Not rated but this one is fairly tame.  While we have stories of sorted pasts, the movie itself seems pretty all ages.  The biggest thing is that, like all art, it should be political.  These are stories of oppression through art.  Similarly, murals tend to have nudity in them, but that's in the realm of art.  There is one guy who seemed to run a gentleman's club.  Also, a worker at a slaughterhouse dropped one of his bloodstained gloves.  So this is me desperately trying to find something to comment on and I didn't succeed.

DIRECTOR: Agnes Varda

Yeah, I'm getting tired about writing about Varda too.  See, the thing about Varda is that I love her and sometimes I can't stand her.  This is one of the times that I love her.  The problem about writing about writing about a movie that I enjoy is that I have a hard time writing about it.  See?  These are very specific problems that I don't really have to deal with, but I face head on anyway.

It's the beginning of the school year, so I'm talking about the categories of film.  The three types of film are fictional narratives, documentaries, and experimental films.  I only had the epiphany recently that Agnes Varda loves all three film styles potentially equally.  I keep talking about how much of a genius that Varda is, but I often find myself frustrated with her more experimental work.  But I realized that, when she's directing narratives or documentaries, she's absolutely destroying, especially when it comes to documentaries like Mur Murs, which should be incredibly difficult to pull off considering that that the topic covered should be dry as toast.  

For those unaware of what Mur Murs is, Agnes Varda in 1980 went around and investigated the murals of Los Angeles.  My buddy back in college made a similar movie, only his was to mock the murals.  We were younger back then and it was probably easier to attack stuff.  Still, I find his documentary funny so I won't apologize for it.  But the thing that Varda makes as the core of her movie is the notion that art has value for a voiceless people.  While not everyone in the documentary is a minority, there seems to be a solidarity of vision when it comes to creating these works of art around the city.  Regardless of execution, it seems these interviews with these mural artists reflect a need to speak about something greater than simply covering a building with wall art.  Even when works are commissioned, the artists seem to have a more grandiose meaning behind their works.  If there's one thing that unifies Agnes Varda as an auteur, it is her need to speak of the value of art in itself.

An idea that spirals out of the many interviews, beyond that of art in relationship to the artist, is the cultural framework of Los Angeles.  I can't help but contextualize Los Angeles as a city of minorities and immigrants.  I say that because Donald Trump has unleashed the National Guard on cities over the past few days and my brain has been innundated with the fact that we are living under a fascist regime right now.  I can't help but watch something like Mur Murs as a historical document of a time when --as bad as race relations were in 1980 --that the federal government wasn't even trying to hide the need to control a people through authoritarian action.  Instead, Mur Murs reminds us that there has been a long history of bigotry and abuse towards different cultures in America.  

This is more a commentary on the documentary format, but there's something incredibly powerful about the use of anecdotal storytelling when it comes to helping us understand a culture as a whole.  I will admit that some of the murals in the movie are less than impressive.  (That's not true about all of them.  The one guy who has a million interviews in this movie made some darned impressive murals.)  But the stories behind these murals, the stories that inspired the creation of these murals, are so heartfelt that it makes the movie worth watching.  There were people in this movie that I was mentally figuring out their age because I would be fascinated to meet some of these people.  I'm mostly talking about the Catholic priest.  I know.  He was the least interesting person interviewed.  But more to my point is that these people seemed like good people.  Okay, the juggler who goes around and evangelizes seemed a little off to me, but you get my point.  What Varda created here was a story about how a city full of a  lot of people still maintained its humanity.  Not only did it maintain a sense of humanity, but it fought through it.  If Varda is all about art and art is political, it also reminds us the smallest actions that we take when speaking about our people is also a political action.

Before I close up on what might be my shortest blog post in a while, I want to thank Varda for one thing.  Part of the pretense is that it imagines that Varda would be omniscient about what Criterion loves to do.  I have to thank Agnes Varda in the year 1980 from the year 2025 for making a movie that takes place at a slaughterhouse, talks about killing pigs, and doesn't actually show it?  I mean, that's Criterion's bread-and-butter, showing how slaughterhouses work.  Nope, Varda's my girl when it comes to that.  I thank her for that. 

Either way, this is a super chill documentary.  I have to watch its follow-up next, Documenteur.  But then I'll finally be able to take a Varda break for a while.

Not rated, but Varda is going for shock value with this one.  There is such an abundance of nudity and sexuality in this movie that she wants you to be taken aback by the world of hippie culture.  On top of that, one of the only lucid parts of the movie surrounds a suicide where one of the actors / directors points out how absurd and exploitative the suicide is.  On top of that, the film surrounds the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. and the assassination attempt of Andy Warhol.  Kids also smoke.  

