Just about the first thing that happens in Jesse V. Johnson’s low-fi epic is that a bunch of Roman soldiers come across a praying band of Druids and slaughter every one of them in brutal detail. A close-up of an innocent belly being sliced open by a merciless soldier tells us exactly what kind of movie this is going to be, and then it just. . . stops being that kind of movie for the next forty minutes or so. Instead, Johnson takes pains to show us the idyllic normality of life under the Empire, at least for the family of the King of the Iceni, Prasutagus, devoted to peace with the Romans and submitting his state to them as a client kingdom. He lives in pastoral splendor with his beautiful wife and daughters, who are all clever and loving. Hints of the real world lie just outside: a vision of Christians rotting crucified on a country road, the danger of an overheard whisper that might disparage the Emperor (Nero at this time, circa 60 AD). A visit from the new Roman in charge, snide and, well, imperious, signals trouble ahead, as do closeups of the King’s sad-eyed second in command. And sure enough, soon the King is dead and the women in his family, disinherited by the Romans, are cruelly beaten, tortured, raped, and left for dead. Most of that we don’t see, but what we do witness is plenty to understand how a charming collaborationist wife and mother could suddenly find herself becoming Boudica, the legendary and long-prophesied warrior queen destined to lead the Britons to freedom. Or, failing that, at the least to kill a whole lot of Romans.
And so she does. After a couple of brief training sequences wherein Boudica proves that she has a magic sword (with an assist from some ghosts) and enlists the support of a band of experienced international mercenaries as well as the local Druids, she sets off to one victory after another, butchering soldiers and burning towns with relish. Colchester (Camulodunum), London (Londinium), and St. Albans (Verulamium) all fall to her band of painted and befurred Celts, before the Romans can finally organize a proper military response. In the meantime, Boudica’s victories cause the Romans at home to riot and burn the city down, inspire the mad Emperor to kill himself. Which isn’t actually what happened at all, Nero killed himself almost a decade later (even the fire was in 64), and the British revolt was only one of several that rocked his demented reign. Nor is it true, as far as I know, that Nero decreed that women couldn’t hold power or property (which in the film is the legal justification for disinheriting Prasutagus’s heirs), but this is a matter where something can be accurate without being true: Roman society was deeply patriarchal, much more so than the Celtic and Germanic nations on their periphery. So if one wants to adopt Boudica’s revolt as a stand for the rights of women, rather than merely a celebration of British nationalism, that seems reasonable. Similarly, if Johnson wants to fold aspects of Arthurian legend into Boudica’s story (at one point she has to dive into the water to retrieve her sword, becoming her own Lady of the Lake), I see no problem with that.
Jesse V. Johnson is one of the most accomplished indie action film directors working today, the man behind any number of straight to video classics starring the likes of Scott Adkins, Marko Zaror, and Louis Mandylor I wrote about his Hell Hath No Fury here a couple of years ago, and that film has a lot in common with this one. Both are centered on a woman hero rather than a beefy Adkins-type. Both are set in the past, mostly in a forest. But where Hell is a small-scale story, set largely in one location which we learn in minute geographic detail in order to better understand and follow the intricately constructed action scenes that form the bulk of the movie, Boudica is Johnson trying something new, albeit with apparently the same limited resources he’s always had. The action scenes, because there are more of them in many different locations, are shorter, more impressionistic, but just as bloody. The emphasis is not on action for the sake of displaying the skill of the stunt performers or choreographers, but rather on the brutality of violence in the Classical period, and thus on the brutality of Empire itself. Boudica gives speeches about freedom, but she is never really interested in ruling or building a state. She’s on a mission to kill as many Romans as she can before they kill her, no more and no less.
Olga Kurylenko plays Boudica and it’s a striking performance if the only work of hers you’re familiar with before seeing this is Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, where she eats at Sonic, makes Ben Affleck sad, and twirls her gorgeous way through fields of sun-dappled wheat. That’s really the outlier in Kurylenko’s career, though. She’s spent most of the past decade making action movies, with parts in various sizes in everything from the Timothy Olyphant-starring proto-John WickHitman (2007) to this year’s Extraction 2. Here she’s equally at home in both halves of the film: memories of Malickian fields in the early scenes, battered and scarred and broken toothed in the action scenes, twirling through them like a ballerina with a magic sword. If Johnson is the low-budget version of a Paul WS Anderson or Luc Besson, then Kurylenko is the indie Milla Jovovich, and Boudica is her The Messenger. (I mean that as a compliment.)
I took my daughter and one of her friends, a fellow tween ballerina, to the screening of Barbie last night. They were excited to see it, though my daughter at least never played with Barbies. She had only a brief doll phase as a toddler, but moved on pretty quickly to video games and drawing and dance. I was curious, then, what they thought about the film, given that it takes for granted the essential role of playing with dolls in the formation of a child’s consciousness, from the opening riff on 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the invention of the Barbie doll frees a generation of little girls who were beforehand only able to imagine themselves as mothers, to the whole philosophical crux of the film, which uses Barbie as a stand-in for our entire culture’s conception of women, both for good and for ill. They said they liked the movie: it was funny, some of it was inappropriate, but they had a great time with it. My daughter did express some exaggerated concern that unlike all the other Barbies in the film, she did not (yet) have a defined identity. Apparently “Tween Ballerina” is not enough to sum up the inchoate mass that is an 11 year old girl. When I pressed them for more specifics, trying to dig into their thoughts on some of the thornier issues, they ignored me and then proceeded to sing along to songs on playing on their phone to each other for the rest of the ride home. They did not listen to “Closer to Fine,” but they did have a lot of fun with “Baby Got Back.”
Barbie is a movie designed first and foremost to sell toys. It’s also a movie by one of the more accomplished Hollywood filmmakers of the last 20 years, one who as both an actress, writer, and director has demonstrated a unique and arresting artistic personality. Even though she doesn’t appear on screen, every word of Barbie sounds like it could have been said by a Greta Gerwig character, which I suppose puts her at least in this in sense, in the same class of auteur as Hong Sangsoo, Eric Rohmer, and Woody Allen. Noah Baumbach co-wrote the script with her, but other than the fact that the film ends up being the kind of thing one would imagine being created at the university in Baumbach’s version of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, the movie doesn’t really sound like him at all. It’s probably safe to say that while Baumbach directed them, it’s Gerwig who, as star and writer, was the true auteur of Frances Ha and Mistress America. Regardless, here this great artist is hard at work selling toys for a massive corporation. That contradiction is just one of many at the explicitly stated core of the film, and Gerwig’s refusal to resolve it, instead in fact to embrace the contradiction is what makes the film so successful as both art and commerce.
Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie” lives in an idealized world with all the other Barbies (President Barbie, Doctor Barbie, Physicist Barbie, etc) and all the Kens (who exist only to bask in the light of the Barbies). It’s a perfect pink paradise until one day Stereotypical Barbie becomes self-aware and plagued by doubts about existence, death, and the nature of the universe. She and Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) go on a quest to the real world to get answers from the girl who is playing with Barbie and thus projecting these ideas into her head, but things go wrong when Ken discovers patriarchy and the Mattel corporation tries to recapture Barbie and put her back in a box. Ken heads home to create a manly paradise while Barbie is rescued by a mom and daughter. The mom is played by America Ferrera, star of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Ugly Betty, and Superstore, three works that collectively have as much if not more to say about being a woman under capitalism as Barbie does.
Beach Ken succeeds in quickly taking over Barbieland, brainwashing the Barbies into subservience while all the Kens enjoy manly pursuits like horses and talking about The Godfather and Stephen Malkmus. The trick Barbie and America discover is that the Barbie can be freed only through paradox, by recognizing the many, many contradictions in what society expects from women. The only way for them to be free is the knowledge that there is no way to be free, that there is no acceptable way to be a woman under patriarchy. The mechanics of this are fuzzy, but the scenes of deprogramming are funny, which basically goes for the movie as a whole. Every second is bright and joyous and weird, with some terrific musical sequences, a great supporting cast (including an all-time great Michael Cera role), and has such an infectious energy, even when it’s being dark and depressing. The embrace of contradiction extends to a critique of Mattel itself: a male-dominated company designing toys for girls. But the men are actually pretty cool and they’re led by Will Ferrell, who is still a funny guy, so maybe it’s OK, but yeah no they’re still going to run things. This is the fundamental conundrum with Barbie’s solution to existential unhappiness: accepting the contradiction is not the same thing as working to make the world a better place, in fact, by focusing our energies inward, it may actual foreclose the possibility of real change. Thus the film would make for a fascinating double feature with Soi Cheang’s Mad Fate, in which the hero, driven crazy by the contradictions of an arbitrary and capricious higher power does not simply accept them with a kind of pseudo-zen complaisance, but pours all his heart and soul into defying Fate in the hope of saving even just one life from degradation and murder. It’s hard to imagine Enlightened Barbie doing anything so rebellious, even if she gets a sequel.
Barbie is, among other things, the best example I’ve seen of “There’s No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism: The Movie”. It’s absolutely true that the evils of society, patriarchy and capital prominent among them but by no means the only ones, are inescapable, that there’s really no way to live in society without compromising one moral value or another. Can a toy, or an artist for that matter, change the world? Probably not. So what’s a filmmaker to do? Preston Sturges answered that question more than 80s years ago in Sullivan’s Travels about as well as it can be answered. People lead hard lives, it’s OK to give them a chance to laugh at some silly moving pictures once in awhile.
Isaac Nabwana is one of the great under-recognized geniuses in contemporary cinema. With budgets numbering, at most, in the low hundreds of dollars, and the support of a community of friends and family, he’s built a film studio in the Wakaliga slum of Kampala, churning out ingenious comedy-action films with handmade props, low-fi computer graphics, and self-taught kung fu artists. Wakaliwood and its films are the ideal of DIY cinema, the fulfillment of digital technology’s promise of allowing anyone to be a filmmaker. Anyone may be able to cook, but it takes a visionary like Nabwana to not only see the possibilities of democratic filmmaking, but actually realize it in a way that is infectiously entertaining and delightful to audiences the world over. And even then, none of it would be possible without the community that has coalesced around him, prop-makers, wanna be actors, martial artists, and film enthusiasts. All of this is apparent in Cathryne Czubek’s documentary Once Upon a Time in Uganda, which chronicles close to a decade in the life of the studio, from the time it first drew international attention (a trailer for Who Killed Captain Alex? posted on YouTube in 2010) through Nabwana’s triumphant appearance at a Toronto Film Festival screening of Crazy World in 2019.
Czubek started filming Wakaliwood in 2012, not long after another westerner, Alan Hofmanis, himself enamored with the studio’s YouTube releases, left his home in America and traveled to Uganda in search of cinematic enlightenment. A longtime veteran of the industry (on sets, in marketing, and in festival programming), Hofmanis tells us he was inspired by what Nabwana and his team had done, and simply wanted to be a part of it. He was quickly adopted into the Wakaliwood family, appearing on-screen as the recurring white guy, the Mzungu, in films like Bad Black and the yet-to-be-released, but delightful looking, Eaten Alive in Uganda. Hofmanis also took on a role in promoting the company, focusing on getting Wakaliwood seen in the West, where his years of festival and marketing experience would prove helpful, though it would be an uphill battle considering that what most Western film festival directors (and therefore the critics and audiences that live downstream from them) want out of third world cinemas are anguished stories of poverty and deprivation, not lovably goofy paeans to the joys of making cinema. While Hofmanis focused abroad, Nabwana would concentrate on getting his films seen at home in Uganda, and that’s where the documentary’s real tension comes.
Nabwana explains that film in Uganda is not seen as a particularly prestigious activity, at least not among the elite classes that actually have the money that Wakaliwood desperately needs to expand and improve. He says that his true audience are the “peasants,” the poor people he grew up with and around in the chaotic years after the end of Idi Amin’s dictatorship and who still occupy the nation’s villages and slums, but, unfortunately, often they do not have access to DVD players. As has been the case in other emerging film cultures, there can be a kind of inferiority complex that certain communities have about their own art, and sometimes it takes recognition by outsiders for a people to appreciate what their own cinema has to offer**. To this end, Hofmanis’s efforts in getting Wakaliwood films seen and praised abroad helps raise Nabwana’s profile at home, leading to an offer from one of the local television moguls to make a Who Killed Captain Alex? TV series. Because Nabwana’s overarching goal is not international success or personal acclaim, but rather building a viable and sustainable film culture in his home country, training actors and filmmakers and seeing them succeed him with their own works, he necessarily devotes himself to the local production. But this in turn disrupts Hofmanis’s efforts at international promotion and distribution, ultimately leading to an awkward falling out between the two friends. But after some time apart, the family is reunited, leading to the heart-warming Crazy World premiere, because ultimately Nabwana and Hofmanis share the same love for what they are doing and hope for the future of cinema.
