Friday's Old Fashioned: Branded to Kill (1967)

The two best movies I have seen so far in 2026 are not new movies but new-to-me movies. The first, 1987’s historical phantasm “Walker,” was so reviled in its time that it got writer/director Alex Cox blacklisted from Hollywood. (Cox, in fact, just released a new Kickstarter-funded movie this year and I really need to catch up with it.) The second, 1967’s surrealist Yakuza crime drama “Branded to Kill,” was so confounding to audiences and bigwigs that writer/director Seijun Suzuki was blacklisted by the Japanese film industry for a decade. What is this, what’s going on here, why are my two favorite films so far this year ones that left their filmmakers ostracized? Is this pure coincidence, or in this destabilizing moment in time, when AI is threatening to reorient the whole idea of art, am I subconsciously seeking genuine, full-throated artists that aren’t just feeding prompts into some app to do all the creative legwork but following their own emotions, instincts, predilections, and tastes right over the waterfall.

As “Branded to Kill” opens, the Japanese underworld’s third-ranked contract killer, Goro Hanada (Joe Shishido), arrives in Tokyo to do a job, greeted by a taxi driver, Kasuga (Hiroshi Minami), who was once a high-ranking hitman but now a shell of himself, bemoaning his old dream of being #1. This is truly hilarious dialogue equating Yakuza assassins with NFL or NBA power rankings, constantly being revised by some keyboard drone after the latest killing. Indeed, there is not much to the character of Hanada beyond his occupation. Through that light, the title assumes an almost deadpan air, as if hitmen are just livestock electrically branded by their employers. All that defines him are the jobs he does and his preeminent sexual fetish of sniffing rice. His own wife, Mami (Mariko Ogawa), who cavorts with the man who has hired Hanada out in the open, deems the two of them beasts, demonstrated in how their relationship is nothing more, really, than an endless series of primal urges, two figurative pigs raised to slaughter.

In its jump cuts and playful attitude toward gangster tropes, “Branded to Kill” suggests a Yakuza movie by way of the French New Wave, and it was one of the latter movement’s most famous figures, Jean-Luc Godard, who noted that all you needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. As if honoring and elaborating on that sentiment, Suzuki includes a gun and two girls. In addition, to his wife, Hanada becomes smitten with the mysterious, mesmerizing Misako (Annu Mari). She enlists him to perform a superhuman job, one requiring a single shot so precise it is nigh impossible, and when it goes wrong, he is marked for death, told in no uncertain terms that the #1 ranked hitman will now have to take his life. Misako is introduced standing in the rain, and frequently posed in frames between fountains, and so if water emblemizes the unconscious, so does Misako emblemize Hanada’s. Her obsession with death, suggesting a noir version of the suicidal woman in the art gallery in “Play It Again, Sam,” echoes Hanada’s own. During one hallucinatory sequence where he gets drunk and wanders the streets, the hitman seems to be taking the end of life out for virtual spin. 

Yet, if that makes “Branded to Kill” sound like some arduous dark night of the soul, I cannot stress enough how despite such subject matter, it is also an absolute blast to watch on account of Suzuki’s almost euphoric formalist kick. In an interview with The Criterion Channel in 2011, Suzuki indicated his motivations did not really extend much beyond making the most entertaining movie possible and in one mid-movie sequence where Hanada knocks off three men right in a row, he brings that manifesto to life by dreaming up increasingly unorthodox hits. This rapid-fire sequence begins with a rifle emerging from the moving lips of a cigarette billboard and concludes on a getaway via advertising balloon. The last shot is a gas and is extra fascinating to compare against one earlier in the movie when another assassin runs out of a building on fire, demonstrating how Suzuki mixes blood curdling chills with boisterous comedy just as much as he mixes intense close-ups with thoughtful long shots and coats so much of it in a dissonant jazz score, the whole mélange epitomizing the absurdity of life itself. That absurdity is never more paramount than in the droll, winding denouement that finds the #1 ranked hitman animating his observation that killers cannot be human by endlessly tormenting Hanada before they finally come to face to face in a boxing ring in something akin to an existential sports movie ending on a note of irony so grim that it might as well be the most mirthless chuckle you’ve ever heard.

