Sam Now (Reed Harkness, ITVS, 2023)

 I missed the initial broadcast of this film in May 2023 but glad it is now making the rounds. 

A full account of the film is here on the ITVS website: https://itvs.org/films/sam-now/

Shot over 25 years, this is a voyage of partial discovery by a Portland-based filmmaker Reed Harkness, for his step-mother Jois through his step-brother, Sam, and the intertwining relationships between families that were, that are, and that will be. 

The audience was very receptive to this story of what seems to be a normal family (for example Reed Harkness seems to get on well with his step brothers, and just about everyone else). But the film turns from a road movie looking for Jois after her sudden disappearance (it was voluntary so there is no criminality here), to a search for an explanation of why she left (she's alive and well and living with another man in Oregon). The discovery of reasons, characters and narrative seems deceptively "simple" but begs more questions than answers. Jois was a half Caucasian half Japanese born in Chitose (rural community in Japan) who was adopted by a Caucasian family who say they raised her like their other natural children. Jois' version is different and one of strict compliance against which she rebelled, much to the enduring discontent of the foster parents - the mother for example says she does not regard her as a daughter any longer. The only evident foster family trait that seems to have rubbed off on Jois is to keep her secrets to herself.

Jois herself is an interesting study. Later in life she thought of looking for her birth mother and learned that sometime after her adoption, her mother married and moved to the US. However she consciously did not make an effort to connect, a dose of reality in a world where TV and movies assume that adoptees want to find and connect with their birth parents. 

Much of Jois' story is left uncovered - probably a mixture of Jois's own reticence, and the filmmaker's main focus on Sam's search. Sam shows a vacillating attitude towards his mother. He sometimes needs her and is angry at her absence. This lack of maternal love has led to some character flaws (such as the treatment of girl friends) that he has tried to overcome. Towards the end of the film we see that he (is partnered with an Asian girlfriend which reminds us that he is a quarter Japanese - something that is never dealt with in the film.

So the whole story is not without interest though it sometimes walks the fine line between family home movie history, and the universal essences of a narrative that strangers would find worth following. It's worth noting that the skilful editing has generally avoided this risk.

Apart from the story though, what is very interesting is that this is a film where the filmmaker himself has a direct and personal stake. And that stake is expressed more through the use of cinema than a simple documentary narrative. So I take it that the film reflects some of the filmmaker's thoughts on cinema or its impact on him. As a teenager growing up in Palo Alto in the 1980s, Harkness (in a Q&A) said he frequented his local video store and watched as much (US) indie cinema as he could. For him it was the era of Jim Jarmusch, Harmony Korine et al. These are not necessarily reflective films but certainly reflections of growing up, an enduring theme in the first few films of many indie filmmakers around the world but in the case of US indies of the 1980s, often infused with a sense of irony, of the question: "how did I end up here?"

Harkness was making super 8 and 16 mm films since his teenage years when he found an old super 8 camera in his dad's garage. It seems there was about 24 hours worth of super 8 film alone, and probably hours more of VHS footage. He is known in the Pacific Northwest for making the teenage (and beyond) action type home movies starring his step brother Sam as "The Blue Panther." These were shown in a Super 8 club in Seattle in the 1980s/90s (as I understand it). A number of "The Blue Panther" films - especially those in color - were shot on 16mm. On the basis of the clips included in the documentary the films veer between amateurish to inventive spoofs (one advantage: his half-brother Sam was good at falling down and around so could do some kind of stunts).

All this footage gives the film a compelling texture - from partly grainy black and white super 8 to glitchy VHS, and a little smoother 16 mm as well as current day polished digital footage. It's practically a history of film/video formats from the late 20th century to now. 

That at first would seem peripheral to the main story of the family but like all characteristics of a contemporary medium (film, video in our time/ novels, paintings in previous centuries), memories are formed by the format in which we choose to preserve them. So the memories presented by Harkness are not only original to his own lived experience but also a currency in which to trade with others. And like many first feature films, his story ends on a beach by the water. The most famous film to present this motif is Truffaut's "400 Blows" where a young Jean-Pierre Leaud stares out at the sea facing an uncertain future, a roiling sea that could presage his life to come. And so it is with "Sam Now" that ends with Harkness and Sam playing around on the beach but seemingly without real direction, and a future whose uncertainty is masked by the clear blue sky above.

ENTER THE CLONES OF BRUCE

Enter the Clones of Bruce (director David Gregory, 2023) is a fascinating documentary about the Bruce Lee clones that erupted in a spate of films after the real Bruce Lee died in Hong Kong in 1973. 

Various martial artists not only from Chinese speaking countries, but also from Korea and Japan were positioned as the new Bruce Lee in what seemed to be an unending stream of low budget kung fu films. It was in effect, a market driven sub-genre in a supply-side film economy because in his time, the real Bruce Lee only made four and a half kung fu films which was obviously insufficient for the huge demand created during his action career and especially after. It was also an exercise in homonyms - Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lei for example.

