Octopus With Broken Arms

Back in the Asian Movie Corner

(In actual fact, this movie was around the corner from those, next to a poster-screen of The Prosecutor, although maybe that was sharing a screen with this today)

I wondered when looking at what was playing in the coming weeks how much continuity the Wu Sha movies have, because while I quite liked Sheep Without a Shepherd (as the first was called in the USA), it doesn't look like the second, Fireflies in the Sun, has made it to the USA at all. At least, it's not streaming anywhere, and I can't even find a Region A disc at DDDHouse or YesAsia. Which is a shame, because it's got a lot of Hong Kong talent. Anyway, it turns out that the answer to the continuity question is "none at all": It's one of those series which have some of the same talent and themes, the sort of thing that would show up under "if you liked X, then you'll like Y" if a site's recommendation algorithm is any good, but no actual links between the stories. In this case, all three movies star Xiao Yang, take place in Thailand, are written by Li Peng, and are produced by Chen Sicheng, but Xiao is playing different characters in all three; they've even got different directors. Not sure whether this one is based on a previous film or not (the first one remade Malayalam thriller Drishyam; the second American film John Q).

So, you should be able to go into this one completely cold if you want. As to whether you should…


Wu sha 3 (Octopus with Broken Arms)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 12 January 2025 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I can't find if I've talked about it much in a previous entry, but Octopus with Broken Arms fits into a sub-genre specific enough that it's surprising how many entries there are: Chinese movies that take place in Thailand, but within communities where almost everybody is ethnically Chinese and speaks Mandarin, though all the television and conversations of people who are not Chinese occur in English. The reason why is obvious - people like pulpy crime flicks with brutal murders and government corruption and incompetence as part and parcel of the story, but you can't imply that this sort of thing happens in China, but there's a weird sort of alternate reality to them that makes things like Octopus feel weird on top of unpleasant.

It opens with a good sort of weird/uncomfortable blend, as wealthy cosmetics magnate Zheng Bingrui (Xiao Yang) watches his daughter Tingting's octopus-themed dance recital seems to take a weird, accusatory turn. Or maybe that's just his imagination, lingering guilt over her mother dying in childbirth. Soon, though, Tingting has vanished, somehow spirited out of an estate bordered on three sides by water during her birthday party. Zheng immediately suspects Shi Fu-an (Feng Bing), an old associate who showed up to ask for money, and his wife Tinaya (Zhou Chuchu), but there are eyewitnesses for his entire time on the estate. The police, led by detective Zhang Jingxian (Duan Yihong), soon focus on a mute gardener named Lu (Bokeh Kosang). When the ransom call comes in, though, Zheng bypasses the police and opts to hand-deliver it with Tingting's teacher Li Huiping (Tong Liya), but it soon becomes clear that the person on the other end of the phone, Yayin (Cya Liu) is as much interested in digging up Zheng's past as taking his 100 million baht.

There's an early comment in the film about the kidnapping being a locked room mystery inside a locked room mystery that maybe gives the cleverness of the construct a little too much credit, but the filmmakers are trying to build something intricate in roughly that same way one builds a locked-room murder. Not quite so well - there's at least one character who clearly exists because Zheng occasionally needs an escape hatch, and the film engages in unreliable narration exactly once, rather than making it an inescapable element of the story, presumably because the writers couldn't figure out how to use misdirection and so used it as a crutch. It all fits together, but it's not elegant.

(An amusing part of the inelegance is how Yayin's face is initially concealed before the revelation, not so much because we've seen her before, but because the actress is recognizable, but it's odd if you don't know who's a big name in China and may even wind up odd there if her star fades in the coming years.)

Perhaps more frustratingly, director Jacky Gan Jianyu and the editorial team don't show much of a knack for building tension and unease in any but the crudest ways. There's seldom a moment when a question hangs in the air, the audience worried about how it might shake out, with surprises generally dropped at the start of a scene rather than built to or given a moment to breathe and have the audience and the characters re-evaluate. Nearly every character has secrets to reveal such that it's hard to get a grip on who they are when all is said and done, or even get a sense of them struggling with this question. It's a movie with secrets to be revealed that's seldom actually suspenseful, and has to have newscasters telling the audience directly that this is a big deal to the wider world and folks are invested. It's not terribly long before the filmmakers are basically going with more horrific violence, particularly against children, leading to yet more devastated parents.

As such, it's not a movie for the squeamish. It has its moments, though - there's a nifty kick to the octopus-themed opener that kind of shocks Zheng with "so, octopi basically abandon their eggs and/or die", enough to wish there was more with Chloe Ye's Tingting to make her more than just a Macguffin. The filmmakers are smart to put someone charismatic that the audience can easily connect to just off center to ground the movie even if one sort of knows that this bit of grounding will be yanked away, just to keep things moving as the story gets into darker territory. When the filmmakers get a chance to do some sleight-of-hand in a chase or caper set-up, they're not bad, especially with occasionally fun angles on their Thai setting (no way not to have that giant Buddha in the scene, so let's make it interesting).

Octopus with Broken Arms is, overall, pretty capable as these movies go, and there's probably something perversely tension-relieving about these films in China, scratching an itch without a tacked-on upbeat resolution or overt scaremongering about how dangerous other places are; even the finale where a Chinese movie would assure the audience that everyone was sentenced appropriately at trial and the government was working to make sure it never happened again is replaced with something that could be redemptive or even more devastatingly bleak. If you're not in the mood for having that itch scratched, though, it can be dreary. The first Wu sha movie, Sheep Without a Shepherd, excelled because it invited the audience to enjoy the idea of getting away with things; while this mostly overwhelms the audience with cruelty but doesn't make it gripping.

The Prosecutor

I occasionally take surreptitious photos during the credits for Asian movies because they don't reliably make it into IMDB for later reference, but sometimes you have a couple things that need noting:

First, the opening credits included "Locker Lam", and I kind of had to know who that was. Apparently he plays one of the accused criminals the title character is prosecuting. A little research indicates that he's popped up a lot lately and his full-and-then-some name is Matthew "Locker" Lam Ka-Hei, and "Locker" was the name of the character he played in his first movie, Weeds on Fire, which is about the first Hong Kong youth baseball team, which I am disappointed to see is only available on AppleTV here, because yeah, this sounds like my sort of thing.

Second, there's always one guy among the goons fighting the hero in these movies that makes you sit up and take notice, and in this case that would be Yu Kang. He's apparently been part of Donnie Yen's stunt team for a while - his credits are almost entirely in features starring Donnie - and has been doing a fair amount of direction and choreography of late. Not a bad living if it pays, I guess, although I wonder if he could be an action star on his own. At least in this movie, he's not movie-star handsome and there's not a whole lot of acting asked of him, so I'm not sure if he could break out of this niche.

It wasn't a bad crowd for a 6pm show. I used to think of as sort of a weird in-between time but maybe it's reasonable for a downtown theater today, since people are likely ordering their tickets and snacks in advance and taking the subway a couple stops rather than driving and thus finding parking, which I must imagine cuts out a lot of waiting in line time and lets you move everything up. Truth be told, it seemed to draw out the local fanbase of Boston's Own Donnie Yen better than when Chinese movies played at the Common near Chinatown. I'm also mildly curious what folks think of Yen these days, as he's had the reputation of being eager to make nice with the mainland even though he mostly still makes movies in Hong Kong, and when Big Brother came out, I remember reading that for Hong Kongers there was something insidious about it, like it gave surface-level praise to teaching critical thinking but implied a sort of systemic weakness, and you can kind of see something like that in The Prosecutor: It's full of heroic cops and prosecutors and the like who want to do the right thing in the way that a lot of Chinese movies are, but the (British-derived) legal system is full of loopholes and rules that work against justice. Which is probably not wrong - see every legal system on Earth - but knowing that previous context makes me wonder. Honestly, I kind of miss having the Hong Kong movie times app on my phone from back when I visited (it didn't carry over when I got new phones twice in the past 6 years), just to see if people are still review-bombing Yen's movies for this sort of thing.


