Viewing Journal - April 2016

Brief reviews of several films I've watched in the past week - from now on, I think I will alternate between these shorter, looser reviews and longer, essay-type reviews. Curiously all of these movies were released in 1991, not something I realized until writing...

Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, United States, 1991)

In a sane world, Point Break would be a disaster. Johnny Utah (that name!) is an undercover FBI agent who infiltrates a gang of surfing bank robbers dubbed the Ex-Presidents because of the rubber masks of Nixon, Reagan, etc. worn during heists. Despite his commitment to the mission, Johnny Utah finds himself drawn to the gangs' charismatic leader, Bodhi, an adrenaline junkie, dangerous criminal, surfer guru, and cool big brother wrapped up in one mega-bro package. This becomes quite the pickle for Johnny Utah, who cannot choose between duty and bromance. Which leads to the iconic moment (memorably referenced in Hot Fuzz) where Johnny Utah finally has Bodhi in his grasp but cannot act as he must, firing his gun into the air and bellowing in manly anguish, all while Bodhi's piercing blue eyes peer sagely at him through Ronald Reagan's plastic face.

The script is a load of nonsense, albeit fun, harmless nonsense. But Kathryn Bigelow's direction elevates Point Break above being a macho-campy guilty pleasure - this is a very well-crafted film. Bigelow is a true master of action setpieces (I'd point to her more recent The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty as further proof) and offers up several jaw-dropping thrill sequences in Point Break, most notably a breakneck foot race through Los Angeles and not one but two skydiving sequences; I'm baffled as to how the latter were even filmed. Across-the-board fun performances keep Point Break engaging as well, even though the cast is a bizarre mish-mash of acting styles. Gary Busey is reliably weird, Lori Petty is a living embodiment of 90s girl power sass, Patrick Swayze manages to make the ridiculously-written Bodhi convincingly charming and villainous, all while sporting a glorious feathered mane.

And of course, there's Keanu Reeves playing Keanu Reeves as always. Keanu Reeves's appeal is one of the unanswerable mysteries of the movies. Nobody would mistake him for a gifted thespian as his range is very limited. Whether playing a pothead teenager or a kung-fu fighting messiah, Jonathan Harker or John Wick, Keanu is always Keanu, responding to everything with the affable befuddlement of a stoner or a Zen master. Yet I'm always heartened by his presence in a film - any movie feels a little bit more lovable with Keanu. I can't explain why - is it just comfortable reliability? Maybe because he seems like a genuinely nice guy? I may never know.

Watch trailer here.

Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, United States, 1991)

Jim Jarmusch is a heroic American oddball. It's no wonder that many of his films, Night on Earth included, prominently feature the music of Tom Waits - like Waits, Jarmusch is a true original, an idiosyncratic artist who seems almost too cool for his own good, but dammit if he doesn't pull it off. Night on Earth is an anthology of five short films, each set in taxicabs in different European and American cities on the same night. In Los Angeles, a chain-smoking, foul-mouthed driver alternately repels and charms her buttoned-up Beverly Hills fare. In New York, culture clash and unexpected friendship is found between an East German immigrant fresh off the boat and a squabbling couple of Brooklynites. In Paris, a driver from the Ivory Coast is intrigued and puzzled by a confident, testy blind woman he picks up. In Rome, a manic, crazed driver insists on giving confession to a priest in the backseat, horrifying him with tales of his odd sexual history. In Helsinki, men bond drunkenly over their increasingly depressing sob stories.

Some of these stories are funny and some are sad, some add up to a moral lesson and some to a punchline. What they have in common is a distinctly Jarmusch hang-out vibe, leisurely and unhurried, pleased to just spend time with and observe these quirky characters. Night on Earth thrives in a romantically grungy atmosphere of cigarette smoke and city lights, in a transient space where very disparate people are thrown together. Jarmusch is fascinated by the brief relationships formed between travelers of the night, whether tense and mutually hostile or unexpectedly warm and empathetic.

Watch trailer here.

Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, China, 1991)

In 1920 China, a young woman with limited options becomes the concubine of a wealthy man who lives in an enormous, walled-off compound. She enters a bizarre, insular world that she will never be allowed to leave, one that has functioned for generations according to archaic rituals. Tellingly, Raise the Red Lantern never shows the face of the wealthy man in close-up - he hardly registers as an individual, more as a representative of an ancient and unyielding patriarchal system. Instead, Raise the Red Lantern focuses on his new concubine, Songlian, and his three other mistresses. Each night red lanterns are raised outside one of their rooms, signifying that the master will be spending the night there - the women compete for his favors, since his attentions directly influence their limited but precious power within the household. The women can be terribly conniving and cruel, but we always remain sympathetic and aware that their narrow world has forced them to become so vicious, like rats in a trap.