 

Many smaller companies with Bruce Lee clones rushed to fill in the gap. For a while, the studio that discovered Bruce Lee – Golden Harvest – held off on releasing a posthumous Bruce Lee movie but eventually following the tidal wave of clone films, Golden Harvest finally put together and released THE GAME OF DEATH which contains the last sequences that Bruce Lee directed and starred in (the famous ascending fights in the pagoda - which was in Korea - that climaxes in the tournament with the 7 foot two inch tall Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. For linking sequences, Golden Harvest used doubles, matte process images etc. One could debate the wisdom and quality of all that but it’s true that some parts of the film are as cheesy as some of the clone movies. One wonders what the film would look like with today's technology.

 

What we learn from the documentary is somewhat tragic, if not sad. By becoming Bruce Lee clones, these actors sacrificed their own careers as themselves – many of them were good martial artists, and some of them had acting ability in their own right. But the need to survive in an exploitation film industry, and the need in some cases to feed families, led them to make a career being in essence someone else. 

 

A couple of them survived but more often than not, many of them disappeared. So it’s a great credit to this documentary that the Bruce Lee clones are given their due, and they turn out to be a sympathetic group. Of course the Bruce Lee clone tide ebbed once Hong Kong’s Jackie Chan appeared with a more action comedy kung fu style, and China's Jet Li with his wushu style.

Twenty Years Later

"These hands speak"

 

The recent enthusiasm for EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE with its Asian inspirations (and references to Hong Kong cinema of the past) reminds me of the similar widespread embrace of films that normally don’t make it to the mainstream, that greeted CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON which was released in 2000 after a runaway success at the Cannes Film Festival and then Oscars.

Although I admire the work of the directors and the impact of the two films, I have less enthusiasm for either of them. The motivation of each film seems weak in the context of their pedigrees and in relation to their varied sources – King Hu, Li Hanxiang, Chau Sing-chi, Hung Kam-bo et al. The insertion of a character driven melodrama into the Matrix-style cyclonic action of CTHD veers on the mechanical unlike say a Chor Yuen film like THE SENTIMENTAL SWORDSMAN where the point of the character is to carry the action not emotion. Similarly with EEAAO, which is almost a text book demonstration of the “montage of distractions,” showy without point, and more important lacking the surprising unconscious of  incongruous and abrupt changes in personality in a movie like Stephen Chow's KING OF COMEDY !999). Simply put, EEAAO seems to me the product of deliberate eccentricity, not a true mise-en-scene of creative freedom.

 

But what is impressive throughout all of these two films, no matter how one sees them, is the presence of Michelle Yeoh. The measure of time is seen in the grace of her movements, the inscription of her face. It is in effect, timeless in its expression and gravity. Michelle Yeoh confirms that she is an actress for the cinema, she defies time as much as she defies gravity.

Already in CTHD she is the aging veteran, living in the Jianghu world that is not too different from the Western – there is always someone ready to defeat you for your position as top dog. The question is not if, and not even when, but HOW. Zhang Ziyi’s (CG-ized) skill in the film as she sprints over rooftops is the signifier of a new world where innovation will displace old school practices. I think this is a question that Wong Kar-wai grapples with in the underrated THE GRANDMASTER where one could contemplate and speculate what that film would have been like with Michelle Yeoh instead of Zhang Ziyi.   

 

PARANOIAC PSYCHO

Hammer studios in the UK are best known for their horror films especially with directors like Terence Fisher and stars like Peter Cushing. 

PARANOIAC made in 1963 by cinematographer Freddie Francis is shot in black and white and features an upcoming actor Oliver Reed. 

Reed's brother died in his teens but a villager who is also the son of the village lawyer and therefore has access to a range of secrets and wills - has found a lookalike of the brother whom he uses to claim an inheritance. 

But the plan runs up against Oliver Reed (the surviving brother and therefore legal heir), his older aunt (who has a thing about Reed), and the sister who thinks she is going mad when she first sees the lookalike. Reed himself is mad and careens his Jag around the family mansion's well manicured driveway. 

The movie's horror mechanism is above average though not exceptional. It's more interesting for its reflection of the impact of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO which had been recently released by the time of PARANOIAC's production (the title alone should give some clue to its debt to Hitchcock's ground breaking movie). 

The essential elements are there - the dead brother preserved (badly) in the basement as a reference to the mother in PSYCHO; a double undercurrent of incest - the aunt lusts after her nephew, the lookalike brother falls in love with the sister; and most notably, Reed as a beefy psychopathic version of Anthony Perkins. 

Reed however plays it without the subtle creepiness of the original and more like a volatile and raging libertine who broods and roars in equal proportions. 

As with all comparisons, the re-interpretation and "edits" from the original are key. The transformation of the closeted Perkins to campy Reed is a market choice - a more blustery pervert could better impress the audience. 

The omission of stuffed animals and voyeurism is notable. The former is understandable but the latter - the scopophilic gaze that is central to PSYCHO - is puzzling until one realises that Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM released around the same time as PSYCHO, was panned and invoked the British censor's wrath.

There were probably more films around the world that were influenced by PSYCHO. Maybe they constitute a simmering sub-genre like the Bruce Lee clone films, that will at some point erupt!