Monday, 30 September 2024
Thursday, 26 September 2024
Saturday, 21 September 2024
Return of Bastard Swordsman
Return of Bastard Swordsman is an unusual sequel, one that almost completely dispenses with its title character to spend vast tracts of screentime in the company of Tony Liu, recast here from the treacherous mole he essayed in the previous instalment to an, apparently unconnected, fortune teller. Norman Chui's orphaned superman Yun Fei Yang is a fleeting presence then, his diminished role in proceedings perhaps somewhat premised on the enlightenment the character experienced in the prior film? So, having shown mercy at the conclusion of writer-director Lu Chun-Ku's Bastard Swordsman, by refusing to erase the Wudang martial arts school that had mercilessly bullied him, Yun strode off into an uncertain future rather than stick around and assume leadership of his devastated former home. Yun's ambivalence has left Wudang rudderless though. Easy prey for the nearby Invincible school, who are spoiling for a fight, and a clan of Japanese ninja who have shown up to encroach on this territory.
As an aside, it's hard not to delight in the Ega force's violent assault on Wudang headquarters, slaughtering a selection of newly imported big shots as well as the ageing law makers who, previously, made Yun's life a living hell. If only the silken superman had done it himself. Far less deranged in either its plotting or the film's physical construction, Return is a misshapen retread that ties itself in knots to (re)deliver on the reincarnation beats established in its predecessor. What Lu's sequel does have going for it though is any time spent in the company of Alex Man as Master Dugu, the cuckolded sifu of Invincible school and the means by which Return dissects a specific kind of middle-aged anxiety. Having dedicated his life to training in seclusion, Dugu finds himself alone and unloved as he nears the end of his life. As well as driving his wife into the arms of another, Dugu's mastery of laser-blasting martial arts has, understandably, caused his blood pressure to spike dangerously as well. It's a diagnosis that sees this cackling, well-dressed madman shit out of luck when he battles against an Ega ninja master who can puff out his own, incredible chest then use the oversized, jackhammering organ within to disrupt the rhythm of Dugu's broken heart.
Friday, 20 September 2024
Bastard Swordsman
Writer-director Lu Chun-Ku's Bastard Swordsman refuses to sit still. Structured around the tangled webs woven by competing martial arts schools, the film is constant movement and counter-movement. This rush of gesticulation isn't just the weightless figures blasting around the frame either. Onscreen energies have sunken into the piece itself, resulting in an assembly that reads like a tape stuck on fast-forward. Lu and cinematographer Chin Chiang Ma (who previously collaborated on the similarly mind-boggling Holy Flame of the Martial World) approach even basic head-to-head conversations as an opportunity to hurl the camera into their actor's faces or stalk around them in an aggressive, agitated manner. Editors So Chan-Kwok, Lau Shiu-Gwong and Chiang Hsing-Lung are the willing accomplices, paring down their director's raw footage until Bastard Swordsman is nothing but breathless motion.
Perhaps this method of delivery is reflective of an overstuffed screenplay? One that aims to condense a 60 episode television series (the show in question, Reincarnated, was broadcast on Hong Kong TV in 1979) into one, ninety minute movie? Lu crams in factions and sub-factions; secret identities and betrayals; as well as heart-breaking familial disorder, into a story that is, broadly, a kind of wuxia Cinderella. Norman Chui, who passed away recently, plays Yun Fei Yang, an orphan who overcomes his diminished station in life to fight on behalf of the kung-fu academy that used him as a live target during throwing dart lessons. Transformed from a virginal whipping boy into a supernatural demi-God, thanks to the combined efforts of several (deferred) love interests, Yun vanquishes the pretenders that have besmirched the good name of Wudang. Having won the day, it's a shame that Yun doesn't go even further, tearing down the pillars of the sect that so relentlessly mistreated him. Unfortunately, for this blood-thirsty audience, by that point in the story Yun towers over such earthly concerns.
