Johnnie To FIlms, Ranked

I haven't been updating this blog like I should to link to everything I've been up to the last month (I hope to catch up on that this weekend), and part of the reason for that is that I've devoted every spare minute the last few weeks to tracking down and watching all of Johnnie To's films for this piece for Film.com. I'd seen about 20 already, but watching everything for this ranking, even the weaker, early years, has only confirmed Johnnie To as, along with Abbas Kiarostami, my favorite contemporary director.

If you're a fan or you've never seen a Johnnie To film (no time like the present!), I hope you'll take a look at my list for Film.com.

Bonus, the film I list as my favorite is on Hulu, and the link is in the article.

Romancing in Thin Air (Johnnie To, 2012)

By virtue of their outlandish style, Johnnie To’s films often broach the postmodern and Brechtian even at their most straightforward; think the opening gunfight of Exiled, in which the sight of a door being suspended and even pushed back and forth in midair is both a source of hilarious cognitive dissonance and the oddly logical climax of the sequence. Romancing in Thin Air, though, features the director at his most nuanced and subtle, stylistically grounding the film so that the many flourishes become not par for the course but formal means of breaking down distinctions between art and life.

If the film ultimately erodes such barriers, however, it opens with a clear delineation of reality from artifice. With HDTVs now offering a home cinema experience even for news shows, To pointedly uses analog, full-frame TVs to show actor Michael Lau (Louis Koo) winning Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards and proposing to his actress girlfriend, Yuan Yuan (Yuanyuan Gao), then being stood up on his wedding day when her first love (a coal miner) turns up out of the blue and wins her back. The farcical turn of events plays out in a constricted frame on old, standard-definition video quality, marking it as something false. But then, what To shows is gossip, the world of celebrity, which belongs neither to the real world outside privileged circles nor to the art that is corrupted by it. But even this aesthetically separated realm is complicated when Michael, driven to alcoholism and ruin, is expelled from the television into the world, the final indignity of the fallen star.

Capsule Reviews: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Life Without Principle, On the Road

Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012)

Benh Zeitlin’s debut feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, uses memories of Katrina as fodder for a sub-magical-realist burst of half-stylized poverty porn. Zeitlin aims for inoffensiveness by casting the severe limitations the poor face—no access to healthcare, poor education, the laughably weak safety net—as fantastical positives. This is a film where witch doctors brew medicine in jars, where everyone looks freshly rubbed down in dirt to achieve just the right look of want, and where only the truly worthy both refuse to evacuate from a coming storm and violently reject any attempts by outside bodies to help them. Young Quevenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry give performances entirely too good and revelatory for such heinous rot, but even their raw and honest work is undone by the falsity of what they are meant to invoke. Like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the film approaches a serious, national trauma and filters it through the eyes of a child. And like that other disaster, it does not use this perspective to grapple with the scope of tragedy but to infantilize it. Grade: D-

Capsule Reviews: Platinum Blonde, The Mad Monk, The Lodger

Platinum Blonde (Frank Capra, 1931)

Now this is more like it. Capra gets it all together with a rip-snorting good time with newspaper idealism, dialogue you just wanna tap with a spoon and peel, and sentimentality that works instead of hinders. Robert Williams is more flirty than Jean Harlow (hilariously playing the straight role as the starched, bossy heiress), and the gender-reversed Pygmalion structure makes for some great comedy with the Eliza in this case being a properly snappy, streetwise paper hack. Not to mention, his gender makes for more interesting resistance to change, as Capra shows how a man reacts to being the less prominent member of a pair and the one actively being molded. Granted, it also encourages the audience to cheer when he demands chauvinistic things like his rich wife taking his name, but this is still a fascinating inversion at times. Also a delight is Louise Closser Hale as the aristocratic matriarch with her affected voice and constant, faint-headed outrage at scandal that truly no one with anything to do cares about. My distrust of Capra has always been balanced by my true admiration for him when he clicks, and this is Capra firing on all cylinders. Grade: A

The Mad Monk (Johnnie To, 1993)

A deliriously ludicrous comedy that has more fun with Eastern religion than an American genre film could ever hope to have with Christianity, The Mad Monk opens in a heaven where the head god has to deal with so many deities he doesn't recognize all of them and only gets odder from there. The Mad Monk tasks a prankster god with altering the life(s) paths of three archetypal individuals with only a trick fan for powers, leading to a whimsically ridiculous farce that To directs to a frenzy. Everything in this movie is funny; To even steps on an emotional death scene by having our Lo Han (played by Stephen Chow) burst into the wrong room (and an embarrassing bit of sexual play) as he hunts for his felled mark. With To's manic camera movement and cutting, inventively staged comic fight scenes and a climax that moves from a kaiju battle with a giant demon to a piss-take on pageantry with a heavenly promotion complete with tiara, The Mad Monk is a bewildering, side-hurting riot. Grade: B


The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)

This thrilling silent, Hitchcock's fifth feature, while still a bit stiff in the narrative department, shows Hitchcock's rapidly developing talent as a director and his seemingly innate control of the camera and the Expressionistic techniques he observed in Germany. It's somewhat amusing that he still finds a way to be expository in a silent film, using multiple news stories to get across developments in the murder mystery. A 'wrong man' narrative involving murdered blondes, pained romances and the suggestion that a slit throat might always be just around the corner, this almost feels like a preemptive tribute to Hitchcock than an early work. This is a fun showcase for a man whom one can tell even here would deserve the title of "master" thrust upon him, from the use of a glass floor for Hitchcock to stick a camera under to a perfectly framed shot looking straight down a staircase as a man obscured by angle and his black clothes runs down the stairs with his sliding hand as the chief guide to his position. A real treat. Grade: A-

Mad Detective

Johnnie To's Mad Detective is one of the most deliberately complicated police procedurals I've seen in some time. As an introduction to the wild Hong Kong auteur's canon, it can be a bewildering experience, but a rewarding one, allowing this writer to get at the heart of what makes To stand out from other genre filmmakers working today.