Raise the Red Lantern immediately overwhelmed me with the painterly beauty and precision of its cinematography. Director Zhang Yimou alternates between dehumanizing wide shots and humanizing close-ups. In many wide shots, Songlian is overwhelmed by her surroundings, whether the labyrinthine halls of the mansion or the opulent decorations of her room. She seems less like an individual, and more like another piece of furniture - which, of course, is how she is treated in her new life, as merely an object, a purely functional thing instead of a human being. Yet Yimou also films Songlian with close-ups that affirm her identity - and as played by Chinese superstar Gong Li, Songlian is a gripping character. With only her eyes and her facial expressions Gong Li can express multitudes - guileless heartbreak and imperious cruelty, sadness and hope and fury. She can be both fascinatingly enigmatic and emotionally open. It's an astonishing performance.

Raise the Red Lantern is a beautiful film, but it's not the kind of beauty you can ease into; like the dainty-looking concubines, its surface is pristinely gorgeous but despair and rage are roiling beneath. Indeed, though it is PG-rated and no sex or violence is shown, Raise the Red Lantern is more chilling than many a horror film.

Watch trailer here.

The Films of Wong Kar-wai: In the Mood for Love

Hong Kong, 2000
Directed by Wong Kar-wai

In the Mood for Love took a turbulent road to its completed form. Wong originally envisioned a film set in mainland China in the mid-20th century titled Summer in Beijing, to be a triptych of stories similar to his Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. Eventually he realized that shooting a film in China set during that time period would be too difficult because of vigilant Chinese censors, and relocated to Hong Kong, also narrowing his focus to only one story - a love story. In the Mood for Love took 15 months to shoot, an unusually lengthy production, especially for a film with such an intimate focus. Wong shot largely without a script, improvising, creating and re-creating the story as he went along. The post-production was, by all reports I've read, rushed and confusing, with the film barely completed in time for its premiere. Enough footage was cut out to have made an entirely different film, and perhaps a radically different one than the final product. For all the chaos of its creation, you'd expect In the Mood for Love to be haphazard or unfocused, if not an outright disaster - but it's not. Actually, In the Mood for Love is among the most controlled, elegantly composed films I've ever seen. Every shot and every edit is purposeful and beautiful, and contributes to a whole that is basically perfect.

Like Wong's earlier Days of Being Wild, In the Mood for Love takes place in 1960s Hong Kong. Two married couples, the Chows and the Chans, move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Separately, Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) and Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) begin to suspect that their spouses are having an affair with each other. They form a tentative friendship, trying to figure out why they were betrayed by those closest to them, and finding some solace in a sympathetic confidant. Quickly it becomes clear that more feeling exists between them than just sympathy, but they both deny it and vow not to be like their cheating spouses. They find excuses to spend time together, Mrs. Chan helps Mr. Chow write the martial arts novel he's long dreamed of making. Though their relationship remains platonic, eventually they can no longer ignore their growing feelings and decide to stop seeing each other.

In the Mood for Love is maximalist in style but minimalist in its approach to character and story. There is little in the way of traditional plot development or exposition. We learn about the main characters from brief snatches of dialogue, their expressions and body language. Wong's films usually contain voiceover from the characters, communicating their stream of thoughts, but In the Mood for Love eschews any narration - we must guess what these people are thinking and how they feel, since they rarely communicate it directly. The characters of In the Mood for Love are often situated within doorways or windows, or partially obscured from the camera by walls or other people. I felt like I was spying on them, and even caught myself trying to peer around a corner to get a better glimpse (a sure sign that I was engaged by the film). Watching In the Mood for Love is trying to solve a mystery, where each gesture, each polite conversation is loaded with more meaning than is apparent on the surface. Wong's decision to position his characters within frames also expresses their entrapment - within marriages where they're been betrayed, within a society that is quick to gossip, and within themselves and their own principles, noble as they may be.

While Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan don't express their feelings, the film does it for them. In the Mood for Love is gorgeously expressive. Shigeru Umebayashi's stirring strings score and Christopher Doyle's colorful cinematography communicate their yearning and their lovesickness. Mundane sequences, like Mrs. Chan going out for noodles, are made achingly beautiful through the music and camerawork. All of Wong's films are more musical than literary in their structure - they are built on repetitions and refrains instead of A-to-B plot developments - and in their impact, which is more emotional and visceral than intellectual. Wong has stated that if Chungking Express is pop music, than In the Mood for Love is chamber music - which seems a perfect comparison to me. It is simple, elegant, and melancholy.