Monday, 16 September 2024
Johnny Mnemonic: in Black and White
Trapped somewhere between Blade Runner and The Matrix, aesthetically as well as chronologically, director Robert Longo's Johnny Mnemonic immediately benefits from any proximity to the latter, the project on which actor Keanu Reeves firmly ascended to his position as one of cyberpunk's holiest messiahs. The thirty years of real-life socioeconomic downturn that has occurred since cameras rolled on this adaptation of a William Gibson short story hasn't harmed the film either, with amateur futurologists noting that more or less every single worst case scenario threatened in Wired's 1997 article The Long Boom has come to pass (in some form) in the decades since. That which registered as pointedly downcast back in 1995, when Mnemonic was originally released, now plays like eerie prescience, particularly the idea that the unceasing data firing at human beings can have a palpable and even detrimental physiological effect. Although this information overload may not trigger the bodily ruptures described in Mnemonic, it'd be laughable to argue that the weaponised blurbs now blasting out of every person's pocket haven't melted a lot of people's brains into a reactionary goo. Re-released on home video in 2022 with a new colour grading that has tweaked Mnemonic to be monochromatic, Longo's film is now better able to present itself as queasy, ideas-driven science fiction rather than a failing attempt at an exciting, post-Speed blockbuster. In black and white, Reeves' face now reads as luminous and glaring: a light source destined to be imprisoned inside the headsets and hardware that the filmmakers have lifted straight out of Shinya Tsukamoto's seminal works of technological alienation, Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer.
Sunday, 15 September 2024
Friday, 13 September 2024
Jason X
Jason X, New Line Cinema's second pass at a Friday the 13th sequel, sees the Camp Crystal Lake killer stalking promiscuous teenagers on a spaceship-cum-battering ram, hundreds of years in the future. So, just as disinterested in languid voyeurism as Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday then. A semi-successful attempt at freezing Kane Hodder's muscle monster in our present is rediscovered centuries later during a class outing for undergrads who, quite apparently, scavenge cobwebbed military installations for extra credit. Jason and his jailor, a government scientist played by TV's Lexa Doig, are defrosted then blasted off into space for sale as carnival attractions. True to form, a catatonic Voorhees stirs back to life - during his own autopsy - when people begin pairing off elsewhere on the ship. His hand tenses when a medical student makes motion towards performing oral sex on his partner; Jason only fully activating when penetration has occurred.
The murder that immediately follows this resurrection then has an uncomfortable sexual element to it. A struggling Jason very clearly grasps his victim by her chest when manoeuvring this unsuspecting intern, played by Kristi Angus, into a more vulnerable, bent over position. Rather than (conventionally) rape this woman though, Jason forces her head into a vat of liquid nitrogen before pulverising her face. This, clearly, is his release. Although uncomfortably staged, the killing is structured as if intended to pass as a joke as well, with the ludicrous, strawberry brain slush outcome positioned as the punchline. Detached and deliberately ironic throughout, Jason X is most entertaining when, as above, the title character's earthier approach to violence is given centre stage. Later, when trapped in a simulation of his lakeside hunting ground, a newly toyetic Jason salves the noises in his head by sealing holographic floozies in sleeping bags before battering them against a tree. Far less agreeable though are any passage in which we're expected to fret about a cast who appear to have escaped from a terrible, made-for-cable science fiction serial about some loser who has built himself a robot girlfriend.
Tuesday, 10 September 2024
Napoleon - Director's Cut
Appropriately enough, given that the feature itself is obsessed with describing folly and decay, Ridley Scott's Director's Cut of Napoleon finds itself dumped, with very little of the expected ceremony, to Apple's streaming service in the midst of a PR downturn for its star, Joaquin Phoenix. As well as torpedoing a Todd Haynes project by walking away at the last possible moment and leaving the rest of the cast and crew in the lurch, Phoenix's Joker follow-up, presumably the guaranteed hit he was expecting to re-write his 2024, attracted far more puzzled shrugs than expected at the Venice Film Festival. As if preternaturally conscious of this widespread cooling on its lead actor, and with nearly an hour more than the theatrical edit to play around with, Scott's second (released) pass at his bored, hateful Napoleon is, at least in its earliest passages, now happy to take the title character off the table for longer periods, apportioning more space to such things as the plight of women during the French Revolution.
Obviously then that means particular attention is now paid to Vanessa Kirby's Joséphine. Although clearly a crucial aspect of the scaffolding underlining Napoleon's ascent from a canny officer to a crowned Emperor in the previous version of the film, Kirby's former viscountess is almost elevated to a co-lead here. Unlike the armies of soldiers, advisers, and hangers-on that sweep in and out of the piece, her Joséphine lingers, enjoying several successive scenes of her own, all of which are constructed around this woman's perspective and the dilemmas she encounters. Following the arrest and subsequent beheading of her aristocrat husband, Joséphine is herself imprisoned. During this detainment she is instructed, by another jailed lady, to get herself pregnant as quickly as possible, in the hopes that the child she carries will then delay her own execution. Of course the previous assembly held similar material but the telling there was perfunctory, as if in a rush to place Kirby by Phoenix's side. Here we're allowed a few scenes of Joséphine picking apart her place in post-revolutionary France.
