The Good, the Bad, and “Unhinged” starring Russell Crowe

This movie is notable from a historical standpoint as being the first feature film by an Asian-American director to get widespread theatrical distribution. It is also one of the first American movies (after 1961’s Flower Drum Song) to have a majority Asian cast, bucking the yellowface trend that had been popular in American movies, such as the Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan franchises, for most of the 20th century. In fact, part of the genesis for the movie was the backlash among the San Francisco Chinese-American community against the filming of 1981’s Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, starring the notably not-Chinese Peter Ustinov as the titular Chinese detective.

Chan Is Missing directly engages with the legacy of Charlie Chan and the depiction of people of Asian heritage in American media and culture. It challenges the idea that “Asian-American” is a homogenous identity and interrogates the degree to which any individual identity is tied up in such cultural signifiers. It depicts San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1980s as a diverse and vibrant place filled with all sorts of different people, all living different “Asian-American” experiences. It could be described as a neo-noir in the way it uses and deconstructs the conventions of that genre. From a technical perspective, the sound design especially is terrific.

There is a lot I want to say about this movie, but it’s also a movie best experienced by going in as cold as possible. So in case any of you decide on my recommendation to watch it, do so without reading any further! Trust me, it’s worth letting it surprise you.

Despite the name, this isn’t really a zombie horror movie, it’s a pretty heartwarming and sincere comedy and love letter to filmmaking as a creative impulse. The first 45 minutes of it play out as a silly, low-budget zombie movie all shot in a single continuous take. It’s full of these truly inexplicable moments of goofiness that sucker you into thinking it’s a “good bad” movie. The second half, though, is where the rug is pulled out from under you as a viewer, and you get essentially a workplace comedy about the making of the zombie movie you just watched. Every little “bad” moment from the first 45 minutes ends up being the set-up to a punchline as the actors and crew try desperately to salvage the movie as everything goes wrong with the production. The writing is incredibly smart and the ending is incredibly wholesome.

One Cut of the Dead was made on a microbudget with a cast of unknown actors. It would go on to make box office history by making over 1,000 times its initial budget, receiving international acclaim. It’s one of the greatest success stories in modern independent cinema.

Like One Cut of the Dead, this is a movie that will impact you most profoundly if you go in knowing as little about it as possible. It is also a movie that is very difficult to describe.

Most of the runtime of this movie consists of people talking as they drive around the outskirts of Tehran in a car. There is a fable-like structure as the protagonist, Mr. Badii, picks up different passengers and has conversations about life and death with them, each one loosely representing a different set of ideas (a soldier, a seminarian, etc.). But it is overly simplistic to paint the movie this way. It is one of the most achingly human and emotionally nuanced movies I have ever seen, and the exact details of the plot aren’t really important for understanding why it is so powerful.

It is a movie about liminal spaces. About the how “truth” is slippery and uncertain, our ability to achieve it constrained irrevocably by historical and cultural forces beyond our control. More than that, it is a film about the fundamental inadequacy of film, and narrative art more generally, in truly capturing the essence of the human experience.

This isn’t a movie about art. Or the nature of the human experience. Or any of that high-falutin’ nonsense. This movie is just fucking fun. Just read this plot description from Wikipedia: “The film is set somewhere in the deep forest of Japan, known as the Forest of Resurrection, where an escaped convict simply referred to as Prisoner KSC2-303 and a gang of Yakuza battle a horde of zombies while at the same time dealing with their sinister leader who wishes to open the forest’s portal of darkness.” It’s an incoherent cocktail of some of the most fun elements from Japanese film culture. It’s got time traveling samurai, immortal yakuza sorcerers, zombies, and lots of sword and gun violence. The only thing missing is a kaiju.

One of the most breathtaking animated features ever made. It is a complete technical marvel, accomplishing sophisticated camera movements and lighting tricks combined with stop motion in a way that has never been done before. The animation is so sophisticated that it puts even the great works made by stop motion luminaries like the Brothers Quay and Jan Švankmajer to shame. Here’s a brief sample:

The narrative is a dark, esoteric fairy tale, sublimating fears drawn from one of the darkest chapters in Chilean history, the Colonia Dignidad (read about it on your own time if you want to be horrified). It’s mesmerizingly creepy.

Pretty much everyone agrees this movie is awful. But I have a tendency to really enjoy off-beat sci-fi movies that don’t quite resonate with general audiences. Even I struggled with this, though. On paper this actually feels like a movie I would really enjoy … I mean, Will Smith’s character is named Cypher Raige, and he speaks in a horribly inconsistent British accent. But it’s just so boring. I don’t even have all that much to say about it, it’s just boring. Nothing interesting happens at any point.

Although it does contain the following dialogue exchange between Will and Jaden:

“I’m reading Moby Dick.”                                                                                                      “Your mother told me. That’s great”                                                                                   (both stare straight forward in silence for ten seconds and then change the subject)

So that’s a plus.

Christmas movies always get graded on a curve. It’s a saccharine formula but it works for the season, and I generally have no problem with it. There are a lot of dumb, corny Christmas movies I genuinely enjoy. Some of which you could argue are actually worse made than Fred Claus.

