Flowers of Shanghai (1998)

When I’m tasked with watching and reviewing 10 Criterion movies each year, my fear usually isn’t that one of the movies I watch will be bad. After all, Criterion has such a proven track record as cinephile tastemakers, that they rarely put a film in the collection that doesn’t have at least some artistic or cultural significance. That’s why the biggest fear for me is watching a film where I recognize the artistic merit of the film and can easily see why it would encompass Criterion’s aims of “gathering the greatest films from around the world”, but I just don’t connect with it. Flowers of Shanghai is certainly that kind of film, where I see why it’s innovative from a storytelling and filmmaking perspective, but I wasn’t all that emotionally invested in it. Continue reading →

The Heroic Trio (1993)

Speaking of Maggie Cheung, The Heroic Trio. This would have absolutely been in my catalogue of tapes I watched on repeat as a kid if I had known about it, as The Heroic Trio feels tonally right at home with the like of Paul W. S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat and Schumacher’s Batman movies. Instead I watched it for the first time as a grown up who is still pretty passionate about super hero action fantasy and even more enthusiastic about the careers of Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh. But this is a trio and Anita Mui is a bit more of a mystery to me, I’ve only seen her in a couple great Jack Chan movies before. After seeing The Heroic Trio, I’ve gotta wonder if maybe I have another actor’s filmography I now need to explore?

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Mystery Train (1989)

I love anthologies! Why don’t they make more anthologies? Yorgos Lanthimos made Kinds of Kindness this year—did I see it? Oops, I’m part of the problem! But I look forward to seeing it because anthologies are perfect for short attention spans (like mine). Don’t like the story? Just wait for the next one. If you want to argue that anthologies are annoying because the movie keeps having to stop and restart, let me try to convince you to reconsider with this review of Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train.

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As Tears Go By (1988)

It’s the height of the Hong Kong film industry and screenwriter Wong Kar-wai has been given his first chance at directing a feature. Thanks to John Woo, gangster movies are all the rage and Wong has an idea that will make his picture unique: he’ll focus on young, unaccomplished gangsters instead of grizzled badasses. A story about a young man who’s caught between a blossoming romance and his hotheaded partner. Basically he’s remaking Mean Streets but that’s not important right now. What you need to know is that, for a while, As Tears Go By doesn’t feel particularly remarkable. And then, at about the halfway point, this happens:

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Wings of Desire (1987)

Wings of Desire is a low-key metaphysical meditation on urban loneliness that kept surprising me. Not because of its novel storytelling or its “stunning tapestry of sounds and images” (thanks official Criterion description) but little funny things that I probably should have known about going in. For instance, Peter Falk is in this as himself. An actor shows up on a movie set in Berlin and people call him Colombo and yep, that’s Peter Falk. Later, we find out that Peter Falk, the real human actor who lived in our world from 1927 to 2011, is a former angel who decided to become a mortal man. That’s a big swing! And just one more thing, Wings of Desire ends on a “To be continued.” Did you know this? I’ve always known there was an America remake that inexplicably pairs up Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan, but somehow I never noticed that Wim Wenders made a sequel in 1993 called Faraway, So Close! We live in a joyous world full of discoveries to make.

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Desert Hearts (1985)

When we picked our movies on the Criterion Draft podcast, I clearly didn’t know exactly what this movie was, since I referred to it both as a “road movie” and taking place in “Reagan’s America”. Neither of these things are true, since pretty much all of the film takes place in and around one city (Reno, Nevada), and I must have forgotten that this movie takes place in 1959 when we recorded that podcast. Still, Desert Hearts nonetheless had more or less the vibe I was hoping it would have, since it does feature a lot of scenes in cars of characters getting to know each other better (like in a road movie) and also features two women having to hide their romantic feelings for each other, much like they would have to in most places in Reagan’s America that weren’t New York or San Francisco. Continue reading →