We see the sacrifices Joséphine will have to make: the men she will have to sleep with and the alliances she will need to cultivate if she is to keep herself and, more importantly, her children safe from the guillotine. Her marriage to Napoleon offers the status and stability she craves but, in this broader telling at least, the relationship does (eventually) strike a note of equitability. Although Joséphine is dismissed just as quickly as Napoleon's other generals, her voice is pointedly heard following her husband's less careful decrees; her notes an informed or steadying influence that isn't heeded. Later, frostbitten and excreting blood in the midst of a Russian winter, it is clearer now that this Napoleon really is nothing without his Joséphine. Her absence, as the film winds its way towards another exile, is much more keenly felt too. The despondency lingers: Napoleon climbing into his former wife's death bed just to feel close to her. Prior to this viewing, the worry presented by a longer telling of Napoleon was that Scott's film would lose the harried but intoxicating energy that previously blasted us through a lifetime that has been exhaustively chronicled elsewhere. Although that style of construction has been mitigated (but not completely eliminated) here, the mode of storytelling that replaces it is one that consistently reiterates then underlines its points.
For the armchair generals, who chafed when viewing last November's highlights package, Napoleon's battles are, presently, both more frequent and more complex in how they are expressed. Their telling is a little less tidy and therefore better able to generate a feeling that, in the thousands of men gobbled up by cannon fire, we are seeing the pitiless result of machinery coming to bear on vulnerable, goose-pimpled flesh. This awfulness then not simply a spectacle of detonation but the design and application of competing mad men. If the appearance of Chris Morris collaborator Kevin Eldon, or The Death of Stalin's Simon Russell Beale for that matter, weren't enough of a hint then frequent, straining trips to the lavatory in this Director's Cut confirm that Ridley Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa's Napoleon was always intended to be both sardonic and relentlessly improper. No matter how high this Emperor climbs or what his achievements are, there will always be some rude intrusion from reality to bring him crashing back down to earth. While she yet lives, Joséphine is often this instant adjustment: laughing in the face of a husband who reflexively issues the kind of pounding, master of the universe rhetoric so beloved of history books. When she's no longer available to us, Scott ensures that gnats itch and bother conspiring royals or flocks of birds slather stale, Russian throne rooms with their chalky white shit.
Monday, 9 September 2024
Friday, 6 September 2024
Tiger Cage
Tiger Cage, director Yuen Woo-ping's take on a modern, urban crime thriller, distinguishes itself from the rest of the streak thanks to a healthy appetite for excess and endangerment. The film's opening shoot-out, when the central narcotics task force are at the height of their powers, is sprawling and relentless. Civilians are caught up in the crossfire as an undercover drug bust spills out onto the streets, before crashing over neon-piped promenades and concrete sprawl. As soon as the police have chased off their quarry, Tiger Cage switches gears to focus in, leadenly, on the forced camaraderie displayed by work acquaintances. The false note these sort of unfunny capers usually strike in similar films actually ends up working in Tiger Cage's favour when it is slowly revealed that several key players within this chuckling department are on the payroll for a heroin smuggling ring.
As the group dynamic dissipates, the film narrows in on a trio of rookie cops played by Jacky Cheung, Carol Cheng and a young Donnie Yen. Obviously, given that this is film directed by Yuen Woo-ping, Yen is given ample opportunity to shine: his hot-headed plod, Terry, a more than convincing answer to a pair of heavies deployed to massage a dockside drug deal. This is Yen pre-megastardom though, so his high-kicking hold on Tiger Cage is only fleeting. Yen's twirling showcase quickly comes a cropper, suddenly depositing Terry in a situation that is reminiscent of the doomed heroics so beloved of Shaw Brothers great, Chang Cheh. As the stakes continue to ramp up, Tiger Cage only gets meaner and coarser, casually disposing of, apparently, crucial characters and trapping Cheng and Cheung's disgraced fuzz in situations that have more in common with a bloody, Italian horror film than your standard police procedural.
