Belle de Jour

BELLE DE JOUR is one of those movies I fired up out of a sense of duty. It’s been around out there, hovering on the edge of my consciousness, for years. I figured it was time I finally buckled down and saw it.

Belle de Jour is Catherine DeNeuve’s hooker name. She’s a Parisienne, comfortably situated in the upper middle class, who feels that something is missing in her life, in her marriage with the reliable but new-agey husband she probably thought was a safe bet at the time. When a lascivious friend tells her that some women find part-time work in some of Paris’s more discreet brothels, she’s horrified, and aroused, and curious. And soon, she’s Belle de Jour.

But, of course, that isn’t the end of the movie. Over the next hour or so, the film explores the consequences of her choice, its effects on her psychologically and physically, and the dangers that can arise when one traffics with those who traffic in flesh. It does so carefully, and in a manner that leads us to believe in the people we’re seeing and invest in Belle’s journey. I believed in DeNeuve’s character, her motivations and needs. I wanted to see what became of her, and I still do. I may have begun BELLE DE JOUR with a sense of duty, but I finished with one of satisfaction. This is a fine movie.

Appaloosa

I was all ready to like APPALOOSA. It starred Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renée Zellweger, and Jeremy Irons in a throwback Western that promised vistas, gunfights, and romance. But the opening voiceover sounded like it was written in a self-actualization seminar, clobbering the Western mood before it could even get rolling.

Once past the voiceover, APPALOOSA tries to be the Bollywood production of Westerns. It throws in everything it can think of, from scheming ranchers to jailhouse watches to raiding injuns to barfights to showdowns on Main Street. Hell, I'm surprised they didn't throw a production number in there. Thing is, there's so much going on that it detracts from the major throughline. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure what the major throughline is.

There's a good movie buried somewhere in APPALOOSA, but writer/director/star Ed Harris wasn't willing to kill his babies to find it. Too bad. We could have been spared the film's maddening "tell me, show me, then tell me again because I must be an idiot" narrative style in favor of "show me and let me figure it out." Here's one Western that could've used a man of few words.

NetherBeast Incorporated

Dilbert, with vampires. Either you're in or you're out.

Me, I'm in.

Steve Burns (yes, that Steve Burns), has a problem. His boss, Darrell Hammond, has just invited him into his office. Hammond tells Burns to take over a project from a recently deceased coworker. The coworker in question is sitting in a chair across from Hammond's desk, a stake through his heart. "Not only does his project need a little work, you see, but I had to kill him," declares Hammond. "He was a vampire." And away we go with a fun and creative take on the vampire mythos.

NETHERBEAST INCORPORATED's vampires don't wear flashy clothes, they don't brood in the moonlight, and they don't gaze with romantic longing at the nubile living. They're too busy working up PowerPoint presentations, dozing through meetings, and running the most mundane business imaginable. That's its hook, but the thing that sells it is Steve Burns, whose deadpan delivery and everyman approach to even the most horrifically outlandish situations kept me chuckling throughout the film's brisk 89 minute run time. This is a low-budget horror comedy that's light on the horror and heavy on the comedy, and a it's a sweet, simple, semi-gory good time.

It's perfect for Valentine's Day, or any romantic occasion. Try it with a nice red wine.

Coraline

Walking out of CORALINE, my 8-yr-old said, "That was a different kind of scary. It wasn't scary like monsters scary, where you only lose your life. It was a scary where you can lose your existence." My response: "Is that a good scary?"

Make no mistake: CORALINE is, indeed, scary, and not in a CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON kind of way. It's as much creeping fear as horror show, and its marvelous visuals serve a tale that can send chills down the spine of child and parent alike. For while my child saw a story about a little girl who fights for souls, I saw a cautionary tale about the dangers of addiction.

Addiction - wha?

There's this episode of "The Wire" in which Sydnor is about to go undercover as a junkie. Bubbles says to him, "What's that on your hand? Take that off." Sydnor replies, "That's my wedding ring!" Bubbles: "Weddin' ring? You married to the spike now. Your wife, your kids, your job, your home - you fed it all to the spike. That weddin' ring was first to go."

In CORALINE, Coraline discovers her spike. She goes to it again again, taking what she thinks it has to give her. She doesn't understand what it's really offering and, by the time she does, she's nearly trapped. When the worm turns and she finds out who's really in charge (spoiler: it's not her), it takes everything she's got, and much that she does not, to win a chance of getting free.

