Author: mark

Posted on

Jeanne Dielman: the Best Christmas Movie Ever Made

(The following is the script for a humorous holiday vlog post, with a link to the video. This site does not *actually* recommend Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as holiday classic.)

What’s up, Film Fans! Welcome back to Mark Loves Films.

I just watched a 1975 masterpiece that critics have been SLEEPING on. A film so heartwarming, so cozy, so Holiday-coded that—it is basically the blueprint for every Hallmark Christmas movie.

Meet Jeanne Dielman. Single mother. Brussels. 1974. 


This holiday season… one woman… will find the magic… in the mundane.

The director understands that the kitchen is the heart of the home. She gives us these incredible, uninterrupted takes of Jeanne just… peeling potatoes. For minutes. It’s so meditative. It’s not about quick cuts; it’s about honoring the starch.

And the family values? Chef’s kiss. The dinner scenes are breathtaking. Look at this.

No iPhones. No iPads. No “skibidi toilet.” Just a mother and son, sitting in silence, fully present, mindfully chewing every bite of…   soup. It’s a powerful reminder to disconnect to reconnect.

But here’s where it gets really heartwarming. Jeanne isn’t just a mom—she’s a Girl Boss. She runs a boutique service-based business right out of her bedroom!

Every afternoon, she hosts these exclusive 1-on-1 networking sessions with gentlemen clients. It’s so empowering to see a woman in the 70s thriving in the Gig Economy.

And THEN—and this is the part that really broke me—after each client leaves, she takes me time. She sits. She stares at the wall. Sometimes for like… ten minutes. No phone. No distractions. It’s a vital reminder for the holidays: You can’t pour from an empty cup!

But things change when her sister writes, she’s all: 

“GIRL get out of Brussels! You need a vacay! Miss u xoxo.”

Will Jeanne the “Small Town Girl” from a tiny French village called Brussels resist the call of the “Big City” Montreal? I won’t spoil the ending, but I think it will surprise you!


Let’s talk technique.

The cinematography is bold. The camera never moves. It’s not lazy; it’s grounded. It’s like the film is a weighted Christmas blanket for your eyeballs.

Costuming? Her wardrobe? Timeless red coat for that Mrs. Claus slay.

And sound design! Forget a big, sappy score. The real music is the sound of  home. The clink of the spoon in the coffee cup. The thwack of her tenderizing the veal. The scrape of the chair on the floor. It’s this incredible, minimalist ASMR symphony of domestic life. Cozy Hygge Holiday!

Now, the ending is… I won’t spoil it. But let’s just say… Jeanne makes a choice.

I think it’s a powerful metaphor for ‘cutting out’ negativity and stress before the holidays.

I see a woman who finally gets what every mom wants for Christmas: a Silent Night. No more guests. No more expectations. Just Jeanne, her thoughts, and the profound peace of a to-do list fully crossed off,

So if you want a film that captures the spirit of giving, the joy of cooking, and the importance of a really sharp pair of scissors… Jeanne Dielman is a five-star holiday classic.

Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and tell me in the comments: What’s your favorite potato peeling technique? See ya next time–happy holidays!

Posted on

The Dark History Buried in Exhuma

While Exhuma is marketed as a straightforward horror film, its true genius lies in its structure as a piece of supernatural “competency porn.” This is a film about experts doing their job with breathtaking skill, only the job happens to be calming the dead and confronting ancient curses.

The narrative begins with a wealthy Korean-American family in Los Angeles, plagued by a series of inexplicable and terrifying paranormal events. They enlist the help of a pairf young, stylish, and prodigiously talented shamans. The pair quickly diagnose the problem as a “grave call”—a cry of anguish from a tormented ancestor whose burial site has been desecrated.

To resolve it, they must return to South Korea and assemble a team: a veteran geomancer, who reads the very energy of the earth, and a duty-bound mortician. Their task is to locate the grave, exhume the coffin, and pacify the spirit through ritual cremation. But when they arrive at the remote, eerily isolated burial mound, the geomancer immediately senses a malevolent energy far darker than any ordinary restless spirit. They are standing on unhallowed ground, and what they are about to unearth is a secret tied to a painful chapter of the past

The film is anchored by a magnetic  performance from Kim Go-eun as the shaman Hwa-rim. She portrays a character who is both deeply reverent to tradition and thoroughly modern. In her ritual scenes, particularly the astonishing daesal gut exorcism, her physicality is hypnotic. The rhythmic chanting, the precise gestures, the sheer force of her conviction—it’s a performance of terrifying authenticity that makes the supernatural feel chillingly real.