DIRECTOR:  Agnes Varda

See, I thought I was in Agnes Varda's sweet spot.  Maybe I just hold too little respect for experimental film.  But Lions Love (...and Lies)​ is so self-indulgent that I genuinely consider this movie to be crap.  I normally don't get so abrasive with films, especially when I hold a whole bunch of respect for the director. But my major complaint with Agnes Varda is that Varda throws so much at the wall to find out what sticks that we have to sit through all of the things that don't stick.

It's not that I'm not a fan of the hippie movement.  Honestly, hippie films are fascinating to me.  I mean, I watched all the Nicholson BBS films and, while I didn't love-love all of them, they were fascinating.  I mean, I wonder a lot about this era.  It's a kind of voyeurism because I do live such a straight-edged lifestyle that to watch an entire generation change society's relationship with hallucinogens is so fascinating to me.  I've also always been completely stumped that one of the most counter-culture generations could turn into the most conservative collectives out there.  But for every time that I get wrapped up in the sweet revolution that was happening with the hippie movement, I am also reminded why they annoyed the staunch traditionalists of the era.  

...and Agnes Varda probably didn't help the cause with this film.

Varda loves messing with the fourth wall.  She is always injecting herself into the film.  I don't really have a problem with that.  Especially considering that the retitling of this film is Lions Love (...and Lies) considering that the orignal title was only Lions Love, that ...and Lies part has to hold some meaning.  Varda has a Bertolt Brecht thing going on.  While Brecht always wanted to remind the audience that they were watching a play, Varda is in a constant state of reminding the viewer that this is the creation of an auteur.  In Lions Love, every time the story gained a sense of investment in the narration, Varda would include a peek behind the camera.  I couldn't help but make a connection stylistically to the I Am Curious movies with the constant reminder that someone is making a movie.  The issue I have is that Varda is an extremely talented narrative director.  She takes ideas that are so abstract and so emotional and does amazing things with them.  But she's also a director who keeps wanting to be a little bit more out there.  

With Lions Love, there's something almost lazy about the experiement going on.  I know.  I whine over things that I don't like and I don't assume that there's something deeper going on with Varda.  But Varda does this stuff with her short films a lot of the time.  There's something that she wants to capture that she almost seems unsure about.  With the case of Lions Love, she wanted to say something about hippies and Hollywood.  There's this need to talk about art, but it seems like Varda doesn't really know what she wants to say.  There are moments when she almost has something to explore, but much of that comes from Shirley Clark, who is definitely doing Varda a favor by being in this movie.  Shirley Clark is a director in her own right and is playing a heightened version of herself.  Honestly, the only person that I could tolerate in this film at all was Clark because she gives each moment verisimilitude.  There's an ironic bit there where Clark repremands herself for her acting chops, but she's also the only one who is not over the top.

What I feel that Varda wants to say is that Hollywood is soulless.  According to Lions Love, the real talent exists from the free spirits who simply create for the sake of creation.  The entire movie is playing with improv because that's what a real artist does, apparently.  But as someone who has seen a lot of student created content where the preparation seems undercooked, that's what it feels like watching this movie.  The three main actors --Viva, Jim, and Jerry --all seem to be having a good time.  But this seems a lot like these three finding their characters as opposed to serving the larger piece.  My kids and their cousins made a homemade Star Wars movie.  For little kids, it's actually pretty darned impressive.  But there are a few fight scenes.  And these fight scenes aren't choreographed.  (Look at me, dunking on kids who made a fun Star Wars movie in their spare time.)  Considering that every other scene followed a script and had reasonable edits, there were ten minute fight sequences without cuts.  It was kids hitting each other with sticks.  Lions Love is a lot like that.  Because the whole thing was improvised and only some of the improv actually had any value, it just dragged in these long sequences of the three naked finding mildly entertaining parts while Varda sped up the boring parts.

The funny thing is that the movie ends with confessionals from the three lead actors.  The two male actors seemed perfectly content being in this movie.  There's some introspection, to be sure.  But Viva?  Viva seems a little exploited with this movie.  Viva's confession closes the movie.  She doesn't seem sad that she did the movie.  Nothing in her voice seems to be accusing Agnes Varda for what happened during this film.  But Viva explains that she is fine with nudity, but is kind of tired of being asked to take her clothes off all of the time.  Similarly, she wanted to act.  From her perspective, she wanted to properly act.  She was desperate for a melodrama with some lines.  She keeps getting these experimental theatre parts where there is no script and she keeps having to improv.  Like, I kind of hate that Varda isn't listening to what her actors are looking for.  The only really compelling scene in the film is when Shirley confronts Varda for the absurdity of the suicide sequence.  Shirley Clarke, who has been through it when it comes to making movies, says that she would never harm herself if a movie fell through.  She understands that it is part of the process.  She calls Varda out, saying that the whole thing feels false.  Varda, with an almost false sense of confidence, plays the "The show must go on" part and tries stepping in for Clarke.  But the point of the story is that this whole thing feels fake and Varda is being the kind of director who is obsessed with her own genius instead of listening to her actors.  Between Viva and Clarke, there's something almost toxic about the film as a whole.

