Dir: John Woo
1990
“Bullet in the Head” is often hailed as one of John Woo’s best, because it springs from his own memories of growing up rough on the streets. And after he sends his three heroes off to Saigon in 1967, determined to lay low from the police and make some money in the process, the film turns into his own version of “The Deer Hunter.”
The leads are Ben (Tony Leung), Frank (Jackie Cheung), and Paul (Waise Lee), and their character types are wistful/sensitive, well-meaning/unhinged, and realistic/selfish respectively.
All three, we see in an opening sequence that combines dancing with fighting (Woo’s tribute to West Side Story), are good at fighting. This comes in handy later when they go up against a crime boss and his minions with all sorts of firepower, from sub-machine guns to exploding cigars (!).
The three are poor, but Ben seems to be starting off well, getting married to a rather drippy girl in the neighborhood. But soon Frank’s problems with a local gangster cause all three to have to leave the country. Will they make a drop off of pharmaceuticals in Saigon while they lie low? Easy!
In the first of many well-executed set pieces, the three have just barely arrived in Saigon for five minutes when they wind up in the middle of an assassination attempt and have their important package blown up. Desperate, they decide to team up with a CIA op called Luke (Simon Yam) are wipe out the crime boss.
Another great set piece of ridiculous violence follows as the three take on the entire building.
So far we are safely in Woo territory. Then the three get captured by the Vietcong, who know nothing of gangland honor, and the movie gets very dangerous, refreshingly so.
At the center of the tale is a US army box full of gold. Paul insists on keeping it at all costs, destroying the friendship. There’s also a substitute for Ben’s drippy wife, a similarly drippy Canto-pop star turned captive druggie whore who Ben tries to rescue. Woo, who is never really that interested in women except when they are abstract plot elements, does away with her too.
I was with the film up until the final act, when Ben returns to Hong Kong to see vengeance on Paul for what happened to Frank. (What happens to Frank results in one of Jackie Cheung’s scenery-chewingest performances. He even got nominated for it.)
The ending, it turns out, was not the original, though that survives on the expanded, remastered DVD as an outtake. Like so many Hong Kong action films, any strides made by the drama are ditched for absurdity. The missus gave up on this film when the skull appeared.
Still, the transfer looks wonderful on this FortuneStar remaster, and is exciting for much of its length. But for those who want to build a case against Woo, there’s plenty fodder here too.
Author: tedmills
Boris Artzybasheff
In a recent Jim Woodring interview, the artist names two art books that changed his life. One, unsurprisingly, was on Surrealism. The other was a book called As I See by Boris Artzybasheff. Before you could even say “Google”, I found a page on him. Not only did he do 200+ covers for Time Magazine in the ’50s, but his style is similar to Basil Wolverton and others. In fact, his range is very wide, from cartoony to realistic, from oils to woodcuts.
Other examples are here and below:
Subtle – F.K.O
Directed by somebody or something called SSSR, this is just lovely, lovely stuff. Subtle – F.K.O (.mov file)
Laura – Diary of a White Trash Girl
The always non-awful Something Awful has a long-running thread I’ve just noticed. Essential reading for this afternoon…
Working at Goodwill, one procures not only a loathing for the greater parts of their local community, but a great many interesting oddities as well. I came across one of my more curious souvenirs today as I cleaned out old drawers: A diary detailing the depressing life of perhaps the most white-trash girl I have imagined. I have been in possession of said book for about a year and a half, and I read through it once at work to give my boredom a kick. However, it wasn’t until I further analyzed the journal that I realized how utterly depressing and hopeless the track of her life was/is (this diary is from the ‘93 period, of which time she must have been a teenager). However, despite all this, parts of this journey into Laura are nothing short of utterly hilarious. Part of me feels bad about posting all this, but then again, I don’t know this person at all and someone donated it anyways. For the time being, enjoy the shenanigans of this complete stranger. I’ll be typing entries as well as linking to the actual journal, and if people like the first bits I’ll definitely do more. This stuff just gets better and better, and it’s LONG. Plenty of hilarious details. On with it. I am making no spelling or grammatical corrections. Everything is as written.
You can continue the diary on page 20, as the in between pages are comments. There’s even an audio book being made, read in a posh British accent, along with an accompanying Flash cartoon. Ah, the Web.
The Internet Cat Photo Collection
If there’s a better gallery of funny cat photos, I haven’t seen it. The first photo on page one is a winner. Amazing Cat Collection
Vinyl Junkies by Brett Milano
Following on from my earlier post about rare record dealers, here comes what looks like and interesting book on record collecting.
Paste Magazine :: Review :: Vinyl Junkies
Every guy with a record collection and a girlfriend should read Brett Milano?s Vinyl Junkies with her as relationship therapy. The book follows die-hard collectors from different walks of life?from R. Crumb?s country and blues 78s to several vinyl addicts in Milano?s native Boston, where he writes for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald. The book presents an engaging look at a diverse subculture?from the rabid nerd completists to the musicians and industry types you would expect to have a serious relationship with their records (including R.E.M.?s Peter Buck and Sonic Youth?s Thurston Moore). But Milano also writes about ?normal? people with jobs and relationships and whose fashion choices range outside jeans and obscure punk T-shirts.
