The Hand (Wong Kar-Wai, 2004)

 Cast: Chang Chen, Gong Li, Feng Tien, Chun-Luk Chan, Jian-Jun Zhou. Screenplay: Wong Kar-Wai. Cinematography: Christopher Doyle. Production design: William Chang. Film editing: William Chang. Music: Peer Raben. 

Wong Kar-Wai’s The Hand was made as a segment for an anthology film called Eros, which also included films by Michelangelo Antonioni and Steven Soderbergh, neither of which were critically well-received. But The Hand has since been released by itself in an extended version, although it remains somewhere between the length of a feature and that of a short subject, just under an hour, so it’s rarely shown except to film classes or at festivals – or in my case, on the Criterion Channel. It should be better known, because it’s an exquisite sample of the director’s art, a languorously beautiful exploration of a relationship. It’s at the other end of the spectrum of Wong’s work from his raucous excursions into the world of Hong Kong youth, As Tears Go By (1988) and Chungking Express (1994). It has more in common with what some think is his masterpiece, In the Mood for Love (2000), the intensely poignant study of a doomed love affair. There is hardly even an affair in The Hand, the story of a courtesan and the tailor who makes her dresses. When Zhang (Chang Chen) first meets Miss Hua (Gong Li), she is at the peak of her success at attracting wealthy clients. Amused by the diffident young tailor’s apprentice, she imperiously orders him to take off his trousers and gives him a hand job. Over the years, her fortunes decline, but Zhang continues to make her dresses and eventually pays the rent for her room in a fleabag hotel. The film is framed by their last meeting, in which it’s clear that Miss Hua is dying, possibly from an STD. We see part of this final encounter at the start of the film, in which the camera focuses only on Zhang’s face – we don’t see her until the film flashes back to that first meeting and begins its story of their intertwined careers. Beautifully shot by Wong’s frequent collaborator, Christopher Doyle, the film also benefits from a score by Peer Raben, who had a similarly productive collaboration with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

Dracula 2000 (Patrick Lussier, 2000)

 

Cast: Gerard Butler, Christopher Plummer, Jonny Lee Miller, Justine Waddell, Vitamin C, Jennifer Esposito, Omar Epps, Sean Patrick Thomas, Jeri Ryan, Danny Masterson, Lochlyn Munro, Tig Fong, Tony Munch, Shane West, Nathan Fillion. Screenplay:  Joel Soisson, Patrick Lussier. Cinematography: Peter Pau. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Peter Devaney Flanagan, Patrick Lussier. Music: Marco Beltrami. 

The cross as vampire repellent has become so much a part of the Dracula legend that Roman Polanski saw fit to spoof it in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). Threatened with a crucifix, a vampire reveals himself as Jewish: “Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire.” But Patrick Lussier doubles down on the Christian mythology in Dracula 2000: His vampire isn’t threatened by the cross so much as he hates it. It turns out that Dracula is really the biblical Judas Iscariot, who when the rope broke as he tried to commit suicide after betraying Christ, was condemned to walk the Earth for eternity as one of the undead. Nobody else knows this except Abraham Van Helsing, who is still alive 103 years after Bram Stoker fictionalized his exploits. (In the film, Van Helsing dismisses Stoker as just a drunken Irish writer.) In 2000 he is posing as Van Helsing’s grandson, the owner of Carfax Antiquities in London. It seems he kept himself alive after capturing Dracula and imprisoning him in a silver casket filled with leeches that feast on Judas/Dracula’s blood. Somehow Van Helsing harvests the occasional leech from the casket and injects himself with that blood to keep himself alive. Unfortunately, this twist in the Dracula legend – borrowed from the legend of the Wandering Jew – is about all Dracula 2000 has going for it. Gerard Butler is not a particularly compelling Dracula, and Christopher Plummer doesn’t invest much of his considerable talent in playing Van Helsing. Jonny Lee Miller, as Van Helsing’s assistant, seems more confused than dashing in the romantic lead, and strikes no sparks with Justine Waddell, who turns out to be Van Helsing’s estranged daughter. It was a critical and commercial flop, though there are those who regard it as underrated, so it may some day re-emerge, like Dracula himself, as a cult film.

