A Guilty Conscience (2023)

Once or twice in our lifetime, if we were lucky we got woken up from a slumber of our own making.  This force majeure  jolts us to remember what we long suppressed like why we wanted to be a lawyer in the first place.  Nobody wants to grow up working 27 hours a day kowtow to the rich and corrupted.  And yet we have grown to accept that as part of growing up and being adults.  A Guilty Conscience (2023), starring the multi-talented Wong Chi Wah with an equally impressive supporting cast, tells such a story.  Wong plays the titular character, an acerbic tongue attorney, and hence the Chinese title, who was passed over for promotions in part for his failure to manage up.  He later quit his job at the bench as a magistrate and went back to private practice with the sole intention of cozying up to the rich or in his words to lick those assholes where presumably money is dripping out.

Lam's scheme to park himself next to the rich quickly falls apart.  He was the defense attorney of a mistress who stood accused of child abuse and  endangerment of her own young daughter.  Her paramour and father of their love child is a doctor and a married man to the daughter of a prominent family.  Both families of the married couple are well respected in Hong Kong for their wealth if not for anything else.  The child endangerment case against the mistress quickly made a turn for the worst.  The child died from injury sustained and his client, the mother of a now deceased child was convicted of manslaughter and was sentenced to seventeen years in prison.  The conviction in large part was due to Lam's professional negligence--his failure to secure written affidavits from the witnesses, that is from both the father of the diseased  and the security guard and Lam's general insouciance towards the case as a whole.

His failure to defend his client left him badly shaken with a guilty conscience, and hence the English title.  The silver lining of his legal debacle, if any, is it makes him reassess his life thus far like why he wanted to be an attorney in the first place: it's about justice and helping defend those who can't defend themselves.   He vows to save his client using all he's left and can muster.  What he lacks in money and powerful connections he more than makes up in his doggedness and not to mention his acerbic tongue to outwit and out maneuver the prosecution.  By saving his client he also saves himself from straying from his original ideal of justice for all and to a larger extent righting a rigged justice system that not only favors the rich and powerful but at times also punishes the powerless and penniless.  AGC is a welcome departure from the all too common gangster genre forever popular in Hong Kong cinema since the 80s.  In present day Hong Kong, people live in extreme wealth disparity and many question law enforcement and the judicial system behind closed doors.  Hong Kong nowadays can't even just have simple evil like regular psychopath who kills and dismemebers for pleasure.  Instead Hong Kong now has an extreme brutal murder that potentially involves cross border organized crime, corruption, and filthy amount of cash: a case that embodies everything that is wrong in Hong Kong.  Lam in his courtroom closing statement utters, "In the past, all were equal in front of the law.  Now, the poor suck dick before the law," a sentiment that's widely shared and believed in Hong Kong.  AGC provides a two hour reprieve for an audience who has to live everyday brutality that's now Hong Kong.

John Wick Chapter 3

The story of John Wick: Chapter 3 Parabellum ("if you seek peace, prepare for war" says the film's character Winston) picks up where 2 left off .  Wick is seen running in his ever slightly bowed gait with his nameless pit bull in tow, seeking refuge in the evening Big Apple while rain is pelting down making his artfully unkempt hair and unshaved face even more alluring.  The opening scene is as beautiful as it's dizzily kaleidoscopic.

Wick proves a book is mightier than a knife.  But then not everyone can stomach the virtue and wisdom that comes with a big book.  The first fight was launched inside the reference section of the New York Public Library.  When Wick force-feeds Alexander Afanasyev's Russian fable on Ernest, another assassin who can't wait to collect the 14 million bounty on Wick, the book proves too much for Ernest to devour.  There is a little continuity problem as Wick is seen using his both hands grappling and hence sans book but then immediately after with the book in hand.  Of course, I can see this only with the benefit of replay and freeze frame.  Using a big book or a pencil as a lethal weapon is not new, as I recall both La Femme Nikita and Jason Bourne use them way before Wick.  The movie is in essence a platform for setting up Wick to fight with horses, motorbikes, daggers, a pencil and a book and of course many guns, in the most mundane and extreme situations.

Wick always fights in a suit with a properly knotted tie no less.  The first two I think because he has to go to a high end nightclub or a gala so he has to dress the part or else what I don't actually know.  Given that he does a lot of running and kicking, I wonder if he sticks to the more dressy but slippery leather soles or the rubber ones that provide better grip but look less dressy.  Wick as a professional contract killer reminds me of Vincent, a role played by Tom Cruise in a movie called Collateral.  Vincent is very business like in his attire and demeanor.  Both have memorable fight scenes in a club as well as on a train.  Cruise' Vincent unfortunately got killed off in his first and also last only movie appearance.  It's such an underrated movie.  Who knows, maybe Vincent was part of the High Table universe.