All this stunning artistry would have a hollow center if Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan's relationship didn't work, but Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung have tremendous chemistry together. Their beauty is certainly a part of it - Tony Leung makes smoking look cool again, and watching Maggie Cheung sashay about in her various form-fitting dresses is mesmerizing. Both Leung and Cheung would have been terrific actors in the silent film era - they express great depth and subtlety with very little dialogue, mostly through their eyes and their posture.

Ultimately, In the Mood for Love is difficult to write about. Words don't really capture its hypnotic effect - this is a film whose power comes less from its ideas and more from how the music, the editing, the camerawork and the performances draw you into its mood, and into sympathy with two good-hearted but very private and very lonely people. I've seen it three times now, and each viewing has cast a spell on me, unbroken from beginning to end. It's a masterpiece of filmmaking, one of the very best films of the past 20 years.

The Films of Wong Kar-wai: Fallen Angels

Hong Kong, 1995
Directed by Wong Kar-wai

Wong Kar-wai originally conceived his two-part Chungking Express as three stories, but once the first two were developed, he decided that they were enough for a full film and cut out the third. This third story, about the relationship between a hitman and his female partner, developed into his next film. Fallen Angels could be seen as a continuation of Chungking Express - both are split into two stories, take place in the same Hong Kong neighborhood, and revolve around similar themes. But Fallen Angels is also a darker, weirder, more stylistically experimental film than its predecessor - the night to Chungking Express's day.

The first story is about a hitman (Leon Lai) and his partner (Michelle Reis). She tells him where his next hit is, collects cash for him, and cleans his apartment hideout, but they hardly ever meet in person. Despite wanting to keep their partnership an impersonal one, they grow infatuated with each other. Both characters are romantically alienated loners, taciturn and cool. The hitman kills his targets nonchalantly, in shoot-outs filmed with woozy style, not caring who they are or why they've been targeted. The second story stars Takeshi Kaneshiro (one of the cops of Chungking Express) as an eccentric mute who breaks into closed-up shops at night and illegally runs the business, aggressively (and amusingly) coercing customers into buying whatever he's selling. He falls in love with another spastic oddball (Charlie Yeung), but his affection is unrequited.

Even more than in Chungking Express, the two stories of Fallen Angels are strikingly different from each other. The hitman's story is surprisingly violent for Wong. The hitman and his partner are classic Wong characters - cool, introspective loners - but taken to a darker extreme. They are entirely detached from everyone and everything, nocturnal creatures living by their own codes, beautiful but doomed. Wong's style is moodier and more experimental than ever. He often films characters with a fish-eye lens, their faces looming in the foreground against a distant background of neon lights and colors. It's a disorienting but perfect way to portray their alienation through visuals, loners drifting through the seductively dangerous world of Hong Kong at night.

The second story is far more sentimental and funny, even becoming an outright slapstick comedy at points. Much of its charm is due to star Takeshi Kaneshiro, reminiscent of a young Cantonese Johnny Depp. His character, though he cannot speak, is quirky and extroverted. Where many Wong characters put protective barriers between themselves and others, the mute forces himself into others' lives, in amusingly obnoxious ways. He takes his failed romance with Charlie in stride, finding happiness wherever he can. The sweetest moments of Fallen Angels involve the mute's relationship with his father, and their odd but loving friendship.

Fallen Angels is an exuberant mess, digressive and tonally all over the map (it should be noted that this sort of 'messiness' is not unusual for Hong Kong cinema, which often combines comedy, action and drama in ways that might seem incompatible to those used to Hollywood standards, which generally sticks to one or two genres per film). Fallen Angels is more about individual sequences and moments than any overarching plot or theme. These moments are sometimes funny - like Takeshi Kaneshiro harassing unsuspecting passerby into becoming his customers despite their protests. And sometimes they are mesmerizing - like when Michelle Reis leans against a jukebox as a strangely sinister pop song puts her in a trance, and for a few minutes Fallen Angels becomes an abstract music video, lingering on Reis's languid swaying as the machine's fluorescent lights run across her reflective dress. Any narrative is forgotten in the hypnotic interplay of music and color and movement. One downside to Fallen Angels's scattershot approach is that the film is, understandably, uneven - the subplot about the hitman and his other love interest, Blondie (Karen Mok), falls flat. But any dull sequences quickly give way to some new wondrous moment of discovery.