It's heavy stuff, but it's wrapped up in a delightfully told, scary and sophisticated movie that entertained two people separated by a 32-year age difference. It's also scary stuff, but it's a good scary. Take it from my eight-yr-old.

The Wackness

In THE WACKNESS, Ben Kingsley counsels young Josh Peck, "Don't trust anyone who doesn't listen to Dylan and who doesn't smoke weed."

I don't listen to Dylan. I don't smoke weed. I didn't trust Ben Kingsley, either.

This is a movie about people from a different universe, one in which the rules of society as I understand them don't exist. They ingest enormous amounts of drugs. They approach sex with damaging casualness. They speak in a foreign language and listen to music that's a mystery to me. In fact, there's not one single character in this film that I could relate to, one person who didn't feel like an example of a type, but rather a complete human being. I've seen movies about murderous, medieval Huns with whom I could relate more than I could anyone in THE WACKNESS.

This movie was an audience favorite at Sundance. CHUD's Devin Faraci loved it. I don't get the appeal, not at all. THE WACKNESS does part of what movies are supposed to do, in that it takes me to a different place and time, introduces me to different people, and puts me in their shoes. But the shoes didn't fit, and the film couldn't sell them to me.

Bummer.

Bottle Shock

Movies like BOTTLE SHOCK are the reason why I read Roger Ebert. I never saw an ad for the picture, didn’t read about it in any of my other wanderings, would never have known it xisted were it not for Ebert’s review.

I just plain loved it.

Here’s a movie about the 1976 Franco-American wine competition, a promotional event organized by one Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman, CDNW) with the expectation that the American wines would be thoroughly trounced. As it happened, the Americans won in both the white and red categories. The movie assumes you know this going in, and it bathes the entire proceeding, from Spurrier’s first inspiration for the event to the aftermath of the competition, in the warm glow of fond memory.

BOTTLE SHOCK is a “little guys against the world” picture with hints of “coming of age,” “romantic comedy,” and “slobs vs. snobs.” It’s laugh-out-loud funny, utterly charming, and delightful from beginning to end.

Thanks, Roger Ebert. Perhaps I should see this SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE of which you speak so highly.

MirrorMask

MIRRORMASK. Hmm.

Dave McKean’s unsettling ‘Sandman’ covers got me interested in this picture. What would an entire film made with McKean’s sensibility look like? Well, I’m here to tell you that it would look like a moving ‘Sandman’ cover.

Unfortunately, McKean’s vision is about all this film has going for it. MIRRORMASK is a rather conventional quest tale, set in a land very much like the Dreaming, that spends all of its time looking fantastical and spends very little time creating people we care about and giving them urgent, interesting things to do.

But hey, this is a PG movie and it’s essentially a kids’ story, so it must be ok to share with the little ones, right? Wrong. My youngest started crying about three minutes in, and I’m glad I saw the rest of the film alone. Many of McKean’s visions are nightmare-inducing, and I just don’t need to wake up to screaming children in the middle of the night.

So, there it is. Scary and rather dull, MIRRORMASK is a film I could have done without.

Traitor

TRAITOR is an excellent film.

Don Cheadle plays Samir, a Sudanese-American working his way up the ranks of a terrorist organization. He's the textbook terrorist candidate: an immigrant caught between two worlds, smart, capable, devout, and with military training. As played by Cheadle, he's also deeply conflicted. He's a man who wants to do the right thing, but the people telling him what is and is not right don't seem to be any more enlightened than he (I'm describing the character instead of the performance because, hey, it's Don Cheadle. You know he nails it.).

Guy Pearce, Jeff Daniels, and Neal McDonough are among the Americans working his case. Saïd Taghmaoui, Alyy Kahn, and Raad Rawi are the major players in his cell. Each of these fine actors sells their roles, but it's a testament to Cheadle's ability that he blows them off the screen without even trying. There's so much happening behind this guy's eyes that he's always the most interesting person in the room, no matter how skilled the other players.

The movie itself is well shot and scored, though not particularly dazzling. This is more a character piece than a virtuoso production, and its exploration of the kind of guy who can rig a suicide vest or sacrifice innocents makes an excellent counterpoint to the more hero-oriented GWOT thrillers we've been getting recently. What a pleasure to get inside the mind of a guy like Samir, a guy wrestling with big questions with important consequences. This one is worth seeing.

