What Would We Do Without John Woo?

We'd have to invent him, that's for sure. I've commented on the great man before, specifically his work on Stranglehold, the game that doubled as a sequel to his masterpiece Hard Boiled, though when I did that I had surprisingly little interest in his latest movie Red Cliff, even though the awesome Tony Leung Chui Wai is in it, and surely the return of Woo to Chinese cinema (and the reteaming with the co-star of Hard Boiled) should be a cause for celebration after his American films failed so badly.


I was paying so little attention to the production of Red Cliff that until a week ago I didn't even know it had been finished, let alone that it had been split into two movies, that the first had opened in Asia to enormous audiences, and that the West would have to wait until next year to see a single film that would lose about two hours of footage. Well, that's not going to happen on my watch. I got hold of a copy of Red Cliff: Part One this week, and I'm thrilled to say that it did not disappoint at all. In fact, I found myself, at times, applauding it. Saying it's his best film since Face/Off might sound like faint praise, as his post-Face/Off films were pretty rough, but trust me, this is an immediate classic. Accessible to all audiences, fast moving, thrilling, imaginative, beautifully shot and scored, and a feast for the eyes, it has vaulted high up my still-in-construction Best Of 2008 list.

(Yes, it's cheeky to add a film that isn't even getting a proper UK release into my list, but then release dates have made a mockery of our list-making, and caused much upset within our household (and we will probably not shut up about it for a while). Still, I'm not going to wait until next year to praise this film, especially as the second installment will be hitting cinemas in January, meaning I have something to look forward to. Here's the trailer for the first movie, just to give a taste of why I am so excited about this.)



Of course, I rave about it without having any knowledge whatsoever of the historical background, and so I pretty much just shouted, "OMG awesome!" every time one of the characters did something cool like catch a spear in mid-air. Even just a couple of minutes spent Wiki-ing leaves me utterly befuddled by the amount of controversy about rival interpretations of this period, i.e. the end of the Han Dynasty. Based as much on Chen Shou's original Records of Three Kingdoms as much as on the later novel Romance of Three Kingdoms by Luo Guangzhong, Red Cliff is a re-telling of a story very familiar to Chinese audiences but barely known in the West. These texts have been translated into English, but they're hard to come by. Just now I considered shelling out for a copy of the unabridged Records of the Three Kingdoms, but it's over 2500 pages long. As I'm still not done with the infernal Atlas Shrugged, another big book does not appeal right now.

So, I have to just accept the movie for what it is, and not get into a debate about whether it should be censured for its interpretations of Prime Minister Cao Cao and Zhou Yu, who are treated with more accuracy than usual, even while Woo keeps the practically superheroic qualities of Guan Yu. It's fair to say Woo was looking for the best opportunities to show off the themes he is always drawn to, while getting maximum hardcore action possibilities from his cast of characters.


It's also informed by the success of Lord of the Rings and 300, with the Red Cliff itself reminiscent of Thermopylae as a location where a decisive battle is held. Woo, as far as I can tell, has been informed by the success of LOTR, as much of the film concerns the actions of Zhuge Liang as he endeavours to unite Liu Bei and Sun Quan against Cao Cao, just as much of the final two LOTR books and films show Aragorn and Gandalf trying to break down the division between the rulers of Gondor and Rohan (which makes me wonder if Tolkein ever read anything about the Three Kingdoms). The supporting generals also resemble the colourful characters of the Fellowship, with Guan Yu almlost Legolas-like in his ability to take down huge amounts of enemy soldiers, Sun Shangxiang resembles Eowyn in her efforts to join in with the fighting despite the misogynist fretting of the menfolk, and volatile Zhang Fei, with his booming battle cry, reminded me of Gimli (though Gimli never body-checked a horse).


Of course, the popularity of those movies means we've had our fill of battle scenes that are just overhead shots of phalanxes of cavalry racing towards each other. Luckily, though Red Cliff does feature that, the battle within the Eight Trigrams Formation is unlike anything I've seen before, with thousands of shield-bearing soldiers forming a maze within which an army is utterly devastated in a series of ambushes. Unlike most action scenes (especially the hyper-kinetic gun battles Woo is famous for), this twenty minute sequence is paced surprisingly slowly, but is filled with imaginative twists and turns and lots and lots of blood. Action scene of the year? Very probably.

