I just assume that's why Rod Steiger was so depressed and tortured…

No, those are your local American punk and indie bands, trying to scrape up some extra cred because "that's what underground bands did in the 80s, dammit!"

Except for your first - and maybe the third - point, you can say the same thing about vinyl. Perhaps even more so.

I've been told that's what's happened in Japan, with CDs, not vinyl, becoming the hipster fetish item of choice.

It's a Michael Mann trademark, going all the way back to Thief.

Novelistic is right: the movie's feeling of homespun, urban conspiracy is probably about as close as we'll get to a feature-length adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's V,. Not bad considering it precedes the novel by a few years.

It's good now.

Wettest County in the World wasn't a great book, but it was the sort of good book that could have made a great film, precisely since the film wouldn't be as chained to the anticlimatic nature of real events.

Perhaps, but I'm not expecting Breihan to be an expert on every nuance of the genre, especially since the finer points of definition are hardly clarified in the West (and possibly not in the East, if the contradicting first-hand sources I've come across are any indication). He's certainly working from received…

They're flashbacks to 1971's One Armed Boxer, Wang's attempt at mashing up his two famous Shaw characters. This despite the fact that Guillotine is set a good two centuries before it's predecessor.

The Wong Fei-Hung tradition certainly warrants mention, but I'd wager they don't qualify for three reasons:

Flying Guilltone boils down to three "franchises":

Himes was a genius, and his novels really anticipate a lot of the direction crime fiction would take (particularly beyond just books). And that's even beyond the "blaxploitation" angle: the twinning of laughter and death anticipates everything from Elmore Leonard to the Coens.

After "Demarcation!", how much bleaker can you get? We know Coburn and Schell are doomed, their last hurrah suicidal. Why wallow in it?

Also, while much of Wang Yu's post-Shaw output was questionable - Taiwan seemed to judge starpower based precisely on how many movies you can crank out - the movies he directed himself are almost always topnotch. I think Tarantino called him the "Jack Kirby of kung-fu cinema", and that really nails down his gonzo,…

This is one of those movies that Dragon Dynasty failed to release during their heyday. If I could proffer a guess, it was possibly because it's the same story as Five Fingers of Death… which was a remake, despite being made less than two years later, and with much of the same cast!

It really is the first film to nail down the kung fu film formula, but Vengeance! was arguably first, and better: the only thing that possibly disqualifies it, perhaps, is the fact the most of the fighting is done with daggers and hatchets, not open palms and fists. But still, the goals were the same: to sharply…

Master of the Flying Guillotine is a sequel to One-Armed Boxer!: the original title translates to One-Armed Boxer vs. Flying Guillotine, the latter having been introduced by Shaw's hit film. Which was in many ways Wang Yu's M.O.: find out what Shaw was doing and make his own version, often getting it out quicker than…

I love the ending and think it's perfect. What else would you want? A happy ending where the German wins? A bleak one where the Germans lose?

Can I get a hat wobble?