I’ve been rolling along with my Johnnie To and Hong Kong Cinema series Running Out of Karma over the last few weeks, taking some fun detours into the work of the Hui Brothers and late 80s Girls with Guns movies. This month I’ve reviewed Tsui Hark’s Working Class, Michelle Yeoh in Royal Warriors and Corey Yuen’s She Shoots Straight in addition to Johnnie To’s third feature Seven Years Itch and a revisit of his great 2012 film Drug War.

I’ve also recorded a bunch of podcasts since the last update. The second of our John Ford episodes on They Shot Pictures, covering his War Movies, along with a extensive two–part year-in-review episode. On The George Sanders Show, we’ve done episodes on The Hudsucker Proxy and Lady for a Day, Crank and The Victim and Meet Me in St. Louis and A Christmas Tale.

Over at letterboxd, all my lists are updated, with a running account of the Running Out of Karma films (32 as of right now) and a new one for Michelle Yeoh.

I’ll have some year-end lists and stuff up here over the next week, covering the best of 2013 movies and also my favorite non-2013 movies I saw for the first time this year. I still have a full week of movie-watching to go.

These are the movies I’ve watched and re-watched over the last couple of weeks, and where they place in my year-by-year rankings:

Pilgrimage (John Ford) – 18, 1933
Lady for a Day (Frank Capra) – 24, 1933
Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli) – 1, 1944
They Were Expendable (John Ford) – 2, 1945
7 Women (John Ford) – 6, 1966

The Private Eyes (Michael Hui) – 14, 1976
The Victim (Sammo Hung) – 6, 1980
Security Unlimited (Michael Hui) – 18, 1981
Love in a Fallen City (Ann Hui) – 19, 1984
Aces Go Places III: Our Man from Bond Street (Tsui Hark) – 32, 1984

Working Class (Tsui Hark) – 16, 1985
Royal Warriors (David Chung) – 15, 1986
Aces Go Places IV: You Never Die Twice (Ringo Lam) – 20, 1986
Magnificent Warriors (David Chung) – 17, 1987
An Autumn’s Tale (Mabel Cheung) – 22, 1987

Final Justice (Parkman Wong) – 25, 1988
In the Line of Duty 3 (Arthur Wong & Brandy Yuen) – 32, 1988
The Killer (John Woo) – 3, 1989
In the Line of Duty 4 (Yuen Woo-ping) – 11, 1989
All About Ah-long (Johnnie To) – 19, 1989

Aces Go Places V: The Terracotta Hit (Lau Kar-leung) – 38, 1989
She Shoots Straight (Corey Yuen) – 29, 1990
The Banquet (Various) – 49, 1991
The Hudsucker Proxy (The Coen Bros) – 9, 1994
Crank (Neveldine/Taylor) – 11, 2006

A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin) – 7, 2008
Drug War (Johnnie To) – 3, 2012
Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Verena Paravel) – 8, 2012
You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Alain Resnais) – 23, 2012
Blancanieves (Pablo Berger) – 30, 2012

It’s a Disaster (Todd Berger) – 45, 2012
At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman) – 11, 2013
The World’s End (Edgar Wright) – 13, 2013
Before Midnight (Richard Linklater) – 14, 2013
Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg) – 27, 2013
Pain & Gain (Michael Bay) – 29, 2013

Neither this nor the alternate title (Lethal Lady) capture the film very well. It’s a film about family, specifically the kind of family where everyone is a cop. This family just happens to have a lot of daughters and only one son. Joyce Godenzi stars as the new addition as she marries the lone boy, the pride and joy of the family, The Other Tony Leung. Leung’s sisters all hate Godenzi, out of jealousy for her crime-fighting skills and the fact that she “stole” their brother. The most vocally disapproving of the sisters is Carina Lau (still recognizable despite some terrible hair, which gets better as the film goes along, and then goes wrong again) and she’s also the most aggressively reckless of them as a cop. The family conflict plays itself out as they all fight a gang of Vietnamese gun smugglers led by Yuen Wah (it’s unclear exactly what their political motivation is, I think they’re still fighting the Communists 15 years after the war ended). Yuen is pretty terrific as a single-minded, bespectacled warrior, though he never really gets to show off his fighting skills (check out Sammo Hung’s Eastern Condors for that, he again plays a Vietnamese guy, the final villain in that one, in which Godenzi also makes a memorable appearance).

Director Corey Yuen doesn’t stint on the action set-pieces, including a spectacular kidnapping at a fashion show, but the most remarkable scene in the film comes midway through, a birthday party for the mother of the clan, herself a police widow, as we and a couple of the guests know there’s been a death in the family, but everyone else does not. The mother, played magnificently by Tang Pik-wan (a Cantonese opera, movie and TV star since before the war, in her penultimate performance), alone knows something is wrong, and as she, and eventually the rest of the family, realize it, the effect is heartbreaking. Yuen doesn’t linger on the tragedy to grotesque effect, in the manner of heightened emotional scenes in many other HK action films, but allows it to play out naturally and on a human scale. I do not know, but can only suspect that this is the only girls with guns movie that’ll bring a tear to the eye.

Hanging over the film like Chekov’s fat man is Sammo Hung, a fellow cop and godbrother to the family who we keep waiting to get involved in the action. He doesn’t, letting Godenzi and Lau take the spotlight. He does get the funniest scene in the film, when he approaches a crying Godenzi and pulls out his handkerchief and makes a big deal of wiping and rewiping his nose before offering it to her. (He does get a couple brief action moments at the end, after the ladies have won the day.) Joyce Godenzi appeared in only a few more films, including Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung’s The Raid and Sammo Hung’s Slickers vs. Killers in 1991 before retiring from film. She and Sammo have been married since 1995.