Yet, outside of these ancient rites, she is a pragmatic professional. Kim Go-eun shows us a confident expert who approaches a paranormal crisis not with fear, but with a clear, systematic methodology. She and her team are consultants for the supernatural, and their meticulous process is utterly compelling to watch.

This sense of historical weight is not accidental. The director deliberately named his main characters after famous Korean independence activists who fought against Japanese colonial rule. This choice reframes their ghost-hunting as a continuation of that historical struggle. They are not merely exorcising a ghost; they are finishing the work of their ancestors, liberating the land itself from a curse born of occupation and oppression.

Exhuma is a great film blending folk horror with historical allegory. You can find it on several streaming services, and it is a must-see for anyone who appreciates a horror film that is as intelligent as it is terrifying.

Posted on

Where Horror, Comedy, and Kung Fu Collide: Mr. Vampire

Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s was a creative cauldron, bubbling with relentless commercially driven energy and an “anything goes” mentality.. Unlike Hollywood’s often more rigid genre structures, the most electrifying Hong Kong films of this era thrived on audacious collisions—action crashing into comedy, romance bleeding into horror, creating crowd-pleasing mashups that shouldn’t work but absolutely did.​

But sometimes, when you improvise wildly enough, you don’t just bend genres—you invent entirely new ones. Case in point: Ricky Lau’s 1985 masterpiece, Mr. Vampire.


The film tells the story of Master Kau, a stern Taoist priest whose unibrowed gravitas anchors a world gone deliriously mad. With two bumbling, girl-crazy apprentices in tow, he’s hired by the wealthy Mr. Yam to exhume and relocate his father’s remains—a practice hoped to improve the family fortunes. Upon opening the coffin, however, Master Kau discovers that twenty years have failed to claim the body. It remains pristine, unmarked by decay—a sure sign that it’s transforming into a jiangshi, a malevolent hopping vampire.​

He relocates the corpse to his mortuary for observation, but his apprentices’ spectacular incompetence allows the creature to escape, unleashing terror that only spiritual kung fu can stop.​

Mr. Vampire didn’t just create a film—it codified an entire jiangshi subgenre for the next decade. The film established the tropes of hopping vampire movies: the Stern Master, , the Bumbling Apprentices (whose incompetence drives half the plot), and most crucially, a specific set of esoteric combat principles for battling the undead.​

Sticky rice draws out vampire venom, paper talismans inscribed with blood-ink spells can immobilize the creatures, and holding one’s breath renders you invisible to these sightless predators. This last was actually improvised by the actors during the filming, but became so central that the movie was released in Taiwan with the title “Hold Your Breath for a Moment”.​

While Mr. Vampire essentially invented the cinematic jiangshi, the film’s visual inspiration springs from a genuinely haunting historical practice: corpse herding. During the Qing dynasty, the practice of “autumn executions” concentrated the killing of convicts into one brief annual period, creating a logistical nightmare: corpses often had to be transported vast distances for burial in their ancestral homes. Traditional funeral processions with four pallbearers were prohibitively expensive. .​

The solution was as ingenious as it was eerie. Taoist priests would bind corpses to flexible bamboo poles, and when two men carried these poles on their shoulders, the natural flex and bounce of the bamboo made the bodies appear to “hop” in unison as the procession moved through the countryside. This practical transportation method spawned folktales of hopping vampires. 

Mr. Vampire was Ricky Lau’s directorial debut, and its success instantly made him the go-to specialist for the genre.. His key technique was the masterful balancing of the film’s wild tonal shifts, ensuring that the slapstick comedy, intricate fight scenes, and moments of horror felt like a cohesive, exhilarating whole.

Mr. Vampire was a massive box office sensation in Hong Kong and across Asia, striking a chord with audiences who delighted in its unique fusion of screams and laughs..   

Today, the film’s reputation has only grown. It is beloved by cinephiles as a great example of the mashups that defined the golden age of Hong Kong’s cinema.

Right now, in October 2025, you can find Mr. Vampire and it’s sequels on the Criterion Channel.

