Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week saw me at last finishing my Blue Prince adventures, which I am not ashamed to admit concluded with me looking up a whole lot of answers that I would never, ever have figured out myself. The game passed the point of what I’d consider a “reasonably achievable deduction” with the introduction of the “A New Clue” book, but I still enjoyed a more guided ride through the conclusion, and can’t really fault the game for culminating in puzzles no mortal mind could comprehend. The game’s balance of increasingly tamable roguelike runs and larger meta-puzzles is truly a magical combination; I imagine its appeal will be forever limited by its demanding nature, but for me, Blue Prince is already a pantheon property. Anyway, we’ve also got some films to get through, so let’s charge right into the Week in Review!
First up this week was The Loved Ones, an Australian horror-comedy film starring Xavier Samuel as Brent, a teenager whose life is turned upside down when his father dies in a car crash. Six months later, the approaching prom festivities are doing little to brighten his spirits, and he has turned to self-harm and near-death experiences to assuage his guilt. However, he soon finds himself with a fresh slate of more immediate problems when he is captured and imprisoned by his classmate Lola, who is determined to be his prom queen even if she has to drill his feet to the floor to do it.
Yeah, it’s quite a swerve from the film’s somber beginnings, and the film can never quite resolve its simultaneous fascination with prom night anxieties and Texas Chainsaw violence. There’s a whole running thread following Brent’s best friend that basically never coalesces with the main narrative; we’re really just watching two films here, one a sort of quietly sad exploration of imperfect adolescent intimacy, the other a half-length Texas Chainsaw riff involving a reprise of that classic dinner table scene, power tools, and a pit of cannibals. As Brent’s captor Lola, Robin McLeavy absolutely nails a particular kind of disquieting, possessive archetype, with her obsession with that awful “Not Pretty Enough” song serving as the perfect cherry on top. I’d never paid enough attention to that song to truly dislike it; The Loved Ones exploits it as well as Barbie skewers “Push,” presenting it as the perfect anthem for a very twisted heart.
We then checked out The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a ‘62 John Ford feature starring James Stewart as Ranse Stoddard, a former lawyer and current Senator whose political career was made with one violent act, the defeat of notorious outlaw Liberty Valance. However, the truth of Stoddard’s heroics involve his tempestuous relationship with rancher and former gunman Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), with whom he fought over love, life, the social contract, and the very measure of a man.
It is hard to imagine looking back that John fucking Ford had to compromise on color photography for a western starring James fucking Stewart and John fucking Wayne, but I suppose it just goes to show that the great films of any era exists in spite of capitalism, not because of it. Anyway, Liberty Valance is a gorgeous picture and a fitting swan song for Ford and Wayne’s partnership. Though their on-set relationship was frayed, that doesn’t come through in the final result; the film is a love letter to John Wayne’s vision of frontier masculinity, with him frequently coming up the better relative to Stewart’s articulation of a new age and new man (he waits tables! He reads!).
This far into his career, Ford seems more interested in paying debts and setting records straight than indulging in the romanticism of Stagecoach or My Darling Clementine. Liberty Valance is hard-edged and ambiguous; Wayne’s machismo is self-destructive, but it is the only weapon keen enough to face the demons of the old west, the big stick behind Stewart’s soft words. Both men are proven incapable of fully embodying their convictions, and though the era turns, it remains uncertain who is truly leading us in this strange new world. A melancholy epic starring a dozen legendary actors (the film is so generously furnished it barely makes use of Lee Van Cleef), a vivid exercise in the power of black and white photography, and a troubled interrogation of the fundamental nature of man. Not bad, Ford.
Next up was Aftermath, a recent action feature starring Dylan Sprouse as an ex-army ranger traveling with his sister across Boston’s Tobin Memorial Bridge. Suddenly, presumed terrorists blow the bridge at both ends, taking hundreds of commuters hostage as they seek to break a prisoner from a high security transport. With memories of wartime horrors flashing before his mind, Sprouse will have to make use of whatever tools and allies he can forage as the Tobin Bridge becomes one final battlefield.
Aftermath is one of those clean, efficient action vehicles that knows precisely what it’s about, establishing a clear field of play and precisely sufficient starting variables, then reveling in the satisfaction of watching a perfectly coherent battle play out. The film uses its venue to persistently compelling effect, juggling sight lines and shifting in tension as one side or another claims each segment of the bridge. The end result plays out quite similarly to Die Hard or One Shot; with the variables in play so clearly defined, theoretically minor shifts in fortune like “he got one of our guns” become validating and consequential, a coherent expression of the battle’s shifting tides. By keeping the terms clear and carefully managing this tension throughout (director Patrick Lussier is a long-time film editor, and it shows), Aftermath builds a sturdy action-thriller out of the fewest possible ingredients.
Last up for the week was Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, in which a refugee named Chan Lok-Kwan (Raymond Lam) arrives at Hong Kong in the ‘80s, and swiftly finds himself in trouble with a local drug-smuggling gang. Fleeing into Kowloon Walled City, he eventually comes under the protection of local leader Cyclone, and finds a sense of community within its labyrinthian alleys. However, old grudges and new ambitions soon threaten his newfound home, prompting an all-out war for the future of the walled city.
Kowloon has been a topic of fascination to me for years now, a vision of discordant, deeply intimate urbanization that feels like something out of cyberpunk fantasy. A city like a truly living organism, a massive block of homes and businesses, gangs and families, every essential aspect of cohabitation repeating horizontally, vertically, diagonally in all directions, a massive honeycomb of human experience, like the endlessly fascinating anomaly that is Hong Kong has been pressurized into an Escherian gemstone. Simply witnessing a recreation of the city was pitch enough for me, so I consider it a bonus that Walled In is also a pretty darn satisfying action movie.
The film seems to agree with my own priorities: the action can get a little floaty in its choreography (the casting director clearly valued movie stars over martial artists), and the political drama ends up petering out rather than violently exploding, but the city itself is always treated with awe and respect. Whether the cast are desperately parkouring across Kowloon’s awnings or simply sharing a meal in its concrete corridors, there is a vivid sense of place and community that keeps the whole affair feeling simultaneously personal and fantastical, a lucid dream of an intimately textured architectural impossibility. If you’re here for martial arts, you might be a touch disappointed; if the idea of Kowloon entices you, you’ll have a lovely time.
