Author: mark

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When John Woo Invented the Language of Modern Action Cinema

What if I told you that the movie that created the cinematic grammar of violence used by action films like John Wick had the narrative structure of a romance novel?

That film is John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow.

It  follows Sung Tse-Ho, a triad counterfeiter caught in a world of shifting loyalties. His younger brother Kit is a police officer who knows nothing of Ho’s criminal life. When a deal collapses into betrayal, Ho surrenders to authorities—a sacrifice meant to protect his family. But the syndicate, worried that he might talk, tries to take his father as a hostage, and kills him in the attempt.

Enter Mark Lee, Ho’s sworn brother. When he reads of Ho’s capture in a newspaper, something compels him forward. Not duty.  Brotherhood. In a restaurant shootout that would echo through cinema for decades, Mark decimates the gang. But he doesn’t escape clean. A bullet takes his leg.

Three years later, Ho emerges from prison seeking only the anonymous life of a taxi driver. His world, though, has collapsed. Kit now sees him as the cause of their father’s death, a scarlet stain on his police career. Mark, reduced to limping through the streets picking garbage, has been enslaved by Shing—the very man who betrayed them both, now running the syndicate like a corporate empire.

The film builds toward something inevitable: betrayal demanding answer, love demanding sacrifice, and the question of whether survival means anything if you’re surviving alone.


On its surface, A Better Tomorrow is a story about gangsters. But the narrative engine of A Better Tomorrow is not driven by the plot to defeat the villain, Shing, but rather by the emotional reconciliation of the brothers.

In a traditional romance novel, the question is never ”Will there be a Happy Ever After?” That’s simply guaranteed; the tension comes from how the characters grow enough to deserve it. This same tension animates A Better Tomorrow.

At the beginning of the film we are shown the deep, affectionate love between brothers, familial and sworn.

In a romance, a misunderstanding or betrayal separates the lovers. Here, Ho’s criminal life leads to a father’s death. This creates the central emotional conflict: Kit’s hatred of Ho. The “question” of the film is not “Will Shing be defeated?” but “How will Kit come to forgive Ho?”

Romance protagonists must often endure humiliation or perform acts of service to prove their change of heart. Ho spends three years in prison and then works as a taxi driver, refusing to fight back when beaten, specifically to prove to Kit that he has changed. He is “wooing” his brother back through penance.

A romance often ends with a grand gesture, like a dash to the airport. In A Better Tomorrow, the grand gesture is the final shootout. Ho realizes that his actions and apologies are insufficient. He re-enters the criminal world not for profit, but to protect Kit.

The film grossed HK$34.7 million. It shattered the previous record. Overnight, it  made Chow Yun-Fat an international star—and rewired Hong Kong’s entire industry. Gangster films flooded in. One movie changed what an audience wanted to see.

But its enduring impact was in how Woo showed us violence.

Guns are blunt instruments of death. For decades, Hollywood kept them symbolic. A character gets shot, clutches their chest, lets out a gasp, falls over. Clean. Sanitary. Morally digestible.


Bonnie and Clyde broke that. Its final sequence showed protagonists being torn apart by bullets from multiple angles, using slow-motion and squibs to force audiences to witness the violence, not abstract it away. A decade later, Sam Peckinpah made this uglier still. His gunplay emphasized trauma, devastation, the actual cost of modern weapons.

But Woo did something different entirely. He looked at Peckinpah’s brutality and Leone’s standoffs, sped them up, and asked: what if violence could be graceful? 

Woo’s gun-fu redefined the visual language of action cinema through a radical reimagining:

Highly coordinated choreography that treats firearms like extensions of the body—not tools, but instruments of expression. Slow-motion not as brutality but as reverence, making each death monumental, each bullet its own tragedy. Infinite ammunition that keeps the percussive rhythm alive, letting the violence breathe as aesthetic spectacle. Impossible angles and unrealistic logistics that prioritize visual beauty over tactical sense. Melodrama elevated through careful cinematography and stylized bloodshed—violence as operatic experience.

This wasn’t just technique. It was a complete decoupling of gunplay from reality. Walk through modern action cinema and you see Woo’s fingerprints everywhere.

Tarantino absorbed this language. The Wachowskis built The Matrix with it.
And when Stahelski made John Wick, he didn’t invent the “gun-fu”,  he inherited it from Woo, refined it through obsessive stunt choreography, and let it speak to a new generation.


Woo also refined his ideas. But A Better Tomorrow is the moment of creation. It is the movie where Woo invented vocabulary that filmmakers are still learning to speak.

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The Kinetic Brilliance of Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues

Knife. Horse. Actress. That’s a blunt, character by character, translation of Daomadan, the Chinese title of Peking Opera Blues—which is also the clearest possible key to a film where performance is a weapon, gender is a disguise, and survival depends on how convincingly you can play your part.

The term daomadan names a specific kind of dan, or female role, in Peking Opera: the woman  warrior, a performer asked to do everything at once—act, sing, and fight with precision. Tsui Hark takes that tradition seriously, then turns it outward. His heroines don’t “become” warriors out of aspiration; they’re forced into virtuosity by a world that won’t forgive hesitation.

Released in 1986, Peking Opera Blues remains one of the major achievements of 80s cinema: a film that braids screwball comedy into political spy thriller, martial-arts choreography into a backstage musical. It’s not just energetic; it’s formally intelligent—keen about gender, skeptical about power, and unusually alert to the way history becomes theater.

