April 2010 Archives

A Japanese superhero program that ran for 26 episodes from 1972-73. Similar to ULTRAMAN, each episode featured a guest giant monster that must be defeated by the heroic Iron King. Sounds tiresome, but the format is redeemed in the details: The hero, Gentaro Shizuka (Shoji Ishibashi) does not become the giant Iron King, instead, his goofy sidekick Goro Kirishima (Mitsuo Hamada) does. And not only that, Iron King doesn't defeat the giant monster all by himself: usually Gentaro must come along, and using only his "Iron Belt", which transforms into a very long whip or a sword, and a handful of grenades, Gentaro must finish off the monster himself, in action set-pieces that defy all known laws of physics and have terrible problems with scale. But the leads are such fun that it is hard not to be swept along with the show.

Anand (Salman Khan) committed murder but was declared insane and placed in an asylum, where psychologist Dr. Sunil (Jackie Shroff) and Tanvi (Kareena Kapoor) look after him. Anand is a endearingly cute, simpleminded madman, and as it turns out, his father helped Dr. Sunil earn his degree, while Dr. Tanvi treats him cruelly at first, but is finally softened by his charm. Her father (Om Puri), the director of the asylum, on the other hand, prefers handling him with electroshock therapy, especially as punishment for his many minor infractions.

Viewers of Hong Kong Cinema in 1980 could be forgiven for thinking the world was coming to an end. The old societal customs no longer held, and the new was open to endless possibility in the imagination, but narrowed by poverty and circumstance into a futile struggle to find some purpose, any purpose, worth having. In Patrick Tam's Nomad, teens hung out and tuned out of a society in which they couldn't find a place, but which wouldn't let them go except in death. In Tsui Hark's Dangerous Encounter - 1st Kind, the bored kids turn to a darker place, and get their kicks killing cats and making bombs, with however similarly disasterous consequences. Somewhere in the middle, then, sits THE HAPPENINGS, its teen protagonists neither dropping out of society nor willfully destroying it. Instead, they just carouse through life, drinking, dancing, partying, stealing, for no other reason than listless boredom. And very quickly, things start getting out of control.

A complete rip off of the classic 1976 film Nagin. While it isn't quite scene-for-scene, a la Gus Van Sant's PSYCHO, it is pretty damn close. As if pretending otherwise, the movie opens with a disclaimer that "All the characters in this film are fictitious and bear no resemblance to any communities, person living or dead." I half expected the disclaimer to also state, "And the film is nothing like NAGIN. Really, we're being totally serious." The director even puts his name above the title, so it reads, "Kishan Shah's PYAASI NAGIN," as if putting his name in front somehow helps him own the material.

Two Snake Spirits are about to consummate their love in human form when some idiot shoots the male snake (Jeetendra). The female snake (Reena Roy), deprived of a good shag, vows revenge on the people who killed her lover. It's sort of a rape-revenge film, except instead of revenging a rape, she's revenging coitus interrupted. "Those rascals changed our copulation night to a mourning night," he says before breathing his last.

For a little while, there, Chinese movies once again had international audiences, the size of which they hadn't seen since Bruce Lee. For that, they had to thank Ang Lee's Croutching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002). In addition the mainland market was for the first time wide open, provided that films were made as "co-productions" including mainland cast members, and did not concern themselves with banned politically charged topics like, say, letting the bad guy get away at the end of a movie, or showing supposedly real supernatural events, or, I don't know, mentioning Tibet. So what better way to rake in cash in both the international and mainland markets than to create a big, slick, epic, historical action picture? But the boom years are over. Chinese cinema forgot to diversify their portfolio, and the epic market has crashed. And burned. Or, if not the market as a whole, certainly, AN EMPRESS AND THE WARRIOR did.

CHINA TOWN opens like any number of "Yellow Peril" Hollywood B-movies from the 30's: The classic "Oriental Riff" kicks off while the opening credits appear like chopsticks. Sometimes I wonder if movies are set in Chinatown just to enable a perverse desire on the part of the director to sink into these tired cliches. But CHINATOWN almost immediately steps ahead, as the opening song transforms into a delightful Ravi song picturized on everyone's favorite item-number dancer, Helen, playing the bar girl Suzie (Wong?). And then: two Shammi Kapoors, one good, one bad, prefiguring the classic DON.