Reversible Mac

 A long time ago, a saw a spy movie on TV. It was dimly lit and the TV was black and white, and the cast seemed to be all similar looking gray men in trench coats. Since I couldn't tell them apart, and everyone was pretending to be something they weren't, the whole thing baffled me. I have always wondered what it was. I thought it might have been The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, but I saw it and it didn't seem right. Then I tried The Ipcress File, and that was all wrong. My most recent guess was The Mackintosh Man (1973).

It stars Paul Newman as a Brit (?) pretending to be Australian (??). He meets up with Harry Andrews, playing Mr. Mackintosh, and his secretary Dominique Sanda/ They are planning a jewel heist - a rather clever one. He pulls it off, and escapes by with the aid of a reversible Mackintosh - plain gray outside, with a tweed lining.

However, he gets caught, and sent to prison. Since I read the cover copy, I knew that he was actually a spy, who is looking to break up a prison escape ring called the Scarperers. So he gets scarpered, along with an agent who was caught spying for the Russians.

They are doped and kept out for days, then come to locked into an old house, somewhere isolated. Slightly domme-ish Jenny Runacre lets them know that they will be released after a week or so when the heat is off. Well, they let the agent go, but they know Newman is a cop, so they beat him up. But he turns the tables, and kicks Runacre between the legs - possibly the first time a woman gets it to the groin in cinema.

So he escaped, but he has lost the agent and the Scarperers. Then he spots politician James Mason's yacht and figures that he is behind it. So it's off to Malta, the yacht's next stop, along with Sanda. And so forth.

First of all, this is not a great movie. Even leaving aside Newman's ridiculous attempts at various accents (he plays Canadian as well as Australian and British), it just didn't hold up too well. Still, it starts well, with the diamond theft, and we do get some nice Valletta locations. 

Second, it is full of British character actors whose names I didn't know, but whose faces were very familiar, probably from BBC TV shows.

In conclusion, this is definitely not the movie I remember. For one thing, there is only the one scene with the Mackintosh (as opposed to Mr. Mackintosh, who dies offscreen). But also, I distinctly remember a shootout in an airplane hanger, or possibly warehouse - where everyone was indistinguishable in their trench coats. I'll keep looking 

Mescalero!

I picked Young Guns (1988) for the ladies, that is Ms. Spenser. It's famously packed with the cutest guys of 1988. But also she likes Westerns.

It starts with young Billy, Emilio Estevez, running away from the law in a western town and hiding with some pigs. Rancher Terence Stamp picks him up and hides him in his wagon. He is gathering a group of young, wild men to protect his ranch, and he decides to recruit Estevez. The other are Charlie Sheen, Keifer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Philips, Dermot Mulroney, and Casey Siemaszko. He calls them his Regulators. Stamp is trying to teach these ruffians manners, comportment, literacy and honor. It won't all take.

It turns out that Jack Palance is looking to take over the ranch, so he has Stamp killed. Now the Requlators want revenge. They go to Stamp's lawyer, Terry O'Quinn, and after trying to dissuade them, he gets them deputized and armed with warrants for Palance's gang. I think it is here where we get the classic Western movie Gang-of-Cowboys-Galloping-Across-the-Plains scene. One of my favorites.

The first warrant they are going to serve, Estevez sees a cowboy going into the outhouse, follows him there, and shoots him while his hands are occupied. That's technically not how you serve a warrant. But it gives you some idea of what kind of guy he is. Soon he is famous - his young age gets him dubbed "Billy the Kid" by the papers. And now we know who this movie is about.

Let's see, Charlie Sheen thinks he's the leader of the group but he gets shot. Actually, they pretty much all get shot, but Sheen is the one who dies. Philips is the knife expert, and gets a lot of grief as a Mexican and an Indian. Sutherland is a poet and philosopher who falls in love with a Chinese woman that Palance has installed as a prostitute in one of his saloons. And it all ends up in a big shootout at Terry O'Quinn's place.

Oh yes, and in the middle, Philips introduces the gang to peyote tea, and there's an extended trip sequence that comes to nothing, but is kind of fun.

The movie has a heck of a cast, and is a pretty good Western, but I'm not sure it amounted to much. It looks like it was very much based on history, although I only know what I read in Wikipedia. I loved Stamp, of course, and Philip is great as well. I'm not sure anyone else is really giving much, except for Sutherland, who gets to be kind of goofy, although it's Siemaszko who is the real comic relief.