As John Wick progresses onto this third instalment, it becomes more elaborate in its world building, i.e. more ridiculous it becomes.  It demands a high level of suspension of belief.  It's like the whole New York City is run by the High Table.  More troublesome is the fact that the film becomes self aware of how cool the Wick character is.  Even the villains are head over heels John Wick so much so that they aren't going to kill him given the chance.  It makes the movie less believable even in its own world.  I think the supporting cast like the Bowery King and Winston could just dial down their coolness a tad bit.  The Adjudicator as a villain is insufferable as what skill set does she possess anyway.  The most down to earth character is still Reeves' Wick.  There is no self awareness the way Reeves plays the character.  If anything I think he always plays the character as is and nobody can deliver dialogues like him.  His last word uttered, when asked by the Bowery King, "You pissed, John?  Are you?" was "Yeah." Reeves' deliverance is always a bit flat, a bit monotone, a bit peculiar with a straight face.

The story of John Wick is like a triptych, the second one is the most balanced and prominence one in action, story and mythology without overdoing them.  With John Wick being pissed and alive, I am sure there is a fourth one in the work.

Brightburn (2019)

Brightburn tells a story that is all too familiar to parents: one day our sweet little buddy has grown to become a complete stranger much to our dismay and disappointment.  Except it is much worse in the case as depicted in Brightburn.  Brendon Breyer is a foundling, just like Clark Kent aka Superman, who is literally an illegal alien or in modern parlance an undocumented immigrant, from outer space.  Both have loving American parents and possess preternatural powers.  However, the similarities end there.  Clark Kent has successfully assimilated to be a full blown American hero while Brendan Breyer, when hit by puberty, his deep seated alien traits manifest themselves as behaviors that are at odds with anybody or anything that is moral, legal or simply wholesome.  He has no qualms lying, hurting and killing people.  On-screen pint-sized hero or villain is not new but still very much a novelty and mildly disturbing and potentially entertaining, especially in R rated features saturated with gruesome violence.  Brendon Breyer, played by Jackson Dunn, has a physiognomy that is as American as white bread or in other words he could just be any other young male shooters in rural America.  His psychosis oscillates between quietly apathetic and aggressively belligerent.  The young Dunn pretty very much nailed the character as an alienated youngster who are fast becoming and has indeed become a mass murderer.  I enjoy this movie for its everted Superman mythology and the restrained storytelling and its rather limited and yet effective gory scenes.

Moonlight (2016)

There is probably a dozen reasons to see a movie.  But this is a first for me--I would like to hear your take on it.

Barry Jenkins' Moonlight tells the age-old story of growing up and finding one's place in this world.  If you are some kid living in a Manhattan high-rise that bears your family name, your struggle could be setting up a lemonade stand in that posh apartment building.  But's that's another story for another time.  If you are Chiron aka Little or Black, the protagonist of Moonlight, it could be a myriad of things like being black growing up sexually unsure in a single mother household in a drug, poverty, and violence infested environment.

Chiron's life is a series of disappointments.  His mom is a crack addict who ends up in rehab.  His only father figure Juan whose tenderness and generosity are as genuine as he is a crack supplier, his mom's crack supplier no less.  His first romantic sexual encounter is his only friend Kevin who also betrays him for the acceptance of a group of bullies.  All these people love Chiron.  But love simply is not enough.  Chiron ends up trapping in the street, with seeming success, just like his childhood father figure.

Trevante Rhodes who plays the adult Chiron delivers the most awkward, in the best sense of the word, and the sexually palpable scene when Chiron confesses to Kevin that he is the only man that ever touches him.  The film ends with a shot pulling in from behind Little, the little Chiron, in the beach then Little looking into the camera.  Chiron is no longer the frail kid that he was, he is a bona fide trapper that can easily bench press ten times his body weight and kills a grown man with his bare hand but deep down he is still that same awkward child who yearns to connect, to love and to be loved.  Aren't we all?

Arrival (2016)

Arrival (2016).  Or how to read ink squirt from giant alien octopus.  This borefest is about time and how time doesn't have a beginning or an end, that is, provided that you know how to communicate in squirt ink.  Louise, played by Amy Adams, is a linguist enlisted by the US army to communicate with the aliens.  Together with some guy called Ian, played by Jeremy Renner, the two keep going in and out of the giant spacecraft parked or floated somewhere above Montana.  Often times a boring movie is just a boring movie.  Arrival fails to deliver any intellectual rigor in the sci-fi genre nor jolts us with any action if only to wake us up every now and then.  The cinematography is a constant drab and looks horribly underexposed.  Amy Adams' performance is not understated, just underwhelming.  With the help of a $2 freshly brewed small coffee I manage to stay awake the entire time if only in a fugue state which is not too different from what Louise experiences in the movie.

