I mean he does basically sign his movies
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you think you’ve seen hotel chevalier on your fucking iphone? get real
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Hoskin’s face in the final scene conveying anger, doom and acceptance while James Bond just fucking chews gum is still my absolute favorite thing about this movie
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watched yes madam…
michelle yeoh is way too cute in this!!
another thing to enjoy about this era of filmmaking is the b-roll footage. i should make a post of frames from establishing shots sometime
we can’t forget too that not only is this michelle yeoh’s big debut, it’s cynthia rothrock’s too!!
the movie even has the same “white girl speaks PERFECT cantonese, stuns audience” joke as righting wrongs
the movie might be worth it just for the coordinated outfits these two wear
but yeah… i think this could have been way more about these two bc most of the screentime is dedicated to a group of bumbling thieves and their antics
however amongst the thieves is… tsui hark, the director of great films such as green snake starring maggie cheung and double team starring dennis rodman!!
in hong kong, even the director of the highest-grossing film in the history of chinese cinema does his own climbing stunts. i’d like to see the insurance policy on james cameron trying this some time
actually something like 75% of the credited cast of this film are themselves film directors!!
he also gets an excellent scene wherein his apartment is transformed into a tom & jerry cinematic short, after all isn’t there so much crossover between directing slapstick and directing an action film? yuen biao is watching a charlie chaplin film projected in his apartment during a fight in righting wrongs…
and here we have academy award winner michelle yeoh smashing her face thru candy glass upside-down in slow motion
so yeah… it’s a little boring and there are about as many scenes of extremely broad sexual harassment comedy as there are action scenes (which is to say like, idk, four), but it was ok. i did like righting wrongs quite a bit more bc they got crazier with that one, actors hanging off of airplanes and shots where you can see the camera operator physically dodging out of the way of car stunts
movies starring martial artists are like my comfort media and they’ve released a bunch of boutique label discs recently so ive downloaded royal warriors and in the line of duty iv as well… and they keep releasing them!
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i think you would like ANGEL TERMINATORS 2
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raising cain is basically stalked by my doctor but with john lithgow dressing as snoopy’s joe cool and directed by somebody cursed by a witch to have to roll a dice every four minutes and improvise a plot based on the results. goes all in on homaging the most poorly aged parts of Psycho at the end which brings it down but it’s also kind of funny to have that stuff coming from the guy who watched all of hitchcock and then went “you know what, i think this guy was too normal about women.” very enjoyable while also maybe being one of the stupidest things i’ve ever seen.
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i love that movie, pairs with Mommie Dearest quite well
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instead of being directed by a stuntman, royal warriors is directed by a cinematographer, so the camera department gets a lot of love
again totally worth it as a michelle yeoh lookbook. miss malaysia 1983 everyone!
here we have the 3 protagonists, played by michael wong (playing a character named michael wong, classic), hiroyuki sanada, and michelle yeoh. interesting to me that none of these actors are from hong kong, michael wong is from the united states, hiroyuki sanada japan, and michelle yeoh malaysia. the wonders of shooting a film silently
(michelle yeoh’s linguistic background is probably more interesting that people assume, a speaker of english as a first language who had to learn her lines in crouching tiger, hidden dragon phonetically and who remains chinese-illiterate despite speaking both mandarin and cantonese fluently now. so if you think grinding anki cards is hard ur not the only one)
anyways i liked that this script was more focused than either yes, madam! or righting wrongs, there’s no grossout yuen kwai role or slapstick tsui hark role, on one hand it’s obviously part of the charm of this era of popular hong kong films but on the other i think it’d wear on my patience 3 movies in a row! it’s probably as hardcore as righting wrongs, entire families get eviscerated on screen, there’s a mass shooting, self-immolation, grave desecration, etc.
