While Hong Kong filmmakers have a gift for action, they tend to overdo it in the melodrama department, at least when it comes to watching their films through Western eyes. Perhaps the worst Hong Kong film I've seen to date is Jackie Chan's Heart of Dragon (1985), which features Jackie caring for his developmentally disabled brother (played by goofball Sammo Hung, who co-directed). All the heartstring tugging made me want to claw my eyes out. Or take another look at a masterpiece like John Woo's The Killer and you'll see an operatic hugeness to the emotional scenes -- especially between men -- that an American would never even dream, much less dare. These folks have an extremely high tolerance level for sentimentality; it takes an enormous amount before their sap detectors begin going off.

The same goes for action director and one-man HK film industry Johnny To (also known as "Johnnie To Kei-Fung"). To was a fairly minor director during Hong Kong's exciting late 1980s/early 1990s heyday, when imported films began to tantalize American viewers bored with big explosions and Vietnam rescue flicks. His biggest credit was as co-director on the exceptional supernatural superhero movie The Heroic Trio (1992). But after the 1997 handover to China, when most other filmmakers withdrew or abandoned ship, To flourished and eventually became the country's most successful and exciting filmmaker. His action hits included: The Mission (1999), Running Out of Time (1999), Help!!! (2000), Fulltime Killer (2001), Running Out of Time 2 (2003), Running on Karma (2003), Breaking News (2004), Election (2005), Triad Election (2006) and Exiled (2007), along with some 40 other films.

Some filmmakers, like Chaplin and Kubrick, determined that they should release a film only every few years, to make it more like an event to be anticipated. Other filmmakers work faster and harder in an effort not to be forgotten, like Spike Lee or Woody Allen. It's difficult to determine which method is more effective, but it seems like if a filmmaker turns in over fifty films of mostly high quality, their work is eventually taken for granted. Everyone loves Hitchcock now, but in 1976 when his final film opened, he must have seemed like a relic compared to Rocky and Taxi Driver. That's how I imagine Claude Chabrol today. Now 77, he releases a movie a year, more or less, and passed the fifty-film marker some time ago. Unlike his French New Wave colleagues, he didn't make a single masterpiece in his youth, and so has nothing to live up to. Rather, he's consistently reliable and skillful, and it's difficult to judge any one of his films up against another. Look through reviews of his most recent films, and for each one you'll find at least one person claiming it's his best film in years.

And so comes A Girl Cut in Two, which recently screened at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. I loved it. It's another superbly-made, highly enjoyable Chabrol film, but you probably won't see it on any top ten lists, nor will Chabrol be collecting any awards for it. I think "consistent" is a bad word among film people; we're more easily impressed by change and diversity, or by the newest, latest thing. Actors like John Wayne were routinely overlooked in favor of actors like Marlon Brando, though Brando could never in a million years have pulled off what John Wayne accomplished in The Searchers. Brando could do lots of things, but John Wayne was the best at being John Wayne. That's my standard rant, and that's how I feel about Chabrol. Now, onto the new film:

With the rise of cheap digital video, some might claim that we're in a Golden Age of documentaries, except for the fact that most documentary filmmakers aren't really filmmakers. They copy a basic template over and over again, assembling footage rather than making a movie. Of course, some of this may qualify as great journalism: the 2003 film Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, for example, or last year's No End in Sight. But very few understand how to combine filmmaking and reporting, how to make the story speak on a personal level. For my money, then, Errol Morris is the greatest living documentary filmmaker. As his reputation has risen -- he went from a guy who couldn't get arrested at the Oscars to a guy who actually won one -- his films have become more like events, like a story you can't possibly miss from a reporter you know and trust. (He has become like a Walter Cronkite or an Edward R. Murrow of the documentary set.)

Morris' Standard Operating Procedure screened this week at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, where Morris received the festival's Persistence of Vision award. The new film can be seen as the third in a trilogy of Morris' war films, with Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) taking on World War II and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) examining Vietnam. This one stumbles right into the current war in Iraq, and stares right into the face of the Abu Ghraib prison controversy. Of course, this story was extensively covered on the TV news and people have already seen the gruesome photographs, but Morris slows down the story a bit, taking a more careful look after the fact (many of his interview subjects have finished serving their jail time).