One week from today, I’ll be arriving in lovely Vancouver, BC for my fifth trip to the Vancouver International Film Festival. I’ll be there for a week, about half of the festival’s run, which is as long as I could trick the wife into taking care of the kids for me. Over the next few days, I’ll be watching a few movies to get me in the mood, films I haven’t seen yet from directors I’ve discovered over the years at the festival: Johnnie To, Hong Sangsoo and Liu Jiayin.

But before then, I thought I’d start with a list of the films I’m hoping to see while I’m there. As usual, there’s a ton of stuff I’d like to see, much more than I’ll physically be able to make it to, for reasons of geography, chronology and my own health (there seems to be a limit to how many four and five movie days in a row I can manage before catching a cold). So I look at this list as more aspirational than a prediction of what I’ll actually make it to see. Some of the films overlap and so I’ll have to choose only one, these are marked with an * while I try and decide. If you’ve got a case for or against any of these (or if you think I’m overlooking something), feel free to let me know.

Sean’s Theoretical VIFF 2013 Schedule:

Saturday, Sep 28

The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh)

The Great Passage (Ishii Yuya)

Good Vibrations (Lisa Barros D’Sa & Glenn Leyburn)

Sunday, Sep 29

Gebo and the Shadow (Manoel de Oliveira)

Bends (Flora Lau)*
A Field in England (Ben Wheatley)*

Burn, Release, Explode, the Invincible (Kim Soohyun)

Four Ways to Die in My Hometown (Chai Chunya)

Monday, Sep 30

Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang)

Yumen (Xu Ruotao, J.P. Sniadecki, Huang Xiang)

My First Love (Tsuruoka Keiko)

Our Sunhi (Hong Sangsoo)

Tuesday, Oct 01

New World (Park Hoonjung)

Boomerang Family (Song Haesung)*
Heli (Amat Escalante)*
9 Muses of Star Empire (Lee Harkjoon)*

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (Ben Rivers, Ben Russell)

The Past (Asghar Farhadi)*
3x3D (Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Edgar Pêra)*

Wednesday, Oct 02

Stand Clear of the Closing Doors (Sam Fleischner)

Trap Street (Vivian Qu)*
Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi, Kambuzia Partovi)*

The Summer of Flying Fish (Marcela Said)*
The Spider’s Lair (Jason Paul Laxamana)*
The Dirties (Matt Johnson)*

Distant (Yang Zhengfan)

La última película (Raya Martin, Mark Peranson)

Thursday, Oct 03

The Invisible Woman (Ralph Fiennes)

Anatomy of a Paperclip (Ikeda Akira)

Rhymes for Young Ghouls (Jeff Barnaby)*
A Time in Quchi (Chang Tso-chi)*

A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke)

Redemption/The King’s Body/Mahjong (Miguel Gomes, João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata)

Friday, Oct 04

Exhibition (Joanna Hogg)

Once Upon a Forest (Luc Jacquet)

Camille Claudel, 1915 (Bruno Dumont)

The Story of My Death (Albert Serra)

Saturday, Oct 05

The Gardener (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)*
Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche)*
Like Father, Like Son (Koreeda Hirokazu)*
Wolf Children (Hosoda Mamoru)*
Longing for the Rain (Yang Lina)*

It’s been a month since I updated these rankings, and a few weeks since I’ve written anything here at all other than my annual All-Time Top 100 List. In that time, I brought the Summer of Sammo to an end, with final reviews of Ashes of Time Redux, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, My Heart is that Eternal Rose and Boat People. In all I watched 83 movies during the Summer of Sammo, roughly from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and of course I have a ranked list of them all over at Letterboxd.

In other media, several episodes of The George Sanders Show have been recorded: on Sons of the Desert and Ishtar, on The Grandmaster and A Touch of Zen, on The Top Ten Films of All-Time, on The Killing and The Black Stallion, and on Once Upon a Time in America and The Roaring Twenties. The first of several planned episodes of They Shot Pictures on director John Ford is up as well, this one covering his Westerns and focusing on Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Two Rode Together in particular. Our second Akira Kurosawa episode, covering his samurai films, should be up any day now as well.

Coming up over the next few weeks, I’m heading once again to the Vancouver International Film Festival. This will be my fifth trip to VIFF, and for the first time I’ll be there as an officially recognized member of the press. So look for a bunch of reviews from that. Before heading out, I plan to watch and review a few VIFF-related films to get me warmed-up, and hopefully I’ll write that one last review to complete my coverage of VIFF 2012. We’ll have a festival recap episode of They Shot Pictures as well, comparing my Vancouver experience with Seema’s time at the Toronto Film Festival. I’m also just starting research for our Claire Denis episode. Meanwhile, The George Sanders Show will be taking a look at two Harakiris and then the two Solarises.

