With Eyes East

Resurrections, Predator, Gold Diggers?

I’d been doing some mental leaps this past year when it comes to Taiwanese superstar Shu Qi’s film and TV projects. I knew that she wrote and directed her debut Girl, which recently won her Best Director at the Busan International Film Festival, and that she was starring in a Netflix series entitled The Resurrected, which released today. I did not put together that she was also starring in a movie entitled Resurrection, which opened at Cannes. That’s confusing! All three are really interesting, though; Resurrection appears to be some kind of avant garde sci-fi movie. And she’s spoken about Girl being a first for her, encouraged by longtime creative collaborator Hou Hsiao-hsien. I like this bit in an interview with Variety:

In the summer of 2013, during the filming of “The Assassin,” director Hou and I were smoking and chatting while waiting for the lighting.

I imagine she was in full Nie Yinniang costume, smoking a cigarette. She goes on to discuss how the writing process took more than ten years, and that she tapped into her own childhood experience with abuse — something she was careful to adapt to film in a delicate way, in the interest of the young actress Lai Yu-Fei. Still, I trust it’ll be a rough watch.

Similarly, I just watched the first episode of The Resurrected, and that was a rough watch! It’s about these two mothers whose daughters were abducted and tortured (one to death) by a gangster now on death row, and they scheme to resurrect him in order to exact the justice they’ve been robbed of. After the lights go up on the guy’s execution, Shu Qi’s character just blankly says, “Is that it?” And so that we understand that line, as well as the simmering rage of her partner, played by Lee Sinje, we witness the torture via video recording. First, though, we linger in these women’s anguish. Although we haven’t seen enough of their former selves to say that they’ve been reduced to silence, they seem to drip with grief. It’s a very atmospheric show, and part of that atmosphere, at least early on, is a profound sadness.

I almost wanted to call it “upsetting,” before realizing that it was, after all, a work of fiction. How soft-hearted am I, or really, how selective with my emotional responses? Why does something like this affect me when I feel desensitized to so much pain in the real world? And that could hardly be the intended effect of the show, but it is a thought-poker overall. Anything revenge-related is sure to stir me ol’ noggin, and this premise is a more supernatural take on I Saw the Devil, a canonical title in Korean revenge. I mean, it’s such a good setup, I wish I’d thought of it.

To my surprise, Shu Qi is playing the more timid of the two mothers, with Lee’s character — whose daughter died — steely and dangerous, only smiling at the end of the first episode when they concoct their resurrection scheme. Shu Qi’s character tries to keep things lighter, being kind to her silly employee at the convenience store she owns (named for her daughter, who’s in a coma). And clearly, this is smiling through sadness, which is something Shu Qi really communicates. She’s so good. Can’t wait to see more.

So, it’s come to be known that the new Predator movie will be certified PG-13 in these United States. The last time we had PG-13 Predator violence was almost twenty years ago, so maybe 20th Century Fox figured everybody forgot how mad they were. The rationale is that, in Predator: Badlands, there aren’t any humans, and as even the Transformers movies demonstrate, you can be as violent as you want toward non-human creatures and get away with a PG-13. I can accept that, and I’m not too bummed either way. I never felt like any Predator movie save the first was a particular gore-fest, with the carnage of Predator 2 trimmed to nothingness, and even Prey splashing dark, CGI blood or none at all during the severing of limbs.

What really bothers me is that AMC recently announced that, yes, Prey will be headed to theaters for the first time — in a double bill with Predator: Badlands. What a roller coaster. I’ve been dying to see Prey on the big screen for three years now, and I’ve been waiting for this announcement — seeing how everything else comes to theaters, like KPop Demon Hunters and Avatar 2 and Angel’s Egg, like, what? There are no rules anymore! Give me my thing, too (though I’d be hard pressed to pass up Angel’s Egg). I mean, I’ve been holding off on rewatching Prey all year, just hoping for this moment.

So, it’s great, right? Well, number one: I don’t want to watch two movies in a row. The piss anxiety I get between finding my seat in the dark and the end of the coming attractions is the most extreme sensation I ever have. And two, I was planning on seeing Badlands in IMAX. This has totally scuttled everything!

