & Fiona Sit Hoi-Kei) have to become responsible adults who can be relied on. Like, I wonder if he quite believes it.

It helps that he's got Chapman To and Fiona Sit to work with; this is To squarely in amiable fourth-wall breaking mode, where he narrates the movie in a way that's clearly self-serving or full of false modesty but also just enough self-awareness to let the audience in on the joke, a nice balance of dorky and cool that gives Wong the chance to make things a bit more outlandish. Sit gets to use him as a straight man, confident enough in her sexiness and good luck keeping her out of trouble without becoming more abrasive than her partner deserves. They spark off each other even if one doesn't entirely believe that they're deeply in love.

And that's fine when Wong is doing goofy jokes that keep pushing a little bigger, starting with To's "Manfred" Wong opening by saying that his name is "Shu Qi", pronounced but not spelled like the actress, a gag based on how To is the on-screen version of a schlub while Shu Qi, well, isn't, and building into more pop culture strangeness and bigger gambling-related problems until Manfred has been cast as the new James Bond, after becoming an actor when discovered by a clear riff on Wong Kar-Wai. The rapid-fire gags don't all hit, but there's enough good ones to make it work.

The trouble comes when Wong tries to thread the needle between having these two become more mature and maybe knowingly defy the audience's expectations that they do that. To and Sit have comic but not necessarily romantic chemistry, so the movie has a hard time making the case that their marriage disintegrating would be a bad thing, and they're not built out enough to be Nick & Nora Charles, who had enough personality to make it work when the vices that made them unconventionally fun were stripped away. The film works well enough as an assembly of jokes and there's no rule that says a movie must feature positive character growth or a good moral message (or, well, there wasn't when this was made ten years ago), but it does feel kind of hollow when the film at least feints in that direction but the makers aren't really interested.

So there's two more from Hong Kong and Mookie getting the better end of the deal by a little bit, which brings the score to:

Mookie: 32 ½ stars
Bruce: 38 ¾ stars

Still not quite in striking distance - barring double features and twenties, Moodie needs two masterpieces against two disasters to really catch up - but, again there's plenty of board to go before the finish.

Getting a little tighter, but Bruce still has an impressive lead!

This Week in Tickets: 2 January 2023 - 15 January 2023 (Being Also a Reassessment of This Blog's Purpose Going Forward)

Holy crap, have I really not done one of these since mid-2020, when it was all virtual tickets because of the pandemic? That's crazy! But also not - I've been logging on Letterboxd pretty constantly since March 2017, and that's easy. I can do it on my phone while on the train back from the theater, without dinking around too much with HTML formatting or image maps or the like. People occasionally like my reviews, for a little fun feedback.

Whereas this blog, well, it's been languishing. The pandemic did a number on moviegoing, my ability to concentrate, the structure of my day and life. None of that is actually from the virus, really, but over that period also became pretty clear that this blog isn't going to lead to anything more than it has: Nobody's going to pay me to write movie reviews, eFilmCritic went off-line with a server crash back in March and now looks even more dead with the URLs directing to some new place. A friend asked last year if I'd be interested in doing an episode of his podcast, and because I'm terrible I haven't responded (I wanted to clear some other projects off first, but…). I can't imagine setting up my own podcast or substack or what have you. There's a really good argument that this blog only still exists so that I can apply for a press pass at Fantasia.

(Which, don't get me wrong, is a great reason to do a blog! I'd buy one if the option was available, to be honest, because I've got a pretty decent day job as far as being able to afford movie stuff goes.)

So, why have I pulled this out of the mothballs? Because it's fun to look at. Because I have been buying calendars for the past few years and taping movie tickets into them, and because my mother getting me a travel scrapbook for Christmas has reminded me that people do enjoy that sort of artifact. Because, dang it, I like structure, and I like doing a second draft of the stuff I write on Letterboxd after I've had a little more time to think it over.

As for the blog in general, I'm going to try and take inspiration for the name that friend I mentioned earlier had for his seldom-updated (and now likely forgotten) blog, which was along the lines of "Adventures in Moviegoing". There will be Film Rolls, because that is fun and random. There will be the times I go to a new theater and check it out, or the times I go to something that is out of my comfort zone or whose booking seems random enough to be interesting. One thing I've realized over the past few years is that the world doesn't really need another middle-aged white guy breaking down Marvel stuff - there are dozens of those, and many good enough to get paid for it. I'm not going to get paid, I'm not going to get famous enough to be a popular podcast guest, so I can just see new stuff and maybe have something to say about what I got from it.

Anyway, that's what I want this blog to be: A place for me to occasionally go long, reconsider, and write about watching a lot of movies, with no worries that it will lead to anything else.

So, now that that's done, it's on to the diary!

Not a terribly busy first week of the year, my first venture out of the house was for Bones and All, a pretty-looking movie that didn't seem to know what to do with its main premise. After that, there were a couple things for Film Rolls, and I'm going to save my writing for the for when I've caught up, X Y & Zee and A Reason to Live, A Reason to Die!. I won't be writing much about them for This Week in Tickets while I'm trying to catch up, but they will be getting full posts later.

Friday night, I headed up to Fresh Pond for The Old Way, a Nicolas Cage western that seemed to be getting a four-walled release and didn't deserve much more. Saturday's matinee was Battle on Buka Street, which is, I think, my first Nollywood movie and part of the whole "adventures in moviegoing" deal, the sort of global-mainstream thing that gets me kind of excited to put something in the blog.

Saturday night, I did a Film Rolls double feature because both The Girl Most Likely to… and The Mobfathers were short. After that, it was off to Texas for a week of "P.I. Planning", which sadly does not involve private investigators of any sort but attempting to figure out when you're going to be doing all your work for the next fiscal quarter. It's not quite futile, but it's not far off in my case, but I did get to meet a few colleagues I'd only talked to over the phone and sketch stuff on a whiteboard for an hour with one, which was probably worth the last six months of Teams meetings.

Once back home, I headed to the Somerville for the Brattle's special presentation of RRR, which is a heck of a movie. I started a Film Rolls watch of Coffin Homes too late, which means I'll probably need to rewatch it when I catch up to it in the review-writing, as I did with Project A and Wicked City on Sunday, with a trip downtown for Babylon in between.

Funny thing about that trip - though the Green Line Extension should, theoretically, get me right to the Boylston station and the Boston Common theater, on Sunday it only got me as far as Lechmere, where another car was stopped in front of us, which we all moved to and then waited a bit for that one to take us to North Station, where we got on shuttle buses for Government Center because a building was being demolished. From there I figured hoofing it to the theater would get me there faster than waiting for another train, and I still needed every bit of AMC's 20 minutes of trailers to almost make it to the start of the movie on time (apparently, I missed an elephant taking a huge dump). Not exactly what I was hoping for from this new route, although I do think slightly worn out is the right way to see that movie, albeit with a little room for it to wear you out further.