Ng poon (The Prosecutor)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 January 2025 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when it leaves theaters)

There are five writers credited on The Prosecutor - "Writer" Edward Wong Chi-Mun in the main titles, "Scriptwriter" Cheung Chun-Ho in the end titles, and three assistant scriptwriters next to him - and yet, somehow, none of them managed to find a reason for director and star Donnie Yen to get into a fight while wearing his robes and wig. It would be silly, yes, but this is a movie that is at its best when played over the top and at its most cringe-inducing when played straight and earnest. Unfortunately, it aims for the latter far too often.

As the film opens, Fok Chi-Ho (Yen) is on his last major case as a police officer, a daring raid on a suspected drug dealer that ends with the perp getting off and Fok injuring himself rescuing a fellow officer (Sisley Choi Si-Pui). He retires from the force and goes to law school, and seven years later is starting as a prosecutor in the office of Yeung Dit-Lap (Francis Ng Chun Yu) under the mentorship of Bao Ding (Cheng Jut-Si). His first case is that of Ma Ka-Kit (Mason Fung Ho-Yeung), who was busted receiving a kilo of heroin but claims that he had just loaned his address to Chan Kwok-Wing (Locker Lam Ka-Hei); Kit is advised by pro bono attorneys Lee Sze-Man (Shirley Chan Yan-Yin) and Au Pak-man (Julian Cheung Chi-Lam) to plead guilty and recant some of his testimony for a reduced sentence. To a former detective like Fok, this stinks to high heaven, but the other prosecutors see their job as clearing the docket and winning cases. Nevertheless, Fok keeps digging with former partner Lee King-Wai (Cheung Tin-Fu), to the discomfort of both his co-workers in the prosecutor's office and the gangsters Au consorts with.

The film is, in many ways, a tale of two Donnie Yens. Yen is perhaps the last true action superstar produced by the Hong Kong film industry, and though the film openly acknowledges he's lost a step physically - Fok literally says "I got old" and complains about his knees, with his fight with fellow sexagenarian action star Francis Ng obligatory and ending in wheezing - he still seems engaged and excited about how to push Hong Kong action forward rather than sticking with formula. The opening gambit works hand-to-hand work into the gun-heavy mechanics of a police raid better than most before shifting to something out of a first-person shooter, and most of the big fights feature impressive use of space: One nests a delivery truck in a tight alleyway, another has folks taking vertical shortcuts in a parking garage, and the finale empties out a subway train and has Yen, action choreographer Ouchi Takahito, and featured stuntman Yu Kang incorporating the poles that keep riders from falling into their motions. It's impressive as heck and incorporates UFC-style ground-and-pound well without that always being terribly cinematical.

On the flip side, though, there's Donnie Yen the actor and more conventional filmmaker; he's become quite capable over the course of his career but is still at his best when his emoting is part of a fight rather than more conventional scenes and has often been more charismatic when doing comedy than drama. And for as much as he seemingly thrives on innovating and trying new things on the action side, he's got a tendency toward the earnestly conventional when it's time to justify that, playing as very bland, and on top of that he still looks just youthful enough that Fok's lecturing other characters, often more experienced prosecutors, comes off as unearned arrogance rather than earnest idealism or hard-won experience. It's a conservative sort of movie and character, the sort of conservatism that earnestly repeats slogans, trusts that the system is good and can make sure that people are treated fairly. Yen probably could play fiery and anti-establishment if he wanted, but that's not his game, and there's no hook to Fok beyond duty - his friends are co-workers, and his only family is a sundowning father whom he dutifully looks after.

It's weird, because it seems like there should be fun to be had here: He winks at the audience by showing a Lego Millennium Falcon in Fok's apartment (and is it too much to see the soccer balls as referencing Butterfly & Sword?), drops a couple of goofy courtroom one-liners in the big final fight, and, knowing he grew up in Boston, I laughed when he dug through a car's trunk to find hockey sticks to fight with. As mentioned, you can practically see him seem to come alive staging the fights, even if they do often have a "it's been fifteen minutes and things have slowed down, so let's try and murder a witness" vibe. He and Julian Cheung also perk up when it comes time to establish just how awful criminals are, and Cheung does a nice job of doing a flustered "why can't my criminal associates be friggin' professional rather than killing people unnecessarily?" thing without making the guy sympathetic.

Instead, it often seems like Yen, Wong, and company took what they felt was an important story (whether "based on true events" or not) with a good message and spent more time trying to tell it with the earnest respect it deserves rather than playing to their strengths. Doing martial arts with the wig on might have looked disrespectful, but it could also look like a symbol of the law fighting for victims; sadly, this movie isn't going to risk people getting the wrong idea.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 10 January 2025 - `6 January 2024

Okay, this is more what January looks like.

• The Somerville Theatre and the Coolidge get out the big 70mm projectors for The Brutalist, Brady Corbet's shot-in-actual-vistaVision epic with Adrien Brody as a famed architect who flees to America after the war and works menial jobs until a magnate commissions him to build a fantastic municipal center, though that's hardly the whole story. It also plays on regular DCPs at Kendall Square, Boston Common; and the Seaport, expanding to Assembly Row next week.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre also opens The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar's first English-language feature, which features Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinto as writers who were friends in their youth reuniting decades later, with one perhaps diagnosed with a fatal illness. It also plays Boston Common and the Seaport.
  
  The French cult midnight at the Coolidge on Friday is Titane; Saturday's Giallo January midnight show is the Bird with the Crystal Plumage, introduced by Cinematic Void's Jim Branscome. Sunday morning's Goethe-Institut German film is thriller Turning Tables, Monday's "Stage & Screen " presentation is Pariah
• Among other potential award nominees is Better Man, a biography of British rock star Robbie Williams (who never really hit it big on this side of the pond), wth Williams voicing himself, though he appears on screen as a chimpanzee. It's at Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay, Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema)
  
  Also opening is Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, in which Gerard Butler's detective, disgraced after his failure in the first movie, tracks down his former quarry (O'Shea Jackson Jr) and says he wants in on the next job, a daring diamond robbery in Europe. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common (including Dolby Cinema), Causeway Street, the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), and Arsenal Yards (including CWX).
  
  Director Mike Leigh's latest, Hard Truths, reunites him with Secrets & Lies co-star Marianne Jean-Baptiste, here playing a woman who cannot seem to confront the world with anything but anger. It's at Boston Common.
  
  The Last Showgirl features Pamela Anderson as the title character in what is supposedly an unexpectedly great performance, trying to figure out her life after thirty years on the stage. It plays Boston Common, West Newton, and CinemaSalem. Another award contender is September 5, a look at the terror attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics from the point of view of the sports reporters with an unexpected front row seat. That one is also at Boston Common, with some showtimes including a prerecorded Q&A.
  
  The Imax re-release of Seven continues at South Bay and Assembly Row through at least Wednesday. There are early access screenings of One of Them Days on Saturday at South Bay and Assembly Row. South Bay also has something called Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare from Monday to Wednesday, just a few days after the character entered the public domain.
• The big Indian film opening this week is Game Changer, with RRR star Ram Charan and Kiara Advani in the new film by Robot director S Shankar in an action epic about an IAS officer fighting corruption. It's at Fresh Pond in its native Telugu as well as Tamil (through Sunday) and Hindi (Friday & Sunday) and Boston Common (in Telugu).
  
