Saturday Matinee: Bullet In The Head

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By Basil Baradaran

Source: The Asian Cinema Critic

Hell is both war and other people in John Woo’s epic tragedy.

“It’s war. Everybody loses.”

It’s certainly not unfair to say that people familiar with the works of legendary Hong Kong director John Woo tend to think of his films as being loaded with stylised action, generally designed around the idea that gunplay is cool, and must look as such. It’s been his shtick for decades now so it will no doubt come as something of a shock to watch his oft-overlooked 1990 epic Bullet in the Head and see a different side to fire fights and bloodshed.

Bee (Tony Leung), Fai (Jackie Cheung) and Wing (Waise Lee) are three friends and gang members in the 1960s, who often clash with a rival gang. After Fai barely escaped a mugging on Bee’s wedding day, the two of them get their revenge, accidentally killing gang leader Keung. Along with Wing, they flee Hong Kong to Vietnam (currently in the middle of its American War), hoping to work for local crime lord Leung (Chung Lin). They meet hitman Lok (Simon Yam), and while attempting to rescue singer-turned-prostitute Ching (Yolinda Yam), they end up facing countless harsh realities, navigating the terrors of a country currently ripped in half and under invasion. In a place where morals are meaningless and it’s everyone for themselves, they fight not only for their own lives, but to keep their brotherhood alive.

On the surface, Bullet in the Head might sound like your typical John Woo film, but watching it is an entirely different experience. While even the most basic action films of his have these themes of brotherhood, loyalty and betrayal, nowhere are they so strongly represented than here. It takes a bit of time to really get going, though, which is probably its biggest flaw: The film has a lot of characters and relationships to establish and it’s not always done with a tonne of finesse. By the time of the big shootout in the nightclub, you’ve forgotten why Lok is out there risking life and limb for these three bozos he barely knows. Thankfully you’re not dwelling on these moments too long: the chemistry between the four leads is strong enough to carry the film by itself, and features riveting performances from everyone, but especially from Cheung as the innocent Fai who’s forced into increasingly horrible situations, and Lee’s Wing whose inner conflict and change throughout the story is perfectly executed.

The setting is extremely rich for storytelling purposes. In a way the basic skeleton of the plot could have been applied to any time period and setting, but 1967 Vietnam is a unique setting, one that allows for a level of lawlessness and tension that would otherwise not be possible. The political strains in the country, and in the world at large, are the biggest antagonistic force in the picture, putting our heroes in increasingly terrible predicaments they have no way of escaping unscathed.

In this world, even the strongest bond between friends is put to its breaking points, and the prisoner of war scenes are some of the hardest to watch in Woo’s entire filmography. Violence is very infrequently glorified here; it’s a horrible act that might be tense and exciting, but for far different reasons than when Chow Yun Fat slides down a banister dual-wielding pistols. Those looking for that high octane Woo action will be pleased, but those who think his stuff is often too blasé about gunfights will enjoy the weight that each shootout has.

It’s a heavy movie that questions morality itself, and what is right or wrong when survival is on the line. It’s an extremely hostile period in Vietnam and Hong Kong’s history, and this is reflected in the lives of our heroes. No one leaves war without scars. Some physical, others psychological. But as Woo makes brutally clear during the movie’s final acts, some bullets leave longer, deeper impressions than others.

Verdict: Arguably Woo’s heroic bloodshed masterpiece, Bullet in the Head is a heart-wrenching story that will surely leave an impression on you once the credits roll.

Saturday Matinee: Black Zombie

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By Peyton Robinson

Source: RogerEbert.com

Depicting otherness is instrumental in crafting horror. There must be an us and them, an in-group and out-group. Monster movies used to be the genre’s bread and butter, making it easy to pick sides. From Universal’s depictions of Dracula and Frankenstein’s Creation to non-humanoid terrors like King Kong and Godzilla, the zombie may seem meager in comparison. But something magnetic about it endured, appearing far more regularly than its counterparts across the decades and tapping into something latent in our fears and cultural sensibilities. Maya Annik Bedward, in her newest documentary, “Black Zombie,” traces its origins and explores the impact of Haitian spirituality on Hollywood’s primarily white fear.

Bedward’s documentary is more of an anthropological study than a highlight reel, focusing less on examples of portrayal and more on the monster’s origin. On the surface, zombification is about the loss of humanity: a body without a soul. Reduced to violent gluttony, it is the embodiment of hacking death to the very worst end. But underneath the sinew, it is rooted in the culture of Haitian vodou and the history of enslavement. Zombies are victims. To become one is to be put back into slavery for eternity, depersonalized and unable to cross over to the afterlife.