Naked Weapon

There's a movie out there called SO CLOSE. Corey Yuen directed it, and it stars Qi Shu, Wei Zhao, and Karen Mok. It's your basic "hot Chinese assassin" movie, and it's one of the best popcorn pictures there is. It has an interesting story; beautifully choreographed fight scenes; and Qi Shu, Wei Zhao, and Karen Mok. This movie does everything right: it's glossy, cheesy, and playful. It's the GONE WITH THE WIND of "hot Chinese assassin" movies.

And then there's NAKED WEAPON, released just two months after SO CLOSE. Directed by Siu-Tung Ching, it stars Maggie Q, Anya, and Jewel Lee. It's another "hot Chinese assassin" movie (Is this a bona fide subgenre? Perhaps I should investigate!), but it's downright terrible. NAKED WEAPON barely even has a story; its fight scenes practically define the word "lame;" and it stars Maggie Q, Anya, and Jewel Lee. If SO CLOSE is the GONE WITH THE WIND of "hot Chinese assassin" movies, this is the CANNONBALL RUN: uninspired, mechanical, and dull.
Here's the story: evil Madame M kidnaps 40 13-yr-old girls, dresses them up like Lara Croft, and puts them through five years of grueling training. Those who survive become the world's elite assassins, taking out the planet's hardest targets while bathing one another in longing gazes guaranteed to ignite the imaginations of 15-yr-old boys and bore the hell out of everyone else. But, of course, the FBI and CIA are hot on their tails, which is surprising: I had no idea that the PRC was so accomodating toward U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

So you've got your chases and your stunts and your fights and your sublimated lesbianism and your budding romance and all that crap, but none of it goes anywhere, none of it makes any sense, and none of it passes for entertainment. Charisma vacuum Maggie Q is no Qi Shu, and proves herself utterly incapable of anchoring a movie; even a cheesy popcorner like this one's trying to be. Siu-Tung Ching doesn't know how to make wirework look good, he doesn't know how to choreograph gravity-based effects, and he's even more in love with the windblown look than the guys who made KRRISH. Plus, he's a moron. How do you put Pei-pei Cheng in your picture and not give her a good fight?

NAKED WEAPON may -may- appeal to the aforementioned 15-yr-old boys, but I wouldn't even recommend it to one of them. If you've got a fever, and the only thing that'll cure it is a "hot Chinese assassin" movie, rent SO CLOSE. It's superior in every way. As for NAKED WEAPON, give it a pass. Watching this movie is like having your spine ripped out: you won't feel a thing.

Burn After Reading

BURN AFTER READING is a comedy with two funny lines. J.K. Simmons gets both of them. And he's only in the movie for ten minutes, tops.

The film, a misanthropic screwball comedy, is so heavy on misanthropy and so light on comedy that I spent more time marveling at the train wrecks piling before me than sustaining any kind of comic mood. Its as if everyone involved was told they were making a tragedy, with the exception of Simmons and his minion David (Sledge Hammer!) Rasche.

Many folks liked this picture, but I don't get it. How can you laugh when you're busy feeling bad for everyone onscreen?

Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans

Emotionally captivating, visually wonderful, and technically marvelous, F.W. Murnau's SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS is a fitting swan song for the silent era.

Released in 1927, the same year THE JAZZ SINGER heralded the dawn of the talkies, SUNRISE proved that you don't need words to expound upon the human condition. The film tells the story of a marriage in crisis: the man, once happy at home, has fallen in love with another woman; one with expensive tastes. He's been selling the livestock to finance the affair, and now his mistress is really putting the screws to him. "Why," she asks, "doesn't your wife have an 'accident'? Then you could sell the farm and we could move to the city." It's a tempting offer. I'm not going to tell you if he takes her up on it or not.

What I will tell you, however, is that Murnau's touch is never more assured. He helps his actors and actresses sell their roles and, in the process, plays the human heart like a master. We laugh, we cry, we bite our nails, we're wholly lost in the story of these people and wholly vested in their fates. From perfectly timed comic touches like the reactions of a very proper gentlemen to the wardrobe malfunctions of the hapless woman standing beside him to scenes filled with a dark foreboding as rich as any in cinema, this is a film that knows how to work its audience.

