Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Kung Fu Hustle (2004) – S. Chow

In opting for Kung Fu Hustle, I was hoping to be transported back to those days of the early 1990s when I first discovered Hong Kong cinema (Jacky Chan, at first, but then Chow Yun Fat and Jet Li).  But I guess you can’t go home again.  Technology has removed the wires that some stars (but not Jacky) formerly used to deliver flying kicks, replacing them with CGI miracles.  I never was a big fan of CGI.  However, I have to say that director and star Stephen Chow seems to have realised that the only way to use it is boldly, brashly, and in the most cartoonish way possible; in other words, what we have here is a Chuck Jones short populated by actual humans.  And that makes all the difference.  The plot is as zany as you would guess from that description.  Chow and his partner Tze Chung Lam pretend that they are part of the Axe Gang in order to try to squeeze money out of a poor community – however, they are quickly challenged by the real Axe Gang who, to their chagrin, discover that there are three aging kung fu masters retired in the town.  Or maybe there are four kung fu masters.  Or perhaps five.  Things do get out of hand (especially when the Axe Gang bring in some notorious ringers to combat them).  There are some well choreographed and over-the-top fight scenes (directed by Woo-Ping Yuen and Sammo Kam-Bo Hung, both immensely famous in their own rights) and some silly or slapstick comedy.  Things do get bloody as well (so this isn’t for kids). Yet for all those things that Kung Fu Hustle gets right, I still felt a hankering for the old school.

The Window (1949)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Window (1949) – T. Tetzlaff

A film noir to scare kids, based on “The Boy who Cried Wolf” (attributed to Aesop).  Bobby Driscoll (star of Disney’s Song of the South, 1946, and Treasure Island, 1950) is a kid who tells tall tales but then witnesses a murder – and no one will believe him.  Possibly an inspiration for Rear Window (1954) since Driscoll, aged 9 or 10, sees the murder while voyeuristically spying on the neighbours (from his NYC fire escape).  And, as in the later film, they eventually come to get him.  Despite the presence of the earnest child actor (who later came to a bad end), director Ted Tetzlaff doesn’t pull any punches (nor does Paul Stewart playing the menacing neighbour, who socks Bobby in the back of a cab).  There is some real tension here and you do believe that Driscoll could get killed.  Quite the surprise, since the rest of the ensemble, parents Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale and some assorted cops, play this like a family drama.  Naturally, in the end, the kid learns his lesson.

American Honey (2016)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

American Honey (2016) – A. Arnold

I wonder if the title American Honey (2016) has anything to do with A Taste of Honey (1961) which I just happened to watch a few weeks ago?  The earlier British film follows a teenage girl who, due to neglect by her mum, ends up having to make her own way in the world, navigating the onset of adulthood (including sexual relations and then pregnancy) as best she can.  The director of American Honey, Andrea Arnold, is British and (although the new film does include a song of the same title by country group Lady Antebellum) I suspect that the use of the word honey here is no coincidence.  After all, the new film also follows a teenage girl who, seemingly abandoned by her parents and living in a kind of hell in Oklahoma, must find her own way in the world.  She joins a circus-like “mag crew” (door-to-door magazine sellers) made up of other lost kids, headed by Riley Keough (Elvis’s granddaughter), only a few years older but a tough businesswoman.  But maybe not a successful one, because it doesn’t seem as though these kids actually sell many magazines.  Instead, their life is one continuous rather chaotic party (with hip-hop the music of choice, despite the title track).  Our heroine, Star (played by newcomer Sasha Lane), observes everything with a bit of distance, some querulousness, some disdain, but a genuine desire to belong.  She is especially thunderstruck by Jake, the chief sales-dude played by Shia LeBeouf, who seems really to have no moral compass.  Indeed, Star herself displays some very poor judgment, often willingly entering situations that contain real risks, especially for a young girl.  But director Arnold passes no judgment on these kids and this is not really a cautionary tale.  The (handheld) camera hovers around Lane, detailing her reactions in close-up, allowing the viewer to soak up the sensations she experiences (and this is a very sensual film, with heightened sights and sounds).  The acting is sometimes impressive and sometimes wet-behind-the-ears.  But the film is also too long (at 157 minutes) and, if it is really meant to be a snapshot of the American experience at this point in time, emphasising the under-class (as did the British Kitchen Sink films of the 1960s), then it seems rather narrow in scope.  In the end, both sad and exhilarating.

I, Dalio (2015)/Debra Paget, For Example (2016)/Our Stars (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

