Reviews

George Lucas is in danger of becoming the C.B. deMille or Stanley Kramer of his generation: a producer who insists on miscasting himself in the director's chair. This picture shows off what George does best - creating eye defying visuals of a fantasy landscape. Some of the vistas in this film - the cityscape, the clone factory and the terrain rushing by in the final chase are truly breathtaking. Unfortunately we also get George at his worst - writing clunky dialogue and failing to coax even moderately engaging perfs from his attractive and talented cast. Okay, Hayden Christensen lacks for talent, but the rest of the cast should have carried even him. The result is a fantastic looking, but dramatically frustrating film. I wanted the leads to shut up and quit blocking the scenery - never a good sign in a film where the central romantic plotline is crucial to the overall drama.

This picture was great fun back when I first saw it as a kid. Predating the spate of early 80's knife-kill flicks meant that 'Horror' as a genre still meant supernatural thriller when this picture was made, and it relies heavily on a taut atmosphere of suspicion and fear among the passengers for its shocks. There are few of the Hallowe'en style jolts that we associate with contemporary horror, in fact very little happens. Watching it again just a few years ago I was surprised that it still gave me chills from its tight, claustrophobic shooting and editing style in a way that good giallo thrillers do (and most giallo pictures, rather disappointingly do not). The writing and acting are standard made for TV disaster fare and the picture is less impressive if you focus on that. So turn the lights down, get some popcorn, turn a deaf ear to some of the shriekier dialogue and enjoy the film as a mood piece. And when the hair on your neck stands up, let it.

Quirky, soft core semi-comedic category III sexploitation flick about a bar hostess who impersonates an office worker is Veronica Yip's best known (thanks to a now infamous shower scene) and probably best film. The film is essentially a sit-com. Everybody in the film has a cartoonish simplicity. The male office workers are porn obsessed louts who harass the female workers. The frigid female office supervisor is a volcano of suppressed lust. The wealthy boss's son turns out to be a chop socky hero type (every well run office should have one). But everything is not all fun and nude games. The baddies scheme and intrigue to ruin the company, and one of the office louts turns out to be a murderous sexual predator. But the odd mix works, mostly because the plot is a flimsy affair intended simply to move things along to the next nude scene.

It is worth knowing that this picture exists in two versions and they are night and day different. Having seen the unrated version on cable, I was very disappointed by the R-rated version widely available on video. Okay, it is not The Godfather. In fact, it's a notch below Dancing at the Blue Iguana. It is basically in the same genre as 100 other Skinemax flix, but distinctly superior in that the approach aims for realistic drama and characters. For once, the sex is not simply exploitation, but part of the everyday reality of the character's lives. They are in the sex business, and Blake Pickett sizzles in her sex scenes, and she and the other strippers look great on and off stage. Herein lies the weakness of the R-rated version. It cuts away almost prudishly whenever clothes start coming off, thereby cutting away from a fundamental fact of the character's lives: that they exhibit themselves and then have to deal with the negative perceptions this initiates. Blake Pickett's best scenes effectively convey her sense of self-loathing at the state of her life while stripping or hooking and most of this is gone from the R-rated version. What remains is a slightly shrieky melodrama in which it is hard to understand why the central character is so self-destructive and hate-filled. In the unrated version this becomes clear and dramatically effective. The R-rated version fails to be either.

The plot is of a grief stricken woman who stalks her family's murderers, a common motivation in Chinese period pictures. Sumptuously photographed, slow moving and carefully precise in its period detail, this one is nonetheless very different from the type of film that typically inhabits this genre. Most significant is its evocation of its setting. Despite the opening massacre that drives its plot, the period evoked is not one of chaotic lawlessness and pervasive evil, but rather one in which ordinary people live ordinary lives and want ordinary things. Sometimes sudden violence enters the lives of such people, notably the main character played by Wu Chien Lien. I'm a big fan, and this is some of her best work. The character is basically a good person driven by and conflicted over a desire to revenge that is both beneath and ennobled by her. Her pain drives her to seek vengeance, but she is ever its reluctant agent. Too often in this sort of picture we watch a supposedly normal character morph into the Terminator following a lesser trauma than that faced by Wu. Here, what would have been a straight-forward revenge mission is continuously side-tracked by the unpredictable results of the interactions of the characters. Here again is a huge difference: necessities of plot do not contrive to move the characters along, but rather character serves to untrack plot. How often does that happen? Wu finds herself in very unfamiliar terrain as an agent of vengeance and reacts and interacts with this in moving and unexpected ways. The result is a very unique, difficult to predict and generally engrossing piece of period moviemaking.