I don't know if Varda actually says anything concrete about Hollywood.  That last diatribe might be the most on-the-nose example of "telling, not showing."  Considering that these three reacting to the larger world of politics in conjunction with mortality shows how there's something false about the whole life of Bobby Kennedy, we don't really get a sense that these three have any real connection to the world of Hollywood.  That's almost a crime because Hollywood in Lions Love is a character in itself.  Ending the film on a diatribe about how Hollywood has no sense of history and acts as a Babylon seemingly comes out of nowhere.  I don't even credit the sequences of the studio execs fighting over final cut because these scenes don't even tie into the three in any meaningful way.  The voiceover can complain (in the most vital way) that Hollywood has no sense of history.  But all I got from the three was that they were insufferable and selfish. 

Like, I honestly don't know what those guys did for money.  They lived these "tune out" lives that almost spat in the faces of all of the people fighting for civil rights out there without ever commenting on it.  While I might not be the most knowledgable about Bobby Kennedy, I also know that he was a guy who tried to turn the tides in the Civil Rights movement.  And as moved as the trio was by his death, it was all because they viewed him from an entertainment perspective.  None of it was because he was a guy who tried to do the right thing.  Maybe Varda is aiming for this, but it seems almost disrespectful to the real Viva, Jim, and Jerry who seemed to encapsulate their real lives.  

It all reads as a mess.  I love when Varda hits, but it isn't when it is this kind of stuff.  It's weird how this kind of slight impoved absurdism works for "Uncle Yanco", but flops really hard in a feature length film. It is also upsetting that there might be two more feature length films on this disc.

I'm changing things up.  I have The Complete Films of Agnes Varda box set.  At first, I thought that this meant only the feature length films.  Nope.  This includes the short films as well.  Since I'm painfully a completionist, I'm watching all of these short films as well.  But I also know that I can't write an essay about each and every one of these movies.  So instead, I'll do some blurbs about each one as I watch them.  So I'll keep updating as I go along.

Les 3 boutons (2015) -I think I like Varda's early work a lot.  I've talked about this in Varda by Agnes and Visages / Villages.  It just seems like it was trying less to be art and simply was art back in the day.  Again, I don't mean to poo-poo.  Varda has more artistic merit in her pinky than I'll ever have.  To a certain extent, this movie felt like some of her earlier work.  It had a narrative.  It had a confusing narrative, but it was a narrative.  But in the mix of visuals, I kind of lost the point of it besides looking pretty and being artsy.

Ô saisons, ô châteaux (1958) -There is something incredibly satisfying about this.  There's an innocence to Varda as she's making what ultimately is a comissioned travel film. She seems worried about upsetting those who are hiring her while trying to maintain an artistic integrity and it is near perfect.  Yeah, it's a travel promo film.  It's the equivalent of a town asking for an extended infomercial.  But it works so well.  But not as well as...

Du côté de la côte (1958) -...this.  In the same year, she's hired for basically the same job with the French Riviera.  Then she just goes bananas and makes her own art film that happens to be emotionally about the French Riviera.  When the folks who hired her saw that she claimed that the best view is from the grave, were they all excited about it?  This is Varda that I adore.  She's spunky and adorable and has social commentary, even when she's hired for travel videos.

L'opera-mouffe (1958) -I'm living with a very pregnant lady right now.  She doesn't go around the streets of Paris making little art films.  This one is pretty.  Maybe things in black-and-white get a little bit of a pass compared to things in color.  I'm not normally a fan of strictly experimental cinema, but this mostly works for me.  Maybe because it is so hypnotic and relaxing that one can't help and view the movie through the lens of calm.  It's sad at times.  I lost myself in my own mortality watching this one today.  There was this old woman who looked so rough and the camera just stayed on her for longer than was appropriate.  I then realized that this lady, along with almost everyone involved in this movie, was probably dead.  But that old lady also has this specific form of immortality because film snobs like me will watch everything that Agnes Varda has ever made.

