31: Through the Olive Trees (a.k.a. Zire Darakhatan Zeyton-Original Persian title)

            Some movies are all about their final shot.  Without it, they’re less than the sum of all their other parts, but with it they are so much more.  Such is the case with Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (1994).  Presumably based on events that took place during the filming of Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987) and Life, and Nothing More (1991), the film rounds out an unofficial trilogy, that preceded Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997), for which he won the Palme D’Or at Cannes.  It has been some time since I saw that film, but if pressed to choose, I’d say I preferred Olive Trees to the later movie.  While the 1994 picture may not have the consistent tension that Taste of Cherry possesses, I feel that it builds to a slightly more rewarding—if equally uncertain—ending.

            Kiarostami uses the only professional actor he’d ever hired up until that time, Mohamed Ali Keshavarz, in the role of a director trying to film a movie in post-earthquake Northern Iran.  He and his crew arrive with the hope of casting locals in the key roles (as Kiarostami had always done), but can’t seem to find a young man and woman to play a recently married couple.  The AD (Zarifeh Shiva) thinks she has it right, but finds that the actress might be difficult to work with and that she doesn’t really understand the role.  After casting calls and wardrobe issues the director is ready to shoot, but finds that the young man he’s cast stammers when he speaks to women, making him less than ideal for the role of the husband.

              A replacement actor is called in, but things go from bad to worse.  He’s unable to make it to the set when a municipal rebuilding project blocks the roadway.  When he does arrive, it turns out that he has asked the actress who will play his wife to marry him, and that she has rebuffed his proposal, and now refuses to speak to him.  Neither performer really seems all that interested in the success of the film.  She studies between and even during takes, and he proclaims his love for her every time the director calls “cut.”  Both of them have trouble following direction.  They shoot, and shoot, and shoot; one bad take after another, building the frustration I always seem to experience in Kiarostami pictures.  He begs her to show him some sign that she loves him as well, but she is resolute in her silence.  They continue in this pattern until finally the director is satisfied (or exhausted).

            The film is a multitude of slices of life, but none better than the final scene.  After shooting is wrapped, the actress decides not to wait for a ride back to the village from the set.  She begins to walk, carrying a plant that the production team borrowed for the filming.  The director, by now sympathetic to the actor’s lovelorn plight, suggests that he follow her as she walks.  As he pursues her through the hills and the trees of the film’s title, he continues his proclamations of love.  After what seems like miles, the camera that has trailed behind the two stops at the top of a hill.  I could only speculate as to what this pause of secondary motion* symbolizes for Kiarostami, but I can say with certainty that to watch these two people continue to walk on, her leading and him following, as they get smaller and smaller, is deeply moving.  Aided by Domenico Cimarosa’s “Conc. C 4.Allegro Giusto,” it is an almost perfect shot.

            Through the Olive Trees, like all of Kiarostami’s work, builds to a conclusion that leaves more questions than answers.  When I reviewed his The Wind Will Carry Us (1999; #70) back in December I noted that I was interested in seeing his Certified Copy (2010), which was stirring up notable debate amongst critics as to the possible twists contained therein.  Having now seen that film I can attest to its greatness and to the credibility of this debate.  In the end, I don’t think it really matters what you believe about the couple at the film’s center (the same could be said for Through the Olive Trees), but that you’ve experienced what they’ve experienced for the time you’ve been with them.  After all, the film wouldn’t be half the fun without the speculation.

            This was the final Kiarostami film I needed to see from the 1001 list, and in a way I’m glad this worked out to be the last.  It is my favorite of the four, surpassing along with Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us the dreadful Close-Up (1990).  I have no doubt that Certified Copy will be canonized in the next edition, and rightfully so, but for now this is Kiarostami’s best film on the list.  My favorite theory about film writing says that essentially there are only two stories: a man goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town.  The great thing about the best Kiarostami films is that you have to decide which one of those stories you are watching.  That’s usually the secret to the mysteries they hold.   

Language: Persian

Runtime: 103 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 3 Hats Off  

*camera movement

32: The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain-Original French title)

            I think there are two essential questions raised by director Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973).  The first is a matter of form, and the second is a matter of content.  Is it possible to make an interesting movie about boring people?  That’s first and foremost.  Reviewers asked this question upon the film’s release, and those who weren’t stymied by its three and a half hour runtime found that indeed such a feat was attainable.  The trick is in the writing and the casting.  So often, movies are about people who appear to be boring realizing their potential and becoming great.  This picture is about how tedious and unexciting it is to appear interesting while never actually realizing any potential whatsoever. 

