3 & 30: Michelle Yeoh, Oklou, and Pinball

Plus: San Diego post-hardcore, erotic cinema, and Nicolas Winding Refn

You’re reading the latest installment of 3 & 30. Just about every month, we’ll each be sharing one record, one film, and one other wild card cultural product beyond those categories we’ve been loving. (That’s the 3.) As for the 30, we both recently turned 30 and each made a list of our 30 favorite movies. We’ll be going through them all, one movie at a time. You’ll see our latest 30 for 30 pick in an upcoming post (for real this time :).

Record of the Month

Shawn: Clikatat Ikatowi — The Trials and Tribulations of…

Sometimes, the best algorithm is going over to your 44-year-old friend’s house and seeing what’s on the turntable. Early last month, it was the San Diego post-hardcore band Clikatat Ikatowi, who was completely new to me and had just reissued their three records as a Numero Group box set. Although the main event that night happened to be a fantasy baseball draft, this was the sort of relentless, anxiety-spiking music you couldn’t really suppress in the background while wondering if Byron Buxton makes it to 100 games this year. I know they often get tagged with “post-rock” (what isn’t?) but instead of the more melodically inclined bands under that banner, I hear those gnarled guitars and unsettled time signatures and think of the noisier freakouts of Cymbals Eat Guitars circa Lenses Alien. The strength of these records isn’t far behind the Karate box set Numero put out a few summers ago, so maybe I’m on the fast track to just becoming a label fanboy (and turning this series into 4 & 40).

Elliott: Oklou — choke enough

There were many great albums in 2024, but I feel comfortable calling Oklou’s Choke Enough my favorite record since Laurel Halo released Atlas in the fall of 2023. The record is tingly in the most pleasant way, beckoning me to a world that feels entirely unfamiliar, yet soothing. Like stepping into a brand new place, but the feeling that comes with it is one of coming home. I’m sure it’ll get lots of love from me when we wrap up the year so I’ll just quickly shout out the song “Obvious” — a song that sounds as if a bunch of magical leprechauns were dancing gleefully on my heart. I had “Obvious” stuck in my head for about 7 days straight, and I felt so much peace during that week. I don’t think that was a coincidence.

Film of the Month

Shawn: Royal Warriors (David Chung, 1986)

In line with my album this month, I’m trying to prioritize the tangible as of late (i.e. pick off the enormous stack of last year’s unwatched Blu-rays sitting on the credenza, to make room for this year’s crop). One doorstopper up there has been the In the Line of Duty box set, which it turns out is the excellent ‘80s Hong Kong action series, starring Michelle Yeoh for a pair of installments and Cynthia Khan for many more. Royal Warriors is the first (well chronologically second after Yes, Madam!, but first in the series) and best and most brutal I’ve seen through three movies. Yeoh and Hiroyuki Sanada are an incredible duo, from their first early fight sequence thwarting an airplane hijacking to the final showdown, which Yeoh rolls up to in an armored tank. The pacing of these movies is so brisk and effortless, bouncing from one set piece to another (that airplane sequence, a graphic California-themed restaurant shootout, Yeoh’s partner dangling from a skyscraper) with the requisite melodrama in between.

Besides the obvious stars on camera, you have the considerable talent behind it in David Chung, director here and cinematographer on some of the major Tsui Hark films (who memorably co-stars in Yes, Madam! alongside his Rube Goldberg apartment). Chung doesn’t bring the same expressionistic touches as Tsui, but so capably establishes space and staging before his set pieces are riddled with whacks and bullets. There’s such tactility here; these are real people, doing real, death-defying stunt work. In an interview for the Blu-ray set, assistant director Shan Tam recalls Yeoh was so exhausted and injured by the end of filming Royal Warriors, the stunt team rigged a wire to help her stand steadily enough to finish the takes — and after the movie wrapped, she still had the gusto to zip-line at an amusement park.

Luckily, you don’t need the box set to watch — you can find the first two films on streaming (and Royal Warriors as part of the Criterion Channel’s ongoing “Michelle Yeoh Kicks Ass” collection, which you can imagine puts it lightly).

Elliott: Two Moon Junction (Zalman King, 1988)

When we select our movie of the month, we often find ourselves championing a critical underdog. Be it Rob Zombie’s Halloween II or Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris, these movies may have been rejected by mainstream critics and the public at large. However those titles are actually kind of considered modern classics within the small community of film twitter personalities that Shawn and I follow. But I’m here to take things one step further and give the title of Film of the Month to a movie currently sitting at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes (9 reviews, but still).