Les dites cariatides (1984) -Varda still has it going on in 1984.  I think it is when film goes digital is when I get off the Varda train.  I think she picks her shots so beautifully when film costs money that, when it is disposable, she doesn't quite get that same sense of grandeur.  She has a specific subgenre of experimental art film.  It's almost a documentary, but with little done in terms of informing.  Varda shows all of these women carved into stone and tells the story of the inspiration of these pieces.  But the point of the documentary is not to have you leave and tell your friends about what you learned, but to experience the same sense of awe that Varda does while looking at these moments.  The 2005 update doesn't really deserve its own section.  That's just someone's slideshow of statues.  But it shows what can happen when a filmmaker really pays attention to the small stuff.

T'as de beaux escaliers, tu sais (1986) -I almost didn't write about this.  I'm actually kind of amazed that I found an image of this.  It actually is probably from another movie.  It's funny.  Varda says that this isn't an advertisement; it's a documentary.  It's both. It's an excuse to say that Varda really likes film and I have no problem with that.  It's what I really like and to claim that this is my favorite of Varda's shorts is a bit too much fan service.  Doesn't mean that I don't like it.

Le lion volatil (2003) -Man, Agnes Varda --especially older Agnes Varda --was a sassy old lady.  In the introduction to this piece, she spills all the tea about how her producer disappeared with all of the money that was meant to make this short into a feature length film.  I'm already starting to see some of the weaknesses of Varda in 2003.  She wants this to be this heady piece about love around this neighborhood, but it all feels a bit forced compared to the other stuff we've seen.  It's cute and I like the fact that it has a narrative.  But it also wears 2003 really hard.

Elsa la rose (1966) -My goodness, I don't want to write about this right now.  The odd part is that I really like a lot about this short film.  I just wrote about Les creatures, where I feel like Varda is trying to be artsy.  Instead, we see honest-to-goodness art here.  She's in the zone with this one.  Maybe she does better with earnest reactions versus trying to reconstruct something.  She is making this almost as a commission.  She took the love between these two people and didn't try to fabricate something.  Elsa is romantic without being sappy.  She talks about art and her husband still embraces her with the skills that he already possesses.  It isn't perfect.  It's a little chaotic, but that's part of the narrative.  

Uncle Yanco (1967) -I always assume that I'm going to be annoyed by Varda's experimental stuff.  It mostly feels put on (trust me, I'm going to be writing a lot about this pretty soon).  But this is that sweet spot.  It comes from the fact that you can feel Varda's appreciation and love for her subject in this one.  The eponymous Uncle Yanco is Scrappy Doo in the best possible way to Agnes Varda's Scooby.  It's insane that both of these are in the same family...even though Yanco makes a point to say that they aren't actually related.  Still, this is a charming short and this is Varda's experimental stuff at its best.​

Black Panthers (1968) -I love when Varda gets out of her own way.  Yeah, I know that we're at the height of Varda's talents.  But I can just feel Varda getting wrapped up in the wealth of actual content that she needs to respect.  It's not like Varda's fingerprints aren't on this.  There are some very Varda elements happening in this documentary.  But the subject matter comes first to her.  There's such a respect for her subject and that's what makes "Black Panthers" compelling.

Not rated, but this movie's lynchpin is about the rape and murder of a little girl.  The rape happens on screen and it is pretty brutal, despite not having nudity in this scene.  However, there is some nudity in another scene and the violence throughout the movie is pretty rough.  Also, another child is killed later in the film.  It isn't an easy movie to watch.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

Oh my gosh, I have so much work to do right now, but I'm sitting at Tire Discounters waiting for my car to be fixed.  I figured, if I'm going to do anything without my work resources with me, I can at least get some writing done.  Honestly, if I can get this uploaded before I leave, I can at least have no distractions about stupid things later.  I think that I'm discovering that my productivity has a lot of context behind my choices.

I've been feeling somewhat burdened by my journey through Bergman's films.  I know that I was always kind of chided (in the nicest way!) when it came to my obsession with retrospectives when it came to catching up on directors because of this exact reason.   Watching one auteur's entire oeuvre leads to burnout and I was getting that over the course of the last few films.  But then I remembered why I got excited to watch the Bergman films to start off with because there are some absolute gems.  Since I'm dancing around this, The Virgin Spring is an absolute banger of a movie.  It's top tier Bergman, which always suprises me.  It's this and The Seventh Seal that play with historical fiction, a subgenre that often leaves me cold.  I think it is because his contemporary films always feel so self-indulgent.  When people are wallowing in their own selfish miseries, it feels like we have so many alternatives to that kind of behavior.  I kind of whined about The Silence, even though I acknowledge that there was something brilliant about the movie.