So, that's the first two weeks of the year! As always, you can follow me on Letterboxd for first drafts with all the spelling errors you'd expect from someone used to a proper keyboard swiping their phone on the subway!

Bones and All

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2023 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, DCP)

Bones and All is the sort of movie where you can see pretty clearly why the cast would jump all over the script - there's good stuff for an actor to work with, and one would think Luca Guadagnino would provide strong direction - but the final film feels like the filmmakers were counting on the premise and the talent being enough to maintain the audience's interest. It's close, but the fact that this group has some sort of cannibalistic mutation almost feels unimportant most of the time. The most notable thing about the movie is barely in the background, even though it's too big a deal to treat like a minor detail.

It's not quite a dull slog - the cast is too good. Taylor Russell's Maren is always compelling, a believably confused adolescent who is going to come into her own even despite that, while Timothée Chalamet plays the other eater she meets as a likably tortured sort of cool. Even poor Mark Rylance as the most clichéd monster of the group. It's very nice-looking in a way that's not flashy, embracing the way rural America can give this sort of dark secret a place to hide without fetishizing or looking down on the places. Title cards show their journey but also highlight just how anonymous the interior of the country may seem.

Still, despite the occasional grisly reminder of how the eaters' appetites can only be satisfied with murder, it's a movie that never seems to have an answer for Maren's questions about how people who eat other people are supposed to live with themselves. Too often, it is just the wrong combination of active and slack in its background building, raising questions that are just too potentially interesting to be abandoned as they are. In at least one case, almost unforgivable clumsy, tripping up when Maren and Lee encounter another outsider of a different sort. It's too big a premise for as little as the filmmakers do beyond having its two kids go on a road trip.


RRR (Rise Roar Revolt)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2023 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Some of the Best and Biggest of 2022, laser-projected DCP)

The folks making RRR know that it's going to be a big deal from the very first frames and never back down from it being that sort of grand, glorious bit-of-everything epic, and who would want it to ? It's so all-out that it almost has to be perfect to avoid falling on its face, but heck if it doesn't just about manage that. It's the biggest, most sincere bromance possible with the John Woo-i-est action you can get.

One doesn't make a comparison to Woo lightly, especially given that director S.S. Rajamouli's brand of action is much closer to a live-action cartoon than Woo's, but one gets the same feeling from it: The staging is noticeably better than average, and he's got the same ability to use melodrama as fuel. The film has three terrific set-pieces even before the main title, the sort that one might say are good enough to be another movie's grand finale, but that's not quite right; the quality is there, but they are each very much built to accomplish something very specific, part of the rhythm of the film rather than show-stoppers. It's the bit just before intermission that really feels climactic, especially considering how it calls back to the water/fire symbolism of the start in a way that feels full-circle even though there's half the film to go.

Did I flag a tiny bit in the second half? Maybe; the hard turn at the interval always seemed to open new and exciting directions in the previous Indian movies I've watched but mostly seemed like something to play out here. That's not necessarily a complaint; as much as I enjoyed the way the first half formed a nifty little knot while still leaving room to play, it's hard to complain about this being all the way in on all the things, and it does pay off in an absolutely crazy finale that maybe loses a bit in how the Brits are never in the same league as Bheem & Raju (watch this and tell me that people are growing tired of superheroes), but makes up for it with impressive "screw these guys" energy.

Anyway, someone please put this out on 3D and 4K discs, so I can have just a bit more excess and can watch it any time in its full glory. I know Indian films don't often get that, but this one is an exception, obviously!


Babylon

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 January 2023 in AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run, DCP)

I almost feel like writer/director Damien Chazelle (and composer Justin Hurwitz) had a few bars of music pop into their heads and decided to build a movie to fit it. The result is often ungainly and unbalanced, with a couple subplots too many because Chazelle was all too well aware of how other movies about early Hollywood left folks out and wouldn't let it happen in his, even if it turns out to be too much.

It's supposed to be too much, though - making movies is fun and exhilarating and exhausting, with success depending as much on lucky breaks as genius, and the first couple acts are like that, an endless party and a first day on-set that is mad and glorious. It's funny when the film gets to how new technology and progress can reduce this joyous, improvisational experience to rote mark-hitting, a clear reference for how indie filmmakers get swallowed by the green-screened blockbusters they "move up" to as well as a representation of the switch to sound, probably the single funniest sequence that also shows the most care in the film. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are obvious but excellent casting as the earnest but hollow matinee idol and the self-destructive sexpot, and there are great bits of casting throughout, from Li Jun Li as a clear Anna May Wong surrogate to Olivia Hamilton as the director who quickly realizes that Robbie's Nellie is, in fact, a movie star (probably my favorite character, really) and on to the end.

I wonder about the last act. I've made the mistake of reading enough IMDB biographies of charismatic folks with seven-year careers in early Hollywood to have few illusions about how this story ends, but the film turns grotesque enough that I wonder if it's being drawn from specific bits of history or present day ugliness that Chazelle has encountered in Hollywood himself, or if the climax should be so dramatic or drawn-out. But, after a bit of thought, it's the flip side of the dark humor of the first half, where I laughed at some mean jokes that aren't quite so funny once you've spent three hours getting to know these people. I'm not sure it entirely lands - there's a thin line between sentimentality and tragedy that the last ten minutes or so doesn't quite walk - but it comes close enough to get a pass.

(I do enjoy seeing the credits roll with Tobey Maguire listed as an executive producer and imagining him saying his company will get behind the film if he gets to play the weird little freak)

Chazzelle doesn't quite get a big hit from his big swing, but there's a lot here that I personally love even if it won't play for everyone, and I thank the filmmakers for that, at least.

Film Rolls, Round 8: Project A, Project A II, and The Wicked City

When we last left these guys, two middling Hong Kong supernatural comedies had left Bruce's lead intact, but there are still some ways for Mookie to make up some ground

For instance, this 9 gets Mookie to Project A II, and because these films have very complicated continuity, it only made sense to re-watch the first one before that, right?

(Note Not only do they not have complicated continuity, and in fact the second was actually the one I had seen before, with the first a new viewing)

Next up, Bruce rolls a 10, which gets him almost but not quite out of the second "random Hong Kong/China" box and brings him to The Wicked City, which apparently doesn't go in the Tsui Hark section because he is only credited as writer and producer rather than director.

So how'd that go for them?

'A' gai wak (Project A)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 June 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

I saw the sequel to this one first, so that set my expectations for this a little low, not so much because the later film is bad but because it's a Jackie Chan solo project, while this one teams him with frequent co-stars Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, and three dragons are almost always better than one. Character-wise, they're all in somewhat familiar roles - Jackie is is earnest but loose, Sammo is the outsider who makes trouble for the others, Biao is initially stuffy but likably square by the end - and the film is of a sort that would become increasingly common in the 1980s and 1990s, historical period pieces where the scrappy Hong Kongers have this secondary mission to show themselves the equal of their British colleagues.

