Lady Reporter aka The Blonde Fury (1989)

This week some kung fu shenanigans featuring the groundbreaking Queen of Martial Arts, Cynthia Rothrock.

After a brief establishing shot of the Manhattan skyline, we move onto what looks like 42nd Street, New York’s sleazy centre of exploitation cinema, where hundreds of martial arts movies were screened in the 1970s and 1980s before the Disneyfication of Times Square. Big bundles of cash are being exchanged discreetly as part of some shady looking deals. These are being masterminded by a man soon revealed to be Hong Kong based newspaper tycoon Wong Dak, played by Ronny Yu.

The FBI are monitoring Dak and decide to send a very special agent over to Asia to delve more closely into the counterfeit dollars operation they suspect him of running from his printing plant. Enter Cindy played by Cynthia Rothrock, who has been specializing in battling Asian crime in San Francisco and has spent time in Hong Kong. She speaks perfect Cantonese too, and has a readymade place to stay with old pal Judy (Elizabeth Lee), who has been looking after her turtles since her last stay there, although the details of their friendship are left hazy. Backstory isn’t big in Lady Reporter.

A plan is hatched for Cindy to go undercover and secure a job at Dak’s paper. Luckily, there just happens to be a vacancy going for a journalist at Dak’s Asian Post. She impresses at her interview and is given an immediate start. She’s just being shown round her new workplace when the news comes through of a fire breaking out locally.

Cindy immediately proves she possesses not only a nose for a story but the ability to become the story. She runs into the burning building, cradles a baby in jeopardy and leaps off a ledge. This is the first real action in the movie and, believe me, it ain’t going to be the last.

That same night, she pays a furtive, out-of-hours visit to the pressing plant and quickly finds herself engaged in a fight with a bunch of the counterfeiters outside on the bamboo scaffolding that surrounds the building (bamboo scaffolding being a thing in Hong Kong).

Eventually, she escapes them by using makeshift bamboo stilts in a stunt that is truly nerve-shredding. As is another stunt where, let’s just say, she uses some ladders imaginatively.

Sometimes known as The Blonde Fury (clearly the best title for the movie), sometimes referred to as Righting Wrongs II: Blonde Fury – although Cynthia Rothrock herself doesn’t see it as a sequel – Lady Reporter is said to be the only Hong Kong movie to ever feature a Westerner in the lead role, Rothrock having proved very popular in early appearances in movies like Yes, Madam and The Millionaires’ Express.

If you’re looking for depth of characterisation, subtly nuanced performances or a clever, constantly evolving and credible plot, this is likely not the film for you. If strictly observed continuity is your thing, don’t even consider this one or it’ll drive you crazy. For starters, Cynthia’s hair colour changes from scene by scene. As for massive coincidences, you’ll find them too, my favourite being the fact that Judy’s lawyer father is the man who is just about to lead a prosecution against Dak, not directly connected to the counterfeiting.

If you want to see the most talented female action hero of her generation taking on bad guys, though, keep reading.

Audacious action sequences are plentiful here. There’s a brutal clash with a Muay Thai master that includes a wince inducing moment where Cindy uses her silver spiked stiletto heel unconventionally to gain the upper hand and there’s a brilliantly choreographed scene where she fights ten of Dak’s henchmen while ascending a giant spider’s web rope climber.

Look out too for Cynthia executing one of her famous scorpion kicks and beating up a villain who wears stone-washed double denim (Jeff Falcon). He really deserved his ass being kicked and not only for his rotten fashion choices.

Lady Reporter originally planned to lean more heavily on comedy and the humour that remains works surprisingly well in several scenes such as when a rat terrifies Judy at the same time a burglar (Fat Chung) has broken into her home. I’ll say no more, but Cynthia tells an amusing anecdote about the rodent in one of the extras here.

Ronny Yu is marvellous as Wong Dak, clearly relishing his pantomime baddy role while Billy Chow, who plays one of his enforcers, is also in fantastic form as an arrogant slimebag bemused by the idea that a woman might be able to take him on in combat.