See, with a film like The Silence, set in a fictional country, these women are being cruel to one another when there is really no environmental factor that drives them to act this way.  I suppose that Bergman is arguing the very nature of existence forces us to be selfish jerks to one another because we're in constant pain.  That is an argument.  I can't deny that it is an argument.  I don't necessarily subscribe to this philosophy.  I mean, the Tire Discounters that I'm sitting in is pretty cold and devoid of humanity.  It doesn't mean that I feel the need to destroy the world around me with my sexual frustrations.  But when you watch something like The Virgin Spring, the social norms seem so much looser.  Everything in The Virgin Spring seems like it allows for bigger personalities because there is no societal codes saying that you couldn't be that way.  If anything, those personality types, which are large and in charge, act as survival tools. Tore is a zealot because he carries that true, 13th century-style fear of the Lord.  All of his joys and miseries are because of his thoughts that about the moral choices that he has made throughout his life.  After all, the only social interaction that he has are the people inside of his home and the church, which is a noticable distance from the house.  You can honestly go down the list of characters and ascribe their dominant trait to a lack of social convention coupled with a need to survive.

It's kind of what makes Karin the ultimate victim in this story.  As much as almost all the characters harbor some kind of ignorance about themselves,  Karin's ignorance is the only one that is fed by those around her.  She starts the movie as the only carefree person.  She --appropriately enough --understands that since the candles are too late to be used for service, there is no real rush to get to the church.  From her ignorance, the Little Red Riding Hood story starts.  I'm assuming that the Grimm's fairy tale is far more gruesome than anything that I grew up with, but the result is still that she is ultimately consumed by the monsters in the woods.  But her death is, by consequence, a wake up call to all of the crimes that each character harbors in their own hearts.  Shy of the actual monsters, who get their comeuppance at the hand of Tore, the characters seem to one-by-one take responsibility for the death of Karin. 

The funny thing is that Karin, right before her death, makes herself pretty unlikable.  I mean, Karin is meant to be a sympathetic character.  She's the only one who loves life.  She's almost a Disney princess with the amount of happy things that happen to her (a sign that I'm not taking this Disney Princess analogy too seriously).  She sees the world as a bright and glorious place.  Even when her sleeping in affects others, she isn't scolded for her laziness.  Instead, she's celebrated by even the gruffest of fathers, who allows her shannigans to go by undiscussed.  

But the reason that we don't like her is that she has no sense of community with others.  Ingeri lives as a foil to her.  For what few consequences that Karin experiences for her blissful life, it seems like Ingeri has adopted those miseries.  She follows Karin into the woods, acting like a pregnant and wreched hag.  She is always angry and upset because none of her tough life come from her own choices.  And that's the moment that Karin becomes the bad guy.  It's only for a moment, but what Karin says is so ignorant, it almost welcomes the universe to strike her down.  When Ingeri discusses the burdens of pregnancy, Karin swears that she could never be raped.  If she was raped, she would simply fight them off.  I refuse to divorce this discussion from the sexual violence component, but that is perhaps the most real-world ignorance that people carry.  I knew a guy who used to claim that school shooting victims shouldn't really be mourned because if a school shooter ever entered his building, he would just attack the guy.  It's this separation from reality that just comes across as silly given any sense of reality.

But Bergman does more than simply make a philosophical argument for people's need for self-analysis.  From a storytelling perspective, The Virgin Spring is actually pretty darned great.  I mentioned Little Red Riding Hood earlier, which might be on the nose a bit.  The Virgin Spring is based on a 13th century legend / poem.  As such, there is a structure there that creates coincidences that we don't really get in contemporary storytelling.  (Again, 13th century works because of a lack of overpopulation.)  The fact that these three men stumble across Karin's house and try selling Karin's dress to the mother is so horrifying.  Bergman feeds that dramatic irony so well that the rest of the movie comes across as an insane revenge film.  When Mom bolts them in that room, it's kind of glorious.  Yeah, the movie could have been more exploitative, making it a slow and torturous story of violence awakened.  Still, the fact that Tore ends up killing the child against the protestations of mother is a solid moment.  

It's a great story done really well.  Yeah, I'm a little shaken by the titular "virgin spring" that pops up at the end of the movie, implying that Karin was somehow a saint or that Tore's declaration that he will build a church on that spot makes God happy.  It does open the door to the notion that God took away Tore's daughter out of a need for worship.  But that's in line with Bergman anyway, so I'll allow it.  Still, the movie slaps so hard.  I dug this one a lot.

Approved.  For being a movie about spycraft, especially spycraft that involves seduction as a means of gaining information, this movie is incredibly tame.  There are upsetting implications.  A caught spy kills himself off-camera.  Still, the moment is awfully disturbing and probably shouldn't be viewed by kids.  But as you will glean from my blog, this movie comes across more as silly than anything truly upsetting.