The Mermaid (2016)

I am surprised and delighted that The Mermaid is played in theaters in New York City.  I have been a Chow's fan since I discovered his brand of comedy many years ago.  Back then as there was only video tape and I wasn't especially well off or well connected so I only saw his works haphazardly.  On the occasions I saw his movies or some snippets or episodes of his TV series, I thoroughly enjoyed them.  Chow always plays this beloved underdog who despite or because of his non sensical non sequitur acts and his utter disregard to the absurd and seemingly insurmountable reality, always overcomes.

 Then one day Chow appeared on the cover of the Sunday New York Times magazine.  If I remember correctly it was a fashion issue.  He was doing a mid air split or something next to a lamp post, a silly pose, I think.  That should be around the time of Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle, two of my favorites that kind of established him somewhat in the consciousness of Hollywood.  More importantly and reassuringly, Chow proves that he can make great dramatic comedy with Hong Kong production in his rear view mirror with much of his comedic integrity intact though I can see that Chow is shedding most of his witty nonsensical Cantonese dialogues that define and catapult his career early on, in favor of more action and better production which translate better in cinema worldwide.

The Mermaid or Mei Ren Yu (2016) is a Chow's film without Chow in front of the camera.  Things certainly won't be the same without Chow being front and center on everything.  With Mei, Chow has crossed the line of being stupendously silly to being incoherently stupid.  It used to be that the audience does the laughing, may that be something Chow or his crew says or does while he and his crew appear totally oblivious to the plight and absurdity of their situation.  Mei is just the opposite, often times, the comedy is heavy-handed and the only persons laughing are the self-aware actors themselves, it feels so forced.   I can see Chow tries to add production value so as to appear Hollywood or something (there is indeed a 3D version) but both the production and special effects just fall flat.  Nobody goes to see a Chow's movie for its special effects or production value so what if they are sub-par compared to Hollywood's?  It wouldn't matter one iota if the comedy holds up.  Alas, this isn't the case.

Perhaps the opening scene in which a group of tourists visit a museum best encapsulates the entire movie as envisioned by the director and experienced by me--the tourists, surrogate for the audience, visit a so-called museum only to discover that the exhibits are mere props and scams so the unscrupulous curator can turn a dime on the gullible and the unsuspected.  Chow's tourists laugh and jeer at the exhibits with gusto as while me in the real audience find the material hardly amusing.

I heard the movie is doing well in China and in Asia in general.  So what do I know?

The Hateful Eight 70mm, Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The big news about The Hateful Eight is of course it was shot on 65mm film stock and transferred to 70mm print for projection.  Just like The Sound of Music or the good old days.  I believe the film was shot anamorphic meaning the image is actually squeezed vertically, and later un-squeezed (on to the 70mm print or during projection?) to make it even wider at 2.76:1 instead of the usual cinematic 2:39:1.

I went to see it in a movie theater by the Lincoln Square in Manhattan, which I think is one of the best.  It also houses one of the best IMAX theaters in the nation, or so I experience, or read and led to believe.

The few things I notice is the film is really film and by that I mean it evokes my early memories of seeing film with warts and all.  One thing I notice is that it isn't as wide or big as I thought it would be.  It is supposed to be wider than what's out there but I don't feel it that way.  The movie screen doesn't seem that gigantic or wide to begin with.  The flicker is pretty obvious right in the Overture before the start of the actual movie; and when the audio is off or low I can hear the sound of the projection which I think is something buried deep in my childhood memory and suddenly resurrected.  The outdoor blizzard scenes don't seem as sharp as it should be or I want it to be perhaps it's the nature of the medium or the scenes or a combination of them.  But the indoor shots seem sharp or sharp enough just not digitally sharp.  It has a rich quality to it.  The audio is great and I never notice any out of sync with the picture even though I tried hard to look at the lips too see if the dialogues are out of sync or not, and they aren't.  The film actually comes with intermission which I don't recall I ever experienced except for double features I saw eons ago.

So what is old is new again.  Film seems to be the next frontier, to be discovered, tamed and enjoyed once again.

By the way, the film is typical Tarantino, that's just another way of saying it got plenty of dialogues and gores, actually not so much for the latter by my standard.  Do I like it?  I like it all right but off the top of my head I am still more blown away by Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill--I saw Reservoir Dog on VHS too long ago to remember anything.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Thank goodness I only paid 6.75 for the ticket.  The movie is all right, very typical J.J.Abrams, very mediocre.

