Every year, on Christmas day, I watch a bunch of the movies I get. So I'm really amped that this is coming out before then. My brain can't process any of the bad response it's gotten, so I'll remain excited until this baby is in my DVD player. Can't wait to give it a watch.

Had the good fortune to see the film and I have to say that the bad and mixed press on the film really missed the boat. The movie I saw was as good as Election and The Sparrow, and it worked on multiple levels of engagement throughout. As an out-and-out Melville homage, nobody's done it better, but the film pushes at and really penetrates a subject many of To's recent films have brought to bear without fully explicating, a kind of morbidity in the face of growing disability. This is most fully illustrated in Throwdown and Mad Detective, but the subject has run through To's films since at least A Hero Never Dies, and in Vengeance the idea gets explicated for a full host of dramatic and thematic meanings. I have a lot to say about the movie, but basically I think it's a fully-satisfying picture, engaging in both it's bleak and abrasive action setups and it's sensitive rendering of a host of To's more sophisticated and recurrent themes.

Very relieved a subtitled version will be coming out around the same time as the French disc-even though most of the picture is in English. Still, there are several scenes in Cantonese and many passing lines in Cantonese and French that are necessary to make the picture clear.