Wait Until Dark

Wheels on Meals

Just a good time with the boys (Jackie, Sammo, Yuen Biao).

I actually had Project A (and a bunch of other Jackie and Sammo flicks) come in the mail, so looking forward to revisiting that one, this time with the original audio. (I've only ever seen it in an awful English dub.)

Jinnistan wrote:

These were the first ones I saw, a couple of years before the American edits started to come out theatrically: Police Story I-II, Armour of God I-II, Wheels on Meals, Project A I-II, City Hunter.  At the time (this was around 92-94) you had to find these on underground videos with xeroxed cover inserts and questionable subs which went through multiple generations of dubs as they filtered through my film friend network.  My copy of Police Story II, for example, was fortunatey letterboxed, but had the English subs beneath another Asian sub (Japanese, I'm pretty sure).

Police Story I first saw on Youtube in a serviceable English dub, but the dub of Project A I originally watched was awful. The guy sounded nothing like Jackie and all the music had been replaced with substantially shittier stock music. So revisiting the latter on a nice transfer and with the original audio was something I'd been intending to do for quite some time, and am pleased to say the movie held up very well. Hoping to squeeze in the sequel before the day is done.

I think the availabilty of these movies (and a lot of Hong Kong cinema) in North America had been hampered by the Weinsteins gobbling up the rights and releasing edited versions of subpar transfers through their DVD labels. It looks like the situation is finally changing, with some American labels starting to do HK releases (Criterion with Police Story, Vinegar Syndrome with Righting Wrongs and Ebola Syndrome), but the situation looks a lot better in the UK, with Eureka/Masters of Cinema and 88 Films both having put out a good number of Hong Kong genre fare.

Jinnistan wrote:

Rock wrote:

I think the availabilty of these movies (and a lot of Hong Kong cinema) in North America had been hampered by the Weinsteins gobbling up the rights and releasing edited versions of subpar transfers through their DVD labels. It looks like the situation is finally changing, with some American labels starting to do HK releases (Criterion with Police Story, Vinegar Syndrome with Righting Wrongs and Ebola Syndrome), but the situation looks a lot better in the UK, with Eureka/Masters of Cinema and 88 Films both having put out a good number of Hong Kong genre fare.

A couple of years back, I noticed that there weren't any decent in-print American region discs of John Woo's Hong Kong classics.  I wonder if a similar rights dispute was behind that.  This may have been rectified since then, because I haven't checked recently to see if newer releases of Woo's films have come out.

I saw Hard Boiled hit Prime recently, so hoping that's a positive sign. But yeah, that and The Killer were put out by the Weinsteins' Dragon Dynasty label, and went out of print around the time the allegations came out (both regarding Harvey Weinstein and Bey Logan, who was heavily involved in most releases). A bunch of Shaw Brothers titles they released were on Prime a few years back (post allegation / legal troubles), but those have mostly left.

Rock wrote:

X

The image of the old woman also seemed stolen straight from Deborah Logan, the similarity seems so conspicuous, but maybe this is just the old woman trope now (like wet long-hair girl from J-Horror).  I agree that Deborah Logan is the better film, and I also agree that it still has plenty of its own issues (that ending sucked).  But at least it managed a much creepier image than anything in X by several degrees.

