"Memories"
Directed by Kim Ji-Woon (The Foul King)
A banner hangs over the entrance to a sparsely populated Korean city under construction: "Welcome to New Town - Where dreams come true." Which sounds nice--as long as you have nice dreams.

"Husband" (Jeong Bo-Seok) is having dreams. Bad dreams. And he's seeing things. (Aside from the death angle, about the only thing the three films share is the recurring motif of people seeing things that may or may not be there.) He's also seeing a shrink. His wife has gone missing and, as he says several times, he has a terrible feeling that "something bad has happened to her."

Meanwhile, "Wife" (Kim Hye-Su) wakes up in the middle of the street, her belongings strewn about. As she retrieves the contents of her purse and tries to regain her bearings, images flash briefly, and we realize that she has no idea where she is, how she got there--or worse, who she is.

Time passes for both of them, but how much exactly we never know. As Husband tries to cope with Wife's disappearance, he seems to be slowly losing his mind, hallucinating and snapping at his in-laws. But as seemingly bad as he has it, Wife has it worse. Hers is a struggle to not only regain her identity, but to make it back home in spite of obstacles that seem to crop up just as she makes a bit of forward progress. She finds a home telephone number on a laundry receipt in her purse, but can't complete a call. She sees a little girl walking to the bus stop and recognizes the girl's backpack, but the bus pulls away and she is unable to catch up. After dark she manages to hail a taxi, but the mute driver takes her in the wrong direction. It's quite a good performance from the actress who, with very little dialogue, effectively communicates her inner confusion.

"Memories" is a story told well in quiet pictures. The cinematography impressed me as very precise, the visuals striking, almost clinical. But as good as it is, it's not perfect. The film is most effective when it's brooding and mysterious, and least effective when the director is just going for shock value. There are two such gratuitous scenes, and they serve only to take you out of the movie. If the elements of the scenes had been thematically related to the movie, that would have been understandable, perhaps--but I still haven't figured out what they had to do with anything.

"The Wheel"
Directed by Nonzee Nimibutr (Nang nak, Jan Dara)
Master Tao, the puppet master of a Thai village, is dying. He's also seeing the ghosts of his wife and son, who drowned in the river while trying to discard his Hun Lakorn Lek puppets because they are cursed. And there's no doubt they're cursed--after all, through the magic of movies, we're blessed with the actual voice of the spirit vowing death and destruction on anyone who messes with the puppets. Yet even the legend of the curse plus the deaths of Tao and his family are not enough to dissuade Khon performer Master Tong (a sort of "lower order" puppeteer) from coveting Tao's valuable puppets.

Tong secretly takes possession of the ornate puppets and things start going wrong immediately. Some family members start dying mysteriously, others start acting strangely, and I actually got goose bumps. Tong thinks he can outsmart the curse, but we all know the spirits aren't ones to suffer fools gladly. The title evidently refers to the wheel of karma--although under this curse, even the innocent are punished with the guilty. I guess it takes a village.

Gaan (Suwinit Panjamawat, aka the lucky bastard who got to fondle nekkid Christy Chung in Jan Dara), the young student of Master Tao, is the only one who believes in the curse--not that it does him or anyone else any good. Tong's young granddaughter, Bua, evokes the biggest reactions with her completely mute performance (she's never heard, and seen "conversing" only once, with her puppet). Hers was the performance that gave me goose bumps and later brought tears.

In the end, after a series of escalating tragedies, Master Tong is allowed what author Richard Bach calls a "mercy chute"--yet given another chance to get it right, he again lets his greed get the better of him. As a Marine buddy of mine used to say: "Never underestimate the power of man to deceive himself."

The Wheel is an entertaining diversion and an interesting look at a facet of Thai culture I wasn't even aware of. And you'll never hear me complain about returning to Thailand, even if only in the movies.

"Going Home"
Directed by Peter Ho-Sun Chan (Comrades: Almost a Love Story)
Two apartment blocks on Hong Kong's Aberdeen Street have been scheduled for demolition. But as the last of the residents are leaving, CID officer and widower Chan Wai (Eric Tsang) moves in with his young son, Cheung. Besides the manager, the only other resident of the blocks is the quiet, focused Mr. Yu (Leon Lai) and his wife, Hai'er (Eugenia Yuan), who is "paralyzed from the waist down," according to the manager. But who is little girl in the red coat Cheung keeps seeing?

