Days of Being Wild, and Minnie and Moskowitz: Two Films That Delve Deep Into Their Characters

Days of Being Wild, by Wong Kar Wai, 1990


Not too long ago, I watched Wong Kar-Wai's first film, As Tears Go By, and was surprised that it wasn't that much like the other Wong Kar-Wai films I had seen. It was kind of a standard Hong Kong crime movie, though signs of the director he was to become show through. Now, I have learned that his second film, Days of Being Wild is really where he found his voice as a storyteller. It apparently kickstarted a whole wave of similar Hong Kong films other than his own, too.

Days of Being Wild, like most of Wong Kar Wai's films, doesn't have a plot, or a linear one, anyway. It follows and deeply explores several richly drawn characters, as their lives collide. Set in 1960, the main-est character of this movie is a man named York (Leslie Cheung), a ladies man who really kind of uses and abuses the women in his life. First he seduces a girl who works at a ticket stand (Maggie Cheung), and when she wants to get serious, he drops her and gets to work on a showgirl (Carina Lau). We eventually learn that his destructive behavior is due to the fact that his adoptive mother has refused for years to tell him who his real mother is. He treats her no better, holding her sort of psychologically captive until she tells him. There's also a police officer (Andy Lau) that gives some comfort to the ticket stand girl, depressed over her relationship with York, before he goes off to become a sailor.

I didn't give away the whole movie, though it almost seems that way. There's a lot going on in there, and a lot happens after where I left off. That's how dense and emotionally textured Wong Kar Wai's films are, and one of the reasons he's so highly lauded. The other is, of course, the beautiful photography by frequent collaborator, Christopher Doyle. This is their first work together, and it looks great. There's a huge difference between this and his first film, which, while still having Wong Kar Wai's vivid colors, looked very much like a seedy low-budget 1980's movie.

Days of Being Wild is a very good film. With it, Wong Kar Wai found both his storytelling and aesthetic styles and in subsequent films honed and improved upon them. I'm looking forward to watching more of those films.

Minnie and Moskowitz, by John Cassavetes, 1971


I've been wondering what I was going to say about this movie ever since I watched it a few weeks ago. I'm not too sure I'm able to sufficiently explain why I loved it so much. I watched it twice within a week, which is something I almost never do, and I liked it even more the second time. I think Minnie and Moskowitz is one of my new favorite movies.

A quirky and unconventional love story, Minnie and Moskowitz is the story of the turbulent whirlwind romance of Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassell AKA Max's dad from Rushmore), a ponytailed, biker-mustached, Jewish, New York parking lot attendant, and Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands), a depressed 40-ish WASP, in an abusive relationship with a married man, and ready to give up on the very idea of romance.

The characters are so rich, detailed, and completely human. Seymour is impulsive, almost aggressively socially awkward, if that makes sense, and is prone to mouthing off and getting in fights. Minnie's self worth has been so damaged that she hides behind a gigantic pair of sunglasses, even indoors. But despite the fact that these two people are so different, you never question the believability their relationship through its ups and downs. One of my favorite moments is when Seymour questions a romantic gesture that Minnie makes. Embarrassed, Minnie immediately retreats back into her shell and starts putting her sunglasses on, and Seymour just reaches over and pulls her hand down and tells her he gets it. I also love the scene where their different ideas of what romance is becomes crystallized for Minnie, when a passionate Seymour bursts out, "I think about you so much I forget to go to the bathroom!"

I'm just now discovering director John Cassavetes. I've seen him acting in a couple of films, but I'm pretty blown away by his work as a director. He seemed like an awesome guy. He paid his dues doing acting roles, often as bad guys or tough guys, and used his paychecks to independently finance his own movies. He was a real trailblazer in the world of independent film. He worked largely with friends and family. Rowlands was his wife, and she starred in just about all of his films. His actors improvise a lot of their dialogue and Cassavetes would patiently let the camera eavesdrop, often embracing accidents or impulsive acts from the cast members.