  Because Game Changer takes up so many showtimes, other Indian films are grabbing showtimes here and there at Apple Fresh Pond: Two Malayalam thrillers also play, Identity on Friday & Sunday and Rekhachitram on Friday. Hindi action flick Fateh plays Friday, Saturday, Monday, wednesday, and Thursday. Tamil-language vigilante thriller Vanangaan plays Friday, Sunday, and Monday. Telugu action/adventure Daaku Maharaaj opens Saturday and plays at least through Thursday (including dates at Boston Common), and Sankranthiki Vasthunam in the same language opens Monday (including dates at Boston Common and South bay). Marathi-language musical Sangeet Manapmaan plays Saturday and Sunday.
  
  Hong Kong action flick The Prosecutor, starring Donnie Yen (who also directs) as a former cop and prosecutor investigating corruption, plays at Causeway Street, as does Mainland Chinese mystery Octopus with Broken Arms, the third film in a series that started with Sheep Without a Shepherd, with Zhang Jingxian (Duan Yijong) this time investigating a kidnapped girl. The second never reached America, but they seem pretty self-contained.
  
  Korean thriller Harbin continues at Causeway Street.
  
  Satoshi Kon's Paprika screens at Boston Common, South Bay, and Assembly Row, in Japanese on Sunday.
• The Brattle Theatre kicks off the weekend with a 35mm print of Fargo for the Friday Film Matinee, and then runs two documentaries focused on the intersection between the American Civil Rights battles and struggles in Africa: Ernest Cole: Lost and Found comes from I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck and lakeith Stanfield as narrator in the story of the South African photographer who saw many parallels between American Jim Crow and the apartheid of his native land. They also run Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, which focuses on the CIA trying to use Louis Armstrong as a distraction from the coup they sponsored in the Congo to find he is not quite so pliant. Both play from Friday to Tuesday.
  
  They also have late shows of the Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski version of Nosferatu the Vampyre from Saturday to Tuesday. After that, they begin the yearly "Some of the Best of 2024" series, with Hundreds of Beavers on Wednesday and Godzilla Minus One on Thursday.
• The Seaport Alamo has three screenings of Birdeater (Friday, Saturday, and Monday), an Australian thriller about a woman who accompanies her finacé and his friends on his bachelor party only to have things get far out of control, and also have matinees of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday; another Japanese film, Battle Royale. Plays Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. There are "movie party" shows for Hot Rod on Saturday and Tuesday; The Perks of Being a Wallflower plays Sunday and Tuesday; Mind Game plays as part of World of Animation on Monday; and Furiosa plays on Wednesday.
• In addition to their other films, Landmark Kendall Square rotates a number of Netflix films pegged as award contenders, including Maria, Emilia Perez, Will & Harper, and Daughters through Tuesday. Tuesday also has a Best Picture Retro Replay in The Sting.
• The Museum of Fine Arts has Hong Sang-Soo's latest (or, at least, one he made last year), A Traveler's Needs, on Thursday; it features Isabelle Huppert as a woman stuck in Seoul and making a living by teaching French.
• The Capitol Theatre has a 4th Wall show on Saturday night with The Ways and Means Committee, Quantum Moon, and Threat Level Burgundy, plus Coolpics.Biz handling visuals.
• The Lexington Venue is open Friday to Sunday plus Wednesday and Thursdaywith Flow, Anora, and A Completed Unknown.
  
  The West Newton Cinema are the only places booking The Girl With The Needle, Denmark's submission for the Foreign Language Film Oscar, which follows a pregnant woman as she befriends a neighbor supposedly running an adoption agency but actually involved in more sinister business, and Union, a documentary about the work to form a labor union at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. Also opening are The Last Showgirl,and Flow, with A Complete Unknown, Babygirl, and Wicked held over. There's also a "Gen-X Movie Club" screening of Reality Bites on Friday and a Sunday "Behind the Screen" presentation of The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
  
  The Luna Theater has Queer on Friday/Saturday, Anora on Saturday, The Shining on Sunday, and a Weirdo Wednesday show.
  
  Cinema Salem has The Last Showgirl, A Complete Unknown, Nosferatu, and WIcked from Friday to Monday. There is also a "VHS Vortex" event on Saturday & Sunday, and their own Weirdo Wednesday secret screening

Looking forward to Better Man, The Prosecutor, The Room Next Door, Harsh Truths, The Last Showgirl, Octopus with Broken Arms, and maybe some time at the Brattle.

This Week in Tickets: 30 December 2024 - 5 January 2025 (New Year, Old-Time Horror)

Place your bets, folks, at how long until I fall hopelessly behind. Last year, we didn't make it to the Oscars, but I'm feeling good about 2025!

Latest appointment book layout is vertical, like most movie tickets these days, although they're wide enough that there's going to need to be some staggering. Not sure what's up with the yellow, though, though.

I had enough vacation time I couldn't entirely roll over to have the last couple days of the year off, so I caught the Coolidge's 35mm print of Nosferatu '24 in the afternoon, really enjoying it far more than I expected, having fallen a little short of loving Robert Eggers's previous work at times. It was obviously very much influenced by the original silent version, which made a nice sort of way to roll into restarting Film Rolls, which by the nature of how my new-to-me shelf is setup will almost always start with silents, in this case The Enchanted Cottage '24 and Lights Out '23 on Monday and Tuesday evenings respectively, As you might expect from movies that were released on crowdfunded Blu-rays, they're not exactly classics, but they're interesting; you can absolutely see what the filmmakers were going for.

First film of the new year was Honey Money Phony, a New Year's Eve romantic comedy from China that gets a long way on just how crush-worthy star Jin Chen is in her role, and most of the cast around her is the kind of good company that helps this sort of movie roll even when you notice it doesn't have a lot of great, big jokes.

Thursday, I got started on the next round of Film Rolls by starting a box set, with the first film of four on tape being Five Shaolin Masters. Friday night had me hitting a new film from Korea, Harbin, which is undoubtedly a big part of Korean history but maybe doesn't quite make for a great movie, at least for those of us who aren't already have particular investment in its subjects. Saturday, it was back to Film Rolls with Shaolin Temple.

Then on Sunday, I closed the week with The Damned, a period thriller that has a lot going for it but only intermittently lands - which, truth be told, is better than the average horror movie that grabs a release on the first weekend of a new year.

As much as I always intend to keep the New Year's resolution to keep up with this, it can't hurt to follow my Letterboxd account just in case, although I'll generally at least try to have Film Rolls entries on the blog first.


Nosferatu 2024

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Coolidge Corner #1 (first-run, 35mm)
Where to stream it (when available)

This might become my favorite version of Dracula, even if I was kind of skeptical going in: I don't like sexy vampires, especially preferring "the walking embodiment of death and decay" for this variant in particular,, and some of the bits I do really like cause the end to leave a more sour taste in my mouth. It doesn't quite reinvent the story - indeed, by filming it as Nosferatu, Robert Eggers is more or less committed to a specific strain - but finds interesting things to do within those bounds.

There's an impressive streamlining of the story that many adaptations of Bram Stoker's epistletory novel don't always manage - Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) has a pre-existing mystical connection to Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), so it can be assumed that he somehow corrupted Knock (Simon McBurney), the employer of Ellen's wife Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), in such a way as to serve the dual purpose of disposing of the romantic rival and establishing a foothold in a new place. Eggers highlights how Ellen's stay at the home of Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin) highlights both financial precarity and questions of mental health, both assumed and real, that lurk under the couples' friendship. The decision of Ellen's physician, Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson), to call in mentor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe) feels like both a wise move and desperation because physicians aren't really equipped to deal with contagion, whether biological or supernatural.