These are the movies I watched and rewatched over the last month or so, and where they place on my year-by-year rankings.

The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin) – 1, 1925
The Music Box (James Parrott) – 6, 1932
Sons of the Desert (William A. Seiter) – 12, 1933
Smart Blonde (Frank McDonald) – 29, 1937
The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh) – 11, 1939
The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (Akira Kurosawa) – 6, 1945
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa) – 1, 1954
The Killing (Stanley Kubrick) – 7, 1956

Sons of the Good Earth (King Hu) – 17, 1965
A Touch of Zen (King Hu) – 1, 1971
A New Leaf (Elaine May) – 4, 1971
The Black Stallion (Carroll Ballard) – 6, 1979
The Sword (Patrick Tam) – 21, 1980
The Happenings (Yim Ho) – 23, 1980
Boat People (Ann Hui) – 8, 1982

Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone) – 11, 1984
Cherie (Patrick Tam) – 23, 1984
Ran (Akira Kurosawa) – 1, 1985
A Chinese Ghost Story (Ching Siu-tung) – 19, 1987
Rouge (Stanley Kwan) – 2, 1988
Chocolate (Claire Denis) – 7, 1988
My Heart is that Eternal Rose (Patrick Tam) – 9, 1989
He’s a Woman, She’s a Man (Peter Chan) – 17, 1994

I Can’t Sleep (Claire Denis) – 22, 1994
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee) – 4, 2000
Zoolander (Ben Stiller) – 17, 2001
After This, Our Exile (Patrick Tam) – 32, 2006
Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar-wai) – 4, 2008
Ip Man 2 (Herman Yau) – 43, 2010
The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai) – 2013

11. Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993)

12. You, the Living (Roy Andersson, 2007)

13. The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jaques Demy, 1967)

14. Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)

15. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, 1974)

16. Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (Wai Ka-fai, 1997)

17. Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929)

18. Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth (Ysujiro Ozu, 1932)

19. Safety Last (Sam Taylor & Fred C. Newmeyer, 1923)

20. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

21. Porco Rosso (Hayao Miyazaki, 1992)

22. La danse (Frederick Wiseman, 2009)

23. Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)

24. Sanjuro (Akira Kurosawa, 1962)

25. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)

26. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)

27. The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa, 1958)

28. Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957)

29. The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928)

30. Dust in the Wind (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1987)

31. Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991)

32. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

33. Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)

34. The Indian Epic (Fritz Lang, 1959)

35. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

36. Sound of the Mountain (Mikio Naruse, 1954)

37. Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)

38. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)

39. The Cheat (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915)

40. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961)

41. The Tall T (Budd Boetticher, 1957)

42. The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937)

43. The Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980)

44. Sergeant Rutledge (John Ford, 1960)

45. The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993)

46. Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)

47. Friday Night (Claire Denis, 2002)

48. Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

49. Mon oncle d’Amérique (Alain Resnais, 1980)

50. Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996)

51. Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

52. Righting Wrongs (Corey Yuen, 1986)

53. My Night at Maud’s (Eric Rohmer, 1969)

54. Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

55. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai, 2004)

56. Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2006)

57. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Nagisa Oshima, 1983)

58. Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar-wai, 2008)

59. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (Adam McKay, 2004)

60. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

61. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)

62. Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984)

63. The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)

64. The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)

65. Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003)

66. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

67. The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951)

68. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

69. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Coppola, Hickenlooper & Bahr, 1991)

70. Yesterday, Once More (Johnnie To, 2004)

71. Limelight (Charles Chaplin, 1952)

72. Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976)

73. The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999)

74. Simple Men (Hal Hartley, 1992)

75. 7th Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927)

76. The Bank Dick (Edward F. Cline, 1940)

77. To Live and Die in LA (William Friedkin, 1985)

78. The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986)

79. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

80. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)

81. The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928)

82. Hard-Boiled (John Woo, 1992)

83. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)

84. It’s a Gift (Norman Z. McLoud, 1934)

85. The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)

86. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)

87. Man’s Favorite Sport? (Howard Hawks, 1964)

88. Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932)

89. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)

90. La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, 1967)

91. Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

92. A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956)

93. Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954)

94. Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1998)

95. The One-Armed Swordsman (Chang Cheh, 1967)

96. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

97. L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Lumière Brothers, 1896)

98. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

99. Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (Tsui Hark, 1983)

100. The Day He Arrives (Hong Sangsoo, 2011)

I’ve declared this the summer of 2013 to be the Summer of Sammo. Throughout these months I’ve been writing about films starring or directed by Sammo Hung, as well as other Hong Kong genre films of the Sammo Hung era. Here’s an index.

