73) Crying Fist (2005)

73) Crying Fist (2005) Dir: Ryoo Seung-wan Not Yet Released Date Seen: March 20^th, 2009 Rating: 3.25/5

Action films are what writer/director Ryoo Seung-wan does best, making Crying Fist (2005) a weird but not unexpected change-up in his budding oeuvre. Not unlike The Wrestler (2008), Darren Aronofsky’s soppy love letter to the spandex-clad pro-wrestlers of the ‘80s, Crying Fist is a melodrama about two men who use boxing to get their shit together. The story’s build-up therefore does not revolve around their preparation for their big confrontation but rather the road that leads them there, making the film’s final fight the goal rather than the means to an end. That kind of sportsmanship and reserve is touching and makes the film a better macho tearjerker than most but its definitely not what Ryoo does best. 

Ryoo made Crying Fist just after Arahan (2004), an action comedy that elicited the same amount of tension from a kung fu pastiche that revolved around a young man quest to fulfill his destiny for the sake of saving a something or other. Crying Fist should logically be the better of the two films as it proves that Ryoo can do more than orchestrate colorful genre pictures. When it comes to emotions, he’s smart enough to know to rely on bodies under stress to convey pathos instead of dialogue. In Crying Fist, he takes that philosophy and runs with it farther than any of his films (that I’ve seen).

In both Arahan and Crying Fist, Ryoo’s protagonists have to maim themselves to get ahead (ie: any knowledge gained takes a beating or two to sink in). In Crying Fist, Ryoo takes that theory of emotional torture as character-builder one step further and allows the actors’ body language to completely carry the film. There are perfunctory moments when Ryoo has the characters literally mutilate themselves to get forward, like when young Yoo Seung-hwan (Ryu Seung-beom) cuts himself in the prison shower to ward off a bully—no soap dropping here—but they’re strictly bush league compared to the films’ truly revelatory moments. Whether it’s cross-cutting between Gang Tae-shik (Choi Min-sik)’s hangdog expression and his doctor as he’s given a bum prognosis or a paradoxically understated tracking shot of Seung-beom’s face as the red and blue lights of a squad car are projected onto it, these moments make the film’s emotional payload stick.

Where the film collapses is in its warm and fuzzy final fight. By that point, both Yoo and Gang have already made the progress they needed to, leaving nothing riding on the fight’s outcome. Unlike earlier fight scenes, which are filmed in hyper-active DV, this one is filmed with none of the overblown but necessary stylistic tricks needed to accentuate any distinct features of the two fighters. It’s as if Ryoo is repudiating the viewer for expecting a climactic finish. He even goes so far as to use his one flag-waving, hey-this-is-what-the-movie-is-really-about moment to tell the viewer, through two sports announcers that quickly disappear immediately afterwards, that his protagonists’ are in it for the right reasons, namely everything but winning. Nice sentiment but if Ron Howard could make a prize fight look great without being really climactic, there’s no reason why Ryoo couldn’t.

Note: Oh Dal-su may still be playing the same guy he plays in pretty much every movie—the sleezy loan shark type guy—but he does it so well. More loan shark, pls.

72) Tricky Brains (1991)

72) Tricky Brains (1991) Dir: Wong Jing Not Yet Released Date Seen: March 19^th, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

Writer/director Wong Jing has a bad, nay a terrible wrap for being one of the worst Hong Kong filmmakers of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Tricky Brains (1991), was made at the height of his career—one of six films he’s credited with directing that year—and its stars—Stephen Chow had eight roles that year while Andy “toilet song” Lau had thirteen—and hence its a prime example of his worst and/or best work, depending on your tolerance for extra cheesy, poorly timed and slipshod humor.

Jing’s films willingly sacrifice logic for the sake of more gags than any sane viewer can handle. Tricky Brains has a plot—a professional practical joker (Chow) is hired to pretend to be the son of Yan-chi (Ng Man Tat), a businessman and the father of Chi-Man Kit (Lau) because…well, we find that out much later for reasons undefined—but it’s negligible. That barebones set-up is just an excuse for the film’s loosely organized string of off-kilter gay jokes, impromptu off-key singing, sight gags, slapstick routines and costume changes—Lau’s fans should note that Tricky Brains is the first time Lau wears a muscle suit. The film’s superhuman, more spazzy than Bazzy level of energy is pretty infectious so long as the viewer is willing to accept that the film has no greater ambition than to throw several kitchen sinks’ worth of grade school-level humor at you.