I’m a little unclear on whether or not this 1986 film is In the Line of Duty or In the Line of Duty 2. Wikipedia says it’s the second one, after 1985’s Yes, Madam!, imdb says it’s the first and uses “In the Line of Duty” as its official title. As I understand it, the earlier film was released abroad only after this one, and they were retitled to match, with Yes, Madam! becoming the “sequel” In the Line of Duty 2 (or Ultra Force 2 or Police Assassins 2, depending on territory). Why it would be called “Royal Warriors“, which is apparently its original Cantonese title, is beyond me, as the film has nothing to do with royalty and “warriors” implies a more ancient setting. Setting right the universe, I guess, is the next film in the series, alternately known as In the Line of Duty 3 and Yes, Madam 2, which stars Cynthia Khan, whose name is a totally synthetic combination of the names of the stars of the first two films, Cynthia Rothrock and Michelle Khan (as Michelle Yeoh was known at the time).

Anyway, Michelle Yeoh plays a cop (named Michelle of course, one of my favorite little things about Hong Kong cinema is how often character names are simply the actors’ names: it helps establish stars and no one has to waste precious screenwriting minutes coming up with fake names for the characters) who with the help of an air marshal (Michael Wong) and a retiring Japanese cop (Hiroyuki Sanada, who has been in a lot of things, including Lost, Sunshine, Speed Racer and the latest Wolverine movie) foil an airplane hijacking. The three then become the revenge targets for the surviving members of the gang that perpetrated the hijacking. A gang of unspecified criminal activity but which comes with a vague Vietnam War backstory about brotherhood and honor. The film is absolutely brutal, as the gang goes full Big Heat on Sanada and a guy with a mustache and an Uzi kills a massive amount of bystanders while shooting up a bar called California (apparently the did a big remodel before reopening for Chungking Express), a scene which features almost as much shattered glass as the famed climax of Jackie Chan’s Police Story, but with giant neon Tic-Tac-Toe signs thrown in.

The plot is only barely coherent (easy to follow, but makes less sense the more you think about it), and unlike Yes, Madam! or Righting Wrongs or Police Story, the film is lacking that extra layer of thematic depth, that something beyond the visceral thrill of the action sequences. (I wouldn’t say depth is necessary for a film to be good, but it certainly doesn’t hurt). The film nods to Dirty Harry-style vigilantism and the ways women are underestimated and demeaned in the workforce, but only barely. We do get a great “hand in your badge and gun, you’re off the case!” scene. Small character touches help, like Yeoh’s barely contained annoyance at Wong’s constant flirting, or how Sanada is always getting half-buried by things. But the real draw is the action, of course, and the hand-to-hand fight scenes and car chases are incredible, fast and powerful, mixing Yeoh’s elegant ballet dancer form with bone-crunching kung fu (seriously: she appears to take a Jackie Chan-level beating in several scenes). And she drives a homemade tank.

The film was directed by David Chung, a follow-up to his magnificently titled 1985 film It’s a Drink, It’s a Bomb!, an early Maggie Cheung film produced by Sammo Hung which I now have to see. Chung worked more as a cinematographer than director, with as impressive a list of credits as anyone in the 1980s-early 90s: Dangerous Encounters – First Kind, Boat People, Nomad, An Autumn’s Tale, My Heart is that Eternal Rose, God of Gamblers, Once Upon a Time in China). His next film as a director was Magnificent Warriors aka Dynamite Fighters aka Yes, Madam 3, starring Michelle Yeoh and which apparently, like Royal Warriors, had second unit direction by Johnnie To.

Taking a big leap out of chronological order, I want to write a bit about Drug War, Johnnie To’s second most-recent film, one that should be showing up on a lot of end of the year Best Of lists right around now. Running Out of Karma is my on-going series on Johnnie To and Hong Kong cinema. Here is an index.

From the beginning, it explains that this is not your typical heroic bloodshed Triad film, concerned more with codes of honor and brotherhood and the mirroring of good and evil than anything else. No, instead this is going to be a straight police procedural, with no metaphysical mumbo jumbo: “You’re a drug dealer, I’m a cop. I didn’t betray you, I busted you,” explains Sun Honglei’s Captain Zhang, and with that 25 years (at least) of Hong Kong genre convention, from John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow and The Killer to To’s own cop/Triad movies (Breaking News, PTU, Mad Detective, etc) is summarily dismissed.

What follows are the details of Zhang’s investigation of captured drug manufacturer Timmy and his gang, with Timmy as an apparently cooperating turncoat. He arranges a series of meetings between Zhang and his connections (the port-controlling Haha and the nephew of a drug lord), providing Sun with the opportunity to first play the spaced-out, taciturn junkie nephew in the meeting with Haha followed quickly by a Haha impersonation with the real nephew. Sun’s performance, as well as To’s coordination of a near miss in the lobby between the real and fake Hahas, is impeccable.

This sequence ends in the first, and least successful, of a series of climaxes. The film has a pulsating rhythm, slowly building tension through dialogue scenes, involving one character attempting to convince another that he is being genuine. This is the film’s Tarantinian inheritance: like Inglourious Basterds, Reservoir Dogs or Django Unchained it is structured as a series of conversations wherein one person attempts to convince another that he is who he says he is (even though we know he’s not). That tension builds to the point of eruption: first as Zhang has a bad reaction to some drugs he’s forced to take (in the film’s least plausible scene, but then I’m not an expert in heroin overdoses), then a tense yet comical roadside confrontation between Timmy and his subordinate truck drivers, then a shootout at a drug warehouse and then finally the film’s final sequence. To sticks doggedly to this structure, leaving no time for backstory or character development. This extends even to the visual style of the film: it flows and it’s lovely, but there are few self-consciously stunning or flashy shots. To has pared down his visual aesthetic in the same way he’s cut down the screenplay: only the essential. We learn about Zhang and his team through their actions: their relentless commitment to their jobs despite the almost total lack of sleep over several days (the cops who follow a suspect truck for 24 hours at the spur of the moment, the way no one wants to sleep when Zhang orders them to get some rest). There are no romances, no past traumas in need of working out, no wondering “if it’s all worth it”, just professionals doing a job.