I might’ve been somewhat aware of Phase IV as an entry in the venerable “animal attack” sub-subgenre of creature feature, but it wasn’t on my radar until a Greatest Movie Ever! podcast about it earlier this year. It’s a movie by graphic designer Saul Bass, who wasn’t allowed to make movies again after this one, but I really enjoyed it. Anytime you have scientists gathering in a research station to solve a crisis (in this case, super-intelligent ants), I’m locked in. Unfortunately, the plot of this one turns on dumb decisions and even madness, possibly induced by ant poison. Still, I appreciate any creature feature that takes its subject matter as serious as cancer, if the best in the genre tend to be knowingly campy (Tremors, Gremlins, etc.) or outright comedies. Man, I used to love Eight Legged Freaks! when I was a kid. Now I’m too afraid of spiders to see just how poorly it’s aged. There’s something to be said for a monster movie that’s more style than substance, even if that style partly owes to the unsteady hand of a first-time director.

Apparently, the ’70s psychedelic laboratory aesthetics were a big influence on the movie Beyond the Black Rainbow, which I might now watch if not for one of Shu Qi’s “resurrection” projects, and I also really want to check out Ms. Incognito. I keep seeing stuff about it online and it looks awesome. Anyway, the thing I wanted to mention with Phase IV was the actress Lynne Frederick, who plays the… girl character. I couldn’t think of a better way to describe her, given the content of the film. Having never heard of her before, I was stunned first to learn that she died at the age of 39, and that she’d been effectively blacklisted at the age of 26, after the death of her husband Peter Sellers. Yes, the Peter Sellers.

As Wikipedia notes, “she came to national attention over the nature of his controversial will, in which she was listed as the primary beneficiary. She was publicly criticised, ridiculed and perceived as a gold digger by the press and public. Her career and reputation never recovered from the backlash and she was subsequently blacklisted by Hollywood. She lived out the remainder of her years in California, and kept a low profile until her unexpected death in 1994.” Dude, that suuucks. Only later was her reputation massaged a bit: “One of the early people to advocate for Frederick was American author Ed Sikov in the 2002 book Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers: ‘Lynne Frederick deserves a bit of compassion herself in retrospect. It was the helpless Peter she nursed, the dependent and infantile creature of impulse and consequent contradiction. Patiently she ministered him.'”

“Gold digging” is something I never really thought about, despite witnessing a high-profile example in real-time, with ex-Patriots coach Bill Belichick and his girlfriend Jordon Hudson, of which there’s an astonishing 49-year-old age gap. That age gap is old enough to be the parent of most other age gaps, and you can imagine the headlines and social media chatter in a town where sports are everything; we don’t have Hollywood celebrities on the East Coast, we have athletes. They’ve leaned into it, though, having filed to trademark the term “gold digger” back in August. Boy, that’s dumb.

Aside from Cleopatra Coleman’s complex portrayal of this exact thing in last year’s FX show Clipped, I’m sitting here just not sure what the bad vibes exactly are — even if we know that the vibes are bad. Like, sure, this is not what most relationships look like, and you can do all kinds of stomach-churning math. My God, when he was 50 years old… But in the case of Lynne Frederick, I tend to read the public assailing of a woman as inescapably touched by misogyny, as in patriarchal societies, it’s there at the roots. Practically any interaction or response to a woman has to navigate sexist conditioning. It might’ve been that Sellers wasn’t around to share in the scorn, but it doesn’t read that way. It’s more like Frederick was considered manipulative. She pursued this perverse relationship and because of the eventual, grim dividends, it couldn’t possibly have been for love.

Oh, if only all or most relationships were so pure. But to my earlier point about not having thought about gold diggers, a google search of “why are gold diggers bad” (some friggin’ Bob Arctor out there is terribly amused by me) returns headlines with basically those words from 2011, 2021, three years ago, and eleven months ago. The reclamation of the gold digger is an ongoing project which likely spikes back into being upon each high-profile example. If Lynne Frederick’s fate is any indication, I’d say that work is necessary — no matter how absurd the example.

Anyway, sorry, Shu Qi, for all this weird stuff at the end of your post. Is it your year? I’d like to think so, though I’ll likely only see these festival movies next year.