Whalefall [dir. Brian Duffield]

There are two sides to Whalefall: One is an cracking A-budget B-picture idea about a guy swallowed by a humongous sperm whale. This is entertaining as far as it goes, especially in 4DX. The movie gives a terrific sense of the sunken depths into which the guy dives and the entire episode of him getting tangled with a giant squid and then vacuumed into the whale's maw is cheer-worthy. He spends most of the remaining movie time inside the whale, first attempting to plow through the whale's gut (bad idea) and then trying to make his way back up. If the movie had kept its focus on the mechanics of the escape, which are sufficiently gooshy and entertaining in themselves, this would have been an immersive fun ride.

But it has A-picture ambitions, and so we also have a sodden drama with the most confounding of allusions. Our leading man (Austin Abrams) is called "Jay", harking back to the Old Testament story of Jonah and the Whale. Briefly, God wants Jonah to obey his command. But naughty Jonah runs the other way in a sailing boat, so God busts him by rousing up a storm (literally) and having him swallowed by a whale. When he repents, he is let out in a torrent of whale vomit. Happy ending.

For Jay, God is replaced by his father Mitt) played by Josh Brolin, doing his best geezer Nick Nolte impression). When the film begins, Mitt has committed suicide by drowning himself at sea because of his cancer. He and Jay have had a very troubled relationship, so much so the boy has not attended the funeral. But for some reason, Jay gets the idea of finding his father's remains. In flashbacks, whose clumsiness even Pietro 'JFK ' Scalia's cutting skills cannot conceal, we learn that Mitt was an overbearing dad forever on Jay's tail about diving and survival. He is also a drunk and an eco-nutter that resents the idea of the majestic whale reduced to a tourist selfie opportunity. And yeah, he has cancer, the sort that is clearly geared at garnering award nominations. Mitt's "tough love" parenting (which seems restricted to Jay, his girls only have loving memories) and demand that the son match his rigorous discipline drives the son away to landlocked Iowa (thus mimicking Jonah's attempt to escape). But after he is trapped in the whale, his father's rants are suddenly revealed as life-saving strategies that Jay applies to survive in and ultimately escape his whale-cell.

To say that the father-son drama is boring is an understatement. Every time the film cuts away from the present to a flashback, it flops like a fish out of water. With the film's pointed agenda of making the drunk nutter cancer patient father a spiritual guide to the boy, the portrait we get of Brolin's character is not even consistent, and you want to throw beer cans at him. Heck, I would pay to see this movie with all the drama bits stripped out and remade as a Meg sequel with Jason Statham punching his way out of the damn whale.

The Betrayal [dir. Tokuzo Tanaka]

Tokuzo Tanaka's The Betrayal could almost be a prequel to Kihachi Okamoto's Sword of Doom, in that it shows how a loyal Samurai becomes disillusioned with the traditional honor code and could eventually turn to amorality. Raizo Ichikawa, who I mainly know from the Shinobi no Mono movie series, is the honorable and skilled warrior forced by his clan senior (and father of his fiancee) to take the blame for the back-stabbing murder of a rival clan member in order to save the home clan's face. Ichikawa does so on the promise of the matter being resolved in a few months, only to find that the old man has died in the interim and there is no one that can vouch for his innocence (although I don't know why his fiancee - Kaoru Yachigusa from Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai trilogy - who is a witness to this conversation, cannot vouch for his innocence, especially after her father is dead).

Ichikawa becomes an outcast, hunted by both the rival clan and his own clan. He disclaims Samurai honor as meaningless, although his conscience still pushes him towards a personal ethical code. He has multiple encounters with the various clan members in which his skills help him to escape. In the end he is surrounded by a literal army of enemies - his own clan, the rival clan and people interested in the bounty for his head. It is a scene of highly exaggerated combat: Ichikawa slays more than a hundred foes coming at him with swords, lances, ladders, ropes, handcarts. Even his enemy is forced to admit that with such skill and valor, he could not have been the backstabber, but for the sake of clan honor he must slay him.

