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Two posts in 24 hours! I'm quite the social butterfly today.
Had a nice Super Bowl Sunday (see previous post) and a pleasant Valentine's Day; still bummed by the various crises in my life at the moment, but movies are always a welcome distraction. Today's lineup:
Chung King Express (1994); written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai
My only experience with the movies of Wong Kar-Wai was "In the Mood for Love" (2000) his moody, feverish melodrama about infidelity and thwarted passion that cemented Tony Leung as an international superstar. That's why Chung King Express (1994) is such a surprise: instead of the nearly oppressive atmosphere of "In the Mood,"Chung King Express is a lighter, fizzier take on the same themes, like a wacky rom-com from 1950s Hollywood that somehow made its way to Hong Kong.
The movie is split into two stories, both centered on the Midnight Express food stand in the Chung King district. In the first, lovelorn cop Qi-wu is haunting the food stand all through April after the break-up with his girlfriend May, buying cans of pineapple with an expiration date of May 1st as a weird sort of demarcation point for giving up on the relationship. He's on the pay phone constantly, to May's house, to ex-girlfriends, and Takeshi Kaneshiro is a hilarious study in romantic futility.
Qi-wu's tale of woe is contrasted with an unnamed woman in a blond wig running a low-level drug smuggling operation in the storefronts around the district's subway system. In contrast to Qi-Wu's static, romantic floundering, she's in constant, confident motion, and Wong's camera almost can't keep up with her. At one point, she's chased through the subway station, captured by Wong in a rapid-fire sequence of blurry, tilted snapshots until she makes her escape.
Of course, the two eventually arrive at the same local bar, and Qi-wu tries the lamest pick-up line in the history of cinema (in three languages, yet!), meeting with total indifference. (She could easily be a femme fatale, but she's too tired and Qi-wu is just too pathetic to make the effort.) After hitting rock bottom, Qi-Wu is ready to accept the expiration date of his relationship and try again with the new counter girl at the food stand. But she's already got her eye on someone else...
In story two, Tony Leung is Officer #663, another local cop who's just gone through a break-up of his own. He doesn't have the stink of desperation like Qi-wu, but he's distant and a little quirky; he projects his emotions onto the objects in his apartment (and his apartment is feeling pretty sad). The new counter girl takes an instant liking to him (hey, it's Tony Leung, after all) and when the old girlfriend drops off the keys to his apartment at the food stand, she decides to cheer up the apartment with some redecorating. (Whether you feel home invasion is adorable in this context or downright creepy is entirely up to you.)
In contrast to "In the Mood," where Leung and Maggie Cheung were often divided by the camera into their own sections of the screen, Leung and Faye Wong find a sort of intimacy with shared space, whether in a crowded food market or their odd "sharing" of #663's apartment. Faye is a little too much HKMPDG (Hong Kong Manic Pixie Dream Girl)--and she plays "California Dreaming" WAY too many times--but #663 is ready for a new beginning and makes a space for the two of them in the end. To use the airplane metaphor in this story, the movie comes in for a safe landing...
(Recommendation: if you're going to do Wong Kar-Wai romance, start here and then move on to the MUCH heavier "In the Mood for Love.")
Nightmare Alley (1947); directed by Edmund Goulding
With the Guillermo del Toro remake still floating around in cinemas, I thought I would revisit the 1947 original, one of the classic "noirs" of the post-WWII era. Tyrone Power fought for the role of Stanton Carlisle, and you can see why he wanted it: it enabled him to use all his charm, his broad-shouldered masculinity, all the things that made him America's swashbuckling hero, in the service of a character who is utterly amoral, who looks at the world and sees a crowd of suckers ripe for the picking.
Stanton's rise and fall is like a warped version of the American Dream, starting as a shit shoveler at a broken-down carnival and working all the way up to the leader of a powerful ministry, exploiting the hunger for spiritual and religious enlightenment to pump the rubes for all they're worth. The problem with being a big-time bullshit artist, though, is that you're only as good as your latest con, and if a better bullshit artist comes along, you're screwed. When Stanton throws in with Lilith Keller (played to femme fatale perfection by Helen Walker), he's doomed--because Lilith plays the angles better than he does and she sells him down the river at the slightest hint of trouble.