I loved Minnie and Moskowitz. It feels so human and real, and it's both funny and emotionally intense. It really lets the viewer come to understand and love the main characters, and it might actually be the ONLY movie from the 1970's with a happy ending. That's a joke, you don't have to list other 70's movies with happy endings for me.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky and Breathless: There Are Lots of Different Ways to Be Great

Wow, everybody, I'm not going to make a big deal of it, but Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is the 300th movie I've reviewed on I Probably Liked It. That's a lot of movies for someone to probably like in only 20 months! I haven't slowed down at all since watching it either. I still have almost 30 movies to review. I'm really wanting to be caught up by the end of this month, but writing takes a lot of time that I don't necessarily have, so we'll see.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, by Lam Nai-Choi, 1991


I've been hearing about this movie since I was in 9th grade. Back in the early, pre-Stewart days of The Daily Show, they always used to show a clip of a guy smashing another man's head with his fists like Ghallagher smashes a watermelon with a sledgehammer. The older geeks who were more in the know than I told me about The Story of Ricky, and thus a legend was born.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, set in a hellish not-too-distant future of 2001, is about a good guy who is imprisoned for killing a crime boss. The prison is just as corrupt as the outside world, as Ricky soon learns when he comes to the defense of a poor old man who is just shy of parole. In doing this, he makes enemies of not only the worst of the prisoners, but also the evil warden and his lackies. Now Ricky must fight his way through these guys and out of the jail that would rather see him dead.

This movie is nuts! I don't know why it took me so long to see it. I guess because it was never sitting directly in front of me, until it popped up on Netflix. The violence is super over-the-top and hilariously fake looking. It's like if Evil Dead 2-era Sam Raimi made a science fiction kung fu prison drama/comedy. We're in a world where pretty much anything can happen. We see Ricky smash his fists through heads and torsos, and one of his foes tries to choke Ricky with his intestines at one point. Ricky has superpowers and is basically indestructible, unfortunately for these bad guys. You never feel like the odds are overwhelming for the hero, you just watch to see how he's going to eviscerate one boss after another.

I'm guessing my description isn't really selling Riki-Oh. You're probably wondering what's so appealing about it. It's hard to do this movie justice with words. Let me just say that it's weird and funny and culty and great to watch with a group of friends (inebriation optional). Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky is off its rocker, and totally awesome for it.

Breathless, by Jean-Luc Godard, 1960


While I think you could say the Story of Ricky achieves a kind of greatness, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless is the real deal. Sure, it doesn't have a scene where the hero shoves a bad guy into a meat grinder, but it has its own non-meat-grinder related merits. There's a reason this film is frequently voted by critics as one of the best ever made.

One of the films that kick started the French New Wave, Breathless is the story of Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a guy who steals a car and shoots a cop and now needs money to get out of the way. He goes into the city to find someone to give him a loan. While he's there, he also tracks down Patricia (Jean Seberg), an American girl he's slept with a few times, and wants to come with him. Much of the movie is set in her apartment, as they smoke cigarettes like they're in a French movie and discuss their situation and she tries to determine whether she loves him or not, while the cops are out there tracking him down.

It says something about a movie when it is the source of all the stereotypes of what a certain kind of movie is. Breathless is like that. Every American parody of an "artsy" French film on TV, in cartoons, and in movies, is just doing its own version of Breathless. This is that movie. The philosophical voice-over narration of the hero, the frequent use of jump-cuts. Not only often parodied, but often used for serious. The way Godard used jump-cuts in his editing was a brand new thing at the time, though it's become recognizable and commonplace over the last 50 years.

I had seen Godard's Alphaville before this, and I liked it, but now that I've seen Breathless, Godard seems much easier to get into. It's bold, groundbreaking, and personal and it still feels that way half a century later. This would have been a much better film for me to start off with.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame

I love when a whole bunch of different genres get mashed together into something strange and new. I love it more when it works, but I still appreciate the attempt when it doesn't. Tsui Hark's film, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame is a historical fantasy murder mystery kung fu adventure movie, and for the most part, it clicks.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame is set in 7th Century China, during the reign of the controversial first female Emperor. A massive statue of the Buddha is being built in preparation for her coronation. But when an official visiting the construction site spontaneously combusts, Detective Dee is called in to use his deductive reasoning to solve the mystery. We then follow him on his mission, and we see fantastical cities under cities, completely hidden from the sun, talking deer Gods, and people who can change their appearance via acupuncture pressure points.

