The Lost Swordship (Chia Li, 1977)

A surprisingly good "lost" wuxia film from Taiwan recently (as in 2007) revived by Rarescope, a DVD company that "restores" (that is, put on DVD and nothing else) old Hong Kong/Chinese/Taiwanesee martial arts films otherwise forgotten due to their relative insignificance. Insignificance, of course, doesn't say anything about the film's quality, and this particular movie is an indication of that. This movie, about a dangerous cult led by a masked woman named "The Bishop" who will stop at nothing to attain the secret of the Fragrant Sword from the Li clan (I love how Hitchcock is touted as the master of the cinematic MacGuffin, when the wuxia is built upon MacGuffins such as "the Fragrant Sword." What does the fragrant swords does? Leave a scent after it kills its victim. Somehow it will lead to world domination, but how it will do that is a mystery. But hey look, SWORDFIGHTS!), features great cinematography (albeit horrible costume design - the women sport ugly fringed skirts when they are about to turn somebody on) and an exciting plot that, common to many wuxia films, is too complex for its own good, and all the better for us the viewers. Of course, it's no King Hu (King Hu would have just ditched the plot complexities and just have one long showdown in the middle of Western China), but King Hu wouldn't be royalty if anyone else in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan did things the way he did things. Like many other wuxia films, this movie's male characters are there simply to kill or be killed; the women on the other hand are complex, playing the men and the other women for their own benefit. One could say that the plot's actors are the men, but the story revolves around its strong women. With a slip of a leg, a sign of helplessness, or an indication ripe sexuality, the women have the men under their thumbs. Here, the women characters are doomed to fail (the film's ultimate revelation is "men have to find their way," which leaves women just perpetually lost), but fail in a prospect higher than any other cinema allowed.

One comment about the DVD: Although I am eternally grateful to Rarescope for releasing this film, the movie's aspect ratio is deceptive. Sure, it is widescreen, but it is so severely cropped that it might as well just be full screen. Judging from the burned subtitles, the horizontal crops probably takes out 25% or more of the image. Sad, because this really functions as a widescreen movie, but beggars aren't choosers...

El lugar sin limites (Arturo Ripstein, 1978)

Arturo Ripstein's early study of machismo through the experiences of an ostracized gay whore in a dying Mexican town is legendary for being a brave overt critique of a Mexican institution when few previously existed. But beyond this, the film is flawed and does not improve upon the effectiveness of the critique already implicit in such Mexican films as El Rapto (1954) or Soy puro mexicano (1942), or the playfullness in which Ripstein's mentor, Luis Bunuel approached the topic in Ensayo de un crimen (1955). Unlike these films, El lugar sin limites does not question machismo itself, rather see it from the perspective of those that exist outside of it. Instead of seeing men as enacting machismo, the film sees men as machismo. In turn, the film emphasizes and affirms that which it tries to criticize: machismo or not, those who are not men or not "bruto"like men orbit around those that give Mexican culture its "essential" identity. Ultimately, Ripstein choice to treat the film's theme of exploitation as a given dooms its characters to the reality and "lugar" they exist. To an extent it isn't machismo that is the problem, it is the unexamined need to co-depend and to exploit that gives the film its weak thrust. To put it in other words, it isn't about machismo, but about the need to feel dour for no good reason. This pseudo-critique (grand platitudes, short on subtlety and moral ambiguousness) is almost a hallmark of Ripstein, whose Profundo carmesi (1996) remakes Honeymoon Killers (1970) by removing the latter's trashiness that gave it the moral weight of a B-movie but the immediacy of a newsreel, and loading it with self-righteous moral judgements about the alienating doomed love that exist between two messed up characters. I guess one can say that he is the complete opposite of the Cuarons and del Toros of today, making seriously no-fun movies loaded with a social, moral, and ethical agenda. Either way, both extremes for the most part are unsatisfying, veering very far from the classical cinema of Mexico's Golden Age, the great artists of which balanced populism and ethics through the mastery of their craft and the greatness of their produced works. The lesser artists of today have to rely on message or bombast; the great artists of the Golden Age simply had to rely on the light and shadow their cameras capture.

Catching Up on My Music Videos

Monkey "Monkey Bee"

Chinese epic Zhang Yimou and King Hu would be jealous of. It's Chinese enough that the high-wire act is exhilarating without the deprecating tongue-cheekiness of the typical Western parody, Western enough that it would not surprise anyone if Wu Tang decided to crash the party.




