jonnyzero

When Hong Kong cinema finally reached Western audiences in the late eighties, its style was quickly and correctly categorized as a strictly commercial approach to filmmaking. Wong Kar Wai’s arrival changed everything. With the same visual tools that his peers were using to make action blockbusters, Wong started making very personal and extremely poetic films, disregarding the rules of narrative storytelling and challenging traditional Chinese mores. Few of his contemporaries have dared tackle homosexuality as directly as he did in Happy Together. From the dizzying Chungking Express to the hypnotizing In the Mood for Love, Wong’s work is incredibly modern and particularly powerful.

Days of Heaven (1978, dir. Terrence Malick)

“At Malick’s insistence certain parts of the film were made at what he calls the ‘magic hour’, that is, the time between sunset and nightfall. From the point of view of luminosity, this period lasts about twenty minutes, so that calling it a ‘magic hour’ is an optimistic euphemism.

The light really was very beautiful, but we had little time to film scenes of long duration. All day we would work to get the actors and the camera ready; as soon as the sun had set we had to shoot quickly, not losing a moment. For these few minutes the light is truly magical, because no one knows where it is coming from. The sun is not to be seen, but the sky can be bright, and the blue of the atmosphere undergoes strange mutations.

Malick’s intuition and daring probably made these scenes the most interesting ones visually in the film. And it takes daring to convince the Hollywood old guard that the shooting day should last only twenty minutes. Even though we took advantage of this short space of time with a kind of frenzy, we often had to finish the scene the next day at the same time, because night would fall inexorably. Each day, like Joshua in the Bible, Malick wanted to stop the sun in its imperturbable course so as to go on shooting.” 

George Sluizer directed THE VANISHING as well as its American remake five years later. It’s funny. The original has cheesy 1980s synthesizer music for its score. It stars actors who don’t have the same star power as someone like Jeff Bridges, who is in the remake. It doesn’t contain much in the way of amazing sets (most of it takes place outside or in public places), grand design or opulent cinematography. And yet it so outshines the remake that the 1993 version becomes its own master class in how to screw up a story that was told right the first time. It also falls into the same trap as DYING ROOM ONLY, giving the audience a prosaic, by the book ending, in which everyone lives happily ever after, except the bad guy. The 1988 version takes a darker approach and, as a result, has a devastating impact. And if Sluizer never made another blockbuster thriller, it doesn’t matter because in 1988, he made one of the greats. If you’re looking for a thriller combined with a coldly cynical examination of evil, skip the remake now and forever and watch the original instead. THE VANISHING, from 1988, is one of the best, and darkest, thrillers you’ll ever see.