Since the last update we actually managed to put out a couple episode of They Shot Pictures. One on Preston Sturges and another on John Woo. I had reviews of Woo’s Princess Chang Ping at Seattle Screen Scene and Jackie Chan’s Project A films here at The End. We’ve also had episodes of The George Sanders Show on The Look of Silence and The Sound of Music and Man of Aran and Neo Tokyo.

These are the movies I’ve watched and rewatched over the last few weeks and where they place on my year-by-year rankings. Short comments or capsule reviews for them can be found over at letterboxd.

Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty) – 3, 1934
The Sound of Music (Robert Wise) – 31, 1965
The Young Dragons (John Woo) – 17, 1974
The Dragon Tamers (John Woo) – 22, 1975
Princess Chang Ping (John Woo) – 16, 1976

Last Hurrah for Chivalry (John Woo) – 12, 1979
Laughing Times (John Woo) – 32, 1980
Neo Tokyo (Rintaro, Yoshiaki Kawajiri & Katsuhiro Ōtomo) – 16, 1987
The Killer (John Woo) – 1, 1989
Just Heroes (John Woo & Wu Ma) – 49, 1989

Bullet in the Head (John Woo) – 4, 1990
Hard-Boiled (John Woo) – 3, 1992
Hard Target (John Woo) – 46, 1993
Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee) – 19, 1995
Broken Arrow (John Woo) – 30, 1996
Face/Off (John Woo) – 30, 1997

Windtalkers (John Woo) – 14, 2002
Paycheck (John Woo) – 27, 2003
Red Cliff (John Woo) – 6, 2008
Oki’s Movie (Hong Sangsoo) – 1, 2010
Reign of Assassins (Su Chao-pin) – 48, 2010

The Crossing Part One (John Woo) – 11, 2014
The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer) – 33, 2014
Shaun the Sheep Movie (Mark Burton & Richard Starzak) – 16, 2015
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie) – 20, 2015
Ant-Man (Peyton Reed) – 23, 2015

Running Out of Karma is my on-going series on Johnnie To, Hong Kong and Chinese-language cinema. Here is an index.

Comparing Project A to Sammo Hung’s Wheels on Meals, released the next year in 1984, shows some stark differences between Sammo and Jackie Chan as directors. Both films are swashbuckling adventures with ridiculously athletic fights and stunts, slapstick comedy and a real obsession with beating the hell out of Jackie Chan. Both star Chan, Sammo and Yuen Biao. Sammo’s film though tells a real story, about immigrants in Barcelona (granted, a Barcelona where everyone speaks Cantonese) that find themselves caught up in what we slowly realize is a fairy tale: three musketeers rescuing a princess from a castle. It isn’t as socially conscious as Hung’s Pedicab Driver (a great film which is now available to stream on Warner Archive Instant), but that little bit of grounding makes the escalating fantasy even more effective. It’s packed with purely visual humor (the split screen gag in the opening moments, Sammo’s variety of hats and Yuen’s entire wardrobe) and moments of sublime absurdity (Wu Ma’s “guy who thinks he’s a clock”). Wheels on Meals is a true ensemble film, with Yuen and Chan sharing the lead and Sammo in support, like he is in almost all of his films from this period.

Project A, however, is a Jackie Chan-starring vehicle all the way. There are long stretches of the film where the other two Little Fortunes are entirely absent (Yuen has a large role as a rival cop in the first half of the film, then mostly disappears, Sammo pops in and out for some scoundrelly awesomeness). Chan is the prime mover of the plot and the true hero of a very thin story about Hong Kong’s Coast Guard fighting a gang of pirates at some very unspecific time in the past. The humor is even more broad and less inventive, wild overacting (even by Hong Kong standards) and literal pie-in-the-face jokes (well, spaghetti-in-the-face). The plot barely makes sense, little more than an excuse for fights, sketchy gags and chase sequences (and of course a contextually nonsensical but nonetheless kind of stirring patriotic dressing-down Chan gives his British superior). The actions scenes are, of course, amazing: the coordination of the fights with Chan and Sammo (side by side, for the moment) is unbelievably fast and intricate, and these are some of Chan’s most famous and inventive chases, especially the central bicycle chase, with Chan’s exasperation toward the useless female lead (another unfortunate Chan trope) and culminating in a Harold Lloyd homage. But even the finale becomes overcrowded with extras and effects. The climax of Wheels on Meals gives each hero a highlighted fight, we see the differences in their personalities reflected in their fighting styles: Sammo’s silliness, Yuen’s gracefulness and speed, Chan’s masochism. In Project A, the climax is a series of mistaken identity gags (which are, to be fair, pretty funny) followed by an all-too-brief mass fight punctuated by the repeated use of hand grenades (some brilliant falling stunts by Sammo here). The three unite to gang up on the villain Dick Wei (terrific here, wish he had a bigger part), but even in this fight, it’s technology that wins as much as anything else.