With no wife and no money for a sitter, Chan has no choice but to leave Cheung--a fearful type--home alone when he goes to work, admonishing him to "be a man and stop being so scared." One day, Cheung sees the little girl on the breezeway; she approaches him and asks, "Will you play with me?" He follows her to the photography studio seen in the opening of the film. When Chan comes home and Cheung is missing, he checks with the apartment manager and with Yu, whose evasiveness prompts Chan to do a little extra digging. While Yu is out, he returns to Yu's apartment and is shocked to find Hai'er submerged in the bathtub...

Lovingly shot by WKW partner Christopher Doyle,"Going Home" plays out like an episode of "The Twilight Zone" with a decidedly Asian flavor. Mostly it reminded me of my favorite "Tales from the Crypt" episode, in which a professor plays a cruel joke on a colleague by making him think he's dead (though he's merely paralyzed).

Leon Lai has certainly moved beyond his pop idol appeal, and Eric Tsang continues to impress me with his range. I just watched him in Infernal Affairs as the cop-taunting triad boss; here he plays the everyman widower concerned more for his missing son than for his own life, even as he tries to figure out the truth behind the predicament he finds himself in. Eugenia Yuan's role was minimal, but presented its own unique demands. She does a lot with very little. The ending is, by turns, nerve-wracking, sad, shocking and bittersweet.

I love a film that makes me think. I'm still not one hundred percent on the meaning of the photography studio that bookends the film, but I've watched "Going Home" twice now, and I think I have it mostly sussed. I don't want to give anything away, so it's up to you to come to your own conclusions. Deeper meanings aside, it's a nice way to bring the story full circle.

Overall, Three is worthy viewing. I found each film to be appealing in its own way, although the stark, clean images of "Memories" are the ones that keep coming to mind. Movies like Three are why I started watching "foreign" films in the first place. If I want another buddy cop movie with lots of explosions and wisecracks, there's no shortage in America. But whether it's because of the language or the storytelling tradition, foreign films are--not to be too obvious--different. And different is good.

On the surface, BTF appears to follow a very simple plot, but it gets so complicated that I still have no idea what was going on. There's some stuff about a lawyer and a notebook, and then some guys in matching jackets beat someone up. (It takes so long to get to the title sequence that a buddy I was watching it with thought it was over and said, "Is that it?")

We meet the main character, P'Tong, practicing martial arts with his son and daughter. The Matching Jackets Gang shows up to fight him and he beats them all. I have no idea what the point of that was, because then some guy P'Tong knows (his former boss, I guess) gets out of his car and tells P'Tong he needs to go to the city to find someone.

P'Tong makes it to the city, but everywhere he goes, some new gang tries to beat him up. He meets up with the inescapable comic relief; they find Uncle Jam and then fight some more. Guys in black coveralls and ski masks jump around in the dark and get P'Tong blamed for something or other. There's some nonsense about mistaken identity, but I was never clear on who the bad guys were or why they needed to kidnap Samsung or Sampan or whatever that guy's name was that P'Tong was looking for. At the end, suddenly the ski-mask ninjas show up again. Finally we get a fight scene worth waiting for (and a bunch of painful-looking stunts that Rittikrai recycled for Tony Jaa). But no terrorists.

The comic relief was mostly irritating, but there were a couple of genuinely funny moments. The girl was cute, but absolutely worthless. The one time when I thought she was actually going to fight, she stood up, clenched her fist...and then stepped back and started cheerleading for P'Tong. She deserved the beatdown she got a few minutes later.

I applaud the effort, but for the most part, the experience is like watching any no-budget early-80s cookie-cutter Chinese kung fu movie. In some regards, it's downright primitive: the acting is terrible; people and vehicles obviously start from dead stops at the beginning of takes; and the vehicle chases take place at about five miles per hour. But hey--this movie led to another, and another, and the rest is history.

Overall, "Born to Fight '84" may be worth a look if you really like old school martial arts movies, but for technical proficiency and sheer jaw-dropping stunt work, see the remake.

The plot follows the standard "impossible diamond heist" blueprint: Michael Fitzgerald Wong and his trademark cigar play Martin, your typical smooth-operating, leather-jacket-and-sunglasses-wearing high-tech thief, challenged by major bad guy Karloff (Benny "The Jet" Urquidez) to steal the "Czar's Prism", a big-ass diamond. How do you think that's going to play out?