The Grandmaster

The Grandmaster is Hong Kong based director Wong Kar-wai's latest film in years.  This US release is 108-minute short, compared to the 130-minute premiered in China and the 123-minute played in the Berlin film festival.  This release has added on-screen explanatory texts, voice-overs and chronological story editing to help the stupid and attention deficit American audience understand the film.  It's hard to ignore the back story of the movie:  Tony Leung broke every bone preparing and pretending to fight,  Wong spent fifty years researching the movie, twenty years shooting haphazardly, ten contemplating and flip-flopping between a singular or a plural English title, and yet another ten on cutting, pasting and rearranging footage into something that resembles a film.  Of course, in the process, miles of footage were left on the cutting room floor, egos were bruised.  The back story takes on a life itself and completely overshadows the actual movie.

When the flag drops the bull shit stops.

The Grandmaster is a distillation of Wong's lyrical style of film making, beautifully and unapologetically rendered from cinematography, wardrobe, sound, music to of course the beautiful actors.  Kung-fu saves Yip Man, the title character, literally and spiritually, carries him through tumultuous times.  The film is peppered with pithy aphorisms.  Yip says kung-fu is just two words: horizontal and vertical, in the end, the one lies horizontal loses, the vertical one standing wins and he is the right one.  This is simplistic to a fault and almost offensive to boil down kung fu to street fighting level.  Or not?  Given the chance to be a collaborator during the Sino-Japanese war, he chooses to endure hardships rather than joining the Japanese.  Yip is pragmatic that if he fights he wants and needs to win.  He later flees Futshan to Hong Kong.  Not exactly heroic but sure pragmatic.  Yip was born to a very well-to-do family, he thinks it's only fair for him, in his forties, to experience hardship and starvation like most everybody else during wartime.  His twin daughters are later starved to death.  The Grandmaster is about kung-fu as much as Casablanca is about WWII.  Kung-fu is an integral part but there is more:  Wong's perennial theme of unrequited and unconsummated love.  Yip is a married man when he first meets Gong Er, played by Zhang Ziyi, the daughter of a kung-fu master from the North.  Gong Er is a master in her own right and her relationship with Yip is really love at first fight.  Gong tries to avenge the honor of her family by fighting Yip.  The fight, set indoor, more like a mating dance, is at once mesmerizing and borderline cheesy.  Wong Kar-wai just couldn't help himself having his slo-mo and close-up shots of the fine boned Zhang.  (Who could anyway?  Ang Lee couldn't either.)  Yip and Gong don't meet again until years later in Hong Kong but only to say fair well.  In between bad things happen to good people.  Gong Er's father is killed by his lead disciple Ma San and to avenge his death, Gong Er vows never get married or having any disciples in front of the Buddha (if she succeeds avenging the death of her father).  Be careful what you wish for.  Gong Er kills Ma though not without seriously getting hurt, which later leads to her opium addiction and ultimate demise.  At some point, Gong Er's house servant urges her to abandon her vow to Buddha as she is in Hong Kong, leading a brand new life in a brand new world, nobody knows any vow, implicitly suggesting her to be with Yip.  Gong, always strong willed, refuses because "heaven knows, earth knows."  She lives and dies by her own code of honor.  The tea house farewell between her and Yip is achingly beautiful and Zhang gives a knockout performance quietly but equally powerful like any kick she delivers, right to the heart of the audience.  Yip lives the life of kung-fu, the last man standing, vertical.

If style is the substance, is there no style over substance?  In this day and age, anything goes nothing matters, people pee, poop in public, disregard etiquette, manner even humanity among each other, it is refreshing and heartening to see a film that takes its style seriously and be reminded that once upon a time there are Chinese people who live honorable lives.