Once again, Wong Kar-wai's love for his home city shines through. Like Chungking Express, Fallen Angels is a cinematic love letter to Hong Kong, though a far stranger and more fantastic one. Fallen Angels takes place almost entirely at night, in a frightening but beautiful vision of Hong Kong that seems more like a science fiction metropolis than a real world city. The mute says that "all the weirdos come out at night" - the characters are these nocturnal weirdos, scrounging a living outside the law and the mainstream, hoping to find simple human connections in the urban purgatory they live in.

The Films of Wong Kar-wai: Ashes of Time

Hong Kong, 1994
Directed by Wong Kar-wai

 Ashes of Time was a difficult production. The shoot took place in the middle of the scorching desert, and went way over budget and over schedule. Even after its initial release in 1994, the movie's journey was not complete - over a decade later Wong Kar-wai discovered that the original negatives of the film were in terrible shape, and desperately needed saving. In the process of restoration, he re-scored and re-edited the film, releasing it in 2008 as Ashes of Time Redux. The Redux version is, as far as I'm aware, the only available way to see the film in the United States, so I cannot compare the two versions.

In either version, the general response to Ashes of Time has deemed it beautiful but incoherent. I don't agree (with the latter part, at least), but it's an understandable response to an aggressively unusual film, and one whose context might be lost on western viewers. Ashes of Time is based on the fantasy novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes, which Wong has compared to The Lord of the Rings in terms of its popularity and influence in China, but is largely unknown elsewhere. It is not a direct adaptation of the book, but a sort of origin story. Wong wanted to explore how the characters became the legendary figures they are at the start of the book. Ashes of Time belongs to the wuxia genre, mythic stories of swordsmen and the chivalric codes they live by. However, Ashes of Time is not a straightforward wuxia adventure, but a deconstruction of the genre, less a tale of battle and honor than a classically Wong meditation on memory and loss.

 

Ashes of Time is similar to Wong's earlier film Days of Being Wild in structure. Both center around one man played by Leslie Cheung who meets other people and becomes involved in their stories. Like Yuddy in Days of Being Wild, Ou-yang Feng in Ashes of Time is cool and cynical on the surface, but trapped in his own feelings of heartbreak and rejection. Ou-yang Feng is a lone swordsman in the desert wilderness, who makes a living by hiring assassins for people with grudges. The traveling swordsmen he meets are formidable killers with supernatural skills, but are every bit as miserable and haunted by their pasts as Ou-yang.

Ashes of Time is all about memory, and the impermanence of things. Nearly all the characters live in regret, either running away from or wallowing in memories of lost love (the sole exception, Jacky Cheung's character, is the only one who finds happiness by the end). The film takes place over the course of a year, as time slips away through the passing of the seasons. Visual motifs express the temporary nature of the world - Ashes of Time constantly returns to images of shifting sand, billowing water, the movement of shadow and light.

Needless to say, if you're looking for a thrilling adventure you should probably look elsewhere. There are fight scenes in Ashes of Time - good ones too, though filmed in a way that renders them nearly abstract - but action is not the focus here. The characters' battles with others do not matter so much as their even more embattled and conflicted inner selves - the film opens with a Buddhist proverb, "The flag is still. The wind is calm. It is the heart of man that is in turmoil." This inner turmoil is made incarnate in one character, Mu-rong Yang (Brigitte Lin), a woman who claims to have a twin brother Mu-rong Yin that she wants dead, yet they are actually the same person. In the film's most ecstatically gorgeous sequence, Yin / Yang magically walks across the surface of a lake and battles her own reflection, because she has found no more difficult opponent elsewhere. Her sword thrusts are so powerful that the surface of the lake erupts into geysers of water with each strike.

Even by Wong Kar-wai's stylish standards, Ashes of Time is a gorgeous film. Daunting landscapes and close-ups of faces are filmed with equal beauty and detail. The colors have a hallucinogenic vibrancy, and the dreamy images are edited together like a kaleidoscopic collage. It's a beautiful enigma, a film where it is a pleasure to get lost in its rich textures and moods.

The Films of Wong Kar-wai: Chungking Express

Hong Kong, 1994
Directed by Wong Kar-Wai

During the making of his wuxia epic Ashes of Time, a difficult production that went way over schedule and budget, Wong Kar-wai took a three month break to direct another movie, just to re-energize his creativity. The result is Chungking Express, which was completed and released before Ashes of Time. The movie was a hit, and for many western audiences their introduction to Wong Kar-wai. Quentin Tarantino was a huge fan and proponent, and helped to bring the film to the States. It's clear why Tarantino is such a fan; like his Pulp Fiction released the same year, Chungking Express is a kinetic blast of moviemaking innovation for its own sake, giddy with the possibilities of what movies can do. The quick, on-the-fly production shows in the film's spontaneous, experimental energy and in its unusual structure. Chungking Express is split in two parts, each a separate short story unfolding in the same hectic Hong Kong neighborhood.