Realistically, the film’s cast is the real reason to watch Tricky Brains, confirming my suspicion that nobody today goes out of their way to watch Jing’s films unless they’re trying to look ironic and/or kill a few brain cells. Like any physical comedian, Chow’s mugging is usually hit or miss, but Jing’s overcaffeinated script gives Chow an ideal amount of scenery to chew up. His supporting cast is, as always, terrific, especially Chingmy Yau as (wait for it) Banana Yau and Ng Man Tat, still the only mustachioed Hong Kong actor to look good in a dress (admittedly, I have yet to see Suet Lam wear one). Their nutty performances make it very hard to dismiss Tricky Brains because of its uncannily high camp content and harder to defend it as a guilty pleasure. More than likely, that’s what it and the rest of Jing’s films will remain for everyone but a few crazies like me.

71) Cube 2: Hypercube (2002)

71) Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) Dir: Andrezj Sekula Date Released: April 2003 Date Seen: March 13^th, 2009 Rating: 2/5

The problem with any sequel to Cube (1997) Vincenzo Natali’s sharp puzzle box thriller, is determining a new aspect of the original film’s psycho-architecture (or psychotecture) to expand on. Space was the obvious first step and so time should logically follow. Initially, Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) looks like it may make good on that promise and add something to the original without trying to diminish its alluring mystery with unnecessary backstories or explanations of who or what built the titular cube. Sadly, the enormous potential that encountering past and future maze dwellers has is never capitalized but rather ignored for the sake of insipid and useless new traps that are distractingly preposterous and the best evidence of why Hypercube could have used several rewrites. It's not only as amateurish as Cube Zero (2004) but that's like saying that Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (2005) was better than House of Flying Daggers (2004; lol Zhang Yimou). 

70) 21 (2008)

70) 21 (2008) Dir: Robert Luketic Date Released: March 2008 Date Seen: March 12^th, 2009 Rating: 1.5/5

While 21 is the story of Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess) a brilliant, ambitious young thing taking on the world and rolling the dice with love and black jack, one can’t help but root for the film’s bad guy, Cole Williams (Larry Fishburne), the brainy bruiser that sets out to take him down. Though his defining philosophy holds no more water than Ben’s or his skeevy mentor Prof. Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey, of course; Pacino and Walken were both busy), it hits home the most. In a moment of flag-waving, character-defining clarity, Williams laments the fact that times are a-changin’ for the casinos and that he’s no longer hip and/or “with it.” Immediately this means that he’s pissed about being replaced by a piece of face-recognizing hardware but indirectly it hints at the biggest reason why 21 is such a good sleeping pill—it’s almost impossible to preserve the mystique of even the classiest gambling den.

There’s really no way to cinematically encapsulate or reproduce the sleazy charm of a casino without cheap storytelling techniques that over-glamorize everything ‘til they’ve triggered your gag reflex. Casinos are zoos and like any other sensual attraction, their pleasures are of the moment. They’re memorable only in so far as the individual person’s experience is so when that person’s experience is a paint-by-numbers plot about the rise, fall and rise again of a real-life prodigal boy genius, things tend to get pretty dull pretty quick. There’s nothing wrong with the players involved but there’s nothing memorable or even likeable about them.

Knowing what will happen to them, how it will happen and how those events will be portrayed—without knowing anything about the real-life characters beforehand, mind you—not only sucks the life out of the story but stymies any kind of vicarious enjoyment. It takes no risks and doesn’t even give an excuse to sate the mildest kind of curiosity the film’s “style” might elicit. It deserves to be airplane viewing.

69) Donkey Punch (2008)

69) Donkey Punch (2008) Dir: Oliver Blackburn Date Released: January 2009 Date Seen: March 10^th, 2009 Rating: 0.75/5

While the worst slasher films have never needed a mandate beyond having the fundamental cliches of the genre on tap--a desolate locale, a murderous lunatic and a lot of pretty people--Oliver Blackburn, the co-writer/director of Donkey Punch (2008), has seriously got some ‘splainin to do. In spite of how amiably crass his premise almost is—pretty dumb young things go out on a yacht and one of them gets donkey punched to death—one has to wonder: just what exactly was he thinking when he made this film? 

I might have given Blackburn the benefit of the doubt if he had given me a single way to sympathize with anyone in the film, even just the girls that have live long enough to kill off their dopey and doped-up attackers. The story plods along in the hope that viewer will have sympathy for these mouthy and utterly uninteresting meat puppets because they're in peril but never provides one except for outlandish murders and pretty scenery. All we know about these girls is that they look good in a bikini, they're British, they like to party and they don’t want to die. In other words, they're Greek tourists. That's such a basic staple of the genre and seemingly such a hard one to fuck up that the fact that Blackburn couldn’t make anything out of it makes me need to reiterate my original question. 