Posted on

Can a Homophobic Cop Marry a Gay Ghost? | The Genre-Bending Genius of Marry My Dead Body


Ghost Month has started in Taiwan, so it’s a good time to consider the Taiwanese film Marry My Dead Body.

The film’s premise is audacious: a macho, homophobic police officer, Wu Ming-han accidentally picks up a ceremonial red envelope and is forced into a supernatural “ghost marriage” with a deceased gay man, Mao Pang-yu.

That’s a lot.  But’s it’s also just the beginning. In it’s two hour ten minute run-time you get a supernatural comedy, and an action movie. A bro-mance that is also a police procedural,  a poignant family drama, and a movie filled with sharp social commentary.

The film is inextricably linked to its social context, produced in the wake of Taiwan becoming the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage in 2019.

Marry My Dead Body successfully combines social commentary on LGBTQ+ rights, generational shifts, and evolving traditions within a highly accessible, multi-genre blockbuster format.  It shattered box office records in Taiwan, and was also the island nation’s official submission for the Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards.

The Chinese tradition of ghost marriage with origins stretching back millennia, is designed to ensure that individuals who die unmarried are not left lonely in the afterlife. It is a ritual steeped in Taoist beliefs about the soul and Confuciian ideals about family.  A Ghost Marriage is often initiated by the deceased’s family leaving a red envelope in a public place, with the person who picks it up becoming the intended spouse, bound by a supernatural obligation wed the ghost to to avoid misfortune.   
Marry My Dead Body radically subverts this tradition. Historically, ghost marriage has often served as a patriarchal custom, reinforcing heteronormative and patrilineal structures. The film seizes this ritual and reappropriates it for a same-sex couple, transforming a tool of patriarchal continuity into a powerful symbol of modern, inclusive values.

The film, and it’s success at the box office suggests tradition and progressiveness are not mutually exclusive but can be blended to reflect contemporary social realities.

For Director Cheng, previously acclaimed for his work in darker genres like the horror film The Tag-Along and the mystery-thriller The Soul, this project represented a deliberate pivot to comedy to tackle a serious topic.

To realize this vision, the script underwent a meticulous three-year development period. Cheng, an expert in crime and plot structure, collaborated with dedicated comedy screenwriter Sharon Wu. They adopted a bifurcated creative process: Cheng focused on the “foreground story”—the action-packed police investigation and crime-thriller elements—while Wu was tasked with crafting the witty dialogue and emotional beats of the “background story,”

You can see how this structured collaboration balanced the film’s complex tonal shifts and ensured that the character-driven heart of the story remained its anchor amidst the genre-bending spectacle. This is a film that not only attempts a lots things, it’s a film that succeeds at them.

The acting is top notch Greg Hsu, often cast in more gentle roles like 18 X2 Beyond Youthful Days, fully commits to the persona of Wu Ming-han, a “macho,” foul-mouthed, and physically imposing cop. Austin Lin, a Golden Horse Award winner, embraced the challenge of his comedic role, imbuing the ghost Mao Mao with a cheeky, sassy, yet deeply endearing personality that provides much of the film’s charm

Gingle Wang, fellow officer Lin Tzu-ching, also gave a really impressive performance, and her character’s compelling arc provides a commentary on workplace misogyny,  As if there wasn’t already enough going on.

The queen of C-pop, and outspoken advocate for marriage equality and LGBTQ+ rights, provide the theme song, and she received for first Golden Horse nomination for it.

As a society with deep roots in Chinese heritage that is also a progressive, Western-influenced democracy, Taiwan is in a constant state of synthesizing these dichotomies. The film’s narrative structure and thematic concerns mirror this national cultural dialogue, making it a profoundly resonant “state of the nation”–in the form of a really fun multi-genre film that anyone, anywhere, can enjoy.  You can catch Marry My Dead Body on Netflix.

Posted on

Akira Kurosawa’s The Most Beautiful (1944): A Study in Propaganda

Akiria Kurosawa’s The Most Beautiful  opens not with an image of beauty, but with a brutal command: “Attack and Destroy the Enemy!” This command is followed by the totalitarian declaration that this is “An Information Bureau Movie for the People,” before the familiar Toho Studios logo even appears on screen. This is the disorienting introduction to Kurosawa’s 1944 wartime docudrama.