Some of this reorganization makes me curious how the first half or so will play on later viewings, because I think the familiarity of the story means director Robert Eggers is able to play things for laughs a bit. He doesn't crank it up to 11, but maybe 10.5, having fun pushing the whole thing as overtly stylized without having to worry too much about what folks will take literally. It also means that he can bring the nastiness of the horror down to earth later. The film is often quite funny but folks might not realize they've got permission to laugh until the second or third time they see it.

I was also kind of suspicious of him making Orlock this muscular, mustachioed warlord instead of the silent version's wraith or Bela Lugisi's elegant noble, but it really works: It lets him dig into the Eastern European origins for all manner of designs on the one hand, and it makes the death and pestilence that Orlok embodies a brutish thing that sacks the city, not just consuming the lifeblood that it needs to fend true death off but gorging itself. Bill Skarsgård may be a handsome Dracula, but his gluttony is monstrous and precludes romance or sympathy.

It's a contrast to the core of this movie which I really like, a scene with Lily-Rose Depp and Nicolas Hoult that has a strikingly modern feel as it becomes clear just how real their love is. They challenge each other and demand explanations, but in the end, they trust each other far more than the pair who said pretty words and did what was expected of people like them at the start. Eggers uses them to see the imbalance between gender roles that this sort of period piece takes for granted, reject it, and put both in position to drive for the rest of the film.

There's tons of good stuff around all this, too: Art design where the architecture is just askew enough to remind one of German Expressionist silents without being an obvious imitation. The carriage ride to the castle that recalls 2001 as much as previous versions of Dracula with its threatening bass and slow zooms of doors opening and closing on their own. Willem Defoe's Van Helsing equivalent is funny and almost always right but also mad enough that he probably should have been thrown off the university faculty. Heck, now that I think about it, I wonder if his madness doesn't lead to the bits of the finale I find unsatisfying because, as one character points out in a grieving rage, his zealous obsession with the supernatural threat blind him to the individual and aggregate humanity around him.

Darn good all around, and that comes from someone who often describes the F.W. Murnau Nosferatu as his favorite vampire movie and has often been left cold by Eggers style.


Shao Lin wu zu (Five Shaolin Masters)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

How many Shaolin Masters is too many Shaolin Masters? The answer isn't necessarily "five, possibly fewer", especially when people seldom complain about seven samurai being excessive, but it kind of feels like the filmmakers should do a bit more to earn that number toward the start, as it introduces five pretty nondescript masters with similar costumes and haircuts, in the middle of a lot of folks with similar looks getting slaughtered, and aside from Fu Sheng's Ma Chao-Hsing, who is more comedic than the rest, they feel kind of interchangeable, especially since they all immediately go their separate ways rather than stick together and explore the contrasts between them and their fighting styles.

(More to come when I finish the Film Rolls round!)


Shao Lin si (Shaolin Temple)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Because of the way I tend to see Shaw Brothers movies - randomly, every few months or so, as they show up at various midnight movie programs or when there's an archival print at a festival - it's easy to forget, or not even realize, that Chang Cheh had a sort of "Shaolin Temple Cinematic Universe" going, reusing characters and actors so that the stories would, at least roughly, line up and form a larger saga. Which is a sort of roundabout way of saying that it was kind of neat when the stars of the previous night's movie, Five Shaoline Warriors, showed up and it became clear that this movie would end more or less where the previous one started.

(More to come when I finish the Film Rolls round!)


The Damned

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 January 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #1 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The Damned is solidly in the category of films that i would have loved to see at BUFF or Fantasia with a packed horse on a hair trigger, but where I just figure it's got some nifty pieces at a Sunday 7pm show in the AMC's smallest screen with one or two other folks in the audience who are occasionally coughing. It's a long 89 minutes, but there's at least one shot of snow covering a house built of black wood and the black volcanic mountains in the background which looks like it's a hand-printed woodcut worth 10% of my A-List membership for the month.

It takes place at a fishing station on the coast of Iceland; Eva (Odessa Young) has inherited the business from her late husband, with some question as to whether she would keep it going. The helmsman of the small boat is Ragnar (Rory McCann); his second-in-command is Daniel (Joe Cole), a longtime friend of the dead man. There are four other men on the team, plus Helga (Siobhan Finneran), the cook. It's a lean year pulling fish out of the treacherous waters, and the group is horrified when they see a large ship foundering, but seek to salvage needed supplies. Helga worries that the morbid mission will result in the drowned sailors becoming draugur, angry undead revenants, but the rest are too practical for such superstition.

I want to like the film a lot more, because it does a thing I love in this sort of period indie, pulling us into a very specific time and place and making it feel accessible rather than opaque, grounding the fantasy in procedure that may not be familiar but which is interesting to learn. All the characters tend to feel exactly like they should, but human rather than types. Even the one guy who feels a bit too 21sr Century does so in a way that says there must have been people like this in 1871 as well. It's got a really nice cast - Rory McCann and Francis Magee capture the period without being consumed by it, and filmmaker Thordur Palsson doesn't make Odessa Young protest that a woman can handle this amid the difficult decisions. She's got a nice chemistry with Joe Cole; when they're not dealing with potential monsters, it's interesting to watch them feel their way around the void left by Eva's husband as they clearly have feelings for each other.

On the other hand, while I feel like I should like the spot it hits between folklore and guilt and maybe guilt come to life, the telling of the tale is a slog. There is just not enough for these people to do while the draugur stalks them or rifts that can be exploited as the evil gets in their head and makes them turn on each other. We're constantly waiting for something to happen, but only really on edge a couple of times. There are a few striking images and scenes - I particularly like one where the perspective has the viewer not sure whether the black shape in the center of the screen is a person, a creature, or just a rocky outgrop with one's eyes playing the same tricks that the characters' are.

Get It in another environment, and I'm probably along for the ride if the rest of the audience is. Without a crowd, though, I've got way too much time to think about why I'm not as scared as I should be.

Harbin

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

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


Harbin

* * ½ (out of four)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 3 January 2025 - 9 January 2024

Considerate of the studios to mostly let the Christmas movies run while I'm doing work stuff in Texas.

• The biggest opening is The Damned, and Irish horror/thriller in which a ship crashes off the shores of 19th Century Iceland and the poor villagers of a nearby fishing village must deal with the consequences of whether they rescue them or not. It's at Boston Common, Causeway Street, and South Bay.
  
  The new French adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, a jumbo-sized picture that attempts to capture the full scale of Alexandre Dumas's epic novel, opens at the Capitol and Boston Common.
  
  From Ground Zero is an anthology documentary of 22 short films made in Gaza, and plays Boston Common.
  
  Seven plays Jordan's Furniture and Assembly Row from Friday to Sunday in Imax. There's a "Screen Unseen" mystery preview at Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay, and Assembly Row on Monday. The Last Showgirl has a preview with live-streamed Q&A afterward at South Bay and Assembly Row on Wednesday.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre has a 35mm print for the Nickel Boys in screen #1, although that's basically matinees Friday to Wednesday because Nosferatu and rep has the night shift. Boys is RaMell Ross's adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Black kids in Florida; it seems to alternate from their literal first-person perspectives. It also plays (on DCP only) at the Kendall and Boston Common.
  