His team of Euro-thieves is good, but Martin insists that to get the job done, they need "Fast Gun" Mandy (Shannon Lee), his ex-partner and ex-future-sister-in-law. See, his fiance Ruth was Mandy's sister (well, maybe half-sister, on account of she was white and blonde), and apparently they were all thieves together, until Ruth got shot on their last job and he disappeared for a while. Martin shows up at Mandy's farm and they smile sweetly at each other for so long that you might start feeling ill. And then some bad guys show up and there's some fighting and pseudo-high-tech thievery and gunfights and chases...culminating in a final showdown ("inspired" by "A View to A Kill") between Lee and Urquidez in a blimp. Comic relief is mostly provided by Jordan Chan as the hapless Tommy ("Thief") and Anita Yuen as Lucy ("Spy"), a couple of small-time pickpockets (Chinese pickpockets in Prague?) who happen to steal Martin's mini-computer and then want in on the "big score".

Okay, so on to the important stuff: How's the fighting? It's satisfying, I'm pleased to say. The choreography is tight and the scenes are well shot, displaying the quick editing and dramatic slow motion (and sometimes overly elaborate devices, like the chain gag at the beginning) that director Yuen would use to good effect with a larger budget in movies like "So Close." Shannon Lee is tough as hell and possesses a smolderingly effective glare--when she's not smirking at someone. As I've noticed in a lot of "chick action flicks" lately, she often looks more like she's posing than fighting. Ah, but when she fights, she fights hard--which is absolutely essential when you're up against a monster like Benny the Jet. An excellent leg fighter, she appears to do all her own stunts--and even if she doesn't, she still takes a serious beating--and even throws in a couple of obligatory (but loving) references to her dad. I would love to have seen her fight side-by-side with her brother Brandon.

Unfortunately, there are some amazingly illogical bits: Fitz throws a potted plant at the cops to distract them...and it works; our heroes make their getaway...on a public tram; a helicopter runs out of fuel...and explodes like a suitcase nuke--and Yuen takes some extraordinary license with the laws of physics. Sadly, the CGI special effects (sparks, flames) are often so poor they're distracting. There is, of course, some obligatory wackiness, but also some pleasant self-referential surprises: The HK "bottomless" gun is ubiquitous, so Shannon's look of shock when she actually shoots her gun to slide-lock is priceless. Like "What? No one reloads in HK movies!" And as a bonus, you'll see where the helicopter dive in "Mission: Impossible 2" originated.

Acting? Even relegated to a sidekick role, Jordan Chan still takes the prize going away. Fitz has a certain appeal, but it's a good thing he has HK, because he makes Keanu look good. Anita Yuen is solid, and her transition from sweet street hustler to subgun-wielding ass-kicker is convincing. The camera likes Shannon and she looks good, but her acting is wooden--she's not as convincing as Brandon, who had his shortcomings, and while her dad was no great shakes, he at least had an accent to hide behind. Despite Martin's claim that "She speaks Cantonese better than any of us," I don't think she speaks more than one short sentence in Cantonese--if anything. Speaking of which...

Subs are redundant, as there's more English than "Gen-Y Cops" (the first Cantonese isn't spoken until 12 minutes in), and you may recognize voice talent from the English dub of "Akira" and other well-known Black Belt Theater flicks (most of the Euros have rubber lips). The dialog is painful (there's no writing credit on the DVD cover; apparently in HK, writers are held in lower esteem than in Hollow-wood, and maybe for good reason) and the delivery doubly so: I was tempted to watch with Mandarin audio so I wouldn't realize how bad the acting is. Which brings up something I've always wondered about foreign acting: If we can't understand the language, how do we know who's good and who's bad?

Final judgment? If you're just in it for the fights and don't mind the often-cheesy effects, or you just want to see Shannon Lee in action, "Eagles" delivers your money's worth.

Chan Kwok-wing, the protagonist of New Police Story, is not Kevin Chan Ka Kui, hero of Police Story-or so they say. This Chan is older, wiser, and drunker. In short, he's a mess. He's even worse off than Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon: Our second glimpse of him prominently features several adult beverages. A couple of scenes later, he's facedown in an alley. How the mighty have fallen.

Flash back one year: Chan is the hot dog cop stud, foiling grenade-wielding hostage takers and punching out shady businessmen in a scene that's a sort of Police Story Condensed. Shortly thereafter, Joe (Daniel Wu) and his gang of rich-kid criminals rob a bank and then…call the cops. Just when we start to wonder why the bad guys (and girl) want to stage a blatant open-air shootout in the street a la Heat, instead of escaping when they have the chance, we find out that they're some sort of thrill-seeking gang, competing to win the biggest share of the bank loot via a point system. Kill higher-value targets (like cops), get more points and more money.