The first story centers around the freshly heartbroken Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and a female drug dealer (Brigitte Lin) who always wears sunglasses and a blonde wig. Cop 223, when he's not chasing down criminals, wallows in amusing self-pity and expresses his heartbreak in odd ways - calling up every girl he's ever known, collecting pineapples because they were his ex-girlfriend's favorite fruit. Meanwhile, a drug deal goes sour for the mysterious dealer and she must go on the run. A few chase scenes, shootouts, and a very innocuous kidnapping occur, but the details of the double-crossing and criminal underworld don't matter, Wong is just having fun splashing punchy pulp fiction cliches across the screen. Cop 223 and the Woman with No Name eventually meet in a bar late at night, knowing nothing about each other. You expect that they will hook up, and there will be a dramatic reveal about lovers on the opposite sides of the law - but what actually happens is far simpler and sweeter than that.

The second story is the longer of the two, and is a straightforward romantic comedy without the crime thriller flourishes of the first. Cop 663 (Tony Leung) has also recently been dumped, and now morosely sleepwalks through life. While on duty he often drops by a food stand where Faye (Faye Wong) works, a mischievous scamp who takes a liking to him. After his ex-girlfriend drops off her keys at the stand, Faye starts breaking into Cop 663's apartment while he's not there, cleaning it, restocking his pantry and replacing his old and broken-down belongings. Cop 663 is so oblivious that he initially doesn't notice.

The vision of mid-90s Hong Kong in Chungking Express pops off the screen. It's a world of neon lights, bustling markets, Chinese and British and Indians rubbing shoulders, cramped apartments and 24/7 chopsocky food stands. It's bewildering and loud and seedy, but overflowing with life, and filmed so beautifully by Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Despite the mass of humanity in this crazy metropolis, all the characters are quite lonely. Perhaps because of the overwhelming zoo surrounding them, they create their own private worlds to cope, out of whatever flotsam they can cling to. Cop 223 obsessively collects tins of pineapple that expire on May 1st, his birthday and the one-month anniversary of his breakup. Faye loudly blasts the Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin" on the radio at her tedious job, creating a protective bubble of sound so she doesn't have to think. Cop 663 talks to the inanimate objects in his apartment to cheer himself up. Wong views his characters' self-created little worlds with fond amusement.

Both stories in Chungking Express are about the miraculous connections that can happen in such a sprawling, chaotic place, when the paths of isolated people somehow intersect. Sometimes these connections are brief ones - Cop 223 and the Woman with No Name remain strangers, but now with a treasured memory about a moment of shared kindness and relief from loneliness. And in the second story, we hope that Cop 663 and Faye will find their way to romance, despite the (often self imposed) obstacles in their way. Watching these oddballs circle closer and closer to each other is great fun, and leads to one of the great romantic endings in the movies. The final scene of Chungking Express puts a big blissful grin on my face every time.

This is easily Wong Kar-wai's cheeriest film, not just because of the sweet stories and likable performers, but because of Wong's giddy style. Chungking Express is as mid-90s in its MTV aesthetic as it is possible to get - it's dated, but in a nostalgic and charming way rather than an embarrassing one. There's even a Cantonese cover of the Cranberries' "Dreams" on the soundtrack (sung by star Faye Wong, who is a popular pop artist in Hong Kong). The synthesis of cool editing tricks, lovely camerawork, and catchy pop songs make Chungking Express addictive to watch. It's the kind of idiosyncratic movie that not everyone will enjoy, but those who do will love it with a cultish fervor. 

The Films of Wong Kar-Wai: Days of Being Wild

Hong Kong, 1990
Directed by Wong Kar-Wai 

 Wong Kar-Wai is arguably the most popular, internationally acclaimed and influential Hong Kong director of all-time. He is known for his distinctive style, driven by music and color, and for his films' consistent themes of romantic yearning and memory. Wong's debut film was the 1988 gangster melodrama As Tears Go By, starring Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau. It's an entertaining, well-crafted movie, with hints of the stylistic verve and melancholy romanticism that would become Wong's trademarks, but on the whole is mostly typical of its genre. His second film, Days of Being Wild, is the first to fully display Wong's unique personality as an artist.

