Letterboxd — Your life in film

Code of the Assassins was originally released in China last summer with the English title Song of the Assassins, but now WellGo has renamed it and brought it to the US, streaming and on disc. The title change doesn’t seem to make much of a difference: there isn’t really a Code in the film, nor is there a Song. But there are a lot of Assassins.

Review at The Chinese Cinema.

Apparently the opening of the movie, presumably with a title and credit sequence and some bit of exposition, was lost, or at least not part of the print they used for this scan. It doesn’t really matter though: in fact, the inexplicability of it lends the film an avant-garde feel: this isn’t a movie about a plot (though eventually it will have one), it is, first and foremost, a movie about what it looks like when one person fights a group of people.

Reviewed along with The Shaolin Invincibles for subscribers only at The Chinese Cinema.

Subscribe today for only $1/month or $10/year.

Much more variety in the choreography makes a huge difference, especially as the story gets lost in its own mythology. Mark Dacascos and Halle Berry’s dogs the co-MVPs.

Admirably expands what had been a fairly tight pseudo-DTV action movie into something like a nastier James Bond and then again into a modern version of a Louis Cha jianghu (complete with an actual beggar clan) while retaining the sense of pointlessness and doom that lies at its heart.

Just wish the action itself, while shot extremely well in some really fun environments, was a bit more creative. A lot of moves recycled from the first film, and repeated throughout this one, without ever building or evolving at all.

I’d forgotten how big a role Liz Lemon’s terrible ex-boyfriend plays in this. 

Were I the guy who just killed John Wick’s best friend, I would simply not call him and tell him about it until I had safely fled the country. 

Of course that would run counter to the whole idea that this world of violence is simply something we can never escape from, no matter how many veneers of propriety, bureaucracy, or honor we invent for ourselves.

It should surprise no one to learn that I was wrong about Peace Hotel. It’s a terrific film, one that in my disappointment over the fact that it wasn’t the kind of movie I’d hoped it would be (a crazy violent Heroic Bloodshed Western), I’d failed to recognize it for what it was: a fascinating mishmash of silly romance and serious drama, suffused with Wai’s distinctly personal approach to the complicated ideal of personal redemption.

Review for subscribers only at The Chinese Cinema.

Maybe I’m just old, but Dazed and Confused is much much better.

First time I watched this with my wife was at a debate camp 28 1/2 years ago. She fell off a couch. Tonight we drank a bunch of beer and watched it again. She didn’t fall off of anything.