Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Today’s a pretty groovy day at the movies if you play your cards right. Barry Levinson’s BANDITS seems to have its fans, people who think it’s a quirky, charming comedy. SPRIGGAN opens in limited release for anime fans, and the new VAMPIRE HUNTER D film is also open. CORKY ROMANO is there for people who haven’t already been bludgeoned beyond caring by the ceaseless ad campaign for the bloody thing. MY FIRST MISTER is opening if you need a nap. And then there’s IRON MONKEY and MULHOLLAND DRIVE.
I saw these films under very different circumstances. IRON MONKEY was a no-brainer. Miramax called and asked if I wanted to go to a screening of the film. Duh. I’ve been in a kung-fu mood lately, and even if I wasn’t, I’ve heard enough about this one that I would make the time to see it. I went to the smaller of the screening rooms at Raleigh Studios with John Robie and Dr. Michael Hfuhruhrr, and when we sat down, I was still under the mistaken impression that I’d seen this film already. I remember one night when Knowles was in town, and he had a stack of DVDs with him that we showed here at the Labs. STORMRIDERS, A MAN CALLED HERO, and IRON MONKEY. I saw the first two with everyone, and I realized about ten minutes into the film that I must have left before IRON MONKEY came on that night. In a way, I’m glad. The experience I had with the film was great, in a theater, with excellent subtitles and an impressively remixed soundtrack. According to the good Doctor, the film was essentially unchanged. He’s an IRON MONKEY addict who’s watched his own DVD copy of it several dozen times. He loved the new presentation and said it felt like a new film for him, as well, just because of how well-treated it had been.
Yeun Wo Ping’s film is a great adventure story, a fable on par with Errol Flynn’s ROBIN HOOD. There’s a great purity to how IRON MONKEY is told. The Iron Monkey is the mysterious figure of justice who fights the corrupt governor (James Wong) of the province in order to better the lives of the people who live there. By day, he is Dr. Yang (Yu Rong-Guang), who charges the rich steep fees for his services so he can care for the poor for free. He’s assisted by the beautiful Miss Orchid (Jean Wang), who is revealed to be just as graceful and formidable in battle as Yang himself. Her backstory is etched in a few nimble flashback scenes, and the bond between her and Yang is deeper than a romantic one. They are bound by the rightness of what they’re doing. There’s a moment early in the film where a gust of wind scatters some papers around the large main room of the clinic, and they both become lighter than air, spinning around the room, collecting the papers in an aerial dance scene that is achingly lovely. Here’s where a film like IRON MONKEY takes something as potentially overused and tired as wire-fu and makes it vital and interesting. When these characters fly during battle, we accept it as possible because we have seen them also fly during a moment of joy. It feels right in this world, natural.
There’s a rich supporting cast of characters here. Chief Fox (Yuen Shun-Yi) is a favorite of mine. He’s the main enforcer for the Governor, charged with catching and stopping The Iron Monkey. Chief Fox knows more than he lets on early in the film, though, and his sympathies may not be what we are led to believe. It’s a genuinely funny comic performance. In fact, the comedy is one of the things that makes IRON MONKEY special. It’s not labored or forced. There’s a gentle, sweet quality to the sense of humor here. This is a film that should play to the same age range that Robert Rodriguez’s excellent SPY KIDS does. Part of that is because of the father-son relationship between Wong Kei-Ying (Donnie Yen) and Wong Fei-Hung (Tsang Sze-Man). Any fan of martial arts cinema knows who Wong Fei-Hung is. Both Jackie Chan (DRUNKEN MASTER I and II) and Jet Li (ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA) have played the folk hero, but as an adult. Here we’re treated to a story of the young Wong Fei-Hung, learning the ideas of heroism from the way The Iron Monkey and his own father work together to stop the Governor and, later, The Royal Minister (Yen Yee-Kwan), a great badass villain character with all sorts of nasty tricks at his disposal. The story and the characters all scream Tsui Hark, and his hand as writer and producer of the film are quite obvious. What makes this special, though, is the work of director/choreographer Yuen Wo Ping, who is essentially a Bob Fosse or a Stanley Donen here, a director whose chief job is to convey the grace and the motion and the impact of these fights.
Trying to explain IRON MONKEY to someone who hasn’t seen it would be difficult, though. Like any pure cinema, it must be seen to be understood. All of it. In context. The trailers for this new release left me cold. I think some of them are actually enough to keep me from seeing the movie. But when you see the way it all plays out, it’s a delight, a film that leaves you feeling energized and well-pleased. Each of the main characters has moments where they shine, specific action scenes that are memorable and amazing. Part of what makes the film work is its constant drive to up the stakes, up the action. The climax, staged on top of flaming poles, is a winner, improbable and insane, delirious in the way it’s staged. If you have even a passing interest in this genre, get your ass to a theater this weekend and support a release done right, a real credit to Miramax. They haven’t shown this much respect to an eastern import since PRINCESS MONONOKE, and they certainly picked a worthy title for the treatment.
How I saw MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a little more complicated. We frequently use cover stories for our sources here on the site, obfuscating just a bit in order to keep peoples jobs safe. But I’m going to explain exactly how MULHOLLAND arrived at the Labs because it somehow feels tied into the experience of actually watching David Lynch’s haunting new vision.
