azumi Tagged Articles at Cinematical

What do celebrities really know about movies? Samuel L. Jackson, for one, demonstrates a good knowledge of recent Asian cinema with his selection of "favorite 10 New Classic Asian Films" from the past 25 years for Entertainment Weekly. The best part? He picks the type of popcorn action flicks that got me interested in Asian films in the first place.

A couple of his selections are easy to understand: John Woo's Hard Boiled and Ringo Lam's City on Fire are definite guns 'n' gangsters classics of late 80s / early 90s Hong Kong cinema. (Quentin Tarantino blatantly stole borrowed from the latter for Reservoir Dogs.) Jackson also includes the great Infernal Affairs trilogy, directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, a high water mark from 2002 / 2003 and later remade into the Academy Award-winning The Departed.

His Korean picks are Park Chan-Wook's diabolical, masterful Oldboy and the visually splendid, yet somewhat shallow Duelist, from 2005. Cut from the same cloth, he also endorsed Japanese swordplay dazzler Azumi by director Ryuhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train), and demonstrated his fondness for strong directors by selecting two films by Takashi Miike, the well-known, chilling horror flick Audition and the much less known Yakuza pic Family, which I confess I haven't seen.

Well, I ventured out of my art house hole last week to catch a Friday morning showing of Snakes on a Plane (a whopping 3555 screens) and I loved it. I finally got the summer movie I wanted. I was ready to hate it, I admit, mostly because I was peeved about New Line not screening it for the press, and all the B.S. they churned out to explain themselves ("it's not a movie for the critics," "everyone's going to get to see it together," etc.). In the end, they wound up with a fairly paltry $15 million gross, mainly because the core audience -- you good folks, the savvy Internet users -- got wind of the film not screening for the press and assumed it was a loser. With a slate of good reviews, mine included, I guarantee business would have been a bit brisker.

While we're at it, let me duck back down into my dank, darkened art house realm and talk about guilty pleasures. Let's start at the bottom, with a gay romantic comedy, The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green, currently hanging on by its manicured nails on one lousy screen with barely enough gross to pay back the caterers. Based on a comic strip, the film is about a wishy-washy hero who can't decide what he wants; when his boyfriend asks him to move in, he panics and breaks up. Most reviewers complained about this guy (played by Daniel Letterle), but the performance was just sunny and flighty enough to score a win. Not to mention that the entire movie has a sort of goofball unreality to it; it sets up the rules that anything is allowed to happen, then it plays by those rules and plays hard.

No wonder everyone's got Snakes on a Plane fever. Not only does it have the best title in years, but also it has a certain "B" movie spirit that, lately, has been all but lost.

A simple look at the movies playing on 400 screens or less this week confirms it. Sure, we've got movies based on comic books and cheesy sequels (or both at the same time). We've got chases and escapes and adventures and comedies, but they're all so serious.

Originally "B" movies were so called because they ran in front of the "A" feature. "B" movies were generally short and cheap and wallowed in all the lesser genres that never win any Oscars. No one noticed at the time, but later, it became apparent that certain filmmakers, like Edgar G. Ulmer or Andre de Toth, had a real touch within these confines. Many of these features burst with a certain kind of furious energy, mainly because the studios didn't care. As long as these cheapies didn't go over budget and came in on time, they could tell the dramatic story of a violent hoodlum or the story of a giant gorilla wrestling on the Golden Gate Bridge with a blob monster from outer space.