Project A (1983)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Project A (1983) – J. Chan

Having watched Operation Condor (1991), Jackie Chan’s take on Raiders of the Lost Ark which is all big scale stunts, I thought it might be time to show the boys an earlier film with more hand-to-hand choreographed action. Back in 2011, I wrote the following about Project A:  “Jacky directs and choreographs amazing fights of 20 or more kung fu guys (playing 19th century Hong Kong police/coast guard/pirates) in one of his first big comedy-action hits. Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, old mates from the Peking Opera School are here as well and their camaraderie shows.  Not sure whether I prefer this series (more kung fu) or the Police Story series (more action) -- both are great for old school (young) Jacky fans!”  Watching with Amon and Aito was fun, especially seeing them laugh uproariously at the opening fight between coast guard and police in a bar and at the subsequent bicycle escape from gangsters. Later, I worried that things got a little too violent (when guns and hand grenades were introduced) and serious (when Jacky quit the force to go rogue) but it’s still all slapstick and stunts and the kids know that it’s all fake and outlandish. This film also contains Chan’s nod to silent comedy star Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last – he dangles from the minute-hand of a clock tower precipitously (but unlike Lloyd, Jackie falls through two awnings to crash to the ground, apparently really injuring himself in the process). An important stepping stone in Jackie’s career and one of his best films.

 

The Bureau (2015; Season 1)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Bureau (2015; Season 1) – E. Rochant

I love a good spy yarn (epitomised by those great miniseries featuring Sir Alec Guinness as George Smiley: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 1979; and Smiley’s People, 1982). Those complicated plots, with a harsh light cast on loyalty/disloyalty, truth/falsehood, secrecy/breach, are endlessly appealing. Anyone could be a mole, any mission could come a cropper – and in this compulsively watchable French series, failure is omnipresent. Mathieu Kassovitz plays Guillaume Debailly a.k.a. Malotru a.k.a. Paul Lefevbre who has recently returned to Paris from a six-year undercover operation in Damascus. He may have “alias syndrome”, a difficulty in giving up the freedom of being someone else – this is exacerbated when he accidentally runs into his lover (undercover lover?) from the Damascus days, Nadia el Monsour (Zineb Triki), now in Paris ostensibly involved in cultural exchange (but perhaps something else?). Although distracted, he is required to lead the DGSE (French Intelligence) in their search for an agent (“Cyclone”) who has gone missing in Algeria, possibly abducted, possibly a double agent. These parallel threads (the hunt for Cyclone, the entanglement with Syria) are joined by a third plot strand focused on a new agent, Marina Loiseau (Sara Giraudeau), who goes undercover as a seismology PhD student with the challenge of being selected to join a research team in Iran led by an Iranian professor visiting the Earth Science Institute in Paris. Each of these plots takes a winding and precipitous route through the 10 episodes of this first series – but shockingly only one of them resolves!  Now I’m invested and will have to move on to Season 2 (2016). Absorbing, escapist, filled with great acting and nary a false step.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) – F. W. Murnau

Gilberto Perez’s essay in The Material Ghost (reprinted in the Eureka blu-ray booklet) has deepened my appreciation of Murnau’s first silent filming of Stoker’s Dracula (with names and other details changed). On previous viewings, I unconsciously interpolated the typical interpretations of the vampire film, not quite realising that Murnau had almost completely removed any sort of erotic theme and much of the plot featuring Lucy and Mina. Instead, Perez suggests that Nosferatu represents death itself and that each character’s reaction to him shows us one way that humans might deal with the knowledge that we are all going to die.  For example, Hutter (Murnau’s name for Jonathan Harker) is happy just to go through life ignoring/denying that death will come; as played by Gustav Wangenheim, he seems rather ridiculous in his wilful neglect of the warnings of the townsfolk and the tome of vampiric legend. His wife, Ellen (Greta Schroeder), is much more anxious and on her guard (as she should be). Knock/Renfield (Alexander Granach) is, of course, driven insane by his thoughts. But, Perez argues, Murnau’s focus was less on one’s personal death and more on the calamity of multiple deaths that resulted recently from WWI and depicted here as the result of Nosferatu’s move from Carpathian outlands to Baltic city, bringing the plague with him. Hard not to think about the current plague, and war, and the growing notifications of deaths of friends or friends’ parents on facebook. However, Nosferatu can also be enjoyed as escapism, a way to distract oneself (from thoughts of death or other things) by observing Murnau’s growing cinematic technique, the location sets, Max Schreck’s ominous rat-like portrayal of Count Orlok (later imitated to good effect by Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s 1979 remake), and the haunting downbeat ending where both Orlok and Ellen die. No answers are provided about what comes next and Murnau offers no salvation in the form of religion or science here. Dark and bleak but mesmerizing.