Set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, which vividly comes to life through small details - bright red Coca-Cola coolers, form-fitting print dresses and bob hairstyles, Western cafes, lounge and latin music. Days of Being Wild immediately draws you into an immersive sense of time and place. You can almost feel the humidity radiating off the screen, the oppressive heaviness of tropical nights. In this languid and lush atmosphere, a romantic roundelay unfolds among an ensemble of Hong Kong's most iconic actors. At the center of it all is Yuddy, played by the late Leslie Cheung, a troubled, detached young man. He was adopted by a high-class escort (Rebecca Pan), who refuses to tell him who his biological mother is. Yuddy is a womanizer, seducing the quiet Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) and showgirl Mimi (Carina Lau), before dumping both when they become too attached for his liking. And during their worst times of heartbreak both women are pined for by other men - policeman Tide (Andy Lau) becomes friends with Su Lizhen, and Mimi is pursued by Zeb (Jacky Cheung), a friend of Yuddy who is jealous of his influence over women.

On paper, the web of relationships in Days of Being Wild sounds like a tangled soap opera; however, Wong structures his film like a series of interwoven stories. The story of one relationship flows into another story, each one like free-standing but connected movements in a symphony, always circling back to Yuddy. Leslie Cheung's performance as Yuddy feels iconic. He's often been called the James Dean of Hong Kong because of his good looks and his troubled-but-cool persona - in fact, Days of Being Wild's title was taken from the Cantonese title of Dean's Rebel Without a Cause. But unlike Dean's handsome misfit in Rebel, Yuddy is not a heroic character but a tragically misguided and destructive one. He is both protective of and cruel to his adopted mother, a manipulative woman who is hardly perfect, but cares for him in her own flawed way. He enjoys the thrill of seducing women but has no interest in them beyond that. Twice in the film his narration tells the story of a bird: "I've heard there is a kind of bird with no legs. All it can do is fly and fly. When it gets tired, it sleeps on the wind. This bird can only land once in its whole life. That's the moment it dies." Clearly he pictures himself as the bird - a vagabond and free spirit, coolly detached from everyone and everything. Late in the film he tells the story to Andy Lau's character, who mocks Yuddy's tragically romantic self-mythologizing. "You think you're some kind of bird?" Yuddy may be a loner but for all his posturing he's really just an angry kid who feels rejected by the world. He envisions a separate life where he was not given up by his family in the Philippines, one where he truly belongs somewhere. Yuddy's 'cool and charismatic' act is magnetic enough that it's clear why people are drawn to him, yet it's the silent moments where Leslie Cheung shows his vulnerability that make him engaging.

What connects all the characters in Days of Being Wild is their search for belonging. Yuddy wants to find his biological mother in the Philippines, his mother wants a man to support her, Su Lizhen and Mimi want Yuddy and Zeb wants to be him, Tide wants Su Lizhen and becomes a sailor just to wander and find his place. Several of the characters have relocated from somewhere else, like the Philippines or Macau. Days of Being Wild captures the dislocation that many must have felt in Hong Kong in this era, where so many people had to relocate after the huge upheavals of World War II and the Chinese Civil War. A sense of yearning hangs over Days of Being Wild as thickly as the tropical humidity.

Wong Kar-Wai takes all his characters' dissatisfaction and melancholy and tells it with the wistful, bittersweet romanticism of a good pop song about heartbreak. The smooth camerawork, intimate close-ups and gorgeous soundtrack give Days of Being Wild a hypnotic quality. Considering that it's only Wong Kar-Wai's second film, Days of Being Wild is remarkably confident, a beautifully crafted gem and early example of his brilliance as a filmmaker.

2015 in Film

My Favorite Films of 2015

Here are the nine films that impressed, moved and delighted me the most from 2015, with the caveat that there are several promising films that I missed or were not released near me (among them, Bridge of Spies, The Forbidden Room, Arabian Nights).

1. The Assassin (directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien) - A bewildering, enchanting work of art from a master filmmaker. Some have found it just too damn slow and opaque, which is a fair response, but for me it was hypnotic - largely through its sheer visual beauty, but also because of Hou's rigorous, uncommon storytelling. For all of its lush visual textures, and its ornate, obsessively detailed recreation of a 9th century China poised between history and myth, the approach to plot and character is radically minimalistic. Every action holds great weight and meaning.

It's also one of the few movies that made me gasp out loud in the theater (multiple times) simply from how gorgeous it is. It's not just surface prettiness, either, there is genuine wonder and sublimity in it.

