Infernal Affairs II

If the jury has been out on prequels it may roll back in to deliver its verdict this summer when Revenge of the Sith is released. (The previous two movies were really just pre-prequels.)

Watching Infernal Affairs II I found myself asking whether the original movie always left room for this? (And what of Infernal Affairs III?) The cool and confusing narrative and style is reprised. Although the younger selves of the two moles reappear, the central and clearly rotational symmetry is now between the triad boss Sam and Inspector Wong. Sam is made more impishly appealing, while Wong, still looking like an agent from The Matrix, is shown to be somewhat flawed.

Some of the detail added here will increase your understanding of later events, others add enjoyment only by stealing it from your memories of the first film. Knowing that Wong and Yan died in the original is part of the problem of all prequels. With it's melodrama and eschatological undertones the producers possibly felt they had found Hong Kong's answer to The Godfather, but the second film in that series cleverly blended prequel and sequel elements and didn't rquire us to engage with the fates of characters whose demises we had already witnessed.

The Departed

Fans of Infernal Affairs will inevitably have some misgivings about Martin Scorcese's remake.

Yet it pulls you along like one of those permanently enthusiastic friends that goads you into turning up at a party you never really wanted to go to...and you end up having a good time in spite of yourself.

The script fizzes. That and the development of character are Scorcese's main developments of his Asian source, but these aren't exclusively enlargements of it. Nicholson is often out of control and the rendering of DiCaprio and Damon's roles actually detracts from what I personally take to be the meaning of the story. The police mole is a bit too likeable and the gangster mole is a bit too un-likeable; The interesting symmetries between the police inspector and the gang-leader are also lost, as well as the sense that we are witnessing a conflict between two competing codes of honour.

There was a pathos about the inverted situations of the two men in the Hong Kong thriller that Scorcese simply doesn't capture. In spite of all of DiCaprio's best efforts I never really felt especially sorry for Costigan and Sullivan's actions are blandly self-serving. You never have the sense that he subconsciously yearns to become one of the good guys.

Infernal Affairs had a certain epic quality, underscored by the Buddhist ruminations on the torments of the betrayer which flash on the screen at the beginning and the end. It's one reason why the underlying structure of the story was able to support a trilogy. Scorcese on the other hand needs to wrap things up in 150 minutes, so he is forced to tell us everything we need to know about his two leads in the first twenty minutes or so, and then to insert a rather artificial ending, courtesy of a new main character of William Monahan's creation. (Mark Wahlberg's Dignam, otherwise there to gas up the dialogue.)

Alec Baldwin's hammy performance (something of a reprise of his movie star from Notting Hill) is actually more amusing than Jack's. And the film actually ends on a strange note of comedy as we see a rat making its way across Boston's rooftops from the window of Sullivan's overstretched ambitions.

It was a nice touch to have the pair share the same shrink, and to suggest that Sullivan was altogether less cocky in the bedroom.

Anyway, give the man his Oscar I say!

Holiday Viewing

A quick run-through of all the films I saw on my recent travels. I'll cover off I,Robot in my next posting. Shark Tale was on offer on the same Continental flight. This was actually more amusing in Spanish than in English. In the latter version Will Smith was a bit too...well, himself, and the alternative cast made more of the possibility of using different accents to shade their caricatures. The Godfather shark Don Lino (De Niro's part in the original) was inevitably played by an Argentine. Godzilla was shown on the ADO bus from Playa to Chetumal. Unwatchable; the bus arrived before it ended anyway.

On the same ride I caught the trailer for The Forgotten, a movie that is in fact best appreciated as a trailer. When I actually got to see the full movie on the flight back from Houston I quickly realised that the plot is based on a premise that the producers should have had the good sense to keep as a premise. My neighbour quite accurately described it as "well-acted, unintentional comedy". Another piece of Americana on the same flight was First Daughter starring Katie Holmes as the freshman offspring of the US commander in chief - an unlikely character played by Michael Keaton. It takes the American fairytale formula to the same absurd and predictable lengths that The Forgotten takes the American paranoid nightmare. Having said that, both films were fairly entertaining. Much the same can be said of Spiderman 2, which I eventually saw all of after three separate partial sittings with a collection of V's nephews and nieces gathered around the DVD player over Christmas. The scenes where Spiderman is doing his signature swinging between the skyscrapers are especially well realised, unlike the CGI-enhanced feline leapings of Catwoman, which played on the flight from Guatemala to Houston. You wouldn't need extraterrestrial assistance to forget that one.