Studio Logos are Part of the Movie Too

Last week, America’s third most prominent idiot son announced that in the wake of Paramount Skydance acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery that the conglomeration will henceforth be known, simply, as Skydance. Even so, American Idiot Son #3 indicated that Paramount and Warner Bros. would still exist as so-called sub-brands, preserving their “distinct identities (and) extraordinary legacies…that have resonated with audiences for generations.” It doesn’t really matter what McDonald’s call its Big Mac, I suppose, so long as it’s good, and if Skydance produces movies under the Paramount and Warner Bros. umbrellas as good as their “extraordinary legacies” imply, that’s what matters. Of course, it’s difficult to picture David Ellison (we will drop the nom de guerre) as some sort of Thalberg-esque steward of creativity, and so more than a Big Mac, I keep imagining Paramount and Warner Bros. becoming the Arch Deluxe. Or maybe Saturn, the sub brand of General Motors that was discontinued in 2010 due to corporate bankruptcy restructuring. David Ellison does not have a face for movies or for radio; he has a face for corporate bankruptcy restructuring.

I know, I know, it’s dumb to romanticize a brand, and there is plenty in the history of Paramount and Warner Bros. to denigrate. I mean, Olivia de Havilland, may she rest in peace, went to war with Warner Bros. in the name of labor while early Hollywood’s anti-competitive practices were regulated courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Paramount Decree. That is all part of their extraordinary legacies too. But then, Bogey and Bacall are also part of Warner Bros., and when Olivia de Havilland won the right to work with whomever she damn pleased, she went to Paramount and gave, perhaps, the greatest screen performance of all time in “The Heiress.” I don’t want to say things even out, but to borrow the title of a Universal picture, it’s complicated. I have been seeing those studio logos for Paramount and Warner Bros. all my movie-watching life. The moment when a movie studio logo appears, it’s like boarding the plane to fly somewhere new, the moment when you take a second to believe that the movie you are about to watch is going to be a good one. It’s why they will always instill a sense of whimsy in me, and it’s why I have always enjoyed it when movies see them with a sense of whimsy too.

Steven Spielberg famously opened “Raiders of the Lost Ark” by dissolving from Paramount’s artistic rendering of a mountain peak to a real one, a playful touch foreshadowing the entire 1981 action-adventure; no matter how dark it could sometimes get, Spielberg always had a gleam in his eye. “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” which predicted the future, opened with an homage to Spielberg’s magnum opus by dissolving the Paramount logo into the mountain peak of the animated movie’s eponymous Colorado town. And both those movies were hearkening back to the Biblical epic “The Ten Commandments” in which Cecil B. DeMille began not with the Paramount peak but with an image of Mount Sinai before superimposing the Paramount logo over it, which always struck me as something like a concession to any God-fearing folk suspicious of those Hollywood infidels. 

The lamentable 1998 action movie “Hard Rain” turned the clouds surrounding the Paramount mountain peak into dark and stormy ones, complete with thunder and lightning, an effect that did not work quite as well as it sounds. I was always sad that Warner Bros. did not beat them to that punch with “Twister” two years prior. Rather than adhering to the Warner Bros. logo of the mid-90s that featured a blue sky and white cumulous clouds, “Twister” put its logo over a dark, stormy sky, but it should have begun with the blue sky before giving way to the stormy one, just like a May afternoon in Tornado Alley.

“Casablanca” did a nifty cross fade from the familiar Warner Bros. shield logo to a map of Africa while “You’ve Got Mail” fittingly transformed the Warner Bros. logo into a computer desktop icon. No movie, though, ever dressed the Warner Bros. logo up better than “Adventures of Robin Hood” which added a resplendent flourish to its original design, making it look like something you might see unfurled on a banner at Nottingham Castle.

