Round One Resurrection Forecast, Films 66 - 70C'est la vie, mon chéri (Yee Tung-Shing, 1994)
Lost to Raise the Red Lantern (verdict by Bill Thompson)I watched this film a little before the bracket started and wrote: "There's enough charm, enthusiasm, and earnestness in this low-budget romance to understand how it became such a sleeper success in Hong Kong upon its release. That said, there's also enough clumsiness in the film to make it a little hard to recommend. I'm glad I watched it, but I have to wonder if this had been an American film I'd randomly picked up at Blockbuster, would I be giving it such a high grade? I have doubts. Speaking of American films, though: It's almost amazing there doesn't exist a 1995-era Hollywood remake of this starting Peter Gallagher as the slightly dour musician and Cameron Diaz as the too-effervescent-to-be-true girl who brightens up his life." Although he liked the movie a little more than I did, Bill's verdict (full review at his
blog) was enough in line with my memory of the film that I didn't bother watching it again for resurrection purposes. It's the kind of film that's nice to see and enjoy in round one of a bracket, but not a film that necessarily deserve a spot in the second round.
Alan and Eric Between Hello and Goodbye (Peter Chan, 1991)
Lost to Art Museum by the Zoo (verdict by Melvil)Like Melvil, I'd previously seen and enjoyed
Comrades, Almost a Love Story, so I was expecting good things from this earlier Peter Chan film — especially given the appealing title. And, again like Melvil, I was pretty disappointed. In fact, this is probably the biggest disappointment of the bracket so far. It's really, really bad. First, there's the acting. I've previously complimented Eric Tsang on his roles in
Comrades: Almost a Love Story and
Metade Fumaca, but his performance here is so awkward and clumsy that I'm nearly tempted to revise my opinion of his later work. Alan Tam is even worse, mugging his way through the entire film like a background actor in an Ed Wood film. Maggie Cheung, like her co-leads, struggles to play 'young' for most of the movie, and it doesn't work at all. I felt a little like I was watching a high school play. The film itself is no better directed that its performances. I was hoping to see the same dream pop aesthetic that Chan showcased so confidently in
Comrades, but that was nowhere to be found in
Alan and Eric — nor any other sure-handed direction. It's not inept or anything, just not good. Writing all this, I have this nagging feeling that the film couldn't really be as bad as I'm making out, but then, imagining myself trying to watch it again, I can't help but cringe.
General's Son (Im Kwon-taek, 1990)
Lost to City of the Rising Sun (verdict by worm@work)worm absolutely brutalized this movie in her verdict. Brutalized! While I can't really disagree with any particular thing she said, I found the movie so innocuous that I feel like I should defend it from worm's wrath. That's easier said that done, however; two days after watching the film, it had almost totally slipped my mind — to the point where I wasn't sure if I'd really watched it or not. Writing about it now, a week later, it's probably playing better in my head than it did on the screen. I definitely see the mass appeal of the film (it was a blockbuster in Korea), just in the way it melds together the martial arts and gangster genres. And the numerous fight scenes were, as even worm conceded, decently entertaining. I was pretty worried when I noticed some blatantly fake punches in the very first fight (maybe that's where the
Godfather comparisons come from, worm!), but the choreography got decidedly better after that. I even enjoyed the fact that our protagonist was such an ass-kicker that none of his opponents seemed to challenge him at all. It wasn't "
Can he beat this guy?" but "How easily will he beat this guy?" I didn't mind that lack of tension at all — probably because I watched a ton of
Buffy this year and kept getting annoyed by how every patrol seemed to be life-or-death, with even the weakest vampire giving Buffy a fight. Anyway, worm is probably right that most everything in between the fight scenes is crap. I honestly don't remember. And coming off the crushing disappointment of
Alan and Eric, I was probably extra receptive to middling entertainment. One thing I do remember, though, is the the visual style of the film called to mind something like a 1970s soap opera that was filmed and aired live. The way Im's camera moved around every scene with such restless futility was amusingly ludicrous. So, in conclusion, I didn't loathe this movie. That's as far as I'm willing to go.
Operation Scorpio (David Lai, 1991)
Lost to Madadayo (verdict by smirnoff)Yay, I get to disagree with someone! Not vehemently, alas, but I'll take what I can get, given how often these forecasts have just been reinforcing the round one verdicts. About
Operation Scorpio, smirnoff wrote, "This movie just doesn't entertain." I'm happy to report that I had the opposite reaction. I thought this movie did just enough to entertain. There are some narrative similarities to
The Karate Kid — old teacher turns out to be a badass; protagonist doesn't realize that all those chores were teaching him kung fu fundamentals — but it also has that same sum-is-greater-than-its-part, sleeper-hit feel to it. It's slow-moving at times, generic, and maybe a little unfocused, but it gets the job done. Yuen Jung's
Scorpion-style of fighting is really fun to watch — I'm a sucker for that kind of elongated movement — and it's great to see Liu Chia-Liang (aka Lau Kar-Leung) in action. Wires are clearly visible in a few of the fight scenes, but I didn't mind that at all. The campy homoeroticism of Frankie Chin's weightlifting crew earned a few smiles from me, as did suggestive shots like
this. smirnoff, I think, viewed the movie as a failed comedy, but for me it wasn't any more a comedy than
The Karate Kid. It's cartoonish, for sure, and humorous in places, but it's a martial arts movie first and foremost, and not a bad one at that. Good enough to resurrect? No, not quite.
A Quiet Life (Jûzô Itami, 1995)
Lost to Artists in Wonderland (verdict by edgar00)Huh, I didn't realize until a second ago that this film is based on a 1990 novel by the Kenzaburô Oe, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature the year before this film came out. I'm not surprised that the book is from the tail-end of an author's career, given how old-fashioned the film adaptation is. There's a moment in the first act that's right out of
I Remember Mama or
Our Town or something like that. It's a long shot of the main family's house, with our protagonist, Maa-chan, standing just inside the gate. Two older woman pushing bicycles walk just in front of the gate, come to a stop, and gossip meanly about Maa-chan's mentally handicapped brother, Iiyo. They don't notice Maa-chan standing right there listening until the very end of their gossip; then they flinch and hurry off stage left. A dozen other scenes end with a group of characters all chuckling over something humorous that was just said, punctuated by a fade to black, like a sitcom going to commercial. It's all very quaint and anecdotal. Unfortunately, even the scene of a child molester holding a young girl in the bushes (and, as is made abundantly clear, trying to jerk off on her face) feels imbued with nostalgia. Definitely the worst moment in the film. There's at least one good moment to help balance the scales — when Iiyo first starts exercising in the pool — but that's about it. The way the last part of the film builds up to Iiyo's big Boo Radley moment is particularly obvious and dumb.
Up next:
Spring and Chaos,
Legend of the Drunken Master,
Red Cherry,
Angel Dust, and
The Taebaek Mountains.
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