Tag: loyalty

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Spirited Away
(Sen
To Chihiro
No Kamikakushi,
千と千尋の神隠し)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 2001 – Japan – Cert. PG – 125m

****1/2

A shorter version of this review was originally published in Third Way for UK release date 12/09/2002. At which point, hardly anyone in the UK outside of anime fandom knew who Miyazaki was.

In director Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, a ten-year-old girl must survive a bathhouse run by demons after her parents are turned into pigs – now showing on Netflix (subtitled / dubbed) and can also be seen in the Anime season April / May 2022 at BFI Southbank (subtitled / dubbed for family screenings)

To discover the films of Hayao Miyazaki – and those of his company Studio Ghibli (pronounced “Jib-Lee”) – is like suddenly being exposed to those of Disney without prior knowledge of their sheer number or quality. In Miyazaki’s native Japan, Spirited Away shattered box office records to succeed Titanic as the most lucrative movie of all time. In the US, it won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature while making only modest inroads into the marketplace. Britain, however, is not the US and it may well fare better here than it did there.

Previous Miyazaki outings have covered children’s experience of the countryside (My Neighbour Totoro, 1988; one of this writer’s favourite films of all time), a young girl’s learning to find her way in the world (Kiki’s Delivery Service, 1989) and conflicting loyalties among pilots in interwar Europe (Porco Rosso, 1992).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

House Of Gucci

Director – Ridley Scott – 2021 – US – Cert. 15 – 157m

*****

A woman marries into the wealthy Gucci family and inadvertently brings about its downfall – out in cinemas on Friday, November 26th

First impressions.

A beautiful day. A well-dressed man (Adam Driver) relaxes at the café, pays his bill, cycles through the streets. Life is good. He reaches his destination. As he approaches the door, a voice asks, “Mr. Gucci?”

Milan, 1978. Another beautiful day. A woman dressed and moving like a goddess (Lady Gaga) walks past trucks and workers to her father’s transportation business office where she works as his assistant. Later, a friend asks her to a costume party. She dances. She looks incredible. She goes for a drink. The barman (Driver) turns out not to be not the barman. He makes her a drink anyway. He’s Maurizio. Gucci. He knows the host. She’s Patrizia Reggiani. She doesn’t. He tells her he can’t dance. She drags him onto the dance floor and makes him look good even though he does nothing. He leaves at midnight, worried he’ll turn into a frog. It’s a pumpkin, she calls after him.

She stalks him, ‘accidentally’ bumping into him at a bookshop where he’s buying armfuls of legal books (he’s studying to be a lawyer).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

A Witness
Out Of The Blue
(Fan Zui Xian Chang,
犯罪現場)

Director – Fung Chi-Keung – 2019 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 104m

****

When a member of a gang of jewel thieves is found dead, the murder suspect may not be the obvious person – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 from Tuesday, February 9th to Monday, February 15th

Following a jewellery store heist, a gang of robbers are to meet to split the loot. But someone gets to gang member Homer Tsui first, slits his throat and makes off with the bag of jewellery. There are no witnesses unless you count the pet macaw which saw the whole thing. When gang leader Sean Wong (Louis Koo) arrives, Tsui is already dead.

Senior Inspector Yip (Philip Keung – Tracey, Li Jun, 2018) is convinced Wong is guilty. “He’s harsh”, says pretty young officer Charmaine (Cherry Ngan), “but he takes care of you.” However, Officer Larry Lam (Louis Cheung Kai-Chung) seems to get on the wrong side of Yip all the time. Lam is passionate about caring for animals and runs a cat sanctuary in his spare time, but he’s got himself into debt with a loan shark setting it up and following an early morning run in with the moneylender arrives late to the crime scene of Tsui’s murder, not to mention slipping on some blood and falling flat on a corpse.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Hard Boiled
(Lat Sau San Taam,
辣手神探)

Director – John Woo –1992 – Hong Kong – Cert. 18 – 128m

*****

Woo’s directorial valediction to Hong Kong, at least for a time as he attempted to break Hollywood, rehashes his now familiar territory of brotherhood, loyalty and betrayal, etched in trademark bullets and blood with grander and greater operatic flourish than his earlier efforts. On-screen alter-ego Chow Yun-fat (The Killer, John Woo, 1989; An Autumn‘s Tale, Mabel Cheung, 1987) is cast for the first time in Woo not as gangster but cop, bonding with a ruthless triad hit man Alan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai from Bullet In The Head, John Woo, 1990, In The Mood For Love, Wong Kar-wai, 2000; Lust Caution, Ang Lee, 2007; Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, Destin Daniel Cretton, 2021). For good measure, Woo throws in therising, young gangster killing the old leader to take over the mob from A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986) (here played by Anthony Wong and Kwan Hui-sang respectively).

Hard Boiled opens with a spectacular tea house shoot out where Insp. ‘Tequila’ Yuen (Chow) accidentally shoots his partner (just as Leung, who turns out to be an undercover cop, mistakenly shoots a fellow officer during the later hospital shoot out).… Read the rest