The moral implications of that job are left to the viewer to tease out. Filming in China, under the restrictions of government censorship, prevents To from being straightforwardly political. Not that he would if he could, as he’s always been more interested in tension and contradiction than polemic or advocacy. But the power of the cops on display here, both in determination and technological prowess (manpower, firepower, tiny cameras and bugs and computers and more: they manage to take over an entire port in a matter of hours!) is impressive, surely enough to satisfy any authoritarian. Perhaps too much: it seems designed to unnerve rather than valorize. As with the 2007 Milkway Image film Eye in the Sky, the film often mixes in images captured from surveillance cameras. This visual trope seems to be growing in popularity as a conventional shorthand for the Big Brother-ness of the PRC government: it’s always watching. (Vivian Qu’s recent film Trap Street explores this metaphor more explicitly.)

In To’s 2011 Life Without Principle, the Triads are beginning to look a bit desperate in the wake of the latest global financial crisis. While they come off slightly more organized here, their grasp on power has certainly been shaken since the late-90s Handover days of The Mission or Exiled. It’s no coincidence that all the cops are played by Mainland actors while all the crooks are Hong Kongers. It’s not just the censor-passifying implication that the criminal element are “outsiders” but also a complication of audience sympathies, especially for those who recognize Lam Suet and Lam Ka-tung and Lo Hoi-pang from previous To films. Beyond that is the performance of Louis Koo, hero of many of To’s films, usually as a romantic lead, the Election films being notable as the only other time he’s played a crook for To. Like those two films, Koo, despite his criminality, plays a sympathetic figure. He’s the only character in Drug War who hints at a past, the only one to ever show any kind of emotion (a very moving scene where his gang mourns the death of Koo’s wife and her brothers, where they are so desperate to show their respect for the departed that they burn real money (the burning of fake money being a traditional mourning activity: it gives the dead some cash for the afterlife)). Even at the end, we can’t help but admire Timmy’s desperate gasps at self-preservation. He orchestrates the finale, bringing cops and crooks together on a city street for a bloody shootout, and does all he can to intensify the chaos, killing cop and criminal alike. It’s only in confusion that he can hope to escape. He has no loyalty to either side: his will to live supersedes any sense of order. Face to face with human desperation, both structures: the seemingly omnipotent power of the state and the criminal gang from capitalist Hong Kong, crumble.

But of course, Timmy doesn’t get away. Zhang, the agent of the state, handcuffs himself to him in his final moments and Timmy, frantically clawing against him like a rat in a cage, dragging Zhang’s body around as he’s surrounded by the military units of the Chinese police, stands as a potent symbol of both the useless, inevitably self-destroying violence of the criminal life and the helplessness of the single individual against the power of the state. The film’s coda, Timmy’s execution as he babbles everything he knows about China’s criminal underworld in a final attempt at freedom, is terrifying in its clinical matter-of-factness. In the end, there’s no escape for him, but even in those last moments, he’s not allowed a kind of human or even spiritual understanding. All he is is a repository of criminal knowledge. All he is is a job.

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

A Cinema City film in all but name, as Tsui Hark directs for his own production company, Film Workshop, this comedy with pop star Sam Hui (of the Hui Brothers and Aces Go Places) and rock star Teddy Robin (of Tsui’s own All the Wrong Clues. Tsui himself rounds out the trio of workers trying to get by in the world of benevolent old owners and evil middle managers (none other than Ng Man Tat – it’s going to be weird seeing him as Stephen Chow’s sidekick again after he’s so great in these 80s villain roles (A Better Tomorrow II, My Heart is that Eternal Rose)). The three work in an instant noodle factory (is there a Cantonese word for ‘ramen’?) and play a variety of pranks to undermine the bosses. Much to the irritation of Tsui’s wife (Leung Wan-yui), Tsui brings the homeless Teddy home to live with them. Tsui and Teddy make a great comic pair: tall and thin with, as Bordwell puts it “an intimidating goatee” and short and squat and almost always wearing sunglasses. Sam falls in love with the boss’s daughter, Joey Wang, but she hides the fact that she’s rich from him (Sam wonders why a fancy Rolls Royce is always following them everywhere they go on their neon-lit dates through the city at night). Then everyone plays soccer and everyone cheats.

Rather than grafting a Socially Important Message onto an essentially silly comedy (the example that comes to mind is Eddie Murphy’s The Distinguished Gentleman, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen), Tsui comes at it from the other direction. He takes what could be, in less interesting hands, a serious scenario about worker exploitation and the lives of the poor in a booming economy where the rich keep getting richer and makes a farce of it. The humor comes organically out of the heroes’ anarchic rejection of the social codes that enforce fealty to the bosses, no matter how treacherous they are. Every prank becomes an act of protest. Even the love story plays backwards: it is Joey’s superfluous wealthiness that is shameful, not the tiny apartment Sam shares with his mother. The politics isn’t the least bit profound, but it is a little revolutionary.