Anyway, Ms. Spenser liked it, because Charlie Sheen gets killed first.

Jane Says

 I wish I could remember who recommended The Veil (2016), because it was a big hit with Ms. Spenser. I want to see what else they like,

It starts with some old news footage of a cult leader (Thomas Jane) documenting his cult, Heaven's Veil, and then the aftermath of the mass suicide that must follow. Jane plays "Jim Jacobs" very much as Jim Jones (same aviator sunglasses, for ex) with a touch of Jim Morrison sex appeal. This flashback ends with one child left alive, who says to the FBI, "Don't worry, they are coming back."

In the present, this little girl is grown up Lily Rabe. She has been asked to participate in a documentary about the cult, and she finally agrees. The doc is being made by Jessica Alba with a crew of six or so. They get to the creepy compound, miles from civilization, and start looking for the films and videos that they know were taken, but were never found.

They camp out, and wake up in the middle of the night to find that one of the grips has taken off with the van, leaving them stranded. In the morning, two of the crew start walking back to civilization - nearest road is ten miles, nearest town another twenty. They won't be back before dark. 

That day, Rabe leads them to a house hidden deep in the forest. This is where all the films are. The generator still works, so they start to watch. Experiment #1 shows Jane taking a lethal injection, then being revived with some kind of powers. Each film they watch shows a little more about Heaven's Veil: Jane wants power over limitless life. When dead, he can inhabit someone else's body, then be revived.

The couple who were walking to town come back to say they found the van, wrapped around a tree, with the driver dead. That driver later comes back to life and kills them. The generator goes out, and the guy who goes to fix it gets killed too. But these dead people then show up perfectly fine, and nobody else notices they were gone. Have they been possessed? (SPOILER - yes.)

This has got a little bit of a lot of horror tropes: haunted houses deep in the woods, death cults, possession, found footage. Even vengeance, since it turns out that Alba's father was one of the FBI agents that found the dead cultists, and he killed himself shortly after. It's a little slow, and not that gory, although there's a decent body count. But it has great atmosphere, and a hell of a performance by Thomas Jane. 

Avast

I mentioned that I should be blogging more of the streaming videos we watch, but I haven't been. For me, streaming is for the random, forgettable content, and for TV series. But if we something interesting, I guess I should record it. For example, The Vast of Night (2020).

It's set in a small New Mexico town in the Fifties. There's a basketball game, and the town is gathering in the gym. Jake Horowitz, a cocky kid with Buddy Holly glasses walks in and start BSing with the kids. He is a local night-time DJ. A young girl, Sierra McCormick, asks him to help her with her new portable tape recorder, so he walks her through the parking lot, taping pretend interviews with random families and giving her advice about confidence and how to duck a boring interview.

These youngster can't stay for the game - they have to work, so he walks her to her job at the switchboard before he heads to the radio station. He records her talking about science - she is enthusiastic about articles she's read. About cars that drive automatically, and a radio that tells you when to turn. (Of course, why do you need the second if you have the first?). Even phone that fit in your pocket and have a little TV on one side, across from the dial. It's a cute scene - and as a few critics have pointed out, we're now ~20 minutes in and all we have is a cocky high school graduate walking a shy 16-year old girl to her job. So it's a slow build.

At the switchboard, McCormick gets calls that are only static and a strange tone. She tunes into Horowitz's radio show and hears the same thing. So she calls him and tells him what's up. He replays the airtape and hears the sound himself. So he broadcasts it over the air and asks listeners to help identify it. 

A caller who will only identify himself as Billy tells a story of a secret military base, a mysterious object, and the same sound. He says he contracted a strange disease after that, as did many of the others in the crew. His call is disconnected, and when he comes back he notes that he and most of the crew are African or Mexican American, maybe because they are disposable, maybe because no one will believe them. But he mentions tapes, which turn out to be in the town library.

McCormick breaks into the library to get the tapes and brings them to the station. There is a scene where Horowitz threads each tape and plays a few seconds until they find the right one. When they play it on the air, the power goes out.

Back at the switchboard, it's getting weird with people shouting about things in the sky. At the station, and older woman calls and asks them to come to her to get the story. When they arrive, she tells of how her son was taken by a UFO that made those same sounds. She tells of a message they use to hypnotize humans before abducting them. Horowitz doesn't believe her, and leaves while she is begging him to take her with him. But soon enough he has reason to believe her.

