Every month, Establishing Shot brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked one film that they saw this month that they couldn’t wait to share with others. Keep reading to find out what discoveries these cinephiles have made, as well as some of the old friends they’ve revisited.
Jesse Pasternack, contributor | A Better Tomorrow (1986)
There’s a lot I like about A Better Tomorrow, which was director John Woo’s breakout crime movie. There’s the great costume design, exciting and perfectly choreographed action sequences, as well as the surprisingly moving story. But what I love about it is how all those elements intersect with my favorite thing about this iconic film: Chow Yun-fat’s performances as Mark Lee.
A Better Tomorrow follows a powerful gangster named Sung Tse-Ho (Ti Lung), who oversees a cunning counterfeiting operation with the help of his best friend Lee (Chow). After getting arrested, Sung decides to leave his criminal life behind, in part to get along better with his ailing father (Tien Feng) and police academy cadet brother Kit (Leslie Cheung). But the Triad which Sung worked for won’t let him go without a fight.
There are few movie characters who have as good of a look as Lee. Everything about his signature outfit — Alain Delon sunglasses, long black coat, even his simple yet elegant pitch-black tie — makes him seem like the coolest person in the room. Costume designer Gam-Jan Yeung’s work creating Lee’s costume would prove to be so popular that large numbers of young people in Hong Kong would start wearing his coat (often called a “duster”) and sunglasses.
A Better Tomorrow features Woo’s first iconic gun-driven action sequence. The editing by Kam Ma and David Wu is excellent as it expertly mixes quick cuts with Woo’s soon-to-be-trademarked use of slow motion. Chow is the focal point of it as his character is the one who ambushes a restaurant where a rival Triad is having dinner. His physicality perfectly expresses the passion he feels as he takes out his enemies as well as the agony of being wounded. It also foreshadowed how Chow would use the nonverbal side of his acting to ascend to action stardom in later Woo films such as The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992).
But Chow’s performance is about more than expertly hitting his marks in action sequences. In addition to making Lee the coolest character in the room and the best one with a gun, he gives him a sensitive side which makes him interesting. He has a genuine friendship with Sun and wants him to succeed. His loyalty to him and the lengths to which he will go to help him defeat the Triad gives a heartwarming layer to Lee. He becomes so likeable that your heart may break a little by the time he meets his ultimate fate.
A Better Tomorrow will always be remembered as the film which helped elevate Woo to the pantheon of great crime/action directors. But it will also be remembered as the film which made Chow a star. It is a performance that is so good it will make you want to watch every other film in which he appeared.
Noni Ford, contributor | The Andromeda Strain (1971)
After finishing Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park in under 48 hours, I got the bug to watch some of the film adaptations of his work. My dad happens to be a science-fiction fan and immediately suggested we watch The Andromeda Strain, a film he rather vividly remembered watching. I went in with minimal information of the film’s premise and was intrigued by the mysterious deaths of everyone but two individuals in the remote town of Piedmont, New Mexico. The deaths of the townspeople after the crash landing of a satellite and the lost communication with the crew sent out to investigate and retrieve its contents prompts a swift response to recruit a small team of scientists to identify the cause of this anomaly. As the scientists discover more and more concerning information on their study of this alien, organic material named the Andromeda Strain, they become increasingly aware of the dangers that it poses to the wider world. Amping up the anxiety put upon them during the course of their study is the fact that any containment that is registered by the computerized system that is embedded in this research lab will trigger a full self-destruction of the lab and everyone in it. The only person who can disarm this alarm is Dr. Mark Hall, who has been entrusted with this responsibility due to being the only person in the party who is a single man with no kids or wife.
The film originally premiered in 1971 and so it has of course somewhat of a dated feeling to it, and some story elements that greatly reduce the importance and work of women in the scientific community, but in terms of just the science, it was as gripping as ever. Crichton’s background in medicine no doubt helped lend more realism to the scientific inquiry and processes in the film. Along with this, the misunderstanding between those in and outside of the scientific community, and another subplot involving the amount of information the project lead Dr. Stone knows about the satellite gives the story more power. Science is indeed a political field because of its ability to change the world and I think including different interferences within this already-heightened study lent realism to the proceedings. There’s not much action or special effects in the movie, and it is quite wordy which made me enjoy it more. Amongst the plethora of new releases every year of science-fiction films, there seems to be ever-adapting effects and CGI with a lack of story complexity, so I appreciated seeing the opposite in this classic.
