Mad Detective
AKA: Sun Taam
Dir. Johnnie To (HK 2007)
Rating: 3 out of 4 Stars (good)
Review by: Jeff

Mad Detective is the most recent crime film from master director Johnnie To. However, unlike its immediate predecessors in To’s filmography, Mad Detective is not a quasi-Spaghetti Western like Exiled or a Godfather-esque saga like Election and Election 2. Instead, Mad Detective is To’s mystical take on the police procedural genre. In the film, the magnificently rumpled Lau Ching Wan plays a highly eccentric police detective who solves crimes with the help of his schizophrenic “visions” which allow him to see the world through the perspective of others. Despite the Mad Detective’s obvious gifts, he is forced to retire after slicing off one of his ears in front of his coworkers. However, when a police officer goes missing in the woods, a young detective (played by Andy On) asks the Mad Detective for help in solving the case. The Mad Detective’s return to police work is treated with scorn by his former coworkers and by his ex-wife (played by Kelly Lin), to whom Lau’s character delusionally believes he is still married.

Mad Detective is a film of remarkable visual poetry. In many striking scenes, To shows the world through the eyes of the title character, who views each personality trait of the people around him as a separate entity. (For example, one actor will portray a character when that character is motivated by fear, while another actor will play that same character when he motivated by greed, and yet another actor will play that same character when he is acting in a coldly logical fashion. This is not as confusing as it sounds; a similar technique was used to much lesser effect in the sitcom “Herman’s Head“.) The scenes between Lau and Lin are quite touching as well. Both actors do a great job with their roles; Lau in particular gives a relatively restrained performance and does a great job of playing a sad sack. However, On comes across as fairly bland and does not leave much of an impression. The film’s big finale, set in the (somewhat clichéd) locale of a hall of mirrors, is also visually dazzling.

On the minus side, To never makes clear what the “rules” are regarding how the Mad Detective’s visions work (or perhaps I just wasn’t smart enough to figure out what the rules were). For example, sometimes the Mad Detective’s visions reveal metaphysical truths but sometimes his visions just appear to be delusions (such as when he imagines he is having dinner with, and is still married to, his ex-wife). But this is of little consequence. In the end, Mad Detective is another ambitious and highly entertaining product from the prolific Mr. To.

MAD DETECTIVE IS PLAYING AT THE NYAFF ON SUNDAY, JUNE 22 AT 7:20 PM AT THE IFC CENTER

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Sukiyaki Western Django
Dir. Takashi Miike (Japan 2007)
Rating: 3 out of 4 Stars (good)
Review by: David

Like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, in whose footsteps it all but explicitly follows (Tarantino even makes a cameo appearance), Sukiyaki Western Django is the bastard child of its predecessors, primarily Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Django. While, unlike Kill Bill, Sukiyaki Western Django isn’t quite able to transcend those influences and become something truly great, what it does accomplish is more than enough to make it a fascinatingly weird little film and an interesting aside from Miike. Certainly the noodle western has been done before, more literally in Eastern-Westerns like Plains Wanderer and more symbolically in Juzo Itami’s effervescent Tampopo, but Miike’s take is as wild and cracked as the man’s filmography would promise.

Oddly, for a film that wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve, Sukiyaki Western Django also harks back to some of the classic works of Japanese art, with backdrops inspired by Ukiyoe masterpieces like Hokusai’s “Red Fuji” and a storyline based on the multi-part epic poem Heike Monogatari. Here that tale of the struggle for power between the Genji and Heike clans (also showcased in the “Hoichi the Earless” segment of Kwaidan and Sogo Ishii’s Gojoe, among others) is transfigured into the grungy plotline of Yojimbo, with the two clans, wearing white and red respectively, duking it out for the rights to a mining town. Impressively, considering the mud-spattered environs, Sukiyaki Western Django makes the biggest splash on a purely aesthetic level, with original uses of color and fantastic set and costume design. In recent years Miike has been showing some startling development as a visual artist – between this film and Big Bang Love – Juvenile A, he is showing off a painterly eye that was not hinted at in his earlier films. Fans of Miike’s more down-and-dirty work need not worry, though, Sukiyaki Western Django is Miike at his most wacky and violent, if not at his most visceral.

Moviegoers should also be prepared for the film’s unique verbal idiom. All the characters speak heavily-accented phonetic English, with varying degrees of success.

SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO IS PLAYING AS PART OF THE NYAFF AND JAPAN CUTS FESTIVALS ON SATURDAY, JULY 5 AT 9:00 PM AT THE JAPAN SOCIETY