Of course, studio logo tomfoolery was not limited to just Paramount and Warner Bros. “Waterworld” utilized the spinning globe of the Universal logo to simultaneously introduce its foremost plot point of melting polar ice caps. According to Ian Failes at Befores & Afters, this was no simple undertaking, and it was evocative of a movie that was much weirder (in a good way, some of the time) than its stink bomb reputation would suggest.

“Mo’ Better Blues” was released the year of Universal’s 75th anniversary, and for its 75th anniversary, Universal ran through all the logos of its past, making for a slightly longer introduction than usual. And so, in his musical-drama, Spike Lee deployed none other than Flavor Flav of Public Enemy to interrupt the Universal logo run-through to tell Spike to get the movie started. I mean, leave it to Spike to throw a little comical shade at his own financier. Lee was my introduction to the idea that directors are the true authors of their movies and that’s why I have always adored this touch: he is telling you that, yes, “Mo’ Better Blues” is a Universal Picture, but it is a Spike Lee film.

There have been various alterations to MGM’s Leo the Lion throughout the years, none better than 1983’s comedy “Strange Brew.” Hinting at the libation-centric comedy to come, this lion does not roar but belch, as if he’s had one too many, at which point the fourth wall is broken and we realize the movie’s own characters are trying to get the lion to roar. I always appreciated the meta nature of this joke, transforming the studio logo not into some static thing but a living, breathing part of the movie itself. 

“Ghostbusters” and “Ronin” both did something a little similar 14 years apart, just with music. The former put the first spooky notes of Elmer Bernstein’s score over Columbia Pictures’ torch lady, giving her the feel of an eerie apparition, while the latter placed the initial notes of Elia Cmiral’s score over the falling stars motif of United Artists logo. Both were letting you know that the movie was beginning – already. 

What makes Alfred Newman’s 20th Century Fox Fanfare (which is still called that, as far as I know, despite 20th Century Fox now being called 20th Century Studios) so great is that it innately communicates to the audience that the movie is now beginning, as it did with such classics as “Star Wars” and “All About Eve.” Indeed, in his typically theatrical way, Baz Luhrmann brought that to life in “Moulin Rouge!” by using computer graphics to have a curtain literally open on the 20th Century Fox logo while an orchestra in the foreground performs the fanfare. 

Yet, my favorite 20th Century Fox studio logo appearance, appropriately from my favorite movie “Last of the Mohicans,” is one when the fanfare is not heard at all. No, rather than Newman’s famous theme, we hear the rumbling percussion of Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s score, immediately evoking a movie of such primal urgency that there is not even a second to waste on a fanfare. And more than that, the percussion in tandem with the familiar 20th Century Fox searchlights manifests the way I have always felt about those studio logos in the first place: they represent the portal to the other side.  

The Weight

1953’s “The Wages of Fear” beget 1977’s “Sorcerer,” both adapted from Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel in which hardscrabble men are paid to transport nitroglycerin canisters by truck through the perilous South American jungle. And though Padraic McKinley’s 2026 directorial debut “The Weight” is culled from original screenplay by Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines, it owes a significant debt to those two movies, nevertheless, updating it for the present even though it takes place in the past. Set in 1933, “The Weight” involves several men hauling gold by backpack through the Oregon wilderness. That’s the first nifty twist on the original conceit: they are going on foot rather than by truck. (As David Bowie once noted, duplicate, then elaborate.) The second twist is that the crew is comprised of convicts hauling the gold to earn their freedom rather than money. Moreover, the man ostensibly in charge, Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke), also seeks freedom to reunite with his daughter, an appropriate detail. Because if Ethan Hawke was ever going to make a movie about a parent-child reunion, it was going to be served with a side of existentialism.