Czubek’s film is at its best showing the Wakaliwood crew at work. Nabwana directing and editing, almost always with big smile on his face. His wife Harriet doing a endless number of jobs, from feeding the crew with leftovers from the cake-making business she’s started to raise extra money, to casting and line producing and helping with every other aspect of the productions. We meet “Mad Prop Genius” Dauda Bisaso, who builds guns and helicopters and camera cranes out of scrap metal, and catch a glimpse of VJ Emmie at work, Wakaliwood’s most glorious contribution to film culture: a Video Joker who talks along with the film, one part Benshi-style narrator, four parts your most hilarious friend three drinks in cracking jokes alongside you as you watch a movie together. A magical sequence shows Nabwana, who had been a mud brickmaker before he became a filmmaker, assembling a film projector out of a couple of batteries, a string of wire, a small lightbulb and some aluminum foil. He uses it to show some local kids how film works, lighting up one frame of film at a time (it appears to be a scrounged reel of some version of Spider-Man), and running it through his hands, magical images projected on a crumbling concrete wall.
Wakaliwood is currently running a crowdfunding campaign for Who Killed Captain Alex 2. If you love movies, contribute if you can. You can also by a deluxe BluRay edition of Bad Black and Who Killed Captain Alex from Vinegar Syndrome and the American Genre Film Archive. You won’t regret it.
Eventually this dichotomy tends to turn in on itself, as those filmmakers most popular in the West are rejected by the next generation for not being authentic enough to their home culture. I’m thinking here about Kurosawa Akira winning an award at the Venice Film Festival at a time when no one outside of Japan and few people inside it considered it to be on a par with the cinemas of the West, only to then be derided as “too Western” by the next generation of Japanese filmmakers. It’s an endless argument that no one wins, except audiences who get to see great films made by all sides of the divide. ↩︎
The prospect of a new Indiana Jones movie at this late date, more than forty years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, is daunting. The series ran its natural course through the 1980s: a stellar debut followed by a sequel that expanded and complicated the original premise and then a second sequel that regressed into crowd-pleasing antics, stunt-casting, meta-humor, and ended with a satisfactory ride off into the sunset. The franchise was revived in 2008 with mixed results. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull features some terrific sequences from Steven Spielberg, who alongside all his other virtues (and shortcomings) as a filmmaker remains one of the greatest directors of action in film history, a fine hammy villain performance from Cate Blanchett, and a mostly satisfactory ending. It’s also marred by a disastrous screenplay, featuring some of the most poorly-written dialogue ever filmed by a major director. What could we expect, another 15 years down the line? Further degeneration of a once-great franchise, or perhaps a return to greatness, fully embracing the age and increasing obsolescence of its star, creators, and the whole world the series was created in homage to?
A little bit of both, as it turns out. The opening reel (an archaic term in reference to a 20 minute chunk of film, rendered nonsensical by the digitization of cinema, much like the terms “film” and “movie”) of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is dire, encapsulating in an ugly gray package all the worst trends in contemporary Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. Star Harrison Ford is digitally de-aged with horrifyingly uncanny results and the exterior shots, and this being a sequence set on a train in an Indiana Jones movie there are a lot of exterior shots as the action moves to the top and the sides of said train, are cartoonishly incompetent. The phoniness of the images, something I’m not necessarily opposed to on principle—there are lots of ways to make a movie and digital fakery is certainly one of them—are made galling by our awareness of what has come before in the series. Raiders of the Lost Ark is, above all else, a loving tribute to the stunt performers and action filmmakers of the Hollywood studio era, when lunatics like Yakima Canutt would risk life and limb for the sake of a two-reel serial installment. Last Crusade even gave us a prologue with a similar set-up: a flashback to a younger Indiana Jones (played by River Phoenix at a time when studios and filmmakers had enough faith in their audience’s imagination to allow a character to be played by more than one actor, without the benefit of computers) for a chase sequence that takes place largely inside and on top of a moving train. An actual train, moving in the actual world. More or less. Dial of Destiny’s opening couldn’t more perfectly remind us of what we’ve lost, of the debased state of the modern blockbuster, if it tried. And maybe that’s the point.
Because the rest of the movie, once it gets going, turns out to, in fact, be about what it’s like to outlive your relevance. In 1969, Ford’s Jones is an old man, nearing retirement, divorced and mourning his son (RIP Mutt). He’s sucked into a new adventure by a daffy young woman named Helena, played by 2018 It Girl Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She’s the daughter of one of his old colleagues (Toby Jones in the prologue), obsessed with the eponymous object, a device designed by Archimedes. The device is split in two: Jones has the first half until Helena steals it. They eventually will team up to find the second half, with the help of a map which also has to be found. Opposing them is Mads Mikkelson, playing a Nazi scientist (now NASA rocket builder) similarly obsessed with the device. The film settles into the familiar rhythm: Jones travels to a new location, meets some strange people, then gets chased by them and a bunch of Nazis.
The chases may be a matter of necessity: every action sequence in the film is something the aged Ford can perform sitting down. But they’re also for the most part fun and creative. New director James Mangold is no Spielberg of course, but he’s always been, at worst, a competent craftsman. They also have a tangibility entirely missing from the opening sequence. The supporting cast is mostly anonymous: Mikkelson’s minions are suitably if generically menacing (they’re also CIA agents, lol); Helena’s companion is a wispy-mustached teenager who is mostly OK; and Antonio Banderas shows up for a little while and has almost nothing interesting to do. So there’s really very little of note other than the plot mechanics, which lead us ruthlessly from one set-piece to another. This is of course the classic Indiana Jones structure, one borrowed from old serials, and one that earned the films and the era of high concept blockbuster they helped usher in the ire of an older generation of critics who longed for more personal, humane filmmaking. This is now the standard form for the Hollywood blockbuster: the chase, enlivened by scenes of mass destruction (usually but not necessarily of cities). The early Indiana Jones films pioneered and perfected this form: think the truck chase in Raiders, with its direct Canutt homage, or the mine cart chase in Temple of Doom, which merged cinema and theme park ride as well as anything before or since. The 21st century Jones movies though, do not aspire to compete with that past. And Dial of Destiny suggests they simply cannot do so: everyone’s just too old to bother.