For all the action, The Betrayal is primarily a melodrama, and it does lay it on a bit thick. Like I said, I am not sure why the fiancee character could not clarify matters to her clan (it would be another matter if she did not know). But the film is shot with style (Japanese film expert Tom Mes' selected scene commentary nicely dissects the visual choices Tanaka makes) and subverts some expectations - a thief character who attaches himself to Ichikawa sees his ethical behavior, but does not flinch from betraying him later. The climactic fight is a doozy, although a lot of the time the enemy pretty much fall on to Ichikawa's sword while making the most inept stabs at him (There is no way he could have overcome those odds if they had shown the slightest competence). The film ends on an ambiguous note where we don't know if Ichikawa's character will be left alone or further pursued by his enemies. Who knows, may be he could end up as the amoral character Tatsuya Nakadai played in Sword of Doom.

A few words on the blu-ray from Radiance Films:

Radiance's blu gives a fine presentation of the B&W widescreen feature, with solid grayscale and contrast. The audio is a mixed bag, with significant distortion in the upper registers, especially noticeable during Akira Ikufube's excellent score. Extras include the aforementioned selected scene commentary, a visual essay by Mes where he discusses Tozuki Tanaka's style (I feel he extrapolates a bit too much here about the thematic elements), and a nice comparison by Philip Kemp of The Betrayal to a silent-era movie of which it is said to be a remake. The booklet in the limited edition contains a scholdarly essay by Alain Silver.

The Furious [dir. Kenji Tanigaki]

I'll cut straight to the chase. It's not since Ong-Bak that a film has so wowed me with its (ha!) furious action. I have seen reviews comparing this movie with The Raid and The Night Comes for Us. The latter I remember seeing some of on Netflix, but after a point I just switched off because it seemed to me just full of sadism and mean-spiritedness posing as entertainment. The Raid comparison is more appropriate, especially since a major action sequence is when an army of thugs enters a multi-story building our heroes are trapped in, and they have to fight their way through. But The Raid itself was butt-ugly, shot on a Handycam level camera with no thought for lighting and contrast.

If we say that The Furious is defined by its action, then to me it owes more to the classic Hong Kong martial arts crime movies than anything else. While brutal, the action is also extremely balletic; 'beat' poetry at its finest (apologies, Mr. Ginsberg). In The Furious' world, duels are rare. Most fights are threesomes, foursomes, in general multi-somes. The bodies of combatants in flow are pressed together like a sandwich, twisted into a pretzel, piled up in a meat pyramid. 

Director Tanigaki knows how to film his action sequences well -  eschewing the frequent modern tendency for rapid cutting, he favors long takes in which we can appreciate the beauty of the choreography and the precision of the actors. It makes the fights easy to follow as a dance of deadly movements. The interesting thing is that in most fights, there are no 'fodder' extras, stuntmen who fall down after just a couple of blows to show how powerful the heroes are. No, almost every battle here is hard-won.

The best part of the film was the climactic 5-way showdown, which for me equals, and (sacrilege!) maybe even surpasses the final fight between the Peking Opera brothers (Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao) and Dick Wei in Project A. Without any spoilers, it features an actor/fighter who is part acrobat and part wrecking ball. He is basically Donkey Kong in live action. Lead actors Miao Xie and Joe Taslim have great action chops, and analogous to Angela Mao in Enter the Dragon there is a pivotal cameo at the start from Chocolate star (Jeeja) Yanin Vismitananda.

So yeah, if watching brilliantly choreographed bruising ballets is your idea of a good time, then The Furious will make you happy indeed.