Chan, cocky with previous success, declares on the news that he will apprehend the gang within three hours. Joe, however, has other plans, and when Chan's team "infiltrates" the gang's lair, the gang starts picking them off one by one. When Chan is unable to save them (indeed, Joe has cruelly engineered this foregone outcome), he spirals into depression and self-loathing, distancing himself from both the police force and his fiancée, Ho Yee (Charlie Yeung), whose brother was one of the officers Chan lost. Just as Chan hits rock bottom, a young rookie (Nicholas Tse) appears to bring him back into the fold.

In stark contrast to the raw quickie action movies of the mid-90s like Man Wanted, for example, NPS is very slick. Nicely lit and shot, NPS features some mostly excellent visual effects and dynamic cinematography. It's not all gritty back alleys and shuttered storefronts; it's glittering chrome and glass and neon. HK has never looked better. Despite all the neon, however, New Police Story is darker and more twisted than any other Police Story film…or any other Jackie Chan movie, for that matter. OK, so even if this isn't the same series, NPS still features numerous references to the original PS series, including a double-decker bus that crashes through a lot of glass.

NPS is a solidly entertaining movie, but it's not without its annoying little foibles. For one, logic and physics go out the window-or should I say over the ledge?-immediately. The big action set piece in the beginning relies on that most implausible of movie gimmicks: the real-life video game scenario. Meaning that there are lots of intricate traps that depend too much on people being exactly where they need to be. It's great in the movies, but it would never work in real life, because one misstep breaks the whole chain. There are some inexplicable sub flubs (Voice: "We are the shit!" Sub: "We are the bomb!"; "Shit!" somehow becomes "Police! Drop your weapons!") and there's a little too much unnecessary wirework for my taste.

Not surprisingly, with all the neon, chrome and hot English-speaking hipsters, NPS is more than a little reminiscent of Benny Chan's earlier Gen-X Cops (Benny just loves the HK Convention Centre). As much as I enjoyed the fluffy goodness of GXC, however, in the case of NPS I think there's too much Benny and not enough Jackie.

On the plus side, most of the gunfights are nicely restrained, and the police tactics are more realistic than usual. Perhaps my favorite part of the movie, besides Charlie Yeung's teeth, is a fantastic battle in Legoland, reminiscent of one of my all-time favorite JC fight scenes: the pachinko parlor fight in the mostly otherwise-forgettable Thunderbolt. And there are some very funny bits that don't go over the top with the comedy. The "ending" was a little on the sappy side, but it still got me, and the epilogue/flashback was even more resonant and touching.

At last, Jackie shoes some real range (and a new hairdo, thank god). Subdued, tired, weary-and, holy cow, he gets emotional (and I don't mean just angry). Not once, but multiple times. It's different, but different is good.

The supporting players are well cast. Nicholas Tse is quite appealing here-not the lightweight he was in Gen-X Cops. At first I would have preferred Stephen Fung in the role, but Tse won me over. (There is actually a cameo by Fung in the deleted scenes.) He even gets to play his role for some laughs, which was nice.

The irresistible Charlie Yeung's Ho Yee (have you picked up on my obsession with her teeth yet?) takes the place of Maggie Chung's long-suffering May and brings some heart and humor to a role that could have been spectacularly unrewarding. On the other side of the female equation is Charlene Choi, who has obviously discovered the secret of eternal youth. How else to explain why she appears to be 12 years old? For some gravitas, there's Yu Rong-guang doing his badass straight-arrow cop shtick. A Mandarin speaker, Yu has here been dubbed into Cantonese-but with a distractingly deep voice (I kept thinking of Sonny Chiba in The Storm Riders).

The standout performer here, hands down, is Daniel Wu. He was merely serviceable in GXC, and I didn't dig him in Purple Storm, but after seeing him in NPS, I have a new respect for him as (and I don't use this term lightly) an actor. As the quietly sinister tortured son-slash-criminal mastermind, Wu digs deep and puts it out there. Excellent job, sir.

The Joy Sales 2-disc Special Edition includes an extras disc with some nice features, including theatrical trailers with English subs, a 15-minute making-of featurette (in Cantonese or Mandarin only, behind the scenes footage (I'm tired of Hollow-wood, but I'm still fascinated by the moviemaking process), deleted scenes and an NG reel that includes mostly bloopers, not stunts gone wrong. It's a treat to have subs on these, too.

I wouldn't bet that this will be the last of the Police Story movies, New or otherwise, but if it is, it serves as a fitting bookend. In any case, it's certainly not the last major HK outing we'll see from Jackie Chan. That I'd bet on. Hey, if Robert Redford is still making action-type movies at his advanced age, Jackie can certainly be making them well into his hundreds. And I almost hope he does.