I was disappointed that Tsui’s breakthrough hit All the Wrong Clues (…For the Right Solution), lacked the oppositional elements that made his first three films so exciting, opting instead for pure farce and parody. His entry in the Aces Go Places series followed in that vein, privileging goofy special effects over not only politics but quality stunt construction (I much preferred the second film in that series, directed by Eric Tsang). Working Class I think gets closer to the heart of what makes Tsui a great filmmaker: the mixing of New Wave politics with popular genre filmmaking. It’s not the commodification or assimilation of leftist ideals into a corporate mainstream, but the repackaging of them as a shiny, goofy treat, a cookie full of arsenic for the exploitative middle managers of the world.

After finding success in his return to filmmaking with 1986’s Happy Ghost III, Johnnie To re-teamed with actor-writer-producer-Cinema City studio head Raymond Wong for a more conventional romantic comedy, loosely inspired by Billy Wilder’s popular 1955 Marilyn Monroe vehicle The Seven-Year Itch. Wilder’s film is an adaptation of the play by George Axelrod, who worked as a screenwriter and director as well as playwright. It’s one of my least favorite of Wilder’s films, and also my least favorite of Axelrod’s works (he wrote The Manchurian Candidate, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and also directed the sublimely weird Lord Love a Duck). By reputation this remake might also be the least of all Johnnie To’s 50-plus films but, while it certainly isn’t great, it’s not without interest. That’s one of the nice side benefits of being an auteurist: even an artist’s worst films can be interesting and enjoyable because of what hints or insights they might provide about the greater works. As a sidenote: this is actually one of Pauline Kael’s more interesting objections to the Theory in her essay Circles and Squares: why is the mere act of recognizing an earlier, usually worse, use of a certain technique or trope interesting? Why should that be a critical value? I don’t really have a good answer for that, but I think it might simply be an attraction for a certain kind of person, one who enjoys putting puzzles together. Finding an earlier example of a later line of dialogue or character type or whatever is like discovering a new piece, perhaps revealing not only more about the whole, but a fresh way of seeing the already-assembled pieces. It may not make the movie better, but it might make watching it more fun. But anyway, even Seven Years Itch isn’t a particularly bad film, it’s just not all that funny.

Raymond Wong, tall and skinny, bespectacled and awkward, cursed with a giant head (I say this with affection as a tall, skinny, bespectacled, awkward, giant-headed man myself) plays a mediocre salaryman living with but not technically married to Sylvia Chang (who sparkled as a tough as nails cop in the first half of the first Aces Go Places movie). His mother-in-law constantly berates him for not throwing the expensive wedding party that would make their union official, while his brother-in-law, the omni-present Eric Tsang, is constantly trying to borrow money and/or tempt him with prostitutes. Bored with his life and irritated at the way Chang always sings Chinese Opera with her gay cousin (this is literally how he’s referred to throughout the film, if the subtitles are too be believed: either “Gay Cousin” or “Cousin Gay”) and makes him the same boring breakfast, Wong begins daydreaming about infidelity. On a business trip to Singapore, he carries on a lengthy, montage-filled flirtation with a pretty girl in red stockings, who of course turns out to be a jewelry smuggler using him as an unwitting mule. Then things start getting weird.

Back home, Wong tries to reignite things with Chang. So he takes her to Singapore and tries to get her to dress and act exactly like the other girl. There are shades of Vertigo in these scenes, which are the best in the film. To playfully repeats the same camera set-ups and movements from the earlier sequence, but to comic effect as Chang plays the scenes all wrong, falls asleep out of boredom and Wong becomes increasingly frustrated. The role-play fails and Chang strikes up a flirtation with an older Chinese-American businessman (apparently named “Mr. Money”). Eventually Chang catches Wong with the other girl (she’s come back to retrieve a smuggled ring she’d misplaced in Wong’s bag which he’d then accidentally given to Chang as an apparent engagement ring, naturally) and leaves him for Mr. Money once they return to Hong Kong. A car chase ensues (with Wong getting sidetracked at a “couples only” hotel, where Chang catches him paying a prostitute so he can enter, as happens). Eventually Wong makes a big scene at the airport, which apparently fails to work and then it all ends happily.

It’s that ending that’s most relevant to To’s later work, as the concept of the Grand Gesture will become a fundamental part of his romantic comedies. Needing You, in fact, follows much the same trajectory in its final third, with Andy Lau chasing after Sammi Cheng and trying to prove his love as she tries to leave Hong Kong with another, much richer, man (via boat this time rather than airplane, boats being both more cinematic and more final). Don’t Go Breaking My Heart consists almost entirely of Grand Gestures, as Louis Koo and Daniel Wu compete for the love of Gao Yuanyuan with a series of increasingly elaborate creations, from Post-Its on office windows to massive skyscrapers. Most of the other romantic comedies feature them as well (the movie Koo makes in Romancing in Thin Air, the ghost’s actions in My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, the final theft in Yesterday Once More). In To’s films, the lover, almost always the man, has to prove himself worthy of the woman’s affection. He has made some mistake that has kept them apart, and he must atone in as elaborate and as public a way as possible. In the later films, the heroine is unconventional, a prankster sort who doesn’t fit in well with straight society. By making his grand gesture, the hero proves that he is willing to play the game with her, that he too cares little for the rules of social decorum.