For if Dial of Destiny is about anything, it’s about letting go of the past. All of the Indiana Jones films are, in some sense, about letting go. Raiders is about the wisdom of choosing to not open the ark; Temple of Doom about artifacts as vehicles for community harmony and growth rather than Fortune and Glory; Last Crusade about finding a balance between obsessive archeological pursuit and family commitment. (Crystal Skull doesn’t really fit this scheme, because, again, Crystal Skull’s script is terrible.) Dial of Destiny finds Jones an obsolete and broken man. The adventure he’s dragged into brings him back to life, and it ultimately offers him the chance to continue that life of adventure or go back home to his broken old man world. He has the opportunity to live in the past (literally), but we know, and he knows, that one can’t ever really do that. Like it or not, we have to go on living in the present, as dull and gray and marred by crappy digital effects as it is.
WHITE ELEPHANTS. Kenneth Anger chose to open his Hollywood Babylon with these two words; Manny Farber’s grandiose polemic endures; Damien Chazelle, we can assume, knows what he’s doing when he opens his own Babylon with the Sisyphean act of pulling one up a Santa Monica hill. (Later, he repeats the image, only with a crew of handlers relaying a nearly unconscious leading man to an epic summit.) For Anger, it’s an incantation preceding a conspiratorial monologue; for Farber, a symbol that allows him to riff on everything he disliked about Antonioni, Truffaut, and Tony Richardson; and for Chazelle it’s a way to show he’s done his research, to prove that he can assume, albeit in a rather anxious pose, the seat of authority required to make a capital-S statement film about the whole business of making massively public art.
The milieu is attention-grabbing: pre-code Hollywood, with enough creative license so that the historical record shadows, rather than defines, the plot. There are, roughly, five protagonists, all of them stars whether entering (Margot Robbie), exiting (Brad Pitt), merely admiring (Diego Calva), or grasping a brief after-hours aspect of the spotlight (Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li). It would be possible to psychoanalyze these players, to trace them to the names, many of them lining Anger’s book, that influence their characterizations. It would also be possible to make a big deal out of the second-hand electricity Chazelle bottles from other films, most notably those by Paul Thomas Anderson. But what’s most striking about Babylon is its attempt to grapple with insignificance.
Chazelle’s prior successes have earned him the title of a virtuoso, someone within shouting distance of the achievements Pitt’s Jack Conrad might be referring to when he pontificates that musical form is the summation of all the arts. But in practice, Chazelle’s films tend to be limited rather than defined by their musical sequences, which work uphill to redeem the curiously leaden drama and deadpan theatrics of scenes so alien from one another they approach, on the larger canvas of Babylon, an anthology film. Yet, seams and all, the film is compulsively watchable.
As in his previous film, the largely unsuccessful First Man, Babylon a work about the difference between reaching the top of a profession and finding nirvana. It is obsessed, not with history or sex, but art — the one role of any significance with a real-life name is Irving Thalberg, a figure whose imprint is visible on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Perhaps the whole movie hinges on a scene where Conway meets a hack writer-critic (Jean Smart) who might, on the one hand, be an industry rag career-maker, but for a moment takes on the movie-breaking transcendent role of something like The Matrix Reloaded’s Architect. The important thing to know, she says, is that the roles that both of them are playing are essentially archetypal, and are doomed, or destined, to recur in eternal fashion.
Taken one way, Chazelle’s boom-bust narrative resembles any criminal line-up of star cash-in biopics. But in the way he would have it, this fantasy, which reaches warp speed in an early sequence that takes place on a kind of Hollywood backlot-of-the-mind, and terminates in an Irma Vep-derived triumph over the aging of cinema, is one that equivocates, or bridges, the enchantments of golden-age industry and the cynicism that, as Bogdanovich said in Targets, all the good movies have already been made.
It’s a project that, for all its sharp elbows thrown at anticipated criticisms, is most apparently nervous at the thought of being thought too high-minded. Its vulgar sense of humour, concerned with nervous reactions (sweat, vomit, shit) and baseness as a form of truth-telling, finds its appropriate climax in a sequence that dovetails with the philosophy of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. Unlike what the poison pens of Alfred Hayes or Nathanael West wrote, the fatalistic quest here isn’t one out of Hollywood. No, the crystallizing moment is when one of our protagonists, instead of lurking by the exits to take a quick poll of audience ecstasy, sits with the masses and gets lost in his own reaction.
Yet Chazelle tries to twist his way into something even more resonant: collapsing the history of Los Angeles’s most lucrative successes into a minute, he presents something like a continuation of Gloria Swanson’s identification with the screen in Sunset Blvd. There, she is assured of her towering stature, no matter what plane of reality she’s on. Accordingly, what Chazelle offers as the pinnacle of moviemaking is images designed to make their witnesses feel pathetically small.
It’s hard to imagine how long I’ve been talking about the film that would eventually become Septet: The Story of Hong Kong. The first time I tweeted about it appears to have been August of 2017, although that tweet is phrased as a reminder, which means I must have retweeted something about it some time before that point. It’s possible the rumors go as far back as the summer of 2016, shortly after the release of Johnnie To’s feature Three. The story was that To was producing an omnibus film called 8 1/2, with contributions from a who’s who of Hong Kong film legends: Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, Patrick Tam, John Woo, Ringo Lam, Sammo Hung, Yuen Woo-ping, and To himself. Somewhere along the way, Woo dropped out (it’s unclear why, I think I heard there may have been health reasons, but Ringo Lam died in December of 2018 and still managed to finish his section, so I don’t know) and the title was changed to Septet. The film was finally set to premiere at Cannes in 2020, when COVID delayed those plans. It eventually did begin making the festival rounds in the fall of that year (Busan in 2020, then the Hong Kong and Fantasia Film Festivals in 2021). It received a theatrical release in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong earlier this summer, and is now set to play at the Vancouver Film Festival.
The setup is simple enough: each director is given a decade and the films are separated by title cards and arranged chronologically. Together they tell not just the “Story of Hong Kong” but a story of Hong Kong film and the story of themselves, an irreplaceable generation of filmmakers looking back on the place they’ve lived and worked and come to define as much and for as long as any group of filmmakers ever has anywhere in the world. Each of these directors was born between 1945 and 1955. Tsui, Hui, and Lam were key figures in the Hong Kong New Wave; Hung and Yuen revolutionized the period martial arts film, modernizing the tropes established by the Shaw Brothers studio and melding slapstick comedy and outrageous stunt-work into some of the greatest spectacles in movie history; and Lam and To (and of course the absent Woo) were leading exponents of the Heroic Bloodshed genre that did as much as anything to establish Hong Kong cinema as a force in world film culture. Together, these filmmakers have produced some of the most vital art works of the last fifty years.