Murnau supplements the cast's efforts through an extraordinary collaboration with cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, men who figured out how to make their camera glide through space, use multiple exposures to create heightened realities, and even pull off some kind of trick that looks just like a modern green screen. These men's collective eye for composition and technical expertise combine to create a world sometimes simple, sometimes extraordinarily dazzling, and ever interesting. There's always something happening in every corner of the frame in SUNRISE, and I look forward to teasing out more details in subsequent viewings.

No kidding, folks: this movie has everything. It's a flat-out masterpiece, and well deserving of its Academy Awards (Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production; Best Cinematographer; Best Actress in a Leading Role). What a gem.

Into the Wild

I was vaguely aware of Chris McCandless (aka Alexander Supertramp) before I viewed INTO THE WILD. I knew that Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air, wrote a book about him. I thought the guy was basically a spoiled kid who thought he could just tramp off into the Alaskan bush with no preparation and got himself killed.

But you know what I just wrote about MONSTER? About how film can take us into worlds we didn’t know existed, into people we’d never understand otherwise? INTO THE WILD does this, taking us into McCandless’s world and into the heart of a fatally idealistic, romantic young man who wanted only what idealistic and romantic young men have always wanted: to find adventure and find the truth.

Sean Penn wrote and directed INTO THE WILD with a sure control of technical detail and an eye for character. As McCandless (Emile Hirsch, quite fine in the underrated SPEED RACER) travels America, the film wraps us in beautiful foreboding and the love of good people. It leads us to care about the young man at its center without allowing us to forget the damage he’s doing to those he left behind. It shows us that, by the time McCandless made it to Alaska, he actually was marginally prepared to be there. And it takes us on his journey with care and tenderness.

This is a beautiful film, with beautiful images, music, and performances. It’s a thoughtful film, a film that cares about ideas and emotions in a real, personal way. It’s a riveting film, one that keeps us fully engaged though we know how it will end. And it’s a great film, the kind we recommend to our friends. See it soon.

Monster

MONSTER, the Aileen Wournos story, takes us into an alien world and shows us what it’s like to live there. That’s the world of Wournos, a person who grew up in what, to many of us, is an alternate universe. Wournos doesn’t live in a place where people are basically good and things generally work out for the best. Rather, she lives in a world where people are vile and things generally fall apart. And while MONSTER never lets Wournos off the hook for her actions, it does leave us with an understanding of where she’s coming from.

Aileen Wournous was a street hooker who became a murderess, killing her customers and stealing their cars and cash. The film shows us why, and it’s a portrait of incredible sadness. As the film begins, Wournos (played by Charlize Theron) is in despair, on the verge of suicide. And then something totally unexpected happens: she falls in love, and she dares to hope. But in Wournos’s world, hope is a false promise. When the money runs out and the rope begins to fray, she’s gotta come up with something. And here’s where the movie breaks our heart, because when you’re Aileen Wournos, the list of somethings you can come up with is tragically limited.

The film has its flaws: Wournos occasionally says things that sound more like the voice of a writer than that of the character. Theron’s performance sometimes jars, as occasionally she belies her physical transformation with vocal ticks that remind us who it us under all that makeup and costuming. But these, frankly, are nitpicks. MONSTER is a very, very good picture, and well worth seeing. I’m sorry I waited so long.

Chopper

CHOPPER reminds me of SEXY BEAST. But imagine the Ben Kingsley character as the protagonist.

Here, Eric Bana plays a guy street-named Chopper. He’s a violent and charming sociopath whose ability to destroy the lives of everyone around him is eclipsed only by his self-absorption. The film, based loosely on the eponymous Australian criminal, is misnamed, however. It should have been named BANA, because its real focus is the ability of its lead actor.

This is the picture that broke Bana out, and for good reason. His Chopper is wheedling, arrogant, dangerous, needy, unpredictable, charming, streetwise but stupid, and extremely violent. Like Kingsley in SEXY BEAST, his every moment creates tension, both in the characters on the screen and the people watching. But as the protagonist of this film, Bana has to keep the tension going almost all the time. It’s amazing.

Well, here I am in my fourth paragraph, and I still haven’t mentioned the story, really. Fact is, I can hardly remember it, for the story is not Chopper’s draw: the performance is. Wow.