While nominally a Toho project, The Most Beautiful was created under the unyielding grip of Japan’s militarist government. By 1944, as resources dwindled and creative control tightened, it was one of only 46 films released in the country. Kurosawa had initially planned an action film centered on Zero fighter pilots, but with no military aircraft available for filming, he was compelled to pivot. His new subject: a “patriotic morale booster” about young women working in the home front.

Kurosawa ingeniously blurs the line between documentary and fiction. In what one might described as startlingly early anticipation of method acting, the actresses lived in the factory where they filmed, ate in its mess hall, and referred to each by their character names, immersing themselves entirely in their roles.

The story centers on a group of women at an optics plant, producing lenses for weapons of war.  When the government mandates a production increase—a staggering 100% for male workers, but only 50% for their female counterparts—the women, driven by a fervent sense of duty, passionately petition to have their own quota raised. The film chronicles their subsequent struggle, a grueling battle against exhaustion, illness, and personal sacrifice to meet these self-imposed targets.

As a historical document, The Most Beautiful offers a window into Japanese wartime society. It captures the realities of industrial mobilization: factory floor dynamics, dormitory life, management techniques, company calisthenics. showing us the lives of Japan’s equivalent of Rosie the Riveter.

Thematically, the film offers a distillation of a core Japanese cultural value: dedication, often referred to as “doing one’s best.” This cultural touchstone, likely familiar to anyone acquainted with Japanese media, finds an extreme and unsettling expression here. For 85 minutes, we watch these women do their best, pushing past physical limits, ignoring illness and family duties, all in the service of building weapons.

Here the virtues Kurosawa would later champion for humanistic ends—dedication, community, and self-sacrifice—serve imperial militarism.  These women work to “destroy Britain and America” and to ensure that the Yamato race would not have to live under the same sky as Chinese people.

Kurosawa himself would later grapple with his role in creating such propaganda, stating with stark honesty: “I offered no resistance to Japan’s militarism… I did not have the courage to resist in any positive way… I am ashamed of this, but I must be honest about it.”

And yet, for the cinephile, there is undeniable value in The Most Beautiful beyond its function as a historical artifact. You can witness the nascent signatures that would define Kurosawa’s later work. The director demonstrates his growing mastery of rapid-fire editing to convey urgency, intimate close-ups to reveal inner turmoil, and meticulously crafted compositions that transform a factory floor into a battleground of the will.

Furthermore, in a filmography often dominated by male bonding and power struggles, it is compelling to see Kurosawa, forced by circumstance, center an ensemble of women.

The Most Beautiful is not an easy film, but for those willing to engage with its complicated legacy, it is an intriguing if challenging piece of cinematic history.Thank you for joining me for the third installment in my series on World War II propaganda films. Next time, we’ll journey from the Pacific to the Atlantic to examine another narrative feature: the immortal classic, Casablanca.

Posted on

Kung Fu vs. Black Magic: The Genius of Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980)

To fully understand the genesis of Hong Kong genre cinema in the 80s and the early 90s, you must first witness a man battling a reanimated corpse with a wooden bench. That scene, in all its boisterous, bone-crunching, and gleefully macabre glory, is the definitive moment in Sammo Hung’s 1980 film Encounters of the Spooky Kind.

While many films I discuss channel whisper themes to art-house enthusiasts, Encounters bellows from a midnight movie pulpit. It is a cinematic chimera: a kung fu actioner stitched to a horror-comedy, then lacquered with Chinese folklore and astonishing practical effects. The result feels both unruly and precise—chaos orchestrated with a stuntman’s peerless sense of rhythm.

The film cements Hung’s transition from stunt coordinator to auteur-star and single-handedly invents the “hopping vampire” (jiangshi) subgenre, creating the blueprint for the blockbuster Mr. Vampire, which Hung himself would later produce.

Our hero is  ‘Bold’ Cheung, a rickshaw puller whose reputation for courage is a constant invitation for trouble. His humiliation is twofold: at home, his wife is having an affair with his wealthy boss; in public, his friends bait him into life-threatening dares. As he proves his courage, his boss is worried what will happen if his affair is exposed. His employer doesn’t simply hire a thug—he hires a corrupt Taoist priest to eliminate Cheung through supernatural means. This act sparks a duel with a rival priest determined to defend the integrity of his sect. Here, the supernatural is weaponized theology, where spells are parried and ancient rites become a form of combat.