Watching Septet, I decided to see if I could guess which director was responsible for which segment (the director credits don’t pop up until the end of their short). I’m happy to say that I was right on all seven, which means that perhaps this whole The Chinese Cinema project and the last decade of my film critic life have not been entirely in vain. Some of them were much easier to guess than others, starting with the first one, which begins with the line, “I’m Sammo Hung.” It also stars Hung’s son Timmy, who looks exactly like a skinny version of his father. The short starts us off in the 1950s, at the Peking Opera school where Sammo was a student (along with many other future stars). Timmy plays the teacher, Yu Jim-yuen, a role Sammo himself played in Alex Law and Mabel Cheung’s excellent 1988 film Painted Faces. The genial story of childhood disobedience (whenever their teacher’s back is turned, the kids slack off on their exercises), concludes with Sammo’s punishment (as the eldest student, he’s expected to set an example). Forced to do a handstand for a couple of hours, he finally collapses and cuts his head. Then we cut to the present and a close-up of the scar on Sammo’s head, as he directly addresses the camera to say, “Time flies like an arrow, it only moves forward. The past is but a memory.” Statements which will set the tone for the remainder of the film.
All but one of the shorts to come will feature some kind of a leap in time. The film is of course an exercise in nostalgia, but one which nonetheless unfolds in an eternal present (that’s what film necessarily is: we always experience it now) where past and past-past mingle freely in the memory. Film is a place where a director can make a film where he recreates a moment from his past in which he is scolded by his teacher, and have that teacher be played by his son, such that the son is scolding his own father, who is a child.
Ann Hui’s story begins in the 1960s, following a couple of teachers at a more traditional kind of school, a kind yet ascetic headmaster and a thoughtful and lovely young woman. Then it leaps thirty years into the future (though still thirty years in our past) where we see a class reunion (very Ozuvian this) with the students from the first half now all grown up (in the blink of an edit). The headmaster is still alive, and wistfully recalls the teacher, who has since died. Unrequited emotions surface and may be resolved with a visit to a memorial, where a photo of the teacher lives — she still looks the same as she did 30 years earlier, while everyone else has grown old.
After two tales of school and the relations between students and teachers, Patrick Tam takes us into the 80s (the 70s are skipped, possibly this was Woo’s assignment?), for the first of two stories about late adolescence and the Handover of Hong Kong from the UK to the PRC. Two young people are in love with each other and poetry, but she and her family are emigrating to England sometime after the Joint Declaration, while his is staying behind. Our temporal perspective comes from sometime in the future, in a narration by an older version of the young man (this narration, plus a shot of an airplane flying over the Hong Kong sky, clues us in that this is Tam’s film, being extremely reminiscent of the work of his most accomplished protegé, Wong Kar-wai). The young couple spend one last day together, fighting through their desperate feelings of loss and abandonment and young love, and in the end, our perspective shifts such that it’s the young woman who narrates the conclusion. A joint memory for the time of the Joint Declaration.
The 90s brings us Yuen Woo-ping and the story of an elderly man (played by Yuen Wah, Sammo’s old classmate, now grown old, but not as old as the kids in the first film would have been in the 90s, rather as old as they are now, in the 2020s) and his granddaughter. Her family is moving away too (to Canada), just before the Handover, but she has to stick around with gramps for a few weeks to finish her exams. It’s a sweet story of a generation finding common ground (she helps him learn English and appreciate hamburgers; he teaches her how to defend herself with kung fu). Then she leaves, but returns three years later. He’s become more older, but more Westernized; she’s grown older and more patient, and tells him their family is back to stay. The short’s title is Homecoming, presenting a rather idealized vision of the Handover: people were afraid everything about Hong Kong was going to end. But it didn’t, and many of those who left (including directors like Woo, Lam, Tsui, and Yuen who went to work in Hollywood) came back.
The short for the 2000s, I will admit, was initially the toughest for me to place. But I finally got it and it in retrospect seemed blindingly obvious that it was the work of Johnnie To (a reference to Chasing Dream late in the film didn’t hurt). It’s set almost entirely in a restaurant over the course of a few key moments in the decade. Three young people are debating whether or not to invest in a tech stock. The price keeps going up while they argue, and it seems they’ve missed their opportunity, when all of a sudden it begins to plummet: the beginnings of the dot-com crash. A couple of years later, they have the opportunity to buy an apartment at a discount price, thanks to it being located at one of the centers of the SARS epidemic. They’re ultimately scared off, which an image of a 2000s era Windows screen informs us cost them dearly given the rapid inflation of the value of Hong Kong real estate. Finally, they have a chance to invest in some stocks around the time of the US mortgage crisis. But they accidentally switch the numbers of the stocks they want with the ones for the dishes they want to order (a classic bit of Johnnie To restaurant table-related comic mayhem), only to make money anyway. It turns out that buying stocks at random is just as effective, or more, than researching and debating them. Once again, in a Johnnie To film, chance and fate work in mysterious ways.
Ringo Lam’s film brings us into the present, or at least the present as of when the film was conceived and finished. It’s also the most heart-breaking, made almost unbearably poignant by our knowledge (from the future, which is our present) of the director’s death, which happened almost three years ago now. Simon Yam plays an elderly man who has come back to Hong Kong to visit his son (played by Lam’s own son). He’s lost in contemporary Hong Kong: all the landmarks he remembers (pointedly a movie theatre is as vital as a major industrial pier) have been transformed by time into something more glassy, less real. He holds old pictures up to the present reality; they can’t compare. His past bleeds into his present, reimagining time spent in these spaces with his own father, when he was the younger man, or with his wife. Inevitably, rushing to his family, he encounters an unexpected bus and disappears. Only his phone remains. But we move a while into the future, to see his family giving him a goodbye, scattering his ashes in the sea. His advice — don’t work so much, focus instead on your family and the people you love — reminds us that Lam himself spent more than a decade away from his work in order to spend time with his family, only returning to directing in 2015, once his son was grown. We didn’t get as many great films from him as we might have, but it definitely wasn’t time wasted.
