{"id":221,"date":"2003-12-08T23:30:18","date_gmt":"2003-12-09T03:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=221"},"modified":"2003-12-08T23:30:18","modified_gmt":"2003-12-09T03:30:18","slug":"fulltime-killer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=221","title":{"rendered":"Fulltime Killer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Johnny To’s Fulltime Killer<\/em><\/a> is a deliriously operatic gangster movie, about the conflict between two rival hit men. (I mean “operatic” almost literally, since there is opera on the soundtrack during the most insanely deranged action sequences). Though I suppose it could just as well be called a love triangle of sorts, with the female lead (Kelly Lin) as the pivot between the two hitmen: one Chinese, and a flamboyant maniac, played by Andy Lau; the other, Japanese, secretive and reserved, played by Takashi Sorimachi. As these two vie for supremacy, chronology is scrambled, subjectivity is multiplied (as there are at least four first-person voice-over narrators), and the frequent digressions seem to follow a logic of whim and obsession rather than one of narrative (though, surprisingly, everything is pulled together with rigorous coherence by the end, though this coherence includes a Borgesian twist). Language is also tangled, as the film repeatedly switches between Cantonese, Japanese, and English (and, I think, Mandarin as well?). The frequent gunfights are hyper-stylized, but in a far more oblique way than is the case, for instance, in John Woo’s Hong Kong thrillers, which look utterly classical in comparison. That is to say, To’s gunfights are spectacular, but also oddly distanced. The slaughter is so cool and detached that you can’t really identify with the assassins as you do in Woo’s melodramatic, romantic films; nor is it in-your-face, both tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top, calling attention to its own virtuosic excess, in the manner of Tarantino’s Kill Bill<\/em>. Rather, To creates a cinema of quicksilver, vertiginous displacements, with no stable points of view either in the action sequences or in the overall narrative. Affectively, Fulltime Killer<\/em> is neither cool and ironic (a la Tarantino) nor hot (a la Woo); I would call it lukewarm, but only if you can imagine a lukewarmness that is a positive quality, pushed to an extreme, rather than signifying not much of anything one way or the other. Fulltime Killer<\/em> is slippery rather than adhesive, which means that it wears its delirium lightly, making it a thing of gliding surfaces. I’m not sure I am grasping it rightly with this description, but “grasping” probably isn’t the right way to approach it. In any case, it’s gratifying to see genre filmmaking that is at once artistically ambitious and utterly unpretentious, in a way that you never see in American film anymore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Johnny To’s Fulltime Killer<\/em><\/a> is a deliriously operatic gangster movie, about the conflict between two rival hit men. (I mean “operatic” almost literally, since there is opera on the soundtrack during the most insanely deranged action sequences). Though I suppose it could just as well be called a love triangle of sorts, with the female lead (Kelly Lin) as the pivot between the two hitmen: one Chinese, and a flamboyant maniac, played by Andy Lau; the other, Japanese, secretive and reserved, played by Takashi Sorimachi. As these two vie for supremacy, chronology is scrambled, subjectivity is multiplied (as there are at least four first-person voice-over narrators), and the frequent digressions seem to follow a logic of whim and obsession rather than one of narrative (though, surprisingly, everything is pulled together with rigorous coherence by the end, though this coherence includes a Borgesian twist). Language is also tangled, as the film repeatedly switches between Cantonese, Japanese, and English (and, I think, Mandarin as well?). The frequent gunfights are hyper-stylized, but in a far more oblique way than is the case, for instance, in John Woo’s Hong Kong thrillers, which look utterly classical in comparison. That is to say, To’s gunfights are spectacular, but also oddly distanced. The slaughter is so cool and detached that you can’t really identify with the assassins as you do in Woo’s melodramatic, romantic films; nor is it in-your-face, both tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top, calling attention to its own virtuosic excess, in the manner of Tarantino’s Kill Bill<\/em>. Rather, To creates a cinema of quicksilver, vertiginous displacements, with no stable points of view either in the action sequences or in the overall narrative. Affectively, Fulltime Killer<\/em> is neither cool and ironic (a la Tarantino) nor hot (a la Woo); I would call it lukewarm, but only if you can imagine a lukewarmness that is a positive quality, pushed to an extreme, rather than signifying not much of anything one way or the other. Fulltime Killer<\/em> is slippery rather than adhesive, which means that it wears its delirium lightly, making it a thing of gliding surfaces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}