Formally, the film is a bridge between two decades. It anticipates the fantasy spectacle and gag-driven kinetics future Hong Kong cinema, yet its narrative spine is pure 1970s kung fu. The plot is a conveyor belt for ever-more-inventive set pieces, not study of character or theme. The film’s priorities are relentlessly physical: bodies colliding with tangible force, props that carry genuine weight, and slapstick that lands because, in Sammo Hung’s world, gravity is a dependable straight man.

The comedy, rooted in kinetic slapstick and practical stunt work, needs no translation. Hung performs with a physical fluency that is deadpan one moment and deliriously inventive the next. The result is a film both historically pivotal and effortlessly accessible—an exhilarating watch that also serves as a key document, charting Hong Kong cinema’s glorious pivot toward high-concept, hybrid-genre excess.

Posted on

The Art of Cinematic Jujitsu: How Frank Capra Turned Enemy Propaganda Against Itself

When Pearl Harbor shattered America’s isolationist fantasies, General George Marshall faced a peculiar dilemma: how to transform farm boys and factory workers into global warriors who understood why they were fighting. His answer: have Hollywood’s most beloved populist, Frank Capra,  wage war with light and shadow.

This is our second examination of the propaganda films of WW2, and today we dissect Capra’s Why We Fight: The Battle for China.

Capra arrived at his Pentagon assignment with experience making beloved features like  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but he wasn’t a documentary filmmaker. His brilliant approach was conceptual jujitsu—he would let fascism indict itself. Enemy newsreels, speeches, and triumphalist spectacles would be surgically re-edited into their own damning testimony. “Let the enemy prove to our soldiers the enormity of his cause,” Capra declared, “and the justness of ours.”


The gamble paid off. Roosevelt, impressed by Prelude to War, ordered the series released to civilians—54 million Americans would eventually witness Capra’s cinematic sermons. The formula was simple: authoritative narration, swelling orchestras, and surgical editing that carved the world into moral absolutes.


The Battle for China shouldered a burden more delicate than the series’ other installments. Beyond selling democracy versus fascism, it had to perform cultural alchemy—introducing America’s Chinese allies and transforming Yellow Peril stereotypes. Capra faced the task of introducing five millennia of Chinese civilization to audiences whose geographic knowledge might not extend  beyond state lines.


His solution: frame the narrative in terms of shared values. Sun Yat-sen became China’s Washington, Chinese resistance became Lexington and Concord writ large. In addition to  demonizing Japan, Capra elevated Chinese endurance—reframing eight years of occupation and resistance not as victimization, but as civilization’s first stand against fascist barbarism.

The film does have what, today, we know as historical errors.  It references the “Tanaka Memorial”—supposedly Japan’s 1927 blueprint for global conquest—that was likely fabricated. But Capra wasn’t engaged in historical deception; he was a filmmaker using the intelligence available at the time. Similarly, the film’s stated death toll of 40,000 in the Rape of Nanking is a stark underestimate of the 200,000 to 300,000 now accepted by historians. This wasn’t an attempt to whitewash the enemy ` ‘s war crimes, but a reflection of the limited information escaping the war zone. In fact, the film’s most haunting sequences derive their power from authenticity: grainy, 16mm footage of Japanese atrocities, smuggled out of China by an American priest, which provided a silent, damning testament to the war’s true horror.

Ultimately, the most discordant note is not found within the film itself, but in the stark and jarring reversal of geopolitical narratives that followed. In the Cold War’s shadow, Japan was recast as a peaceful, aesthetic culture, while our former allies, the people of  mainland China after Communist takeover, were suddenly portrayed as a monolithic, fanatical horde.

The Battle of China  preserves a history often marginalized in Western accounts: that the Second Sino-Japanese War was the true opening act of the global conflict. China’s eight-year resistance, fought against staggering odds, is a story that has to be  remembered.

Today, as new lines are drawn and old alliances are tested, Capra’s film serves as a powerful reminder of how narrative shapes reality, and how the allies of yesterday can become the adversaries of tomorrow. But the human cost of conflict is a haunting constant.

Posted on

Strange Days: Kathryn Bigelow’s Forgotten Masterpiece Revisited

What if I told you there’s a film written by James Cameron, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, that critics praised but audiences ignored-leaving it to vanish into the shadows of cinema history? That film is Strange Days.
.

Released in 1995, Strange Days plunges us into a volatile Los Angeles on the precipice of the new millennium – a ‘near future’ 1999 crackling with social unrest and technological anxiety.