Nightmare Alley (the movie and William Gresham's novel) might have been the start of seeing the American Dream as The Big Con--the pursuit of happiness and self-actualization (through the acquisition of material wealth, psychiatric therapy, or religious purity) as a scam designed to disguise the emptiness of our lives. We think we're climbing the mountain, but we're really stumbling down the corridor of Nightmare Alley, to the inevitable end of the line.
I only wish the movie had ended with the penultimate scene ("Mister, I was born for it"); but studio head Daryl F. Zanuck wanted to give the audience a smidgen of hope for Stanton's redemption through the love of Molly (who, fittingly, blew up his whole operation in the first place). Maybe del Toro's version will correct this. Fortunately, this bit of sweetener doesn't come close to covering the bitter taste of this cynical masterpiece. Highly recommended.
Within Our Gates (1920); written, produced and directed by Oscar Michaux
Oscar Michaux was almost forgotten.
One of the pioneers of both independent and black cinema, Michaux was a distant memory during the dawn of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, a relic of the silent era, relegated to a respectful line or two in the history books about his breakthroughs, but no longer relevant in the new age of socially conscious cinema.
But then, slowly but surely, Michaux was re-discovered, brought to light again by historians and the work of his successors, like Melvin van Peebles and Spike Lee. The black film-makers of the modern era found that the subject matter of Michaux's films--the importance of education in the black community, the necessity (and undependability) of white allies, intermarriage, and the omnipresent threat of racial violence against black people--were still disturbingly relevant. Michaux's films refuse to fade away because the problems he put on screen a century ago are still with us today.
OK, they're relevant--but are they still entertaining? Can a modern audience get something out of these movies other than their historical significance?
"Within Our Gates" was Michaux's first major motion picture, and Michaux had some definite ideas of what he wanted to put on screen. He was determined to show the wide variety of characters in the black community, all classes, all professions, warts and all--a conscious attempt to counter racist stereotypes in movies like "Birth of Our Nation."
In that way, Michaux covers all his bases: you have the well-educated mixed-race southern heroine, Sylvia; her upper- class Boston stepsister, Alma; a police detective and a small-time con artist/sleazeball; and two preachers--one a noble educator, determined to lift up the poor black children of his town, and the other a VERY broad comedic fire and brimstone hypocrite (who wouldn't feel out of place in a Tyler Perry movie).
But for most of the movie, none of these characters break out of their roles as "representative types" and come to life as real people on the screen. The plot meanders, digresses, and the intertitles do NOT help you to understand what's happening. (Part of the problem is that the only surviving print of this movie was found in Spain, and the intertitles had to be converted BACK into English after they were translated into Spanish. Something might have been lost in translation.) There are numerous "white savior" characters here that don't hold up well at all (if they ever did), and I was ready to mark this down as an interesting historical curiosity...
Then we get the flashback.
Near the end of the movie, we see the story of Sylvia's hidden past, and it completely blows away everything else. The tragic story of the Landry family has everything the rest of the movie is missing: vivid characters, a great villain (villains!), powerful, disturbing imagery--and a shocking twist that makes perfect sense and actually shocks. The small scene where Sylvia tallies up Jasper's bills and receipts so he won't get cheated by the plantation owner says more about the value of education than anything else in the movie. There is a fantastic, bitterly satirical scene showing the white press' version of Gridlestone's murder, with Jasper as a maniacal, murderous demon. (A white sharecropper killed the old bastard with a shotgun.)
The lynching of Jasper and his wife and the near rape of Sylvia are still almost too much to take, even a century later. It's no wonder that this movie is a vital part of every black film maker's background. (The scene where the Landrys run into the swamp to hide from the mob is eerily echoed in John Singleton's "Rosewood", over 75 years later.)