Shining Victory (Irving Rapper, 1941)

 

Cast: James Stephenson, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Donald Crisp, Barbara O’Neil, Montagu Love, Sig Ruman, G.P. Huntley, Leonard Mudie, Doris Lloyd. Screenplay: Howard Koch, Anne Froelich, based on a play by A.J. Cronin. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Carl Jules Weyl. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Max Steiner. 

Shining Victory – not to be confused with Dark Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939) or Bright Victory (Mark Robson, 1951) – is a solid Warner Bros. product about a research physician (James Stephenson) who gets exiled to a private sanitarium in Scotland after accusing a senior researcher of stealing his work for an article about the treatment of dementia praecox, which we now call schizophrenia. Embittered by the experience, he snarls at and offends his colleagues until he’s assigned an assistant for his work: a lovely young woman (Geraldine Fitzgerald) just graduated from medical school. “A woman!” he sneers, and his scorn is compounded when he learns that she wants to be a medical missionary in China after her term as his assistant is over. Eventually, she wins him over – largely, it seems, by cleaning up his messy lab – and they fall in love. But things are not to be…. Based on a play called Jupiter Laughs by A.J. Cronin, the movie is more interested in getting the two doctors together than in his research, although his somewhat dodgy workaround of medical ethics is what produces the film’s crisis. Bette Davis, who co-starred with Fitzgerald in the aforementioned Dark Victory, has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo as a nurse.

Handsome Devil (John Butler, 2016)

Cast: Fionn O’Shea, Nicholas Galitzine, Andrew Scott, Moe Dunford, Ruairi O’Connor, Michael McElhatton. Screenplay: John Butler. Cinematography: Cathal Watters. Production design: Ferdia Murphy. Film editing: John O’Connor. Music: John McPhillips. 

I’ve got nothing against happy endings, except when they turn a promising movie into an ordinary one. Something like that happens in John Butler’s Handsome Devil, which starts off well, with a deft lightness of tone and some extremely likable performances, especially from Andrew Scott as Mr. Sherry, the Irish high school’s new English teacher, and Fionn O’Shea as Ned, the misfit student who hates rugby in a school devoted to it. Naturally, Ned is immediately suspected of being gay, especially by the blustering bear of a rugby coach, Mr. O'Keefe (Moe Dunford). But then Ned is assigned a new roommate, Conor Masters (Nicholas Galitzine), a rugby star who was expelled from his old school for fighting. After a bad start, Ned and Conor find that they’re more compatible than they expected. There’s a lot of bright, sharp dialogue as the film progresses, but soon you see the turn into familiar territory, as the only way Butler seems to see for his film to end is by turning to conventions out of sports movies, romcoms, and the troubled adolescent subgenre. At the end, everyone involved learns a lesson about prejudice and tolerance, and what was a thoroughly enjoyable movie becomes a vehicle for a message. I didn’t feel bad at the end of Handsome Devil, but I did feel cheated. 

 

Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2022)

 

Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thompson, Richard Roxburgh, Kelvin Harrison Jr., David Wenham, Kodi Smit-McPhee. Screenplay: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner. Cinematography: Mandy Walker. Production design: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy. Film editing: Jonathan Redmond, Matt Villa. Music: Elliott Wheeler. 

In 2001, the two movie critics at the San Jose Mercury News both put Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! on their end-of-the-year lists: One put it on his list of the year’s best movies, the other on his list of the worst. Something like that may happen to Luhrmann’s Elvis, which similarly divided critics into love it or hate it cohorts. But how can anyone object to the movie as “loud” or “garish,” as some do? This is Elvis Presley, for god’s sake, not the most subtle or cerebral of celebrities. And no one expected subtlety from Luhrmann, one of our most operatic directors. Elvis has its stylistic roots in Luhrmann’s love of opera, and it has to be described as Wagnerian, with Elvis as a kind of Siegfried, a naïf and demigod, and ultimately a tragic figure, undone by his trust in others. The villain of the piece, though he’s determined in his voiceover narration not to bear that label, is Col. Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks in a performance almost smothered in prosthetics. It’s this old carny who turns Elvis’s life into a perpetual carnival. The real triumph in the film is Austin Butler’s: He manages to keep Elvis real despite all the gaudy trappings with which the self-commissioned colonel (not to mention Luhrmann) is determined to adorn him. This is not my idea of a great film, being one in which substance is fitfully allowed to co-exist with the style that threatens to overwhelm it, but it’s pretty damn good entertainment.  

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.