It also features men respecting each other and giving pointedly adoring looks; in some scenes the admiration Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) has for Zhou Yu (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) would qualify as homoerotic if it wasn't for the fact that this is what Woo does. Instead, they're a classic Woo double act, two men forced together by circumstance and filled with admiration for each other, all the while knowing their friendship is almost certainly going to be tested to the brink of destruction by events outside their control. And yes, there are doves. One bravura shot shows a dove fly from Red Cliff, over Cao Cao's navy, and into the heart of his military camp, which is greatly pleasing, especially as it is a showcase for the excellent effects team, who provide work more convincing and better integrated than any other Chinese film I can think of.


One of the reasons I responded to this with such joy (other than that seeing Kurosawa Woo-ised is as gratifying as seeing Peckinpah get the same treatment) is that I also saw Peter Chan's The Warlords recently, and even with Jet Li, Andy Lau, and Takeshi Kaneshiro heading the cast, it was disappointing. One terrific scene with Li charging a row of cannons thrilled me, and a mid-film sequence showing the terrible choices made following the siege of Suzhou was very interesting, but it fell apart in the final thirty minutes, and was so slackly paced prior to this that I struggled to maintain interest. Red Cliff, on the other hand, is a pure joy, and ignore the haters who complain that it is too slow. As the first half of a four-hour movie, it makes perfect sense to structure the movie the way it has been, and I cannot wait to see how all of the narrative threads introduced here are tied up in the final half. Forget the truncated Western version. Chase down a DVD copy of the first half, or find some other way to get hold of it. It's worth the effort.

This Post Is Going To Be All Over The Place

Among the many trivial frustrations I endured yesterday, which included the horrifying endirtying of a load of washing due to catastrophic clothesline malfunction, and watching the worst two-parter of Justice League I've seen to date (some sympathy, please!) the most exasperating was spending four hours reading the responses to Joan Walsh's article about the psychic debt Barack Obama owes Hillary Clinton for the behaviour of other people. The article itself irked me enough to ruin any chance of a good mood, but the letters took over my day, from the well-reasoned arguments against Hillary's determination to stay in the race, to the occasional trolls who insulted her followers, to the vows of her supporters to vote McCain in November to punish the young women who had "turned their back on feminism" by not automatically siding with the female candidate.

It was a series of monologues, screeching at Joan Walsh, Obamaniacs (or Obama Boys / Obamabots, as the Clintonites would have it*), women, men, African-Americans, Geraldine Ferraro, Keith Olbermann, and anyone else who has dared to disagree with someone else. Racist!!! Sexist!!! Troll!!! Robot!!! Ageist!!! Elitist!!! I'll vote McCain! You fucking idiot! It's not over! Stupid emotional women! He'd better kiss our asses if he expects us to vote for him! You're going to sell us all out and ruin our country just because you're a bit peeved! The horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound in the deep one last time! Fell deeds awake! Now for Wrath, now for Ruin, and a Red Dawn!


After the third hour of my stupefied click-scroll marathon, eyes dried open, brain pummelled like William Forsyth at the end of Steven Seagal's best film (Out For Justice), I was just as punchy as everyone else on there, and seriously wanted to join the fray, but as I tend to think of the world in popular culture parameters, I would have just ended up derailing the whole anarchic mess by sniping at Battlestar Galactica fans who dare to suggest it is better than Lost, or accusing all those who refused to see Speed Racer of being fun-averse assholes who obviously despise love.

I've said before that I'm wary of talking about things I know little about for fear of being turned into so much Blogger Puree in the comments section, but even in a passive sense, surfing the net can have its hazards. It struck me that that's one of the worst thing about the internet, that you can often find a multitude of different viewpoints, many of them vile, most of them just different from yours, and end up thinking that you have to modulate your viewpoint until it resembles theirs because no one seems to be thinking the way you are. I'm lucky that though I read some pretty annoying talkbacks (including the often horrific Ain't It Cool discussions), a lot of them are frequented by interesting people who I may not agree with all the time, but are willing to express themselves like intelligent people do, instead of being troll assholes.

