B+ | A police raid of an apartment building is met with fierce resistance. Directed by Gareth Edwards Starring Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, and Yayan Ruhian Review by Jon Kissel |
One of the joys of foreign cinema is the compare and contrast game. While all movies share similarities within genres, the choreography in a genre like action movies differs from region to region. In Asia, Japan has its period samurai films while Hong Kong combines the mythic wuxia style with Jackie Chan’s life-endangering stunt work. Lacking the decades-long tradition of those two regions, Thailand burst onto screens in the 2000’s with the athleticism of Tony Jaa, and Indonesia followed with the bone-crunching pencak silat style, shepherded to global audiences by Welsh director Gareth Edwards. Edwards became fascinated with Indonesia through his Japanese-Indonesian wife, and found talented non-actors to star in his second film, Merantau. In his follow-up, The Raid: Redemption, Edwards makes a brutal crowd-pleaser of brilliant physicality and contained simplicity, and puts an Indonesian style of martial arts on the map.
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I haven’t seen the original Road House, though it gets mentally grouped in with the muscly action trash that dominated the 80’s. Maybe it’s better than the Commandoes and Cobras of the world, but it sits comfortably alongside its genre buddies with their big body counts and hacky quips delivered in a Schwarzeneggar accent, Stallone mumble, or Seagal whisper. Present-day action filmmaking is too cloaked in irony to pull off the same kind of tone, preferring a that-just-happened incredulity to the you’re-damn-right-it-did swagger of the Reagan/Persian Gulf era. It’s therefore interesting to see what a modern remake of Road House might look like, and how that 80’s tone translates to current sensibilities and filmmaking trends. However, Doug Liman’s adaptation is fruit of a poisoned tree. As Hollywood moves away from superhero movies and is in search of its next big blockbuster trend, let’s hope they leave the 80’s in the rearview where it belongs.
Of the major global outposts for movies, India is the one I’ve had the least experience with. I’ve seen two Satyajit Ray films from the 50’s (both great), The Lunchbox starring Irrfan Khan (pretty good), and, most indicative of India’s cultural exports, 2022’s RRR. That last one is what most think of when they imagine the work of Bollywood/Tollywood; epics with frequents musical interludes and intricate dance numbers. RRR was a strong introduction to this kind of filmmaking, though it’s not the kind of cinematic empathy-building that I’ve found in countries as varied as Brazil, Romania, Iran, and South Korea. Indian non-musicals, removed from the heightened nature of the genre, seem few and far between, and that’s generally what I want in my foreign film-watching. Monkey Man, from actor/writer/director Dev Patel, isn’t exactly that, as it’s a bloody revenge flick with plenty of choreography, just not the kind that everyone dances to. It does, however, give a peak into a culture and a nation that I feel like I should know more about, given its place in the world, while also delivering on the martial arts ultraviolence of its genre predecessors.
Tom Cruise is a movie star who insists on getting things right. No matter what the audience thinks about his role as highly placed cult official, he’s undeniably a craftsman who takes immense pride in his work, even at the risk of his very expensive safety. It therefore seems inevitable that he would star in a period vehicle that elevates and valorizes a Japanese ethic of expertise and excellence, especially in the immediate years after filming Eyes Wide Shut with Stanley Kubrick, he of the endless, repetitive takes. Cruise finds the perfect historical epic that both validates his approach to work and turns him into the adaptable genius who is capable of mastering anything. In its subtextual flattery of Cruise, The Last Samurai, directed by historical epic veteran Ed Zwick, smells like a more pungent variety of white savior trope than it actually is. The film itself works as one of the best examples of white-man-meets-foreign-culture. It doesn’t totally avoid the various pitfalls, but it skillfully navigates them.
As big-budget filmmaking finds itself at a crossroads, where the cash cows of the past have been put out to slaughter and no one knows what the next billion dollar film will be, every film that smashes expectations creates a possible future where movies like itself will one day be the next exhausted fad. Will it be historical biopics with all-star casts, weightless video game adaptations, satirical toy tie-ins, or jingoistic advertisements for the military industrial complex? Denis Villeneuve imagines the possibility that the wave of the cinematic future is superficially opaque space operas, where invented terminology like kwisatz haderach and lisan al-ghaib are made to sound meaningful instead of ridiculous. His two Dune films, with a third on the way, use the bludgeoning effects of size and scale to make the theater experience a must, but Villeneuve also remembers the human element, even moreso in Dune: Part Two. Frank Herbert’s novel is a recognizable hero’s journey, partly because it’s a classic story and partly because so many subsequent stories have imitated it, but the specific influences of the book and what Villeneuve chooses to embellish and focus on makes Dune into a hopeful harbinger of a better cinematic future. |
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