Alas, we bid farewell, as the Prince of Darkness has finally taken his throne in Hell. Ozzy Osbourne, who probably should have died in 2003 after being crushed by his quad bike, or in 1978 when he challenged David Lee Roth to a cocaine duel, or during his self-reported “40-year bender” that lasted until he got sober around 2018, has died.
These last few years I’ve been jumping around the World of Wong Kar-wai so I think a little bit of context helps for Happy Together. In 1994, while working on the epic Ashes of Time, Wong took a break and made Chungking Express to clear his head and fall in love with filmmaking again and it ended up being a huge hit and made him an international darling. The next year, he followed that up with the stylistically similar Fallen Angels, which further earned him widespread recognition. Both movies were heavily influenced by the looming handover of Hong Kong to China, so when his next film, Happy Together, was slated to be released just weeks before the handover, everyone expected this would be what it was about. And they were sort of right, it’s just almost entirely set in Buenos Aires.
From Boyz N The Hood to Trainspotting to Fight Club to gangsta rap to grunge to nü metal, for whatever reason, the ’90s were a decade where angry young men were well-represented in pop culture. For this reason, the subject matter of La Haine did have a bit going against it for me, since it felt overexplored in this particular era. However, as I keep finding out throughout this Criterion Month, there are many different ways to tell a familiar story. La Haine manages to sidestep feeling overly familiar because it is so particular to its time (the 1990s) and place (the working-class suburbs of Paris), which combined with an arresting black and white-inflected visual style manages to do these angry young men justice. Continue reading
What is Canadian cinema? I mean, outside of “the King of Venereal Horror” David Cronenberg (who’s been covered on this site 11 times). James Cameron is a Canuck, though he’s spent his whole career making flicks in the U.S. of A. Denis Villeneuve, though now more associated with Hollywood, started his career directing films in his native Quebec. Then there are people I sort of, kind of, don’t actually know, like Guy Maddin and François Girard (both with films in the Criterion Collection), and of course today’s filmmaker, “the King of Emotional Alienation” (my newly coined nickname for him), Atom Egoyan.
Merely seven months after their first adventure, the heroic trio of Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui, and Michelle Yeoh return Executioners. And if you thought things were bleak before, let me tell you, this one starts with a bang! Nuclear war has poisoned the world and the survivors are forced to grovel at the feet of anyone who can provide clean water. Hong Kong’s president (Kwan Shan) is desperately trying to keep the government on top while a masked, disfigured maniac (Anthony Wong) pulls the strings from the shadows. This is a world that needs heroes more than ever before, so where are they?
It is to my great surprise that I am once again reviewing a movie where the third act twist is our traveling heroes stumble upon a house occupied by a lone Italian woman who one of them instantly falls for. Yes, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is, like Down By Law, a story about an unusual friendship, but more than that it’s an unique gay road movie set all over the Pacific Northwest. And more than that, it’s an unlikely, loose take on Shakespeare’s three-play Henriad. So Midnight Cowboy meets Chimes at Midnight? Sign me up!
Ah, what a fresh breath of Madrileño air. After two laborious trudges through melancholy epics with my last two picks, it’s refreshing to return to something light… if you consider a certified psychopath kidnapping a former porn star “light.”