The basics of the plot: Don, a former resident of Nong Pradu, a rural Thai village, steals the head of the village's Ong-Bak (Buddha statue) and takes it to Bangkok. Ting (Jaa) volunteers to travel to Bangkok and bring the head back. Of course there will be much fighting, and rightly so. If you've seen the trailer and think that you've already seen all the good parts, you're sadly mistaken. There's plenty more where those came from. Believe the hype.

Director Prachya Pinkaew very quickly and effectively demonstrates the significance of Ong-Bak to the villagers, thereby immediately establishing the importance of the goal. It's good, standard filmmaking: Give the hero a vital goal and start the ticking clock. If Ong-Bak is not returned within the seven days before the festival, the village is doomed. It doesn't matter whether we believe it; the hero does. (And by the end, so do we.)

Ong-Bak is a fish-out-of-water/country-bumpkin-goes-to-the-big-city story, and Pinkaew skillfully illustrates the stark contrast between the village, Nong Pradu (quiet, sleepy, spiritual), and the big city, Bangkok (noisy, frenetic, godless). I love Thailand and I love to go back--even if it's only in the movies. Jaa is not some muscled-up Van Damme type, and he's not (quite) a shredded-to-the-bone Bruce Lee clone--he looks pretty much like a regular guy...who happens to have extraordinary skills born of long years of training. Due to his demeanor, and the high pitch and nasality of the Thai language, Ting comes across as gentle, almost timid. A small man with a big heart. Until it's time to fight, and then he brings it like nobody's business.

To make a martial arts movie in 2003 is already a challenge. But to make a martial arts movie in 2003 that doesn't rely on wirework and CGI--that's downright ballsy. The movie has more than its share of breathtaking stunts, and plenty of "Oh, damn!" moments. The opening scene is so brutally realistic that you just know someone went to the hospital. Not three minutes in and I was already saying "Ouch." Over and over.

The story may be a fairly conventional martial arts tale with a Thai twist, but it's the fighting that appeals most to me. Of course I can't say I've seen every style there is, but once you've seen a couple hundred or so Chinese and American martial arts movies, you've pretty much covered the major styles. So to see a Muay Thai showcase is a refreshing change of pace. That said, I would have liked to see Jaa perform the Muay Thai pre-fight ceremony and Ram Muay, the dance ritual, before his rope-fist bout with Saming. I can't imagine why Pinkaew would have left them out.

Now, about this "no strings attached" business. I'm not fully convinced. Maybe Jaa wasn't wired, but there were some gravity-defying stunts that just had to have been wire-enhanced. I don't mind tasteful wirework, but don't float a guy or change his direction in midair and then tell me it's all-natural. And yes, there were CGI effects (though they apparently weren't used during the fights). The shower of coins and Khom Tuan's cigarette smoke, for example. But I'm just being picky.

Along with an abundance of fistfights, there's a great foot chase early on in which all sorts of obstacles appear, forcing Ting to come up with quick, on-the-run solutions (which in this case means varying types of leaps, jumps and flips). Tony Jaa has trained in movie stunts since he was 10 years old, and is an accomplished stuntman. It's really something to see your lead actor doing a double midair somersault sans wires and know that it's really him doing it.

Crisply edited, with nice camera angles and movement, Ong-Bak is a solid action movie with all the right stuff, well assembled. Not that it wasn't without its minor peeves. (Most unrealistic effect: the big floppy wig on the stuntman standing in for Saming in the final battle.) The tuk-tuk chase was novel, but I have to say that I've never seen Bangkok streets so deserted. I would have preferred a little run-up to the final battle--maybe throw in a little village montage that would give us a chance to catch our breath, plus serve as an emotional lead-in to the climax. Finally, the constant multi-angle instant replay of cool stunts gets annoying. Pinkaew got a lot of mileage (or footage) out of it, but for maximum effect, he should have saved it until the finale.

One more thing: Luc Besson (of La Femme Nikita fame) purchased the international rights to the film, recutting it and adding his trademark hip-hop soundtrack. The result is a tighter film with a snappier pace, at the expense of a few minor plot points. My usual gut reaction to recuts is that they're evil, but in this case I don't think the movie suffers. (I will explore the subject further in another essay.) Although the original Thai version--available on Edko DVD from HKFlix--has no English subs, if you want to experience the entire film as the director intended, get the uncut version. It's not like you need subs for the fight scenes.

So what's not to like? Ong-Bak has brutal fights, jaw-dropping stunts and a smattering of hot Thai women. Plenty to keep me happy (I only wish I'd picked it up on DVD when I was in Thailand last year). If you consider yourself any kind of martial arts movie fan--hell, if you consider yourself any kind of movie fan, period--you must see Ong-Bak!