First, I want to mention that this reminded me a lot of Pontypool. Both spend a lot of the movie at an isolated location like a radio station or the switchboard, with communication to the outside world restricted to a narrow channel. But Vast had a different angle, and also a different style. The camerawork combined long tracking shots and quick editing to mix up the pace. You might accuse it of being self-indulgent. I thought it was a little show-offy, but tasteful. I also liked the friendship between the main characters. He was kind of obnoxious and full of himself, always teasing her. She was not very self-confident, but as a 16-year old, she showed a lot of initiative. And there was never a hint of romance. 

In conclusion, a good streaming film, presented and paid for by Amazon. I wonder if this would have done much if released in theaters instead of to a quarantined world over streaming. 

Before the Fall When They Wrote It on the Wall

We queued up Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) partly because we'd seen another Werner Herzog documentary, and were curious about his style. How much is self-parody, how much is actual weirdness? But we also wanted to see inside the cave.

Herzog got permission to film in the Chauvet Cave along with a scientific team. This cavern contains perhaps the oldest known paintings of animals known. Herzog talks a bit about the discovery of the cave, how it has been sealed for ~20-30,000 years, and a bit about life at the time the paintings were made. He talks to some scientists who discuss some of the sensory impressions the people who made the paintings might have felt. For example, one scientist suggests that the flickering torches might have given an impression of movement, which Herzog likened to prehistoric cinema. He even brings in a retired perfumer, who is trying to find caves by smell. He goes into the cave and can smell - nothing in particular. The cave has no characteristic smell. Ah, but what he can imagine.

And here I don't know if Herzog is serious or just kidding.

Then the camera crew - Herzog, a handheld camera operator and two grips with small portable LED lights, get to go in by themselves. The movie becomes magical here, as they film the aurochs, cave lions, rhinos, and horses in shifting lights. This is the real thing. 

I was amazed to see how sophisticated these drawings were. Not just the stylization of the giant horns on the rhinos, or the feeling of action, but the modeling of the 3D surfaces of the horses. I didn't know shading had been invented 30,000 years ago.

Herzog finishes by visiting a habitat near the cave, heated by the waste heat of a nuclear reactor. They farm alligators there, and some are albinos, mutants, he suggests, due to the radiation. He wonders if, in the far future, would these mutant alligators look upon the cave paintings, and see, as if in a mirror, the reflections of themselves? OK, now I know he's just pulling our legs. Or is he?

Le Vieux Carre

 I think I had watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011) already, but I can't remember much about it. I assumed that was because it was subtle and convoluted, not because I had fallen asleep. Maybe I was thinking of the Alec Guinness series. Anyway, we watched The Night Manager on Amazon Prime, and Ms. Spenser got on a John Le Carre kick, so we queued it up.

TTSS stars Gary Oldman as George Smiley. But first we see John Hurt as Control send Mark Strong to Budapest to make contact with a potential defector. But a gunfight with the Russians breaks out and he is killed. Control and his protege Smiley are forced to retire in disgrace, allowing Toby Jones to take over the Circus. Toby Jones, what a perfect name for someone who looks like a Welsh Toby mug.

Jones has a secret source high in Soviet intelligence, but since there is a mole at the highest level in the Circus, he won't tell anyone. Meanwhile, is Oldman going to just go fishing? No! But he can trust no one except Peter Guillam - Benedict Cumberbatch, and Ricky Tarr - Tom Hardy. Guillam is the cold, calculating bureaucratic spy, with nerves of steel, an impenetrable poker face and unquestioning loyalty to Smiley. Tarr is more of the Swinging Sixties type spy, racing around on a motor bike and dropping off the map for extended periods after trying to turn a beautiful Russian agent.

I won't go into the plot any further than that. But not because I can't - I didn't fall asleep or get lost much at all. It was certainly tricky, but not at all impossible to follow. There isn't a lot of action, and a lot of story is watching tightly controlled men having tightly controlled conversations. But the actors seem to relish the tamped down acting style and get a lot out of it. Oldman in particular seems to disappear in the part, and the part is a bit of a disappearing act anyway, since Smiley is a grey bureaucrat.

