Lessons of Darkness

Christmas Grudge

For moviegoers interested in seeing a new release this weekend, the question is: are you in the mood for Halloween horror or Christmas cheer? My two latest reviews over at Slant magazine provide the low-down on a surprisingly decent horror movie - actually, a surprisingly decent horror movie remake, which is even rarer - and a predictably terrible Ben Affleck yuletide disaster.

The Grudge (Slant magazine)
Surviving Christmas (Slant magazine)

The Lewd and the Lyrical

The funniest - and shrewdest - politically-minded film of the year has arrived, and its name is Team America: World Police. Profane, offensive, and hilarious, it's hands-down the best puppet movie ever made.

On the other end of the spectrum, Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien's latest - the poetic Café Lumière, screening at this year's New York Film Festival - is another one of the director's moving meditations on the relationship between the past and present.

You can find my incredibly thought-provoking reviews of both at Slant magazine.

Team America: World Police (Slant magazine)
Café Lumière (Slant magazine)

And in addition, I've got reviews of four other Hou Hsiao-Hsien films - as well as a write-up of the awful 1986 thriller The Hitcher, starring C. Thomas Howell and Rutger Hauer - posted below. Enjoy.

Millennium Mambo (2001): B

As the new millennium dawns, Vicky (Qi Shu) balances separate love affairs with abusive, drug-smoking Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan) and paternal petty gangster Jack (Jack Kao) in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s exquisite Millennium Mambo. Narrated (in hindsight) by Vicky from the year 2011, the film’s splintered, flashback-heavy narrative nominally concerns Vicky’s tumultuous two romances, though the storyline is – even more than usual for Hou – largely inconsequential. Supposedly part of a trilogy about Taiwanese youth culture, Millennium Mambo is similar to Hou’s superior Goodbye South, Goodbye in that both chart small-timers’ aimless search for money, love, or, at least, some fleeting feeling of genuine human connection. As is his custom, Hou frames his bored, detached protagonist (who, in a telling early scene, lies motionless as Hao-Hao sexually ravages her body) in doorways and hallways, thus visualizing Vicky’s inability (or unwillingness) to abandon her vacant, static existence for something more fulfilling. Nonetheless, Vicky’s narration alludes to her eventual evolution, as does the ravishing opening sequence (seemingly set in 2011) in which she prances down a deserted walkway and – one can sense – away from the tedium and madness of her former life. Despite its techno-enhanced rhythm and stunning cinematography by In the Mood for Love’s Mark Lee Ping-bin – who uses bold, primary colors to create a pulsating vision of Taiwan nightlife – there’s a noticeable redundancy about Hou’s latest. But as proven by moments like Vicky leaving a temporary face-print in the snow – one of the film’s many stirring visions of the transitory nature of life – even a minor Hou effort is brimming with poignant artistry.

Flowers of Shanghai (1998): B+

A story of insularity, slavery and sexual politics, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s straightforward period piece Flowers of Shanghai tells the story of four brothel houses (“flower houses”) and the relationships shared between its wealthy patrons and attractive, cunning employees (“flower girls”). In 1880s Shanghai, wealthy men spend their days and nights gambling, playing drinking games, feasting and smoking opium in the company of servile beauties who function as their escorts, lovers, and financial benefactors. The fragile-looking women project easygoing compliance, yet as Hou’s film reveals, the women are actually unsentimental realists eager to secure their freedom through their dealings with the foolish, hesitant, capricious men they entertain. Hou employs no traditional edits throughout his meticulous film (instead, scenes are conjoined by fade-ins and -outs), and his long, unbroken shots – which are set solely inside the opulent brothels, never giving us a glimpse of the outside world – capture the suffocating airlessness of the film’s decadent milieu. As Master Wong, a man who suffers after punishing his flower girl by marrying another, Tony Leung exudes a somber, forlorn uncertainty, and Hou eloquently illustrates the unpredictability of passion through a startling third-act scene in which a flower girl’s impulsive attempt to poison her beau ironically leads to marriage. While the drug-addled men ensconce themselves in lavish, ornate whorehouses, their pragmatic female companions covertly plot to escape their extravagant prisons, and as these lovers squabble, cavort and reconcile, Hou – in this, his most accessible film – sympathetically depicts the consuming, love-sick ennui which afflicts both his discontent male and female characters.

Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996): A-

Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first film set entirely in present-day Taiwan, Goodbye South, Goodbye concerns two low-level gangster brothers – easygoing Gao (Jack Kao) and impulsive Flathead (Giong Lim) – who, along with their girlfriends Pretzel (Annie Shizuka Inoh) and Ying (Kuei-Yin Hsu), navigate the rural outskirts of Taipei trying to earn enough money to open a restaurant. However, since the director is more interested in atmosphere and conveying a sense of time’s relentless progression than he is with straightforward narrative clarity, Goodbye South, Goodbye is more elliptical mood piece than traditional gangster flick. Gao and Flathead organize illegal card games, attempt to sell pigs at inflated prices, and engage in a variety of other misbegotten business ventures, all the while drinking, smoking, and coasting through life with the vague, imperceptive grogginess of men incapable of seeing the forest from the trees. Hou’s trademark long takes and fondness for gliding dolly shots – including stunning views from the front and back of moving trains, shots of the brothers driving motorcycles through the lush forest, and the image of the city as seen through a car’s green-tinted windshield – convey the hazy aimlessness and insularity of Gao and Flathead’s lives, and their indifferent detachment from the world functions as a microcosm of modern Taiwanese youth’s disconnect from their social and cultural roots. From the film’s opening scene in which Gao fails to hear a caller on his cell phone, to the closing sounds of Flathead desperately (yet vainly) attempting to garner a response from Gao, Hou brilliantly evokes the isolation of a generation hopelessly cut off from its past.

Good Men, Good Women (1995): B+

The lingering effect of the past on the present is once again Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s thematic focus in Good Men, Good Women, which jumps back and forth between contemporary Taiwan, the immediate past, and the 1940s and ‘50s to tell a fractured tale of personal and national treachery. Lian Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh) is an actress preparing to make a movie (titled “Good Men, Good Women”) in which she’ll star as Chiang Bi-Yu, a real-life revolutionary who traveled to mainland China in the ‘40s to fight Japanese occupation, only to return home to be executed by the government (along with hundreds of others) for being a communist. While preparing for her role, Lian begins mysteriously receiving faxed pages of her diary that concern her romance with a small-time gangster named Ah Wei (Jack Kao), sparking (in a lovely formal device) flashbacks to their heady love affair and, ultimately, her betrayal of his memory during her subsequent years as a drug-addled bar hostess. The implication, as subtle as it is powerful, is that Lian’s struggle to come to grips with her own disloyalty reflects modern-day Taiwan’s attempts to confront (and accept) its own shameful past persecuting communists. Cinematographer Chen Huai-en shoots Lian’s visions of the movie-in-progress in aged black-and-white, while drenching the present-day events in luxurious color, and Hou’s stunningly sparse direction – using no close-ups and measured, uninterrupted takes – frequently frames characters in doorways and other physical structures as a means of visualizing the claustrophobic binds of time, place and memory. Never easy but immensely gratifying, Good Men, Good Women may not achieve the epic grandness of The Puppetmaster, but it’s nonetheless a gorgeously wrought portrait of the cyclicality of history.

The Hitcher (1986): C

I’ve always found Rutger Hauer to be an awesomely menacing actor, and The Hitcher – Robert Harmon’s preposterous thriller about a kid named Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) who picks up a hitchhiker (Hauer) in Texas and winds up being terrorized by the stranger – does nothing to dispel that notion. The film, written by Body Parts scribe Eric Red, is a horribly long-winded affair, weighed down by both Howell’s awful performance as a fresh-faced youth consumed by vengeance and a slow-footed story that not only makes no sense (if Halsey is driving from Chicago to San Diego, how the hell did he wind up in Texas?), but also disastrously keeps Hauer’s boogeyman off-screen to heighten tension (the result, predictably, is the exact opposite). Harmon’s direction is a mixed bag – at times his compositions are laughably exaggerated, at other times he captures the frightening, oppressive desolation of the desert highway (and provides a truly frightening image of Hauer leering in the dark corner of a motel room) – and one can only groan at the realization that Hauer’s unhinged hitchhiker may be pestering Halsey because he wants to turn the teen into his bloodthirsty doppelganger. Still, Hauer is at the top of his game, his wild, shining eyes glowing like those of a nocturnal predator maniacally focused on his prey, and his relaxed physique masks an imposing, coiled viciousness. The actor may have gone on to make even worse B-movie blunders, but the Scandinavian star is nonetheless a master of off-key creepiness, and his lunatic performance is the only thing that keeps The Hitcher from completely running off the road.

Review Avalanche

Between the NYFF and my regular slate of screenings, I've been a busy reviewer as of late. This week, I've got three new Slant magazine reviews, two for films coming out this Friday - the mediocre Friday Night Lights and the terrible Taxi - as well as a review of Ken Burns' latest, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, which appears at this year's NYFF.

Friday Night Lights (Slant magazine)
Taxi (Slant magazine)
Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (Slant magazine)

And because too many reviews is never enough, I've also got new write-ups (posted below) of the French thriller Red Lights, an Israeli film called Or (My Treasure), David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees, and - last but certainly not least - Zhang Yimou's incredible House of Flying Daggers, which may very well be the best film of the year.