The obvious answer, apart from creative constipation, is that there’s no way to be both nasty and good-looking. Apart from the grisly and unintentionally hilarious deaths, Donkey Punch might very well be an avant garde travel brochure. The eye candy squirm about in skimpy clothes behind a backdrop of blue waters filmed in hyper-stylized DV, as if the natural charms of the kids’ and their exotic surroundings’ weren’t enough to seduce the viewer. Looks like Blackburn had some foresight, even if his vision is otherwise pretty myopic, to put it mildly.

Note: Be thankful I didn't put up the, ahem, thematically related image of the guy in the donkey costume with boxing gloves on. Hell, I'll be thankful for you.

68) The Birth of a Nation (1915)

68) The Birth of a Nation (1915) Dir: D.W. Griffith Date Released: March 1915 Date Seen: March 9^th, 2009 Rating: 1.75/5

If you were to watch the only the first half of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) knowing only the vaguest details of its infamous politics, you’d feel cheated. It’s possible to gloss over the first 90 minutes thanks to its sleepy, florid story of the inseparable bonds connecting everyone white at heart that were forged by the fires of the Civil War. Even the film’s second half begins innocently enough, insisting that the events we are about to see, many of which the dastardly intertitles tell us are based on “historical facsimiles,” do not reflect contemporary people or events. Griffith’s pretense of gentility holds up until John Wilkes Boothe leaps onto the Ford’s theater stage and mutely bellows “Sic Semper Tyrannis." After that, the racial apocalypse offended film scholars and laypeople alike have promised breaks out. 

The Birth of a Nation can ostensibly be aesthetically defended for all the reasons Griffith’s shorter fantasies about tough women in tight corners I’ve seen can be but its politics, which are the main reason why it and he are so fondly remembered, cannot. Its muddled worldview cloaks its white supremacist mentality underneath the catch-all fantasy of a united nation, which gives the film a veneer of respectability that prizes Abraham Lincoln but poopoos the darkies that he had such a yen for.

 Granted, I can’t tell you objectively tell you if Caucasian Reconstruction Southerners were actually a “helpless white minority” but any chance that I might sympathize with the impotent racism inherent in Birth flies out the window when it's used to justify such insipid caricatures. Seeing 101 freemen outnumber the 23 seated old white guys in the House of Representatives might have been innocent enough to be laughable but it's not considering how it's used as one of the cornerstones of the film’s argument for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Forgive my delicate stomach but racism as a sickly semi-humorous punchline is pretty noxious.

The KKK are depicted as knights in white billowing armor, “the answer to the black and Carpet baggers” that are just taking back what never belonged to the bad blacks—apparently, the slaves that side with their masters are good. To valorize their activities is like how Macagni made the mafia look chivalrous in Cavalleria Rusticana but at least the mafia don’t excuse their actions by crying wolf. Ignoring the associations the KKK evoke outside of Birth’s plot, Whitey’s fears of the jeering Black Scourge that threatens to overtake his way of life remains one of the most absurd popular paranoid fantasies to date (black men taking up the white man’s sidewalk, denyin ‘im the right to vote, marryin’ his sister before he can…white power!). 

If Griffith’s story were compelling outside of its fiery rhetoric, the wrong-headed politics might have been negligible. As it’s not, all I can offer is more rote indignation.

Note: awesome photo stolen from http://www.the-spine.com. 

67) In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

67) In the Mouth of Madness (1994) Dir: John Carpenter Date Released: February 1995 Date Seen: March 9^th, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

As what may very well be John Carpenter’s last really good feature film, In the Mouth of Madness (1994) breaks no new ground in the veteran auto-didact’s varied oeuvre. There’s nothing startlingly innovative in this Lovecraftian pastiche but that’s just fine. Considering how he would follow Mouth with more schlock than his fans can forget through sheer force of will alone, it is a welcome addition to his highly touted canon. 

Carpenter’s ability to tell virtually goreless horror yarns that tease the viewer with Hitchcockian sight gags—let’s just say that the ol’ “now you see it, now you don’t” bit gets trotted out a lot—is on full display in Mouth. Though the film’s makeup and set design crew never let up, there’s only one or two scenes that rely on blood for their impact. Instead, the film relies on shallow but effective psychological hooks that are some of the best screen adaptations of Lovecraft’s favorite kind of horrors—the unfathomably grotesque. Because private dick John Trent (Sam Neill) cannot understand what’s going on, we only see what he sees in bursts and starts, making for some of the most satisfying horror montages I’ve seen in a while.

As hammy as the film’s high-falutin, m SubTerraneans eta-reflexive author-as-God explanations are, it fits perfectly with Carpenter’s usual game of peekaboo that he probably did best in Halloween (1978). Despite some minor speed bumps along the way, Carpenter had me going from start to finish and that alone makes me proud to continue my membership in the John Carpenter is American Horror Club for Troglodites and Other Subterraneans.