Only a few months after the movie was completed, and while Michaux was probably selling it to theaters around the country, a white mob destroyed the black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The full details of that tragedy are still being uncovered in 2022. There is a movement today to squash the teaching of "inconvenient" history, and Michaux reminds us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Had a nice Super Bowl Sunday (see previous post) and a pleasant Valentine's Day; still bummed by the various crises in my life at the moment, but movies are always a welcome distraction. Today's lineup:
Chung King Express (1994); written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai
My only experience with the movies of Wong Kar-Wai was "In the Mood for Love" (2000) his moody, feverish melodrama about infidelity and thwarted passion that cemented Tony Leung as an international superstar. That's why Chung King Express (1994) is such a surprise: instead of the nearly oppressive atmosphere of "In the Mood,"Chung King Express is a lighter, fizzier take on the same themes, like a wacky rom-com from 1950s Hollywood that somehow made its way to Hong Kong.
The movie is split into two stories, both centered on the Midnight Express food stand in the Chung King district. In the first, lovelorn cop Qi-wu is haunting the food stand all through April after the break-up with his girlfriend May, buying cans of pineapple with an expiration date of May 1st as a weird sort of demarcation point for giving up on the relationship. He's on the pay phone constantly, to May's house, to ex-girlfriends, and Takeshi Kaneshiro is a hilarious study in romantic futility.
Qi-wu's tale of woe is contrasted with an unnamed woman in a blond wig running a low-level drug smuggling operation in the storefronts around the district's subway system. In contrast to Qi-Wu's static, romantic floundering, she's in constant, confident motion, and Wong's camera almost can't keep up with her. At one point, she's chased through the subway station, captured by Wong in a rapid-fire sequence of blurry, tilted snapshots until she makes her escape.
Of course, the two eventually arrive at the same local bar, and Qi-wu tries the lamest pick-up line in the history of cinema (in three languages, yet!), meeting with total indifference. (She could easily be a femme fatale, but she's too tired and Qi-wu is just too pathetic to make the effort.) After hitting rock bottom, Qi-Wu is ready to accept the expiration date of his relationship and try again with the new counter girl at the food stand. But she's already got her eye on someone else...
In story two, Tony Leung is Officer #663, another local cop who's just gone through a break-up of his own. He doesn't have the stink of desperation like Qi-wu, but he's distant and a little quirky; he projects his emotions onto the objects in his apartment (and his apartment is feeling pretty sad). The new counter girl takes an instant liking to him (hey, it's Tony Leung, after all) and when the old girlfriend drops off the keys to his apartment at the food stand, she decides to cheer up the apartment with some redecorating. (Whether you feel home invasion is adorable in this context or downright creepy is entirely up to you.)
In contrast to "In the Mood," where Leung and Maggie Cheung were often divided by the camera into their own sections of the screen, Leung and Faye Wong find a sort of intimacy with shared space, whether in a crowded food market or their odd "sharing" of #663's apartment. Faye is a little too much HKMPDG (Hong Kong Manic Pixie Dream Girl)--and she plays "California Dreaming" WAY too many times--but #663 is ready for a new beginning and makes a space for the two of them in the end. To use the airplane metaphor in this story, the movie comes in for a safe landing...
(Recommendation: if you're going to do Wong Kar-Wai romance, start here and then move on to the MUCH heavier "In the Mood for Love.")
Nightmare Alley (1947); directed by Edmund Goulding
With the Guillermo del Toro remake still floating around in cinemas, I thought I would revisit the 1947 original, one of the classic "noirs" of the post-WWII era. Tyrone Power fought for the role of Stanton Carlisle, and you can see why he wanted it: it enabled him to use all his charm, his broad-shouldered masculinity, all the things that made him America's swashbuckling hero, in the service of a character who is utterly amoral, who looks at the world and sees a crowd of suckers ripe for the picking.
Stanton's rise and fall is like a warped version of the American Dream, starting as a shit shoveler at a broken-down carnival and working all the way up to the leader of a powerful ministry, exploiting the hunger for spiritual and religious enlightenment to pump the rubes for all they're worth. The problem with being a big-time bullshit artist, though, is that you're only as good as your latest con, and if a better bullshit artist comes along, you're screwed. When Stanton throws in with Lilith Keller (played to femme fatale perfection by Helen Walker), he's doomed--because Lilith plays the angles better than he does and she sells him down the river at the slightest hint of trouble.