Do Bigha Zamin [dir. Bimal Roy]

It was heartening to see the 700-seater Regal cinema hall on a weekday evening full of young viewers lined up for a more-than-70 years old film. To make a confession, I had never seen Do Bigha Zamin (DBZ) in its entirety before, only selected clips on TV especially the cycle rickshaw race with its calamitous end. Said to be inspired by watching Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, DBZ is a grounded drama about the downtrodden in society. Our protagonist Shambhu Mahto (an unforgettable Balraj Sahni) is a farmer forced to look for work in the city to earn enough to clear the mortgage on his farm, after he refuses to sell the land to the rich zamindar (Murad) for the construction of a mill. 

Shambhu lands in the sprawling chaos of Kolkata with his stowaway son Kanhaiya (Ratan Kumar), while his wife Parvati (Nirupa Roy) is left in the village with his ailing father. In the metropolis, they meet a motley of characters, some of whom - like the fiery-tongued slum landlady or the street-smart boot-polishing urchin Lalu (a young spirited Jagdeep, devoid of excessive buffoonery) are sympathetic enough to help them out. To put the money together before his repayment term ends, Shambhu works like a dog, refusing himself even basic necessities as a good meal or rest after an accident.

With Shambhu and his family's life Roy depicts the hardship of poor folk in the country, the struggle to make a living or hold on to their most meager possessions, while still trying to maintain a shred of dignity and avoid taking the path of crime. It is a sensitive and sympathetic tale helmed by someone that truly believed in the power of cinema for social change. Roy would later go on to make other striking social dramas like Bandini and Sujata; even his gothic melodrama Madhumati has a strong social backdrop of oppression by the privileged class.

The film's production design and cinematography are wholly married to the vision of social realism. Even the songs (composed by Salil Chowdhary) are an integral part of the narrative, with no extravagant escapist dream sequences. DBZ ends, as it should, on a tragic and poignant note: Shambhu finds himself fenced out of his own land after it is auctioned by the debt court, not allowed to even take a handful of dirt from the earth that he and his forefathers had tended for so many generations.

Kudos to the Film Heritage Foundation and Janus-Criterion for undertaking the 4K restoration of this classic. Largely free of any heavy damage and showing painstakingly calibrated contrast that reveals the vision of its makers, the restored version is a marvel.

Assi aka Eighty [dir. Anubhav Sinha]

Assi is story-wise probably the best film Anubhav Sinha has made thus far because, as Baradwaj Rangan in his review says, he constantly subverts our expectations about what the film is about. When we think it will be a grandstanding courtroom drama where a woman lawyer snatches justice from a biased system for her assaulted client, it goes in another, more interesting direction. It looks at the vicious spiral of violence and retaliatory violence, and how in celebrating an act of vigilante justice, the original victim is no longer a factor.

Of course, Anubhav the storyteller is often tripped over by Anubhav the writer of clunky portentous dialog and his need to virtue signal. To no fault of these terrific actors, Mohd Zeeshan Ayub's sensitive husband and Taapsee Pannu's firebrand lawyer are less credible people than idealizations of the script. Where the film is saved is in the introduction of Kumud Mishra's character - I won't spoil it with any further description, but in both the writing and Mishra's committed performance (including an amazing body transformation that makes you see the actor in a different light), a new dimension is added to what could have been a cliched Pink 2 kind of story. Sinha as director also breaks the fourth wall with periodic reminders that a rape crime takes place at least every 20 min in this country (Adding up to the title's eighty in a day, and that's counting only the reported ones).

All things considered, Assi's core is IMO strong enough to make an impact - the climax is beautifully written in terms of how it again restores focus on the person who was originally violated, and only by systemically addressing the 'might is right' thinking which governs our social conflicts - be they gender, religion or caste based - can we truly aspire to be civilized.

Cruel Gun Story [dir. Takumi Furukawa]

Cruel Gun Story (CGS) was a pretty good heist caper in the veteran Nikkatsu Studio's crime filmography. Joe Shishido (he of puffed cheeks fame from Branded to Kill) heads the gang meant to carry out the heist. But Joe is not calling all the shots - a big fish gangster is bankrolling the caper and has assigned a motley of crew-mates to Joe, who may not all be trustworthy.