Andy Lau (Infernal Affairs, a million billion billion other movies) portrays "Detective Dee", a fictionalized version of a real historical figure. He's a bit of a Sherlock Holmes type, well ahead of the curve in a lot of ways. When we meet him, he's been imprisoned for eight years for opposing the rule of the Empress that he is enlisted to help. I thought that aspect was interesting, his willingness to help a ruler he ideologically opposes for the good of China. In a way, it kind of reminded me of D'Artagnan of the Three Musketeers fighting so hard to protect the Queen's honor, even though he knows she's been sleeping around on the king. Does that make sense? Maybe just in my head.

My favorite character was Jing-er, played by Li Bing Bing. She acts as the Empress' right hand, and is sent to keep an eye on Dee. Her weapon of choice is a whip, and she's all sorts of awesome, and you're not quite sure where her loyalties lie.

As a whole, Detective Dee is an entertaining fantasy adventure with an interesting engaging mystery. I thought it would be a stretch to have a skeptical Holmes-ian character integrated into a world full of Chinese mysticism, but the mysticism is accepted as fact in the context of the movie and is all kind of taken in stride by the characters, and it actually works rather well.

The one element in the genre mish-mash that didn't really come together for me was the Kung Fu. Pretty surprising, right? There are some fun sequences and fights, but the way they were shot felt very Western to me. So much of it was done in tight close-up, with more cutting than is necessary. The best martial arts scenes in movies are shot in a way that we can see the fighters' whole bodies at work. If it's just patched together in editing, it's far less impressive.

Besides that aspect, though, the action sequences are all a lot of fun. They just feel more Hollywood than Hong Kong. Overall, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame is an interesting and original piece of popcorn moviemaking, and totally worth a watch.

The Mighty Peking Man

Action! Adventure! Excitement! Animal Cruelty? Well, I can't confirm that last one, but it looks probable. I don't think they had any laws preventing animal cruelty in 1970's Hong Kong.

The Mighty Peking Man, originally released in the states as Goliathon, is an attempt by legendary Hong Kong producers, The Shaw Brothers, to cash in on the 1976 remake of King Kong. Why they didn't just call it "Hong Kong" is beyond me. The story is similar to that of King Kong, but with a little bit more exploitation, because hey, sex and violence sell, right?

The producers, The Shaw Brothers, are best known for making many of the classic Kung Fu movies of the 60's and 70's, such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. I wasn't even aware that they made other kinds of movies, but I guess it makes sense that they did. Later, in the 90's, Quentin Tarantino rereleased it through his distribution company.

Johnny (Danny Lee) goes on a dangerous expedition to the Himalayas, on a search for the Peking Man, a monstrous ape that has been terrorizing villages. He loses all of his men on the way, due to tigers and climbing treacherous cliffs and such, and ultimately makes it to the jungle that the Peking Man calls home. There he meets Samantha, a scantily clad American woman whose parents died in a plane crash there when she was a child. She is the only one who can control the Peking Man. After a snake bites her inner thigh and Johnny sucks out the poison (oh come on!) and nurses her to health, the two fall in love, and the Peking Man gets jealous. Then of course comes the scene when Johnny's boss finds and rescues him, along with Samantha and the Peking Man, bringing them to Hong Kong, where a rampage ensues.

Considering the fact that it's a knock-off movie, The Mighty Peking Man is actually very well made. Johnny and Samantha are likeable characters. I thought it was funny when, on the ship to Hong Kong, he gave her a dress to wear. Not seeing the point of clothes, she waits until he leaves for a minute and tosses it out the window. The effects are solid, too. Not so much the effects themselves, which looks like any B-Movie would, but more the use of the effects. Director Ho Meng-Hua integrates and blends various different methods, such as animation, miniatures, rear screen projection, and even stock footage to make his story work.