DIRECTOR:  Josef von Sternberg

Oh man.  I had such high hopes for the von Sternberg box set.  I teach about von Sternberg.  Marlene Dietrich is one of those cornerstones of cinematic canon.  You'd think their shared work together would be blowing my mind right now.  But I'll tell you, two movies into this set and I'm really questioning what people are seeing out of this movie outside of nostalgic charm.

Before I go dogging this movie too hard, I oddly like the last half hour of this movie.  That's a third of the movie.  I can't be saying that this movie is absolute garbage because it absolutely isn't.  If anything, the movie can be seen as something quite charming and of its era because there's a lot of fun moments.  Like, honestly?  If I wasn't being this turd who decided to write about every movie that he ever watched, I would probably write this off as simply something a little silly.  It's 1931.  A lot of what I'm going to talk about is in context of the fact that it is 1931 and the language of cinema is only being explored for the first time in history.  We're in the birthing pain times in cinema.  Is this to say that there aren't amazing movies during this time?  Absolutely not.  There are some real bangers in this era.  But something like Dishonored is one of those movies that can be seen as a bit charming because it doesn't know how the genre is going to look like in the long run.  

Because the faults of this movie come down to silliness.  The movie touts a real heavy subject.  Josef von Sternberg, in his opening text, promises to tell us about the secret history of World War I espionage.  There's something about history that we should all know and the only reason that we don't know anything about this spy is because she is a woman who is only forgotten because of her sex.  That's a rad concept.  Now, I'm watching this in a world where I've seen movies that have been adapted from the works of John Le Carre and Tom Clancy.  The espionage thriller has been honed to such a point that I tend to find the genre boring because it is so technically fact checked that these movies tend to feel like someone is citing tech specs on something that I don't care about.  Now, a subgenre of the espionage thriller is the spy-fi movie.  I don't think that von Sternberg is shooting to make a spy-fi movie because the entire subgenre of spy-fi doesn't really exist.  Spy-fi is stuff like James Bond or Mission: Impossible.  Even from an English teacher's perspective, I know that James Bond isn't how real spy stuff works.  I have all of those boring The Spy Who Came in From the Cold kind of movies to tell me how it really looked.  

I know that James Bond is silly, but I like James Bond.  So why don't I like Dishonored that much?  The technical answer is that James Bond originated from the world of Ian Fleming, a real life spy.  Now, Fleming's works were adapted into silly fantasies that teenage boys idolized.  But even the novels were a bit goofy.  But there was a certain verisimilitude to these films.  I could lie to myself quite easily and tell myself that these movies at least have a consistent universe.  But when I watch Dishonored, it seems like anything that involved even rudimentary research was avoided.  Every time the movie required a bit of spy jargon, it kept on going back to the same well of "Invisible Ink."  That's the big pull.  Let's have phone calls about invisible ink.  Now, it was silly once, but the movie used that bit twice.  It's what little kids thinks spy work looks like.  To bounce off of this, when the Russian is about to escape, he uses a wall that slides up from the ceiling.  The movie didn't let us know that we were doing goofball rules, but it certainly sticks by these rules.

So why do I like the last half hour?  Now, it takes me a minute to really make peace with a lot of what is happening in the movie.  One of the things that is always so weird to me when watching pre-WWII movies is that I have to remember that the relationships of soldiers and foreign nations wasn't always so --justifiably! --viotriolic.  As much as I understand the basics about World War I, I have such a hard time when anything really practical pops up over The Great War.  So when you watch this movie and you see that the protagonist of the piece is a spy for Austria and that the quasi-antagonist of the piece is a spy for Russia, my brain can't help but get lazy and start associating the ally and axis powers from World War II.  So I have to just shut my brain off a little bit and accept that X-27 is the noble hero...despite the fact that she gets executed.

Because that's where the movie gets interesting.  One of the false premises of the movie is that Marie really shows much aptitude for being a spy.  A lot of that isn't Marlene Dietrich's fault.  A lot of that is that she kind of just falls into the roll.  Much of the movie is her flirting with people and that's probably only one facet of being a spy, even in a world like Dishonored.  The latter third of the movie, there's at least something kind of interesting going on with musical notes, even if we don't quite understand the nuts and bolts of the information that Marie is communicating to Austria.  But that manic slamming on the piano in between violent scribbling is actually pretty darned cool.  Finally, the movie establishes that Marie possesses a talent that makes her a unique asset for the war effot. 

