Category: Film

Dir: Sidney Lumet
1976
Dog Day Afternoon was one of two DVDs I bought for Abel’s Christmas present (people always buy him food, not knowing what else to get him; Mom suggested DVDs), but being a used copy, we watched it before wrapping it up. Sidney Lumet’s job was to take a sensationalist story (two incompetents try to rob a bank, one of whom wants the money for his lover’s sex-change operation) and turn it inside out, making the outlandish universal. With Pacino, he succeeds, and then goes further into doom and despair. Sonny and Sal’s attempts are funny at first, but as the day wears on and the AC and lights go out in the building, death seems right outside the door, cheered on by the bread’n’circuses New York mob.
The film now is a documentary glimpse into a New York that opened up to us only in the 70s, before being reformed and reshaped in the 80s. DDA’s opening five minutes show life in the city, c. 1976 (set in 1972, nobody worries that 1976’s film “A Star Is Born” hangs on a marquee). It was a move borrowed from the New Wave, and rarely seen these days, but sets up the wider context for a film that mostly takes place in two locations: inside and outside the bank. And look closely, for wandering among the crowd is Sonny’s wife, who we won’t see till much later–fiction intermingling with fact.
Pacino’s performance is tempered here with equal doses of anger and passivity–and it’s his star power that allows us entrance into the more disturbed or delusional aspects of Sonny’s personality.
The film pulses along between slow pools of calm and thrashes of activity (the series of lightning fast cuts that follow Sonny’s gunshot out the back window shows that you can cut quick and still be comprehensible). The script has time for dialog that exists apart from furthering the plot. And the supporting cast stand out as real people, not central casting drones (in particular the frizzy haired teller who is always doing something idiosyncratic when the camera passes over her.
Lastly, we come to identify with Sonny so much that in the end we feel his sadness when the hostages–supporting characters in Sonny’s head movie–refuse to acknowledge us or him once he is arrested. He’s lost his chance, his friends, his family–and mostly he’s lost center stage.

Dir: F. Gary Gray
20003
The Italian Job remakes the Michael Caine vehicle and though it keeps the MiniMetro, much to Austin’s delight, it ditches Italy after the opening Bond-like sequence for less interesting Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. Throw into the mix some psychobabble thread about father issues (Donald Sutherland as masterthief–it’s his death that must be revenged for the rest of the film) and some attempts at light humor (mostly Seth Green), and each sort of outweighs the other. Edward Norton hangs around for a paycheck, which he admitted as much in an article around the time of the film’s release. His lack of joy at being on set certainly helps his dour character, and Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron have as much chemistry as an underfunded inner city science class.
Still, it proceeds at a quick pace and director F. Gary Gray knows how to shoot action for the most part. Don’t expect any of it to make sense, though.

Dir: Corey Yuen
2002
At heart this is a rather silly film that tries to mix melodrama with spectacular violence in the grand tradition of John Woo, but has trouble keeping the two hanging together.
Hsu Chi and Vicki Zhao (the female lead in Shaolin Soccer) play sisters whose parents were murdered years before by thugs over their father’s magical software. Now, they use the software–a program that can tap into any security camera anywhere–as assassins for hire. Lynn (Hsu) does the leg work, Sue (Zhao) stays at home behind monitors and guides her. After an opening sequence where Lynn kills off an evil CEO and jumps off a skyscraper to safety, rookie-but-brilliant cop, Hong, played by Karen Mok, is on the case and begins to track them down.
Just recounting the plot makes no sense. But for some reason it hangs together, as it’s only a backbone to have the sisters in a cat and mouse with Hong, and, like Woo, set up a series of fight scenes where adversaries slowly become partners against a larger menace (here, the same corporation as seen in the beginning). Woo’s homoerotic attraction here becomes thinly vieled (and barely explored) lesbianism between the cop (who wears slacks and smokes those silly long cigarettes) and the heavy-lidded Sue. Meanwhile, Lynn is involved with a drippy guy who may cause her to leave the business.
When the women have at it and bring the smack-down, the film comes alive. Nothing’s as brutal as the Bride/Elle Driver fight in Kill Bill 2, but the scenes are well shot and cut, and nobody stops for a witty quip. There’s also gratuitous shots of Mok’s pantie-clad booty and lots of Hsu Chi flesh. Who can complain?
But seriously, if you’re going to be an ultra-secret assassination team, why the huge summer house? Who pays for this? When Mok gets framed for murder later in the film, it makes no sense. Nor does a computer system that on one hand is so advanced it offered real time shots over the network of security cams, but on the other seems to take ten seconds to send a 1k email.
So Close is pure eye candy, and that’s great, but it’s hard to imagine the script making it out of development so quickly here. It’s truly slapdash. It’s to the credit of the actors, mostly Mok, who I find fascinating even when she’s hamming it up, that the movie isn’t a total stinker.