Saint-Domingue was a French colony (now modern-day Haiti), often called “the pearl of the Caribbean” because of the wealth it generated through sugar production. However, it was also called a “powder keg.” From 1659 to 1801, enslaved Africans outnumbered white colonists about 17:1, and the fear of their power in numbers resulted in extreme measures of brutality to keep them repressed. From this cruelty and overwork, the zombie was born: a person robbed of spirit and will, toiling away with unfocused, soulless eyes, living in a shell of humanity. Both a physical and spiritual imprisonment, the mythical zombie is synonymous with the robbery of autonomy.

Ironically and yet unsurprisingly, this Haitian spiritual belief was itself colonized, both proving the principle of the zombie whilst villainizing the figure and overall culture behind it. The first use of the word “zombie” in the English language was by author and occultist William Seabrook, who introduced the concept to the Western world. Yet he viewed their existence not as tragedy, but as monstrousness, and wrote a novel, White Zombie, that posited the fear of its contagion onto innocent whites. The film adaptation of the novel marked the birth of the spiral, where zombies and vodou become synonymous (though a vodou priest himself tells us the opposite: they are, in fact, the difference between possession and dispossession) and are equated with villainy.

“Black Zombie” does stop short of the zombie canon, mostly concluding with 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead.” This feels like a supreme omission of other notable areas of opportunity, like Nia DaCosta’s claim on the “28 Days Later” franchise, or even Michonne in “The Walking Dead,” who, in addition to being a Black female protagonist, is first introduced walking in the woods with literal Black zombies trailing behind her by chained collars. Concluding the film at popular culture’s most familiar starting point, rather than using extra run time (at only 90 minutes, they could afford it) to contextualize modern depictions, is simply disappointing.

The wealth of interviews ranges from researched to random, featuring figures in Haitian vodou practice and Slash (who, despite having a pretty basic zombie fandom growing up, doesn’t contribute much). The spiritual leaders are far more interesting and involved, describing their relationship with the faith, culture, and its sensationalized dissemination (not only through media, but tourism to cities like New Orleans). In one clip with priest Erol Josue, he tells the filmmakers, “I want to trust you.” This active apprehension about whether his testimony will be given credence or blanket voyeurism is an integral moment to the ethos of the film—will “Black Zombie” be a good faith dossier on the co-opted and colonized Haitian history, or another exploitative, bloodthirsty side show?

Bedward’s film is thankfully the former, weaving together a thoughtfully constructed anthropological history. While modern-day blind spots burden the film, “Black Zombie” stays true to its motivation: lifting the cloche on the erasure and exploitation that founded one of horror’s most iconic figures.

Watch Black Zombie on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/16772982

Saturday Matinee: Obex

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By Zachary Lee

Source: RogerEbert.com

Projects that primarily center on characters’ isolation and the respite they experience from hiding themselves behind a screen land differently in the post-lockdown era. Director Albert Birney’s “OBEX,” though set in 1987 (denoted as such by TV adverts for “Nightmare on Elm Street”), feels seeped with such proximate anxieties. It is sympathetic to the ways we’ll migrate to digital worlds to escape the hell of embodied living, but it sweetly and gently reminds us about the beautiful inconvenience of community. Even though we can pick our flavor of digital numbing, Birney brings his DIY mentality and a host of collaborators who are in sync with his sensibilities to craft a project that shakes us out of the tempting lull and urges us to live life as an NPC. 

The first section of “Obex” focuses on the daily rhythms of its protagonist, Conor Marsh (Birney), who lives in his Maryland house with his dog, Sandy (played by Dorothy, who gives fellow horror hound Indy from “Good Boy” a run for his money). His only communication with the outside world is with his neighbor and proto-DoorDash driver, Mary (Callie Hernandez), who kindly delivers him food but is never invited into his home. We spend much of the film watching Conor and Sandy go about their lives in an unremarkable fashion; Birney plays Conor with relatable contentment. He has his dog and three TVs … what’s there not to like? 

Mileage may vary about whether or not you enjoy getting what amounts to an extended house tour, but Birney and his crew have put in the work to make Conor’s house the type of oasis that would warrant such sedentary. The production value is rendered in such hypnotic detail that I found it a joy to simply be lost in the lo-fi, analog space. It is befitting of the theme, in that Conor has created his home to be a place of such alluring safety and comfort that it becomes nauseating to consider leaving (or any form of disruption).

