Chor Yuen Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (Chor Yuen, 1972) As angry and passionate an attack on institutional prostitution as anything you’ll see from Mizoguchi or anywhere else, director Chor Yuen uses all the opulent romanticism of the Shaw Brothers style at its peak to expose the twisted black heart of the brothels that casually make up the background
Lau Kar-leung Dirty Ho (Lau Kar-leung, 1979) A twist on the master-student narrative, where the student, a petty thief and scoundrel (‘Dirty’ Ho Jen, played by Wang Yue) has to be tricked into following the master (Gordon Liu), who himself turns out to be a Manchurian prince. The Manchus are almost always the villains in these stories,
Angela Mao Hapkido (Huang Feng, 1972) An early supporting role for Sammo Hung as he and Angela Mao (the film’s alternate title is the somewhat awesome Lady Kung Fu) travel from Japanese-occupied Korea to China in 1934 to establish a martial arts school, teaching the newly invented style of “Hap Ki Do” which looks like
Luo Li Emperor Visits the Hell (Luo Li, 2012) The Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the Vancouver International Film Festival has an illustrious history. Handed out every year since 1994, previous winners include such now-vitally important filmmakers as Hong Sangsoo, Jia Zhangke, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Liu Jiayin, Lee Changdong, and Wisit Sasanatieng. Winning the award this year,
Sammo Hung The Iron-Fisted Monk (Sammo Hung, 1977) Sammo Hung’s debut film as a director, while heavily steeped in the 1970s Shaw Brothers style, already shows evidence of his distinct personality as a filmmaker. Based, like so many kung fu films, on a bit of folklore involving the struggle of the Southern Chinese to resist their new
Sammo Hung Pedicab Driver (Sammo Hung, 1989) This 1989 film once again finds Sammo Hung mixing tones in a highly unusual way, as what appears to be a light-hearted farce about human taxis turns into a very dark indeed exploration of human trafficking and prostitution in the lower class Macao underworld. Sammo plays the garrulous leader of
Sammo Hung Winners & Sinners (Sammo Hung, 1983) More a straight comedy than any of the other Sammo Hung films I’ve seen, though it does contain some interesting stunts. An amiable hangout movie, with Sammo and his buddies just playing around with goofy jokes and the barest necessities of a plot. Sammo and his four ex-con friends
Sammo Hung Encounters of the Spooky Kind (Sammo Hung, 1980) Sammo Hung plays a regular guy whose reputation as The Boldest Man in Town makes him susceptible to all kinds of dares, leading him to an escalating series of encounters with the dead in this smash hit, one of the first major films to combine kung fu, horror, and comedy.
Tsui Hark The Butterfly Murders (Tsui Hark, 1979) Tsui Hark’s audacious debut film is a horror mystery about killer butterflies that has more in common with Roger Corman or Dario Argento than the Shaw Brothers. It begins with a lengthy narration, describing how the world came to an end in two battles where most of the martial
Sammo Hung Warriors Two (Sammo Hung, 1978) One of Sammo Hung’s first films as a director, this period kung fu film is very much in the Shaw Brothers mold. It most resembles Lau Kar-leung’s masterpiece The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, also released in 1978, both in its plot and its middle section, an extended series
Tsui Hark Zu Warriors (Tsui Hark, 2001) Last night I was flipping around Hulu and found two movies with similar titles. One is labeled Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, which is the title of Tsui Hark’s 1983 fantasy epic, and the other is called Zu Warriors: The Legend of Zu which is Tsui’s 2001
Sammo Hung Eastern Condors (Sammo Hung, 1987) It occurs to me that I’d never actually seen Sammo Hung in a starring role before. I’d seen him as a supporting actor and bit player, and as a director and fight choreographer, but never as the lead. At least not since his late-90s TV series with Arsenio