That's not me saying, "Waaauuuugh! Why are the people being so mean to me?!??!?" It's more that I just like to learn things, and reasonable, calm, non-histrionic people are great accidental teachers, even when I don't always agree with them. It also inspires me to be as calm and collected as them, and to think that once I have that part sorted, I can be as bold as I like with my opinions, and not worry about whether it is contrary to the norm, or perceived by the small-minded as being borne of some idiotic impulse simply because they see the world in terms of Manichean conflict between their opinion and everyone else's. That the more rabid followers of both Clinton and Obama (or Battlestar Galactica and Lost, or Speed Racer fans and the rest of the world) move further and further apart because of some weird need to get into a fight is their problem. Mine is becoming more confident in stating my feelings, having a solid rationale behind it, and then sticking to it until I am proven wrong. I shouldn't need validation, and I shouldn't think that every comment made by others that disagrees with me is probably automatically right, as I have little faith in my own reasoning abilities. I should just, "man up", as they say nowadays.

That said, my distress over delving into the, "You're racist!" "You're sexist!" morass, and seemingly getting lost in there for a few hours, was relieved when I read Warren Ellis' take on it, who not only voices my feelings far better than I ever could due to his Awesome Powers Of The Brain (not self-pity; he did write Transmetropolitan, after all), but is impervious to criticism and more than willing to unleash Arse Eels if he feels his supremacy is being challenged. I mean, that's bound to make you feel bold and strong. What do I have? Chim Chim Cookies? It's grim, but it's not the same thing.


Since then I've found other articles that have talked about the contest while avoiding the obvious namecalling, which is a huge relief for one as insecure as myself. The Economist had an interesting one about the mistakes Hillary and Bill made, and even Salon managed to get Joe Conason to write something that was fatalistic and optimistic at the same time, but at least didn't demand anything of Obama, instead asking the Obamaniacs and Clintonites to shut the fuck up for a bit. What with vicious slime like Joe Lieberman working against his own party like an enormous Judas, it's not a good time to be making threats in order to win concessions when there are people out there who want to ruin the party to settle a score and are so unwilling to make a deal that they must only be crushed with extreme prejudice.


It's silly to get so riled by all of that, and I know that, especially as these things are way more ephemeral than it seems at the time, which is why the thousands of pissy letters written to Salon and Huffington Post end up meaning nothing as they change no one's minds, only occasionally contain any useful information, and are forgotten about a couple of days later. Anyway, I appreciate that politics can bring out the best in people in the real world, and the worst in people when separated by a screen and keyboard (and vice versa). Which is why, even though I am actively interested in politics (especially American politics, partially due to previous studies and partially because I intend to live in America and need to know something about it), and unless I'm really really annoyed by something such as a mean-spirited decision to act like a child over an incontrovertible loss (and seriously Clintonites, it really was), I tend to keep my blog posts and thoughts on a pop culture track, because until I feel more confident about talking about politics, when talking about films or TV shows, no matter how angry the conversations get, and no matter how entrenched the different opinion-factions get, it's only films or TV shows, and it's not ever really about anything that important.

Oh for fuck's sake!

* I'm very disappointed that the Clintonistas couldn't see that a far more entertaining insult would have been Obamatrons.

I'll Let St. Patrick and St. Michael Do My Talking For Me!

The Golden Globes happened very quickly last night, and though it featured some lovely justice (yay Tina Fey, Javier Bardem and the Coens for their writing!), it also had some real headscratchers. Atonement as best dramatic picture? Over No Country For Old Men? Not only is that a very peculiar choice (possibly caused by a split in the vote between the 82 members of the HFPA, as mentioned elsewhere by Anya-from-Buffy fan swsa), but its win (and that of Extras and Longford) means that tomorrow's newspapers will be filled with "Brits triumph at Golden Globes!" Quick drinking game; down a bottle of Old Cliche's 50-Year Old Rum for every article that has the phrase, "The Golden Globes, long considered a barometer of which movies will be successful at the Oscars..." or some derivative. If you went through all of the papers, you would die from alcohol poisoning. The triumphalism of the UK press after a big American award ceremony always strikes me as hypocritical. While happy to paint Americans as knuckle-dragging galoots, the UK press gets all, "Look! The Americans noticed us!" when someone British wins something more prestigious than Best Sound Effects Editing.