Chris Forrester, contributor | The Seventh Continent (1989)
As one does when the world is headed in the general direction it’s been headed for some time now, and accelerating faster and faster as if there’s a deadline to meet for societal collapse, I’ve turned to increasingly dreary dramas and sociopolitical critiques. The most affecting of my discoveries in this general realm this month was Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent, a searingly bleak Jeanne Dielman-for-nihilists about the catharsis (or lack thereof) of self-destruction in the face of capitalist work culture’s constrictive, numbing monotony. What Akerman did for the solitary existence of a single mother, Haneke does for the family unit, applying a similar approach of rigorously formalist, patient observation of the routines of people obviously living life on repeat. Here, though, those routines offer preface to a much darker back half, and in condensing what was for Akerman several hours of brilliantly sustained tedium into only 40 or 50 minutes, Haneke employs a kind of formal ellipses in his editing that places lengthy cuts to black between passages of the characters’ days. They feel like deep sighs; whether that offers reprieve or sinks deeper into the film’s desaturated despair depends on the viewer.
The title refers to Australia, where the characters dream of starting a new life, and which is shown a handful of times in a single, repeated long shot of waves crashing on a bright, sandy beach. But there’s a fabricated, dreamy quality to the image (it recalls the chapter title cards of Lars von Trier’s later, similarly depressive Breaking the Waves) that belies the warmth of the fantasy, and even in the midst of its intrusion on the film’s otherwise drab aesthetic we’re reminded that it’s not an escape these people are likely to ever see. The escape they do mount, if we can call it one, comprises the third of three portions of the story (the first two are day-in-the-life glimpses at the monotony that begets such action) and remains one of the more brutal, unforgettable sequences Haneke ever put to film, with images so deeply sad one is liable to feel leached of all hope by the roll of the credits. But it is fantastically affecting, and moreover it articulates with Haneke’s usual sharpness something quite singular about our capitalist existence, the liberating destruction of self and capital it might take to escape it, and the brief moments of joy we’d be throwing away in the process.
Michaela Owens, Editor | Topaz (1969)
Despite being an Alfred Hitchcock devotee for most of my life, there are still a few of the filmmaker’s movies I’ve left untouched, fully aware that once I watch all of them, there will be no more “new” Hitchcocks to discover. However, I decided this month was finally the time to check out Topaz, one of Hitch’s most derided works from later in his career — an unfair assessment, I realized, just like the one people have placed on his last film, The Family Plot, which I’d argue is actually a great watch with a genuinely stellar final shot that beautifully closes a towering filmography.
A Cold War thriller about government espionage adapted from a novel by Leon Uris, Topaz doesn’t open very promisingly with credits rolling over stock footage of a ceremony outside Lenin’s tomb in Russia, but we soon settle into classic Hitchcock mode as a Soviet official and his family are calmly tailed by a trio of assassins while out shopping, leading to them being whisked away by CIA agent John Forsythe and taken to Washington. From there, the story slowly shifts to French agent Frederick Stafford as he works to uncover information about Cuban missile bases and, later, sniff out a mole within the French government who has been giving secrets to the Russians.
Although Topaz would benefit from a shorter runtime and a tighter pace, I still found myself completely forgetting the workout I was trying to do, instead stopping every few minutes and getting sucked into the film as I gasped at gorgeous shots, smiled at signature Hitchcock gags like an important paper being used as a hamburger wrapper, and shook my head at the somewhat soapy antics of Stafford and his wife. The film’s most famous shot has long been a character’s dress pooling around her like blood as she falls to the ground after being killed, but Jack Hildyard’s cinematography combined with Hitch’s sharp direction created so many other indelible moments, such as Stafford enlisting an undercover agent’s help in a Harlem florist shop (truly one of my favorite sequences thanks to Roscoe Lee Browne’s incredibly charismatic performance as the unflappable agent), the soft glow and “stars-in-their-eyes” lighting present in almost every character close-up, and a steamy encounter between Stafford and his mistress, a Cuban resistance leader, in her moonlit bedroom, just to name a few.
Topaz doesn’t reach the heights of Rear Window or North by Northwest — it’s much more sobering with its interest in looking at the human cost of spy games rather than the glamour of them — but it is absolutely still worthy of reconsideration. (I didn’t even mention the great score by Maurice Jarre!) Think of it as the closest you’ll ever get to Hitchcock adapting a really good John le Carré book.