Round One Resurrection Forecast, Films 41 - 45Black Mask (Daniel Lee, 1996)
Lost to Eat Drink Man Woman (verdict by Gobman)This is a superhero movie. Even though I'd read up on it a bit before watching, that key point escaped me. And with all the glossy superhero movies that Hollywood's turned over the course of the last decade, it's pretty cool to see such a pulpy take on the genre. A lot of the classic elements are there — the origin story, the superpowers as both a blessing and a curse, the isolation — just with a little more gore than usual, a much lower budget, and maybe a preference for quantity of story over quality. Most of the positive reviews I've read (including Gobman's verdict) praise the film's action, but I found it a little hard to appreciate; the editing is just too choppy and impatient, seriously detracting from much of Jet Li's badassery. Despite this continual frustration, it's still a relatively fun and entertaining film, and I'm very glad I made the effort to track down the Taiwanese release of it. I was going to make a similar effort to watch the sequel, but then I saw that, in place of Jet Li and the equal cool and wonderfully used Ching Wan Lau, it offers instead the likes of Jon Polito, Rob Van Dam, and Traci Lords. Um, what?
Green Fish (Lee Chang-dong, 1997)
Lost to Blues Harp (verdict by edgarchaput)A strong directorial debut from Lee, for sure, though one not without a healthy share of flaws, as edgar pointed out. The main problem for me is how all the nice performances and the strong cinematography (You Yong-kil, the celebrated, veteran director of photography, died the following year) and great individual moments are at the service of such a well-worn narrative. Hollywood probably made a hundred of these films in 1946 alone — all the "soldier returns home, finds things changed for the worse, takes up with a gang, falls for the boss' girl" film noirs. At times, the main narrative here is just a framework for Lee to explore other nuances of character and society, and that's when the film is at its best — like in the great scene (highlighted by edgar) between the brothers in the egg truck and the cops in the cop car. The filmmaking there (and in other moments) is wonderfully free and exuberant, making the subsequent return to the more conventional narrative all the more disappointing. Not majorly disappointing, though. As edgar said near the beginning of his verdict, "The movie is…fine. It’s…good, I’ll go with that." Me too.
Ordinary Heroes (Ann Hui, 1999)
Lost to One Evening After the War (verdict by roujin)Hui's
Ordinary Heroes reminds me quite a bit of Hou's
Good Men, Good Women, and that's both a good thing and a bad thing. They're both difficult watches, thematically dense — to the point of seeming impenetrable. And they both utilize complicated narrative structures, elliptically weaving together multiple storylines, the connections between which are often unclear. Finally, they're both "interesting if not entirely satisfactory" films (to borrow a phrase from roujin's verdict) from, umm, directors with three-letter family names starting with H.
Interesting is the operative word in that last sentence, by the way.
Ordinary Heroes is a very interesting film. It might also be a very good film; I'd need another look to find out. The problem on first viewing is that the film, an understated docudrama at heart, initially frames itself as a typical Hong Kong melodrama about an amnesiac in a love triangle (or something). This bait-and-switch strategy really undermines things. For the first half, all the political stuff seems like a boring distraction from the overheated romance I felt I was promised. Once I finally clued in to what Hui was doing, I regretted not having been a better viewer right from the beginning. I liked roujin's verdict and didn't understand why he was dissatisfied with his writeups for this matchup. I get it now, though:
Ordinary Heroes is a very hard film to write about (I've been struggling with this paragraph for a while). That's probably a good thing.
The Contact (Yoon-Hyun Chang, 1997)
Lost to Christmas in August (verdict by smirnoff)smirnoff, I'd like to do my best to free you from any lingering guilt you might be feeling for kicking
The Contact out of the bracket. It's just not a very good movie, I don't think. I agree with you that the music is nice — as I mentioned elsewhere, any romance that hinges on Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes" is off to a good start with me — but otherwise it was a pretty boring experience. That's largely because Suk-kyu Han, in the lead role, is just so totally bland, and as a result his character doesn't really work (as you mentioned). I was totally indifferent to him and everything that happened to him. The other big problem, I think, is that the main storyline — about two people meeting online — keeps getting pushed aside in favor of a bunch of less intriguing subplots. It sometimes felt a little like a short film that was padded out to make it feature length. Even though I'm not much of a fan of
Christmas in August, I'm pretty sure that the right film advanced here. But at least
The Contact is better than
An Affair.
The Longest Summer (Fruit Chan, 1998)
Lost to The Longest Nite (verdict by Clovis8)The key line from Clovis' verdict: "The scenes telling the story of the handover [of Hong Kong] were affecting, while the triad story seemed forced at times." It's basically the same criticism I had of
Green Fish: the more understated moments are so often brilliant and beautiful that it's a shame the film feels the need to tie them together with such overly conventional and familiar narrative tropes. Chan really shows what he's capable of a little more than a hour into the film, when the protagonists visit a dance club looking for a guy who screwed them over. The scene is dominated by the impending threat of violence, but when that violence arrives, it's quick and confusing and confined to the periphery. Chan keeps the focus on the general atmosphere of the club. We hear the deejay announce, in English, "In a few more days, we'll be coming into a brand new era. So I want everybody to put their hands in the air — and wave them like you just don't caaaaare. Whoo!" Nobody seems to listen at first except the group of dancers on the stage. As the deejay repeated implores, "Come on! Come on!" the crowd slowly starts to join in. Not our protagonists, though. They continue to sit totally stone-faced, keeping their eye on the other triad members who are just then leaving the club, tucking their knives back into their waistbands. Soon, the youngest member of the group is, as instructed,
waving his hands in the air. His older brother asks, "What're you doing? Surrendering?" Another of the guys answers, "Come on, let's forget the bad stuff," and puts his own
hands into the air. The older brother is the last to join in. It's wonderfully
awkward and rather perfect. The film as a whole isn't nearly at that level. It's just okay, really. A bit of a mess, like Clovis said, and the ending feels all wrong. Some great photography throughout, however, and Sam Lee has
great presence in the lead role (Melville would have loved to cast him, I imagine, given the chance). Even without seeing Chan's other two bracket films, it doesn't surprise me that they've been so well received, with
Made in Hong Kong already in round three and
Little Cheung maybe on its way.
The Longest Summer won't be joining them, but it's still worth a look, for sure.
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