NYAFF, Part 2: Tactical Unit: Comrades in Arms (2009)

Law Wing-Cheong has paid his dues at Milkyway Image. Working as an assistant director and editor since 1995, he was the AD on Running Out of Time, The Mission, and PTU, among others. Milkway seems to work on the habits of the old studio system, where one apprenticed in technical positions before rising to the director's chair. Law has gotten his feet wet on a few sequels, with his first gig on Running Out of Time 2, up to his two sequels to PTU: Tactical Unit: The Code (2008, for TV), and Tactical Unit: Comrades in Arms (2009, theatrical). The latter film recently screened at the NYAFF, and was another example of Milkyway's well-oiled genre machinery (also see Tativille's take on their Eye in the Sky).

All the characters from Johnnie To's original return, including Simon Yam's ramrod straight cop Sam, his careerist competitor May (Maggie Siu), and the lazy, demoted curmudgeon, Fat Lo (Milkyway axiom Lam Suet). Sam's unit is competing with May's unit for promotion, and this not-so-friendly rivalry starts the film off on a Keystone Kops vibe. Filmed with slapstick vigor, the two teams chase down a petty thief, down opposite sides of the street, eventually combining into a morass of tangling feet, dangling handcuffs, and bruised morale. May's boys win out, and eventually are bumped upstairs.

The day before the promotions are to take place, though, a major bank heist takes place, and the perps disappear into a forest. Thus the two bickering units are forced to work together to take them down. This is where the main body of the film begins, and Law shows a distinctly light touch in this darkly scripted tale. His deft use of cross-cutting shows the various bumblings of the teams, as they all variously get lost in the bowels of the night, not unlike an old dark house comedy-horror film like The Cat and the Canary (1927).

As funny as it is, Law doesn't skimp on tension, wrapping things up with a tightly choreographed shootout in a quaint rural church. Esssentially it has everything one could desire in a quick and dirty crime film. Definitely worth seeking out, especially if you're a fan of PTU.

There are no more screenings, but it's readily available on HK DVD at the usual vendors (YesAsia, HKFlix, etc.)

New York Asian Film Festival, Part I: Written By (2009) and The Longest Nite (1998)

As integral to summer in NYC as panicked Mets fans proposing ridiculous trades on WFAN (Jon Niese for Matt Holliday, maybe?), the New York Asian Film Festival is quickly becoming the most entertaining film series in the city. It has the plums to program genre actioners along with the art films that tend to solely populate regional surveys here. The breadth of the NYAFF is its great strength, as was evidenced early on.

The opening night film was Wai Ka-Fai's Written By (2009), a narratively dense family drama. Ka-Fai has been Johnnie To's right hand man for over a decade at Milkyway Productions, writing, directing, producing, and polishing the eccentric company's output. He's known mostly for his co-writing and co-directing duties with To on Fulltime Killer (2001), Running on Karma (2003), and Mad Detective (2007), but he's also helmed idiosyncratic projects of his own, including the 2006 comedy The Shopaholics. His latest solo jaunt is an ambitious but strangely flat exercise in experimental narrative. It's structured like a Russian Doll, stories within stories within stories.

Lau Ching-Wan (a Wai regular since their TVB days) plays a lawyer who dies in a car accident, leaving his daughter Melody blind and his wife and son devastated. Trying to rekindle happy memories, Melody starts writing a story where her father survived (although also blinded) while the rest of the family died. The film then follows this second story, as Lau and his Filipino maid aimlessly putter about their large home. Lonely and desperate, this invented Lau starts to write his own story, a more fantastical tale where the ghosts of his family return to aid him through his depression. These story layers remain discrete until the final act, when characters begin crossing between stories and tragedies beget tragedies.

For all of its conceptual complexity, Written By never takes off dramatically. The characters are ciphers, thinly drawn receptacles of grief that serve as pawns in Wai's narrative game-playing, not unlike Charlie Kaufman's embalmed Synecdoche, New York. As Wai draws his deterministic web, Melody flails without a discernible inner life. Her attempt to exorcize her memories through her imagination is a potent device, but it stagnates on the screen. Wai never finds a consistent style to visualize her plight, and his use of subpar special effects lends the piece a Saturday morning cartoon insubstantiality. It ends up a tantalizing disappointment.