House of Flying Daggers (2004): A

Mere months after the U.S. release of Zhang Yimou’s Hero – a film which was made in 2002 but then inexplicably left on a shelf for two years by Miramax – the acclaimed Chinese director returns with House of Flying Daggers, a significantly superior samurai epic about an ardent love triangle between a fetching assassin and the two warriors who covet her. In 849 A.D. China, the government’s efforts to eradicate the Robin Hood-ish “House of Flying Daggers” clan has resulted in the death of the insurgents’ leader but no further progress in undermining the shadowy organization. To surreptitiously discover the identity of Flying Daggers’ new chief, local deputy Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) – posing as a disaffected opponent of the cruel, repressive government – woos a beautiful blind swordswoman named Mei (Zhang Ziyi) who may be the daughter of the Flying Daggers’ fallen general. Mei and Jin are suspicious of each other’s motives, yet hesitant romance soon blossoms between the wary companions, much to the chagrin of Jin’s boss, captain Leo (Andy Lau).

Yimou, working with cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding, drenches his film in pulsating primary colors that reflect the changing seasons of the couple’s burgeoning affair (a golden field of springtime flowers segues into the autumnal evergreen of a bamboo forest and, finally, a wintry snowbound climax). And his exhilarating action sequences – once again employing graceful wirework and deft CGI, such as during recurring POV shots of daggers slicing through the air – have a refined majesty. The wondrous set pieces are numerous, from Mei’s lithe dance in a brothel (in which her long silk sleeves bang on drums and, stunningly, wield a blade) to a semi-airborne forest scuffle in which hordes of enemies scale towering bamboo trees with chimp-like fluidity. Bolstered by Tao Jing’s potent sound design and the plaintive, choir-like singing of Shigeru Umebayashi’s stirring score, these thrilling, exquisitely choreographed skirmishes (in which blades magically bend in the heat of battle and combatants levitate as if buoyed by the wind) have a mesmerizing beauty and poise, and on more than one occasion made me audibly gasp in delighted amazement.

Though the film’s visual splendor equals (if not surpasses) Hero’s loveliness, House of Flying Daggers boasts a fervently melodramatic soul all-too-noticeably absent from the director’s previous sword-fighting adventure. Ziyi’s physical dexterousness and startling emotional guilelessness results in the most assured, moving performance of the year, and as Jin and Leo battle for Mei’s affection, Yimou wonderfully conveys how the act of loving another can be a game, a sacrifice, a ruse, a weapon, a betrayal, and, most of all, a political act. Mei’s choice between Leo and Jin is, fundamentally, a decision between dutiful adherence to her beliefs on the one hand, and irrational rebellion against them on the other. Yimou, throughout the swoon-worthy third act, conflates conflicts of the heart with those of the state. Yet the ultimate elevation of Mei and Jin’s relationship above the story’s larger political backdrop reveals the director’s staunch faith in love’s overpowering grandness – and, in the process, confirms his status as one of cinema’s preeminently romantic, humanistic filmmakers.

-- 2004 New York Film Festival

I Heart Huckabees (2004): B-

Maddeningly uneven but mildly amusing, David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees – a philosophical examination of the meaning of life disguised as a droll screwball comedy – had me simultaneously laughing at its good-natured wackiness and revolting against its faux-weighty intellectualism. Earnest environmentalist Albert (Jason Schwartzman) is fighting urban sprawl by working to protect marshland from the development plans of insidious clothing chain Huckabees. When he’s fired from the project for clashing with Huckabees’ smarmy corporate egomaniac Brad (Jude Law), Albert finds himself spiritually and emotionally adrift, and through a series of coincidences (or are they?), winds up hiring existential detectives Bernard and Vivian (Lilly Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) to help him solve his personal crisis. What follows is two hours of watered-down Sartre punctuated by flashes of off-the-wall lunacy. Albert’s quest for understanding brings him into contact with Mark Wahlberg’s Tommy, a firefighter fixated on educating people about America’s detrimental dependence on foreign oil (or “the petroleum situation,” as he regularly calls it); Dawn (Naomi Watts), Huckabees’ cheery spokesmodel (and Brad’s girlfriend) who feels increasingly disenchanted with her role as objectified corporate logo; and French author Caterine (Isabelle Huppert), whose gloomy pessimism appeals to both Albert and Tommy. Albert’s central dilemma – “What the hell is life supposed to be about?” – is presented as a choice between Bernard and Vivian’s cheery theory of connectivity (i.e. everything is intertwined, and thus we’re not alone) and Caterine’s competing nihilism (i.e. life is cruel and random, and thus we’re all alone), though – in keeping with the film’s smart-alecky attitude – a middle ground is eventually discovered. There’s some pleasure to be had at Huppert’s embodiment of (stereotypical) French cynicism, and Russell’s direction has buoyancy during zanier moments, such as Tommy slamming his face with a red ball to achieve a state of non-thinking bliss and Dawn’s decision to film Huckabees commercials not in scantily-clad sex-kitten garb but, rather, in an Amish milkmaid bonnet. In the end, however, the hilarity isn’t nearly as enervating as the philosophizing is aggravating, and I Heart Huckabees’ portrait of Americans’ unresolved post-9/11 confusion and despair winds up being less profound than pretentious.