Pete Ohs (who most recently directed quirky nightmares of his own with last year’s “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick” and “Erupcja”) serves as the cinematographer and co-writer, and the film thrives on his and Birney’s surreal wavelength. Even though Conor is comfortable, the film’s visual language is anything but. We often see Sandy and Conor framed from an object in Conor’s room; as we peek at their lives from the perspective of a toaster or keyboard, these grainy shots, dreamy in their ambling compositions, feel as though they’re probing for dysfunction. It feels like we’re seeing Conor’s and Sandy’s lives from the perspective of a benevolent spirit, watching and curious about how someone seemingly well-adjusted can be so lonely. It feels less like a movie we stumbled upon and shouldn’t be seeing, and more like a project that’s eerily being filmed, where we’re trying (and failing) to locate the cinematographer.

The sound design is worth saluting, as Kevin Hill, the re-recording mixer, and Matthew Giordano, the post-production sound designer, work to create a hypnotic soundscape that chillingly unites disparate elements. Josh Dibb’s score, with its spectral and techno-piercing wavelengths, is unsettling in and of itself, and it’s particularly fascinating to see them work in the context of the rest of the film’s audio. The buzzing of cicadas outside Conor’s home is a common audio fixture, but it gets remixed with the hissing of the tea kettle in Conor’s kitchen, the hum of TV static, and the downpour of a running faucet, so that these sounds become indistinguishable from one another. Try as he might, Conor’s digital life is bleeding into his physical one.

That theme comes more into the fray after the film’s inciting crisis. Conor later sees an ad for the mysterious, state-of-the-art computer game, OBEX, which allows you to scan yourself into the game, where you have to fight the demon king, Ixaroth. Conor plays the game but quickly gets bored, and later finds that Sandy has been abducted by Ixaroth. He then reenters the game to liberate Sandy from her digital captor, all the while being forced to grapple with the uncomfortable truths about his family history and how that trauma informed his tendency to self-isolate. 

The world of OBEX, while free of keyboards and printers, is just as painstakingly realized as Conor’s physical world. There, he meets Mary in real life (Hernandez, riparian in her ability to oscillate between earnest and farcical, is a delight even in her small scenes) and encounters a traveling companion with a TV for a head (Frank Mosely). There’s a humor in seeing a scruffy, ’80s equivalent of a tech bro bring his white button-up and Spirit Halloween-coded sword to battle against humanoid cicada soldiers (Ixaroth’s lackeys) and Birney mines all the earned laughs from this mash-up between high fantasy and reality. 

In many ways, “OBEX” works best when it embraces its roots as a fairy tale of sorts, even as it feels rooted in its contemporary tenderness about the human condition. This framework helps recontextualize earlier dialogue scenes in which characters can state the film’s central provocation out loud (“Someday we’ll all live in computers because life outside is too sad,” Conor says at one point), because characters in fairy tales often speak so overtly. 

To some extent, it’s impossible to fully unplug from the ways technology and virtual worlds are enmeshed with our lives. Everything from the algorithms designed to keep us hooked on certain platforms to the addictive nature of blue light makes it far easier to ignore the world around us. Pointedly, Birney never lambasts Conor or others for whom this retreat is a reflex. But his film, like all the best art, is an invocation: not merely reflecting a despondent reality and world we know, but reminding us that there’s more to life than just the screen.

Watch Obex on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/16210459

Saturday Matinee: Late Night with the Devil

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By Eddie Pasa

Source: DC Filmdon

I love horror movies. (My wife can tell you that they’re often my favorite thing to throw on when I go to sleep, often to her chagrin.) They can be fun and entertaining, and they offer you the thrill of being scared without being in danger, if that’s your thing. But it always goes the same way: You leave the theater considering the acting, the makeup effects, and how the filmmakers tried to make you jump out of your seat or make your brain go sideways. But it all wears off usually around about the time you get home, and – in my case as a reviewer – you try to hold onto the memories you want to talk about, whether positive or negative.

Not here. Hoo, boy, no. This one stays with you.

It’s been over fourteen hours since I finished watching Late Night with the Devil, and I’m still shivering at the memory of it. Not for a long time have I been completely freaked out and scared by a movie – maybe not since Fede Alvarez’s truly visceral Evil Dead remake in 2013. That was a movie that had scares, gore, and atmosphere, all set in and around a backwoods cabin – plenty of room to move about and create any kind of atmosphere you want. Alvarez did just that, using different colors, smash zooms and whip pans, and other mood-setting techniques where his limits were only his and his crew’s imaginations.