Roisin Murphy "Movie Star"

Maybe I just watched it one too many times while utilizing the gym (it is way overplayed on MTV Arabia), but it is a good song. And who wouldn't want lobster rape and drag queens once in a while?

Pulp Fiction Series #1: Demon Caravan, John Eagle Expeditor: Valley of Vultures, The Destroyer: The Final Death

I'm adding a new section here where I review pul fiction novels I read. Being deployed, there are a lot of organizations who like to send us free books to enjoy in our free time. Unfortunately, most of these books are crap. Here, I get to write a small ditty about the best of them! Some of them actually turn out pretty good--pretty good as in, they are crazy as hell and too cool for irony. Here are the first books of the series.

The Demon Caravan (Georges Surdez, 1927)
Action, romance, and adventure in the Sahara--belied by the era it was from, this book is total and complete French colonial romanticism. African slaves, violent Arabs, peaceful Berbers, and the civilized French caught right in the middle, it largely toes the French colonial bent, with the distant metropole always alluded to by reminiscing French Soldiers (that is, reminiscing for civilization) or barbarians admiring examples of what it is to be civil. However, as much as cluelessly colonial the story is, there are peeks of self-doubt: many a times, Surdez's French captain hero questions what civilization and conquest has brought to the savage beauty of North Africa. It almost pushes self-examination, but the answer is simple: the great ordering effect of Western law and civility.

John Eagle Expeditor: Valley of Vultures (Paul Edwards, 1975)

A James Bond wannabe, John Eagle is a white man raised as a native american (street cred) working for an unknown boss to bring about peace and harmony by kicking ass. Many dead people, many bombed houses, and many pleasured ladies (in this story, Eagle's only untouched female conquest is the Jewish female assasin that looks like she's sixty). In Valley of the Vultures, John Eagle tracks down Nazis who transplant testicles in the middle of South America. Yeah, apparently his nemeses throughout the series are the Nazis. But of course, he kicks their asses, until a lunatic member escapes right before he kills him, cackling and promising revenge. It's actually an engaging read, still much of the 60s, dedicated to world peace, yet also entering the 70s with its obession with manly men who can kick ass and pleasure women at the same time.

The Destroyer: The Final Death (Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy, 1977)

If John Eagle is the conscientous hero, Remo is the clueless athlete who could care less--that is, until it involves killing somebody with special kung fu moves. The Final Death is full-on Nixon anti-60s revenge era, where racial gags, mysoginism, and right-wing ideology abound. In this one, Remo tries to hunt down a clan of Chinese vegetarian activists who try to punish America by killing all meat-eaters in the country. Worse still, however, is when they reveal their true identity: Chinese vegetarian vampires! And oh shit, they can kung fu too. (Un)Fortunately, Remo is the white man with a funny Korean sidekick who writes a script for a TV soap opera, and he kicks all of their asses in many varied ways. Gore, sex, kung fu, and killing Chinese vampires...this one has all of them. But it's not really entertaining, more like "who comes up with this shit!?"

Blithe Spirit (David Lean, 1945)

A story of a two divorcees trying to affirm their love for each other amongst angry ghosts, Blithe Spirit is a good example of that traditional English form of comedy: very mundane happenings peppered with acerbic lines delivered in what is now considered “dead-pan.” Added to that are Lean’s mastery of light and shadows, cheesy but effective special effects, and a wonderful use of color, and one has a very entertaining movie delivered with a filmmaking that can only be described as enchanting. The plot could be the answer to the question posed by Lean’s next movie, Brief Encounter: what if the affair did go far enough? Would the man eventually regret his decision? Would the woman finally be granted happiness? The answer of course is no. Even the spirits, finally rid of their bodies, still seem bored and unfulfilled. Lean and Coward thus condemn us all to an eternal search for happiness—which, from the fun that the characters seem to be having, doesn’t seem all that bad.

Of all the characters, the most interestingly portrayed maybe Madame Arcati, the spiritual medium whom the couple invited for the purpose of exposing her “fraud,” and whose actions unleashed the spirits and the unresolved past on the insecure couple. She isn’t aloof and decaying like other old cinematic mediums, or a nut-job who quite obviously is faking the funk. Arcati is a lively British eccentric who clearly believes in what she does and loves what she does. It was her “fraud” that the film’s other characters was supposed to expose, and instead it was theirs that she exposed. She was also the film’s stand-in within the film, unleashing the magic of cinema to the “realism” of cinema. To that extent, Arcati is Lean’s stand-in, as the character that opened the audience—who expects the reality of pictures played before them—to the magic of photographic effects.

