Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)

 

Cast: David Bradley, Freddie Fletcher, Lynne Perrie, Colin Welland, Brian Glover, Bob Bowes, Bernard Atha. Screenplay: Barry Hines, Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, based on a novel by Hines. Cinematography: Chris Menges. Art direction: William McCrow. Film editing: Roy Watts. Music: John Cameron. 

I have to admit that I put off watching Kes because it sounded like the kind of movie to which I am averse, stories about children and animals that inevitably end in tears and uplift: tales of a boy and his dog like Old Yeller (Robert Stevenson, 1957) or a boy and his deer like The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946). Kes, a story about a boy and his bird, does end in tears, but the uplift is there only if you’re capable of reflecting on what a remarkable film Ken Loach has made by avoiding sentimentality. I’m certainly not the only one who sees the film as rooted in Dickens (setting aside his own sentimentality). It has the same hatred of bullying and bad education that beset his young protagonists, and there are characters who are drawn with the same broad strokes Dickens used. The headmaster of the school, Mr. Gryce (Bob Bowes), is given to long-winded preambles to his infliction of pain, rambling on about how he knows that the thwacks he’s about to give to the palms of the miscreants won’t do anything to change their ways, but nevertheless taking an obvious delight in the act. And Dickens might well have created Mr. Sugden (Brian Glover), the school’s physical education master who delights in tormenting the boys during their football lesson while pretending to be a great soccer star. I can only reflect how disappointed Dickens, who died in 1870, would have been to see how little things had changed in the life and education of the working poor in the century after his death. 

As Tears Go By (Wong Kar-Wai, 1988)

Cast: Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, Jacky Cheung, Alex Man, Ronald Wong, Ang Wong, Huang Pa-Ching. Screenplay: Jeffrey Lau, Wong Kar-Wai. Cinematography: Andrew Lau. Production design: William Chang. Film editing: Cheong Bei-Dak, Kai Kit-Wai. Music: Danny Chung, Teddy Robin Kwan.

It takes mastery of a genre to transcend that genre, as Martin Scorsese did with the gangster film and Douglas Sirk did with the romantic melodrama, and Wong Kar-Wai does just that with his first feature, As Tears Go By. Scorsese looms larger here, in that his Mean Streets (1973) was an acknowledged influence on Wong’s film, but I can’t help seeing touches of Sirk in the portrayal of the romance between Wah (Andy Lau) and Ngor (Maggie Cheung). Yet Wong is very much his own man, and the film is a smashing (in all senses of the word) success full of fire and energy, yet able to show the ameliorating effect that Ngor has on the initially standoffish Wah, preoccupied with making his way in the underworld and defending his friend Fly (Jacky Cheung). The use on the soundtrack of Sandy Lam’s version of Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock’s Oscar-winning “Take My Breath Away” evokes its source, Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986), but it also accentuates the pop-culture-saturated milieu in which the action and the romance take place. 

Thor: Love and Thunder (Taika Waititi, 2022)

 Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi, Russell Crowe, Jaimie Alexander, Idris Elba, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Sean Gunn, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper. Screenplay: Taika Waititi, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. Cinematography: Barry Baz Idoine. Production design: Nigel Phelps. Film editing: Peter S. Elliott Tim Roche, Matthew Schmidt, Jennifer Vecchiarello. Music: Michael Giacchino, Nami Melumad. 

Critics were kind of meh about Thor: Love and Thunder, but I found it one of the less wearying of the entries in the superhero comic book sweepstakes. Aside from the unnecessary episode with the Guardians of the Galaxy, it zips along through the narrative challenges and nicely balances the love with the thunder. Chris Hemsworth is one of the most engaging actors stuck in the action genre, especially when Taika Waititi is giving him opportunities to play the goof. Christian Bale turns Gorr into one of the more complex Marvel villains, and it’s good to see Russell Crowe loosen up and have a ball playing Zeus. I have mixed feelings about Natalie Portman’s performance as Jane: She does a good job playing the diminutive foil to Thor, but I never felt the necessary chemistry in their love affair. Thor seems more enamored of Mjolnir than he does of Jane. I don’t know why Waititi needed to reprise the gag of the actors – Luke Hemsworth, Matt Damon, and Sam Neill – playing Thor, Loki, and Odin, this time adding Melissa McCarthy as Hela; it only overloads an already bloated excursion into Thor World. 

Pushing Hands (Ang Lee, 1991)

 

Cast: Sihung Lung, Lai Wang, Bozhao Wang, Deb Snyder, Fanny De Luz, Haan Lee, Hung-Chang Wang. Screenplay: Ang Lee, James Schamus. Cinematography: Jong Lin. Production Design: Scott Bradley. Film editing: Ang Lee, Tim Squyres. Music: Tai-An Hsu, Xiaosong Qu. 

I admire Ang Lee’s Pushing Hands because it takes its story up to a point where a more conventional film would have found an easy resolution to the plot, and then it doesn’t go there. Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung), an elderly tai chi instructor, has come to America to live with Alex (Bozhao Wang) and Martha (Deb Snyder), his son and daughter-in-law. Mr. Chu speaks no English and Martha speaks no Mandarin, and when they’re left alone together during the day, tensions flare. She’s trying to write a novel – her first has just been published – but his presence in the small suburban house proves a constant distraction, a irritant that causes tension not only between Martha and her father-in-law, but also between husband and wife. Mr. Chu teaches tai chi at a local community center, where he makes friends with Mrs. Chen (Lai Wang), an elderly widow who likewise lives with her Americanized children. When things reach an explosive point at home, Alex decides to try making a match between his father and Mrs. Chen. Things seem to be going well in that direction: Both families go on a picnic together, and Mr. Chu uses some of his tai chi training to help Mrs. Chen with a pain she has in her shoulder. But just as we can see the conventional happy ending on the horizon, Mrs. Chen rebels against the matchmaking, expressing her own bitterness at being manipulated by others. This avoidance of sentimentality is what strengthens Lee’s film, his first. It’s an enormously likable movie, with a couple of flaws: Martha is written and played with more shrill edginess than is entirely credible. Couldn’t an obviously intelligent woman married to a man who speaks Mandarin and whose small son is learning it have managed to learn at least a few phrases to communicate with her father-in-law? And Alex’s destructive rage – he destroys the kitchen when the tensions get too high – feels a bit over the top.