Widowed and raising the seven-year-old Penny (Avy Berry) during The Great Depression, Murphy is introduced as struggling to make ends meet, winding up evicted and then incarcerated when he confronts an undercover police office he thinks harbors bad intentions. With his daughter in state custody, Murphy ends up at a labor camp run by Clancy (Russell Crowe), fingering this prisoner as a man of strong aptitude and intelligence and enlisting him to enlist a small team to transport all the gold from a mine about to be claimed by the government on the condition of early release. That’s a lot of set up, and at several minutes under two hours, “The Weight” does an impressively economical job of doling out information while also establishing character in single scenes. When Clancy invites Murphy into his place to make his pitch, the way Hawke has his character take a beat as he does so, like he’s trying to get his bearings at being inside a real home, communicates so much. Hawke and Crowe develop such an enjoyable rapport as two equally wary men, in fact, that even if you understand why the narrative prevents the latter from appearing more, you still wish that he would.

In addition to the pair of armed men safeguarding Clancy’s interests, Murphy handpicks three fellow prisoners, Singh (Avi Nash), Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), Rankin (Austin Amelio), as his gold-hauling crew. Not long into their trek, they are joined at her insistence by the indigenous Anna (Julia Jones). Her inclusion is less a narrative stretch, frankly, than Rankin’s, the latter deliberately introduced as untrustworthy and beggaring belief that the otherwise thorough Murphy would call on him. (Amelio’s performance is still spot-on.) Indentured to servitude, Anna is nothing less than a prisoner too, seeing this crew passing by as her only chance at escape. And through nothing more than a single introductory close-up in which we see her sizing up these men as they pass her by, “The Weight” conveys her intelligence as no less formidable than Murphy’s. In one suspenseful sequence, she saves his life, a neat blending of presence of mind with romantic spark.

As he reproved with his Oscar nomination for last year’s “Blue Moon,” Hawke has a gift for talkative roles, though in “The Weight,” he demonstrates an identical knack for non-verbal communication. Even without the fancy shot reflecting a crackling campfire in Murphy’s eyes, Hawke figuratively conjures that fiery-eyed nature throughout in a determined gaze imbuing his character’s constant deliberation. Hawke also lets in just enough vulnerability to render the character believable. The tautest sequence involves transporting all the gold bars across a rickety wooden bridge by way of the most dangerous game of catch of all time, necessitating Murphy receiving one gold brick at a time in the middle of the overpass and then hurling it himself to the other side. With each reception and throw, Hawke evinces a palpable physical exhaustion that only amplifies the suspense.

The title of McKinley’s movie, of course, is not just literal but also figurative. Not just in the emotional weight that Murphy carries from wanting to reunite with his daughter but in how these men can only be set free in this capitalist society by doing capitalism’s bidding. The government’s very meddling that this quest seeks to avoid might intend to temper that sense of greed, and Singh is revealed as a socialist in a mid-movie monologue outlining the alternative, but the concluding twist also can’t quite square the circle between those opposing ideologies. Not that it necessarily needs to. “The Weight” still succeeds as something like a spiritually freeing heist movie, and besides, the penultimate scene in which a few characters do nothing but share a single cigarette by passing it around suggests its own kind of collectivist victory.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Take Aim at the Police Van (1960)

Seijun Suzuki’s monochrome “Take Aim at the Police Van” belongs to a post-war Japanese genre of film known as borderless action, blurring geographical lines by simultaneously blurring genre lines, utilizing an American-like spirit to appeal to American audiences, which feels eerily appropriate given America’s postwar occupation. Of course, if America was seeking to instill its values in the newly democratic country, what does a movie like Seijun Suzuki’s dynamite noir-thriller hybrid say about them? In fact, let’s amend that description to noir-thriller-comedy. The opening images seen through the scope of a sniper rifle on a dark mountain road show four signs in rapid succession – “MANY ACCIDENTS,” “HAVE OCCURRED,” “IN THIS AREA,” “CAUTION” – that is so emphatic it compels your laughter. It’s not so funny, though, when that same sniper rifle takes aim at, what else, a police van, assassinating two prisoners inside, an ambush that ends with the prison guard in charge, Tamon (Michitarô Mizushima), put on six-month leave. And though for one brief scene at home, he entertains the idea of a six-month vacation, he just as quickly decides to investigate the incident himself. Almost as soon as he does, he is pulled into his police precinct and kindly told by his boss to leave the investigating to them. Tamon agrees and leaves with a smile on his face. The second he closes his boss’s door, though, the tone immediately changes, his smile vanishes, and in voiceover, we hear him ponder his next lead. The tonal shift is so severe that, I swear, if you altered the soundtrack just a little, it could work as a scene in “Police Squad!” It’s a thin, thin line in “Take Aim at the Police Van” between black comedy and a black pit of despair.