Project A 2 (Jackie Chan, 1987)

The sequel is even more Chan-focused, as the other Little Fortunes are absent (they were off in the jungle making Eastern Condors) and Jackie is joined by a trio of women played by Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau and Rosamund Kwan, in an apparent nod to Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues and its trio of Brigitte Lin, Sally Yeh and Cherie Chung. The film picks up right at the end of the first one, with surviving members of the pirate gang vowing revenge on Chan. They end up poor and desperate in Hong Kong where they join the various factions trying to kill our hero. These include a corrupt cop with a penchant for inflating his reputation with fake arrests and a gambling den magnate/gang leader. The women are part of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary group, and they try to get Chan to join up as well. As always, Chan refuses to take a political stand, rather than supporting one government or another he sticks to a personal ideology of honesty and righteousness. He’s against corruption, aids the sick and helpless and protects the innocent. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things, of course, but one can’t help notice that this political vagueness also makes his films palatable for the widest possible audience, whereas more committed films like Tsui’s, in which the female revolutionaries are the heroes and prime movers of the plot, make an unmistakeable political argument threatening to the powers that be.

Chan’s political vagueness aside, I think this is actually even better than the first film. It expands and perfects his desire to pay homage to old Hollywood classics, with an extended sequence in Cheung’s apartment that recalls A Night at the Opera (as well as a similar, but smaller-scale, sequence in Tsui’s Shanghai Blues) and the finale ups the Harold Lloyd sequence from the first film by recreating Buster Keaton’s most famous stunt (from Steamboat Bill, Jr.) The best sequence though is an extended chase with Chan and his rival cop handcuffed together and attacked by the ax-throwing pirate gang that starts in a restaurant and extends across the streets of the city. This is the pinnacle of Chan’s slapstick kung fu style, avoiding the brutal masochism of Police Story (made between these two films in 1985), in which the light-hearted comic hero Jackie gradually comes undone at the abuse of his body perpetrated by the villains and his own choreographic imagination. The conclusion of that film is violent and cruel, as the hero resorts to a pure expression of murderous rage against his (captured and defenseless) enemy, part of a series of Hong Kong films in the 80s that seem to justify police vigilantism and brutality, also a popular trope in American cop films of the same era. As Chan’s career went on, the cartoon of the Project A films became his default persona while the Police Story darkness, a natural outgrowth of the masochism of his early films, dissipated. But aside from a spark here and there, the films were rarely so good, becoming increasingly content to rest on audacity rather than ingenuity for his stunt sequences and awkward mugging for his comedy. And as his physical skills have declined with age, the hollowness of his work has become ever more apparent. Unlike Tsui Hark, or Lau Kar-leung, he’s been unable to extend his directorial career into old age with any kind of success. He never really had anything to say anyway.

Over the past month or so I wrote about King Arthur here at The End and a bunch of movies over at Seattle Screen Scene, including Christmas in July, Trainwreck and The Lady Eve, A Hard Day and Unexpected, and a quartet of Running Out of Karma movies: Wild City; Yes, Madam!; The Heroic Trio, and A Better Tomorrow.

We discussed that last one as well on The George Sanders Show, along with Blackhat. We also did shows on Summer Interlude and Songs from the Second Floor and The Green Ray and X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes. We have a new episode of They Shot Pictures on Preston Sturges ready to go, it should be making it’s way onto the internet any time now. And, following tradition, I made a bunch of Best of the Year So Far lists.

I also went on a bit of an Endy Awards kick, handing out fake cat statues to films from the years 1993, 1995, 1996 and 1997. I also updated the years 1994 and 1998-2014, changing some nominees and winners based on new movies I’ve seen since the last revision in March. You can find all of those, as always, in the Endy Awards Index.

These are the movies I’ve watched and rewatched over the last few weeks and where they place on my year-by-year rankings. Short comments or capsule reviews for them can be found over at letterboxd.

The Power and the Glory (William K. Howard) – 33, 1933
The Good Fairy (William Wyler) – 11, 1935
The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz) – 2, 1938
Christmas in July (Preston Sturges) – 4, 1940
The Great McGinty (Preston Sturges) – 20, 1940

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges) – 2, 1941
Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges) – 11, 1941
The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges) – 5, 1942
Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges) – 8, 1944
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges) – 12, 1944

Unfaithfully Yours (Preston Sturges) – 5, 1948
Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman) – 31, 1951
X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (Roger Corman) – 24, 1963
Temple of the Red Lotus (Hsu Tsung-hung) – 27, 1965
The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (Patrick Lung-kong) – 21, 1967

A Better Tomorrow (John Woo) – 1, 1986
The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer) – 2, 1986
Middlemarch (Anthony Page) – 40, 1994
Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson) – 23, 2000
Emma (Jim O’Hanlon) – 27, 2009

Blackhat (Michael Mann) – 3, 2015
Wild City (Ringo Lam) – 12, 2015
Trainwreck (Judd Apatow) – 13, 2015
7 Days in Hell (Jake Szymanski) – 17, 2015