2. Mad Max: Fury Road (directed by George Miller) - I've seen it six times already. Safe to say I'm obsessed. As brilliant as The Road Warrior is, this is the film George Miller was born to make. It is a mind-boggling achievement, with madly ambitious action sequences and stunt work, and a wholly immersive and detailed creation of a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. The technical perfection of this thing is insane, and it's terribly exciting. And for all its bombastic spectacle, the way it builds theme and character through incremental details is just beautiful storytelling.

3. Inside Out (directed by Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen) - Pixar strikes again! Inside Out deserves to be ranked alongside WALL-E and Toy Story as one of their greatest achievements. I am amazed at what they've managed to pull off here, a story that functions on so many levels - a tearjerking coming-of-age / family drama, a brightly colored and hilarious adventure, and an illustrative exploration of the complicated relationship between our emotions, our personalities, and how we process and respond to the world around us, told in a way accessible to kids but engaging to adults. And it is packed with witty and casually wise grace notes ("these facts and opinions look so similar!").

4. What We Do in the Shadows (directed by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement) - Funniest movie of the year. An undead This is Spinal Tap with a Kiwi spin. The characters are lovably pathetic, the jokes are constant, and the film is irresistibly good-natured fun even when it gets bloody.

5. Carol (directed by Todd Haynes) - A restrained but quietly passionate romantic drama based on a Patricia Highsmith novel from the 1950s, unusual at the time for its frank and nuanced portrayal of a gay romance and its hopeful ending. I have not read the book but the film feels as evocative and subtle as a good novel, though it is entirely cinematic in its telling - beautifully recreating an era, communicating chemistry and connection through glances and body language, expressing through swooning music cues and visuals what the characters cannot through words. Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett are both perfect, as an uncertain but luminous young woman and a recently divorced mother whose glamour hides a vulnerable spirit.

6. Timbuktu (directed by Abderrahmane Sissako) - Less a classically structured narrative and more a collection of vignettes forming a panoramic study of a community - Timbuktu, Mali during a brief occupation by Islamic extremist group Ansar Dine, who imposed sharia law on the locals. Sissako's film eases you into the rhythm of day-to-day life in Timbuktu - music and soccer, family life, women working outdoors alongside men - so that the uneasy presence of the jihadists, and the inevitable violence of enforced sharia law and the cruel absurdity of its rules, are all the more clearly a violation of this vibrant community. It is a film in love with the beauty of Mali and its people, mostly Sunni Muslims, and horrified at the violence done to them. Yet even the jihadists are recognizably human, comically so at points. One young, unenthused jihadist stars in a propaganda video, but to the frustration of his director is an utterly abysmal actor; these young men with machine guns smoke cigarettes and discuss their favorite soccer stars in casual moments, even though they have banned smoking and sport from the community. They are entirely human, which makes their actions all the more disturbing.

7. Phoenix (directed by Christian Petzold) - A German-Jewish concentration camp survivor, after facial reconstruction surgery that leaves her uncannily similar-but-different to her former self, returns to ruinous post-war Berlin to reunite with the boyfriend who may have betrayed her to the Nazis and no longer recognizes her. Where the story unspools from there I will not reveal, but Phoenix has the kind of movie plot that requires but greatly rewards a suspension of disbelief. It's Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo recontextualized as an allegory for the painful reconstruction of the German and Jewish identity after the war, and builds to an astonishing final scene. Nina Hoss's performance was the best of the year to my eyes, a mostly silent, subtle portrayal of despair and delusion, revelation and rebirth.

8. The Duke of Burgundy (directed by Peter Strickland) - Such a curious object of a film. Centers around a seemingly outré sexual relationship, but has no nudity and very little actual sex - anyone in search of titillation will probably be disappointed. It builds a stylized and hermetic world around its characters, taking a great delight in all the little retro and esoteric details, almost like a sapphic Wes Anderson. It is beautifully directed, unfolding like a dream and structured in repetitions. Each repetition peels away another layer, revealing new aspects of the characters and their relationship - with the most surprising reveal being just how relatable and mundane they are for all the tongue-in-cheek exotic trappings. Like Eyes Wide Shut, this is a romantic fever dream that goes to surreal lengths to make simple observations of the natural problems that can arise in a relationship. The Duke of Burgundy is too specific and strange a film to have more than a small, self-selected audience, one I'm glad to be a part of. It is witty, unexpectedly funny and insightful.