Then there's Troy. I was actually expecting this to be worse than it ended up being. It was certainly quite hard work and I'm still not sure exactly how ridiculous Brad Pritt was as Achilles, but at the end I felt I had been just a little bit thrilled and moved. Eric Bana's Hector is certainly the heart of this. Perhaps the biggest deviation from Homer was the secularisation - which made the prospect of bulked up Brad dying from a single arrow to the heel a bit tricky, so Paris had to finish him off by pumping him with almost as many arrows as Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring. Apparently there were a bunch of condom gags (Trojans!) that went completely over my head.

Last week's movie on FilmFour Weekly was the superb Infernal Affairs. Possibly the best Hong Kong crime movie I've ever seen. I immediately decided to watch it through again the following night. There's so much detail and depth to revel in. My only quibble would be that the writers could have made the two alternative worlds of policeman and Triad brother more vivid by showing us a bit more of the other social exchanges and rituals in their lives, but maybe that it what Infernal Affairs 2 & 3 set out to do. We shall see.

Over the weekend I watched Zatoichi meets Yojimbo, one of the original series starring Shintaro Katsu from 1970. Toshiro Mifune reprises his Yojimbo role from Kurosawa's films. The build-up is fairly slow and uneven and the blind masseur-swordsman much less uncomplicatedly cool than Takeshi's updated version. The mood is relentlessly grim - High Plains Drifter is jolly in comparison. Director Okamoto Kihachi participated in some of the worst fighting in the Pacific as the second world war reached its conclusion and it is said that this profoundly influenced his later career and general outlook on the violence within mankind.

BAFTAs: "I donnaspeaka english, gracias"

Strangely the BAFTAs are all going where they deserve to. The production design and cinematography of Children of Men were recognised, Eva Green took the Rising Star gong, and Pan's Labyrinth, in truth the best movie of 2006, was chosen for best foreign-language film.

Great acceptance speech from Guillermo del Toro: "I'm far too fat for this excitement..I always love England because I can get very drunk and be very repressed."

The Mexicans are doing well so far. Let's see if they carry this success through to the Kodak Theatre next month.

I can see why it annoys Mark Kermode that they all refer to Babel as "bab-EL". At least Jonathan Woss says it wight.

I hadn't realised that The Departed was a remake of Infernal Affairs!

Isn't Forest Whitaker such a nice bloke? (He almost forgot to thank his wife!)

36 Quai des Orfèvres

Starring Daniel Auteuil, Gérard Depardieu and Valéria Golino, Olivier Marchal's 36 is unquestionably the most stylish and melodramatic crime thriller since Infernal Affairs (see hilarious spoof below).

It's hard to describe the set-up without spoiling it, but essentially it is the story of two cops that operate by their own rulebook chasing both a violent gang of robbers and the soon to be vacant job of their boss. Auteuil's character Vrinks is married to a beautiful doctor who would appear to have been his former chum and now rival's girlfriend. Both men are prepared to take extraordinary risks to land the arrest and although it seems that Depardieu's Klein has screwed up first, he has a nasty surprise in store for Vrinks. Who does bottled-up, wounded masculinity better than Auteuil?

Just when it looked to be ramping up to an operatic Hong Kong style climax, Marchal delivers the twist that is exactly the denouement that this story requires. Superb.

And now for the funny stuff:



Update: Watching the extras I discovered that Marchal was himself an anti-terror policeman and that everything up to the moment Vrinks is released is effectively a true story. He admits though that he chose to make an 'urban western' which might have compromised the level of realism somewhat!

Divergence (San cha kou)

I flicked quickly from the main menu to the extras hoping to find the WTF was that all about? option. On the IMDB its says This plot synopsis is empty. Add a synopsis, but nobody has felt up to it.

There's some sort of not especially heinous white collar crime at the centre of this slick Hong Kong caper, around which a cop, a lawyer and an assassin buzz, while bodies twitch and fall relentlessly.

It's all very easy on the eye in a post-Infernal Affairs kind of way, especially Angelica Lee, the very picture of Asian super-cuteness.

Here she plays two mysteriously identical women who we are led to believe are the same person only to have that morsel of sense cruelly snatched from us at the end.

The gaps between the set-piece sequences are filled with icky sentimentality straight out of a pop video. At any moment I was expecting Aaron Kwok to clutch onto a wire fence in the pouring rain and start crooning.

Infernal Affairs 3

More of a gap-plugger than anything else, and as the gaps being plugged occur at the end of the first and second films, I probably ought to have refreshed my memory of these in advance.

In contrast to the second installment all of the big names have returned (plus a few new major characters), but the emphasis is firmly back on style, so we learn little new about any of them - Wong and Sam in particular are very much background characters here.

Overall it savoured of yesterday's salad, brought back to life by chucking in some new ingredients and generally re-tossing.