The romantic comedies are told from the perspective of the woman, or at least it’s her with whom we most identify. But that’s not the case with Seven Years Itch. But for a few scenes of Sylvia Chang in cooking class (where she hears gossip from her married friends), almost every scene is built around Raymond Wong’s character, and he’s not a particularly likable one. Despite a few attempts at critiquing the kind of patriarchal ethos that attempts to justify infidelity (articulated by Tsang and Wong’s male co-workers), the script wants us to root for him, to see his lying and conniving lustfulness as quaint and charming, or at best benignly ridiculous. To gives us a montage of lady parts, close-ups of breasts and legs and asses walking the streets of Hong Kong as they’re ogled by men at every turn (including a recreation of the famous Marilyn Monroe subway grate upskirt-shot from Wilder’s film, one that lingers for quite awhile on the unfortunate woman’s improbably complex lingerie) that is somewhat reminiscent of a similar scene in Orson Welles’s F for Fake, but it doesn’t seem like that’s nearly enough to defuse the boorishness of every male character in the film (Gay Cousin excepted). At times it seems like Wong and To very much want us to dislike the main character (while Chang plays the most emotionally coherent and likable person in the film), but the generic demands of Cinema City-style goofy slapstick prevent them from going all the way with it. Given a darker turn, they might have produced a cogent critique of Wilder and Axelrod’s source material. Instead the film just gets lost in its ambivalence, while giving us a glimpse of better things to come.

Next Up: The Eighth Happiness

Since the last rankings update, I launched a new review series on Johnnie To and Hong Kong Cinema that I’m calling Running Out of Karma because I couldn’t come up with a snappier title. So far I’ve covered his debut film The Enigmatic Case, John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow II, Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues, Ringo Lam’s Prison on Fire as well as the Happy Ghost series, of which To directed the third installment. Those reviews and more can all be found in the Index.

I’ve also recorded some more podcasts, four episodes of The George Sanders Show (The Big Parade and The Red & The White; Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Three Ages; Monsieur Verdoux and Bonfire of the Vanities; and Computer Chess and The Chess Players) and a new episode of They Shot Pictures on Claire Denis, focusing on Beau travail, L’intrus and 35 Shots of Rum.

These are the movies I’ve watched and rewatched over the last few weeks, and where they place on my year-by-year rankings.

Three Ages (Buster Keaton) – 3, 1923
Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin) – 4, 1947
The Red and The White (Miklós Jancsó) – 2, 1967
The Chess Players (Satyajit Ray) – 4, 1977
The Contract (Michael Hui) – 7, 1978

All the Wrong Clues (…For the Right Solution) (Tsui Hark) – 29, 1981
Aces Go Places (Eric Tsang) – 25, 1982
Aces Go Places II (Eric Tsang) – 15, 1983
The Happy Ghost (Clifton Ko) – 21, 1984
Happy Ghost II (Clifton Ko) – 35, 1985

Peking Opera Blues (Tsui Hark) – 4, 1986
Happy Ghost III (Johnnie To) – 23, 1986
Prison on Fire (Ringo Lam) – 25, 1987
A Better Tomorrow II (John Woo) – 35, 1987
Seven Years Itch (Johnnie To) – 40, 1987
The Eighth Happiness (Johnnie To) – 29, 1988

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Stephen Herek) – 16, 1989
The Bonfire of the Vanities (Brian DePalma) – 41, 1990
Only Yesterday (Isao Takahata) – 8, 1991
Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondo) – 5, 1995
Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski) – 7, 2013

A conventional yet effective prison drama from director Ringo Lam, who appears to have cornered the market on “on Fire” movies with this and City on Fire, also from 1987, along with the next year’s School on Fire. All three were made at the Cinema City studio, where Lam was quickly distinguishing himself from his occasional collaborator, Johnnie To (the two more or less co-directed Happy Ghost III and twenty years later accounted for two of the three parts of Triangle, with the third being by Tsui Hark). The ‘On Fire” films were big hits, capitalizing on Chow Yun-fat’s superstardom, and Lam even attracted a following in the US (he spent some time making Jean-Claude Van Damme movies in the 90s, along with John Woo and Tsui Hark), most famously with City on Fire serving as an inspiration for Reservoir Dogs.

In Prison on Fire, The Other Tony Leung plays the new guy, sentenced to three years for accidentally getting a jerk who had skipped out on the check at his father’s restaurant run over by a bus. Leung is great, tall and skinny with oversized glasses and a look of constant, terrified bewilderment, but his character is unrealistically naive, if not outright stupid. Chow Yun-fat, a veteran prisoner with a happy-go-lucky attitude attempts to show him the ropes (generally leading to Chow slowly shaking his head in resigned disgust as Leung ignores his wise advice). At one point, Chow explains that they’re in the jungle: Chow’s the monkey and Leung’s the lamb, but Leung doesn’t seem to get the point, he keeps trying to impose outside standards of honesty and forthrightness to the prison world. The two run afoul of the local tough guy as well as an evil prison guard (Ho Ka-kui and Roy Cheung, respectively, both of whom are fantastic and menacing, Cheung with teeth-gritting, bug-eyed intensity and Ho with glasses, a slight paunch and utterly conscienceless), leading to some intense and violent confrontations. Both stars get to flip out in slow motion, it’s pretty great.

Prison movies generally function as microcosms of society, providing opportunities for critiques of capitalism or the state or both. Those elements are here in force as well, most explicitly when the prisoners go on a hunger strike because the prison has raised prices for things like cigarettes beyond what they can afford with their meager pay. The prison functions as a pre-union style corporation (workers can only buy from the company store) and as an instrument of state terror, enforcing its arcane rules with the threat of violence while the guards manipulate the prisoners against each other to save their bureaucratic faces. The system explodes for one brief shining moment that recalls an ultra-violent Zéro de conduite, doused in water and blood, but it will quickly reassert control. Leung’s innocent never really wises up, nor does he effectively change anything. The best he can do is get out when his time is up.