The other really interesting aspect of the movie is its use of Technicolor. The ghosts weren’t merely ghosts—invisible and all that—but separated from the “world” by their color (ashen gray, sometimes greenish) and how gusts of air from unknown sources that blow their gowns about make them look immaterial. Again, Lean does the invisible thing when he needs to, but his reliance on the coloring effect emphasizes the separation between the living and not living. This in turn emphasizes the characters’ placement in relation to one another: characters who could not see the “ghosts” looking in the wrong direction (except for Arcati, whose upturned gaze always looks at the correct general direction), the always close husband but never close enough, and the stiff wife who competes against the former wife’s ghost. These constant shifts emphasize that eternal “search,” and the fun to be had to look for something one cannot even see.

May Lady (Rakhshan Bani Etemad, 1998)

Although Etemad's Nargess (1992) is the film which many consider the film to which comparisons are to be made to truly judge her work, I have never seen Nargess. Thus, I guess I am truly capable of judging her work in the accepted sense. But having seen Under the Skin of the City (2001) and her pitch-perfect Gilaneh (2005), I have to say that May Lady is somewhat of a digression. Filmed like an Iranian love poem with its constant reliance on literal rich metaphors, May Lady follows the life of a middle class woman, part mother to her son, part artist, and part lover to an unknown and unseen man of whom her son disapproves, both because she is divorced and because she is tangled in somewhat of an Oedipal struggle with him. The film is driven by the mother's musings, questioning her relationship with her kind but rebellious child, to her unseen lover who we only know from the letters he writes, and to the culture that forces her to choose between roles. All of this, while she makes a film about the "exemplary" Iranian mother. For the most part, Etemad is lost, never settling into a rhythm that really drives the conflicts of having to chose one's identity. It sounds ironic, requiring certainty in form to depict uncertainty in theme, but to an extent the uncertainty in her filmmaking--the inability to make either her voice-over or camera take dominance, or to fully depict the conflicts that bind lover, son, and mother together--belies a certainty in the opposite of what she wants to say about the role of the woman in Iran. The conflicts remain unsaid because sadly, one has to admit that in this case, there may be none at all. Unlike the mothers of her documentary, her conflicts stem from this perceived "choice." She realizes that she has options, and must choose one over another. Compared to the faces and lives of the women she captured on tape and stops, rewinds, and fast forwards on her editing deck at will, the question posed back to her dilemma is, "so what?" Unlike their brave choice to just be, the mother's brazen idea that there is any other option but to live disables Etemad from humanizing her, instead posing her as a "question" rather than a character. Gladly, Etemad's mother/filmmkaer does finish her film, through Gilaneh, which we are all very lucky to have.

The clock (Vincente Minnelli, 1945)

Produced during--or in this case, right at the very end of--WWII to, like many other films during the time, to bolster the war effort, The Clock is a classic Minnelli, constructed with equal lyricism evident in Minnelli's musicals such as Gigi or Meet Me in St. Louis applied to the romantic/melodrama non-musical format. A soldier goes on a pass in New York City, but finds a city cold and crowded until she meets another lonely person from a different world (in her case, a Midwestern transplant desperate to be a native--kinda like Sex and the City). In a short span of a day (or is it a few days? I don't remember) they familiarize, fall in love, and marry before they are separated by war. The Clock is a precursor to many modern movies that deal with urban alienation and the existential crises of human beings trapped between the machinations of history and the great men that drive it. His crowd scenes are intense--swirling camerawork, frames filled to the brim of walking/running feet, bumping against each other but not necessarily meeting each other--and lorded over by the machine that define and threaten to destroy modern life: the clock, which has regimented life and compartmentalized moments and signifcant times in one's lifespan into sconds, minutes, hours. But unlike Harry Lime's last minute gesture of desperation, the two lovers raise their hands in a promise that through it all, they will transcend their mechanical reality. It may not fall within the philosophical confines of film noir, but this cheery culmination of a sordid reality is just as defiant and just as strong a statement against that very march of time as the dark and pessimistic tone that American cinema will soon take.