Die Nibelungen

Fritz Lang’s THE NIBELUNGEN, clocking in at over five hours long, is an ambitious work that had a huge impact in its day. Unfortunately, it hasn’t aged well. I slogged through the saga with one eye on the screen and one on the clock, never believing in anything or anyone I saw onscreen.

The film begins with Siegfried, a blacksmith’s apprentice who forges a blade so keen that his master declares he has nothing more to teach the young hero. Taking the sword and setting out to find his fortune, he slays a dragon, finds an invisibility cloak, and captures the treasure hoard of the dwarves. This is the best part of the picture, with a magnificently realized dragon puppet that’s over eighty feet long, great craft on Siegfried’s part, and a transfiguration effect that must have take days days to create.

But soon enough, Siegfried is in the hall of the Burgundian Kings, the titular Nibelungen. And here’s where the picture gets nasty. From here on out, the film is a feast of misogyny, racism, and general repudiation of Judaeo-Christian values. There’s deceit and counter deceit, blood revenge, cruel realpolitik, and an ultimate affirmation of the heroic woman only in terms of her cold-hearted cruelty. There’s a significant portion among the Huns that makes this proud people out as barely a step above lowland gorillas. But most importantly, and unforgivably, there’s nothing here to hang on to: the characters aren’t inherently fascinating, the pageantry isn’t particularly dazzling, and the whole thing feels rather flat.

At least, that’s how it seems to me, the modern viewer. The film made such a splash during its initial release that Goebbels asked Lang to make propaganda films for the Nazi political effort (showing great judgment, the director promptly fled to America). But while I can put myself into the mind of a person who enjoyed INTOLERANCE and THE IDLE CLASS, I can’t see the appeal of this one. It’s coming from a place too alien to me.

Encounters at the End of the World

I've had some time to cogitate on ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD, and I appreciate it even more now than I did right after I saw it.

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD begins with a jaw-droppingly beautiful shot of scuba divers under the Antarctic Ice, segues into a silly visual of a monkey riding on a goat, and gets us thinking with an interview with one of the many denizens of Antarctica's McMurdo Station. And the film just goes from there, weaving a tapestry of people, stories, projects, and visuals in its portrait of a little place at the end of the world where the smart, hardworking, and adventurous come to explore the world and mankind's potential.

In the process, it gives us a film that pushes all our buttons: it's beautiful, enlightening, and thought provoking, and it lingers in our consciousness long after the credits end. It makes me regret that I made my "Best of 2008" list before I saw it: this film would surely rank at #1.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

There is such a thing as competitive vintage video gaming. There are adults, people with businesses and families, who spend enormous amounts of time pursuing world records in games like Frogger, Q*Bert, Joust, Space Invaders, and Donkey Kong. These people have their own subculture, and their subculture has an evil king. THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS is a documentary about a hapless schmuck who decides that there's gotta be something he can succeed in, makes becoming the Donkey Kong champion that one thing, blunders into this subculture, and takes on the king.

It's phenomenal.

THE KING OF KONG has everything one could want in a movie: heroes, villains, partisans on both sides, romantic tension, and a structure so perfect one wonders if parts of it were scripted. As Steve Wiebe pursues his quest to finally win at something, we get wrapped up in it with him even as we see the toll it takes on his family. As Billy Mitchell and his minions try one ploy after another to protect his title, we boo and hiss even as we marvel at the fact that such an obvious slimeball can actually succeed in the wider world. Who knew that watching a pixellated plumber climb up a ladder could generate so much drama?

WALL-E

Pixar is in an interesting place. When we sit down for a Pixar film, we expect beauty and thought and humor. We expect to be dazzled, and anything short of that disappoints us.

Fear not. WALL-E is dazzling - it entranced my 2-yr old, my 8-yr old, my wife, and me. But it's also disturbing.

One of the film's sequences follows an obese person in a floating chair, gorging on visual media and wasting time discussing inanities such as what he thought of some movie or tv show he'd recently seen. It's all part of the film's message about consumerism, physical and virtual, and I couldn't help but see it as a shot at me.