Dirs: Andrew Lau and Alan Mak
2004
Infernal Affairs was the big HK blockbuster of 2002, and unsurprisingly enough, it still hasn’t opened here (except for the big cities), so when I saw it in Taiwan, I bought it, 2-DVD version too.
Andy Lau plays a cop who is secretly a Triad spy. Tony Leung plays a Triad member who is secretly a police mole (but for so long he’s perhaps crossed the line). Though we are informed they trained long ago at the academy, neither knows of each others’ existence until Lau’s character goes into the audio shop where Leung’s character works to buy some speakers. To each other they’re just regular guys. This, among other twists in this revved up genre flick, will also be the last time they meet until the end.
With such a simple premise that offers such complex conflicts (both men are suffering crises of character and identity) directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak speed things along until it’s hard to know exactly how either character will react. On the other hand the speed also undoes the finale, which resolves itself too quickly for my tastes. (There is an alternative ending which I have yet to watch.) It’s not that I couldn’t figure it out, just that the pace feels wrong.
Andy Lau is again good in this film, two in a row. When he’s playing these sort of characters (authortarian types who may just be traitors–as in Flying Daggers) he’s fine. When it’s comedy or romance, he comes up short. Tony Leung’s world-weary character, beaten down for years on an undercover assignment that will never end, walks through the film, skulking but sympathetic. When he salutes his commanding officer’s passing funeral procession, hidden down an alley so nobody can see him, we fully understand his sad situation.
The double-DVD contains making-ofs, trailers, and other goodies, but all are in Chinese.

Dir: Zhang Yimou
2004
Zhang Yimou’s Hero may have promised wuxia and delivered it in a Rashomon-style vehicle, but his follow up, House of Flying Daggers, is something different altogether: a classic love triangle playing itself out in a world of the Law and a band of secret rebels who plan to overthrow it (the titular House being the rebels’ HQ).
Andy Lau and Takeshi Kaneshiro play Leo and Jin, policemen who go undercover to arrest a suspected member of the Flying Daggers, played by Zhang Ziyi, who is incognito as a blind dancer at the local Peony Pavilion brothel. These opening scenes, as Ziyi’s Mei is put to the test by Leo, mark the film as a thing of beauty, as it trades in “Hero’s” solid colors for extravagant, finely detailed silks of many colors and patterns. After her arrest, Jin breaks Mei out of jail and flees with her to the north, hoping she will take him to the group’s hideout. Being undercover means Jin has to fight alongside Mei, even when his fellow officers, not knowing who Jin is, attack. And of course, meanwhile Jin is falling in love with Mei (when it’s Zhang Ziyi, who can blame him?) while only pretending to do so for the sake of his cover. There are more twists and turns to come, and the film is so pure in its story (Salon rightly compared it to silent film and opera), that they still surprise.
The action sequences are finally, truly breathtaking, instead of us wanting them to be so (as in Hero). Jin undertakes some archery skills that would put Legolas to shame (with a motion technique that Peter Jackson would love), and the Flying Daggers get their due as well. Adding to all this is the excellent sound design: for a fight in a bamboo forest (a wuxia staple), Yimou drops out all the music and leaves just the strange sounds of bamboo, which are after all a forest of hollow tubes. A good 5.1 system should be required to appreciate what is done here.
Yet it’s not all flash. In the center is a true romantic tale, free of irony, which few directors would get near in the west. Love is suffering, as my wife likes to remind me (physically sometimes). Yes, there’s princesses and such in sword’n’sorcery tales here, but they’re the prizes to be won after the battle, not the causes of the battle themselves. Plus, Zhang Ziyi’s Mei can do fine by herself, thank you, if you give her some daggers. Andy Lau, who I’ve never particularly liked as an actor is really good here too, with all his character’s repressed pain returning in the very last reel. Of course, maybe it takes a director like Zhang to bring out a good performance in Lau.
There was a period (“Not One Less”) where I really thought Zhang Yimou had lost it as a director, and who’s string of mediocre films were approaching than of his contemporary Chen Kaige. But fortune’s wheel had turned again, and he’s come back, in a surprising different style, perhaps, but he’s rediscovered the emotional power of his earlier work.