At its core is Lenny Nero, played with a desperate energy by Ralph Fiennes. Nero is a charismatic but morally adrift black market dealer in ‘SQUID’ recordings – illegal, immersive slices of other people’s lives, experienced directly through the cerebral cortex. When one such recording captures a brutal crime someone powerful wants buried, the intricate machinery of a classic noir thriller clicks into gear, but with unexpected and subversive deviations.

Why should you invest your time in this commercially overlooked venture? Beyond the inherent thrill of its action sequences and the labyrinthine mystery, Strange Days offers a strikingly unique science fiction premise, explored with considerable thematic depth. Bigelow’s direction is characteristically muscular and kinetic, complemented by innovative, almost disturbingly intimate, point-of-view cinematography that places you directly within the recorded experiences.

And the performances? Fiennes is a wonderful, as is Angela Bassett, as the formidable bodyguard Mace, delivering a powerhouse portrayal that anchors the film with unwavering conviction.

What elevates Strange Days its intelligent deconstruction of noir conventions. While it knowingly flirts with these tropes, it refuses to be  bound by them. Fiennes’ Lenny Nero, intriguingly, embodies characteristics less typical of a hard-boiled protagonist and comes across as a gender-inverted, femme fatale. He’s defined by a seductive pull – not just over others, but critically, over himself through his obsessive reliving of recorded memories. His profound emotional vulnerability and pronounced self-destructive tendencies are hallmarks often attributed to the classic femme fatale, entangled as both architect and victim of her own devastating schemes.

This fascinating inversion clears the stage for Bassett’s Mace to transcend the archetypal sidekick or token love interest role. She emerges as a figure of undeniable strength, competence, and unwavering integrity – a Black woman who serves as the film’s moral compass and action hero. This deliberate re-centering of agency, is a potent and conscious critique of established genre norms and patriarchal storytelling.

Similarly Lenny’s journey diverges from noir’s formulaic fatalism. His redemption-spurred by Mace’s influence-shifts the focus from self-destruction to collective accountability.

So, why did this ambitious, critically lauded project falter so spectacularly with audiences in the mid-90s? Bigelow crafted this film in the long, uneasy shadow of the Rodney King case and the subsequent Los Angeles riots. It’s plausible that, a few years on, a lot of white folks were just not interested in engaging with uncomfortable societal truths and simmering racial tensions, preferring narratives that offered escapism rather than challenging reflection.

And, ultimately, the film’s depth, complexity and courageous subversion of audience expectations may have been too intellectually demanding for mainstream tastes at the time. Yet, these are precisely the qualities that commend Strange Days to contemporary film fans.

You can experience this overlooked gem on the Criterion Channel. Have you encountered Strange Days? What aspects resonated with you, or perhaps, what elements do you believe contributed to its initial commercial struggle? Share your thoughts in the comments; I’m looking forward to your perspectives.

Posted on

How Buster Keaton Broke His Neck & Reinvented Cinema: The Story of Sherlock Jr.

Imagine a man running on the edge of a rushing locomotive, staring up at a torrent of water about to crash over him-knowing he’s about to risk his life, not for glory, but for a laugh. This was Buster Keaton: the silent era’s daredevil, stone-faced genius, and master of audacious stunts.

Keaton’s journey began before he could read, working the rough-and-tumble vaudeville circuit at the age of three. Billed as “The Little Boy Who Can’t Be Damaged,” his act involved playing a child whose antics provoked his father into physically throwing him across the stage – smashing into the scenery, tumbling into the orchestra pit, sometimes even tossed into the startled audience.

While such a spectacle would horrify modern sensibilities, this hazardous upbringing cultivated in Keaton an exceptional physical resilience and an almost supernatural comprehension of comic timing. It served as perhaps the most rigorous and unconventional apprenticeship conceivable for any auteur. By the 1920s. Keaton was a writer, director, and luminous star.

His 1924 film Sherlock Jr. is a testament to both his artistry and his appetite for danger. Keaton plays a humble film projectionist with two aspirations:to learn the deductive skills of a master detective, and to win the affection of a young woman billed simply as “The Girl”. When a rival frames him for theft, Keaton’s character retreats to the theater where he works. As the film flickers before him, he succumbs to sleep, and here, the story takes a surreal and innovative turn. He dreams himself into the very film he was projecting, transforming into the sophisticated, heroic detective he yearns to be, suavely navigating a fictional world.

