Right after western star Clint Eastwood first directed himself in PLAY MISTY FOR ME, but before he directed his first western with THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, Sidney Poitier beat him to it with BUCK AND THE PREACHER (1972). It was his first time directing a movie and first time leading a western (though he’d been in DUEL AT DIABLO).
Much like POSSE will have to do 21 years later, BUCK AND THE PREACHER starts out by establishing that yes, silly head, there were Black people in the old west. This history is communicated visually by showing the film’s characters in sepia tone photos. The story takes place after the civil war, when some former slaves decided sharecropping was just slavery 2.0 and tried their luck traveling west to find, as a title card puts it, “new frontiers where they could be free at last.” Where the western genre comes in is that “they placed their hopes in the hands of the few black wagonmasters that knew the territories of the West.” (read the rest of this shit…)
COCAINE BEAR is a kind of funny new horror comedy written by Jimmy Warden (
Tsui Hark’s groundbreaking 1983 wuxia epic ZU: WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN recently got a fancy new blu-ray release, inspiring me to finally get around to seeing it. In fact I watched it right before I watched 
Well, I’ve been thinking about it for far too long, but I’ve finally gone and done it: my first home brew, play along commentary track. This is designed to sync up with the US cut of NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER (the shorter of the two included on the Kino Lorber DVD and blu-ray) but I think it would also work okay if you just want to listen to it like a podcast. I try to explain my love for this intersection of Hong Kong cinema and ’80s American pop culture, with my usual goal of being informative and wise but also funny, sincere, and occasionally stupid. Lots of talk about little details of the movie and the people in it, the Seattle locations, the history of action movies filmed in Seattle, the worldwide phenomenon of Bruce Lee worship, some stupid stories about me, and of course plenty about Van Damme. (Sorry for slagging Chuck Norris for the same reason two different times, but I say some nice things about him too.)
Watching Ryuhei Kitamura’s latest 
Ryuhei Kitamura is an interesting director. He started in Japan with the attention-grabbing yakuzas vs. zombies movie VERSUS (2000). That one was kinda cool but I straight up loved his fourth movie, the samurai manga adaptation 
SENTINELLE is a pretty good 2021 French revenge movie that’s mostly made out of cliches, but benefits from a dedicated performance by its star Olga Kurylenko (
TRIANGLE OF SADNESS was the last 2023 best picture nominee I hadn’t seen, but I’d been planning to watch it anyway. It’s the latest from Swedish director Ruben Östlund, and his second in a row to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. I haven’t seen the previous one (2017’s THE SQUARE), so my impression of him comes from FORCE MAJEURE (2014). Although I liked it I guess I didn’t review it, and I mostly just remember the A+ premise (a guy ruins his marriage in one moment because an avalanche seems to be headed for his family and he runs off without helping them).
You may be surprised to hear that I had never seen IRON MONKEY (1993) until now. I rented it many years ago but it turned out to be some Miramax dubbed and chopped version, so I decided to hold off, and I guess I got sidetracked. Now, upon the occasion of a new blu-ray release, I finally watched it. So I’m happy to be the last to tell you this is a straight up martial arts classic!
THE RED-WOLF (just RED WOLF on the DVD cover) is a 1995 movie directed by Yuen Woo-ping that’s kind of like his take on UNDER SIEGE and/or 
It takes place on New Year’s Eve (the December one, judging by the number of Christmas trees around) on a luxury cruise ship called the White Whale. That’s a literary reference in my opinion, but most of its influences are cinematic. If you know your important filmic art you know that in the film UNDER SIEGE the captain of an aircraft carrier is killed by one of his underlings, who’s working for a guy who gets on board disguised as the singer for a corny blues rock band. This is kind of a variation on that – the ship’s captain (Steve Brettingham, 