In conclusion, if you want to see Tom Hiddleston as an amateur agent taking down charming arms dealer Hugh Laurie, try The Night Manager.

Blood Sputnik

I had Sputnik (2020) on my queue for some reason - I suppose I'd seen an early review somewhere, but I tried not to read enough to get spoiled. So I didn't really know what to expect. But as soon as Ms. Spenser read the sleeve copy on the Netflix envelope, she said, "Huh, sounds like Night of the Blood Beast."

Like Blood Beast, it starts in space. Two Soviet cosmonauts are re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, when they hear a clunk on the capsule. This isn't good. When the recovery team gets to them, one cosmonaut has no face, and the other is in bad shape.

Next we meet Oksana Akinshina, a beautiful, skilled but unconventional doctor. She is getting blasted by a review board, even though she helped the patient. After, Col. Fyodor Bondarchuk recruits her for a secret project. It is the surviving cosmonaut, Pyotr Fyodorov. The current psychologist is trying to find out what happened by hypnotizing him. Now, a disclaimer - I am very susceptible to hypnotism in movies, so I may have fallen into a deep sleep at times during this movie. But it has a certain deliberate pace, so I don't think I missed much.

Little by little, they let Akinshina on the problem. At night, when Fyodorov is asleep, a slimy alien crawls out of his mouth. This creature, who looks like an attenuated Demogorgon, lives in his esophagus when he's awake. And he doesn't know about it. They are trying to figure out how to separate them without killing Fyodorov.

Later, she discovers that the creature eats peoples heads, and they are feeding it convicts every night. Of course, they want it for military purposes.

All this is done in a deliberate, tense, almost art-house style. 

Now, if you aren't familiar with Night of the Blood Beast, you have been missing one of the great Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. It's a black and white horror produced by Roger Corman, about the days when NASA was two guys in a pickup truck. An astronaut runs into trouble on re-entry, and seems to be dead when they find him. They take him back to the lab (a ranger station?) and find that he is dead, but isn't decayng. In fact, he wakes up, feeling pretty good. But a flouroscope reveals that he is full of shrimp-like alien embryos. Are they friendly? You guess.

So, not exactly the same. But clearly influenced by. You'd have to ask director Egor Abramenko.

Sim City

Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) is another movie I feel like I should have seen. But I'm pretty sure I would have remembered it.

It starts in the middle, with Jane Wyman driving Richard Todd through London. He is telling her he didn't know who else to turn to, then tells her the story in flashback. 

His married lover, Marlene Dietrich, showed up at his apartment in a blood-stained dress. She had killed her husband accidentally in a fight. She's a singer, and isn't sure whether to go to her performance that night. He convinces her to act normal (she's also an actress) but she'll need a clean dress. So he goes to her place to get one. And of course, someone sees him. So he dropped off the dress and called Wyman.

She takes him to her father's country place so he can hide out. He's a sly old duffer played by Alastair Sim. I thought at first that he was actually Inspector Cockrill or the guy from Cottage to Let. But no - in this one, he plays the accordion when thinking deeply. 

One of the things he's thinking about is the blood-stained dress that Todd is still carrying around - it seems to have been smeared purposely. Todd gets angry at this, and burns the dress. 

But now Wyman wants to investigate further. She follows Dietrich's shrewish maid, Kay Walsh, to a bar to eavesdrop. But a nice man named Smith (Ordinary Smith) chats her up. He is played by Michael Wilding, Mr. Elizabeth Taylor No. 2. He is also a Scotland Yard detective. 

Wyman bribes Walsh to let her take her place as Dietrich's maid, pretending to be a reporter. So we get to see Wyman, who had been playing prim upper-middle-class, doing a simple girl in service. She does all this while falling in love with Wilding, although she had been in love with Todd, who was in love with Dietrich, who was probably just toying with him, even after he covered up her killing.

All of this is handled by Hitchcock with snesitivity and humor. I wouldn't call Wyman a great actress, but she is quite convincing as a love-struck innocent (for two different men) and as a snoop playing a servant. Sim is a joy as always, and Todd and Wilding play their parts as bad boy and besotted detective well. Dietrich gets shorted a bit, although she has some good scenes as a heartless widow. Hitchcock is perhaps too respectful of her iconic status, so she stays an icon. She does get to sing "La Vie en Rose", though.

