Archive for the ‘Crime’ Category
Thursday, September 7th, 2023
THE DRY is an Australian mystery thriller from 2020. It stars Eric Bana (CHOPPER) as Melbourne federal agent Aaron Falk, who gets wrapped up in some off-the-books mystery solving in his home town while on personal leave.
It’s arguably a neo-noir, but not in the sense of shadowy cinematography. It takes place mostly in the daytime, in rural Kiewarra, during a torturous drought. It hasn’t rained in almost a year, so this farming town is full of desperate people. Falk hasn’t been home in years, and only returns due to a brief, stern note in the mail telling him to be at the funeral of his childhood friend Luke (Martin Dingle-Wall, GUN SHY).
From the beginning it’s a bleak and uncomfortable tone. He saw in the newspaper that Luke died in a murder-suicide. Killed his wife, his kid, then himself (abandoning a baby). The funeral is for the whole family but some people are pretty upset about including the guy who killed them. And here’s Falk coming in from out of town just to honor Luke – he never met the wife or kid. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australian cinema, Bebe Bettencourt, Bruce Spence, Eric Bana, Genevieve O'Reilly, Harry Cripps, Jane Harper, Julia Blake, Keir O'Donnell, Martin Dingle-Wall, Robert Connelly, Samantha Strauss
Posted in Reviews, Crime | 13 Comments »
Monday, June 26th, 2023
MASTER GARDENER is the latest from Paul Schrader, who I consider to be on a late career roll between FIRST REFORMED and THE CARD COUNTER. This one is thematically related to those, and Schrader has called the three of them his unintentional “Lonely Man Trilogy,” but the template goes all the way back to TAXI DRIVER and has been loosely repeated over and over again throughout his filmography. Which is one of the things I love about him.
This time the journal-writing weirdo narrator is Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton, JANE GOT A GUN), the fastidious horticulturalist in charge of Gracewood Gardens, an estate in Louisiana (filmed at a former plantation). He’s very loyal to his aging heiress boss, Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver, ABDUCTION) – including having sex with her on demand – so he does as she says when she instructs him to take on her troubled grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell, BLACK ADAM) as an apprentice. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Devonte Hynes, Esai Morales, Jared Bankens, Joel Edgerton, Matt Mercurio, Paul Schrader, Quintessa Swindell, Sigourney Weaver
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Drama, Thriller | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023
May 27, 1983
CHAINED HEAT is a genuine exploitation movie. Maybe it’s my ignorance, having been a child in the early ‘80s, but I think of those days as being pretty separated from the era a decade earlier that produced Jonathan Demme’s debut CAGED HEAT, which the title seems to be a throwback to. That must be wrong, though, because there’s not much that seems winky about this one. It’s very serious about providing lurid, sleazy entertainment.
Linda Blair, in her followup to HELL NIGHT, stars as Carol Henderson, a nice girl and “prison virgin” doing 18 months for vehicular manslaughter. Sitting on a bench waiting to be booked she meets some more experienced cons who are pretty welcoming to her. But one of them saying she’s in for stealing TVs starts a discussion of favorite soap operas that escalates to a threat of throat slashing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Henry Silva, John Vernon, Linda Blair, Monique Gabrielle, Paul Nicholas, Stella Stevens, Sybil Danning, Tamara Dobson, women in prison
Posted in Reviews, Crime | 14 Comments »
Tuesday, April 25th, 2023
“THE 51ST STATE is very dear to me, because it was the first time in Hollywood that I didn’t have to deal with dolls.” –Ronny Yu, 2004
Three years after the unlikely career milestone of BRIDE OF CHUCKY, Ronny Yu made easily the weakest of his English-language films – a UK-Canada co-production called THE 51ST STATE, but we call it FORMULA 51 here so people don’t think it refers to DC statehood. (Actually I’m not totally clear what it does refer to. But the number 51 is in the name of a super-drug that’s central to the plot.)
