ObsessiveCinemaDisorder

Black Bag is a fast-paced, talky spy thriller that aims hard to break the rules, and frustratingly falls precisely between being a commercial blockbuster and an arthouse indie, but retains the entertainment value of neither.

George Woodhouse, a National Cyber Security Centre counterintelligence officer, is assigned to investigate a suspected inside leak of a top-secret software Severus. George sets up a dinner party to investigate his five colleagues, including his wife Kathryn...

Steven Soderbergh's style takes a film genre, strips it down to its bare bones, and remixes it in his trademark snappy, smooth jazz pacing, which moves the plot along, and forces the audience to keep up.

This style has worked in Ocean's Eleven (a heist film), Side Effects (a psychological thriller), and Haywire (an action movie), where the genres benefited from Soderbergh's fast-paced direction.

Conversely, this approach fails in No Sudden Move (a noir film) and this film (a spy film), where the genres are completely stripped of the required mood and atmosphere.

Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender and the supporting cast are a great ensemble, but it is not a performance showcase. The characters are cogs to a plot machine gunning forward, cutting any scenery being chewed.

The theme of spies keeping secrets all the time from everyone, including their loved ones was fascinating and familiar territory to John Le Carré. However, it pales in comparison to the depths of 2011's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. David Koepp's script devotes no time to the misery of how spies destroy their personal lives. The absence of trust becomes a thing that I know is happening, as opposed to feeling that lost in my gut.

Although I appreciated how relevant the film was to current events and presents a realistic depiction of spy work, I couldn't quite connect with Black Bag. I kept disagreeong with its sensibilities.

It is too throwaway with its material and reduces itself to being a poorly made by-the-numbers thriller.

I've never been a stickler for cinematography but I disliked the soft focus muddy aesthetic. The dinner party scene was shot with yellow burning lamps on the table were distractingly irritating to look at.

The film kept inviting me to play its deliberately odd little game. I just thought everything was moving so fast anyways that the answer will arrive soon enough, but I ended up falling asleep before the reveal.

Four Trails was an ambivalent experience.

On paper, it's an inspiring sports story about athletes pushing the limits to take on an impossible challenge.

But I got something darker out of it.

Director Robin Lee captured something else that he didn't intend to document, and it slowly became my main focus, of which I will explain...

The Hong Kong Four Trails Ultra Challenge is an extreme hiking marathon challenge in which contestants complete the four Hong Kong hiking trails, totaling 298 kilometers, within 72 hours. The documentary follows several veteran hikers who aim to finish the challenge in under 50 hours.

As I cheered on the individual athletes' Herculean efforts to complete the run under 50 hours, there was a creepiness to how much the contestants and the group were behaving.

Two athletes were risking permanent injury to their knees. One of them, who had stitched from an injury weeks prior, decided to run anyway and had a nurse on standby to examine and possibly restitch his injury between the trails.

Why didn't anyone encourage the poor chap to rest and do the run next year for the sake of his leg? It's an annual event!

No, the group cheers him on.

It's a supportive, warm community-as long as the athlete keeps pushing on!

And every year, the Four Trails creator makes the rules more challenging, shortening the cutoff time, banning painkillers and music, and changing the start time to evening. Where does this intensity come from?

As I was cringing over the contestant's leg wound, wondering if a resulting amputation would snap them all out of this spell and realize how insane they were behaving... it dawned on me. I saw what Werner Herzog deems the Ecstatic Truth.

I recognize this behavior from hobby groups where a cult-like dynamic naturally develops. The once-passionate hobby leader assumes a power position over the participants, controlling the very thing that the group enjoys, to the point of holding it ransom. The intensity then cranks up in odd ways and the participants become fiercely competitive.

I'm sure this social dynamic happens in all hobby groups around the world, but being from Hong Kong, I link the behavior in Four Trails specifically to Hong Kong and even Hong Kong expats, too.

It's how fast life in Hong Kong moves and how hard and busy people work to keep up with it. They work hard and proverbially have a need to play hard as well, which ends up being unknowingly exploited in this process.