But here's the spoiler - I had heard about this myself but managed to forget - that first flashback was a lie. It didn't happen the way Todd told us, even though we "saw" it with our own eyes. Some people, including Hitchcock in the end, consider this a cheat. Well, all the flashbacks in Rashoman are questionable, and nobody complains about that.

In conclusion, I feel like I've seen Sim playing accordion when thinking, like Sherlock Holmes' violin, somewhere else. Is this just deja vu? Some other character with another instrument? Or have I seen this before?

No Zombie is an Island - He's a Peninsula

Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula (2020) might not have been such a cool movie as the original Train, but it was a lot of fun.

It starts around the same time as the first movie, but with a whole different set of characters. Gang Dong-Won is Korean military, driving his sister, nephew and brother-in-law to a ferry so they can all get to Japan. On the way, they see stopped car with a man begging for a ride. He's bloody, but promises that he hasn't been infected. He has a woman with him, and she has a child and baby. He hardens his heart and leaves them. 

On the ferry, he hears that Japan won't take them and they are heading to Hong Kong. By the way, I've taken one of these ferries - Japan to Busan, actually - and it looked just like this: the passenger area has no seats, just a slightly raised carpeted area for sitting or sleeping. Of course, one of the men turns out to be a zombie, and he bites the nephew. Gang has to lock his sister and nephew in - only he and brother-in-law Kim Do-Yoon get out.

Four years later, Gang and Kim are living as undocumented refugees in the Hong Kong underworld. Korea has been blockaded and the world has given up on them. But a crime boss wants to send a team to Incheon to get some of the money that is just sitting around in Korea - the zombies aren't using it. and Gang and Kim will be part of that team. After all, the zombies are mostly blind at night, and only respond to noises. Stay quiet in the dark, and no problem.

When they get there, they soon find out that some living people still exist. First, there is a military unit gone feral, who highjack the money truck with Kim in it. Next, there is a little family unit: a grandfather who keeps trying to call General Jane on a broken radio, his daughter and her two children, a teen and a yougster who distracts zombies with her collection of radio controlled cars. SPOILER - these are the family that Gang left behind at the start of the movie. No hard feelings. as long as he can get them out.

So it's a big fight between the military, the family, Gang, Kim and the zombies. This fight is mostly played out with cars, using lights, horns, and flares to attract or distract the zombies. When they were on the ferry, I thought it would be "Die Hard with zombies on a train, on a ferry". But instead, it's sort of Fury Road with zombies. If you like zooming around in rat rods and random vans, will being pursued by mad militias and zombies, you'll like this too. The non-action parts are interesting as well, the guilt, the world turning its back on Korea, and the way the some survivors went mad, and some lived real lives. 

But mostly, the action. In conclusion, General Jane came through!

Sweet

In these troubled times, it was a pleasure to get to revisit our old friends with Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020). I was surprised by how emotional it made me.

It starts with Bill (Alex Winters) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) playing at the wedding of Missy to Ted's younger brother. They play their version of the Jazz Odyssey, with Keanu looping on theremin and Alex throat-singing Tuvan style - until Ted's dad, Hal Landon, Jr., pulls the plug. At least Bill and Ted's daughters, Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Thea (Samara Weaving) like it. But they love their father's, their father's music, and music in general. 

Bill and Ted are very discouraged when unloading their gear. It's be 25 years and they haven't come up with the song that unites the universe. Bill wants to keep trying, but Ted is almost ready to quit. He's worried that the princesses are getting fed up. Then a time egg appears, and Rufus' daughter, Kristen Schaal, appears to take them to the future to face the Great Leader. Alex isn't worried, because they love them in the future.

But the Great Leader isn't happy - time is coming unraveled, and they need to do the song thing in 71 minutes, or everything will end. So they grab Rufus' old phone booth from the museum, and head for their future to see if they have written the song yet.

They arrive a couple of years in their future, to find the Wyld Stallyns playing "We Who Are About to Rock" to a tiny audience. Future them are ragged, angry, depressed, and Ted has a bad goatee and drinks to much. They tell our Bill and Ted that everything went down the drain because they didn't write the song. The princesses left them and their daughters won't even talk to them. Future them are dicks. Bill can kind of handle it, but Bill is always so awkward with himself.

So, after rushing to couples therapy to try and make things better with the princesses, they of course make it worse. The princesses take of in the phone booth with their old selves to see if they can find a time that Bill and Ted will make them happy. 

