Love how this explicitly references The Man From Nowhere. The Killer is familiar but it knows exactly what it is, it gets in, delivers slick action sequences that are coherent but continuously kinetic and brutal, and gets out in a little over 90 minutes. Speed-ramping tends to annoy me, but it's well placed here. Tactically deployed, the speed-ramping accentuates the speed, precision, and power of our main protagonist as he makes his way through a sea of baddies. He is a stoic agent of punitive justice against the darkness that permeates our modern world. A simple story of good vs evil, there is no grayness here. Jang Hyuk plays the part well, oozing understated confidence amongst the carnage to suggest that he has been here before and everything will be okay.
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A bleak, uncompromising anti-war film, Yasuzo Masumura's Red Angel never feels polemic or political, I'd actually characterize it as eerily calm in its display of such depravity. Focusing on the desecration of the flesh and the soul while exhibiting the psychological and physical horrors of war through its searing, unadulterated vision, Masumura crafts one of the more difficult anti-war films ever made. Told largely through the perspective of a front-line wartime nurse, the actual battles of the second Sino-Japanese War are never exhibited on screen, outside of the last 10-minutes of the film, they exist almost solely on the periphery, with only the aftermath of such brutality being shown, repeatedly, without any sense of slowing down. Never exploitative but steadfast in its unwavering approach, the Black and White photography feels like a necessity given the degradation of the body on display. The stark photography aligns well with Masumura's vision, one which offers no answers to such horrors ultimately being only interested in displaying it with an unbridled realism. Any good war film is an anti-war film by definition but Masumara's Red Angel is more overt in its approach, focusing solely on the aftermath of conflict - the desecration of the body and soul on display makes this one of the more potent anti-war films ever made.
A distillation of affect and its indescribable yet undeniable power, Drugstore Romance wonderfully exhibits the purity of impulse disentangled from positive or negative connotations. Melodrama utilized to interrogate emotion - its impracticality, transience, and omnipresence - Paul Vecchiali's Drugstore Romance reminded me a lot of John Cassavetes' oeuvre in the way it obfuscates cinematic form, narrative logic, and social expectation to reach for a more pure understanding of what it means to live, what it means to love. The material outcome doesn't seem to interest Vecchiali so much as the psychological and cognitive journey. Drugstore Romance is a rich, messy tapestry of emotion and melodic melodrama uninterested in subscribing binary notions of right or wrong to this brazen pursuit of love - it's interested in truth, which is far more complex than the romanticism we often associated with desire, connection, and love. The interiority of emotion, the transient nature of affect, and the interplay between our internal impulses and external reality are beautifully captured with a cinematic grammar that masterfully uses editing techniques such as exquisitely placed insert shots that are inscribed with invoking emotion and the interiority of its characters. What I think struck me so much with Drugstore Romance is how it doesn't attempt to comprehend something as incalculable or unquantifiable as desire. It seeks truth and in a sense rejects dialectics, focusing on an ontology in which prescribed answers to the nature of being are inconsequential at best or fool-hearted pursuits at worst.
An ethnographical procedural so rich and vibrant in its exhibition of the Chinese-American experience. A travelogue, a mystery, so lived-in and authentic that it serves as such a resounding and pertinent reminder of the importance of independent cinema and the utter failings of Hollywood when it comes to subcultures that exist beyond the monolithic white middle class that dominates consumption and broad culture in America. How this blends a compelling narrative schematic with its ethnographic exploration is really exceptionally rendered, showcasing the diversity within the specific experience of the Chinese-American. Rooted in the exhibition of the unseen and unrepresented subculture on the silver screen, Chan is Missing's playful artifice congeals extremely well with its naturalist formal style, being precise yet lively, managing great specificity to Chinese-American identity while subverting the very idea of that while exposing the universality of collective diaspora and the complexities of identity beyond mere classification and expectation.
Obayashi's inventiveness, tactical absurdity, and ingenuity of the cinematic medium have perhaps never been better utilized in Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast. Condemnation of War, Imperialism, and Nationalism told through a framework in which the bloodshed and desolation of such conflict exists almost entirely in the periphery. Violence itself is never exhibited on screen yet it perniciously affects everyone and everything it touches. Within such silly abstractions as nationalism, either you live in ignorance or you are psychotic under an authority structure such as imperialist Japan. The youth never stood a chance amongst such a fervent milieu but Obayashi still sees hope and unbridled humanism in the innocence of youth. Dreams and nightmares intertwined in another rich visual tapestry by the master filmmaker.