Jean-Luc Godard was utilizing the jump cut in new and exciting ways that very same year in the trailblazing “Breathless,” and while “Take Aim at the Police Van” might not be quite so avant-garde in its own editing, it is impressively furious, nonetheless, constantly pushing the narrative forward by not lingering on the ends of scenes. It createss a rhythm that echoes Tamon’s dogged determination as much as the swift 79-minute run time. His character might be modeled on Sam Spade, but Tamon also effuses much less cynicism, viewing his prisoners as human and worthy of redemption. Yet, it is the surviving prisoner of the van attack, Goro (Shoichi Ozawa), who kickstarts Tamon’s off the clock sleuthing, bringing his hopeful worldview into tension with the sordid, cynical one he encounters that is defined by a human trafficking ring tying back to an enigmatic crime lord known only as Akiba. The so-called agency funneling girls to this ring is run by Yuko (Misako Watanabe), proving more formidable than she might first appear, conveyed in a conversation with another lowlife character where Suzuki’s masterful blocking of the actors demonstrates the ever-shifting upper hand in the power dynamics. Yet, even as Yuko proves formidable, she proves more vulnerable too, demonstrated in the revelation of Akiba that blurs love and hate to such a degree that you can’t even tell them apart.

Best TV Shows of the 21st Century

We are a movie blog, of course, first and generally foremost, and half-performatively, half-seriously contend that television is an inferior artform. Yet, at the same time, we must admit that because of TV’s semi-takeover of the culture and Hollywood’s emphasis on youth-focused formula, the small screen has become the only place you can find a postmodern version of a Douglas Sirk movie melodrama that takes place entirely on the other side of the looking glass. Which brings me to The New York Times recently naming the best television shows of the 21st century and then inviting readers to submit their own ballots. 

My ballot did not take long. See below.

Alright, back to regular programming on Friday.

Hope

Na Hong-jin’s two-hour-and forty minute sci-fi action-thriller “Hope” begins not with a slow build but a cold plunge, as if “Jaws” immediately dropped us aboard the Orca with the hunt for the great white shark already in progress. One minute, we’re standing with Hope Harbor police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) on a rural road investigating the perplexing, grisly death of a cow and the next he’s tracking some unseen monster on foot through the rubble of his South Korean village with a shotgun. The dexterous camera yokes us to his point-of-view, making it feel as if we are along for this terrifying ride as much as he is along for the ride when he winds up in the car driven by rookie cop Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) with the gas all the way to the floor. That we don’t get a sense of Hope Harbor before its destruction is not an unintentional oversight preventing emotional connection but a deliberate choice emphasizing the confounding immediacy. The scene is set via context clues, signs warning of enemy infiltrations, oblique references to fencing, and ordinary citizens armed to the teeth. This is the Korean Demilitarized Zone, in other words, and yet, the emergent enemy is not from the North but outer space, a revelation shrewdly teased out over the course of this hour-long opening chase. And when the payoff finally comes, “Hope,” it turns out, is just getting started.