  January's Friday midnight shows at the Coolidge will be French cult films, starting with Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day, with Cruising on Saturday. On Saturday afternoon, they have an encore show of Return of the Jedi, which sold out on Wednesday. Sunday morning offers a selection of "Big Kids' Flicks" from the New York Children's Film Festival. Not for kids is the animated "Projections" entry Fantastic Planet, playing Sunday afternoon. Mondays Big Screen Classic is a 35mm print of A Fish Called Wanda, with Starship Troopers on Tuesday part of Projections although Thursday's Cult Classic show of The Thing technically is not. Also on Thursday is a preview of All We Imagine of Light, with writer/director Payal Kapadia receiving the Coolidge Breakthrough Award. She'll do a Q&A after the (sold out) 7pm show and introduce the 7:30pm one.
• Korean period action movie Harbin, which follows freedom fighters attempting a massive holiday attack on occupying Japanese forces, opens at Causeway Street, SOuth Bay. It comes from director Woo Min-ho, notably responsible for The Man Standing Next and Inside Men.
  
  Apple Fresh Pond holds over Hindi-language actioner Baby John and brings back a few that got pushed off screen by the big Hollywood Christmas movies: Rifle Club (Malayalam-language) through Sunday, Marco (Kannada-language), Ui (Kannada-language), and Max (Kannada-language). Telugu-language thriller Legally Veer plays Saturday afternoon. Robot director S Shankar's newest, Telugu-language actioner Game Changer opens Thursday (also at Boston Common).
  
  The Last Dance from Hong Kong, as well as Her Story and Honey Money Phony from Mainland China, continue at Causeway Street.
  
  Satoshi Kon's Paprika screens at Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row, in Japanese on Wednesday and dubbed on Thursday.
• The Brattle Theatre opened a new 4K restoration of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg on the 2nd, and it continues to play at least one show a day through Thursday the 9th.
  
  Filling out the rest of the program are a Friday Film Matinee of Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, Escape from New York on Friday & Saturday, a 4K restoration of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice Sunday to Tuesday, Moonage Daydream for David Bowie's birthday on Wednesday, and a 35mm print of Caligula: The Ultimate Cut on Thursday.
• The Seaport Alamo has Speed Racer on Saturday, Mad Max: Fury Road on Saturday & Wednesday, Bergman's Persona on Sunday, Possession on Monday, and A Clockwork Orange on Tuesday.
• The Capitol Theatre has a 4th Wall show on Sunday night with Pulsr, Grief Mop, Community College, and Alexander and visual by Digital Awareness. On Thursday, they play Mac and Me as the first film in a cult movie series hosted by High Energy Vintage and Disasterpiece Theater.
• Landmark Kendall Square has a secret First Look preview on Monday and starts a weekly Retro Replay series of Best Picture winners on Tuesday with Casablanca. They also bring some more of Netflix's potential award nominees back, with Emilia Perez all week, Will and Harper and on Wednesday, Maria on Wednesday and Thursday, plus Daughters on Thursday.
• Joe's Free Films shows a screening of The Vasulka Effect at the MIT Bartos Theatre on Wednesday as part of the Individual Activity Period; the documentary on Steina & Woody Vasulka is free and open to the public (and there's pizza), with RSVPs required.
• The Lexington Venue is open Friday to Sunday and Wednesday with Mufasa and A Completed Unknown.
  
  The West Newton Cinema keeps last week's schedule of A Complete Unknown, Babygirl, Nosferatu, Mufasa, Sonic 3, and Wicked. They also show Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God on Thursday.
  
  The Luna Theater has Queer on Friday/Saturday, Ghost Cat Anzu on Saturday, Anora on Saturday/Thursday, The Wizard of Oz on Sunday, and a Weirdo Wednesday show.
  
  Cinema Salem has A Complete Unknown, Nosferatu, Mufasa, and WIcked from Friday to Monday.

Will probably catch Harbin and The Damned, possibly Nickel Boys on 35mm film, and it's probably last call for Wicked in 3D. Then to Texas for a week of meetings and probably not having a movie theater near the hotel so I can duck out of team-building nonsense.

Honey Money Phony

I ask you, and not just because posts with pictures tend to perform better, if this is the optimal way to name this movie:

Understand - I actually really like the title, because I like almost-rhymes as much as the real thing, and it kind of gets across the vibe of what the movie is going for, and I kind of like the old-school "doesn't quite get the nuances of English" vibe of another generation of Chinese movie titles - think Wheels on Meals - but maybe the two together is too much? There are six ways to arrange these three words, and which works the best?

Honey Money Phony
Honey Phony Money
Money Honey Phony
Money Phony Honey
Phony Honey Money
Phony Money Honey

I'm not going to get out the "English adjectives go in this order but we're never specifically taught it" post out, but most of these sound vaguely wrong except Money Honey Phony and Phony Honey Money. It probably comes from the Chinese title - "骗骗喜欢你" transliterated as "Pian Pian Xi Huan Ni" and (according to Google) translated to "Lie, Lie, Like You" having something like "Honey" in it. Three-quarters clever, but stumbly.

Anyway, it had the odd New Year's Eve opening, which is apparently a thing in China, perhaps particularly with romances, with probably the most (in)famous being Long Day's Journey Into Night, which was promoted with special screenings timed so the on-screen couple would kiss at exactly midnight and presumably all the lovers in the audience would join in, only to find they'd walked into a long, slow-moving art-house picture with a half-hour oner you needed to put 3D glasses on for, and audiences haaaaaaated being fooled like that. Last year, If You Were the One 3 came out a few days before New Year's Eve and it kind of played weird, with the traditional Chinese New Year postscript despite coming out for Western New Year's, and I wonder if it was also synched to midnight for some shows. Heck, i wonder if Honey Money Phony was at Causeway Street; I don't recall whether they were open late or closed early.

Oh, and one last thing - I was cheered to see the logo for Da Peng's company before the movie, and didn't realize that he was producing it. It turns out to be the directorial debut of his regular co-writer, although the script is credited to someone else. The vibe is similar but not quite the same, and it's interesting that Da Peng has a credit as "Supervisor" right up with the writer and director credits, and I'm kind of curious what that means. Super hands-on line producer? Shadow director? Chilling on set because the studio doesn't trust the first-time director? It's a category I've seen a fair amount on Hong Kong films and animation, and I wonder how different the workflow/division of labor is.


Pian Pian Xi Huan Ni (Honey Money Phony)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 January 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #5 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it when it's out of theaters

Is this getting a bonus quarter-star for Jin Chen's crush-worthiness? Yeah, probably. When you get down to it, it's neither a terribly clever con artist movie or a terribly romantic romantic comedy. But the cast counts for a lot on this sort of feather-light feature, and they make their characters a fun two-hour hang even though the outcome is never really in doubt. It's pleasant, which can be a back-handed compliment for a movie even if it's often what the audience wants.

Jin plays Lin Qinglang, a single 29-year-old woman who has a salaried job at an insurance company but also does side jobs, gig work, and a monetized vlog because her ex-boyfriend Zhang Zijun (Wang Hao) grifted 200,000 yuan (about $27,000) from her before casting her aside. She's wise enough to recognize when Ouyang Hui (Sunny Sun Yang) is posing as a customer service rep for her video host and turn the tables, convincing him to help her steal her money back. He agrees, but his plan will require a couple of accomplices - Dong Xiaohui (Li Xueqin), an aspiring actress and auto-bump scammer that Qinglang knows from work and Ouyang's mentor Bo Shitong (David Wang Yaoqing) - and will need to net 600K to break even.

honey Money Phony seldom gets the big belly laugh despite its jokes often being broad and always feeling like the filmmakers are about to take a big swing (there's an article to be written about about movies that use countdowns as a crutch rather than making the events feel pressing), but it gets a steady stream of chuckles, and probably more than I recognize because they're based on Mandarin wordplay and what may be an untranslated text gag about folks being punished for their crimes toward the end. The folks in the audience who spoke the language were laughing enough for me to take their word for it at points. The movie is full of funny set-ups that end in a decent punchline but seldom snowball, which is fine, and occasionally finds a little barb to stick the audience with, like Qinglang's self-aware narration describing her cheerful and eccentric videos.