            In Eustache’s mind no actor could better convey this paradox than Jean-Pierre Léaud, Truffaut’s reliable alter-ego.  In this role, written specifically for him by Eustache, he breaks free of the confines of Antoine Doinel, but he never really leaves him behind.   He is Alexandre, a self-centered pseudo intellectual whose “busy” life seems evenly divided between sleeping, pretending to read in cafes, and picking up women.  He lives with a woman, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), but he treats her badly, never willing to commit to their relationship.  He’s fixated on an old flame, and as the film opens he gets out of bed with Marie to arrange to meet his former lover. 

            When she rejects him, he doesn’t seem particularly upset.  After all, there are still plenty of hours in the day.  He drinks and smokes with a friend and discusses his favorite banal topics, all the while hoping to meet another potential conquest.  Eventually she materializes in the form of Veronika, played by Eustache’s own former lover Françoise Lebrun.  Though at first Alexandre is tepid in his pursuit, his interest is peaked when he begins to realize that she is just as adept, and perhaps even better, at the game of sexual musical chairs. 

            He begins an affair with Veronika, making only what appear to be intentionally poor attempts to hide it from Marie.  When she discovers the romance, she’s marginally hurt but even less surprised.  She and Alexandre fight, but nothing comes of it.  In writing, Eustache was clever enough to realize that the audience that would accept this film wasn’t interested in major changes, and for that matter, neither are Alexandre and Marie.  She claims to love him, as does Veronika, but I don’t recall him ever declaring love for her.  I was compelled to wonder why she didn’t kick him out—after all, it is her apartment he sleeps at—like any decent woman would, but was then reminded by the film’s title that neither of the women Alexandre is interested in is particularly decent.  To him, women really only have two functions. 

            While ultimately Eustache is able to generate sympathy for his female characters, even as they both remain sexually subservient to Alexandre, their actions rarely seem justified.  Despite his evident loafer status, Marie is always willing to take her boyfriend back, and even warms to Veronika when it becomes clear that she isn’t going away.  The three form a love triangle that is wholly beneficial to none of the parties, and yet are temporarily content to remain sexually available but emotionally distant from each other.

            These characters lead the type of lives that sound interesting, but are in actuality tremendously without excitement.  They sometimes seem to fight simply because there isn’t anything else to do when they are tired of sex.  This unfortunately begins to feel formulaic in a 212 minute film.  Yes, it has its interesting moments, but they are more often generated through the subtle but growing distances we sense between the characters than by any scenes of sex or violent outbursts.  Alexandre (perhaps in an extension of Doinel) sometimes comments that these events remind him of a bad movie, and it’s difficult to tell whether Eustache is being ironic.

            He based this film on events from his own life, which leads me to wonder whether he and his characters are self-centered, or just his movie is.  It is a picture comprised of three and a half hours of conversations that ultimately add up to very little having been discussed.  Yes, this is an interesting movie about particularly boring people, but I don’t know whether that ultimately means that the people are boring, or that sex is.  This leads to the second question the film raises.  Was the sexual revolution really all that revolutionary?  Alexandre would likely claim that it was, but he’s simply using women’s lib and sexual liberation as his excuse to get laid.  He is, in effect, a chauvinist of the truest form, and so immature that he can’t even conceive of a different way to perceive women.

Language: French

Runtime: 212 Minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 2.5 Hats Off  

33: The Bitch (a.k.a. La Chienne-Original French title; a.k.a. Ain’t Life a Bitch-Loose translation)

            La Chienne (1931) isn’t a Renoir masterpiece.  Critics usually refer to his late 1930s works, such as The Grand Illusion (1938) and The Rules of the Game (1939), when looking for the film that defines classical French cinema, and they are right to do so.  However, I was reminded this week by the release of the Sight and Sound poll, and Roger Ebert’s subsequent response blog, that choosing a single film as the definitive work of a director’s overall output can be dangerous.  Vertigo (1958), which topped the 2012 S&S list, doesn’t define or encompass Hitchcock.  Yes, most of his consistent themes and techniques are there (as well as some tricks he used only once), but no novice movie fan is going to get everything Hitch had to offer from that one piece.  They may not even like it.  Audiences didn’t upon its initial release, and Hitchcock wasn’t particularly fond of it.   