You see, I'm a guy who likes to spend his time thinking about entertainments. I find watching movies and writing little snippets about them to be recreational, certainly moreso than the mind-numbing tedium that is fishing or planting stuff. And I do that writing on a nifty little computer, while sitting on a comfy couch. Granted, I'm fit, but I'm pretty sure that Jack LaLanne could kick my ass, and he was born in 1914. In other words, I'm almost exactly the kind of guy at whome WALL-E is taking a shot.

Which is fine. Good art has the power to confront, and I resolve that confrontation by noting that this isn't *all* I do, but that I also spend a considerable amount of my time doing actual jobs that actually make people's lives better here in the real world. But while I accept that film's thesis that a passive life is a live half-lived, I take issue with the agrarian utopianism it presents as an alternative. While the agrarian utopia has long held a place in the western imagination, anyone who has spent considerable time around farmers can report that they aren't the healthiest people on Earth. They live a hard life, the kind of life that looks great when you're stuck in a cubicle writing code, but the kind many would trade in a minute.

Jeez. Looking over the last couple of paragraphs, it seems like a wrote an nigh-incomprehensible mishmash of ideas. Perhaps it's time to go for a run.

Strictly Ballroom

Oh, how I love STRICTLY BALLROOM. 

I don't love this movie for its innovative storyline. I don't love this movie for its powerhouse performances. I don't love this movie for its groundbreaking technical innovations. I love this movie because this movie is so in love with movies that I can't help but fall in love with it. 

STRICTLY BALLROOM loves everything about movies. It loves classic, David v. Goliath setups wrapped around love stories. It loves big, broad, physical perfomances, the kind where the mousy girl from the back row lets her hair down, takes her glasses off, and blows everyone away. It loves those filters that turn every point of light into a star. It loves bright costumes, big dance numbers, and villains getting their comeuppance. 

And that love is infectious. It creates a film so joyful that my wife and I laughed all the way through it, riding a crest of goodwill the film created early and carried through to the closing number. What a great movie. 

Swordsman II

SWORDSMAN II is a milestone in my family. It's the first subtitled film that my 8-yr-old has sat for all the way through. It's also the first film featuring transgendered characters, quasi-lesbian romance, and bondage he's sat through. That wasn't really part of the game plan, but I guess it had to come sooner or later.

An hour after finishing SWORDSMAN II, I'm still not entirely sure what it's about. Jet Li is a Drunken Master -ish leader of a group of wuxia warriors on their way to some holy mountain, where they plan to renounce Kung Fu and live as - I don't know - peaceful mountain people until they run out of food or money or both. One of the warriors, a woman who refers to Li as "brother," is clearly hot for him. I hope he wasn't really her brother, or I'll have even more splainin to do when my wife gets home. Anyway, they're on their way to meet some hot chick whose equally hot henchwoman calls her "chief," and with whom she engages in some amusing tongueplay.

Then ninjas show up. With scorpions. But Hot Chief Chick and her minions unleash their snakes upon them and rocks them like a hurricane.

There's more: soon, a transgendered warlord (warlady?) shows up, back by her band of ronin. That's right: a transgendered warperson with samurai henchmen. "Really," I felt like saying to this movie, "you had me at ninjas and scorpions." But there's a twist (Oh, of course there is!): the warperson is married to a lady who's wondering why her husband hasn't slept with her in six months. And why he's wearing makeup. And taking up embroidery. And having the likes of Jet Li show up at her doorstep, drunk and horny, in the middle of the night.

Wait, what? What's Jet Li doing with this dudelette, when he's got these other two chicks (one with snakes) all over him? Well, it's complicated, but it has to do with the warperson's brother, whom she's been keeping chained in a dungeon for (coincidentally) six months.

Just as SWORDSMAN II really started to creep me out, however, it rolled into a huge wirework battle. While, sadly, the battle lacked scorpions or snakes, it featured plenty of needlepoint, swordplay, and needlepoint swordplay. Not to mention of the winnowing of the love quadrangle (which is always awkward, I don't care who you are) to a more manageable triangle. Bondage guy gets his mitts on warperson, which is satisfying if that's your thing, and Li is left with serious questions about his sexuality, which (it appears) his totally submissive quasi-sister will be more than happy to help him work though.

In other words, SWORDSMAN II makes for lovely family viewing. I'm reasonably confident that my kid didn't catch any of that, but instead saw an entirely different movie, one about a heroic clan fighting an evil warlady and relearning lessons about the futility of the martial life.

Thank God. I don't have time for that much splainin.