Revolution is war is hell.

Something in the air with the Hong Kong New Wave and Japanese leftists in 1982. Patrick Tam’s Nomad envisions the United Red Army as psychotic dead-enders while Ann Hui here depicts an idealistic photojournalist who sees past the Potemkin images provided for him by the newly victorious government of Vietnam to the nasty reality of post-revolutionary entrenchment. It’s hard not to read Hui’s Vietnam as a stand-in for China during the Cultural Revolution, but that just may be because I know a bit more about China in this period than I do Vietnam: the forced labor camps, the elevation of bureaucratic illusionism to a political doctrine, the cannibalization of the previous generation’s revolutionaries by a new generation of amoral ideologues (coming of age in a period of war, they lack any kind of rational moral sense, or rather, “the revolution doesn’t allow for petit-bourgeois notions of ethics” as they put it).

George Lam plays the Japanese journalist Akutagawa, a World War II orphan whose parents were killed by American bombing when he was only a year old, and who documented the triumphant liberation of Danang. He returns to Vietnam three years later to report on the country’s progress. What he finds once he manages to break away from the direction of the Culture Bureau horrifies him. Starving children stripping bodies of freshly executed men, kids selling themselves into prostitution, political prisoners forced to clear fields of landmines all while the older generation of revolutionaries drink themselves to oblivion in nostalgia for their early post-colonial ideals. In a blunt but potent metaphor, Akutagawa is so moved by what he sees that he takes action, trading his camera for the cash to finance the escape of a couple of kids.

The film was attacked as pro-Chinese (and/or anti-Communist) propaganda on its release in 1982. It was the first Hong Kong film shot on the mainland since the revolution (technically on the island of Hainan, under PRC control) and was made in the wake of the brief Chinese border war with Vietnam in 1979. The role played by Andy Lau (one of his very first performances) was meant for Chow Yun-fat (who had starred in Hui’s previous film about Vietnamese refugees, The Story of Woo Viet) but, the story goes, he turned it down because by shooting a movie in China, Chow would have been blacklisted by the Taiwanese film industry. The film was pulled from competition at Cannes apparently because of its political content (the French government was anxious to maintain good relations with Vietnam) and it was apparently panned in the Village Voice by J. Hoberman and Andrew Sarris, though I can’t find any record of this online.

But the politics of revolutionary art in the late 70s and early 80s were more fraught than they are today. Far removed as we are from the cauldron of the Vietnam War, we can look at Hui’s film on its own terms, and see that it was what she maintained it was all along: a deeply humane anti-war film. It doesn’t take a position on politics, or on Vietnam itself. What it depicts is a society gone off the rails, utterly destroyed by 50 years of war and poverty. It’s not the ideology of the victors that’s at fault, it’s war itself. My working theory on the Hong Kong New Wave is that it was attempting to document as clearly as possible within certain industrial generic confines the reality of a generation of kids raised in the abject backwash of decades of war. Boat People is the most direct expression of that idea I’ve seen yet.

I’ve declared this the summer of 2013 to be the Summer of Sammo. Throughout these months I’ve been writing about films starring or directed by Sammo Hung, as well as other Hong Kong genre films of the Sammo Hung era. Here’s an index.

I still think this is a pretty great movie, almost 15 years after it proved to be a surprise hit, thanks in no small part to Sony Pictures releasing it uncut in its intended form (ahem, Harvey Weinstein). That it lost Best Picture to Gladiator is one of the underrated travesties of recent Oscar history (and there’s a tough competition). Especially fantastic are the fight scenes, where Ang Lee’s classical restraint in framing and editing gives weight to Yuen Woo-ping’s spectacular wire stunts. Where the dominant 90s standard had been the Ching Siu-tung/Tsui Hark school of rapid-cutting to hide the strings, Lee and Yuen, working with a bigger budget and fancier technology were able to digitally remove them, giving them much more room to relax the visual style and allow the excitement to come from the actors moving through space (my favorite shot might be one from the fight at the inn, where the camera glides down three stories following Zhang Ziyi’s jump, a POV version of the old trampoline stunt rendered smooth and lovely by computers and Steadicam). The movie’s full of great fight sequences, great performances and is a touching tribute to the wuxia classics of the 60s and 70s, particularly those King Hu made in Taiwan and that Ang Lee was familiar with from childhood.

But. . .