What unfolds within this “film within a film” is a cascade of thrilling action sequences and astonishing comic set pieces, all famously performed by Keaton himself.

The dangers were genuine. During the iconic water tank sequence the deluge drove Keaton down into the tracks below. Unaware of the severity of his injury, ignoring his blinding pain, Keaton simply continued, completing the film. His broken neck would only be diagnosed years later by X-ray, a stark testament to his unparalleled physical commitment and stoicism.
Yet, Sherlock Jr. is more than a collection of amazing stunts. The technical ingenuity required to realize the film’s central conceit: a dreaming projectionist attempting to navigate the constantly shifting cinematic landscape – demanded meticulous planning and mathematical precision. This playful yet profound exploration of the porous boundary between the audience and narrative, between perceived reality and cinematic fiction, marks the film as startlingly meta-cinematic, anticipating theoretical discussions by decades.
Too surreal for audiences in 1924 – achieving moderate success rather than the blockbuster status of Keaton’s broader comedies – Sherlock Jr. is now hailed by critics and arthouse audiences. Its audacious blend of physical prowess, narrative invention, and cinematic self-awareness led to its preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1991.

Fortunately, Sherlock Jr. is in the public domain, allowing me to share a few grainy glimpses of its magic. However, to truly appreciate the startling genius of Keaton’s vision, I recommend experiencing the beautifully restored version available on the Criterion Channel.

Keaton’s legacy is not bruises and broken bones, but the way he expanded the language of film, inviting us to dream with our eyes wide open. What’s your favorite Keaton film? Let me know in the comments below.

Posted on

Kurosawa’s Debut: Genius or Just Practice? Revisiting Sanshiro Sugata (1943)

Akira Kurosawa: a name synonymous with cinematic mastery. His debut, Sanshiro Sugata, often heralded as the first glimpse of towering genius. But strip away the reverence, look past the auteurist mythology… What are we really left with?

Released during the height of World War II, Sanshiro Sugata charts the familiar arc of a young, impetuous man seeking mastery in Judo during the Meiji era. Crucially, this historical setting allowed Kurosawa to subtly sidestep the overt ultranationalism demanded by the wartime censors – though not entirely without difficulty. The film reportedly faced initial resistance, and significant portions were later excised by authorities in 1944, leaving us with a potentially compromised version of Kurosawa’s original vision. Despite this, it found favor with audiences, proved commercially successful, and prompted the greenlighting of a sequel.

The narrative is, frankly, rudimentary melodrama. Our protagonist grapples with his own fiery temperament, learns discipline under a wise mentor, overcomes rivals in progressively challenging bouts, and ultimately secures a conventional romantic resolution after confronting the film’s big bad.

Yet, within the sphere of film appreciation, a certain Sanshiro Sugata is often discussed with a kind of retroactive awe. It garners respectable ratings – a 3.4 on Letterboxd, for instance – accompanied by descriptions lauding its supposedly fluid, poetic fight choreography or the profound spiritual journey of its hero. The assumption seems to be that genius must manifest, fully formed, even in its earliest expressions.

But, viewed objectively, Sanshiro Sugata can be a rather challenging watch. The protagonist’s arc towards self-mastery is almost a caricature of a badly written YA novel . The gestures towards spiritual depth feel tacked-on.. And the fight scenes? Far from being dynamic spectacles, they often feel protracted and stiff, far from the kinetic energy that would define Kurosawa’s later work.

Now, I’m not saying to avoid the film. While it fails as entertainment, Sanshiro Sugata offers something invaluable: a window into the nascent stages of a legendary career. We see Kurosawa wrestling, perhaps clumsily, with themes of honour, discipline, and the student-mentor relationship that would recur throughout his filmography. We know he was deeply drawn to Tsuneo Tomita’s source novel, reportedly devouring it in one sitting and immediately drafting a screenplay before even securing the rights – that passion is palpable, even if the execution is crude.

So, should you watch Sanshiro Sugata? Absolutely, if your interest lies in tracing the development of one of cinema’s greats. But approach it with clear eyes. Don’t let the weight of Kurosawa’s legacy, or the sometimes overzealous praise, set expectations the film itself cannot meet. What are your thoughts on Kurosawa’s debut?