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July 27 movie: Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters. This was a lot of fun, but how could any movie with the words "Tsui Hark" and "Vampire" in the title not be fun? Tsui Hark didn't actually direct the film (I guess he produced it or something) and it isn't going to enter my permanent library of HK classics. It was pretty confusing at times, but never quite freaky enough to reach the delirious heights of Zu Warriors style surrealism. But still, a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

They win bonus points for having vampires that look like extras from a George Romero movie, not metrosexual Eurotrash. I wonder if that's the traditional form of the bloodsucking undead in Chinese folklore? Also, Chinese vampires don't bite people to steal their blood: they use their acid breath to suck it out through the capillaries and orifices in some amazingly low-budget effects. They also see people by their body heat, and are confused by water. The vampire hunters at one point dump barrels of water on themselves so the vampire can't see them, and they hide the damsel in distress in a shallow pool under a wet coat.

Some exposition at the beginning of the film explained that Chinese vampires start out as zombies, but turn into vampires if they taste human blood. Chinese zombies, however, do not look like extras from a George Romero movie. They just look like dead people. Best of all, Chinese zombies don't shuffle with their arms outstretched before them. They keep their arms at their sides and hop up and down! I'm super bummed that I never encountered this when I was studying Chinese. I even read a whole book of supernatural stories called "Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio." But no hopping zombies that I can recall. Georg had read about it, though, in a book about HK cinema. And both of us found the sight of a room full of zombies hopping towards our heroes absolutely hilarious.

Perhaps the best unintentional comedy was provided by the sorceror who could control zombies. Actually by his title. The subtitles described him as a "zombie wrangler," as in "I know a zombie wrangler in the village! He'll help us!" But the end credits called him a "geomancer." Which is completely wrong. I mean, maybe he was also a geomancer, but his skill in the movie was as a necromancer. Okay, I'm being totally pedantic. But at least "zombie wrangler" was accurate!

July 27 movie: The Thomas Crown Affair. Not the remake; the original, with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. I had heard of this as a slick caper movie, but I wouldn't describe it that way at all. The plot about the bank robbery was secondary and too plodding to be that interesting in my mind. Really the good thing about this movie was the amazing chemistry between McQueen and Dunaway. McQueen never convinced me as a millionaire businessman, but I didn't care as long as he and Dunaway kept smoking up the screen. The best scene was definitely the sexy chess. Every movie should have a sexy chess game!

One thing I will grant this film: I totally did not expect the ending. I thought they were heading towards another ending entirely. I haven't seen the remake but I'd bet money that it doesn't end the same way.

Director Norman Jewison described it as "style over content" and I would definitely agree with that. I almost gave up on it during the interminable glider scene -- just McQueen flying around and around while "Windmills of Your Mind" plays and god I hate that song. But thankfully Dunaway showed up onscreen soon after that. Even if the movie had totally sucked, I would have continued watching just to see her clothes. Picture perfect 1968 fashions. Which I'm kind of into, as you may have gathered if you read this journal with any regularity. During the film I guessed that her clothes were by YSL, but it was actually Thea van Runkle, a movie costume designer I'd never heard of before.

July 13 movie: Dogtown and Z-Boys. I had seen about half of this movie last year, and have been waiting for it to show up again on IFC so I could see it all the way through. It's a documentary about the Zephyr Skate Team who (according to them) revolutionized skateboarding in the 70s by incorporating surfing techniques and skating in empty pools, creating the vertical and airborne styles.

The movie was fascinating to me on a bunch of levels. First, it does a really good job of capturing the creation of a subculture & letting the viewer feel the excitement of the moment. But besides that, the filmmaker (Stacy Peralta) was himself one of the Zephyr team, which maybe gave him better access than an outsider would have had, but also raised a lot of interesting questions about point of view in a documentary. For one thing, when Peralta is on camera (which he frequently is) who interviewed him? During interviews with other Z-boys you can hear Peralta laughing at stories or in-jokes, which creates the impression of listening in on a conversation between old friends rather than watching a documentary.

And of course, the filmmaker being one of the gang means that self-aggrandising statements tended to be taken at face value. I know nothing about skateboarding so I have no way of knowing if their claims are true. But it does seem that they might have been more a part of a culture than lone trailblazers. At times the Z-boys talked about skating in pools as though they were the only people doing it, but then they said that a good pool was a closely guarded secret because they didn't want a lot of other people horning in on their good thing. Which would indicate that there were others doing similar things.