However, the biggest shock of the night (for me and a bunch of other 30 Rock fans) was David Duchovny getting best comedic actor instead of the mighty Alec Baldwin. I honestly thought that anyone involved with the creation of The House of D was ineligible for any award ever again. Isn't there a rule? That movie stained our TV, it was so bad. Well, so wonderfully bad. As mentioned in the Worst Movies post I made recently, a truly bad movie is a thing of joy forever, and The House of D is right up there, what with the practically seismic tonal shifts, mawkish sentimentality, and lowest-common-denominator intentional humour (the best laughs are to be had when the film is trying to be serious). It is required viewing, even if only to try to figure out what was going on with Robin Williams' teeth. Or Duchovny casting his real-life wife as his onscreen mother. That's not creepy at all. (!)

Actually, I can't really hate on Duchovny. I always thought he was a hugely likeable actor, especially on The X-Files, and I know that Canyon was a BIG fan way back when. Plus, no one who was that great on The Larry Sanders Show can be hated. Besides, it's not really about him. Quick admission; I have yet to watch Californication (Canyon has watched it and thought it was passable), but my main beef is how anyone can win in the same year that Alec Baldwin performed his Redd Foxx impression. That alone was justification enough for a win, and that is only one of the many incredible things he did this year.


It's as if Mystic River won the Academy Award for Best Picture in the year that Return of the King won everything. It had to win everything, coming at the end of three years of magnificent filmmaking, as if the Academy was awarding Peter Jackson awards for everything he had done to make that wonderful trilogy. That's how I feel about Baldwin this year. He is Aragorn to Duchovny's Faramir. Oh well. Sincerely, congratulations to David Duchovny. It pains me to see Baldwin go without for once, but I do like the fact that people who hate Duchovny (and there are many) will be horrified by this. Leave his Speedo-wearing ass alone!

Besides, at least he got to win over Ricky Gervais. Ugh! The man sickened me this morning, being interviewed on the ever-hapless Breakfast. After being asked if he was happy to have won (a typically stupid question from Bill Turnbull, the anti-Paxman), he said, "Yes, I am pleased to have won. For the third time. Ahem!" Later on he said, "I'm looking forward to putting it on my shelf. Next to my two other Golden Globes. And my two Emmys. And my seven Baftas." That's not a misquote. Then he bragged about getting his first lead role in a major Hollywood motion picture, and also writing a new film with Stephen Merchant. Nice to be living in the UK where the writers aren't on strike, eh? He must have realised what he'd said because he then stressed, over and over again, that he was working in England, okay? England! Not LA! Not a scab!

I didn't want to bring my massive antipathy towards Gervais onto this blog because it's more complicated than "Bleh Gervais", and seems to be borne of poisonous jellusy. He is obviously hugely talented, and The Office was wonderful, and he can make me laugh, for which I thank him, but this "shtick", that he's satirically arrogant, pretending to be a parody of self-absorbed celebrities, is not that funny a joke, especially when told with his obnoxious Brentian mannerisms. There doesn't appear to be any difference between Ricky Gervais and "Ricky Gervais, popular entertainer and commenter on celebrity hubris" any more.

I gather that Extras eventually becomes his Munchian wail of horror at the celebrity culture, but does he really have an antipathy towards it? Or is it just his fans and the public in general? I'm simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by him and his ego. It's very confusing. Anyway, congratulations on his win. Now can he please get a new act and knock that self-satisfied shit right off? Oh, and Mr. Gervais, you've only won one Golden Globe and four Baftas, but don't think that getting that wrong on purpose makes it a meta-comment. It's just... just so... Oooooh! Blood pressure! Rising!



ETA: New supercontributor Masticator has pointed out, in the comment section, that Gervais did indeed get seven Baftas, and yes, he is right. That'll teach me to look at the number of awards and not the number of years he won awards (What??!?! I was counting the number of times it had the word Won. Is that wrong? Well, okay, it's wrong, but is it WRONG?!?!?!). Good for him. Mind you, that makes him like the Walt Disney of the Baftas. Which makes me... makes me so... Anger! Increasing!