The narration doesn't go on that long because director Su Biao and writer Yang Yuting want the audience to feel Qinglang's can-do optimism more than cynical reflection; from the start, it's fairly clear that she has reacted to getting scammed by reading up on them but not necessarily building defenses against them. Jin Chen plays her a couple steps removed from Manic Pixie Dream Girl status - she's been through enough that she doesn't quite have that energy - but she's cute as heck and charismatic enough with that to keep the movie her story even when the other characters are more active participants in the scams and being given moving backstories.

The rest of the cast around her is playing some sort of oddball or another, even if it's muted: Sunny Sun's Ouyang is the secretly sad one, Wang Hao's Zijun is malicious, Li Xueqin's Xiaohui is the performer, David Wang's Shitong the veteran who never quite fit into normal society, with Song Muzi a one-joke character for how much he spits when he talks. That's pretty much fine, for the most part - there's enough to Ouyang to make him an interesting romantic interest for Qinglang, and most of the rest are fun but no threat to make the movie scattered. Sometimes the movie doesn't quite know what to do with Zijun, especially when they hint that he's got enough skills as a con artist himself to see through things but not doing much with it.

One thing that I kind of like about the film, at least as an idea, is how the filmmakers eschew certain staples, in that they never put Qinglang in a tight dress and made her seduce someone, or otherwise go in for elaborate disguises and transformations. Qinglang, like most of the characters, really, is kind of a dork, and even when she's lying and scamming alongside the others, it's by letting her eccentricity and vulnerability out rather than faking something. By and large the movie world rather have the team triumph by being who they are rather than otherwise, even if giving the actors a bunch of alternate personae is where the jokes usually are in this genre.

It's a risky trade-off, and I'm not sure it always works. The earnestness is nice, but the movie could really use a moment or two when the audience can really erupt in laughter or marvel at how slyly the filmmakers have misdirected them for the previous couple hours. I laughed a bit and liked the group, but think i still would have liked them if I laughed more.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 01: The Enchanted Cottage and Lights Out

Let's get 2025 on the blog started right, with me trying to make this thing from a couple years ago happen again, with the goal of leaving my shelves less full than when I started.

After Mookie and Bruce basically tied in Season 1, the competitors this time around are the Atari Centipede, who looks much cuter than I expected for a creature that bedeviled me in various arcades and home machines starting in the 1980s, and Dale Arden, the constant companion and true love of Flash Gordon. Look, I'm just going to say it right at the top: I don't particularly care for the movie. Deliberate camp is not my thing, even if it has Timothy Dalton in it. This series isn't going to go there.

And here is this year's "game board", which is taller than the makers of these shelving units recommend at six levels. That's twenty cubes in all, which the competitors will dash across, wrapping around to the next row at the whims of the big d20, and as films get landed on, they get pulled and watched, with the gap filled from below as much as possible. Indeed, the pile to the right of the board is what wouldn't fit into the third column, but will enter the board as space develops at the bottom. The films I haven't seen by Jean-Pierre Melville will probably enter as well, should three or four slots open at the end of a row.

The zones are:

• Column One: Western films from Kidnapped (1917) to The Stewardesses (1969)
• Column Two: Hong Kong/China/Taiwan from Lady Whirlwind & Hapkido (1972) to Streetwise (2023), with the first two of Arrow's ShawScope sets lurking at the bottom waiting to rocket someone ahead
• Column Three: Western films from Zeta One (1969) to Summer of Sam (1999)
• Column Four, Rows One to Three: Korean films from The Flower in Hell (1958) to The Moon (2023), plus directors' sections for Ringo Lam, Jon Woo, and Tsui Hark
• Column Four, Rows Four and Five: Japanese films from Warning from Space (1956) to Last Letter (2020)
Column Four, Row Six: Johnnie To, Wong Jing, and Pang Ho-Cheung

This isn't my entire collection, but just the discs I have bought in the past few years (roughly since the pandemic) of films I haven't seen before. It was out of hand when Season One started and I've only been crowdfunding silent releases, grabbing at things in Kino Lorber, Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome sales, and just otherwise grabbing physical media that might not be around tomorrow at a faster clip since. That Korean Film Archive sale one foreign store had ballooned the K-film section!

(Also, I highly encourage anyone else who has trouble choosing to buy a blind box and a die and play along on their own board and use the hashtag #FilmRolls on Blluesky or, ugh, X to share your progress.)

So, let's go!

Dale rolls first, and gets a 17, which lands her on The Enchanted Cottage, preceded by short "Where the Road Divided" (which will not count toward the scoring).

Centipede rolls next, and gets a 16, catching him (or her; no need to assume gender) to Lights Out. Because we remove discs as they're watched, that leaves them at exactly the same spot!

So, how is that start?

"Where the Road Divided"

* * (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)


The description on IMDB seems to be of a much more interesting movie, a sort of Sliding Doors narrative where what happens at a fork in the road, but that's not the actual short in question, which is a pretty conventional morality play about a pretty young teenager (Louise Huff) who is seduced by a City Slicker (earl Metcalfe) looking to exploit the local mineral rights; her father being a moonshine-swilling wastrel, it's up to her schoolmaster (director Edgar Jones) and a longtime admirer (George Gowan) to stop her being taken advantage of.

The thing about this "morality play" is that the teacher is pretty clearly infatuated with her, at the very least, with early scenes talking about her not getting special treatment because of that and, ick. Like, you could probably make this a movie about a businessman saving a bright young girl from the groomers around her by removing a couple more lascivious looks and changing some intertitles. It's not that movie, to be clear, but its moral authority is undercut more than a bit, and not just because it was made 110 years ago. It leads to a finale that wants to have tragic gravitas but kind of comes out of nowhere.

Nice looking, though, and even if the details are often bad, the story feels right. The cast sketches their characters well, even if I sort of run into issues with how Louise Huff's Rose is probably supposed to be about fifteen or so, but that's mostly be - the actress was about 20 at the time, and the idea of the "teenager" was a few decades away. Anyway, it's not really good, but it's and shows its age, but it's decent enough to pl.ay before something else without sending one to the concession stand.


The Enchanted Cottage '24

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Available on DVD on Amazon (not the crowdfunded Blu-ray)

Pretty dead-simple in its intent but likably earnest, The Enchanted Cottage tells the story of an injured war veteran (Richard Barthelmess) who, after discovering that his fiancée loves another man, runs off and isolates himself in a honeymoon "cottage" where he meets a poor, plain girl (May McAvoy) to whom he semi-cynically proposes marriage to get his own family off his back and give her some stability. The spirits of the centuries of honeymooners watch over them, and one morning they wake up transformed!

At a mere 80 minutes, this still manages to feel dragged out at times - to the point where, in the end, the now-attractive Oliver and Laura themselves are wondering what is taking so long! - but that and an ending that doesn't just underline it's moral but is like someone moving their pen back and forth to really emphasize it (kind of the same thing) are the only real knock against it. There's a sincerity to both the fairy-tale elements and the more grounded issues that impresses: I love Oliver's pained decency at seeing his intended Beatrice run to the side of her true love, and how the pair's blinded neighbor privately reveals his despair toward the end after putting on a brave face for the rest of the film.