The story of it is simple on the one hand and a bit needlessly involved on the other - with the Coast Guard (or "Hong Kong Water Police") seen as a drain on the colony's finances and then seeing two of their boats blown up before a major operation, Chan's Dragon Ma Yue-Lung and others are assigned to work on land, where he is partnered with rival Tzu (Biao) and also crosses path with old friend Fei (Hung), now a thief. As with a lot of movies Jackie wrote and directed in this era, it's occasionally very much on the goofy side, very heavy on the wacky hijinks before the story goes in a non-hijink direction, and he can have trouble sharing the spotlight with both of his co-stars at the same time.

Of course, that's entirely secondary to the action, which is some of Chan's very best. I am, naturally, a particular mark for when a Modern Times homage seamlessly becomes Safety Last, and that's just the big flashy stunt, as opposed to the upscale and downscale bar fights and final attack on the pirates' lair. There's a terrific bicycle chase, something not seen enough despite the great balance of speed and human scale it offers. It's some of Jackie's most purely fun work, not overly skewed toward daredevil antics or high-concept slapstick (although there's some of each), with the main trio and their foes mostly playing up their skill and (presumably) friendly offscreen rivalry, to the point where they can't elevate one over another when fighting the final boss, despite it being Jackie's movie.

It is also fun to watch as a period action piece that clearly has some effort put into costumes, set decoration, and the like, but doesn't seem overly precious with it, the way a more modern, bigger-budget movie might extend everything a little bit more, make the costumes fancier, or add/erase things with CGI in pursuit of perfection rather than being comfortable and good enough. It's fun to look at and inhabit without being distracting, right down to how Sammo Hung can make a top hat work better than most people can.

'A' gai wak 2 (Project A 2)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 June 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

It's a testament to just how action-packed Project A 2 is that, despite a recap of the first movie that features both Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao playing at the start, one never really wonders where their characters are, even though Jackie Chan's Dragon Ma could probably use the help of a good-hearted thief or an honest cop at various points in the movie. It's Jackie's film, and it's kind of at its best when his honest fish out of water is facing off against David Lam Wai's slick and corrupt cop.

There's more, of course, including whole subplots about Chinese revolutionaries in Hong Kong to obtain weapons and funding, which 35 years later are mainly interesting for how the ladies involved (Maggie Cheung! Rosamund Kwan! Carina Lau!) were less established but big deals later, and also for how pointedly apolitical Chan and his character play things, compared to his later career. It's a little scattered story-wise, and maybe that's the natural way of movies built around fights: multiple opponents lead to shifting antagonists.

Still, this fights and stunts are pretty great, with big, creative stunts alienating with the close-up magic of a well-executed folks-handcuffed-together gag. After a certain point, the action is pretty much non-stop with even the silly bits kind of thrilling. The big stunt is a visual corker, with a finale that references Buster Keaton as surely as the first played with Chaplin and Lloyd, but with plenty of delightful chaos all around it.

In a way, this sequel feels like an acknowledgment that Jackie Chan had become a superstar; he's too big to be part of an ensemble as an actor now, but as a director, he's still learning how to tell stories as opposed to being a guy who knows what he's doing on a set. I don't know that he ever got there - we'll see what The Diary brings - but he could sure bring the action.

Yiu sau dou si (The Wicked City)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

I'm mildly surprised to discover that The Wicked City was based on the first novel in a series, because it has a lot of the same issues as many films adapting long-running manga: Deep lore on the one hand, constant cliffhangers and switchbacks on the other, and fluid monsters who seem more suited for black-and-white line art than the three-dimensional world. This one winds up in the hands of writer/producer Tusi Hark, and it makes for a weird experience: Japanese sci-fi filtered through Hong Kong action and a filmmaker interested in pushing what special effects could do there forward.

(Is this unfair erasure of actual director Peter Mak Tai-Kit? Probably! This was Mak's last major job as a director and fits the narrative of Tsui's interest in making effects-driven movies, so it gets lumped in with that.)

The result of this weird mix of influences and personnel makes for a movie that expects the audience to just run with it from the start, introducing Taki (Leon Lai Ming) and Ken (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau) as agents of an international agency rooting out "rapters", although it's not exactly clear whether these superpowered shapeshifters are mutants, aliens, demons, or something else, just that they've been around a long time behind the scenes, preying on humans for whatever reason and amassing power. Their boss (Yuen Wo-Ping) doesn't trust Ken because of his "background", although Taki is the one who let Windy (Michelle Reis), the rapter agent he has a crush on, escape in an encounter years ago. She still works for Daishu (Tatsuya Nakadai), a kingpin in the rapter world, but one who seems content to coexist peacefully, leading ambitious son Shudo (Ray Cheung Yiu-Yeung) to mount a coup and attempt to conquer both human and rapter worlds with a drug called "happiness" and an attack on secret magnetic shields.

I wonder a bit when watching this how much it influenced later Japanese franchises like Parasyte and Tokyo Ghoul, although the secret monsters among us genre was having a boom at the time, with the original novel predating the likes of The X-Files and Vampire: The Masquerade, all great-grand-children of Illuminatus! and its influences, though those were less mainstream. It's a familiar enough sort of world that one can connect the dots that Hark an co-writer Roy Szeto Wai-Cheuk are racing past, and almost giggle when they decide that this is the point about which they need to repeatedly stop for a melodramatic flashback. There's whole hosts of "sure, why not?" twists and tech and repeated phrases like "rapter vacuum" that feel like they almost, but don't quite, make sense.

But that's because Mak et al are cramming a lot of action and weirdness into 87 minutes, in a sort of film we don't necessarily see that much from Hong Kong in this period, a slick present-day sci-fi world jam-packed with effects that were a notch or two beyond what one might expect from a similar film from Hollywood but which the filmmakers have no intention of hiding in the shadows. Instead of darkness, they tend to cloak any shortcomings in the weird - bodies get so distorted that you can't rule out that this is what something would look like, and if the living liquids and shadows don't have CGI to play with yet, the way they move is the right sort of uncanny.

Add to that the fact that the filmmakers are ready to turn everything up to 11: Everybody chewing so much scenery that it's kind of amazing that Japanese legend Tatsuya Nakadai is here and able to inject any gravitas at all, for instance, even though they are spewing nonsense with absolute conviction. It's also just downright weird at points, never more so when the villain is having sex with his shapeshifting robot henchwoman while she's in the form a of a pinball machine.

I don't do guilty pleasures, and I don't really do "bad movies I love", because if you love it, it is obviously succeeding at something This is the closest I come - it's a frequently cringe-worthy mess, the intersection of two sets of Asian genre films that don't really work that well together, but it's also not something were I was anything close to tempted to turn off.


Fate smiled upon Mookie this week, getting him a double feature and better movies than Bruce, so the new standings show a cap being closed:

Mookie: 29 ½ stars

Bruce: 36 ¼ stars

Still not quite in striking distance - barring double features and twenties, Moodie needs two masterpieces against two disasters to really catch up - but, again there's plenty of board to go before the finish.