But something about this movie is just so mean spirited. I would estimate without any exaggeration that a full third of the dialogue in this movie consists of fat jokes about Santa. Every scene he is in, someone tells him to lay off the cookies. It’s not profane enough to be entertaining based on shock value, or strictly repetitive enough to become funny again in a weird Adult Swim post-irony kind of way. It’s just a string of uninspired fat jokes padding out the script. It doesn’t help that Kevin Spacey is in a lot of these scenes, too. Another third is Vince Vaughn literally stalking and gaslighting Rachel Weisz, who somehow got tricked into being in this movie. The rest is about Vine Vaughn basically teaching the chief elf at the North Pole how to be his wingman in Wedding Crashers.

Between this and Fred Claus, I’ve come to the conclusion that directors with alliterative “D” names should not be allowed to make Christmas movies.

In all seriousness, this movie is essentially Triumph of the Will for the most extreme wing of “prosperity gospel” evangelicalism. But say what you will about Leni Riefenstahl, at least she had some talent and a legitimate aesthetic vision. This movie is ugly, both aesthetically and morally.

I could write an entire blogcat breaking down how horrific the ideology at the heart of this really is (and maybe I will one day). But really all you need to know is that the moral of the movie is “capitalism itself is God”. When faced with questions about the role of faith in modern materialist Christmas, this movie doubles down on materialism. It features such bizarre contortions as “Christmas trees represent the crucifix, and the ornaments are Jesus, so when you decorate the tree you are crucifying Jesus” and “Christmas presents under the tree represent the skyline of Jerusalem”. There’s also a scene where St. Nicholas beats up a person of color in a bar while Kirk Cameron’s narration talks about how you shouldn’t put up with political correctness. And it ends with the whitest rap/break-dance sequence ever made.

This is a more controversial pick than the above, being a movie that Roger Ebert includes on his “Great Movies” lists (and many other critics include on best movies of the 2000s lists). Despite my dislike for it, I still recognize that it is in a qualitatively different category than Fred Claus. This isn’t a movie that inherently lacks value. It features some great acting performances and does serve as a sincere portrait of post-9/11 New York City. Even if I don’t personally like the aesthetic choices involved, I at least have to grant that Spike Lee came into this with a coherent vision, which is more than I can say for any of the previously entries on this list.

That said, I do strongly dislike this movie. I find the whole thing to be cloying and trite. There are points in this that would work better as a satire of a certain type of New York personality, but the whole thing is too sincere to be read that way. Flashbacks aside the entire movie takes place on Edward Norton’s character’s last day before going to prison; therefore, in the logic of the movie, every single person he talks to needs to talk about prison rape. I’m hardly even exaggerating, almost every single conversation in this movie involves either someone telling Edward Norton he is going to get raped in prison or Edward Norton telling someone else that he is going to get raped in prison. I’m not saying that it’s a taboo topic that shouldn’t be mentioned, or that an exploration of anxiety and masculinity shouldn’t broach the topic at all, but that’s more or less the only example of how going to prison can be scary that the movie seems to be able to think of. Instead of exploring that sense of fear and loss in any intimate or personal way, it just says, “Don’t drop the soap, bro.” ]

Most damningly, I think, is that despite being directed by Spike Lee, the world-view of the movie is driven predominantly by that of its writer, David Benioff (of Game of Thrones and “Themes are for eight-grade book reports” fame). Everything about the perspective of this movie feels incredibly white, in a way that I am surprised a filmmaker as talented and polemic as Lee couldn’t find a coherent way to subvert.

And the less said about the gender dynamics of this movie the better.

This, too, is a controversial pick, seeing as this movie won Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Film Editing at last year’s Academy Awards. As with 25th Hour, I am not trying to argue that this is a Fred Claus; but, too, I don’t find it as bland and sophomoric as 25th Hour. Carey Mulligan truly is fantastic, Emerald Fennell has a well-defined visual style and makes some unique and interesting aesthetic decisions (that feel far more polished than you would expect from a directorial debut), and I rather like the score. As I said in the intro to this little section, I don’t think this movie is “bad”, per se. I just did not enjoy the experience of watching it.

I honestly think at least part (not all) of the reason for its rapturous reception over Hollywood is a penitence for Harvey Weinstein. I don’t mean to say that it’s awards campaign was some sort of premeditated or cynical PR stunt, mind you, or that the adoration for it isn’t sincerely felt. But rather that this movie addresses the issues of sexual assault and rape in about the safest, most milquetoast Liberal way possible. It doesn’t make an effort to challenge the way Hollywood and other power structures helped enable the behavior of Weinstein and others like him, instead it has a neat tidy ending where the police swoop in and catch the bad guys and the problem is solved. It provides absolution without self-reflection, broaching difficult topics just enough to be edgy but not quite enough to be uncomfortable.

There are other things I would say, but I also feel that it is not my place as a male to pass these judgments on the perspective of a female filmmaker when it comes to a topic as important as sexual assault. Instead, I would like to quote a non-binary film reviewer that I follow, who already expressed it better than I could:

“We are more than the things that happen to us. Watching a woman inflict mental trauma onto other women by making them think they, or their teenage daughter, were raped is not sweet vengeance. Ignoring the pleas of your dead best friend’s mother to move on and instead you use said dead best friend’s name as your call to arms and justification for your actions is not sweet vengeance. It all works for the argument that we are watching a deeply traumatized women try and justify her own actions instead of healing but to tout these actions around as a thrilling expression of female vengeance feels nauseating and so deeply counterproductive to the ideas of intersectional feminism. Even if we see an offering of respite through clarification for those women who are being convinced there has been a rape, that doesn’t negate the great deal of harm even remotely incorporating that narrative can cause … Martyrdom does not a feminist film make.”