i love its deliberate color palettes, it looks like miami vice or something. i’m glad this one received a new restoration in particular it’s a delight to look at (the director david chung is better at directing the parts of the movie that happen around the action than corey yuen too, he can make a conversation visually interesting as in a shot where michelle yeoh and michael wong converse across two moving cars) i guess no one in the cast here moves like yuen biao or cynthia rothrock but this excels at making the most of its urban settings, it’s thrilling seeing airplane cabins and construction sites reconfigured into proto-videogame levels and the use of objects like chainsaws and construction equipment as the center of action setpieces
and obviously they all do some fucked up crazy stunts. ridiculous amount of shattering candy glass and the sound effect they use is for it is as excellent as any final fantasy key chime imo
a few other shots i enjoyed:
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Mission: Accomplished
Let’s do this
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oh i fucken LOVE The Hidden. very fun shit. also love its posters:
if you liked The Hidden, you would probably also enjoy Dead Heat (1988) which is yet another paranormal buddy cop film, featuring decomposing zombies and a lot of infleunce from New Wave music. the credits close with a song they got made for the film and by the end the main guy is straight up styled after Billy Idol with shrapnel earrings to boot. Originally watched the two together
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Yeah watched this last year and was … a little disappointed! i’d seen stills / clips from the fight scenes and was very excited about all the facts around its production. the fact that rothrock is in it, and made her film debut atall, because they thought she was better than any of the male talent they were originally considering for the role so they made the character a woman. the fact that its michelle yeohs first leading role and also what got her into doing action movie shit. i wanted to love it so bad
but i think going in with this expectation of an accidentally dykey action flick is why it sucked so bad to realize it was mostly a three stooges act. the boys are quite funny! but they are not what i signed up for! give me the hot lady punch movie!
the few fight scenes are great though and the fits are nonstop
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I’ll think I will probably not be able to write more on these for a while but I had completely forgotten that I have actually never seen MI:2 before. Watched it for the first time today. Wow. This is c i n e m a. Not the best MI movie or the best John Woo movie, not even his best Hollywood movie (face/off). But I think it is the apex of Woo’s attempts to emulate and transcend the like Bruckheimer/Bay mode of action movie-making. Maybe the ultimate farewell to the 90’s/pre 9/11 era of blockbusters. So many interesting things about it to me I wouldn’t know where to begin. Aesthetically has more in common w Manhunt (2017) than I expected, since the blinding blue skies of that felt to me like a huge departure for him at that time. Also had no idea the script for this one was also written by Robert Towne. In a lot of ways feels like a retread of the first one. De Palma’s horniness becomes more interesting to me when channeled through Woo’s obsession with homosocial turmoil
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it’s not great but I’m increasingly sympathetic to the argument that it’s actually the least bad & most fun of the first 3 which are all incredibly uneven compared to the impeccable later instalments
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I liked 3 a lot when it came out and I’m expecting it not to hold up anymore. But I still don’t think any movie with that much Philip Seymour Hoffman in it can actually be bad
3 has a great cast but truly terrible direction, and it was made during the brief era that cruise was a better villain than hero, which the script struggles with
the remarkable thing is that even the first one isn’t that great, none of de palma / woo / abrams really got to play to their own strengths, the franchise just sort of willed itself along
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Yea I was surprised by how flat 1 felt. I find it useful to think about it kind of like the Brady Bunch movie, like an old Gen X person revisiting the stuff they were raised on and being simultaneously embarrassed and captivated by it. The opening scene is basically someone watching an episode of Mission Impossible on a tiny TV. It’s a r t but it’s not like. A super great movie. There’s some abrupt transitions that make it feel kind of slapped together which is sort of unthinkable for classic De Palma but feels like too studio controlled for the late era weirdo De Palma that would emerge later. Was Domino any good. Does anyone even know
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Looking into late career De Palma made me learn that Cahiers du Cinema ranked Mission to Mars ahead of Yi yi and In the Mood for Love on their year end list lmao
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3 is the most 90s abrams thing: lifeless direction, poor blocking, incoherent action, everything looks really cheap, like its a made for tv movie instead of a blockbuster
It also has the most unbearable maudlin “Tom Cruise got himself married to a nice upper middle class beard and he doesn’t want her to get hurt and caring about her only endangers the manful spy so he has to gaslight her about his occupation” misogyny/“romance”
The kind of ‘save the cat’ drama you would expect from a 90s tv hack
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I always thought it played kind of like a humorless remake of True Lies.
Funny to me that it’s probably jjabrams’ best movie still
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nah, star trek 2009 and force awakens are way less actively bad, even if they’re fundamentally middle of the road abrams junk (and he subsequently made far worse installments in each series). tulpa is spot on, you won’t believe how cheap and inept MI3 looks now.
he can cast and produce and fundraise adequately as evidenced by his record of reviving all these moribund franchises but his floor as a director is very very low
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