Hong Sangsoo Oki’s Movie (Hong Sangsoo, 2010) This remains my favorite of Hong Songsoo’s movies, most of which are marked by an unusual structure, in which elements, situations, and/or characters from the first part recur later in the film, in ways that deepen, comment upon or subvert what has gone before. Oki’s Movie is
Andrew Lau Infernal Affairs (Andrew Lau & Alan Mak, 2002) In the midst of a lengthy binge on Johnnie To movies, preparing for a They Shot Pictures episode we hope to record this weekend, I’ve tried to fit in a few other Hong Kong films that I thought might have influenced or been influenced by To’s work. I
Johnnie To The Johnnie To Whimsicality Index All 41 of the films by Johnnie To and/or Wai Ka-fai that I’ve seen, by Whimsicality Score over time. Whimsicality Score is how whimsical I think the film is on a scale of 0–100. The recent film with the lowest Whimsicality Score I can think of right
Lou Ye Mystery (Lou Ye, 2012) The first film Lou Ye was able to make in China following a five-year filmmaking ban he received for submitting his Summer Palace to Cannes without government permission back in 2006 (he made a couple films in the intervening years outside the Mainland). It’s a slick, clever neo-noir melodrama,
Lou Ye Lou Ye Capsule Reviews Summer Palace — July 28, 2014 A young woman’s erotic journey from Tumen to Chongqing. Following, more or less, 15 years in the life of a group of kids who were at university in Beijing starting in 1988. The rather tangled sexual relationships of college life fall apart in the
Lau Kar-leung Mad Monkey Kung Fu (Lau Kar-leung, 1979) If I had to pick a favorite Shaw Brothers director, and thankfully I don’t, Lau Kar-leung would be my choice. His visual style isn’t particularly innovative or beautiful, and he doesn’t bring the raw, anguished physicality that distinguishes the work of Chang Cheh, or the sense of
Chor Yuen Killer Clans (Chor Yuen, 1976) Showing more of a noir-by-way-of-Yojimbo influence than most Shaw Brothers films, this Chor Yuen-directed adaptation of a novel by Gu Long shows that there’s more to kung fu movies than simple revenge and enlightenment plots. Chor takes his time setting up a world ruled by devilishly clever gangsters demanding
Lau Kar-leung Executioners from Shaolin (Lau Kar-leung, 1977) The anti-Qing struggle and the destruction of the Shaolin Temple is a common narrative backdrop in kung fu movies. Respectively, they’re kind of akin to the role the Civil War and Little Big Horn play in American Westerns. The Temple story is a subset of the larger Qing-Ming war,
Ho Meng-hua The Flying Guillotine (Ho Meng-hua, 1975) A crazed Qing Emperor suspects everyone around him of disloyalty, and when two well-respected advisors dare to suggest that maybe he shouldn’t have killed a bunch of innocent teachers and intellectuals, he decides to kill them, along with anyone else who might be disloyal. He tasks another advisor with
Jeffrey Lau East Meets West (Jeffrey Lau, 2011) Jeffrey Lau’s 1994 film The Eagle-Shooting Heroes stands out among the weird and wacky world of Hong Kong comedies as possibly the weirdest and wackiest, at least in my fairly small sampling. A parody of the same source material that formed the basis for Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of
Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab People’s Park (JP Sniadecki & Libbie Cohn, 2012) A few thoughts I jotted down while watching People’s Park, a single-take documentary set in a park in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan by directors JP Sniadecki and Libbie Cohn: * So this is a lot like Russian Ark, the single-take trip through the Hermitage directed by Alexander Sokurov, except
Song Fang Memories Look at Me (Song Fang, 2012) After several days of festival movies filled with storytelling gimmicks and dazzling displays of artistic virtuosity, I was utterly unprepared late on my fifth day at VIFF 2012 for the hyper-mellowness of Song Fang’s debut film about visiting her family as an unmarried adult. It’s a fuzzy blanket
Wang Bing Three Sisters (Wang Bing, 2012) By nine o’clock on Tuesday, October 5th, 2012, my VIFF experience was four days and fifteen movies old. I trepidatiously settled in for movie #16, a two and a half hour verite-style documentary about three poor kids in China by acclaimed director Wang Bing (his nine hour documentary West