I like some of the slight changes from King Kong, too. Ok, I've never seen the 1976 version, so these might actually be directly lifted from that, for all I know. I like that instead of just putting Kong on a stage, they put the Peking Man in an arena, in basically a big Monster Truck Pull. It's too bad Truckasaurus wasn't around yet. I also like that the Peking Man is inspired to break free from his bonds because he could see through a window that the bad guy was trying to rape Samantha.

What I found rather unsettling, however, are the jungle sequences with live (and possibly dead?) animals. It began when a tiger attacked the explorers. At first, I was amazed that they had a man wrestling a real live tiger. But then I thought, obviously the tiger was declawed, probably sedated, and worst case scenario, de-toothed. That's kind of a horrible thought, right?

Then we come to Samantha's pet leopard, also obviously sedated. It follows her around and she plays with it, carrying it over her shoulders, lifting it by its underarms and spinning it around. It just kind of looks confused. At one point they toss the snake that bit her his way and he starts fighting with it. Pretty sure that was a dead snake. And absolutely worst of all, there's a close-up of the leopard when Samantha is saying goodbye, and I am pretty certain that this poor cat is trying to open up its mouth but completely unable to.

I hope that poor leopard was alright after the shoot. It seems to me that there's a pretty strong chance that it wasn't, which, well, it really dampens my enjoyment of the movie.

Removing myself from all that, The Mighty Peking Man is actually a well made movie. I can't really recommend it to animal lovers, but lovers of B-Movies, monster movies, and Shaw Brothers movies might get a kick out of it.

Wing Chun

My knowledge of Chinese and Hong Kong cinema is pretty shameful. While I have seen and enjoyed many Chinese films over the years, I was never able to put them into any kind of historical context. I'd love to know which directors most influenced the distinct style of Kung Fu movies in their early years. Did it all start with Bruce Lee? I somehow doubt it. One of the reason's I'm so ignorant is the difficulty of finding older Chinese films in their original language. They're almost all dubbed, and I have little to no patience for dubbing.

When looking for a Kung Fu movie to watch, I pretty much picked Wing Chun at random, because I recognized some of the names in it. It stars Michelle Yeoh as Yim Wing Chun, a girl who uses her Kung Fu mastery to save her friends, family, and even her entire village from a gang of bandits. It also stars Donnie Yen as her love interest.

Wing Chun is a pretty light-hearted movie, with a lot of comedy and a twisty little romance. It's pretty PG-rated. The humor is a little more over-the-top than I usually like, but I'll admit that I did laugh out loud a couple times.

The real centerpiece of the movie, is of course, the Kung Fu battles, and surprise! This movie is directed by the master choreographer, Yuen Wo Ping, the guy behind The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill, and countless other martial arts spectacles. It goes without saying that the fights are a real treat. His trademark wire-fu is still in it, but it's a little older than those other movies, so the wires themselves are still very visible.

My favorite fight was probably the one where another master challenges Wing Chun to prove males are superior fighters. She sets up a tray of tofu and challenges him to smash it if he can. Then she effortlessly (ok, a little effort) keeps the tofu tray away from his blows by blocking him and tossing the tray itself around. It's a lot of fun, and there's a good deal of Jackie Chan-ish physical comedy involved. There's another great fight on top of a giant spear stuck in a rock wall, too.

Wing Chun was pretty enjoyable, though the story didn't really blow me away. It suited my needs, though, since, at the moment, I was looking for something light and breezy to watch, and something shorter in length than a lot of the more epic, House of Flying Daggers types of movies (I still haven't seen House of Flying Daggers, so you might see a review of that coming up in the future). Still, the fight choreography alone made the movie worth watching.

Next time, I might check out something more serious. I have it on good authority that Ip Man is a good one.