After the failure of his debut film, The Enigmatic Case, Johnnie To went back to television for several years (where he directed an acclaimed adaptation of Louis Cha’s Legend of the Condor Heroes), not returning to film until 1986, when Raymond Wong hired him to direct the third film in his Cinema City studio’s successful Happy Ghost comedy series. In the west, even today, To is known primarily as a director of hard-hitting, violent gangster dramas starring taciturn men who find themselves trapped in the inexorable machinations of fate, the state or the ancient honor codes governing cops and crooks alike. But that description only comes close to describing about half the 50+ films he’s directed to date. His filmography is vast and diverse and we do it a disservice when we privilege the darker part over the brighter. This is one of the main goals of Running Out of Karma: to reach a fuller understanding of the man’s career by looking at all of his work, not just those that fit with our understanding of what counts as “serious” genre cinema. It’s one of the fundamental tenets of auteurism that the critic must look at all of a filmmaker’s work, or at least as much as they can. That it isn’t merely in the prestige films that an auteur shows their artistry, that it can be found in the most humble of program pictures as well. And indeed, Happy Ghost III shows exactly that, especially when seen in comparison with the first two films in the series, helmed by Clifton Ko.

But first, a note about authorship. As with most, if not all, of Johnnie To’s films in this period, it’s impossible for an outsider like me to assert with any confidence who exactly was responsible for any given element in a film. Especially given the communal working conditions at a studio like Cinema City, where the star of the film, Raymond Wong, is also the writer and the studio co-founder and where Tsui Hark, as dominant a force as there was in 1980s Hong Kong film (exceeded perhaps only by Jackie Chan) is in charge of the visual effects. The imdb doesn’t even credit Johnnie To as director on the film, giving Ringo Lam that title and relegating To to Assistant Director (which is just weird, To talks about it in an interview in Stephen Teo’s indispensable book on To as if he directed it, though he does make a special point of saying how happy he was to just be the working director on the film, and not be responsible for writing the screenplay as well. Wikipedia and Hong Kong Cinemagic credit Lam and To as co-directors). The on-screen credit lists To as “Acting Director” which is somewhat ambiguous: did he just direct the actors while another person was in charge of camera placement, shot construction, etc, or was he merely filling in for the real director? But the simple fact is that none of that really matters. It’s fascinating (at least to me) as historical background trivia, but when looking at the film through the auteurist lens, when trying to see glimpses of the Johnnie To to come in this early film, it doesn’t so much matter who was responsible for what. If there are qualities of To-ness in Happy Ghost III, elements of the film that would become distinctive traits of his later work, then it doesn’t really matter if the initial creation of those elements was the idea of Lam, Wong, Tsui, Maggie Cheung, a particularly skilled gaffer or anybody else. In fact, I assume that at this relatively early stage in his career, To was still soaking up influences wherever he found them. Throughout the next decade, a hallmark of To’s career would be his willingness to collaborate, his ability to work with other, often dominant personalities (like Tsui Hark, Stephen Chow and Ching Siu-tung). Indeed, his collaborations with Wai Ka-fai continue to account for some of his best work. Auteurism isn’t about assigning credit, it’s an inductive process whereby looking at a vast number of films we can begin to tease out the particular elements that a certain artist brings to their work. We can’t fully understand what makes a Johnnie To film just by watching the films for which he was the sole, or at least most dominant, creative force, because we’d have nothing with which to compare them. We would have no way of knowing which elements are peculiar to the genre he’s working in, which are culturally specific to the nation he’s from and which are uniquely his own contributions. And still we wouldn’t be able to assign credit anyway because we have no way of knowing what actually goes on on his film sets (maybe Milkway Image is an elaborate conspiracy set up by To to steal credit for other directors’ work, I don’t know, I suppose it’s possible). The best we can do is gather evidence, make comparisons and propose hypotheses.

The Happy Ghost was released in 1984 as a vehicle for studio head Raymond Wong, a comic actor and writer (note that Raymond Wong Bak-Ming is a different person from Raymond Wong Ho-yin, a much younger actor who appears in many later Johnnie To films beginning with 1997’s Lifeline and also Raymond Wong Ying-wah, a composer who scored several To films as well as many of Stephen Chow’s, including Kung Fu Hustle). It’s part of a cycle of horror-comedy hybrids that swept Hong Kong in the early 1980s, influenced by Sammo Hung’s Encounters of the Spooky Kind and Tsui Hark’s films (his early genre hybrids as well as his pioneering importation of Hollywood-style effects with Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain). These films play off Western horror movie conventions, but place them within the Chinese religious tradition of Buddhist and/or Taoist folk tales (see for example the Mr. Vampire series, Ching Siu-Tung’s A Chinese Ghost Story and even Tsui’s Green Snake). Like Encounters, The Happy Ghost provides an intriguing blend of moods: not just horror and slapstick comedy, but also a surprisingly dark portrait of Hong Kong youth. Beginning with a prologue ripped straight out of any given Hollywood slasher film: a group of teenagers on a camping trip find themselves in a temple ruin, haunted by the eponymous specter. The film then becomes, for the most part, a teen drama as the Ghost is brought back by one of the girls to their boarding school, where he has a series of adventures (basically he makes things worse and then better and then is threatened and then saves the day). It’s the unsettlingly realistic depiction of the girls’ lives that is most memorable: one sleeps with her boyfriend for the first time, gets pregnant and is abandoned by him; another is severely stressed out by a test, gets caught cheating and tries to kill herself. These aren’t sitcom kids along for a goofy ride, they’re recognizably of the same cohort as the nihilistic youths of New Wave films like Yim Ho’s The Happening or the hopeless rich kids of Patrick Tam’s Nomad. It’s like Scream but with the characters from Kids. The Ghost himself, despite his moniker and outward appearance, conceals a dark past: he killed himself after repeated failures both professional and marital. This mixing of moods, wild, unpredictable swings from farce to melodrama to action movie and back again, are one of the more intriguing features of Hong Kong cinema, the best of them deftly avoiding the feeling of calculated sentimentality that can plague similarly blended Hollywood films.