The story is set in 1913, in the wake of the revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty and installed the young Republic of China. The regime is new, the situation is chaotic and the streets feel like they’re being rehearsed rather than governed. Yuan Shikai, the strongman who brokered the transition, maneuvers toward dictatorship by negotiating a foreign loan he plans to divert to pay his private army: politics as paperwork, backed by guns.

Into that volatility steps Cherie Chung as Sheung Hung: a jewel thief and wandering musician whose comic ingenuity keeps the film’s pulse quick. We meet her casing a warlord’s mansion with the wary focus of someone who’s learned to read danger in glances and footsteps. When the warlord’s soldiers mutiny over unpaid wages, she slips through the chaos and exits with jewelry—loot that, through a chain of accidents and misunderstandings, ends up at the theater of a Peking Opera company..

Sheung Hung begins as a political outsider: not immoral, just uninterested in martyrdom. And the film doesn’t scold her for it, as Star Wars chides Han Solo.  Instead, she becomes a kind of viewpoint character—recognizably pragmatic in a way that would have resonated with many people in 1980s Hong Kong: get paid, stay alive, don’t get absorbed into someone else’s cause. Chung’s performance is both dexterous and volatile—scrambling through ventilation ducts, wedging herself into trunks, ricocheting from lie to lie as bullets and misunderstandings close in. Her eventual shift—from self-interest to solidarity—doesn’t arrive with a lecture; it arrives as a consequence of friendship, proximity, and a growing inability to pretend neutrality is safe.

By contrast, Brigitte Lin plays Tsao Wan, a revolutionary agent operating with calm intensity. She’s the daughter of a general entangled in Yuan Shikai’s rise—pulled between family bonds and fierce loyalty to the republic she’s sworn to protect. Educated abroad as a doctor, Tsao Wan cross-dresses to move through spaces where authority is coded male: she borrows the silhouette of power in order to fight it. Lin gives her an austere physical control as she commands soldiers, organizes revolutionary cells, stoically endure torture.

This androgynous role marked a turning point in Lin’s career.  A Taiwanese actress already famous as the ethereally feminine star of romance movies, as one of the two Lins alongside Jackie Chan’s future wife,  Her collaboration with Tsui Hark repositioned Lin as an absolute icon embodying complex gender ambiguity. Peking Opera Blues established her as “the most beautiful woman in Hong Kong and Taiwan” precisely because of her ability to move fluidly between feminine grace and masculine intensity. This duality would later reach apotheosis in Swordsman II  with Lin’s legendary portrayal of Asia the Invincible.

Our last protagonist is  Sally Yeh as Bai Niu, daughter of an opera troupe owner and a would-be performer barred from the stage. Her father clings to Qing-era values, including the old prohibition against women performing—an edict that forced female roles to be played by men. I’ll note that rejecting imperial values, and allowing women to perform was part of the modernizing agenda of the new Republic. Yeh plays Bai Niu with a vivid mix of yearning and irritation—the particular urgency of someone told that their talent is irrelevant because tradition says so. (It’s no surprise the performance earned her a Hong Kong Film Award nomination.)

That Tsui Hark centers three women—and makes their bond, not the angst of a lone male hero, the film’s emotional engine—was a real commercial risk in 1986. And it isn’t simply “representation” as ornamentation. The film’s setting inside Chinese opera culture lets Tsui show gender as something learned, worn, and weaponized: costume as ideology, makeup as identity, blocking as claiming space in society.

Tsui’s action filmmaking here also moves beyond the older Hong Kong tendency to treat set-pieces as punctuation marks. In Peking Opera Blues, action extends narrative logic; it doesn’t interrupt it. Tsui has said the film’s disregard for gravity is intentional: characters soar, bounce, and hang in the air because, in this universe, physics answers to feeling. If someone needs—urgently, irrationally—to fly, to escape, to rescue, to keep the country from collapsing, then they fly.

The result isn’t “fantasy” so much as stylization, tying cinematic motion directly to the codified movement of Peking Opera, effectively blurring the line between the diegetic stage performance and the “real” world of the narrative.

That’s reinforced by the craft behind the camera. Action choreographer Tony Ching Siu-tung was trained at a renowned Peking Opera school, and you can feel it in the way bodies move through space: not merely striking, but phrased—motions that belong to rich visual language.

The editing is equally bracing. Tsui has described the film as “120 minutes of content squeezed into 90,” and you can sense that compression in the way scenes cut without warning—sometimes mid-action—so the story seems to sprint ahead of you, dragging you along by the sleeve. The rhythm is less like conventional continuity than like percussion: accents, collisions, sudden silences, then another burst.

And the tempo isn’t just editorial. Composer James Wong—one of Tsui’s long time collaborators—crafts a soundscape that modernizes tradition without parodying it. During the opening credits, traditional opera percussion locks in with a contemporary, driving synth line. An actor in full face paint stares directly into the camera and laughs—an image that feels like a dare. The film announces itself as a modernization project: not “respectful” in a stale museum sense, but respectful enough to  believe that this form is worth gambling on.

Peking Opera Blues is a rare kind of wonder: a film you can analyze for years and still enjoy as visceral, immediate cinema. It’s willing to let slapstick coexist with torture, gunplay with opera, history with fantasy—and it makes those collisions feel like the point, not like a problem. By dressing 1986’s anxieties in 1913’s costumes, Tsui made a timeless film that stays current precisely because its world is unstable. It suggests that when history turns absurd, hope depends on performance: put on your makeup, hit your mark, and when the roof collapses—jump high enough that it seems you’re flying.

In our own moment,  that performer’s spirit—resilient, adaptive, and stubbornly alive—is worth holding onto.

A new restoration of Peking Opera Blues is available on Blu-ray from Shout Studios, and it’s currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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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.