Finally we have Tsui Hark’s contribution, which might be set in our now (2022) which would be the future from the film’s 2020 premiere, or possibly some as yet undefined future of our own as well as the film’s. It’s the funniest and weirdest and boldest of the shorts, as it should be considering Tsui is all of those things and more. Two men are arguing in what appears to be some kind of mental institution. The doctor asks the patient who he is, and he replies “Ann Hui”. When pressed on this (the gender congruity alone seems to belie the factuality of his assertion) he resorts first to “Ringo Lam” and then “Johnnie To” and then back to Ann Hui. After a few minutes of this farce, we pullback behind a mirror to find two doctors observing (played by director Lawrence Ah Mon and icon Lam Suet). They suggest that who we think is who is exactly backwards, part of a kind of therapy for a man who believes he’s a doctor. Then another shift reveals a big crowd behind another window, this one including Tsui himself along with Ann Hui and several other film figures. The tangle of identity: who is watching who, who is the director, who the audience, who exactly is calling the shots here, becomes impossible to sort. It’s the plight of the Hongkonger under the watchful eye of the PRC, as well as of the Hong Kong filmmaker who, like Tsui, strives to work within the censorship codes and regulations of the Mainland government, ostensibly giving them the propaganda they require, while struggling to remain their own, independent (Hongkonger) self. The struggle is real, the silliness, the joy in the jumble of it all, is the wisdom of perspective, of age, of a life lived in a Hong Kong that has changed so much, so wildly, in the span of these seven single lifetimes.
Joining the ever-expanding pantheon of great Chinese filmmakers given the full-length documentary treatment is King Hu, the man behind many of the most accomplished and influential action films of all-time. But while Johnnie To, Ann Hui, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Jia Zhangke are still very much alive and working, and thus the films about them all feature extensive interviews with them and footage of them at work (and of course scenes of them drinking and/or singing karaoke), King Hu has been dead for 25 years. Director Lin Jing-jie thus takes an unusual approach: rather than using an interview as the spine of his story, having the director talk us through their life film by film, or big event by big event, he splits King of Wuxia into two parts. The first half, subtitled The Prophet Was Once Here, looks at the run of films Hu made from Come Drink with Me in 1966 through the pair of Legend of the Mountain and Raining in the Mountain in 1979. This is the core of Hu’s career, the masterpieces on which his reputation has been built. The second half, called The Heartbroken Man on the Horizon, takes a more biographical approach, covering Hu’s first days as a 17 year old refugee in Hong Kong in 1949 through his work as an actor in the mid-1950s, then skipping his successful years as a director ahead to the last 15 years or so of his life, marked by emigration to the United States and a series of professional disappointments.
The first section runs just over two hours and features a remarkable cast of talking heads: big directors like John Woo, Tsui Hark, Sammo Hung, and Ann Hui are to be expected, as are appearances from frequent Hu actors Shih Chun, Cheng Pei-pei, and Hsu Feng. But Lin gives just as much attention to less famous names who nonetheless provide some of the most interesting insights to Hu’s work. A pair of Peking Opera actors recreate certain stunts to demonstrate the connection between Hu’s approach to screen fighting and the stage tradition, while two traditional musicians explain the link between Hu’s editing and music. Production designer Huang Mei-ching explains Hu’s exacting and painstaking approach to set decoration and costume design and color and the ways he’d use framing and editing to discover all kind of new and unusual spaces within his sets. Renowned critics like Shu Kei and Peggy Chiao explain all kinds of interesting things about his work, who he was influenced by and what made his films so influential. Everyone talks about how much he loved to fill his shots with smoke. Extensive clips from the movies are studied and used as examples, and also intercut with present-day scenes set in the same locations Hu shot at, with actor Shih Chun wandering around the landscapes, pointing out where they filmed, why Hu chose the locations he did, and how they’ve changed over the past 50 years.
All through the first half of the film, we only ever see Hu himself in still images. But early on in the second there are clips of him speaking about his early life. He was from a wealthy family in Beijing, though as the son of a concubine, he had a lower status than his many half-siblings. Arriving in Hong Kong as the Civil War drew to a close, he worked a variety of odd jobs before finding himself acting in several dozen films from the mid-1950s through early 60s. Most of these are difficult if not impossible to find in the West, so getting to see him act is one of the many pleasures of King of Wuxia. Just before he transitions into directing, however, the film skips ahead to the 1980s, and finds Hu living in Los Angeles, again working odd jobs (writing a magazine column, lecturing at universities) while trying and failing to scrape together film projects. The talking heads include most of the big names from the first half, but the emphasis is more on his circle of friends, including Chung Ling, Hu’s wife at the time (she had written Legend of the Mountain). We get some new insights into how Hu came to leave and/or be fired from the production of Tsui Hark’s The Swordsman in 1990, which is basically the story of the second half of his career in microcosm: his painstaking approach led to extremely long shooting periods for Hong Kong cinema of the time, and he refused to compromise on that, to the displeasure of the money people in charge of the production (how much Tsui did or did not agree with said money people remains an open question).
The final stages of the documentary are heartbreaking, as Hu finally seems to be able to put his dream project, an epic about Chinese laborers in California, into production, with financiers on board, John Woo producing, Sammo Hung choreographing, and Chow Yun-fat starring, only for him to die due to complications during an angioplasty mere weeks before shooting was set to begin. It’s devastating, as are his friends’ and colleagues’ reminiscences of him, clearly still pained by their loss though it’s been 25 years. The most crushing scene, for me at least, comes somewhat earlier, as critic Shu Kei is discussing the commercial failure of Legend of the Mountain, a film that he now understands to be one of Hu’s greatest achievements. The money people pulled the three hour long Legend out of theatres and demanded Hu recut it to mangable length. Shu recalls Hu calling him in, helplessly asking how to do it. He can’t remember what he said (though he does say Tony Rayns cheerfully suggested “you need to cut here and here and here and you don’t need this or that, etc etc”), but he’s overcome with guilt over the fact that he even thought he should be cut at all, to the point that he breaks down in tears. They aren’t the only tears shed in King of Wuxia, but they are the only ones that aren’t necessarily about the person who’s life was cut short, but about the art that we all lost because we weren’t able, or willing, to support it in the way it could and should have been supported.
Part of the deal as an auteurist is that we will follow the director from film to film, keeping an open mind The relationship is the point. The director reaches out to us, and we hope to reach back and embrace their new film. Will it make us understand something new? Will it deepen a certain aspect of their art? Will it set off in new directions? Will it disappoint us? Each film is a new encounter. And so we take out our notebooks and begin to revise our notes, our ideas.