Under any name it’s a thoroughly 2001 film, with wall-to-wall dated music (score by somebody called Headrillaz), annoying whooshes and flash cuts, character names and descriptions written on screen as they’re introduced, a long scene at a rave type dance club, and two stars – Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Carlyle – who had ridden the ‘90s indie wave to the specific level of commercial viability where they could be cast in stuff like this. It’s one of a handful of movies, along with THE NEGOTIATOR and SHAFT, that could arguably be considered a straight up Samuel L. Jackson vehicle. But even though it starts and ends with him he’s kind of a mysterious, unexplained character, while co-star Carlyle gets to have the love story and sex scene. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anna Keaveney, designer drugs, Emily Mortimer, Hang-Sang Poon, Meat Loaf, Rhys Ifans, Robert Carlyle, Ronny Yu, Samuel L. Jackson, Sean Pertwee, Stel Pavlou, Stephen Walters
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comedy/Laffs, Crime | 11 Comments »
Thursday, April 6th, 2023
GREAT PRETENDERS a.k.a. THE GREAT PRETENDERS is from 1991, and it’s Ronny Yu’s con man comedy. It stars the great Tony Leung (a year before HARD BOILED) in a much broader role than what we normally associate him with. The type of comedy where he’s running around waving his arms. His character has a shaved head to wear different wigs, and there’s a whole sequence about him putting the wig on the wrong way and looking ridiculous, plus a montage of trying on a bunch of other wigs. Strangely, when he pretends to have a mohawk later on it uses a very obvious bald cap. I don’t know if that was a matter of his hair growing out or not wanting to glue the mohawk on, but it’s hard to accept people believing it’s his real hair. Not that it matters in a movie like this.
His character is named Snake Wai (alias “Tony Leung”), and he’s a conman running small time scams on the street. It’s the type of movie where you follow him and hopefully are charmed by him even as he’s lying to everybody, but you won’t feel too bad about it either way because most of the time everybody’s actually in on it or secretly playing their own angle. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: cons, mahjong, Raymond Wong, Ronny Yu, Simon Yam, Teddy Robin, Tin Leung, Tony Leung
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Crime | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 5th, 2023
CHINA WHITE (1989) is the movie where Ronny Yu tackles the ’80s Hong Kong gangster genre that we all fell in love with when we found out about John Woo, Ringo Lam and those guys. Like A BETTER TOMORROW or BULLET IN THE HEAD it chronicles the tragic rise and fall melodrama of dashing young anti-heroes who run a criminal empire and care about family and loyalty and what not. Like CITY ON FIRE it deals with somebody undercover getting too close to a crook, but in this case it’s a female informant falling in love with a guy who she doesn’t know is bad (so, a little bit like THE KILLER). But along with these standard genre themes we have the strongest example so far of Yu’s international world view.
That’s because it takes place in Amsterdam, where the Chow brothers, Bobby (Russell Wong, ROMEO MUST DIE, THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR) and Danny (Steven Vincent Leigh, RING OF FIRE, SWORD OF HONOR) have made a home, but must make peace or war with gangs of other nationalities. They’re most threatened by the Italians, led by Scalia (Billy Drago shortly before DELTA FORCE 2). This is a cutthroat internationalism, but Yu sees opportunity for these immigrants, and seems to come out in favor of cross-cultural/interracial relationships. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex Man, Andrew Lau, Billy Drago, Carina Lau, Hong Kong action, Lisa Schrage, Ronny Yu, Russell Wong, Steven Vincent Leigh
Posted in Reviews, Action, Crime | 5 Comments »
Thursday, March 30th, 2023
LEGACY OF RAGE (1986) is Ronny Yu’s Hong Kong action movie that’s in a crime/martial arts type vein, written by Clifton Ko (ONCE A THIEF) and Raymond Fung (later art director of Yu’s CHINA WHITE). It’s also the first starring role for then-21-year-old Brandon Lee, following his father’s path from American television (he was in KUNG FU: THE MOVIE) to Hong Kong cinema. Of course, we can also draw a parallel to Yu’s travels between Hong Kong and the U.S., which is part of the reason producers Linda Kuk (HARD BOILED) and John Sham (YES, MADAM!, ROYAL WARRIORS) thought they might work well together.
But Lee’s character Brandon Ma is not specified to be an immigrant, and I think his mouth movements are Cantonese (though both that and the English soundtrack seem to be dubbed by someone else). I was nervous when the opening had some nerd rollerskating through traffic listening to a Walkman, but luckily that’s just some drug courier and not Brandon. He gets a much more macho introduction controlling the machine that lifts and smashes cars at a junkyard.
This Brandon is a good-hearted guy – when his girlfriend May (Regina Kent, A BETTER TOMORROW 2) is angry at him for being late he doesn’t even bother to explain that he was delayed by heroically carrying a toddler to the next bus stop after she was left behind by her mother. That’s just the kinda shit he does, so it wasn’t even worth mentioning.
