The Wild Goose Lake

Movies to See Right Now (at home)

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THE WILD GOOSE LAKE

Here are more Shelter In Place movie recommendations – you can watch them all at home.

ON VIDEO

More of an art movie than a neo-noir crime thriller, The Wild Goose Lake is a beautifully shot fable from China’s underworld. You can support San Francisco’s Roxie Theater by buying a ticket to stream The Wild Goose Lake from the Roxie Virtual Cinema.

The intriguing documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project tells how and why a woman’s obsession turned into an essential and irreplaceable video archive of 30 years worth of American broadcasting and society. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project is streamable on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Buck is a documentary about real-life horse whisperer Buck Brannaman, an exceedingly grounded and gentle man who knows everything about horse behavior.  But the movie is more about human behavior, about the disturbing crucible that formed Buck, and about what we can learn about people from their handling of horses. You can rent Buck from Amazon, YouTube and Google Play or buy it from iTunes.

Other recent streaming recommendations:

ON TV

On April 7, Turner Classic Movies airs the innovative film noir He Walked By Night, completed by an uncredited Anthony Mann.  Inspired by a true life story, the LAPD goes on a man hunt for a highly skilled wacko played by Richard Basehart, with his bland good looks (but maniacal eyes).  It’s a police procedural elevated by the great cinematography of John Alton, especially the sewer escape chase (right up there with the one in The Third Man). Look for film noir veteran Whit Bissell is perhaps his shadiest role. As a bonus, Jack Webb of Dragnet fame plays a CSI with a decidedly unsafe but cool way to confirm that a substance is really nitroglycerine.

HE WALKED BY NIGHT

THE WILD GOOSE LAKE: vivid nights in the underworld

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THE WILD GOOSE LAKE. Photo courtesy of Film Movement.

In the atmospheric neo-noir The Wild Goose Lake, Zenong Zhou (Ge Hu) is a small time hood who unintentionally kills a cop. He goes on the run in a downscale lakeside resort known as a lawless no mans zone. Not only is he hunted by hundreds of police, the local criminal gangs are chasing him, too, to collect the price on his head. A mysterious woman, Aiai Liu (Lun-mei Kwei), shows up and purports that she has been sent by his gang to help him escape.

As the double crosses mount, and Aiai Liu confesses that she has really been assigned to betray him, we wonder if she will. The two of them slink around the resort area, trying to lay low, until the gangs and the police converge for a climactic scene just before the satisfying epilogue.

THE WILD GOOSE LAKE. Photo courtesy of Film Movement.

Director Yi’nan Dian has delivered a beautifully and inventively shot film. We first see the femme fatale thru a plastic umbrella. Much of the action is at night, and the colors in those nighttime scenes are vivid, even sometimes breathtaking. I especially liked a brief shot of the locals line dancing with glow-in-the-dark shoes.

Visually, The Wild Goose Lake reminded me of Long Day’s Journey into Night, a Chinese film that made my Best Movies of 2019 along with Ash Is Purest White. Overall, The Wild Goose Lake‘s screenplay and performances keep it from being as good as those films, but its cinematography by Jingsong Dong matches up.

Liao Fan (Ash is Purest White) plays the cop commanding the man hunt. Fan doesn’t have much to do for most of the film except to calmly issue orders, but we’re glad he’s around for the final scene.

Even before the hunters close in on their prey, The Wild Goose Lake contains some very effective set pieces, including an in-service training for gang members on how to steal motorbikes and then a contest billed as the “Olympic games of theft“.

More of an art movie than a crime thriller, The Wild Goose Lake is a beautifully shot fable from China’s underworld. You can support San Francisco’s Roxie Theater by buying a ticket to stream The Wild Goose Lake from the Roxie Virtual Cinema.