There was no lack of inspired Wai, though, for there was also a rare screening of 1998's The Longest Nite, a rescue job he performed with Johnnie To. Credited director Patrick Yau was fired after he had completed five scenes, and the duo built an entirely new story around this feeble skeleton. It turned out to be a punishingly dark yakuza tale, as Tony Leung and Lau Ching-Wan's mobsters tumble into an abyss of violence and swapped identities.

The film is literally dark, using very little artificial light and framing the bald, glowering Lau as a black angel of the apocalypse. Leung, a twitchy crooked cop, is soon framed-up for a fall, and his only way out is to assume Lau's identity. Only one can survive, so they devour each other for the use of it, in a mirror-smashing finale redolent of Welles' Lady from Shanghai. In the Q&A that followed (available online), Wai admits this final battle was hatched on the spot, as they needed 10 minutes to fill and had little money. So they rented an empty warehouse, shaved Leung's head, and had them beat the shit out of each other. It's a miraculous bit of improvisation, and the film is a testament to Wai and To's adaptive creativity.

More to come...

The Best of Ought-Eight

Ah, the year-end list. Nothing makes me shudder with excitement more. Let's get it out of the way. From any festival and theatrical screenings in 2008, in alphabetical order:

A Christmas Tale
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Flight of the Red Balloon
Gran Torino
The Headless Woman
In the City of Sylvia
Sparrow
Still Life
Tokyo Sonata
Wendy and Lucy

Honorable mentions: United Red Army, Wall-E, The Duchess of Langeais, RAZZLE DAZZLE, Step Brothers, La France, The Romance of Astree and Celadon, Before I Forget, You Don't Mess With the Zohan, Redbelt, Che, Happy-Go-Lucky, Mad Detective, 24 City, Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, My Winnipeg, Be Kind Rewind, The Secret of the Grain

Now I feel better. It's been another strong year for American cinema, and a heartening one. The continued maturation of David Fincher is probably the most exciting news, his talent for subordinating digital gimmickry to the demands of story and character is unparalleled. Benjamin Button is not only a technical marvel, but a lovely meditation on all that is fleeting in life. As far as treatises on death go, it's an adult next to Synechdoche, New York's adolescent self-loathing. Then there's Eastwood's on-going investigation of aging and violence, Kelly Reichardt's devastatingly soft-spoken Wendy, and the perplexing audacity of Soderbergh's Che, a mammoth anti bio-pic about the process of waging a guerilla war and filming one. For me personally, I'd take this year in American film over last year's more ballyhooed crop of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. And that's without even mentioning the vibrancy on the comedy scene, with the buzzing anarchy of Step Brothers, the sentimental lunacy of Zohan, and the various small character pleasures of the Apatow and Stiller crop.

The movie that I urge one and all to see, though, is Johnnie To's deliriously passionate Sparrow. Screened only as part of the New York Asian Film Festival, but now availabe on HK DVD, it's a project To had been working on for 3 years, in between his higher budgeted features. Often described as a musical without songs, it follows a group of pickpocketing brothers as they get ensared in the web of Kelly Lin's femme fatale, who has been forced into a union with a local crime boss. Filled with lyrical passages of a bustling HK, it then explodes into symphonically complex heist sequences, done with little regard for common sense. Balloons float down affixed with a safe key, criminals engage in a thieving dance underneath a downpour, with the umbrellas used in twirling Busby Berkeley-esque patterns. Suffused with a love of movies and his hometown, it's irresistable and astonishing.

And by all means look out for Tokyo Sonata next year, which is getting a NYC release next March. It's a new high for Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who takes his talent for haunted male psyches into the sphere of family drama. Koji Yakusho steals the show.