Yet, in widening its scope to reveal far more rampaging aliens than just the one, and all not alike in form, it gradually becomes clear that Na’s pacing works better throttled up than throttled down. He not only introduces more E.T.s, but also more humans, like an old man getting stitched up in the hospital with a story to tell and hunting party in the forest who find themselves as prey, none of whom are conveyed with any real dimension. Even a bout of friendly fire that seems readymade to reveal character from the extreme circumstances ultimately comes to nothing. Maybe this could have been glossed over had “Hope’s” action stayed in the stratosphere, but in ramping back up, it becomes oddly repetitive, consequently monotonous, and so reliant on machine gun fire that by the end it had literally given me a headache. One endless sequence on a highway becomes emblematic of a movie that does not seem to know how to call it quits. What’s more, the striking tactility of so much of the first hour is undercut by much of the creature design that feels disjointedly inserted from a video game. It’s not just the old rule of thumb that the less you see of the monster(s), the better, but that one character’s evocative description of them being a mush of peas and beans proves too much to live up to.

The imagery is all the more disappointing given Na’s willingness to see the aliens as more than unthinking predators. He demonstrates this via narrative revelations of his screenplay, but even more than that, through a pair of captivating lengthy close-ups of deceased outsiders. These seem primed for classic horror movie jump scares, holding and holding the shots until...nothing happens. Like Chief Ko finding himself unexpectedly moved by looking long and hard at the creature he’s chasing when he’s supposed to be taking aim with his rifle, Na lingers over these alien faces to instill compassion. But even if he does, he continually undermines it, giving his his characters, including Chief Ko, so many familiar action movie one-liners that he seems to suggest these aliens really are just brainless beasts to be dispatched. The sequence in which Chief Ko enlists a doctor to perform an alien autopsy yields ferocious blood-splattered comedy, though the movie itself does not seem to know what we’re supposed to be laughing about.

The monotony of the overstretched conclusion, meanwhile, is ironic because “Hope” leaves us not just with myriad loose ends and unresolved feelings but literally drops a whole other gigantic question right out of the sky. When this question arrives, it will leave you feeling like the characters on screen, literally unsure what you are seeing in more ways than one. This lack of resolution, though, leaving the human characters spiritually stranded, running along a road toward figurative points unknown, conjures the sensation of ontological response that we are generally told would go hand-in-hand with the discovery of not being alone in the universe while simultaneously imparting the unmistakable sense that they are not really the protagonists in this story. In that way, the whole two-and-a-half hours plus might have paradoxically locked into place without locking anything into place at all. Except that afterwards, I discovered “Hope” was merely set-up for a sequel, a post-movie revelation as the most predictable revelation possible, leaving me not only disappointed but retroactively insulted, unmasking a movie without even the courage of its seeming enigmatic conviction. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Linda Linda Linda (2005)

When a teenage Japanese rock band calling itself Paranmaum loses both its singer and guitarist with three days before the Shiba High Holly Festival at which they are set to perform, the remaining trio presses on by having the keyboardist switch to guitar and recruiting the Korean exchange student as their new vocalist. It sounds readymade for crisis and complication and yet what’s notable about the 2005 comedy drama “Linda Linda Linda” (the title is the name of a song by Japanese punk rock band The Blue Hearts) is how it mostly eschews traditional drama. Once the band is in place, director Nobuhiro Yamashita emphasizes the sweet camaraderie that emerges in late night practice sessions while his preferred visual approach of long takes and static frames epitomize how so much of teenage life takes places in the in-between spaces where nothing and everything happens. (Yamashita also likes to include all four bandmates in those static frames to underline their emergent group dynamic.) Their school principal seems ripe for antagonism, but secretly, he’s their biggest fan, charting their progress from afar with a wistful countenance, as if he’s daydreaming about his own lost rock and roll dreams. When a rainstorm briefly delays the band getting to the big gig, it feels like a deadpan nod to such manufactured machinations and can’t slow them down. And though rock and roll movies often turn climactic performances into catharsis, by deploying a narrative that does not culminate in anything momentous, exactly, Paranmaum’s climactic performance is given a spectacular immediacy that would do their punk rock forebears proud.