Meanwhile, the daughters decide to help out. They borrow Schaal's time egg to go round up a band. They start with Jimi Hendrix, then use him to recruit Louis Armstrong, then Mozart, Ling Lun, and prehistoric drummer Grom (Beyonce drummer Patty Anne Miller). Then Dennis, a killer robot from the future kills them all. That gives them a chance to get William Sadler, the Grim Reaper, to join the band.

I think I first noticed it when Schaal introduced herself as Rufus' daughter. When we see a hologram of George Carlin as Rufus in the museum with his phone booth, I almost started crying - I didn't realize how much I had missed him. Then I realized that seeing Bill and Ted's determination to do the right thing, to show how much they love the princesses, and to try to save the universe - even with their limited brain-power - well, it got me. And when Jimi shows up (played by DazMann Still), I got goosebumps. 

It's not like these scenes are amazingly well done. But, like Bill and Ted, they are pure and full of generous good intentions. Maybe it's soppy, but this is a sweet movie.

It also has some interesting things to say about life - like how you can't just go to the future and skip over all the work. It's also about children - maybe Bill and Ted's big contribution to world unity is their daughters. That doesn't always quite show through: Weaving and Lundy-Paine do a pretty good job being modern, female versions of Bill and Ted, but are kind of non-entities. And the princesses (who are played by different actors in each movie) are even more blanks. But Bill and Ted are unwavering in their love and devotion. They, like us, may not really know these women, but they love them.

Maybe it's the pandemic, maybe the movie makes me think of the long-ago days of my own wasted youth. But this movie moved me. 

Roach Circus

Road Show (1941) is not as weird as it seems - it's directed by Hal Roach, which probably explains a lot.

John Hubbard, a sort of handsome blank, plays Drogo Gaines, a rich man with an odd name. He is leaving his bride at the altar, pretending to have a mental breakdown. It seems that the bride is just a gold digger, so when she realizes he is faking, she pretends he has attacked her, and gets him committed to a "rest home."

Once there, he can't convince anyone he is sane, for the usual reasons. But he meets Adolphe Menjou, a rich eccentric who helps him escape. They meet a circus caravan, and the owner helps them hide. She is Carole Landis, playing Penguin Moore, another person with an odd name. Maybe they are meant for each other. 

Penguin's circus is low on money, and Drogo wants to help out, but 1) she doesn't know he's a millionaire, and he wants to keep it that way and 2) she's too proud to accept the money. So he gives her $100 to let Menjou have a photo concession - with his camera invention that automatically develops pictures that are usually blank.

So we have the usual fun of circus life. Patsy Kelly plays Jinx, who among other things plays an injun squaw in a medicine show act. She is amorously pursued by a small silent Indian played by George E. Stone. This would be a very racist depiction of a Native American, unless you think of him as an insane white man who just thinks he's an Indian. At least that's how I justified to myself.

I don't need to justify black comic character actor Willie Best - he plays the usual shuffling, cowardly black menial, but has a great scene where some lions escape. Penguin cluelessly tells him to round them up, and he timorously obeys, muttering, "I'm always hunting lions and such." When the lions corner him by the cage, he opens the door and firmly commands. "Get in there!" When they obey he says, "Was that me?" and struts out into a brawl - then quickly hides in a trunk.

Menjou has a rich nephew, Charles Butterworth, who likes to play with fire engines and other silly things. Menjou has the circus set up in his estate during a party and raises the prices about 1000%. So the money problems are over. But get this: the show gets busted up in the aforementioned brawl, so Menjou stores the wreckage in a barn that Butterworth is burning down for fun (to get to use his fire engine). Then Drogo shows Penguin that he has bought her a new circus - all shiny and birght, to be called "Gaines and Moore". And she is grateful - grateful that he has burned down her own circus, the circus that she loved and put her heart into, that she wouldn't take a penny for if she didn't earn it. 

Oh well, can't have everything.

Fistful of Yen

Dragon (2011) (Chinese title, Wu Xia, is better) was just a wild and fun as Jiu Jitsu, but, well, better.