Following the success of the first film, Happy Ghost II was released in 1985, again with Clifton Ko directing and Raymond Wong serving as star and co-writer. Set at a different girls’ school, Wong this time plays a dual role as the Ghost and his reincarnation, a clumsy teacher named Sam Hong. Sam has been plagued his whole life by an unwelcome super power bequeathed him by his ancestor, which tends to magnify his clumsiness (it’s basically a telekinesis type thing). He arrives at the school after a cadre of mean girls has run off their latest victim (Sam is their eighth teacher, if I remember correctly). Leading the girls is Fennie Yuen, in her first role (she went on to play Blue Phoenix in the Swordsman movies, among other things), playing “the Chairman” with an air of disaffected maliciousness. The girls spend most of the film making life miserable for Sam, despite his using his powers to help them cheat at sports (which the Ghost did in the first film as well). Eventually he gets fired, gives up his powers and gets them back (a plotline not unlike that of Superman II) and everyone has a party on the beach. This sequel is much brighter than the original, with Wong playing up the slapstick (a scene where he destroys the classroom of his love interest teacher is particularly impressive) while any trace of the series’ horror roots is lost.

The third Happy Ghost film was released in 1986 and though it still starred and was written and produced by Raymond Wong, it has a distinctly different look to it. Partially this is the result of the special effects, much more elaborate and modern than in the first two films, utilizing computer graphics and supervised by Tsui Hark (who also has a small role in the film as The Godfather, the gatekeeper of the afterlife). But also the film is simply more composed visually than the first two, which are rather perfunctory in style. Whether To or Lam is responsible for that I can’t say, as both have shown keen eyes as directors. But there are a couple images or motifs that will recur in To’s later work. The most obvious is the use of colored light, electric reds and blues that suffuse and dominate the screen, especially in night scenes (the blues) and interiors (the reds). This trope is by no means unique to To (Ching Siu-tung, who choreographed the action in Happy Ghost III, uses it in Swordsman II, to name one example) and I’d actually taken it as an 80s Hong Kong, or at least Cinema City, trademark. But then in watching A Better Tomorrow II I realized that John Woo’s films are almost always realistically lit, so maybe it’s a To-specific contribution? A subject for further research. To will continue to use this kind of color abstraction throughout his career, most especially in the late 90s with Milkway films like A Hero Never Dies (red), Where A Good Mans Goes (blue) or The Odd Ones Dies (orange). Less obvious, but perhaps no less indicative of an artist at work is a very simple, very brief shot, an establishing shot of the school. Shot from enough of a distance that the white, four-story building fills the frame, doors and windows fronted by open balconies running the breadth of the structure, we see the girls waking between classes. It’s an elegant image, one that captures the unique architecture of the building (and perhaps implies something about the rigid, ant farm-like qualities of the school environment), the kind of throwaway transitional shot you don’t think much of at all. Except we never saw it in the second film, though it uses the same building, the same walkways and classrooms. It may not be the shot of a great artist, but it is evidence that someone was paying attention. This kind of detail, of care in framing and composition is striking when watching the second and third films back-to-back: Ko and Wong are good at setting up gags and sustaining a variety of tonal moods, but Lam and/or To have a better sense of where to put the camera and what to put in front of it.

But the most striking thing about Happy Ghost III is the performance of Maggie Cheung. We know her now as one of the great stars of the last 30 years, with a string of brilliant performances in art house classics (In the Mood for Love, Irma Vep, Centre Stage, Hero, Comrades Almost a Love Story and so on). But in 1986 she was a former Miss Hong Kong runner-up most known for playing Jackie Chan’s cute girlfriend in 1985’s Police Story. But she gets the central role here, as the ghost of a failed singer in search of reincarnation who is continually stymied by Wong’s clumsiness (here reprising his role as the teacher Sam, as well as the Happy Ghost). After two failed reincarnations, she vows revenge on Sam and begins making his life miserable, terrorizing his classroom and possessing his students. The students have undergone another change as well: from the barely getting by strivers of the first film, to the arrogant and entitled mean kids of the second to well-behaved and rather dull kids this time around. This is most evident in the transformation of Fennie Yuen’s character, from a bad girl in dark glasses to a perfect class prefect, the only time she shows the spark the character had the the previous film is when she’s possessed by Maggie Cheung (literally) and gives the famed Kubrick stare: chin down, eyes up, maniacal grin. The first half of the film is a series of tricks Maggie mischievously plays on Sam (the spirit is always playful here, no darkness to be found). In the second half they become friends (including a magical music video sequence as they frolic around the city at night) and eventually end up saving the prefect from a gang of pimps.

There is a tonal mixture to the film, but it’s of a different flavor than that of the first film. Instead of horror and comedy, it’s a blend of comedy and melodrama, and melodrama of a surprising depth and resonance. In this respect it fits in very well with Johnnie To’s later romantic comedies, many of which blend an anarchic style of body humor (either with slapstick or makeup effects, for example the use of fat suits on Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng in Love on a Diet) with an almost tangible sadness and sense of loss (My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, Romancing in Thin Air). This film doesn’t reach anything like those heights, and I’m inclined to give most of the credit for the film’s emotional ambivalence to Maggie Cheung, who is of course adorably spunky yet also reveals her character’s sadness (she too committed suicide, but also her heartbreak when Sam kicks her out as well as late in the film, when she’s convinced she’ll never be reincarnated (which is also a cool visual effect where Maggie fades to black and white)) and joy. The movie is better at the joy: the profound kind when Maggie hears that people have discovered her lovely pop song 20 years after her death for sure, but more importantly the sheer glee with which she toys with poor Sam. She’s the first incarnation of a character that more than any other typifies and unifies Johnnie To’s cinema: the game player. From crime epics to romantic comedies; in cops, gangsters, bankers, gamblers, thieves, musicians, actors, wrestlers, and pickpockets, what marks a Johnnie To character is the spirit of play, the complex interweaving of chance and fate and the pleasure they take in competition, in performance.