Jun Ichikawa's Tsugumi is such an elegant portrait of a troubled soul. Ichikawa's graceful cinematic language quakes with quiet understanding - an existential and elemental experience about the nature of self and how internal turmoil is in intrinsic contention with social harmony. Deftly navigating what it means to live, Tsugumi is a story of continuous micro-conflicts, featuring a central protagonist whose illness as hardened her from an early age, a character who chooses the ego over altruism as a coping mechanism to make sense of unjust circumstances that make up her reality. A coming-of-age archetypical story but so much more, Ichikawa's exquisite direction excavates the realities of sociality with a gaze rooted in existentialism. Drawing parallels between the harmonious waves of the ocean and sociality intrinsic to human beings, Ichikawa deploys a recurring visual motif of the sea as a figurative device. The lesson our main protagonist through her journey must come to learn is quite simple - Humans are not above nature, and our individualism while essential to self is rooted in contention with the social order. The polycentric nature of the social world will never ultimately serve all one's internal desires, but social harmony is what we as creatures ultimately strive for - a communal sense of understanding that frees us from the intrinsic horror of our own mortality and towards a path of acceptance and ultimately peace.
ACAB unless you are Harrison Ford. In a certain sense, this truly is a great pacifist work of cinema and one that is particularly rare in American cinema. While the finale has some bombast, ultimately the denouement is a plea for sensibility in the face of violence, selfishness, and greed, and in this respect, Weir even suggests there is something to be learned from a more traditional way of living, free from the chaos and competitive mindset embedded into modern life. I still love how authentic this film aims to be in its exhibition of Amish culture. Weir makes every attempt to not show judgment, viewing this distinct subculture with respect and a sense of understanding which shouldn't be all that surprising when considering his treatment of the aborigines of Australia in The Last Wave or the indigenous in Mosquito Coast. Weir has always been interested in this contention, and it's prevalent throughout almost his entire oeuvre, whether it is a tactile critique of colonialism or just a film that aims to exhibit the hubris of modernity. For my money, this likely is Ford's greatest performance.
Familiar territory for sure and unfortunately still very timely and relevant today (sigh), but I love how this film employs soft focus and 4:3 framing to accentuate the interiority of this character. An intense, increasingly claustrophobic experience, the social alienation escalates as it narratively progresses in a way that truly invokes the intensity and horror of this situation. Astutely understands the internal turmoil of such a situation, and is very effective at elucidating the emotional strife and weight on such an individual who trapped on all fronts by the legal and social standards subvert any true notions of female autonomy. Well-crafted and structurally pointed to pronounce the temporal scarcity of such a situation with added vigor, Happening is intense, gripping, and infuriating as one would expect that unfortunately feels not issues of a bygone era but an ongoing struggle for equality and personal autonomy.
Get Love or Die Trying
The power of love, an existential force beyond material strictures is beautifully conveyed in Soi Cheang's Love Battlefield, a singular vision that conscripts the brutality and grit of a Hong Kong crime story to ultimately deliver a deeply poignant rumination on existential love. Beginning with a fragmented formal style that details the up-and-down relationship of our two main characters, Love Battlefield's opening is a kinetic, kaleidoscope of a relationship that is disorienting but ultimately transcendent when one begins to see exactly what Soi Cheang is building towards. After this messy but emotive opening, Love Battlefield settles into a more logic-based cinematic language of the crime drama. Incited by the loss of property (a car), this event threatens to sever this couple's relationship forever after tensions boil over and the break-up, despite this being something that fundamentally neither of them can control. It turns out a gang of criminals are the ones responsible for the theft and when the male protagonist rediscovers his lost property he is kidnapped. This sets off a rather traditional HK crime story but one that aches with existential notions of love and connection that transcend social constructions of legality. The shift in cinematic language only pronounces disparity between logic and emotion, and the juxtaposition between our protagonist couple and the criminal couple resting at the fulcrum of this story gives this film a downright existential or dare I say mythical layer. Narratively speaking, they are in conflict due to their material circumstances, but ultimately they can be seen in a similar light. In the end, both couples are agents of emotion who sacrifice their physical auras for a feeling, a connection, that is not quantifiable - the intangible power of love. Substantive concerns of even mortality fall by the wayside in the end, and what Love Battlefield manages with such existential weight is to capture a rather simple concept - Any meaningful relationship will intrinsically have conflict and contention, but when threatened with more substantive concerns petty contentions wither as a major component intrinsic to love is sacrifice. The almost unintelligible opening section ultimately comes into focus. Love isn't structured like the logic of narrative storytelling, it's a cataclysm of disparate emotions that ultimately become congruent through sacrifice and understanding. Imbued with existential notions of love, fate, and connection, Love Battlefield is such a unique vision and I'm frankly enamored with just how emotionally affecting this tale inevitably ends up being. Looks cheap at times - a symptom of the streaming era in which the aesthetic has no texture and the digital sheen is borderline oppressive to the cinematic experience. With that in mind, Văn Kiệt's The Princess is a conceptually slight, tight little bit of action cinema that's whole structure is built around point A to point B violence which is effectively an inversion of 'The Raid'. Similar to Văn Kiệt's Furie, The Princess brings a nice sense of physicality to its fight choreography. There is a consistent emphasis on coherence, and the action set-pieces refrain from too much cutting, relying more on camera movement to fuel its kineticism. It's a solid piece of action cinema built around a fantasy film framework, and while I continue to appreciate how economic Văn Kiệt's direction is, The Princess falls rather flat emotionally and thematically. For the love of God, give Veronica Ngo more roles in Hollywood.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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