Richard Barthelmess and May McAvoy don't really look like folks who would be shunned - even a hundred years ago, you didn't want to remove too much glamor from your movie stars - but it kind of works for the film that you can see their inner beauty before Oliver straightens up and Laura gets a magic makeover; it's show-don't-tell in a way that's particularly suited to silents. Barthelmess in particular does some nice physical acting here, capturing Oliver's infirmity by the way he holds one leg and bends his neck without hamming it up, suggesting he's learned how to live with it a bit.

The visual effects look surprisingly good - the transparent spirits don't quite interact with the living, but seem to exist in the same space in the same lighting in a way that later silents an early talkies don't quite manage. It's a simple movie but works well enough.

Lights Out '23

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)


I'm kind of interested to see the 1938 remake/re-adaptation Crashing Hollywood, or see the original play staged somewhere, because Lights Out seems almost there in so many places. Star Theodore von Eitz's glasses make me wonder what it would be like if you dropped Harold Lloyd in and built a big slapstick climax into the finale, while on the other hand, the first act seems like it would be much improved by having rapid-fire dialog to bring out characterization rather than big exposition dumps in the intertitles and characters trying to emote while sitting.

(I'm also not sure whether the train porters and servants are blackface or "just" Steppin Fetchit-style mugging, but that's obviously not great.)

That bit on the train from Austin to Los Angeles takes a long time to set things up: A bank in Austin has been robbed, and the police and private security detectives have their eye on Egbert Winslow (von Eltz), who insured his black valise for $50,000 before boarding the train. He hits it off with the banker's daughter Barbara (Marie Astaire), and while they sit in the observation deck, "Hairpin Annie" (Ruth Stonehouse), who picked the bank's lock but was denied her share of the loot, and her fresh-out-of-stir partner in crime "Sea Bass" (Walter McGrail) try to get at his case. He's surprisingly not upset; he's always wanted to meet real crooks and pick their brains because he's a screenwriter for Hollywood serials. Which suits Sea Bass and Annie fine; the convince him to make one that paints the real robber, "High-Shine" Joe (Ben Deeley), in an unflattering light, figuring that will bring him back from Brazil and lead them to where he's hidden the rest of the take. Of course, Barbara's father and the law note that this production seems to know details about the robbery that weren't given to the press, and figure Winslow must be in on it.

It's a genuinely terrific scenario that is great fun to watch play out once it starts moving ahead in earnest; the filmmakers do a very nice job of shuffling folks around various locations so that they just miss each other or are only privy to enough of a conversation to misunderstand. It's the sort of farce that doesn't always benefit from the way moving from stage to screen opens it up as editing can sometimes blunt the illusion of near misses and the subconscious knowledge that someone is waiting in the wings, but works well here. It helps a lot that the farce seems to be driven forward by the characters' motivations as opposed to having them twisted to move the pieces to a new spot: One can see Barbara becoming fonder of Winslow than the detective she's engaged to (Ben Hewlett), and the time jump from the train to the production of the serial's final episode lets the audience believe that Annie and Sea Bass would not only get closer but start to view Winslow as a friend instead of just a resource to exploit. Ben Deeley, meanwhile, adds spice to how good-natured all this is with a criminal mastermind whose ego is funny but also dangerous enough to feel like a threat; and he also does nice work pulling double duty as the actor playing High-Shine in the serial.

That opening segment is almost a killer, though, devoting a long stretch at the start to honeymooners looking for a bit of privacy to make out who we won't see later, like the movie needs to spend ten minutes to justify pulling a shade. It's got some strained physical comedy around Winslow either keeping the bag close or forgetting it as he flirts with Barbara and too many people circling it, including some of the tackier bits of racial humor and a person mostly seen as a hand reaching out from behind a chair that I lost track of at various points. It's a segment that could use a real slapstick pro rather than van Eltz, who just never sells the physical comedy casually or as someone believably frazzled, which is something of an issue through the movie.

Lights Out is genuinely fun once it gets going, and since the play must be in the public domain by now, it might be fun to see someone take a run at it today. For a century-old farce, it doesn't seem like it would be particularly broken by air travel, cell phones, or other bits of modern tech, which may be a part of why it still works fairly well.

So, two crowdfunded silent movie releases that maybe weren't great - there is, after all, a reason why so many of these lesser-known movies didn't stay in the public consciousness and have Kickstarter goals that would be met if 100 of us bought them - but are worth watching once. And, yes, I've already backed one new campaign in the new year. Which gives us a score of:

Dale Evans: 2 ½ stars
Centipede: 2 ½ stars

Dale may lead by a nose in points, but they're at the same position on the board, with at least one likely to move into the Hong Kong section with the next roll!

Film Rolls, Round 24: Piraha and … oh, never mind

I'm in a sort of ashamed awe at this post, which was nearly a year in the making - the first of the 9 movies intended to be included came off the shelf on 24 February 2023, the last on 19 November 2023, and while there's reasons, I'm certainly going to find ways to tighten this up on the next pass through.

But, it's the final round of the game! How does it play out?

Well, it starts with Mookie rolling a 9, which gets him to Piranha in 4K. As nutty as the choices for what gets put on 4K and what is let to languish on VHS/DVD can be, Joe Dante's first feature that caused people to sit up and take notice certainly seems like one that demands some attention.

Things got a little busy after that - March is Boston Underground Film Festival time, for instance - so it was April before get got back to this, excited about being close to the end. Bruce rolled a 12, and I honestly can't remember whether that got him to the first in the line of Kino Lorber's "Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema" box sets exactly, or if I just decided that the appropriate amount or over stopped you there. At any rate, it's a five-film box, and it seemed unfair to skew the results at the end, so, when I picked this back up in November (hey, there's Fantasia and other stuff in there!)...

Holy cats, Mookie rolled a six and ended up exactly where he needed to be! What are the odds? Okay, obviously 5%, but this picture was definitely staged.

It's been a whole year since then, during which I figured on re-watching the eight films noirs in order to write decent reviews but it just never worked out that way, so I'm going to treat those movies as bonuses and wrap this up. So I figured on not starting Season Two until I got this wrapped up, which means my shelf has been bloating all year, and isn't the idea to use this as a way to watch movies without hemming and hawing so much?

So, yeah, here's a quick wrap-up and a clean slate, mostly posted because I've wanted to take the photo at the bottom for at least a couple years.

Piranha '78

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 February 2023 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)
Seen 7 February 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)
Available for stream/digital rental/purchase on Prime or elsewhere; 4K Blu-ray on Amazon

There's a moment or two during Piranha when some random old B-movie appears on a TV screen, and 45 years later, you can kind of laugh, saying it's just Joe Dante being Joe Dante, but I found myself kind of wondering if someone seeing it 45 years ago would wonder why Dante was reminding us that there were monster movies out there that were, if not necessarily better, at least more imaginative. I'm not sure what the term folks at the time would use the way we sort of dismissively say "content" in 2024, but that's kind of what Piranha is - producer Roger Corman cranking out a new movie to fill spaces on drive-in and grindhouse screens, or maybe play some late nights where a regular theater had a hole, but not really anything meant to last. It's got a fancy 4K disc not because it's particularly good or noteworthy, but because director Joe Dante and writer John Sayles went on to bigger and better things.

Which, it should be made clear, does not make Piranha bad; it does what it says on the box and does it in pretty capable fashion. Sayles gives Dante a script that includes everything a movie like this needs with the occasional fun variation or bit of dialog; Dante-the-director gets Dante-the-editor good material to cut together, and the cast could often maybe dial it down a bit - you can see a fun dynamic in Heather Menzies's headstrong skip-tracer and Bradford Dillman's grumpy local guide, except that they're too close to shouting when they should maybe be closer to bantering - but more often than not, it's the right people in the right roles and you can see them existing outside the movie. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say it's never great but solidly competent throughout - it's often very rought! - but Dante generally seems to get enough that's decent to put together.