As South East Asian film expert Tony Rayns says in his video essay included on the blu-ray from Radiance Films, CGS shares a kinship with Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, in which also a gang plots to steal the receipts of a horse racing derby. In other film references, there is a chase through sewers a la Carol Reed's The Third Man. 

As can be expected, the heist does not go as planned. The gang face unexpected stumbling blocks - including a guard that refuses to leave the bulletproof money van, and there are double and triple crosses galore. CGS is based on a story by Haruhiko Oyabu, who also wrote the sources behind several Seijun Suzuki movies. The overall mix is delirious, and while there are logical fallacies and contrivances of melodrama, it does not prevent the film from being entertaining.

Shishido as the tough-talking leader holds our attention (and his cheeks don't look as ridiculous as they did in Branded to Kill). I noticed that the environment around the characters had predominantly English signage; Rayns explains that the film is set in and around an American military base (Shishido's contact even obtains a sniper-scope rifle from a GI) and is indicative of the corruption culture prevalent in the period.

A few words on the Radiance blu-ray:

Video quality is solid but not spectacular. The master appears dated, with middling detail and limited contrast / grayscale; it might be the same that was sourced for The Criterion Collection's DVD release as part of their Eclipse box-set on Nikkatsu Noir). Initially, the audio seemed to have some distortion, but that feeling went away afterwards, and the brassy score punches hard. Extras include two video essays (one being the aforementioned Tony Rayns piece and one by Jackie Scanlon on the Nikkatsu Noir period), a commentary by expert Jasper Sharp and a short interview with an older Joe Shishido who looks a lot more handsome after having removed the cheek implants.

Die Katze aka The Cat [dir. Dominik Graf]

Dominik Graf's 1988 thriller The Cat begins with the visual of a man and woman having sex to the strains of Good Times by The Animals, then craftily segues to a couple of blokes in a car singing along with the radio. All these people will play a part in a planned heist. The woman is unhappily married to the bank manager and a willing accomplice in the plan. The two blokes are henchmen that will carry out a robbery and later hold the manager and employees hostage for a hefty ransom. The man - played by German star Gotz George - is the cold-blooded brains behind the operation.

What follows is a multi-layered scheme in which the man arranges for the henchmen to ask for the ransom to be carried by the manager's wife (Gudrun Landgrebe). From his hotel room window opposite the bank and access to police radio communications the man can clearly predict the police operations and accordingly issue counter instructions. Later in a thrilling interlude, he himself navigates fire escapes and narrow ledges, and even slinks under trucks to sabotage them (Gotz reportedly performed his own stunts). But his mistress complicates his scheme by demanding that he kill her husband in return for her cooperation.

As can be gleaned from the above summary, The Cat is a tense noir thriller, and brilliantly done at that. Because of the gray shades in all of the characters, the film is able to constantly play with audience sympathies. The calculative intensity of Gotz's character, the frustration that builds among the henchmen when events start to overwhelm, the tactical games with the police, these make for a boiling mix. This visual texture of the film reflects this element - it unfolds over the course of a sunny, humid day and the characters are frequently bathed in sweat. There is constant cross-cutting between the events inside the bank, Gotz's hotel suite and the police control room; the overall effect is of a constantly tightening grip.

I had not previously heard of the film, and was able to experience it thanks to Radiance Films' excellent blu-ray. A few words about it:

The high-definition transfer beautifully represents the evocative cinematography (Martin Schafer, who did camera duties for Wim Wenders on his Road Trilogy, Paris, Texas and The American Friend). The stereo track comes across strongly in the action scenes and in the soundtrack. There are a number of meaty extras, including a lengthy conversation with Graf (in which he details his early career, the Robert Aldrich influence, how this project began, the contributions of star Gotz George etc) and shorter ones with writer Christopher Fromm and producer Georg Feil. There is also the usual limited edition booklet.