Zalman King’s Two Moon Junction is an erotic, borderline softcore odyssey of an engaged woman caught in an arranged marriage exploring her individuality and her sexuality, and to quote our favorite music pod, where those things intersect. April is played by Sherilyn Fenn (to most, Audrey in Twin Peaks) with both zest and heart stretching vulnerability as she engages in an affair with carnival hunk meathead Perry (Richard Tyson). It’s the kind of movie where if you saw it with a typical crowd, people would burst into laughter at the charged line reads and shifting tones that could break one’s neck. But Two Moon Junction reminds me of Showgirls before it was justifiably reclaimed. Like Verhoeven, King is most interested in capturing a heightened, at times ridiculous reality to portray when young adult passion is almost too much to bear. There are scenes between April and her carnie crush that are straight up transcendent with feeling, cut and staged with masterful lighting to experience overwhelming visceral impact. While King feels like his own voice, I thought of Brian De Palma and David Lynch throughout. And you know praise doesn’t get much higher from us than a comparison to those two fellas.

Wild Card

Shawn: Pinball Perfection

Did you know that there’s a pinball museum just a bit west of Babcock Blvd? I didn’t, until friend of Even Better Devon Chodzin put me onto it and summoned me up there to Ross Township this past weekend. (For the non-locals, this is still within Pittsburgh city limits, but maybe 15 minutes north of downtown and the stadiums.) For $15 per hour, Pinball Perfection offers you the chance to play on hundreds of machines, mostly all in great working condition, from the medium’s early days in the 1930s to present. It feels like stepping into the biggest garage on earth, with full band equipment set up in the back, air hockey, TVs playing random Star Trek reruns, guys who maybe sorta work there tinkering with the wiring on a machine’s undercarriage. You can bring your own beers, and when we got there, one of the proprietors handed my girlfriend and I koozies that said “Straight Outta Marriage” on them. Don’t forget to look for the secret basement, with about a hundred ancient machines, and other surprise rooms, and another secret, more forbidden basement underneath.

Although they have some modern machines, the majority are open to explore gaudy excess free of digital screens or IP. (Casinos, baseball, and bowling rule the land, though there’s still Twister, Demolition Man, and The Phantom Menace.) Personal highlights were the ‘80s game Haunted House, with a trapdoor playfield inside the machine’s base, the seated cocktail machines, and a super forgiving skateboarding machine called Radical! Much like when I’m watching basically any classic cinema from the medium’s first decades, handling these bulky old tables over their ear-splittingly loud dings and clanks, made me wonder if there was ever any point in trying to best these early peaks.

Elliott: Too Old to Die Young (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2019)

While everybody’s talking about White Lotus and The Pitt, I’m out here watching Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young series from 2019. Remember that? Oh, you don’t? Well, I recall there being a lot of buzz when the project was developing, but once it was announced that nearly every episode of the show was going to be the length of a feature film, totaling 13 hours across 10 episodes, and getting buried in the Amazon algorithm, as they also clearly decided to barely advertise it, it faded quickly from memory.

I’ve never been much of a Winding Refn fan, finding nearly everything he's made to be disposable exercises in colorfully lit, stylized tests that neither thrill nor stir (Drive is still solid in spite of certain film bros preaching it as the second coming of Christ (Nicolas Winding Refn himself included, though he may be trolling here)). Essentially, I’ve found Winding Refn to be like a poker player that that tries to impress with confidence and provocation, but he typically doesn’t have much of anything to show in his hands.

Too Old to Die Young though…oh baby. This feels like what Winding Refn was born to do. Freed from the restrictions of feature length time, he stretches scenes and shots to their longest, most bearable length. I’d be hard pressed to define how great I think it is. But it’s downright hypnotic, making every gesture, line of dialogue, and camera movement all the more gripping for its slowness. How much does it have to say? I’m not sure. But I can’t emphasize how little I care. Even when it takes side steps that I roll my eyes at, I’m never not under its spell. And it’s a show that feels genuinely evil, with an actual blackened soul, belonging perfectly in Nick Newman’s Epsteincore list. It’s truly wild this was made by the Jeff Bezos company. Miles Teller’s minimal robotic performance is inspiring, and there are frames and dissolves that have my jaw drop at their hazy beauty (s/o DOP Darius Khondji). I have 3 episodes left, and I can’t possibly imagine where it will end. But I do know it won’t end well for these characters, and I can’t wait to see just how bad it gets :)