But that's not the piece that people tend to take away when it comes to this movie.  The conclusion of the film is far more fascinating.  Now,  I don't really buy the fact that Marie views Kranau as someone special.  There's this love interest that, like with Morocco, we're told more about than we actually experience.  Honestly, because I felt no chemistry from them, I kept all that information about him in the forefront of my brain and I kept seeing him as this potential monster because that's what the movie told me.  Now, it sounds like I'm really grousing about this ending, right?  Those people who know how it ends see this scene when she lets Kranau escape because she is attracted to him or loves him?  That's a Hollywood ending.  

But the great thing is that the movie doesn't let us off the hook that easily.  Kranau's escape is actually kind of a big deal.  I was watching this scene and I was supposed to be romantically moved by it.  Instead, I'm watching that scene thinking that Kranau was going to slaughter all kinds of Austrians because he's a really effective spy.  Coupled with that is that the relationship between these two didn't seem mutual.  If anything, it was like X-27 carried a torch for a guy who might have been borderline abusive, but that might be more of a product of 1931 than anything else.  Anyway, Marie is still shot.  Josef von Sternberg teases us that somehow, this great masterspy is going to somehow escape using her feminie wiles.  Instead, we have an interrupted execution only to be capped with the death of Marie by firing squad.  It's a heck of a choice to do all that, but I dug it.  Yeah, there were moments where I thought, "Man, Marie did bring out that music piece that kind of saved a bunch of people."  But then I realized the movie was kind of right.  She probably undid all the good that she accomplished with the music thing by letting Kranau go.  

Magicians and comedians both work on the premise of misdirection.  They build up suspense, make you think you know how something is going to go, and then turn right when you thought that they were going to go left.  While Dishonored is an incredibly immature film, mostly due to the juxtaposition of similar films that followed it, it does have a great dismount.  I don't think it is enough to save the movie.  But I at least have something memorable to take away.

R and that is possibly the most confusing R-rating that I have ever seen.  This is barely a PG-13 film.  There's some mild cursing.  The most R-rated stuff in this movie is the blood in the final fight.  Admittedly, someone gets impaled.  When I write it out, it sounds pretty bad.  But really, this is 1992.  There were all kinds of movies where the bad guy had a mildly gross death.  It's a lot more tame than the previous entry in the franchise.  But there were a bunch of corpses.  Still, R-rated is R-rated.

DIRECTOR:  Hark Tsui

Okay, I often write how I don't want to write.  I'm borderline depressed and know that no one is going to read this.  I'm really just knocking this out so that I don't have to do this later.  You know what?  Things aren't really that bad.  I have just had better days.  I wish some things in my life were better.  But do you know what this space is reserved for?  Once Upon a Time in China II.  That's what I'm supposed to be writing about so that's what I am going to write about.  

I really think that I need a Masterclass on the very specific politics of Hark Tsui and the Once Upon a Time in China series.  The last film's take on isolationism was incredibly confusing.  This one...while I don't think it is a glowing take on Westerners, definitely places the villainy on the Chinese characters.  I don't know how many times that I have to write this, but I'm always in the camp that all art should be political and openly political.  With Part II, the politics are far more focused.  The bad guys of the piece are a cult whose sole mission, it seems, is to purge China of all foreigners.  As an extension of this philosophy / mission statement, they also kind of want to kill all sympathizers and collaborators with Westerners.  Similarly, they also extort local vendors into paying for protection from the White Lotus cult.  From that perspective, the message of the story is that xenophobia is poisoning the country and that religious extemism is the most deadly threat to China.  Okay, cool.  The last movie dabbled with similar themes.  

But the last movie also went hard against Westerners.  It's not like white people get their butts kissed here.  There is still a n element of the braggart Westerner who treats the people of China as primitives.  That hasn't gone away.  But instead of making white people monsters like the last movie did, they simply come across as simpletons.  So it seems like this franchise went by the way of supporting the West?  It just seems like I have to watch more of these movies before I have a final takeaway of what this franchise is trying to say abotu foreigners.  Again, if I had to make a guess and my life was on the line, I would say that the Westerners are going to become huge buttheads by the next movie.

I had to come to some really harsh truths about myself.   I both think this movie is incredibly dumb and not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.  If I wanted to, I could make this blog one entire gripe about all of the stupid things I saw in this movie.  On the flipside, I also continually told myself, "Hey, this movie is pretty good."  I don't know how it is true, but both statements are absolutely true.  There's a lot of dumb stuff in this movie.  If I presented this movie from a "Cinema Sins" perspective, there would so so many dumb things to list.  I'm still going to talk about those things or else this would be the shortest blog entry that I offer on this page.  But the most important thing about Once Upon a Time in China II is that it is a far more focused movie than the last one.