Watching this film reminded me of that comment from a less savvy critic who, arguing against the genius of Raising Arizona, pointed out that Nicolas Cage is only at his best when he's "unintentionally funny".  Which is presumptuous in a number of ways (what exactly were Cage's intentions in films like Vampire's Kiss, Deadfall, Zandalee?), but it best illustrates the disconnect that exists between those fans of Nicolas Cage's early electric eccentricities and those fans of 'Nic Cage' and his campy bombastic bravado which seems clearly inspired by his boredom with the material he's reduced to.  This film, evidenced by the credits, is supposed to be a comic contrast of these two polarities, but ultimately it's rigged for the latter.  This is a film for fans of ridiculous Nic Cage, and it shows in all of the films which are fondly cited - Face/Off, Con Air, National Treasure, Gone in 60 Seconds.  Even as the film feigns to champion Cage's true talents, it completely ignores references to work like Birdy, Raising Arizona, Leaving Las Vegas, Bringing Out the Dead, Matchstick Men.  There is a brief but pretty clever nod to Moonstruck, and an outright rip-off from Adaptation, using a cheap alter-ego trick to further the contrast, but it misses the mark because the film still never acknowledges Cage's talents as anything other than an exhuberant goofball.  The moral of the film isn't for Cage to get back to better, more sincere work (which is actually exactly what he's been trying to do recently with Mom and Dad, Mandy, Willy's Wonderland, Pig), but to not spend so much time on his career at all.  The assumption being that this is really all that his career amounts to.  The triumph of this film is that Cage turns it into exactly the kind of empty action crap that marked his downfall as an actor.  (His family's constant disparagement of his artistic sensibilities throughout the film is a distasteful indicator of the film's priorities.)

But outside of all that meta-nonsense, if one is willing not to look at the more personal context implied by it, the film is breezy disposable fun, at least slightly more self-aware of the artificial ludricrosity of the action film genre than Cage's actual ludicrous action films constantly referenced throughout.  Pedro Pascal, as Cage's star-struck host, manages to be both suave and goofy simultaneously, believeably entranced in his misunderstood glamorization of Cage's cartoon machismo.  But the film also tries way too hard to be touching and sentimental, which only manages to invoke a whole other category of Cage awfulness (City of Angels, Family Man, Captain Corelli's Mandolin).  All in all, despite stringing some interesting and amusing situations together, the film isn't very well written, and, frankly, nowhere nearly as weird and insane as a film celebrating Cage's excesses really should have been.  Mandy remains the superior late-career Cage-on-LSD picture.  This is basically just a sitcom by comparison.

I should also add that Cage has no one to blame but himself.  He chose to practically ruin his career in the 00s with trash after trash, and tacitly courting his camp-icon cult, until he found himself releasing monthly direct-to-video anonymous garbage that can only be gauged by the degree of anguished confusion in his face on the cover boxes.  Parodying this shameful career self-destruction is a smart move, and provides a lot of potential.  Unfortunately, this film doesn't seem to remember what a great actor Cage could actually be, making the catharsis a lot of wet wind.

6/10

Daughter of the Dragon

The Sand Pebbles

Jinnistan wrote:

Rock wrote:

Daughter of the Dragon

Good to see the love for this review. I don't have Criterion, but I find the era of Asian depiction very fascinating. Probably not in fashion, but Griffith's Broken Blossoms is a very sympathetic film, but the "yellowface" makes it kryptonite to bring up in polite society.  And I still like Karloff's Fu Manchu, but what are you going to do?  But a light definitely needs to be shined on those actual Asian-American actors working at the time, with a special shout out for Hayakawa, maybe the first nominated for an Oscar?  His credits are astounding.

I saw Broken Blossoms pop up on there as part of this series, so definitely plan to get to it soon. I've struggled with silent dramas in the past, but at an hour and a half, I suppose I should be able to get through it okay.

But yeah, I've been going through the titles of the series, and the selection has been pretty fascinating, a mix of pioneering roles and movies chosen for historical context, with both positive and negative portrayals and roles thrown in there. I haven't watched the accompanying documentary yet, but in the series intro, the programmer said he wanted to show the wider range, not just focus on the positive or negative (I think in modern discussions people tend to heap the entirety of cinema into one or the other without any real nuance applied, so this was quite refreshing to hear).

I also plan on digging further into Anna May Wong's career, as it looks like a lot of her movies are in the public domain. I watched Daughter of Shanghai on the Internet Archive in a pretty respectable print, will give that one a recommendation as it features both her and Korean-American co-star Philip Ahn in positive and proactive lead roles.