Maybe the Zephyr club did revolutionize skateboarding. But I'm guessing they wouldn't have ended up so famous without photojournalist Craig Stecyk, co-founder of the Zephyr shop that sponsored their team, who wrote a series of articles about them in Skateboarding magazine. They also had a photographer (Glen Friedman) hanging out with them at the time, creating a mountainous photographic record which is heavily drawn on by the film.

The only disappointment for me was the lack of airtime given to Peggy Oki, the only female member of the Zephyr team. It comes off as a testosterone-driven environment (for example, 2 different Z-boys compare skating a new pool to having sex with a virgin), and I really wanted to know about her story. How did she get in with this group, and why were no other women included? Did they accept her, did they consider her as good as them? Did she get the endorsements that were thrown at the male stars? None of these questions are answered or even asked.

Oki has a couple of quotes and shows up in the group shots, like most of the Z-boys. The only people who are profiled in any depth are Tony Alva (who comes off like an egomaniac), Jay Adams (who is not dead, although I assumed he was from the tone of his profile -- actually he's in prison), and Stacy Peralta himself (as Georg said, these guys aren't exactly humble). I guess 90 minutes wasn't enough time to examine every member of the Zephyr team in detail.

The soundtrack is spectacular. There are a few misfires ("Maggie May"? *shudder*) but mostly the music makes the Z-boys seem gloriously cool, like Bowie, Iggy, the Buzzcocks, Sneaker Pimps, and Devo. "Gut Feeling," yeah! Unfortunately none of that stuff is on the soundtrack album. Maybe they had problems with music clearance or something.

The last thing I have to say is that Dogtown and Z-boys included one startling technique that I had never experienced before: at one point narrator Sean Penn stumbles, coughs, then has to repeat a word before finishing the sentence. And they left it in. That's gonzo filmmaking for you!

July 11 movie: Our Man Flint. Good golly, I love this movie. Best spy parody ever stars James Coburn as Derek Flint: super genius, super agent, sex machine. Made four years after Dr. No, Flint sends up the Bond movies and was clearly a main inspiration for Austin Powers. To its credit, the Powers movies acknowledge the debt with touches here and there (like the phone in Austin Powers' car, which makes the same funny ring as the red phone in the Flint movies).

I think Our Man Flint is better than the sequel, In Like Flint, except that the sequel includes Anna Lee, who I love, as a matriachal villainess in crazy wimpleish headgear. From the cigarette lighter with 82 secret functions (83, if you'd like to light a cigar), to Flint's four multinational girlfriends, to the spy organization called Z.O.W.I.E., to the "anti-American bald eagle" trained to attack Americans, to the whole bizarre "I am not a pleasure unit" scene, it's hard to pick out the funniest moment.

But the best thing about Flint, absolutely the best, is that he doesn't make stupid quips when he kills a bad guy; he just kills the guy and moves on. That's because he's Flint! Derek Flint is too cool for lame quips.

July 9 movie: Mr. Lucky. Cary Grant is a wartime con artist who dodges the draft by stealing someone else's 4F card, and plans a grand scheme to bilk a war relief organization out of $200,000. Does the love of a good woman (Laraine Day) reform him? What do you think?

Grant is terrible at playing a street-smart gangster, but this movie has some high points. Like a running gag where the war relief ladies teach knitting to Grant and his driver, Crunk, who thereafter knits all the time and teaches it to the other hoodlums. Also Gladys Cooper in a supporting role as, believe it or not, a nice person. She specializes in the sadistic maternal figure (the mother in Now, Voyager and Separate Tables, and the mistress of novices in Song of Bernadette) but here she's the head of the war relief organization. I've seen her in a bunch of other movies but I'd never before seen her smile! Charles Bickford (who I always get confused with Joseph Cotten) also had a nice supporting role.

There's a thing about Grant teaching Cockney slang (bizarrely described as being from Australia) to Day that was so horrible it was funny, but in the unintentional comedy way. And Grant did get to be all tough guy violent in one scene, knocking Day's lights out (for her protection of course), and stomping his foot on the face of the bad guy. That was about as convincing as his Australian cockney slang. All told, I wouldn't watch this again.

June 28 movie: In Name Only. Cary Grant falls in love with Carole Lombard, but his golddigger wife Kay Francis won't give him a divorce. Grant's upper crust parents and friends are mean to Lombard, but eventually everything works out. Francis is great as the villain and Charles Coburn has a nice turn as Grant's father. The only thing wrong with the movie is that Grant spends the entire end of the movie lying in an oxygen tent looking weak while the other characters sort things out. Doesn't that violate a cardinal principle of classic movies? It's the woman who's supposed to become deathly ill so the man realizes he can't live without her, not the other way around.