            But Vertigo is, without doubt, great.  In the context of Hitchcock’s career, he was at the top of his game.* Ultimately, I believe it was voted the greatest film ever because it is a great work from a universally respected director who made many great films.  It dethroned Citizen Kane (1941), atop the British magazine’s perch since 1962, and a movie that has benefitted from two factors unrelated to its production (as well as numerous creative elements that were).

 Kane was essentially forbidden fruit upon its release; kept when possible from the public at great costs by its unwilling inspiration, media magnate William Randolph Hurst.  When it was finally available to a wide audience, the anticipation added to the art.  Thus it ascended to glory in the 1962 S&S voting.  Perhaps even more alluring is that the film represents what might have been.  After Hurst’s slander campaign of the picture, Orson Welles was never again given the creative control that made Kane a masterpiece.  And though he made other great films, Citizen Kane remains a lone masterpiece from a director who had seemingly limitless potential.  People often say that ironically Yoko Ono made the Beatles what they were.  People simply didn’t want it to end, and they still don’t (me at least).  Perhaps it is the same with Hurst and Welles.  It wouldn’t be the only irony between them.

            All this to say that it is important to think about films within the context of the times, lives, and careers of those who made them.  In this regard La Chienne is a valuable motion picture.  Renoir’s second sound film, it was also his second collaboration with Michael Simon, the actor who came to represent French cinema of the 1930s.  Simon plays Legrand, a lowly clerk and cashier who is mistaken for a wealthy businessman by the prostitute Lulu.  Legrand comes to care for Lulu, and through deceptions sets her up in an apartment as his mistress.  His shrewish wife doesn’t seem to notice the money he slyly sneaks to support her, and is happy that his habit of painting seems to have subsided. 

            Meanwhile Lulu engages in her own deceptions.  Passing the paintings Legrand creates at the apartment off as the work of a young American artist, she and her boyfriend/Pimp Dédé devise a scheme to get rich in the art market.  Dédé encourages Lulu’s relationship with Legrand as it keeps the bills paid, all the while pretending to be her brother.  His motivations are self serving as well, as much of the art profits go toward his gambling debts.

            The complications of Legrand’s relationship with his wife begin to mount until fate intervenes.  Her first husband, long assumed dead, approaches the distressed lecher.  He proposes a change of status, and one of the film’s best scenes concerns the bargaining these two husbands engage in over their mutual wife.  Eventually, without legitimate claim to his bride, Legrand happily resolves to bow out and take up residence with Lulu.  However, things take a turn for the worse when he shows up to find her in bed with Dédé.

            Like much of Renoir’s work, La Chienne can’t be defined as a simple comedy or tragedy.  Both elements are at play here.  The director has serious things to say about humanity and society, but he isn’t above making his audience laugh to make his points evident.  He lays the groundwork with this film for his later tours de force, and to experience his sense of growing confidence as a director is a reward.  The film is gritty, emotional, and at times playful, and throughout Renoir changes tones deftly.  Viewing La Chienne is viewing a master artist begin to shape his oeuvre.         

           

Language: French

Runtime: 91 minutes

Available @Youtube.com

Grade: 2.5 Hats Off

*or getting there.  I prefer Psycho (1960), which he made two years later when he wanted to go back to low-budget basics.

34: Report

            At 13 minutes, I believe avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner’s Report (1967), is the second briefest movie in the 1001 canon (bested in this category only by the list’s second title, The Great Train Robbery (1902)).  The film was made as a response to the Kennedy assassination in the fall of 1963, and contains both network news footage of the event and local coverage, as well as numerous images related to the shooting only through Conner’s use of editing.   

One would suppose that the popular fascination with these events, as well as the film’s short runtime, would, in this modern world of YouTube, make it one of the easiest titles on the list to view.  Not so.  In fact, to see the film (which apart from one incredibly rare DVD release is only available on 16mm) I had to travel to the Windy City, where one of the technicians at the School of the Art Institute was kind enough to screen it for me.   Of course, upon my return and my subsequent sitting down to write this blog, I found it posted in plain sight online when I Googled “Bruce Conner’s Report.”