Wonder Twin Powers ACTIVATE!
Ah, with a little time on my hands, I have successfully migrated the contents of my front page, never-updated blog into my alive-and-postin’ blog “Stone Cold Pimpin'” and made the latter my front page. So now, going straight to tedmills.com will bring you here! Cool, eh?
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Dir.Mamoru Oshii
2004
As far as I know, this isn’t based on a manga by Masamune Shirow, but a film-only sequel to one of the best post-Akira sci-fi anime on the last decade.
With “The Major,” the female cyborg hero of the first film, living inside the ‘net/Matrix/computerverse, the sequel focuses on her partner, Bateau, a cyborg with a human brain, and his rookie partner, Togusa, a human with a synthetic brain.
The plot is police-procedural–investigate the homi- and suicidal impulses of pleasurebots (called gynorgs here), who have taken out their wealthy industrial johns. What is causing this breaking of one of the three robotic laws?
As GITS2 (great acronym!) progresses, it becomes apparent that the suicides, as well as Bateau’s outre responses to them (taking on an entire yakuza den with clever holography and a bloody great fun) are chess moves to draw protag and antag together. The solution to the mystery is a nice inverse on the idea that prostitution–in particular child prostitution–destroys the soul.
In between GITS2 delivers some of the most beautiful set pieces and animation so far in animation. Blending 2D and 3D animation, a painter’s eye for light, an otaku’s attention to techie detail, the film demands repeat viewing. Certain sequences deserve a mention: Bateau’s paranoid attack in a convenience store brings us fully into the subjective view of its cyborg brain; Kosuga’s brain-viral attack that leads into a Moebius loop of a nightmare narrative sends the film off into a Borgesian dimension.
It’s a very restrained film, and chilly in its diagnosis. Yes, the “soul” might be what separates the humans from the borgs (even when that line is blurry), but when soul becomes rare it turns into, in a capitalist system, a commodity
Puffy live!!
Last night I went down to L.A. to see Puffy (known in the States as PuffyAmiYumi) play the House of Blues. My companion: the estimable Jonathan Crow, who says he remembers the day I first played him their debut single (the never-bettered “Ajia no Junshin”) in the car while driving around Tsuchiura. So, amazingly, it has come to this, eight years later. Tamio Okuda’s “idol” group kept on keeping on, and now is poised to go American pop-sub-culture mainstream with the premiere of their Cartoon Network show next month. They’ve scored a hit with the theme song to the Teen Titans cartoon, a level of American saturation most Japanese bands would only dream about.
It helps that they have good songwriters and producers (Tamio, Andy Sturmer, Velveteen), a crack back-up band (known as Dr. Strangelove, aka Tamio’s backing band), and they can actually sing in tune (in harmony), something not often called up in the ‘gambatte’ culture of Jpop.
This concert ended up costing a lot of money. Sure, tickets were $20, but after Ticketbastard service charges, that went up to $32. Then because it was at the House of Blues on Sunset (“located in a cool part of town with no parking”) we had to valet park, a whopping, criminal $15. Fortunately, the tour T-shirts blew and I felt no need to get one.
We waited in a line that stretched down Sunset, and got in just after Puffy had finished their second song. And we turned up on time, too!
Anyway, the band just focused on their most rockin’ numbers. “Jet Police” is a good ‘un, as is “Akai buranko”. In between patter was written up on crib sheets and they were cute in an exchange student way. I expect most new fans assume the two are in their 20s, whereas they’re crackin’ on into their 30s.
They encored with “Ajia no Junshin” which just capped off the night for me. Ahh, pop satisfaction. Who woulda thought I would have ever seen this live?
Because they are promoting their Cartoon Network show, they came back on after and taped a song for a New Year’s Eve concert for the network. We were asked to pretend it was now Dec. 31, 2004 and we counted down to one. A net full of balloons hanging above the crowd failed to break and instead, like a giant white sausage, floated down on to the crowd. It will be interesting to see how that gets edited…
UPDATE: If you’re curious about the “service charges,” here’s the breakdown, for the two tickets I bought:
FULL PRICE ADULT US $20.00 x 2
Total Building Facility Charge(s) US $2.00 x 2
Total Convenience Charge(s) US $7.70 x 2
Order Processing Charge(s) US $3.75
ticketFast Delivery US $2.50
TOTAL CHARGES US $65.65
I won’t even pretend to know what the difference is between the “convenience charge” and the “ticketFast” charge. You mean I should pay you money for the use of an online database and sending me a pdf file? It’s not like you even had to use ink to print it out. Nobody helped me, so who had to process this? My judgement? These are bullshit charges that Ticketbastard makes up.