EDIT: To copy the sage Matt Singer, here are my fave older releases that I saw in '08:

A Modern Musketeer (1917) [MoMA]
3 Bad Men (1924) [Ford at Fox box set]
Man's Castle (1933) [TCM]
Ceiling Zero (1936) [BAM]
The Bells of St. Mary's (1945) [DVD]
99 River St. (1953) [Film Forum]
Lola Montes (1955) [Film Forum]
Doomed Love (1979) [BAM]
Bronco Billy (1980) [DVD]
Mélo (1986) [DVD]

****

In other, less-informed news:

My favorite albums of the year are:

1.The Unreleased Hank Williams

Ashton Shepherd - Sounds So Good
Lucinda Williams - Little Honey
Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III


Books:

2666, by Roberto Bolano
Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Terror and Consent, by Philip Bobbitt

Johnnie To Interview

An e-mail interview I did with Johnnie To in advance of the New York Asian Film Festival went up today at IFC News. I wish I has been able to speak with him over the phone for a more in-depth talk, but he's already knee deep in preparation for his Le Cercle Rouge remake. So while the interview is fairly choppy, rest assured it's for a good cause.

NYAFF: Sparrow (2008)

For Johnnie To, who consistently directs two (or more) films a year, Sparrow is an anomaly. Taking over three years to make, it has the feel of a sketchbook, filled with ideas too offbeat for his larger productions, they've been tossed around his head until they've been polished to a high sheen. This is a personal project in every way. He filmed it in the spare days between the Elections, Exiled, and Mad Detective, gathering Simon Yam and Kelly Lin to shoot scattered sequences. It's a remarkable run he's on now, but for me, Sparrow is the richest. It reveals To's priorities - which are luxuriantly visual.

The plot is minimal, but every tracking shot tells its own story. Simon Yam is the eldest of a group of pickpocketing brothers, each of whom is drawn into the enigmatic web of Kelly Lin, a sulking femme fatale yearning to break free from her aging sugar daddy, who happens to be a thief himself. Kelly spins this web in a series of breathtaking duets. With Simon, it begins with the eponymous sparrow, who flutters into his apartment to the accompaniment of a chirping, grand Legrand-like score. Later, he tours Hong Kong on his bike, taking snaps of the passersby with his film camera, and To, a film over DV guy, further identifies himself with Yam by irising his lens to ape Yam's. Narrative is ignored to take some B&W portraits of his city, and Sparrow is in many ways his ode to Hong Kong, whose vertiginous verticals baffle and charm Yam's clan throughout. But then Kelly runs into his frame, trying to escape, so Yam captures her in his camera. A few clicks and she's gone.

She entrances Yam's three brothers in turn: through inhaling endless bottles of wine, seducing a balloon in an elevator, and, above all, smoking. Yam lights a cig in her car, Lin impishly snags it from his lips. An achingly slow slo-mo follows, a blur of lipstick smears and glowingly glamorous close-ups. I swooned out of my seat, so the details are hazy. Let's just say it's pure cinema - emotion delivered by motion. Which is what the whole film is, truly. It hearkens back to Hawks with its male group of professionals and games of "are you good enough". It recalls Demy in its tinkly jazz score, the arrangement of bodies in the frame, and the umbrellas. Except these umbrellas are black, are used as weapons, and are the subject of a finale as transcendent as Demy's parapluies of Cherbourg.

UPDATE: The geniuses over at Tativille have chimed in on Sparrow as well, calling it "a film of unsurpassed tactility". Seconded!

NOTE: Look out for my interview with Johnnie To at IFC News sometime next week. Also: see Ken Jacobs' RAZZLE DAZZLE: The Lost World. It's at Anthology Archives this week, and will blow your goddamn mind.

Mad Detective (2007)

I couldn't wait. IFC Films is releasing Johnnie To's Mad Detective on July 18th, but the Hong Kong DVD has been available for some time now (which Dave Kehr kindly let us know about) and I caved. To reunites with writing partner Wai Ka-fai for the first time since 2003's knockabout Buddhist action-comedy Running On Karma and once again they tap a spiritual/supernatural theme, with the fucked-up lead (To regular Lau Ching-wan) claiming to have the ability to see people's split personalities. After a string of successes solving cases "emotionally" instead of factually (he gets himself into the headspace of victims and killers, getting tossed down stairs, etc.), he slices off his ear as a gift for his captain. He's tossed off the force - and To never reveals how insane his tousled lead actually is, cutting deftly back and forth between Lau's visions and "reality", never judging or revealing their truth. That's left up to the proverbial viewer to decide.