9. The Look of Silence (directed by Joshua Oppenheimer) - A documentary exploring the modern-day aftermath of the Indonesian Genocide of 1965 - 66, where an estimated million people accused of communism were killed by their neighbors, often in unusually barbaric ways. The men behind the massacre still hold political power in Indonesia and are treated as war heroes, brave eradicators of the godless communists, while the extent of the violence has been swept under the rug. The Look of Silence follows Adi, a young father whose older brother was killed in the massacre, as he interviews the families of the victims and the killers. It is a deeply disquieting and disturbing film, not only for the barbarity of the violence (one senile old man casually mentions that he and many others drank the blood of their victims to "keep from going insane"), but for the prevalence of delusions, repression and distorted language in how everyone attempts to justify and live with their past (a dreadful illustration of how the winners have the privilege of writing history). Yet Adi is a beacon of hope: pursuing the truth with level-headed, unwavering persistence. 

Honorable Mentions (other films I really liked, in alphabetical order): 

• Blackhat (Michael Mann)
• Creed (Ryan Coogler)
• Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro)
• Ex Machina (Alex Garland)
• It Follows (David Robert Mitchell)
• Mistress America (Noah Baumbach)
• Spotlight (Tom McCarthy)
• Tangerine (Sean Baker)
• Wild Tales (Damian Szifron)

And, just because it's fun to be mean occasionally…

MY LEAST FAVORITE FILMS OF 2015 

(with the note that I've avoided most of the movies I knew I would hate, so these probably aren't the actual worst of the year)

• The Cobbler (directed by Tom McCarthy) - Well, except for this one, which absolutely has to be one of the worst of the year. On one hand, it's an Adam Sandler comedy, so its awfulness may not come as a surprise - but it's directed by Tom McCarthy, the talent behind charming films like The Station Agent and Win Win, and this year's very good (and Best Picture nominated) Spotlight, a drastic turnaround which might be the biggest-ever gap in quality between two subsequent films in any director's career. I don't know what happened to McCarthy during the making of this film, but wow it's a disaster. Not even bad in the standard Sandler comedy way, meaning lazy and juvenile; it keeps finding new and unique ways to be repugnant, with a bafflingly ill-conceived plot line that turns outright creepy before going off the deep end with an ending that is jaw-dropping in the worst way.

• Pan (directed by Joe Wright) - Everything I hate about Hollywood's "modernized" fantasy blockbusters in one nauseating package. Unceremoniously stuffs Peter Pan and the Neverland crew into a preordained "Hero's Journey" / Chosen One narrative that fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of J.M. Barrie's original vision of the character. Is full of ugly and unimaginative CGI that is so weightless that none of the loud, flashy action has any impact. Also here: obnoxious anachronisms, like the orphaned slaves of Neverland singing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in unison, all while mining fairy dust (what) for the villainous Blackbeard, who snorts it like cocaine to stay eternally young (WHAT). Directed by Joe Wright, who also made the lovely Pride & Prejudice adaptation with Keira Knightley and hopefully will return to making good movies after this.

• The Danish Girl (directed by Tom Hooper) - The true story of Lili Elbe, a Danish artist in the 1920s who was the first recipient of gender reassignment surgery. Except it's not really the true story, but like many other manipulative Hollywood bio-movies, is largely fabricated and sanitized. Here is a film entirely devoid of insight of any kind - sociological, historical, psychological, sexual - it is pretty looking but totally vapid. Eddie Redmayne's Oscar nominated (WHAT) performance is terrible, consisting entirely of effete and weepy mannerisms with no depth or subtlety (although it's not the worst Redmayne performance of the year, see here if you want a hilarious glimpse at that). I liked The King's Speech, but between this and his obnoxious, tone-deaf adaptation of Les Miserables I think I'll skip whatever Tom Hooper comes out with next.

• Kingsman: The Secret Service (directed by Matthew Vaughn) - A parody / homage to James Bond that is too witlessly violent and soulless to be fun at all. Not poorly made, but made me feel queasy and grouchy by the time it was over, though it might be the new favorite movie of certain teenage boys and violent sociopaths.

• The Boy Next Door (directed by Rob Cohen) - Calling this a "least favorite" is not exactly accurate - don't misunderstand, this is a terrible terrible movie, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is every bit as trashy and unintentionally funny as movies like this should be. An "erotic" "thriller" about J. Lo and her young stalker, who before he goes all Fatal Attraction buys her a "First Edition" of Homer's Iliad that he bought at a garage sale (WHAT). Also has the greatest, and the most inexplicably, hilariously violent, use of an epi-pen in cinematic history. Worth a watch if you want a good laugh.