I, Dalio (2015)/Debra Paget, For Example (2016)/Our Stars (2015) – M. Rappaport

You may remember video essayist Mark Rappaport from his ‘90s features, Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) or From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), in which he used film clips to investigate a certain thesis (for example, that Hudson’s films often hinted that he was gay) or to review an artist’s work as a way of gathering insight into the culture as a whole (as he does with Seberg).  Well, Rappaport has been very active again lately (in his 70s) creating a series of short essays, that use an actor as a starting place for a certain premise and then digress all over the place.  Of the three that I watched last night (each about 30 minutes long), I, Dalio (2015), focussing on French Jewish character actor Marcel Dalio, was the best.  Rappaport’s premise is that Dalio’s Jewishness meant that he was channelled into outcast roles (such as stool pigeon, hoodlum, etc.) in France before WWII but then when he fled to the US during the war he was typecast instead as French and was granted more positive roles (such as Frenchy in To Have and Have Not (1944) or the head croupier in Rick’s Café in Casablanca, 1942).  Returning back to France after the war meant a return to villainous parts – until he was old enough to be typecast simply as “old”.  Only the great director Jean Renoir had Dalio explicitly play Jewish roles in both The Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), where his Jewishness is openly discussed and reflected upon (just before the war).  So, Rappaport’s point is that identity is a function of context and the career of Dalio is a case in point.  The premise of Our Stars (2015) is that Hollywood pairings of stars that worked during their first cinematic incarnation cannot work again years later because they can only demonstrate that the stars have aged and that their chemistry has dissipated.  He uses Gregory Peck & Jennifer Jones, Barbara Stanwyck and both Gary Cooper and Fred MacMurray, and Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster to illustrate the point.  Debra Paget, For Example (2016) seeks to use the 20^th Century-Fox contract actress of the 1950s as an example of the careers of those on the second rung who never crashed through to stardom.  Neither of these latter two films seemed as rich or deep as I, Dalio but they were still never less than entertaining, with well chosen “knowing” clips and digressions that were sometimes more interesting than the main focus.  Rappaport narrates each essay himself or instead uses actors who pretend to be the central protagonists, speaking in first person about what they might have been thinking. Of course, it’s all a fiction (or a blend of fact and fiction) but thought-provoking if film is your thing.

Theory of Obscurity: A Film about The Residents (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆

Theory of Obscurity: A Film about The Residents (2015) – D. Hardy

The main reaction I had to this documentary about The Residents is a wish that the band had made the film themselves.  But, of course, they may have, because director Don Hardy appears to have had access to a lot of presumably unseen footage from the early years of the 40-year-old band and members of the Cryptic Corporation (that oversee the business dealings of the band) were actively involved in editing and in front of the camera.  Of course, we still don’t know who the Residents actually are – but some of the old guys being interviewed sure seem to know a lot about their history.  My regret is not really with the content shown (which is often truly weird) but instead with the rather formulaic approach taken here – this is really just another one of those music docos where you’ve got talking heads (including with fans/accomplices) interspersed with short clips of the band playing.  There are some great clips but they never show you enough.  Why can’t the makers of these types of documentaries understand that fans would really want to see an entire song?  Especially in the case of the Residents where the visual and multimedia aspects of their show are so astonishing!  There are a couple of songs from the Commercial Album played on the 2013 fortieth anniversary tour that do run their full (short) length but that tour seems stripped down in comparison to earlier tours.  Of course, if the band’s output really is 60 albums (plus all sorts of other ephemera), then no single 90-minute film is going to be able to do justice to any one aspect of their career.  But we do learn a lot about those eyeballs.  Check their records, folks!

  

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) – Y. Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies are exceedingly strange, partly because they tend to feature highly stylized sometimes affectless acting, partly because they are staged and shot in a chilly clinical way, but mostly because the plots hold things back, gradually offering up unusual events or “underlying principles” as though they were normal when clearly they are not.  His previous film was The Lobster (2015) which featured a world in which it is illegal to be single (and if you cannot find a spouse you are turned into an animal of your choosing).  That one starred Colin Farrell, as does The Killing of a Sacred Deer.  Here he plays a surgeon who has a friendly relationship with a teenage boy that he seems to be keeping from others. Later, we discover that the boy’s father died on the operating table, so the friendship seems to be Farrell’s way of expressing sympathy (or reducing guilt).  The boy (played by Barry Keoghan) seems friendly toward Farrell, if not a little needy (as is his now single mum).  That is, until he places a curse on Farrell’s family.  The rest of the film shows the family (including wife Nicole Kidman) coping with this predicament, which unlike the characters in previous Lanthimos films, they don’t accept as matter-of-fact but instead take a long time to come to grips with - and the movie sort of lopes along as they struggle.  Sure, there are lots of weird and inappropriate moments (particularly odd sexual disclosures) that make this more than your usual family-menaced-by-evil-outsider flick but it isn’t entirely out-of-this-world – instead everything is basically made as mundane as possible, so it’s our world but somehow off-kilter.  The alien soundtrack and unusual camera choices add to the effect.

The Assassin (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Assassin (2015) – H.-H. Hou

Absolutely beautiful to look at, with an impressively subtle use of colour (layered gauzy overlays on images shot through fabric), the film takes place in 8^th century China with lavish costumes and settings of that era.  The plot, however, is rather difficult to follow.  A young assassin (Qi Shu) is sent back to the province of her youth in order to kill a rebellious lord, who turns out to be her originally destined husband, until she was betrayed and sent away – to study to be an assassin with a fearsome nun.  At least that is what I think was going on.  But regardless, the movie can be enjoyed purely as a visual artwork (it is far too slow to be an action film, with little actual fighting).  Director Hsiao-Hsien Hou from Taiwan won the Best Director Prize at Canne but, apart from its majestic visuals, this probably isn’t his best film.  I haven’t seen them in ages but I really enjoyed The Puppetmaster (1993) and A Time to Live and A Time to Die (1985); his more recent films, perhaps not as much, though there are many I’ve not seen.  He has been making films very infrequently now so this may be his last.