Lau never tips his hand either, making his insane acts endearing, hinting at a structure behind his actions that never quite reaches the surface. The character is no easy read. Stylistically it's a cleaner, more subdued work than the previous slice of action perfection, Exiled, but it serves up a superbly timed climax, a Lady From Shanghai ode that the above photo gives you a taste of. Perfectly suited to the lead's shattered psyche, this hall of mirrors shoot 'em up ranks with the best of his work. Pay specific attention the final shots, as Lau's partner decides how to tell the next part of the story, actively constructing a future narrative whose motivations are as obscure as the preceding one.

In some ways it's a darker version of To and Ka-fai's My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, also starring Lau. In that bit of haunted house slapstick, Lau is a boyish ghost who tags along with a young slobbish widow suspected of offing her husband (he died a few days after the marriage). A film of false visions and abundant black humor, it's a sprightlier take on the subject matter of mystical visions - plus it wields an ending of surprising pathos which drove Spinster Aunt into an extended crying jag.

The prolific Mr. To has already released two more films after Detective. The first, Linger (2008) (trailer here) is a melodramatic soap that has received no attention, presumably because it's not an action film. According to Grady Hendrix's Variety blog it was dumped into minor theaters in HK with little fanfare. It clearly has no shot for U.S. distribution, so hopefully the DVD will be released soon. Then there's Sparrow (2008), which recently premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and has me all hot under the collar, being compared to The Young Girls of Rochefort and such.

The only thing that could get me as excited would be two Clint Eastwood releases in one year. Oh my.

Film Comment Selects: Exiled (2006)

Johnnie To is a master. There's no more doubt in my mind after seeing Exiled, the second film this prolific HK director made last year (the other, Triad Election, the sequel to '05's Election, opens at Film Forum on April 25.

Screening as a part of the eclectic Film Comment Selects series at the Walter Reade Theatre in Lincoln Center, it's a tightly scripted action film centered around the friendship of four gangsters. It's a pseudo-sequel to 1999's The Mission (a must rent for me now), containing the same cast playing different characters.

Mark Olsen's description in the press notes compares the film to both Leone and Peckinpah, and I'd have to agree with him. The ritualistic action sequences that favor grand operatic gestures over realism are pure Leone, while the fatalistic attitude of a group of men whose moral codes are passe in the modern age is derived from Peckinpah, while the final shootout is a direct homage to The Wild Bunch.

But enough about the past...the film is bracing from the start, as To is a brilliant crafter of opening sequences (see the astonishing long take that opensBreaking News for a further example). Two duos descend upon a humble corner house. In succession they knock on a woman's door, looking for a man named Wo. In the exact same shot-countershot set-up, the woman disavows Wo's existence. Then, in a high angle crane shot, we see the two groups relax in a nearby public garden. Their leaders, Simon Yam and Anthony Wong, share a cigar. Everyone lights up. Then a blue moving truck rumbles into view, and they wordlessly descend upon it, staring at the man inside but allowing him to enter. A cowardly cop drives up, only to be driven off by the pinpoint shooting of a aluminum can sitting near his feet. Yam and Wong follow Wo up the stairs, setting up a classic Leone-esque standoff that begins the story proper.

What's amazing about this opener is how much story and character information is dispensed without saying a word. The woman's stubborness is deepened as the film progresses, eventually becoming a central element. The cop shows up throughout the film, a self-consciously comic counterpoint (he retires at midnight!) to the pistol opera happening around him. The cigar lighting belies a deep friendship between Yam and Wong that is explored and problematized through each succsessive action sequence. The blue truck becomes an escape vehicle, which then breaks down - another motif repeated throughout. The aluminum can returns in the final shootout as an ingenius way to time the quickness of the battle. The economy and grace of his storytelling is astounding (and I've only mentioned a few of the patterns he introduces), especially considering that he produces two films a year.

And it's all anchored by Anthony Wong's face (sitting, above), one seemingly forged for the cinema - with drooping jowls, cavernous pockmarks, and perpetual sunglasses. His stonefaced charisma introduces a note of comic tension into every shot he's in - making Exiled a very funny film among it's many other virtues. He's a brilliant comedian, something which I noticed in the otherwise drab drag racing hit Initial D.

And oh those action sequences. Flowing curtains, doors flying end over end, the unexpected uses of tarpaulin, and luxuriant slow-motion caused some dumbfounded grins to perk up my non-cinematic visage.

Exiled was picked up by Magnolia Pictures, but no release date has been set, as far as I can tell.