The next bit has a big gap in the middle, but it won't look that way here!

Film Rolls, Round 7: The Dead and the Deadly and The Haunted Cop Shop

This isn't the first round that works as a themed pairing - things started off with two silent collections, after all - but the board has kind of been set up to make it relatively rare, with the boxes mostly ordered in such a way that you'll jump from one era/country to another frequently, although pieces tend to be kind of in the same general area, so that if the pieces are sticking close to each other, and a period contains a lot of movies from the same genre, you can have both "players" wind up in early-1980s Hong Kong supernatural comedies.

A 19 lets Mookie jump pretty far ahead into the next box, landing on The Dead and the Deadly, which stars Sammo Hung and has him messing around with the supernatural and supernatural-adjacent, which I gather he did a lot as Hong Kong cinema tried to ride a post-Ghostbusters wave. This particular movie predates that import; it's not like Hong Kong needs western influences to do ghost stories.

A week or so later, Bruce rolls a 15 and hits The Haunted Cop Shop, I actually saw the sequel to this coughcoughcough years ago, possibly as a sort of adjunct to a Wong Kar-Wai series because everybody has to start somewhere, like John Sayles writing Alligator.

So how'd the boys do?

Ren xia ren (The Dead and the Deadly)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 June 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

I joke about Sammo Hung doing a lot of these supernatural kung fu comedies, but when you consider he's had nearly 200 roles, four or five of them isn't actually that many. He's had a lot more parts where he's credited as "Fatty", and it's not exactly always body positivity, but the thing about that is, the extra weight made Sammo less obviously toned and trained than someone like Jackie Chan or Yuen Biao, so he could kind of blunder through this sort of adventure naively, ready to freak out. When the time for a little kung fu slapstick came, he could both surprise and sell it.

It's still a bit odd watching him play this sort of goofy man-child, an undertaker's assistant whose being in the wrong place at the wrong time gets him the middle of a man faking his death in an inheritance scam on the one hand and some actual bits with ghosts on the other, all while being too much of a doofus to realize that the pretty (but similarly odd) Siu Yuen, played by Cherie Chung Cho-Hung. It's the sort of very silly thing that winds up spiraling far enough out of wacky capers and into something kind of genuinely nasty that Sammo is going to have to use his screen-fighting skills in actual fights as opposed to slapstick, although that buildup is done pretty well here.

The bulk of the movie is the silly stuff, though, and while a lot of it hinges on people being cringe-inducingly dumb, Sammo and director/co-star Wu Ma come up with a lot of pretty darn good slapstick, an impressive blend of tacky situations and quality physical comedy that hits a nice sweet spot. The trick in these things is to have them seem to reel out of control but stretch it out with physical gags that go just right every time. The film isn't quite wall-to-wall with that - it's the sort of dumb comedy that sort of lurches from one thing to the next when it could have flowed with just a little more effort and less chance of someone checking out - but it works often enough that you can see why Sammo Hung got associated with this sort of comedy for a while.

Mang gwai chai goon (The Haunted Cop Shop)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 June 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

This wasn't quite the last non-auteur film to have a script by Wong Kar-Wai before he could really focus on his own art-house material - As Tears Go By would come out the next year but there were still a couple action flicks in the pipeline - but it's interesting because this film's director, Jeffrey Lau Chun-Wai, would go on to produce many of Wong's films, even though most of his career was more in line with another frequent collaborator, Stephen Chow. If you're looking at hints of what Wong would become soon afterward in this, you're going to have to squint (although, amusingly future art-house favorite Fruit Chan can be found in an uncredited part).

Not that where this film sits in terms of Hong Kong (and world cinema) history really matters; dial back the strangely good pedigree and it's a solidly entertaining horror-comedy. Like a lot of Hong Kong comedies, it is thoroughly screwball - it starts off with the premise that a police station was a Japanese army post during WWII, and the ghosts who of the Japanese soliders killed there want to resurrect, but they're going to do so as vampires. Plus the cops are moonlighting, one of them was once an item with their superintedant, there's a cute new policewoman, a snitch who has been brought in gets in the middle of it, and so on. There are things that Kam Mark-K (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau) and Man-Chill (Ricky Hui Koon-Ying) have to do to keep this all from becoming a disaster, but they're more likely to stumble through them than actually get heads-down and act like they're on a mission.

I kind of admire that; there's a shift in a lot of American action/fantasy/horror/comedies of this sort where everything gets kind of serious, at least in terms of events (characters will mcontinue to quip but their actions get less chaotic), and while some of that happens here, Mark-K and Man-Chill never actually stop being slackers or reluctant heroes. There are times when I'm not sure the gags are really good enough to make up for a story and charactes who exist as the shortest path to the next joke as opposed to being interesting themselves, but the movie's short, the vibe is right, and the folks involved make it a fun curiosity.


Two right down the middle doesn't change the standings at all:

Mookie: 26 ½ stars

Bruce: 36 ¼ stars

But, though we're zoomed in too close to see it below, there's plenty of board left for Mookie to chip away at Bruce's lead.

Next up: More from Hong Kong!

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 13 January 2023 - 19 January 2023

We're in a bit of a weird "gotta have the awards contenders hang around even if not a lot of people are watching them" place now, although apparently the genre films being released aren't crap being dumped, which is nice.

• Plenty of jokes to be had about the generic title of Plane, in which Gerard Butler plays a pilot who makes an emergency landing on a dangerous Philippine Island, leaving him and a prisoner being extradited (Mike Colter) to rescue the passengers and crew, but the movie itself looks pretty solid. It plays Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  House Party is a remake of Reginald Hudlin's movie starring Kid & Play (none of them look involved enough here to make this a stealth legasequel, though who knows), although the premise (kids host a party that spins way out of control) is not exactly one that requires an existing IP. This time Lebron James's house gets used as home base. It's at Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, and Assembly Row.
  
  Also opening is indie horror flick Skinamarink, whose premise is nifty - kids wake up in the middle of the night to find themselves alone with all the doors and windows out of the house gone - but whose trailer doesn't get at that at all, just doing "vaguely creepy". The genre's fans are going nuts for it, though. It's at the Coolidge, Boston Common, and CinemaSalem. The larger-scale horror movie The Devil Conspiracy opens at Boston Common and South Bay, and involves a cult stealing the Shroud of Turin so that they can recover Jesus's DNA and sacrifice a clone to Satan.
• Living, a remake of Kurosawa's Ikiru that stars Bill Nighy as a man who realizes just how little of it he has done when diagnosed with cancer, opens at Landmark Theatres Kendall Square. It seems like a role Nighy was born to play, and also plays at West Newton and Boston Common.
  