There is currently a video on Youtube titled “Naoko Ogigami: Japan’s Comfiest Filmmaker.” It’s around 25 minutes long and goes in-depth into Ogigami’s career and background, combing through her interviews to provide insight into her process and her films. It’s worth watching. But this title of “Japan’s Comfiest Filmmaker” cannot be ignored. At first blush, it is understandable. But it’s also somewhat insidious. Ogigami’s films are undeniably gentle and whimsical. Their surfaces are placid and calm. More than anything else, her cinema is welcoming. But this only describes her cinema up to a point. And it doesn’t quite work to describe the achievement of her latest films, 2017’s Close-Knit and 2021’s Riverside Mukolitta. In these two films, she is pushing her art further and further – her films will always be gentle and inviting, but now these same surfaces are used to invite you to wade into darker and darker undercurrents.
How do you live? Riverside Mukolitta is a work steeped in death. All the major characters are touched by it, ruined by it. But Ogigami does not film dourly She does not film to wallow in her character’s misery. Her cinema provides an alternative. Kenichi Matsuyama plays Yamada, a young man recently released from prison. He finds a job slicing up squid at a small factory; repetitive work that his boss says has driven people to quit after a day or two. But Yamada has nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. His boss helps him find a room at an old apartment building where he soon meets his colorful neighbors.
Part of Ogigami’s universe will always be, on some level, filled with quirkiness and whimsy. But whereas in previous films, like Kamome Diner, this revealed itself as a way to celebrate the oddity of all its characters, in Riverside Mukolitta, tries to marry the oddball nature of her characters to their desperate struggle to find a way to live. Ogigami always makes community pictures. So Yamada’s neighbor invites himself into his apartment, over and over, first to use his bath, and then to eat his food – anything to stave off the loneliness. Another of Yamada’s neighbors takes his young son to sell tombstones door to door, both of them wearing identical suits, which at first registers like a too-cute joke, but soon makes sense as another aspect of the film’s relationship to death. Once Yamada is able to afford some food and finds a fan in the garbage heap, life begins to be somewhat bearable.
How is community built? How is it formed? Ogigami’s cinema is built of small gestures, mundane domestic rituals. Characters share meals with each other, they help tend to each other’s gardens, they walk to the local temple to cool down. One of the film’s funniest scenes occurs as more and more neighbors invite themselves to a meal, popping up by the door, as they prepare their sukiyaki. Perhaps they complain, but deep down it is nice to have company. Each interaction builds on the last, and soon an unmistakable fond is formed, impossible to ignore.
All of Ogigami’s films are essentially manuals on how to go about life. Her early films such as Kamome Diner and Glasses built up small little communities, they preach tolerance, inclusiveness, relaxation, rest. In Rent-a-cat, the main character lets people rent her cats so they can find healing and comfort. Perhaps, on some level, they deal with issues of self-care. But in her last two films, she has left behind these characters who don’t have too many conflicts to show characters who genuinely struggle through life. Ogigami’s search in how to deal with these characters lends the films a lot of their interest. How do you live becomes how do you film.
Eat your bones When writing about Ogigami’s Close-Knit, I wrote that the camera was always at right distance, every time. Due to the nature of the film’s subject, she had to confront intolerance and at points approached melodrama. But in Mukolitta, her staging is a little unclear. The film registers as a reformulation of her approach to character, to drama. Everything is more internal, a little more abstract. Sometimes she falls back to her wide shots, letting the action play out from a distance. But then the camera moves in for a medium shot, hand-held for some reason, and the staging feels a little haphazard, like it has not been blocked out all the way, which is not something I would’ve ever felt about Ogigami’s cinema before.
The question becomes how to integrate death into her cinema, how to represent it. Perhaps adapting her own novel has forced her to dig deeper into metaphor. Giving images to her words is already something difficult, but to make them feel alive, new… All the characters are surrounded by death. Early on, Yamada is told that his father has died, all alone, in a nearby apartment. He goes to pick up his remains and is told that his father’s Adam’s apple survived cremation intact. But now what does he do with these remains? What kind of relationship does he hope to have with his father now that he’s dead? His neighbor reveals that he had a son and then lost him. He then asks him to forget he said that. His landlord, Hikari Matsushima, lost her husband a few years ago. He sees a ghost, tending to the garden, and everyone agrees that, yes, that was the old lady who used to live at the apartments.
Death is not abstract. Ogigami makes the experience of it literal. The death of a body is not the end. The living must deal with what remains, a body, bones. For Matsushima’s landlord, she visits the grave of her husband, buried by a tree. While on the way back, the taxi driver remarks that he took the remains of his wife, ground them up, and put them in a firework, shooting her up in the sky. And this leads to the most striking sequence of the film, and Ogigami’s cinema so far. Matsushima, alone in her room, takes out the remains of her husband, proceeds to nibble at the bones, take a few hesitant bites, and then uses it to fondle herself. Ogigami has never quite filmed something like this. She’s not really a director that places a premium on sensuality. But in here she takes a fairly big swing, connecting the desire to commune spiritually with the dead to a somewhat erotic exploration, hesitant, awkward, a moment that’s mystifying, even to the character.
Watching Riverside Mukolitta, we witness a director test the boundaries of what her cinema will allow. Ogigami makes hangout films, she does not film complex scenarios. So she must look for new images and often this can a beautiful and awkward struggle. She does not forget her quirky touches, such as that garbage dump in between the train tracks, where the characters congregate. It’s here where that little boy in the suit fiddles with a melodica while Yamada watches, or where he gathers all the rotary phones he can find while he waits for a call from an alien. It’s precious, it’s twee. But this is important to understand, it is not naïve. The image of the alien in the sky in a lesser film would be joyful. Ogigami immediately complicates it but showing by showing the despair it triggers.
Part of the evolution in Ogigami’s cinema has necessitated an engagement with melodrama. At first, her films resisted outbursts of emotion. But now her films seem to demand it. Part of the journey of the film is from Matsuyama’s early reticence to show any display of emotion to the overwhelming breakdown at film’s end. Ogigami’s films are ultimately healing. Her gaze seeks to shelter and protect her characters. She films her characters to heal them. But the process has become more complicated, more fraught. As Yamada’s tears fall and mix with his father’s bones, Ogigami makes clear that both are necessary to move forward. The final images perfectly express this sentiment. Death is now all around them, in the air, in their room, in their clothes. But also the joy of being able to move forward, to smile, to live another day. In this new encounter with Ogigami’s cinema, we register the joy of seeing the boundaries of her cinema, reaching its limits, and then pushing forward with new images and new approaches.