It started with me bitching here on the site about not having seen the film yet. I am not on Universal’s press list, so I knew I wouldn’t be invited to any screenings for the movie. C’est la vie. I was just impatient for the actual release so I could lay eyes on it for myself. One morning, I got an e-mail from someone asking if I’d like to see the film, and asking for an address if I was interested. I sent them back my mailing address. The next morning, Henchman Mongo came back to where I was working with two videotapes held together with rubberbands. Both had been painted on with White-Out. Both said MULHOLLAND DRIVE on the spine. There was something vaguely creepy about the way they looked, all marked up like that. Mongo said he found them on the front windowsill of the Labs. I was immediately psyched to see the film, and popped the first of the two tapes in the VCR.
The Studio Canal Plus logo came up first, then a colorful sort of montage of people dancing. It was silent, making their crazed jitterbugging look strange, exaggerated. I kept watching as the credits began. A car winds its way up Mulholland Drive at night, all by itself. Still silence. A car full of kids races by the camera, somewhere else, a quick cut, still silent. I got a sinking feeling as the face of the gorgeous Laura Harring appeared onscreen and she spoke. There was no sound. No dialogue. I recognized her from a show I used to do closed-captioning for, a miserable Aaron Spelling soap opera called SUNSET BEACH, where she played Paula. I fast-forwarded just far enough to see a car accident that also played out in silence, and then I shut the tape off. The copy was beautiful. No time code. Letterboxed. And no sound.
I wrote back to my mysterious benefactor, who shot me a quick replay saying I’d have a new copy by Sunday. Sure enough, Sunday morning rolled around, and I rolled out of bed with my girl to go get some breakfast. On our way out of the apartment, we found another pair of tapes on the front windowsill. These were in cases, taped together instead of rubberbanded this time, and these weren’t just marked up with White-Out... they were attacked, ravaged. It was like someone had bled White-Out into the two cases. Even amidst the chaos, there was a creepy design to it all, though. I took these tapes in and checked the first one. The same opening images played out, the same quality of transfer, and this time, there was sound. I turned the tape off and set them aside for later that night.
The point is, all of that feels like the sort of thing that would happen to someone in the film MULHOLLAND DRIVE. I can just picture The Cowboy on the front steps of my building in the wee hours of the morning, carefully placing the tape for me to find when I woke up. I can imagine the order being issued by Michael Anderson, the famous backwards-dancing midget from TWIN PEAKS, who shows up in an equally oblique role this time out. I can picture the White-Out being applied by the man who lives out behind the Winkie’s on Sunset. And all of this creeps me out.
David Lynch proved with THE STRAIGHT STORY that he is still perfectly capable of telling a conventional narrative story, and doing so with grace and heart. He is not a man who is incapable of communicating with his art. When he makes a film like MULHOLLAND or LOST HIGHWAY or FIRE WALK WITH ME or ERASERHEAD, he is still trying to convey certain ideas and story points. He’s just doing it in a way that is uniquely his. He has a world view as skewed and grotesque as that of Dali or Picasso, and there is a purity to his art that has to be admired. His frequent collaborators Angelo Badalamenti (score) and Mary Sweeny (editor) and Peter Deming (director of photography) are all present on this one, and by this point, they have become astonishingly efficient at conveying the precise mood and idea that David is trying to accomplish. Despite the rather unconventional origin of this film, a failed ABC pilot for a series that has been reworked with additional footage shot later, it feels like a feature. Aside from a few distracting well-known actors in minor roles who vanish, obviously destined to show up later in the run of the series, there’s no indication that this is anything but a one-shot slice of surreal nightmare.
Naomi Watts is the star of the film, and in large part, how you feel about her work in the movie is going to determine how you feel about the movie as a whole. I think she’s great in it, particularly in an audition scene that manages to generate uncommon erotic heat. Lynch has an eye for the honeys, no doubt about it. As with TWIN PEAKS, he has filled MULHOLLAND with lush, unusual beauties, and in this film, it is the relationship between Canadian farmgirl Betty (Watts) and mysterious amnesiac “Rita” (Harring) that really fuels the story. Justin Theroux does some very interesting work as Adam Kesher, a hot young Hollywood director who is forced to cast a particular girl as the lead in his film. When he tries to refuse, ruin falls on him like a plague, and he is offered one chance to change his mind and get his life back. His story wraps around the story of Betty and Rita and a handbag full of money and a blue key and a strange club called Silencio, but there’s no mistaking which story is most important.
Betty and Rita start to unravel the mystery of who Rita is and why she was in a car on Mulholland Drive that was in an accident, and the more they dig at the story, the less traditional sense the film makes. Finally, there comes a moment that is like a psychotic break, a complete narrative flip that turns each role inside out. Suddenly, actors are playing different roles. We’re following someone who should be dead. And it all somehow relates to the opening images of dancing, and someone putting their head down on a pillow. I found the movie intensely frightening for reasons I’m not sure I can articulate. Lynch seems to be able to recreate the way nightmares really feel, the strange lack of discernible logic that somehow still makes emotional sense. And this film is nothing if it is not emotional. At the club Silencio, a woman performs a Spanish language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” that is just devastating. It’s not played for laughs at all, or just for the sake of being weird. It’s an emotional ephiphany for these characters, and I have my theory why. I won’t tell you what it is because I don’t want to rob you of the sense of build-up and pay-off that I enjoyed so much in the movie.
In many ways, Lynch seems to have made a film about that desire to be a movie star that draws people to LA every day and then destroys so many of them. It’s a cautionary tale about the price of fame, the loss of identity that comes with being famous and desired, and the compromises that enable that sort of fame. But you could watch this without once thinking of any of that, and you’d still see something fascinating and hypnotic. Such is the power of Lynch’s art. I do not recommend this film for all audiences, but if you have any sort of interest in Lynch and his work, this is a must-see, another dark poem by one of cinema’s most eclectic voices.
"Moriarty" out.