Brandon and May work together at a hotel restaurant called Casablanca, as a waiter and a dancer, respectively. Is the junkyard demolition thing part time? I’m not sure, it’s not mentioned again. Other than maybe having two jobs, you could call him a slacker – he sleeps on a mattress with no bed frame and has two posters of motorcycles on his walls – but he gives May a ring, which I think indicates engagement. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bolo Yeung, Brandon Lee, Hong Kong action, Mang Hoi, Regina Kent, Ronny Yu, Teddy Yip
Posted in Action, Crime, Martial Arts, Reviews | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, March 28th, 2023
FURIES (Thanh Sói) is a great new Vietnamese action movie on Netflix as of last Thursday, and it’s a prequel to FURIE (2019). On one hand I want to be clear that not having seen FURIE would hardly affect your viewing of FURIES – it’s just an origin story for one of the supporting characters, and you don’t even know for sure which one until the end (it’s kinda like LEATHERFACE in that sense). On the other hand, FURIE is fuckin great, so you should definitely watch it. But I really don’t think the order matters.
FURIE starred Ngô Thanh Vân a.k.a. Veronica Ngo in a knockout performance as a rural debt collector who has to venture into the city when her daughter is kidnapped – and it turns out that when her daughter was born she ran from a life there as a gangster, which is why she knows the ins and outs of this underworld, as well as how to kick 75 different types of ass. For FURIES, Ngo takes over as director, as well as having a supporting role in the movie. As a totally different character! It’s weird. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Kefi Abrikh, Rima Thanh Vy, Song Luan, Thuan Nguyen, Toc Tien, Veronica Ngo, Vietnamese film
Posted in Reviews, Action, Crime, Martial Arts | 2 Comments »
Monday, March 20th, 2023
Ronny Yu is a director whose work I’ve enjoyed since the ‘90s, when I first saw his beautiful wuxia film THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR. Part of what’s interesting about him is that he was so adept at making those lush martial arts fantasies, but he was on a trajectory to come to Hollywood and make something quite different, including two of the more notable and unusual franchise horror films of the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
But he started out in another place entirely – making raw, low budget Hong Kong cop thrillers like his very-hard-to-find first two films, THE SERVANT (1979) and THE SAVIOUR (1980).
Yu was born in Hong Kong in 1950. He suffered from polio as a child, preventing the type of physical play most kids take for granted, and leading him to retreat into his imagination, especially by watching movies. “In the dark I could forget about my problems. I could forget that I couldn’t walk so good,” he later said. He attended a boys school in England, and in the ’70s he wanted to go to UCLA and study filmmaking. His dad wouldn’t pay for that, and told him that to really understand the United States he should live in the heartland. So – figuring commercials were similar to movies – Yu studied marketing and communication at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, the alma mater of Paul Newman and Richard Dean Anderson. Other filmmaker alumni include Joe Eszterhas and Betty Thomas.
Becoming a director was kind of an accident, and it came, strangely, from being friends with a cop. Philip Chan had been a police officer for around 15 years before working as a consultant (and ultimately co-writer) on JUMPING ASH (1976) gave him the bug to be a movie star. He got a few bit parts, but his dream was to be a leading man in a movie about his experiences as a Superintendent in the Anti-Triad Squad of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force. No one was giving him that role, so he had to create it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfred Cheung, Gigi Wong, Hong Kong New Wave, Ken Cheng, Kent Cheng, Pai Ying, Ronny Yu, Tien Feng, Zero External Reviews on IMDb
Posted in Reviews, Action, Crime, Thriller | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023
Ryuhei Kitamura is an interesting director. He started in Japan with the attention-grabbing yakuzas vs. zombies movie VERSUS (2000). That one was kinda cool but I straight up loved his fourth movie, the samurai manga adaptation AZUMI (2003), and by 2004 he was doing that crazy GODZILLA: FINAL WARS. If nothing else, he’s a hero for doing the one thing everyone wanted to do but nobody knew they could do: assassinate Roland Emmerich’s version of Godzilla. I think we all remember where we were when we first heard the news. Ladies and gentlemen, we got ‘im.
That unprecedented act of heroism made Kitamura so huge and important to cinema that in 2008 Hollywood chose him for the crucial job of directing Bradley Cooper’s first serious leading role. He agreed to do it only under the condition that it could take place at midnight on a meat train. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amazon Eve, Emile Hirsch, Gigi Zumbado, organ trafficking, Ryuhei Kitamura, Sabina Mach, Stephen Dorff, Tanner Zagarino, Tyler Sanders, Vernon Wells
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Horror | 5 Comments »
