From the Vault: January 2022 Streaming

Hong Kong Cinema Nicolas Cage, Men for Sale on Celluloid, and Favorite First Watches of 2021

“I didn't realize Hong Kong looked so beautiful at night,” Chow Yun-fat notes in John Woo’s gorgeous and furious A Better Tomorrow (1986), one of the director’s signature “heroic bloodshed” films, which capture the city at its most frenetic. “Such beauty can vanish in a blink.”

January 11, 2022

Well. You've either got it, or you ain't. And folks, I've got it.

The Holidays, a new job, and (now) Omicron may have conspired to prevent the timely release of January's streaming spreadsheet, but hell or high water couldn't keep me from giving you guys some new themes to ring in 2022 (just...eleven days late).

We started the New Year with the loss of our last Golden Girl and things haven't really looked up since: just last week we lost Sidney Poitier and Peter Bogdanovich, two of our greatest last links to the Classic Hollywood era. Sidney Poitier, obviously, broke through considerable racial barriers, changing Hollywood forever and leaving behind a well of impressive film performances. To him, with love. The loss of Bogdanovich is the loss of a great filmmaker, but more importantly, the loss of a true cinephile, one of the last living legends to speak with and study from the auteurs of the studio era...someone to whom we are forever indebted.

Nevertheless...time marches on...and so must we...

This month, we're looking forward with four new streaming themes: a retrospective on one of the most influential film industries in the world, a BIG actor showcase, a flip of one of my favorite previous programs, and one final look back at 2021.

Such Beauty Can Vanish in a Blink: Hong Kong Cinema

Brigitte Lin is a mysterious woman in a bad wig running through the streets of Hong Kong in Chungking Express (1994), Wong Kar-wai’s explosive tribute to the multi-faceted city that raised him.

Hong Kong: a city that is roughly half the size of Rhode Island, yet houses a population of 8.49 million people, making it the fourth densest region in the world and one of the richest cities in the world (and the least affordable to live in). Shuffled between East and West in the 20th century, the region is a melting pot of cultures and languages and contradictions...where people live in "coffin homes" on top of each other despite the immense wealth that's concentrated there. This former British colony—officially handed back over as a special administrative region to mainland China in 1997—possesses one of the most culturally and financially significant film markets in the world, which has influenced filmmakers and performers from all over the globe. Exploding as an independent filmmaking identity in the second half of the 20th century (after Chinese-language filmmaking was largely displaced from the mainland following the CCP's victory in 1949), the Hong Kong film industry introduced and cultivated a number of legendary artists who would go on to change the look and feel of cinema forever: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, John Woo, Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui, Johnnie To, Tsui Hark, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, Andy Lau, Simon Yam, Stephen Chow, and Leslie Cheung...to name just a few. Hong Kong cinema really took off in the 1970s with the introduction and international popularization of martial arts cinema—thanks to the popularity of Bruce Lee (and later Jackie Chan and Jet Li) — but it would expertly cultivate several genres—including the "heroic bloodshed" action epics of John Woo, the mo lei tau (“silly talk”) screwball comedies of Stephen Chow and Jeffrey Lau, and heart-wrenching melodramas (from directors like Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui, and Stanley Kwan) about isolation, displacement, and cross-cultural strife. Taking inspiration from both traditional Chinese storytelling forms like folk opera and dance and the filmmaking influences from the West, Hong Kong films are truly unlike any other, marrying story and style, eschewing realism, and foregrounding emotion. The groundbreaking stunt work incubated in the industry could be its own program, representing some of the greatest feats of physical performance ever committed to film. With its streamlined action filmmaking and tradition of multiple sequel films, reboots, and remakes, the Hong Kong film industry really did pave the way for the post 20th century Hollywood film industry, which can't help but look dull and sloppy by comparison. Watching films from the Hong Kong New Wave, it's really hard not to ask: what happened to movies?

[ETA: In 2025, Shout Factory announced that it acquired distribution rights to 156 films from influential Hong Kong studio Golden Princess, which includes the films of John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Ringo Lam, and so much more, meaning very soon, a ton of these Hong Kong classics are going to be a whole lot easier to watch in the United States)!]

“I am not a demon. I am a lizard, a shark, a heat-seeking panther. I want to be Bob Denver on acid playing the accordion”: Nicolas Cage Movies, Ranked

Nicolas Cage got to flex his comedic chops (deliberately for once) in the Coen Bros.’ Raising Arizona (1987), in which he’s a criminal-turned-dad forced to commit increasingly desperate acts to acquire the family life he’s always coveted.

The "hell or high water" I mentioned up top includes this month's particularly challenging actor showcase: Nicolas Kim Coppola, better known to us as Nicolas Cage, who celebrates his birthday this month. For Christmas, I promised Vince that I would give him a Nicolas Cage retrospective in the New Year, and to up the ante, I promised to rank his films. This was a particularly bold promise, given that he's a subject that has nearly broken some of the greatest pop culture minds of our time. If anyone was meant to do it, it feels like it should be me...because I will watch pretty much anything. This living legend has been in many, many films: the good, the bad, and The Weather Man; we could spend years trying to understand the artistic choices he's made and the order in which he's made them, but we will never truly understand this actor. He's the first nepotism star to also feel like a Hollywood outsider: relatable to no one, as distant and off as one of his characters, and all the better for it. I'm not going to get into any of the actor's eccentric—and depressing—offscreen life, because I like to envision him as a mystical entity that lives on a studio soundstage, crawling to his mark when it's time for the marker to fall on yet another project (of which he's made at least 120). We've discussed actors who have scaled high and low, but no one has defied such distinctions so religiously as Nicolas Cage, who never met an unusual wig, or outrageous sound, or an outlandish accent that he didn't want to surreptitiously add to a performance, whether it feels organic or not. Onscreen, he almost feels embarrassed to be acting: this is a man who once described his performance in 1950s nostalgia piece Peggy Sue Got Married as "Jerry Lewis on psychedelia," because he only agreed to star in the film if they let him talk like "Pokey from The Gumby Show." That quality of jadedness ("I'm a policeman...see my badge?")—whether it comes from being a Coppola, or something else—makes us feel like we've got someone on screen as in on the artifice as we are; an ally, who is not above humiliating himself in the service of entertainment. After at least three life cycles of stardom, Cage has tentatively settled back into an acclaim period, thanks to his moving performance in last year's Pig, showing up to actor end-of-year roundtables to tell us about a vengeful horse named Rain Man. For the sake of my sanity, we're covering just an abridged portion of Cage's extensive filmography here.

[ETA: This has been updated up through 2025] .

Mad About the Boy: Men for Sale on Celluloid

Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980) turned its lead, Richard Gere, into an instant star, keenly “selling” the hunky leading man as high-end commodity, not unlike the chic Armani suits the man puts on (and takes off).