Next Up: Seven Years Itch

I first saw this eight months ago, on my first night home after the birth of my second kid (I had rented it from Scarecrow Video and needed to watch it before returning it the next day). Needless to say, exhausted and occasionally interrupted, I remembered very little of the experience, other than that I liked the film quite a bit. Happily, a more clear-headed rewatch confirms that initial vague impression: this is a great movie, perhaps the best melding of director Tsui Hark’s twin impulses toward subversion and entertainment I’ve seen yet.

The setup follows two plotlines that will come together and intertwine with a third, each focused on a female protagonist. Brigitte Lin plays the daughter of a local warlord. She dresses like a man (having spent time studying in the West, and also because she’s Brigitte Lin) and is secretly a revolutionary. She and fellow revolutionary Mark Cheng (memorable as Louis Koo’s able assistant in Johnnie To’s Election 2) have to steal some MacGuffins from the general’s safe. Cherie Chung (from The Enigmatic Case) plays a musician who stole a box of jewelry from a soldier (Tung Man, played by Cheung Kwok Keung) in the chaos after the previous general was run out of town. Through a series of complications, the box ends up at a local theatre troupe, where Sally Yeh, daughter of the director (played by film director, actor, clock Wu Ma), wants very much to go on-stage but can’t because women aren’t allowed to perform. Lin and Cheng also find themselves at the troupe, as it’s the favored entertainment for the most powerful people in town, including the local police commander/gangster Liu, who becomes infatuated with the star actor, Fa.

That covers the first 20 minutes or so of the film, what follows is an elegantly structured twisting and deepening of the characters and their relations as the film progresses through a variety of suspense and comic set pieces. Ching Siu-tung choreographs some exceptional action scenes, usually featuring Mark Cheng jumping into or shooting a bunch of bad guys (the sequences at the theatre make ingenious use of the space’s multi-leveled design, with Cheng diving under and jumping over tables and benches, then on the main stage and up to the stage above it before swinging across the rafters and finally onto the rooftops), but there are also cunningly designed short sequences like the one David Bordwell describes early in Planet Hong Kong, where Mark and Cheung and Cherie hide in Sally’s bed from her father. The two father-daughter relationships are especially poignant, with Lin’s eyes exploring every aspect of her self-hatred for destroying the father she loves while opposing everything he stands for politically. It’s most remarkable to see her usually implacable image break down in anguish near the end of the film and even in happiness in a brief middle section where she gets drunk with the other girls. As well Wu Ma brings a note of knowing sadness to the theatre director father, a man who we took as a stock type gains nuance when we realize exactly why he so strictly keeps his daughter away from the stage: because if she catches the eye of the powerful, she’ll be forced to prostitute herself for the sake of the company (as Liu attempts with Fa). Complex as well are the film’s romantic relationships. Not so much the main one between Mark and Brigitte (if that even is a romance given Lin’s ambiguous orientation), but the all but unspoken one between Cheung (whose soldier I don’t think is even named in the screenplay) and Cherie, which exists almost entirely in the subtle looks he gives her of longing and disappointment at her more venal moments. That soldier, in fact, is one of the more fascinating characters in the film: a hapless guy, bullied by his fellows, who joins the revolutionaries by chance, falls in love with a girl and ends up saving the life of the heroine in a spectacular last minute rescue. There are few martial arts films I know of that have so many richly developed characters and relationships. The only one that even comes to mind in Tsui’s own epic Once Upon a Time in China.

The Peking Opera setting provides Tsui a world full of potential meaning, and he plays it up beautifully. The gender reversals required of the all-male stage echo the real-life reversals of Lin’s character, as she not only dresses like a man but takes on the traditional hero role (note that it’s the women who rescue the men time and again). When the other two women make it on stage, they become women impersonating men impersonating women, just as they more or less unwillingly take on the roles of revolutionaries. Eventually, the politics that undergirds the plot comes to be seen as a form of performance, with one general shuffling on stage as the other exits, the rebels scheme amounting to a lifting of a curtain (exposing certain warlords as conspiring with foreigners) all while the real power lurks behind the scenes, in the form of the black clad local police force. That the local commander is both bluntly evil and homosexual (as well as the ultra-effeminate depictions of the male actors) might be a cause for concern were it not for the sincere warmth with which Tsui depicts the homoerotic relations between the three women (Sally in particular seems infatuated with Brigitte). Instead, what we see is sexuality, with politics, as another kind of performance that serves to either mask our baser urges (the violence of the commander, the greed of Cherie) and/or complicate our nobler ones (the father-daughter relations, the multiple instances of self-sacrifice throughout the film, as each hero in turn faces death to save the others).

The result is a film not too far in spirit from the anarchic nihilism of Tsui’s earliest films, the burn-it-all youth drama Dangerous Encounters – First Kind or the cannibal comedy We’re Going to Eat You. But instead of merely exposing the world, politics, and human relations as a sham, Tsui instead finds a humane warmth at our core, while simultaneously celebrating the artistry of that disguising performance itself: Mark’s ultra-cool secret agent and Lin’s resolute stoicism, as well as the athleticism of the opera performers. The film opens with a series of close up shots of Peking Opera costumes and props and actors, scored to a traditional sounding song with a modern synthesizer beat. And it ends with a close-up from that same series of a performer in full make-up, laughing maniacally at us, or maybe with us.