Yuasa Masaaki continues his winning streak: he’s probably been the best director in the world over the past five years, or at the very least the most productive great director. Since 2017, he has produced three acclaimed TV series (Devilman Crybaby, Japan Sinks 2020, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!) along with four feature films: the definitive One Crazy Night romance Night is Short, Walk on Girl, the off-beat Little Mermaid variation Lu Over the Wall, the heart-breaking post-romance Ride Your Wave and now Inu-oh, a medieval rock opera about the power of rock and roll to connect us to our past, find our true selves, and help us overcome our terrible fathers.
Inu-oh begins with the story of Tomo (they’ll be, at various times, “Tomona”, “Tomoichi”, and “Tomoari” throughout the story). As a child, Tomona works with his father diving for treasure lost at sea 600 years ago during the definitive battle between the Taira and Minamoto clans, passed down through history in the Tale of the Heike, a collection of stories about the war that plays a somewhat similar role in Japanese literary history as The Iliad or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The Tale of the Heike was compiled in 1371 by Kakuichi, part of a band of traveling blind monks that recited the various tales accompanied by music on the biwa, a lute-like stringed instrument, pretty much just as the Greek bards would have done (and, if he was an actual person, the blind poet Homer himself). What Yuasa’s film, written by Nogi Akiko, asserts is that there were other tales of the Heike, tales which were so powerful in their truth that they were able to magically transform their tellers into the greatest versions of their selves.
Tomona is blinded by buried treasure in an accident which also kills his father. Wandering the countryside, he takes up with the blind monks and over the next decade or so learns the biwa and all the various tales. One day he meets a malformed young masked man (legs too short, one arm way too long, scales for skin, and eyes in the wrong places) who loves music and dance. He’d grown up all but disowned by his father, a dancer of Heike tales in an early form of Noh theatre called sarugaku, made to live and eat with the family dogs. One day, overcome with the spirit of music, he dances and his legs are transformed into normal human limbs. Tomoichi (name changed to reflect his status as a member of the blind monk troupe) deduces that the spirits of the lost Heike soldiers are rewarding the as yet unnamed man for dancing and singing their story. The two then do what comes naturally: form a rhythm and blues band to spread the untold tales of the Heike (whispered to them by the spirits of the dead) far and wide.
The second half of the film is dominated by their music, as Tomoari (a third name, adopted to show their new-found indepence, along with a fluid expression of gender) incants lengthy rock introductions to three spectacular performances by the newly self-christened Inu-Oh, songs and dances which heal his limbs and skin and face. But they run afoul of the shogun, who doesn’t have time for new stories, and especially Inu-oh’s father, who turns out to have been a villain all along, like so many rock and roll dads. It all ends tragically, as a rock opera should. Rock star revolutionaries don’t tend to last long, at least not in that form. They shine bright and either burn out or become something less spectacular (think Ziggy Stardust morphing into the Thin White Duke, or the Wild Mercury Dylan turning into a Regular Dad). Music can keep stories alive, or bring them back from the dead, and it can change people’s lives for better and for worse, but is it enough to sustain them? For that, the maker of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! and Inu-oh would seem to suggest we need animated cinema. And I’m not sure he’s wrong.
Last night I picked up and started reading the first Jack Reacher book. I saw the first Tom Cruise movie years ago, and liked it well enough, and really enjoyed the Amazon series that premiered on Amazon earlier this year. My edition of the book includes an introduction by author Lee Child, where he describes how he came to be a writer in mid-life and how he designed his project deliberately to run counter to prevailing trends in suspense literature. Specifically, he wanted to make Reacher not a flawed protagonist, haunted by addiction or trauma or moral grayness, not a guy who loses over and over again until he somehow, barely, wins in the end, but rather the biggest, strongest, smartest, most capable person in every situation. He figured that audiences would grow tired of relatable heroes, that we’d much more enjoy seeing the forces of evil get what’s coming to them by a larger than life (literally), hero. I thought about that a lot while watching The Killer, the latest action thriller from Korean star Jang Hyuk.
Jang plays a retired professional assassin (the eponymous killer) who is tasked by his lovely wife with babysitting her friend’s teenage daughter while the two of them (wife and friend) go hang out at a beachside resort for three weeks. Because he’s a pushover, he accepts the job, only for the unfortunate teen to almost immediately fall into the hands of murderous sex traffickers. So he does what he does best: employ his fists, feet, knives, guns, automobiles, sticks, or whatever in tracking down the girl and killing all the bad guys in the way. Many many action scenes follow, a highly competent example of the dominant contemporary mode of action filmmaking outside the Hollywood blockbuster machine: flowing digital cameras in artificial sequence shots; bright colors (golds, neon pinks and greens) contrasting with deep blacks (the hero wears all-black, John Wick-style); reasonably creative choreography emphasizing physical impacts and speed but lacking the inspiration of the Hong Kong filmmakers at their best (no opera acrobatics or ingenious appropriations of found objects and natural environments) performed by competent stunt-people (with Jang apparently doing much of his own stunt-work). Above all the fights emphasize a forward momentum, paralleling Jang’s dogged pursuit of his quest. And, most interestingly, he never appears to get hurt.
For Jang’s killer is very much in the Reacher mold: he is quite obviously better (physically, intellectually, morally) than any of his opponents. This isn’t a crumbling kind of hero, like Mary Elizabeth Winstead in last year’s Kate, taking an unreal amount of abuse but staying the course until her enemy is defeated. Instead, we never believe Jang is in any real peril—our enjoyment of the action scenes comes not from suspense, but from the thrill of watching evil get punished. The only suspense there is in the film is the mystery of why the girl was kidnapped, but we can rest assured Jang will kill his way to a satisfactory answer. It’s not an enlightened approach to moral dilemmas to be sure, and the pacifist in me knows very well that it is not a good thing for individuals to run around murdering people, even if they are for an undoubted fact terrible human beings. But we’ve been living with gray areas in our action fiction for so long: anti-heroes and heroes who can’t win because the system is corrupt, and heroes who cling to a code of honor no longer relevant in our corrupted modern age, and heroes who sacrifice themselves for an infinitesimally small chance at a better tomorrow. Is it so bad to make believe ourselves into an excessively violent yet morally clear world for a little while? Yeah, probably. But it’s fun while it lasts.
Seattle Screen Scene 