The first thing you notice is the camerawork. To has found a committed fan in David Bordwell, perhaps the most knowledgeable man in the world on the subject of mise-en-scène and the meaning of a shot, and one can see why instantly: setting up what might be a usual pairing of mismatched cops, the camera instead instantly subverts expectations. It moves with a fluid grace as it tracks over the sight of an older detective with a knife readied for a fight, only to reveal a swinging pig carcass that he stabs repeatedly to mimic a killer's attack. The camera cuts to reveal the previous moment to be a POV shot as a young cop, Detective Ho Ka-On enters the room to find the other cops staring at the spectacle.

Before five minutes have elapsed, To has taken the formula and muddied it, opening with those cliché establishing shots of a precinct and the rookie entering before splitting attention between objective and subjective shots. The only thing the audience can trust so far is the printing on the Kowloon District door: everything else already carries the possibility of fabrication. We subsequently learn that the older detective, Bun, stabs the pig and mimics another crime -- having Ho place him in a suitcase and throw him down some stairs -- because he is psychic and recreating the scenarios allows him to see what happened. This just opens the can of worms.

The entire department admires Bun, to the point that no one ever bothers to question how he can see people's inner selves. But they also fear his mental imbalance, and when he offers his retiring captain his own right ear as a "present," the rest of the precinct makes the not altogether unwise decision to send Bun to pasture as well. Only years later, when a cop, Wong, goes missing and his gun shows up in the use of deadly robberies does Ho go looking for the mad detective to get to the bottom of the crimes

What is also remarkable about Mad Detective is the emotional range it conveys. To juggles broad comedy, suspense, tragedy and cerebral psychological thriller deftly, and if the film is inconsistent in tone, as I have heard some say, that can only be because, for all the supernatural elements of the film, it is one of the few cop films to express any kind of believable emotion. And if emotion is believable and human, it is always complicated and conflicting.

Paired up once more with his writing partner, Wai Ka-Fei, To delights in poking fun at cop clichés without making an outright comedy. Where most buddy cop films pair a reckless rookie with a wizened old detective, To's film gives us two totally unique characters. The older cop is the crazy one, and the young one isn't particularly ambitious or adept. Late in the film, Bun sees Ho's inner personality, a frightened, insecure child whose angry front cannot remotely disguise his fear.

To's constant leap through perspectives brings out the complexity in Bun and the way he sees the world. He lives with his imaginary wife after his real spouse left him, and it's heartbreaking when the camera cuts from seeing her interacting with Bun to a more objective angle that shows a desperate man trying to keep up appearances. Perhaps the most memorable scene in the film has nothing to do with the corkscrewing narrative but an aside that shows Bun inviting Ho and his girlfriend to dinner, complete with Bun's "wife." Ho's girlfriend cannot take the absurdity and hides in the bathroom, but a sympathetic Ho makes a noble go of it, and the moment is surprisingly sweet. It's the one coherent bit of Mad Detective, and it's more affecting than the forced moments one expects of such thrillers.

Elsewhere, though, this is a pure exercise in style, and To's style is boundless. Wong's partner, Chi-Wai, is the culprit behind Wong's disappearance, and Bun sees seven distinct beings when he looks at Chi-Wai's inner personality, a person for each deadly sin and for major body parts. In the climactic shootout, the camera tracks through a hall of mirrors, alternating fluidly between objective shots of Chi-Wai moving through the room and subjective views of seven characters crowded around the one of them with the gun. Best of all is an overhead crane shot capturing shot and shattered mirrors on the ground reflecting the characters.

Mad Detective revolves around the MacGufffin of gun ownership. Chi-Wai got his gun stolen by an Indian thief, so he killed his partner and took his gun. When Bun heads out into the woods to recreate Wong's death, he confronts a spiritual vision of Chi-Wai, embodying the lost gun, taking the existential threads of a cop's badge and gun to an extreme, literal level. In the aftermath of the final showdown, the camera pulls back into full objectivity as the story moves into its most subjective and surreal moment, with guns changing hands so investigators will have an entirely different story than what we saw. I'm reminded of the climax of the Harry Potter series, which hinged on ideas of wand ownership, but To's film is sly and deconstructive where Rowling's ending was obtuse and clumsy.

"B-movie" continues to be used as a derogatory term, even a half-century after the director/critics at Cahiers du Cinéma proved that B-movies contained more ingenuity than the lavish prestige pictures, and Johnnie To may well be the filmmaker most qualified to continue demonstrating this today. Mad Detective is an off-the-wall cascade of pleasurable but conflicting elements that work only because they are unified by To's elegant style. Praise should also go to Sean Lau as Detective Bun: since his first acting nomination at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1995, Lau has received nine more in the last 15 years. He flawlessly embraces the absurdities and the severity of the script, crafting one of the most unique characters in modern film in a performance that would be worth repeat viewings even if everything around him was mediocre. Lucky for us, it's all great. I'm routinely inspired by Asian cinema's capacity for aesthetic beauty and emotional and thematic power, but sometimes I forget how entertaining the industry can be as well. Johnnie To reminds me.