Retro Reels

A movie that reminds me of my mom. Thankfully not for any of the reasons you might assume based on the content of the film.

Happy(??) Mother's Day! I'm doing Mother's Day all month, starting with a certain Hollywood legend.

This week I watched a film about a donkey. No, it was not Shrek.

A movie about the turn of the milliennium seems a fitting end to this series on the works of Hou Hsiao Hsien.

I did a lot of research for this one, enough that you can consider this episode a viewer's guide for the film.

Yes hello, Hou Hsiao Hsien? Can I get another huge downer of a movie please? Thank you. Happy birthday, by the way.

Just ahead of his birthday, Hanna's kicking off a monthlong series about the works of Taiwanese New Wave director and erstwhile actor Hou Hsiao Hsien.

Hanna wraps up women's month with a double feature by director Kelly Reichardt.

Chantal Ackerman's film illustrates how women's work is never finished, rarely asked for, and hardly noticed or appreciated. 

French New Wave? On MY program? It's more likely than you think!

Let's give Kinuyo Tanaka her due. You can watch The Eternal Breasts right here on YouTube.

Jane Fonda's performance is unforgettable in this 1969 movie by Sydney Pollack, and somehow its message feels more relevant than ever.

It's been an up and down kind of ride with Mizoguchi, but by the end, Hanna is reminded of why she watches all these old movies in the first place.

Maybe Hanna can squash her beef with Mizoguchi yet.

The first time in a long time that Hanna is taken aback by how much she disliked a movie.

It's real sad girl hours for this week's double feature and introductory episode on the legendary Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi.

A mind-blowing pick for this month's installment of One Week in the West.

Where did the social and sexual stereotypes about Asian women played out in movies like Sayonara and The World of Suzie Wong come from, anyway? All roads lead back to Madame Butterfly.

Hanna continues to torture herself with shoddy movies featuring Asian stereotypes. Don't worry, there's a point to all of this suffering.

Ending the year with much less than a bang, Hanna watches a movie so racist and so sexist that she might have hated it even more than she hated Memoirs of a Geisha for similar reasons.

Feeling obligated to make a seasonal choice, but generally allergic to anything billed as a Christmas movie, Hanna goes with the most obnoxious possible option. Yippee-ki-yay...you know the rest.

Over the top is the name of the game when it comes to John Woo. Unbelievably, his 1992 film Hard Boiled technically started out as an effort to tone things down.

Hong Kong director John Woo was one of a long list of filmmakers to feel inspired by Jean Pierre Melville's film Le Samourai. His take on it, however, has quite a different vibe. 

Hanna looked into French director Jean Pierre Melville's take on the samurai warrior so often seen in the films of Akira Kurosawa and finds herself pleasantly surprised, not least of all by how hot the leading man happens to be. 

One Week in the West is the program's new series that'll see Hanna spend a week analyzing a film made in the Western world...partly due to realizing that after about a year and a half, she's been working through Asian film so quickly that it's probably best to mix things up a bit.