Nightmare Alley (the movie and William Gresham's novel) might have been the start of seeing the American Dream as The Big Con--the pursuit of happiness and self-actualization (through the acquisition of material wealth, psychiatric therapy, or religious purity) as a scam designed to disguise the emptiness of our lives. We think we're climbing the mountain, but we're really stumbling down the corridor of Nightmare Alley, to the inevitable end of the line.
I only wish the movie had ended with the penultimate scene ("Mister, I was born for it"); but studio head Daryl F. Zanuck wanted to give the audience a smidgen of hope for Stanton's redemption through the love of Molly (who, fittingly, blew up his whole operation in the first place). Maybe del Toro's version will correct this. Fortunately, this bit of sweetener doesn't come close to covering the bitter taste of this cynical masterpiece. Highly recommended.
Within Our Gates (1920); written, produced and directed by Oscar Michaux
Oscar Michaux was almost forgotten.
One of the pioneers of both independent and black cinema, Michaux was a distant memory during the dawn of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, a relic of the silent era, relegated to a respectful line or two in the history books about his breakthroughs, but no longer relevant in the new age of socially conscious cinema.
But then, slowly but surely, Michaux was re-discovered, brought to light again by historians and the work of his successors, like Melvin van Peebles and Spike Lee. The black film-makers of the modern era found that the subject matter of Michaux's films--the importance of education in the black community, the necessity (and undependability) of white allies, intermarriage, and the omnipresent threat of racial violence against black people--were still disturbingly relevant. Michaux's films refuse to fade away because the problems he put on screen a century ago are still with us today.
OK, they're relevant--but are they still entertaining? Can a modern audience get something out of these movies other than their historical significance?
"Within Our Gates" was Michaux's first major motion picture, and Michaux had some definite ideas of what he wanted to put on screen. He was determined to show the wide variety of characters in the black community, all classes, all professions, warts and all--a conscious attempt to counter racist stereotypes in movies like "Birth of Our Nation."
In that way, Michaux covers all his bases: you have the well-educated mixed-race southern heroine, Sylvia; her upper- class Boston stepsister, Alma; a police detective and a small-time con artist/sleazeball; and two preachers--one a noble educator, determined to lift up the poor black children of his town, and the other a VERY broad comedic fire and brimstone hypocrite (who wouldn't feel out of place in a Tyler Perry movie).
But for most of the movie, none of these characters break out of their roles as "representative types" and come to life as real people on the screen. The plot meanders, digresses, and the intertitles do NOT help you to understand what's happening. (Part of the problem is that the only surviving print of this movie was found in Spain, and the intertitles had to be converted BACK into English after they were translated into Spanish. Something might have been lost in translation.) There are numerous "white savior" characters here that don't hold up well at all (if they ever did), and I was ready to mark this down as an interesting historical curiosity...
Then we get the flashback.
Near the end of the movie, we see the story of Sylvia's hidden past, and it completely blows away everything else. The tragic story of the Landry family has everything the rest of the movie is missing: vivid characters, a great villain (villains!), powerful, disturbing imagery--and a shocking twist that makes perfect sense and actually shocks. The small scene where Sylvia tallies up Jasper's bills and receipts so he won't get cheated by the plantation owner says more about the value of education than anything else in the movie. There is a fantastic, bitterly satirical scene showing the white press' version of Gridlestone's murder, with Jasper as a maniacal, murderous demon. (A white sharecropper killed the old bastard with a shotgun.)
The lynching of Jasper and his wife and the near rape of Sylvia are still almost too much to take, even a century later. It's no wonder that this movie is a vital part of every black film maker's background. (The scene where the Landrys run into the swamp to hide from the mob is eerily echoed in John Singleton's "Rosewood", over 75 years later.)
Only a few months after the movie was completed, and while Michaux was probably selling it to theaters around the country, a white mob destroyed the black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The full details of that tragedy are still being uncovered in 2022. There is a movement today to squash the teaching of "inconvenient" history, and Michaux reminds us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