  The Kendall also has A Clockwork Orange on Tuesday as a part of its Retro Replay: Stanley Kubrick series.
• Indian openings on Friday at Apple Fresh Pond this week include Tamil-language Varisu and Telugu-language Veera Simha Reddy, both action movies about sons thrust into peril after their fathers' deaths (Varisu also plays in Telugu as "Vaarasudu" starting on Saturday); Telugu action flick Waltair Veerayya, about a fisherman/smuggler; andHindi action-comedy Kuttey, with three crews trying to pull the same heist. Telugu-language romantic comedy Kalyanam Kamaneeyam opens Saturday, while Thunivu opened Wednesday at Fresh Pond and Boston Common. Dhamaka continues at Fresh Pond through Monday. If you can get out to the Deadham Community Theater, they are playing Indian Oscar submission Last Film Show.
  
  Fenway picks up another Egyptian comedy this weekend, with Nabil el Gamil, Plastic Surgeon focusing on the wacky hijinks and stories that such a practice encounters. They also continue Egyptian family comedy Shalaby and Nigerian comedy/drama Battle on Buka Street.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre mostly holds steady, but celebrates Friday the 13th overnight on Friday (duh) with the first six movies, four in 35mm and the third possibly in 3D (not sure if that's part of the name or not). The first also plays Fenway on its own earlier Friday night. Saturday's midnight show at the Coolidge is back to January Giallo, with a 35mm print of Lucio Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin. In other special bookings, Brookline for the Culture presents The Wiz on Saturday. The "Projections" indie sci-fi series has a Blade Runner double feature on Sunday and Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 on Tuesday. Not part of that series, technically, is the "Science on Screen" show of The Fountain on Wednesday, which is in 35mm and has Dr. Michael Rosenthal introducing it with a discussion of cancer treatment. Thursday's Big Screen Classic is Yi Yi (A One and a Two…).
• The Brattle Theatre is a spot for binge-watching Danish TV this weekend, with restorations of Lars Trier's The Kingdom (Saturday) and The Kingdom II (Saturday/Sunday), as well as his latest entry in the series, The Kingdom Exodus (Friday/Sunday/Monday).
  
  After that (and the Belmont World Film Family Festival), they will be closed for the rest of the week a they install surround sound, but will be teaming with The Somerville Theatre to present "(Some of) The Best and Biggest of 2022" on the latter's main screen with their spiffy laser projector. That includes Top Gun: Maverick (Friday), RRR (Saturday), Utama (Sunday), Dos Estaciones (Sunday), Nope (Sunday/Monday), Moonage Daydream (Tuesday), Three Thousand Years of Longing (Wednesday), The Northman (Wednesday), Fire of Love (Thursday), and Mad God (Thursday).
• Belmont World Film is holding much of their annual Family Film Festival in person this year. On Saturday, they are at West Newton with a "What's New from Scholastic Weston Woods Studios" short program, Dutch stop-motion comedy Oink, Serbian drama How I Learned to Fly, and German adventure The Path; Saturday brings them to Arsenal Hards with Czech animated film The Websters Movie, German comedy Lucy Wanted, Slovakian animated adventure Journey to Yourland, and Danish sci-fi storyMy Robot Brother; and on Monday, they are at the Brattle with the "Hnoring Dr. Marting Luther King Jr." shorts package, another group of shorts called "You've Got a Friend", French cartoon Little Nicholas: Happy As Can Be, and Icarus and the Minotaur. Many of the films are subtitled, but there will also be headsets with simultaneous translation for kids who aren't quite reading that well yet (at least at certain locations).
• The Museum of Science adds a remastered version of Imax documentary "Everest" to their giant-screen offerings (including "Serengeti" and "Ancient Caves") on Tuesday, with "Train Time" ending its run the day before. Similarly, "Octonauts" replaces "Thomas & Friends" in the 4D room.
• The Lexington Venue is open through Monday with A Man Called Otto and The Fabelmans.
  
  The West Newton Cinema adds Living to A Man Called Otto, Everything Everywhere All at Once (Monday) to Avatar 2 (no show Thursday), The Fabelmans, Aftersun, The Banshees of Inisherin (Saturday), and Tár (Saturday). They're open for the holiday on Monday, but closed Tuesday.
  
  The Luna Theater has showtimes for Iran-set serial killer movie Holy Spider on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed screens on Saturday and Sunday, as does Joana Hogg's The Eternal Daughter, with Tilda Swinton as both mother and daughter. There's also a Weirdo Wednesday show. Cinema Salem has A Man Called Otto, M3GAN, Corsage, and The Whale from Friday to Monday, plus Skinamarink on Friday and Saturday.
• For those still not ready to join random people in a room for two hours, theater rentals are available at Kendall Square, West Newton, the Capitol and Somerville, The Venue, CinemaSalem, and many of the multiplexes.

Yeah, I'm down for Plane, Living, and maybe Skinamarink, plus some catch-up and catching some of the stuff at the Somerville again. I mean, even if some of these weren't great audience films, it's not like anyone's putting RRR out on 4K (or any?) discs, and only a dubbed/cut version is on mainstream services.

Nollywood!: Battle on Buka Street

There are different sizes and sorts of blind spots you can have as a person who is into movies. You can have not seen something that's been out in theaters for a bit and everyone would assume you've seen; it took me months to get around to Top Gun: Maverick. You may have missed a particular classic - I can't imagine sitting down for three or four hours of The Ten Commandments, for instance. . I'm missing major swaths of certain genres people might assume I'm conversant in, like how I write a lot of horror-movie reviews for someone who has never seen an entry in the Friday the 13th series. And so on.

And then there's the thing when you open your Letterboxd stats page and scroll down to the world map and see large swaths either gray or a very light green, far from the neon yellow of the USA. It's fine to not particularly worry about it - there's a lot of world, and you can get yourself into a situation where you'll never catch up just with whatever's mainstream in your part of it. Still, if you're curious, those gaps can gnaw at you. There's a story I tell even though I don't remember all the details about posting a review of an Iranian art-house movie and having someone in the comments mention that nobody in Iran actually watches them and they don't necessarily reflect the country, because everyone there watches Egyptian action movies. It would be something like twenty years before I actually saw one (mostly. Seeing Indian movies took a while, too, and even then, it took a while to see that there was more than just Hindi-language Bollywood movies, but a whole host of local film cultures, and the very fact of that, on top of seeing Indian-led fantasies, romances, and comedies, taught me something about a massive place I hadn't considered as much more than kind of homogeneous.

But the big gaping hole has been Africa, and while I've chipped away with that through various horror movies and afro-futurist sci-fi movies at Fantasia and the occasional art-house/IFFBoston booking, plus the Officially Sanctioned Cult Phenomenon of the "Wakaliwood" movies from Uganda, nothing from Nigeria has shown up, which kind of shows the pitfalls of relying on art houses and festivals to learn about world cinema: You see a lot of movies from the fringes, an a lot of it is good stuff, but Nigeria's "Nollywood" is the mainstream engine that drives cinema around Africa, cranking out a ton of films - by some accounts, a number right up there with India, China, and the USA, which get exported across the continent and probably influenced that Senegalese import as much as the west did.