I mean, not completely.  The last 18 minutes of the movie kind of feel like they come out of nowhere.  In my head, this is a movie about how Master Wong (also now Dr. Wong?) has to fight a nationalist cult who can't be killed.  These guys are going around ruining every scene with their constant attacks and Wong can't stand by and let innocent people get killed.  If you were looking for a purity of story, that's as simple as it gets. Good guy fights evil cult before they kill more people.  Easy peasy.  But it seems like the movie didn't have enough screen time, so the movie added a whole separate plot at the end of the movie where Wong has to fight Nap-Lan, who oddly surplants the most insane villain with a villain that is somehow meant to be a bigger threat?  I didn't quite get why this story was in this movie.  It seemed like we just needed 18 more minutes of movie so they gave us this fight with an evil magistrate or something.  Maybe I just don't know the intricacies of Chinese histories and they were talking about this important historical moment and I just treated it like technobabble.  That's a real option.  I'm not always the smartest guy in the room.

It's weird that I liked the movie as much as I did.  It broke one of my rules.  And I don't even forgive it for it.  Maybe it's because I had such low expectations and I'm tired and probably ignoring very real signs of depression, but I didn't care that the movie broke my sequel rule.  What's my sequel rule, you ask? I'm glad you did because all of this gave me a few more sentences to dump in here.  My sequel rule is that you can't undo the growth that the character got from the first movie.  Wong is one of those protagonist that probably isn't going to lose a fight unless that's the core idea of the movie.  (Like, in Part IV, he's so convinced that he's going to win and then gets trounced?  That's fine.)  Wong's flaw in the first movie is that he's unable to allow himself to be vulnerable around the woman that he loves and keeps calling her "13th Aunt."  But by the end of that movie, the two of them discuss the feelings that they have for each other and the 13th Aunt stuff was supposed to go away.

But that doesn't happen in Part II.  Instead, the character completely backpedals to where he was before.  There's that new apparently unstated tention that the two characters have with each other, only made worse by Foon's worsening crush on 13th Aunt.  I mean, the movie leans pretty heavily into the fact that Foon carries a torch for 13th Aunt and that it is driving Wong nuts.  I'm not sure if there's some kind of long con going on here where the hostility between Foon and Wong progresses, forcing them to become enemies.  I don't get that vibe based on how these movies are kind of laid out, but I suppose it is possible.  Heck, I'll even go as far as to say it would make an amazing progression for this franchine.  I'm pretty sure that there are six movies so we have time to make Foon and Wong hate each other.  I'm sure that Ted Lasso fans don't agree, but I wouldn't hate seeing Foon go the way of Nate the Great.  

One thing that did drive me nuts was the opening.  I will admit that the end of the movie tried to make amends for broken promises made by the opening sequence.  The movie starts off with the head of the White Lotus Clan showing off that he's borderline immortal.  Blades can't cut him.  He can't be burned.  He is bulletproof.  It's kind of insane.  Considering that the movie's protagonist is the greatest fighter ever, that's actually an insane conceit.  It's an unstoppable-force-immovable-object kind of thing.  And if the movie kept with that, that's kind of rad.  It seems like he taught his disciples also to become immortal, so the White Lotus Clan seems unbeatable?  Nope.  Like most movies that offer a too powerful bad guy, these guys are nerfed pretty quickly.  If anything, his disciples have no powers.  But the final fight with the big bad of the White Lotus Clan?  Sure enough, he seems unkillable.  He's not a good fighter, which I found interesting.  But if he's unkillable, I suppose has no reason to learn to fight.  So the apology was in the form that the movie technically only said that the main guy was invulnerable.  But then, like it had to, it made him killable.  NOW!  I WILL CONCEDE!  The way that the bad guy was killed is actually kind of thematically okay.  Having him impaled by his god who granted him powers is super cool.  

But then we got the whole "He was wearing a bulletproof vest."  There has to be a print of this movie where the movie full on embraced the supernatural.  These movies seem supernatural adjacent, so I don't know why it didn't go full-bore supernatural, especially considering that the bulletproof vest doesn't explain, like, 90% of the things that the bad guy could do.  Hey, early '90s wire-fu film?  Stop being cowards.

Maybe I shouldn't force this blog to go any longer.  I'm in the thick of a franchise.  From a perspective of "Is Once Upon the Time in China II watchable?"  I'll give that answer a resounding "Yes."  Heck, I'll go even as far as to say that it might be an improvement on the first film.  Do I hate that they back track the character?  Yeah.  Are the bad guys instantly nerfed?  Yeah.  But the action is good and the story is far more streamlined.  It was a good time.