I came back from my Taiwan trip with a lot of DVDs and VCDs. I’ll be giving these a look soon enough…:
From Beijing with Love
Fight Back to School 2
Look Out, Officer
Street Angels 3
House of Flying Daggers
Goodbye Dragon Inn
The Missing
Dog Soldiers
Welcome to Sarayevo
My Name Is Joe
Time and Tide
Three
My Sassy Girl
Phone
Donnie Darko
So Close
Light Sleeper
The Warriors
Curry and Pepper 3
Double Vision
The Addiction
Viva Tonal
Sex For Sale
A lot of the Western films were for sale in a cut out bin where DVDs were something like $3 each. Total amount spent: $115. Nice, eh?

Dir: Yoichi Sai
2004
The poster may show a labrador puppy, but Quill is much more than a cute widdle doggie film. Instead, Quill is something that has yet to be achieved in the west, methinks: a realistic portrayal of a dog’s life. The Quill of the title is a labrador than is chosen, because of its calm nature, to train as a seeing-eye dog. We follow Quill from puppy through academy graduation to being in the service of a irascible blind man, Kaoru Kobayashi, and how their relationship unfolds.
In America, we seem unable to have a film about a dog unless it has super powers, can play sports, or rescue children trapped down wells. Though director Yoichi Sai is better known for gangster films, he brings the right lack of sentimentality to this story, though there’s plenty to get choked up about. No CG mouths, no talking dogs, no humans falling on their ass (“D’oh! That darned dog! WhyIOughta…!”). Just straight ahead dog behaviour.
There is one slightly amusing diversion to the realism, where Quill falls asleep and dreams of his old squeeze toy, now walking by itself and tormenting him–which is probably what dogs do dream about. But for the most, we see Kobayashi and Quill interacting as owners and dogs do. His wife doesn’t like the dog at first, but we never get the obvious “Quill does something daring and wins her affection” scene that some hack would write, we just get a quiet admission later on in the film that you might miss if you’re not paying attention.
The film also deals bravely and clearly with death, and as I said, this is a dog’s life story, so we encompass all. No, Quill doesn’t die saving the owner from an oncoming train, but instead the film simply observes the facts of life. There’s more, but I don’t want to spoil it.
By the end, Jessica and I were wiping away tears. This would be a good film for all the family, especially if you want your children to accept that we don’t all live forever, and that dogs have more to offer than just making dunk shots.

Dir: Lik-Chi Lee and Stephen Chow
1994
Long said to one of Chow’s best, I finally found a copy of “From Beijing with Love” at one of Chia-yi’s CD stores for about three bucks. Here Chow plays a pork butcher who has been waiting years and years for an assignment from China’s spy agency, despite having a large red “rejected” stamp in his files. Yet, as we see, he’s a dab hand with his curved meat cleaver, which he keeps in a holster. The film is–obviously–a parody of James Bond, with a Jaws-like villain, a sequence of useless spy goods (a solar powered flashlight), and a femme fatale, played here by dewy-eyed Anita Yuen.
There’s a disturbing mix of violence and comedy here that keeps it off my top list, with a father being gunned down in front of his young son in a shopping mall, and it’s missing “Uncle Nat,” but there’s still lots of good jokes: The springboard “Magic Box” which shoots Chow off in all sorts of wrong directions (the best gag from this sequence, though, is in the closing blooper reel), and a scene where a wounded Chow watches a porno tape, hoping the diverted blood flow to his erection with stop the bleeding. (Eagle-eyed porn hounds will notice the star briefly glimpsed is–I believe–Traci Lords.) In a way, the serious turns the film takes are a test run for the more successful mixture in God of Cookery. And Chow’s character, as usual, knows more than he lets on, which allows him to play fool and hero at the same time.

Dir: Mark Mylod
2002
I came across this purely by accident on HBO while we were channel surfing, so I can’t be too disappointed that it turned out to be much much less than of what the Ali G show is capable. The Ali G shows gets all its tension and humor from the collision of a brilliant fiction with a unwitting reality, as Sacha Baron Cohen’s homeboy character asks blindingly dumb questions of his various guests, who have pegged him for a moron or worse.
But throw the character into a scenario where he must prevail as a sort of hero, and immediately you have problems. In reality, an Ali G would be brought up short by reality immediately, but then we wouldn’t have a movie, so Ali G’s story here paints him as the wise fool, recruited by a scheming politician to run for a local council seat and cause the Prime Minister to fall. This is the “Producers” ruse, and it comes undone similarly, where Ali G’s idiotic yet straight talk makes him the most popular politician in the land. There is a slim satire of Blair’s “Cool Britannia” in all this, but it never really pays off.
Instead we get poo jokes, dick jokes, and drug jokes, and though some is funny, most could have come from any number of inane teen comedies.

Scenes from an aborted project by Errol Morris.