The epilogue still doesn’t sit right with me. A bunch of people seem to think the movie ends with Zhang Ziyi killing herself, maybe because she’s sad that she basically caused Chow Yun-fat’s death. But in no way do I think that’s what Ang Lee intended to convey. She leaps off the cliff to fulfill Chang Chen’s wish, and flies away knowing it has come true (like the boy in the folk tale he had previously told her). The contradiction is that his wish is for them to be together, and thus the ending is a paradox: she’s alone but free and together and in love. She can’t be both, and so the film ends in a kind of zen state. That’s fine, except Lee hasn’t really prepared the audience for that kind of ending (in the way that King Hu slowly builds to the ending of A Touch of Zen), it being for the most part a straight-ahead action movie with asides about the contradictions of love and honor.

The whole film is about what people want from Zhang: everyone wants her to be something in relation to them rather than allow her to develop as her own person: daughter, disciple, sister, wife, lover. The love/honor conflict is the story of the interrupted romance between Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh. But they’re on the verge of resolving the contradiction, by setting aside out-dated notions of loyalty (to her dead fiancee) and getting on with their romantic lives. Their resolution doesn’t require some kind of supernatural wish-fulfillment (it’s just chance circumstance that gets in the way), and neither do we think Zhang’s should. At the end of the film, she and Chang are together at Wudan Mountain, she’s freed from her evil master (the always great Cheng Pei-pei) and her familial obligations. There is literally nothing stopping them from living happily ever after. And yet, she jumps. Why? Devotion to a code of honor she’s seen ruin the lives of Yeoh and Chow, has had no respect for or belief in in the past? Or sadness and guilt leading to suicide? Realization that Chang only wants something from her as well, that with him she’ll never really be free?

I think what Lee is after is that her leap is an expression of her conflicting desires: she wants freedom and she wants Chang: domestic happiness along with a fulfilling career as a martial arts professional. That’s not too complex a concept (it’s a challenge being a working wife and mother), but the vagueness with which Lee depicts it lends itself too easily to misinterpretation (the suicide theory) or dismissal (he’s just being obscure so as to make the movie seem more “arty”.) But I’m curious as to what other people think. I love so much else about the film.

A cavalcade of comedy classics as we tackle Elaine May’s neglected masterpiece Ishtar and Laurel and Hardy’s acclaimed 1933 feature Sons of the Desert. We also talk all about the Marx Brothers and share our picks for Essential Slapstick movies.

You can subscribe to the show in iTunes, or download or listen to it directly from our website.

Since the last rankings update, I’ve recorded a new episode of They Shot Pictures on John Ford, as well as a couple episodes of The George Sanders Show (Logan’s Run and WALL-E and Gun Crazy and Point Break). The Ford show should be posted any day now, while you can find the Sanders show at our website.

As part of my preparation for the Ford discussion, I wrote here about his My Darling Clementine and Sergeant Rutledge. I’m also continuing with the Summer of Sammo, but moving away from the Shaw Brothers films of the 1960s and 70s into the New Wave films of the 80s and 90s. So far I’ve written about Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild and Patrick Tam’s Nomad. I’ll need to think of a new name for this series of reviews in a few weeks, as summer is coming to an end and I don’t think I’ll be able to wait until December rolls around and it’s time for Christmas with the Shaw Brothers to rent more of these films. Any suggestions?

I’ve added and updated some lists over at letterboxd for Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, John Ford, Wong Kar-wai and George Sidney. On that same page you can also find updated lists for many other directors and actors.

These are the movies I’ve watched and re-watched over the last few weeks, and where they place on my year-by-year rankings. Links are to my short letterboxd reviews/comments, where applicable.

Straight Shooting (John Ford) – 3, 1917
Just Pals (John Ford) – 4, 1920
The Iron Horse (John Ford) – 5, 1924
Stagecoach (John Ford) – 3, 1939
My Darling Clementine (John Ford) – 8, 1946
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford) – 4, 1949

Wagon Master (John Ford) – 2, 1950
Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis) – 5, 1950
Rio Grande (John Ford) – 14, 1950
Sergeant Rutledge (John Ford) – 7, 1960
Two Rode Together (John Ford) – 6, 1961
Hatari! (Howard Hawks) – 10, 1962

Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson) – 22, 1976
Raining in the Mountain (King Hu) – 9, 1979
Return of the Sentimental Swordsman (Chor Yuen) – 27, 1981
Nomad (Patrick Tam) – 2, 1982
Ishtar (Elaine May) – 6, 1987
As Tears Go By (Wong Kar-wai) – 7, 1988

Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-wai) – 1, 1990
Full Moon in New York (Stanley Kwan) – 16, 1990
Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow) – 19, 1991
Full Contact (Ringo Lam) – 20, 1992
WALL-E (Andrew Stanton) – 3, 2008
The Avengers (Joss Whedon) – 44, 2012