Minor frustration aside, here it is:  http://www.stickam.com/viewMedia.do?mId=192157747

I’ll let you experience it for yourself, as I think any dedicated film fan should, but I will give you some background.  Conner started recording the live TV coverage of the assassination on super 8 almost immediately.  He was primarily drawn to the event as he was living in Kennedy’s birthplace, Brookline, MA, throughout that fall.  He stated after the film’s release that he used the project as a way of dealing with the tragedy, commenting on the events and the media sensation they created while trying to come to grips with the myriad emotions they both generated.  

Conner screened his initial cut of the picture to the Harvard film society in 1964.  Working with funds from a Ford Foundation grant, he subsequently created at least six different versions of the film, each the same length, before completing the work in ’67.  Conner often said that he felt as though finishing was admitting that the assassination was in fact a reality.

This is a moving film on numerous levels.  It was made available 8 years before the (in)famous Zapruder footage was shown on television, and it thus captures and casts the tragedy in a unique light.  With his editing technique, Conner manages to be both reverent and humorous in his short time with the viewer.  Report is in many ways the “Holy Grail” of found footage films and ironically, up until its recent posting, it was difficult to find. 

I’m glad I took the trip to Chicago regardless.  To see Report with the clicking of the projector behind me was unique and rewarding (take that, internet).  I also had to the chance to peek into the Flaxman Library’s stacks of 16mm prints.  The collection currently sits in limbo between availability and archive status, and screenings have to be scheduled, but contained on those shelves was enough movie gold to make any cinefile weak in the knees.  With Report I only scratched the surface.

For much more in-depth criticism of the film, check out Adrian Danks’ (Lecturer of Media at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) 2009 article in Senses of Cinema : http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/cteq/report/.  

Language: English

Runtime: 13 Minutes

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off

35: Cyclo (a.k.a. Xich Lo—Original Vietnamese title)

            I can’t agree with the premise laid out in the 1001 text that Anh-Hung Tran’s Cyclo (1995) derives greatness from the fact that it showcases the modern Hanoi to a Western society that hadn’t seen the city since Ho Chi Minh renamed it for himself.  That explanation is too simplistic, and is ultimately derived from a Eurocentric perspective that the film was made for audiences outside of Vietnam.  And while I’m sure that Tran enjoys the international appreciation of his film, I would assume that he made it as much (if not more) for his domestic audience than he did in the hopes of winning the Golden Lion at Venice, which he did.  Yes, Cyclo is an exploration of the city’s seedy underworld, and yes it is deeply concerned with the rhythms of the streets, but to assume that these images and rhythms would be less poignant had they been available in the interim between U.S. troop withdrawals and 1995 is ridiculous.  They stand on their own merit.   

            The plot of the film is both simple and complex.  It asks us to follow the lives of many individuals, but emphasizes two young men who essentially inhabit two different Hanois.  The first is Cyclo, the generic name given to pedicab drivers, who lives a meager existence currying passengers across town to provide for his sisters and grandfather.  The second young man is Poet (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), a stoic henchman for the loan shark who lent out the money for Cyclo’s cab.  The two men are brought together after a rival criminal faction steals the cab as retaliation for a fare taken to their own protected neighborhood.  The persistent turf war covers everything from cab fares, to prostitution, to drugs, and Cyclo is drawn in full force.

            To pay back the money he still owes on the cab to the loan shark she forces him into Poet’s gang of thugs.  At first he’s expected to commit petty crimes and disruptions in the rival’s neighborhood, but increasingly he’s called on to smuggle drugs and even perform a hit.  He becomes more and more wrapped up in the lifestyle, taking drugs and partying, but less connected to the family he once supported.  He’s so aloof in fact, that he doesn’t recognize that Poet has also tapped his sister to work for him as a prostitute.  When the pressures of gang life and struggles to maintain his family finally boil over, Cyclo finds that he has little left in life that he can rely on. 

            Cyclo is a striking film, using a unique color pallet and varying film speeds to create its artistic visuals.  Though its plot is loosely related to De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), there is enough of a departure in its scope and number of characters that it feels original.  Whereas De Sica’s film focused on the father and son at its center, Tran’s picture feels like a completed picture of a subset of the city’s population.  Though this occasionally makes for a confusing narrative, it is ultimately a rewarding one.