Yes, it has its faults, but Lady Reporter is outrageous fun. All these years later, Cynthia Rothrock’s action scenes still stand up. Okay, some wirework was utilised very occasionally but her training in martial arts is clear to see, unlike nearly every female action hero of today’s Hollywood, where directors routinely rely on CGI and then editors routinely rely on adding motion blur to attempt to hide how unrealistic the CGI looks.

Lady Reporter is one of Cynthia’s personal favourites from her filmography and even if it had been the only movie she ever made, she’d still deserve her place in the pantheon of female action stars.

Lady Reporter makes its UK debut on Blu-ray today on the Eureka Classics imprint. Special features include a limited edition O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Darren Wheeling [2000 copies]; a set of facsimile lobby cards; original Cantonese mono audio and optional ‘classic’ English dubbed audio; a brand new feature length audio commentary by Frank Djeng & actor and martial artist Vincent Lyn; a brand new feature length audio commentary Mike Leeder & Arne Venema and new select-scene commentary with Cynthia Rothrock; new interviews with Cynthia Rothrock and Mang Hoi and a limited edition collector’s booklet featuring new writing by James Oliver.

For more on the release click here.

Ozean & Oeil: Shoegaze Saturday

Energy levels have been down this week. The heat has been strong. My solar shower even produced some warmish water, helping me make a tiny dent on my rip-off gas and leccy bills. Sorry, I mean helping me do my little bit to help save the planet.

Of course, one immutable rule of music is that shoegaze is best heard when the sun is out, so this week, I’ve been listening to some of the subgenre from Northern California and Tokyo. First up, Ozean.

Some bands just go on and on, decade after decade, and never produce a single song that remotely appeals to me – there’s quite a few of these acts making up the forthcoming bill at Glastonbury. Others only exist for an all too short time but at least manage to shine brightly briefly while together.

Ozean belong in the latter category. In 1992, they recorded a three track demo and only ever played once live. They were big fans of Slowdive – who I have always liked and who will be on at Glastonbury – and when that act played in a joint in Sacramento called The Cattle Club, two members of Ozean, Eric Shea and Mike Prosenko, went to the show and afterwards met up with and passed a tape to Slowdive’s Neil Halstead.

A few months later, an impressed Rachel Goswell got back to them, saying she wanted to pass it on to Creation head honcho Alan McGee but by then, the band were fizzling out and singer Lisa Baer – another music rule, incidentally, is that the best shoegaze acts always have female vocalists – had decided to move to Los Angeles, effectively ending the short lifespan of Ozean. She’d never been a natural performer onstage anyway and confessed, maybe half jokingly, in one interview that: ‘I had terrible stage fright and social anxiety so I’m grateful that we stuck to working on music in bedrooms mostly!’

Did McGee ever hear the tape? Don’t know. Would he have liked it and wanted to get the band on Creation? He did already have Slowdive, Ride and My Bloody Valentine on his books but I’m sure he would have enjoyed hearing this. From the aforementioned demo, this is Scenic, and as you can see by the picture at the top of the page, the three tracks were finally released on vinyl:

Considering the term was initially a putdown, shoegaze has proved surprisingly durable. Somehow, impressionistic music with honeyed vocals and layered, woozy guitars has hardly dated in the thirty plus years since Lush, Slowdive and others began honing their sound.

Film soundtracks have helped. Greg Araki, for instance, whose White Bird in A Blizzard I looked at here, loves to regularly drop in something dreampoppy to his movies. There’s even been talk of shoegaze cinema. According to somebody on Letterboxd: ‘This “shoegaze” wave of film focuses on storytelling as emotionally intimate as it is stylistically intimate, exploring the lives of characters that feel alienated from the advances of society.’ Think Araki’s Mysterious Skin, apparently, Wong Kar Wai’s Fallen Angels, or Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.

Nah. Bit too vague a term for me, I’m afraid.

Speaking of Lost in Translation, though, this next track would have been ideal for its soundtrack alongside those Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine contributions.

I know very little about Oeil. On their Bandcamp page, they provide one short sentence about themselves: ‘Oeil is a Shoegaze band based in Tokyo, Japan.’

Four minutes of celestial gorgeosity, this does veer almost too close to comfort towards My Bloody Valentine, but I adore it anyway. This is Strawberry Cream from 2007:

And this is Perfect:

For more on Oeil, click here or here.

And for more on Ozean, click here or here.