I'm not sure what's up with the Regal in Fenway booking Battle on Buka Street this week - it's apparently a massive hit featuring people who are especially popular in Africa and among the diaspora, although I don't know to what extent it is more so than any other recent Nigerian movie. Is there an African immigrant community near there, akin to the way AMC Boston Common is near Chinatown and AMC South Bay apparently draws from a Vietnamese community? Don't know; it wasn't hugely crowded, but it was a literal Saturday matinee (11:50 start time), and who knows how well word got out? Maybe there's all this and Regal figured they don't get the traction on award contenders that other theaters do, they already had M3GAN and Avatar on all the screens they could support, and still had a couple slots per day after even after booking an Egyptian movie, so why the hell not?

And, why the hell not? It's a different thing from a lot of the movies I've seen, and I suspect that it will take me a few tries to get used to. The performances are big and broad in many cases, the story takes some crazy turns, and the ending does not seem to be what most of the movie was leading up to at all (and, man, that movie just stopped). The budget is small enough that the filmmakers sort of suggested a prison break and I had no idea what was going on until later, but I suspect locals would know how to process that sort of scene better. I had it pegged as a comedy going in but it had the feel of a soap opera playing to the rafters, a telenovela cut down to 140 minutes and also in Nigeria. And, speaking of, I am obviously missing a lot of context - is polygamy common in small-town NIgeria? Is one wife being Yoruba and another Igbo a big deal or just interesting details?

I can't say I particularly loved it; it's the sort of thing that I recommend to people because, hey, I bet other folks would like to fill in their blind spots as well, not because it's a particularly strong movie. Anyway, I hope that, with the Seaport and Causeway Street theaters reopening under new managements in the next few months, all these places within a few T stops of each other keep drawing from relatively far afield to fill their screens, including more Nollywood stuff; I'm looking forward to learning more about the cinema and society of Western Africa.

Battle on Buka Street

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 7 January 2023 in Regal Fenway #6 (first-run, DCP)

Even more than with most foreign-to-me movies, I don't know that I've got the right vocabulary or mindset to approach a Nollywood movie like Battle on Buka Street, and as a result the film both frustrates and fascinates me. It's a film with a few issues beyond me not being used to the vibe of movies from Nigeria, but it's also a lot more movie than I was expecting, different enough in culture and style that I want to see more.

Once upon a time, Maduka (Nkem Owoh), a merchant in the community of Otonwa, had several wives. Two of them in particular, Asake and Ezinne, despised each other, and it only got worse when they each gave birth to daughters on the same day, each figuring the other was trying to upstage her. The daughters carried on their mothers' feud, and a generation later, on the day Asake's daughter Yejide (Funke Akindele) married her fiancé Lashile (Femi Jacobs), Ezinne's daughter Awele (Mercy Johnson Okojie) tied the knot as well, causing an eruption that ended with Awele leaving town. Now, Yejide operates one of the most popular eateries, though Asake (Sola Sobowale) does most of the cooking, with son Ademide (Moshood Fattah) looking to start a singing career while daughter Fadeke helps at the restaurant. It's going well until Awele rolls back into town, older daughter Ifunanya and teenaged twins Kaiso and Kaira in tow, leaving an abusive husband, and opens her own restaurant directly across the street, and not only are Asake, Ezinne (Tina Mba), Yejide, and Awele immediately at each other's throats, but Fade and the twins are all too willing to to engage in an escalating campaign of sabotage, while the more level-headed Ademide and Ify are sent abroad to find opportunity.

That's a lot, and there's more besides. Some of that "more" might have either been shaved out or more tightly integrated in a different sort of movie; there are at least a couple of "wait, what?" moments where directors Funke Akindele & Tobi Makinde do things which could potentially send the movie off in new and screwy directions (and sometimes do) in ways that seem like they use a different shorthand than I'm used to. It goes all over the place and much of the final act is concerned with things that are at best tangential to what had been at the center of the movie for the first half, right up until it ends at a point that didn't particularly feel like the culmination of the story. It can also be abrasive, with lots of parents calling their children idiots and no hints that this family has any feelings more complicated than innate loathing for its other branches.

There is something genuinely appealing about this shagginess, though - there's a straightforward sort of comedy at the core, but that belies that this is also a generational epic and a soap opera, and the way the filmmakers will often shift into different episodes or have the story veer in a new direction with a lot of melodrama makes it bigger than the plot: It's a foolish animosity, but the audience can feel just how much bigger than them it must feel to the characters. The film doesn't do much to dig into how this kind of self-destructive, miserable-looking family feud gets started and sustains itself, but does an impressive job of pulling the audience into it without taking sides but instead feeling how irresistible the momentum of it can be, and how Ifunanya are potentially making a major break by acting sensibly.

The actors playing those two cousins give the performances I felt most comfortable with, in large part because of how they aren't yelling until something merits it; it's part of how they mostly seem to be playing to the other character, not the audience. That's not the case with Akindele and Mercy Johnson as the middle generation, but they are forces of nature, sometimes playing to the rafters but also absolutely convincing in how strongly felt their animosity is and how the ends of their marriages has left something at least a little broken underneath. Sola Sobowale and Tina Mba are both playing it a bit more broad in their roles as the grandmothers - Ezinne's frailty is a millimeter away from being outright comedic.

I'm not quite sure if Nkem Owoh's Maduka is a flat portrayal or hitting a certain type of toxic masculinity that has plausible deniability head-on, with a certain offended above-the-fray manner that on the one hand makes me think that if someone's going to do polygamy at all, they should be better than this, but is probably more about how men like this maintain control by pitting women against each other. That's what's been happening for generations here, to the point where men being good enough to break the cycle seems to be regarded with suspicion by these women who have for so long seen each other as the enemy.

It doesn't quite gel, especially the filmmakers don't seem to have the resources to depict some of the events that the film turns on rather than having them happen mostly off-screen. Nevertheless, I'm curious to see more from Nollywood; it's long been a blind spot and I don't want to judge it by just this one example.

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.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 6 January 2023 - 12 January 2023

Last week's "dead period after Christmas" gives way to "awards contenders making their way to other markets after opening in New York/Los Angeles (plus a goofy-looking horror movie)". It's how the change from one year to another works.

• The three awards hopefuls opening at The Coolidge Corner Theatre all played the IFFBoston Fall Focus. Women Talking is likely the most eagerly anticipated, with Sarah Polley adapting a novel about a group of Mennonite women deciding among themselves how to respond to abuse by the men in their colony, featuring Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Frances McDormand, and others. It also plays Kendall Square and Boston Common.
  