Is it notable that this film emerged from Vietnam after years of relative cinematic silence from that nation?  Yes.  Is that what makes it an effective picture?  No.  Its story would be moving, and its visuals and sense of place would be powerful in any context.  As a story of lost innocence and seemingly immanent corruption, it is universal.  Consider the scene in which Poet pimps out a young girl  in a club to a high roller with U.S. cash.  Radiohead's "Creep" plays over the club's sound system, and I get the sense that Poet knows its about him even if he can't understand the words.  In any language he knows that he's sold his soul for something worth much less. 

Language: Vietnamese

Runtime: 123 Minutes

Grade: 3 Hats Off   

36: Safe

            I can’t think of a film (non-documentary) made in the last five years that was as pretentious as Todd Haynes’ I’m not There. (2007).  It is the story of Bob Dylan, perhaps the American artist of the last fifty years, told through seven separate narratives in which Dylan is played by seven different actors, each representing a unique element of the Dylan mythology.  Essentially, the film (and Haynes) makes the sub-textual claim that Dylan is too complex to be covered in the traditional biopic format that served Ray Charles and Johnny Cash so well; that he is somehow beyond being defined by the art of motion pictures.  Then of course, the film attempts to define him by the same terms it rejects, expecting the audience to applaud this effort.  In short, I’m not There. attempted to be the definitively non-definitive definitive Dylan movie.  Why the hell else would Haynes have included a period in the film’s title?

             Despite some solid performances, and positive press generated by the death of costar Heath Ledger, Haynes 2007 effort basically turned me off the director’s work.  I have yet to seek out his Velvet Goldmine (1998) and have been forced to rethink my position on his well-executed, but ultimately lackluster Far From Heaven (2002).  As such, I approached Haynes’ Safe (1995) with caution.  I found much of the film’s first half hour to be formulaic and dull, but I must confess that unlike the other work I’d seen from the director, this movie took me in unexpected directions.

            Safe stars Julianne Moore as Carol White, a San Fernando Valley housewife of the 80s who lives a life of banality.  She has no job, no hobbies, and no real reason to get out of bed in the morning.  Essentially, she lives for her routine of keeping up appearances.  She is not unhappy, nor unloving, but her life is empty.  The most excitement she expresses is over the delivery of a new couch…only it’s not the one she ordered: “It can’t be black.  Everything we have is teal.”  Carol has little to get worked up over—she doesn’t even sweat when she does aerobics—and little to fear.  She can hardly walk around her yard after dark without alerting the attention of a patrol car.  She is as safe as could be in her closed world.

            But something does attack Carol; something she can neither prevent nor understand.  She seems to be suffering from unexplainable ailments.  At first they take the form of headaches and ostensibly benign rashes, but these nuisances begin to wear her down.  She sees a doctor and is pronounced perfectly healthy, though he does suggest she slow down on her dairy intake.  These early scenes drag into near tedium as Haynes sets the stage for a payoff, but emotional outbursts are sparse in this picture.  I spent several minutes waiting for what felt like an obligatory, and obviously cliché, spilling of one of the glasses of milk Carol asks her maid to bring her, just thinking that such a scene would break up the monotony.

            Eventually escalation does occur, as Carol begins to experience panic attacks and bloody noses.  Though she’s convinced that she’s more than physically exhausted, her doctor insists that she is perfectly healthy.  She tries dietary changes to alleviate her symptoms, but nothing seems to work.  Eventually she stumbles onto a self help group for those experiencing similar ailments, and diagnoses herself as “chemically sensitive,” a condition resulting from prolonged exposure to the compounded elements of the late twentieth century. 

            She takes the diagnosis seriously, and begins carrying an oxygen mask with her almost everywhere she goes.  When exposed to a pesticide, she has a minor stroke.  Convinced she needs treatment outside of the city, she checks into a detox-style rehabilitation center in rural New Mexico.  Though her husband and step son continue to not understand her condition they try to be supportive, even though the center seems more like a cult than a place of healing.

            What gives Safe its edge is the fact that Haynes wisely remains neutral toward his subject.  The sense of commentary on materialism that drowns the picture’s early sequences begins to give way to the question of the legitimacy of Carol’s illness.  Whether she experiences these discomforts out of a desire to feel anything at all, or she is legitimately allergic to modernity is left up to the viewer.  Haynes gives his audience the choice to decide for themselves, even avoiding several easy sucker punches at the self help sector.  Yes, Carol seems to be in the midst of a cult by the film’s conclusion, but Haynes does not try to persuade us into thinking that this is necessarily a bad thing.  For Carol, the rehab center seems just right.