The thing is, it's a Corman-produced movie from after he'd peaked, and there are times even a B-movie-lover like Dante seems frustrated with the spots he's got to hit, making sure that Menzies' Maggie is all "really?" about the nature of the distraction Dillman's Grogan suggests before flashing her [body double's] breasts, and there's an obvious need to hang a lantern on how cheap the fancy resort looks. There's a Phil Tippet stop-motion creature that they ran out of money for, but it's in the film because it cost money even if it doesn't go anywhere. Corman's clearly chasing a trend on a tight budget, rather than doing something that anybody involved finds particularly interesting or inspired by. Unlike a lot of those movies, it lucked into having just enough up-and-coming talent to remain watchable.


Okay! That makes the finale score before the Film Noir Box sets

Mookie: 81 ¼ stars
Bruce: 79 ¼ stars

Bruce was ahead until Mookie got that last film, but he would have had five movies compared to Mookie's three, so let's say it's too close to call!

Of course, if you do feel like calling it, here's how the pair stood up… literally!

Okay, that was fun! I'm going to try it again starting next week (next year!), once again trying to find a good balance between "it is a fun thing to do with a movie blog" and "you're not getting paid and have other hobbies, stop making everything a massive writing project!"" Which, if I specifically enumerated resolutions, would absolutely be my New Year's Resolution.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 25 December 2024 - 2 January 2024

Let's see just how much free time I have/need…

• Lots of movies that have been promoted pretty much non-stop for a couple months opening for Christmas! First up is A Complete Unknown, with Timothee Chalamet playing Bob Dylan in his early years. It's at The Capitol Theatre, the Coolidge, Fresh Pond, the Lexington Venue, West Newton, CnemaSalem, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  It's kind of nuts that we're on our third version of Nosferatu, when the first is basically an end run around Dracula still being under copyright. Here, Robert Eggers puts together a nifty cast (Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgaard, Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and draws heavily from the original's German Expressionist imagery. It plays The Somerville Theatre, the Coolidge (including 35mm), Fresh Pond, West Newton, CinemaSalem, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), and Assembly Row (including Imax Laser).
  
  I feel like I've spent more time watching the trailer for Babygirl than the film's actual runtime. Nicole Kidman stars as an executive who enters a submissive affair with her intern, and, you know, she looks pretty good for someone who has been doing movies about inappropriate relationships with younger guys for 30 years. It's at the Somerville, the Coolidge, Fresh Pond, West Newton, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay, and Assembly Row..
  
  The Fire Inside has cinematographer Rachel Morrison stepping into the director's chair (with a script by Barry Jenkins) to tell the story of Claressa Shields (Ryan Destiny), a teenage boxing prodigy who discovers that Olympic gold may not lift a girl from Flint, Michigan out of poverty on its own. It's at Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Seaport, South Bay, and Assembly Row.
  
  Bloody Axe Wound, a horror comedy about a young woman taking over the family slasher business, opens for late shows at Boston Common on Thursday.
  
  Los Frikis, a Spanish-language film from the makers of The Peanut Butter Falcon about Cuban youths who infect themselves with HIV to gain access to a care facility in the 1990s, opens at Boston Common.
  
  Folks who have been holding it in: Wicked adds sing-along shows with on-screen lyrics at the Capitol, Boston Common, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards. Boston Common also has Terrifier 3 on Christmas night, because it is apparently a Christmas movie..
• New Indian movies at Apple Fresh Pond for Christmas are Baby John, a Hindi-language action movie with Varun Dhawan as a cop who fakes his own death to get to the bottom of a case (also at Boston Common); Telugu-language mystery Srikakulam Sherlockholmes, with a consulting detective hired to solve a serial murder case in 1991; and Barroz: Guardian of Treasures, a Malayalam-language action adventure playing in 3D. Tamil-language crime film Viduthaliai Part 2 is held over.
  
  Hong Kong's The Last Dance and Mainland China's Her Story share a screen at Causeway Street. On Tuesday (New Year's Eve), Causeway Street opens romantic comedy-drama Honey Money Phony, with Jin Chen as a nice girl in deep debt and Sunny Sun Wang as a con artist.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre has A Complete Unknown and Babygirl like everything else, but they've got a 35mm print for Nosferatu, at least when it's playing on screen #1. On Friday, they open The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a thriller set (and secretly shot) in Tehran where a newly-appointed judge finds himself gripped by paranoia. That one also opens at Kendall Square and Boston Common.
  
  The final midnights of 2024 at the Coolidge are Dracula 2000 on Friday and a 35mm print of New Year's Evil on Saturday. Speaking of New Year's Eve, Strange Days plays on 35mm film both Monday and Tuesday, On Wednesday, they kick off the new year and annual "Projections" sci-fi series with Return of the Jedi. Thursday's Big Screen Classic is a 35mm print of Fellini's Amarcord.
• The Brattle Theatre wraps the year-long celebrations of Columbia's 100th with Nineties Nostalgia, mostly on 35mm: A double feature of Little Women & Go on Christmas, A League of Their Own & Groundhog Day (plus a late DCP show of Anaconda) on Thursday, Single White Female & The Cable Guy on Friday, Bottle Rocket & El Mariachi on Saturday, separate shows of The Age of Innocence and Boyz n the Hood (both digital) Sunday, and Double Team & Bad Boys on Monday.
  
  In the middle of that, Friday's Friday Film Matinee is a 35mm print of Tap, which I never would have thought of as directed by Nick Castle. Then there are some holiday festivities - matinees of The Thin Man on New Year's Eve, with Stop Making Sense for the evening show, then the annual Marx Brothers Marathon - A Night at the Opera, Room Service, Animal Crackers (35mm), and Duck Soup (35mm). Then on Thursday, they open the new 4K restoration of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
• The Seaport Alamo has The Holdovers on Christmas, Paris, Texas on Saturday, When Harry Met Sally… on Sunday (including brunch) and Tuesday, South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut on Monday, The Apartment on Tuesday, and Phantom Thread on Tuesday and New Year's Day. No rep scheduled for Thursday the 2nd.
• In addition to playing the big releases, Landmark Kendall Square brings back Emilia Perez.
• The Regent Theatre switches up their school vacation sing-along shows this week with Bohemian Rhapsody playing with on-screen lyrics from Thursday to Tuesday. They also have a screening of Being Robin with star Roger Kabler on hand Sunday evening.
• The ICA has a second weekend of Kids Flicks Short Films matinees this weekend, with shorts for kids as young as 5 on Saturday and Sunday's package recommended for ages 8 and above.
• The Lexington Venue is open every day through the 2nd with Mufasa and A Completed Unknown.
  
  The West Newton Cinema opens A Complete Unknown, Babygirl, and Nosferatu, keeping Mufasa, Sonic 3, and Wicked. There's also a special "Behind the Screen"preview of The Room Next Door with producer Han West on hand.
  
  The Luna Theater has Ghost Cat Anzu on Thursday the 26th, Saturday the 28th, and Thursday the 2nd, Y2K on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and Heretic on Saturday.
  
  Cinema Salem has A Complete Unknown, Nosferatu, Mufasa, and WIcked from Christmas to New Year's Day. Friday's Night Light show is Pan's Labyrinth, and Eyes Wide Shut plays Sunday & Monday.

I've got the week off from work, so I'm looking at Nosferatu, The Fire Inside, Mufasa, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Honey Money Phony, Wallace & Gromit, and whatever else I can fit in.