448) Yesterday Once More (2004)

448) Yesterday Once More (2004) Dir: Johnnie To Not Yet Released Date Seen: December 14, 2009 Rating: 3.5/5

As an action choreographer, Johnnie To's sleek shoot-outs often feel a bit over-determined. As gorgeous and memorable as they can be, they lack the anarchic spirit of the more playful scenes of one-ups-manship that typically precede those highly-stylized bloodbaths. Like the gunfights they set up, these breezy displays of skill are all about showing off but they're more about gamesmanship than unmatched skill (cf. the soda can scene in The Mission that gets redone in Exiled or any of the pickpocket scenes in Sparrow). They have all the playfulness that we've come to associate with To's signature style and none of the dour posturing, suggesting that To would do well to focus on romantic comedies as they're all about flirtation and improv.

Yesterday Once More looks to fit that bill nicely: Mr and Mrs. Do (Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng) are affluent thieves that suddenly divorce and now compete for Mrs. Do's new beau's heirlooms. The Do's confrontations are usually more smug than not but that's because To's not accustomed to working at such a frenetic pace--Yesterday Once More is about as fast-and-loose as he's played it in a while. Scenes of competitive gambling at the track are fairly straight-forward staples of To's cinema. But once you get to the pair of sweaty, rolly-polly P.I.s that resemble Thompson & Thompson or an aborted heist that involves two teams of color-coded marathon runners, a dog and some furtive glances exchanged via binoculars, then you know you're no longer in To territory as we know it. That kind of humor is so silly that you'd expect it to crop up somewhere in Wong Jing's filmography (perhaps Tricky Brains?) but the formal restraint of these scenes, the kind that keeps them from completely bouncing off the walls, is all To. That's not a compliment: To is so afraid to let himself go, that his story takes an inspired bit of catty table-turning Mr. Do pulls on Mrs. Do and turns it into a serious new focus of the film. This is a film with a screenwriting credit shared by someone named "The Hermit," his or her first and only work, too. It shouldn't be played straight and yet, To does just that.

Note: I was initially bothered by Lau's mugging but then I realized that his abundance of confidence fits the part just fine. Cheng however has never left much of an impression on me. It's like she's coated in charisma-resistant teflon.

446) Vengeance (2009)

446) Vengeance (2009) Dir: Johnnie To Not Yet Released Date Seen: December 13, 2009 Rating: 3.5/5

If any one thing can be blamed for Vengeance's shortcomings, it's screenwriting guru Wai Ka-Fai's script. The material he gives genre wunderkind Johnnie To is wildly uneven, selectively collapsing when it comes to fleshing out the character-defining nuances of its protagonist, Francis Costello (Johnny Hallyday, a poor stand-in for Alain Delon if ever there was one), an old frog lost in Hong Kong in search of his daughters' murderers. Costello's name positions him as an homage to Delon's character in Jean-Pierre Melville's formative Le Samourai (1967). In Melville's film, Costello is a young, good-looking loner with an arcane system of self-discipline; in To's film, Costello is an older man fallen out of practice now turning to an older system of belief dependent on bonhomie amongst amoral badmen. Like in To's Exiled (2006), that code has roots in Peckinpahsian man-logic: if you shoot things and break bread, you are as good as brothers. Wai looks to defy that old-world logic, which makes sense in Exiled considering that it marks the end of an era in Macau's history, by having the posse of guns (To's usual bunch, Suet Lam, Anthony Wong and Ka Tun Lam) Costello hires to find the killers relate to the hired hands that did the killing as family men and mercenaries, just like them. But when push comes to shove, they have at it anyway: spilled blood is spilled blood, period.

Similarly, Wai doesn't spend enough time properly developing much of what makes the conflict of ideologies that defines Costello so complex. Costello only shows debilitating signs of bullet-induced amnesia halfway through the movie, effectively clobbering the viewer with what looks like a sudden, prolonged senior moment rather than an extension of Costello's ailing worldview. Another scene, one that shows his newfound brothers of the holster fighting for him by proxy, is too on the nose in its images of a fight in a scrap heap. It's the end of an era--now with trash cubes serving as over-sized tumbleweeds! To's choreography is never in doubt and his skill at turning his acute sense of play into arresting shoot-outs doesn't fail him. But I wish that when Costello gets the last word and declares, "This is your jacket," that I could appreciate it on an emotional level.

202) Where a Good Man Goes (1999)

202) Where a Good Man Goes (1999) Dir: Johnnie To Not Yet Released Date Seen: June 29th, 2009 Rating: 1.75/5

There's a good reason why Johnnie To has not seriously pursued making domestic dramas. Where a Good Man Goes, the story of a mercurial gangster (Lau Ching-wan, of course) that falls in love with a single mom (Ruby Wong), sinks underneath the weight of preposterous conservative ideas about the essential "good"ness of a potential male suitor. In the film, our anti-hero gives us no good reason as to why he should be given a chance to win our heroine's heart. He uses her son to get to her, abducting him so that he can play with him. This is after he berates her and beats up several cab drivers, an act which she apparently has not just disavowed to the police but to herself because she eventually allows him to play with Junior. Jim Anderson he's not.

 Lau's character also almost rapes Wong's and holds up a bank to get the money from his abusive ex to pay off her debts. The fact that he stops himself from doing anything more than ripping her clothes off (after he hears her kid calling for her, no less) and is stealing for her makes everything all right. When family matters call, apparently anything goes. Yikes.

Additionsal Notes: I would've rated this tedious film lower were it not for Suet Lam's larger role in the film. More mole, please.

Lau Ching-wan's lackluster performance confirms my suspicions about his extremely limited range. He puts nothing on the line, showing that he is emotionally wounded by covering his eyes with his hands instead of actually emoting. Ah well; we'll always have Mad Detective.

189) The Longest Nite (1998)

189) The Longest Nite (1998) Dir: Johnnie To, Wai Ka-Fai and Patrick Yau Not Yet Released Date Seen: June 20th, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

While I couldn't say why immediately, it was obvious that the five scenes that Patrick Yau directed before The Longest Nite were different from the superb noirish framework Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai gave them. Yau's scenes all revolve around spontaneous violence, creating jaw-dropping moments of insane black humor thanks to their frighteningly abrupt and volatile nature. To and Wai probe the nature of those scenes with a tangled plot that could only come from them (the film's central metaphor of being a rubber ball, full of restless motion but not being able to control where you go, is very much Wai's cinematic worldview distilled). Moody and dark, the film is yet another exceptional transitional film in To's career, a movie that like Hero Never Dies (also 1998) pushes him from his so-so earlier films to the string of great films that he continues to crank out today.

Note: Tony Leung Chiu-wai was seriously miscast here. The film can be broken down into four quarters. First and last are when the film goes off-the-rails and requires Tony to be an unhinged tough guy capable of matching Lau Ching-wan's effortless attitude; the middle half is a traditional whodunnit plot. Leung does well with the that latter chunk but is never really convincing in the former. These extended bookend scenes are crucial in changing Leung's character from a mild-mannered detective into a vicious character capable of anything, just like Lau's character. Leung instead shows that he's best when he's playing characters that look breathless and confused all the time, which is nowhere near the enigmatic anti-hero the role required.