It stars Donnie Yen as a humble worker in a small village paper factory. He lives in a nice house with a few cattle on the roof, a loving wife and some kids. When he is fixing the paper screens of the general store, three ruffians break in to rob it. Yen hides, but when it looks like the bad guys are going to kill the storekeeper, he grabs their leader around the waist and holds on. There's a great fight sequence here, where he just holds on while getting swung around, and the bad guys basically beat each other up. One guy gets his ear chopped off. In desperation, Yen punches him by the earhole, and he drops dead.

Takeshi Kaneshiro shows up from the government to do the autopsy and investigation, and finds that One-Ear is an infamous villain and martial artist. The village celebrates Yen's bravery, but Kaneshiro is suspicious. How could a humble papermaker defeat such a fighter? The killing blow actually hit at just the right spot to paralyze the vagus nerve, killing him instantly. And Yen's history is vague - he came to the village a few years ago, and married a woman whose husband had left her. He says that he ran away from a cruel father won't give any other information.

When it is time for him to leave, Yen offers to show Kaneshiro a shortcut through the woods. When they are all alone, he realizes that Yen knows he is suspicious, and expects him to try to kill him. But he just sends him on his way.

Still, Kaneshiro thinks Yen might be a member of the notorious 72 Demons gang. Even if he has been living a blameless life, the law must be upheld. So he goes back to confront him. Then the Demons show up.

The 72 Demons are said to be Tangut, who are cannibalistic barbarians who don't bury their dead. Wikipedia has the Tangut as a linguistic minority in China, who had a large kingdom in 11th-13th century. I suspect this is an ethnic slur. But this crew is pretty rough. The head of the Demons is Donnie Yen's father, Jimmie Yang. His kung fu is so powerful that a sword chop to the neck doesn't even break the skin.

In conclusion, great fights and interesting ideas about justice. Also great acting, with Yen being a humble and truly reformed man of peace, and Kaneshiro a slightly silly bureaucrat in a white panama hat who is also a brilliant detective. Fun and worth thinking about.

Cage Fight

I must have heard about Jiu Jitsu (2020) before the pandemic hit: a martial arts movie with Nicolas Cage, Tony Jaa and space aliens. But when it came available about a year into "social distancing", I didn't really care how good or bad it was. I just queued it up.

It actually stars Alain Moussi, who we first see running through the forest while futuristic shuriken go whizzing by. Futuristic shuriken are very inaccurate. Cornered on a cliff, he leaps into the sea and cracks his head. He is fished out and patched up by Burmese peasants, who drag him to a nearby American army base. He comes around with amnesia, but Marie Avgeropoulos spends a while interrogating him anyway. She doesn't seem to be too good at it.

When they get a little rough with him, he beats up the entire squad of soldiers. Except it is blatant mo-cap CGI, looking very computer gamey. Soon, he's beating up everyone, until Tony Jaa shows up and tells him "Time to go." Tony Jaa fights his way out, and he is NOT mo-cap CGI.

Jaa takes Moussi to meet the gang, which includes Frank Grillo, Rick Yune, and Juju Chan (who seems to have been his girlfriend). They could use Moussi's amnesia to do some exposition, but instead just keep saying stuff like. "At least you remember the plan, don't you? It was your plan!" But we kind of know what's going on, from reading the subtitles from the Burmese peasants: In ancient times, a space alien came to Earth to teach us Jiu Jitsu. Now he returns every 6 years to challenge 9 Earthlings to a Jiu Jitsu fight with vague rules and consequences. But if you fight fair and bravely, he'll only kill you. If not, he'll destroy all life on earth. The Army would have known this, but their interpreter, Eddie Steeples, is comic relief.

So this alien, who of course can become invisible, gets in a series of fights, mostly killing his opponents after toying with them. Nic Cage finally shows up as a guy who chickened out of the fight, ran away and has been acting crazy ever since. Imagine, Nic Cage acting crazy.

So, more or less Predator rip-off, with a touch of Street Fighter, also a touch of WTF. Pretty much all we were interested in was the fighting. Which was very mixed. Tony Jaa, incredible, and very underused after his first scene. Everyone else, mostly just fair. Nic Cage has a fight that is largely floor work, and I'm pretty sure it's Cage's face mo-capped onto a 3-D model. Since he's fighting with a 3-D model alien, it makes sense.

But, you know, we didn't hate this movie at all. It didn't take itself very seriously (Steeples' goofball soldier act was pretty funny), and having Cage around just drove that home. We turned off our minds and enjoyed the spectacle.