  Also opening is Broker, the latest bit of international art-house cross-pollination which has Hirokazu Kore-eda making a film about well-meaning human traffickers in South Korea, with Song Kang-ho as the head of the ring and Bae Doo-na as the world-weary cop tracking them down. It's at the Coolidge, Kendall Square, and Boston Common. The last of the three Fall Focus alumni opening this weekend is Corsage, with Vicky Krieps as Austria's famed "Princess Sisi", whose influence as Empress is beginning to wane in 1877 as her beauty fades and her husband seeks younger partners. It's at the Coolidge, Kendall Square, CinemaSalem, and Boston Common.
  
  The Coolidge's "giallo January" begins at midnight Friday with a 35mm print of Pieces (Boston-set and Spanish-made, so maybe not truly giallo), while Cinematic Void programmer Jim Branscome is in town to present a 35mm print of Torso the next night. Monday's Big Screen Classic is In Bruges. There's Open Screen on Tuesday, and the "Projections" series of art-house sci-fi continues with Sun Ra's Space Is the Place on Tuesday and Tarkovsky's Solaris on wednesday (with optional seminar from Emerson College professor John Gianvito). There's also a free "Panorama" screening of IFFBoston selection The Janes on Thursday, with filmmaker Tia Lessin in attendance.
• The less-fancy opening is M3GAN, a sci-fi horror thing in which a toy designer (Allison Williams) has her recently-orphaned niece (Violet McGraw) test an autonomous, artificially-intelligent doll, and that never ends well. I liked director Gerard Johnstone's Housebound, and writer Akela Cooper also did the script for Malignant, so this could be wild. It's at the Somerville, Fresh Pond, CinemaSalem, Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Kendall Square, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards.
  
  I'm not going to lie, when I first saw the early-January date for A Man Called Otto (an American remake/New adaptation of Sweden'sA Man Called Ove), I thought it was a dead-period dump, but apparently it's an awards expansion and they're pushing Tom Hanks as the grumpy title character for Best Actor. It's at West Newton, Boston Common, Fenway, Assembly Row, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Nicolas Cage's latest VOD-looking piece is The Old Way, a Western co-starring Clint Howard, getting limited screenings at Fresh Pond. Fenway has a Monday Mystery Movie preview, while Plane gets an early-access screening at Boston Common on Wednesday (plus the regular Thursday screenings).
• Quiet week for Indian cinema, as Apple Fresh Pond only opens Malikappuram on Friday, a Malayalam-language film which plays through Monday and follows a young girl and her family who wish to visit the Sabarimala Temple in Kerala. Tamil heist actioner Thunivu opens Wednesday at Fresh Pond and Boston Common. Dhamaka continues at Fresh Pond through Monday. If you can get out to the Liberty Tree Mall, Gujarati-language musical Lakiro also opens on Friday.
  
  Two from different parts of Africa play at Fenway this weekend: Shalaby is an Egyptian family comedy about a man who has quit his job to become a marionette performer and who connects with a 9-year-old girl who lost her voice. Battle on Buka Street, meanwhile, is the first film from Nigeria that I can recall playing locally despite the Nigerian film industry being huge throughout Africa; it follows to women who have been longtime rivals and now set up competing food businesses on the same street. Note that Battle only appears to have matinee shows, even during the week.
  
  Shin Ultraman, a film adaptation of the long-running Japanese superhero-versus-kaiju franchise that manages to be both slick and tongue-in-cheek, plays Boston Common, Fenway, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards on Wednesday (subtitled) and Thursday (dubbed/not at Arsenal Yards). I had a good time at Fantasia with that one.
• The Brattle Theatre continues this run of "Refreshed, Renewed, Restored" films with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Friday/Saturday), Flaming Ears (late Friday/Saturday afternoon), Solomon King (Late Saturday/Sunday afternoon), The Last Waltz (Sunday), What's Up Connection & Robinson's Garden (Monday), Tales from Gimli Hospital (Tuesday), The Double Life of Veronique (Tuesday), and binges of The Kingdom (Wednesday) and The Kingdom II.
• In addition to the new releases, Landmark Theatres Kendall Square has a Retro Replay of 2001: A Space Odyssey on Tuesday, part of the Kubrick series
• The Somerville Theatre also welcomes back an IFFBoston film on Thursday, as locally-produced (and decent-enough) thriller How to Rob plays on the main screen with filmmakers on hand for a Q&A.
• The Lexington Venue is open through Sunday with Puss in Boots and The Fabelmans.
  
  The West Newton Cinema adds A Man Called Otto and Everything Everywhere All at Once (no show Thursday) to Avatar 2, The Fabelmans, Aftersun, The Banshees of Inisherin, and Tár. Closed Monday.
  
  The Luna Theater has the annual A24 retrospective with X and its prequel Pearl paired Friday & Saturday, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On Saturday afternoon, and Everything Everywhere All at Once Saturday evening and all day Sunday. There's a Weirdo Wednesday show, and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed plays thursday.
  
  Cinema Salem has M3GAN, Corsage, and Avatar: The Way of Water from Friday to Monday. American Graffiti plays those days for free in their new fourth screen, although since it's a small room, it may behoove folks to reserve their seats. Like the Coolidge, they're also having a January Giallo series, with a double feature of Blood and Black Lace & Stripped to Kill on Thursday.
• For those still not ready to join random people in a room for two hours, theater rentals are available at Kendall Square, West Newton, the Capitol and Somerville, The Venue, CinemaSalem, and many of the multiplexes.

I've got to travel for work next week, and we'll see whether I can easily walk to the nearby resto-cinema from the hotel or if there's "Mandatory Fun" that keeps me busy. Before I go, I'll probably try to catch Battle on Buka Street, The Old Way, and maybe Flaming Ears.

Film Rolls, Round 6: Pitfall and Bruce's Box Set

Definitely a weird round, between something I had apparently already seen sneaking into the "unseen" shelf (it happens) and the sort of unbalancing coincidence that would raise questions about the legitimacy of the competition if this were an actual competition

Mookie's 8 almost catches him up to Bruce and lands him on Pitfall. The funny thing about catching up with writing about this one months later is that it kind of reminds me of taking it off this shelf without recalling that I'd seen it, so when I open up the IMDB page, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's right!

Then there's a bit of a gap, because IFFBoston happened. When I return, Bruce gets a 12, and as a result lands on his own box set! Now, I'm not necessarily above rigging the game, but I did not actually do that here! Anyway, I decided that I wouldn't include Enter the Dragon, since I'd seen it in 2021 (first movie at the reopened Coolidge!) and because this big old box set was already going to make it a little less competitive.

So, strap in!

Pitfall

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 April 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Pitfall is the sort of film noir that fits a lot of moving parts but which is actually simple enough to fit them into something under ninety minutes. It fits in the "murder drama" category that Eddie Muller described at Noir City Boston the last time he was here in '18, with Lizabeth Scott as a relatively sympathetic femme fatale, Dick Powell as the earnest insurance adjustor who falls for her despite already being married to Jane Wyatt, plus Raymond Burr as a detective with eyes on her and… Well, it goes on.