Kelly Chen's Dr Lee has had her significance extended, with some gently comic-romantic scenes with Leung. There's a particularly memorable one where a split screen creates the illusion of a simultaneous session with the two moles on couches either side of her, finally coughing up their parallel secrets.

By the end Lau's "never-ending hell" has become a great deal worse. Perhaps this doom, or at least fate-laden trilogy will start a trend for greater metaphysical profundity in crime-thrillers.

The Killer

High-camp Hong Kong action classic from John Woo in which there can never be enough bad guys to shoot (and they can never have enough lead pumped into them) and where most of the sexual tension inbetween these immoderate shoot-outs is generated by the male leads. (Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee.) As in later examples of the genre such as Full-time Killer and the Infernal Affairs series, the handsome adversaries stare into each other's eyes with a mix of cool contempt and mutual admiration, sublimating in the direction of lust, as their automatics press onto each other's temples.

2046

After the red raw experience of Irréversible I decided to take myself out to see something a bit more, shall we say...elegaic. Trouble is, when you have grown aclimatised to more visceral cinematic experiences, movies like 2046 can have you fidgeting in your seat from quite early on.

Joel went to see it at the Curzon last Friday and afterwards texted me a short review, giving it a 6.75, and adding that it was "a bit long and dragging, but very sad". I discovered last night that you become aware of this impedance effect pretty much from the outset, but fortunately the ratio of motion to drag varies a bit as the film progresses.

Zhang Ziyi certainly livens up proceedings whenever she's on screen. At first she appears to be back in her type-cast role of coiled spring. She plays hard to get, foxy yet oddly disengaged, before suddenly exploding with wild man-eating passion. With her ventriloquist's diction and lively eyes she's utterly fascinating to watch. Whenever she whispers in a man's ear it's practically a sexual act.

She even gets to slap Mr Chow - a brief reminder of her butt-kicking prowess from recent Asian films of more martial artiness. (Though bizarrely the trivia page on the IMDB reveals that 2046 was originally conceived of as the story of a hitman in Bangkok!) However, Chow is determined not to enjoy himself too deeply and soon she's just another melancholic wreck in his tawdry biography.

It seems to me that both Tony Leung and his co-star from Infernal Affairs Andy Lau sport a naturally wounded look on screen, but while Lau's default expression is one of bug-eyed tension, as if permanently on the brink of the direst anguish, Leung's is more rueful, as if he has learned to simply absorb the punches.

Actually I was again reminded that Leung could quite easily pass himself off as a Mexican. Won Kar Wai's films undoubtedly feature the immoderate romantic sensibility of boleros, and like many works of Latin American cinema the background music often pushes to the front, blatantly captivating our attention and conducting our emotions with its dance. Bellini and Nat King Cole are laid on thick and repetitively. The 2046 Main Theme sounds a lot like the theme from Leon and there's a tune by Zbignieuw Preisner, who composed so much of the music for that other ponderous poet of the modern cinema, Krzysztof Kieslowski.

In the Sunday Times this week Cosmo Landessman observed that Wong Kar Wai's films are "a passionate postmodern mix of Gustav Klimt, Edward Hopper, Frank Sinatra and God knows what." Now Hopper's work is often cited as having been very influential on the cinema of his day, but his canvasses are frozen moments, studies of the transcendent gaps in human existence, and hence possibly not the best ingredients for full-length feature presentations. In the film-maker's art, when your underlying subjects are things unsaid and actions misplaced you can all too easily end up with over-nuanced interactions; and indeed by the end of 2046 you're hoping that someone, somewhere will get something off their chest just a tad more directly.

This torrent of repressed happenings ultimately feeds the aforementioned fidgeting , especially when you start to factor in your recollections of the earlier Chow Mo Wan film In the Mood for Love. (In fact, appropriately enough, I remember is that is was a beautiful, and indeed very moody film, but not much else.)

"When in doubt, gross'em out", proclaims a character in a Manga comic I read recently- an approach that Gaspar Noé for one might agree with. Wong Kar Wai on the other hand opts for the opposite aesthetic strategem; I guess you could call it "When in doubt, grace'em out". In 2046, even the doorknobs are achingly evocative.

The futuristic scenes from Chow's science fiction stories meanwhile are somewhat incongruously styled like a bad 80s pop video. (Does anyone else remember Drowning in Berlin? A classic of the genre!)

Anyway, if it finds you in the right mood 2046, like its predecessor, will most likely be an indulgent pleasure, poignant and never quite pretentious. However, unlike that other recent romantic sequel, Before Sunset, personally I have no immediate desire for a repeat viewing.

Incidentally, Jason commented to me yesterday that my review of Irréversible contained a few choice keywords likely to assist my Google ranking. Here's to that!