petronia

Exiled: I sit at Johnnie To's feet as at those of a master. XD I said "Traffic" was a rip off Soderbergh structurally but the camera work (as with "The Berchtesgaden Debriefing" I do think of it as camera work) is all Johnnie To. Like, why pretend I didn't just go the short route and cast Francis Ng, Roy Cheung, etc. as OCs in my head. XD Of course, as soon as the storyline hits Japan... we're in a Miike film. I think.

Technically this isn't a sequel to The Mission, it just has the same cast playing essentially the same characters and really, does anyone ever bother to remember the names of Johnnie To's triad hitmen. XD They're too cool for that shit. The whole thing consists of manly comraderie (expressed through: carjacking, Mexican standoffs, whacking crime bosses, moving furniture) and about a hundred people dying in several discrete hails of bullets. The gimmick here employed is what might be termed the diet-Coke-and-Mentos method of action set-piece construction: position the pieces one by one with care, then pull the string and watch the spray fly. This happens like five times during the course of the movie, and it doesn't get old. XD

The Rug Cop: parody of cheesy old Japanese TV shows about do-gooder policemen, with the enka OP theme and so forth. The main character is a maverick detective whose special weapon is his wig, which came alive as the result of a scientific experiment on hair regeneration (he throws it like a boomerang). That gives a reasonably good idea of what the movie is like. Directed by the same dude who brought you Executive Koala and The Calamari Wrestler, which are a suspense thriller and a sports movie starring a giant koala and a giant squid respectively. The latest doesn't have bizarre animals, unless you count the wig.