Coming out in 1948, the postwar suburbs had barely come into existence at this point, but already movies were being built around the sort of frustration of them, with folks who had been in the war doing something exciting and dangerous not quite coming to grips with these domestic entanglements no matter how chipper they are much of the time. The irony, of course, is that how nice and professional John Forbes (Powell) is might be what draws Mona Stevens (Scott) to him, even if she's not the good girl his wife is. There's something interesting about characters like Mona, written and directed by men but played by women who are keenly aware that they too are trading on their sex appeal and have to make hay while the sun shines. She's not really out to ruin a man, but knows these guys will be okay if they discard her, and is fierce as a result.

Perhaps unusually for a film noir, the missing money never feels like the primary motivator; it's almost all messy attraction with the money just one more thing that makes things complicated, which maybe makes it feel a little less tragic but also unpredictable.

Tang shan da xiong (The Big Boss)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 May 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

I did not realize Golden Harvest was around early enough to be the company behind the early Bruce Lee vehicles, which meant it overlapped with the Shaw Brothers heyday a lot more than I realized - and while they hadn't really made the leap forward that they would when the Peking Opera School guys really got involved when The Big Boss came out, they were still ahead of the game having Bruce Lee Siu-Lung around.

And Bruce is definitely the thing that pops out at you in this movie. He's maybe not a great actor in the way you think of that these days, but he's got an easygoing charisma that seems effortless; his humble outsider goofing around seems a proper goofball until he just casually does something absurdly athletic, and eventually the shirt comes off and the fighting starts. Even fifty years later, when it feels like absolutely every actor is ripped and you've got action choreographers trying to top the guys trying to top Bruce Lee, he feels like a shock to the system, raw physical power unleashed in a way that feels much less carefully choreographed than the dancers that came before him.

It'll also pop your eyes for how bloodily violent this all is; the ice factory with its giant saws and sociopathic ownership leads to some gruesome ends. It's a stark contrast to the more elegant or fanciful martial arts pictures, especially when it's just brutalizing the characters who have mostly been there for broad comic relief.

Jing wu men (Fist of Fury)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 May 2022 (or so) in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Fist of Fury is maybe not the prototype for the films where Chinese martial arts are spat upon by murderous foreigners only for a legendary folk hero to rise up and defend its honor - I'm sure there were plenty before it - but it may be where this all begins to form a pattern. The formality of pre-Bruce action lets the occupying Japanese army be properly nasty rather than trading in comedic betrayal. It's a nasty, angry little movie, although not in the way similar movies are now (Hong Kong wasn't quite the crossroads it would become in the 1980s, but it was getting there).

Still, one is coming for the action here, and there is all sorts of "Bruce Lee versus a whole room full of guys doing karate", eventually working his way up to the rival senseis, and where many of the other films in the set sort of emphasize Lee as being cool but having ridiculous power underneath, this one is all him as the wiry powerhouse ready to strike.

Meng long guo jiang (The Way of the Dragon)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2022 (or so) in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

The only movie Bruce Lee made as writer/director/star, and knowing that one probably can't help but look to see how much more of Bruce there is in it than everything else. It's definitely one that allows him to show off both as a martial artist and as a charismatic movie star. He takes to the more comedic parts of the film easily and strives to appeal to an international audience even as he is also making a movie that would, at least initially, mostly get played in Hong Kong.

Indeed, there's a lot of comedy in this, some of it kind of clumsy slapstick that kind of wears out its welcome toward the beginning, or Bruce's Tang Lung keeping his kung fu skills on the down-low so that his co-workers at the restaurant he's been sent to help don't realize what they've got in him (and then gleefully try to exploit him when they do). It's kind of delightfully garish with its late 60s/early 70s colors and overt sexuality, the villains especially being entertainingly mean folks. It makes one wonder, a bit, if Bruce Lee would have evolved to do projects more along the lines of what Jackie Chan would later do had he lived, and how Jackie would have differentiated himself from Lee in that case.

Still, for all that you can say about what Lee is doing in this movie when he's not fighting, or how that action integrates into the story, it does save the best for last with an epic, iconic showdown between Tang Lung and Chuck Norris's Colt, and that's a blast. Norris would become an odd sort of movie star later - what charisma he has doesn't exactly enhance or complement his fighting skills - and it makes for a weird contrast with Lee, because he can't quite make that stoic self-assurance a contrast to the live wire that Lee is. Still, they've both got moves and Lee's choreography is meticulous, and with the Colosseum providing an epic backdrop, their final clash is an instant classic, worth catching the movie for on its own.

Game of Death

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 May 2022 (or so) in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

A tremendous mess - how could it not be, made up as it is out of whatever footage remained from Bruce Lee's original shoot and whatever Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse could manage to make work after Lee's death - but there's no denying that it sort of fascinates as a trainwreck. Yes, every attempt to try to pass off Yuen Biao or a couple other folks as Lee's character is goofy as heck, but it falls into this potentially-entertaining area where one is both sort of slack-jawed and appalled at how ill-conceived it all is on the one hand and kind of rooting for it to work on the other. There's desperation in the optical tricks they try and tackiness in the use of actual footage of Lee's own funeral for when his character is faking his death, but, damn it, they're doing their best.

And for all that one may be tempted to say that this is a cursed project and any of the footage seeing the light of day is disrespectful… Well, do you really want a world where folks don't see Bruce Lee in that iconic yellow tracksuit, or where the fights where there is good footage don't get out? That the real Bruce Lee is only sparsely seen throughout makes the finale when he steps out of the shadows, starts working his way up the pagoda, and gives folks a good look at what they've been missing more powerful. Indeed, everything that doesn't have to work around Lee's absence (and that of the folks who felt returning would be disrespectful) is kind of a blast, from the James Bond-style opening credits to Lee taking on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

(And, on top of getting Yuen Biao in there, there's also early work from Sammo Hung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai!)

It is, on balance, not a particularly good movie, despite the electrifying moments that give it a reason to exists, and at a certain point one starts to wonder to what extent Clouse was trying to deliver a quality film and to what extent he was embracing the fact that this project was destined to be a curiosity and treated it as such. This movie can't be winking at the camera or otherwise urging the audience to laugh at something whose star died before finishing it - that would have been unambiguously disrespectful to someone so important and well-loved - but the filmmaker and the audience kind of have to agree on the space in which this thing exists. So he does what he can to hold it all together and make sure that the paying customers got something feature-length and not boring for their money, but he knows he can't upstage Lee and wants to let the audience feel his absence, mourning the loss in the place where it will be most keenly felt. I wonder how that factored into decisions - was it conscious, or just inevitable?


It seems kind of unfair that Mookie got the best movie but Bruce got four, and as a result, gets to jump to a pretty big lead:

Mookie: 23 ¼ stars

Bruce: 33 ½ stars

On the other hand, this isn't the last box set these guys will encounter, and a 20-roll could offer Mookie more chances to catch up.

There'd be some travel away from the game board before I got back to it, but still plenty of fun to be had!