牯嶺街少年殺人事件 A Brighter Summer Day

***** SPOILER ALERT ******

There are movies I just go and see--because they kind of fit my schedule.  And there are movies I say I want to see but never did--because they kind of not fit my schedule. And then there is A Brighter Summer Day, an unapologetically, interminably, and spectacularly boring fine piece of film making. It takes certain courage, commitment, patience and plenty of luck and not to mention a whopping or meager $17 to see A Brighter Summer Day on the big screen.  The length of the movie can be and is a turnoff.  Who has that much of time to spare anyway except maybe mindlessly surfing the web and online gaming?  And even if you are committed to spend 237 minutes, not 2 hours and 37 minutes like Google would have you believed, of your life to see it, there hasn't really been a good copy available for the longest time.  It's an unicorn of a movie, an alluring film that has grown even more elusive for the past twenty years since its 1991 debut, anywhere but here in America.  Everything changed when Martin Scorsese and company restored the film and had it released here in Lincoln Center for a very limited theatrical one week engagement: 2PM and 7PM from November 25.  I guess if you missed it this time you missed it for good.  Or you may have to wait another twenty years to see it on big screen again.  Hey, you never know, but you can always count on YouTube, Google Video or other dark alleys and corners of the Internet for some version of it. The Chinese title <<牯嶺街少年殺人事件>> reads like a news headline, the name of an article in a news magazine or even the name of a police report; it means "Bullock Ridge Street Teenager Murder Incident"--thanks Google Translate!  Indeed, the film is loosely based on or rather inspired by the first teenage murder happened in Taiwan in the 60s after the National government fled there in 1949.  Director Yang and the juvenile murderer went to the same school.  The murder was a sensation and left an indelible mark on the director's psyche.  The film is an artistic reconstruction of the events leading up to the climatic killing which is as tragic as it is inevitable.  Chang Chen, in his cinematic debut, plays the eponymous character, though most of the times he is affectionately referred to as Xiao S'ir  小四 (little fourth, as in his birth order); who is like most other teenagers from the Chinese diaspora, hangs out with gangs, gets into fights, skips classes, enjoys ambiguous romance--in his case with Ming (Lisa Yang) or affectionately Xiao Ming--you add "Xiao" to make everything endearing, a passive aggressive inadvertent femme fatale, and given the opportunities or being pushed over the edge, he is capable to kill and did indeed kill.  The Changs are originally from Shanghai, which explains everything, doesn't it?  The handsome father (Zhang Guozhu, is the father of the two sons on and off screen) resembles someone from the old Shanghai intelligentsia who has enough pride and stubbornness that can give him more than a lifetime of constipation, and prevents him from being happy, and makes him feel forever out of place no matter how long he has lived in Taiwan and away from Shanghai.  Though to be fair, his unhappiness and feeling of alienation are not totally unfounded--he was taken away one night and interrogated by the secret police for days.  The fact that Xiao S'ir fails to get into a day middle school only gives him more the reason to feel miserable.  The father tried in vain to save Xiao S'ir from the evening middle school first by trying to talk the school bureaucrat to review his son's exam papers, which the bureaucrat would have none of it; then by going through some back door through his fellow Shanghainese old friend in high or higher place.  And as fate would have it or in real life, things only get worse without getting any better.  The English title "A Brighter Summer Day" is more of a yearning than a declarative statement.  The irony is, in addition to being a mis-transcription of one of the lines of Elvis's singing of Are You Lonesome Tonight, most scenes are shot almost pitch black with minimum lighting--there is nothing bright or summery to the movie. There is little let alone fancy camera movements (there is however one day scene where Xiao S'ir and Xiao Ming are shown merely and briefly as shadows on a white door talking, alluding to their fragile transient youthful existence or even demise) nor are there any special sound effects.  The very first thing I notice, after years of movie consumption, the film feels still and disturbingly quiet, there is no sound effect to remind me it's time to feel sad, empathetic or exciting.  Besides the constant gloom, the film is peppered with the director's own brand of humors.  I don't know how on earth one of the film's villains or actually a protagonist is called Honey, in actual English no less, and it's not even a she or meant to be a joke.  And then we have Little Cat (I guess so called for his love of Elvis who is nicknamed as Cat King in the Chinese speaking societies), Little Tiger, Triangular Pantie (the song used to taunt him is such a riot), and Crazy so on and so forth.  Or why the parents, in distress, curse and talk dirty in Cantonese.  Like any good comedy, though this one is obviously not, it's actually a tragedy in disguise.  In the final tragic scenes, Xiao S'ir was seen carrying and clumsily tucking a Japanese little sword into his waist band and it fell right through his pants.  The scene is at once innocent, sad, funny and ominous.  It just doesn't auger well what's going to happen.  In the movie's typical wide shot, the audience watches helplessly in horror as the tragedy unfolds while the passers-by or in a sense the whole world blissfully ignores what is going on, purposely or not .  As if to reaffirm what Xiao Ming says moments ago, "The world does not change because of you."  Lisa Yang never again appears in any movie after Chang Chen killed her character on screen.  I don't blame her.  It would be impossible for her to star in another movie that is as good and as long as A Brighter Summer Day.  Ask Chang Chen.  If you refuse to be entertained and long for something dark and gloomy, A Brighter Summer Day is your ticket to this spectacularly boring cinematic experience.