I've chatted with friends and colleagues since I saw Four Trails. One friend joined and quit the local dodgeball league after one trial cause of how aggressively competitive people were and how hard they were chucking the balls. Another friend told me he quit a football group because the organizer instructed the players to only pass the ball to him to score.

As an inspiring documentary of the athletic spirit, I give Four Trails a 7. As an accidental portrait of Hong Kong life and the intensity therein, I rate it an 8.

From Rigor Mortis writer-director Juno Mak, Sons of the Neon Night is a lavish, brooding arthouse crime drama with an impressive star-studded ensemble and a whopping budget that buckles under the weight of its huge overreaching ambition.

Set in an alternate, crime-ridden, snowy Hong Kong, a hospital bombing causes the death of Park Li, the chairman of QIN, a pharmaceutical conglomerate that acts as a front for a major drug ring. Moreton Li, the youngest son, succeeds the chairman position and aims to turn QIN into a clean, legitimate business.

Armed with seemingly unlimited resources and time, Juno Mak has admirable ambition, aiming to deliver something unique and different from commercial filmfare, and to his credit, maintains his singular artistic voice.

However, the ponderous multi-threaded narrative is so focused with breaking storytelling rules that it has no chance of finishing satisfyingly within its 132 minute runtime, reportedly cut down from a six-hour director's cut.

The visuals are striking. Every frame could be a matted black-and-white photograph hung in a modern designer gallery. Takeshi Kaneshiro waking up smoking in his bed in the Hong Kong Cross Harbour Tunnel in the opening set my brain on fire, "Is he the king of the underworld?"

It is bold to create a perpetually snowing Hong Kong and let the Hong Kong movie audience deal with that visual. I've read so many online posts commenting, "There's no snow in Hong Kong" or "Causeway Bay doesn't look like that". I imagine Juno Mak smirking every time that happens going, "Tsk tsk".

It was fascinating entering this metaphorical crime-laden Hong Kong and relating to Juno Mak's unique, oddball and glum worldview. It felt like a more abstract version of the Sin City movies and I enjoyed deciphering what all the visual motifs meant. However, this empty vagueness could be frustrating for many.

My key criticism with the visuals, as gorgeous and well-composed as they are, is the cinematography does not visualize the narrative and its themes.

Moreton's proposal to sell pharmaceutical drugs over illegal drugs is a thematically rich idea, but never visualized. How about a montage juxtaposing a tired office worker popping painkillers from his medicine cabinet to a junkie shooting up in the alleyway?

One of the plots features Sean Lau's narcotics officer trying to save his sick daughter, but the camera never fully shows her face. How can the audience root for a character they can't see?

The movie habitually floats interesting ideas and plot threads, watches it lift off, but then cuts the kite string and goes, "You know where that'll go, right?".

All the story exposition, the who, what, where, when, why, and how, is entirely delivered through dialogue, a similar issue to Christopher Nolan's Tenet. It even sinfully opens with lengthy blink-and-you'll-miss title cards setting up the story.

International audiences will struggle with the subtitles and keeping track of which character is being mentioned in the dialogue.

The film's open-ended approach is a double-edged sword. At times, the negative space is well-placed and the audience is invited to brood along with its characters on what will happen next. But other times, lot of the story seems forcibly left open as there isn't enough runtime for proper payoff.

It all ends on a unsatisfying note...

The problem in the end, is still script.

In a behind-the-scenes interview, Takeshi Kaneshiro, told Juno Mak after reading the script, "You'll never finish telling the whole story. Every character is a lead part. This should be a series."

Sons of the Neon Night is a similar case to Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, a self-financed project where the director has free reign, but nothing's reigning him in.

There are rumors of Netflix releasing a longer version as a mini-series. I'd be interested in seeing a complete director's cut.

Will adding more runtime solve the issue? I'm not sure but I'd be happy to find out.

There's a lot of things to like in Sons of the Neon Night and I am not quite ready to dismiss it all yet.