            The Village Voice* critic’s poll named Safe as the best film of the 1990s.  I suspect that this was due in large part to the fact that this picture so well foreshadowed the paranoia that accompanied the time period in which such end-of-decade polls were being taken and published.  Looking back, I suspect the critics’ choice would be different, particularly as Haynes covered much of the same material of the film’s early sequences, again with Moore, in Far From Heaven.  Still, I think Safe is a relevant piece of 1990s cultural assessment of both the decade it seceded and the end of the twentieth century.  The 1001 write up on the movie refers to it as a horror film, and while I don’t think I was ever scared while watching it (and even laughed a bit) I can’t think of what else I would label it.  Perhaps this is another aspect in which Haynes ambiguity also serves this odd film.

         

Language: English

Runtime: 119 Minutes

Grade: 3 Hats Off

*realizing that this was the second review in a row in which I’ve referenced this publication, I wanted to note that I am not on their payroll       

37: Peking Opera Blues (a.k.a. Do ma Daan—Original Cantonese title)

            I learned from the (limited—not that I really cared) special features on the Mega Star DVD release of Hark Tsui’s Peking Opera Blues (1986) that upon the film’s initial U.S. run it garnered the high praise of the Village Voice, which said it “out Spielberg’s Spielberg.”  While retrospect makes this comment seem silly at best, and while it was over-zealous even in its time, I can at least say I understand why the reviewer makes the comparison to the Indiana Jones director.  Indeed, Peking Opera Blues capitalizes on the Action Adventure/Comedy trend that the Jones films spawned, but for my taste this picture relies far too heavily on the latter element of that genre mash up. 

            Through well-imagined—if not necessarily well shot—fight sequences, the film follows the story of five revolutionaries brought together amidst the chaos of the Chinese warlord conflicts of the 1910s.  Though these characters’ motivations vary drastically, they find themselves each drawn into a plot revolving around an envelope of military dispatches.  These papers are the classic MacGuffin, and their content is utterly unimportant to the story.  What does come to matter are the relationships between three women and two men (a rare gender pairing in the movies if ever there was one) who fight to capture them before they can be delivered.   

            Emerging as the strongest character in the bunch is Tsao Wan (Brigitte Lin), the daughter of a general whose forces invade the city.  In secret, she works as an agent against her father, almost all the while keeping close by his side.  Dressing in masculine clothes, her gender bending brings to the forefront the subtext of gender issues present throughout the film.  Also pointing to these issues is the character Pat Neil (Sally Yeh), who longs to be an acrobatic performer in her father’s all-male theatre troupe.  The two women encounter each other at the opera house where the troupe performs, as it is often used as a meeting place in plain sight by the underground forces.  The third primary female drawn into the plot is Sheung Hung (Cherie Chung), a musician who is in hot pursuit of a jewel box looted from the previous warlord as he fled Peking.  The Jewels also end up at the opera house, mistaken for costume pieces and become Sheung’s initial reason for involvement.  These three women are joined by two men, one a prominent figure in the underground, the other a bumbling soldier of the old regime who mostly functions as comic relief and the obligatory injury prone member of the crew. 

            These character dynamics are important, not inasmuch as they affect the story, but rather that they altogether replace a confusing and lackluster plot.  Peking Opera Blues basically boils down to an old-fashioned white hats vs. black hats serial that completely skips over the underlining motivations of either side.  Here we know that Tsao and Pat are driven to defy their fathers, and that Sheung is out for the money, but the political context of all of the conflict involved isn’t really touched on.  There are exciting fights with interesting choreography, gunplay, and beautiful women and that’s about it.

Tsui’s film is kind of a no-brainer as films go.  Is it fun? Yes.  Is it overambitious in scope? Perhaps, but maybe to its benefit.  Is it moving? Not really, but for Saturday entertainment it’s decent and it far outshines many kung fu pictures in that regard.  It doesn’t have the production value (that Spielberg touch) of the Hollywood pictures that no doubt inspired its style.  It does, however, present three female characters that combined are almost as interesting as Marion Ravenwood.  That’s certainly not knocking it out of the park as far as film standards go, but it outdoes many of its stateside contemporaries in that respect.

Language: Cantonese

Runtime: 102 Minutes

Grade: 2 Hats Off