Conversely, Late Night with the Devil confines itself to a TV studio, with TV cameras and two behind-the-scenes film cameras capturing everything as it happens. There’s lighting, sure, but the usable areas are limited to the soundstage and the direct backstage area. The behind-the-scenes cameras are running black and white 35mm film, leaving the 1970s TV cameras to capture everything else in the then-limited color space. And why are we here? To watch late-night host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) attempt to stave off cancellation with a desperate broadcast stunt.

We’re propelled back to the days of gas shortages, the Nixon resignation, Jimmy Carter, and the rise of news reporting that followed the “If it bleeds, it leads” adage coined by William Randolph Hearst. Also central to writers/directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ found footage frightfest is the ‘70s obsession with cults and the occult, both of which play into why Delroy has chosen Halloween to tackle all of it. His guests for this night, where the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest? A self-professed psychic; a former magician, now devoted to debunking so-called paranormal activity; and finally, a parapsychologist and her young patient, the sole survivor of a demon-worshipping cult mass suicide.

The Cairnes brothers take care not to overplay anything, leaving us hanging on the possibility that maybe we’re just seeing things owing to blips on the master tape or mere suggestions of the unnatural. We see Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) work his supposedly psychic powers to middling effect with the studio audience, which casts doubt on the screaming fit he has that causes his eyes to forcibly roll upwards and beyond a physically possible position. Even more doubt is thrown our way when Carmichael (Ian Bliss) shows us how all of Christou’s act is a bunch of hooey.

But there’s no mistaking the increasing amounts of dread piling up with each commercial break, as Delroy gets more news – both about his show and the condition of one of his hastily departing guests – that makes him push the envelope further than he should. And when he brings out Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and cult survivor Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), the latter of whom stares intensely at the cameras instead of talking with everyone on stage normally, the Cairnes brothers masterfully build and build to a shocking climax that will horrify even the most jaded of scary movie enthusiasts.

The notion of the audience being toyed with is savored, especially where Carmichael is concerned. We almost rely on his condescending attitude to help us believe that none of this is really happening, that Delroy is doing anything and everything he can to maintain his viewership through sordid chicanery. The Cairnes brothers give us outs, but we’re unwilling to take them, having been conditioned through the media to stay tuned for bigger and better “after these words from our sponsors.” All of this is borne by the committed cast led by David Dastmalchian, who usually takes roles that skew toward the strange and unusual.

Here, Dastmalchian tones it down completely, not even venturing to make Jack Delroy the comedian he’s supposed to be. Instead, he’s the baseline for this night of terrors; while everyone around him is some sort of archetype, he’s calm, trying to stay in control of himself while others either encourage him to go further or warn him against doing so. Aside from last year’s Oppenheimer, this is the most knowingly natural I’ve ever seen him; the Cairnes brothers wisely use our expectations against us with his casting, and Dastmalchian solidly holds down his end to keep the film grounded.

Opposite him, Ingrid Torelli stands out as the frighteningly placid Lilly, who seems to have happily accepted that a demon might be residing in her body. Lilly freaks us out by just looking at the camera; she doesn’t have to say a word, leaving Torelli the room to create an ominous presence through her eyes and posture. Again, our expectations are flouted by having Lilly portrayed as this smiling teenager who seems to relish being on camera and who doesn’t mind that “Mr. Wriggles” can come and go when he wants. Torelli alternately keeps us glued to the scene and repulses us just by her mannerisms, switching deftly between her character’s intent and what’s behind her piercing, eerie visage.

I once wrote an opinion that “horror films” are different from “scary movies,” figuring that the latter was kind of everyday, Friday the 13th-type film that teens attend to have a good time and the former was where characters cannot escape horrible fates. Late Night with the Devil is a perfect combination of the two, holding enough in the scare department while watching our characters tunnel further away from the light toward their agonizing destination. Even though we wish for reason to settle the matters and that people could make the right decisions, the Cairnes brothers purposefully travel down the other path. In this film, hubris gives way to damnation, and for every second of it, we’re clinging to hope that some possible good could come of these events. Here’s the thing, though: Cameron and Colin Cairnes don’t care one solitary whit about that hope, leading us through a waking nightmare the likes of which I’ve seldom seen.

Watch Late Night with the Devil on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/15032949